In my running commentary on Syria over the past year and more, I have occasionally had recourse to mention, and sometimes to criticize, not just mainstream press accounts of events, but sometimes also specific commentators. One of these has been David Ignatius of the Washington Post. His column in yesterday’s paper marks a new low, however, and must not pass without further critique.
The subject of yesterday’s column hinges on an interview Ignatius recently conducted in Paris with Manaf Tlass, of whom I have spoken before. In the column, titled in the paper, “A Way Out of Assad’s Syria”, Ignatius allows and enables Tlass to characterize himself as a conflicted Syrian elite apostate who early on separated himself from the atrocities committed by the regime. Ignatius takes what can only be characterized as a fawning attitude toward Tlass. Not only is Tlass humanly emotional (he has to leave the room in tears at one point, Ignatius makes a point of noting), but he is also a man of “rugged good looks” that made him a “charismatic military leader.”
Ignatius makes Tlass out to be humble, as well. He seeks no position in a new, post-Assad Syrian leadership, we are told. All he cares about is preventing ethnic and sectarian bloodbaths between Alawis, Sunnis, Kurds, Armenians and other Syrian communities. Ignatius further pleads Tlass’s case, saying he is “wise to disavow political ambition, as his wealth, secular lifestyle and prominent background (his father was defense minister) makes him a target for a populist, Islamist opposition movement.” Presumably for this reason, Ignatius doesn’t say where in Paris the interview took place. Crazy populist Islamists might be gunning for Manaf, after all.
It is hard to know even where to start taking apart this incredible, absolutely huge load of crap. Let’s start with a basic Syrian reality check.
Manaf Tlass is not only vulnerable at the hands of crazy Islamist fanatics; just about every upstanding Sunni family in Syria thinks of the Tlass clan as the ultimate turncoats, the quislings of Syria, traitors to their own people as the running dogs of the Alawi dictatorship. Not only that, the clan is flatly criminal in the eyes of most Sunnis, since Tlass’s father Mustafa was Defense Minister during the spring 1982 mass murder (estimates vary between 10,000–40,000 killed) of mostly Sunnis in Hama. Indeed, Mustafa Tlass was instrumental for more than thirty years in ruthlessly supressing dissent of any and every kind against the Assad regime.
Manaf was 19 years old at the time of Hama, hardly a child. Yet he had no hesitation about following in his father’s footsteps to join the Alawi-based elite as its preeminent boot heel of repression. The Sunni community in Syria knows all this, and Manaf knows they know it. Everybody knows it except, for all appearances, David Ignatius.
Manaf’s recital of events, complete with quotes that Ignatius uncritically passes on, might be accurate—but I doubt it. More likely, Tlass was implicated in the regime’s crimes against the Syrian people until the tipping point at which he calculated that the regime might actually fall. Then he began hedging his bets, and when that seemed inadequate protection against the future, he plotted his exit into the lap of luxury he now inhabits in France, thanks to the money his father stole before fleeing the country and, of course, his sister’s enormous wealth, courtesy of the since-deceased, rather elderly Saudi billionaire she married. The idea that Manaf Tlass might be some sort of bedraggled refugee, moving from low-profile apartment to apartment in Paris, is simply bizarre.
We should also recall that, after Tlass made his exit from Syria across the Turkish border in early July (he didn’t stay very long in Turkey with the genuine Syrian refugees), a fair bit of time elapsed before he declared his supposed solidarity with the opposition. He may be sincere about this affiliation, but then again this may be just another aspect of his calculations aimed at self-protection. It’s a lot easier to run that drill from Paris, too, than from the Turkish side of the Syrian frontier. The very possibility seems to elude Ignatius.
There is one positive aspect to yesterday’s column: For the first time since the beginning of the Syrian upheavals, and despite all that Ignatius has written on them, he finally managed to get the word “Alawi” into one of his analyses. This is real progress. An otherwise untutored reader might now begin to understand that there is a sectarian element to what is happening in Syria. You wouldn’t know that from the basic line that Ignatius has held heretofore.
When the so-called Arab Spring first erupted, Ignatius was confident that the contagion would never get as far as Syria. In a February 2, 2011column entitled “The Arab Revolution Grows Up”, he wrote that: “That’s why Assad today is less vulnerable than Mubarak: His regime is at least as corrupt and autocratic, but it has remained steadfastly anti-American and anti-Israel. Hard as it is for us in the West to accept, this rejectionism adds to Assad’s power, whereas Mubarak is diminished by his image as the West’s puppet.” Oh well, so much for that theory.
In all fairness, Ignatius was not alone in taking this view. Thus said Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group around the same time: “I would see Syria having a relative advantage because the country’s foreign policy is broadly in sync with public opinion [and] its expansive informal sector mitigates economic difficulties to some extent. . . . But this definitely doesn’t preclude the possible expression of resentment in certain segments of society.” (Got to admire that last CYA-inspired remark…)
It’s one thing to be mistaken from time to time, and it’s no big deal in a deviously uncertain world. People who write as often as David Ignatius, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer and all the rest, are bound to be wrong from time to time; it just goes with the territory. But it’s another thing to be self-contradictory.
All through the crisis, at least until lately, Ignatius has steadfastly promoted active U.S. engagement of the Assad regime. It’s hard to say if his view influenced the Administration, which in the early months was still insisting that Bashar al-Assad was the best hope for reform in Syria. (Not one of Hillary Clinton’s greatest moments, true, but there have been so many…). The contradiction lies in the fact that Ignatius has insisted, as per the quote brought above, that Assad’s highly advantageous legitimacy derives from his opposition to the United States and Israel. The premise is wrong, but let’s assume for a minute, just for the sake of argument, that it’s correct. So then how do we explain why, if Assad relies on his hostility to the United States to keep himself in power, the Obama Administration should expect to be able to build a useful relationship of trust and compromise with Syria, let alone waste time trying to broker a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement?
There is more. If Assad is so broadly popular as a Syrian national figure (or at least was so popular back in February 2011), then why is there now such a sharp sectarian divide in the country—between the mainly Alawi security forces and regime elite, on the one hand, and most of the rest of the country, on the other? How can “Assad the popular” morph into “Assad the sectarian leader” virtually overnight? Did the country itself change that quickly? (Relax, this is a rhetorical question, the obvious answer to which is “no”.)
What I don’t have a feel for is whether Ignatius is merely credulous or knowingly complicit in the story that Manaf Tlass—that sensitive, selfless, ruggedly good-looking, charismatic, humble and wise dude of yesterday’s column—is trying to peddle. Given the frailty of Ignatius’s Syria analysis all along, I lean heavily toward the former interpretation. I can barely wait for his next Syria dispatch.
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