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Hussein's Fall Leads Syrians to Test Government Limits (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, 3/20/04, NY Times)

A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for a citizen of Syria, run by the Baath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, to make a documentary film with the working title, "Fifteen Reasons Why I Hate the Baath."

Yet watching the overthrow of Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq prompted Omar Amiralay to do just that. "It gave me the courage to do it," he said.

"When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next," he added, having just completed the film, eventually called "A Flood in Baath Country," for a European arts channel. "The myth of having to live under despots for eternity collapsed."

When the Bush administration toppled the Baghdad government, it announced that it wanted to establish a democratic, free-market Iraq that would prove a contagious model for the region. The bloodshed there makes that a distant prospect, yet the very act of humiliating the worst Arab tyrant spawned a sort of "what if" process in Syria and across the region.

The Syrian Baath Party remains firmly in control, ruling through emergency laws that basically suspend all civil rights. The government says the laws are necessary as long as Israel occupies the Golan Heights, 40 miles from Damascus, and the two nations remain at war.

Yet subtle changes have begun, even if they amount to tiny fissures in a repressive state. Some Syrians are testing the limits, openly questioning government doctrine and challenging state oppression.

Syrians who oppose the government do so with some trepidation because it used ferocious violence in the past to silence any challenge. Yet the fall of Mr. Hussein changed something inside people.

"I think the image, the sense of terror, has evaporated," said Mr. Amiralay, the filmmaker.

This was precisely the premise of the Iraq war, an Islamic domino theory, if you will. It's interesting to note that Mr. Amiralay understands that the transformation is internal to the people of the region, who now see how hollow was the regime. President Bush would seem to have been just about the only political leader who understood that this would be the case, an understanding he shared with only a few neocon academics (like, most importantly, Paul Wolfowitz). The establishment believed that the Islamic world was impervious to liberalization, maybe even unfit for evolution towards democracy.

The situation calls to mind what Robert Kaplan wrote about Ronald Reagan, tongue deeply in cheek:

In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, [Henry] Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite--notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.

Missing from that list is only Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose 1975 assessment of the USSR--at the time when all but these few viewed it as permanent--applies just as well to the totalitarian regimes of the Islamic world:

Yes, yes, of course, we all know you cannot poke a stick through the walls of a concrete tower, but here's something to think about: what if the walls are only a painted backdrop?

In the Middle East today, thanks to George W. Bush, people have perceived that the walls surrounding them are merely a painted backdrop.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 20, 2004 9:01 AM