Great things were once expected of Bashar al-​​Assad.  When he took power in Syria in 2000, he was seen as a young reformer who had absorbed West­ern val­ues and would lead Syria out of his father’s dark shadow and into an era of lib­eral democ­racy. Unfor­tu­nately, all these dic­ta­tors’ sons have got­ten pretty good at fool­ing gullible West­ern­ers (see Saif Gaddafi’s PhD the­sis on the “legit­i­mate demo­c­ra­tic aspi­ra­tions of the Libyan peo­ple”) and the crack­down in Syria slammed down all of a year after Bashar took power in 2000. So much for great things.

Then the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks hap­pened, and Bashar al-Assad’s sins were sud­denly the least impor­tant pol­icy issue in the Mid­dle East. He wasn’t an Islamist and his régime was pretty far down the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive hit list. The Syr­ian régime made a show of coop­er­at­ing with the War on Ter­ror while serv­ing as an Iran­ian proxy against the United States and Israel, and we ulti­mately had big­ger things to worry about than al-Assad’s duplic­ity. And so things went for a while. Bashar al-​​Assad flew under the world’s radar for a decade, entrench­ing him­self as the Mid­dle East’s most bor­ing auto­crat, until the Arab Spring came along in 2011 and upended the order of the Mid­dle East. (more…)