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Fantastic insight into understanding Syria and its conflict within historical context. Sad that there is no follow-up text to the current conflict -- the author, a brilliant scholar, passed away last year. Can't wait to start digging into his other 30 books - Barry Rubin was prolific and fair-minded when it came to topics about the Middle East.

This book is in the style of academic books on the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany--the anatomy of a dictatorship. Rubin details early Syrian politics, the rise to power as sole dictator of Hafez al-Assad and then the transfer of power to his son Bashar al-Assad. For those wishing to understand the internal dynamics of Syria this appears to be quite a good guide. I would urge caution, however, in reading the chapter on relations with Israel. Rubin writes with certainty and conviction, and some persuasion, that Ba'athist Syria is incapable of making peace with Israel. But he writes that Israel offered to return all of the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace and Assad turned Israel down. This is not true. Rabin made the offer provided that Syria was willing to offer full peace in exchange. But Peres broke off talks in the early spring of 1996 because Syria refused to condemn a terrorist attack and Barak wanted to adjust the border when his final offer was made to Assad by Clinton in March 2000. Dennis Ross blamed Assad's rejection of the offer on Assad's focus on assuring a smooth succession before his impending death from cancer. So Rubin's thesis regarding Israeli-Syrian peace has yet to be fully tested, contrary to what he writes. But I still urge those interested in Syria and Middle East peace to read this book.

This is a great work about Syria and a must if you want to understand more about the Middle East.This book is a no holds barred kind of account in which the author just tells it like it is.The book gives you a very good look of a regimen that feeds off the fear of his people and just wants to consolidate his power without regard for any consequences.The book is easy to read and understand since the author writes in a simple and easy manner without compromising substance or importance.Just a great book for anyone interested in the Midddle East.

The title of this book should have been, "A Jewish Perspective on Syria" The truth? No history pre 1945. No political perspective from a Syrian point of view or Lebanese for that matter.
No mention of motives. Why Syria is the way it is or why the government does what it does. Rubin sounds like a bully in the school yard calling Hafiz, Bashar, Iran, Hizballah, Hamas, Kurds, Nasser and others "tinpot dictators", comic-villians that just runaround for no reason blowing people up. While saying NOTHING about the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others.
Double standards, no in-depth research or historical perspective is why this book is a poorly written editorial on "why Syria sucks".
Instead of buying this book just turn on Fox News, you will get the same information and you will save a couple of dollars.

I study the Middle East extensively and Syria makes up about 80% of my studies. That being said this is by far the worst of them all. Rubin works in Israel and his book was funded with Israeli money and it is exactly that, paid propaganda. His extremely biased assumptions are told as fact and the history of Syria is distorted greatly to the point of recreation just to fit his mold. There are very legitimate complaints about the state of Syria but 99% of the one Rubin bring up are just ridiculous and unfounded. If you would like to read a good book about Syria that is not overly academic in nature I would recommend "Inheriting Syria, Bashar's Trial by Fire." Don't waste your money on this book, it is truly the biggest waste of $10 I have made in a while and I am a college student so you can imagine I waste $10 randomly a lot

Why have decades of well-intentioned diplomacy been so ineffective in moderating the stance of the Syrian regime? It has been because diplomats have not fully understood the interests of the regime, says Dr. Barry Rubin. However, the Assads' intransigence to overtures for peace is logical when their actual interests are understood, he explains in The Truth About Syria. The bottom line is that their interests are not peace, regional stability, an open or free society, or economic development for Syria. Their interests are to stay in power. Peace, democracy, and economic success for Syrians would spell the end of the Assad regime, and the Assads know it.

The Assads would not be elected by Syrians in a fair democratic election. Economic success for the masses in Syria would empower the people, making them less dependent on the government, which is the main employer in Syria, and give the people the means and time to rise against the regime. And as for peace, if they were to have it, the Syrian regime would no longer have the alleged need for the "resistance" as their excuse to suppress all dissent within Syria.

The Assads mastered the technique that other Arab dictators and Islamists have used, whipping up hatred of a fiendish external enemy -- America and Israel -- through indoctrination of children in schools, use of sermons in mosques, and saturation of their media with anti-Western and antisemitic propaganda. They used this to divert attention away from their own corrupt and oppressive governments. They have used it as an excuse for maintaining a permanent state of emergency in Syria for the last 50 years. It is an Orwellian police state where critical discussion about the regime is tightly controlled. Syrians brave enough to criticise the regime are branded Zionist spies, their career is over, or they are imprisoned or worse, they "suicide" --i.e., are murdered by the police.

To preserve their need for the external bogeyman the Syrian regime has thwarted peace in the Middle East in every way they can. The regime supported PKK terrorists against Turkey, torpedoed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process multiple times, supported Hizballah oppressing the Lebanese and fighting Syrian proxy wars against Israel, they murdered Lebanese leaders and milked Lebanon of its wealth, supported Islamist insurgents destabilizing Iraq, and so on--making Syria one of the major state sponsors of terrorism and mayhem in the world.

Syria's "pan-Arab" ideology is a mixture of Arab nationalism, socialism, and racism against Jews, and is the modern face of that old European synthesis called national socialism -- i.e., it is Nazism. In recent decades, the Assads added a veneer of Islamism in an attempt to gain Islamist sympathy. This is despite the fact that the Alawites, the minority sect the Assads and most of the rest of the Syrian oligarchy come from, are not considered Muslims by many. Mainly for political reasons the Assads opted to portray themselves as Shiite Muslims, and align with the Shia axis (Iran and Hizballah), rather than the Sunni one (the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda).

However, the Assads have been unable to stem the rising tide of radical Sunni Islamism in Syria, which has a majority Sunni population. Although the book was written in 2008, the last chapter is prescient, because Dr. Rubin foresaw that the Islamists would likely be a major challenge to the regime, and that civil war appeared to be threatening.