In the previous thirteen chapters of this series we remembered the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War; the course of the war itself; the breakdown in Iraq’s relations with its coalition allies and with the United States in the war’s aftermath; the chain of events leading to the Gulf War; the start of the Gulf War itself; Saddam Hussein’s desperate efforts to maintain power as his military forces disintegrated in the face of coalition military pressure during Desert Storm; the ultimate collapse of his regime in the final days of the war; the manhunt for the fallen tyrant; Saddam’s trial and eventual execution; the political and social problems that confronted Iran’s people in the early years of the post-Gulf War era; the Islamic Revival Party’s controversial stance towards Iran’s ethnic minorities during the late 1990s: and the Mousavi government’s role in providing sanctuary for thousands of political refugees during the “Syrian Spring” of the year 2000. In this installment we’ll look at the collapse of Syria’s Baathist regime and the capture of Syrian dictator Hafez el-Assad.

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With Saddam Hussein executed, Hafez el-Assad under arrest, and Khomeini’s old theocratic regime in Iran a distant memory, an old U.S. adversary from the Reagan era would re-emerge as a threat to Western interests in the Middle East: Muammar Khadafy’s Libya. As one of the Arab world’s leading oil producers, Libya was one of the richest countries in the region-- and it used that wealth to finance acts of terrorism all over the globe. When George W. Bush was inaugurated as President of the United States in January of 2001, he told his national security advisor Condolezza Rice he was “tired of swatting flies” and wanted to take the battle against terrorism right to Khadafy’s own backyard. With that in mind he laid out a no-nonsense agenda for containing and then dismantling the Libyan dictator’s radical regime.

The Bush Administration had a three-pronged strategy in mind for putting an end to Khadafy’s state-sponsored terrorism. The first prong was economic: through a series of sanctions and boycotts the administration sought to cripple Libya’s oil industry, the Khadafy regime’s primary lifeline and source of revenue for its brutal acts against opponents both at home and abroad. The second prong in the Bush strategy involved lending clandestine aid to dissident groups inside Libya who were seeking to pressure the Khadafy regime into making way for a more democratic government. But it was the third prong that would be the most significant and controversial: it made provisions for military action against Libya if the other two prongs of the strategy didn’t have the desired effect.

Bush’s critics on the left accused him of fear-mongering at best and conspiracy to commit unprovoked aggression at worst; from their perspective his campaign to neutralize Khadafy’s regime was little more than an attempt to distract the American public from the domestic problems facing them. Nor was the political right unanimously in favor of conducting large-scale military operations against Libya-- at least one nationally prominent conservative writer suggested in a February 2001 guest editorial for The American Spectator that the aim of neutralizing Khadafy could be just as easily achieved, and at much less cost in American lives, by dispatching a Special Forces or Navy SEALs contingent to arrest him under the war crimes provisions of the Geneva Convention. The response from Spectator readers to this idea was, to say the least, divided; the magazine’s editorial offices got buried in an avalanche of letters both pro and con on the subject of using special ops units to bust Khadafy. So many e-mails were sent to the Spectator website that the site’s central server nearly crashed as a result of the strain. And the volume of snail mail correspondence in reaction to the Khadafy editorial was nearly as plentiful-- Spectator would report a 65 percent spike in hand-delivered letters received by the magazine’s central offices in the weeks immediately following the publication of the editorial.

    But while Spectator readers and political pundits might have been at odds over whether military action should be taken against Khadafy, the general public was far less uncertain on that score. In a Gallup poll of 10,000 people taken just after President Bush took office, at least 72 percent of those surveyed told pollsters they would support military operations to topple the Khadafy dictatorship-- and of that number 58 percent agreed such operations should be mounted whether or not other countries approved of them. That wasn’t to say the White House was going to totally disregard international opinion; in fact, at the time the Spectator editorial went to press Bush’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was mounting a full-court press to persuade U.S. allies in the Middle East and Europe to get on board with the idea of military strikes on Libya if economic sanctions didn’t dislodge the Khadafy dictatorship.

The left-leaning political magazine The Nation accused the Bush Administration of engaging in what its editorial board described as “schoolyard bullying” against ordinary Libyans, but the White House defended its hard-line stance as a vital necessity for defending U.S. interests abroad and securing freedom for the people of Libya. Bush’s argument and resolve were strengthened in March of 2001 when Libyan gunboats fired on and damaged an unarmed British tanker that had been en route to the Suez Canal when it was attacked. In a press conference at the White House East Room the day after the attack, the president bluntly warned Khadafy that any further attacks by Libya on Western vessels would be regarded by Washington as an act of war against the United States and dealt with accordingly; he pointed to the Libyans’ unprovoked firing on an unarmed commercial vessel as evidence of the Khadafy regime’s unrelentingly hostile nature the necessary to take a firm stance against it.

If any doubts lingered in anyone’s mind that Bush was dead serious in his intention to thwart Khadafy, those doubts were likely squashed by the April 2001 deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan to the Gulf of Sidra. Just as the carrier’s namesake had directed the USS Nimitz to “show the flag” in the gulf thirty years earlier, so now was Bush dispatching the Reagan to the Mediterranean to give Khadafy a crystal-clear signal of what he could expect if continued to sponsor anti-American and anti-Western violence. It was a signal which Khadafy apparently missed; no sooner had the Reagan and its accompanying task force taken up patrol stations twelve miles off the Libyan coast than Libyan-funded terrorist cells attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the bus system in metropolitan London. China, a country which was having its own difficulties with the United States due to an incident in which a Chinese jet fighter had collided with a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane, tried to convince Khadafy to break ties with the ringleaders of these cells before it was too late only to be rebuffed by the notoriously mercurial ruler.

Even if he had been inclined to follow Beijing’s advice, it would likely have done him little good at that point; enraged by what the New York Daily News editorial page denounced as “the most horrific and evil acts of mass murder since the Holocaust”, the U.S. and British governments resolved once and for all to wage war on Khadafy until he either capitulated or died. Egypt, Libya’s neighbor and Khadafy’s most bitter adversary within the Arab world, opened up its air bases and its naval facility at Port Said for use by the U.S. and Great Britain as staging areas for the impending military strike against the Khadafy regime. Code-named Operation Deliverance, the campaign would involve a total of twenty-one countries in a direct role and twelve others in a peripheral capacity.

On June 3rd, 2001 the collective armed strength of those countries smashed its way across Libya’s border with Egypt in the first phase of Operation Deliverance. Off Libya’s Mediterranean coast, warships fired salvo after salvo of cruise missiles at vital strategic targets across the country; simultaneously, American and British special forces teams in the Libyan hinterlands assisted anti-Khadafy rebels in launching a series of guerrilla attacks against key industrial facilities as well as communications centers. An enraged Khadafy went on Libyan state TV to threaten U.S. and allied forces with “utter annihilation”, but that threat was more bluff than reality-- many of his soldiers either broke and ran at their first sight of the invasion force, or defected to the rebel side out of disillusionment with the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution of Libya.

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Within four days after Operation Deliverance commenced U.S. and allied forces were already 65 miles inside Libya; back in Damascus, meanwhile, the special tribunal organized to try Hafez el-Assad for crimes against humanity was beginning to line up witnesses for their first week of hearings. The deposed Syrian dictator promised “legions of true patriots” would take to the streets to free him from prison and restore him to power, but those legions would never materialize. If anything he was essentially “thrown under the bus” by his onetime followers; out of either a desire to save their own necks or genuine regret at the part they’d played in tyrannizing their fellow Syrians, wave after wave of former Baathists testified against Assad, including some of his own former cabinet ministers.

The Assad trial was closely watched not just in Syria but all over the Middle East; the tribunal also attracted a great deal of attention from the West, particularly in the White House, where Bush’s foreign policy advisors were already beginning to discuss what kind of legal framework should be used for a post-Operation Deliverance trial of Khadafy if or when the Libyan dictator was captured. Perhaps the only figure in the trial to cause as much controversy as Assad himself was his chief defense counsel, former United States attorney general and committed far leftist Ramsey Clark, who in his opening statement to the court asserted that Assad had been the victim of a U.S.-Israeli conspiracy and the accusations the deposed Syrian ruler had sanctioned numerous atrocities against his own citizens were nothing more than a CIA-orchestrated smear campaign.

Clark’s assertions didn’t sit well with the prosecution, or with the scores of witnesses who were called to testify against Assad. And they certainly did nothing to ingratiate the ex-U.S. Attorney General with the chief judge of the tribunal, who in a fit of revulsion toward Ramsey threatened to hold him in contempt for the incendiary rhetoric he had used in his opening statements. When Ramsey ignored the threat and continued to spout his conspiracy theories in the midst of cross- examining prosecution witnesses, he was summarily arrested and spent two full days in a Baghdad jail cell for his troubles. No sooner had he been released from that cell than he put himself at risk of being sent right back to it by getting into a confrontation with one of the deputy prosecutors.

By the time the defense was ready to begin presenting its case three weeks after the prosecution rested their own, the tribunal had become so irritated with Clark’s bizarre rants that a few people were beginning to question who would wind up on the gallows first, Assad or his chief defense counsel. One enterprising Damascus resident ran a secret betting pool offering odds on who would be the first person other than Assad to be executed when the tribunal finished prosecuting former Baathist regime officials; Ramsey Clark was the heavy favorite at 6-2. (Assad’s son Bashar, a colonel in the Syrian army before the Baathist regime collapsed, was the second favorite at 5-1.)

The defense’s case was, to put it mildly, weak. Ramsey Clark had next to nothing to back up his spurious claims his client had been framed by a U.S.-Israel conspiracy; he certainly had little proof that Assad hadn’t ordered or at least sanctioned the atrocities committed by his military and security forces during his rule over Syria. And as the prosecution relentlessly attacked inconsistencies in the deposed Baathist dictator’s testimony, his already slender chances of escaping the gallows declined still further...

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...vanishing altogether when a young woman who’d been raped by agents of Assad’s security forces and previously testified for the prosecution was recalled to the stand to rebut questionable claims by the defense that the rape had never happened. In a tearful 90-minute session that was interrupted twice by coughing fits from the witness because her sobs had affected her breather, the victim-- who wore an opaque mask and used an electronic voice distorter in order to protect her identity --poked holes in the defense’s argument that were simply too big for the tribunal to ignore. Once she stepped down, it was only a question of how long the tribunal would take to render a verdict of “guilty” against Assad.

The answer was: even less time than the prosecution had been expecting. Barely two hours after starting their deliberations, the tribunal in Assad’s trial found him guilty on all counts; the deposed Syrian dictator collapsed in shock when the verdict was announced, and he had to be put in restraints to prevent him from taking his own life before the sentence of death by hanging could be carried out. When the new Syrian government officially announced Assad’s execution and gave the world press photographs showing Assad’s corpse being prepared for burial at sea, it touched off spontaneous celebrations throughout the Syrian countryside; in Damascus, university and high school students who had been subjected to persecution by the Baathist security forces or seen their families endure such persecution burned the late Syrian dictator’s body in effigy.

He was just the first of scores of high-ranking members of the deposed Baathist elite to meet their end by way of hangman’s rope: just two weeks after the dictator’s execution, his son Bashir was also hanged. Within a month of Hafez el-Assad’s death, at least two-thirds of his former cabinet had met their end on the gallows(with the rather conspicuous exception of two former Syrian army high command generals who were executed by firing squad as retribution for their roles in some of the more brutal atrocities against the civilian population of Syria).

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No sooner had Bashir Assad’s corpse been cremated and the ashes scattered than U.S. and allied ground forces in Libya reached the outskirts of Tripoli. By then the Libyan capital had become what one BBC journalist privately described as “a massive open-air insane asylum”, with looting, rape, and murder going on almost hourly right under the eyes of Khadafy’s secret police-- indeed, in some cases, the secret police themselves were active participants in these crimes. Some of these men were simply indulging their baser instincts, while others used sexual assault and robbery as weapons to get revenge on those they suspected of being disloyal to the Khadafy regime. At the postwar International Criminal Court trials of the surviving senior officials of the Khadafy dictatorship, it would be revealed that the third-highest ranking commander in Khadafy’s secret police personally raped five women before the regime collapsed.

Partly to keep Tripoli from descending into total anarchy and partly to avenge the crimes that had been perpetrated against their loved ones, Libyan rebels moved on the capital with the objective of seizing control of key communications and police facilities. It was these fighters who cleared the way for U.S. and allied troops to take out remaining government military strongpoints in Tripoli when they entered the city on June 15th; they also played a critical role in the capture of Khadafy when his regime collapsed once and for all some 48 hours later.

The arrest of Muammar Khadafy and his subsequent extradition to the Hague for war crimes trials made headlines around the world-- as would his prosecution for the human rights abuses and terroristic acts he had sanctioned during his thirty-two years as Libya’s absolute dictator...

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