Last week, after 50 years of tyranny and repression, the government of Bashar Assad fell in Syria. It fell thanks to a combination of three forces: first, Israel's military utterly eviscerated Assad's foreign military support base, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia; second, Ukraine has bled dry the Russian military coffers over the course of the last several years, leading Russia to withdraw its support from the Syrian theater; and third, the Turkish government, led by Islamist authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stepped into the breach, with its favored radical militia, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, cruising through the country with almost no opposition.
Assad was a vicious and brutal dictator; according to the Syrian Emergency Task Force, opposition groups and rescue workers are uncovering mass graves that could hold upward of 100,000 bodies of Assad's enemies. Assad not only used chemical weapons against Syrians; he also directly intervened in Lebanese affairs, targeting Lebanese Christians among others. His regime was cruel and odious.
What replaces Assad is no picnic.
HTS' leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani is a former al-Qaida and ISIS terrorist. He spent five years in prisons, including Abu Ghraib. In 2017, the FBI put a $10 million bounty on his head. Al-Jolani is currently attempting to position himself as a moderate figure, despite his history of terrorism and his group's human rights abuses in the Idlib region of Syria.
Meanwhile, the Turks have spent years pressing into the northern regions of Syria, largely in an attempt to attack the Kurds, whom they see as a threat to their sovereignty. Turkey currently occupies approximately 9,000 square kilometers of Syrian border territory, which it has been using as a launch point against the Kurds -- all of which threatens the possibility of an ISIS jailbreak, since thousands of ISIS members are held in prisons in Kurdish territory.
In short, Syria is a chaotic mess, filled with competing interests.
Yet according to simplistic foreign policy analysts, the problem is, as always, the United States and its allies.
In response to HTS' takeover of Syria, Israel has now moved into the Syrian region of Mount Hermon, the strategic high point of the area, seeking to forestall the possibility of that land being used as a staging ground for attacks on the Golan Heights. Many Druze in Syria are hopeful that Israel will act as their protector against HTS and Turkish forces; Israel also has warm relations with the Kurds. Yet Western opponents of Israel now suggest that Israel somehow plotted Assad's fall in order to expand their territorial interests in Syria -- despite the fact that Turkey, a Hamas-aligned state, literally supported the HTS insurgency. They also suggest that America, under Joe Biden, plotted Assad's downfall -- a strange accusation given that Biden's agenda in the Middle East has been to back Israel off of attacks on Iranian proxies in the region.
It is no surprise to find the same analysis applied to Ukraine, by similar actors. They suggest that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was somehow a defensive move, motivated by resistance to American imperialism abroad; that American support for Ukraine amounts to taking the wrong side.
What drives this analysis? A strange combination of "blame America" thinking and conspiracy theorizing. In this viewpoint, the only countries with actual interests and agency are America and her friends; everyone else is merely a victim of these predatory powers, engaging in "blowback" against Western imperialism. The solution, presumably, would be for America to withdraw from the world stage, thus creating a vacuum to be filled by America's opponents -- China, Russia and Iran.
We need not explore the motivations of these theorists in order to point out how facile this argument truly is. Great powers have always pursued their own interests, and they have always done so aggressively. Long before America existed, Sunni Ottomans fought Shia Safavids; Russia first swallowed much of Central Ukraine during the reign of Catherine the Great, in the late 18th century. America need not engage all over the world, nor should we -- but to pretend that other countries act only in response to America is to forcefully reject reality.
And rejecting reality is dangerous and stupid.
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