Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East

By Patrick Seale. University of California Press, 1988. 552 pp. $25.00.

Reviewed by Russell Warren Howe

When publishers decided they wanted short or "sexy" titles, the sub-title came back as the true explanation of a book. Patrick Seale of the London Observer sees the struggle for the Middle East as being, not between Washington and Moscow, or Tehran and Riyadh, but between Baghdad and Tel Aviv. This is the story that he tells through the prism of a biography of a "stubborn yet prudent" man who, like Egyptian presidents Anwar Al-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak and Turkey's Kenan Evren, reached distinction through the armed forces—because cadet school was the passport to education for poor peasant boys.

Like Mubarak, Hafez Al-Assad (Seale prefers one s) was a fighter pilot. He never saw action, but he did win a trophy for aerobatics. The skill is unexpected in one whose trademark has been caution. With, until recently, far fewer military pieces on the board than Israel, he has waited patiently for Israeli overreach (like that of the Ottomans in the area, or the Germans in Europe) to allow him to achieve his goals. A proud man, this secular Ba'ath politician and frustrated poet has borne international humiliation with Muslim patience. Last spring, in one of his final interviews with Seale before publication, he said with what must have been a sort of weary satisfaction: "I have always been a man of institutions."

The truth is perhaps that this foxy 9th child of an illiterate peasant's 11 children has never overreached to the same degree as the Americans, the Israelis, and the Palestinians. He has ridden the tortuous crests of Syrian politics, including those of Syrian-occupied Lebanon, which taken together resemble a Boston Brahmin's idea of a Polish wedding. He is also a veteran of pan-Arab political intrigues, with their often Shakespearean dimensions.

Empathetic Yet Critical

Seale's book is the empathetic but critical profile of a survivor who, although called the "Bismarck of the Middle East," is first and foremost an archetypical Arab chieftain from the mountains. He lacks the easy graces of the desert monarchs. He is instead as ascetic as a Sufi mystic.

Yet his charisma is that of a king. The Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia scuttled the first coup d'etat against him by simply returning from a foreign visit and ordering the rebels to surrender. When Assail lay ill with a heart condition in 1984, his youngest brother, Rifat, perhaps fearful that power would slip from the family's hands, tried to seize power. Assad, although tired and gravely ill, simply drove to Rifat's house without guards and challenged him. The conspiracy collapsed like a pricked balloon.

Assad puts a high value on loyalty and trusts only a few intimates—mostly fellow Alawite Shi'a, but also some non-Syrians who pose no threat and who are dependent on his grace and favor. He can be savagely brutal or Machiavellianly soft with opponents. A workaholic with little time for his wife and children, he seems like a mirror image of the new US secretary of state, James Baker III.

Assail vs. Arafat

The Syrian leader, as Seale makes dear, has committed mistakes. He has repeatedly tried to undermine Yasser Arafat's leadership by setting up puppet Palestinian leaders and organizations. The result has been to discredit the Palestinians Assail adopts, and to confirm Arafat as undisputed leader of Palestinians everywhere. Assad also shares with Yitzhak Shamir and Ollie North the dubious distinction of having supported Khomeini's Iran in the Persian Gulf war, and so on.

But Assad has often showed astonishing shrewdness, as, for instance, in the way he has played the Moscow card. For obvious geographic reasons, Moscow should be far more concerned with the area than is Washington. It's clear, however, that the Kremlin had to be cajoled into playing the sort of regional role which Kissinger believed the Soviets planned to play. After Israel had obligingly destroyed Syria's last-generation aircraft and missiles, Yuri Andropov felt compelled to give Assail a real air force and defense system, operated by Russians, and with a guarantee that Moscow would punish any attack.

But this is also the story of how Assad was duped by Israel into the 1967 war just as surely as was Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, with Syria being "the sprat to catch the Egyptian mackerel."

Seale relates the 1973 Ramadan war in detail how Sadat informed Kissinger of his limited "beachhead" objectives across the Suez Canal, and how Kissinger (in the final analysis, perhaps, an immigrant with mixed loyalties) betrayed this confidence to Israel, which then switched most of its forces to the Syrian front. With equal duplicity, Sadat had already deceived Assad by saying Egyptian forces would not stop until they had reoccupied the Sinai passes. Later, Sadat was to tell Assad that "Henry" had persuaded Israel to implement UN Resolution 242—not just withdrawing from Sinai, but also from the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.

The book gives the most complete detail to date of how the Mossad arranged for explosives to be found in the totebag of an El Al passenger in London in 1986, thanks to its penetration of an extremist group in Syria. The arrested Jordanian, Nizar Hindawi, had a record of working for the Mossad; but the episode embarrassed Damascus, as it was supposed to do.

Now, with chemical warfare a reality, Israel's illegal settlements in the occupied territories have become, potentially, that country's Achilles' heel. But Syrians and Israelis, as Kissinger once said, “are more alike than they care to admit” and Assad rejects optimism. He sees whoever is president of Egypt as Neville Chamberlain—or much as Chamberlain saw Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Russell Warren Howe is a Washington-based free-lance journalist who writes regularly for newspapers in the US and abroad. He is also the author of numerous books and articles on the influence of special interest groups on American politics.