Bashar's Syria: The Regime and its Strategic Worldview Shmuel Bar ...

Bashar’s Syria 355of political importance and no institutionalized bureaucratic process for making decisionson war and peace. A case in point would be the decision to go to war in 1973, whichwas decided on in a meeting between Presidents Sadat and Asad and was handed down tothe military. It appears that little or no strategic planning preceded Asad’s decision to jointhe war. Similarly, the Syrian preparations for the peace process with Israel were clearly“top-down”; the president provided the strategic goals and determined what information heneeded and the bureaucracy provided the papers. The bureaucracy was notoriously unableor unwilling to provide the president with options that he himself had not proposed or toanalyze the pros and cons of the policy that the leader had handed down. This weakness didnot go as far as the terror which pervaded the Iraqi leadership, and which prevented it fromwarning Saddam of his miscalculations. It was more like long-conditioned subservience tothe leader.Hafez al-Asad was not an advocate of “groupthink”; his way to access opinions andinformation from his subordinates was in direct one-on-one reporting of the latter to thepresident. Asad was rarely known to hold multiparticipatory consultations or participate in“brainstorming” sessions of a large numbers of individuals. It is said that during militaryoperations in Lebanon, he would circumvent the chain of command in order to get reportsfrom lower-ranking officers in the field. In doing so, however, he did not “consult,” butmerely gathered information. Rarely did any of these subordinates receive any feedbackfrom the president. This centralist and “micromanagement” leadership style, along withtotal loyalty to the president and a clear allocation of areas of responsibility, restrainedcourt intrigues and limited blatant rivalries amoung members of the leadership. Asad’sleadership style may have derived of a divida et impera tactic; by limiting the exposure ofhis senior deputies to the information that was brought before him, he could maintain a highlevel of uncertainty between members of the elite and control the balance of power amongthem. It has also been postulated that he acted out of distrust of the efficacy of consensusmechanisms and self-confidence in his own ability to integrate information brought beforehim.The Syrian decision-making process under Asad also left no room for true strategicintelligence and net assessment by professional analytical experts; the information broughtto the president seems to be relatively raw intelligence, with little strategic context orpolicy recommendations. The Syrian bureaucracy lacked a culture of scenario building anddiscussing sundry alternatives. 5 As a result, the information background and analysis of thesituation available to the president for decision making were based primarily on the personalknowledge and analysis of senior advisors who directly participated in the decision-makingprocess. The Syrian regime had not developed professional support for decision makingsuch as the sort that exists in a “Cabinet Office” (in the U.K.), The American NationalSecurity Council, or Israel’s Planning Branch. The absence of a mechanism of this sort witha remit and responsibility that derives from its constitutional duties rather than loyalty to thepsresident is not an oversight. Such an apparatus would be incompatible with the autocraticleadership that the Syrian regime is built on.The upshot of this leadership style was the development of a well-suited party andregime bureaucracy. This was particularly manifested in political and military areas, whichwere also the main areas in which Asad tended to make decisions, and less so in the sphereof the economy. This individualist management style was also the rule in lower echelonsof the party and the regime. During the Hafez al-Asad era the Ba’th party lost the internaldecision making mechanisms that existed in the pre-regime Ba’th. The party became aninstrument for collecting information on the domestic theatre and mobilizing support for thedecisions that the leader took, but was not a real participant in the decision-making process