Syria Recognizes Reality, Maybe

Syria is one of the strangest and least understood countries in the world. It is at one a secular republic, yet it has had a long and often close relationship with Islamists. However, the Assad regime has always understood that the greatest threat to their grip on power comes from the religious fundamentalists within the country.

Following the 9/11 attacks and the American invasion of Iraq, the Syrians largely ended their policy of brutally persecuting the Islamsts, I believe because Damascus concluded that the United States was a more immediate threat. The Bush administration never disabused Assad of the notion that he could be next.

Now that the threat from Washington has receded, Assad is cracking down, yet again.

This country, which had sought to show solidarity with Islamist groups and allow religious figures a greater role in public life, has recently reversed course, moving forcefully to curb the influence of Muslim conservatives in its mosques, public universities and charities.

The government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and started to strictly monitor religious schools. Members of an influential Muslim women’s group have now been told to scale back activities like preaching or teaching Islamic law. And this summer, more than 1,000 teachers who wear the niqab, or the face veil, were transferred to administrative duties.

The crackdown, which began in 2008 but has gathered steam this summer, is an effort by President Bashar al-Assad to reassert Syria’s traditional secularism in the face of rising threats from radical groups in the region, Syrian officials say.

The policy amounts to a sharp reversal for Syria, which for years tolerated the rise of the conservatives. And it sets the government on the seemingly contradictory path of moving against political Islamists at home, while supporting movements like Hamas and Hezbollah abroad.

To understand this dynamic, you need to understand Syria's demographics. The majority of Syria is Sunni, but the dictatorship established by Bashar's father, Hafez, and is centered in the Baath Party and the senior levels of the military, is Alawi, a sect of Shi'ism. In the eyes of not only the fundamentalists, but the Sunni's broadly, they are illegitimately governed not only by secular socialist tyrants, but hated Shi'ite ones, at that.

Asssad's support of Hamas and Hezbollah, as the Times points out, has nothing to do with Syria's internal sectarianism. It is much more of a foreign policy calculation in Syria's precarious balancing act with it's two powerful neighbors, Israel and Iran.

The Syrians have been negotiating unofficially with Israel for years, and Assad's support of both Hamas and Hezbollah are important bargaining chips in those negotiations. Without Syria as a land bridge between the groups' Iranian patrons and their bases in Lebanon and Gaza, supply them with much of anything becomes much more challenging and expensive. If the terrorist groups cannot be easily supplied, Israel's internal security situation improves dramatically.

If Assad can make peace with the Israelis, full relations with the United States and the European Union would immediately follow, which would do more than anything to rescue Syria's backward economy, open the door to American military aid, and lift the threat of Washington-backed regime change permanently. A Syrian deal also isolates Iran more than anything else could.

Now that Israel enjoys relations with both Jordan and Egypt, the Syrian situation, particularly on the matter of the Golan Heights, is the only thing keeping the Saudis from recognizing Israel formally, which is something that they've informally done for years, anyway. With the Saudis and Syrians on board, a Palestinian peace deal would merely be a formality, since the radical elements in Gaza would only be supported by the Shi'as in Tehran.

The Arabs and the Israelis have one important thing in common - they both fear a resurgent Iran, especially a nuclear armed Iran, more than they fear each other. Splitting Damascus from Tehran would be the most significant thing to happen to Israel's security since before the Six Day War.

Both Jerusalem and Damascus know this, which is why the negotiations have continued for long, despite maddening impasses. Israel needs this deal, probably far more than Syria does, although they would never admit that in public.

But for any of that to happen, Assad needs to crack down on the Islamists at home. If the Baathists are overthrown, it won't be in a democratic uprising, it will be by radical Islamists. That would be disastrous for everyone involved.

For the first time, there would be a blatantly Islamist state not just in the Middle East, but on Israel's border. That would give al-Qaeda a base to attack Israel directly which it has not yet had and actively sought. Moreover, it could serve as base of support, either politically or militarily, for jihadi movements in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen. An Islamist Damascus could also throw Iraq right back into chaos, which would threaten the 50,000 U.S troops there and America's credibility.

Assad's restraining of the Islamists is not going to be pretty. That doesn't run in the family.

Again, from the Times.

The campaign carries risks for a secular government that has fought repeated, violent battles with Islamists in the past, most notably in 1982, when Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, razed the city of Hama while confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, killing tens of thousands of people.

The destruction of Hama is recounted in Thomas Friedman's 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. It's a chilling read.

The trick for the Obama administration is to support Assad without appearing to do so. The main reason that the United States is hated in the Muslim world is that, from Egypt to Indonesia, the American government has funded and trained the secret police that have systematically and brutally destroyed the democratic (or somewhat democratic) opposition to ruling regimes that happened to be anti-Soviet. That belief is not only universally held, it's supported by the fact that it's true. No one should expect an illiterate and angry persecuted underclass to appreciate the peculiarities of Cold War politics, or to care about them if they did.

Hopefully the American government has learned from it's experimentation with democracy in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, which only served to make both Hezbollah and Hamas more powerful than anything else could have and further endangered Israel.

This is a brutal and sad thing to say, but Bashar Assad is doing what needs to be done. And he's doing it, I believe, because he's getting ready to make a deal with Israel. It might be a few years coming, but coming it is. And he's going to need to protect his flanks, both politically and literally, when that happens, and there's no better time than the present to start doing it.

Despite what North American, European and Israeli commentators think, making peace with Israel isn't a pleasant or fun experience for Arab leaders, as anyone who saw what happened to Anwar Sadat when he tried it thirty five years ago knows. If doing that can get you killed in a mostly homogeneous state, like Egypt, imagine what can happen when a despot that happens to be from a loathed ethnic and religious minority attempts it. By the way, Iraq has been a "democracy" for some five years now, and I haven't seen them recognizing Israel, or even officially declaring that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations.

Timing, as it usually is, is everything in this happening. If a deal is going to be cut being Syria and Israel, it has to be done before Iran successfully tests a nuclear weapon. Iran can undermine Assad's regime whenever it wants, but the United States will never be able to guarantee Syria's security the way that a nuclear Iran can.

On the other hand, if Syria can be enticed into enforcing the sanctions against Iran fully, there might not be a nuclear Iran at all. But if Tehran gets the bomb, all bets are off. There will never be a Syrian peace agreement. Assad is savvy enough to know that having a friendly nuclear Iran near his borders is far better than the alternative.

Of course, there's every possibility that my theory is wrong. Based on the available evidence, it's probably likely that I am. It's entirely possible that Bashar Assad is stomping down the Jihadis in his country because he's an evil prick and just wants to.

But I think that Assad is actually starting to think about the good of his country and his place in history. Spending the last sixty years in a state of war with Israel hasn't done Syria any good. More than anything, it has kept an economic, military and societal backwater, and there's virtually no chance that this is going to change anytime soon in the absence of a settlement with the Jewish state. Unless there's significant economic improvement in the lives of ordinary Syrians, it's only a matter of time before the Baathists are deposed, most likely by the Islamists.

Syria is a police state, so there's little way of knowing what anyone thinks there. The only way of knowing that a deal is in the offing is if Benjamin Netanyahu starts laying the political groundwork for the return of the Golan at home in the coming months. The Israelis are the ones to watch here.

But they had best hurry. The clock is ticking in Tehran.