After Bashar "Le Deluge"!

April 21, 2011 — The late Princeton scholar Philip K. Hitti called Greater Syria -- the historical antecedent of the modern republic -- "the largest small country on the map, microscopic in size but cosmic in influence," .... Although territory had been cut away on all sides, the rump French mandate of "Syria" that came into existence, nevertheless, contained not only every warring sect and regional and tribal interest, but also the spiritual headquarters in the capital Damascus of the pan-Arab movement, whose aim was to erase all the state borders that the Europeans had just created.

Pan-Arabism -- of which the post-World War II independent state of Syria claimed to constitute the "throbbing-heart" -- became a substitute for Syria's very weak national identity. Indeed, Syria's self-styled "steadfast" hatred of Israel was a way for Syrians to escape their own internal contradictions....

Assad's son, Bashar, who succeeded his father as Syria's president a decade ago, has yet to make his bones in such a way. It is unclear whether the son is visionary enough to satisfy today's protesters, or cruel enough like his father to stay in power. His regime's survival may require stores of both attributes. A complicating factor is that to a much greater degree than his father, the son is trapped within a web of interest groups that include a corrupt business establishment and military and intelligence leaders averse to reform. So the political crisis in Syria will likely continue to build.

Syria at this moment in history constitutes a riddle. Is it, indeed, prone to civil conflict as the election results of the 1940s and 1950s indicate; or has the population quietly forged a national identity in the intervening decades, if only because of the common experience of living under an austere dictatorship? No Middle East expert can say for sure.Were central authority in Syria to substantially weaken or even break down, the regional impact would be greater than in the case of Iraq. Iraq is bordered by the strong states of Turkey and Iran in the north and east, and is separated from Saudi Arabia in the south and Syria and Jordan to the west by immense tracts of desert. Yes, the Iraq war propelled millions of refugees to those two latter countries, but the impact of Syria becoming a Levantine Yugoslavia might be even greater. That is because of the proximity of Syria's major population zones to Lebanon and Jordan, both of which are unstable already....The unrest in Syria brings the Middle East perhaps to a precipice. Peaceful or not, the future of the region will be one of weakened central authority. Mesopotamia at least has a historic structure, with its three north-south oriented ethnic and sectarian entities. But Greater Syria is more of a hodgepodge..."