Making sense of this crazy world

For a very brief period, Bashar seemed to offer a liberal regime but he soon revived the authoritarian tactics of his late father’s administration. It would eventually lead to protests, that became an uprising or a revolution, and eventually a civil war; and that’s what our focus is for this episode.

Hafez Assad moved Syria ever closer to the Soviet Union (and then lost it). And he set out to position Syria as a regional power and himself as the leader of the Arab world, filling the vacuum left by Nasser, and that meant taking on Israel (or at least at first it did), it also meant rivalry with Saddam Hussein, and, as we have seen, it meant interfering in the Lebanon Civil War and, indeed, its occupation of Lebanon (so I won’t revisit that). But all this also meant that, one way or another, whether he wanted it or not, there would be a relationship with America.

The good, the bad and the downright ugly side of Hafez Assad's rule.

The fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime took us all by surprise. The armed coalition, led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), put an end to over fifty years of the Assad family’s rule of Syria. And I want to explore how first Hafez al-Assad, and then Bashar al-Assad, got to power and what they did in power. In other words, how did we get to where we are today?

A peaceful, people-led, revolution against Syrian occupation, Hezbollah attacks on Israel and another Israeli invasion of Lebanon. 

With the Israeli’s and the Christian Maronites both eager to cement their relationship and control Syria, and with Syria determined that they should be the leading player in Lebanon and so be the leading player in the Arab world’s settlement with Israel, and with the root of the problem – the question of a Palestinian state – unresolved – nothing was settled in Lebanon. Far from it.

Civil war broke out in Lebanon for a second time in 1975, partly as a result of the communal divisions in Lebanon but partly as a result of communal relationships with Syria and Israel, and because of the Arab world's conflict with Israel. But the consequences of the civil war would do nothing to ease the situation with regard to Israel.

In this, my last episode looking at the impact of the Cold War on the Middle East, I’m going to take us to the end of the Cold War and the part Afghanistan played in the Soviet Union's collapse.

Both America and the Soviet Union continued to build links with the region at every opportunity. But Iran and Iraq made it an unsettling, uncertain experience. 

I thought it important in this long series looking at the Middle East and how we got to where we are today, to include a look at how the Cold War affected what unfolded. And this episode will begin that look in the 1950s.