Two Ways of Looking at Regime Change in Syria

Free at last, or victim of many devils?

The recent changing of the guard (to be polite) in Syria has its defenders and detractors. Is Syria finally free, or has it fallen into the next lower ring of hell?

‘A Victory for the Syrian People’

As a straightforward example of the “freedom” school of thought, liberal commentator Sam Seder, through his daily newsletter, frames the story this way:

After Years of Civil War, a Dramatic Syrian Revolution Topples Assad

In a remarkable military campaign lasting less than two weeks, Syrian rebels, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), stormed through a number of Syrian cities before taking the capital Damascus yesterday. After 13 years of civil war and 53 years of rule by the Assad family, the Syrian people threw off the yoke of dictatorship as President Bashar Assad and his family quickly fled to Moscow. …

It's a remarkable end for a despotic regime that not long ago had seemed to survive a serious challenge to its rule. While the Syrian conflict is riven with factionalism, violent competing interests, and the imperial influence of the United States and Israel, last week's revolution was a victory for the Syrian people…

“Syrian revolution” … “yoke of dictatorship” … “victory for the Syrian people” … you get the idea. The good guys won. Hooray.

Reuters has a slightly less editorial report with much the same content:

Syrian rebels topple Assad who flees to Russia in Mideast shakeup

DAMASCUS, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Syrian rebels seized the capital Damascus unopposed on Sunday after a lightning advance that sent President Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia after a 13-year civil war and six decades of his family's autocratic rule.

In one of the biggest turning points for the Middle East in generations, the fall of Assad's government wiped out a bastion from which Iran and Russia exercised influence across the Arab world. Moscow gave asylum to Assad and his family, Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia's ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, said on his Telegram channel.

His sudden overthrow, at the hands of a revolt partly backed by Turkey and with roots in jihadist Sunni Islam, limits Iran's ability to spread weapons to its allies and could cost Russia its Mediterranean naval base. It could allow millions of refugees scattered for more than a decade in camps across Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to finally return home.

For Syrians, it brought a sudden unexpected end to a war in deep freeze for years, with hundreds of thousands dead, cities pounded to dust and an economy hollowed by global sanctions.

"How many people were displaced across the world? How many people lived in tents? How many drowned in the seas?" the top rebel commander, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, told a huge crowd at the medieval Umayyad Mosque in central Damascus, referring to refugees who died trying to reach Europe.

"A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory," he said, adding that with hard work Syria would be "a beacon for the Islamic nation." …

“Flees to Russia” … “shakeup” … “a bastion from which Iran and Russia exercised influence across the Arab world” … “‘A new history, my brothers’” … you get the idea. The good guys won. Hooray.

Turn on any television and that’s the story you’ll hear. The good guys won. Take this as main media’s wisdom, what “everyone knows to be true.”

Realpolitik American-Style

The other story is that the CIA, Israel, the Turks and various Sunni Arab governments — many of whom are brutal dictatorships — ran a years-long op to overthrow a similarly brutal, but wrongly aligned government planted unfortunately in Israel and Turkey’s back yard. “Wrongly aligned” means sympathetic to or supported by Russia, Iran and Shi'a Arabic interests.

Here’s Jeffrey Sachs, speaking in 2019:

Did he say “CIA”? Operation Timber Sycamore is not a phantom; it’s an actual thing:

Timber Sycamore was a classified weapons supply and training program run by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and supported by the United Kingdom and some Arab intelligence services, including Saudi intelligence. The aim of the program was to remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power. Launched in 2012 or 2013, it supplied money, weaponry and training to Syrian opposition groups fighting Syrian government forces in the Syrian Civil War. According to US officials, the program was run by the CIA's Special Activities Division^[6] and has trained thousands of rebels.^[7] President Barack Obama secretly authorized the CIA to begin arming Syria's embattled rebels in 2013.^[8] The program became public knowledge in mid-2016.

Note the involvement of the Sunni-aligned Saudi kingdom. About the origins of Timber Sycamore, this is noteworthy:

CIA director David Petraeus first proposed a covert program of arming and training rebels in the summer of 2012. Initially President Obama rejected the proposal, but later agreed, partially due to lobbying by foreign leaders, including from King Abdullah II of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.^[13]

The regional Sunni kingdoms are no fan of Syria. Nor are they friends of Palestine, for that matter. If they were, there’d be peace in the region already, as Israel would have been forced to stand down long ago.

This realpolitik analysis has natural resource and pipeline elements as well, too much to go into here but very much present.

For more on the U.S. troop presence in Syria, see this from Ken Klippenstein (emphasis mine):

The Pentagon acknowledges about 900 troops based in Syria, but the actual number is nearly double that, according to well-placed military sources and documents we’ve reviewed. This number includes clandestine forces of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that operate under numbered task forces and are quite independent of the conventional military units in Syria. On the clandestine side, JSOC is joined by CIA paramilitary and covert operations in country, Defense Intelligence Agency operations focused on human intelligence collection, Defense Threat Reduction Agency WMD-related operations focused on Assad’s chemical arsenal, and other intelligence and counterintelligence operations on the ground that spy on the Russians and Iranians.

The clandestine forces operate from at least ten bases and outposts, according to documents we’ve reviewed.…

Israel Invades Syria

Jeffrey Sachs believes that most of the U.S. involvement in the Middle East deliberately and for years has served Netanyahu’s interests. I’m not sure that’s true, but it looks more true every day, with Israeli’s immediate incursion into Syria following Assad’s defeat:

Israel also confirmed that it had sent forces into the buffer zone beyond the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and into former Syrian military positions on Mount Hermon in what it described as a “temporary measure”. It said it would continue with airstrikes on former regime sites associated with missiles and chemical weapons.

Note the careful media-synchronized phrasing: “buffer zone” and “temporary.” We’ll soon see how temporary. Israel is not known for temporary seizures of territory, buffer zone or not.

Israeli Syrian seizures as of December 8 (source)

The latest Israel-Syria news as of this writing (December 10) supports this analysis:

• IDF Destroys Syrian Aircraft and Ships, Denies Reports of Israeli Tanks Moving Closer to Damascus (Haaretz)

• Israeli warplanes pound Syria as troops reportedly advance deeper into the country (AP)

• Israel pounds Damascus; Turkiye-backed forces take Manbij (from Aljazeera’s live update page a few hours ago)

• Israeli forces have carried out large-scale attacks across Syria, targeting three major airports and other strategic military infrastructure, including in the capital, Damascus. …

• Qatar, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have condemned Israel’s “dangerous” land grab in the Syrian Golan Heights, as UN peacekeepers accuse it of violating the 1974 ceasefire deal that ended the 1967 war.

Turkey Invades Syria

As you read above, Turkey via surrogates has also invaded Syria. Turkey hates its own Kurds, and it hates the Kurds in Iraq and Syria even more. What do you think its goals in Syria are?

For an answer, see the following map, produced in 2019, showing the Kurdish region in Syria and the area (hashmarked) that Turkey wants to control. Manbij, which the Turks have just taken, is called out near Aleppo.

Source

It will be interesting to see just how far Turkish forces advance. Partition may be on the menu for what we called Syria once.

Meet the New Boss? Or Something Far Worse?

The bottom line from the realpolitik view is that the U.S. has funded this war for its own ends and that of its Sunni and Israeli allies, and has spent billions prosecuting it. Aaron Maté:

The US and allies spent billions of dollars arming an insurgency that they knew was dominated by Al Qaeda -- and that carried out atrocities like in Latakia. The US military has occupied a large swath of northeastern Syria, stealing its oil and wheat. The US has also imposed crippling sanctions that, as Trump-Biden officials boast about, "crushed" Syria's economy, "deny reconstruction", and have "exacerbated fuel and food shortages for everyday Syrians."

From arming insurgents, occupying oil/wheat fields, to imposing sanctions that hurt everyday Syrians, the aim of this regime change campaign was to cause enough misery in Syria so that its government imploded and its place in the axis of resistance was severed. After years of war, pillage, and economic strangulation that has finally happened. While one authoritarian system has collapsed, another one has succeeded.

So what’s next? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? Or something far worse, a picked-apart failed state in the Libyan mold?

We’ll know soon, I think. As will the Syrians.

Seeing Both Sides at Once

An even and comprehensive view, one that brings these two points of view together, is provided by DropSite News and Jeremy Scahill on Monday’s edition of Breaking Points: