Assad the Exception?

Submitted by Chad (United States), Mar 10, 2013 at 18:10

An American friend of mine who takes a keen interest in Syria told me that the Israeli military and security elite is currently split on the desirability of removing Assad. One faction views the alternative to Assad as worse; the other does not.

While the case can be made (and was done victoriously by Daniel Pipes in a recent televised debate) that the secular dictators of the Arab world are preferable to elected Islamists, is that really the case in Syria? The Assad regime was a Soviet client during the Cold War, and hence an enemy of the West in every sense.

With a disproportionally large Soviet (then Russian) equipped military, it almost resembles North Korea - with a hereditary dictatorship to boot - and is thus a post-Cold War "mutant" state where the head of state has a godlike quality in society that exceeds even Qaddafi's in Libya in the sense that it doesn't even have a cartoonish aspect.

Given the 30% of the country that is non-Sunni Muslim (and therefore non-Muslim Brotherhood), would Syria not be the exception to the rule that Mubarak, Ben Ali, Saleh and even Qaddafi were preferable to the one-party Islamism that succeeded them? Could the outside world not contain and weaken Syrian militant Islamism to the extent that the threat a post-Assad regime posed to Israel or other neighbors would effectively be defanged?

Any comments would be welcome.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".