From Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East

By Patrick Seale

Many Arabs have a sense of unfair treatment by more powerful nations, but Syrians have one skin less than most and feel the wrongs done them more acutely. The new rulers bore the burden of a whole catalogue of frustrations: the European carve-up of their country, Zionist colonization of Arab land, disillusion with Nasser, the failed union [with Egypt], the failed party, a fear of foreign plots. These were Asad's disconcerting colleagues in the first cabinet of which he was a member.

To say he was an autocrate malgre lui is to do him more than justice because he had a powerful sense of knowing best. Yet he seemed also to have a hunger for democratic structures and gaye a great deal of care to his new-born institutions. Perhaps what came to tilt the balance toward autocracy was the dangerous times he lived in and the nature of Arab politics, essentially brutal joustings between individual leaders, each enjoying something like absolute power in his own country.

Camp David and the peace treaty transformed Israel's strategic environment. Always more than a match for all the Arabs combined, Israel had now neutralized the largest and most powerful Arab state and had become wholly unchallengeable. Freed from the threat of a two-front war, it faced no pressure to solve the Palestine problem nor to heed the angry clamor from Syria and other Arab states. To those who regarded peace between Egypt and Israel as a welcome breakthrough, Asad's fears were simply not comprehensible. Far from correcting Kissinger's work, President Carter had ended up completing it. And just as Sinai had cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars, so Carter now pledged further billions to secure the peace treaty, paying Israel to do what it desperately wanted to do anyhow.