In the recent past, it wasn't unusual to hear Syrians (those who dared whisper about politics) say that although they lived under a repressive regime, they had bread on the table, and car bombs didn't go off in their neighborhoods, unlike in their troubled neighbor to the east, Iraq. Such security was part of a decades-old, now decaying grand old bargain with autocratic leaders: they'd provide relative peace and limited prosperity in exchange for iron-fisted, one-party rule. In particular, the Syrian capital Damascus, the headquarters of all 18 or so of the state's security and intelligence agencies, as well as the military, was particularly impenetrable to would-be no-gooders.
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