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Assad’s Six Degrees of Collaboration

Nicholas M. Guariglia - 5/30/2007

While at Harvard University, the late social psychologist Stanley Milgram attempted to prove his “small world phenomenon” hypothesis to be true. From his ideas spawned the now widely known six degrees of separation concept of connectedness. There is some debate as to who ought to be granted full credit for the theory, as the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy likewise proposed this supposition earlier, but nevertheless the concept has more or less been empirically vindicated over time. Namely, any person or entity can be linked to any other person or entity through a chain of acquaintances or contacts using no more than five liaisons or intermediaries.

The recent spat between al Qaida-linked Palestinian terrorists and Lebanese infantrymen seems to validate this theory, even as we have been consistently reminded throughout this terror war –– of “bumper sticker” acclaim, according to John Edwards –– that those in the Mideast which have ideological or sectarian differences would never and could never collaborate against a common enemy. It is hard to say where this root fallacy came from, given it had been conventional wisdom, pre-9/11, that Arabists and Islamists worked together for decades.

Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad has been playing this gambit since he relinquished ophthalmology and took up autocracy. Upon his ascension to power after his murderous father croaked, Western press smothered the new despot with complementary praise hinged on an unsubstantiated hope he would “modernize” and “liberalize” Syria’s polity. European postmodernists saw Assad as a young, adolescently lanky doctor, formerly based in London, dressing in casual Western attire, walking around with his British-born and admittedly attractive wife Asma, and thought, “Gee, look at him, he can’t be that bad.”

Meanwhile, in the interim between his coming to the forefront and the war his regime has decided to wage, he and his family have arrested and tortured human rights activists like Kamal Labwani and Anwar al Bunni (friends of a friend, in the spirit of the six degrees of separation aforementioned), opted to assassinate democratic dissidents and members of parliament in Lebanon, turned a blind eye to (or proactively assisted) menacing saboteurs entering western Iraqi provinces to kill, and more, all the while stonewalling any international investigations into its transgressions.

The fighting underway between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese military exemplifies the degrees of collaboration I speak of, and the “big picture” our intelligence community ignores, or diplomats deny, and President Bush tries fruitlessly and inarticulately to explain. Fatah al-Islam is a loon organization, led by Shakir al Abssi, a Palestinian killer who was sentenced to death, alongside friend and collaborator Abu Musab al Zarqawi of Iraq fame, by the Jordanians for the death of American diplomat Laurence Foley. Abssi may or may not have joined the Iraqi insurrection, and the links between him and Zarqawi, or Fatah al-Islam and al Qaida proper, may or may not be concrete (but rather ideologically abstract).

But all of the minute details are meaningless if we are talking about grand strategy. The Syrian Ba’athists are aiding the Salafist-inspired Fatah murderers and, like the Iraqi Ba’athists which helped the al Qaida-linked GSPC in Algeria (amongst others), that seems to be enough to prove the point: just because the Ba’athists in Damascus are avowedly “secular” and have had their fair share of skirmishes with Islamists, does not mean they have not and are not helping Islamic fundamentalists and jihadist movements both within Sunni and Shi’ite camps.

This same standard needs to be applied everywhere in the gangland that is the Middle East. Saudis and al Qaidists, Syrians and Iraqis, Iranians and Iraqis, Kuwaitis and Iraqis, Kuwaitis and Palestinians, Sunnis and Shi’ites, autocrats and theocrats, Persians and Arabs, Arabs and Pashtuns, Wahhabis and Ba’athists, militiamen and warlords, Egyptians and Yemenis, Lebanese and Palestinians, Jordanians and Palestinians, secularists and religious radicals et. al. –– all have hated each other, fought each other, and subsequently killed each other in the past. And yet all will continue to cooperate and collude against common foes, real or perceived, in the future. Let’s accept that.

Case in point, Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al Sadr has just reappeared from hiding (in Iran) and has propagated rhetoric aimed to align with Sunni insurgents that does not seem to coincide with the sectarian nature of his militia which kills its Iraqi brethren. Left-leaning British papers recently quoted unnamed U.S. military officers in Baghdad which swore Tehran is planning for a summer offensive, using both Sunni and Shi’ite militant proxies, to force the United States to flee the Iraqi theater. Somali Salafists received expenditures from Khomeinists and “allies” like Mubarak alike. And in the Afghan campaign, British forces are stumbling across Iranian-made weaponry found in the cold hands of dead Sunni Taliban Schutzstaffel. Triangulation is the name of the game.

Therefore, this regional plague of trans-ethnic and trans-ideological collaboration is clearly not confined to Damascus. But Assad is the easiest takedown. His regime serves as a medium for the Iranian mullahs, a satrapy to arm Hezbollah, it has killed Lebanon’s brightest and bravest patriots, it crushes its own dissident movement, it laughs at international wrist-slapping, it assists Sunni groups in Lebanon affiliated with our sworn enemy al Qaida, it houses ex-members of the former Ba’ath clan from Iraq, it shelters some of the world’s most wanted men like Khaled Mashal, its weapons programs are not transparent and are cause for concern, it finances and arms Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and it allows 80 to 90-percent of suicide bombings in Iraq (according to the assessment of General Petraeus) to occur unopposed, as foreigners from all over use Syrian territory as a conduit to the Iraqi battlefield.

In the midst of a silly Syrian vote where he stands uncontested, it is long past time to apply legal and political pressure on Bashar al Assad, force him and his crony cousins into exile, and chalk up what should be a nonviolent and relatively easy victory.