Syria will never be unified Western busybodies should be wary

The ensuing Arab defeat came as a terrible humiliation, which prompted the first of Syria’s many coups. The next president, General Husni al Zaim, only ruled for 137 days but set enduring precedents: although he had been in charge of the fighting as the Army Chief of Staff, he blamed civilian politicians for Syria’s defeat, and second, he was not an Arab but a Kurd — the first of a series of non-Sunni Arab rulers, found in no other Arab country.

During the next 21 years, 17 presidents followed one another. And three of those years were under Egyptian rule. In 1958 Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the very embodiment of Arab nationalism, had been invited to rule Syria as well, in what became the United Arab Republic. The Syrian elite, desperate for stability, had simply given up on independence.

This experiment in Arab unity lasted for three years and 219 days, long enough to teach the Syrian elite both civil and military that the rule of much larger but much poorer Egypt was very costly. A military coup dissolved the United Arab Republic on 29 September 1961, and six more presidents tried to rule Syria. But stability would come in November 1970 when Hafez al-Assad took control as military dictator before naming himself the president in February 1971.

With Hafez al-Assad there was no more beating around the bush on the question of ethnicity, never even mentioned by all his predecessors. He was an Alawite, therefore only a very nominal Muslim (they drink wine and believe in the transmigration of souls), and he relied very largely on fellow Alawites to control the levers of power, from the command of air force squadrons and every armoured unit within reach of Damascus, to the customs service that generated revenue much more reliably than taxes, and the police which recruited informants in every part of Syrian society.

It was Hafez-al Assad’s father, Suleiman, who had laid the basis of subsequent Alawite power over Syria. In June 1926, along with other notable Alawites, he sent a letter to the French Prime Minister Leon Blum, to explain why his people — mostly peasant farmers in those days — could never live under Muslim rule. “The spirit of hatred and intolerance plants its roots in the heart of Muslim Arabs toward everything that is non-Muslim,” he wrote, warning of the risk to Syrian minorities if France granted independence. At the time the French were organising their colonial army for Syria, and thought it prudent to favour Alawite applicants along with Druzes, Ismailis and a few Christians, all much more likely to be loyal to France against majority Arab Sunni demands for independence.

The disproportionate number of Alawites in the officer corps allowed Hafez al-Assad to seize control of the armed forces in 1970. But the elevation of Alawite farmers into the ruling class would ultimately undo the 54-year long regime of Assad father and son that finally collapsed two weeks ago. The sons of farmers moved into Damascus and other Syrian cities to exploit their Alawite connections to occupy lucrative government positions or work in state-connected firms, and were less and less willing to serve as soldiers, gendarmes and spies to protect the regime from its enemies.

For many years this enfeeblement of the Alawites was masked by the rise of Iran’s power in Syria. Tehran’s militantly Shia rulers needed bases in Syria to build up Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to claim overall Muslim leadership against Israel. They therefore chose to accept the exceedingly heretical Alawites as both Muslim and Shia.

Iran’s support allowed the Assad regime to cling to power for years, even in the face of the mass “Arab Spring” protests led by the Sunni Arab majority that started in December 2010. The Revolutionary Guards trained Shia recruits from Iraq and as far as Afghanistan to repress the Sunni majority rebels all over Syria, while relying on higher grade Hezbollah units to reconquer strongly held towns and city quarters, with bombing support from Syrian aircraft and Russian fighter-bombers.

Determined to resist by all means possible including the use of chlorine and mustard gas, the regime survived for another 14 years. But it could not survive Israel’s demolition of Hezbollah, and its clear-cut aerial victory right over Tehran. The thousand or so Sunni fundamentalist rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham who drove into Aleppo on 29 November, would easily have been stopped by a Hezbollah battalion in the past, but not this time. And neither could Iran’s Revolutionary Guards be flown to support the regime because the Israelis would not have allowed it. After Iran’s air force did not even try to resist Israel’s 26 October attack near Tehran, the entire edifice of Iran’s military power was exposed as a sham. Assad fled just in time to avoid certain death.

The Foreign Office, State Department Near East Bureau, and French Quai d’Orsay should pause to reconsider this history. The Alawites might be beaten down but not the Kurds in the north-east, nor the Druzes in the south-east.

There are other ways to accommodate plural identities. Switzerland, for example, once the scene of civil war, caters to the diverse preferences of its multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious population with 26 different cantons, each of which has its own government, constitution, and primary language. The last time Swiss took up arms against each other was in 1847, but the newest canton, French-speaking Jura, only acquired its independence in 1979.

Of course, there are glaring differences between ultra-prosperous and perfectly tranquil Switzerland and war-ravaged Syria, but the former’s accommodation of diversities at the local level is far better than any attempt at nation-wide ethnic/religious accommodations, as in India, where the original idea of helping the lowest-caste “untouchables” that started under British rule has escalated over the years into a system of privileges (including in university admissions) for whatever group is strong enough at the ballot box, including a newer “Other Backward Classes” category that embraces almost a third of the population. A unitary Syrian state without strong local governments would be disastrous, especially because each city and some larger towns has its own distinct urban culture shared by most ethnicities and religions.

Perhaps the Syrians are best left alone to rebuild their state as they see fit. But if benevolent Western officials do intervene, they should not automatically favour a unitary and centralised state — a preference unfortunately shared even by American officials who come from a federal state. A confederal Syria would be a much better alternative.

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Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.

ELuttwak