Syrian Tragedy Raises Specter of Competing Conflicts

That Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad felt compelled to do a televised interview with Barbara Walters on ABC this week to refute charges of brutality and oppression against the people of Syria is remarkable.

He claims that he is not in control of the military and that units of his military have committed acts that do not reflect his policies. He did not order a crackdown on dissidents, he asserted.

Yet in the six months since the protests began, more than 4,000 Syrians have been killed; Assad claims many of those dead are members of the government's security forces.

What's really going on?

It's hard to tell in a country like Syria, where protesting against Israel is encouraged but criticism of the government can land you in jail.

But here are some thoughts.

It took the Arab League months to finally act and impose sanctions on Syria as the death toll continued to mount. But they did finally act. Those sanctions motivated Assad's TV appeal, which will do little to build sympathy for his claims that the pro-Democracy protesters are actually terrorist thugs.

Why did the Arab League act? Part of the reason has to do with the politics of Syria. Part of it has to do with politics in the region. And part of it has to do with religious rivalries.

Arabs, for the most part, are Sunni Muslims. The Assad family is Alawite, an offshoot of Islam. Syria's primary allies are in fact Shiites, including the Shiite government of American-occupied Iraq, the Iranian Republic and the powerful Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

It was easy for the Sunni-dominated Arab League countries to finally come down on Syria's oppression.

They couldn't possibly have voted to impose sanctions against Syria because the Assad regime is an oppressive dictatorship. Nearly every member of the Arab League is a dictatorship, too.

Killings of protesters, including attacks against journalists, have taken place in Bahrain and in Jordan. Yet there is no move to sanction them.

In fact, the Arab League would implode if it were mandated to impose sanctions against member countries that engaged in dictatorial policies and the suppression of civilian freedoms.

Another factor is the rivalry between Syria and Saudi Arabia, which played out for decades in war-torn Lebanon. Syria has always claimed Lebanon as being a geographic splinter taken from its homeland by the Allies in the aftermath of World War I. Lebanon was carved out of political interests driven by the French and the presence of a growing Christian Maronite population there.

Saudi Arabia is the political ally of the United States, even though 15 Saudis were among the 19 terrorists who commandeered the four hijacked airlines, including the three that crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, on 9/11. Saudi Arabia has counter-balanced growing anti-Saudi public animosity by artificially managing the price of oil to help hold down the price of gasoline in America.

Never underestimate the power of lower gas prices when it comes to buying off American anger.

Another factor in the mix is the constant struggle between the forces of extremist political Islam and the secular Arab movement. The two movements continue to clash.

Syria, a secular Arab country, has tried to insulate itself against religious fanaticism by embracing the two largest religious fanatic movements in the Middle East, Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But Saudi Arabia continues to be the largest funder of militant Islamic political movements who are less Islamic and more political extremists.

The Arab World is slowly and steadily changing from the old days, when Egypt's President Gamal Abdul Nasser advocated Arab nationalism to unite the Arab World, to today's movements to impose strict interpretations of Islam on the Arab people.

The Arab world is becoming less and less "Arab" and more and more "Islamic." That trend is driving the redefinition of the Arab world, assimilating it more into the non-Arab Islamic world. The majority of Muslims in the world are non-Arab, and the Arab as an identity is becoming more and more of an extinct cultural breed.

In his battle to protect his secular dictatorship, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad is helping to strengthen the rise of the Islamic Middle East.

Not that dictators really care about what happens when they are gone. But the secular dictators are fast being replaced by religious dictators and religious movements that claim to be democratic but that in reality are in conflict with democratic principles.

Ray Hanania is an award-winning Palestinian American columnist. To find out more about Ray Hanania and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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