The scenes of rebel fighters celebrating the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Asad immediately brought to mind similar scenes from Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Afghanistan where other seemingly well-entrenched regimes fell with surprising ease. This volatility is due to the prevalence of authoritarian regimes throughout the Muslim world, which has led to the creation of weak and unstable states prone to sudden and spectacular demises. Syria is just the latest Muslim nation to dramatically suffer the consequences of the systemic weaknesses that have destabilized Muslim societies for centuries.
To break this cycle, Syria’s new rulers will need to build a government that unites and empowers their people instead of trying to control or oppress them. To that end, it may be worthwhile to consider why the revolutions mentioned above all failed.
Some may disagree with characterizing events in Iran and Afghanistan as a failure since the Ayatollahs and Taliban still reign but their refusal to deliver on their promises of freedom and justice for their people warrants the description. In fact, the repressive police states created by Iranian and Afghan clerics to ensure their rule are perhaps the greatest failures among those listed. As such, they provide the most valuable lessons of the bunch. Their oppression has needlessly destroyed the lives of countless innocents while simultaneously making their nations too weak to effectively resist the imperial powers who have been trying to control the Muslim world for centuries.
If Iran’s and Afghanistan’s revolutionaries were serious about finally freeing themselves from their neo-colonial chains, they would have embraced democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of expression. As the author has argued many times, doing so is the most logical way to stimulate the economic and technological development needed to build powerful militaries in the modern age. Instead of taking these long overdue steps, the Ayatollahs and the Taliban wasted a rare opportunity for real change by replacing their old dictatorships with more vicious ones.
The people of Yemen, Libya, and Sudan never got the chance to create their own governments because the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE flooded their countries with weapons as part of their plan to sabotage their revolutions. Their machinations also played a pivotal role in the coups that toppled Tunisia’s and Egypt’s short lived democratic experiments. These monarchies are agents of chaos that consistently use their money to prop up authoritarian allies and stamp out any trace of democracy in the region.
In addition to learning from the mistakes of their fellow revolutionaries and protecting themselves from the toxic policies of the Gulf monarchies, Syria’s new rulers will need to navigate a complicated web of actors and competing interests. Chief among them: Turkey’s desire to begin repatriating refugees and counter the Kurds, Iran’s need to maintain its communications and supply routes to Lebanon, and the Kurds who have long desired their own state. They will also need to deal with the territorial ambitions and hegemonic policies of apartheid Israel and its trigger-happy American allies who happen to have a small force of roughly 2,000 troops in the country.
The degree to which they successfully deal with these issues will largely depend on whether they have truly repudiated the unhinged views of groups like Al-Qaeda and their ideological offshoots in ISIS. Abandoning their toxic ideology and embracing democracy is the only way to unite Syria’s diverse people, which is, in turn, the only way to develop the strength to stand up to the many foreign powers trying to control them.
The signs so far have been encouraging, but it is still too early to tell which path they will take. The Taliban played a good game with western media too only to impose a vicious form of gender apartheid on Afghan women while cracking down on non-Pashtun minorities. The real test will come over the next few months and years. As they consolidate power, their actions will reveal their true character and beliefs. If they enact inclusive policies designed to let their people thrive, they can turn Syria into a bridge that connects the region’s Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, Druze, Sunnis, and Shiites, laying the groundwork for greater cooperation between all of them.
Come what may, one thing is certain – Syria is better off without Asad. He was a butcher and a tyrant who deserves a far worse punishment than exile in Russia. If Syria’s new rulers show the same disregard for their people, their country will remain mired in conflict, and they will inevitably suffer a similar fate.