The end of an ideology.

IT IS CHEERING to reflect that, when Bashar Al Assad’s government finally collapses in Syria, the governing ideology known as Baathism will likewise undergo a massive setback—though whether Baathism will fade away without a trace is something we can doubt. Baathism is one of the last of the grandiose revolutionary ideologies of the mid-twentieth century—an ideology like communism and fascism in Europe (both of which exercised a large influence on Baathist thinking), except in an Arab version suitable for the age of decolonization. Its champions came to power not only in Syria but in Iraq, in both cases in the 1960s; and the consequences were not of the sort that leave people unchanged.

In Iraq, the Baath ruled for 35 years, chiefly under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, and this meant repeated military campaigns and acts of extermination against Iraq’s Kurdish population (Baathism is anti-Kurd), against Iran (Baathism, in its Iraqi version, is anti-Persian), against Kuwait, and against Iraq’s Shiite population, not to mention the protracted two-act war with the United States and its allies—from all of which the poor and suffering Iraqis will need a hundred years to recover. In Syria, the Baath has ruled for half a century, usually more shrewdly than Saddam. And yet, in Syria, too, permanent crisis has been the norm—the unending emergencies that derive from the Syrian Baath’s repeated wars against Israel and from the proxy wars using guerrilla armies and terrorists in Palestine and Jordan, together with the Baath’s intervention in Lebanon. And there is the history of Baathist mass executions and civilian massacres within Syria itself.

Even so, Baathism enjoyed for long decades a prestige almost everywhere across the region, with branch organizations in various countries. Baathism appeared to be, in the eyes of its admirers, the ultimate in revolutionary principle—the truest hope for a “resurrection” or “Baath” of the Arab people from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, regardless of the really-existing Baathist regimes. And all of this is going to mean that, soon enough, when the Syrian Baath finally tumbles from power, the Baath’s legacy will be triply visible.

The political and cultural landscape of the Middle East, post-Baath, will be pockmarked by blighted zones that might otherwise have been a prosperous Iraq and Syria, if only the Baathist doctrine had not destroyed those countries. A cloud of intellectual bafflement and paranoia will hover overhead, consisting of the confused thoughts of everyone across the region who, in the past, talked themselves into supposing that Baathism was a good idea. And more than visible will be the triumphant zeal of Baathism’s principal rivals in the matter of grandiose revolutionary ideology—the champions of the single Middle Eastern millenarian doctrine still standing, once the Assad regime has finally gone. These will be the Islamists.

BAATHISM IS A PRODUCT of the European 1930s. The doctrine’s founders were Syrian students who attended the Sorbonne in the ’20s and ’30s, took their readings seriously, and came away with two impulses. The students wanted to overthrow French and British colonialism in the Middle East. And they wanted to conduct the overthrow in a modern spirit of revolutionary reform. Only they never could decide which version of revolutionary reform might suit them best, and they spent the next few decades veering from one to another, such that oscillation became Baathism’s identifying trait.