Palestinians living in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria have been massacred both by Bashar al-Assad’s troops and throat-cutting mujahideen from ISIS… - Amir Taheri

Some poets still write about the hair and eyes and body of a beloved and depict scenes of joy when lovers meet to drink and dance and be merry. But that is not the kind of poetry that the Islamic movement, grown on the concept of jihad and martyrdom, wants.

The Shah's vision of the ideal form of government was not so far removed from that of Mossadeq. In that ideal model one man, the king, prime minister or Pishva [Führer] would act as the guardian of the nation's highest interests. The Pishva, because he loves his people, could never do anything that might not be good for the people and the country. He might sacrifice the interests of the few for the benefit of the many. But he would never harm 'the people' or 'the nation' as a whole. Mossadeq's version of the same model envisaged a role for crowds, political groups - though not for political parties - and religious associations whose task was to support the Pishva by fighting his opponents and making him feel loved and cherished. In the Shah's model, the Pishva's decisions were to be carried out exclusively through the bureaucracy with the armed forces always ready to crush any opposition. All that was left for 'the nation' to do was applaud the Pishva and make him feel good. Mossadeq and the Shah advanced exactly the same argument in defence of their respective models: Iran, being constantly prey to the devilish appetite of the rapacious foreign powers, the influence of the ajnabi (foreigners), multiplying the centres of political power would allow the ajnabi to infiltrate the nation's structures. Neither man could invisage a situation in which different sections of the Iranian society might, for reasons of their own, oppose the Leader. They could conceive of no circumstances in which an opposition movement could emerge without foreign backing and intrigue.

When I asked Bhutto what he thought of Assad, he described the Syrian leader as “The Levanter.” Knowing that, like himself, I was a keen reader of thrillers, the Pakistani Prime Minister knew that I would get the message. However, it was only months later when, having read Eric Ambler’s 1972 novel The Levanter that I understood Bhutto’s one-word pen portrayal of Hafez Al-Assad. In The Levanter the hero, or anti-hero if you prefer, is a British businessman who, having lived in Syria for years, has almost “gone native” and become a man of uncertain identity. He is a bit of this and a bit of that, and a bit of everything else, in a region that is a mosaic of minorities. He doesn’t believe in anything and is loyal to no one. He could be your friend in the morning but betray you in the evening. He has only two goals in life: to survive and to make money... Today, Bashar Al-Assad is playing the role of the son of the Levanter, offering his services to any would-be buyer through interviews with whoever passes through the corner of Damascus where he is hiding. At first glance, the Levanter may appear attractive to those engaged in sordid games. In the end, however, the Levanter must betray his existing paymaster in order to begin serving a new one. Four years ago, Bashar switched to the Tehran-Moscow axis and is now trying to switch back to the Tel-Aviv-Washington one that he and his father served for decades. However, if the story has one lesson to teach, it is that the Levanter is always the source of the problem, rather than part of the solution. ISIS is there because almost half a century of repression by the Assads produced the conditions for its emergence. What is needed is a policy based on the truth of the situation in which both Assad and ISIS are parts of the same problem.