Can Heir-Apparent Bashar Assume the Mantle of Mafia Don?

If Saddam Hussein were to die tomorrow, his son, Uday, would have no difficulty taking his place, at least for a while, because the machinery of Saddam Hussein’s Stalin-type dictatorship is essentially simple. There are no rival cliques, no independent power blocs--only a straightforward terror apparatus. With secret police agents, informers and agents provocateurs everywhere, would-be plotters cannot even begin to recruit confederates to do away with Hussein. Anyone they approach is caught in the classic dilemma: The plot may be genuine and, if so, it may perhaps succeed one day, but the only safe course is to report it immediately because if the plot has already been penetrated--or if it was an entrapment operation all along--the penalty is torture and death, for wives and children as well in most cases. All it takes to keep a machine of terror running smoothly is to periodically announce failed plots--usually faked--followed by publicized arrests and televised executions, as Hussein has been doing from the very first night he seized power.

Assad’s dictatorship was only superficially similar. To be sure, he too had competing secret police organizations--most labeled “intelligence services” for the sake of appearances--to ensure that no single outfit could overthrow him. And, of course, Assad also had his heavily armed palace guard, staffed by carefully picked men--mostly members of his own Alawite minority, some his own blood relatives. And, in Syria, democratic institutions are strictly for show. Just as Hussein periodically gathers his appointees to nod approvingly at his every word and wildly applaud every rhetorical sally, Assad too had his own “parliament,” which only exists to rubber-stamp his decisions. In fact, his control persists even in death because the Syrian parliament has just given servility a bad name by convening to amend the constitution to lower the minimum age for the presidency from 40 to 34; Assad’s son and designated successor, Bashar, happens to be 34 years old.

Yet there is a crucial and obvious difference between the Iraqi and Syrian dictatorships that greatly affects Bashar’s chances of keeping the power that is about to be given to him. Although Assad’s regime has sometimes resorted to extreme forms of brutality against its enemies--it used artillery and tanks against Palestinian refugees and Islamist insurgents that the Israelis would have contained with rubber bullets--it never was a Stalin-type dictatorship based on pure fear. Syrians had to watch what they said, but there were no manufactured plots to lure Assad’s enemies into revealing their disloyalty nor any of Hussein’s unprovoked purges, designed to keep his own bodyguards, police, palace guards and army generals in a state of terror and childlike dependence.

Assad’s method was quite different; his model was rather the successful Mafia don who keeps everyone loyal by harshly punishing disloyalty, of course, but mainly by distributing rewards to his henchmen. With Syria’s economy long in decline, Assad could not emulate the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states by gifting palaces and executive jets to his cronies and supporters. Yet he did have one bounty to parcel out to his favored army and police cliques, which in turn ensured his hold on power: the smuggling business in and out of Lebanon. The big item is the export of narcotics.In a delicate and elegant balancing act, Assad allocated the trade mostly to the heads of non-Alawite army factions, for they did not have to support him out of ethnic loyalty. Lesser rewards--even the smuggling of humble fruits and vegetables into Lebanon is quite profitable--went to other cliques and factions to earn their loyalty.

In Syria, would-be plotters were not paralyzed so much by the fear of torture and execution as in Iraq, but rather by the more mundane fear of losing a nice bit of business.

The young, well-educated Bashar is quite plausible as a modernizing reformer, but much less so as a Mafia don. His very youth and education will work against him in rallying his father’s supporters, all of them older, much tougher and altogether more practiced in the skills of power.