Liberal Syrians and others increasingly favour a certain analysis of
why the Syrian revolution failed. The
analysis masks the mistakes that really did contribute to that failure. This invites future disasters. I apologize for bringing this up; it is not
my place to do so. But trying to prevent
the next failure seems reason to speak out of turn.
The 'official' liberal version, palatable to Western commentators, runs
like this. The Syrian people came out
demonstrating for freedom and democracy.
Their authentic revolution was hijacked by Islamists. These Islamists, along with Assad, ISIS, and,
often, Erdogan, destroyed Syria's dream.
The extent to which this analysis departs from reality is immediately
apparent in its haste to put the Islamists (never mind Erdogan) in the same
category as Assad, referring to " stupid Assadists, Islamists,
Erdoganists". This stoops low
indeed. Assad killed at least 200,000
civilians. Even ISIS, which never
claimed nor was considered part of the revolution, killed about 2% of
that. In the tally offered here, "the
rebels", i.e. the nice ones who aren't too Islamist, killed a bit over
4000. The Bad Islamists, represented by
Jabat al Nusra, later HTS, killed 452.
"The Coalition", incidentally, killed around 3,000. That "the Islamists" are lumped
together with the likes of ISIS and, incredibly, Assad, is good reason to
question the whole liberal Syrian narrative.
That narrative is mendacious from beginning to end. No one really knows exactly why "the
Syrian people" revolted - that is to say, what proportion of those out in
the streets were there for which reasons.
The horror of Assad's response left no room for thorough surveys. But most accounts allow that, at the start,
people massed around the slogan
"The people want the fall of the regime." That certainly doesn't imply democracy. It doesn't imply freedom in the democratic
liberal sense - only freedom from spectacularly monstrous repression. And it must be said that 'the Syrian people'
included and still includes some substantial proportion of régime supporters.
They obviously didn't want anything remotely liberal, unless by that is meant a
triumphantly secular lifestyle that aspired to Western cultural norms. The Syrian liberals are well aware of all
this.
What we do know is that resistance to the Assads, in the decades
preceding the revolution, was spearheaded by Islamists - the Muslim
Brotherhood. This did not stop Syrian
liberal eminences like Hassan Hassan from telling us, in Western media, that
the Muslim Brotherhood had 'hijacked'
the revolution as early as 2013. His
evidence? That the Brotherhood has
aspired to dominate various revolutionary committees like the Syrian National
Coalition at various meetings in various hotels. Apparently these almost forgotten
administrative constructs are supposed to be a valid stand-in for 'the Syrian
people' who, it seems, made the revolution.
How quickly 'the people' cede the stage, in liberal eyes, to the notable
individuals who purport to represent them.
The portrayal of Islamists as hijackers or even as enemies of the
Syrian revolution mirrors what has undermined resistance to Assad almost all
along. It is not that secular or
non-Islamist fighting groups refused to join with Islamists. It is that the secular, bourgeois
commentariat constantly incited secularists to do just that. They cheered every
attempt - for example in Kafranbel and Maraat al Numan - to resist and
undermine Islamist movements. It's as if
the necessity of unity in the face of a formidable enemy never crossed their
minds. Either that, or they thought
their anti-Islamist takes would win them enough favour with the Americans to
become dominant in the Syrian revolution.
This was a pipe dream. The Syrian
revolution was never going to be utterly sanitized to American standards. It was always going to have enough
association with Islamists (if only in the past) that the US was never
going to trust even non-Islamist Syrians with serious military resources.
We'll never know how much difference, if any, that made. But what seems clear is that the
anti-Islamist commentary is the tip of a strategic iceberg that bedeviled the
revolutions in both Egypt and Syria. It
is the reluctance to make hard choices, or even to acknowledge that there were
hard choices to be made.
Secularist and liberal Muslim opposition to Islamists is only to be
expected. In Syria there were and are
Islamist groups far more radical than, say, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The radical Islamist opposition in Syria - I
don't mean the crazy Islamists, like ISIS - certainly ventured into policies
the secularists found abhorrent. Radical
Islamist punishments for smoking, going about unveiled, just being homosexual,
were harsh, sometimes appalling. Radical
Islamist governance often involved active suppression of free speech and local
democratic institutions. This governance
included educational projects that were in some cases obscurantist.
Furthermore, given the understated prominence of Islamists in the
Syrian revolution, there was reason to believe that Syria, after Assad, might
come under Islamist rule. This could
happen democratically, or undemocratically.
And given such rule, there was reason to believe that, quite possibly,
religious minorities would be persecuted.
There might even be massacres, especially of Christians perceived as
Assad loyalists.
Given all this, did the secular and liberal Muslim opposition really
even have a hard choice? It would be polite
to say this, but untrue. There was no
choice. To avoid unending mass torture
and slaughter, the liberals would have to accept Islamists as allies, perhaps
as leaders. Given the absolute necessity
of stopping Assad, no other course of action was even worth considering.
In the first place, Assad's determination and brutality, unprecedented
in a region which has seen much brutality, was underwritten by a sizable
professional army, an air force against which the rebels had no defence, and
virtually unlimited supplies of manpower from Iran's proxies, as well as
virtually unlimited resupply of equipment from Russia. The very thought that the rebels could
overcome this without full cooperation with Islamists, was absurd. And a failed revolt meant more than defeat;
it meant unlimited and unending slaughter, for decades. So even if it meant submission to Islamists,
there was no viable alternative.
In the second place, the anti-Islamists mislead when they put radical
Islamists in the same category as extremists like ISIS, much less extreme
monsters like Assad. Many Islamists
might be called extreme in their social or cultural doctrines, but that doesn't
translate into extreme savagery. While
Islamists factions certainly have committed atrocities in the civil war, so
have all the other participants, including 'The Coalition'. It's the scale that counts, and by that
criterion even the most 'extreme' Islamists are very moderate, despite what
some consider their immoderate domestic agenda.
In the third place, the mere possibility of future atrocities carries
no weight against the ongoing absolute certainty of present atrocities. What the Islamists might do in power, what
might be done to prevent atrocities, and by whom, are all purely
speculative. Taking the dangers
seriously doesn't justify preferring possibility to reality. There was no stopping the deaths of hundreds
of thousands without full-fledged support for the Islamists - though even that
might not have been enough.
This might be considered crying over spilt milk. But what of the future? Non-Islamists cling to fantasies about
'their' revolution. It wasn't hijacked
by Islamists. There will never be a
successful revolution in the Middle East without Islamists, because the
oppressors are overwhelmingly anti-Islamist and because the small minority of
nice anti-Islamists cannot muster enough strength to overcome cruel,
well-equipped militaries. In short,
until nice people abandon their dreams and accept an Islamist future, there is
no hope.
