The Familiar Themes of Hope and Delusion in Syria

“This time around Syria was liberated by its people for its people,” Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian immigrant active in the fight against tyranny in his homeland, told Face the Nation on Sunday. “It’s truly inspiring.”

When Moustafa spoke of “an indescribable feeling of happiness,” the viewer inevitably caught his exhilaration. He provoked thoughts that differed from the contagious feelings.

Bashar al-Assad surely ruled cruelly and seemed like nobody’s idea of a philosopher-king. One cannot blame Mr. Moustafa and so many for rejoicing in his ouster. Still, his deposition raises the question seemingly never raised in Middle Eastern politics: What comes next? (RELATED: Approach Syria With a Tragic Mind)

The Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, the group that overthrew Bashar al-Assad, “has its roots in al-Qaida,” according to ABC News. The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, fought for al Qaeda in Iraq and was held by the Americans for more than five years in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

If your face shows wrinkles and gray expands on your head, then you have seen this movie before. One iteration was set in Iran.

“By ‘Islamic government,’” Michel Foucault assured, “nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.” He wrote of the Islamic Revolution in the French press in October of 1978: “With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others; minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not injure the majority; between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is a natural difference. With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority, the leaders should be responsible to the people, and each person, as it is laid out in the Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs.”

In the United Kingdom, Trotskyist Ted Grant saw in the Islamic Revolution “scenes reminiscent of the February Revolution of 1917.” He saw “the working class” as “the main battering ram for awakening the people” against the Shah. “Support for Khomeini will melt away after he forms a government,” Grant predicted, and “trade unions in Iran will have an explosive growth.”

In the United States, Mother Jones envisioned “democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government” for Iran.

Such delusions did not end with the Ayatollah Khomeini trampling them in Iran. They continued, to a smaller degree, among Republicans almost a quarter-century ago who imagined an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein as a model for democracy throughout the region.

Westerners do not understand the Islamic world. They err by narcissistically projecting their own culture upon people who practice a different religion, spring from a different history, and live nearly halfway around the world. In seeing Arab dictatorships, idealistic Americans imagine Vermont-style town meetings as the alternative.

In practice, the alternative to secular strongmen proves to be religious fanatics. The notion underlying the Western approach —that everyone yearns for freedom — finds an unforgiving testing ground in the Middle East. The idea that most yearn to boss others around seems closer to the truth.

Thus, the impulse to imagine universal suffrage, freedom of speech, assembly, the press, and religion, and peaceful policies at home and abroad replacing oppressive government led to disappointment in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere. Syria probably disappoints, too. One can hope but when al Qaeda alumni constitute the liberating force that hope flirts with delusion.

This phenomenon does not find a welcoming climate only in Islamic lands. Not just in the Middle East but in Europe, Asia, and points beyond, revolution generally ushers into being a worse situation. The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? The Cuban Revolution? In each instance, the overturned regime had earned legitimate criticism. In each instance, the new regime outdid the fallen one in terms of atrocities and oppression. Like Charlie Brown kicking at the football that Lucy invariably pulls away, intelligent people somehow still reflexively greet revolution with optimism.

What explains this? The failure to even consider “worse” alongside “better” as a possible alternative to “bad.”

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