Approach Syria With a Tragic Mind

Reuters reports that Syrian Islamist rebels have captured Damascus and  overthrown the regime of Bashar al-Assad, ending at least for now the six-decade rule of the Alawite regime. The Guardian notes that the rebels are part of an Islamist alliance Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS), whose founder, Abu Mohammad Jolani, fought with the Iraqi insurgency against U.S. forces as part of the Islamic State, and the Syrian National Army backed by Turkey.

The United States has designated HTS, which was formally affiliated with al-Qaeda, as a terrorist group. Assad, whose regime was backed by Iran and Russia, has reportedly fled to Russia. U.S. forces are present in the eastern portion of Syria controlled by the Kurds.

Syria is a land divided among rebel groups who will undoubtedly engage in a struggle for power, as previously happened in Iraq after U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, and Libya after U.S. forces helped overthrow the Gaddafi regime. Like Hussein and Gaddafi, Assad was a brutal dictator who headed-up what the Financial Times called a “parasitical regime [that] bled the country dry,” just as his father Hafez al-Assad did until his death in 2000.

“Assad’s demise,” writes Andrew England in FT, “will be welcomed by the many millions who suffered under his rule … But the massive outpouring of jubilation will be tempered by wariness about what comes next.” One possibility is Syria becoming a “fragile, hollowed-out state in chaos with Islamist groups at the fore.”

Middle East expert Edward Luttwak noted that Assad’s fall was helped along by Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which long supported Assad’s regime. Just a few days ago, U.S. forces carried out a military strike against Syrian forces in eastern Syria.  So Assad’s defeat is a loss for both Iran and Russia, but that doesn’t mean it is automatically a gain for the United States in the region.

President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the U.S. military “is not going to … dive into the middle of a Syrian civil war,” while president-elect Donald Trump said that the struggle in Syria “is not our fight.” President Biden commented simply that “at long last the Assad regime has fallen.”

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have taken control of a buffer zone on the Golan Heights, the strategic ground that separates Israel from Syria, because the Syrian Army “abandoned its positions,” according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also called Assad’s fall a “historic day” that “offers great opportunity but is also fraught with significant dangers.”

Netanyahu is approaching the developments in Syria with a “tragic mind” — Robert Kaplan’s phrase to describe a realist approach to international affairs. The “tragic mind,” Kaplan has written, is anti-utopian, appreciates the limitations of human nature and the “terrible power of the irrational.”

Netanyahu understands that the fall of a brutal regime often produces chaos which can be more deadly than tyranny. Kaplan saw that happen in Iraq — a war that he initially supported only to conclude that as bad as Hussein’s regime was, the chaos that followed was worse. The choice in human affairs is not always between good and evil — it is quite often between different degrees of evil.

Neoconservative voices are already applauding the fall of Assad’s regime, with Bill Kristol, the champion of regime change throughout the region, snidely remarking that with Assad in Moscow, Tulsi Gabbard and Tucker Carlson can now “visit both of their BFFs [i.e., Assad and Putin] on one trip.” Kristol wants to shape what happens in Syria “as much as possible.”

The editors of the Washington Post urge U.S. leaders to help build a “new Syria,” forgetting perhaps how we failed to build a “new Iraq” or a “new Libya” or a “new Afghanistan.” For the neocons, Syria is just another land to experiment with nation-building — like Marxists after communism’s repeated failures in country after country, the neocons believe that maybe this time nation-building will work.

Donald Trump seems instinctively to approach international developments with a tragic sensibility, aware of the limitations of American power and the potential unintended consequences of unbridled hubris. It is quite possible that none of the outcomes in Syria will benefit U.S. interests, but surely contributing to the chaos will not help matters. We have no vital interest in making Syria a democracy. Surely, we have learned the lessons of our failed and costly nation-building efforts in that part of the world.

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