THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIII, Issue # 134, May 24, 2011
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
FIN DE REGIME IN SYRIA?
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
THE GREAT OPPORTUNITIES THE REVOLT IN SYRIA OFFERS THE WEST -- WHAT THE WESTERN STATES MUST DO:
QUICKLY & ROBUSTLY SEIZE THE MOMENT TO DISPATCH BASHAR AL-ASSAD & HIS ACCOMPLICES -- THE MANY BENEFITS
THAT WILL FOLLOW WHEN THE ASSAD REGIME REACHES ITS APPOINTED DUSTBIN OF HISTORY -- FOREIGN &
GEOPOLITICAL BENEFITS --DOMESTIC & HUMANITARIAN BENEFITS -- ONE POTENTIAL DANGER OF REGIME CHANGE IN
SYRIA -- SUNNIS VERSUS ALAWIS -- HOW WESTERN POLICY CAN MAKE A DECISIVE DIFFERENCE
FULL STORY:
The revolt in Syria offers great opportunities, humanitarian and geopolitical. Western states should quickly and robustly
seize the moment to dispatch strongman Bashar al-Assad and his accomplices. Many benefits will follow when they reach
their appointed dustbin of history.
FOREIGN & GEOPOLITICAL BENEFITS
The malign, but tactically brilliant, Hafez al-Assad blighted the Middle East with disproportionate Syrian influence
for decades. His son, the feckless Bashar, has continued this pattern since 2000 by sending terrorists to Iraq, murdering
Lebanon's Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, overthrowing his son Saad, aiding the Hezbollah and Hamas terror groups, and
developing chemical and nuclear weapons. His riddance will be a universal boon.
But Bashar's main role internationally is serving as Tehran's premier ally. Despite Westerners usually seeing the
Syrian-Iranian alliance as a flimsy marriage of convenience, it has lasted over thirty years, enduring shifts in personnel and
circumstances, due to what Jubin Goodarzi, in 2006, called the two parties' "broader, longterm strategic concerns derived
from their national security priorities."
The Syrian intifada has already weakened the Iranian-led "resistance bloc" by exacerbating political distancing Tehran
from Assad and fomenting divisions in the Iranian leadership. Syrian protesters are burning the Iranian flag; were (Sunni)
Islamists to take power in Damascus they would terminate the Iranian connection, seriously impairing the Mullah's
grandiose ambitions.
The end of Assad's rule points to other important consequences. Bashar and the ruling Islamist AK party in Turkey have
developed such close relations that some analysts see the Assad regime's removal leading to a collapse of Ankara's entire
Middle East policy. Also, unrest among the Kurds of Syria could lead to their greater autonomy, which would, in turn,
encourage co-ethnics in Anatolia to demand an independent state, a prospect that so worries Ankara, it sent a stream of
high level visitors to Damascus and urgently pushed a counter-insurgency accord on it.
Turmoil in Syria offers relief for Lebanon, which has been under the Syrian thumb since 1976. Similarly, a distracted
Damascus permits Israeli strategists, at least temporarily, to focus attention on the country's many other foreign problems.
DOMESTIC & HUMANITARIAN BENEFITS
In a smug interview discussing developments in Tunisia and Egypt, and just weeks before his own country erupted on
March 15, 2011, Bashar al-Assad explained the misery also facing his own subjects: "Whenever you have an uprising, it
is self-evident . . . that you have anger, [which] feeds on desperation."
The word desperation nicely summarizes the Syrian people's lot; since 1970, the Assad dynasty has dominated Syria with
a Stalinist fist only slightly less oppressive than that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Poverty, expropriation, corruption, stasis,
oppression, fear, isolation, Islamism, torture, and massacre are the hallmarks of Assad rule.
Thanks to Western greed and gullibility, however, outsiders rarely realize the full extent of this reality. On one hand, the
Syrian regime financially supports the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife,
Scotland, United Kingdom. On the other hand, an informal Syria lobby exists. Thus, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
refers to Bashar al-Assad as a "reformer" and Vogue magazine publishes a puff-piece on the tyrant's wife, "Asma
al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert" (calling her "glamorous, young, and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first
ladies").
One potential danger resulting from regime change must be noted. Expect not a relatively gentle coup d'état, as in Tunisia
or Egypt, but a thorough-going revolution directed not only against the Assad clan but also the Alawi community from
which it comes. Alawis, a secretive post-Islamic sect making up about one-eighth of the Syrian population, have
dominated the government since 1966, arousing deep hostility among the majority Sunnis. Sunnis carry out the intifada
and Alawis do the dirty work of repressing and killing them. This tension could fuel a bloodbath and even civil war,
possibilities that outside powers must recognize and prepare for.
As impasse persists in Syria, with protesters filling the streets and the regime killing them, Western policy can make a
decisive difference. Steven Coll of the New Yorker is right that "The time for hopeful bargaining with Assad has
passed." Time has come to brush aside fears of instability for, as analyst Lee Smith rightly observes, "It can't get any
worse than the Assads' regime." Time has come to push Bashar from power, to protect innocent Alawis, and to deal with
"the devil we don't know."
MORE ON REGIME CHANGE IN SYRIA -- SEVERAL POINTS
My title intentionally echoes one in Foreign Policy magazine from Summer, 1980, "Dateline Syria: Fin de
Régime?" Yes, I know: Stanley F. Reed III jumped the gun by (at least) 31 years, but that does not deter me from
repeating his quasi-prediction of the Assad demise.
Contradictory Iranian and Turkish advice to Assad foreshadows the larger differences ahead between the two Islamist
powers. Whereas the Iranians counseled Assad violently to repress the protesters and actually helped him do so,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan advised Assad that "responding to the people's years-old demands
positively, with a reformist approach, would help Syria overcome the problems more easily." He even got into details:
one newspaper report indicates he told the Syrians "to increase the effectiveness of public services, ensure a more
transparent economy and public tendering process, and restrain the security forces." (Those are not exactly the
priorities I would stress.) Contradictory Iranian and Turkish tactics point to looming tensions between the Islamist 1.0
and 2.0 regimes.
The Assad government insists that the street protestors are Salafis, or violent Islamists, and that the government is
protecting the country from them. As one pro-government politician put it, the regime cannot permit "some people
[to] announce a Salafi emirate in Dara'a. This is not Afghanistan." Salafis and other Islamists are indeed a great danger
in the Middle East, but, as in Libya, they are far from the mainstay of the opposition.
Vogue magazine is unrepentant, even defiant, about its wretched story on Bashar al-Assad's wife Asma. In an
interview, Vogue Senior Editor Chris Knutsen justified the glamorization of tyranny, explaining:
"We thought we could open up that very closed world
a very little bit. … The piece was not meant in any way
to be a referendum on the al-Assad regime. It was a
profile of the first lady. … For our readers, it's a way of
opening a window into this world a little bit."
A leading member of the West's Syria lobby, Patrick Seale, has apparently bailed out on the regime. He is married to a
Syrian, Rana Kabbani, who published a sharp article, "From the Turks to Assad: To Us Syrians, It Is All Brutal
Colonialism," that surely ended the Seale connection to Damascus. One excerpt from her scathing analysis:
"The entrenched and tyrannical Assad regime is viewed
by so many Syrians as an internal colonialism that, much
like the external colonialism of the past, has robbed them
and bombed them and impeded them from joining the
free peoples of the world."
© Daniel Pipes 2011
Originally Published in National Review, May 24, 2011
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, May 24, 2011
URLs:
http://www.danielpipes.org/9832/syria-fin-de-regime
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2011/05/more-on-regime-change-in-syria
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Middle East & the Problem of Syria
The Middle East & the Problem of Iran
Turkey, the Middle East, & the U.S.A.
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and Director of the Middle East Forum,
Publisher of Middle East Quarterly,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author of three books on Syria and author or co-author of a total of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for
National Review Online, Front Page Magazine, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His
analyses of world trends and of forces and developments in the Middle East have appeared in numerous North American
newspapers, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He
frequently appears on American network television, as well as at universities and think tanks, to discuss the Middle East,
Islam, and the Islamist threat to the U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on BBC and Al Jazeera, and
has lectured in approximately twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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