The fall of the Syrian regime and Lebanon

There is no need to speculate any further as to when and how the Syrian regime will fall because it has already fallen, specifically in the short battle that occurred in May last year. Hezbollah basically announced the fall of the Syrian regime after it tried to salvage that which could not be saved from the Assad regime. As the masks fell off, Hezbollah also fell into the abyss with the Syrian government and, in doing so, it has dragged all of Lebanon down with it.

Today, we find ourselves facing a new regime in Syria and it is not the Assad regime, which has to all intents and purposes disappeared. On the one hand, the new regime has extended into Syria’s southern provinces and, on the other hand, the new regime is embodied by cantons created for militias from Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, which represent Al-Qaeda.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Assad regime collapsed in March 2011, when the president’s reply to his people’s protests about the torture of Daraa’s children went completely against what everyone expected. What Assad wanted to say to his subjects (we cannot say that he considers them to be citizens) was that Syria is not Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Yemen. He wanted to remind the people that nothing was beyond him. After all, did he not destroy Hama completely over the heads of its residents when they tried to confront him? Did Assad not commit countless massacres in the prisons of Tadmor and Sidnaya until the people understood that not just imprisonment and torture would await those whom the regime detested? Did he not also order political assassinations of those who questioned his regime in order to teach them that there is no such thing as a safe haven or even international law regardless of status or age, killing Salah Bittar in Paris and Chebli Al-Issmi in Beirut?

There is a joke which we used to tell one another as children and it goes like this: every morning, a dog used to have fun by chasing a goat. He would chase the goat until it was tired of running and eventually leave it alone and go about its way. One morning, the dog begin to chase the goat as usual; however, that day the goat decided that it would attack and it began to chase the dog head first, pointing its horns at it. The dog was surprised and began to stutter in disbelief, “Has this goat gone crazy?”

The Assad regime fell the day that the “Syrian goat” went crazy and decided that it no longer wanted to play the Assad dog’s game. The regime lost its ability to terrorise the Syrian people when the people of Daraa refused to submit to its guns. The “bank of terrorism” went bankrupt and its currency fell. This stands as a reminder to all of us that the survival of any authoritarian regime is the result of a complicated relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. It is not the terrorism practised by the Assad regime or the Syrian army’s presence in Lebanon alone that ensured the regime’s survival, but the presence of several parties in both Syria and Lebanon, which gave to and took from the regime much to its advantage and benefit.

Syria’s President Hafez Assad, Bashar’s late father and predecessor, was among the most brilliant policy-makers in the Arab world, if not in the whole world. He used to embrace Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini with one arm and shake the Saudi King Fahad’s hand with the other. He cursed imperialism but sent his soldiers to fight alongside those of President George H. W. Bush in Saudi Arabia. He called for socialism but practised free market economics. He killed Kamal Jumblat but embraced his son Walid. He destroyed Hama but opened the door for merchants in Damascus and Aleppo. He used to express his support for resistance against Israel yet gave Zionist leaders many assurances in secret. He assassinated Bashir Gemayel and Aoun Hrawi and expelled and dispersed the Lebanese forces, but embraced Amin Gemayel and supported the Maronites against Arafat and the rest of the Lebanese left. In short, he was the most skilled player in the Middle East.

The biggest mistake that the current President Assad made was to assume that terrorism and gang politics characterised the policies of his father. The truth is that Assad senior lived by the words of American President Theodore Roosevelt who said, “Speak softly but carry a big stick”. Hafez Assad realised the value of deterrence and learnt that it was better not to use his biggest sticks too much. The Syrian regime lost its most valuable weapon, deterrence, when it gave the nod for the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005. It was then that the Syrian presence in Lebanon began to collapse and, after that, it was only a question of when, not if, the regime would fall.

The political collapse of the Syrian regime began when the people of Syria refused to submit to its state terrorism. It began its moral decline (it was always a Machiavellian regime that took into account neither the human being nor his blood) when it began to act like a gangster. Assad collapsed diplomatically when he said that the Arabs and the Persians were nothing more than a handful of rogue states; and he collapsed militarily when he allowed numerous foreign militias to defend his palace in the capital and the presidency. What we are witnessing today is a struggle, a weak attempt to salvage the remains of a collapsed regime.

It is unlikely that the regime will be able to avoid a full collapse; however, if it does, Hassan Nasrallah’s influence will be much greater than that of Bashar Assad. Iraqi and Lebanese militias will serve as the remnants of the Syrian army and the sectarian equation in the country will change dramatically. Overall, Syria will become the new Somalia, due mainly to the fact that the Sunni cantons will be outside of Iranian control.

There are now many new international equations because Iran has its grip on those who stand against its foreign policies and those who are hoping to restore their relationship with the West. Furthermore, Obama’s former restorative policies, which sought to avoid new conflicts, have become a thing of the past in the wake of the new cold war. There are loud words in Washington that the complacency over the Assad regime was embodied by Putin’s actions in Crimea and that the new Cold War will begin in Damascus. In this sense, the Assad regime and its allies will be victorious when they succeed in acquiring more chemical weapons. This is the painful blow that awaits the West.

This new equation will facilitate the elimination of Hezbollah, which has taken over Syria and Lebanon completely and now views itself as an expanding superpower that is taking over the Middle East. The adventures of the group are no longer being tolerated in the region as it has become isolated in Lebanon and is now involved in a feud with the majority of the Syrian people. Unfortunately for Hezbollah there will be no Tunisia to which it can retreat, as was the good fortune for Yasser Arafat and the PLO in the early eighties. Perhaps the best it can hope for is the formation of new camps in Iraq in the coming year.

Translated from Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper 20 March, 2014

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.