Eurasia Press & News
A former Al Qaeda commander has seized power in Damascus, bringing great jubilation and relief to Washington, D.C. regime-changers who pined for this day. Bashar al-Assad has fled ingloriously to Russia in the dead of night without so much as making a statement to bid farewell.
It’s certainly interesting how quickly the profane ideological origins of militant groups can be ritualistically forgotten, so long as the erstwhile extremists appear to align with U.S. geopolitical interests—of which liberals in particular have styled themselves such passionate proponents in recent years, for among other reasons to counter the perceived “isolationism” of Donald Trump and his MAGA cohort.
In 2018, an entry in the Federal Register declared Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the new rulers of Syria as of this weekend, to be a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization, given its lineage with Al Qaeda. One amusing parlor game in D.C. will now be to predict how long it takes for this designation to be officially stricken from the record and flushed down the memory hole.
The swift rehabilitation of the Syrian militants is analogous to the PR makeover afforded to the Azov Regiment in Ukraine, once decried by ever-perceptive Progressive Democrats in that same bygone year, 2018, as a “Neo-Nazi” formation engaged in “government-supported Nazi glorification.” Then, in short order, Azov were treated to their own glorification process, rebranded as Freedom Fighters battling the Russian hordes in defense of liberal values.
Perhaps there’s a case to be made that both Azov and “HTS” have, to some extent, liberalized and moderated since their heady days of unfortunate radicalism. Without more independent reporting from Syria to elucidate the supposed evolution of this newly empowered group, it’s difficult to say with any certainty, whatever soothing pluralistic overtures the group’s leadership may now be publicly making.
The militant commander, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, appears to indicate that he won’t persecute minority religious or ethnic factions. But that’s hardly a pledge that should inspire much confidence in notoriously sectarian Syria.
“Is he simply trying to detoxify his image for international consumption?” asked Patrick Cockburn, the veteran journalist who has spent much time chronicling the wreckage from the Syrian civil war, and certainly has little sympathy for the ousted Assad.
The incoming ruler Jolani has even reverted back to a prior name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, though it would probably take more than an expeditious name-swap for anyone in the United States to be forgiven of a past operational affiliation with Al Qaeda. That Mr. Jolani/Sharaa, a one-time deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, could soon be embraced by the “rules-based international order” shows just how infinitely flexible those rules really are.
As nonchalantly as the desiccated Syrian security forces changed out of their uniforms and into civilian clothing amidst the militant offensive, official D.C. institutions are eager to change their nominal antipathy for anything “Terror”-related and embrace their inner Salafists. With various enticements surely soon to be offered by the U.S. and E.U., it could only be a matter of time before a Pride Flag flies over Damascus.
“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen,” mumbled Joe Biden in what was supposed to be a triumphant proclamation from the White House. “A fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice,” he said, announcing that the U.S. proceeded to bomb at least 75 targets in Syria to mark the moment of liberation. So many liberal triumphs of recent vintage seem to be accompanied by a generous deployment of U.S. munitions.
Israel promptly took the opportunity to launch a ground incursion into Syria for the first time since 1973, with Benjamin Netanyahu boasting, “This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s main supporters.” There is probably some truth to the boast; few gambits have ever backfired more spectacularly than the October 7 attacks, supposedly launched by Hamas grand planners with the aim of emboldening an “Axis of Resistance” to free the Palestinians—only for the Axis to crumble, thanks to U.S. and Israeli domination. While it’s acceptable in American liberal circles to bemoan the nuisance of Netanyahu, his military muscle certainly contributed to the downfall of Assad, which has now made these same liberals so cheerful and optimistic.
It’s doubly ironic that the hollowing out of Syrian state institutions, which has also undoubtedly contributed to the Assad regime’s rapid collapse, can be directly attributable to the first-term foreign policy initiatives of Trump, who imposed sweeping sanctions in 2020 that, among other things, severely hobbled the ability of Assad to receive foreign investment for reconstruction efforts. While the Syrian conflict had been largely “frozen” for the past several years, much of the country remained ravaged by the war and U.S.-led economic blockade. Trump’s sanctions expressly penalized anyone, Syrian or non-Syrian, who engaged “in reconstruction activities,” as the State Department reported at the time. The clear effect, to further immiserate the Syrian people with the ultimate aim of disintegrating the government, seems to have borne fruit. As noted by Joshua Landis, the longtime Syria observer at the University of Oklahoma, “Soldiers weren’t getting paid. Officers were making $30 a month, enlisted men $10 a month.” Many were abandoning their posts for basic lack of subsistence income. This all came to a head when Assad’s troops simply gave up, and gave way to the militants.
The U.S. strategy thus appears to have worked. Achieving regime change by willful infliction of civilian suffering, and pummeling a bothersome government into collapse, will surely warm the hearts of regime-changers who populate D.C., whether they brand themselves liberal internationalists or under the increasingly malleable label of “America First.”
Some liberals may also welcome the perceived blow to their arch-nemesis Vladimir Putin, who has indeed lost a significant client state in the heart of the Middle East; the fate of Russian military assets in Syria remains unclear. But overjoyed liberals seem to again have a discomfiting ally in Trump, who released a curious post-collapse statement that appeared to heap ridicule on Putin. “Assad is gone,” Trump declared, “He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place.”
For all that liberals like to tediously scorn Trump for supposedly being an admirer of Putin, a Trump/liberal convergence has apparently emerged as it relates to rebuking Russian interests in Syria.
The liberal position on plundering Syria’s natural resources has never been especially clear. For all the freakout and fits over Trump’s endless parade of wisecracks, there was little consternation about his stated policy preferences for Syria, where on the one hand he would claim that the U.S. should not be “involved,” while on the other impose drastic sanctions and profess his delight to keep U.S. soldiers indefinitely stationed in the country to “take the oil”—diverting more resources away from Assad for reconstruction.
Trump called Assad a “Gas Killing Animal” and bombed his forces twice, in 2017 and 2018, after Barack Obama declined to do so. In 2020, Trump said he even wanted to assassinate Assad, but was talked out of it by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. As much as liberals and America Firsters might want to disassociate themselves from one another on questions of foreign military entanglement, they’d really have to struggle to conjure any appreciable difference in their mutual quest for Syrian regime change.
Though the new rulers in Damascus have indicated that they wish to orchestrate a more orderly “transition” than was the case in Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011, when governing institutions were essentially dissolved, it remains to be seen whether such “stability” could be effectuated after the sudden downfall of a single-family dynasty after 54 years.
Nonetheless, Democrats and Republicans alike are clearly chomping at the bit to see what high-minded input they can beneficently offer.
