From Father to Son: Ruling the Syrian State
Given Flynt Leverett’s three images of Bashar: (1) The Closet Reformer, (2) The Loyal Son, or (3) “The Neophyte,”55 it rings clear that he is a little of each. As someone who initially wanted social and economic reform, he still had to operate in the system he inherited from his father and proved incapable of standing up to those elements in the regime who opposed a change in the status quo. As a loyal son, he also sought to maintain regime stability and quickly realized that reform would pose a threat to the carefully crafted order he inherited. More than anything else, Bashar proved to be a neophyte – inexperienced, ruling through emotion rather than sense, lacking in an all-encompassing vision, and incapable of change.
He is as Eyal Zisser observed: “Since his rise to power in 2000, Bashar al-Asad has been responsible for a litany of fiascos both at home and abroad; to make matters worse, his policy has also been marked by vicissitudes and instability.” Bashar’s performance “has been replete with failures that attest to his inability to confront challenges facing him and Syria.”56
Bashar’s tone and speeches proved to be far more bellicose than his father’s in the 1990s, and Syria’s regional role has become defined abroad by their ability to prevent rather than make peace. At the same time, the regime is stable and there are no other significant power-bases in Syria that pose a threat to that stability. Put simply, there are no other serious candidates for Syrian leadership at the moment that would lead to a dramatic change in direction.
While most threats to the regime are external, the domestic socio-economic problem is acute and growing. As previously mentioned, Hafiz al-Asad experienced many economic problems during his time and especially by 1990. Yet each time a crisis occurred, something lucky occurred beyond his control and rescued the state from an economic collapse. Syria’s tactical rejectionism toward Israel in the 1980s led him to seek strategic parity with Israel and purchase as much Soviet weapons as he could. This caused a severe economic crisis but in the 1980s, oil fields were discovered in Eastern Syria and they started production in 1990.
Whereas the Gulf states stopped paying Syria as the lead confrontation state with Israel in the 1980s because of their support for Iran in their war with Iraq, in 1990 Hussein invaded Kuwait and Syria chose to join the anti-Iraq coalition, leading to billions of dollars from the Gulf states. At the end of the 1990s, a few bad years of drought in Syria and low oil prices again threatened the economy but soon thereafter oil prices doubled. From 1998 on smuggling oil from Iraq also became a boon for the Syrian economy.
Bashar, however, has had no such luck and has chosen poorly at nearly every turn. In the end, Syria’s economy in the age of globalization may present the most serious threat to the regime – if Washington does not.
55 Leverett. Inheriting Syria. pp. 18-21.
56 Zisser, Eyal. "In the Name of the Father: Is Bashar in Control of Syria?" The Middle East: The Impact of Generational Change. Ed. Asher Susser. Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 2005. 49-54. pp. 50-51.