ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

4/23/11

Before our nation’s media types and right thinking pols get all gooey-eyed about the prospect of a revolution, like the uprising in Egypt about which they were so gaga, taking place in Syria, perhaps they ought to heed the words of one Joshua Landis, director for Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oklahoma and clearly a man who knows of what he speaks:

“Who will step in for Syria? No one, it will be decided in the streets.”

Life is about to get very hard in Syria, and not only for the 10% of the population that is non-Muslim, mostly Christians but also, in small but tenacious numbers, Jews. The Muslim population is also far from uniform, with Sunnis comprising 74% of the population and the other 16% of Syrian citizens being of various Muslim groups. Over all these has ruled the Assad family, who are Alawites, since 1970. Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal points out (4/23, page A11), the Assads “have held together the country’s eclectic mix of sects and ethnic groups, sometimes uneasily (What a weak word in these circumstances, but I digress.), under a single umbrella.”

In the wake of our problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan, one would hope that we are realizing why most Middle Eastern leaders are not the types of Jeffersonian democrats who would be lionized in the faculty lounge at Harvard. The West, largely the British but also the French, with American complicity, drew the maps of the Middle East with little regard to ethnic, tribal, and linguistic affinities. What the West bequeathed to the Middle East was a batch of ungovernable agglomerations of people who have not gotten along for millennia. Keeping a reasonable degree of order under such circumstances requires a degree of force and amorality that is indeed regrettable but perhaps even more necessary. Note, too, that the application of such force never bothered us all that much when the applicators (e.g., Saddam Hussein, Shah Reza Pahlavi) were doing our bidding, but that is grist for another mill.