It did not take long after the murder of Kamal Jumblatt for his son Walid to concede to Hafez al-Assad. The story has it that during their meeting, Assad looked at the young Druze leader and said "this is where your father used to sit," in an implicit threat to Jumblatt that, should you follow in your father's footsteps, you would face a similar fate. 

Decades later, another anecdote had it that while receiving Lebanon's Ba’ath leader and Labor Minister Abdullah Al-Amin, Assad said "you've put on some weight Abdullah." That was Assad's way of chastising his protégé for not sharing the fruits of his corruption with his Syrian patrons. Al-Amin later lost his Ba’ath position and never made it again to parliament or cabinet.

 

These were the ways of Assad the father, subtle yet serious, and often with a smile.

 

Assad the son, however, is different. In 2004 he reportedly threatened "to break Lebanon on the heads of" former French President Jacques Chirac and late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

 

In 2011, when a delegation of tribal chiefs from Daraa visited Mr. Assad to complain of his security personnel's torture of their underage children, they threw their caps in front of him, a tribal way of voicing a request. Should Assad grant them the request, they'd wear the caps back, or else, they walk out without them, a sign of humiliation.

 

The story has it that Assad instructed an aid to collect the caps and throw them away. He told the tribal chiefs that they should forget the children, and that if their men were not virile enough to impregnate their women to replace them, he could send his men to do so. Assad the son insulted his visiting chiefs – and gravely.

 

The chiefs went back home and started a confrontation that sparked an uprising. The rest is history.

 

But what if it were Hafez receiving Daraa's tribal chiefs? Judging by his style, Assad the father would have probably honored the tribal tradition of treating them to lunch, during which he would have studied the behavior of his guests, figured out who could be turned, and bought those off with ego-boosting praise and state largesse. The defiant ones would be shamed by their peers or killed in "accidents." The security chiefs would be "punished" by being relocated to more lucrative provinces.

 

The Assad regime is designed in such a centralized way that the characteristics and persona of the ruling Assad make all the difference. Thus, differentiating between the styles of the two Assads becomes indispensible to understanding how Bashar lost Lebanon, until then one of the few remaining occupations in the world that his father had brilliantly maintained. It might also explain how under Bashar, Syria turned from a regional player into the theater of a proxy war, and from an ally of Iran and a master of Hezbollah into a protégé of both.

 

In "Syria's Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levant," Emile Hokayem tries to make sense of the Syrian uprising. He paints a picture of a Syria where the economy is growing, but so is the gap between the rich and the poor. He argues that Bashar became overconfident after he managed to get out of international isolation and made strong allies, like Turkey and Qatar, but that he shrank his inner circle to a level that proved fatal.

 

Hokayem then offers a solid narration of events, at times going out of his way to prove issues that became, after his print, more easily evident, such as Hezbollah's participation alongside Assad. In the closing chapters, he offers some "solutions," even though – perhaps in an effort to stay away from advocating any position – he merely reiterates the debate on how to end the conflict.

 

In trying to explain the reasons behind the revolution, however, Hokayem seems to lump the two Assads into simply "the regime" or the "household of Assad," or at times credits the father for things he was not known for.

 

Under both Assads, corruption was rampant, the economy in shambles, and institutions hollow. The cunning father perfected "divide-and-conquer" in Syria and Lebanon, and used it next to his feared security agencies, while brilliantly sitting on the fence regionally and winning concessions from bigger and competing powers. The less capable son relied on his fearsome henchmen alone, which could keep him in power this much.

 

Hokayem writes that Bashar "al-Assad was keen to portray himself as embodying the state and preserving the pretense of its institutional functioning, even as real power moved away from institutions and into the hands of a narrow circle." This suggests that under Hafez, real power was with institutions rather than a narrow circle. All evidence, however, points to the contrary.

 

In his recommendations for Syria, Hokayem quotes US Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey as saying that Syrian air-defenses are more formidable than Libya's, and that as such, they would be a harder nut to crack. The book stops short, however, of questioning Dempsey's judgment and, if justified, offering alternative tactics such as using standoff weapons to hit Assad assets, including runways that allow his forces to fly fighters and receive reinforcements from Iran and Russia.

 

Another recommendation seems to raise more questions than answers. "[A] power-sharing arrangement with willing remnants of the Assad regime," he writes, adding that "the substance of such an arrangement would have to recognize the primacy of citizenship over other forms of identity and establish an inclusive form of government that secures minority rights alongside greater political participation."

 

But if Lebanon and Iraq are any clue, power-sharing frameworks never work.

 

Hokayem goes on to recommend "primacy of citizenship over other forms of identity," which begs the question: If Syrians are citizens with equal rights, then who should share power with whom, and why?

 

In Syria's Uprising, Hokayem does a good job recapturing events, but not so much explaining them. His book would be a good primer for many Syria newbies, and less so for wonks.