I spent more than five years living in the Middle East, crossing nearly every border the region has to offer. The longest single chapter of that tenure was in Syria, decades before its descent into the recent catastrophe. The country I knew belonged entirely to Hafez al-Assad. It was an unambiguous police state, suffocating and watchful.
Like many young men, I carried an unspoken romanticism regarding the universal appetite for liberty. I was never activist material—temperamentally, I have always preferred quiet observation to public noise—yet I believed the regional autocracies were an unsustainable aberration. I looked forward to their collapse, assuming, with the lazy conviction of Western orthodoxy, that liberal democracy would naturally rush in to fill the vacuum.
A single evening in Damascus put an end to that conceit.
I was seated at the dinner table of a high-ranking Syrian military officer, surrounded by his family. The setting was civilized, hospitable, and warm. Inevitably, the conversation drifted into statecraft, and the dialogue turned toward the 1982 uprising in Hama. Mindful of my position as a guest, yet unwilling to abandon my convictions, I posed the question that Western sensibilities always demand: Could it not have been handled differently? Was the total, leveling violence truly unavoidable?
The officer looked at me and asked a single, clarifying question: How do you negotiate with an adversary whose operational mandate ends only when you are converted or dead?
It was not an evasion; it was an axiom. Political Islamism was never an aggrieved civil society movement seeking parliamentary compromise. It was, and remains, an absolute zero-sum ideology: total submission or eradication. There is no middle ground, no institutional bridge, no forum for mutual concession.
Assad’s regime answered that absolute demand with an absolute response: the utter destruction of the threat. It was brutal, pitiless, and morally repugnant by any standard of Western humanism. Yet the alternative was not a Nordic social democracy; it was an Islamic caliphate established thirty years ahead of its eventual, blood-soaked arrival under modern black flags.
We prefer to believe that every conflict possesses a tidy, non-violent equilibrium, if only the actors involved were sufficiently enlightened. History exhibits no such benevolence. When an ideology refuses the terms of secular coexistence, politics ceases and the cold mechanics of survival take over. It is neither noble nor comfortable, but the real world has never cared for our discomfort.