The Anti-Empire Project

By a slave owner’s reading of history, Abraham Lincoln butchered 260,000 to 400,000 of his “own people” in the South to keep the Confederate States from seceding from the USA. [1] Lincoln was actually a perpetrator of genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America like the all the US presidents who established the USA. He also wanted to expel the Black population to Haiti after the Civil War. But taken in isolation, his military victory over the Confederate States – even if you know that the plight of slaves was not actually Lincoln’s priority – cannot be used by any reasonable person to depict him as a monster. There is no “freedom” to establish a giant confederation of slave owners that anyone should respect. Waging a civil war to prevent it was fully justified. That does not mean that Lincoln’s side never acted immorally in the way it fought the war. But an honest assessment of Lincoln’s human rights record must take into account that he was on the right side of the US Civil War.

Waging war to defend against the world’s greatest evil is justified

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria also fought, but in his case ultimately lost, a civil war that he was fully justified in waging. Since 2011 until his ouster weeks ago, Assad fought to prevent his country from being conquered and partitioned by the greatest evil in the world today: the US Empire. Assad fought armed rebels backed by the US and its top clients in the region: Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The case for depicting Assad as a monster is based on the premise that Assad had no right to defend his country against the US and its allies. Sometimes Assad’s detractors denied the significance of the US role in the war. Always absurd, their denial became downright farcical once the US occupied part of Syria in 2014.

With the help of Russia and other allies (Iran and Hezbollah), Assad was able to achieve a stalemate in the war for years. But it was a stalemate that allowed the US and its proxies to occupy resource-rich areas of the country. The US occupation magnified the impact of sanctions that Washington used to ruthlessly bleed Syria economically. Neither Assad nor his foreign allies were willing to take the enormous risks required to kick the US out of Syria, or to stop Israel’s constant bombing of Syria. The economic bleeding eventually paid off dramatically for the US-backed rebels. Assad was overthrown mere days after rebels launched an offensive to break the 2020 stalemate that had been negotiated by Russia and Iran with Turkey.

The civil war to oust Assad was a US project executed for the benefit of Israel. The genocidal Zionst state has already bombed hundreds of sites in Syria to destroy any military capacity for the new government. At the same time Israel has done this, Syria’s new government has clearly signalled its submissiveness towards Israel, but expressed hatred for Israeli enemies: Iran and Hezbollah. Israel is occupying Syrian villages, issuing deportation orders to Syrian citizens, and bringing in Jewish settlers. Israel now has better military options for attacking Lebanon and for cutting off armed support to Hezbollah. So those hailing Assad’s ouster on “human rights” grounds must ignore that his ouster has provided the Israelis state with greater power and impunity to crush the human rights of Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese.

When we declare the US Empire to be the world’s greatest evil, our case is overwhelming. Before October 7, 2023 one could point to countless military coups the US has sponsored in the Americas; its slaughter of millions in Indochina during the 1960s and 70s; the millions of deaths it caused in Iraq since 1990; economic policies that consigned hundreds of millions to misery and premature death; its sponsorship of Israeli atrocities for several decades. The case was already irrefutable, but today it is even more stunningly so.

The US government has sponsored a Holocaust in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Its horrors have been live-streamed around the world so continuously that even outfits with proven track record of subservience to the US have been forced into damage control. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant. Days ago, Amnesty International belatedly concluded that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. But both the ICC and Amnesty international, still insisted on parroting the genocidal Israeli (and US) take on the Palestinian armed resistance of October 7. [2]

Imperialists have always posed as a “human rights” crusaders

The character assassination of targeted leaders for their “human rights” records was conceived by Western imperialists, avant la lettre, in the 19th century to justify the destruction of states and the colonization of the post-destruction territories. When the Scramble for Africa was happening at full speed in 1884, the Times of London carried campaigns about every single individual African leader and how they each “must go”: Tippu Tip of Eastern Congo had to go, Msiri of Katanga had to go, Cetshwayo of the Zulus had to go, Mwanga of Buganda, Kabarega of Bunyoro, Arap Samoei, Bai Bureh, Yaa Asentewaa, Abd el Kader of Algeria had to go, Sadok Bey of Tunis had to go, Sultan Ahmadou, Samori Toure, King Benanzin – had to go, of course Queen Ranavalona had to go, she was a Mad Queen, Mkwawa of the Hehe, Samuel Maherero, Hendrik Witbooi – had to go, Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii had to go. This is not an exhaustive list. Every single one of these leaders had the equivalent of their human rights record pilloried in the Western press, notably the Times. The Belgians claimed that they colonized Congo to protect the Congolese from slavery. Then they killed 10 million of them over about 20 years, chopping off their hands for trophy photographs if they didn’t collect rubber fast enough.

The imperialist game of targeted leaders that “must go” is older than the specific doctrine of human rights and democracy. But that doctrine also was conceived and built as an engine of imperialism. When Africa was decolonizing itself in the 1960s, Africans looked naturally to the communist countries as models. Economic equality and economic development – tangibles like caloric intake, health and education, and infrastructure – these were the kinds of things that were rapidly improving in postcolonial communist nations. In the kind of neocolonial relationships that the US was trying to impose on the newly decolonized countries – in which the West would continue to control investment, finance, intellectual property, and elite education – Third World nations tilting to the West would not be getting economic equality or development. They would instead be getting unequal exchange and impoverishment while enriching the West.

What the West could offer, especially to communist, nationalist, or developmentalist states that were trying to protect themselves from Western economic penetration, was “human rights and democracy”, a methodology for measuring “authoritarianism” and even a framework for overthrowing these developmentalist regimes – the “color revolution”. Another benefit of campaigning for human rights and democracy is that the open (to foreign penetration) multiparty electoral political and media systems that the US promotes render developmentalist states unprotected from US campaigns against them. US agents can freely use local media (and now social media) to generate political influence inside almost any country in the world. Any state that constrains US media, tech, or political agents like NED, IRI, and NDI gets labelled as authoritarian.

This is all outlined in, among other works, Nicholas Guilhot’s The Democracy Makers, Jessica Whyte’s The Morals of the Market, and James Peck’s Ideal Illusions. Our own book, Extraordinary Threat, shows the working of this (so far failed) methodology on Venezuela and previous books by one of us, Haiti’s New Dictatorship, and America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo shows the working of this (successful) methodology to Haiti, Rwanda, and the DR Congo. Yugoslavia is another well-documented case.

Closer to Syria, in the Arab world, the “human rights and democracy” campaign was run to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, leaving generational destruction in their wake and countries that show no sign of regaining the sovereignty or developmental level they had under dictators they were told “must go’. As already noted, Bashar al-Assad in Syria was targeted with incredible ferocity and held out for a long time, but ultimately left in 2024. Syria’s development prospects had already been destroyed by Israeli bombing, US sanctions, and US and Turkish occupation and outright asset stripping before the overthrow.

How bad was Assad’s human rights record?

But what if we put all these important considerations aside? Put aside Assad’s right to defend his government from being overthrown by the US Empire. Put aside western imperialism’s long track record of lying about enemies and pretending to be human rights crusaders as they murder and plunder. Let’s simply try to assess how bad Assad’s government was.

He first took office in 2000. There are two questions:

• How badly did he violate human rights between 2000-2011, before the civil war began?

• How badly did he violate human rights in the way he fought the civil war from 2011-2024?

“How badly” can only be answered comparatively.

So, we review what is known about Assad’s human rights and democracy record, compared to two states: Saudi Arabia and the USA. These two comparators have prisons, the death penalty, and torture. They commit genocide (the US all over the world and notably Gaza right now, Saudi Arabia in Yemen from 2014 on), but face no threat, nor even any rhetoric, of being overthrown by anyone.

The main index of human rights violations / authoritarianism / tyranny would be numbers killed and imprisoned. The main index of dictatorship / democracy is elections.

How does Syria under Bashar al-Assad, from 2000-2011 compare?

Prisons. Consider the prison population data shown below which is taken from the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR), a research outfit funded in part by the UK government.

During the 2000s both the USA and Saudi Arabia had vastly larger prison populations than Syria. Adjusted for population, Syria’s imprisoned about half as many people as Saudi Arabia, and only one tenth as many as the USA.

Elections. Saudi Arabia doesn’t even bother holding sham elections at the national level.

In the USA, the Republican and Democratic parties can be considered two factions of the same party that serves US elites, not the general public. Some have branded them the Uniparty. There are certainly significant differences between Democrat and Republican voters. African Americans are far more likely to vote Democrat than Republican for example (80 percent voted for Harris in 2024, and 90 percent for Biden in 2020). Majorities of Democrat voters and independents said last year that the US should stop arming Israel. Democrat voters ( as well as independents) are twice as likely as Republican voters to say that the US should stop weapons sales to Israel. However, we know for certain neither party would ever cut off weapons sales to Israel simply because most voters want that. In fact, the Democratic party’s willingness to defy their voting base (and disregard trying to appeal to independents) by arming Israel probably cost them the presidential election in November. But what does “losing” really mean when Uniparty always wins?

Alternatives to the Uniparty are very effectively marginalized: everything from the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes, to the lawsuits to deny alternative ballot access, to the exorbitant cost of media access, to the dependence on private donors all work to ensure that the Uniparty consistently gets over 96 percent of the vote.

In fact, as shown below, the Uniparty in the USA, has sometimes been more dominant in elections than Assad had been in Syria.

ELECTION RESULTS

Saudi Arabia – no national level elections

USA percentage of vote won by the Uniparty [3]

2000…96.3%

2004…99.0%

2008…98.6%

SYRIA percentage of vote won by Assad [4]

2000…97.0%

2007…97.0%

2014…88.7%

2021…95.1%

Services. A broader view of human rights in Syria before the civil war would look at access to basic services like health care and food. One way to capture that is through child mortality data. As of 2011, UNICEF’s data for 2009 (the most recent available at the time) showed Syria had a very low child mortality rate compared to many nearby countries. It was significantly lower than Saudi Arabia’s and Jordan’s in 2009 according to UNICEF’s 2011 data.

But UNICEF often revises its data retroactively. As with other UN agencies, these revisions often look like they have been driven by pressure from powerful western donors. UNICEF revised by 2009 so that as of 2024 it is claiming that Saudi Arabia’s child mortality rate was actually much better than Syria’s in 2009. Regardless, in neither data set does Syria stand out as a country with a poor child mortality rate compared to its neighbors, many of them dictatorships that were not hit with US-orchestrated destabilization campaigns.

We can’t really use human rights data from 2011-2024 to compare Syria to the USA and Saudi Arabia since neither of those two countries were fighting a civil war. But we do have a long-running war in the neighbourhood that we can use for comparison. Let’s compare Assad’s conduct of the Syria war to the way Israel (with the unconditional and essential backing of the US) has waged war since October of 2023.

Comparing Syria’s civil war to the Holocaust in Gaza

Deaths. According to the New York Times, fourteen years of civil war in Syria caused as many as 620,000 deaths in a country whose population in 2011 was 22 million. These deaths were inflicted by both the Syrian government and the armed opposition. The NYT cited various counts of war-related deaths, not cluster sampling methods that have been used to estimate the death rates before and after a war. Cluster sampling captures deaths from the war that might not otherwise be reported as war-related: the deaths caused by damaged health and sanitation systems for example. In Iraq, cluster sampling methods produced vastly higher estimates of the death toll from the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and the subsequent occupation) than did direct counts produced by sources such as Iraq Body Count.

So to compare the NYT’s count for Syria civil war we will use similar direct counts available from Gaza’s health ministry. In Gaza, with a population of only 2.2 million people before the Israeli rampage since October 7, there were 43,000 deaths tallied by Gaza’s health ministry in 13 months – Ralph Nader and others have argued this is a drastic underestimate. Unlike the NYT’s figure for Syria where the government and rebels share responsibility for the deaths, all of the victims of the war on Gaza were killed by Israel.

So the share of Gaza’s population killed by Israel in only 13 months is 1.95 percent. In 14 years of civil war in Syria, all sides together killed 2.8 percent of the population (about 0.2 percent per year on average). According to the lowest estimates of Israeli killing (which could be off by a factor of 5) Israel is therefore killing Gaza’s population at a rate about nine times faster than all actors in the war in Syria killed Syrians.

The Syria numbers used in the comparison above include deaths on all sides, combatants as well as civilians. The anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, seems to claim that Assad is responsible for 219,223 civilian deaths by March of 2024. [5] Given that the death toll in Gaza has overwhelmingly been of Palestinian civilians, a better comparison with the Gaza health ministry data would be the number of civilians Assad has been accused of killing since 2011. In that comparison Israel has been killing Gaza’s population at a rate about 16 times faster than Assad did to Syrians. [6]

Displacement. By 2014, three years of Syria’s Civil War had displaced 9.5 million people, 43% of the pre-war population of 22 million. By 2024, 14 million were displaced, 63.6% of the population. The responsibility for displacement is shared by both sides of the war. In Gaza, 90 percent of the population had been displaced after a year of war, entirely by Israel.

Hospital Destruction. In 2021, nine years into Syria’s civil war Aljazeera reported that “in northwest Syria, [not all of Syria] for example, the UN has said that 50 percent of health facilities are no longer functioning.” In Gaza, after only a year of war, less than half of its hospitals were functional, and those that were “only partly so” according to Doctors with Borders.

In conclusion:

• Syria under Assad incarcerated a fraction of the numbers the US incarcerates.

• Its record on women’s rights is a century ahead of Saudi Arabia’s.

• Its conduct during the 2011-2024 civil war destroyed a fraction of the buildings and infrastructure Israel destroyed in Gaza and Lebanon.

• Assad’s government did not target children and medical facilities with anything like the intensity Israel did, nor did it impose starvation and siege conditions.

• There were disputes about the fairness of Syria’s elections, but unlike Saudi Arabia, it held some. If Republicans and Democrats are counted together, as they should be, the duopoly achieves vote tallies that would make any authoritarian or dictator blush.

• The 2011 protests in Syria were suppressed with violence, as were protests in Saudi Arabia. When Palestinians in Gaza protested against Israel in 2018, Israeli snipers killed hundreds of them and injured thousands. American police also kill protesters. Several of the leaders of the Ferguson and George Floyd uprisings in the US were killed by police after the fact. And of course US police kill around 1000 Americans a year, every year.

According to any measure of human rights or democracy, the ousted Syrian regime had more legitimacy than the completely secure genocidal governments of the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Trotskyists believe in permanent revolution and anarchists believe that all tyrannies must fall. For Westerners who belong to those political tendencies, it is necessary to prioritize. On the basis of human rights and democracy, among these four governments (US, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Syria), overthrowing Syria ought to have been the fourth priority.

So why was there such an intense campaign to overthrow Syria?

Syria was overthrown because the US is devoted to neutralizing and destroying independent countries; it was prioritized by the US and Israel for overthrow because Arab states are prioritized for destruction. We’ve written about this in the past and will write more. For our purposes here, we will conclude by talking about the role the Western campaign to overthrow Syria played in Western politics.

2011 was the year of the Arab Spring: grassroots movements arose in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria – but not in Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar. The demands of protesters varied from economic and developmentalist demands to demands for multiparty elections. In Egypt and Bahrain the spring was crushed. In Tunisia the president left the country and reforms did follow. With Libya and Syria, the US got involved quickly (some have argued that they sprung the spring in the first place) and turned springs into civil wars. Libya was an immediate success for the US, the government overthrown, Gaddafi publicly murdered. But Syria turned into a 13-year war.

As the Syria war went on, campaigners for the overthrow of Syria targeted the Palestine solidarity movement in the West for destruction. Sectarianism played a role. But their main rhetorical tool was “human rights and democracy.”

That movement was always fighting an extremely uphill battle. All mainstream Western political parties and mainstream media outlets are pro-Israel and racist against Palestinians. Even in this weak movement, 2011 was not a particularly strong year. The year before, Israel had murdered activists trying to get into Gaza by sea in the Freedom Flotilla, waylaying the boats and sending the message that the siege would never be broken nonviolently. Antiwar mobilizations during Israel’s Gaza wars (2006, 2008/9), as well as attempts to get into Gaza, were ongoing. Campus movements were updating the models of struggle developed for solidarity with anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s. Social media was becoming important – for better and worse.

Those of us who knew about US-backed regime change operations and opposed agitation in the West for the overthrow of other countries, found ourselves to be a minority in the Palestine movement. For the most part, we were simply shouted down by the “human rights and democracy” wielding regime changers. We tried both holding debates and holding our tongues but the split left the antiwar coalition degraded even relative to its weak pre-2011 state.

When Israel and the West opted for genocide in Gaza after October 2023, many of the same people on both sides of the decade-old split found themselves mobilizing to try to stop the genocide alongside younger activists unfamiliar with the old debate. The focus on the genocide led us to naively believe that the fracture over Syria had been transcended. It hadn’t. Once again, “human rights and democracy” is being wielded not against the genociders, but against the now-ousted Syrian government. Even now, with Assad gone, regime changers are primarily focused on blaming the current chaos on Assad.

Antiwar, Palestine solidarity efforts have not thus far been a powerful force in the West. We will never influence events if we can be divided at will by regime changers wielding the fraudulent weapon of human rights.

NOTES

[1] Britannica gives a low value for the death toll in the South of 260,000 (and 620,000 combined for North and South) but notes that other researchers have estimated a combined North-South death toll of 752,000 to 851,000.

[2] Amnesty said in its report that “On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage-taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers”. This is false. Palestinians overran at least eight military bases on that day according to a UN report. The Electronic Intifada showed that Israeli forces likely killed hundreds of its own people in its response to the raids, in fact, likely killing many in an effort to prevent more hostages from being taken.

And the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri at the same time it issued warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The resistance to Israel’s genocide was considered as bad as genocide itself. And the ICC neglected to issue warrants for Israel’s full partners in genocide, several western governments, most especially its benefactors in Washington.

[3] US presidential elections results downloaded from the Federal Election Commission website

[4] Syria’s presidential election results taken from Straightstimes (2000 and 2021), from Washington Post (2007), and Gulf News (2014)

[5] A March 2024 SOHR article listed 164,223 civilian deaths overwhelmingly caused by Assad or his allies. The article later added “These statistics, documented by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, do not include the following:

Over 55,000 civilians who were killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime…”

[6] Assuming the Gaza Health ministry numbers for 13 months are 70% civilian deaths then 1.33% of the population had been killed. According to SOHR, over a 13 year period the civilians Assad killed equaled 1% of the pre-war population of 22 million (an average of 0.077 percent of the population per year). If Nader is correct, Israel is killing Palestinians at a rate more like 80x the rate that the Syrian government’s enemies claim Assad killed Syrians.

The primary responsibility for the disastrous situation in Syria is Turkey’s decision to invade with its proxy force HTS, which was trained, armed, gathered, and launched from Turkey-controlled Idlib. The strategists, trainers, armers, and financiers include the US and Israel, who with Turkey are reaping the benefits of Syria’s downfall.

The responsibility for the crime lies with the US, Israel, and Turkey. Nonetheless, anti-imperialists are looking for lessons to learn and what went wrong. Because Syria, throughout the civil war period 2011-2024, had been held up by an alliance of Lebanese Hizbollah, Iran, and Russia (who entered the conflict in that chronological order) analysts who are sympathetic to each of these groups are presenting slightly different explanations of what went wrong for the alliance.

Russia-focused analysts: I have seen analysts focused on Russia emphasize the following points: Russia offered in 2018 to rebuild Assad’s army from its rotten foundations up, but Assad refused. In the 2024 campaign to defend Syria, Russia’s air force quickly went to work when the Turkish / HTS invasion began but couldn’t defend the country if the SAA would not fight. By the Arab League (which had recently let him back in) and the Emirates specifically, Assad had been promised normalization with the West and the lifting of sanctions if he broke out of his alliance with Iran and Yemen and exited the axis. He began to do just this, and Russia reached a point where they could do nothing more for him. I’ve also seen analysts pointing to an orientalist argument about Why Arabs Lose Wars. The same analysts cited admiringly an article about Russia’s intervention in Syria and how it was effective because it was based on a careful reading by Russia of the history and politics of the region. In fact, Russia’s reading was the reason the intervention failed, why in 2024 Syria is in the exact situation it would have been in 2015 had Russia never intervened.

The gap Russia-focused analysts presentation – the Israel loophole: Russia gave the coalition to destroy Syria an Israel loophole. Russia’s explicit position was that they would protect Syria from Islamic State-type invaders from Idlib but not from Israel’s bombing campaign. A decade of unanswered bombing from Israel attritted Syria’s capacities. Israel’s freedom of action in Syria also helped them to decapitate Hizbollah in September 2024, as they developed intelligence assets on the Hizbollah leadership by following the latter’s activities in Syria. Russia told Syria that they would support them against one enemy but not the other. Knowing that is the case, the offer to rebuild the Syrian army in 2018 cannot have fully been believed. A rebuilt Syrian army would not be acceptable to Israel any more than Russia helping Syria defend itself from Israeli bombing would be. Russia’s receptivity to Israel guaranteed Syria’s degradation over time. There may have been good reasons for Russia to make these choices, but the result was the degradation of Syria’s ability to defend itself over the entire decade of Russian support. Russia seems to believe that Israel has legitimate security interests in the region including killing its Iranian and Syrian allies. Russia’s leaders must know that Turkey, the US, and Israel are all working together in West Asia as they are in Ukraine – but for their own diplomatic reasons, they behave as if they are facing separate entities.

In 2015, Russia put a shield up over Syria, but the shield had an Israel loophole through which Israeli bombs attrited the Syrian state.

Iran-focused analysts: Iran-focused analysts emphasize Assad’s seemingly successful approach to the Arab League including the Gulf states last year. The price of this reintegration into the Arab world was that Assad distance himself from Iran and Yemen (notably asking the Yemeni ambassador to leave at the request of the Saudis). Iran and its allies, including Hizbollah and Iraqi resistance groups, were ready to defend Syria, but Assad didn’t want them. Iran also recognized that for them to defend Assad was playing into anti-Shia sentiment in Syria, giving the impression that Syria’s was a sectarian conflict, an impression neither Assad nor Iran wanted to give.

The gap in the Iran-focused analysts presentation: Since the assassination of president Raisi in a helicopter crash in May 2024, Iran has presented political divisions about their approach to the West. The new president, Pezeshkian, has said publicly that his priority is to convince the West that Iran doesn’t want war. The chronology shows that Assad was moving away from Iran for a long time, but Assad must also have considered in light of Pezeshkian’s statements whether asking Iran to come to his aid in another round of bloody civil war might provoke further divisions inside Iran and further difficulties for that country, strengthening the arguments of the faction that wanted to wash its hands of any conflicts with the West.

Hizbollah-focused analysts: Hizbollah focused analysts look to several key moments of the war as lost opportunities. In 2020, when the military architect of the Axis of Resistance concept, Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, was assassinated in Iraq by Trump’s order, then Secretary-General of Hizbollah (and the strategic and charismatic leader of the Axis of Resistance) said that the only appropriate revenge for Soleimani’s death would be the removal of all US presence from the region including bases in Iraq and Jordan and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In an interview with Rania Khalek yesterday, Elijah Magnier said that Hizbollah had placed a substantial amount of its missile force in Syria around the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, hoping that Israel would refrain from bombing civilian sites if they placed their missile forces away from them (Israel didn’t).

When Nasrallah ordered the opening of the support front in October 2023, these missile forces were disallowed from engaging Israel by order of Assad, who feared Israeli retaliation. Also – knowing he didn’t have Russian support – Assad refused to retaliate for Israel’s weekly bombings of Damascus, airports and roads, granting Israel impunity to degrade Syria over time. When Hizbollah, along with Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian forces were ready to end the war by destroying HTS and taking back Idlib in 2019, Russia came up with the Astana formula to “freeze” the conflict and leave Idlib to Turkey. That diplomacy culminated in Turkey’s return to war in 2024 and the final disaster yesterday.

Gap in Hizbollah-focused analysis: The Hizbollah-focused analysts I have seen emphasized that armed struggle alone offers a deterrent. Diplomacy with the West (and Turkey) is pointless. Watching Israel destroy Syria’s military arsenal in total and occupy its lands now that Syria has a pro-Israel regime, it is hard to argue that they’re wrong. But the ability to take the offensive is resource-dependent. Russia’s choice of diplomacy instead of finishing off HTS could well have been motivated by wanting to maintain good relations with Turkey, but it could also have been based on a sober assessment of whether the Syria-Iran-Russia-Hizbollah alliance could actually win the war if Turkey and the US had intervened directly on behalf of HTS (which they threatened to do at the time). Perhaps the war would come anyway, but on less favorable terms – which seems to have been what happened. So maybe there’s not much to impeach in the Hizbollah-focused analysis.

Does this provide much in the way of lessons?

Russia: Don’t give Israel a loophole. Don’t freeze a conflict if you can avoid it.

Syria: You can never make Israel feel so secure that it won’t attack its neighbors. Not retaliating gives Israel impunity to more depravity, and when Israel feels secure, it attacks.

Iran: The West will betray all agreements.

Everybody: Blame the sanctioners and the occupiers, not the sanctioned and occupied.

[On that note, in my next article Joe Emersberger and I will assess Assad’s human rights record and argue against the idea that Assad’s human rights record is the root cause of Syria’s downfall.]

I’ll conclude by addressing some questions about Assad that I have seen arise: Was it cowardly for Assad to order the SAA to stand down or for Assad to go into quiet exile without even a statement? What difference would a statement have made at this point? Would giving the West another lynching of another Arab leader to broadcast around the world, giving Hillary Clinton another cackle about a murder, have been less cowardly?

Should Assad have met with Erdogan instead of snubbing him? The notion that Erdogan did all this because he felt snubbed implies, at the very least, that Erdogan was not someone with whom a meeting would have been productive.

Did Assad do enough to alleviate the suffering of his people? An hour a day of electricity, soaring prices, unpaid soldiers, all made the situation in Syria intolerable and the state fragile. But were these the outcomes of Assad’s decisions? The US occupies all of Syria’s oil and wheat fields: Syria is cut off from its own food and energy. The Turks dismantled Aleppo’s factories and trucked them off, whole, to Turkey at the beginning of the war: Syria’s industrial base was literally stolen. The US imposed the worst sanctions regime since the others on Syria, the Caesar sanctions, preventing Syria from being able to rebuild its economy.

Two days before Syria fell, I wrote that “Syria and its allies will attempt to reorganize and turn the tide.” The tide wasn’t turned. Syria is destroyed. The stronger side triumphed over the weaker. The geographical hub that made the Axis of Resistance possible as we knew it, is gone, like the main leaders who built it (Nasrallah and Soleimani). Israel will keep genociding, Palestinians will keep resisting, the victorious imperialists will keep marching on, with Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and indeed Russia in their crosshairs.

So, perhaps there’s not too much to be learned from all this. But do take this away from the above: the criminals are to blame, not those who tried to stop them.

This report analyzes the Syria situation using the usual chronological approach taken here at the AEP.

Historical background from colonialism to 2000

Before it fell under 20th century Anglo-American colonialism, Syria was the core of the Levant, encompassing (today’s) Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, the site of multireligious, multicultural cities between which people traveled and traded freely. In the countryside, peasants and herders tended an agricultural and pastoral landscape of olive and orange trees, pasture, forest, and drylands. This region was under the control of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years (perhaps Erdogan’s dream is to take some of it back. He’s been accused of “neo-Ottoman” fantasies). England seized Palestine from Turkey during WWI. After that war, the rest of the Ottoman Empire was carved up and this region partitioned into English and French colonies. England kept Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt, and gave France Syria and Lebanon.

After WW2, these colonies were further carved up and given nominal independence. Palestine was partitioned and given to the Israeli colonizers. Lebanon was carved off from Syria and given a special sectarian structure to ensure France would be able to continue to interfere through a neocolonial relationship (they’re still at it). Syria got its independence from France in 1946. In the final year of its mission civilisatrice, France bombed Damascus at the same time as Syria’s prime minister was speaking at the first meeting of the United Nations in the US.

After independence, Syria, like Iraq and Egypt, had a nationalist, developmentalist ideology and an alliance with the USSR. Egypt under Anwar Sadat switched to the Western camp after 1973. But Syria and Iraq maintained alliances and military cooperation with the USSR until its collapse. When Yeltsin announced to the US that Russia was going to abandon all of its allies – Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia – the US took the opportunity to destroy all of these states (intensified attempts were made on Cuba too, but it hangs on). Under Putin, Russia’s foreign policy changed from Yeltsin’s. Russia’s decision to support Syria has been persistent, even as it has tried to maintain good relations with two major powers seeking Syria’s destruction – Israel and Turkey.

From the military history perspective: in every one of Israel’s major wars – 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, and all the Gaza wars – Syria was on the side of the resistance to Israel.

In the Zionist colonizing ideology, all of Greater Syria (plus part of Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, and the Arabian peninsula) is part of the colonizer’s dream of Greater Israel.

In practice, postcolonial Syria has been a major check on US/Israel’s ambitions, as Patrick Higgins documented in his article “Gunning for Damascus”, and has paid a heavy price in lives and in economic destruction.

In the 1967 war that Israel has been trying to repeat ever since, Syria lost the Golan Heights, a strategic position from which it has been impossible to dislodge Israel (and from which, indeed, it should have been impossible for Israel to dislodge Syria). In the 1973 war, Syria fought well but Egypt’s leader Anwar Sadat had a treacherous plan to abandon the fight against Israel and US imperialism in the region. Throughout Lebanon’s civil war that began in the 1970s, the Israeli intervention and occupation from 1982-2000, Syria supported the opposition to Israel. After Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and even after the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon in 2005, Syria remained a supporter of Hizbollah.

Iraq’s destruction has also had an impact on Syria. Bush Sr. destroyed Iraq in 1990/1 and Clinton sharpened the sanctions weapon on that country; Bush Jr. invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 as part of a broader project of recolonizing the whole region. The destruction of the Iraqi state made way for the current dispensation in Syria’s neighbouring country: the establishment of al-Qaeda and then the Islamic State there, the stationing of a large number of US bases there, and a renewed alliance between Iran and resistance organizations in Iraq who fight al-Qaeda and are also part of the so-called Axis of Resistance.

From 2006-2019

Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon has numerous echoes in 2024.

With the Americans in Iraq, the West Bank reoccupied, the post-2005 withdrawal period of intensified Gaza genocide just beginning, and Syrian troops having left Lebanon in 2005, Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 intending to repeat the 1982 occupation and destroy Hizbollah.

They were unable to do so: they were, as Matt Matthews’s now-famous paper argued, “caught unprepared”. When the Israeli military retreated, the Americans tried to help them win through peace what they couldn’t win in war, by engineering an agreement between Israel and Lebanon that made the Lebanese Army responsible for the disarming of Hizbollah and the United Nations responsible to ensure Israel’s safety by patrolling south Lebanon for Hizbollah presence. That was the basis of UN Resolution 1701, back when wars ended with UN resolutions. Having a UN Resolution that ends a war seems like a relic of a lost civilization now.

Once they’d engineered a deal to leave the UN and the Lebanese state holding the bag, the US and Israel moved on to try to destroy Syria (sound familiar?). If a friendly regime could be installed there, Israel could take what it felt like in Lebanon and continue its genocide of Palestinians without distraction. The uprising, documented, e.g., in Tim Anderson’s book, The Dirty War on Syria, a series of essays by William van Wagenen, and elsewhere, was duly produced through careful adherence to the US color-revolution playbook: the sponsorship of local opposition from political training through to arming and equipping forces for a coup; the amplification of their narratives back and forth from Western media and back to make them look larger and better supported than they were; the use of violence and of “false-flag” operations; an attempt to force an unfavorable political deal on the regime that would later be violated by the opposition…

When the regime didn’t fall after a few sharp blows, the US, with Turkish help, decided to plunge the country into destruction through fomenting a civil war, the resurrection of al-Qaeda, then the Islamic State, the sponsorship of Syrian Kurdish organizations to fight the Islamic State that the US had sponsored in the first place.

This kind of pressure had been enough to destroy the Libyan state, which has never recovered. It brought Syria to the brink of destruction before Syria was saved by Hizbollah and Iran. From Lebanon, Nasrallah explained patiently and repeatedly the existential nature of the battle for Syria and why Hizbollah had to intervene; he also warned against those he called takfiris, those who decided their ideology gave them the right to label other Muslims as unbelievers, stirring up sectarian conflict that only served imperialists.

The US redoubled its efforts and nearly destroyed Syria again, before Russia intervened in 2015 and turned the tide decisively in Syria’s favor. The Syrian government would not fall. But nor was it able to recover the territory carved out of it by the Americans and their proxy forces.

From 2019-2023

Russia’s solution to the Syrian conflict was to push the Turkey- and American-backed al-Qaeda forces into the northwest corner of the country in Idlib, where they were allowed to do what they wanted. This was called “freezing” the conflict. The American-sponsored Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were also left in place, also “frozen”. And the US occupation also reaches the joint border with Jordan and Iraq. The “frozen” conflict left Syria destroyed, its economy unable to recover because of starvation-level sanctions, as written up by Charles Glass in May 2023, its state unable to access its own energy resources (as these are occupied by US proxies). The first time Aleppo was held by Turkey’s takfiris, its entire advanced industrial base was dismantled and trucked off to Turkey (Aleppo is Syria’s main industrial city). In addition, Israel bombs Syria at will, knowing that devastated Syria does not have the ability to exercise its right to self-defense.

After October 2023

When Israel began the current genocide in October 2023, it did so counting on the knowledge that broken, partitioned Syria could not oppose it the way it had done before 2011. When Israel began its war on Lebanon in September 2024, it used intelligence it had been developing since 2012 on Hizbollah commanders who’d gone to save Syria. It also had perhaps hoped that the destruction of Syria and the frequent bombing of the supply routes from Syria to Lebanon had left Hizbollah short of resources: this proved not to be the case.

But, as in 2006, frustrated after an unsuccessful invasion of Lebanon, the US and Israel have once again turned, with Turkish help, to the plan of destroying Syria. The US and Israel have reached the same conclusion in 2024 as they did in 2006: that destroying Syria through a Turkish-sponsored war would help them isolate Lebanon, which would help them isolate Palestine. The specific goal is to cut Palestine off from its demographically, scientifically, and (potentially) economically largest ally: Iran. (This is also a repeat – in the early decades when Palestine’s biggest ally was Egypt, successful efforts were made to turn Egypt into a Western ally and traitor to Palestine.) Tactically speaking this means the takfiris taking control of all the Syrian routes into Lebanon, besieging the country.

Who’s to blame?

After an shocking week of surprise successes by Turkey’s takfiris it is natural to try to find out whose errors led to this outcome. How come Syria didn’t see this coming? Why didn’t Russia see it coming? Why didn’t Iran? How could the Syrian Army have retreated collapsed like a house of cards? Why didn’t Syria finish off the takfiri enclave in Idlib when they had a chance in 2019 instead of freezing the conflict?

The short answer is: in this conflict, the imperialists have most of the advantages. The Western empires have centuries of experience of colonial subversion and have all the resources that centuries of theft could give them.

The weaker side doesn’t have to make huge errors to suffer greatly. The decapitation of Hizbollah in September 2024 was not the result of Hizbollah’s errors – they were following sound security protocols that had worked for decades – Israel just achieved surprise. The fall of Aleppo doesn’t mean that anyone, Syria or allies, did anything really stupid either. The nature of a surprise attack is that the timing and scale is chosen by the enemy. Knowing in general that an attack will come one day isn’t enough to remove the element of surprise. As for the freezing of the conflict being a mistake: it’s likely that Syria in 2019, like Hizbollah in 2024, needed the freeze as much as the Turkish proxies and Israelis did.

The genocide coalition are formidable and ruthless and the surprise attack is one of their favorite tricks. Turkey spent the past year fueling and feeding Israel for genocide, arming Ukraine with drones, while proclaiming interest in BRICS and in detente with Russia – their committing to the genocide coalition was going to be a surprise whenever it happened.

Any power that equivocates – notably Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar here – maintains an ability to backstab either side. Restoring trust after making the kind of commitment Turkey’s just made will be difficult.

As for those targeted by the West, what are they likely to do? Syria, the Palestinians, Lebanon, Iran, and Russia too – have signed up to ceasefire after ceasefire only to have them violated by the other side. They’ve repeatedly shown the willingness to let up on military pressure when the chance to end a war arose. They know their side – the weaker side – suffers more in war, especially a war with the depraved opponents of the West. While it is only human to fear that the alliance might break under pressure, every member of the alliance has very good reasons to support the others and nothing to gain by defecting to the other camp. The alliances between Russia, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Resistance are durable and likely to hold. These are core elements of how they do things that very likely will continue as the war continues.

As for the US, Israel, and Turkey: the US-Israel’s goal is a forever genocide, and the destruction of the alliance that has gathered to stop it. For the US-Israel, the best outcome is the overthrow of Assad. The second best is having Turkey’s takfiris envelop Lebanon and finally close off Hizbollah’s supply routes, leaving Lebanon unprotected and therefore unable to help the Palestinians. The third best is just to keep the Syria war burning forever, sapping Iranian and Russian resources and preventing Syria from getting back to its feet. Especially if Turkey is paying for it, which they are. Israel’s army and economy are still in bad shape and the takfiris, with their new Ukrainian drones, will nonetheless for now have to make do without an air force, since if the US, Israel, or Turkey wants to be their air force they might have to fight an air war with Russia.

The takfiris have so far been stopped on a front line at Hama. The Russian air force is hitting them in both Aleppo and Idlib. Reinforcements have arrived from Iraq and Lebanon. Next, Syria and its allies will attempt to reorganize and turn the tide.

READING LIST

Tim Anderson, The Dirty War on Syria

Charles Glass, Syria Burning

Ali Kadri, Imperialism with Reference to Syria

Patrick Higgins, “Gunning for Damascus”, Middle East Critique