Assad’s fall was swift and unexpected. But the signs were always there. (Liz Sly, December 8, 2024, WaPo)

American foreign policy is too often based on erroneous assumptions and fourth-fate governmental guesswork, which too often sustains dictators on our tax dollars. Check out the Washington Post's reports on Prof. Ted Moran, my rather heroic Georgetown University School of Foreign Service International Business Diplomacy Professor, a former State Department FSO, and his sadly ignored prediction that the Shah of Iran's corrupt regime would soon be defeated, leading to generations of oppression due to America's support of a corrupt kleptocratic nepobaby and his kakistocracy. For extra credit, please feel free to compare and contrast authoritarian regimes in USA, Northeast Florida, Northeast Tennessee, Asia and the Middle East, and their reliance on fear, smear and reluctance to oppress the good people and pick our pockets. Are  some of our frail planet's lucre-mad louche longstanding family dynasties little more than organized crime families?  You tell me. From The Washington Post:

Assad’s fall was swift and unexpected. But the signs were always there.

Assad missed multiple opportunities to reconcile with his opponents and the international community, and failed to address his country’s economic suffering.

December 8, 2024 at 6:28 p.m. ESTToday at 6:28 p.m. EST

9 min

An anti-government fighter tears down a portrait of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo on Nov. 30, after rebels and their allies entered the northern Syrian city. (Mohammed Al-Rfai/AFP/Getty Images) 

By Liz Sly

President Bashar al-Assad ruled his country with an iron fist for 24 years, as his father had done for 30 years before him. When he appeared to prevail in Syria’s civil war, it was widely assumed he would remain in power until he was ready to hand over to his own son.

Instead, his supposedly indomitable regime turned out to be a hollow shell, crumbling in only 11 days in the face of an advance by lightly armed rebels. As opposition forces converged on Damascus from the north and the south late Saturday night, Assad fled to the airport and boarded a plane, according to Syrians in Damascus. Russian state media reported Sunday that he had been granted asylum in Moscow.

By the time the end came, Assad was isolated and alone, abandoned by his main international allies, Russia and Iran, by an army that was no longer willing to fight for him, and by his minority Alawite constituents, many of whom chose to defect or flee to their coastal heartland.

Assad made no public address in his final days in power and remained out of sight, except for one meeting, photographed by state media, with the Iranian foreign minister. A widely anticipated speech expected Saturday night never materialized.

“He did not say a word of comfort to us, and we are disappointed,” said an Alawite woman in Latakia who had remained a staunch supporter of the president, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of rebel reprisals.

He leaves a legacy of cruelty, fear and destruction that has disfigured the modern Middle East. Huge swaths of Syria are in ruins, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the country’s civil war and tens of thousands are missing, many of them vanished into the black hole of the regime’s notorious prisons.

The speed of the rebel successes stunned the world, catching off-guard an international community that had long ago given up on the Syrian opposition and had become reconciled, in varying degrees, to the seeming inevitability of Assad’s rule.

But the warning signs of a collapse were there all along. Assad missed multiple opportunities to reconcile with his opponents and the international community, and failed to implement policies that might have rescued his country and united his people, Syrians and analysts said.

“He had no answers and no solutions,” said Amr Al-Azm, a former Damascus University professor who teaches at Shawnee State University in Ohio. “Just more of the same, the same intransigence, the same oppression.”

“He brought this all on himself,” said Andrew Tabler, who founded Syria Today in the early 2000s under the auspices of Bashar’s wife, Asma. He later wrote a book about Assad and is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“In the end he lost everything and it cost the Syrians hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Assad welcomes his Iraqi counterpart Jalal Talabani at the Presidential Palace in Damascus in 2011. (Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images)

After Assad succeeded in putting down the uprising, there had been an expectation among his followers of a “peace dividend” — a revival of the shattered economy, at least some steps toward reconstruction, perhaps a new chance for acceptance on the global stage.

But none came. Eventually, even those Syrians who remained loyal because they saw him as a bulwark against the Islamists they feared became disenchanted, Azm said. The Assad family ran the country as though it was their personal piggy bank, and the lavish lifestyles of the president’s relatives, frequently shown on Instagram, fueled the resentment.

Meanwhile, the country was descending ever deeper into deprivation. According to the United Nations, 90 percent of Syrians are living in poverty and half are food-insecure.

“His biggest problem was that he didn’t seem to care,” Azm said. “Things were economically extremely dire. When even his own people couldn’t put food on the table, he lost all support from his own base.”

Assad squandered numerous opportunities to shore up his status externally and internally, with his stubborn refusal to make the kind of concessions that could have brought him international recognition and desperately needed economic relief. Russia, his chief ally, made strenuous efforts to bring about a peace settlement that would have been accepted by the West, but he refused to compromise when it came to his absolute hold on power.

In the weeks before the rebel offensive, he rebuffed several fresh approaches from global powers that might have helped secure his rule. One, made indirectly from the United States through the United Arab Emirates, would have lifted crippling U.S. sanctions in return for Assad severing Iran’s ability to arm and sustain Hezbollah militants in Lebanon using land routes through Syria, said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat who defected in the early days of the revolt.

Perhaps more fatally for his regime, he also rejected an olive branch from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was seeking to normalize relations with Damascus in return for efforts by Assad to keep Kurdish forces off his border, engage in dialogue with the Syrian opposition and accept the return of at least some of the millions of Syrian refugees who have sought sanctuary in Turkey.

Assad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a news conference at the palace in 2010. (Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images)

Turkey has long backed parts of the Syrian opposition and appears to have countenanced the rebel offensive as a retort to Assad’s rejection, Erdogan hinted Friday.

“We had called Assad. We said, let’s determine the future of Syria together,” Erdogan said Friday, expressing hope that the rebels would reach Damascus. “We did not receive a positive response.”

The Turkish efforts “all failed,” Foreign Minister Hasan Fidan said Sunday in Doha, Qatar. “We knew something was coming.”

Assad’s departure heralds an end to one of the most brutal dictatorships in the modern Middle East, one that stretched back to Assad’s father, Hafez, who seized power in a coup in 1970 and became president the following year. Hafez established the family’s reputation for cruelty with a harsh crackdown on a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982, which killed tens of thousands of people.

Bashar assumed the presidency after his father died in 2000, and there were hopes that he would introduce reforms and modernize the centralized, state-run economy. But after a brief flowering of freedoms in the early 2000s, known as the Damascus Spring, he reverted to repression.

By the time the Arab Spring protests swept the Middle East in 2011, Syrians were more than ready to join in. Protesters surged onto the streets of villages, towns and cities around the country chanting for “freedom” and “justice,” only to be met with hails of gunfire from the regime’s security forces.

Initially, Syrians aimed their protests not at Assad but at the corruption of the officials and family members surrounding him. In the first few weeks of the nationwide protests, he seemed to be willing to countenance reforms that might have appeased the demonstrators, according to Syrians involved in the discussions.

Instead, he chose to crack down, unleashing the vicious civil war that would forcibly displace millions, help fuel the rise of the Islamic State and draw soldiers from the United States, Turkey, Russia and Iran into the country.

Almost from the outset, Assad’s army was bolstered by the presence of advisers and fighters from Iran, but it was the intervention of Russian warplanes in 2016 that definitively turned the war in his favor. Four more years of bloodshed followed before a ceasefire deal negotiated by Russia and Turkey brought the fighting to a halt in the north — freezing the conflict but not resolving it.

Assad survived in Damascus, but two-thirds of the country remained beyond the control of his forces, with the opposition still holding an enclave of territory in the north. Kurdish forces, backed by the United States, controlled the east and northeast.

In 2019, the Arab countries that had broken ties with Assad and backed the opposition began reestablishing diplomatic relations with Damascus, starting with the UAE. The reasoning, Emirati officials said at the time, was to lure Assad away from his dependency on Iran and thereby reduce its expanding influence in the region.

To that end, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries followed suit, and in 2023 Syria was readmitted to the Arab League after being expelled for its brutal crackdown on protesters.

Yet for all the regional efforts to restore Assad’s standing, he refused to break ties with Tehran, lamented a former Egyptian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “We spent a lot of efforts,” the official said. “But he was in the arms of Iran.”

In his final weeks in office, Assad seemed oblivious to fast-changing regional dynamics, as Israel’s military pummeled Hezbollah, which had contributed thousands of fighters to defend the Syrian government at the peak of the civil war.

Some of his advisers recommended that he accept the indirect U.S. offer to sever ties with Iran in return for the lifting of sanctions, Barabandi said. But Assad held firm, he said, thinking he might get a better deal once President-elect Donald Trump was in office. As rebels raced south toward the Syrian capital, Iran began withdrawing its forces and Assad’s time ran out.

In the end, analysts said, it was the president’s intransigence, overlain with arrogance, that proved his undoing — speaking to a deeper failure to ever truly grasp the realities of his or Syria’s circumstances. “He was never the bright one in the family,” Azm said. “He missed so many opportunities because of his stubbornness.”

Claire Parker in Cairo contributed to this report.

By Liz Sly

Liz Sly is a correspondent-at-large covering global affairs. She has spent more than 17 years covering the Middle East, including the first and second Iraq wars. Other postings include Washington, Africa, China, Afghanistan and Italy.follow on X@LizSly