In the Lion's Den

by Andrew Tabler

  The question remained whether Syrians would buy into the regime’s version of “the plot.” After six years of Syria’s “reform process,” most Syrians were unhappy with the way they were ruled. A host of European countries had stepped forward to support Bashar al-Assad when he assumed the presidency in July 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez. The primary reason for engaging the son was political: Syria bordered Israel and controlled Lebanon, and Hafez al-Assad had nearly signed a peace agreement with Israel only three months before his death. The secondary, but nevertheless related, reason was to reform one of the most corrupt and authoritarian systems in the Arab world, to bring it into a Western orbit, and to arrange for a smooth transition toward democracy. Overly centralized decision making, combined with Syria’s continued socialist ideals a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, weighed heavily on Syrians. Their innate Levantine entrepreneurial spirit ensured that the private sector survived, however distorted it was by triple bookkeeping and a system of bribes that substituted for taxation.

  What held the Syrian people back in the autumn of 2005 from rioting in the streets and demanding the downfall of the Damascus regime at perhaps its weakest point in the last forty years? Fear of arrest by the security services, for sure, but also serious doubts over Washington’s intentions for a post-Assad Syria. The Hariri investigation coincided with a rapid increase in the bloodshed in neighboring Iraq. If television news footage of the slaughter of civilians was not enough to raise questions in Syrians’ minds about Bush’s agenda, waves of Iraqi refugees flooding into Syria certainly was. Some brought suitcases full of money, but most did not. The Syrian government offered Iraqis basic support, but budgets ran out in early 2006. Charities and international relief agencies tried to fill the gap.

  The “chaos” raging next door in Iraq was no accident, Syrians told me again and again. They said it was part of an Israeli-inspired plan, forged with neoconservatives prominent in the Bush administration, to smash Arab societies through military action, create sectarian strife, and cause civil war. While I argued back that the Levant was full of crazy conspiracy theories, Syrians would reply, “Do you think what is happening in Iraq for the past three years is just a mistake? No, it’s policy.”

  The Syrian regime exploited the Iraq fiasco by issuing daily statements attributing the region’s problems to the “Zionist-American” conspiracy and implicated the Syrian opposition with a wave of arrests following the signature of the Beirut-Damascus Declaration. The regime also made Washington’s worst nightmare come true: the permitted burning of the Danish embassy in Damascus in response to caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper, along with news reports of radical takfiri Islamic groups carrying out operations in Syria (with American weapons), fit in nicely with the regime’s newly strengthened alliance with Iran.

  When Hezbollah and Israel went to war, therefore, it was a perfect regime safety valve for releasing popular aggression toward its enemies. Hezbollah is a Shiite Islamic movement, so Syria’s majority Sunni population, and its supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood, could not control it. It also helped people to feel that they were fighting the Western powers that supported Israel and were overseeing the carnage in Iraq. Last but not least, because the Israeli and American threat to Syria turned to violence in Lebanon, it allowed the regime to put off reform until the “enemy” was defeated and “dignity” restored.

  The first government-organized demonstration for “the resistance” on July 17, 2006, indicated that popular support for Hezbollah was lukewarm. When I called Syrian friends and journalists that morning to ask if they were going to the rally, most were still in bed shortly before it kicked off at 10 AM. Only a few thousand state workers, who had been given two hours’ leave, attended.

  The giant television-camera booms I had first seen at the pro-Syrian demonstrations in Damascus in March 2005 were back in action. TV cameras used close-up images of the crowd to exaggerate its true size. This technique was repeated at several Damascus rallies over the next week.

  The demonstration was so uninspiring that a group of journalist colleagues and I decided to visit the nearby Rouda Café—an opposition hangout adjacent to parliament. As they sucked down cups of tea to wake up, a Syrian colleague leaned over the table and whispered in my ear to look behind me. Sitting only three feet away was Hussam Taher Hussam, the thirty-year-old witness cited in the first report of the Hariri investigation who had recanted his testimony against the Syrian regime the previous November. There was a brief but comical moment of excitement when I snapped a photo of Hussam stealthily over my shoulder. Meanwhile, the café’s patrons were extremely laid back, seemingly unconcerned about the war raging next door.

  As civilian casualties increased, however, Syrians got behind the resistance. For weeks, I noticed that my friends’ cell phones had ringtones featuring excerpts from Nasrallah’s speeches. Some even bothered to play longer clips for me; they traded these among friends. As the war dragged on, my Syrian friends began including me in mass e-mails showing photos of dead women and children being pulled from bombed-out buildings in Lebanon and in the occupied territories. Some were even arranged into PowerPoint presentations, though they were badly made, with photo captions that had bad English and Arabic spelling and grammar mistakes. They were genuine expressions of popular concerns, however, and were a far cry from the state’s clumsy propaganda. Such sentiments grew after Lebanese refugees began flooding into Syria in the war’s second week.

  “See, like Iraqis,” Othaina said to me as our car approached the swarm of Lebanese cars piling across the Syrian border crossing at Al-Jdeida. Iraqis continued to stream into Syria from Iraq every day too. The fact that Othaina made the connection helped me realize that popular sentiments and the regime’s official line were quickly merging.

  This notion was reinforced by the genuine hospitality extended by Syrian society to the Lebanese refugees upon arrival. While semiofficial organizations like the Syrian Arab Red Crescent passed out water and food, it was the private sector that delivered truckloads of supplies. A phone booth set up by the mobile-phone operator Syriatel, owned by President Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, offered free calls to anywhere in Syria and Lebanon. As Lebanese waited to pass immigration procedures, young activists from the Lawyers’ Syndicate—the equivalent of the Syrian Bar Association—and the Syrian Public Relations Association (led by Nizar Mayhoub, the Ministry of Information official responsible for foreign journalists) canvassed arriving cars and trucks, asking passengers if they had a place to stay in Damascus. Those in need of food and shelter were put in touch with Syrian families who had placed their names with the canvassers. “We have so many names!” one of them told me, pointing to a clipboard stuffed with papers in her hand.

  All in all, more than 230,000 Lebanese refugees found shelter in Syria. Around 80 percent of those were housed in private Syrian homes. In many cases, sons moved back in with parents to make room for the war’s displaced. As I walked among the throng of vehicles making their way into Syria, I reflected on the soft power of Syrians’ generosity. I also sadly realized that the United States—the world’s superpower and the champion of globalization—had absolutely nothing to offer as a counterweight. “Assad is sitting pretty now,” a friend said to me later that evening. If a regime’s legitimacy doesn’t come from its people, the next best way to obtain it is by responding to an external threat.

  At the offices of Syria Today, the magazine’s staff had put up Syrian flags and banners on the walls and affixed prints of photos showing children killed and wounded from Israeli bombs. Every day that the civilian death toll climbed, the staff became more nationalistic, including wearing pins with i love syria on the lapels of their jackets. Others wore Hezbollah T-shirts.

  High civilian casualties seemed to be helping the regime’s case, even among the opposition. “We denounce the Israeli aggression against Lebanese civilians,” Hassan Abdel-Azim told us a few days later. “Israel can
not attack Lebanon without an approval and support from the United States. We call on the Syrian leadership to strengthen the national unity through more opening to the Syrian opposition to make Syria stronger to face the Israeli threats.”

  Meshal Tammo, the secretary-general of the Kurdish Future Party, said they drew the line at violence against civilians as well. “We as a Kurdish people condemn all kinds of aggression and violence against the Lebanese civilians,” Tammo said. “We sympathize with Lebanese because our people [Kurds] face the massacres and killing [of] civilians. The war in Lebanon is a regional war between Syrian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah front and the United States, Israel, and some Arab states which follow the American orders. The war aims to change the game rules in the Middle East.”

  Even Riad al-Turk, one of Syria’s most outspoken opposition leaders, toed the nationalist line, though ever so critically. “Lebanon is a yard for the world to fight in,” Turk said. “Lebanon is a part of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel and the US used the capturing of two Israeli soldiers as a pretext to wage a war against Lebanon. The Syrian stance to open the border to Lebanese civilians and humanitarian aid is acceptable. Syria should support the Lebanese by using its army. In this regard, the Syrian official stance is very weak.”

  The US State Department soon leaked a plan in the New York Times that a new US policy was being formulated to drive a “wedge” between Syria and Iran, but it didn’t get anywhere.2 According to another Times report a few weeks later, Secretary of State Rice sent Deputy Chief of Mission Seche over to meet Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem and see if Syria was willing to negotiate. While the meeting took place, the report said that Moallem “gave no indication that [the Syrian regime] would be moderately constructive.”

  So with Washington defying Damascus and Tehran and vice versa, the conflict dragged on for weeks. As the United States and France argued over ceasefire texts in the Security Council, Syrians (and later Lebanese) said to me over and over again that Washington was simply giving Israel more time to finish the job, at the expense of more Lebanese civilian lives.

  Those specialists of “positive pressure,” the Europeans, then stepped in to give diplomacy a chance. On August 3, 2006, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos arrived in Damascus for talks with Assad. His arrival seemed promising, as his last trip to Damascus on February 14, 2005—the day of Hariri’s murder—marked the last time a European official had set foot in Syria. Moratinos told reporters after the meeting that Assad was willing to use his influence to rein in Hezbollah—a statement that was quickly denied by the state news agency. European newspapers reported that certain EU countries—led by Germany, the primary supporter of Syrian reform—were preparing a package of incentives for Syria to cut off arms supplies to Hezbollah. Among these “carrots” was reportedly a German-led effort to push the member countries of the European Union to sign its long-delayed “association agreement” with Syria. Once ratified, the agreement would lock Syria into a schedule of reform steps aimed at liberalizing trade, promoting investment, and bolstering respect for human rights.

  Finally, on August 11—one month to the day after the conflict began—the Security Council passed Resolution 1701, which called for a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in south Lebanon. The ceasefire, to which Hezbollah and Israel consented, was to take effect forty-eight hours from the resolution’s passage.

  In a clumsy attempt at a public relations coup de grâce, Israel quickly launched its “largest airborne operation since the 1973 war” throughout south Lebanon. They were hoping to capture what would be the war’s great surprise: Hezbollah’s extensive network of tunnels and concrete-reinforced bunkers—some only one hundred meters from the Israeli frontier—from where daily rocket barrages were launched during the conflict. Their construction in hard limestone had gone completely undetected by Israel, the UNIFIL force (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese government. One UN commander told a friend that Hezbollah “must have been bringing the cement in by the spoonful.”

  Eager to talk with Lebanese about the war, I passed through the only crossing point from Syria to Lebanon that had not been destroyed by Israeli bombing the minute the ceasefire took effect on the morning of August 14. The usual two-hour journey from Damascus to Beirut took a little more than six due to Israeli strikes on roads and bridges. When I arrived, I quickly rented a car and went for a drive around Beirut, including the Hezbollah headquarters in the southern neighborhood of Haret Hreik.

  Israel’s “precision bombing” was impressive, as Israelis were able to destroy a sole building with very little if any damage to adjacent structures. Their intelligence information on targets seemed to have been less successful, however: nearly one thousand Lebanese civilians died from Israeli strikes during the war. In the south, Israel used so many cluster bombs that unexploded ordnance has since claimed the lives of almost fifty children and wounded more than one hundred.

  Hezbollah hung huge banners off buildings in the southern suburbs to make their point. One banner hanging in Haret Harek read extremely accurate targets and was adorned with a photo of a bandaged child missing a limb. It was footnoted by the slogan “The Divine Victory.”

  That afternoon, The New Yorker magazine posted an article on its website by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, which stated that Washington had indeed planned Israel’s response to the Hezbollah kidnapping well in advance. The reason? To destroy Hezbollah’s ability to hit Israel during possible future US preemptive strikes on Iran, which had a UN deadline of August 31 to stop enriching uranium. As much of Iran’s program was literally underground, Hersh said that the United States wanted to understand the effectiveness of its weapons in Israel’s arsenal against such targets. The report also said that the Bush administration hoped that the raid would further democracy by strengthening the government of Lebanese premier Fouad Siniora “so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah.”3

  The next day, President Assad finally broke his silence in an address to a Syrian journalists’ conference in Damascus. The fire-and-brimstone speech, which featured the word “conspiracy” scores of times, dashed hopes for peace anytime soon.

  “The more elusive the realization of peace becomes, the more important and necessary other ways and methods become,” Assad said. “The whole world only got interested in the Middle East after the 1973 War … [the West] only moves when Israel is in pain.” Resistance, Assad added, “is necessary for the achievement of peace.” While Assad’s pro-Hezbollah rhetoric was not unexpected, his open swipe at Europe, which supported Syrian reform efforts, was unprecedented. “The countries concerned with the peace process—and they are mostly European—are responsible for what is happening. We might wonder what motivates some officials in these countries to send messages about a sick prisoner [in a Syrian jail]…. What nobility! What humanity! What greatness! We might ask as well, where are these same officials concerning the massacres perpetrated in Lebanon?”

  Assad had a few words for his fellow Arab leaders as well. “One of the other positive sides to this war is that it has completely uncovered the Arab situation. If we asked any Arab citizen about the Arab situation before this war, they will say it is bad—which is true. Arabs used to see our situation under makeup, now they see it as it is in reality. This war prevented the use of such cosmetics as it classified positions in a clear way. There was no room for half-solutions in such a war where it unveiled half-men, or people with half-positions … i.e., those who were waiting to see where the scales would tip have fallen along with their positions. This is one of the very important outcomes of this battle.”

  Less than an hour after Assad’s speech, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier canceled a trip to Damascus scheduled for later that day. He dubbed it a “negative contribution that is not in any way justified in view of the current challenges and opportunities in the M
iddle East.”

  A few days later, in an interview with Dubai TV’s Hamdi Kandeel, Assad tried to mend fences with Arab leaders, nearly all of whom were refusing to speak with the Syrian president. Assad insisted that Iran had a strong role to play in the region.

  “Iran is a country that has existed in the region for centuries,” Assad said. “It is the Arabs who are absent from the political arena, whether in decision making or in shaping the region’s future…. If strong countries play a just and positive role, this would serve stability in the region…. Iran says it wants its nuclear project for peaceful means. There is nothing to fear from Iran.”

  Kandeel then asked Assad about concerns that the Islamic Republic’s influence would feed an already “growing religious current” that could undermine the regime’s pan-Arab ideological bedrock. The president responded that he could handle it. “Syria is a secular country, and has no problem cooperating with Iran. If one looks to what is happening in Iraq, it’s easy to see that the Western powers, which are propagating secularism, are working to consolidate the nonreligious radical current in the Arab world as well.”

  When Kandeel asked Assad point-blank if Syria would adopt the resistance model that it was now championing in the region, Assad mapped out a Saddam Hussein–like insurgency strategy in the event of war. “We know there is a semi-siege imposed on Syria, and we know that the US backs up Israel one-hundred percent,” Assad said. “So we have changed the army’s duties and are preparing, at least in the first phase, to defend our territory. Israel is an expansionist state, and if peace is not achieved, war is the natural future in the region…. The resistance is a public process, not a state resolution, and people may overtake their governments to carry it out.”