Some will argue from the title of this opinion that I am ignoring what the dictator Bashar Assad has done to Syria over the past 11 years, but the fact is that Assad's butchery in Syria since 2011 was carried out jointly by Putin's Russian army (in a country not bordering Russia) and Assad's Syrian army (in its own country).
In Ukraine, only Russian soldiers with a few Chechen mercenaries are leading the carnage of a much smaller and weaker neighboring country. Just as Hafez Assad did between 1973 and 2000 (when he died), then his son Bashar continued from 2000 through 2005 when his army was chased out by the people of Lebanon.
There is an uncanny resemblance between the two pairs of countries. Russia and Ukraine, and Syria and Lebanon.
An ideological dimension based on false historical narratives. For Putin, Ukraine has always been part of Russia, even before the Soviet Bolshevik ideology forcibly glued together a large number of countries around it (from the Central Asian nations like Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakstan... through the Caucasus nations like Armenia and Georgia...and the Baltic States of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia...to the East European countries of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and others).
For the Assad regime and for many Fascist Baathist Arab nationalists, Lebanon has always been part of Greater Syria, just as Kuwait, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and (for some nebulous reason) even the Greek-Turkish Cyprus are. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990-1991 for the same ideological imperialist reason of Arab ultra-nationalism that Putin is today invading Ukraine. Saddam Hussein wanted to force Kuwait "back" from its past as a British colony to its Arab present. Assad still wants to force Lebanon "back" from its 1921-1943 French mandate tutelage (which ironically Syria too was subjected to) to its glorious Arab present represented by how the Assads have ruled Syria, i.e. barbarity, brutality, repression, destruction and mayhem. According to the Baathist ideology of the Syrian regime, all those countries are not separate nations and do not deserve a life of independence and sovereignty.
For the coward Russian regime of Putin and his oligarchs, ruling Russia, stealing its wealth, and depriving its people of their basic freedoms are not enough. They must assassinate, repress and jail all dissidents to maintain their grip on power. They must reconquer what the Soviets lost in 1989. They claim that the relatedness of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, and the fact that both countries are for the most part Orthodox Christian are proof that Ukraine cannot be a separate nation. They ignore that the Russian Federation is itself composed of a number of ethnicities and languages, each of which is likely deserving to be a separate sovereign nation were it not for the brutal rule from Moscow that keeps them herded together.
For the coward Syrian regime of the Assads (in power since 1969), it is not enough to rule over the miserable lives of the Syrian people whom they pilfer to grow their own individual and sectarian power and wealth, they must assassinate, repress and jail all dissidents. They must reconquer the long lost mirage of an Arab empire that is defunct since the late 10th century, and just as the Russians do, the Baathists in Syria ground that ideology on two tenuous criteria : all the countries around Syria speak one form or another form of Arabic, and their populations are majority Muslim. Yet, Syria itself is a mosaic of ethnic and religious groups and does not deserve to be a nation.
Syria is a vast desert punctuated by cities, each with a different historical reference, religious identity and language. In fact, the Assad regime is merely the minority (10%) Alawite sect ruling by sheer brutality over the rest. The Alawites occupy the Mediterranean coast of Syria from the Lebanese border to the Turkish border. According to Wikipedia, Syrians have three identities: "Arab, Syriac, and Syrian. Many Muslims and some Arabic-speaking Christians describe themselves as Arabs, while many Aramaic-speaking Christians and some Muslims prefer to describe themselves as Syriacs or Arameans. Also some people from Syria, mainly Syrian nationalists describe themselves only as Syrians or ethnic Syrians. Most of the divisions in ethnic nomenclature are actually due to religious backgrounds".
Just as Putin and his regime never accepted a sovereign, independent, and prosperous Ukraine free of Russian hegemony, the Assad regime never accepted a sovereign, independent and prosperous Lebanon that emerged free from the Ottoman occupation as early as 1842 when Lebanon, just as Greece and Egypt had done, shook off Turkish rule and became an autonomous self-ruling entity that became independent in 1921. For the twenty years between the two world wars, both Lebanon and Syria were under a League of Nations (the ancestor of the UN) mandate managed by France. By 1943, Lebanon had evicted the French to become fully independent, while it took Syria another 3 years to obtain independence in 1946.
From that point in their respective histories, the two countries diverged enormously. Lebanon adopted a liberal and neutral posture in its economy and international relations. It prospered and became a shining example of coexistence, freedom and political stability found nowhere else in the Middle East. Throughout its modern history, even during the war waged against it by Israel, Syria and the Palestinian movements beginning in 1970, Lebanon saw peaceful transfers of power, with 22 presidents since 1926, of whom 15 since 1943. Meanwhile, Syria saw on average one military coup d'etat per year since its 1946 independence, with one dictator toppling and assassinating the previous dictator, until it all climaxed with one Hafez Assad who mounted the most brutal coup d'etat in 1969 which ensured the permanence of his regime until his death in 2000 when his son Bashar took over. In other words, Syria has had one dictatorship for 53 years, not unlike North Korea.
For the decades since their respective independence from France, Syria has never recognized Lebanon's right to exist, it refused to exchange embassies and diplomatic relations with it, it adopted the "one people, two states" mantra, it staged failed coups and closed its borders to pressure the Lebanese, it sent Palestinian terrorist groups (Yarmuk Brigade, Al-Saiqa, the Arab Liberation Army, etc.) to commit massacres in border villages, it engaged in smuggling of goods, weapons and mercenaries. The current territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is about the Shebaa Farms territory, a bald hilltop at the tri-border juncture between Lebanon, Israel and Syria. It is currently under Israeli rule, giving the terrorist Hezbollah organization a pretext to justify its existence and its warmongering "resistance". Yet, Shebaa's history is an interesting telltale of Syria's constant undermining of Lebanon. The Shebaa Farms were initially within Lebanon when the borders were delineated in the 1940s. In 1956, the Syrians dispatched a military force that killed the two Lebanese soldiers manning the hilltop and took it over. The Lebanese, unfortunately, did not bother to file a grievance with the UN, and Shebaa remained under Syrian custody until the 1967 and 1973 wars when Israel seized Shebaa from the Syrians. So technically, in any settlement, Israel must return the Shebaa Farms to Syria, even though legally it is Lebanese. But the Syrians refuse, despite repeated demands from the Lebanese, to officially return the territory to Lebanon, because that would compel Israel to withdraw from it. The reason? Syria and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah need the so-called Israeli occupation of Shebaa to maintain the justification of an occupied land in need of resistance and liberation.
.... continued in Pt 2
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