This February Hafez al-Assad was elected to a third seven-year term as president of Syria. In the country that popularized the Middle Eastern coup d'état, Assad's rule is remarkable if only for its longevity. Successful dictators must both lead and follow the countries they rule, and Assad's career embodies well the strengths and failures of his countrymen. Coming to power in the wake of debacle and despair, Assad has tenaciously defended Syrian national interests. At home, the “Butcher of Hama” has not created political community or viable institutions, but he has stayed in power. Relying on increasingly brutal and minoritarian methods, Assad has brought a tenuous stability to Syria, but nothing more.

We know, or we think we know, what happened in 1945, and therefore President Reagan travels to Europe this month. There was triumph, we remind ourselves on the fortieth anniversary of the Allied victory, but there was also the revelation of Dachau. We also found Hitler, and now we live with Hitler, remembering other names that have become entangled with his: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mylai. the Gulag…. Small wonder, then, that the terms of warfare preoccupying us today are terms of complicity and noncomplicity, terms such as “collaboration” and “resistance.” (Reagan himself thinks nothing of comparing the Contras of Nicaragua to the heroes of the Maquis.) Preoccupied by such terms, we are bound to think of France, of Occupied France and the Vichy.

Imagine the scene. A river running through a green valley. Under the trees, the river looks like a black-green stream. Pontoons are stretched across the surface, while long lines of tanks wait to cross—sixty-ton behemoths, with the menacing barrels of their 105 mm guns pointing at the opposite shore.