FROM ANTIWAR.COM
LIBERTARIAN ANTI-IMPERIALISM
Leave Syria Alone
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s rule is an opportunity for the US to overhaul its bankrupt Syria policy. The US should have abandoned this policy years earlier, but now there are no longer any pretexts for continuing the collective punishment of the Syrian people and the illegal American military presence on Syrian soil. The time has come for rapid sanctions relief and immediate withdrawal of US forces. The US must finally leave Syria alone.
US troops currently in Syria have no good reason to be there. Successive administrations have kept troops in Syria in the name of combating the Islamic State, but it has been clear for years that their real unstated purpose has been to oppose Iranian influence. Iran withdrew its forces from Syria prior to Assad’s departure, and it is unlikely that a new Syrian government will be welcoming them back anytime soon. Now Washington can’t use the specter of Iran to excuse keeping hundreds of soldiers in a country where they have no business being.
Whatever form the Syrian government takes, it will be within its rights to demand the departure of all foreign forces from its territory. The US shouldn’t wait to be told to leave. It would be a good idea to remove US forces quickly from the country to avoid any chance of conflicts or accidental clashes. Once US troops are out of Syria, there will be no reason to have a US military presence in Iraq, either.
The US has been illegally at war in Syria for the last nine years. Congress never authorized any use of force or deployments in Syria, and there is no international mandate for US forces to operate in Syria. The US has been flagrantly violating international law and trampling on Syrian sovereignty for almost a decade. That needs to end at once.
Now that Assad is no longer in power, there is no possible justification for keeping punishing broad sanctions in place. These sanctions were always destructive and mainly harmed the civilian population by throttling the economy and preventing reconstruction. Sanctions have exacerbated the country’s severe humanitarian crisis and impeded the delivery of aid. Broad sanctions were a terrible policy when Assad was still in control, and they are completely indefensible now that he is gone. Congress should repeal existing sanctions legislation, and the next administration should lift or suspend as many sanctions as they can.
The US must not make the same mistake it made in Afghanistan when it penalized the Afghan people with economic warfare after Washington’s client government collapsed. The worst thing that the US could do right now is to delay sanctions relief for Syria or attempt to use sanctions as leverage to try to influence the direction of Syrian politics. Syria’s future is for its people to decide, and the US should butt out.
Trump has signaled that he has no interest in US involvement in Syrian affairs in the future. That is welcome news if it holds true. The last time that Trump indicated that he wanted to get US forces out of Syria, he met significant resistance from within his own administration and from the military and he ended up leaving a military presence in the country. This time nothing should stop a complete withdrawal from happening. It cannot be framed as a concession to Assad, because he is no longer there. It cannot be misrepresented as a gift to Iran, since Iran has already pulled out of the country.
The Syrian war proved beyond any doubt that outside intervention intensifies and prolongs conflict. If not for the endless and destructive meddling of the US, European states, Russia, Turkey, the Gulf states, and Israel, the war in Syria might have ended much earlier with far fewer casualties. The people of Syria were made to suffer for the disastrous ambitions of these outside powers. If Syria’s neighbors and other powers had respected Syria’s sovereignty, both Syria and the wider region might have suffered much less violence and upheaval.
The US should be prepared to assist in humanitarian relief efforts when asked, but otherwise Syria has received enough “help” from Washington to last a lifetime. The US should move quickly to remove all impediments to foreign investment and reconstruction that it has set up. Then it should keep its hands off a country that it has done so much to devastate.
Daniel Larison is a columnist for Responsible Statecraft. He is contributing editor at Antiwar.com and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison and at his blog, Eunomia, here.
The Syrian Rebellion: Who Are the Big Losers?
After an inconceivably fast twelve day march through Syria by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in exile in Moscow, his government has fallen, the more than five decade’s long Ba’ath rule of Syria is over and a group descended from Al-Qaeda is in control of Syria.
The Assad regime only survived as long as it did because of Hezbollah ground support, Russian air support and significant Iranian assistance in the first round of the Syrian rebellion over a decade ago. This time, none of that was available.
Hezbollah had been critically wounded by airstrikes and assassinations in its war with Israel. To concentrate on its war with Israel, Hezbollah had withdrawn forces from Syria. And its ceasefire agreement with Israel prevented its presence in South Lebanon, hampering its ability to assist Syria. Iran had been weakened both locally by its exchange of attacks with Israel and regionally by the weakening of Hezbollah. Russia was focussed on its own war with Ukraine.
But it is not entirely clear that Iran and Russia lacked the ability to come to Syria’s aid more significantly. Despite the forces and material being committed to Ukraine, a recent report by Chatham House concludes that “Russia’s global power projection capabilities are undiminished.” General Christopher Cavoli, the commander of United States European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, similarly told a congressional audience of the House Armed Services Committee that “Much of the Russian military has not been affected negatively by this conflict… despite all of the efforts they’ve undertaken inside Ukraine.”
Russia promised to “continue to provide support to President Assad.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia is “actively studying measures needed to stabilise the situation in the region,” and Syrian military sources said Russia had promised that more military aid would start arriving withing 72 hours.
But there may not have been 72 hours. As HTS forces poured through Syria, the Syrian army just melted away. The rapidity and ease of the advance took everyone, including Israel and the United States, by surprise. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that Iran was “fully aware” of what was going on in Syria. “What caught us off guard,” he said, “was, one, the inability of Syria’s army to confront the movement and, second, the speed of developments.”
Syria’s two biggest supporters seem to have realized that the speed of events “were outpacing their ability to turn the tide.”
Perhaps more even than the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran and the distraction of Russia, the rapidity of events may have been because, as one U.S. official put it, “The Syrian military forces are not really fighting.” The New York Times, too, reported that it was crucial that “Syria’s Army has demonstrated an unwillingness to fight.” There are reports of Syrian soldiers abandoning their posts and even leaving for Iraq and surrendering their weapons.
Middle East expert Stephen Zunes, who is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, told me that without external support, Assad was forced to rely on conscripts in the Syrian Army, “who were clearly unwilling to fight for him.” The surprisingly rapid advance of the rebels was the result “more of a political collapse,” Zunes told me, “than a military victory.” In the end, Assad fell, not because Iran and Russia didn’t support him, but because the Syrian military and people didn’t support him.
Though the U.S. claims it was not being behind the rebellion that has not stopped them celebrating it. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN that because HTS is “a terrorist organization designated by the United States… [w]e have real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization.” But, “[a]t the same time, of course,” he added, “we don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are facing certain kinds of pressure.” U.S. President Joe Biden called the fall of Assad at the hands of “rebel groups” with “their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses,” a “fundamental act of justice.”
The U.S isn’t crying because, although there may be many losers in and around Syria with the ascendancy of a regime that is a radical offshoot of Al-Qaeda, the real losers are Hezbollah, Iran and Russia.
Already reeling, Hezbollah has been dealt another blow. Syria was the bridge over which Iranian arms flowed to Lebanon.
For Iran, the overthrow of Assad by a radical Sunni group that is no ally of theirs represents the continued dismantling of its front line proxy defense and deterrent. Iran not only had military bases and missile factories in Syria, but every weapon Iran sent to its partners in the region went through Syria.
In his victory speech, HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani said that Assad had made Syria “a playground for Iranian ambitions.” No sooner had Damascus been captured than the Iranian embassy was stormed by Syrian rebels.
For Russia, the loss of Syria represents the loss of its closest ally in the Middle East and the “backbone” of its “military presence in the region.” It could also mean the loss of its only Mediterranean naval port in Tartus. Although, according to the Russian media, “Russian officials are in touch with representatives of armed Syrian opposition, whose leaders have guaranteed security of Russian military bases and diplomatic missions on the Syrian territory.”
But Russia could suffer not only a military setback. Russia could also suffer a diplomatic and grand strategy setback. Coupled with China’s brokering of a resumption of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Russia’s brokering talks between Syria and Saudi Arabia held the promise of ending the imposition of Cold War blocs on the region with a U.S. backed Saudi bloc in opposition to an Iran bloc. Russia and China were diplomatically attempting to reshape the region into one of multipolarity and cooperation. Saudi Arabia and Syria had agreed to reopen their embassies, and, last year, Syria was welcomed back into the Arab League.
In round one of the Syrian rebellion over a decade ago, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and others tried to isolate Syria and actively supported the ISIS and Al-Qaeda groups who were trying to overthrow Assad. This time, they supported Assad. The replacement of Assad with a radical group hostile to Iran threatens to throw the region back into the new Cold War.
There are more losers than just Assad. Hopefully, this time, the Syrian people will not be the losers. America, though, seems not to be a loser because the rapidly unfolding events coincide with U.S. ambitions for the region. The big losers are America’s big enemies: Russia and Iran.
But, even for the United States, there are risks. A group that the U.S. recognizes as a Foreign Terrorist Organization is now at the head of a very unstable country that still has many opposition groups struggling for their share of control. How much HTS will be in control and how much they can control the other radical members of the opposition is still unknown. Much is still unstable, and much is still to be determined. And that, in today’s Syria, is a very volatile and dangerous situation.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
Washington Celebrates Al-Qaeda’s Victory in Syria
Washington finally completed its dirty war in Syria. What started as a CIA covert operation to smuggle weapons and jihadists from Libya to Syria has resulted in Syria leader Bashar al-Assad being deposed and replaced by Abu Mohammad al-Julani.
Julani found his way to Damascus by rising through the ranks of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Inspired by the 9/11 attack, he joined AQI to fight against the US during the Iraq war. Julani was a close associate of both AQI leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and founded the al-Qaeda affiliate group Syria in coordination with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
As more Americans became aware of the CIA’s covert operation in Syria to back jihadists, Julani changed his organization’s name from Al Nusra to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, then Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) to obscure his group’s al-Qaeda links. However, HTS was no moderate group and focused on bringing ISIS forces under Julani’s control following the collapse of Bagadadi’s caliphate.
Even the US State Department was not fooled by Julani’s rebrands. In 2017, the State Department issued a $10 million reward for the capture of Julani.
For most of the past decade, Julani has ruled over northwestern Syria under the protection of Washington’s NATO ally, Turkey. Had Turkish troops not set up outposts surrounding Julani’s territory, Syria, and its Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah allies may have eliminated the lingering jihadist threat. During this period, Julani’s Idlib province was the largest safe haven for jihadists on the planet.
Since the ISIS caliphate was defeated, the frontlines in the Syrian War largely froze. Still, Washington and its allies engaged in a relentless assault on Damascus.
Turkey protected jihadists on Syria’s northern border, allowing them to terrorize the Kurds that lived there.
Israel engaged in weekly strikes on Assad and his allied forces. Over the past year, those strikes have escalated to hit civilian and diplomatic targets in downtown Damascus. Tel Aviv even bombed the Aleppo Airport following a major earthquake, preventing aid from reaching the desperate citizens.
The US illegally occupied the eastern quarter of Syria, exploiting and stealing some of Damasus’s most valuable resources. In this region, the US allowed the Kurds to lord power over the local Arabs. The Kurdish SDF runs a massive torture prison known as the al-Hol camp, and local citizens protest the Kurds conscripting their children as young as 15.
Washington waged an economic war on Syria, deliberately meant to prevent Damascus from rebuilding its war-destroyed infrastructure. The US also bombed Assad’s allied forces near the Iraq-Syria border.
Additionally, Turkey and Ukraine used this period to bolster the HTS forces.
The long-frozen conflict thawed rapidly over the past two weeks. Seemingly in coordination with the announcement of a truce in Lebanon, Julani’s forces went on the march, first seizing Aleppo. Reported to be aided by advanced drones, HTS made quick work of any Syria forces that resisted, and on Sunday, Julani arrived in Damascus and declared the “mujahideen” won the war. And Washington celebrated.
“Syria is free. The rebels won. The people liberated themselves from tyranny. Freedom won,” the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wrote on X. “Russia, Iran, Hezbollah & Assad lost. Historic. The road ahead for Syria won’t be easy. But it will be better than the past. The world should celebrate Syria’s liberation & help it succeed.”
Post columnist Max Boot wrote, “Assad – after a quarter-century of ruthless rule – had fled the country. Syria was free at last.”
“The fall of Assad. On some days, one can believe that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice,” neocon Bill Krystol wrote on X.
Of course, what happened to Syria is not about the Syrians. The real goal of Washington was to weaken Damascus because they believed it would weaken Moscow, Tehran, and Hezbollah.
What happens next in Syria is unlikely to be good for many of the minority groups that enjoyed some level of protection under Assad. However, Washington and its allies are swooping in like hungry vultures to feats on the remains of Syria.
Shortly after Assad left Damascus, in Tel Aviv Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel would be seizing a “buffer zone” in southwestern Syria. Turkey also launched airstrikes on a Kurdish-held city in northern Syria.
No doubt, in the coming days, we will hear crowing from the hawks in Washington about their triumph in Syria by severing Tehran’s land connection to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. In the White House, Biden’s staff is no doubt discussing how to exploit Assad’s downfall as far as possible; this includes attempts to remove Russia from its military bases along Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
The biggest losers in Syria are the Syrian people, who, for nearly a decade and a half, have been subject to a brutal and complex war that shows no signs of ending. They have been bombed by a seemingly unending number of countries, all with their unique geopolitical interests. The Syrian people have been intentionally starved and impoverished by the US to bring about Assad’s downfall. While Assad was a tyrant, no doubt Julani will come with his own, and likely more oppressive, tyranny.
Among the other losers are the American people. More American lives and treasure were wasted on a project to dispose of another Middle East dictator. In Iraq and Libya, this policy caused unimaginable suffering for the locals.
The top threat is that our government has empowered the only true enemies of the American people. Iran, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Assad’s Syria, etc. all present no threat to the American homeland. However, now an al-Qaeda terrorist sits on the throne in Damascus, and Washington’s support for Tel Aviv’s genocide in Gaza has given him an endless supply of anti-American hatred.
Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute. He hosts The Kyle Anzalone Show and is co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Connor Freeman.
Islamist Takeover of Syria Proves Tulsi Gabbard Was Right
The tragic events in Syria over the weekend should, but will likely not, prompt reflection and rethinking on the part of many within the Washington establishment who were at the forefront of calling for the overthrow of the secular leader of multi-confessional Syria, Bashar al-Assad, beginning in 2011 when his government was the object of a coup attempt by Islamist jihadists. What was unfolding there thirteen years ago was no secret – at the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s adviser Jake Sullivan noted in an email that “AQ is on our side in Syria” – AQ being Al Qaeda. Yet this did not dissuade an alliance of crusading “progressive” foreign policy thinkers and neoconservatives from wholehearted embracing Hillary Clinton’s war cry that “Assad must go.” The question they never had a satisfactory answer for was “and then what?”
We arrived over the weekend at the “and then what?” part of the story. It appears by all accounts that the Islamist group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which has roots in the al Nusra front, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda, has now, and with fearful alacrity, taken control of Syria. And so what has happened is exactly what a number of us, perhaps most prominently Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, have spent years warning about: an Islamist caliphate on the Mediterranean.
What to expect now? The Christian population of Syria which was heretofore free to worship should expect to be fed to a slaughter, as advertised.
What do I mean ‘as advertised’?
Eyewitnesses to the earliest protests knew that this was no peaceful pro-democracy movement. Recall the observations of Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch missionary to Syria who was murdered by so-called “rebel” forces in 2014:
…From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”
The murdered Dutch priest also observed, “The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order to then blame the government.”
The promise made by Saudi- and Turkish- backed terrorists in the early days of the anti-Assad uprising, that they would drive “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave” is now likely to come to fruition.
Given this, opponents of Gabbard’s nomination to serve as DNI might take a deep breath and consider what is happening in Syria at this very moment before they unleash another round of unfounded, uninformed – and in the cases of Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz – hysterical attacks on her character.
Part of the reason for the attacks has of course to do with her heterodox view of US-Russia policy (a view I share), which in some ways tracks with Trump’s. The other reason for the opprobrium aimed in her direction has been her steadfast opposition to an Islamist takeover of Syria.
As has been widely reported, Gabbard met Assad in January 2017. Gabbard was hardly the first American politician to meet with the Syrian leader. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with him against the objections of the Bush White House in 2007.
Why did Gabbard meet with Assad? Likely because our policy toward the region was deeply immoral and strategically counterproductive. And we know this because the man serving as Washington’s chief diplomat at the time of Gabbard’s meeting was caught on tape admitting as much. Here is a transcript of then Secretary of State John Kerry in September 2016 admitting the US led ISIL run wild in the hope that it would topple Assad:
…And we know that this [ISIL/Daesh] was growing, we were watching, we saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened…We thought, however, we could probably imagine that Assad might then negotiate, but instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him.…The reason Russia came in is because ISIL was getting stronger. Daesh was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus at some point and that’s why Russia came in. Because they didn’t want a Daesh government and they supported Assad. “
They, the Russians, didn’t want a Syrian government controlled by ISIL/ISIS.
The question remains: Why did we?
What Gabbard knew then and so few else did or claimed not to (the argument over the nature of the Islamist beast attacking Syria was particularly venomous among publications on the left, as I remember all too well from my time at The Nation) was that Assad – dictator that he might have been – had been the target of a decade long coup attempt perpetuated by some of the most violent religious fanatics in the Middle East.
One hardly expects someone like Wasserman-Schultz, who would flatline an electroencephalogram, to understand the difference between an Alawite ophthalmologist and a Salafi-jihadist. But for the US Senators now tasked with considering Gabbard’s confirmation, there is no excuse.
James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
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