A DOCTOR'S DOWNFALL

FYI.......

 

From the link:

Even now, there’s little agreement among analysts on whether Assad actually wanted the “Damascus Spring” to last. Dovish voices like Lesch believe his mildly progressive ambitions were thwarted by hardliners from his father’s government. Many others believe the early rhetoric was merely a front to attract international investment to Syria’s backward economy. “It was a PR campaign to normalize the government,” says Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Radwan Ziadeh, a human-rights activist and fellow at the Arab Institute in Washington, DC, agrees. “The Damascus spring was only a cosmetic step to try to get legitimacy,” he says. “Assad actually got this because lot of international leaders praised him early on.”

“The Damascus spring was only a cosmetic step to try to get legitimacy.” Ziadeh has good reason to be skeptical of Assad’s motives—he was one of the opposition intellectuals Assad targeted in 2001.

Never persuaded by Assad’s promises of reform, Ziadeh criticized him in articles published under a pseudonym in Lebanese newspapers. When the crackdown started, the government took his passport away, censored his writing, and had him followed by the security services for almost a year, he says. He eventually fled to the US in 2007 under the pretext of buying medicine for his father, who had cancer, and has never returned to Syria.

 

It is absolutely ridiculous to connect this in anyway to American politics. The situation that the el-Assads have in common with the Husseins in Iraq is that they are a minority religion holding power in a hostile radical Moslem environment. They feel they must go to any lengths to inflict dominance over the vast mob mentality in their countries. Horrible as they are, there is a school of thought that they do the West a favor by keeping a lid on the brutal masses.

 

Christians and Alawites are (were) about 10 and 12% of the Syrian population. Iraq had a Shia majority.

 

Either way: Alawites and Baath are both minorities.

 

You mean Baathists in both Syria and Iraq? There must be 8 or 10 political parties in Syria that are some variation on Communism or Socialism.

 

Margot - you are spitting in the wind with your argument.

 

Just trying to sort out who's who..

This may help.

Baathism: and Obituary.

Aflaq was nominally a Christian from a Greek Orthodox background, but, to be honest, Christian influences in his doctrine are hard to see. It is true that, when he invokes Islam, he does so on nationalist grounds. But this is not unusual even among overtly Islamic thinkers, who conventionally invoke the ancient caliphate as proof of Islam’s divine origins. And Aflaq speaks repeatedly of the Arab nation’s “eternal mission” and “spirit,” which hints at more than worldly concerns.

He worked up these ideas during the same period when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was putting together its own doctrines, and I am struck by the overlap, Baathist and Islamist. I wonder if Sayyid Qutb, the greatest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideologues, ever had occasion to study the writings of Aflaq. Occasional phrases of Aflaq’s do seem to turn up in Qutb’s essays and commentaries from the ’50s and ’60s, somehow or another. The notion of returning to the ancient Islamic past in order to construct a postcolonial future, the emphasis on psychological and cultural problems deriving from the penetration of Western ideas, the occasional fascist overtones, and the special role granted to the Arab people (a feature not just of Baathism but of the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of Islamism), together with the veneration of Islam and its prophet—this is a lot to share.

Then again, in Aflaq’s Baath, the party leaders thought of themselves as the ultimate authority, instead of invoking the authority of the sacred texts and religious interpretations. The irksome little details of theology, sharia, and ritual interested Aflaq not at all. His Baathism was about Islam, or maybe it was an addendum to Islam, but it never claimed to be Islam itself. And Aflaq, with his talk of socialism, reserved the option of veering flexibly in different directions entirely—all of which has meant that, on doctrinal grounds, Baathists and Islamists could look upon one another as either friends or enemies, depending on whether they chose to emphasize the overlap or the lack of overlap.

And, to be sure, the history of the Arab East over the last half century has offered examples of Baathist-Islamist alliance and enmity in roughly equal measures: In the case of Syria, the Baath’s violent enmity for its archenemy, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, contrasted with the Baath’s longstanding alliances with any number of Islamist groups: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood of Jordan, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the case of Iraq, the Baath’s insistence on war against the Islamist mullahs of Iran, contrasted with the Baath’s persistent habit of supporting Islamist terrorist groups elsewhere in the world, not to mention the Iraqi Baath’s post-defeat guerrilla alliance (if I may touch on a controversial matter) with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—enmities and alliances that follow naturally from the doctrine.

THE BRANCHES OF Aflaq’s party tended to be conspiracies of the elite, consisting of schoolteacher intellectuals like Aflaq himself, together with military officers and tough-guy bruisers, who maneuvered clandestinely in the hope of staging their own coups d’état. This was the kind of movement that used to be known in the classic European left as “Blanquist”—secretive, crafty, steely, and revolutionary, indifferent to questions of mere popularity. (You haven’t heard of Auguste Blanqui? He wouldn’t mind.) And the Blanquist approach led to ideological consequences.

The original Baath party in Syria conformed to the inclusive pan-Arabist ideal, with room in the ranks for Sunni Arabs, for Christians like Aflaq himself, for members of the heretical Alawi sect of Shiism, for Druzes and Ismailis, and for anyone at all who claimed some kind of Arab background, if only linguistically (though, to be sure, Aflaq ultimately reserved to himself the right to determine who is an Arab, with the crucial factor being in agreement with Aflaq’s ideas).

But the demands of hugger-mugger inevitably tilted the Baath toward pickier ways of selecting comrades. Anyone joining a Baathist cell would naturally want to trust the other conspirators, and the simplest way to keep everyone reassured was to enroll people from similar backgrounds—comrades from the same denomination within Islam, or the same town, or neighborhood, or family. And when Baathists came to power, the conspiratorial habits led naturally to the triumph of the party’s military cells over its civilian cells.

Aflaq’s Baath staged its coup in Syria in 1963, only to discover that, after a while, the Baath Secret Military Committee was running out of patience for the Baath’s civilian leaders. Aflaq himself, a mere schoolteacher, fled into exile.

And who was the Secret Military Committee? The leading personalities turned out to be not just members of Syria’s Alawi minority, but people from a single village, belonging to a section of a single tribe and, in the inner circle, to the family of Colonel Hafez Al Assad, the father of Bashar.

The Iraqi Baath, which welcomed Aflaq after his exile from Damascus, went through similar evolutions. The original leaders in Iraq belonged to the majority confession, which is Shiite. The leaders went down to defeat. The party revived sufficiently to stage a coup in 1963, and the new leaders turned out to be ruffians from a single neighborhood in Baghdad. Their coup was overthrown.

The Iraqi Baath staged another coup in 1968, this time with sufficient strength to remain in power, and the principal leaders, this time, turned out to be members of a single tribe from the town of Tikrit, and especially from a single family, whose most prominent son turned out to be Saddam, a member of the Sunni minority—and Aflaq’s protegé, by the way. In this fashion, the Baath in Syria and Iraq alike ended up preaching an expansive pan-Arabism while practicing a narrow politics dominated by ever tinier kinship groups: anthropology’s triumph over ideology.

You want family values? Baathism is for you. And, under these circumstances, nothing prevented the official doctrine from oscillating ever more wildly.

continued

https://newrepublic.com/article/107238/baathism-obituary

 

Jeez woman. I know who the Baathists are, and I know who the Alawites are. I am not condemning or condoning or being judgmental in any way. I'm simply drawing a bead along the thread between minority power in the Middle East going to extremes to hang on against the totalitarianism of Islam. We look at El Assad as being a monster for using gas, while his father used similar strong arm tactics against his own people and was praised for it.

 

I don't recall Hafez being praised for killing nearly everyone in the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

The is shocking.