The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (25 page)

After Mufleh explains that the regime has been manipulating jihadi fighters dating back to the 1970s, I note the possibility that Hafez al-Assad had inadvertently assisted in bringing down his Soviet patron by facilitating the flow of Arab fighters in and out of Afghanistan. Mufleh notes the deeper irony that he was jailed for taking Marxism seriously. “We Marxists couldn’t get money to publish our pamphlets,” he said. “So how do terrorist groups get money
for weapons? You can’t keep these organizations afloat without money from states. The Europeans know this,” says Mufleh, citing the intelligence service of his new home country. It brought him in for questioning when he first moved there. “Terrorism is not spontaneous. It is not stateless. I am sure that the Americans know this, too, that the Syrians sponsor terror.”

Perhaps it seems strange, then, that during the Bush administration’s second term many of the harshest critics of Bush’s Syria policy were former CIA hands, or journalists with extensive CIA sources, who complained that the White House was making a mistake by isolating Damascus. Since members of the intelligence community have done so much liaison work with Damascus, they argued that the Syrians could help us with Al Qaeda since they shared a common interest with the United States in putting down jihadis. They contended, with many in Washington, that Damascus couldn’t possibly be working with Sunni Islamists: first of all, Syria’s was an Arab nationalist regime that had no love for Islamists; second, Damascus had as much to fear from Sunni fanatics as anyone else since Syria’s ruling clique was drawn from the minority Alawi community.

Since 1966, Sunni-Arab-majority Syria (some 70 percent of the country’s seventeen million inhabitants) has been governed by the Alawis, a small syncretic sect that is ostensibly an offshoot of Twelver Shia Islam.
¹
The name of the community is derived from that of the last of the
rashidun
, Ali, in whose person the Alawi faithful believe God manifested himself. This heresy, together with the Alawi observance of Christian holidays, lends credence to the idea that the Alawi faith owes perhaps as much to Christianity as it does to Islam.
²
In any case, few Alawis are initiated into the deeper workings of the faith. Anti-Alawi polemicists describe it as a fertility cult based on worship of the vagina, and claim that once a year the Alawis observe debauched pagan rituals where they engage in sex with anyone they want, including relatives and members of the same sex, all to satisfy the voracious sexual appetites of their women. Bin Laden’s mother is
apparently an Alawi, even as one of Sheikh Osama’s intellectual godfathers believed that the members of this sect were “more infidel than Jews or Christians, even more infidel than many pagans.” Ibn Taymiyya, whom we have met before, believed that “war and punishment in accordance with Islamic law against [the Alawis] are among the greatest of pious deeds and the most important obligation.”
³
To this day the Sunnis consider the Alawis heretics.

During the post-World War I French mandate of Syria, Paris played on Alawi anxiety and resentment to carve a military, security, and intelligence apparatus out of the minority sect to serve French interests. As plans were being drawn for post-mandate Syria, the Alawis called in their claims to French favor and petitioned to have their own state, or to be attached to Lebanon, the refuge of minorities, or for the French to stay in Syria—anything but to be cast off as part of an independent Syria that would leave them at the mercy of the Sunnis. A group of Alawi leaders, apparently including the greatgrandfather of Syria’s current president, wrote to the then prime minister of France to explain that the Alawis were afraid “to be joined to Syria for it is a Sunni state and Sunnis consider them unbelievers; ending the mandate would expose the Alawis to mortal dangers.”
⁴

The French remained impervious to Alawi appeals. And so, as the mandate came to an end, the Alawis had little choice but to find a way of living with the Sunnis. Their solution was to forge a common national identity with their potential persecutors, an identity forged almost entirely around opposition to Israel. By unifying to make war with the outsider, Syrians would forgo campaigning against each other. The Alawis therefore draped themselves in the mantle of Arabism, and by making war on another regional minority, the Jews, they almost managed to disguise their own anxious status as Muslims. Following the turnover of yet another Sunni government—post-mandate Syria had endured a chain of coups and countercoups from the very beginning—an Alawi military regime brought stability with Hafez al-Assad’s ascent to the presidency in 1971. Assad’s regime
clinched the Alawis’ place in Syria, but it also augmented Sunni ire. Throughout the mid-1970s and early 1980s, Syria’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood waged a war against the Alawi regime, culminating in an attempt on Assad’s life. The regime retaliated by leveling Hama, a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold, where security forces killed anywhere from ten thousand to forty thousand Syrians.

Given this history, it wasn’t entirely shocking that after 9/11, the White House and the Alawis essentially agreed that the central problem with the Arabic-speaking Middle East was Sunni violence. (This changed, of course, once the Bush administration came to see that bin Laden was less of a threat than Iran.) After all, this was a point of view that the Alawis had held for hundreds of years, even if Washington had just recently stumbled upon it. For most of the twentieth century, Americans had been accustomed to thinking of the Sunnis as allies and friends in whom they had vested their interests in the region. But 9/11 left the White House feeling betrayed by the Sunnis, and made many in Washington believe that Assad could become an important asset in the war on terror—even though Syria had been on the State Department’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism” since it was first compiled in 1979. While it was true Damascus supported Hezbollah and Hamas, people argued, it would never back Al Qaeda and other networks of “stateless” terrorists, because they targeted not only the United States but Arab regimes as well.

The problem was that even though the Syrian regime believed that Sunni violence was a threat to its interests, that did not mean it would be willing to work seriously with the United States in quelling it. Indeed, the notion that Syria was a potential ally against Al Qaeda rested on a pair of mistaken assumptions: first, that Arab nationalists and Islamists are always at war and would not dare to work together; and second, that the Alawis’ fear of the Sunnis compels them to make perpetual war against them, when in fact it is often easier and quite productive, if still dangerous, to manipulate Sunni Islamists instead of fighting them. This kind of manipulation,
after all, is a central part of power politics in the region, with the various Arab rulers using terrorist organizations as cat’s-paws in their struggles with each other. For instance, the coups that overturned Syrian governments throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were typically backed or instigated by outside actors, among them Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan. So, when Hafez al-Assad came to power, he decided to act preemptively by interfering with other regimes before they could interfere with him. He backed the rivals and enemies of, among others, the Jordanians, Egyptians, Arafat, Saddam, and the Saudis, working with both Arab nationalist and Islamist terrorist organizations. In short, Arab terrorist outfits do indeed target Arab regimes, which is precisely why they are often funded by those regimes’ intra-Arab rivals. Arab rulers either set up their own cutouts or bought off existing organizations, just as Saudi princes paid off hostile Arab journalists, and redirected their energies onto other regimes. Syria’s history made it clear that, far from being unwilling to partner with Sunnis or Islamists (or both), the Alawis were happy to do so when it served their interests. And that meant any alliance with the United States against Al Qaeda was unlikely to amount to much.

Why did so many policy makers, officials, and analysts continue to insist that Syria was not the problem but part of the solution? Here again we can see how policy often dictates analysis. In the 1990s, both the Bush and the Clinton White Houses hoped to capitalize on the end of the Cold War, and Operation Desert Storm, by pushing for Arab-Israeli peace. In order to keep the Syrians at the table, Washington pursued a policy known as “constructive engagement,” which meant that so long as Damascus made gestures toward peace, or just kept talking, the United States would overlook its occupation of Lebanon and its support for terrorist organizations. During this era, which you might call the golden age of peace processing, U.S. secretaries of state were frequent guests of Hafez al-Assad in the Syrian capital—James Baker made twelve trips to Damascus; Warren
Christopher, thirty-four; and Madeleine Albright, seven.
⁵
It would, of course, have been unseemly for America’s chief diplomats to be seen so assiduously wooing a state sponsor of terror, and so the Americans simply buried the fact that Syria was supporting a wide array of terrorist organizations, from Kurdish nationalists in Turkey to Palestinian Sunni jihadis in Lebanon. Who was responsible for arming and funding these groups and giving them logistical support? Not Syria, the United States insisted—it was a peace partner. As a result, the myth took hold that no state was responsible for arming and funding terrorist groups: these groups were not shaped and supported by Middle Eastern states pursuing their strategic interests; rather, they were all just rogue networks of stateless operators motivated by a wide array of grievances.

The reluctance of many U.S. policy makers to acknowledge Syria’s complicity in terrorism was nicely illustrated in the winter of 2007, when former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was in Damascus meeting with Bashar al-Assad, even as on the other side of town Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah commander, was killed in a car-bomb attack. Mughniyeh was thought to be responsible for many acts of international terror, including the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, and the fact that he traveled freely to Damascus made it obvious that Syria was providing shelter to terrorists, even to those with American blood on their hands, and under the nose of a visiting American dignitary no less.

Brzezinski, along with Democratic lawmakers like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who also visited Bashar in Damascus, was one of those pundits and policy makers who chastised the Bush administration for isolating Syria, an opinion institutionalized in the bipartisan gravitas of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker. These attacks made it sound as if the Bush administration had willfully ignored Damascus’s overtures toward an alliance. The truth was more nearly the opposite: the Bush White House had tried to improve its relationship with Damascus after 9/11. It had dispatched
several high-level envoys, like Secretary of State Powell, whose April 2003 visit was intended to secure Assad’s cooperation in Iraq and a promise to shut down the Damascus offices of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But that visit ended in disarray—when Powell convened a press conference to boast of his success, reporters quickly discovered that the bureaus of the Palestinian groups were still open for business. And needless to say, Assad never cooperated over Iraq. Even so, the administration kept the doors open: in January 2005, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made a last visit to Damascus. But a few weeks later, Hariri was assassinated in Beirut, making it all too clear that Assad had no interest in altering his behavior. A day later, Washington withdrew its ambassador.

The fact that the United States spent more than a decade trying to cajole Damascus would have been bad enough had it only been a waste of American money, time, and prestige. What made the U.S. efforts even more problematic was that by trying so hard to work with the Syrians, American policy makers had effectively encouraged terrorism. The reason they were so intent on working with Syria, after all, was that they believed the Syrians had the ability to spoil peace efforts in the region. That sent a clear message: the easiest way to get the attention of world leaders and prove that you are indispensable to peacemaking is by killing people. To be sure, American policy makers sought to frame it differently, and tried to come up with explanations for why Syria, given the right carrot, would stop sponsoring violence throughout the region. But in doing so, the United States ended up, as it so often has in recent decades, excusing those who make violence their initial response to anything that offends them, and legitimizing terrorism.

 “I
f the Americans try to do to Syria what they did to Iraq,” says Ibrahim, “we will fight them. Syrians are tough.”

And the Iraqis are not? I ask him.

“Not like Syrians are tough,” he says. “And we will all fight as one.”

Ibrahim usually laughed when he was caught blustering through a lie. The first time I walked into his store in the Old City of Damascus he flattered the American’s sense of business propriety by telling me he set a fair price for rugs and furniture, and never bargained. I told him I wanted to be there when he told the next Arab customer who came through that he refused to bargain. Then there was the afternoon I brought a friend around from New York who asked about the Jewish quarter close by, and Ibrahim confided that his name was in fact Abraham. He was a Jew, he said in hushed tones, one of a mere hundred or so remaining in the city after centuries of a major Jewish presence here in the heart of the Holy Land now scattered to the Syrian Jewish diaspora in New York and New Jersey—maybe my friend knew some of his relatives. Ibrahim kept a straight face throughout, but my friend still didn’t buy anything from Abraham the landsman.

Ibrahim’s criticism of the Iraqi resistance didn’t sound all that convincing, either. At the very least, it was not something you heard from many Syrian Sunnis, since between their fight against the Americans and the slaughter of Iraqi Shia, the Iraqi Sunnis had come to be regarded as rock stars by many Syrians, as they were in the Damascus cabaret that Ibrahim and I visited one night. The top-notch cabarets are staffed mostly by Russian girls, with the blondes fetching the most attention from the Gulf tourists, but where Ibrahim goes, the girls are Arab, Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi, and so self-conscious that I began to wonder how many of them were veiled before they started to earn a living in their ill-fitting prom-dress knockoffs and chunky high heels. The MC swapped dirty jokes with a small group of Iraqis. One of them, a compact man sitting in front of a bottle of Absolut, wore a turtleneck, brown leather coat, and a mustache characteristic of the Arab officer class. He was pouring himself shots of vodka and loudly toasting the MC, who took a small
bow and returned the compliment. “To Iraq,” said the MC, “and the proud sons of the resistance of Fallujah.” When the blood drained from Ibrahim’s face and he suddenly asked for the check from a middle-aged Egyptian woman in a bathing suit, I began to wonder if maybe he really was Jewish after all.