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Visions On The Road To Damascus: Thoughts On Religion And Syria

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Bashar al-Assad

Religion poisons everything.

That’s what the late and dearly-missed Christopher Hitchens taught me.

And the current situation in Syria is no exception. But though his perspective on religion helps demystify much of what is going on in Syria, a Hitchens’ style defense of US intervention would be a mistake, just as it was in Iraq.

As Hitchens might have said, the parties of God are, as can be expected, ruining what began as a liberatory struggle to overthrow an authoritarian regime in a wave of revolutions sweeping the Arab world.

Now, the conflict is one where a dictatorial Alawite Shiite regime with (quite predictably) the aid of the Iranian theocracy and Hezbollah is fighting against a mostly Sunni opposition, itself backed by the Saudis and aided by Islamists. Diving into the Syrian civil war leaves one thoroughly soaked in theocrats.

And whether Bashar Al-Assad stays in power or not, any predictions of what will happen in a post-civil war Syria will have to take religion into account. And the influence religion will have will probably not be a benign one.

If the Assad family stays in power, you can bet that Sunnis, no matter how religious they are, will pay a harsh penalty for their attempts at overthrowing the regime. If the opposition succeeds in ousting Assad, there is a good chance that the minority Alawite community will experience the revenge-hungry anger of the Sunni majority.

And no matter who wins, Syria’s Christian minority, who Rand Paul seems to be especially worried about, will probably end up receiving a fair share of post-war wrath and oppression.

In my mind, all this shows that Hitch was all too right about the way religion poisons everything.

But the pro-Iraq War Hitchens would have also probably supported the US intervening in order to bring down the brutally authoritarian rule of a murderous Ba’athist crime family, especially in a country with an oppressed Kurdish minority.

He would have been wrong on that point yet again though.

Though the opposition to Assad does include Islamist groups who would simply replace Assad’s secular authoritarianism with religious authoritarianism if given the chance, it also has many secular-minded Syrians who simply oppose Assad’s oppressive rule. Despite religion’s deleterious effects on this civil war, it is still (for now at least) predominantly a struggle against a tyrannical regime.

US intervention would only further spoil this conflict in addition to what religion has already done. US intervention would make the anti-Assad forces look like American/Western lap dogs as well as make any post-Assad Syrian society look as if it was constructed for US/Western interests.

US intervention, whether right or wrong, simply does not have a reputation as being done strictly for humanitarian or liberatory ends.

If the more secular-minded factions of the opposition end up deciding what a post-Assad Syrian looks like, then they will not be tainted by the fact that the US (i.e. the despised hegemon) helped them achieve their goals. If the Islamists and religious authoritarians end up winning that battle, their religious regime will (like all theocracies) eventually come to be hated by the people, and the Syrian people will reject religious authoritarianism just as they rejected Assad’s secular authoritarianism. At that point, the Islamists will not be able to blame US/Western intervention on their failures, and hopefully, this all will lead the Syrian people in the direction of a more secular and libertarian form of politics.


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