INDIANA JONES AND THE ALAWITE APOSTASY

Last Monday (8/20), Senator Joe Lieberman came quite close, in the op-ed page of the Wall St. Journal, to publicly calling for regime change in Syria. 

He couched it as calling for a boycott of Damascus Airport by international airlines as it is "the main terminal for international terror," through which flow foreign suicide bombers to be sent into Iraq and kill Iraqi civilians and American soldiers.

Privately, he wants the "terrorist regime" of Bashar al-Assad removed from power, and is in close consultation on how to do so with the only folks possessing real cajones in the Bush White House, Dick Cheney and his staff.

This is giving the Little Lord Fauntleroys in the seventh floor of the State Department the vapors.  Condi has become their stooge, totally wimping out to the permanent (and permanently invertebrate) State bureaucracy.  Thus she is blocking any attempt of Cheney and Lieberman's to get Bush to approve a plan for regime change in Syria.

Now it looks like they've got allies, the richest and most influential allies in all the Middle East.  The Saudis have decided that the Bashar regime must go, and Cheney and Lieberman are only too happy to accept their help.

Finally, the Syrian dictatorship's Alawite Apostasy has caught up with it.

And that brings up Indiana Jones.

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jones' and his father's (played by Sean Connery) search for the Holy Grail takes them to the city of "Alexandretta", capital of "the Republic of Hatay."  From there, they must find the "Canyon of the Crescent Moon" where the Grail is hidden.

Most movie-goers think these names are movie make-believe.  Folks familiar with Middle East geography, however, know that Alexandretta is a real place, founded by Alexander the Great in 333 BC, and is alternatively given its Arabic name, Iskenderun (Iskendar is the Arabic rendering of Alexander), on some maps and atlases.

But not many know there was an actual Republic of Hatay, of which Alexandretta was the actual capital – and during the time in which the Indiana Jones movie was set: 1938. (Sorry, no Canyon of the Crescent Moon, though.) The ruler of Hatay is portrayed in the movie as accepting a bribe from the Nazis also searching for the Grail, a Rolls Royce Phantom II.

Here's the story of this unknown country, and its devastating effect on modern Middle Eastern history.

Alexandretta is on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea at a critical location – the entrance to the Syrian Gates, a narrow pass providing the easiest access from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia and Persia.  It thus became an important trading center for the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans.

When the Ottoman Empire was dismembered by the victorious Allies after World War One, the French carved out Syria for themselves as a "mandate," a League of Nations legalism meaning "colony."  Alexandretta served as the main port and entrepôt for Syria.

This made Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) upset.  He had created modern Turkey from the Ottoman ashes and prevented the Greeks, Armenians, Russians, and other neighbors from swallowing it up in the early 1920s.  For this, the grateful Turks called him Atatürk, Father of the Turkish Nation.

He was an extraordinary man who struggled to bring Turkey into the 20^th century.  But by the mid-1930s, the struggle was going stale and he cast about looking for a cause to rev up lagging Turkish nationalist fervor.  He settled on Alexandretta.  Claiming it and the surrounding area known as Hatay was predominantly ethnic Turkish, he demanded France cede it to Turkey.

But Alexandretta and Hatay was not mostly Turkish.  It was an ethnic mélange of Sunni Arabs, Orthodox Christian Greeks, Circassians, Armenians, Turks – and members of a Shia Arab sect called Alawites.  The majority of all these folks did not want to join Turkey.

So as France dithered, promising to give independence to Syria in 1936, then reneging, then hemming and hawing over Alexandretta, Kemal sent troops to the border, trucked in thousands of Turks for a "referendum," whereupon his agents announced the declaration of an independent Republic of Hatay.

The French acquiesced, granting Hatay independence from French Syria on September 7, 1938.  The state language was declared to be Turkish, the state flag personally designed by Kemal.  Turkish laws were adopted, and the Turkish lira as legal currency.

Kemal died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 57 on November 10, 1938.  His successors put an end to the Hatay charade on June 29, 1939, formally annexing and incorporating it within Turkey.

This shrunk Syria's Mediterranean coastline in half and deprived it of its only good port with inland access.  The Turkish seizure of Alexandretta also deeply embittered  Hatay's non-Turkish citizens – particularly the Alawites, who followed their own version of Shia Islam.

Most embittered was an Alawite named Zaki al-Arsuzi (1899-1968), who led an anti-Turkish resistance movement in Hatay he called al-Baath al-Arabi, Arab Resurrection.  Fleeing from Turkish annexation, he reformed this into a political party in Damascus with a nucleus of Alawite refugees from Alexandretta. 

After France granted Syria independence in 1946, the Baath Party publicly advocated a Pan-Arab unity and nationalism, but remained a mostly Alawite cabal.  That year, 1946, a 16 year-old boy from a prominent Syrian Alawite family joined the party, named Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000).

By 1966, al-Assad was both a general in the Syrian military and leader of the Alawite Baath.  He organized a coup d'etat, was named Minister of Defense, and by 1970 consolidated his power.  Hafez al-Assad's Baath Party established an Alawite Police State that continues to tyrannically rule Syria to this day.  Bashar al-Assad is, of course, Hafez's son.

Thus for over 40 years, Syrians have had their lives controlled and oppressed by a small religious sect, most of whom they consider to be heretical.  Alawites claim to be Shias, but mainline Shia Moslems view them as heretics.  Sunnis – and three-quarters of Syrians are Sunni – hold Shias in general as contemptible Islamic apostates, rejectors of true Islam, and Alawites even more so.

For 39 of those 40 years, the Saudis – who as the world's preeminent Sunnis possess a bottomless disgust for Shias – held their noses and cooperated with the Alawite al-Assad regime as fellow Arabs.  Then Bashar al-Assad had Rafik Hariri murdered.

Rafik Hariri (1944-2005) was a Sunni from Sidon, Lebanon who at age 21 went to Saudi Arabia to work for a construction company.  In four years he had his own company, expanding it from construction to banking, real estate, telco, et al with a business genius that made him the most successful entrepreneur in the Middle East by the time he was 34.

The Saudi Royals, with whom he now had deep friendships, made him a Saudi citizen in 1978 and appointed him ambassador to Lebanon, now in the midst of a nightmarish civil war promoted and paid for by Hafez al-Assad as a way for Syria to colonize Lebanon. 

But he persevered, as he did in business, until the Taif Accord ended the civil war in 1989.  Unfortunately this was at the cost of continued Syrian military occupation of Lebanon and Syrian support for a Shia anti-Israel terrorist group (the PLO is Sunni), Hezbollah.

In 1992, Hariri was elected Prime Minister of Lebanon, and put his billions to work in rebuilding his shattered country.  He put up with Syrian occupation until Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, then informed the Syrians they had to leave.  Hariri saw Hafez's son Bashar as a chinless weakling.  True enough, but he forgot to think about Assef Shawkat.

He's Bashar's brother-in-law and head of the Mukhabarat, the Syrian Secret Police.  You heard about him in Can Porter Turn Syria Orange? (2/05).  There you learned:

In 2002, Saddam Hussein paid Shawkat and his wife Bushra [Bashar's sister] several million dollars to hide the WMD technology everyone knew he had. That's why they've never been found – because they're in Syria, including chemical and biological samples, plus the tools to mass produce the toxins. Shawkat is also the principal provider of supply and support for Iraqi terrorists operating out of Syria. Tens of thousands of Shawkat's Mukhabarat secret police are omnipresent in Syria – and in Syria's colony of Lebanon.

Shawkat was not about to retreat from Lebanon as Hariri ever more vociferously demanded, and as that demand gained the ever more vociferous support of the Lebanese people.  So, on February 14, 2005 on the streets of Beirut, Assef Shawkat, with the approval of Bashar al-Assad, had Rafik Hariri assassinated.

Millions of Lebanese demonstrated in outrage and organized the Cedar Revolution to demand Syria's withdrawal.  With Saudi support, the UN passed Security Council Resolution 1559, forcing the withdrawal.  Finally, by late 2005 the Assad regime was on the ropes.

But Porter Goss, Bush's replacement of the disastrous George Tenet as CIA Director, never got the chance.  Three days after Hariri's murder I  wrote Can Porter Turn Syria Orange?  Fifteen months later (5/06) I sadly had to write about the CIA Weasels' victory in Porter and Casey. 

In the meantime, Bashar and Assef Shawkat made a deal with the Persian devil himself, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Money, weapons, and Pasdaran (Iranian Revolutionary Guard) soldiers began pouring into Syria.  The Alawite Assad regime was rescued – at the cost of becoming a colony of Shia Iran.

Then Bashar added Alawite insult to Sunni injury.  In August of last year, on the heels of what he viewed as his personal victory over Israel via his Hezbollah in Lebanon, he referred in a press interview to Saudi King Abdullah and Egyptian President Mubarak as "half-men." 

That tore it for the Saudis.  An insufferably insulting sect of despised heretics has converted a Sunni Arab nation into a colony of the greatest and most dangerous Moslem heretics of all, Persian Shias.  For as much as Sunnis despise Shias, Arabs despise Persians.  For the Saudi Royals, it's an intolerably treasonous double-whammy of Alawite Apostasy.

That's why they are talking with Cheney's people on how to best effect regime change in Syria.  Of course, the most obvious first move is to take out Assef Shawkat.  The giant problem is that the CIA is hopelessly incompetent to do so, or put any other measures of regime destabilization in operation.

Cheney and Lieberman's ability to provide direct US assets is thus limited.  So they are suggesting to the Saudis that they consider working with someone else who can help:  the Jewish Indiana Jones called Mossad. 

Do the Saudis want to end the Alawite Apostasy bad enough to work with the Israelis to do so?  Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman have asked one of the most pregnantly interesting questions of recent times.