In Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk's epic tome about the formation and disintegration of Lebanon, Fisk recalls reading a faded 1950s newspaper story in which a European visitor writes of being wowed by the typical allures of the "Switzerland of the Middle East," while he glosses over a deadly anti-government protest - the beginning of Lebanon's first civil war - as the birth pangs of a young democracy.
National Geographic writer Don Belt, who has penned a knowing portrait of Syria for the magazine's November issue, seems determined to avoid missing such a historical boat. His wide-ranging story about the precariously perched Bashar al-Assad regime has impressed even Syria News Wire - never happy with carpetbagging foreign correspondents - which has called it "the best article on Syria in a decade."
Belt's prose is compact and efficient, as it must be if he wants to make an attempt at putting Syria's past and present into about 4,000 words. But the style lends itself to his mostly unflinching account of Assad's unlikely rise to power, his attempts at modernization and the important ways in which he's falling short.
The access Belt got to Assad himself creates a few moments in the article, such as when Belt recounts fuzzy memories of the ruling family, where I felt like I was being treated to some pro-Assad spinning at a time when many are critical of him. But Belt's a journalist; he's compelled to tell both sides of the story and, after all, Bashar al-Assad is just a man like everyone else.
We're left with a Syria that seems stuck, economically and politically, in a mindset that's at least 40 decades old. The manager of a government-owned cotton plant, oblivious to or concealing any knowledge of the workplace dangers there, stares at Belt in seeming confusion when asked if he's ever made a profit. Academics and activists still fear the intelligence services created many years ago by Assad's father to destroy the opposition when his famed political wiliness wouldn't work.
"Living here is something like a phobia," says a nervous human rights activist who Belt does not identify. "You always feel like someone's watching. You look around and there's no one there. So you think, I shouldn't have this feeling, but I do. I must be crazy. This is what they want."
Like Syria News Wire, I won't give away Belt's inspired ending, except to say that it draws a conclusion about Syria that speaks to many Middle Eastern societies, where the lack of seemingly mundane necessities, and not ancient history or modern conspiracies, is what's truly important.