The Syrian Dilemma (Page 3)

Damascus

Perhaps even more dangerous to Syrian Baathism than the loss of this priceless Lebanese asset would be the potential domino effect inside Syria of the Lebanese "people power" that chiefly brought it about. First there were elections in Iraq and Palestine, which, however flawed, showed Syrians the shaming fact that Arabs enjoy more electoral choice if they are occupied than if they are sovereign. Then came this huge, unscheduled outbreak of popular self-assertion in a country where an Arab sister-state, not an Israeli or American occupier, is in charge.

And could any Syrians fail to grasp that what the Lebanese were rising up against was not (despite some ugly, chauvinist side effects) Syria itself but the extension, on Lebanese soil, of what they themselves more drastically endure at home? That is to say, the oppressions of a once-revolutionary new order that has long since betrayed its three great founding principles, pan-Arab unity, freedom and socialism. Like the now-defunct Soviet-style, single-party "people's republics" on which it was largely modeled, this Baathist order has lost all true legitimacy, sunk as it is in the most cancerous corruption, minority sectarian rule, intellectual and technical backwardness, bureaucratic ossification, abuse of law and human rights, imperviousness to dissent or criticism.

Syrians also know that those who brought the Syrian presence in Lebanon to its disastrous pass are the same people--the so-called "old guard," shadowy power centers in the army and intelligence services--who have brought fear to their own lives these past forty years, as well as blocked all reform and democratization. It is no surprise that Syria's dissident intelligentsia identify entirely with Lebanon's democratic uprising; call, like it, for full Syrian withdrawal; and use the international publicity the uprising has brought to dramatize their own campaign for human rights and civil liberties, a campaign whose most visible form is small snap demonstrations, outside courts or prisons, whenever opportunity arises.

But the Syrians aren't going to rise up like the Lebanese--not yet, anyway. Long repressed, they don't have the organized opposition or the strong residue of democratic traditions that the "Syrianization" of Lebanon never snuffed out. And the barrier of fear, always much higher than in Lebanon, remains strongly in place. "Hariri's murder," said a dissident who had no doubt about its authorship, "was a savage warning to us as much as to the Lebanese." Yet weak though it may be, and still confined largely to the intelligentsia, small political groups and human rights activists, the opposition is certainly gaining ground on a regime that is in little better shape itself, rattled and insecure as it is behind the despot's characteristic facade of lofty self-confidence, loyalist street demonstrations and the portrayal of obvious reverses as great achievements in the onward people's march.

Syrians find it hard to imagine that with Lebanon and all the domestic, regional and international pressures it has unleashed, President Bashar al-Assad doesn't realize he must do something--and do it decisively--to guard his regime, or even his country, against the gathering perils. But in this aptly dubbed "dictatorship without a dictator," has he the means, or the will? Whereas his late father, Hafez, was absolute master of what he had built, Bashar often seems more like its prisoner, forever torn between two alternative courses, reform or reaction, liberalization or repression, reaching out to the people as his source of authority or falling back on his old guard. Thus, on coming to power a few years ago, he initiated the "Damascus Spring," only to rein it in when, timid though it was, he thought it was going too far.

Such alternatives now confront him more starkly than ever. He can either make a clean break with Lebanon, purge the old guard, open wide the doors to domestic reform and appease America and the world; or he can cling to Lebanon by any means, bow to the old guard, revert to full-scale repression and defy the world. What he will probably try to do is essentially what he always has done: make no clear choice, temporize, hope that something turns up. But with his authority steadily fraying, both within his apparatus and in the country at large, how long can it be before someone, somewhere, decides it is time to rescue the regime--or overthrow it? These are the kinds of questions now being asked by Syrians, whose yearning for change is tempered only by fear of the way--liable to be tumultuous at best, civil war at worst--it might come about, and what would come after.

Not the least of the great imponderables is what America's role and objectives might be. The homily that a typical liberal, secular-modernist dissident might address to President Bush would go something like this:

In principle we like your "freedom and democracy" and think that what you've been doing in the Middle East has, by accident or design, given a push in that direction. But the bad things your country does still so far outweigh the potentially good that the last thing reformists like us need is to be identified with you, especially if you or Israel physically attack us. For we know that whatever you do it is Israel's wishes, not ours, that concern you. And we fear that you really do take seriously your Israeli friend Natan Sharansky--the right-wing fanatic who inspires your speeches--and his preposterous theory that only when Arabs are democratic will they be ready for peace with Israel. No, we want democracy because it will serve our national interest far better than a despotic regime whose nationalism is just a cover to suppress democracy. And so long as your policies remain what they are, our national interest will be to oppose them. But in any case, if one day we do have free elections here, it won't be the likes of us who win them but--thanks largely to you--the Islamists.

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