Why the Western Diagnosis of the Syrian Conflict Is Wrong

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http://www.aina.org/releases/20150216194247.htm

(AINA) -- The dominant Western narrative that has framed the Syrian conflict as that of a "tyrant killing his people" suffers from a fatal misunderstanding of the sectarian and political structure of Syrian society. That diagnostic failure has led to recurrent false predictions of an imminent collapse of the Syrian government, which in turn has emboldened the armed groups fighting it and thus prolonged the conflict. The Syrian regime's resistance to political reform prior to the "Arab Spring" uprisings and its recent resilience in withstanding the overwhelming economic, political, and lethal means deployed by domestic, regional, and international players to topple it can only be understood correctly by examining the perceptions of the power base of the regime itself.

Apostates and Infidels Rise to Power

The perspective of the power base for the Syrian regime is rooted in the history of the region. For more than a millennium, the tradition of attributing infidelity (takfir) and apostasy (irtidad) to religious communities that did not conform to the dominant Sunna religious orthodoxy led, in the best case, to their marginalization. Those marginalized communities lived, as a result, through circumstances of extreme uncertainty and faced long-term challenges for survival. In the 1960s, the elite of one of the most persecuted and destitute of those communities, the Alawis, rose to power and attempted to reverse that marginalization through socialist economic reforms.

From Socialism to Crony Capitalism

However, as time passed, the socialist experiment failed, and power and wealth concentrated in the hands of families affiliated with the highest ranking military officers, including families belonging to the Sunna majority who supported the new power structure. While small-scale urban businesses and proprietors experienced a trickle-down of some of the concentrated wealth, the multiplying inhabitants of the countryside lived on a subsistence level. Within half a century, because of a culturally based high level of fertility, a declining rate of infant mortality, and prolonged life expectancy, the Syrian population quadrupled. The emerging economy was not able to absorb the population increase in a manner adequate to providing a rising living standard compatible with people's expectations. Several years of successive droughts further disproportionately deteriorated the living standards in the countryside.

Religious Identification

The backdrop to the matrix of class- and region-based social and economic hardships affecting Syria's inhabitants, across religious sects, is the Middle Eastern cultural model that prioritizes religious identity over all other social identities. Because of that prioritization, all those sharing the religious identity of the ruling military and intelligence elite, the Alawis, have been judged by the discontented of the Sunna majority as responsible for their economic misfortunes, and they accordingly demanded freedom from the Alawis' grip on power, a demand that should not be confused with the Western concept of individual or political freedom. Thus, economic discontent was channeled through religious identification, which in turn, transmitted all sorts of grievances along religious lines. Moreover, demands for freedom have been combined with religious slogans, and for several months protests emerged almost exclusively from mosques after every Friday's prayer.

The Government's Reaction

The military and intelligence elite saw the initial emergence of protests from mosques and several violent attacks on government facilities and security offices as attempts to settle the unfinished battles of 1979--82 between the Muslim Brothers and the secular, Alawi-led regime. Fear of the extreme uncertainty that could result from the toppling of the regime prompted its power base composed of heterodox Muslims, Secular Muslims, Christians and leftists to back the regime at any cost.

The West Backs the Rebellion of the Sunna

The regime's clampdown on protests and the subsequent formation of armed rebel groups composed exclusively of Sunni Muslims transformed the unrest into an open sectarian conflict. The West and the Sunna dominated Muslim countries, such