The Middle East: Death of a Tyrant - Assad and the world he left

National Review, July 3, 2000 by David Pryce-Jones

A wise man once said that each man's death diminishes us all. He did not have the Middle East in mind. The death of President Hafiz Assad of Syria relieves the world of a tyrant who held power these last 30 years. Widely described, and even admired, as a cool and calculating man, he was thought to hold the key to war and peace in the region. In reality, he made a series of egregious mistakes whose effect has been to marginalize and impoverish Syria. Lively and creative individuals, in a country of potential wealth, Syrians under Assad have instead experienced unremitting oppression. "This too will pass," is an Arab saying that expresses historic helplessness in the face of tyranny. The passing of Assad is a necessary-though, unfortunately, insufficient- step toward progress.

Assad came to power in 1970 through a particularly unscrupulous coup, after which he had his rivals and several colleagues imprisoned or murdered. His sole and abiding purpose was then to maintain and consolidate absolute power for himself. This was not a straightforward issue. Assad was an Alawi, which is to say a member of a Shia sect estimated to form about 12 percent of the population. The huge majority of Syrians are orthodox Sunnis, and they saw no good reason to submit to domination by a minority. Historically, the Sunnis had provided the ruling elite. Now Assad, his family, and favored Alawis divided the spoils between them, enriching and empowering themselves in a process as visible as it was corrupt. Hama is a city of 200,000 inhabitants, and in 1982 the Sunnis rose against the Alawi establishment there. Perhaps as many as 30,000 Sunnis were killed when Assad turned artillery on the city center. Their corpses were then buried under cement, otherwise unmarked to this day.

In almost all countries without democracy, there are irreconcilable disputes between majorities and minorities, and it may be argued that Assad had little or no choice if he was to survive. Leaving aside the inhumanity, the violence of the Hama massacre calls for revenge, in a society where revenge is a matter of honor.

Assad's brutally primitive methods of control had much in common with Communism. After training as an airforce pilot in the Soviet Union, Assad evidently believed that Communism was compatible with his ambitions, suitable for Syria, and destined to win the Cold War. So he made Syria into a Soviet client state, with a centralized economy, a single party, and a secret police to enforce his will regardless of law. Some of his political opponents have spent whole lifetimes in prison without trial. Syria offered such sights as women's labor brigades in khaki fatigues, something wholly alien to a Muslim country.

The steadfast friend and ally of Brezhnev and later Andropov, Assad became a true Kremlin conspirator, the recipient of huge secret subsidies and arms deliveries. President Ceausescu, then the Communist leader of Romania, liked to boast that when he needed to have someone murdered in the West, he turned to Rifaat, Assad's brother, to do it. Assad also sponsored international terrorists such as Abu Nidal and Carlos Sanchez, the so-called Jackal, and Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish advocate of violence against Turkey.

Whether Assad really believed his regular denunciations that Israel is a wicked imperialist state that ought to be wiped off the map is doubtful. In all likelihood, he was too complete a cynic. Conflict with Israel promoted Assad to a role of importance on the world's stage. Here was a threat that he could brandish either to suit the Soviets in the Cold War or for advantage in the Arab world. In that spirit, he collaborated with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in launching the surprise war of 1973. In the last decade, calibrating the degree of violence with the precision of a chemist, he exploited the Israeli security zone in Lebanon to keep up regional tension.

At the same time, he was sending agents for overt or covert subversion and sabotage into Jordan and Iraq, closing the common frontiers whenever that seemed expedient. He sponsored violence against Turkey, threatening to mobilize until the Turks made unmistakably clear their own intention to invade Syria. Since 1976, some 35,000 Syrian troops have occupied Lebanon and dictated that country's external and internal affairs. Probably the Pales tinians have had no greater enemy than Assad, whose regular outbursts of rage against Yasser Arafat were notorious. Once he even had him detained. In short, not one of Syria's neighbors escaped Assad's attempts at aggrandizement.

Allegiance to the Soviets carried the certain expectation of reward, and also served to tantalize the United States with the prospect that he might switch if offered even greater rewards. In the 1991 Gulf War, he joined the Allied coalition in return for a couple of billion dollars that he promptly spent on Soviet Scud missiles and chemical weapons. But by then this game of playing off the superpowers was coming to a close. One fine day, Gorbachev dismissed Syria without apology. Assad had misunderstood the balance of forces in the world; or more simply, backed the wrong horse. Misplaced flattery from the Clinton administration encouraged Assad until the end of his life to persist in the illusion that he could embark on a peace process whereby Israel would make a complete surrender without any meaningful compromise on his part.