December 9, 2024

The Fall of The House of Assad

Syria's Baathist regime pissed off too many people and created too many enemies, both internal and external. Its end was inevitable, but what will follow it won't be pretty. Damascus in the hands of Al-Qaeda's successors and the thieving Turks won't be a success story. Afghanistan 2.0. 


An excerpt from, "Blowback" by Matthew Petti, December 8, 2024:

Hypotheticals aside, Assad’s fall is already a clear case of blowback — just not on the part of the United States. The Assad family was one of the most cynical actors in the modern Middle East, having dealt with and backstabbed almost every major player in the region. And many of those double games came back to bite Assad at the last moment.

Of course, the social rot of the old regime, U.S. economic pressure preventing reconstruction, and broader geopolitical shifts were important structural factors that brought down the Syrian state. But the specific actors that brought down Assad — breakaway Al Qaeda and the Kurdish-led democratic confederalists — were both ones that the Assad dynasty had played footsie with. And the curious lack of support from Assad’s most important patron, Iran, was likely the result of more backstabbing.

The democratic confederalist movement exists today because Assad’s father had helped Kurdish exiles from Turkey settle in Lebanon in the 1980s. In order to gain leverage in Syrian-Turkish border disputes, Syria backed a variety of Turkish and Kurdish dissidents. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) first trained with Palestinian guerrillas, then set up its first headquarters in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.

It’s a history that is well known and often brought up by Syrian nationalist opponents of the Kurdish movement and their American sympathizers, who portray the PKK and its offshoots as stooges of Assad. Of course, these opponents speak less about Assad’s falling out with the PKK. In 1998, as part of a Syrian-Turkish normalization agreement, the Syrian government expelled the PKK, allowing for Turkey to capture its leadership, and stepped up its repression of Syrian Kurds.

That crackdown ended up awakening a sleeping giant. Their peace with the Syrian state broken, local Kurds founded the underground Democratic Union Party to fight Assad’s regime. (The 2004 soccer riots between Arabs and Kurds in Qamishli were a particularly important turning point.) Once civil war broke out, the Democratic Union Party took control of the situation in Kurdish towns and swiftly booted out government forces. The party later became the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which conquered a third of Syria, including some of the country’s most valuable natural resources, and welcomed in a U.S. military presence.

Around the same time that it was cracking down on Kurdish aspirations, the Syrian government opened its territory to Iraqi guerrillas fighting the U.S. occupation, including Al Qaeda in Iraq. Assad likely believed that he was killing two birds with one stone: raising the cost of U.S. regime change efforts while getting restive dissidents killed in a foreign struggle. In the words of writer Rob Ashlar, “AQI took the aid since it viewed the regime as fools whom it would later betray. The regime thought it was being clever. It wasn't.”

December 8, 2024

How The West's Generational War With Russia Led To The Ascendancy of Islamic Terrorism In The Middle East

Napoleon in Russia, 1812.


"Faith and luck were in short supply in Iran in the late 1940s and early fifties. The end of the Second World War did not usher in peace or stability but instead hurled Iran into the treacherous currents of the Cold War. Iran’s oil wealth and its proximity to the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf made the country a prize worth fighting for. Though the wartime allies had signed a pact to evacuate their forces from Iranian territory within six months of Germany’s defeat, Stalin decided to test British and American resolve by keeping Russian troops on the ground supporting a puppet Communist state in the northern province of Azerbaijan. It was only in the face of tough diplomatic pressure from the Truman administration that Moscow backed down and Azerbaijan was liberated from Communist rule. This first major international crisis of the Cold War convinced the Shah and the army generals that they should cultivate close ties with the United States if Iran was to avoid falling behind the Iron Curtain." - Andrew Scott Cooper, "The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran" 2018, Picador, pg. 65.

"As Russia becomes increasingly embroiled in its own neighborhood, Moscow can decrease its priorities in the WANA region. For instance, Russia has called the mercenaries from the Wagner Group, which was heavily involved in Africa and West Asia, to participate in the war in Ukraine to the detriment of Russian ambitions in the WANA region. Notably, President Putin has already once exhibited his inclination to withdraw Russian troops from Syria.

The withdrawal of Russia from the region can lead to a decrease in the power of Iran and destabilize the Assad regime as well as the position of Haftar. The Western countries can also employ stringent sanctions against Russian allies. There can also reprisals against Russian allies in the region as was witnessed after the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan. The unrest caused by the reprisals can provide the space for US or Chinese allies to acquire more power and influence. Countries in the region are also looking for alternatives to grain and oil imported from Russia and Ukraine, which could decrease dependencies over time.

Furthermore, Russia can lose control of its leverage over Saudi Arabia over the hydrocarbons as Russia not only controls its own hydrocarbons but also the reserves of Syria and Libya as well. Terrorism can also increase in the traditional Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia. This concern emanates from the capabilities and reach of countries in the WANA region such as Iran that have the power to cause disruption in Central Asian nations. As Russian influence deteriorates from the region, its leverage over these countries declines as well.

Central Asian countries are at the “nexus of a number of interlocking regions,” including the WANA region, where Russian retrenchment can contribute to intensification of instability and the creation of a haven for violent nonstate actors. Russia’s withdrawal is also likely to be the Russian abandonment of its great-power ambitions and will provide regional powers such as Turkey and Israel along with great powers the United States and China opportunity to thrive." - Arushi Singh, "Rivalry Further Afield: The Probable Consequences of Great-Power Competition in the West Asia and North Africa Region" Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, June 1, 2022.


Making sense of events in Syria is not possible without having a historical understanding of the Western-Russian rivalry. 

Over the course of the last two centuries this civilizational clash has produced spillover geopolitical and political effects in Eastern Europe, South Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, and North Africa. 

The policy of fighting and isolating Russia, which Britain has spearheaded, has caused immense suffering for the people caught in the middle, with Ukraine being the latest example. 

That poor nation was brainwashed and turned into mercenaries in a span of a couple of decades after the Soviets fell. Washington used the Ukrainians' anti-Communist feelings, which were real and justified, to full effect by casting the new, Christian Russia under Putin in the old light.

And there are many more examples of such psychological trickery and geopolitical engineering. 

After WWII, the British created the state of Pakistan upon their departure from India for the sole reason of preventing Russia access to the Indian Ocean. 

They believed India wouldn't put up a fight if Russia invaded south so they created a garrison state and a military dictatorship to prevent such a scenario. Like the Ukrainians, the Pakistanis have proven to be useful mercenaries for London and Washington.

The official excuse they gave for this new Frankensteinian state was to give Indian Muslims their own homeland, but securing the West's geopolitical interests in Central Asia and South Asia was the real reason. 

Later on, in the 1970s, the regional and global consequences of the creation of Pakistan became apparent when Afghanistan sled into chaos. Islamic terrorist forces operating out of Islamabad brought mayhem and destruction to the peaceful country. 

Since the socialist government in Kabul was a Russian ally, the United States and the West saw nothing wrong with developments there. They encouraged the Pakistanis, and added fuel to the fire by supplying the terrorist groups with arms and money. 

The strategy worked. Russia was dealt a severe blow to its image in Afghanistan. 1989 saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islamic fanatics in Central Asia. And the West was more than willing to live with that awful reality. 

When it was faced with a similar dilemma in Iran a decade before---either the acceptance of a Communist regime friendly to Russia or a band of clerics hostile to the West---Washington chose the later option. 

In both cases, in Afghanistan and Iran, America and the West preferred to empower Islamic terrorists rather than cede crucial geopolitical space to the Russian orbit. 

But they weren't successful forever with their clever schemes. History has a way of playing tricks on tricksters. The rogue clerics in Tehran have allied with Moscow in a number of conflicts after the demise of the Soviet Union. And the Taliban has also been accommodating with the Kremlin. Russia’s potential decision to remove it from its terrorism list could hearld better relations in the future. 

A similar scenario could play out in Syria if its new Islamic rulers truly act in the interests of Syria and its people instead of foreign powers. So far they have proven to be nothing more than vassals so expect the worst. 

Syria under Al-Qaeda leadership will be a mercenary state, much like Ukraine and Pakistan. Its foreign policy will be dictated by London and Washington, and that means saying goodbye to Russia in the Mediterranean.

December 7, 2024

China's Wise Washingtonian Foreign Policy

 

Ideological foreign policies bankrupt states. China's pragmatism in world affairs serves as a model for all to follow.

"The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." - George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796.


An excerpt from, "China’s Foreign Policy Objectives" from the book, "China's International Behavior: Activism, Opportunism, and Diversification," By Evan S. Medeiros, 2009, RAND Corporation:

Chinese policymakers describe their increasingly active and robust diplomacy using the expression “all-around diplomacy." On face value, this principle sounds rather broad and explains little, but in a Chinese context, it possesses specific and new (or newly emphasized) dimensions of statecraft. All-around diplomacy is meant to contrast China’s current approach with past CCP guiding principles---such as "leaning to one side"---which had a more ideological nature. This phrase reinforces (to foreign as well as Chinese audiences) the notion that Chinese foreign policy will continue to focus on protecting China’s national interests (i.e., sovereignty, development, and respect) and not on ideological goals, as was often the case in past years. All-around diplomacy is also meant to emphasize the comprehensive nature of Chinese foreign policy: It will include all nations, developed and developing, and will include multiple regions, such as Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe as well as Asia. Chinese foreign policy will embrace all modes of international interactions (bilateral, multilateral, and regional), and such interactions will encompass economics, politics, military, science and technology, culture, education, and tourism. In the words of reports from the high-level 2006 Central Conference on Foreign Affairs Work, “China has created a pattern of opening to the outside world in all directions, at all levels, and in broad areas. . . . [emphasis added]” Thus, all-around diplomacy is meant to signal the degree to which the Chinese leaders support a highly internationalist and nonideological foreign policy.

An excerpt from, "Asia as the New Center of Geopolitics" By Evan Medeiros, Internationale Politik Quarterly, October 25, 2024:

It has become commonplace—almost trite—to argue that Asia is emerging as a new power center in the world. Policymakers and analysts point to China’s and India’s economic rise, Asia’s centrality to global supply chains, and, of course, US-China strategic competition and the risk of conflict. All of that is true, but it is also inaccurate. It misses the fundamental changes occurring in both the region and in the very nature of geopolitics today.  

In truth, Asia’s rise is the story of a region becoming the center of geopolitics for the 21st century. Asian security, economic, technological, and ecological dynamics will define global affairs. Just as Europe was the center of geopolitics for the second half of the 20th century (both before and after the Cold War), Asia is rapidly assuming that role today. What happens in Asia will come to define geopolitics and what happens in the world will directly impact Asia. The nature of this interaction (i.e., between regional and global politics) is perhaps the most important variable in international affairs today.

Consider the facts. Asia is now home to half of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies, generates two thirds of global growth, and accounts for 40 percent of global GDP. Many Asian economies are at the center of global supply chains for the consumer and industrial technologies driving innovation and prosperity today. The core global trends of digitalization and green technologies are facilitated by innovations from Asian economies and are being adopted there more quickly than in the West. Moreover, 60 percent of the world’s population lives in the continent, and the size of Asia’s middle class (including China and India) is expected to reach nearly 2.3 billion people, or 65 percent of the world’s total by 2030. Indeed, Asians will constitute the largest share, some 88 percent, of the next billion people in the middle class.

Asia also accounts for seven of the 10 largest standing militaries in the world and seven of the nine nuclear weapons states (declared and undeclared), which includes the United States, China, Russia, France, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. The US has five formal treaty allies in Asia (including two with active territorial disputes with China) and currently deploys, including at Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii, over 350,000 US troops in the region from across all armed services. The stakes for the United States are massive and growing. 

The Syria Story: A New Inquisition, Not A Rebellion

 An army of savages is heading to Damascus. They bring with them a new inquisition.

In "Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East" Patrick Seale explains the French role in the creation of a partitioned Syria after WWI, especially its political sponsorship of religious minorities in the region---the Alawite Shiites of Syria and Maronite Christians of Lebanon being the biggest success stories. 

It's important to note that Syria was a much bigger piece of territory before the French got their hands on it. The new radical Sunni rulers of Syria won't end their march in Damascus, should they get that far. They have their sights set on Lebanon, and the surrounding region. 

If a deal with Israel has been struck, and all signs point to it, then they will attack Hezbollah from the rear in the coming months. Lebanese Christians will also be in their crosshairs.

What happens after, who knows. 

Israel emboldened Hamas in its early days to counteract the PLO, and it was successful in doing so until Hamas got too big for its role and outlived its usefulness. 

They're just repeating that same strategy on a regional scale. They're uber confident right now and they believe they can handle a radical Sunni Greater Syria backed by the Ottomans on their doorstep. 

And maybe they can since their principal way of fighting is carpet bombing cities and committing massacres on every street. With the West behind them, it seems they can commit any crime and get away with it. Israel is just copying what the Romans did, "they create a desert and call it peace." They are great students of history.

As for Syria itself, new inqusitions are being planned. The people taking over have a thousand year grudge against the Shiites, which they believe to be the main source of their ills in the present day. Without a doubt the Alawites will be hunted, as well as other minorities in the area like the Christians, Armenians, Druze and Kurds in the North of the country. 

Turkey would like nothing more than to see a Syria devoid of its ethnic and religious minorities so it can accomplish its aims quicker and rule without worrying about potential revolts in the future. 

A unified, monolithic, theocratic, expansionist, Sunni Syria would be a big prize for the Turks. And they have a history of committing genocides to get what they want so it shouldn't be out of the realm of possibility. They're still busy trying to destroy whatever is left of Armenia a century after the original crime. And since Israel is helping them with that little side project it only stands to reason it is aiding its criminal takeover in Syria too.

II. 

Below are excerpts from Patrick Seale's 1988 biography of Asad, called, "Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East"

The names, values and tribal organization of the 'Alawis derive both from their distant nomadic background and from the experience of life in the mountains over the last few centuries. Today's 'Alawi tribal structures reflect what is left of this heritage. Most 'Alawis belong to one of four main tribal confederations, the Haddadin, the Matawira, the Khaiyatin, and the Kalbiya and it is to the Kalbiya that Asad's grandfather Sulayman belonged. Originally each of the four big groupings was probably concentrated in a distinct part of the mountains, but over time the tribes intermingled so that even a hamlet of a hundred people might have Haddadin and Khaiyatin living side by side, if not in harmony. In addition, three smaller tribes, the Darawisa, the Mahaliba and the 'Amamira, settled at the northern end of the mountain range while several thousand 'Alawis lived, largely detribalized, on the plains outside the mountain areas. As a result tribal maps of the 'Alawi district are not neat affairs but show inextricable overlappings. Sulayman's village of Qurdaha, however, was less of a tribal mosaic than others. Overwhelmingly Kalbiya and the seat of the principal religious dignitary of the tribe, it was sometimes called Qurdaha al-Kalbiya.

Alawis today are not always comfortable with the subject of tribal affiliations as the Ba'thist state has striven to replace such categories with the modern notion of citizenship, but if pressed every village boy could tell you to which tribe his family belongs. Asked to name the leading tribes and families of Qurdaha, the head of the municipality replied, 'We have no tribes or families here. We are all members of the Ba'th family under the leadership of Hafiz al-Asad. Only then, after some coaxing, did he mention the Kalbiya clans which trace their lineage back hundreds of years.

The name of the 'Alawi community is of recent coinage dating only from the French Mandate. Before the First World War the community was known either as the Nusayriya after its alleged founder Muhammad ibn Nusayr, a ninth-century religious propagandist, or, in a variant of the same word, as the Ansariya, the traditional name of the mountain range which they inhabited. Only in recent decades has a member of the community become known as an 'Alawi or Alawite, strictly speaking a follower of 'Ali, the fountainhead of Shi'ism, a name which places the 'Alawis within the family of Shi'i sects.

The history of 'Alawi or Nusayri beliefs is misty indeed. The earliest references come from Druze polemics against them in the eleventh century when, to the outrage of Druze theologians, Nusayri missionaries started proselytizing among the newly arrived Druzes in southern Lebanon. The Nusayris make a fleeting appearance in Crusader chronicles and later in a few travellers' tales and reports by European consuls, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a determined attempt to throw light on them was made by the Reverend Samuel Lyde in The Asian Mystery, published in London in 1860. He based his work on the first Nusayri text to come to the attention of Western scholars, a book called The Manual of Shaykhs which he bought from a Christian merchant of Latakia into whose hands it had fallen during the Egyptian conquest of Syria in the 1830s. The next breakthrough came with the publication in 1900 of René Dussaud's Histoire et Religion des Nosairis, itself based on a book published in Beirut in 1863 by Sulayman al-Adhana, a Nusayri turned Christian who was later killed for his apostasy. Adhana's book contained the Nusayris' principal prayers and instructions and an account of their fundamental beliefs. On these rather shaky foundations, more recent scholars have built a fuller picture of the sect, although most readily admit that it remains, in Philip Hitti's words, a 'partially unsolved religious riddle'."

There seems little doubt, however, that the Nusayris are a schismatic offshoot from mainstream 'Twelver' Shi'ism whose history for the last thousand years has been one of stubborn survival in the face of invasion and repression. The Franks of the First Crusade (1098) seized their strongpoints in the mountains and built castles on them. In the early twelfth century the then powerful Isma'ilis stormed up from their base in the plain at Salamiya and also built fortresses in Nusayri country, where pockets of them remain to this day still at odds with their neighbours. Saladin conquered the area in 1188 and demanded tribute. The Mamluk Sultans who followed him over the next century routed the Isma'ilis, drove out the last Crusaders, and tried forcibly to convert the Nusayri sectarians to orthodox Islam. When the fourteenth century traveller Ibn Battuta passed through the mountains he recorded that the Nusayris were compelled to build mosques. The Syrian theologian Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), a champion of Sunni orthodoxy, condemned the Nusayris as more dangerous than the Christians and urged Muslims to make holy war on them---a text which still provides ammunition for their twentieth-century opponents.

Their next oppressors were the Ottoman Turks who conquered Syria at the beginning of the sixteenth century and made a new attempt to force orthodoxy on the Nusayris. Ottoman government, lasting until 1918, was interrupted briefly by a decade of Egyptian rule from 1832, which far from bringing relief meant better organized and still more severe repression. By this time the highlanders were widely despised as heretics and outcasts and it was only with the coming of the French Mandate after the First World War that the Nusayris felt free from persecution. (Pg. 9 - 11).

. . .Asad grew up in one of the strangest political societies of modern times: an 'Alawi 'state' of some 300,000 people which France carved out of a backward corner of the Ottoman empire after the defeat of the Turks in the First World War. This unusual background was to have an enduring effect on him. The central paradox of his career was that as a man who was to claim to embody militant Arab nationalism he should have started life in an obscure backwater - separatist, Western- sponsored, and by definition sectarian, which held itself aloof from the Arab world in general and from the rest of Syria in particular. Separatism and unity, minority and majority, margin and mainstream, the part and the whole these opposites still lie just below the surface of politics and society in the Arab world. Is that world a mosaic, a bewildering babble of ancient communities each at odds with the other? Or is it a unit, essentially one in way of life, language and aspirations? Most Arabs believe the second to be true and blame their fragmentation on the malevolent interference of foreigners. In Syria this feeling is particularly acute.

Every Syrian schoolchild is brought up to hate the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the two instruments which in Arab eyes carved up and disposed of 'natural Syria'. Although natural Syria was almost never politically united, this vast area bounded by the Taurus mountains to the north, the Mediterranean to the west, the Euphrates to the east, and the Arabian desert to the south was in the minds of its inhabitants a whole, homogeneous in culture, threaded with economic ties and known for centuries as bilad al-Sham, 'the lands of Damascus'. Each of the main cities of the region had its own character and jealous particularity, and its constellation of leading families, but there was a sense in which Jerusalem and Jaffa, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tripoli, Damascus, Homs and Hama, Latakia, Aleppo and Alexandretta were all kin, and of all these Damascus was acknowledged to be the most important.

For ten years in the 1830s natural Syria was ruled by Egypt from Damascus as a single unit for the first time since the reign of the Umayyad caliphs twelve hundred years earlier. When Egyptian occupation ended, bilad al-Sham reverted to Ottoman rule and was again subdivided into provinces, but these divisions were no more than local authority demarcations offering no obstacle to trade or settlement or family ties. (The real division at the time was between this 'natural Syria' and the Arab frontier provinces facing Persia that is to say, present-day Iraq.) When the First World War finished off the 400-year- old Ottoman empire, its Arab provinces were left to the mercies of Britain and France, the victorious superpowers of the time, who had secretly arranged to share out natural Syria between them. France took the northern part which was to become the republics of Syria and Lebanon, while further south Britain seized what were to be Palestine and Transjordan.

The inhabitants of the whole region made it clear that they wanted natural Syria to be independent and undivided: in July 1919 an elected body calling itself the Syrian National Congress repudiated the Sykes- Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration and demanded sovereign status for a united Syria-Palestine. Overwhelming popular support for this demand was confirmed by the King-Crane commission, an American fact-finding team which visited scores of towns and villages and received nearly two thousand petitions. But in 1920, to the despair of the Syrians, the European powers were given Mandates over the new states carved out of the former Ottoman provinces. These Mandates were conceived as a form of guardianship of young nations, but France ousted the Arab administration which the Amir Faysal had established in Damascus and proceeded to set up a colonial regime, before reordering the region to suit itself and its local friends.

First, in August 1920, it detached large areas from Syria - the ports of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tripoli, the Biqa' valley, and the Shi'i region north of Palestine and attached them to Mount Lebanon, the fief of its Maronite protégés, so as to create the State of Greater Lebanon. At a stroke Damascus lost its outlets to the sea and saw its horizons violently contract.

A second amputation occurred in October 1921 when France surrendered to Turkey large parts of the former province of Aleppo, bringing the Turks within fifty kilometres of the city. Aleppo's domain was further whittled away when France granted a special status to the Alexandretta-Antioch enclave of northern Syria because it contained a sizeable Turkish minority. (Less than twenty years later, the whole region was handed over to Turkey.) France then divided into four what remained of the country entrusted to it. In September 1920 Damascus and Aleppo were made the capitals of separate mini-states and in March 1922 the 'Alawi mountains and the Druze mountains were severed from Damascus and proclaimed 'independent'. In addition, the essentially tribal north-eastern part of Syria was brought under direct French rule and separatist sentiment encouraged by the settlement of Christians and Kurds.

These internal and wholly artificial frontiers were eventually swept away but Syria never regained its lost territories. When the French finally withdrew in 1946, the country had shrunk to 185,190 square kilometres from the 300,000 square kilometres which had been the extent of the Ottoman empire's Syrian provinces. The Syrians did not easily recover from the shock of this surgery, and the feeling that their country was made smaller than it was meant to be became a continued source of frustration.

When France arrived as a mandatory power, it perceived itself as the protector of minorities and especially of the Maronites on whose behalf it had joined with other European powers in sponsoring a semi- autonomous Mount Lebanon after the 1860 massacres. It therefore proceeded to create a 'Greater Lebanon' in the 1920s. The benefits bestowed on the Maronites over the years could surely be extended to the backward 'Alawis just a step further up the Mediterranean coast. In French minds, the 'Alawis seemed to be crying out for the protector's touch. Thus a sort of political map took shape in French official thinking: the flatlands of Syria were largely Sunni and unfriendly, but skirting them were the mountain havens of the minorities, not only the 'Alawis but the Isma'ilis of the same area and the Druzes in their basalt hills in the south.

A French advance guard entered Latakia, the Mediterranean port which lies at the foot of the 'Alawi mountains, on 6 November 1918, a bare month after the defeated Turks had packed their bags. The interior of Syria was not occupied for another two years, a clear pointer to France's greater interest in the mountain minorities. In the 'Alawi area it set about trying to pacify the mountains, something the Turks had never managed, but faced immediate resistance which soon spread to the scattered villages of the uplands, finding a leader in an 'Alawi headman, the young Shaykh Salih al-'Ali. An old photograph shows this early nationalist wearing a curved sabre in his belt and a breastplate of beaten metal strapped over his 'abaya. Terrain well suited to maquisards enabled him to defy France for over two years. Among his supporters was Asad's father, 'Ali Sulayman, who is remembered in local legend as riding off on horseback to raid a French position.

Eventually the French lost patience: in May 1921, three mobile columns were sent into the mountains to disarm one village after another, and by October it was all over. Shaykh Salih surrendered and was jailed in a Crusader castle on the small island of Arwad, just off the Syrian coast near Tartus, where a barracks still bears his name. Having imposed order on the 'Alawi district, the French could not make up their minds about its political destiny, an uncertainty reflected in frequent changes of name. In 1920 the area was called the 'Autonomous Territory of the 'Alawis', in 1922 it was renamed the 'State of the 'Alawis' and federated with the other Syrian statelets the French had created, only to be detached in 1924. In May 1930 it was named the 'Government of Latakia', in 1936 it was re-attached to the rest of Syria, but in 1939 had its autonomy largely restored. In 1942 it was brought yet again under the authority of Damascus in a last arrangement of the jigsaw before Syria won full independence from France in 1946. So the pendulum swung back and forth from separatism to unity, from part to whole.

The French put a stop to 'Alawi brigandage, introduced the rudiments of public administration, issued identity cards, and corralled the scattered and mistrustful mountain people into the statistics of a population census. They even gave them a postage stamp and a flag - a yellow sun on a white ground, a symbol which the local people must have found puzzling.

In Turkish times Sunni Muslims had been the privileged community, growing rich on 'Alawi labour. An 'Alawi highlander who ventured into the plains to look for work or to sell a basket of vegetables to buy the necessities of life could expect to be ground down by the Sunni or Christian merchant, money-lender or landowner with whom he had to deal. But once the territory was pacified in the early 1920s the French gave the 'Alawis privileges to the chagrin of both Sunnis and Christians, the latter in particular expecting better treatment at French hands. Perhaps with their missionary schools the French hoped to convert the 'Alawis to Christianity or at any rate turn them into clients. Be that as it may, the 'Alawis on the whole seized on the opportunity for self-improvement.

The port of Latakia acquired a traditional hold over the 'Alawi mountains through tobacco, the one export crop to find a market in Europe where it was especially favoured as pipe tobacco when the American Civil War cut off supplies of Virginia leaf. In the last years of the Ottoman empire, France took over the Syrian tobacco trade and established a monopoly, the Régie des Tabacs, in a mansion built over a fourteenth century caravanserai in Latakia. When the empire collapsed and France inherited Syria, the French governor commandeered the handsome mansion as his residence. For decades the Régie remained the growers' only customer and banker, and therefore the real master of the mountains whatever the political system at the time.

Another major instrument of French influence was the recruitment of young 'Alawis into the Troupes spéciales du Levant, a local force raised in 1921, in which they served under French officers together with Circassians, Armenians and other 'reliable' minorities. The auxiliaries totalled 7,000 in 1924 and double that number by the mid- 1930s. Like the Circassians and Druzes, 'Alawis joined the Troupes spéciales because there was often no other employment and because the French deliberately sought them out, using the minorities as a fire brigade to suppress disorders elsewhere in the country. For the first time in their lives 'Alawi youths enjoyed some small but steady income, were disciplined, trained and exposed to new ideas. Service with the French established the beginnings of an 'Alawi military tradition central to the community's later ascent. Needless to say, the French made every effort to keep the Troupes immune from the Syrian nationalist ferment of the towns. When in 1925-7 the Druze revolt inflamed the whole south and beyond, even reaching the orchards of the Ghuta oasis around Damascus where the bloodiest battles were fought, most 'Alawi tribal leaders did not stir. And the community as a whole grew more separatist still in the 1930s when France faced a rising tide of opposition to its rule from a National Bloc of Syrian city notables campaigning for independence. (Pg. 14 - 18).

The French connection may not have radically improved the 'Alawis' lot, but it made them feel different, and this in the long run may have been a more valuable bequest than prosperity. Yet when the French left there was a price to be paid. 'Alawis had always been disdained for their poverty and heretical beliefs; now they were condemned as disloyal to the political ideas of Syrian unity and Arab nationalism. Their service in the Troupes spéciales, the fact that they owed their first step up in the world to French colonial patronage, and their separatist sentiments all bred suspicion of them in other Syrians, widening even further the breach between 'Alawis and Sunnis. For a few years after the Second World War they found it necessary to lie low. It was not until the 1950s that a new 'Alawi generation, that of Hafiz al-Asad, began to elbow its way into the mainstream of Syrian life.

For their part the 'Alawis suffered from an acute sense of grievance, nourished over centuries, which explained the formidable energy, even the frenzy, with which this unfavoured community snatched at education, wealth and power once the wheel of fortune turned. With their history of oppression and exploitation, it was to be expected that 'Alawis should seek redress for the injustices of the past and should be utterly determined never to be subdued again.

No doubt the young Asad shared the feelings of his co-religionaries, resenting the past and suffering embarrassment on account of the ambiguous and unavowable French connection. But from his teens on he rebelled against this background, threw off his sectarian grudges and joined the most pan-Arab of parties, the Ba'th, eventually coming to rule Syria under its banner. Nevertheless despite his later nationalist credentials, the inescapable 'Alawi label was to be his burden. He had to work hard to convince his sceptical compatriots that he had left minority complexes behind him, had committed himself body and soul to the nationalist mainstream, and was indeed fit to lead them. (Pg. 23).


December 6, 2024

U.S. Strategy For The Near East: Keep Armies Weak And Nations Poor


The new would-be rulers of Syria, fully backed by Washington and its regional allies, regard these two gentlemen as modern day Muslim heroes, which points to the utter absurdity of U.S. policy in that part of the world. 

Just as Saddam and Bin Laden were once allies turned useful enemies, the same fate will befall the head chopping conquerors of the Syrian desert. 

But Washington couldn't care less what happens to Syria as long as Israel is happy with the final outcome. There isn't a grand U.S. strategy for these nations beyond keeping them poor and their armies weak so Israel remains the dominant state, able to kill whomever, whenever, and wherever. 

As a result of that policy, there are many weak states that are ripe for the picking. And when Washington does decide to attack and invade a sanctioned and impoverished country like Iraq and Afghanistan what follows isn't a Marshall plan, or any type of national reconstruction. There isn't any ambition or desire for that type of thing. 

The U.S. couldn't do it even if it wanted to because it is the junior partner in the Near East. Israel is the hegemon. It is the superpower. It is the brain. 

When President Truman threw his support behind the state of Israel, after an intense lobbying campaign by Zionists during the election, he couldn't have imagined the amount of influence that small state would come to have over U.S. decision-making in the Muslim world. And that disproportionate influence has been detrimental for all involved.  


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"The real danger in the Korean situation," said Arnold Toynbee in the course of a recent lecture at Stanford University, "is not the apparent danger of a third World War. I feel that we shall be able to keep it within local limits and to do likewise with any other local affairs . . . elsewere. I am more afraid of the future relationship of the Western world with the Oriental and African peoples. They will have the last word in the issue between the West and Russia. We must win them to our way. . . " The Near East, which comprises an area extending from Turkey to the Indian Ocean and from the Caspian Sea to the African Sahara, forms, perhaps, the most important part of the area with which Professor Toynbee has shown grave concern. Greece and Turkey, owing partly to the Russian threat to which they are directly exposed, but mainly to effective American help, are definitely committed to the West, and there seems to be no serious Communist danger from within. The Arabian Peninsula, on the other hand, which is probably the most backward region in the Near East and whose governments are the most authoritarian, is relatively immune to Communist propaganda. The core of the Near Eastern area, which lies between Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula and extends from North Africa to the Caspian Sea, is the most dangerous sector, because of internal as well as external factors.

The first question which arises is that of discovering what is wrong with this area and why it has not yet been committed to the Western way of life. Have not Great Britain and France been active for a long time in this area and could they not exercise a great deal of influence on its people? Has not the United States enjoyed great prestige in that part of the world through its missionary and educational activities, which have been active in this region for over a century? Why has the Russian or Communist propaganda become such a threat in this area as to prevent its peoples from making up their minds to side with the West? The answer, we are told by foreign observers as well as Near Eastern leaders themselves, is to be found in the lack of material progress achieved and in the general weakness of the area. "The very weakness of the Near East," says Colonel Eddy, "the very lack of industrialization there, the very lack of any strong armed forces on which friends of the Near East might count: those are the conditions which have made it, and make it today, a vacuum---a vacuum which has terrific sucking power. And the wind is blowing from the North." - Majid Khadduri, "The United States and Political Stability in the Near East" World Affairs, 1951.

"Whether on the issue of immigration or on that of Jewish statehood, Truman was aware of considerable resistance to these initiatives in the State Department and the military. He spoke somewhat deprecatingly of the "striped pants boys" who, according to him, did not care enough about the fate of Jewish displaced persons and who were mainly concerned with Arab reactions to American proposals. Indeed, the State Department professionals, watching as they did over the entire range of U.S. interests in the Middle East, viewed the farreaching commitments to the Zionists with apprehension. The same was true of Acheson, a man supremely loyal and devoted to Truman, who held his own opinion on the matter: "I did not share the President's views on the Palestine solution to the pressing and desperate plight of great numbers of displaced Jews. . . . [T]o transform the country into a Jewish state capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East." Similarly, Acheson found Roosevelt's and Truman's assurances to consult the Arabs inconsistent with their sympathy toward Zionist aspirations.

Serious reservations about support for the Zionist program were also voiced by the military. In response to the president's request for an opinion, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended against any action that would cause disturbances in Palestine beyond Britain's military capability to control and definitely opposed the use of U.S. forces. Such a use of troops, they believed, would not only hurt British and American interests in the Middle East (including adverse effects on control of oil) but also pave the way for the Soviet Union "to replace the United States and Britain in influence and power in much of the Middle East."

Perhaps most vocal on this issue was the secretary of defense, James Forrestal. He spoke to the president repeatedly about the peril of arousing Arab hostility, which might result in denial of access to petroleum resources in their area, and about "the impact of this question on the security of the United States."

In spite of these critical voices within the administration, Truman gradually was won over to the idea that a Jewish state should be established. Thus when the UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended partition of the mandated territory into a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as an international enclave, the president instructed the State Department to support the partition plan. Accordingly, the U.S. delegate in the un General Assembly voted for partition on November 29, 1947. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed in Tel Aviv, and the next step for the U.S. government was to decide the time and kind of recognition to be extended to it. The president did not hesitate: within eleven minutes of Israel's proclamation of statehood the president gave de facto recognition to the newly created Jewish state. It was followed by the de jure recognition on January 31, 1949.

In shaping his policy toward Palestine Truman experienced continuous pressures, especially from the Jewish community, virtually from the very moment he took office as president. These pressures were not limited to solicitation of his political and diplomatic support. "Top Jewish leaders in the United States were putting all sorts of pressure on me to commit American power and forces on behalf of the Jewish aspirations in Palestine."

. . .In shaping his policy toward Palestine Truman experienced continuous pressures, especially from the Jewish community, virtually from the very moment he took office as president. These pressures were not limited to solicitation of his political and diplomatic support. "Top Jewish leaders in the United States were putting all sorts of pressure on me to commit American power and forces on behalf of the Jewish aspirations in Palestine."

When the Palestine question reached the forum of the United Nations, Zionist efforts to ensure partition gained in intensity. They also bifurcated: some were directed toward securing a favorable vote of lesser Latin American countries and some were aiming straight at the U.S. president. According to Truman,
The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed and annoyed me."
The president's daughter, Margaret, also testifies to the relentlessness and intensity of the Zionist campaign that "irritated" the president. Zionist leaders, she recalls, urged her father to "browbeat" South American and other countries into supporting partition. She acknowledges that "It was one of the worst messes of my father's career. ... To tell the truth about what had happened would have made him and the entire American government look ridiculous. Not even in his memoirs did he feel free to tell the whole story, although he hinted at it. Now I think it is time for it to be told." Thus she reveals that on August 23, 1947, some three months before the UN partition vote, the president expressed his disapproval of Zionist pressures in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt: "The action of some of our United States Zionists will prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side."

But the president's resentment at the pressures intensified when they were accompanied by threats. Margaret Truman recalls an episode when, in October 1948, a New York Democratic Party delegation called on her father to urge him to offer Israel de jure recognition, lift the arms embargo, and endorse the widest possible boundaries for the Jewish state. Failure to do this, they warned, would result in certain loss of New York State. On this occasion Truman did not conceal his irritation. "Dad looked them in the eye and said: 'You have come to me as a pressure group. If you believe for one second that I will bargain my convictions for the votes you imply would be mine, you are pathetically mistaken. Good morning.' " - "An excerpt from, "Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East" By Wilbur Crane Eveland, 1980, Forbidden Bookshelf, 'Chapter Three - Thirty Years of Indifference'.

"At the same time, focusing on the current crisis has now led to consistent failures in the U.S. strategy when dealing with Iraq and the Middle East for the last two decades – and has already turned two apparent “victories” into real world defeats. From the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the present, the United States has never had a workable grand strategy for Iraq or any consistent plans and actions that have gone beyond current events." - Anthony H. Cordesman, "America’s Failed Strategy in the Middle East: Losing Iraq and the Gulf" CSIS, January 2, 2020.