Bashar Al-Assad Next Tyrant to Fall After Qaddafi?

Mike Totten has a short piece on the twisted maniac of Damascus.

Many hoped that Assad would turn out to be a reformer when he assumed Syria’s presidency after his father died in 2000. He promoted himself that way, and for a while, he looked halfway convincing. He’s an ophthalmologist, not a military officer; he’s a bit of a technology geek and an Internet addict; he spent several years in the United Kingdom, where his wife, Asma, was born. Even when the promised reforms failed to materialize and repression against dissidents was ramped up again, some blamed the regime’s so-called “old guard,” followers of Hafez al-Assad who were maybe, just maybe, in Bashar’s way.

The problem with that theory is that Bashar has been in power for more than a decade now, and he has handpicked those who surround him. “The basis for such arguments was Assad’s own public relations strategy,” Lebanese-American scholar Tony Badran writes in Foreign Affairs. “When Assad inherited power from his father in 2000, he adopted the ‘old versus new guard’ theme to cultivate his image as a reformer and bolster his legitimacy at home and abroad. For a brief period, he allowed dissidents to criticize corruption openly. But this so-called Damascus Spring was a cynical mirage. In the past decade, Syria has not seen a single meaningful act of reform.”

Even if he wanted to, Assad would have a difficult time reforming the system that he inherited—not because of a stubborn “old guard,” which doesn’t exist, but because of the nature of Syria’s sectarian demographics. He and his family are members of the Alawite minority, a religious sect that constitutes about 10 percent of Syria’s population. Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority has always considered the Alawites infidels. (The region’s Shia Muslims considered them infidels, too, until Lebanese cleric Musa Sadr issued a fatwa declaring them Shias in 1973 because doing so suited his political agenda at that time.) Between the First and Second World Wars, the Alawites had their own semi-autonomous state along the Mediterranean coast, just north of Lebanon, but it was absorbed into Syria shortly before the French left the region. The Alawites (including Bashar’s grandfather, Suleiman) loathed the idea of living as vulnerable minorities in a country with a Sunni majority. Since the French left the Alawites to their fate, some figured—perhaps rightly—that the safest thing they could do was conquer Syria and rule it themselves. They still believe that their battle for power is a fight for their very survival. No one should expect them to go quietly.

Oh, by the way. Imam Musa Sadr came to an unknown, but presumably bad, end when he visited Libya on a "goodwill" trip later in the seventies. The current [and soon to be publically castrated] monster of Tripoli, the egregious madman Qaddafi, presumably had him "disappear" during a trip into the Syrian desert. You can read all about it in a book called "The Missing Imam" written by none other than Fuad Ajami. [Presumably the always paranoid Colonel Qaddafi suspected Musa Sadr of having a "sinister" connection with the Sufi [and suspected closet Shi'ite] Senussi King Idris whom Qaddafi deposed in 1969 when this abortion staged a "Young Officers" Movement imitating Egypt's Nasser.

Now the jokes on the half-Jewish [on his mother's side] Qaddafi, who should use his "Right of Return" instantly or end up gloriously dead tout de suite.