Collapse

JSOU Report 16-1
fueled this belief. When it became apparent that his reforms did not extend
to the political sphere or the prerogatives of the regime, the general disillusionment
was more profound. 141 The ‘Damascus Winter’ quickly followed
the ‘Damascus Spring’ as security organs cracked down on pro-democracy
elements and intellectuals that criticized the regime. 142 The invasion of Iraq,
accompanied by calls in the West to make Syria next, prompted Assad to
harden his position insisting that democracy had to be home-grown and not
imposed from the outside. It would have made no difference; he not only
lacked his father’s powerbase and credibility, but to anyone knowledgeable
about Syria, it was apparent that if controls were removed as in Iraq, the
country would likely fragment and descend into chaos. 143 This was absolutely
correct; beneath the administrative and security structure of the Alawite
state, there were no institutions capable of maintaining the cohesion of the
state. For 500 years, structure and stability had been imposed top-down—
Western liberal wishful thinking could not change that fact.
The Iraqi Dictatorship
From the perspective of Saddam Hussein (and to be fair from that of the
broader Iraqi political elite), Bakr’s proposed union with Syria offered little,
and in addition to the risks for Saddam Hussein and his carefully constructed
security and intelligence apparatus that controlled the Bakr regime,
the growing linkage between the Alawite regime and Iran and then to the
Shi’a majority in Iraq could not be ignored. By the time of the 1979 coup in
Baghdad, the Ayatollah Khomeini had emerged as the real power in Iran.
While the shah of Iran had forced compromises on the Bakr regime,
including division of the Shatt al-Arab waterway leading to Basra during the
Kurdish border war of 1975, he had kept his agreements and withdrawn his
support for the Kurds and he opposed the rising tide of Shi’a fundamentalism.
Because Khomeini had been Saddam Hussein’s prisoner while in exile
from Iran, the ayatollah hated Saddam and the Sunni-Ba’thist regime in
Baghdad almost as much as it did the shah. In an interview in Paris in 1978,
Khomeini named his enemies, “First the Shah; then the American Satan;
then Saddam Hussein and his infidel Baath Party.” 144 It would only be a
matter of time until the ayatollah moved against Iraq. Even if all other issues
were excluded, the linkage to Shi’a sectarianism was a showstopper for the
70