SYRIA-THE REGIONAL PLAYGROUND OF THE MIDDLE EAST -AGAIN; IRAN /HIZBALLAH-SYRIA

SYRIA-THE REGIONAL PLAYGROUND OF THE MIDDLE EAST -AGAIN;
IRAN /HIZBALLAH-SYRIA

By Josef Olmert

This is part 3 of a series of articles on the Syrian civil war. Part 1 and 2 can be
found in our website.

On 20 July 1976, soon after he sent his army to intervene in the Lebanese civil
war, President Hafiz Assad delivered a programmatic speech about what really was
the Lebanese crisis all about. It was, by far, his most important and detailed speech
about the subject, in a way, his most honest one. Not a mean feat when dealing
with a dictator like Assad. In it, Assad declared, that ‘’Lebanon and Syria were one
country’’, and he also referred to the sectarian character of the Lebanese conflict
and its implications about Syria. In one speech, the dictator included the two
most important elements of his strategic thinking; first, the historic Syrian
grudge about being the victim of the post-WWI arrangements, the Sykes-
Picot Agreement, and the creation of an independent Lebanese state , whose
territory was taken away from ‘’greater Syria’’, as well as ‘’Southern Syria’’,
a.k.a ‘’Palestine’’ [this is what he said in another important speech, the Ba’th
Revolution Day speech, on 8 March 1974]. The second, was his on-going latent
fear about his own legitimacy, as an Alawi, in a Sunni Muslim state like Syria.
Indeed, Hafiz Assad did not just speak about these problems, as he conducted
policies that were all intended to overcome them. He can be credited as being the
one Syrian leader who ended the chronic internal weakness of the state, at least for
30 -40 years, though by using the most draconian, brutal measures, and by so
doing, he, for a while, ended also the traditional gap between Syria’s ambitions to
be in the center of Arab politics and its inability to fulfill the ambition due to
internal malfunctioning.

Syria of old days, was the playground of Arab politics, the traditional rivalry
between the Hashemites and Saudis, then between the Iraqi and Trans Jordanian
Hashemites, later between Nasser and his rivals. Both Patrick Seale [The Struggle

For Syria; A Study Of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945-1958] and Malcolm Kerr[The
Arab Cold War; Gamal Abd Al Nasser And His Rivals, 1958-1970] covered well
this theme, emphasizing the implications of Syria’s weakness. After Assad came to
absolute power in 1970, not immediately, it seemed, that Syria managed to
overcome its weakness. Hafiz And Bashar Assad were considered major
independent regional players, though grudgingly so, as being Alawis was
never something that the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, for example, really
cherished, to say the very least. There were however red lights indicating that
the Assad regime was acting as a minority regime, despite the Pan-Arab
ideology of the Syrian Ba’ath Party. During the long Iran-Iraq war [1980-
1988], Syria was the only Arab country to support Iran, as opposed to the rest
of the Arab world which was firmly on the side of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi
dictator. Saddam was not the cup of tea of the Saudis and their allies, but he was
Sunni. The Iranians were not their cup of tea, because they were Shi’ite
revolutionaries, and their emergence in the region posed a religious challenge, not
just political to the Sunni world, particularly to the Saudis. It became a rivalry
between Shi’is and Sunnis, the beginning of the most important conflict in the
Middle East since 1979-not the Arab- Palestinian – Israeli conflict, but the
resumption of the oldest schism in the world of Islam.

Professor Ramazani, a well-known Iranian scholar wrote in his authoritative book
on Islamic Iran’s foreign policy and its regional repercussions [R.K.Ramazani,
Revolutionary Iran; Challenges And Response In The Middle East],that ‘’both the
challenge of Revolutionary Iran and the response of other Middle Eastern states to
Iran’s challenge are multidimensional’’, meaning that they include elements which
do not seem in conformity with their stated official ideologies. This general
observation is particularly true in the case of the Iranian-Syrian relationship.
Iran professes supra-national Islamic ideology, whereas Syria, secular,
Socialist-oriented Pan-Arabism. These two seem to be irreconcilable,
nonetheless, the two states found enough common ground enabling them to
become close allies. An alliance that has lasted for 40 years, in itself a fact to
be emphasized when dealing with the shifty sands of Middle Eastern politics.
There is one reason which supersedes any other one in explaining this
phenomenon. Syria of the Alawis and Iran of the Shi’is found common ground
which is not based on religious convictions, but on sectarianism. Alawis are not Shi’is, surely when viewing them through the interpretation of strict Shi’i
doctrines, but they are despised by the Sunnis and considered followers of
most heretic, anti-Muslim doctrines. This is where sectarianism plays its role.
For the new Iranian rulers, the Alawis were natural allies in the overall-Shi’i –
Sunni confrontation. Syria’s Alawi rulers, for their part, always were aware
of their problem of legitimacy, belonging to a religious minority in a Sunni
state. They have cultivated relations with Iran as a means of adding another
layer of defense to the regime, a process starting with the alliance created
between the Assad regime and the Shi’i leader of Lebanon, Imam Musa Al Sadr,
leading the latter to grant religious ruling implying a Shi’i sanction to the Alawis in
1973. Joshua Landis, not an anti-Alawi expert on Syria, referred to this feature of
the relations in this way beyond Iraq, Syria and Iran also found common cause in
Lebanon, where in the 1980’s they joined forces against the US and Israel and later
sought to promote the fortunes of Hezbollah nor were the ostensible sectarian
differences between Iran and Syria any bar to better relations, either, since the
Assad regime is hardly less suspicious of Sunnis than is Tehran’’.[Landis
interview to NPR, 22 August 2007].It is in this context also, that we need to look
at the failure of Israeli-Syrian peace talks, particularly under PM Ehud
Olmert, in 2008-2009. Israel was more generous than before in readiness for
territorial concessions in the Golan, but Bashar Assad did not accept-he could
not agree to Israel demanding an end to the Syrian-Iranian axis. For him , this
was a relationships amounting to a lifeline, an insurance policy for a rainy
day, which for him, as well as his father, it was the possibility of such Sunni
opposition to the Alawi regime, that even suppression like in Hamah 1982[as
was described in pt.1] would not be enough to put an end to. For him, external
help would be needed in such a case, and that could be only Iranian, either directly
or through Iran’s proxies. Assad may not have thought about siding with Iran, all
the way to participating in a possible future war between her and Israel. That can
be seen from a leaked WikiLeaks document from 20 December 2009, according to
which, the US Embassy in Damascus informed Washington, that Syria told Iran,
that it would not participate in such a war. Before and after there were other
situations, which indicated the limits of Assad’s readiness to sacrifice for the sake
of the alliance with Iran, but all this changed with the Syrian civil war, starting in
March 2011 and the gradual deterioration of his rule over his country. Desperation
calls for urgent, not necessarily the most palatable solutions. Assad needed allies,

and Iran was there, ready to invest in the Syrian Alawi regime. The overall
Iranian calculus about Syria is out of the scope of this paper, but it is clear,
that a key Iranian interest was, and still is, to use the Syrian civil war, a
Sunni-Alawi-Shi’i conflict, as yet another element in its grand regional
strategy of creating the Shi’i crescent. The Shi’i response to centuries of Sunni
humiliations and domination. Also, being based in Syria is another element,
and a significant one, in the Iranian build-up towards the much-declared
Jihad against Israel.

The Syrian civil war shattered Bashar Assad’s image as a reformer[we dealt with it
in pt.1], and also the deceiving feature of internal Syrian stability. In the context of
Syria’s regional standing and its historic ambitions, the tables were turned in so far
as Lebanon is concerned. Hafiz Assad reference, cited above, about Syria and
Lebanon being ’’one’’ came true, but with reversed roles. It is Syria which is so
weak, compared to a more viable Lebanon, and nothing shows it more dramatically
than the fact that Hezbollah, Iran’s stooge in Lebanon, became one of Assad’s
main pillars of support.

The Syrian civil war presented Hezbollah with a simple, stark choice-to act as
a Lebanese nationalist organization, and in that case, not to intervene in the
civil war, or to act as a Shi’i organization, and come to the help of a fellow
Shi’i- oriented state. We know the answer-Hezbollah chose Shi’i sectarian
interest over the overall Lebanese national one. In the moment of truth, it
was sectarianism that tilted the balance in favor of intervention. Iran and their
Lebanese arm have shown for 8 years, that this is their utmost interest. They pay a
heavy price, in material damage, as well as casualties, but they are there. Alongside
Hezbollah, the Iranians use Iraqi Shi’i militias and ‘’volunteers’’ from as far as
Afghanistan, all Shi’is, in an effort to save the Assad regime. It is the Lebanese
involvement though, which is so symbolic. The tables turned on the Assad
dictatorship. What a humiliation to the regime, which in his heydays entertained
the ambition to be the ‘’heart of Arabism’’, as every school child in Syria was
taught to believe in as of 1963.

It is all to be emphasized in the context of both the issue of who won or is winning
in the Syrian civil war, and in particular, what is the connection between the civil
war and Syria’s regional position, a question which is also very relevant with regard to a neighbor of Syria, Turkey, and that will be the gist of pt.4 in our series on Syria.

Dr. Josef Olmert is a Senior Fellow at the Palm Beach Center for Democracy and Policy Research and an adjunct professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina

Image by ErikaWittlieb from Pixabay