Sectarian violence in Syria between Sunnis and Alawites is worsening by the week. Now that a non-violent movement for reform and change has molted into an armed insurrection, Bashar al-Assad’s Shabiha militia is shooting and hacking even children to death.

Syria is part of a pan-Arab nation, according to the Assad family’s cynically adopted Baath ideology, but the truth is that Syria is hardly even a stand-alone nation. Like Lebanon and Iraq, it’s a disastrous mess of a place riven by sect and ethnicity. With its fractious collection of Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, and Druze, it’s more of a geographic abstraction than a coherent nation-state. It’s very unlike Egypt and Tunisia that way, both of which have coherent identities transcending sect, region, and tribe.

Until recently, the sectarian monster has spared Syrians the grisly communal bloodletting Lebanon and Iraq know only too well. That’s not because Syrians are inherently more tolerant or enlightened, but because the monster was locked in the basement by a total surveillance police state. It’s out now and running loose in the streets.

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Eric Trager, who has forgotten more about Egypt than I have yet learned, writes in The New Republic about the unhappy birthday of Egypt’s botched revolution.

Egypt is now headed for radical theocratic, rather than liberal democratic, rule…

It is tempting to believe that things might have turned out differently had Washington worked harder to bolster the young revolutionaries who seemingly exemplified America’s own liberal values when they took to the streets last January. These brave activists, after all, had won America’s hearts to the tune of an 82-percent approval rating at the height of the revolt, and their photogenic faces carried the promise of a more democratic, friendly Egypt.

But the activists were never who we hoped they were. Far from being liberal, their ranks were largely comprised of Nasserists, revolutionary socialists, and Muslim Brotherhood youths—an alliance of convenience for opposing Mubarak and, later, for denouncing the U.S.

Thus, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Egypt in March 2011, a group of leading activists refused to meet with her. They also turned out to be intolerant conspiracy theorists: When classically Cairoesque rumors that a “Jewish Masonic” ceremony was to be held at the pyramids on November 11, the April 6th Youth Movement’s Democratic Front declared that this non-existent event should be prohibited. “We are committed to the achievements of the revolution, which emphasized freedom,” they said in a statement. “But freedom is not absolute freedom, and … it is constrained by the regulations and beliefs of the Egyptian people, who do not accept that these celebrations be protected in the wake of the revolution.”

I know a few Egyptian intellectuals and activists who are authentic liberals, but they’re not remotely a majority. The percentage of Egyptians who genuinely support most or all the tenets of Western-style liberal democracy is in the high single digits at best.

Of all the Arab Spring countries so far, the odds of a successful outcome were always the bleakest in Egypt. The place is just so painfully backwards and dysfunctional. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, remember, and one of the reasons I was initially optimistic about democracy’s prospects there is because Tunisia is the Arab world’s great anti-Egypt. It differs so radically from Egypt in so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to believe the two countries belong to the same civilization. They are both Arab countries, and they are both in North Africa, but they are nearly at opposite ends of the Arab cultural and political spectrums.

I’m far from certain that it’s springtime even in Tunis, but there should be no doubt at this point that it’s winter in Cairo.

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My second book, In the Wake of the Surge, is on sale.

You can get a trade paperback for 17.99. The price on the Kindle version has been temporarily lowered to just 7.99.

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“I used to think, ‘Life is great, but people suck,’ but now I’ve had to learn the opposite, ‘Life sucks, but people are great.’”

Neil Peart, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

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I want to sincerely thank all my readers who donated money last week so my wife and I could visit her brother in Boston one last time before he died. It was a rough week, but I’m glad she didn’t have to go by herself. I will send everyone a personal thank-you note, but in the meantime here is a general thanks. And thanks also for being patient and for your warm words in email, in the comments section, and on Facebook.

I’ll need a little more time before I can reboot–we’re both exhausted and coming down with a cold from the plane–but things will be back to normal here shortly.

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My brother-in-law Scott Trockman died from cancer in Boston a few days ago. Nearly everyone who knew him thought he would beat this, partly because he was so young, but also because he bravely suffered in silence and didn’t want to worry and frighten everyone else. My wife and I did not know his cancer was terminal until almost the end, but even his mother, a doctor of internal medicine who cared for him in her house, was surprised at how suddenly and rapidly his condition worsened.

He spent his last few days in a hospice where he was comfortable, though not always conscious, and surrounded by people who loved him.

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My wife’s brother is terribly sick. He has what we all thought was a minor case of cancer, but all of a sudden it’s bad. Real bad. He is way too young for this to be happening to him. I am stunned and haven’t really processed this yet.

He lives far away and we need to leave town and see him as soon as possible. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I need to check out for a while.

UPDATE: I have to buy two plane tickets to the East Coast and leave within 24 hours. I don’t exactly have money stashed away for this sort of thing, so if any of you can help out I sure would appreciate it.

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Andrew Tabler lived and worked in Damascus for years. He visited Beirut most weekends—you would, too, if you had to live in Damascus—and that’s where I met him.

He came up with a great phrase to describe the utter inscrutability of the Syrian regime. He called it “the blackness.” “Fog” isn’t the right word because fog eventually clears. No, what went on behind the scenes among the elite was utterly dark even to Andrew who had excellent connections with the elite.

Syria is hardly the only place in the Middle East shrouded in blackness. Just look at Iran. Somebody killed an Iranian nuclear scientist yesterday with a car bomb.

Who?

The first country that came to my mind when I read that was Israel. The second was the United States.

But car bombs aren’t exactly the modus operandi of either. Who else, though, wants so badly to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program that they’d send someone in there or recruit somebody local to whack scientists?

I suppose it might have been the Saudis, but that’s a wild stab. I have no evidence.

Maybe the Iranian government thought the scientist was spy? Maybe the scientist was a spy?

I do not know.

This sort of thing happens a lot, not just in Iran, but also in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Conspiracy theories are common in the Middle East for all sorts of reasons. This is one of them.

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The Israeli Army’s Chief of Staff Benny Gantz says Israel is preparing to take in refugees following the downfall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The interesting part is that Israel is expecting refugees from the Alawite minority and to house them on the Golan Heights.

The Assad family and most of the regime are Alawites at war with the Sunni Muslim majority. The Golan Heights​ was taken from Syria in the 1967 war when Damascus used it as a platform to shoot at and shell Israeli civilians in the Galilee far below.

When Assad demands the Golan Heights back, he does not have it in mind as a refugee camp under the stewardship of his enemies for his overthrown clan.

Read the rest in Commentary magazine.

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A few days ago the U.S. Navy rescued 13 Iranian fishermen who had been held hostage on their own boat by pirates for a month in the Arabian Sea (between Oman and India).

Iran’s foreign minister described the rescue as a humanitarian act, but the state-run Fars News Agency says our Navy turned a routine incident into a “Hollywood” drama.

I don’t believe the United States military routinely rescues Iranians, but let’s leave that aside for right now. What Tehran’s propagandists are concerned about here is the imagery. That’s what they mean when they play the “Hollywood” card. Hollywood is all about imagery. They’re saying the rescue was also all about imagery.

Okay, so let’s take a look at the imagery. What we have here is a picture of an Iranian fisherman hugging a member of the United States military.

The odds that a random working-class American will ever voluntarily hug anyone in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is just about zero. The FNA would love to get its mitts on such a picture, but it’s never going to happen unless it is photoshopped.

We can’t know the political opinions of the Iranian man in that photo. We don’t even know who he is. The odds are decent, though, that the fisherman has a more positive opinion of the United States than he has of his own repressive government. It’s almost certainly true of at least some of the rescued 13, and it might even be true of most of them. The hacks at FNA know it, too, and it must be driving them crazy.

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I’m having technical difficulties at the moment. Blogging will resume when I figure out what the problem is and how to resolve it. Thanks for being patient.

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Earlier this year the Israeli government agreed to release more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, many of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of the captured soldier Gilad Shalit. If even two Israelis are killed by that batch, Israel will have gotten the raw end of the deal.

Everyone seems to understand this. The math isn’t difficult. They understood it at the time, too. The government, though, had been under enormous pressure from the entire society for years to strike even a bad deal. That pressure was fueled by emotion. The emotion was entirely legitimate, of course. Leaving an individual human being with the wolves—an individual human being with a name, a face, and a family—for the safety of the society in the abstract is a nasty thing even to contemplate, especially when Shalit’s name and face appeared on posters all over the country.

A thousand for one is bad math. More people will die with these sorts of exchanges than without them, especially since they give Hamas an incentive to kidnap even more people. Now that Hamas isn’t holding any Israelis captive, however, the math can be computed without emotion. New rules for prisoner exchanges will likely prevent any more similarly lopsided deals. The rational Israel of today is binding a more-emotional Israel of the future by law. Lives will be saved. We can’t know their names, but they will be saved. And there will be fewer kidnap victims to agonize over.

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This week, a few hundred students and teachers at Manouba University in Tunisia demonstrated against the niqab, or veil, which is used by some ultra-conservative women to cover their faces. It has been outlawed in Tunisian schools and government offices for decades, ever since it was described by the modern republic’s secular founder Habib Bourguiba​ as “that odious rag.” One sign at the demonstration said “Science before the niqab.” Another said “no to shackles, no to niqab, knowledge is free.” The protest was a counter-demonstration against an Islamist sit-in at the humanities department.

I’ve seen a few women in Tunisian cities wearing niqabs, but not very many. That kind of headgear is far more common in the Persian Gulf nations than in North Africa. While having coffee at an outdoor café in downtown Tunis, the capital, a group of women with their faces covered walked past. All the locals sitting at tables near mine eyed the women as though they had been beamed in from another planet. I assumed these ladies weren’t even Tunisians, but Saudis. They could hardly have drawn more attention to themselves had they dressed like that in a small town in Bolivia.

Read the rest in Commentary magazine.

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I have a new essay in the January/February issue of World Affairs about the Arab Spring, which is looking more and more like an Islamist winter with each passing month. The piece is behind the pay wall at the moment, but you can read it if you have a subscription. And you should have a subscription becasue it’s an outstanding magazine, one of the best in the business.

It will be out from behind the subscription wall by the time the next issue is out. Then I can link it again.

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Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druze community, was for a time the most strident and defiant leader of the Beirut Spring, or Cedar Revolution, that ousted Syria’s occupying military dictatorship in 2005. But in 2008, Hezbollah and its allies in Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party invaded Beirut and the Druze mountains southeast of the capital. Jumblatt was then compelled to turn against his allies in the “March 14” movement and temporarily join Lebanon’s pro-Syrian bloc. Fortunately for him and his community, he was only forced to do so at arm’s length.

The Arab world’s Druze do not have their own state. Like the Kurds, they are fragmented and live as minorities in more than one country. In each place they side with the strong horse—to use Osama bin Laden’s phrase for the most powerful leader around—in order to stay out of trouble. Israeli Druze are pro-Zionist. Syrian Druze are, or at least have been so far, with Bashar al-Assad. Lebanon’s political scene gets rebooted every couple of years, so the Druze there shift around all over the place. You can always tell which Lebanese faction is dominant because they’ll have Walid Jumblatt on their side.

Jumblatt has been slowly inching away from Damascus again for some time as the revolution against Assad has continued to spread and to grow. The Druze chief’s transistion is nearly complete. He is now openly calling for regime-change in Syria.

Assad has been therefore demoted, at least in his backyard, from strong horse to weak horse. Out of desperate necessity, Jumblatt’s political instincts are more finely calibrated than just about anyone else’s around, and he is convinced that the butcher of Damascus is on his way to becoming the ex-horse or even a dead horse.

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When two suicide bombers allegedly blew themselves up in front of mukhabarat offices in Damascus a week ago, my first thought was that Al Qaeda did it. The world’s most radical Sunni Arab terrorist organization has worked with the Assad family before, but now that the “infidel” Alawite regime is massacring Sunnis by the thousands, albeit in medium if not slow motion, what’s for a bin Ladenist to like? Suicide bombings certainly fit the modus operandi.

My second thought, which occurred to me within seconds, is that the Syrian government did this to itself.

I chose not to say so in print or in pixels because that sort of charge is almost always outlandish. It’s the sort of idea conspiracy theorists hatch in the tea shops of Cairo and the coffeeshops of Haight–Ashbury. You’d better have some serious evidence before going public with something like that even if we are talking about the Assads.

Well, Michael Weiss at World Affairs found some evidence that Damascus is behaving in a way that is at the very least odd.

According to the Syrian state media, suicide bombers drove two cars rigged with explosives to points just outside two hard-to-reach facilities: the State Security Administration building and the Military Security base in Kafarsouseh, a neighborhood in central Damascus. These facilities are preceded by several military checkpoints, and any person or vehicle desiring access to them will need to carry a special permit. Cars also tend to be searched thoroughly before being able to roll right on up to the doorstep of secret police headquarters. When a terrorist attack is perpetrated, it takes oodles of man-hours of forensic analysis and data-gathering to determine the party responsible and the methods used. Not so in Syria. The regime’s Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported in an impressive 13 minutes that al-Qaeda was the culprit and that a man called Munir al-Binjali “conducted” the attack. The only problem is, al-Binjali is alive and well in Saudi Arabia, not blown to bits in Damascus.

There’s plenty more where that came from, including a hilarious announcement on state TV that the terrorists who blew themselves to smithereens had been “arrested.” An Arab League observer claimed the bodies appeared to have been moved to the blast site a little too perfectly from somewhere else. And when the Al Qaeda story finally collapsed under its own absurdity, Syrian intelligence set up a fake Muslim Brotherhood Web site and forged a responsibility claim.

Saad Hariri—Lebanon’s former prime minister, son of the slain former prime minister Rafik Hariri, and a man not known for conspiracy theories—is now saying, yeah, the Syrians staged it.

Whether or not the Assad clan is responsible, they’re definitely up to shenanigans.

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Sky News reports two separate anti-regime demonstrations in Syria — one in Idlib province, and the other in Hama — that swelled to 250,000 people apiece. Security forces opened fire, killing five and wounding a couple of dozen.

Those first two numbers are huge. The second two numbers are not. Think of it this way. If fifty people out of a half-million were shot, that’s only one in 5,000, or 0.0002 percent. It’s not safe to take to the streets and challenge the government, but it hardly means certain death or arrest anymore. Assad’s totalitarian stranglehold over his citizens has completely evaporated.

The security forces have enough firepower to massacre thousands per day if they’re given the orders to do so. That’s what happened in 1982 in the city of Hama. The government actually boasted about killing tens of thousands of people in one weekend alone.

We can only guess why that’s not happening today, but I’m reasonably certain it is not because Bashar al-Assad is more squeamish or less-determined to win than his father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled the country in 1982. What most likely explains the government’s relative restraint is the fact that Damascus fears foreign intervention.

Assad knows if he kills fewer than 50 people a day he likely won’t be punished with anything more severe than isolation and sanctions. There is no real appetite in the Arab world, the West, or in Israel for armed confrontation. If the crisis can be kept at a low enough boil, Assad most likely thinks he can withstand it.

Syria’s opposition is overwhelmingly Sunni while the government is overwhelmingly Alawite. Massacring tens of thousands of unarmed Sunnis all at once would bring serious and credible accusations of genocide. Many governments in both the Arab world and the West would start thinking about and even discussing a military intervention to stop it. I slightly doubt Syria would be invaded even then, but it is possible, and it is Assad’s worst nightmare scenario.

So he’s “only” killing a few handfuls of people each day. He might be able to keep that up for years without bringing a regime-change from abroad down on his head.

There’s a problem, though, with that strategy. I am not better at math than the people of Syria. They, too, can compute that the odds they’ll be shot in a demonstration are only one in 5,000. Their incentive to hide under the bed rather than take to the streets is not large.

Assad, then, is finding himself in a vise. If he kills too few people, they may eventually bring him down. And if he kills too many, we might bring him down.

Dwight Eisenhower once said, “If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.” Sometimes that’s good advice, so watch out. Assad might try it and hope for the best.

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Happy New Year, everybody.

I’ll be working on my next book, Where the West Ends, over the next couple of days, and I might go hiking over the weekend if the rain clears.

See you in 2012.

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I can count on one finger the number of movies based on comic books that I like. They aren’t for me, but Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a major exception. It’s a serious and instantly classic crime film that transcends the limitations and silliness of the genre.

Nolan’s next film looks fantastic, as well.

There were faint echoes of the war against terrorism in The Dark Knight—not as allegory or argument, but as context as Peter Suderman notes in Reason. In The Dark Knight Rises—or in the trailer, at least—we hear whispers of a communist insurgency.

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Russia has never been the kind of place many people feel has a warm and fuzzy future ahead of it, but it’s better prepared today for something that looks like political liberalism than Egypt or Libya. The anti-communist revolution that brought down Soviet totalitarianism made Russia and the world as a whole much better places than they were, but Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin were hardly the Vaclav Havels of the east.

Today, though, the biggest demonstrations since the end of communist rule are rocking the capital. Vladimir Putin may actually be on his way out. He doesn’t seem the sort who would massacre thousands of civilians Assad-style in the streets, nor are his opponents the sorts who yearn for a different brand of authoritarianism.

“By its sheer size and scope,” Vladimir Kara-Murza writes in World Affairs, “the protest movement of December 2011 is being compared to the anti-Communist revolution of August 1991.”

In one respect, today’s movement is more significant. The protest against Communist rule was both political and economic: not just against totalitarianism, but also against the economic misery of Soviet socialism. Today, economic demands are non-existent: the December movement is unequivocally and consciously about political rights and civic dignity. The protests are led by Russia’s emerging middle class—young, successful, and educated—which has already achieved economic wellbeing, and which now strives for the rule of law. According to a survey by the Levada Center polling agency, 73 percent of the protesters are financially comfortable; 62 percent are university-educated; 56 percent are aged between 18 and 39. Sixty-nine percent describe their political views as democratic or liberal. Only 13 percent are communists; just 6 percent are nationalists.

Russia is a cold place where spring comes weakly and late, but maybe—just maybe—it is finally coming.

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