Syria: the US as dog in the manger
Inexorably, the war on Syria is coming to a close.
Arab governments that supported the war in 2011 are sending delegations to Damascus, while Syria is sending delegates to Arab capitals, with Bashar al Assad recently visiting Abu Dhabi and Oman. Saudi Arabia and Iran have taken the first steps towards reestablishing diplomatic relations, hastening an end to the war on Yemen as well as Syria. Turkiye has agreed to withdraw its troops from northwest Syria, leaving US troops isolated in the east when it happens. Congressional pressure to pull them out, too, will surely build up.
Crowning all of these epochal changes, while Iraq began brokering the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran several years ago, the deal was finally sealed by China, now joining Russia in pulling the rug from under the feet of the US across the Middle East.
The developing multipolar world order that is the impetus for these regional changes bears no relationship to the ‘new world order’ envisaged by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, but rather represents its final disappearance from history. The same goes for the ‘greater Middle East’ set in motion by US policymakers about the same time. They are dusty relics on which future historians won’t waste much time. US policy across the region has been turned upside down, the ‘shock and awe’ of the first war on Iraq in 1990 replaced by shock and awful.
Why did the US attack Syria in the first place? The ‘Arab spring’ was the pretext for an opportunity to break the strategic alliance between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah. The prime target was Iran, but Iran was too big and too dangerous, despite the superiority of US and Israeli firepower. Syria was smaller and weaker but the central arch in the ‘axis of resistance’ stretching across the Middle East. If it could be destroyed the whole structure would come crashing down. In time the two pillars still standing at either end could be toppled one by one.
The template was supposed to be Libya in 2011 but, deceived once, Russia and China were not to be deceived again. They blocked the attempt by the US to have the UN declare a ‘no fly zone’ over Syria, forcing the US to rely on armed proxies to destroy the government in Damascus.
The operation was franchised, with various players, notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkiye, providing money, weaponry and bases for the training of the ’rebels’ but with the overall operation managed by the US. Takfiris (see the note at the end of this article) from around the world poured into Syria from across the border with Turkey, having flown into Istanbul or crossing land borders from the Caucasus.
The war, even including the two wars on Iraq, has been the most determined attempt made by the ‘west’ in modern history to destroy an Arab government. More than half a million people have been killed, including about 100,000 Syrian soldiers. About 13 million have been displaced within Syria, millions more have fled to neighbouring countries (almost four million to Turkiye) or have sought refuge further afield, in Europe, north America or Australia. From north to south, east to west, cities and towns have been gutted.
Many of the ‘rebels’ were not even Syrian but members of the most brutal armed bands on the face of the earth, all of them ideological clones of the Islamic State. Russian aerial intervention in 2015 broke the back of the Islamic State and exposed the plunder of Iraqi and Syrian oil under the cover of war. Gradually Syria was able to wind back the territorial hold of the takfiris, leaving them holding only the northwestern Idlib province. Once Turkey withdraws they won’t have that either. They will have nowhere to go as no one, including their previous sponsors, wants them.
Arms having failed to achieve the primary goal, the US turned to the weapon it used against Iraq with genocidal effect, sanctions. In fact the US has been sanctioning Syria ever since its alignment with the Iranian revolution of 1979. Since 2011 sanctions have been tightened at regular intervals, leading to NGOs in the US having their assets frozen after trying to send funds to Syrian charities.
The consequences have been summed up by Professor Alena Douhan, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the effect of sanctions, whose report Susan Dirgham mentioned in her P & I article The cruel impact of US sanctions on earthquake-affected Syria. The detail is shocking: 90 percent of the population living below the poverty line, deprived of medicine and specialised medical equipment for chronic illnesses, with only restricted access to food, water, electricity, shelter, heating fuel transportation and spare parts for water pumping stations. Half Syria’s vital infrastructure has been destroyed. US-led sanctions are blocking reconstruction, opening up yet another opportunity for Russia and China to take the lead.
Since 2007, financial sanctions have been declared against Lebanon, aimed at Hizbullah but affecting Syria, through the freezing of funds held by Syrian businesses in Lebanese banks. While the US did not create Lebanon’s current economic crisis, sanctions have greatly worsened it, with flow-on effects that have impoverished 75 percent of the population, according to UNICEF.
For all the damage and death it has caused, the US has been left behind by the dramatic changes sweeping across the Middle East. In Turkiye, public opinion polls ahead of the May elections are putting the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) alliance well ahead of Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) but whichever party wins, the Syrian occupation will be ended, probably quite quickly if the opposition comes out on top. This will leave the US all by itself in eastern Syria, defending ‘national interests’ harder to define by the day.
The US has about 12 military bases in Syria, including one at Al Tanf, in the southeast corner of Syria close to the Iraqi and Jordanian border, where a ‘Revolutionary Commando Army’ is being trained for future missions. These bases regularly come under drone attack, the US responding with missile strikes against ‘Iranian-backed’ positions, which Syria claims are nothing of the sort.
The US is plundering Syria’s oil. It is in Syria because Russia is there, it is in Syria because Israel wants it to be there, it is in Syria because of Syria’s strategic alliance with Iran and Hizbullah. That is why the US led the attack on Syria in the first place, leading to one last question: since then, has anything changed for the better, for Syria, for the region, even for the US and Israel?
Author’s note:
“Takfiri”, as used in this article, is a more accurate term than jihadist. Jihad is a noble undertaking, first to improve one’s self as a Muslim and a human being, and, the secondary meaning, to defend the Muslim umma, traditionally as represented by a state, when it is under attack. The root meaning of takfiri is unbelief, and thus the declaration of unbelief, on individual Muslims and states who don’t satisfy the takfiri criteria of what it is to be a ‘good’ Muslim, frequently followed through with extreme violence by takfiri groups. All Shia are automatically excluded. In such circumstances, one is entitled to ask who is the true enemy of Islam. These points need to be made, given the sloppy use of jihad.
Jeremy Salt taught modern Middle East history at the University of Melbourne, Bogazici (Bosporus) university in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara. he is the author of 'The Unmaking of the Middle East. A history of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press, 2008) and 'The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923' (University of Utah Press, 2019). He is now an independent researcher.