COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
What we are witnessing is not just the end of a regime but quite possibly the destruction of the Syrian state.
We are being told by the Western media that we should join Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden and the Europeans in celebrating what risks being the creation of yet another failed state in the Middle East/West Asia.
I shed no tears for Assad — nor would I if any of the US’s preferred family dictatorships in the region fell. I’m happy for the prisoners who have been freed; could we also free those in Guantanamo Bay, Israel and all the US torture/black sites in places like Jordan, Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Kosovo?
When I see that most of the destruction to the country has occurred after Assad has left and that Israel is in the lead in destroying the military and administrative foundations of a viable state, there seems little to give me hope that Syria will be united, sovereign and free any time soon.
Political scientists say that “state monopoly on violence” — the concept that the state alone has the right to use or authorise the use of force (and has the means to ensure compliance within its territory) — is a sine qua non of a viable state.
Assad has fled, the armed forces have vanished yet the Israelis, in particular, by their massive ongoing air strikes on the country’s navy, air force, military installations and arms depots, are ensuring the incoming government will struggle to defend itself against aggressors foreign or domestic.
Permanent dismemberment could easily follow, with Israel already over-running the UN buffer zone and taking territory in the south, and the US and its Kurdish allies holding a huge swathe of the northeast.
The extent of Turkish ambitions is unclear and whether the Russians hold on to their bases in Tartus and at Khmeimim is unresolved. The fate of the two million Alawites and other minorities is also unsure. The country is awash in arms and factions.
People liberating themselves from a dictator is admirable; state destruction, in contrast, is a grave crime against humanity because it robs millions of people of the ability to meet even the most basic needs of existence.
Israeli tanks invade Syria. Video: Kanal 13
Look at Libya. In 2011, the US-NATO bombing campaign turned the tide against the Gaddafi regime. US drones spotted Gaddafi’s motorcade fleeing Sirte and signalled to French jets to strike the convoy. Locals finished the job.
As Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said with a chuckle during a TV interview hours afterwards: “We came. We saw. He died.” A sick variant of “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered), Julius Caesar’s cocky phrase for one of his swift victories.
There was nothing swift for the Libyans, however, other than their fall from being one of Africa’s wealthiest societies with excellent health, education, housing and infrastructure to being a zone of endless civil war, criminality, desperate poverty and insecurity from 2011 to the present day.
And here we are, yet again, the amnesiac West celebrating another lightning quick victory — like the fall of Kabul, the fall of Tripoli and the fall of Baghdad. Mission Accomplished.
Talking of Julius Caesar and cocky imperialism, the US named their highly-successful, crushing economic, energy and food sanctions against Syria “The Caesar Sanctions”. Imposed and maintained since 2019, they helped hollow out the Syrian economy, making it easy meat for hyenas, such as the Israelis, to work on the carcass.
A couple of years ago I listened to Dana Stroul, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East talking to an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Perhaps because she was in a friendly place Stroul was remarkably candid, boasting that the US “owned” a third of Syria — which they do to this day.
During the “civil war” America seized the wheat and oil fields in Northern Syria and are unlikely to give them back anytime soon. This, perhaps more than any single factor, is the root cause of the collapse of the Assad regime.
Most people in the West don’t even know that the US holds this chokehold on the country. It uses a Texas oil company to pump Syria’s oil out of the ground, sell it on the international market and use the proceeds to pay their Kurdish fighters.
By seizing the breadbasket of Syria and its oil, the US gained what Stroul described as “compelling leverage to shape an outcome that was more conducive to US interests”.
“But it wasn’t just about the one-third of Syrian territory that the US and our military owned,” Stroul said. The US was isolating the Assad regime, preventing embassies from returning to Damascus and blocking reconstruction.
The US used some of the looted oil money for civil projects in northern Syria but Stroul boasted: “The rest of Syria is rubble. What the Russians want and what Assad wants is economic reconstruction — and that is something that the United States can basically hold a card on via the international financial institutions and our cooperation with the Europeans.”
That’s called saying the quiet part out loud: the US and the EU prevented measures to improve the lives of millions of Syrians and ensured millions of refugees could not return home, all in order to weaken the regime and ensure popular discontent remained high. Nice.
There are more than 10 million Syrian refugees — most are hated “Others” in Europe and Turkey. The war, with so much blood on Assad’s hands, was in part fuelled and funded by the US and the EU to weaken a geostrategic adversary.
It created the largest refugee and displacement crisis of our time, affecting millions of people and spilling into surrounding countries. More than 15 million Syrians needed emergency assistance in 2023, more than 90 percent live below the poverty line and some 12 million suffer food insecurity, but the US has the chutzpah to view Syria as a geostrategic success story because it robbed the country of any chance at reconstruction over the last several years.
Interrupted …:)
Syria’s rebirth hinges on inclusivity, democracy, and sovereignty: Marwa… https://t.co/8QJrCbubFl via @YouTube
— Marwan (@marwanbishara) December 12, 2024
For the moment the Western media is promoting Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose forces took Damascus last weekend, as a kind of Woke Al Qaeda leader who has embraced Western values. More cynical commentators like Pepe Escobar refer to him as “an Al-Qaeda head-chopper with a freshly-trimmed beard and a Zelensky suit”.
I have no opinion either way; time will tell.
I’m perplexed, however, that within hours of his Turkish-trained, Qatari-funded, Western armed troops crossing out of Idlib province, al-Jalani was on CNN; it smacked of a K Street/Washington PR exercise. Clearly al-Jolani is astute enough to know that being friends with America is a sensible survival strategy for the time being.
He may even have had his own Road to Damascus moment. Let’s hope.
Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham is still designated a terror group by both the UN Security Council and the US, the latter posted a $10 million bounty on al-Jalani’s head some years ago. But that didn’t stop the US keeping close contact with him via diplomats like James Jeffrey, Special Envoy to Syria from 2018-2020, who described HTS as a US “asset”.
From the Obama administration onwards, the US poured arms and dollars into al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups, via secret multi-billion dollar programmes like Operation Timber Sycamore. The jihadists were the most effective fighters undermining the Assad regime. Back in 2012 Jake Sullivan wrote to his boss Hilary Clinton to famously clarify that “AQ [al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.” Thanks, again, Wikileaks.
President Biden, like Netanyahu, says that his country played a vital role in bringing down the Assad regime. Fair enough: then apply the Pottery Barn Rule: If you break it, you own it — and you should fix it.
Several hundred billion dollars in reparations, and the return of the oil and wheat fields would be a start. In reality, I think peace will only come to the region once the Americans and Europeans are driven out.
I hope Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham lives up to its promise to respect other ethnic and religious groups. I hope Israel withdraws. I hope for lots of good things for Syria but I’m not optimistic, despite being told daily by BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times and others that something wonderful has just happened.
Balkanisation — the fragmenting of the country into hostile statelets — is the great risk for Syria. Let’s hope for something better for the Syrian people — that they are allowed to form a state that is united, sovereign and free.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz and contributes to Café Pacific.
