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Yeah, this mirrors my impression. It was unequivocally a controlled society : one simply didn't speak about the regime in anything less than absolutely glowing terms. The threat of the secret police was persistent.

As far as the people go, your odds of being hustled in Syria were pretty high (but not any worse than, say, Thailand) - other than that I totally agree wrt the westernization and general pleasantness.

I don't think it's really possible to argue the country is in any way better off than it was before the insurrection. I don't want to trivialize the experience of living in a police state, but there are worse things in this world.

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I was in Syria in 2010 (backpacked around Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra, also hitchhiked across the border from Baalbek/Lebanon to Homs). At the time, I found it rather similar to experiences in South-Eastern European countries around 2000 [1]: friendly, curious, cynical, indifferent, defiant, ambitious. You could feel something was about to change, but I never expected this :(

[1] I lived in Bulgaria 2003-2006. Sorry to generalize so broadly.

    I don't think it's really possible to argue the
    country is in any way better off than it was 
    before the insurrection.

The question is then, what would have been a better solution? Surely as long as Assad was ruling they were stuck (at best) at a local maximum and would have never transitioned to a free democracy without overthrowing the current government.

But aren't they stuck in abyss now? If that's the choice, maybe it wasn't a good plan after all.

The current situation is not a stable state, at some point one of the combating sides will win or the country will split into several independent states.

I don't think it will ever recover to pre-war levels. Not in our time.

The combating sides include outside parties, so the war could continue until every Syrian is dead and then beyond even that.

   as long as Assad was ruling

Assad's secular dictatorship is massively preferable to ISIS rule, especially to the 25% of the Syrian population that are non-Sunni.

Sigh, it seems so surreal now that the Arab Spring was once cheered on by the whole world.

Edit: word

The less Arab revolutions were stomped on, the more favorable was the outcome. The progression from Tunisa through Egypt and Lybia to Syria is quite evident.

What's really surreal is so many people in the (still relatively free) West denying basic agency to their fellow human beings in the Middle East.

> so many people in the (still relatively free) West denying basic agency to their fellow human beings

Because there's a lot of cynicism with charities and foreign aid. There is an active campaign here in Britain to reduce the latter and anecdotally, I have friends and relatives who refuse to donate to aid agencies because they believe that the whole thing is a sham.

Sure there's bureaucracy, but most of them are genuinely hardworking and already operating on shoestring budgets...

You could point them to clearinghouses like CharityNavigator [0] (which is probably US-centric) that rate the charities on things like how much of their donations go to administration.

The short of it is that one can donate to Oxfam, Save the Children or Medecins san Frontieres and remain confident that >95% of funds raised go to direct relief efforts.

[0]https://www.charitynavigator.org/

Agency as having their own interests and following their own agenda, it has nothing to do with charity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(sociology)

For example the view professed here by you and the GP, that Arabs should have quietly suffered in their dictatorship without right to dissent, is denying the agency.

Too many people believe in the movie version of the American revolution.

God I agree, can you imagine how Ethan Allen would be covered today? I don't know enough to have a side in the Syria conflict, but man, the Green Mountain Boys weren't so far off from a lot of modern non-state actors.

Google tells me he's a furniture store these days.

(I'm a Brit, so my knowledge of the American Revolution is cobbled together from popular media, Sid Meier's Colonization, Wikipedia, anti-colonialist literature, and a trip to Boston. The latter led me to believe it was mostly about lobsters. This may or may not be more accurate than what's taught in US schools)

I agree, but that wasn't my question - can Syria have something better than Assad eventually, and how do you get to it without overthrowing Assad?

Assad eventually dies, probably of old age.

Current Assad is already the son of the previous dictator.

Can we get his children interested in programming or something?

bashar started off as an american-educated dentist

There was a lot of high hopes in Israel when he succeeded his father, that his rule would be pro-western.

Assad is an ophtalmologist with a British spouse. Didn't seem to help much.

You can eventually "sublimate away" a hereditary ruling family; that's what lots of European countries have done. In some cases (like Pinochet or Franco), the ruling dictator simply accepts there is no point in continuing and just dies away without bestowing the country on his children.

People tend to forget that Middle-Eastern countries are all pretty young from an institutional perspective. Before the mid-XX century they did not exist in forms resembling the current ones. Ottoman collapse, Arab consolidation and general decolonisation were fluid processes that sprung (or were forced to spring) very complex entities with all sorts of growing pains.

> In some cases (like Pinochet or Franco), the ruling dictator simply accepts there is no point in continuing and just dies away without bestowing the country on his children.

Yeah that's not what happened in Franco's case. He appointed Juan Carlos to succeed him as King of Spain. Juan Carlos was crowned after Franco's death, and decided to turn the country into a democracy. So we got lucky in that sense.

For all of Franco's troubles, the conclusion was basically foregone when he appointed as heir a member of the royal family. Juan Carlos's father had long accepted an evolution into a constitutional monarchy should he ever regain the throne, as an inevitability; any smart person in JC's shoes would have seen the writing on the wall and would have acted in the same way, imho. I don't think it was luck, the forces in motion were already there; in a Cold War setting, a Franco-less Spain would have been subject to infighting between different franchist groups and would have suffered infiltration from Washington and Moscow, with the risk of a new civil war. A transition to a more legitimate government was the only way to reduce instability, it simply couldn't be done with Franco alive. South-American countries went through similar transitions at one point or the other.

> any smart person in JC's shoes would have seen the writing on the wall and would have acted in the same way, imho

I disagree. As evidenced in the 23-F coup, the armed forces were either opposed to democracy, or loyal to the king. If Juan Carlos had wanted to remain an absolute monarch, all the machinery of the state would have kept turning as usual. The same way it did during 30 years of dictatorship during the Cold War.

One suggestion has been that Assad gets help with fighting ISIS on condition that he participates in fair, open, democratic and internationally monitored elections as soon as Syria is pacified.

As far as I am aware this was discussed. I'm not sure (please correct me if I'm wrong) but I seem to remember that it was not Assad who rejected this scheme.

There's also the rebels, not only ISIS.

And what would be the consequence of him not complying after the fact?

And here we have the last 70 years of United States foreign policy in a nutshell.

> United States foreign policy

Western foreign policy.

And in many ways extending back well into the time of European Colonial powers carving out territory and promoting the interests of more friendly tribes/ethnicities to maintain stability and keep the money flowing.

I suppose this kind of question can only be answered in hindsight. If indeed there is a transition to a free, stable democracy, I suppose we could argue that what happened was ultimately worth it. But I don't know if such a thing is likely to happen.

It seems quite possible to me that all this turmoil will lead to another local maximum that isn't much better, and perhaps even worse, than the previous one.

So basically they're eternally condemned to live in either a failed state or a harsh dictatorship?

Afghanistan used to be a normal country in the 70s by Middle Eastern standard. Not too different from Iran, Iraq, or Syria of those days.

It hasn't recovered for over 40 years.

Iraq doesn't seem like it will recover any time soon.

If it's a free democracy we're after, we should get rid of the western double standard provided to other states that had Arab Springs which were violently suppressed by their undemocratic governments. Such as Saudi Arabia[0], Bahrain[1] and Yemen[2]. I don't remember hearing about rebels being armed, no fly zones being established and missiles being launched by western states in these countries.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9312_Saudi_Arabian_...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahraini_protests_of_2011

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Crisis_(2011%E2%80%93pr...

Generally I agree, but the West's double-standard does at least benefit some countries, such as Tunisia.

Also, even support for Syria is based to a great degree on the Western nations' own interests and not those of the Syrian people. Most of the West's involvement is to destroy ISIL and to contain Iran and Russia.

There was no credible possibility that the Saudi Arabian government, for example, would be overthrown; there was nobody for the Western nations to support. If there was a credible possibility, of course the Western nations might have decided supporting the Saudi rulers was more important, as they have many times in the past, and portrayed the rebels as terrorists.

Finally, it all begs the question: Revolutions are very risky; often the outcome is worse than the starting point, with many dead, a generation in ruin, and no improvement in government. When are they worthwhile? How can they be made more likely to obtain worthwhile outcomes?

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