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19. Behind the Resilience of the Syrian Regime
- Indiana University Press
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169 19. BEHIND THE RESILIENCE OF THE SYRIAN REGIME BASSAM HADDAD Seasoned observers were long accustomed to making light of apparent political changes in Syria. Following the death of Hafiz al-Asad, who ruled Syria for thirty years, and the accession of his son Bashar to the presidency, a series of “springs” came and went without substantially opening up the system. The country’s political institutions were stable, but stagnant, including the Baath Party, which continued to rule by periodically reshuffling elites. Syria’s economic growth continued to lag, its small oil reserves to dwindle and its work force to fall behind in acquiring the skills needed in the global economy. Perhaps the most troubling part of Syria’s predicament was an invisible but rising wave of poverty. For Syria’s elite, this precarious state of affairs was not unusual. For years, its primary strategy for getting by was to accentuate Syria’s importance on the international stage. Between 1970 and 1990, the Syrian regime benefited from the superpower competition of the Cold War. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Damascus relied more heavily on its regional role, beginning with its participation in the US-led coalition to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait in 1991.Washington also quietly appreciated the Syrian army’s presence in Lebanon. At the same time, Damascus posed before Syrian and Arab public opinion as the keeper of the Arab nationalist flame, rejecting Egyptian, Jordanian, and Palestinian deals with Israel, backing Hizballah in Lebanon, and loosing a stream of anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist rhetoric. At the time of Hafiz al-Asad’s death, the challenge before the regime was to bring Syria fully into the regional and international fold without alienating its domestic base of support. Over the course of the 2000s,the world around Syria’s cocoon was twice transformed.In 2005, Damascus was isolated and its regional influence diminished by the combined effects of regime change in Iraq, the humiliating loss of Syrian control in Lebanon and the new stridency of Israel in the atmosphere of the US-led “war on terror.” Negotiations with the European Union to bring Syria into a“partnership agreement,”as part of the EU’s“Barcelona process” of Euro-Mediterranean economic integration, were stalled. To make things worse, the Bush administration,backed by Congress,was pursuing an anti-Syria campaign,going so far as to recall the US ambassador to Damascus.But soon there was a second transformation, effected by the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq, the Hizballah-Israel standoff in 2006 and the corresponding rise of Iran, Syria’s ally, as a regional power. Even though it remained isolated to some degree by its closeness to Tehran, the Syrian regime recovered several of its 170 foreign policy tools, a fact recognized by the Obama administration when it sent back an ambassador. So matters stood on the eve of the 2011-2012 uprising. The Syrian regime’s international and regional position—ententes with Russia, China, and Iran—offered it a measure of protection as the uprising descended into civil war and reports mounted of atrocities committed by loyalist forces. So did the stubborn truth that the regime is unitary and cohesive, while the society is heterogeneous and, to some degree, divided.Naturally,the regime had worked hard over decades to reproduce and exacerbate the divisions,whether of sect and ethnicity,class,or region.The regime meanwhile had labored to bolster the unity at the top,building an army and security services whose fates are intertwined with that of the regime. But there was another such stratagem of regime survival at work: Beginning in the 1970s, the regime forged networks of capital that bound elite business actors to state officials as the latter, and their offspring, ventured into the commercial realm. These ties have paid big dividends for the regime in times of crisis. The Balance Sheet By June 2005, date of the Tenth Regional Conference of the Baath Party, the transition from the rule of Hafiz to Bashar al-Asad was complete and it was clear that there would be no meaningful liberalization of the Syrian political system from the top. Though the new regime was not impregnable, the intra-party tensions that had characterized Bashar’s first five years in power—replete with a few aborted “springs”—were over. The evident winners were Bashar and his team,including the Asad family and their innermost circle.The evident losers were the old guard, or those...