Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
the summit of Mt. Hermon in Syria, Dec 17, 2024. (Photo: Screenshot/GPO)
I am finding it very hard to swallow the disaster that has
occurred in Syria, or to digest its consequences. It makes me sick.
Though it foresaw the looming disaster, my last article was
written just before the flight of Assad and the fall of Damascus, and it was
still possible to imagine there might be another out to be played. Well, it’s
now, definitely, game over, and there’s no denying who won and who lost. The
result is depressing and demoralizing.
To reprise what I said in that article, “If Now that Syria
is lost to the Erdogan-sponsored Jihadi forces, Russia, Iran, Lebanon, the Axis
of Resistance, and the Palestinian people will have lost something very
important, something that cannot be recovered without a…more deadly fight than
would have been required to prevent the loss.” Correspondingly, US imperialism,
Zionism, and Turkish neo-Ottomanism have won a strategic geopolitical victory
that gives them advantages that will be hard to overcome.
Since 2012, I’ve written at least 17 articles about the vicious
“multiple, concentric proxy war” the US, Israel, Turkey, and
the Gulf States (especially Qatar), with their jihadi pawns, have waged to
destroy the Syrian state. By 2015, it had become
“the most expensive US covert action program in history.” Along with many
others, I critiqued and attacked the Axis of Chaos’s arrogant and insouciant
destruction of a country and a region, creating hundreds of thousands of
casualties and refugees, destroying ancient and vibrant cities and towns,
replacing secular pluralism with head-chopping takfiri sectarianism—all to
eliminate a polity independent of and resistant to U.S. imperialism, Zionist
colonialism, and Turkish ambition. I and many others had been glad to see that
project interrupted by a Russian intervention, and, even though most of
us knew that it was not stopped, we were too complacent about the ongoing
destructive effects of the ongoing U.S. occupation and sanctions (per US thug Diana Stroul) and way
too complacent about the persistence and armament of the Turkish-controlled
jihadi redoubt in Idlib.
Over the last couple of years, many of us focused on the
waning hard and soft power of U.S. imperialism in relation to the rising
military power of Russia and China and their allied economic bloc in BRICS, as
well as to the waning of Zionism’s hard and soft power in relation to the
rising power of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Axis of Resistance and in relation to
the world’s (especially the world’s youth) rising understanding of the
illegitimacy of Zionist colonialism.
All these factors are still true and in play, but we have
foolishly underestimated how strong, tenacious, and diverse the Zio-imperialist
team is, and we have to recognize that. We didn’t see him as the team slugger, but,
in Syria, Erdogan came in and hit a walk-off home run. And we didn’t even know
what inning we were in. It’s going to be a long, hard season.
Here’s where we now stand, what we have to accept:
Syria is gone. The “nation” of Syria exists only as a
wished-for abstraction; it is no longer, and will never again be, the
geopolitical polity that it was. It is now a territory divided into sectarian—ethnic
and religious—cantons, with no central administration or military power,
subject to the political and military whims of actual states, especially the
United States, Israel, and Turkey, who planned and executed that outcome.
The current “leadership” in Syria is comprised of the
rebranded Al-Qaeda, now named Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammed
al-Golani. As I’m writing, Golani is still a “terrorist” with a USG
$10-million-dollar bounty on his head, although he’s also meeting with Western
media personalities and cabinet officials, who are frantically rebranding him.
Haircut, beard trim, new suit, and even a new name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and voila,
the old ISIS/al-Qaeda “terrorist” becomes an internationally respected, diversity-loving,
moderate rebel.
In fact, the HTS/al-Golani-al-Sharaa “leadership” controls nothing. Its job, that it’s doing very well, is to stand down and allow Israel to bomb the former country over 800 times to destroy every bit of the former Syria’s military and its research facilities, to take its main water resources, and to invade, seize, and settle all the former Syrian territory it wants. HTS’s job is to allow its immediate puppet master, Erdogan, to remind the world that, if it weren’t for that pesky World War a hundred years ago, Aleppo and Damascus would be part of Turkey. HTS’s job is to “shift” the former Syria into a full “free-market” economy so that US and European capital can buy up all its assets. And HTS/Golani has no more important job than constantly to proclaim that their new regime has no quarrel with Israel or the West, and will peacefully accommodate whatever the fuck Israel, or Turkey or the US/Blackrock want to do with the corpse of Syria. It makes me sick.
