Last week, after 50 years of tyranny and repression, the federal government of Bashar Assad fell in Syria. It fell because of a mixture of three forces. First, Israel’s navy completely eviscerated Assad’s international navy help base, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. Second, Ukraine has bled dry the Russian navy coffers over the course of the final a number of years, main Russia to withdraw its help from the Syrian theater. And third, the Turkish authorities, led by Islamist authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stepped into the breach, with its favored radical militia, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, cruising by means of the nation with nearly no opposition.
Assad was a vicious and brutal dictator; in keeping with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, opposition teams and rescue staff are uncovering mass graves that might maintain upward of 100,000 our bodies of Assad’s enemies. Assad not solely used chemical weapons in opposition to Syrians, he additionally instantly intervened in Lebanese affairs, concentrating on Lebanese Christians amongst others. His regime was merciless and odious.
What replaces Assad is not any picnic.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s chief, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, is a former al-Qaida and ISIS terrorist. He spent 5 years in prisons, together with Abu Ghraib. In 2017, the FBI put a $10 million bounty on his head. Al-Jolani is at present making an attempt to place himself as a reasonable determine, regardless of his historical past of terrorism and his group’s human rights abuses within the Idlib area of Syria.
Meanwhile, the Turks have spent years urgent into the northern areas of Syria, largely in an try and assault the Kurds, whom they see as a risk to their sovereignty. Turkey at present occupies roughly 9,000 sq. kilometers of Syrian border territory, which it has been utilizing as a launch level in opposition to the Kurds—all of which threatens the potential for an ISIS jailbreak, since hundreds of ISIS members are held in prisons in Kurdish territory.
In brief, Syria is a chaotic mess, stuffed with competing pursuits.
Yet in keeping with simplistic international coverage analysts, the issue is, as all the time, the United States and its allies.
In response to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s takeover of Syria, Israel has now moved into the Syrian area of Mount Hermon, the strategic excessive level of the world, in search of to forestall the potential for that land getting used as a staging floor for assaults on the Golan Heights. Many Druze in Syria are hopeful that Israel will act as their protector in opposition to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Turkish forces; Israel additionally has heat relations with the Kurds.
Yet Western opponents of Israel now recommend that Israel someway plotted Assad’s fall in an effort to develop its territorial pursuits in Syria—even supposing Turkey, a Hamas-aligned state, actually supported the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham insurgency. They additionally recommend that America, beneath Joe Biden, plotted Assad’s downfall—an odd accusation on condition that Biden’s agenda within the Middle East has been to again Israel off assaults on Iranian proxies within the area.
It is not any shock to seek out the identical evaluation utilized to Ukraine by related actors. They recommend that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was someway a defensive transfer, motivated by resistance to American imperialism overseas; that American help for Ukraine quantities to taking the improper facet.
What drives this evaluation? A wierd mixture of “blame America” pondering and conspiracy theorizing. In this viewpoint, the one nations with precise pursuits and company are America and her associates; everybody else is merely a sufferer of those predatory powers, partaking in “blowback” in opposition to Western imperialism. The answer, presumably, could be for America to withdraw from the world stage, thus making a vacuum to be crammed by America’s opponents—China, Russia, and Iran.
We needn’t discover the motivations of those theorists in an effort to level out how facile this argument actually is. Great powers have all the time pursued their very own pursuits, and so they have all the time executed so aggressively. Long earlier than America existed, Sunni Ottomans fought Shia Safavids; Russia first swallowed a lot of Central Ukraine through the reign of Catherine the Great within the late 18th century. America needn’t have interaction all around the world, nor ought to we—however to fake that different nations act solely in response to America is to forcefully reject actuality.
And rejecting actuality is harmful and silly.
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