The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (26 page)

 “F
ighting the Americans in Iraq is very dangerous,” Abd al-Halim Khaddam told me. “But it also makes Bashar popular. Anything under the banner of resistance is popular.”

Khaddam knows all about Syrian resistance policy—the terror that advances Syrian interests abroad while it consolidates domestic support in the capital of Arab resistance. Khaddam served as Hafez al-Assad’s foreign minister and vice president, a post he held under Bashar for five years before he split with the regime and left Syria. Shortly after he moved to Paris, he told an Al Arabiya interviewer that Bashar was directly responsible for the Hariri assassination. Damascus responded by claiming that Khaddam’s charges were compromised by the millions he’d stolen while in power. Obviously Khaddam had helped himself to the kitty, but only a regime as vainglorious as the Syrian Arab Republic’s could suppose that calling a high official with a quarter century of service dirty would not make the entire government look rotten from the head, Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, on down.

Still, it was curious to see Khaddam refashioning himself as a champion of democracy. The short, aging, white-haired man in a turtlenecked sweater with the kind eyes and the gracious manner sitting before me in a Brussels hotel room had been responsible for a lot of human pain. He managed Syrian interests in Lebanon before Bashar took over the Lebanese file himself.

“Bashar got his influence back in Lebanon through Hezbollah,” said Khaddam. “But the Americans say they want him to cut his ties to them and Hamas, which is also an important card and they expect
him to throw it away. The Americans see appearances without seeing the fundamental issues. They want an agreement between Syria and Israel, but the Americans are naive. They want to change the regime’s behavior, but behavior is an index of human nature. A dictator has the soul of a dictator. It is in the nature of a dictator. How can you ask him to change his behavior? Is it objective to separate the dictator’s behavior from the nature of the regime?”

Khaddam had worked for the dictator’s father, who was also a dictator and equally vicious, if smarter. I asked him how he rationalized it, now that he was a democrat, after all. Khaddam avoided the question of morality and instead contrasted the strategies of the father and the son.

“In the ’70s, Syria had a very balanced policy,” he said. “We stood with the U.S.S.R., but we always kept channels open with the West. We were opposed to the U.S. but not in conflict, we knew what our limits were. We saw that in 1974 we could not fight Israel once Egypt was out of the picture. We compensated by supporting resistance.”

Much of that resistance was waged against the other Arab states as well as Israel. The Syrians made it especially hard for Egypt after Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel.

“But we never went against the region,” said Khaddam. “With Bashar and his alliance with Iran, that changed.”

It was Hafez who had initiated the relationship with the Iranian Islamists even before Khomeini came to power, but Khaddam said that Hafez always knew he couldn’t afford to antagonize the Arabs. “Whenever the situation deteriorated between Iran and Saudi Arabia, we told Saudi that if anyone is against Saudi, we will stand with Saudi. And we went to talk to the Iranian leadership and calm things down, to say how dangerous the potential for conflict is.”

Khaddam explained that it was the Hariri assassination that pushed Syria irretrievably into the Iranian camp. The Saudis blamed the murder on Bashar, and his response was a steady stream of insults directed at the Sunnis until the only friends he had left in the
region were the Iranians. “He can’t get out of the Iranian basket even if he wanted to,” said Khaddam.

For the past thirty years, since the Islamists took over Iran and allied with Syria, Western policy makers have sought to “split” Damascus from Iran, wasting countless hours, money, and lives (Arab, Israeli, and American) in the effort. Describing the ties between the two states as “unnatural” or a “marriage of convenience,” Western officials choose to ignore what the Syrians and Iranians say themselves—that it is a strategic alliance with deep roots and a shared ideology. It is true that one state is a Shia theocracy and the other an Arab nationalist regime, but the ideology they share is resistance. Both support armed resistance; both are expansionist powers—Iran desirous of exporting the revolution, and Syria with designs on Lebanon; and both are opposed to the Sunni Arab order and determined to drive its American underwriter from the region once and for all. It is on behalf of Iran that Syria has confronted, enraged, and alienated the Sunni states in the region, doing so because it has calculated that Tehran is winning. Yet the Europeans, many Americans, and even a few Israelis believe that Damascus may yet move away from Iran, abandon Hezbollah and Hamas, and thereby forsake its ideology, its self-image as the capital of Arab resistance and steadfastness, and everything else that allows it to project power in the region—all in exchange for a peace with Israel that it can’t make, a regional profile as meager as Yemen’s, and a U.S. bribe.

“The alliance with Iran puts Syria in the middle of the very dangerous conflict,” said Khaddam. “Iran has ambitions to control the region, from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan, which is against the interest of the Arabs and the West. And Bashar fought in Iraq on behalf of the Iranians.”

This was, to be sure, a gamble on Assad’s part, since he could not be sure how the White House intended to respond, and with troops on the Syrian border the United States had the ability to do something
drastic. But he had an advantage, namely, that as bad as he was (and is), Washington feared that if he fell, what came after him would be worse: either a Sunni Islamist regime or a semi-failed state. In either case, the White House believed, Syria would actually become more likely to export terrorism. This was almost certainly wrong, resting as it did on the assumption that terror is the work of rogue networks of stateless actors who flourish in failed states, rather than relying heavily on the sponsorship of regimes and their mukhabarat. But effectively, the United States, chastened by its experience in Iraq, chose the devil it knew over the devil it didn’t, and Assad’s gamble paid off.

This wasn’t entirely shocking. The Arab regime, after all, is a resilient beast. And in the past five years, Syria has sustained several significant blows to its prestige—its presumed responsibility for the murder of Hariri, its withdrawal from Lebanon, the Mughniyeh assassination conducted on its front doorstep, and Israel’s raid that destroyed the Al-Kibar nuclear facility in northwestern Syria. Through it all, the Alawis have stayed in firm control, suffering no real damage to their power and, to date, minimal international repercussions.

And so, even after the surge, the Syrians continued to push their luck by sending foreign fighters across the border, as though to signal to the incoming Obama administration that Damascus had to be dealt with—after all, the Syrians were capable of putting out fires they’d started. And so in the spring of 2009, the U.S. military discovered a network of Tunisian fighters thought to have been warehoused in Syrian prisons before they were dispatched to Iraq; and a Syrian national detained, according to the Iraqi police, in a Syrian jail was apprehended in Kirkuk before he could detonate his explosive vest in a Shia mosque.
⁶
During one period, U.S. military sources found that more than 90 percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq came through Syria, as Damascus International Airport became the transit spot of choice for jihadis, who flew straight into the beating heart of Arabism and were processed through to the Iraq frontier.
⁷

For all of the assistance Assad gave the insurgents, this doesn’t mean that he was the
cause
of the violence in Iraq. Syria merely helped describe the phylogeny of the region. For Assad and the Alawis, 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 countered that the Middle East could only be governed through violence. Its support for the insurgency was, at least in part, intended to give Washington no choice but to put away dangerous ideas like Arab democracy.

It is of course true that the Bush administration did not fully comprehend the dangers of sectarianism around the Middle East, but the fact is that even the Al Qaeda home office did not understand what was happening out in the field.

In a letter captured by the Americans in 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri sent his greetings and congratulations to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but also queried him on certain matters raised by his jihad in the land of the two rivers.
⁸
Zawahiri conceded that the Shia, adherents of “a religious school based on excess and falsehood,” were indeed calumnious and destined in the fullness of time to reap the rewards of their heresy. But he was nonetheless compelled to note, “Many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia.” He admonished Zarqawi to focus on the Americans and leave the Shia for later because Al Qaeda fans did not understand his obsession with killing those who were presumably co-religionists.

There was something to this: I remembered Raouf’s mother in Cairo, who sat at home all day watching the new Iraqi cable stations that revealed a different world to her that she knew nothing of previously—it was a Shia world. She was moved to tears when she heard for the first time the tragic story of Hussein’s martyrdom. “Why are you crying, Mother?” Raouf’s Islamist sister asked her. “Okay, it’s a sad story, but it’s not our story. We’re Sunnis.”

Perhaps Zawahiri, like Raouf’s mother, could not fathom the depths of sectarian loathing, for it was he, hiding in a cave somewhere mulling over grand strategy, who misread public opinion, and Zarqawi had tapped into something essential. He was playing to his Sunni Arab base throughout the sectarian states, and they loved it. His audience wasn’t just
takfiris
and fellow travelers but also mainstream Sunnis around the region who might not have entirely approved of all his tactics, but agreed that someone had to put the Shia back in their place lest they misunderstand what was in store for them once the Americans left. Bin Laden killed Americans, and the Palestinians and Hezbollah killed Jews, but Zarqawi was the man in the trenches who slaughtered the heretics that Sunni Arabs have successfully kept in their place for a millennium now and have to live with every day.

Compared with Zarqawi, Zawahiri and bin Laden were just mainstream Arab demagogues. Washington, they say, is the only thing standing between them and the fall of the infidel regimes in Cairo, Riyadh, and elsewhere. But only a
takfiri
Boy Scout could really believe that a few stalwart souls camping out in caves could topple authoritarian states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, states managed by massive security services devoted exclusively to preserving their own power. Zarqawi, by contrast, showed that to bring down the established order, you don’t fight the regimes; you set the region in flames by tapping into sectarianism and force the people to fight each other.

This is what the Syrians, and the Iranians, did in Iraq—but the Americans were also at fault, and not just because we failed to provide enough security early on. We should have given more consideration, and even respect, to the theory the Arabs had about us. While Washington may have thought it was laboring to bring democracy to the region, the Arabs believed we were on a deliberate course to set them at each other’s throats, with the goal of dividing and conquering. The sectarian warfare in Iraq that Zarqawi was waging was therefore
seen as just the first of many more conflagrations to come, conflagrations that the Arabs thought would be to our benefit, and of course to that of the Israelis.

Sometimes shows of power and diplomacy are, in fact, connected aspects of one player’s coherent and comprehensive Middle East policy. But often what appears to be a grand strategy is just a fantasy that Arab analysts, journalists, and café society have projected onto the map of the region in order to pass time and keep the mind nimble, like a narrative version of backgammon. That was the case with the Arab interpretation of U.S. policy in Iraq. We didn’t want to set the Sunnis and Shia against each other—we just wanted to take a few pieces off the table. But the Arabs find it impossible to believe that we do not understand the nature of the Middle East, and they therefore assume that our guile matches our power.

The assumption that democracy was all a plan to set the Arabs at each other’s throats also made sense to many Arabs because it fit with the way they see their own societies. For the Americans, democracy meant investing the Arab man, woman, and child with the rights due every human being. From the Arab nationalist perspective, empowering the Arab individual would necessarily come at the expense of the Arab nation. And weakening the unity of the nation would animate the sectarian monster that has stalked the region for a millennium.

Nowhere were these fears stronger than in Damascus. For the Syrian regime, democracy would mean an end to the domestic peace cultivated through coercion and repression since the founding of the modern Syrian state, and the unleashing of violence at unprecedent-edly lethal levels. Majority rule, meanwhile, would obviously not only spell the demise of the Alawi regime but also threaten the very existence of the Alawi community. As they watched what was happening in Lebanon and Iraq, it was easy for the Arabs to conclude that if representative government meant brother slaughtering brother, then the Americans could keep their precious democracy to themselves.
Hatred of America’s freedoms, the Bush White House liked to say, is why jihadis commit acts of terror against the United States. The Syrian regime reminded the Arab mainstream that it wasn’t American freedoms that they hated, but their own. The Arabs feared each other.