Birth of a Myth: Winning Over Syria's Dictator with High-Tech?

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
17 June '10


The dispatch of an official U.S. high-tech delegation to offer the Syrian dictatorship more Internet access and other gizmos--in exchange for him abandoning his alliance with Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and now even Turkey!--reminds me of a little personal experience which shows a lot about Western naivete and how the media works nowadays.

After Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria, following his father's death, there was a huge amount about how he was a devotee of Internet and a real kind of twenty-first century "hip" guy when it came to hi-tech. The main, in fact the only, evidence of this was that he was head of the Syria Internet Society.

Being a bit of a researcher, I took 30 seconds and went to the site of the Syria Internet Society. Within another 30 seconds I noticed what was really going on. Yes, Bashar was the head of the Society, but the previous head had been his older brother, Basil.

Everyone knows that Basil was supposed to be the successor to their father, Hafiz, and that Basil was a real thug. But when he wrapped his sports car around a bridge pillar on the airport road near Damascus and was killed, Bashar inherited the family business. No one ever would have thought that Basil was a big Internet surfer. So that's the real story: Bashar was head of the Society not because he loved computers but because he was the dictator-in-training.

So here's the basis for the idea that Bashar is a liberal, high-tech loving guy: He became head of the Society because he was son of the dictator and the successor, not because he was an Internet surfing dude. I wrote about this in my book and elsewhere but, to my best knowledge, no one else has ever done this simple task or quoted my points on this matter.

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