On the menu today: Noah Rothman called it Friday afternoon; with an eye on history, Jay Nordlinger notes: “The rule of the Assads is now over, it seems. It has been an incredibly murderous and sadistic rule.” This morning, a look at the ramifications of the Assad regime’s collapse for Iran, Russia, Assad himself, the old al-Qaeda–ISIS crowd, President-elect Donald Trump, the Biden administration, and director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard.
The Assad Regime Falls
The ramifications of the collapse of the Assad regime for . . .
IRAN: Much like the winning contestant on that old NBC reality show, the Iranian regime is the biggest loser.
How would you like to be Ayatollah Khamenei right now?
Your most important proxy regime in Damascus has collapsed, Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah are all dead, and both terrorist organizations are a shadow of their former selves; Israel has figured out how to kill your top nuclear scientist with an AI-assisted killer robot; nobody wants to buy a used Apollo pager; two waves of Iranian rocket attacks on Israel earlier this year did minimal damage; Bibi Netanyahu is all smiles; Iran continues to experience shortages of gasoline, natural gas, and electricity; the government doesn’t have enough money to pay its pensions; and Donald Trump is about to come back as the U.S. commander in chief — and he’s going to “make Iran broke again,” in the words of former State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus.
“For Iran, Syria has been the backbone of our regional presence,” Hassan Shemshadi, an expert on Iran’s proxy militant groups who was for years a documentary filmmaker on the battlefields of Syria, told the New York Times in an interview from Tehran. “Everything that Iran sent to the region went through Syria. It is now extremely difficult to keep these channels open.”
“The resistance front has had a really hard year,” Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi acknowledged Sunday in an interview on Iranian state television. It’s very rare that you hear an American enemy just come out and admit that it’s a rebuilding year, and they’re just hoping that this year’s losing record gives them a better position in next year’s terrorist draft.
With only one glaring exception, Iran has had a miserable 2024. That one glaring exception:
Iran is “dramatically” accelerating its enrichment of uranium to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent level that is weapons grade, U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi told Reuters on Friday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency later confirmed in a confidential report to member states that Iran was speeding up uranium enrichment, a process that refines the raw material so that it can be used as fuel in civil nuclear power generation or, potentially, nuclear weapons.
Tehran already has enough material enriched to up to 60 percent purity to be able to make four nuclear weapons if it enriches it further, according to an IAEA yardstick.
The good news is the Iranian mullahs are absolutely screwed. The bad news is the Iranian mullahs are probably getting increasingly desperate.
ASSAD: You might think that Bashar al-Assad is the biggest loser, but as of this writing, it appears he has survived being deposed with his freakishly long neck intact, which he must count as a big win. Forced retirement in Russia — even with a “precipitous fall in living circumstances,” as a former MI6 head put it — is still preferable to a hangman’s noose or gunshots from an angry mob. Ask Colonel Moammar Qaddafi. (Qaddafi spent his life raging against “Yankee imperialism,” but in the end, the Yankees got him anyway.)
As Moe Lane put it, “guess Bashar al-Assad wanted a ride instead of ammo.”
For a long stretch, Assad was Washington’s favorite dictator, at least in some circles. In 2007, the then-relatively new speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, traveled to Damascus and after her talks with Assad she told reporters, “We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace.” Good call, ma’am. Good call.
(Just think, 17 years later, one of those two ruthless leaders seated at that meeting in Damascus would take down an American president.)
In 2010, the Huffington Post ran a slideshow entitled, “Asma Al Assad: Syria’s First Lady And All-Natural Beauty.” In perhaps the most stinging indictment of its readers any publication has ever chosen to publish, they commented, “HuffPost readers ended up commenting more on Asma’s beauty and less on what an Obama/Assad meeting would mean for the Middle East.”
In the March 2011 issue, Vogue magazine profiled the first lady of Syria. “Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her ‘the element of light in a country full of shadow zones. . . .’ Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East.”
The same month, then-secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared on Face the Nation, and said, “There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” A few days later, when asked whether she believed Assad was a reformer, Clinton backtracked. “I referenced opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”
By 2019, Assad had “reformed” Syrian women and children’s lungs from healthy and functioning to dead from the use of chemical weapons at least 336 times. (For those thinking the researcher who came to that conclusion, the Global Public Policy Institute, had their thumb on the scale, they ultimately dismissed 162 reports as not “credibly substantiated,” “confirmed,” or “comprehensively confirmed.”) Assad and his regime used chlorine, sarin, and some substances that were never identified — both before and after August 18, 2014, when “all declared stockpiles of Syrian chemical weapons materials” were allegedly destroyed offshore. You’re going to hear that “both sides used chemical weapons” in the Syrian civil war, which is technically true but misleading. Of the 336 uses of chemical weapons confirmed by the Global Public Policy Institute, 98 percent were committed by the Assad regime and 2 percent were committed by ISIS — mostly using sulphur mustard. That’s not “hooray for ISIS,” just an observation that Assad demonstrated you could use chemical weapons willy-nilly on unarmed civilians and that the Obama administration’s “red line” meant nothing.
The Syrian Scientific Research Center in Damascus is where Assad ran his chemical-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. Both the dictator and the building are in past tense, the latter courtesy an Israeli air strike.
THE OLD AL-QAEDA–ISIS CROWD: For your grandparents who get confused by acronyms, “HTS” is short for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sha, “a coalition of northern Syria-based Sunni Islamist insurgent groups that evolved from Jabhat al-Nusrah, or ‘Nusrah Front,’ al-Qa‘ida’s former branch in Syria,” as described by the Counterterrorism Guide of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The leader of HTS is Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, sometimes spelled al-Jawlani. As the United Nations Security Council laid out:
The formation of Jabhat al-Nusrah, featuring Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, was announced on 23 January 2012. Abu Mohammed stated that the group consisted of fighters from the Near East. . . . Many of the attacks carried out by Jabhat al-Nusrah under the command of Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani have caused the deaths of civilians.
In a statement released on 10 April 2013, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani confirmed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave Jabhat al-Nusrah considerable support, and that Abu Bakr had deputised Abu Mohammed to run the Al-Qaida fight in Syria. Abu Mohammed declared that it was his intention to establish a state in the Levant region (not just Syria) through violent means. Abu Mohammed asserted his pride in the banner of Al-Qaida in Iraq. Abu Mohammed pledged his and his organisation’s allegiance to Aiman Muhammed Rabi al-Zawahiri (QDi.006), the head of the international Al-Qaida umbrella movement and deferred to his guidance.
The U.S. government has been eager to talk to Mohammed al-Jolani for a long time — so much so, that the U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice program will give you up to $10 million for information on where to find him. Hey, fellas, I think he’s in Damascus now. Secretary Blinken, you can send the check to me, care of the National Review office.
Muhammed al-Jolani did an interview with CNN a few days ago, and in that interview, he pledged a kindler and gentler form of Islamist rule:
The group said it is working to reassure civilians and groups that suffered persecution at the hands of extremist and jihadist groups in Syria’s decade-long civil war. It also said it has gone out of its way to publicly tell Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities that they will live safely under its rule.
“There were some violations against them [minorities] by certain individuals during periods of chaos, but we addressed these issues,” Jolani said when asked about concerns for their safety.
“No one has the right to erase another group. These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them,” he said.
You’ve got every right and reason to be skeptical. But maybe even Islamist jihadists get softer in middle age.
I think this assessment from Walter Russell Mead is the correct one: “Both world and Syrian history suggest that what comes next could be ugly. Think Iraq. Think Libya. But the fall of Assad and the defeat of his Russian and Iranian enablers are good things. We can rejoice in this good news without losing sight of the potential downsides.” Similarly, the editors of NR conclude, “It’s difficult to shed any tears about the fall of an evil dictator. But our hopes for a new Syria will be tempered by trepidation.”
RUSSIA: For a country that supposedly has endless military resources and is, in the eyes of some military analysts who sound like a malfunctioning WestWorld robot, perpetually on the verge of a decisive victory in Ukraine . . . Russia sure loses a lot, doesn’t it?
Guys riding atop a rusty armored minivan come rolling into Aleppo, and Vladimir Putin acts like he’s less familiar with the place than Gary Johnson.
If you welcome 10,000 troops/fresh cannon fodder from the North Koreans and let your stooge regime fall without a fight while giving up a warm-water naval base . . . how great are things going for you?
Much like Iran, how valuable does Russia look like as an ally right now?
TRUMP: Thoughts from the president-elect, via Truth Social, early Sunday morning:
Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever. Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success. Likewise, Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness. They have ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers, and many more civilians. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed, and if it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse. I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!
BIDEN AND HARRIS: It’s not quite true that the U.S. president and vice president are missing, but they’ve been awfully quiet for the past week, rarely making public appearances. The reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral was attended by President-elect Trump and . . . First Lady Jill Biden.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained Friday, “They were both invited to be there for the reopening of the Notre Dame. The president has had a scheduling conflict which is why he was not able to able to attend. There was scheduling conflict which is why he decided not to attend. But the first lady is there and he’s very proud that she’s there representing us.”
But the reopening was Saturday; from the official White House weekend schedule guidance: “Saturday, the President has no public events scheduled,” and he had no last-minute public events on his schedule Saturday. Biden didn’t do anything Sunday until he attended the Kennedy Center Honors at 6:30 p.m.; the president returned from his Angola trip Thursday morning.
I know that losing a hard-fought presidential race is an exceptionally difficult experience. But according to the White House website, Vice President Harris has made public remarks twice since her concession speech — her Thanksgiving message and at the National Black Caucus of State Legislators’ Annual Legislative Conference.
It’s been more than a month. Does she know that she still has a job as vice president?
TULSI GABBARD: Well, I guess we don’t have to worry about Gabbard passing along sensitive intelligence to the Assad regime anymore, do we?
ADDENDUM: If you’ve ever wanted to see my fellow Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart crack up after Ruth Marcus used a term that sounded much dirtier than she intended . . . you’re going to want to watch the closing minutes of Friday morning’s video chat.