Huset som Hafez al-Assad bygget står for fall. Det sier den kjente professoren, libanesiske Fouad Ajami. Han er ikke i tvil om at Assad-husets dager er talte og at dynastiet vil falle.

Han har nå skrevet bok om det syriske opprøret og få er bedre kvalifisert enn ham.

fra vaskeseddelen:

As Ajami explains, Bashar, the accidental inheritor of his father’s political realm, now had his own war. He had stepped out of his father’s shadow only to merge with it. But the house that Hafez Assad built, some four decades ago, is not destined to last.

Arabs are firm believers in nasab, inherited merit passed on from father to son, a nobility of the blood. So what mattered when a rebellion broke out in Syria in 2011 was the insight into the similarities and the differences between Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar. The father had rigged the succession, with fear completing the trick. Although the people fervently hoped that Bashar would open up the prison that Syria had become under his father, it was not to be.

In The Syrian Rebellion, Middle East expert Fouad Ajami explains how an irresistible force clashed with an immovable object: the regime versus a people who conquered fear to challenge a despot of unspeakable cruelty. Offering a detailed historical perspective, he shows how, for four long decades, the Assad dynasty, the intelligence barons, and the brigade commanders had grown accustomed to a culture of quiescence and silence. But Syrians did not want to be ruled by Bashar’s children the way they had been ruled by Bashar and their parents had been by Bashar’s father. This book tells how a proud people came to demand something more than a despotic regime of dictatorship and plunder.

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the co-chair of the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.