Reporting from Beirut?
Tucked into President Obama's speech on Arab world policy Thursday were indications of a subtle but important shift regarding the repressive rule of President Bashar Assad in Syria, a linchpin state in the Middle East that has long been considered a bulwark of stability.For years, diplomats and scholars worried that the departure of the Assad clan would plunge Syria into the kind of civil strife that engulfed neighboring Lebanon and Iraq or the former Yugoslavia. But increasingly they believe that the biggest factor in Syria's potential instability is the regime's attempts to exploit the nation's sectarian tensions, not the inherent divisions in the country.
"Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from somebody else," Obama said of the region, words that could describe the tactics used by Assad as well as Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh and Libya's Moammar Kadafi."But the events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore.... Societies held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder."
After the uprisings this year in Tunisia and Egypt, the doomsday scenario of post-revolutionary Arab countries becoming echoes of Iraq or Islamic states such as Iran ? a specter promoted by Assad, Kadafi and the ruling monarchy in Bahrain ? is being increasingly dismissed.
"Obama was really talking about a new foreign policy philosophy," said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian democracy activist in Washington. "From an old pragmatism based on security to a new pragmatism based on managing the transition to democracy and erring on the side of the people."
Syria's record of supporting militant groups opposed to Israel, its alliance with Iran and its interference in Lebanon have earned it special scrutiny in Washington, but the secular Assad regime nonetheless was considered predictable and secure.
"There was a long policy of the U.S. supporting a regime no matter what for the sake of keeping stability, especially on the borders of Israel," said Riad Khawhaji of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, a think tank based in Beirut and Dubai.
The mood appears to have shifted.
"It is difficult to imagine any conceivable successor to Assad who would pursue more problematic or troublesome policies," says a report published Thursday by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and written by retired Israeli Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a former intelligence chief, and Robert Satloff, the generally neoconservative think tank's executive director.
"The president not only sanctioned Assad but articulated an issue, which is: Democratize or get out, beginning the clock ticking toward calling on Assad to leave," Satloff said in an interview. "The idea that this regime in Syria is going to meet any reasonable standard of reform is unconceivable."
In Syria, Sunni Muslims, ethnic Kurds, the Druze and various Shiite Muslim and Christian sects make up a potentially volatile mosaic of 22 million people. Like Iraq and Lebanon, the nation was haphazardly cobbled together by colonial powers after World War I.
The Syrian regime, in power since 1963, has a long history of manipulating that ethnic and sectarian brew.
Assad's father, Hafez, and his Arab nationalist Baath Party stalwarts renamed Kurdish villages in the northeast in Arabic and resettled Sunni tribesman in traditionally Druze districts. The elder Assad gave fellow Alawites ? a small Shiite sect that makes up perhaps 12% of the population ? access to cheap property in Damascus that helped them move their center of power from the coastal northwest to the capital. Most importantly, he put fellow Alawites in charge of the various security branches.
"The regime has gone out of its way to cultivate, delve into and almost celebrate this sectarianism," said Amr Al-Azm, a Syrian archaeologist who served for years as an advisor to the regime and now teaches social science at Shawnee State University in Ohio.
Bashar Assad, who took power in 2000, wooed the urban Sunni merchant classes into the regime's inner circle, but never at the cost of giving up any of his group's power or granting proportionate power to the country's Shiite majority.
"In terms of apportioning power, they brought Christian and Sunni elements of the business class and co-opted them into the government ? Sufis as well," said David Lesch, professor of Middle East history at Trinity University in Texas who has maintained a years-long correspondence with the current Syrian president. "I've seen that more so under Bashar than under the father."
The sectarian incitement only increased during the recent protests. The regime has bluntly used Alawite-led security forces against Sunni bastions, such as Homs and Dara, where the uprising began, and the areas around Damascus. According to a Western diplomat in Beirut, citing Lebanese security officials and witnesses in Damascus, Assad has activated and armed Alawite militias in the north and in the capital.
"On the one hand, they are saying that the opposition and foreign elements are fueling sectarian tensions," said the Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "On the other hand, they play on sectarian tensions."
During unrest this month in the coastal city of Baniyas, home to Sunni, Alawite and Christian communities, Assad dispatched tanks solely to Sunni districts, deepening the divide among residents, activists say.
Alawites themselves have also been fed a diet of fear, analysts said, being told that any regime change would spell not only the end of their privileges but possibly their communities. Al-Azm said many of those in the Alawite community have grown extremely uncomfortable with Assad's strategy, but its logic compels them to back the regime and his family for fear of losing everything.
"What the Assad family has done is pushed the country to its extreme limit, and they're dragging with them the rest of their sect," he said.
The scholars who best know Syria doubt it will fall into the cycle of violence seen in Lebanon and Iraq, and are increasingly willing to imagine the Assads out of power.
"While there are certainly these underlying vertical divisions," said Raymond Hinnebusch, director of the Center of Syrian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, "there are also counter-forces that have in many ways integrated the society."
A special correspondent in Damascus contributed to this report.
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