Last week, time collapsed. Bashar al-Assad’s fall recalled scenes across the region from the start of the Arab spring almost 14 years ago. Suddenly history felt vivid, its memories sharpened. In fact it no longer felt like history. Scenes that it seemed we would never see again – of crowds thronging the squares; the obscene riches of despots exposed, their fortresses stormed, their iconography desecrated – unlocked a familiar, almost sickening sense of possibility. Of giddiness, of horror at what fleeing dictators had left in their wake, and of hope. Syria’s long revolution – the death, torture, imprisonment and exile that Assad’s crushing of it unleashed – makes its successful end bittersweet. The price was so high, which makes its spoils even more dear.
The moment is also different in another way. In those 14 years, other revolutions across the region either unravelled or resulted in the retrenchment of dictatorial regimes under new management. And so that sense of untrammelled optimism that followed the fall of that first crop of dictators is tempered by some wariness of what comes next. But it can and should be a productive wariness rather than a reason for despair. Because what Syria benefits from now is an understanding of the fragility of this period. To those of us who experienced it before in other countries, it felt like a time when the momentum of revolution was unstoppable and cleansing. It had a kinetic energy that swept away the old systems to be replaced by new administrations, armed with good intentions and popular support, that would simply figure it out.
