No room for old prejudices when judging the new Syria

Syria is still full of surprises and raises many questions. Perhaps regime change is not that bad after all. If so, then why did it not happen before? Can we expect a Syria’s new rulers to evolve and create a relatively free and somewhat liberal society? Can fundamentalists and puritans produce good governance? These are questions that are significant beyond their implications of how we now look at the Syrian Arab Republic, as they have dominated relations between East and West for centuries.

At the root of all this is not only the relationship with Islam, it is also the larger question of religion and politics in Europe dating back to the 16th-century wars of religion and the Reformation. These European experiences were projected on to the Middle East — secular nationalism would always be looked at as progress, no matter how tyrannical. Bashar Assad was forgiven because there was a clash between the values of secularism and freedom. These European dilemmas influenced policies. When they got it wrong, it was at great cost; a tragedy of errors for bad reasons.

In retrospect, we now know that, in 2013, we did get it wrong. After eagerly supporting the revolt against the Assad regime and just at the moment that it was on the brink of collapse, we dropped the ball. I was there and watched it happen. In European capitals and in Washington think tanks, the mood was changing from one meeting to the next. The idea was successfully sold that Assad was really a secular reformer fighting radical Islamists, that he was the only safe option and that every other alternative was either worse or impossible.

The democracy-promoting free world changed its mind. Instead of “Assad must go,” it was the Syrian people who had to go: millions were internally displaced or had to flee as refugees. This is the reason we all looked the other way when Russia and Iran came to the rescue of the regime. Then-US Secretary of State John Kerry kept repeating that there was no military solution in Syria, while the Kremlin agreed as its airplanes were bombing Aleppo, Homs and Idlib. In Second World War Europe, cities were destroyed to get rid of a tyrant; in Syria, cities were destroyed in order to keep a tyrant in power.

The Western fear of Islam, because of the actions of a minority of radicals, was stronger than the West’s love of freedom

Nadim Shehadi

“Regime change” had become a bad phrase after Iraq and Libya. The wrong conclusions were drawn from those fiascos: that dictators had to be kept in place to prevent the chaos that would emerge after their fall and to prevent the rise of an Islamist alternative.

The same mistakes were previously made in Iraq, with catastrophic consequences. In 1991, after the first Gulf War that liberated Kuwait, a weakened and defeated Saddam Hussein faced a nationwide popular uprising. The regime lost control of 14 out of 18 provinces, people went to the streets and took over one town after another, occupying Baath Party and state security headquarters. The Iraqi people had every reason to believe they had international support, otherwise it would be madness to oppose the regime.

What was in fact suicide was a naive reliance on Western support, in the belief that the West was opposed to tyrants and supported democracy. What they learned then was that the Western fear of Islam, because of the actions of a minority of radicals, was stronger than the West’s love of freedom. The result was that Saddam was kept in power and his victims, the people of Iraq, were punished by sanctions that gave their ruler even more power.

In both Iraq and Syria, it was justified for whole cities to be bombed flat because of the presence of Islamists.

In fact, secular regimes have not been much better for the people of the region. Secular Arab nationalist movements like Kemalism, Nasserism and Baathism have been catastrophic in terms of their human rights records. The repression of religion by secularist regimes politicized religion and created Islamist movements. Repression only produces more radicalism — Tunisia is a perfect illustration of that. The most secularist of all states in the region was also the largest supplier of foreign fighters for Daesh.

There could be a remedy, but it is certainly not to support secular dictators merely for the fact that they are anti-religion

Nadim Shehadi

The larger question of Islam in Europe is also about radicalization. Arab migrants in Europe tend to be more religious, simply because when secularist governments persecute religious people, they are more likely to emigrate. There could be a remedy, but it is certainly not to support secular dictators merely for the fact that they are anti-religion. It is like a vicious circle and will cause more emigration.

Historically, both the US and the city of Geneva were either founded by or home to radical puritanical movements not dissimilar to Islamist “takfiris,” with a strict definition of religious doctrine intolerant of dissent. Yet they eventually turned out to be models of liberal societies.

In 16th-century Calvinist Geneva, when Michael Servetus was considered an apostate, the discussion was whether he should be hanged, decapitated or burnt at the stake. It was not an issue of whether he should be allowed to live and have his own ideas. The first American colonies in Massachusetts, set up by the Pilgrim Fathers, were also bigoted, intolerant, puritanical societies.

Maybe the lesson is that religion has less to do with it than 20th-century hang-ups suggest and even the best system can be corrupted. The French academic Olivier Roy describes movements like Al-Qaeda and Daesh as a result of radicalism being Islamized, rather than of Islam being radicalized. The Baath parties in Syria and Iraq were originally modernizing, liberal nationalist movements until they were taken over by dictators who could easily have climbed other ladders.

Going back to now-Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, the transformation looks convincing and real. In the words of my friend, former Palestinian Ambassador Afif Safieh, Al-Sharaa sounds “unreasonably reasonable and extremely moderate.” The lesson is that we must evaluate the performance of the new regime that liberated Syria by liberating ourselves from old taboos and prejudices.

• Nadim Shehadi is an economist and political adviser. X: @Confusezeus