Once we were in a meeting and the minister got a call from Assad senior. He told us, “The president wants us to hire seventy thousand young university graduates.” Assad knew that if all those people were going out on the streets with no jobs, they’re going to start protesting. His way of solving this problem was to dump them on the state. You didn’t need to know economics to see that this wasn’t going to work. The state was already huge—the biggest employer in the country. The problem was just going to get worse and one day it was going to explode.
