From Beirut to the Beltway

In his speech on Saturday, Syrian president Bashar Assad said “national sovereignty is the most significant thing and not UN resolutions," and lashed out at a "global plot" that is targeting "Syria and Lebanon," Iraq and Palestine, as well as “the Arab peoples” and the “Islamic nation.”

Assad spoke to an audience of Arab “lawyers” at an Arab legal conference in Damascus, in front of a backdrop which read "Defending Syria is National Right and Duty" in English. In Arabic, it read “Defending Syria is an (Arab) Nationalist right and duty.”

Assad’s speech contained your usual combative and nationalist statements that earned him standing ovations and ecstatic cheers and applause from the audience. He held the Lebanese responsible for the deteriorating Lebanese-Syrian relations, alleging that certain Lebanese want to see their country destroyed. He said his cooperation with the UNIIIC “must be made by respecting principles of national sovereignty, the neutrality of the inquiry and on a legal basis." He dismissed the UN probe as a “condemnation commission” that relies on “made-up testimonies by certain traitors”, in reference to his VP Abdel Halim Khaddam, who accused him of ordering the Hariri assassination. He wondered why the world was focusing on the Hariri assassination and not the “Arafat assassination.”

Domestic reform again took a back seat to the global plot and need to preserve “stability.” "The road is long, and perhaps reforms are being done slowly, but we want to accelerate them as fast as possible, without harming (the nation's) stability," he said, limiting future reforms to those “consistent with domestic requirements, and we refuse to accept them being imposed from abroad."

Bashar’s speech reeked of ignorance. It was a hodgepodge of nationalist statements that made no sense combined.

The Syrian president claims to know and understand Lebanese and Palestinian affairs better than Lebanese and Palestinians. After all, he is the supreme Arab leader, protector of Arab causes and identity, the one who must not fall, because if he did, the Arab regimes’ house of cards will collapse. Or that’s what he says.

Just like Bin Laden and his dispersed cohorts appointed themselves the rulers of a fictitious Islamic land, the novice Syrian dictator has made himself the commander in chief of an imagined Arab nationalist empire.

Bashar’s attitude towards Lebanon resembles Jamal Abdel Nasser’s attitude towards Syria as the northern province of the failed United Arab Republic in the late 1950s. Nasser didn’t know much about Syria and he treated Syrians like lower class Egyptians. All that Nasser knew was the necessity of a centralized authoritarian system with him in absolute control. It is ironic that Bashar would act like the guardian of an extreme brand of Arab nationalism that his own father helped destroy. Compare Lebanon’s situation to Syria’s in the late 1950s when the Nasserites “relegated the majority of Syrians to the rank of traitors, governing by terror and trampling on the honor and dignity of citizens.” These were the words of ex-Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatly.

Of course Bashar is no real Arab nationalist, or at least his Arab nationalism is just a cover for his dictatorship, a formula that most Arab leaders employ successfully. For as soon as the logical requirements of such an imagined union with Lebanon and the rest of Arab world present themselves, Syria’s “sovereignty” pops its head right on time to spare the regime any duties towards that imagined union, including cooperating for the sake of strengthening the union, as opposed to strengthening the authoritarian regime.The regime’s convenient dual use of both Arab nationalism and “nationalism based on sovereignty (qawmiyya and wataniya) is pathetic, and unfortunately, it eludes most of Syria’s ignorant clappers. Bsshar wants to force a Nasserist Arab nationalist union on Lebanon while subscribing to a reduced version based on Syrian sovereignty. All the regime had to do to make this paradox appear logical was to accuse Syria’s enemies and Lebanon of doing Israel’s bidding. And then the conspiracy theory is complete and logic dies at the altar of honor and ignorance.

With plenty of illiterate citizens in Bashar's empire putting off free thinking till Judgment Day, Bashar finds plenty of cheerleaders to enslave and parade to the world as proof of his popularity. It also helps him when men and women with law degrees choose the rule of ignorance over the rule of law, making it easier to turn poor people into cattle, and to present slaughter houses as places of worship and sacrifice.

In this regional order of hypocrisy and delusion, seeking truth and sovereignty for the purpose of independence becomes a great sin. Bashar can shamelessly use his country’s "sovereignty" to protect himself from retribution, and then somehow portray repercussions from Syria’s mistakes as foreign plots to redraw the Arab nation. When Lebanon seeks sovereignty, it is viewed as an attack on the Arab nation. Very few see Syria's attempt to impose on Lebanon what most Arab countries have rejected and destroyed: Nasserist Arab nationalism. The situation is now such that the road to Lebanese sovereignty (and Syrian freedom) will have to pass through the rejection of all political pan-Arab ideologies, especially when they are made as basis for a solution to the country's problems. This sounds logical, yet difficult to perceive by many in this region, who unfairly expect Lebanon to guard what their leaders only use to keep them in check. For as long as the dictators are allowed to hold the ideological axe of Arab nationalism over our heads, there will be no progress in Lebanon, Syria or any other part of the region.