US rattles its sabre at Syria

Submitted by Anon on 2 May, 2003 - 12:54

By Clive Bradley

The United States administration has started to rattle its sabres at Iraq's neighbour Syria. Like Iraq, Syria is ruled by the Ba'th Party, though a different faction; they have been bitter rivals for decades.

The Ottoman empire, of which Syria was part, was divided up between France and Britain after the First World War. Syria, along with Lebanon, went to France. A series of coups after the Second World War culminated in the 1963 seizure of power by the Ba'th Party. Faction fights spilled over into further coups-later in 1963, and eventually, in 1970, when a conservative wing of the party under Hazef al Asad took power. Asad ruled until his death in 2000, when he was succeeded by his son, Bashar.

The Arab Ba'th Socialist Party was formed in Syria in 1944 (the word "socialist" was added in the early 1950s) as a pan-Arab movement-aiming at unity across the Arab world. Indeed in 1958, partly as a result of Ba'thist influence, Syria merged with Gamal Abdul Nasser's Egypt to form the United Arab Republic-though the merger was short-lived. The Syrian section of the party grew more radical, kicking out the original Ba'thist leadership, which decamped to Iraq.

Ba'thism was always a vague, though radically-inclined nationalism (in the early sixties, Nasser famously thrashed the Syrian party leaders in a radio debate, accusing them of having no ideology). In Syria it had something of a mass base-far more so than in Iraq, the only other country where it grew at all.

Its chief base, like other nationalist movements in the Arab world, was in the army. Though less notoriously chauvinist than the Sunni-based Iraqi party, in Syria, the ruling party also had its stronghold in a small section of society, in this case the Alawite Muslim sect (which is concentrated in Syria and neighbouring Lebanon).

The Syrian government was shaken by the Arab defeat by Israel in the 1967 war (Syria lost the Golan heights, less than an hour from Damascus by tank). As in Egypt, the debacle prompted a shift away from the most radical nationalism, though less dramatically. Syria continued to back radical nationalist causes against Israel. It backed factions in the Palestinian movement, and in Lebanon. After the first round of the Lebanese civil war, in the mid 1970s, Syria invaded, and stayed there until 1990, contributing heavily to that country's ongoing agony.

It has more openly supported Iraq than any other state in the region, and many of the volunteers found by American troops in Iraq are Syrian nationals.

Syria's support for Saddam Hussein in the war is probably as much because of general nationalism than any specific Ba'thist affinity.

The Syrian regime is a one-party dictatorship, which while less extravagantly repressive than its Iraqi counterpart, brooks no opposition. In 1982, when the world's eyes were focused on Israel's invasion of Lebanon, the Syrian regime crushed an Islamist revolt in the city of Hama, killing perhaps 9,000 people.

While the claim that Syria has weapons of mass destruction would prove even harder to prove than in the Iraqi case, its links with terrorist groups are well-known-from Palestinian factions to the Lebanese Hizbullah. Although Syria, has not formally softened its stand towards Israel much, in reality it is anxious to regain the Golan Heights, and to break out of isolation (which has deepened since the fall of the USSR, with which Damascus was more closely allied than any other Arab state). They are likely to want to avoid war at all costs.

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