BACK in 1989, when the communist regimes of Europe were tottering towards their end, almost every day somebody would say 'There's going to be a civil war.' And our job, as foreign journalists who allegedly had their finger on the pulse of events, was to say: 'No, there won't be.'

So most of us did say that, as if we actually knew. But the locals were pathetically grateful, and we turned out to be right.

It was just the same in South Africa in 1993-94. Another non-violent revolution was taking on another dictatorship with a long record of brutality, and once again most people who had lived their lives under its rule were convinced there would be a civil war. So we foreign journalists (or at least some of us) reassured them that there wouldn't be, and again we turned out to be right.

Now it's Syria's turn, and yet again most of the people who live there fear that their non-violent revolution will end in civil war. It's not my job to reassure them this time, because like most foreign journalists I can't even get into the country, but in any case I would have no reassurance to offer. This time, it may well end in civil war. Like Iraq.

The Assad dynasty in Syria is neither better nor worse than Saddam Hussein's regime was in Iraq. They had identical origins, as local branches of the same pan-Arab political movement, the Baath Party. They both depended on minorities for their core support: the Syrian Baathists on the 10 per cent Alawite (Shia) minority in that country, and the Iraqi Baathists on the 20 per cent of that country's people who were Sunni Arabs.

They were both ruthless in crushing threats to their power. Hafez al-Assad's troops killed up to 40,000 people in Hama when Sunni Islamists rebelled in Syria in 1982, Saddam Hussein's army killed at least as many Shias in southern Iraq when they rebelled after the 1991 Gulf War, and both regimes were systematically beastly to their local Kurds.

When the American invaders destroyed Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003, however, what ensued was not peace, prosperity and democracy. It was a brutal civil war that ended with Baghdad almost entirely cleansed of its Sunni Muslim population and the whole country cleansed of its Christian minority. Only the Kurds, insulated by their own battle-hardened army and their mountains, avoided the carnage.

So if the Baathist regime in Syria is driven from power, why should we believe that what follows will be any better than it was in Iraq? The country's ethnic and sectarian divisions are just as deep and complex as Iraq's.