With authoritarian regimes in general, dissidents express their views in secret, or whisper them behind the tyrant's back. Today, we can retroactively discern Syrian stances that ran contrary to the regime's well-known attitudes over certain non-Syrian issues. One can say that those stances can be linked to the majoritarian sympathies as seen with the Syrian uprising later, exactly as the stances of the regime in general can be linked to the minoritarian sympathies of the regime. However, apart from this, those stances, over a number of unseen stops, are demonstrative of how the majority of Syrians was gradually breaking away from the regime's ideology – that is, with its militaristic structure, socialist jargon, and its friendship with the Soviet Union and its heir Russia. This might be inferred from the stance over the war in Afghanistan, between the Soviets backed by the bureaucratic-military regimes, and the 'mujahidins' backed by Western nations, the Gulf, and Muslim public opinion. This alignment is indeed reminiscent of the current alignment in the Syrian revolution itself. In the Iraq-Iran war and throughout the 1980s, the Baathist regime took the side of Khomeini's Iran, contrary to official Arab positions and popular sympathy with Saddam's Iraq, as seen in Amman and other capitals in the Sunni world. This alignment, without necessarily benefiting either side morally and politically, was a precedent that is being repeated today as Assad's Syria stands alone against a broad Arab consensus. In the civil war in Algeria in the early 1990s, the Syrian regime did not hide its sympathy for the ‘progressive' military regime that resembles it much, and which had disrupted the elections and prevented the ‘barbaric' ascent of the Islamist Salvation Front and other armed Islamic groups to power. Here, there are also unmistakable similarities. Then in the conflict in Serbia and Bosnia in the 1990s, the regime was closer to the Serb Milosevic, heir to Tito and ally of the Russians, while support of Serbia was translated in the Levant as a bid to defend Eastern Christian minorities, regardless of the rights of Bosnian Muslims and their desire for independence from the remnants of the Yugoslav Empire. The ready-made argument was that the European and American – and of course imperialist – West supported the Bosnians. These are also issues that return today to the forefront of the Syrian debate, albeit under different titles. In Lebanon, it was no coincidence that the sympathies of the Syrian people in 1976 were completely against the regime's intervention at the time against the Palestinian resistance, just as they were against intervention in 2005, when Rafik Hariri was assassinated and the leaders in Damascus were accused of the slaying. If we consult the lexicon used in the discourse about majorities and minorities, a lexicon that is in broad and free usage today, we can decipher many riddles about the two stances and the two objections in these two events above. True, the opponents of the Syrian regime could never express their sympathies with the same clarity and candidness that the regime could. But nothing suggests they were in support of the regime on any of those issues, many years before their direct clash with the authorities over the immediate matters. Indeed, in other places, and under different names, the clash was already taking place long before it came to Daraa, Homs, and Aleppo.
