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Article Excerpt
The American foreign-policy establishment seems deeply divided over how to deal with Syria. No one in Washington doubts that Damascus plays a pivotal role in the Middle East, helping to shape events in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine while influencing calculations in Jerusalem, the capital of its principal foe, and Tehran, the capital of its principal ally. But there is considerable disagreement within Washington on how to approach Damascus. Should Syria be isolated until its economy and its leadership crack under the strain, as the Bush administration has long favored? Should it, to use fashionable parlance, be forced into a "hard landing"--bullied into abandoning its disruptive behavior on the regional stage and softening its internal political complexion? Or should the United States help Syria achieve a soft landing, as many commentators outside the White House now propose? Should engagement with President Bashar al-Asad's authoritarian regime be the order of the day, with carrots as well as sticks employed to persuade Syria of the benefits of a more cooperative relationship with its neighbors and the West and of more democracy at home?
This debate seems set to run indefinitely, with each of the two main presidential candidates lining up behind a different option. But there is one thing that both schools of thought, and both McCain and Obama, can agree on: Syria needs to change, and, ideally, to change not only its policies but also its political system.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, this recognition of the need for some sort of change is shared by many Syrians. More surprisingly, this realization extends even to Bashar al-Asad. As Bashar is well aware, a weakening economic base, a deteriorating system of social control, and an awakening of identity conflicts in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq could threaten his hold on power. Recent episodes of religious and ethnic discord suggest that the government's time to reform is running short.
But how should it reform? The changes with which Bashar has tinkered since he succeeded his father as president in 2000 are far too modest to address the multifarious problems confronting the country. Meanwhile, the Iraq experience has vividly shown that attempts to introduce sweeping political and economic reform can easily awaken savage identity conflicts, conflicts that haunt almost every Arab state. Like Iraq (and many other Middle East states), Syria is a divided polity with weak formal institutions that have little history behind them and that are stable only to the degree that they are backed by a formidable security apparatus. If Syria does experience a hard landing, social unrest is a certainty and sectarian violence a high probability.
Is there, however, a middle path between Bashar's piecemeal reforms and Bush's preference for abrupt political transformations, a third way that can satisfy powerbrokers in both Washington and Damascus? This essay argues that there is. Moreover, it contends that a middle path may well be the only realistic option if Syria is to overcome its worsening economic and sociopolitical situation, maintain long-term stability, and move towards a more open and accountable system of governance. Effecting a program of significant reform, however, will demand three things: the patience to introduce change gradually, incrementally and cautiously, so as to avoid instability; the flexibility to alter Western-style democracy and development to fit Syrian conditions; and the readiness to work with, not against, Bashar or some other leading figures within the regime.
A FRAGMENTED SOCIETY
Syria is a state both young and old, divided by conflicting interpretations of its past. The modern state--an artificial creation that dates only to the Anglo-French partition of the region following World War I--has inherited a unique blend of geographical, ethnic, religious and ideological heterogeneity that complicates all efforts to construct a cohesive whole from its disparate parts.
A brief recital of the history of what "Syria" has been illustrates the diversity of the modern state's inheritance. Syria has been the home of historic pan-Arab nationalism, (1) where the first short-lived modern Arab state was based; of Greater Syria, the ancient bilad al-sham (literally, "the land of the left hand" (2) that encompassed the whole Levant for centuries; of some of the world's oldest cities, with longstanding ties to international trade routes but little connection to nearby rural economies; of peoples conquered and converted by the great monotheistic religions, then abandoned and left to fracture into an ungodly number of sects; of a complex mosaic of almost two dozen distinct religious and ethnic groups that were traditionally so highly autonomous and self-administering that the government of the Ottoman Empire was limited to simple tax collecting. So rich and varied a history is not an unalloyed blessing. The state's very diversity dominates its political dynamics, limiting policy options, inhibiting risk-taking, and making any government highly defensive. Decades of stability have only partly compensated for the sectarian handicaps that hinder its capacity to develop a lasting identity.
Syria's 19 million people are divided into Sunni Arabs (65 percent), Alawis (12 percent), Christians (10 percent), Kurds (9 percent), Druze (3 percent), (3) Bedouin, Ismailis, Turcomans, Circassians and Assyrians. This demographic mosaic is further complicated by divisions within many of these groups. The Christians, for example, are divided into eleven main sects, including the Greek Orthodox, Melkite, Syrian, Maronite, Chaldean, Armenian and Catholic denominations. The Sunni Arabs range from the highly pious to the very secular and are divided between an urban elite and the rural masses that traditionally have had diverging political loyalties. Of all the groups, the Kurds and the Sunni Islamists are the greatest threats to the Syrian state. Their political movements have the cohesion, established agendas, outside support and sense of grievance to drive them to challenge central authority. The country's dearth of Shiites, however, makes the situation potentially less explosive than that in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq.
Conscious of their country's history as the center of a closely knit region of commanding size and stature, many Syrians have also repeatedly sought an identity in pan-Arab, Greater Syrian or Islamic causes, further impeding any attempt to construct a nation-state on Syrian territory. Loyalty to Arab nationalism--which continues to be an article of faith for many Syrians even though it has long since fallen out of favor with Arabs elsewhere--is enshrined in the first article of the country's constitution and explains Syria's generosity to other Arabs whenever a crisis creates a new wave of refugees. The desire to reconstitute itself as some version of Greater Syria (today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel) helps explain the country's preoccupation with Lebanon and historical unwillingness to recognize a number of the borders that separate the state from its neighbors. The weakness of Syria's sense of national identity makes at least some Syrians receptive to the self-confident call of Islamic fundamentalism; in fact, between 1976 and 1982 the country experienced the region's first modern Islamist uprising. Fears over the ability of outsiders to stir domestic religious discontent are part of the reason for the regime's longstanding alliance with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.
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