THE FORMER OTTOMAN EMPIRE - The Revenge of Geography - page 224

that George W. Bush demanded in the wake of the February 2005 assassination of anti-
Syrian Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri would have undermined the very political
foundation of the minority Alawite regime in Damascus right then and there. The Alawites,
a heterodox Shiite sect, demographically spill over into both Syria and Lebanon. An Alaw-
ite ministate in northwestern Syria is not an impossibility following the collapse of the
Alawite regime in Damascus.
In fact, following Iraq and Afghanistan, the next target of Sunni jihadists could be
Syria itself: in the Syrian regime, headed through early 2012 by Bashar al-Assad, the ji-
hadists have had an enemy that is “at once tyrannical, secular, and heretical.” 18 This Alaw-
ite regime was close to Shiite Iran, and stands guilty of murdering tens of thousands of
Sunni Islamists in the 1970s and 1980s. Jihadists have deep logistical familiarity with
Syria—sustaining the jihad in Iraq necessitated a whole network of safe houses inside
Syria. Truly, no one has a feel for what a post-authoritarian, post-Assad Syria will eventu-
ally turn out to be. How deep is sectarianism? It may not be deep at all, but once the killing
starts, people revert to long-repressed sectarian identities. It may also be that a post-Assad
Syria will do better than a post-Saddam Iraq, precisely because the tyranny in the former
was much less severe than in the latter, making Syria a less damaged society. Traveling
from Saddam's Iraq to Assad's Syria, as I did on occasion, was like coming up for liberal
humanist air. On the other hand, Yugoslavia was a more open society throughout the Cold
War than its Balkan neighbors, and look at how ethnic and religious differences undid that
society! The minority Alawites have kept the peace in Syria; it would seem unlikely that
Sunni jihadists could do the same. They might be equally as brutal, but without the soph-
isticated knowledge of governance that the Alawites acquired during forty years in power.
Of course, it does not have to turn out that way at all. For there is a sturdy geographical
basis for peace and political rebirth in Syria. Remember again Hodgson: these countries
such as Syria and Iraq really do have roots in agricultural terrain; they are not entirely man-
made. Syria, despite its present borders, still represents the heart of the Levantine world,
which means a world of multiple ethnic and religious identities united by commerce. 19
The Syrian-born poet Ali Ahmad Said (known by his pen name “Adonis”) constitutes the
very expression of this other Syria, with its wealth of civilizational interaction, that, as we
know from the work of William McNeill, forms the core drama of history. Adonis exhorts
his fellow Syrians to renounce Arab nationalism and forge a new state identity based on
Syria's very eclecticism and diversity: in effect, a twenty-first-century equivalent of early-
twentieth-century Beirut, Alexandria, and Smyrna. Adonis, like the Assads, is an Alawite,
but one who instead of embracing Arabism and the police state as shields for his minority
status has embraced cosmopolitanism instead. 20 Rather than look toward the desert, Adonis
looks toward the Mediterranean, on which modern Syria, despite the loss of Lebanon, still
has considerable real estate. The Mediterranean stands for an ethnic and sectarian synthes-