By TARIQ ALI*
What we are witnessing in Syria today is a huge defeat, a mini 1967 for the Arab world.
No one, except a few corrupt cronies, will shed tears at the tyrant’s departure. But there should be no doubt that what we are witnessing in Syria today is a major defeat, a mini 1967 for the Arab world. As I write, Israeli ground forces have entered this battered country. There is no definitive agreement yet, but some things are clear.
Bashar al-Assad has become a refugee in Moscow. His Baathist apparatus has made a deal with the leader of NATO East, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (whose brutalities in Idlib loom large), offering the country on a silver platter. The rebels have agreed that Bashar al-Assad’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, should continue to oversee the state for the time being. Is this a form of “Assadism” without Bashar al-Assad? That is, a brutal regime even as the country is about to distance itself geopolitically from Russia and what remains of the “Axis of Resistance”?
Like Iraq and Libya, where the US has oil possessions, Syria will now become a shared American and Turkish colony. US imperial policy globally is to divide countries when they cannot be swallowed whole.
The goal is to remove all significant sovereignty in order to assert economic and political hegemony. This may have started “accidentally” in the former Yugoslavia, but it has since become a pattern. The European Union’s satellites use similar methods to ensure that smaller nations (Georgia, Romania) are kept under control. Democracy and human rights have little to do with it. This is a global struggle for world domination.
In 2003, after Baghdad fell to the US, the jubilant Israeli ambassador to Washington congratulated George W. Bush and advised him not to stop there, but to move on to Damascus and Tehran. However, the US victory had an unintended but predictable side effect: Iraq became a Shiite remnant state, greatly strengthening Iran’s position in the region. The disaster there, and later in Libya, showed that Damascus would have to wait more than a decade before it received proper imperial attention. In the meantime, Iranian and Russian support for Assad prevented a routine regime change.
Now, the ouster of Bashar al-Assad has created a different kind of vacuum – one that will likely be filled by NATO’s Turkey and the US through “ex-al-Qaeda,” as well as by Israel. It will rise Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a replacement for Abu Mohammad al-Jolani; after his stint in a US prison in Iraq, he will now appear, normally, as a freedom fighter. Israel's contribution to this was enormous: it partially destroyed Beirut through massive bombing rounds; in addition, it managed to weaken and disable Hezbollah.
In the wake of this victory, it is hard to imagine Iran being left alone. While the ultimate goal of both the US and Israel is regime change, degrading and disarming the country is the first priority. This broader plan to reshape the region helps explain the unstinting support given by Washington and its European proxies to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine. After more than a year of killing, the Kantian principle that the state’s actions must be such that they can become universally respected law seems like a bad joke.
Who will replace Bashar al-Assad? Before his departure, some reports suggested that if the dictator made a 180-degree turnaround — breaking with Iran and Russia and restoring good relations with the US and Israel, as he and his father did before him — then the Americans might be inclined to keep him. It is too late now, but the state apparatus that abandoned him has readily declared its willingness to collaborate with anyone. Will Recep Erdoğan do the same?
The Sultan of Donkeys will certainly want his own people, raised in Idlib since they were child soldiers, to be in charge; Syria must be under Ankara’s control. If he succeeds in imposing a Turkish puppet regime, it will be another version of what happened in Libya. But he is unlikely to get his way. Recep Erdoğan is strong on demagogy but weak on action.
And given the circumstances, the US and Israel may veto a renewed al-Qaeda government for reasons of their own. They will do so despite having used the jihadists to fight Assad. Regardless, the replacement regime is unlikely to abolish the Mukhābarāt (secret police), outlaw torture or provide accountable government.
Before the Six-Day War, one of the central components of Arab nationalism and unity was the Baath Party, which ruled Syria and had a strong base in Iraq; the other, more powerful, was Nasser’s government in Egypt. Syrian Baathism during the pre-Assad period was relatively enlightened and radical. When I met Prime Minister Yusuf Zuayyin in Damascus in 1967, he explained that the only way forward was to outflank conservative nationalism, making Syria “the Cuba of the Middle East.”
However, Israel’s attack that year led to the rapid destruction of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, paving the way for the demise of Nasserist Arab nationalism. Yusuf Zuayyin was overthrown, and Hafez-al Assad was thrust into power with tacit US support – much like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, to whom the CIA provided a list of the top cadres of the Iraqi Communist Party. The Baathist radicals in both countries were discarded; the party’s founder, Michel Aflaq, resigned in disgust when he saw where it was headed.
These new Baathist dictatorships were, however, supported by certain sections of the population, as long as they provided a basic safety net. Iraq under Saddam and Syria under Assad father and son were brutal but social dictatorships. Father Hafez al-Assad came from the middle class of the peasantry and enacted several progressive reforms to ensure that his class was kept happy, reducing the tax burden and abolishing usury. By 1970, the vast majority of Syrian villages had only natural light; peasants woke and went to bed with the sun. A few decades later, the construction of the Euphrates Dam allowed 95% of them to be electrified, with power heavily subsidized by the state.
It was these policies, not repression alone, that ensured the stability of the regime. The majority of the population turned a blind eye to the torture and imprisonment of citizens in the cities. Bashar al-Assad and his group firmly believed that man was little more than an economic creature, and that if such needs were met, then only a small minority would rebel: “one or two hundred at most,” Assad once remarked, “were the kind for whom the Mezzeh prison had originally been designed.”
The eventual uprising against the young Bashar al-Assad in 2011 was triggered by his turn to neoliberalism and the exclusion of the peasantry. When it calcified into a bitter civil war, one option would have been a compromise and a power-sharing agreement – but the apparatchiks, who are currently negotiating with Recep Erdoğan – advised him to be against any such deal.
During one of my visits to Damascus, the Palestinian intellectual Faisal Darraj confided that the Mukhābarāt agent who gave him permission to leave the country for conferences abroad always imposed one condition: “Bring back the latest Baudrillard and Virilio.” It is always good to have educated torturers, as the great Arab novelist Abdelrahman Munif—a Saudi by birth and a leading intellectual in the Baath Party—might have said.
Abdelrahman Munif's 1975 novel, Sharq al-Mutawassit (East of the Mediterranean), is a devastating account of torture and political imprisonment. Egyptian literary critic Sabry Hafez described the book as one of “exceptional power and ambition, aspiring to write the ultimate political prison in all its variations.” When I spoke to Abdelrahman Munif in the 1990s, he said, with a sad look on his face, that these were the themes that dominated Arabic literature and poetry: a tragic commentary on the state of the Arab nation. Today, that shows little sign of changing. Even if the rebels have freed some of Bashar al-Assad’s prisoners, they will soon replace them with their own.
The US and most of the European Union have spent the past year successfully sustaining and defending a genocide in Gaza. All US client states in the region remain intact, while three non-client states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – have been decapitated. The fall of the latter removes a crucial supply line linking various anti-Zionist factions.
From a geopolitical strategic point of view, this is a triumph for Washington and Israel. This must be acknowledged, but despair is useless. An effective resistance will only be reconstituted depending on the next confrontation between Israel and a besieged Iran, which is engaged in direct underground negotiations with the US and certain members of Donald Trump’s entourage, while accelerating the development of its nuclear plans. The situation is fraught with danger.
*Tariq Ali is a journalist, historian and writer. Author, among other books, of clash of fundamentalisms (Record). [https://amzn.to/3Q8qwYg]
Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.
Originally published on sidecar blog da new left review.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
