Nearly a decade after President Barack Obama left office, Democrats remain fond of juxtaposing his foreign-policy record with that of George W. Bush. To a certain cast of mind, the two men offer sharply opposed models of statesmanship: the urbane peacemaker vs. the pri-mitive warmonger. But it is almost certain that more people died violently in the greater Middle East during Obama’s presidency than during his predecessor’s.
The vast majority of historians with a keen interest in political affairs, usually in close range to the citadels of progressive orthodoxy, would not be so indiscreet as to draw attention to this awkward fact.
A prominent exception is the British historian Con Coughlin. A defense and security editor for the Telegraph, Coughlin has made a career out of painstakingly exploring the dark terrain of despotism in the Middle East. A few years ago, he published Khomeini’s Ghost, about the Islamic revolution in Iran. Back in 2002, as U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf prepared to depose the Iraqi regime, Coughlin published Saddam, an arresting chronicle of the Butcher of Baghdad.
Coughlin’s latest contribution is Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny, which constitutes a fitting coda to his earlier examination of the rival Iraqi branch of the Baath Party. Coughlin’s account of Syria’s despot focuses on the political drama of the last surviving Baathist dictatorship during its near-death experience. After Saddam Hussein was forcibly deposed, Assad’s Syria became the most fearsome national-security state in Arab lands—and in time it spawned the most potent rebellion in the misnamed “Arab spring.”
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Coughlin gives a brief historical review of the House of Assad, which has long draped itself in the mantle of a belligerent Arabism to disguise its own uncertain status among the Muslim faithful. The Assads hail from a despised minority sect, the Alawites, and the family’s ruling cabal has run a cruel prison state at home and exported violence abroad.
The book opens in the spring and summer of 2000 with an aging Hafez al-Assad, the former ruler of the Levantine state. Hafez came to prominence for his role in organizing Syria’s surprise military invasion of Israel in 1973 during Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the Jewish year. This gambit nearly succeeded in capturing the disputed Golan Heights, until a desperate Israeli counteroffensive secured a decisive victory. But it was an event nearly a decade later that made Hafez al-Assad infamous. In 1982, he was condemned as an international pariah after his regime cracked down on an Islamist revolt orchestrated by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. The uprising, in the northern city of Hama, was the culmination of a long-running campaign by the Brotherhood to overthrow the Assad regime. On Hafez’s orders, it was pitilessly crushed. He entrusted the bloody task to his elder brother Rifaat. An estimated 12,000 Syrian forces surrounded Hama for three weeks, subjecting it to a constant aerial and artillery bombardment until the rebels were routed. The Syrian Human Rights Committee later determined that 20,000 civilians perished.
It was Hafez’s eldest surviving son, Bashar, an eye surgeon by training, who succeeded his father when his health began to deteriorate. With reluctance, Hafez al-Assad passed his power to this “poor substitute” for Bashar’s more dashing elder brother, Bassel. The latter had been groomed to succeed his father as president but had died in a car accident in 1994. Hafez had misgivings about the young doctor inheriting the realm, remarking that “Syria is a jungle and Bashar is not yet a wolf.”
The declining tyrant had been wrong to worry. As Syria’s 19th president, Bashar al-Assad defied expectations and came to match his father in ruthlessness and cunning. Prominent leaders from Europe and America visited Damascus, where they paid court to its young dictator and his glamorous Western-educated wife. But despite his pretensions as a reformer, Assad ensured that Damascus remained the capital of Arab resistance—with perpetual enmity toward the Jewish state and a strong ambition to make Lebanon a Syrian satrapy once more. Meanwhile, the repressive apparatus of the state continued to operate, and in time placards were seen in Hama reading “Like Father, Like Son.”
The acid test for Bashar al-Assad came barely a decade into his reign, in August 2011, when an uprising against his rule broke out in the Syrian hinterland. It had long been believed in the region that the Syrian edifice would not crack, that its quiescent population had been effectively forced into submission. But amid an Arab-Islamic world awakening to the promise of participatory politics, Syrians hoped to take their place in the Great Arab Revolt. The upheaval spread to the urban centers of the country, posing a frontal challenge to the primacy of the Assad dynasty. The result, as Coughlin bitterly notes, was “the greatest humanitarian calamity of the early twenty-first century.”
This is a large claim, but not an unfounded one. Coughlin observes that during four decades of covering wars around the globe, he never encountered “a more savage conflict than the Syrian civil war.” He once believed he would never witness a more vicious struggle than the civil strife that played out in Beirut in the early 1980s—where, as a foreign correspondent, Coughlin would sleep in the bath for protection from exploding shells and would wake to discover colleagues kidnapped by Iran’s militiamen. But Syria presented an even more sanguinary spectacle of an internationalized civil war that never lacked for firepower (except on the side of the Syrian opposition). The Syrian government behaved without a trace of mercy or moderation. “Acts of barbarity,” writes Coughlin, were carried out “on an industrial scale” under the personal direction of Assad. The bloodletting encompassed the “worst war crimes of the modern age” in which schoolboys were tortured to death and chemical weapons were used without restraint against the civilian population.
Early on, President Obama demanded that Assad step aside. But Obama refused to make good on his own professed policy of regime change in Damascus. A dreadful struggle ensued between the Syrian despot and the Sunni majority. The consequences were a death toll of more than 500,000, nearly half of them civilians; more than 13 million people driven from their homes, 6.6 million of them now outside Syria; and the incubation of a sectarian proxy war between Sunni and Shiite jihadists, with the Shiite Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force fighting on behalf of Assad while the Islamic State carved out a caliphate in the vast desert along the Iraq-Syria frontier. The emergence of Russia as a global power helped save the regime on the diplomatic front as well as on the battlefield.
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All this was the direct or indirect consequence of the delinquency of American statecraft, its willful shrinking from the defense of the nation’s interests, to say nothing of its ideals. Obama had expressly forbidden the use of chemical weapons a year after the upheaval began, threatening reprisals if Damascus violated this hallowed taboo of the respectable order of nations. Under intense pressure to deploy American might in defense of vulnerable Syrians, Obama insisted that his only “red line” would be the use of Assad’s chemical arsenal to quell domestic unrest. Almost exactly a year later, in August 2013, that red line was crossed when rockets containing the nerve agent sarin hit the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, with devastating results. The attack left some 1,100 civilians foaming at the mouth and convulsing before suffocating to death, underlining the Syrian despot’s hauteur as much as his depravity. The promise of punitive military strikes by the American superpower never was kept. Even when chemical warfare continued unabated, the presidential palace in Damascus remained unscathed. Washington’s policy of indifference dictated that Assad be spared, no matter the outrages inflicted on the Syrians. No matter the cost to America’s national honor.
Obama argued that it was not America alone but the international community that needed to decide how to enforce global order and whether to take action against the Assad regime. As Coughlin reminds readers, Obama even sought to distance himself from his original commitment: “I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line.”
This abdication is well captured by Coughlin. He methodically documents not only how Assad’s tyranny retained power by bludgeoning and slaughtering its domestic foes, but also how the stewards of American power wrung their hands in the face of these horrors. In this penetrating book, Coughlin demolishes the accepted view that Syria’s tragedy had no ramifications beyond its borders. In reality, it proved to be a hinge moment, confirming the suspicion of friend and foe alike that America was no longer willing to provide a modicum of order in the Middle East.
Obama confirmed as much when he claimed—in his announcement of the 11th-hour agreement brokered by Russia to remove Assad’s chemical arsenal in exchange for calling off any potential military campaign—that America’s vocation was not to police the world. In the end, he had dispensed with the pious illusion that a global consensus might form against Assad and halt his depredations. Obama, who must have known that Syria’s rescue had depended on U.S. intervention all along, effectively declared that the United States had no interest in freedom’s battle raging on the banks of the Euphrates—or, at least in theory, anywhere else. After all, he had been elected to end wars, not to join them.
The Syrian ordeal thus birthed a reality that was a cause for cheer among tyrants near and far: not merely that America lacked the resolve to enforce its red lines, but that it no longer seemed to have any.
Photo: AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda
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