Thoughts on the Fall of Assad

 With regard to events unfolding in Syria this weekend, I have to admit, sadly, that history tends to suggest this will all end horribly. Like its geographic neighbors in the Middle East, Syria is home to intense ethnic and sectarian divisions. It's quite possible that the emerging victory of the Sunni-aligned rebel forces could mean future persecution of Syria's Shia and Alawite populations. The collapse of the Assad regime—hopeful as it may appear now—could give way in the near future to more civil war and sectarian strife—just as the fall of Saddam Hussein did in Iraq, or of Qaddafi in Libya, or of Bashir in Sudan... Indeed, history suggests this is not only a possible outcome, but a likely one. 

Still, though, as Benjamin Wittes notes—even while knowing all of this, it's impossible not to be swept up in the joy and hopefulness of the moment. Millions of Syrians who have been exiled over the past decade-plus now have a chance to go home (even if it ultimately proves to be a rapidly-closing window). And a dictator who bombed his own people with chemical weapons and tortured and jailed dissidents is now stripped of power and forced to flee the country he terrorized. Only Tulsi Gabbard will be shedding any tears over that outcome. Thus, when it comes to the fall of Assad on its own terms, one can only echo Percy Bysshe Shelley's thoughts on the fall of Napoleon: 

I hated thee, fallen Tyrant! I did groan

To think that a most unambitious slave

Like though, should dance and revel on the grave

Of Liberty. 

Plus, who knows what the future may bring? I admit that past experience tends to suggest the outcome of Assad's fall in Syria will be instability and strife. But past is not always prologue. As Arthur Hugh Clough wrote, of the defeat of liberal hopes in continental Europe in the 19th century, the endless repetition of past experience is not in fact the only possible outcome. People at the time, of course, said that "as things have been they remain," Clough writes. But, he counters with an observation that no one who reads history can gainsay. Namely, that if sometimes "hopes were dupes," so too: "fears may be liars." In other words, even if sometimes hopes are disappointed, pessimism likewise is not always vindicated. 

Look at the nineteenth century itself. At the time Clough wrote, many people would have thought that the future victory of liberal democracy in continental Europe was every bit as naïve an expectation as hoping for the victory of a secular, multi-sectarian, pluralistic democratic society in Syria today. But stranger things have happened. We now take it for granted that democracy is secure in Western continental Europe—and are far more fearful about its future here in the United States right now than in, say, Germany... And so, even while I can't promise the hopeful note of this moment will be fulfilled—neither can I say for certain it will be dashed. If hopes were dupes indeed—sometimes, fears are liars.