None but a few corrupt cronies will be shedding tears at the tyrant’s departure. But there should be no doubt that what we are witnessing in Syria today is a huge defeat, a mini 1967 for the Arab world. As I write, Israeli land forces have entered this battered country. There is not yet a definitive settlement, but a few things are clear. Assad is a refugee in Moscow. His Baathist apparatus did a deal with the Eastern NATO leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (whose brutalities in Idlib are legion), and offered up the country on a platter. The rebels have agreed that Assad’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, should continue to oversee the state for the time being. Will this be a form of Assadism without Assad, even if the country is about to pivot geopolitically away from Russia and what remains of the ‘Resistance Axis’?
Like Iraq and Libya, where the US has a lock on the oil, Syria will now become a shared American–Turkish colony. US imperial policy, globally, is to break up countries that cannot be swallowed whole and remove all meaningful sovereignty in order to assert economic and political hegemony. This may have started ‘accidentally’ in the former Yugoslavia but it has since become a pattern. EU satellites use similar methods to ensure that smaller nations (Georgia, Romania) are kept under control. Democracy and human rights have little to do with any of this. It’s a global gamble.
In 2003, after Baghdad fell to the US, the exultant Israeli Ambassador in Washington congratulated George W. Bush and advised him not to stop now, but to move on to Damascus and Tehran. Yet the US victory had an unintended but predictable side-effect: Iraq became a rump Shia state, enormously strengthening Iran’s position in the region. The debacle there, and subsequently in Libya, meant that Damascus had to wait for more than a decade before receiving proper imperial attention. Meanwhile, Iranian and Russian support for Assad upped the stakes of routine regime change.
Now, Assad’s ousting has created a different type of vacuum – likely to be filled by NATO’s Turkey and the US via the ‘ex-al-Qaida’ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the rebranding of its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani as a freedom fighter after his stint in a US prison in Iraq is par for the course), as well as Israel. The latter’s contribution was enormous, having disabled Hezbollah and wrecked Beirut with yet another round of massive bombing raids. In the wake of this victory, it is difficult to imagine that Iran will be left alone. Though the ultimate aim for both the US and Israel is regime change there, degrading and disarming the country is the first priority. This wider plan for reshaping the region helps to explain the unstinting support given by Washington and its European proxies to the continuing Israeli genocide in Palestine. After more than a year of slaughter, the Kantian principle that state actions must be such that they can become a universally respected law looks like a sick joke.
Who will replace Assad? Before his flight, some reports suggested that if the dictator made a 180-degree turn – breaking with Iran and Russia and restoring good relations with the US and Israel, as he and his father had done before – then the Americans might be inclined to keep him on. Now it is too late, but the state apparatus that abandoned him has declared its readiness to collaborate with whomever. Will Erdoğan do the same? The Sultan of Donkeys will surely want his own people, nurtured in Idlib since they were child soldiers, in charge and under Ankara’s control. If he succeeds in imposing a Turkish puppet regime, it will be another version of what happened in Libya. But he is unlikely to have it all his own way. Erdoğan is strong on demagogy but weak on actions, and the US and Israel might veto a cleansed al-Qaida government for their own reasons, despite having used the jihadis to fight Assad. Regardless, it is unlikely that the replacement regime will abolish the Mukhābarāt (secret police), illegalize torture or offer accountable government.
Prior to the Six Day War, one of the central components of Arab nationalism and unity was the Baath Party that ruled Syria and had a strong base in Iraq; the other, more powerful one was Nasser’s government in Egypt. Syrian Baathism during the pre-Assad period was relatively enlightened and radical. When I met Prime Minister Yusuf Zuayyin in Damascus in 1967, he explained that the only way forward was to outflank conservative nationalism by making Syria ‘the Cuba of the Middle East’. Yet Israel’s assault that year led to the speedy destruction of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, which paved the way for the death of Nasserite Arab nationalism. Zuayyin was toppled and Hafez-al Assad was propelled to power with tacit US support – much like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, whom the CIA supplied with a list of the top cadres of the Iraqi Communist Party. The Baathist radicals in both countries were discarded, and the party’s founder Michel Aflaq resigned in disgust when he saw where it was headed.
These new Baathist dictatorships were supported by certain sections of the population, however, as long as they provided a basic safety net. Iraq under Saddam and Syria under the Assad père et fils were brutal but social dictatorships. Assad Senior hailed from the middle-strata of the peasantry, and passed several progressive reforms to ensure that his class was kept happy, reducing the tax burden and abolishing usury. In 1970, a vast majority of Syrian villages had only natural light; peasants woke up and went to sleep with the sun. A couple decades later, the construction of the Euphrates dam enabled the electrification of 95% of them, with energy heavily subsidized by the state.
It was these policies, rather than repression alone, which guaranteed the stability of the regime. Most of the population turned a blind eye to the torture and imprisonment of citizens in the cities. Assad and his coterie firmly believed that man was little more than an economic creature, and that if needs of this type could be satisfied, then only a small minority would rebel (‘one or two hundred at the most’, Assad remarked, ‘were the types for whom Mezzeh prison was originally intended’). The eventual uprising against the younger Assad in 2011 was triggered by his turn to neoliberalism and the exclusion of the peasantry. When it calcified into a bitter civil war, one option would have been a compromise settlement and power-sharing deal – but the apparatchiks who are currently negotiating with Erdoğan advised against any such arrangement.
During one of my visits to Damascus, the Palestinian intellectual Faisal Darraj confided that the Mukhābarāt agent who gave him permission to leave the country for conferences abroad always laid down a condition: ‘Bring back the latest Baudrillard and Virilio.’ Always nice to have educated torturers, as the great Arab novelist Abdelrahman Munif – a Saudi by birth and leading intellectual of the Baath Party – might have said. Munif’s 1975 novel Sharq al-Mutawassit (East of the Mediterranean) is a devastating account of political torture and imprisonment, which the Egyptian literary critic Sabry Hafez described as a book of ‘exceptional power and ambition, aspiring to write the ultimate political prison in all its variations’. When I spoke with Munif in the nineties he said, with a sad look on his face, that these were the themes that dominated Arabic literature and poetry: a tragic commentary on the state of the Arab nation. Today, this shows little sign of changing. Even if the rebels have freed some of Assad’s prisoners, they will soon replace them with their own.
The US and most of the EU have spent the past year successfully sustaining and defending a genocide in Gaza. All US client states in the region remain intact, while three non-clients – Iraq, Libya and Syria – have been beheaded. The fall of the latter removes a crucial supply line linking a number of anti-Zionist factions. Geostrategically, it is a triumph for Washington and Israel. This must be recognized, but despair is worthless. How an effective resistance will reconstitute itself depends on the coming clash between Israel and a besieged Iran, which is engaged in direct underground talks with the US and certain members of Trump’s entourage, while also speeding up the development of its nuclear plans. The situation is fraught with danger.
Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. He writes fiction and non-fiction and his non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author.
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