If our enemies are going to keep warring with each other, let them.
Our only interest in Syria is to ensure that jihadists cannot use the country’s ungoverned spaces as sanctuaries to train recruits and orchestrate attacks against the United States and our allies.
I appreciate the sobriety of our editorial on the fall of Bashar al-Assad: the brutal Syrian dictator, son of former brutal dictator Hafez al-Assad, and client propped up by the brutal Shiite jihadist regime in Iran and the mafia-style regime of the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. (And sprinkle in a little North Korean brutality on the nuclear weapons front.)
Six years ago, I penned a column titled “The Syria Fairy Tale Lives,” noting that I had been a longtime naysayer on American involvement in Syria (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here) and bemoaning the folly of the sharia-democracy project. By then it had been manifest for well over a decade that United States policy in the Middle East persisted in willful blindness to what remains the most basic, incorrigible fact about the region: the predominance of sharia supremacism. Fundamentalist Islam, which has developed for over a millennium, is not merely a religious creed; it is a comprehensive legal and societal framework that is self-consciously hostile to Western liberalism and, thus, to the principles of the American republic.
However helpfully disruptive Trump’s populist backlash against the bipartisan Beltway’s transnational progressivism may be, it is problematic. Delusionally, it holds that we have no committed enemies — just deals waiting for the artist in chief to negotiate. Even when our vital interests are at stake, MAGA scoffs at the prospect of military intervention as nothing more than a pretext for the Swamp to entangle us in yet another pointless “forever war.” Alas, this is to be expected when fights we’ve had to fight — such as Afghanistan in 2001 — were transmogrified by Washington into multi-decade, multitrillion-dollar sociological experiments at the cost of American lives.
Most Americans know that “forever wars” is a nonsensical term. If we are truly in a war that national security requires, Americans will fight as long as it takes — such wars don’t come with an end date. But Americans will no longer support Washington’s penchant for Middle Eastern adventurism — which not only consciously avoids the most essential facts on the ground but is unable to tell the good guys from the bad guys, . . . or, in the case of Syria, to sort out the bad guys from the other bad guys.
There was and remains nothing for us in that hellhole, where for over a dozen years America’s enemies have been pitted in a savage war against America’s enemies.
Assad and his allies are among the worst actors. But they’ve also been aligned against some of the worst actors. Our editorial notes that a brutal crackdown ordered more than 40 years ago by Assad’s father was mainly directed against the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s worth delving into.
The Brotherhood has been the most pernicious, most successful global sharia-supremacist movement in the century after World War I. Indeed, it was the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate, and Kemal Ataturk’s turn toward Western secularism in Turkey, that inspired an Egyptian schoolteacher, Hassan al-Banna, to establish al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (the Brotherhood, about whose ideology and long war against the West I wrote The Grand Jihad in 2010). Not only has the Brotherhood been the catalyst for more militant Sunni jihadist movements (most notoriously, al-Qaeda and its renegade franchise turned rival ISIS); it is also the progenitor of the Muslim Students Association, the most consequential Islamist organization in the United States (and one of the main reasons little Johnny and Sally don’t know what a genocide is despite the $70K you ponied up for tuition this year).
In 1982, when the Brotherhood’s revolt against him was in its third year, Assad the elder brought the Hama down, so to speak. Assad was a member of the Baathist movement, founded by Michel Aflaq (an iteration of the Marxist pan-Arabism of the Brotherhood’s nemesis, Gamal Abdel Nasser — who became a model for Palestinian Liberation Organization founder Yasser Arafat, a rival of the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas). The Syrian Brothers were not freedom fighters; they were Sunni mujahideen on a jihad to oust the elder Assad. They were not seeking democracy; their objective, the objective of Islamists everywhere and always, was to create a sharia state — the kind of regime we saw spring up briefly and hellishly in Egypt during the delusionally dubbed “Arab Spring”; the kind of regime that abominates liberty and equality.
Speaking of Egypt, the Brothers were then in revolt there, too. As Assad watched from nearby, the Ikhwan and its co-conspirators (including al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group, led by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman — whom I eventually prosecuted on U.S. terrorism charges in the mid Nineties) murdered President Anwar Sadat. This led to a harsh crackdown by the successor regime of Hosni Mubarak (as with Assad in Hama, it’s de rigueur in the West to recall the dictator’s crackdown while bleaching out the “mostly peaceful” agitation that occasioned the crackdown). Around the same time, in 1979, the Baathist Saddam Hussein took over Sunni Iraq, purged his opponents in the party, and began making a push for Iraqi–Syrian unification, which would likely have entailed muscling aside Assad.
This is a tough neighborhood.
In Syria today, beside the Brotherhood, the opposition is led by an al-Qaeda spin-off, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (or HTS, formerly known as the al-Nusra Front), whose emir, Ahmad al-Sharaa, is better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. Both Jolani and HTS are designated terrorists under U.S. law.
The Western media and progressive political class, in their desperation for a consequential Islamic movement they can describe as “moderate” (and willing to make up an Islam of their very own because the sharia-supremacists stubbornly refuse to moderate), are cooing over Jolani. That’s because he separated from al-Qaeda in 2016. ISIS separated from al-Qaeda, too — doing so doesn’t necessarily signal a “moderate” turn. In Jolani’s case, the separation apparently owes to his being a self-professed Syrian nationalist who disavows interest in the mothership’s global jihad.
Even if that’s true (and I am skeptical, given that sharia supremacism rejects the borders drawn by Western powers and imposed on Arab countries), Jolani still wants to impose a sharia state in Syria, which would be disastrous for the country’s Alawite, Shiite, Christian, and Druze minorities. If you are wondering why, in the days after Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, Israel’s defense forces bombed Syrian weapons depots, missile batteries, potential chemical and biological stocks, fighter jets, attack helicopters, tanks, and Syria’s sparse naval fleet in massive air strikes, it is because Israel prudently fears that a well-armed, HTS-led sharia state might be even more atrocious than Assad’s regime.
So far, Jolani has been shrewd in consolidating his power, instructing his forces that no harm is to come to residents of the cities and towns the victorious opposition forces have conquered in their impressive campaign from Aleppo through Damascus over the last month. In this approach, Jolani and HTS are following their sponsor and model, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Pretend to be moderate for Western consumption, then gradually supplant any vestiges of Western liberalism and secularism with sharia-supremacist principles.
It is worth remembering that Erdoğan has given the Brotherhood and Hamas safe haven in Turkey and has backed to the hilt their latest war against Israel. That should be surprising to no one who has followed Erdoğan’s rise since he took power in Ankara more than 20 years ago. (My 2012 book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, tracked Erdoğan’s emergence, his close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and his hostility to the Jewish state.) Of course, no one wants to acknowledge this — including President-elect Trump, who has swayed from confrontational to accommodationist in his let’s-make-a-deal approach to the Islamist authoritarian. After all, Turkey is our NATO “ally.” (I am not opposed to strong alliances, but I am not as enthusiastic about NATO as many of my NR colleagues because Erdoğan is a wolf who, having taken NATO’s measure, has shed most of his sheep’s clothing — with impunity.)
We’ve spent years fretting over Iran’s “land bridge” — the mullahs’ project to project power to the Mediterranean Sea by establishing de facto control over Iraq and Syria, and to use this corridor to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon mainly to wage the jihad against Israel and American forces. With Tehran reeling, the relevant land bridge may now be in the north, with Turkey as the proprietor abetting both an al-Qaeda spin-off on Israel’s Syrian border and the Sunni jihadists in the Palestinian territories.
And let’s not forget ISIS, lurking and certain to thrive in the Syrian chaos.
America’s only interest in Syria is to ensure that jihadists cannot use the country’s ungoverned spaces as sanctuaries to train recruits and orchestrate attacks against the United States, our allies, and our vital interests. We can look for sensible ways to help oppressed minorities (mindful that we have gargantuan problems of our own). But if our enemies are going to keep warring with each other, we should stay out of it. Trump is right about that.