Analysis: World holds its breath as Assad clings on

ENGLISH author and priest William Ralph Inge once said: “A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.” Syria’s Assad dynasty, however, seems to believe it can defy that dictum.

Historically, few autocrats have understood that change produced peacefully by government is the most viable conservative solution to popular demands, and the best way to avoid violent revolution. This is the wisdom that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh all failed to learn. It is the central lesson of the Arab Spring, and one that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has bloodily ignored.

A country whose weight in Middle East politics has stemmed more from its role as an engine of the Arab-Israeli conflict than from its objective military or economic power, Syria under the Assads always feared that abandoning ideological confrontation with the Zionist enemy would undermine the regime.

But times have changed. The new Arab generation’s quest for dignity is rooted in a yearning for decent government and civil rights that was long denied under the pretext of conflict with the “Zionist crusaders”.

One of the most secular regimes in the Arab world – Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was another – the Syrian Baath system, based on a trinity of party, army and ethnic loyalty, has drawn the country into a sectarian war between its Sunni majority and the Shia-Alawite minority that has ruled for 45 years. Since the rebel Free Syria Army, which is mostly Sunni, split from the regular army, Assad has used the Alawite core of his forces and the shabiha – a notorious Alawite paramilitary group – to conduct his ruthless campaign for survival.

Other minorities in Syria, such as Christians, Druze and Kurds, have reason to dread a change for the worse. The Christians, in particular, who were protected by Assad, now fear that if the Baath regime is overthrown, then they will suffer the same consequences as Christians in Iraq.

The Sunni al-Qaeda flourishes in conditions of mayhem. Denied their Iraqi and Afghan bases by western intervention, al-Qaeda militants are now flocking into Syria from Libya and Iraq. Al-Qaeda’s move to the Levant also threatens to spark a momentous confrontation between Sunni radicals – some of whom have recently taken control of part of the Syrian-Lebanese border – and the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Sunni clerics in Syria and throughout the Arab world are issuing fatwas to give the Free Syria Army the halo of holy warriors fighting the Alawite infidels who have denied Syria its true Sunni identity. Shielded by China and Russia from foreign intervention, Assad has license to pursue his goals with no mercy for his opponents. Both China and Russia feel betrayed by the West’s behaviour in Libya, where it clearly transcended the United Nations mandate by toppling the Gaddafi regime. And, given their own potentially explosive political and ethnic tensions at home, neither is inclined to support foreign intervention.

Moreover, Russia, still traumatised by its Cold War defeat, wants to maintain the Syria-Iran axis as a key bargaining chip with the West, while both it and China are simply weary of the West’s naivete. As they see it, the immediate choices in the Arab world are not between dictatorship and democracy, but between malevolent stability and apocalyptic mayhem.

The West is also hesitant to act, on fears of a repeat of the Iraq debacle. Transforming Syria’s Baath regime into a workable democracy is practically impossible, but the prospect of a jihadist-style ethnic war that extends throughout the Levant is not especially attractive, either. For Russia and China, too, that cannot be a happy prospect.

• Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister who now serves as the vice-president of the Toledo International Centre for Peace, is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy