ABSTRACT
Libya is the chief example thus far of an Arab Spring movement that resorted to intense armed conflict and successfully deposed the national leader. Syria is the chief example thus far of a resort to intense armed conflict that has failed to dislodge the national leader. When Bashar Assad succeeded his father, Hafez Assad, as president of Syria in 2000, he entered office with the hopes of many that his new regime would usher in an era of relaxed restrictions on political discussion and dissent. However, the few steps he took in that direction were soon reversed under pressure from the “old guard” in the government he’d inherited. Yet the younger Assad believed that Syria was immune to the prodemocracy, antiauthoritarian movement that swept the region in 2011. As David Lesch observes, Syrians disdain the chaos created by open ethnic conflict of the kind all too evident in its neighbors, Lebanon to the west and Iraq to the east. The government and military institutions are tightly cohesive, bound by the sectarian and kinship connections among Assad’s allies whom he has placed in key posts. And if Assad’s clique is composed principally of minority Alawites (a Shiite sect), he has skillfully bound to his regime other minorities—notably Christians and Druze—by playing on their fears of what Syria under the rule of the Sunni majority might be like. Yet the warning signs were there. Syria had a repressive security apparatus clamping down on popular discontent over corruption, poverty, and unemployment. The examples of Arab Spring protests elsewhere emboldened Syrians to express their discontent. Assad has claimed, and apparently sincerely believes, that the demonstrations and armed resistance alike are the result of foreign agitation. He has resisted outside attempts to calm the situation through diplomacy. Instead, says Lesch, Assad is dedicated to pursuing a “security solution” to the uprisings.
