The Tyrant of Damascus

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that the United States will pursue no Libya-style intervention in Syria, where demonstrators are setting government buildings on fire, security personnel are using live ammunition against the regime’s opponents, and some warn of impending civil war. Part of the reason for American inaction, Clinton explains, is that members of both the Democratic and Republican Parties believe that Syria’s ruler, Bashar al-Assad, is a reformer. Unfortunately, she’s right about that: both political parties do seem to think, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that the current tyrant of Damascus wasn’t raised in the house of his father, Hafez al-Assad.

In fact, Bashar, like his father before him, is a blood-spattered sponsor of terrorism responsible for the murders of American, Iraqi, Israeli, Lebanese, and Syrian citizens. He helped jihadists from all over the Arab world cross Syria’s border with Iraq to kill Americans and Iraqis; backed a car-bomb spree against Lebanese journalists and members of parliament; allows Iran to use Syria as a logistics hub in its armament of Hezbollah; and leases prime real estate in downtown Damascus to Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, who uses it for his headquarters. As if all that weren’t enough, Assad’s soldiers are now shooting unarmed protesters in the streets of their own neighborhoods.

Assad’s regime has always been characterized by totalitarianism at home and terrorism abroad. The reason for the first is simple: he can’t survive without his instruments of internal repression. As for the terrorism, if Syria severed its alliance with Iran, let Lebanon go its own way, and dismantled its support system for Hamas and Hezbollah, it would have no more geopolitical clout than Yemen has. Further, Assad supported the Iraqi insurgency because it made the world’s democrats shudder at the bitter fruits of regime change in the region. “For Assad,” Middle East expert Lee Smith wrote in his brilliant but bleak book The Strong Horse, “the Iraqi insurgency amounted to a debate over the nature of the Middle East. The Bush administration thought that the region was ripe for democracy and pluralism, and that its furies could be tamed by giving Middle Easterners a voice in their own government. . . . [Syria’s] support for the insurgency was, at least in part, intended to give Washington no choice but to put away dangerous ideas like Arab democracy.”

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