It’s ironical that Damascus, seat of the Umayyad dynasty and established by a clan of the Prophet’s tribe to rule the world’s first Islamic empire, should be at the heart of a new Great Game over a bunch of terrorists claiming to represent the Islamic caliphate of the future. For what the American and European response to Russia’s belated intervention in the Syrian civil war highlights is the crucial difference in the objectives of the two camps.
Syria is a deeply wounded civilisation. None of this may have happened if the British and French had not carved out between themselves the territories of the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate and in the process amputated about two fifths of Syria’s territory and coastline and erected new state frontiers between Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem. As the mandatory power in Syria and Lebanon, France sliced off regions which were added to Lebanon, creating a Greater Lebanon more than double the size of the old Ottoman province and restricting Syria’s coastline to some districts in the far north-west. As if that wasn’t enough, France then ceded to Britain the whole of the Mosul region, which it had been awarded in the infamous secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, but which Lloyd George wanted because of its huge oil reserves. Then, in 1939, the French ceded about 40 per cent of what was left of Syria’s coastline to Turkey, which independent Syria has never accepted.
Given this steady erosion of the Syrian state, it is hardly surprising that Syrians are one of West Asia’s most radical people. The militarisation of their politics began with the coup of March 1949 – West Asia’s first military coup – which was launched with American encouragement if not prompting. There was a second coup four months later, and a third in December 1949. Anticipating Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria banned political parties and set up the Arab Liberation Movement as a regime-controlled surrogate. By then the Syrian army itself had been politicised and in February 1954, a number of senior officers rebelled.
Four years later, the army commanders, supported by some civilian politicians, gave up on Syria as a viable political entity and persuaded Nasser to take them into a political union. The terms he imposed in effect subordinated Syria to Egyptian rule. It must have been a bitter blow for the inheritors of the Umayyad dynasty.
Everyone seems to have acknowledged that the infant republic of Syria could not be a viable state. But no one could agree on a solution. Some sought to recover lost territory. An alternative was some kind of federal arrangement with countries like Lebanon or Iraq that had benefited from Syria’s dismemberment. But Iraq was much bigger and richer than Syria, and under a Hashemite king (like Jordan) whom other Arabs saw as a British client. Israel’s emergence put an end to all hope of any Arab state recovering lost territory. Meanwhile, Anglo-American efforts to exploit the Cold War to subordinate the Arabs through instruments like the 1955 Baghdad Pact polarised and radicalised West Asia.
But Syrians were disillusioned three and a half years after their 1958 union with Egypt. The 1961 coup in Cairo led by an anti-Nasserist officer whom Jordan and Saudi Arabia (with the US and UK behind them) backed led to the collapse of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria. A bewildering series of coups and counter-coups was finally resolved by the Ba’ath Party, which took power in 1963. But after the Golan Heights were lost to Israel in the disastrous 1967 war, Syria’s defence minister, Hafez al-Assad, seized power, with the aim of making Syria a viable and defendable country. He sought consensual support at home, and alliances with the Soviet Union and Iran abroad. He rebuilt the armed forces and other state institutions, and even allowed leftist political parties to operate within a National Progressive Front in which the Ba’ath remained supreme. Assad’s Syria was not given to political or religious excesses. It encouraged economic liberalisation. It saw itself as the champion of a viable Arab cause even if it did not live up to Western notions of parliamentary democracy.
Assad’s death elevated his son, but Bashar, the present ruler, could not dominate Syrian politics like his father had done. He was allowed to undertake minor reforms and to promote younger men of his own choosing, but also made aware of red lines that could not be crossed. His fate and that of the state he rules are of immense relevance to the Arab future.
Historically, Syria is where, in 1516, the absorption of the Arab world into the Ottoman empire began with the Ottoman victory in the battle of Marj Dabiq. It is where the cultural renaissance of the Arab world blossomed in the 19th century. Damascus was supposed to be the capital of the unified Arab kingdom that the British promised the Hashemites, who led the 1916-18 Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire. It is where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the most politically developed and socially radical version of the dream of Arab unity was conceived by the founders of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath (“resurrection”) Party. Syria is where the Arab Spring withered and died.
More than 200,000 men, women and children have perished in Syria’s civil war. Some four million Syrians have fled to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. About seven million are internally displaced. Many Syrian towns have been destroyed. This descent into chaos seems to enjoy the support of the West, and its West Asian protégés like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the oil-rich Gulf states, who are in one way or another helping the Syrian rebels. President Assad is castigated in the Western media and by Western politicians for using force against the rebels. What government doesn’t? India used and uses force against separatists in Nagaland, Mizoram, Assam, and Jammu and Kashmir. So does China in Tibet and Xinjiang. So did Sri Lanka against those who wanted a Tamil Eelam. A government would be failing in its duty if it didn’t.
The West blames Vladimir Putin for using force against terrorists of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams who oppose the Damascus regime. The ISIS, with its headquarters in Raqqa in northern Syria, has benefited most from the West Asian crisis. It reportedly practises the most vindictively sectarian and brutal form of Islamist politics witnessed in modern times. It now exerts control over much of Syria and Iraq and is spreading its tentacles south to the Gulf States and west to North Africa. It should be seen as the West’s natural enemy. Yet, if Putin is attacked for attacking the ISIS, the implication can only be that, as in Afghanistan, the US and its European allies have no objection in principle to collaborating with terrorists. That recalls Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously remarking of Nicaragua’s dictator, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
