The Syria Paradox
It took a month of protests to depose the president of Tunisia and 18 days to remove Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt. Libya took longer. Rebels there spent more than eight bloody months fighting Muammar el-Qaddafi before defeating him. But Syria — where protests began at roughly the same time as in Libya — remains in a vicious civil war, and the fighting seems very far from over. One reason for this is simple: Syria’s economy was designed to all but prevent a broad coalition from forming against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. This is, of course, awful news for most Syrians. But it also calls into question some Things We Thought We Knew About Revolutions — the most important being that countries with diverse economies and a growing middle class are supposed to be better at overthrowing despotic rulers than petrocracies like Libya or Iraq.
Before I visited Syria in 2003 and 2004, I expected it to look like North Korea with souks. But I was surprised to find that Damascus and Aleppo — the two major commercial centers — contain truly affluent neighborhoods. Many locals drove sports cars, wore fancy watches, ate at top-notch restaurants and generally made me feel like a broke hick. And I met a lot of people in the big cities who made a decent living as engineers, doctors, shopkeepers, even artists. They may not have been rich, but they led far more comfortable lives than folks I encountered in neighboring countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.