It took a month of protests to depose the president of Tunisia and 18 days to remove Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt. Libya took longer. Rebels there spent more than eight bloody months fighting Muammar el-Qaddafi before defeating him. But Syria — where protests began at roughly the same time as in Libya — remains in a vicious civil war, and the fighting seems very far from over. One reason for this is simple: Syria’s economy was designed to all but prevent a broad coalition from forming against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. This is, of course, awful news for most Syrians. But it also calls into question some Things We Thought We Knew About Revolutions — the most important being that countries with diverse economies and a growing middle class are supposed to be better at overthrowing despotic rulers than petrocracies like Libya or Iraq.

Before I visited Syria in 2003 and 2004, I expected it to look like North Korea with souks. But I was surprised to find that Damascus and Aleppo — the two major commercial centers — contain truly affluent neighborhoods. Many locals drove sports cars, wore fancy watches, ate at top-notch restaurants and generally made me feel like a broke hick. And I met a lot of people in the big cities who made a decent living as engineers, doctors, shopkeepers, even artists. They may not have been rich, but they led far more comfortable lives than folks I encountered in neighboring countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

Syria’s economy is, within the context of the Middle East, unusually diverse. Agriculture, which employs roughly half the rural population, contributes around 20 percent to gross domestic product. Oil represents another 25 percent. Before the crisis, tourists — especially Arabs, but also some Europeans and the occasional American — visited its beautiful, ancient cities and seaside towns. While it has never been a major global player in manufacturing, Syria has a modest industrial sector that churns out clothes, packaged foods, beverages and, lately, inexpensive cars. Lastly, the country has major phosphate deposits, a mineral that’s in increasing demand as a fertilizer.

When the Baath Party took command of Syria in 1963, its leaders intended to centralize control of the economy, much as Stalin did in Russia or Mao in China. But it didn’t work. The Alawite ethnic and religious minority, which eventually assumed leadership of the party, was made up of poorly educated people from mountain villages who “knew nothing about running a country or an economy,” says Joshua Landis, a pre-eminent Syria watcher and a professor at the University of Oklahoma. The Alawites, he notes, had been given a role by the French colonial government in the military precisely because they had few ties to the majority Sunnis in the big cities: “They were very unsophisticated, and they didn’t have a deep community of cosmopolitan people from which to draw.”