Op-Ed: Syrian Regime's Lost 'Mask Of Moderation'

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NEAL CONAN, host: Now the Opinion Page. Over the past few weeks, government response to protests in Syria escalated from billy clubs and warning shots to tanks and assault helicopters. Activists report at least 1,400 dead and another 10,000 in custody. The northwestern city of Jisr al-Shughur is reported under siege and more than 6,000 refugees have fled across the border to Turkey.

In an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami says the world now has no choice but to confront its illusions about a regime where massacre is a family tradition. Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the John Hopkins School of School of Advanced International Studies. He joins us now on the phone from his home in New York. Nice to have you on again.

FOUAD AJAMI: Thank you very much, Neal.

CONAN: And when you say a regime where massacre is a family tradition, you were referring to the massacre of at least 10,000 people in Hama in 1982.

AJAMI: Of course, in many ways, I think the Syrian regime, the circle has been closed. The old man, Hafez al-Assad, the father, had been a cruel man. But maybe an argument could now be made that Bashar al-Assad, his Western-educated son, the ophthalmologist, the young man, the man on whom many hopes were pinned in Syria that he would be a different kind of man, he may even be more cruel than his father. So I think the Syrians are confronting the reality of their history, this incredibly rotten dynasty, this Assad family and the intelligence there and the killers around the family. And there is no exit for anyone in this situation.

CONAN: And the international community, you write, has to, well, see through the illusions that colored its - their relations with Syrian for so many years.

AJAMI: Well, you know, if you compare, Neal, the - if you look at Libya and how easy it was to isolate Moammar Gadhafi, if you look at the way the Arab League broke with Moammar Gadhafi and singled him out as a brigand and called for a Western intervention against him; a remarkable development for the League of Arab States.

And then you compare the silence of the League of the Arab States toward Syria, the greater deference accorded to the Syrian state. When you compare to the fact that the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 was passed in condemning the Libyan regime and asking - authorizing the protection of the Libyan population, and when you all the games that the U.N. and the difficulty of coming out with a resolution condemning the Syrian regime, you can see that the Syrian regime has had much more running room than the Libyans.

CONAN: To this date, the Russians and the Chinese seem very reluctant to approve anything that would be critical of the regime in Damascus.

AJAMI: Well, the Chinese and the Russians - you know, you're exactly right. The Chinese and the Russians were willing to let the Security Council resolution on Libya pass. But they have been very reluctant to, you know, to do the same thing in the case of Syria.

Part of it - in the case of the Russians, they've had enormously long history and long traffic with the Assad family and the Assad regime in Syria. So decades of dealings between the Russian state during the Soviet Union and even the post-Soviet states in Russia and Syria, I think, have a lot to do with that.

CONAN: I was interested, though, in Syria's relationships with some of its neighbors and two are very different. One of which, of course, is Turkey, its neighbor to the north. And it has had sometimes rocky relationships with Turkey, better of late. Though in the past few weeks, the regime in Acra seems to have taken pause.

AJAMI: Well, I think the - I have a little problem here. You know, there's some problem with the connection. But, you know, on the issue of the relations between Syria and Turkey, these are very interesting. And I think the Turks now really fully understand what this Syrian regime is all about as they watch thousands of Syrians spill over into the border of Turkey.

Prime Minister Erdogan now admits that he misjudged the Syrian regime and he misjudged Bashar al-Assad. He now admits that he was lied to by Bashar al-Assad. And the Turks are talking about having tried to reform Bashar al-Assad, having tried to teach him better ways and to underline to him that you can't kill your people, you can't run this kind of regime. The Turks are even telling us that they even sent a booklet to Bashar al-Assad about the way they have done their politics and reform their politics.

But it's idle because I think that the Assad regime and the dynasty and the barons and the intelligence people around Bashar al-Assad are very different breed.

CONAN: Another important Syrian ally, strategic ally, is Iran, which with Syria, supports a lot of groups in Lebanon and, of course, Hamas in Gaza.

AJAMI: Well, the Iranians will stay with the Syrians. There is no other choice. They depend on the Syrians. They need the Syrians. I mean, I think it's interesting to think of Iran as now a power of the Mediterranean, that the influence of Iran reaches the Mediterranean - to Lebanon through Hezbollah, to the Palestinian territories through Hamas. But all this access to the Mediterranean has granted them, granted the Iranians by the Syrians. So I think they are in the same ditch. They are very close. And I think the Iranians will stand by the Syrians, through thick and thin.

I think the interesting change is - as we talk, just mentioned - the interesting change is the change in the attitude of Turkey towards Syria. That is a fundamentally important change.

CONAN: You mentioned Lebanon, of course, Hezbollah, a client of Iran, a client of Syria as well. And in the new government formed today, the majority of the cabinet positions are filled by Hezbollah.

AJAMI: Well, Hezbollah, basically, in fact, as you said, it relies both on the support of Syria and the largesse of Iran. And I think that what has happened in Lebanon is a tragedy because, in fact, Lebanon has slipped out of the western orbit, into the orbit of Syria and Iran. There was a fleeting hope. There was a moment after 2005, when the Syrians were forced out of Lebanon by the Cedar Revolution and by the pressure of the United States and the pressure of France combined. There was a hope that somehow or another that some new democratic order, some moderate order, would prevail in Lebanon.

But I think these hopes have come to naught. I think so long as Hezbollah has a dominant role or a seminal role in the affairs of Lebanon, pity Lebanon and pity the Lebanese, because Hezbollah is a radical organization. Hezbollah is not really, fundamentally, in my opinion, is not a Lebanese organization. It is really an arm of the Iranian regime, and it does Iran's bidding.

CONAN: There is also, you write in your piece in The Wall Street Journal today, among those who've had the illusions about Syria is the administration of Barack Obama.

AJAMI: Absolutely. I think we have to be honest about this because our president, President Obama, came to office in 2009 and offered engagement, offered an olive branch, both to the regime in Tehran and to the regime in Damascus. And there was a whole lobby, led for the most part, by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator John F. Kerry from Massachusetts. I mean, he is an influential figure in the Democratic Party, and with this administration.

And it was the argument was made, and it was made over and over again by Senator Kerry directly, that Bashar al-Assad is a secular man, is a modern man, that he's eager to break with Iran and eager to break with Hezbollah. And that we - if we offer him the right deal, if we send an envoy, an ambassador to Damascus, that somehow another Bashar al-Assad will see the light of day.

And the Obama administration insisted that Bashar is capable of change. He was a reformer. I mean, even our own Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, normally a very, very levelheaded person, made the same arguments and made the same observations about Bashar.

CONAN: And this has all come to naught in the developments in the Arab Spring, where these protests started and were seen almost immediately as a threat to the stability of the regime and put down as if there was insurrection?

AJAMI: Well, absolutely. What happened in this Arab Spring and its meaning for Syria? We will recall that the Arab Spring began in Tunisia and then immediately in Egypt. And then it made its way to both Yemen and Libya. If you notice, the Syrians came later. They came to it - if the Tunisians and the Egyptians came to it in January of 2011. In the case of the Syrians, the - their evolution that - the trouble in Syria, the eruption against Bashar al-Assad, began in March.

And it began in a very interesting way, in a very small way, in a very limited way. A bunch of boys in a small town of Daraa in southern Syria, scribbled some graffiti on the walls. And a regime that's so brittle and so cruel basically went after the children, went after Daraa. And in a way, the dynamics are very interesting. The more cruel the regime, the more brutal the regime, the more the Syrian people were offended by it, and the more they went out onto the street to challenge this regime.

CONAN: And it, as you say, started in the most provincial of places and grew outside of the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo until recently.

AJAMI: Absolutely. And it came - when it came to the interesting city that people were looking at was the city of Aleppo. It's a commercial city. It's a very prosperous city. And the argument was made that Aleppo would never break with the regime. That it did so well by the regime, economically, that it would tolerate this regime. But I think what the Syrian people really are telling us in a clear way as they could, with all the sacrifices and all the ordeal, is they had grown weary of this Assad tyranny. They have grown weary of Bashar al-Assad. They have grown weary of his younger brother Maher, who does the killing and does the dirty deeds of the regime.

They've also grown weary of the Makhlouf family, who are basically the cousins of the Assads and who loot the economy. So what you have is this regime of completely a kleptocracy. They are both killers and thieves at the same time. And the people went out because they had grown desperate. And 40 years of the Assads, 40 years of authoritarian rule, 40 years of economic decline and economic backwardness had done their work.

CONAN: We're talking with Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, director of the Middle East Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Yet, arguments we heard from Syria, they may sound familiar to those who have been following the situation in Yemen and those who followed it earlier in Egypt. After me, the deluge, the leadership said, if the stability of this regime goes, there will be chaos and sectarian warfare and anarchy.

AJAMI: Well, you're so right, Neal. That's exactly the selling point of the regime. It knows no other argument. What it basically tells the world, what it tells the Arab states, what it tells Israel, what it tells the United States, what it told France as well; is that, look, we are a secular tyranny, we are an authoritarian regime, we admit to a certain measure of authoritarian regime. But we are ruling a critical piece of real estate in the region. We are ruling this country.

And the alternative to our tyranny is a regime led by the Muslim fundamentalists, is a regime that would kill the Christians in Syria, that would go after the Alawites, who are the ruling community thus far, that would go after the Druze and so on. So I think for quite a number of years, we have to grant the Syrian rulers their due. They did a very able job frightening everyone with the alternative to their tyranny.

And I think gradually and slowly, whether it's in Ankara, whether it's in Paris, whether it's in Washington, people are coming to a recognition, policymakers are coming to a recognition that this regime is as bad as any that Syria could spawn and come forth with.

CONAN: One of the places that may not yet be convinced though, is in Tel Aviv, where we're told the Israeli government is quite nervous over the prospect of a change of - if the Assad regime should fall.

AJAMI: Well, I think they are nervous. I think they are nervous because if you look back at the history of the Assad regime, both father and son, they kept the peace on the Israel-Syria border, until very recently, when they were able and they were willing and they were keen to send Palestinian refugees across the border, to the Golan Heights, in order to challenge Israel across the Golan Heights.

But gradually and slowly, the way I read Israeli opinion now, is that they, too, are beginning to understand the dark side of this regime and to appreciate it more fully - that they understand that this regime, even though it maintains a certain measure of peace across the Syria-Israel frontier, it is also a patron of Hamas and it's a patron of Hezbollah, and that the regime in Damascus is very sly and very wicked.

It keeps the peace across the border, its own border with Israel, but then uses the Lebanese border with Israel to ferment all kinds of troubles. So the game is up, and I think, gradually and slowly, among policymakers in Israel, among the military in the in foreign office, you're beginning to see a recognition of this dark side of the Assad regime.

CONAN: As this started, we have to remember that Syria was being considered for a position on the human rights panel at the United Nations. No matter what happens - and one has to believe that in the short run the military is gonna be able to keep the government in power - but it will be changed, you would think, forever.

AJAMI: Well, I think everything has changed in Syria. I think what - no the Syrian people now see Bashar for what he is. When he - when Bashar inherited the job from his father in the year 2000, the Syrians saw him as a young man, they saw hope in him. They were told that he was the head of the Syria computer society. That he love the music of Phil Collins. That his wife is a very trendy young woman, et cetera, et cetera. They pinned their hopes on him. And I think these souls have been shattered beyond any repair.

So I think what you have now, is this incredibly brutal standoff between a population that doesn't want this regime but can't yet overthrow it, and a regime that can't frighten the Syrian people back into submission. Because what Bashar really wants, what he's eager to do, what he's keen to do, is to scare the Syrian people back into their old submission. Because he and the people around him and the intelligence people around him - his brother, his brother-in-law - all this intelligence functionaries, I think they were shocked by the fact that the Syrian people shook off their fear and went out in a determined effort to challenge, and if possible, to overthrow this regime.

CONAN: We just have a few seconds left. You mentioned some of the minorities in Syria, the Druze, the Alawites, the...

AJAMI: Right.

CONAN: ...family of the ruling, of the ruling family, the Kurds, the Christians, they are said to be supporters of Bashar al-Assad for fear of regime that would follow.

AJAMI: Well, I think that's the, you know, I wish knew more, in greater detail. I wish the evidence was more persuasive, that the minorities are keen to stick with Bashar because of their fear of Sunni fundamentalism, or the Muslim Brotherhood were to come to power. But my own sense is that I think now all segments of Syrian society understand the cruelty of this regime.

And I think, even the minorities that would have sought shelter under the banner of Bashar al-Assad, now fully know what this regime is all about, whether it's the merchants in Aleppo, whether it's the minority communities. The brutality of this regime, the war against the children, and the mutilation of this young boy Hamza al-Khathib, I think, more and more Syrians of all walks of life...

CONAN: Fouad Ajami, I'm afraid we're gonna have to leave it there. Thank you very much. This is NPR News.

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