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Syria The Fall of the House of Assad 2013 David W.
Lesch Digital Instant Download
Author(s): David W. Lesch
ISBN(s): 9780300186512, 0300186517
Edition: Hardcover
File Details: PDF, 4.42 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
 SYRIA
David W. Lesch is Professor of Middle East History, Trinity University,
San Antonio, Texas. He is the author or editor of twelve books on the
Middle East and has traveled widely there on scholarly and diplomatic
endeavors. He is a frequent consultant to US and European government
departments as well as the United Nations.
 SYRIA
THE FALL OF THE
HOUSE OF ASSAD
David W. Lesch

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

N E W HAV E N A N D L O N D O N
Copyright © 2012 David W. Lesch

First published in paperback in 2013

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:
U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com
Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk

Set in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

Printed in Great Britain by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, Totton, Hampshire

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lesch, David W.
Syria : the fall of the house of Assad / David W. Lesch.
   p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-18651-2 (alk. paper)
1. Syria—Politics and government—2000– 2. Assad, Bashar, 1965–
3. Assad, Bashar, 1965—Political and social views. 4. Political
leadership—Syria. 5. Syria—History—Demonstrations, 2010– 6. Protest
movements—Syria—History—21st century. 7. Political
violence—Syria—History—21st century. I. Title.
DS98.6.L475 2012
956.9104’2—dc23
2012021934

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-300-19722-8 (pbk)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface vi

Map x

1 The Hope 1

2 Surviving 20

3 Syria is Different 38

4 No, It’s Not 55

5 The Regime Responds 69

6 Opposition Mounts 87

7 The International Response 122

8 All In 164

9 Whither Syria? 206

Epilogue 242

Notes 268

Index 293
Preface

Choosing the title of a book can be a somewhat hazardous venture. This is

especially the case when the subject matter of the book deals primarily
with recent and current events. A number of things can occur in the time
between the final submission of a manuscript to the publisher and the
actual appearance of the book on the shelves. There may, then, be a few
(hopefully a very few) parts of the book, including the title, that may
become a bit outdated or seem rather out of place. When the title of a book
is Syria: The fall of the House of Assad, I might be expected to be pretty
darn sure that President Bashar al-Assad will fall. But what happens if
Assad does not actually fall from power by the time the book is published?
In fact, at the time of writing (perforce a phrase I use often in the book),
it seems more likely than not that Assad will, in fact, survive the domestic
uprising (which has already been going on for over a year) against his rule
well past the publication date.
But I have gone with this title for another reason: whether or not he
remains in power, Bashar al-Assad, in my mind, has already fallen. And
thus the (more than) forty-year rule of the House of Assad – Hafiz
al-Assad, who ruled from 1970 to 2000, and his son, who succeeded upon
his father’s death in 2000 – is over. This is the judgment of someone who
got to know Bashar al-Assad fairly well and, at one point, had high hopes
 P r e fa c e vii

of him. Despite his shortcomings, I thought he could lead Syria to

achieve its full potential as a country, and the Syrians to reach theirs as a
people. Even if the event is more metaphorical than real, however, he has
fallen in my estimation. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that
the authoritarian Syrian system has proved too difficult to overcome.
Assad morphed into a real-life tyrant; this became most dramatically
manifest in his sanctioning of the government crackdown of what were, at
first, largely peaceful protests, inspired by the Arab Spring. He acted
against his own people even though he may have deluded himself into
thinking he was doing the right thing. I examine his journey to the ‘dark
side’ (so to speak) throughout this book. In doing so, I analyze and trace
the causes of the uprising in Syria, the nature of the government response,
the development of the opposition movement, the varied – and often
contradictory – reactions and policies of the international community,
and the different outcomes the Syrian crisis may produce in the near
future.
I have been traveling regularly to, and writing about, Syria for twenty-
three years. The accumulation of experience and contacts in Syria created
the opportunity for me, in 2004 and 2005, to extensively interview Bashar
al-Assad, his wife Asma al-Assad, and other leading Syrian officials for a
book published by Yale University Press in 2005 entitled The New Lion of
Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and modern Syria. This unique access meant
that I got to know Assad probably better than anyone in the West. At his
urging, we continued to meet on a regular basis until late 2008, and I had
meetings with high-level Syrian officials well into 2013. In the beginning,
I was generally impressed with Bashar and the promise of his leadership.
As an American interested primarily in improving the position of my
country in the Middle East, I also tended to believe that the pressure on
Syria that was applied by the US administration of George W. Bush was,
for the most part, counterproductive, and that opportunities for a better
and mutually beneficial US-Syrian relationship were being missed; even in
retrospect, I still believe this. However, I clearly detected changes in Assad
as he became more ensconced in power and survived threats to his rule.
I saw these changes at close quarters and describe them in this book.
viii P REFACE

For now, let me just say that when Bashar unleashed Syria’s military and
security forces on the protestors, I was not the least bit shocked; if
anything, my initial reaction was that of disappointment, sadness and
ultimately even anger – anger that someone who was in a position to
propel his country forward had failed so miserably to do so. On the
contrary, Assad had degraded Syria.
Instead of creatively and courageously embracing the future, Assad
chose a bloody path that is well beaten by an impressive list of brutal dicta-
tors from Middle East history. The shape of the future is still very much in
doubt, but one thing is clear: the popular protests and rebellions of the
Arab Spring have wrought a tangle of change in the Middle East that may
take a generation to unravel. Bashar al-Assad, the person I came to know
(and like), showed that he – and the hope he sparked when he came to
power – is long gone. The Assads have lost whatever legitimacy they had.
Their claim to fame was that they kept Syria together in the face of
regional strife and maintained domestic stability. This is no longer the
case. They have lost their mandate to rule. A return to the status quo ante,
even if tweaked with some political reform, will not suffice. The office of
the president of Syria, as it existed, is vacant – whether or not an Assad
occupies it.
There are several people to acknowledge for their efforts in helping
to make this book possible. I would like, first, to thank Heather McCallum,
publisher at Yale University Press. This is the second book on which we
have collaborated, and it was no less an enjoyable experience this
time around. Heather is the type of editor who, at one and the same time,
adeptly encourages and challenges the author, all of which leads to a
better final product. The rest of the staff at and those working with Yale
University Press have been marvelous, including Rachael Lonsdale and
Clive Liddiard, who is an outstanding copy editor. I also want to thank my
colleague-in-arms and fellow Syria expert, James (Jim) Gelvin, for reading
an earlier draft of the book and to Mark Haas for his helpful comments on
my work. Trinity University has continued to support my research and
writing, and I am very thankful for its faith in my projects. In addition, I
want to thank a research assistant, Krystal Rountree, one of my students at
 P r e fa c e ix

Trinity University, in particular for helping me better understand various

aspects of the social media with regard to the Syrian uprising – a topic she
has researched and written on for one of my classes. My son, Michael
Lesch, a student at Rollins College in Florida, also conducted some
research for me, for which I am grateful. He has been to Syria three times
already in his young life. My wish is that he can make another visit to a
peaceful and prosperous Syria in the near future. Indeed, I firmly hope for
all my dear friends in Syria, who are on both sides of the divide, that they
can soon see and experience stability, freedom and prosperity. Often these
things are born of conflict and despair, as we know all too well in my own
country; but may the unrest and violence in Syria end soon, with the pros-
pects of a brighter future alive and well and within their grasp.
Finally, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Judy Dunlap, for her
unending support and encouragement, as well as for acting as the first line
of defense in reading the rough drafts. I hope she takes the time to read
the final version, so that she sees just how much help she really was. More
to the point, she makes me insanely happy and serene, which more than
compensates for the frequent moments of drudgery in writing a book.
Thank you for making this very concentrated period of writing tolerable.
C HA P T ER 1

The Hope

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Or perhaps it was inevitable . . .

For three decades, from the time an intra-Baath party coup brought
him to power in 1970 until his death in June 2000, President Hafiz
al-Assad was the ruler of Syria. By the early 1990s, though, his health was
failing, and it was widely accepted that his eldest son, Basil, was being
groomed for the top job – even though Syria is officially a republic, not a
monarchy. Basil was viewed in Syria as a charismatic military figure who
would seamlessly assume the presidency when the day came. But Basil was
killed one foggy morning in 1994, in a car accident at a roundabout just
outside Damascus International Airport.
Bashar al-Assad, the second-eldest son of Hafiz, was in his London
apartment that January morning when he received the news that his older
brother had died. Bashar, a licensed ophthalmologist who had graduated
from Damascus University, was in London, studying for a postgraduate
qualification in ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital. Of course, he
returned to Syria to support a grieving family and to assist with the funeral
arrangements, in a show of familial solidarity. He may or may not at that
moment have entertained the idea that he might someday become presi-
dent. But – whether by choice or compulsion – that is what he became, six
2 SYRIA

years later, on his father’s death. He could not have guessed that, eleven
years on, he would face a popular uprising against his rule. Nor could he
have suspected that – as a result of the regime’s brutal response, which has
already left thousands dead – he would one day be almost universally
reviled as a bloodthirsty killer who has lost his legitimacy to rule.
This was a far cry from people’s high expectations of Bashar when he
came to power. Indeed, even before he assumed the presidency, in Syria he
was being called ‘The Hope’ – as in the hope for the future.1 After Basil’s
death, Bashar had been systematically elevated within the ruling apparatus
and given more and more responsibility. He was appointed chairman of
the Syrian Computer Society, a position that had been held by his older
brother. He moved quickly through the ranks of the military, reaching the
equivalent of brigadier general by the time of his father’s death. In 1998,
the all-important Lebanon portfolio was taken from Vice President Abd
al-Halim Khaddam (who was not happy about it) and given to Bashar. It
seemed to be a race against time to build Bashar’s legitimacy and power
base within the Baath party, the government and, especially, the military,
to the point where he could succeed without serious opposition. If only his
father could hang on long enough.
And his father did hold on just long enough: there was no serious
opposition to Bashar al-Assad becoming president. Essentially, the generals
in the state military-security apparatus gathered around Mustafa Tlas,
Hafiz al-Assad’s longtime – and loyal – minister of defense, to discuss the
succession. No doubt most of the generals were Alawite, the minority
Muslim sect in Syria that comprises 12–13 per cent of the population,
which had dominated the ruling apparatus since the mid-1960s when the
Baath party had consolidated its hold on power. The Alawites, a secular
off-shoot of Shiite Islam that is considered by most Muslims to be heretical,
had, for centuries, been an oppressed minority in the area that came to
comprise Syria. Indeed, the great thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Sunni
Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who leaned to the more rigorous – some
would say puritanical – interpretation of Sunni Islam, issued a fatwa, or
legal religious ruling, calling the Alawites greater infidels than the Christians,
Jews or idolaters, and authorizing a jihad or holy war against them.
 The Hope 3

It was not until the French mandate over Syria in the period between
World War One and World War Two that the fortunes of the Alawites (and
certain other minorities in Syria, such as the Christians and the Druze)
began to improve in a country that is 75 per cent Sunni Muslim. At the
time of Syrian independence from the French, in 1946, the Alawites found
themselves well positioned in the military: they had volunteered for and
been recruited into the Syrian armed forces during the French mandate
period, when Sunnis either looked down on military service or frowned
upon it as collusion with the French in ruling over the country. When
the socialist and pan-Arab neutralist Baath party started to win more
and more parliamentary seats in the 1950s, and after it allied itself with
important elements in the military to improve its political power in the
divided and unstable Syrian political landscape, Alawite officers worked
their way into the political mix and up the ladder, eventually becoming the
dominant element in government as the primary arbiters of power. The
February 1966 intra-Baath coup brought Hafiz al-Assad to a senior
position in the new regime, as defense minister and commander of the air
force. The Alawites were well represented from 1966 to 1970, but their
position, especially in the military-security apparatus, improved immeas-
urably under Hafiz. This trend gained further momentum under Bashar,
and Alawites are dominant in important sinecures in the regime (though
over the years both Hafiz and Bashar also appointed Sunni Muslims to
important posts in government).
The point is that the Alawites worked long and hard to obtain their
positions of power and influence in the country, and they were not going
to give those up easily. The Alawite-dominated military-security appa-
ratus, as well as leading (mostly Sunni) businessmen tied into the regime,
saw in Bashar al-Assad the best chance (or perhaps the least worst) of
maintaining their political, economic and social positions and status. This,
above all other reasons, is why Bashar became president. He was young, he
had gained a certain amount of popularity, he was an Alawite – and, most
importantly, he was an Assad.
On 11 June 2000, one day after his father died, Bashar was unanimously
nominated by the ruling Baath party as president. There were no other
4 SYRIA

nominees. The national assembly (or parliament) hastily amended article

83 of the Syrian constitution, which stated that the president of the republic
must be forty years old – the minimum age was changed to thirty-four, the
exact age of Bashar, who was born on 11 September 1965. On 24 June he
was elected secretary-general of the Baath party at the Ninth Regional
Congress meeting, the first such gathering of the Baath party for fifteen
years. Three days later, the Syrian parliament voted ‘yes’ to the nomination,
and in a nationwide referendum, Bashar received 97.29 per cent of the total
vote (slightly less than the 99 per cent his father had regularly received to
confirm his seven-year terms in office).
President Bashar al-Assad officially took the constitutional oath of
office and delivered his inaugural speech in Damascus on 17 July 2000.
By Syrian standards, it was a remarkably enlightened speech, and it even
went so far as to criticize certain policies of the past under Bashar’s father. It
served to confirm the suspicions among many inside and outside Syria –
especially the pro-reform and pro-democracy elements – that Bashar was
indeed a breath of fresh air who would lead the country in a new direction.
In his speech, he made economic reform a clear priority; indeed, the
frankness of his criticism of the previous system was unprecedented.
The new president declared that the state bureaucracy had become a
‘major obstacle’ to development, and he admitted that economic progress
had been uneven, due, in large measure, to the state-dominated economy:
‘Don’t depend on the state. There is no magic wand. The process of change
requires elements that are not the preserve of one person . . . Authority
without responsibility is the cause of chaos.’ He went on:

We must rid ourselves of those old ideas that have become obstacles. In
order to succeed we need modern thinking . . . some people may believe
that creative minds are linked to age and that they can frequently be
found with the old, but this is not quite accurate. Some young people
have strong minds that are still lively and creative.2

And, in a subtle fashion, he seemed to lay the foundation for embarking

on a different path from his father, proclaiming that ‘the approach of
 The Hope 5

the great leader, Hafez al-Assad, was a very special and unique approach
and therefore it is not easy to emulate, especially as we remember that
we are required not just to maintain it but to develop it as well’. Despite
this reform-tinged rhetoric, Bashar did say that it would be impossible
for Syria to become a Western-style democracy, calling instead for ‘democ-
racy specific to Syria that takes its roots from its history and respects its
society’.
There was a genuine exuberance among many who had longed for
change in Syria. Bashar brought into government a number of members of
the Syrian Computer Society, people who could legitimately be called
reformists. This added to the anticipatory environment, although the
new so-called ‘reformers’ were more technocrats than pro-democracy
elements. They were tasked with the job of modernizing Syria, imple-
menting administrative reform in the various ministries to which they
were assigned, and examining the economic weaknesses of the system and
devising ways to correct it; they were not there to enact political reform.
Besides, they had reached their privileged positions by being part of
the system; they were not going to do anything substantial that would
undermine it.
Bashar inherited from his father an authoritarian state. It was in
a dilapidated condition, characterized by a stagnant economy, pervasive
corruption and political repression. It was, as existed in a number of other
authoritarian countries of the Middle East, a mukhabarat state – that is,
one in which the security or intelligence services, in combination with
certain trusted elements of the military, are dominant in controlling
the population and in defending the regime against perceived threats,
both internal and external. Hafiz al-Assad had largely established the
mukhabarat state in Syria, having created a tangled matrix of overlapping
security agencies during his time in power. With so much political insta-
bility in post-independence Syria, seething as it was with actual and
attempted coups, many Syrians willingly accepted the Faustian bargain
of less freedom for more stability that Hafiz al-Assad implicitly offered
(or demanded). With chronic political instability and war on Syria’s
borders (in Lebanon and Iraq) an almost constant feature since the
6 SYRIA

mid-1970s, it was not terribly difficult to convince most Syrians of the

importance of stability above all else, even if this came at a considerable
price. Under the Assads, therefore, it has been a constant mantra of the
regime that it has performed its primary duty well – at times even
achieving a modicum of socio-economic growth and opportunity – and
that it is often the only thing standing between stability and chaos.
It has been an enormous challenge to provide that modicum of growth
and opportunity, however. Syria is categorized as a lower-middle-income
country, and is in the bottom third on most of the important international
economic indices. It is a country that is dominated by the public sector,
which was initially forged during the socialist-leaning and economic-
nationalist post-independence period of the 1950s and 1960s, when
countries were emerging from the shackles of British and French colonial
rule. As Charles Issawi wrote at the time, three main shifts in power took
place in the Middle East: ‘from foreigners to nationals; from the landed
interest to the industrial, financial, commercial and managerial interests;
and from the private sector to the state’.3
This was, of course, well intentioned: it aimed at distributing wealth and
political power more equitably, ending reliance on outside powers, elimi-
nating corruption and restoring justice. A social contract with the people
became common in such countries, with the regimes promising to establish
adequate safety nets, and to provide employment, education and social
services in return for compliance and obedience (if not obeisance). As
typically happened in such economic systems, Syria instead developed a
bloated and inefficient public sector that, for five decades, provided the
support base for the ruling regime. In the process, it established a classic
‘Bonapartist’ state, where economic policy was primarily driven by regime
survival, especially in a regional environment that was anything but benev-
olent. As time went on, the wealth was funneled to the state as the capital
accumulator, and the government became the source of patronage, as a
pervasive clientelist network was created in the military, bureaucracy, busi-
ness community and other elements of society tied to the state apparatus.
Because of this dominant public sector that was tied into the political
apparatus, when the Syrian economy faced a crisis situation – a fairly
 The Hope 7

frequent occurrence, since Syria’s agrarian and oil export-based economy

was ultimately dependent on unpredictable rainfall (and drought) and
on the volatile international oil market – the regime had sometimes to
engage in what has been called ‘selective liberalization’.4 It had to be
selective because of the following dilemma: if the Assads were to liberalize
too much and/or too quickly, that could undermine the public sector
patronage system that helped maintain the regime in power. Some
contend that Syria’s selective liberalization was directed as much by a
desire to broaden the regime’s support base during times of change as
by the intrinsic need to improve its economic situation in general;
therefore, significant elements of the bourgeoisie were brought – or
dragged – de facto and de jure into a sort of coalition with the state.5 This
led to enhanced access to political power and to greater corruption in the
private sector, with lucrative results for those willing to be co-opted.
On the other hand, it may have, as Volker Perthes put it, ‘amalgamated’
these societal elements together behind the regime, and it did not lead
to any acquisition of political power by the private sector.6 Indeed, as
Ghassan Salame wrote, this state of affairs could be described as ‘bour-
geoisies leaving politics to their masters who secure the stability these
bourgeoisies need to enrich themselves’.7 This is also what Patrick
Seale called the ‘military-mercantile complex’,8 which developed strong
ties between the government and the large Sunni business class, whose
support proved so crucial in 1982, when Hafiz al-Assad moved against
the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. The highlight – or in this case
the lowlight – of the crackdown was the shelling of the city of Hama, the
base of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood: this killed some 10,000–20,000
people, many of them innocent civilians, though it did succeed in
stamping out the violent Muslim Brotherhood uprising that had been
going on since the late 1970s.
Both Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad opened up the economy at various
times, and to varying degrees; but the primary beneficiaries were usually
those already tied into the regime through familial, business and/or
political connections. An already elite class enriched itself further, and
especially under Bashar this resulted in a conspicuously unequal
8 SYRIA

distribution of wealth. But it also meant that the elite were co-opted by the
regime, in the sense that their socioeconomic status depended upon
regime support; they could very rapidly lose that status if they displayed
any sign of disloyalty or acted in any way that embarrassed the regime.
In addition to the burden of an overly dominant public sector, there
were numerous problems that inhibited economic growth under Hafiz
al-Assad, including:

• a very small and restricted banking system, and no stock market to

organize capital;
• an inadequate regulatory regime and insufficient transparency, which is
also related to a corrupt and politicized judiciary that is anything but
independent (a major impediment to attracting foreign investment);
• a private sector that is too fragmented to lead the way in capital
accumulation;
• rampant corruption and a vibrant black market; and
• the absence of any tradition of large-scale domestic capital investment
(leading to a proliferation of small-scale enterprises and investment in
non-productive areas, such as commerce, instead of manufacturing).

Moreover, as a noted 2002 United Nations study (the Arab Human

Development Report) found, right across the Arab world there is a ‘knowl-
edge’ deficit – a result of poorly performing and inadequately supported
educational systems, combined with the brain-drain of those who receive
an education in the West and choose to stay there, rather than return to
their native countries.
One can see why Bashar al-Assad focused on economic reform in his
inaugural speech. Nonetheless, there was a noticeably more open political
environment in the months after Bashar took office, leading many to call
this period the ‘Damascus Spring’. The seven or eight months of the
Damascus Spring were marked by general amnesties for political prisoners
of all persuasions, the licensing of private newspapers, a shake-up in
the state-controlled media apparatus, the provision of political forums
and salons at which open criticism and dissent was tolerated, and the
 The Hope 9

abandonment of the personality cult that had surrounded the regime of

Bashar’s father.
The regime appeared to be caught off guard by the precipitate growth
in the number of civil society organizations and pro-democracy groups,
and by the level of criticism directed at the government. It is generally
believed that some of the stalwart elements in the regime (referred to at
the time as the ‘old guard’ – those who had reached positions of power,
especially in the military-security apparatus, under Hafiz al-Assad and
had been loyal to him) basically approached Bashar and warned him of
the deleterious effects on the regime’s power base of his move to open up
society. As one diplomat who served in Syria at the time told me: ‘Probably
some of the tough guys in the regime came to Bashar and essentially said,
“Hey kid, this is not how we do things here.” ’9
As a result, most of the political and social reforms announced during
the Damascus Spring were reversed directly or indirectly. This backtracking
saw the re-imprisonment of a number of prominent pro-democracy
activists. A winter of retrenchment set in; this was followed by a decade
of some economic, monetary and administrative reform. There was,
however, scarcely any trace of real political reform away from the single-
party system that dominated this neo-patriarchal authoritarian structure,
in which the state apparatus – and therefore the country as a whole – was
dependent upon and subservient to the ruling regime, and particularly
the Assad family.

Regional and international isolation

In March 2006, I gave a talk on President Bashar al-Assad and Syria at

the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
I happened at the time to be in the camp that was advocating the establish-
ment of dialogue with Syria and its president. After my talk, a foreign
policy advisor on Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff came up to me and
said he understood what I had meant. He then grew more animated,
waved his finger in my face and bellowed: ‘But those sons of bitches are
killing our boys in Iraq!’ He was obviously referring to the regime in Syria.
10 SYRIA

It was at that moment that I realized what a visceral issue this had
become among at least some important members of the George W. Bush
administration. Administration officials were quite simply inordinately
upset that Syria was not, in their opinion, doing all it could to prevent
foreign fighters from entering and traversing Syria, crossing the border
into Iraq, and fueling an insurgency that, at the time, had bogged down
American efforts there following the 2003 US-led invasion and had sullied
the reputation of the Bush team. There was genuine anger at Syria, and
there continues to be residual anger in Washington over this. Sometimes
emotional responses are not factored into the equation that deals with
policy objectives or rationale, because they are difficult (if not impossible)
to measure. On that March day in 2006, however, I learned that they did
play – and may well continue to play – a role in the US–Syria dynamic.
My response to Vice President Cheney’s staffer was twofold. First, I
mentioned that I had volunteered on occasion at the burns unit at Brook
Army Medical Center (BAMC) in San Antonio, Texas. BAMC’s burns
center was (and is) the primary treatment facility for burned soldiers
flown in from Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, it is quite possible
that some of the severely burned soldiers I met at BAMC, many of whom
will since have died from their injuries, were maimed by improvised
explosive devices or suicide bombings that were, in a way, facilitated by the
very man I had been meeting regularly in Damascus. So, yes, I was angry
about this state of affairs as well, because I saw ‘up close and personal’
the end result.
Secondly, I told him that he (and, by inference, other like-minded
administration officials) needed to role-play and view the world as though
from Damascus, so that he could better understand Syria’s motivations
and policy objectives in supporting the Iraqi insurgency, by at least turning
a blind eye to foreign fighters using Syrian territory to cross over into Iraq.
If he performed this mental exercise, he would find that, when President
Bashar al-Assad looked out from Damascus, he found himself virtually
surrounded by actual or potential hostile forces. Much as his father had
done when he was up against the wall in 1982 and 1983, faced with a
domestic Islamist uprising and an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Bashar
 The Hope 11

realized that he had to fight back in an asymmetrical fashion that foiled

perceived US threats, yet did not incur the wrath of the United States in
the form of a full-fledged military response. It was a fine line to tread.
Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000 in a threatening regional
environment. The al-Aqsa intifada (uprising) had erupted a few months
after he became president, when frustrated Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories, following almost a decade of failed Israeli-Palestinian negotia-
tions, rose up against Israel to demand more rights, autonomy and
independence. Long the self-proclaimed champion of Palestinian rights in
the Arab world, the Syrian government was compelled vocally to support
the Palestinians and condemn Israel, thus spoiling at the outset any
chances of developing a positive relationship with Washington and
of restarting negotiations with Israel. Then, in rapid succession, came
9/11, the US invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 US invasion of neigh-
boring Iraq. The rules of the game were changing, and they were being
dictated by the Bush administration in a way that placed Syria on the
outside looking in.
Since the early 1970s, Syria had been able to straddle the regional and
international fence. Hafiz al-Assad had relished this position, and it had
allowed him to select whichever side of the fence to sit on, depending
on the circumstances of the day. He was, after all, a foreign policy pragma-
tist. Alone of the major Arab actors in the Middle East, Syria could play
this role. On the one hand, Syria is the cradle of Arab nationalism, in the
forefront of the Arab world’s confrontation states arrayed against Israel,
and supportive of groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas. It also did not
give in to what, in the region during the Bush years, was often called the
‘American project’. On the other hand, Syria sent troops to support the
US-led UN coalition forces that evicted Iraq from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf
War. Damascus has also entered into indirect and direct negotiations with
Israel over three decades, often with US brokerage, coming tantalizingly
close to an Israeli-Syrian peace deal in 1999–2000.
The Bush administration basically told Damascus that it could no
longer play both sides of the fence: it had to choose one side or the other.
After post-9/11 intelligence cooperation on al-Qaida (prompting one US
12 SYRIA

official to say that Syria had ‘saved American lives’) the two countries’
relations began to sour when the US invaded Iraq, a move that Syria
opposed.10 Essentially, Bashar al-Assad did not adequately adjust to the
important underlying changes in American foreign policy after 9/11. This
heightened Syria’s exposure to US regime-change rhetoric, especially as
the Bush doctrine defined US policy. Damascus thought the old rules of
the game still applied, and US administration officials periodically led it to
believe this was so. The Syrians may have been guilty of only hearing what
they wanted to hear; but at the same time, the new rules of the game were
being written in Washington – in the corridors of Congress, the Pentagon,
the vice president’s office and influential conservative think tanks, by
those who saw Bashar and his regime as part of the problem, rather than
as the solution. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commenced and
progressed, the focus of foreign policy power in the Bush administration
shifted away from the State Department, leading to a more bellicose
posture vis-à-vis Syria. State Department officials, including Secretary
of State Colin Powell, made comments from time to time praising
Syria’s cooperation against jihadists crossing over into Iraq, which reas-
sured Damascus that perhaps the old rules still applied; but in hindsight,
these statements carried little weight in the US foreign policy-making
apparatus, as Powell and the State Department in general were
marginalized.
Thus Bashar’s continued verbal assaults on Israel and his support
for Hizbullah and Hamas well into 2003 played straight into the hands
of the ascendant group of US foreign policy ideologues. Bashar was quite
unaware that he and his regime were becoming more of a target. As
President Bush stated on 24 June 2003, ‘Syria must choose the right side in
the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organi-
zations.’11 Syria assumed that the clear differences between al-Qaida on
the one hand and Hamas/Hizbullah on the other were self-evident, as
they were understood by most in the region. But these distinctions were
apparently lost on the Bush administration.
No longer could the differences between Washington and Damascus be
resolved as part of a Syrian-Israeli peace process; Syria now had to meet all
 The Hope 13

of Washington’s concerns before negotiations with Israel could even begin.

From the point of view of Damascus, this was a non-starter, for it would
entail relinquishing its few remaining assets (such as its ties with Hizbullah,
Hamas and Iran) before the initiation of peace talks. As a result, Syria was
regarded by the Bush administration as a rogue state, and, with the US
invasion of Iraq, a series of accusations was hurled at the regime in
Damascus – from harboring Saddam Hussein regime members and hiding
Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to supplying Iraqi fighters with
military equipment. The most pointed accusation of all, however, would
only gain momentum as the Iraq insurgency took shape: that the Syrian
regime was actively assisting the insurgency financially and logistically.
Now, according to US officials, Syria was costing US lives. It had crossed the
line. Typical of US comments was one by a US Central Command
(CENTCOM) official: ‘If Americans are dying in Iraq because of Syrian
policies, then this is something we are not going to tolerate.’12 Although the
language was rhetorical, as the Bush administration shifted its emphasis
toward promoting democracy in the region, and especially in Lebanon,
Syria’s authoritarian regime became a natural target. Given the interna-
tional revulsion over the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister
Rafiq Hariri in February 2005 (by order of Damascus, in Washington’s
view), the subsequent Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the evacuation of the
remaining Syrian troops from the country by April, and the launch of a UN
investigation into the Hariri murder, Bashar was clearly on the defensive,
and regime change in Damascus seemed to be just a matter of time.
Responding to the US accusations, Bashar told me in 2004:

Some see me as bad, some see me as good – we don’t actually care what
terms they use. It is not right to apply this term to Syria – I mean, look
at the relationship that Syria has with the rest of the world; if you have
good relations with most of the rest of the world, you are not a rogue
state just because the United States says you are.13

Weathering these multiple storms took a great deal of ability – with a

little bit of luck thrown in. Bashar al-Assad was no longer the untested,
14 SYRIA

inexperienced leader. No one remains as president of Syria very long

without being capable and cunning. In Middle East circles, Bashar was
often compared unfavorably to his father; but one must remember that
Hafiz al-Assad did not become ‘Hafiz al-Assad the clever, tough leader and
shrewd negotiator’ overnight. He, too, had had a learning curve, particular
points on which included being taken to the diplomatic cleaners (on sepa-
rate occasions) by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and US Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger, during and after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
Bashar had to tread very carefully. As seen from Damascus, the invasion
of Iraq implanted 150,000 US troops in a country on Syria’s eastern border,
armed with the Bush doctrine and fresh from a swift and – to Syrian
eyes – shockingly easy military removal of the only other Baathist regime
on earth. To the north was Turkey; while Syria had markedly improved its
relationship with Ankara, Turkey was still a member of NATO. To the
south, of course, was Israel, as well as Jordan, with which it had a long-
standing mercurial relationship (and which, in any event, was a US ally).
The only friendly neighbor was Lebanon, and even there various domestic
factions were agitating more assertively for a Syrian troop withdrawal and
for less Syrian interference.
In the fresh glow of the Bush administration’s ‘mission accomplished’
in 2003, several implicit threats were directed at Damascus – threats that
Syrian officials took very seriously: Syria could be next on the Bush
doctrine’s hit list. As such, it is no surprise that the Syrian regime (at the
very least) turned a blind eye to insurgents crossing into Iraq. Damascus
wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first
and last time the doctrine was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this
outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States,
was considered fair game. These are the actions of a rational actor, and
most regimes would have done the same.
While certainly under pressure from the United States to do more on
the border, Bashar also had to face a domestic constituency that identified
strongly with the Iraqi insurgency. The minority Alawite Syrian regime
was caught rather off guard by the popular reaction in the country against
the US-led invasion of Iraq, particularly as manifested in salafist groups
 The Hope 15

among the Sunni Muslim majority. Because Bashar still had not consoli-
dated his hold on power, he could not afford to appear to be doing
Bush’s bidding – and nor did he want to. In fact, the more the United States
pressured Syria, the more it compelled Bashar to appeal to a combination
of Arab, Syrian and Islamic nationalism to strengthen his support base. As
US pressure was stepped up following the Hariri assassination, Bashar
orchestrated a nationalistic response that reinforced the portrayal of
internal regime critics as accomplices of the West. In addition, the threat-
ening external environment gave the regime something of a green light
to crack down on civil society and democracy activists, some of whom,
both inside and outside the country, were in contact with and were being
supported by the Bush administration. With chaos reigning in Iraq
and instability growing in Lebanon, it was not hard to remind the Syrian
populace that US-promoted democracy could likewise rip the fabric of its
own society apart. Trying to walk a fine line, Bashar did take some
measures along the Iraqi border. At this time, there was little harm in
meeting some of the US concerns; after all, it emerged soon enough that
Damascus and Washington had a shared interest in stability in Iraq.
From the point of view of Damascus, it was fortunate that the Americans
had got bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq. The United States was, there-
fore, in no position to turn its guns on Syria. Bashar could heave a sigh of
relief. The more the United States was involved in Iraq, the less enthusiasm
and ability it would have to widen what had become the neo-conservative
agenda in Syria’s direction. As one US military source said in April 2004,
a full year after the invasion had begun, ‘The Syrians know America can
bark a lot, but what else can we do?’14
There is little doubt that the Syrians were trying to complicate things
for the United States in Iraq. It must be said, nonetheless, that even if
Syria had been the most compliant and helpful country on the planet
toward the United States, the situation in Iraq would not have been
dramatically different.15 In other words, Syrian influence on the situation
in Iraq was marginal; but from the point of view of Damascus, compli-
cating the US position in Iraq even a little might have meant the difference
between regime survival and joining Saddam and his cohorts on the
16 SYRIA

‘ash heap of history’. But it was in Syria’s interest to have a stable Iraq
next door, once the US threat receded. It was also in Syria’s interests
to position itself as a friendly neighbor, the better to establish (or
re-establish) the economic and business links it had begun to forge in
the late 1990s, as well as to form a working relationship at the political
level.16
Damascus certainly wanted the US presence in Iraq to be minimized,
but it did not want Iraq to split up into its constituent parts. Syria has its
own ethnic and religious cleavages, and having one state – Lebanon –
violently implode for almost a generation was more than enough; it did
not want the same thing to happen on its eastern border. In addition, the
break-up of Iraq could potentially cause minorities in Syria to agitate for
outright independence – a possibility that was brought home by the
Kurdish nationalist riots in eastern Syria in March 2004, which were
certainly motivated by the enhanced autonomy of the Kurds in Iraq.
So by 2005, the perception of Bashar al-Assad in the United States and
much of the international community, including key regional actors, was
quite negative; indeed, there was a steady clamor of disappointment in the
Syrian president. Utterances from Washington and beyond regularly
derided, even mocked, Bashar as incompetent, naïve and weak; indeed,
when Bashar came to power in 2000, following his father’s death, I pointed
out in writing some of the similarities with the fictional character Michael
Corleone from The Godfather movies, noting how Michael, like Bashar,
was not originally selected to engage in (much less take over) the family
business. A number of people suggested to me that the correct analogy
was not with Michael, but with the weak, confused brother, Fredo. This
was usually followed by some derogatory remarks that the ‘real’ leader of
Syria should be Bashar’s tough-minded older sister, Bushra, or even the
president’s cosmopolitan wife, Asma al-Assad. Particularly in Arab society,
such a suggestion would be regarded as an attack on Bashar’s manhood,
i.e. his ability to lead.
Emblematic of the negative view of Bashar al-Assad in Washington in
the early days of the Bush administration was the congressional testimony
in 2002, when the Syrian Accountability Act was being discussed (the SAA,
 The Hope 17

which established a series of economic sanctions against Syria, was signed

into law by President Bush in 2004). This view helped establish an image
of Bashar as inept. The diatribes against him emerged from the post-9/11
environment, at a time when Congress was on anti-terrorist steroids, each
member trying to outdo the next in building up his or her anti-terrorist
credentials. This group-think also contributed to congressional support for
the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Syria was an easy target, as was its presi-
dent – ‘low-hanging fruit’, in the jargon of the time. It could easily be
attacked verbally – and even militarily, in targeted strikes – with no serious
repercussions. Giving testimony on the SAA before the House Committee
on International Relations in September 2002, Dick Armey (Republican,
Texas) claimed:

Our inaction on holding Syria accountable for its dangerous activities

could seriously diminish our efforts on the war on terrorism and
brokering a viable peace in the Middle East . . . Syria should be held
accountable for its record of harboring and supporting terrorist
groups; stockpiling illegal weapons in an effort to develop weapons of
mass destruction; and transferring weapons and oil back and forth
through Iraq.17

The co-sponsor of the SAA, Eliot Engel (Democrat, New York) asserted:
‘We will not tolerate Syrian support for terrorism. We will not tolerate
Syrian occupation of Lebanon . . . I do not want to witness horrors worse
than 9/11. I urge the Administration to get tough on Syria.’ His colleague
from New York, Gary Ackerman, chipped in: ‘This is not too big a nut
to crack. Syria is a small, decrepit, little terror state that has been yanking
our diplomatic chain for years.’ Alluding to the fact that President Bashar
was a licensed ophthalmologist, Shelley Berkley (Democrat, Nevada)
stated:

I don’t care if he’s a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, a carpenter – this is not

a kinder and gentler leader. This is a kinder and gentler terrorist, and we
don’t need another one of those. He is no different from his father;
18 SYRIA

perhaps, even worse because he should know better. This is a disgrace

that this country isn’t standing up to this terrorist and making sure that
this type of behavior is not only condemned, but eliminated.

Bashar had been in power for a little over two years when these comments
were made. They were based on a lack of knowledge in Congress of how
Syria works – or, in many instances, does not work. For instance, Bashar
had announced in the early days of his regime that he intended to
authorize the opening of private banks in Syria, a novelty for a public
sector-dominated country where most of the fluid capital found its way
to Lebanese banks. When private banks had failed to materialize by
2003, Bashar was taken to task by some members of Congress and officials
in the Bush administration for not following through on what he had
promised – further indication of his ineptitude and prevarication. He
could not be trusted.
The fact of the matter is that Syria is practically immune to innovation
and short-term change because of an almost institutionalized convulsive
reaction against it, all the way from the low-level bureaucrat to the head of
a ministry. Change in Syria just does not happen quickly. It is incremental
at best. As Syria’s First Lady, Asma al-Assad, herself steeped in a financial
background as a broker on Wall Street with J.P. Morgan before she married
Bashar, commented to me:

We have not had private banks in Syria for fifty years. Our public banks
are not functioning . . . We have staff who do not speak English, who do
not have computers. So we are on a very, very basic level . . . We had no
idea how to do this. We don’t have the experience.

Both of the Assads told me that the biggest mistake they made in this case
was announcing the intention of establishing private banks to such fanfare.
It created expectations that could not possibly be met in a year or two. A
handful of private banks were, indeed, established in 2004 – a number that
has since grown as other monetary reforms have been carried through;
and in early 2009, the long-promised Syrian stock exchange commenced
 The Hope 19

operations. This is the Syrian way, but in the sound-bite-oriented, four-

year-term American sociopolitical system it did not happen fast enough.
Heightened expectations were Bashar’s main problem from the very
beginning. The first time we met, in May 2004, I half-jokingly mentioned
to him that he had made a mistake in telling the media that he liked the
music of Phil Collins. When the unknown second son of Hafiz al-Assad
came to power in 2000, this widely reported snippet of information fed
into an emerging profile of him as a pro-West, modernizing reformer
who was not cut from the same cloth as his taciturn father. Bashar was an
ophthalmologist, not the heir to the throne, as his more flamboyant and
charismatic older brother, Basil, had been. He was the forward-looking
head of the Syrian Computer Society, something of a computer nerd
himself, and an avid amateur photographer. He liked the technological
toys of the West.
Maybe Bashar is partially to blame for these raised expectations; after
all, he did launch the Damascus Spring, which was quickly followed by a
wave of political repression. But the main thing is that officials and
commentators in the West failed to grasp that he had spent all of eighteen
months in London, and they were not during the formative years of
his life. He is the son of Hafiz al-Assad. He is a child of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. He grew up amid the superpower Cold War. He lived the
tumult in Lebanon. These are the relationships and historical events that
shaped his Weltanschauung, not his sojourn in England. Israel is Syria’s
primary competitor. He is suspicious of the United States. Lebanon should
be non-threatening at all costs, and preferably within Syria’s sphere of
influence. And he is the keeper of the Alawite flame. His hobbies might
well include playing with Sony camcorders and listening to the Electric
Light Orchestra; but maintaining Syria’s traditional interests has always
been his obligation.
C H AP T ER 2

Surviving

By early 2005, it seemed that Bashar al-Assad had made it through the worst
that the US invasion of neighboring Iraq had to offer. But regional and inter-
national pressure would increase exponentially over the next few months. It
is important to go over in some detail what happened to Syria (and to
Bashar) at this time, because it sheds light on the regime’s actions, its deter-
mination to hold on to power, and the leadership’s belief that it would
emerge victorious when confronted by an even more lethal threat in 2011.
On 14 February 2005, Rafiq Hariri, the billionaire businessman and
former Lebanese prime minister, was assassinated by a massive car bomb
in Beirut. Syria was immediately held at least indirectly responsible for the
killing, with many in the region and in the international community –
certainly in Washington – suspecting that it had been carried out by order
of Damascus. The US ambassador to Syria was recalled the day after the
assassination. The United States, Europe (particularly France, whose then
president, Jacques Chirac, had been close to Hariri) and most of the Arab
world (especially Saudi Arabia, whose royal family had also had close ties
to him) were united in calling on Syria to withdraw its 14,000–16,000
remaining troops from Lebanon. Those who held Syria responsible for the
murder believed Damascus thought the Lebanese leader had been working
to force the Syrian troops out of Lebanon.
 S u rv i v i n g 21

This was Bashar al-Assad’s severest test to date, and it gave additional
ammunition to those who wanted to contain Syria (if not to generate
regime change). Although Bashar had reduced Syria’s troop presence in
Lebanon by over 50 per cent since he came to power, he now had to cave
in to regional and international pressure and implement a complete with-
drawal in April 2005.
Syria cooperated to a minimal extent with the UN investigation into the
murder. However, some UN Security Council members (such as Russia,
China and Algeria) were opposed both to any expansion in the breadth of
the investigation and to the imposition of tougher sanctions against Syria.
By early 2006, the focus of the Bush administration’s attention seemed to
have shifted more toward Iran’s alleged attempts to develop a nuclear
weapons capability. From the perspective of Damascus, the threat receded
somewhat as the United States sank deeper into the quagmire of Iraq. Even
the UN investigation process slowed considerably, thus easing the angst in
Damascus, where naturally the whole affair was viewed as a political
instrument wielded by the Bush administration to put pressure on the
Syrian regime.
The Bush administration and anti-regime Syrian exile groups over-
played their hand vis-à-vis Damascus in late 2005. This followed the
seemingly damning preliminary UN report, which implicated figures
close to the Syrian president in the Hariri murder, including Bashar’s
brother, Maher al-Assad (commander of the Republican Guard and the
army’s elite Fourth Armored Division), and his brother-in-law, Asef
Shawkat (head of Syrian intelligence). But Bush and the exiles underesti-
mated the staying power and resilience of the regime: quite unexpectedly,
Bashar used the crisis atmosphere to consolidate his power. As Syrian
expert Joshua Landis put it at the time, Bashar may have lost Beirut, but
he gained Damascus. In other words, he used the internal fallout from
‘losing’ Lebanon to push aside domestic foes and albatrosses. This was
manifest in the forced resignation of Vice President Abd al-Halim
Khaddam at a Baath party congress meeting in June 2005. Even though
Khaddam gave some damning interviews once in exile, the fact that he
was doing so from outside Syria was evidence that Bashar had consolidated
22 SYRIA

his position. In addition, with the intense anti-American feeling in the

region, the more the Syrian exiled opposition appeared to attach itself to
the United States, the more it became discredited in Syria; and the more
Bashar appeared to stand up to Washington, the more popular he would
become – and not only inside Syria, but throughout the Arab world gener-
ally. Bashar continued his maneuvering by reshuffling his cabinet in early
2006 and implanting loyalists in the military-security apparatus. A senior
Syrian official was asked in December 2005 if his country would make
concessions, muddle through or lash out in order to escape from the
burden of international pressure: he responded that Syria would do all
three. That is the Syrian way.

US-Syrian confrontation

Bashar adeptly survived 2005. It was not easy, though. One of the ways in
which Damascus could get Washington off its back was by offering more
cooperation on Iraq. At the end of February 2005, Syria captured and
handed over to the Iraqi authorities Saddam Hussein’s half-brother,
Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, as well as twenty-nine other fugitive
members of Saddam’s regime. Sabawi reportedly was one of the leading
organizers and financiers in Syria of the insurgency in Iraq, and he was
number thirty-six on the list of the fifty-five most wanted Iraqis compiled
by the US authorities.1 Since the Syrians took more time to apprehend
Sabawi than Washington thought was warranted (Damascus believed US
intelligence was faulty), the gesture did not ingratiate the regime with the
Bush administration.
With international pressure building on Syria over the Hariri murder,
any concessions on Iraq were ignored. Indeed, it was reported that there
were several clashes during 2005 between US and Syrian soldiers along
the Iraqi-Syrian border, including a prolonged firefight during the summer
that ended in the death of several Syrians.2 There were also reports that
US Special Forces units had been carrying out missions into Syria. In
the aftermath of the Hariri assassination, the United States turned up the
heat on Damascus. In addition, political flashpoints in Iraq led to height-
 S u rv i v i n g 23

ened American pressure on Syria along the border, in an effort

to lessen the chances that insurgent activities could disrupt political
developments – a theme that would be repeated in coming years. In
October 2005, President Bush called Syria one of the Islamic extremists’
‘allies of convenience’.3 Ironically, even though important elements in the
Bush administration favored the overthrow of the Assad regime (or at
least sufficient pressure being brought to bear to induce a change of
behavior), others feared that too much pressure might lead to Assad’s fall
from power, which could result in something much worse: greater
instability in the region and/or the possibility of an Islamist regime
coming to power in Syria. This policy divide regarding the Assad regime
would reappear in 2011.
The way Damascus viewed matters, then, perhaps it made sense to
hold the Iraq card close to its chest, just in case things took a turn for the
worse . . . As things turned out, they did not; but it was clear to Damascus
that its ability to control the flow (at least to some extent) of insurgents into
Iraq was of considerable value to the Americans. But how far was this
politicized by the Bush administration in an attempt to explain away the
deteriorating situation in Iraq? A number of studies in late 2005 and early
2006 concluded that foreign fighters represented well below 10 per cent of
all insurgents in Iraq. Military officials were regularly quoted as saying
that 95 per cent of the insurgents in Iraq were homegrown. One former
intelligence official said that he thought the senior commanders were
‘obsessed with the foreign fighters because that’s an easier issue to deal
with . . . It’s easier to blame foreign fighters instead of developing new
counterinsurgency strategies.’4 General John P. Abizaid, the head of
CENTCOM, said on 2 October 2005, in a television interview on Meet the
Press, that he recognized the need to avoid ‘hyping the foreign fighter
problem’. On the other hand, Abizaid and others quickly pointed out that
even though the foreign fighter contingent was relatively small, they
provided most of the suicide bombers, since they were more likely to be
affiliated to, or to sympathize with, al-Qaida, and therefore the damage
they inflicted was disproportionately high compared to their numbers. It
is clear that there was confusion and disagreement in Western circles on
24 SYRIA

the extent of the foreign fighter influence in Iraq at the time and on what
role Syria was playing in this; there was even more disagreement on how
to deal with Syria over this issue. With its own ambiguous position on the
subject, Damascus did little to clarify matters – which is probably how
Syria wanted it. It was hedging its bets.
Things were looking up for Bashar at the start of 2006, as the situation
in Iraq appeared to be rapidly deteriorating. This was highlighted by the
bombing in February of the al-Askariyya mosque in Samarra, a venerated
Shiite shrine. The sectarian warfare between Sunni and Shia, which had
been simmering and episodic prior to this point, seemed to erupt after the
bombing, which was suspected to have been perpetrated by al-Qaida in
Iraq. All of a sudden, the prospect of unbridled chaos in Iraq allowed the
United States and Syria to develop converging interests: neither of them
wanted disintegration. For the Syrians, sectarian warfare and the break-up
of Iraq could spill over into their country, with equally devastating conse-
quences, and could even spark an unwanted regional conflagration. On
the prospects of this, and reflecting on recent events, President Bashar
commented in a Saudi newspaper in 2007:

We say that the biggest threat in the region right now is the sectarian
one. This is why we in Syria have started to act independently with our
Iraqi brethren. We hosted many delegations from tribes and different
religions. We had them conduct direct dialogues and meet with each
other. We didn’t witness at the popular level what we are witnessing at
the political level, which means that until now the sectarian dispute is
limited to the political arena . . . Arab states must deal with Iraq not on
a sectarian basis but as a whole. Without its Arab identity . . . Iraq will be
divided . . . and this will have direct repercussions on us, on you and on
other states.5

Syria began both to reject and to accept the US occupation of Iraq, and to
work more earnestly with the recognized Iraqi government. As such,
Syrian-Iraqi diplomatic relations were finally restored in November 2006,
following a visit to Baghdad by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem,
 S u rv i v i n g 25

and the two countries signed a security cooperation agreement in

December 2006, as well as some trade accords.

Riding coattails to opportunity

The Israel–Hizbullah war of summer 2006 also improved Bashar’s regional

position: Israel was unable to ‘defeat’ Hizbullah, and a ‘victory’ for
Hizbullah was a victory for Syria. Bashar had very few strategic assets left
as of early 2006, and Syrian foreign policy under the Assads is all about
having leverage for quid pro quos, particularly regarding Israel’s return of
the Golan Heights. The Bush administration had basically said to Bashar:
‘There is nothing you can do to hurt us, and you have nothing to offer us.’
The actions by Hamas and Hizbullah in summer 2006, however, showed
that these quasi-state and sub-state actors could make a significant differ-
ence in the Middle East political and strategic landscape, thus providing
Syria with more regional diplomatic leverage. Bashar rode Hizbullah
leader Hassan Nasrallah’s popularity to boost his own on the home front,
as well as his regime’s popular legitimacy in the region. Maybe now Syria
could regain a seat at the diplomatic table and utilize its new-found
leverage to restart Syrian-Israeli negotiations and engage the United States
in a dialogue on more equal terms.
There was no shortage of signals emanating from Damascus after the
2006 war that Syria was prepared to resume negotiations with Israel. A
debate ensued inside and outside the Israeli government on whether to
explore Syrian intentions. But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
remained steadfast in rejecting Bashar’s peace overtures for the time
being – partly because he did not want to negotiate from a position of
perceived weakness, following the debacle in Lebanon. It was also widely
believed that the Bush administration was pressuring Israel not to
re-engage with Syria, in order to maintain the US-led isolation of
Damascus.
Then came the Democratic victory in both houses of Congress in the
November 2006 midterm elections, widely seen as a repudiation of Bush’s
foreign policy. This was followed by the publication in early December of
26 SYRIA

the bipartisan Iraq Study Group report. The Group was charged with
producing recommendations on Iraq, but commissioners soon saw that
Iraq’s problems were so tightly interwoven with those of its neighbors that
they concluded that the question of improving the US position in the
Middle East overall would have to be addressed. Accordingly, they advo-
cated a broader regional diplomatic offensive, including a call for the
United States to re-engage with Syria.
Syrian officials, however, were both disappointed and angry over the
refusal of the Bush administration to change course. They met Iraq Study
Group representatives, and several US senators visited Damascus and met
Bashar in December 2006. Syria hoped a corner had been turned with the
United States, but it would be disappointed for the time being. Discouraged,
Bashar concluded that he must wait until another administration came to
power in Washington, which, regardless of political party, could only be
better than Bush.
By early 2007, it was time to concentrate on other matters. It was
certainly in Syria’s interests to do what it could, even if its influence was
marginal, to help stabilize the situation in Iraq. From the point of view of
Damascus, the ideal outcome would be a strong authoritarian government
in Baghdad that maintained the country’s Arab character and that was
favorably disposed to Syria, coupled with a near-term US troop with-
drawal. This might also minimize Iranian influence, which had been (and
would continue to be) considerable on account of the Shiite control of the
Iraqi government: despite their close strategic relationship, Syria and Iran
do not see eye to eye on several issues, one of them being the makeup of
the Iraqi government. Accordingly, Damascus played host to a variety of
Iraqi factions – Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish alike – seeking to maximize the
limited political influence it had in Iraq, as well as the potential lucrative
business and economic benefits as Iraq recovered from the war.
In addition, stability in Iraq would help Syria with its Iraqi refugee
problem. Depending on the source, estimates of the number of Iraqi refu-
gees entering Syria ranged from 500,000 to 1.4 million. Whatever the
actual figure, clearly Syria’s largely altruistic move to open its doors to
Iraqis escaping the tumult of sectarian warfare placed a tremendous strain
 S u rv i v i n g 27

on an already brittle Syrian economy. Most of the Iraqi refugees settled in

and around Damascus, forcing up rents, reducing the availability of
housing for ordinary Syrians, overcrowding the schools and generally
contributing to inflationary trends in the country. Crime also spiked
upward as the disposable income of the refugees evaporated and job
opportunities remained scarce. Support from international organizations
for refugees in Syria was slow and inadequate, so the Syrian government
was stuck with the lion’s share of the bill.
In the course of 2007 and 2008, the United States and Syria seemed to
dance around the issue of foreign fighters in Iraq: sometimes Damascus
received praise for its efforts; at other times it was urged by US officials to
do more. On the one hand, a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq
released in February 2007 concluded that external actors (including Syria)
would not likely be a ‘major driver of violence’, and that most of the
violence appeared to be driven by internal factors.6 On the other hand, at
a 26 April 2007 briefing, General David Petraeus, who had become
commander of the multinational forces in Iraq in January 2007, stated that
‘80 to 90 percent of the suicide attacks are carried out by foreigners’ chan-
neled into Iraq by a ‘network that typically brings them in through Syria’.
He said the Syrians had to do more to ‘crack down’ on the trafficking of
insurgents into Iraq, although he stopped short of saying that Damascus
was supporting the militants.7 Within the Bush administration, Petraeus
had actually been advocating a policy of engagement with Syria, as a way
of sealing the border, and he offered to travel to Damascus to facilitate
military and intelligence cooperation; but apparently his plan was vetoed
by the White House.
In April 2007, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy
Pelosi, led a bipartisan delegation of congresspersons for a high-profile
visit to Syria and a meeting with Bashar al-Assad. This was certainly a far
cry from the antagonistic attitude Congress had had toward Syria at the
time of the Syrian Accountability Act. The seesaw effect in the US
approach to Damascus was more a reflection of domestic politics in
Washington (between the Republican administration and the Democrat-
controlled Congress) than any sort of intended foreign policy ambiguity.
28 SYRIA

Regardless of this, it was quite confusing to the Syrian regime, and it

would continue to be so, because schizophrenic US actions vis-à-vis Syria
would continue throughout the remainder of the Bush administration.
According to American military intelligence officers, there appeared to
be some low-level US-Syrian military and/or intelligence cooperation in
2008, with Syrian sources passing information to US forces so that they
could target insurgents inside Iraq. In addition, Syria stepped up its arrests
of foreign fighters inside the country. As one US military official stationed
in northern Iraq, along the Syrian border, said: ‘We don’t really deal
directly with the Syrians, but I will tell you that they have been relatively
good in the near recent past, arresting people on their side of the border.’8
Several US officials in Iraq stated at the time that the number of foreign
fighters crossing into the country from Syria had gone down from about
ninety per month to about twenty per month (and down from an esti-
mated high of 120 per month at the peak of the violence in 2007). This
reduction in the flow of foreign fighters also had to do with the relative
success of the ‘surge’ of US military forces in Iraq, initiated by Petraeus in
early 2007, and – maybe even more importantly – with US efforts to win
over Sunni tribal confederations to the US cause (the Sunni ‘Awakening’),
after they had become alienated over the years by the extremist tactics and
beliefs of al-Qaida elements in Iraq.
It seemed as if US-Syrian interests and cooperative efforts were finally
aligned with regard to Iraq. This paralleled Bashar al-Assad’s rapid emer-
gence from US-led isolation, highlighted by his attendance at a Euro-
Mediterranean summit meeting hosted by French President Nicolas
Sarkozy in July 2008. This was a major breakthrough for the Syrian presi-
dent, coming as it did on the heels of French gratitude for Syria’s positive
role in constructing the Doha agreement in May 2008, which put to rest
(for the time being) a crisis in Lebanon that threatened to spiral out of
control. Bashar was playing the role he had repeatedly said he wanted to
play – that of facilitator. He preferred not to sever relations with Iran,
Hizbullah or Hamas; instead, he wanted to utilize Syria’s unique capacity
to play both sides of the fence in order to facilitate Iranian, Hizbullah and
Hamas engagement with the West, in the process elevating Syria’s status.
 S u rv i v i n g 29

Bashar was confident that he had placed the country on the right side of
the strategic equation in the inter-Arab arena, especially after Israel’s
heavy-handed military action in Gaza against Hamas at the end of 2008
and early 2009. He consistently refused to give in to what, in the region,
was called the ‘American project’. It is almost as if the Arab world moved
closer to his consistently held position, rather than the other way around.
The burgeoning cooperative attitude between Syria and the United
States appeared to come to a halt on 26 October 2008, when American
forces carried out a daring cross-border raid into Syria, near the frontier
town of Abu Kamal, and killed a senior al-Qaida operative by the name of
Abu Ghadiya, who apparently had been in charge of a Syrian facilitation
network since 2005. Officially, the Syrian government denied the claim
and expressed outrage over what it viewed as an unwarranted attack. Syria
announced the closure of the American School and the American Cultural
Center in Damascus – hardly an earth-shattering response.
Bashar knew, however, that he could do little in any tangible way to
respond in kind. He was also smart enough to pay attention to the polls,
which showed that Barack Obama, who was much more favorably disposed
to diplomatic engagement with Syria, was likely to win the US presidential
election. The fact that Bashar was able to hold off those in the Syrian lead-
ership who wanted a more aggressive response was a sign that his vision
of Syrian foreign policy had imposed itself on the Syrian foreign policy-
making apparatus. He did not want to jeopardize the momentum toward
a US-Syrian rapprochement when Obama came to power in January 2009.
More importantly in the immediate term, though, following the Abu
Kamal raid Syria decided to scale back cooperation with the United States
over foreign fighters.9
In addition, the Bush administration’s influence in the Middle East had
been considerably circumscribed over its Iraqi policy and the lack of any
tangible movement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. To make up for the
diminished US role in Middle East diplomacy, regional players began to
enter the Middle East negotiations as arbiters and brokers, especially
Qatar and Turkey; indeed, many were surprised by the announcement in
May 2008 that Turkey had been brokering indirect Syrian-Israeli peace
30 SYRIA

negotiations. This not only revealed the diplomatic vacuum in the region
that the United States should have filled, but it also indicated that Syria
was indeed serious about peace with Israel (contrary to the lamentations
of the Bush administration that Damascus only wanted the benefits of
being involved in a peace process and was not prepared to make the neces-
sary sacrifices). Unfortunately, the Israeli offensive in Gaza in December
2008 and January 2009 forced all sides to cancel the negotiations.
The walls of isolation surrounding Syria were crumbling fast. High-
level diplomats from a host of European countries beat a path to Damascus
in late 2007 and 2008. Even the Israelis deemed Bashar’s peace overtures
worth exploring, as he continued to maintain the strategic choice for peace
with Israel (despite a September 2007 Israeli attack on a suspected Syrian
nuclear facility, which sparked an investigation by the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)).10 As with the US cross-border raid into
Syria from Iraq in October 2008, this did not alter Bashar’s overall course.
He responded in a relatively measured fashion. He knew he could not do
much more anyway, but he did not want to sour the relationship with the
United States just when an anticipated Obama presidential victory might
herald a new diplomatic environment.
Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election seemed to
create another opportunity to improve the US-Syrian relationship; indeed,
in 2009 and 2010 high-level US and Syrian officials met on a regular
basis. In June 2009, the Obama administration announced that it would
return the US ambassador to Damascus, and in early 2010 an ambassador-
designate was chosen. But ideology and anti-Syrian institutional inertia
often trump logic, and moral absolutism buries compromise. Obama was
not able to wave a magic wand and immediately build a productive rela-
tionship with Syria. The legacy of the Bush administration resulted in
tremendous distrust on both sides of the equation. The situation was not
helped by a raft of UN resolutions, a UN tribunal continuing to investigate
the Hariri assassination, an IAEA investigation into Syria’s alleged nuclear
site, and the Syrian Accountability Act. All of these things found their way
into the US-Syrian dynamic, and they could not be easily disentangled,
especially as the Obama administration was compelled to deal with other
 S u rv i v i n g 31

important domestic and foreign policy issues soon after it came to office
in 2009. What, during the Bush years, could have been a sagacious foreign
policy of dialogue and cooperation with Syria to combat Islamic terrorism,
foster peace with Israel and promote political space in Lebanon instead
ended up in a neo-conservative ideological straitjacket.

Gaining confidence

Over the years, I saw Bashar al-Assad grow more comfortable as

president – perhaps too comfortable. When I first met him, in 2004, he
was still a bit unsure about the world around him. Particularly befuddling
to him was US policy. In 2005, he was defensive and angry, especially as he
had ordered the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon (something
for which he felt he should have received at least a little credit, even if it
was primarily due to international pressure). In early 2006, having survived
the worst that 2005 had to offer, he began to feel more secure in his posi-
tion and more sure of his future. In the summer of 2006, when I met him
during the Israel–Hizbullah war, it was apparent to me that Bashar’s
confidence had grown, perhaps in proportion to the regional perception
that Hizbullah had inflicted a defeat on – or had at least survived – the
Israeli onslaught. His anger at the United States turned into cockiness,
as if the Bush administration had taken its best shot and he was still
standing.
In May 2007, amid Bashar’s re-election in a referendum to another
seven-year term, I noticed something in him that I had not detected
before: self-satisfaction, even smugness. Ever since first meeting Bashar I
had found him to be unpretentious, even self-deprecating. Despite the
very serious circumstances surrounding him, he never seemed to take
himself too seriously: to my invitation to talk about what he felt had been
his biggest achievements, he responded that perhaps we should spend
more time on his biggest failures. He is not a commanding figure at
first glance: soft-spoken, gregarious and with a childlike laugh – not the
typical profile of a dictator. However, for this very reason he commands
attention. Beneath him lies the pyramidal Syrian political and military
32 SYRIA

structure. He has got where he is and has stayed there despite – or perhaps
because of – his unassuming appearance.
The election of 2007 generated tremendous mass support for the
re-elected president. Mingling with the throngs of supporters around
Umayyad Square in Damascus over two days, I sensed that a good portion
of this outpouring of affection was genuine. Though, of course, much was
prearranged: in Syria, when one group – be it a ministry or a private
corporation – starts to organize celebratory events, others rapidly clamber
on board to generate a tidal wave of support. (Equally, in a mukhabarat
state, where one never knows who might be a government informant, no
one wants to be seen not to support the president’s re-election.) Bashar
had finally been able to tap into that aquifer of support that he had appar-
ently built up, and for the first time he was able to experience it in grand
style. It seemed a cathartic experience for him, after all that had happened
in the previous two years. In a personal meeting with him on ‘election day’,
I found him genuinely touched by the celebrations and parades in his
honor; more importantly, he seemed to drink it in. It all reminded me
rather of actress Sally Field’s emotional 1985 Oscar acceptance speech –
you like me, you really like me!
And yet he ran unopposed, in a yes–no referendum vote. Visiting a
polling station, I observed that each ‘voter’ had to tick the ‘yes’ or the ‘no’
box – in public – with a band playing and people singing pro-Bashar tunes.
It would be an intrepid voter who ticked ‘no’, especially with security
personnel no doubt watching closely. The Bashar posters draped over virtu-
ally every upright structure and hanging from virtually every window, and
the ‘I love Bashar’ (in English and Arabic) pins, pendants and billboards were
at odds with the way he had up to then eschewed such ‘cult’ behavior. Bashar
understood that the over 97 per cent vote to re-elect him was not an accurate
barometer of his real standing in the country. He said it was more important
to look at turnout rates, since those who did not vote could probably be
added to those who voted ‘no’. According to Syrian estimates, the voter
turnout rate was 75 per cent, so still a very favorable response for Bashar.
This was the first time I felt that Bashar had begun to believe the
sycophants – that to lead the country was his destiny. His view of his
 S u rv i v i n g 33

position had certainly evolved since the early years of his rule. In the 1950s,
the US authorities had frequently referred to friendly dictatorships as ‘tran-
sitional authoritarian regimes’ (i.e. with US guidance and support, those
countries would ‘transition’ to democracy). More often than not, of course,
the transitional authoritarian leaders did not want to transition: they liked
the power and, in many cases, were convinced that the well-being of the
country was synonymous with their retention of power. I wondered at
the time whether Bashar had passed the tipping point in this regard.
By late 2007, Bashar felt vindicated, which contributed mightily to his
renewed sense of confidence. Syria was even invited to attend the Annapolis
conference that the Bush administration sponsored in November to jump-
start the Middle East peace process. European and Middle Eastern diplo-
mats were beginning to travel to Damascus to meet Bashar and other
Syrian officials, and Bashar’s schedule was filling up.11 While not claiming
outright victory, Bashar certainly believed that the noose had been
removed from around his neck; indeed, time was on his side now. Syrian
officials scoffed at the popular notion that their country could be brought
in from the cold à la Libya, i.e. that a warm US-Syrian relationship awaited
Damascus if only it would give up Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran, in the same
way as Libyan leader Muammar al-Gadafi had renounced weapons of
mass destruction and made amends for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. On
the contrary, the Syrians believed they had stayed the course and that it
had proved to be the correct one: it was the United States that needed
to be brought back in from the cold. The 2008 presidential election and
the victory of Barack Obama (in a resounding renunciation of the Bush
presidency) allowed the United States – not Syria – an opportunity to
make amends.

A seat at the table

Bashar – and Syria – wanted to be taken seriously by the international

community. In a telling exchange in July 2006, during the Israel–Hizbullah
war, I asked the Syrian president what he thought of President Bush’s
expletive that had inadvertently been caught on tape at the G8 summit
34 SYRIA

meeting earlier in the month: in a conversation with British Prime

Minister Tony Blair about the conflict in Lebanon, Bush had said, ‘Yo
Blair, you see, the . . . thing is what they need to do is get Syria to get
Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.’ Despite the US president’s
misreading of Syria’s (lack of) influence over Hizbullah, Bashar’s reaction
was unexpected and interesting: ‘I love it. I love that he [Bush] said that. It
makes me feel great, because at least he is thinking about Syria. He is
thinking about us.’ Syria was not behind Hizbullah’s actions, and Damascus
was lucky the Israelis knew that and decided not to take out their wrath on
Syria as well. But the very perception that Syria could do some damage
gave it some utility, some leverage, some more arrows in what had been a
near empty quiver.
But, as many Syrians have pointed out over the years, Damascus wants
to be seen as a problem solver, not a problem seeker. One might say that
Syria sees its ability to create problems – which it believes it has every
incentive to do when threatened – as translating into an ability to solve
problems. Certainly Bashar was consistent with me in trying to advocate
the utility of Syria in the region. If Syria is denied this role, its leverage
in the region is drastically reduced. In other words, Damascus was loath
to completely sever its ties with Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran, as they
provided Syria with diplomatic leverage. On the contrary, Bashar saw his
country as a conduit for the West to develop a dialogue with these very
entities.
In late 2008, Bashar certainly believed he could now sit back and see
how things unfolded – for example, the policy direction of the new Obama
administration when it took power a few months later. He felt empowered
politically: 2008 had been a pretty good year for him. There had been the
Doha agreement, which had temporarily enhanced the Syrian position in
Lebanon; French President Sarkozy had welcomed Bashar in Paris on
Bastille Day, along with other heads of state, including Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert (this had signaled a significant breach in the West’s
attempts to isolate Syria and was a major victory for Bashar). And perhaps
most important of all, the Bush administration was all but gone, swept
away in a presidential election that brought to power someone whose
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