Divided & Conquered

Our first stop was Damascus, the capital that has nearly achieved full “axis of evil” status in George W. Bush’s Washington. Syria is under sanctions legislation rushed through Congress in 2003, the American ambassador has been withdrawn for “consultation,” and the charge d’affaires tells us that American policy is to “freeze” the country. An official Syria resistant to being frozen is delighted to welcome a group like ours and to demonstrate to its citizenry its ability to do so.

So on our first morning we had an audience with President Bashar al-Assad, a motorcade to whisk us up the mountain to a white marble presidential palace, our photograph on the front page of the next day’s paper, our comings and goings chronicled on the TV news. Tall and gangly, educated in London as an ophthalmologist, Assad is articulate and well-informed. He is unassuming for a head of state (much less a dictator), a man who might pass for a wonkish professor of biology or computer science at an American university. Assad essentially inherited his post from his late father, Hafez al-Assad—posters of the two together are ubiquitous in Damascus—who had come to power in a 1970 coup. He is an Alawite, a minority Sh’ite sect, and his regime is vulnerable to ethnic pressures as well as political ones. Christians, who make up 10 percent of Syria’s population and a much higher share of its professional classes, are in a similar minority position and are probably more at home in cosmopolitan Damascus than anywhere else in the Middle East.

The American Conservative

Note: The American Conservative