The Witness Chronicles, 12/14/24

Syria blows up. Why we should care.

Photo by Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash

What Does Syria Right Now Mean For Us?

It might be an indicator of a crack in the authoritarian wall. Might.

It’s been the big story this week, along with the coverage of the insurance executive shooter, which has been wildly overdone. But a handsome assassin shooting a business bad guy is the tabloid kind of sensationalized story the media loves, and they are beating us over the head with it.

Reality? This guy is probably mentally ill, another screwed up dude with a manifesto and a gun who was lost and needed attention. So, kill a big shot, don’t bother really hiding your trail, and have your moment in the spotlight. These things are a dime a dozen these days and these sad characters are not heroes. Enough said.

Meanwhile Syria, a small middle eastern country ruled for decades by a corrupt and violent family of dictators, was taken over by rebels, insurgents who once were associated with terrorism groups, including Al Qaeda. In other words, just another day over there. Or was it?

This happened fast, as these things often do, a lesson many dictators fail to learn from history. Largely ignored as one more opposition group in a country rife with them, these rebels gathered their forces and waited for events to line up in their favor. And then the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s proxy military group, provided that moment.

Netanyahu, in his brutal campaign against Hezbollah and Hamas, carpet bombed both terrorist groups into disarray, while shaking off massive Iranian missile attacks with a shrug. While I find Netanyahu’s heartless strategy of mass killing repulsive, it had the effect of breaking the terrorists armies’ hold on any meaningful change in a place like Syria.

Add in extremist elements like Isis and Bashar Assad’s inhuman crushing of his own people while he lived in luxury, and this was a time bomb. And two weeks ago it went off as the rebels came, seemingly out of nowhere, and crushed Assad’s forces, taking new cities daily until they reached Damascus and Assad fled to Moscow. And suddenly everything changed.

Why Moscow? The only thing propping up Assad in recent years was Putin’s Russia with their Air Force, that effectively kept things in check in Syria. However, reading the writing on the wall, and under intense pressure due to his war in Ukraine, Putin pulled his shrinking resources in the Middle East and left Assad hanging.

And the rebels emerged and ran over the country. There was another factor in Putin’s decision. His economy in Russia is finally failing due to the cost of war and international sanctions, with inflation over 10% and the price of basic goods skyrocketing. As we saw during our election, price shock at the grocery store is a powerful political mover.

Did you get all that? There will not be a quiz.

So, a crappy dictatorship overturned in the middle of a distant region where stuff like that is happening constantly. Ho hum. Except…that distant region is critically important to Americans for a number of reasons. It has been a hotbed of terrorism that reached into our homeland with horrific results. It is a major oil producing region and home to some of our biggest allies, though Israel and the Saudis are not exactly pals*.

It is also central to global trade routes, we have a huge military presence there, and the Russians have used it as a base for their increasing exploitation of Africa. These are all major US interests.

Trump may make a huge deal about America First and isolationism but we are not isolated and never will be again. Like that butterfly wing flapping in China changes the weather in a far away country, small events in the Middle East reverberate across our economy at lightning speed.

Right now the main Western response to events in Syria is extreme caution. It looks good on the surface but these rebel forces are not the idealistic rebels depicted in Star Wars, they are a mish mash of conflicting groups, including terrorists who claim to be reformed. There could be a big internal conflict brewing in that mix.

Biden, who probably has more Middle Eastern foreign policy experience than any US politician, immediately ordered airstrikes on over seventy known Isis hotspots in Syria, hoping to quell that group from taking advantage of the instability. It was probably the best thing we could do without getting involved further right now.

The biggest story here for us is the frailty of these dictatorships, including both Assad and Putin and the frailty of any alliances they make. Putin only supported Assad as long as there was no real threat. When there was, he abandoned him. Even though Assad has asylum in Russia, we are hearing that there will be no support for the dictator beyond that.

There is a lesson for Donald Trump in this, but it is unlikely he will pay any attention as he gathers his forces to create his own autocracy. Those are lessons no narcissist aspiring to power wants to learn. Trump sees the moment as his time and he will likely overreach in his attempts to create absolute power.

You know what they say about absolute power. Ask Bashar Assad, cowering somewhere in Russia, while rebels cavort amongst his Lambos and blow holes in his notorious prisons. And while Bibi Netanyahu testifies in his corruption trial, testimonies that we hear have been the words of a man with a messianic belief in himself. Then there’s Vlad, increasingly isolated in Moscow, his own people restless and his hopes lying in the rise of a criminal president in the US.

For those who think foreign policy is somehow other people’s problems, think again. Syria’s liberation may mean little to us personally, it will have an effect over time, hopefully a positive one.

*The Saudis and Israel were on the brink of an alliance before the October Seventh terrorist attack on Israel, an alliance that would have drastically shifted the balance of power in the region away from Iran and its terrorist groups. Disrupting those talks was likely a major reason for the timing of the attack that triggered much of what I’m writing about here, over a year later.

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