By Jeremy Salt

The article explores why Syria, despite its early independence, was unable to establish a democracy, instead evolving into a mukhabarat state, largely due to external interventions and internal struggles.

Bilad Al-Sham (the land of Syria) is currently experiencing one of the greatest upheavals in its long history, with the outcome currently uncertain. Stretching from what is now southeastern Turkey to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south, bordered on the west by the Sinai Peninsula, and on the east by Iraq, Bilad Al-Sham, as geographically defined in history, included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. 

Not until the 20th century was there a Syrian state. Under Ottoman rule from 1516/7, Bilad Al-Sham was divided into provinces (vilayets) and sub-provinces (sanjaks), generally centering on a city: thus the vilayets of Aleppo and Damascus, with their sanjaks covering the whole region, with a special administrative status given in the late 19th century to Mount Lebanon (1863) and Jerusalem (1872). 

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Britain and France occupied the Arab provinces. The US was not yet in the game, not in the Middle East anyway. Oil had been discovered in Iran in 1908 and was soon to be discovered in Kirkuk, consolidating Britain’s determination to hold on to the region. Allies in 1914-18, Britain and France were back to their traditional rivalry when the war was over. 

Britain had the canal to defend and a foothold in the Gulf through treaty arrangements with local tribal sheikhs. ‘Imperial communications,’ plus the canal and oil, dictated British domination of the region east of Suez. With few troops on the ground, and defeated by the Turkish nationalists in southeastern Turkey, then part of France’s La Syrie Integrale (Greater Syria), the government in Paris was determined to have its cut but had to give up the claims to Mosul and Palestine that had been written into the Sykes-Picot Agreement. 

France also had to settle for a much smaller Syria, which in 1920 it immediately made smaller by creating the state of Greater Lebanon, before its mandate for Syria-Lebanon was even officially proclaimed by the League of Nations. Having chopped off Lebanon, the French kept chopping. They created two statelets for the Alawi and Druze and two more centering on Aleppo and Damascus, a divide-and-rule tactic that was frustrated in 1925-27 by the national uprising led by the Druze. 

The Syrians wanted a state that conformed to the historic boundaries of Bilad Al-Sham but were not going to be allowed to get it. With the excision of Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, and in the 1930s the Sanjak of Alexandretta, now the Turkish province of Hatay, partition was imposed on them. 

Imperial control through the mandates was accessorized by the establishment of constitutional monarchies in Egypt and Iraq, with one man in the palace far easier to control by the British government than squabbling politicians. This was to end badly, with the Egyptian king overthrown in 1952 and the entire Iraqi royal family wiped out in 1958, with nationalist republics on both occasions replacing the monarchies. The end of the war brought an end to the mandate for Syria. It should not be thought that the French wanted to go, however. 

The truth was that they were too weak to be able to stay, as Britain would prove to be in Palestine a few years later. Truly independent in 1946, Syria had its first nationalist elections the following year. The old guard that had battled against or collaborated with the French in the 1930s was voted into government. 

The younger men with ‘radical’ alternatives included Michel Aflaq, Salah ad-Din Bitar, and Zaki Arsuzi, the founders of the Ba’ath Party, and Khalid al-Baqdash, the founder of the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon. Both had some electoral success in the 1950s but were basically ‘vanguard’ parties. Emerging from the long shadow of the French mandate, Syrians had previously only managed themselves as part of an Ottoman administrative system. They were not prepared for the sudden arrival of independence. 

Patrick Seale has described Syria in 1946 as weak, unstable, socially repressive, and governed “after a fashion” by city and landowning notables “in a mode scarcely changed from the previous century” (The Struggle for Syria, xvii). Its first decades were a story of a country “courted, subverted, manipulated, intrigued against by just about everyone: Hashimites, Saudis, Egyptians, not to mention the Great Powers for whom the Middle East had been an arena of competition since the last decades of the 18th century” (when Napoleon invaded Egypt).

Mismanagement, nepotism, crop failures, and the unfamiliarity of untried institutions added up to what Seale describes as a “whole creaking network of family patronage and administrative venality.” As structurally unsound as this “creaking network” already was, it was saddled with the enormous extra burden of Palestine, still southern Syria in the general view. Syria’s opposition to Zionism was inflexible. 

When Balfour arrived in Damascus in the 1920s, he was forced by public anger to flee out the back door of his hotel and make a speedy run for Beirut. During the Palestine uprising (1936-39), the ‘infiltration’ of fighting men from Syria forced the British to build a wall (the Tegart Wall) along the boundary between the two mandates. Although Syria pushed hard in the Arab League for war against the colonial settler state implanted in Palestine, it was poorly prepared to fight one. 

The ‘army’ was newly formed and minuscule. The shock of defeat in 1948 was amplified by scandals that set the politicians and the generals against each other. One was the discovery that soldiers on the front line were being served food cooked in a foul-smelling substitute for the proper samneh (clarified butter) cooking oil. Corruption in the delivery of arms was revealed in both Syria and Egypt, resulting in arms intended for Syria ending up in Israel.

The shock and ensuing political turmoil over the Palestine war precipitated the first of three military coups in 1949, led successively by Husni al-Zaim, Sami al-Hinnawi, and Adib Shishakli. The Vichy government of Syria had given Zaim 300,000 Syrian pounds to organize resistance to the Free French, but he absconded with it. Sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1942, he served three before being released by President Shukry al-Quwatly in 1945. In March 1949, Zaim overthrew the Quwatly government. 

The coup was instigated by the CIA and followed by Zaim’s declaration of a truce with Israel, the arrest of hundreds of communists, and the approval of a pipeline running from Saudi Arabia across Syria to the coast, which Quwatly had blocked. In August, Zaim was overthrown by Sami al-Hinnawi and executed. The truce with Israel lapsed, but the construction of the pipeline (by Bechtel) went ahead. The coup was only the first planned US intervention in Syria. The prime motive was the rising popularity of the Soviet Union and its ‘subversion’ across the Arab world, as the West would put it. 

In February 1955, the UK announced the formation of the Baghdad Pact, a pro-Western ‘defense’ alliance between the UK, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. In September, unable to procure arms from the West, Egypt turned to the Soviet Union and bought $83 million of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia. In June 1956, after the US withdrew its offer of finance to build the high dam at Aswan, the USSR stepped in and the dam was eventually built on the basis of a $1.1 billion loan. 

Syria was also consolidating its relationship with the USSR. As seen from Washington, the entire Middle East was now at the risk of falling into the hands of ‘radical’ Arab nationalists backed by the Soviet Union. The nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 was quickly followed by a plan to depose the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abd al-Nasir, and return control of the canal to the Anglo-French company that had been running it since 1875. 

The three plotters, the UK, France, and Israel, hid their plans from the US. The deception was the most brazen in the history of US-UK relations and especially infuriating to the US because it was planning the overthrow of the Syrian government – Operation Straggle – at the same time and had to call it off after Egypt was attacked. The ‘tripartite aggression’ on Egypt was planned for October 29, US intervention in Syria on October 25. The UK even tried to persuade the US to delay its operation for four days, so that Egypt and Syria would come under Western attack simultaneously. 

Eisenhower was furious, not just at the deception but at the way the British government had deliberately scuttled the US plot. In 1957, the US tried again, this time with Operation Waffen, exercised through the payment of $3 million in bribes to Syrian army officers, who immediately reported the plot to the intelligence services and handed the money over. Three senior US diplomats were expelled by way of retaliation. 

In the same year, MI6 came up with a plot of its own, supported by the US, based on the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister Muhammad Musaddiq in 1953 and Guatemala’s president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Since then, the same script has been followed in the targeting of many other governments. Syria’s intelligence chief, Abd al-Hamid as-Sarraj, the army chief of staff, Afif al-Bizri, and the leader of the Syrian Communist Party, Khalid al-Baqdash, were listed for assassination. ‘False flag’ operations would be launched, weapons supplied to armed groups (including the Muslim Brotherhood), and a ‘Free Syria Committee’ established. 

Iraq would lead outside military intervention to complete the overthrow. The plot never went ahead, with the UK apparently dissuaded by Saudi Arabia. Under threat from the West, Syria was also permanently harassed within the Arab world, by the Hashemite dynasties of Iraq and Jordan seeking dominance through their ‘Greater Syria’ and ‘unity of the Fertile Crescent’ plans and involved in plots of their own against the Syrian government. 

Following the overthrow of the third dictator, Adib Shishakli, Syrians went to the polls again in 1954, for the first time since 1947. This resulted in relative triumph for the Ba’ath Party, which won 22 seats. Khalid al-Baqdash was also elected, further evidence to the US of Soviet subversion in Syria. In fact, communism as an ideology had little appeal to the Arab masses and was strenuously opposed even by Arab nationalist governments. The Soviet option was no more than a practical one for governments targeted by the West for overthrow and denied arms and economic assistance.

In January 1957, President Eisenhower announced the ‘doctrine’ of his name, promising aid to governments threatened by outside aggression. The beneficiaries would be pro-Western governments threatened by the ‘radical’ Arab nationalism that was spreading to every corner of the Middle East. Of course, behind the nationalists, the US saw Soviet ‘subversion’ at work.

On February 1, 1958, attempting to close ranks against internal and external threats and fulfill the nationalist ideal of one large Arab unitary state, Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic. It was to last only three years before foundering on Egypt’s view of Syria as a junior partner and egos dented by the insistence of both sides that they were the true standard-bearers of Arab nationalism.

In Damascus, instability and military takeovers followed. In 1963, the Ba’ath Party carried out its first military coup. In 1966, Hafez al Assad, the air force commander, launched a second coup, forcing the two principal founders of the Ba’ath Party, Michel Aflaq and Salah al Din Bitar, into exile.

In 1966, Israel lit the kindling for a new war by repeated violations of the DMZ along the armistice line with Syria. In the attack that followed in 1967, Israel seized the Golan Heights, later partially withdrawing from them but since December 2024 fully occupying them as well as further territory and water resources in the south.

In 1970, Assad carried out a third coup, described as a ‘corrective movement,’ and establishing himself as Syria’s strongman until his death in 2000. Syria was turned into an authoritarian mukhabarat (intelligence) state with political participation controlled by the ruling party.

In 2012, Bashar al Assad sought to modify this through a constitutional referendum removing the Ba’ath party as the central pillar of state and society and laying the groundwork for multiparty elections, at a time, however, when the government was already losing much of its authority over the country.

As a young man, as a mild ophthalmologist working in London thrust into the role of president by family and party demands, Bashar was not equipped at all to deal with the problems he faced back in Damascus.

These included entrenched corruption in state institutions, the crisis in Lebanon following the assassination of Rafiq al Hariri in 2005, for which Syria was blamed (and later found not responsible), problems in the economic liberalization program begun by his father and finally the devastation caused by the proxy war launched against his country in 2011.

The downfall of a secular government in Damascus and its replacement by the ideological offspring of the Islamic State is now being celebrated in the pages of the Guardian, and ‘liberal’ western media more generally, apart from the propaganda funneled through the media outlets of the government of Qatar. The history is shamelessly being rewritten on the basis of lies already told. That they have long since been exposed as lies makes no difference.

Now that Bashar has been overthrown, a host of questions remain to be answered but one stands above the rest: could Syria have developed democratically after 1946? The answer has to be ‘no.’

The US conspired in the overthrow of the first democratically elected government in 1949. It conspired again in 1956 and 1957. Syria was also targeted for covert action by the UK and its Hashimite proteges in Amman and Baghdad.

Over two decades the US and its allies ruptured any chance of Syrian democratic development. Democracy was not the point of their interventions, as it was not when they launched their proxy war in 2011. They were bent on breaking Syria, on taming Syria and forcing it into a western mold of good behavior, which at the center meant Syria standing down from its confrontation with Israel.

Under constant threat of subversion, and attacked by Israel in 1967, with the full support of the West, Hafez al Assad took the only path he saw ahead of Syria, the transformation of the country into a top-down, one-party-centered mukhabarat state vigilant night and day against the plots of Syria’s enemies.

The state was protected, but the cost was high: limitations on freedom of speech and political action and corruption within state institutions and society, a problem that existed before and will continue to exist in the future.

Having effectively driven Syria into this corner, the West had new weapons to use against Syria: the ‘dictator’ and ‘the regime.’ Needless to say, the West is not troubled by all dictators, only the ones that won’t do what they’re told.

(The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.)

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.