Yeah, Fisk, "Assad's Fate is Sealed," and صحّ النوم on "The State of the Alawites"

I don't know what it is with hack "analysts" incapable of going beyond the obsolete models of Arab nationalism. Is what drives them ignorance, an impulse for omissions, or flat out historical perversions?

Take for instance this gem of unscrupulous dilettante journalism:

... this "frontier" of fire matches almost precisely the "State of the Alawites" temporarily created by the post-First World War French mandate which chopped Syria up into mini-nations partly on sectarian lines.  

Huh? Is Fisk at all capable of sticking to ideologically-innocent history?  Would he care to admit that the 1920 "State of the Alawites" instated by the French was not intended to be "temporary," nor was it the result of a "chopped up Syria."  There was no "Syria" precedent (to this "temporary" entity) to merit "chopp[ing] up." In 1918 the French inherited a bevy of semi-autonomous (ethnically coherent) Ottoman administrative units which they attempted to keep intact until 1936.  Those were the "Pays Alaouite," "Pays Druze," "Etat d'Alep," and "Etat de Damas"; and they actually made more sense than the current Syrian entity.  In fact, prior to 1936 there was no united or unified "Syria," nor was there a coherent cohesive Syrian nation to be racked by French colonial rapacity and end up being "chopped up into mini-nations."  The current, rending, "modern Syria" is a historical anomaly that is simply reverting back to its natural dissected past.  It never needed the French to "chop it up." If anything, the French proceeded with a profound understanding of (and respect for) the multi-ethnic nature of the Levantine mosaic, and attempted to remain faithful to the coherence, soundness, and practicality of the Ottoman administrative precedent.

Today's problems in the Levant (Syria's problems included) are the result of forced and coerced unities, as mandated by the early 20th century British, who, post-1936 had become the effective rulers of French-controlled Grand-Liban, Pays Alaouite, Pays Druze, Etat d'Alep, and Etat de Damas, and which they attempted (against the natural order of things) to bring together in an unholy cantankerous union.  It is high time things went back to the past, and Levantine history got justice.

The [no] Case Against an Alawite State

Here is another speculative wishful-thinking "Syria analysis" by Joshua Landis. 


This is at best an apologetic, brimming with the usual tendentious unconvincing and misleading hagiographic material, by one who made career out of these sorts of shameless panegyrics. Here is a quick sampling of distortions, omissions, and outright historical howlers: 


1- "After the French conquered Syria in 1920..."  Really?  "[T]he French conquered Syria in 1920"? Actually, as in "conquered," conquered Syria? If "conquest" there was, it was one of former Ottoman Provinces in 1918 (not 1920), which were cobbled together by the British in 1936 to form what then became the template of a future Syria.  What the French "conquered" were in fact League of Nations mandated Ottoman Territories, not a coherent cohesive "Syrian" entity, which were actually "conquered" by Hejazi Sherifian forces (Faysal and his gangs.)  The French wrested back (under a League of Nations Mandate) what was conquered by Faysal.  But why bother with trivialities?  


2-  "Bashar married a Sunni Muslim in an attempt at nation-building and to stand as an example of integration..." Really? Whatever happened to marriage for love?  Specially for one long touted as a Westernized (computer-geek) liberal reformer iconoclastic eye-doctor, by this very same analyst? 


3-  "Assad has done nothing to lay the groundwork for an Alawite state.  There is no national infrastructure in the coastal region to sustain a state: no international airport, no electric power plans, no industry of importance, and nothing on which to build a national economy..."  I won't mention Basel al-Assad International Airport, or Syria's only deep water harbors in Lattakieh and Tartous (which Landis himself refers to as "port cities" in his piece), and will let those who have visited Syria recently weigh in on the dishonesty of this statement. 


The rest--like "no country will recognize the Alawite state"--is a big colossal yawn!!  As if when faced with an existential crisis the Alawites are going to fret about international recognition.

A Paradigm Shift for Syria

I am traveling through early Fall on a Boston College research grant.  I expect to be in the Middle East for at least part of my grant period.  If this pans out, I hope to revive this blog "from the Levant"--provided I have reliable internet.  In the meantime, and before I get disconnected, here's my latest on Syria, and my commentary to the doubting Thomases who've only now begun considering a "third option" (umm, partition) which I've spoken about since the very early days of the uprisings.

A version of this post (here) ran in the July 10, 2012 issue of the National Interest

Many Middle East commentators have described the Houla massacres of May 2012 as "a turning point" in Syria’s sixteen-month old uprisings.  “This is Syria's Srebrenica” clamored some, speculating sterner international pressures ranging from the imposition of more debilitating sanctions against the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, to further isolating his government (with the prospects of enlisting Chinese and Russian help,) to possibly putting boots on the ground to lend support to the armed opposition and eventually create civilian "safe havens."  Yet the brutal killings continued, an undaunted Assad went on flouting international denunciations, and save for a quasi-universal litany of jeremiads and consternations about the regime's cruelty, precious little has changed on the ground in Syria.  If anything, Assad seemed to have raised the stakes in late June downing a Turkish military jet that had presumably breached Syrian airspace.  Yet, this too, along with news of fresh new massacres in the Damascus neighborhood of Douma, met with international mutism—and curiously enough, with Turkish resignation.

True, there was the recent ballyhooed Geneva conference, and before it the histrionic expulsions of Syria's diplomatic corps from key Western nations—with the Obama administration, true to form, demurring.  But those remained sparse, perfunctory, timorous, and largely ineffective slaps on the wrist.  For, beyond the killings, beyond the world's cacophonous indignation, and beyond the Syrian regime's continued recalcitrance, there lurked a method to Assad's madness that very few observers have deigned address or entertain: namely, that what animates Assad are communal survival concerns and Alawite group contingencies; that the international community’s and the Syrian opposition’s oratory about Syria’s unity and national integrity are the least of the regime’s preoccupations; that it might be too late at this point in the game for the Alawites to abdicate their reign and resign themselves to a subservient future in Syria; that many assumptions about the current shape of the Syrian state are broken beyond repair; and that the Alawites would rather dismantle their existing republic and retreat into a fortified autonomous entity in the Alawite mountains than share power with a brutalized Sunni-Arab majority ill-prepared to granting either democracy or clemency to its cruel erstwhile wardens.

Save for analysis published in The National Interest throughout 2011 and early 2012 (see for instance here, here, and here,) most analysts, diplomats, and policy makers invested in Syrian affairs seem still beholden to spent paradigms about the country; namely that Syria is somehow a single unitary entity that shall remain so whatever the cost and whatever the outcome of the current uprisings, to be ruled in its entirety by a single dynasty beholden to a single ideology and bound to a single political culture. Yet, if anything, the events of the past sixteen months—and more recently the Houla and Douma massacres—have demonstrated that the Alawites, not unlike other Syrian communal and ethnic groups, have yet to overcome their regional, sectarian, and subnational loyalties for the sake of some fancied uniform "Syrian nation."  Historically speaking, there was never anything resembling this vision of a homogenous Syrian entity, and there is precious little today that would justify the constitutive elements of this artificial construct remaining intact.  

The grisly massacres running riot through the Syrian countryside are not mere sectarian outbursts or spasmodic bouts of senseless killings and retaliatory counter-killings; they bear the telltale markings of what became known in Yugoslavia of the 1990's as "ethnic cleansing."  Like their twentieth century Balkan precedent, Syria’s massacres of civilian populations are deliberate, controlled, methodical, and focused, aimed at removing "from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group... in order to render that area ethnically homogenous."  Ironically the parallels don’t end there.  Like the Balkans, geographic Syria—including today’s troubled Syrian Arab Republic—was once part of the Ottoman dominions.  It was and remains at once a crossroads and a rugged mountainous refuge where many linguistic families, multiple ethnic groups, and bevies or religious and sectarian communities—among them Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, Shias, Sunnis, Greek-Orthodox, Druze, Syriacs, Alawites, Maronites, Jews and others—have for centuries lead an uneasy existence and a tenuous coexistence.  The conditions that have lead to the twentieth century rending of the Balkan states into multiple ethnic formations may be different from those responsible for Syria’s travails today.  But the ingredients are hardly dissimilar: restless ethnic, religious, and linguistic mosaics forcibly brought together under the banner of a homogenizing authoritarian pan-national idea.

And so, today’s strings of wanton murders, sexual assaults, torture, arbitrary detentions, targeted bombings, and destruction of civilian neighborhoods—and what they entail in terms of displacements, deportations, and population movements—are nothing if not the groundwork of a future Alawite entity; the grafting of new facts on the ground and the drafting of new frontiers.  No longer able to rule in the name of Arab unity, and in the process preserve their own ethnic and sectarian autonomy and specificity, the Alawites deem it salutary to retreat into the Levantine highlands overlooking the Mediterranean.  The area in question is a sanctuary that the Alawites had called home for centuries, and which the French had helped them instate and protect as an autonomous “ethnic state” during the first-half of the twentieth century. 

By no means will the population of this projected state be homogenous; but its Alawite element will be an overwhelming majority that is politically, psychologically, militarily, and economically well-prepared to stand up and be counted.  What’s more, the largely Christian coastal regions of Tartous and Lattakieh have remained “neutral” throughout the uprisings—and have in effect signaled (even if tacitly) their acquiescence in an Alawite-dominated state.  Furthermore, the buffer zones of Masyaf and Cadmus to the East are home to a large Ismaili community, which has thus far remained loyal to the Alawites.  Heading northeastward, beyond the Turko-Syrian border town of Idlib, the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) seems to have already begun establishing the foundations of autonomous rule, with Alawite blessings and encouragement.  Though its industrial resources are quite limited, this projected Alawite region benefits from a well developed infrastructure, rich arable highlands, fertile coastal plains, abundant water sources, and more importantly perhaps, Syria’s only deep-water harbors—Tartous and Lattakieh—and an international airport that would make any emerging state in that particular region at once self-sufficient and supremely defensible.

The earth is flat no more when it comes to Syria, and its current shape no longer makes sense to a recently empowered group unwilling to revert back to servility.  It is high time prevalent images of "Syria" and its future—as a cultural, linguistic, historical, and ethnic monolith—also moved away from this sort of cognitive dissonance.  This is not a prescription.  This is a gentle reminder that a model for this future can be found in Syria’s Ottoman and French-Mandatory past, and that a single unitary Syria locked up in its current map is neither sacrosanct nor a law of nature.  Indeed if anything it is an historical anomaly that arose in 1936—a date prior to which conceptually, politically, and geographically speaking, Syria as we know it today was non-extant.  Policy maker, peace processors, diplomats, and those invested in Syrian affairs and the Syrian people’s wellbeing would do well exploring all possible solutions to the current Syrian crisis, not only solutions dictated by prevalent models and comforting ideological predilections.

Might is Right in Syria

For those of you who still bother visiting this site, I've been on a long hiatus preparing for the launch of a new refereed Middle East e-journal at Boston College.  The Levantine Review is now live and still accepting essays for review (until September 30) and possible publication in the Fall 2012 issue.

I also thought, before reactivating this blog, to revisit an essay on Syria from earlier this year.  It seems to me that what is currently happening in Northern Lebanon (the heavy clashes between Sunnis and Alawites/Shi'ites) might fit into the Assad's "re-ordering" of the Eastern Mediterranean, in preparation for the impending Alawite Canton.

The Delusion of an Arab World

My response to Rami Khouri's jaundiced call for "killing the Levant" was recently featured in the National Interest under the title The Delusion of an Arab World.

Does Anyone Speak Arabic?

My latest in the Fall 2011 issue of the Middle East Quarterly (Vol. 18, No. 4)

Killing the Levant, Rekindling the "Arab World"

In 1999, long before the fitful rise and fall of the 2011 “Arab Spring,” former Arab-nationalist author and public intellectual Hazem Saghieh published a scathing critique of Arab dogmas, delusions, and political discourse. He named his book The Swansong of Arabism. It was a work of painful and honest introspection, in which the author called for casting aside the soothing jingles of “Arab Unity” and discarding the assumptions of “Arab Identity,” urging his former comrades-in-arms to let go of, and bid farewell to the corpse Arabism. “Arabism is dead,” wrote Saghieh, and Arab nationalists would do well bringing a healthy dose of realism to their world’s changing realities: “they need relinquish their phantasmagoric delusions about ‘the Arab world’ [… and let go of their] damning and outmoded nomenclatures of unity and uniformity [… in favor of] liberal concepts such as associational and consociational identities.”

Arabism and unitary Arab identity—“philosophies of compulsion, coercion, and exclusion” in Saghieh’s words—have rained disaster on the Middle East of the past hundred years; yet their ideologies persist as lodestar to many an irredeemable nationalist, and their illusive terminologies remain the dominant prism through which some insist on defining the Middle East. Liberal, multi-ethnic, polyglot models such as those of Switzerland, Belgium, or India, complained Saghieh, “elicit nothing but contempt from Arabists still infatuated with overarching domineering pan-identities.” Diversity frightens the Arabists he claimed. To wit, Lebanese militant scholar Omar Farrukh wrote during the second half of the 20th century that it is irrelevant should Iraqis deem themselves a hybrid of Aramaeans, Persians, Kurds, Turks, Indians, and others still: “They still are Arabs, in spite of their racial diversity,” even in spite of themselves, “because the overriding factor in their identity formation is the Arabic language.” Likewise, Farrukh stressed that the inhabitants of today’s Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and elsewhere in Northern Africa, may very well be a mix of Berbers, Black Africans, Spaniards, and Franks; “but by dint of the Arab nation’s realities [sic.?] they all remain Arabs shorn from the same cloth as the Arabs of the Hejaz, Najd, and Yemen.”

More recently, Palestinian public intellectual and journalist Rami Khouri suggested proclaiming “the death of the ‘Levant’ label” as a referent to the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. His rationale was that the “revolts across much of the Arab world capture the fact that Arab citizens are now in the very early stages of rewriting their own history and crafting their own national narratives.” Consequently, those citizens’ physical and geographic space, argued Khouri, deserved nomenclature reflecting the nature of their world and the mood of their revolts. The “Arab world” was a more apt term to describe Egypt, Syria, and their Mediterranean bailiwick claimed Khouri; “Levant,” on the other hand, was a linguistic, perceptual, and geographic throwback to a hated “colonial era,” which the current upheavals seem bent on erasing. Yet Levantines could not disagree more with Khouri's oversimplifications; most see themselves not as colonial inventions, but as sophisticated, urbane, cosmopolitan mongrels, intimately acquainted with multiple cultures, skillfully wielding multiple languages, and elegantly straddling multiple traditions, identities, and civilizations, including those of Khouri’s vaunted Arabs.

Yet, oblivious to the realities of the Levantine Near East as a crossroads and a meeting-place of peoples, histories, languages, and ideas, Khouri seems hellbent on snuffing out diversity in the name of Arab uniformity; as if Arabism’s resentful history of the past hundred years had not yet been sanguinary enough, repressive enough, or negationist enough. “History beckons to the Arabs,” wrote recently Syrian thinker Adonis,

to put an end to their culture of deceit; for, [the] states of the Levant are much greater, much richer, and much grander than to be reduced to slavery for the benefit of Arabism […] and no amount of cruelty and violence emanating from Arab nationalists will change the reality that the Middle East is not the preserve of Arabs alone.

Yet Khouri somehow deems it fitting to slay Adonis’s Levant—the Levant of millions of Adonises—on the altar of a spent ideology and an “Arab world” that no longer obtains. Never mind that in this year’s Middle East uprisings not a single banner was raised in the name of an “Arab world,” not a single candle was lit in the name of an “Arab world,” not a single slogan was intoned in the name of an “Arab world,” and not a single victim (mauled by the cruel killing machines of writhing Arab nationalist regimes,) not a single victim self-immolated for the sake of an “Arab world.” Still, the indecent champions of a moribund “Arab world” have no shame piggybacking on the sacrifices of those seeking freedom from the brutality and servitude of a hackneyed and dessicated ideology.

Nearly a decade before Khouri’s delusional exhortation to rename the Levant, Nizar Qabbani, an Arab nationalist with impeccable credentials, was announcing the death of his Arab world, not the Levant; and he was inviting incorrigible nationalists to join him at the wake. Eulogizing an anthropomorphic “Arab world,” Qabbani wrote:

… This is the end of dialogue […] My language has despaired of you: and I have set fire to my clothes, and I have set fire to your language and your lexicons. I want out of my voice; out of my writings; out of my place of birth. I want out of your cities of salt, your hollow poetry, […] and your tedious language and silly myths and lore. I have had enough already of your hallowed idiots and your lionized impostors. I have despaired of your skins; I have despaired of my nails; I have despaired of your impenetrable wall.

Perhaps Khouri, and those like him, still romancing outmoded delusions about some uniform, unified, reformed “Arab world,” would take heed.