Syria : Politics and Morals
We have made many mistakes in assessing the Syrian regime and its leader Bashar-al Assad. I have already pointed out a few of them in this blog. Our most serious mistake was probably to consider that it was simply more harshly despotic than other regimes, without seeing that its very nature differed from the dictatorships we usually compared it to.
Let’s admit that we may have been taken in by the appearance of the young dictator, reputedly schooled in the West (where he only spent fifteen months as an adult and mainly in the company of Syrians), trained as a doctor, a profession that would seem, a priori, to require some qualities of compassion and married to a young, beautiful, UK-educated Syrian with an impressive résumé (that no one ever thought to check however).
And yet there were many signs that should have awakened our caution. Nevertheless it took five months for the westerners to understand that it was useless to wait for him to change his governmental politics and, at last, call for his resignation.
Deep down, we see the Syrian regime as the oriental cousin of Tunisia or Egypt, that is, securitocracies with patrimonial power that the West put up with for economic or geopolitical reasons. But it’s more to Saddam Hussein’s or Gaddafi’s regimes that we should have, from the start, compared Bashar-al Assad’s.