The Autumn of the Autocrats

Fouad Ajami

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005

Summary:  If the assassins of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri sought to make an example of him for his defiance of Syria, the aftermath of the crime has mocked them. For a generation, Lebanon was an appendage of Syrian power. But now the Lebanese people, in an "independence intifada," are clamoring for a return to normalcy. The old Arab edifice of power has survived many challenges in the past, but something is different this time: the United States is now willing to gamble on freedom.

Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

No one in the Arab world would shed tears for Assad and his political dynasty, and he and his men knew that. Theirs was a minority regime, the dominion of the Alawis, a heterodox Muslim community from Syria's northern mountains, over a principally Sunni Muslim society. Hafiz al-Assad, who established the regime, may have lacked Saddam's megalomania, but at the heart of his government was the cult of the ruler and his iron fist. In Syria as in Iraq, a generation of peasant soldiers and merciless ideologues took the society apart and trumpeted their pursuit of a new social order, only to create a system of political sterility and economic plunder.

Although Assad's regime had shut down its critics at home and had seemingly subdued Lebanon, the new security doctrine of the United States held dangers aplenty for it. Wars of pre-emption were now a distinct possibility. Washington had its hands full in Iraq, but no one in Damascus could be certain that the U.S. drive to finish off Arab dictators would come to a halt in Iraq. And there were Washington's "neocons" -- a veritable obsession of the Arab intellectual and political class, in Damascus and beyond. Who knew what they had in mind? There was unsettling talk of "low-hanging fruit" and "phase two" of the U.S. military effort. There was paranoia to spare in Arab political circles about a new American imperial bid to remake the Arab world.

As Syria's rulers hunkered down and waited to see the unfolding of the U.S. project in Iraq, they did their best to aid and abet the anti-U.S. insurgency there, while still maintaining the necessary fiction of their neutrality, doing what they could to avoid open confrontation with Washington. It was a game of cat and mouse: it was known that Arab jihadists from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan traveled to Mosul and the Sunni Triangle from Syria. There was irony here: an Alawite regime that was at odds with Sunni Islamists at home was feeding a Sunni insurgency next door. The jihadists dreaded the Syrian regime as a "godless tyranny" but took its favors. The 400-mile border was porous, and the Syrians had no interest in securing it. There were loyalists of the decapitated Iraqi regime with money to spare; they were looking for sanctuary, and the Syrians would provide it.

It was important for Syria that this heady U.S. bid to change the politics of the Arab states be thwarted. The more blood and treasure the United States expended in Iraq, the safer it was for Damascus. The new U.S. reach into the Arab world was a transient affair, the Syrians hoped. In time, Washington would grow weary of its burdens and pack up the military gear, along with U.S. designs for the region and its people. In the interim, Syria would punctuate its steady undermining of the U.S. operation with small favors and concessions to the U.S. military authorities. The Syrians could also plead that sealing the Syrian-Iraqi border was beyond their power and that they lacked the means and technology to monitor the age-old traffic on their frontier.

The Bush administration had announced nothing less than the obsolescence of the Arab world's old authoritarian order. The brittle system in Damascus was in a fight to keep intact its old ways of control. Gone was the steady hand of the old juggler, Hafiz al-Assad. Gone, too, made obsolete by the rise of George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, was the tortured U.S. diplomacy, that fabled "peace process," that had courted Damascus and catered to its sense of importance as a big player in the Fertile Crescent. When he was Israel's prime minister, Ehud Barak had contemplated a deal with Damascus in preference to a settlement with the Palestinians. The Syrians had held back and were left on the sidelines. No one in Jerusalem or Washington was waiting on Syria any longer. An autocratic regime had survived, but the confidence and the security it had once possessed had cracked.

A DIFFERENT WORLD

In retrospect, it was inevitable that Lebanon would provide the setting for the response of Syria to the mounting pressures it faced, that it would be in Beirut that Damascus would set out to defy the world, only to highlight the crisis of its moribund regime.

In late 2004, trouble had erupted when Syria extended the mandate of its Maronite Christian satrap in Beirut, President Emile Lahoud. He had served out his six-year term, and Lebanon's constitution decreed the end of his tenure. Lahoud's had not been a happy stewardship. The country had begun to bristle under Syrian control, and the former military officer was Syria's man -- nothing more. Lahoud was even at odds with the mainstream members of his own Maronite community, who have traditionally been devoted to the ancestral independence of their country. Over time, the Syrian embrace had grown suffocating. Syrian agents were trampling on internal matters such as naturalization policies and an education system of which Lebanon had long been proud. The machinery of extortion had become particularly burdensome, as the Syrians helped themselves to what could be had in Lebanon. It had become increasingly difficult to live with the humiliation.

A quiet rebellion was gathering steam. The revered Maronite patriarch, Cardinal Mar Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, launched a brave campaign for the restoration of Lebanon's sovereignty. Lebanon had always been, at its heart, a "Christian homeland." With the sanctity and protection given him by his standing in Lebanon and the Catholic world, Sfeir emerged as the standard-bearer of the country's sovereignty. Hereditary Druze leader Walid Jumblat, who had accommodated Syrian power for a quarter century, also drifted into the opposition. His father, Kamal, once a towering figure in the country's politics, had been struck down by the Syrians in 1977. The son knew that there was nothing he could do to avenge his father, but he threw caution to the wind to become a vocal opponent of Syrian hegemony.