Ba'ath Birthday Party

Yesterday, Damascus seemed as ordinary as ever for a rainy Saturday. I had the usual claustrophobic interviews in smoke-filled offices, drank the usual tiny cups of Turkish coffee, and heard the usual complaints about the Bush administration. Only when I returned home and turned on Syrian state television (the only working channel on my set), did I remember that this was the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Ba'ath Party, the country's ruling political organization.

The event used to be cause for major celebration in Syria, but not anymore. While the government news anchor heralded "60 years carrying the torch of Arab progress" and other "Onwards and Upwards"-type nostrums, the footage told a different story. No parades, no bunting, not even a live shot of President Bashar Al Assad, who clearly had better things to do. The main event consisted of a reception at some second tier government building with a bunch of party hacks, almost all of whom had already celebrated their own 60th birthdays and looked none the better for it.

The Ba'athists who make headlines these days are mostly the die-hard Iraqi followers of now dead Saddam Hussein. But Ba'athisim -- a kind of pan-Arab socialism -- was once a vital ideological force. The driving idea was that the nation-states of the Middle East are artificial entities created by the imperial west to divide Arabs and make them weak. However, when individual Ba'athist leaders such as Saddam or Hafez al Assad (Bashar's father) took power, they spent more time building security states and invading their neighbors than planning egalitarian Arab revolutions. Arab unity took another big beating when Egypt, the Palestinians, and Jordan all signed separate peace treaties with Israel.

Without Ba'athist ideology as a guide, Syria is now suffering from an identity crisis, a kind of societal schizophrenia, with (as I see it) at least three different personalty traits battling for dominance. On the one hand, the Syrian regime shows signs of being pragmatic, yearning for legitimacy, a peace deal with Israel and access to global markets so it can reform its economy and provide its growing population with jobs. But other times, Syria behaves like an an un-reformable rogue state, hell bent on resisting American and Israeli dominance of the Middle East by any means necessary. Meanwhile, outside the tight leash of state security, Syria is in the early stages of an Islamic revival that at its fringes is being radicalized by the American occupation of Iraq.

Which Syria will cary the day? The answer depends as much on what happens in the rest of the Middle East as in Syria itself. Will there be a regional peace deal between Israel and the holdout Arab states led by Saudi Arabia? Will Washington start engaging Syria? Or will the chaos of Iraq and confrontation with America push Syria farther down the road of mischief and radicalism? Nothing seems certain except that the Ba'ath party is not going to lead the way. Sixty years of torch carrying is quite enough.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus