A Requiem For Ba’athism (Part 1 of 2)

The collapse of the Syrian Government and the historical context of a century Arab humiliation, Islamic Fundamentalism, and the birth of Ba’athism

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It took less than two weeks for the Syrian government to fall and for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to almost effortlessly march into the country’s capital, Damascus, ending six decades of Ba’athist rule in the country, five of which were directly under the Assad family.

The collapse was quick; what was intended as a limited offensive to reach the Sunni suburbs of West Aleppo from Idlib Province ended up in the mass surrender of regime forces. Adolf Hitler is reported to have said of 1941 USSR that: “You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!”. That turned out not to be true in that case, but it aptly describes what we all just witnessed take place in Syria.

The rush to Aleppo seemed like another suicidal dash as is typical of extremist Sunni groupings….but then they captured the entire city, the second largest in the country. The HTS-led forces then streamed south towards Hama, easily capturing that city. “The regime could still survive this”, thought many, as it has always been a hotbed of Sunni radicalism. Everything rested on Homs, the next large city to its immediate south. If it fell, Damascus and its environs would be cut off from the coast, the heartland of the Alawites, the Shi’ite sect to which the Assad family belongs.

Homs fell without much of a fight, and regime forces were split in two. Shortly thereafter, Sunnis in Dara’a Province (to the south of Damascus) rose up and took over government and military facilities. The US-backed and Kurdish-led SDF had already begun moving days earlier to shore up their positions in the east of the country, taking over government positions without shots being fired. Homs fell to HTS on December 8th, with the capital Damascus capitulating only hours later.

And just like that, the Assad Dynasty came to an end.

I want to take a look at how the regime collapsed in Syria so quickly, but I think that it is more important to put what just took place into a larger context, geopolitically, historically, and culturally. Many others have published reports and essays on the events of the past several weeks and how they were the ‘inevitable result’ of the Syrian Civil War, but I think it would best serve us to peer deeper into the past to see beyond recent events in order to try and understand just how significant the changing of the guard in Damascus really is.

Tying Up Loose Ends

The ease with which HTS strolled into Hama signaled to me that the regime in Damascus was done for. Being a conservative type who likes to hedge, my gut was telling me that the rapid fall of Aleppo to the cleaned-up Islamists of al-Qaida’s re-re-re-named local branch office clearly indicated that Bashar Assad was approaching the end of his time in office, but the continuous bombardment of the advancing Mujahideen by Russian aviation served as a caution to not jump to that conclusion too quickly. Syria was not just a venue of the fight between government forces and the Sunni radicals (and Kurds too), but of outside forces like the Iranians, Hezbollah, ISIS, Turkey, Israel, and those very same Russians. Multiply the stakeholders and betting large becomes very, very risky.

By the time HTS rolled up to the outskirts of Homs, no rally was in sight. Despite persistent Russian airstrikes, Hezbollah had not moved a muscle to aid its Syrian ally, and even more importantly, Iran didn’t lift a finger to rescue its protege. Worse still, the Syrian Arab Army no longer had any fight left in it, as demoralization, defections, and outright betrayal had set in. There was to be no heroic last stand, just a domino effect of local deals to hand over power, all beginning with that nudge towards West Aleppo and ending with Bashar Assad fleeing into exile in Moscow.

Prior to the outbreak from Idlib, things seemed to be quieting down in the Levant: Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with the IDF, while the latter kept re-arranging the rubble in Gaza through bombing strikes. Most eyes were diverted elsewhere, divided between Trump’s cabinet picks and appointment nominees, and the war in Ukraine where the incoming White House administration is expected to force Kiev to come to an agreement with Moscow to wind down that war. The events in Syria arrived like a bolt from the blue, and when the dust (what little was thrown up into the air) settled after HTS seized Aleppo, my mind was immediately taken back to one generation ago, to precisely when then-ex US General and presidential candidate Wesley Clark said the following:

A former commander of NATO’s forces in Europe, Clark claims he met a senior military officer in Washington in November 2001 who told him the Bush administration was planning to attack Iraq first before taking action against Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.

The general’s allegations surface in a new book, The Clark Critique, excerpts from which appear in the latest edition of the US magazine Newsweek.

Clark says after the 11 September 2001 attacks, many Bush administration officials seemed determined to move against Iraq, invoking the idea of state sponsorship of terrorism, “even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever”.

Ousting Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action, the general writes, dismissing it as a “Cold War approach”.

Clark criticises the plan to attack the seven states, saying it targeted the wrong countries, ignored the “real sources of terrorists”, and failed to achieve “the greater force of international law” that would bring wider global support.1

I have never found out if there was any truth to this charge, but it would not surprise me one bit if it were true; this was the peak era of US neo-conservatism after all.

Immediately after recalling Clark’s incendiary charge, my next step was to tie it into the war in Ukraine, specifically the moves to begin negotiations to end the fighting. I thought to myself: “Syria is an important asset to Moscow as it is both a client state and the location of its naval re-filling station, permitting it to project its power further away onto the African continent. To take away this vital asset would give the USA more leverage over Russia regarding negotiations over Ukraine.”

Syria was taken off of the table in less than two weeks. Several have argued with me, insisting that HTS’ ‘speedrun’ was entirely a Turkish affair, but I refuse to believe that the Turkish military did not coordinate it with the USA and get its blessing from the Department of Defense, and by extension, the White House. US forces are still on the ground in Syria, some 2,000 strong, and US aviation helped clear the way for HTS to seize power from the government in certain parts of the country.2 Was the surprising collapse of the Syrian regime actually not that surprising to at least one of its major enemies? Did the Americans take advantage of the diverted attention of Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran to capture an opposing rook? And lastly, was the fall of the Assad regime the tying up of loose ends left over from the 2003 Iraq War?

What can be stated with 100% certainty is that the Assad regime was an anachronism, a relic of the long-gone Cold War era. Its collapse also officially ends the political philosophy known as Ba’athism, one of the two main reformist strains that dominated the post-WW2 Arab World.

A Century of Arab Humiliation

It started off so promising.

The Ottoman Empire had thrown its lot in with the Germans and Habsburgs in WW1, a move that resulted in the final deaths of all three empires, two of them centuries-old. Long-deried as the “sick man of Europe”, the Ottoman Empire still laid claim to being the Caliphate and therefore the leader of the Islamic world. However, it had been fraying at the edges for some time, and the First World War created an opportunity for those living under the rule of the Sultan to chip away at its crumbling facade, aided by outside forces such as the British who rallied Arab tribes south of Anatolia. The sick man of Europe breathed his last, his corpse pulled in several different directions all at once.

To many an Arab, the fact that the Caliphate was for centuries in the hands of the non-Arabic Turks was a major insult.3 After all, Allah’s greatest prophet, Mohammad, was himself an Arab, and the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina, lay within Arab lands. Futhermore, the Qur’an was “revealed” to Mohammad by the angel Gabriel, and royal scribes were ordered to record it in its entirety shortly after the Prophet’s death. The language that it was transcribed in was Arabic. Nor was this resentment entirely a confessional one as many Arabs are Christian, making the Turk an even more foreign ruler in their eyes. The collapse of The Porte opened the path to Arab liberation from the Turkish yoke, even if technically the Ottoman Empire was the Caliphate and therefore non-ethnic in legal and philosophical terms.

“Isn’t there someone that you forgot to ask?” That someone was Europe. Battered, bloodied, and bruised from the most savage and deadly war known to mankind up until that point in history, Europe’s great powers were somehow still not exhausted by it. Having raced ahead of the rest of the world in terms of technological and industrial advancement, they glanced over to the Middle East with envy, seeing the incredible bounty of oil that they did not have at home, but that did lay under the ground there, oil that they needed to power their modern national (and still imperial) economies. The Russians had locked down Baku and its oil wells for some time, but France and Britain would not let the barely-exploited oil fields of Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the Hejaz, etc., out of their grasp. France and Britain moved quickly to re-partition the Middle East, denying the Arabs (and others) their perceived right to self-rule. The Arabs went from the frying pan into the fire.

Many of you are familiar with the Sykes-Picot Agreement in which the British and French hatched a secret plan to partition the Middle East in the event of a Triple Entente victory in WW1. The plan was leaked in 1917, upsetting the Arabs who felt that the British had stabbed them in the back after promising them self-rule, and delighting the Turks who told their Arab subjects that they were being used by the West for their own purposes. This essay is not the place to delve into the double-dealing and triple-crossing that coloured the war years and the first few years after its end, but suffice it to say that Britain and France got their way, a Turkish state was born on the ashes of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire (stymying Anglo-French plans in Eastern Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara), and the Arabs found themselves under western rule, largely cheated of their desired liberation from foreign domination. Most ominously of all, the British secured a mandate to rule Palestine.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916)

The Partition

Oil

Freed from a failed empire, the Arabs were partitioned between more foreign and much more powerful western empires. To make matters worse, control over the oil that was needed to power the economies of their new overlords was largely wrested out of their hands by these very same new arrivals. For those sitting atop oil fields, little leverage was available to secure good deals on extraction concessions. For those far away from the oil corridor, direct investment in their economies was practically non-existent apart from transportation and logistics to serve the exploitation of the nascent oil industry. The Arabs were down, and they were down bad.

The greatest insult to the Arab’s already-wounded sense of pride was the transformation of the British Palestinian Mandate into the State of Israel and what should have been an Arab state next to it. Instead, this happened:

Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Sunni Islam, was lost to them. Even though the Saudi tribes of Arabia managed to take control over the two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, Arabs viewed the Saudi royals as venal, greedy, untrustworthy, and in thrall to the West, particularly the USA, the country that became the sponsor of the hated enemy, Israel, by the late 1960s.

The Quest for Arab Renewal, Renaissance, and Redemption

Under the rule of powerful foreigners, whether fully or partially, and insulted by the creation of the State of Israel, Arabs the world over felt the need to chart a new path to not only restore the dignity they felt that was denied to them, but especially to achieve the liberation that they longed for. Two paths were quickly carved out in front of them, each diverging wildly from the other.

A. Islamic Fundamentalism

You don’t see these two words side-by-side all that much anymore, but they were the default setting back in the 1980s and early 1990s. One of the big reasons for this is that we in the West have become somewhat well-versed in the various levels of extremism in the Islamic World, and the groups found in that milieu. We all know that Iran and Hezbollah are Shi’a Muslims who are Islamist in orientation, and that ISIS, al-Qaida, the Taliban, etc. are Sunni groupings. Back in the 1980s, you had the Iranian regime, Islamic Jihad, and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan on western public radar, with most not even aware of the confessional divides between them. 9/11 changed all that.

The road to 9/11 was a long one, and it overlaps with the ongoing ‘Arab Humiliation’ that is central to the subject of this essay. 9/11 was an act committed by Islamic fundamentalists in what I and many others describe as “blowback”, one fully in line with restoring a sense of pride and dignity in both Arabs and Muslims after decades of foreign-inflicted wounds to their pride. To understand Islamic fundamentalism, we must go back to 1920s Cairo in order to meet a man named Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949).

al-Banna was born in a rural Nile Delta town in British-occupied Egypt in 1906.4 His father, Sheikh Ahmed, was an Imam, Muezzin, Hanbali scholar, and mosque teacher. Although not part of the Egyptian elite, his father was well-respected and the family was initially well-to-do until financial issues forced them to move to Cairo in the early 1920s.

al-Banna attached himself to Egyptian nationalist movements and partook in the anti-British rebellion that began as WW1 ended. Yet he could not hide his displeasure at the liberal elites of the Egyptian capital, people he felt had strayed too far away from Islam in their daily lives. To al-Banna, there was no liberation if Egyptians only mimicked Westerners. Even more importantly to al-Banna, there was no liberation to be found in narrow ethnic nationalism. The only real liberation came through Islam.

His disdain for Cairo’s liberal elites led him to move in the other direction, eventually finding him attending the lectures of the early Salafist Rashid Rida, a very influential figure in extremist circles at the time, someone with whom he would maintain a long correspondence with until the death of Rida in 1935. al-Banna continued to grow disillusioned not just with Cairo’s liberal intellectual and governing elites, but with British colonialism as well, concluding that the two were conspiring together to secularize and de-Islamicize Egyptians. His solution was to form the Muslim Brotherhood (جماعة الإخوان المسلمين Jamāʿat al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn or al-Ikhwan for short).

Delivering inspiring and stinging lectures, al-Banna taught his students that moral decay due to straying from Islam resulted in the catastrophic situation of Arabs and the larger Islamic world. Only through the establishment of an Islamic state ruled by Shari’a could Arabs and Muslims experience a renewal, a renaissance, and redeem themselves in the eyes of Allah. Secularism was therefore an enemy, as there could be no separation between mosque and state. Petty nationalism too was haram, as Islam teaches that all Muslims are brothers regardless of tongue. To the Ikhwanis, the road to liberation and salvation was found through the Islamic State.

Hasan was a dangerous firebrand who made many enemies among the Egyptian ruling elite and the British authorities. He was assassinated in 1949, but not before he left a powerful legacy in the Muslim Brotherhood, and an even stronger message to Muslims: unite in a state ruled by Shari’a in which society and the economy were to be run according to Islamic principles, and where western materialism and European imperialism were to be evicted from daily life.

Another Egyptian, Sayyed Qutb (1906-1966), took al-Banna’s teachings one step further, pleading for a global Islamist revolution that would take the world by storm. Everything non-Islamic was to be evicted from daily life. Qutb would begin his adult life as secular, going on to become the most extreme of all the Islamist thinkers of his era:

It was Sayyid Qutb who fused together the core elements of modern Islamism: the Kharijites’ takfir, ibn Taymiyya’s fatwas and policy prescriptions, Rashid Rida’s salafism, Maududi’s concept of the contemporary jahiliyya and Hassan al-Banna’s political activism.5

An often-recounted story about Qutb is the influence that his two years spent in the USA had on him. Most notorious is his view of American women (of the 1940s):

The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.6

More importantly was his condemnation of the USA overall, including its materialism, focus on individual freedoms, strong support for the then-new State of Israel, perceived lack of artistic feeling, and lack of taste in the arts:

The American is primitive in his artistic taste, both in what he enjoys as art and in his own artistic works. “Jazz” music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other. The American’s intoxication in “jazz” music does not reach its full completion until the music is accompanied by singing that is just as coarse and obnoxious as the music itself. Meanwhile, the noise of the instruments and the voices mounts, and it rings in the ears to an unbearable degree … The agitation of the multitude increases, and the voices of approval mount, and their palms ring out in vehement, continuous applause that all but deafens the ears.7

Many a Muslim thinker, scholar, and teacher of the time denounced the colonial presence of the British and the French, but al-Banna and Qutb both zoned in on the USA, recognizing in it a stronger force in opposition to their desire to re-awaken Islam in the Arab world and beyond. They immediately identified the greatest impediment to their call to Islamicize all around them, and at a time when the US footprint in the Middle East was barely visible, while the Anglo-French were omnipresent. The power of capitalism, of liberalism, of open sexuality, of artistic experimentation…all of these combined were seen by al-Banna and Qutb as the most significant threats to an Islamic renewal, the only vehicle through which Arabs could end their humiliation and redeem themselves in the eyes of Allah.

However, others were not so certain that the path to Arab liberation was through Islam. Arab intellectuals very familiar with life in the West saw a different path, one that rejected elements of the hated West, but borrowed from them too. For them, the solution was in secular Pan-Arab nationalism based in socialism, but a socialism that rejected Marx’s class struggle, as for them Arab unity was paramount and their struggle would be against their non-Arab rulers and enemies. This current was forming and would one day be known as “Ba’athism”.

Next – Part 2: The Birth of Ba’athism, The Cold War, New Challenges, Rivalry with Islamic Fundamentalism, Death