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

Bashar’s Syria 411in their former apparatuses, using those links to plan and execute the assassination.This explanation has two alternative possibilities for a motive. The first is that theformer officials saw al-Hariri as a threat to their own personal influence and businessin Lebanon, as well as to Syrian dominance. The second possibility is that theysaw Bashar loosing his grip on Lebanon, and therefore wanted to create a situationthat would force him to revise what they saw as his inept policy. The flaw in thisexplanation is that most of the “old guard” with influence in Lebanon (such as thelate Ghazi Kana’an) are aware of the dynamics of the Lebanese arena and tend tobe cautious in the use of force that may incriminate Syria. The continued attemptsto assassinate lower-level critics of Syria after the murder of al-Hariri also raise thequestion of why, if the cause is “loss of control,” the regime had not taken any visiblesteps to reign in its “loose cannons.”There is no doubt that there was deep Syrian involvement in the assassinations. Thequestion is the extent of Bashar’s involvement in the affair, and what can be learned from itregarding his leadership style. Bashar’s personality and the decision-making process underhim does not support the account of his personal involvement in ordering the assassination.Rather, his aversion to political risk on one hand, and tendency to delegate authority on theother, tends to support the first explanation of “overdelegation of authority.”If this is true and senior intelligence officials set in motion one of the most disastrousblunders in the history of Syrian intelligence operations, the circumstances of the affairwould have warranted, in such an autocratic regime, either a genuine purge of the apparatusor apparatuses that acted against the policy of the president, or, at least, a bid to disengagethe president himself from responsibility by claiming that the Syrian involvement was thepersonal initiative of a mid-ranking official who has been duly punished. This latter wasthe image that Hafez al-Asad tried to project after the Hindawi affair of 1986, when he(temporarily, at least) moved aside those who were known to have been involved in theoperations attempts. However, the only senior figure to have been moved aside after theassassination was Bahjat Suleiman, and there is no evidence to date—and certainly noofficial declaration—that his dismissal was linked to the assassination.The development of the Lebanese situation offers additional insight into Bashar’s decisionmaking. The Lebanese case is particularly instructive, as Bashar had received his“apprenticeship” in politics in this theater. From the mid-1990s Bashar appeared to be informallyresponsible for the “Lebanese file” as Vice President Khaddam became more andmore marginalized. He developed close ties with various members of the Lebanese elite(he was said to be close to Suleiman Tony Franjiya, the grandson of former pro-SyrianLebanese President Suleiman Franjiyeh) and was deeply involved in Syrian manipulationof the Lebanese political scene, including the replacement of Prime Minister al-Hariri, whowas associated with Khaddam, and the Syrian Chief of Staff, Hikmat Shihabi by Salimal-Huss. 136 Pressure on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon began after the Israeli withdrawalin May 2000. Syria’s initial response to this pressure was in line with its traditional modusoperandi in that country: it supported Hezbollah’s claim that the Sheba farm area (occupiedby Israel with the Golan Heights in June 1967) was part of Lebanon, and therefore Israelhad not implemented a total withdrawal and the raison d’être for Hezbollah’s resistanceremained in force.As pressure mounted on Syria to withdraw, the conventional wisdom, grounded in thestrategic significance of Lebanon for Syria (see above) and the behavior of Hafez al-Asad,assumed that Bashar’s Syria would first procrastinate and buy time, then create a crisis thatwould put the call for an early Syrian withdrawal on the back burner, and, finally, perform a