Walking through the burned-out shell of the British embassy in Libya in the autumn of 2011, I was asked by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen what I thought the future would hold for Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Syrian counterpart, Bashar al-Assad. I said I didn’t see how he could survive the upsurge of popular rage, sparked by the brutal torture and murder of civilian protesters – including 15 young boys – by his security forces in the southern Syrian town of Daraa. I was wrong about the timing. But it turns out I was right about the principle.
Of course, if you wait long enough, any prediction can come true. At the time, I genuinely thought that Gaddafi’s fall would act as a spur to others. And in a way it did. But it also acted as a salutary reminder for dictators of the costs of weakness – and of wishful thinking for Western policymakers. Gaddafi ended up being dragged out of a drainage pipe and viciously tortured before being dispatched by a bullet to the head. Bashar al-Assad clearly decided he wasn’t going to meet the same fate – especially as no one was offering him a choice. So he doubled down on violence against his own countrymen and women, calculating that this would provoke extreme violence in return, especially if he primed it by releasing the most extreme Islamists his regime had locked up. The world’s attention would then be diverted. And amid the wreckage of the Arab Spring his form of securitised brutality would come to seem like the lesser threat in the face of jihadi savagery, then being used as a tactic by al-Qaeda and later on steroids by the Islamic State.
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