Daily Inspiration Quote by Bashar al-Assad

“Armies are not only for offensives” is the kind of line that pretends to be modest while smuggling in permission. Coming from Bashar al-Assad, it reads less like a neutral clarification and more like a rhetorical shield: a way to normalize military force as a multipurpose tool of statecraft, not just a last-resort instrument for external war. The phrasing is deliberately incomplete. If armies aren’t “only” for attack, what else are they for? Defense, obviously, but also “stability,” “order,” and the elastic category authoritarian governments love most: internal security.

The intent is strategic ambiguity. Assad doesn’t have to argue for a specific operation; he widens the moral and political room in which operations can happen. “Offensives” evokes foreign conquest, a word with diplomatic consequences. By denying that narrow function, he implicitly redirects attention to softer-sounding missions that can still involve tanks on city streets. It’s a sentence designed to make repression sound like governance.

Context does the heavy lifting. In Syria’s modern history, the military and intelligence apparatus are not just defenders of borders; they’re the backbone of regime survival. After 2011, as protests escalated into civil war, the regime repeatedly framed violence as defensive: protecting the nation from “terrorism,” preventing collapse, preserving coexistence. This quote fits that playbook. It’s a reminder that in Assad’s political vocabulary, “the army” is a domestic actor with a domestic mandate.

The subtext is blunt: legitimacy comes from force, and force is justified by whatever the state defines as a threat.