Edward Luttwak
The foreign busybodies in the State Department, Foreign Office and the French foreign ministry, who are already now pressing for the reconstruction of a unitary Syrian state, should reflect on the country’s history. Syria was never meant to function as a unitary state. Nor under Sunni Arab majority rule, as it is likely to now.
The distinct national identities of its Alawite, Arab Christian-Orthodox, Druze, Kurdish, Armenian, Ismaili and Arab Shia populations were all recognised under Ottoman rule. And when France obtained the territory in 1919, it strove to accommodate plural identities by creating two separate states: an Alawite one in north-west Syria and a Druze one in the south-east.
But when the French gave up their attempt to control Syria in 1946, a Sunni Arab, Shukri al-Quwatli, became the country’s president. He did not discriminate against the minorities, but he did send troops with Transjordan and Egypt to invade Israel in 1948 in the name of Sunni Arab solidarity. He had high hopes of conquering the Galilee, because the Syrians had tanks and artillery left behind by the French, while the Jews only had rifles, some machine-guns, and a couple of antique 1906 howitzers.
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