Syria: The View from 30,000 Feet

December 16, 2024

Tags: Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
Posted in: Biden, Iraq, Libya, Military, Syria, Trump

Originally published on Responsible Statecraft.

If a time traveler from 2024 went to the Middle East of some years ago with the intent of revealing the future, he might not be believed. He’d tell how the stalwart regimes of Quaddafi, Saddam, Pahlavi, and the Assad family were gone, their once stable countries now either in some level of chaos/failed state or under control of Tehran as proxies. Same for Lebanon and Hezbollah. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is gone, Hamas is beholden to Iran for its survival, and Egypt survives as a sort of U.S. ally, saved by American do-nothingism from the democratic possibilities of the Arab Spring.

When asked how all this could have happened, he’d explain with the exception of the Iranian Revolution and the PLO, it mostly had to do with the United States and its invasion of Iraq, the destruction of a stable (“evil” regime; they’re all evil) regime it turned out was a linchpin holding most of the whole Sykes-Picot world together. In 2003 the U.S. invasion began a process of inviting all comers to take hold of a piece of Iraq and see how far they might get with it. Many of the same ISIS and former al-Qaeda elements that now stand athwart Syria (and will no doubt soon begin fighting each other for control there) almost grabbed the entire country after the U.S.-trained and equipped post-Saddam Iraqi army ran from the field. It was left for the Iranians to take the reigns, fashioning Iraq into a client state after the U.S. cut its losses by cooperating with Iran to wipe out most of ISIS in Iraq and abandoning the Kurds who had foolishly believed the U.S. owed them a nation-state after all this.

American hubris led to the fall of Quaddafi after a U.S.-sponsored revolt of sorts ended up doing little more than creating a failed state in the once stable region. Pundits saw it, as they will wrongly see the fall of Syria, as a blow toward Russian ambitions in the area, not calculating the negative value of unleashing chaos in a region consumed by the Iranian-U.S./Israeli proxy war. As a side note, watching Quaddafi being sodomized on TV after he gave up his nuclear weapons assured the world North Korea would never do the same. But that’s another world away…

Nobody is going to miss the Assad family. Bashar’s father and the family ran Syria since a 1970 coup. Assad initially portrayed himself as a modern reformist, but he responded to peaceful protests during the Arab Spring with brutal crackdowns, sparking a nationwide uprising. As the ISIS rebels advanced, they took over many of the notorious prisons where the Assad regime had for decades tortured and killed political prisoners. As with Iraq being left open for anyone who wanted a piece of it and could find a way to hold it, Syria is going to dissolve. Israel already grabbed snippets of territory to round out its border with Syria, and destroyed the Syrian navy, rocket and chemical stores, and much of its air force because in chaos lies possibility if you have not already blown your money, lives, and goodwill in Iraq.  Unlike in 2012, when Hezbollah came to Assad’s rescue against insurgents, Hezbollah today has few shock troops available to help. The internecine fighting among revolutionary groups will inevitably result in one of them seeking aid from Iran (who else? Turkey?), who’ll emerge as the victor of sorts in all this with another proxy statelet under its belt. A weakened Russia is out of the picture and appears to have already abandoned its naval base in Syria.

What’s left is to see what America has to say. There are 900 American soldiers on the ground today in Syria, and U.S. warplanes flew bombing missions accidentally in support of Assad against ISIS factions in their battles outside Damascus (strange bedfellows and all that.) Had all this happened a year ago, when Joe Biden was still nominally in charge of the U.S. military, you might have seen some sort of intervention, more of a blocking move really, to keep the ISIS factions from uniting, to limit their success or at least slow it down, and to interdict any Iranian help arriving from the east. Joe Biden is no longer really in charge of anything. He used up his Commander-in-Chief goodwill on two ugly proxy interventions, fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian and of course supporting Israel in Gaza. A year, or more realistically two or three years, ago Joe might have made the case for either direct involvement in Syria or hitching the old bull of America more directly to another proxy, maybe the beleaguered Kurds who still want a piece of Syria for their own. As it stands, Joe lacks the political oomph to do any of that in his final days in office and good riddance. We are in no position (and have no wherewithal) to take advantage of the situation in a positive way. This will be in spite of trying to claim the lead ISIS faction has a nice government on its mind. Any future expedient rehabilitation of the Syrian terrorists is analogous to the disingenuous glow up granted the Ukrainian Nazi militias (U.S. would recognize a Syrian government that comes from inclusive process, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says, uh oh.)

Incoming president Donald Trump has made it clear he wants no part of a war in Syria (and is not too enamored with continuing the one in Ukraine, either.) He tried in Term 1.0 to withdraw American forces from Syria and failed, and will likely try early on in Term 2.0 to pull them out. It would be the right thing to do and likely engender wide support. Americans getting killed in the Middle East for vague reasons is so-2003 and far from the mandate Trump was handed. Syria will sort itself out, with Israel on one side helping keep the fight inside existing borders (or less!) and Iran, if it is clever enough, siding with the ISIS group most likely to emerge as the most powerful in Syria, say Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whom the U.S. considers a terrorist group. If all that fails to come true, expect another failed state in the heart of the Middle East.

Our Middle East time traveler would certainly have some explaining to do.

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