As the Syrian revolution enters its second year, analysts remain busy trying to explain and understand how a country with very strong authoritarian credentials and strict central rule could suddenly slip into chaos and civil conflict.
In trying to do that, analysts have made several mistakes. In the first place they failed to spot signs of a brewing storm. For most of them, the Syrian revolution was something completely unexpected. The Syrian regime contributed to making such a perception, but has eventually fallen victim to it.
The regime in Damascus thought that adopting a more hawkish foreign policy towards the West in general and the US in particular would make it immune to revolution. That was a fatal mistake.
In January 2011, merely six weeks before the uprising, Syrian President Bashar Al Assad told the Wall Street Journal that his country is very unlikely to go through the turmoil that hit Tunisia and Egypt because the foreign policy of his country had tremendous support among Syrians.
“If you want to talk about Tunisia and Egypt, we are outside of this ... We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance. So people do not only live on interests; they also live on beliefs, especially in very ideological areas,” Al Assad told the US newspaper.
Indeed, this line of argument would help later to explain the protest movement in terms of foreign conspiracy, but that proved to be another fatal mistake.
Even when some resorted to socio-economic tools to analyse the situation in Syria following the Tunisian and Egyptian revolution they came up with exactly the same conclusion: Syria was immune to revolution.
Economic grievances
Michael Broning, Director of the prestigious Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a German political foundation, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine. The key theme of his article was that Syria was different from other countries in the Arab Middle East. “Syrian youth certainly share the economic grievances of young people in Tunisia and Egypt, but widespread poverty and unemployment are unlikely to catalyse sudden popular uprising.”
He justifies his argument on the grounds that in Syria “political isolation and domestic authoritarianism have severely restricted the development of a politically conscious and economically empowered middle class”. As such, the situation in Damascus differs significantly from pre-revolutionary Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
In all three countries, public fury was fuelled by a highly visible and ever-increasing status gap between a large elite class and a marginalised majority. Unlike Syrians, protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya perceived their poverty to be relative rather than absolute — and thus as an injustice caused by the regime, Broning concluded.
Indeed, like many other theories about the Middle East and Arab world, this pathetic argument fell like a house of sand just a week after it was published in Foreign Affairs.
Another big mistake was made after the breakout of the uprising and focused on the roots of the Syrian crisis. Most analysts, especially after the transformation of the largely peaceful protest movement into an armed struggle, tended to focus on the sectarian element of the conflict. This was also very misleading theory.
The key point that the average Syrian does not really care about the confessional background of his oppressors was completely overlooked. Analysts have also ignored the fact that a sizeable part of the Sunni rich class remains loyal to the regime as is still apparent in Syria’s two biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo.
What is more? When the uprising began, most western and Arab governments expected the regime to crush it in a matter of days or weeks. Today, western officials and the media talk about a coup, divisions within the ruling class, isolating the regime from its confessional base of support as viable alternative to prevent the slide towards civil war.
This represents another false theory. It reveals how ignorant western policies are about the political and social situation in Syria. These are just few examples of the poor understanding of Syria in the West and in the region too.
Indeed, Syria will prove the most challenging case for both the so-called Syria’s experts in western academia and policy-makers. Unless real efforts are made to reach a correct understanding of the Syrian question, things will continue to deteriorate and the future of the whole region will be at great risk.
Dr Marwan Kabalan is the dean of the Faculty of International Relations and Diplomacy at the University of Kalamoon, Damascus.                 –Gulf News