After The Ayatollahs: A Middle East Without Hezbollah, The Taliban And Islamic Republics
What hangs in the balance in the second battle for Kobani and the war against northern Syria is of great historic and geopolitical importance.
Two different types of political visions for Syria are in a life and death struggle. On one side is an exclusivist, sectarian, tyrannical, and expansionist Islamic polity centered in Turkey, with offshoots in Damascus and God knows where else tomorrow, and on the other side is the seed of a post-Islamic Middle East.
A post-Islamic Middle East, where religion doesn't have a central role in public life and the existence of Israel is accepted and welcomed, sounds far-fetched but so did the idea of Al-Qaeda possessing a state twenty years ago.
Now, emissaries of the Al-Qaeda regime in Syria are saying prayers for Bin Laden in the Umayyad Mosque. Al-Qaeda has come a long way from the CIA caves in Afghanistan. And they don't intend on stopping anytime soon once they receive international recognition.
With the destruction of the Assad regime these two versions of the future of Syria are now in direct competition with each other. It is not a battle of arms but of will. And that battle will test the political endurance of the Islamists in Damascus who did not come to power via elections, a popular revolt, or military conquest.
The head choppers don't have a democratic mandate or a divine one. They are like blind crows who were plucked from the air and put on a carcass. They took power because of backdoor deal making, societal collapse, and geopolitical interference.
Who says Syria belongs to these killers? CNN and the Sultan from Constantinople? Reality says otherwise. Syria is up for grabs. And Damascus is weak as hell right now. That's why Israel feels free to pound every corner of Syria to dust and Turkey's mercenaries can't wait to loot every store and factory they come across.
Assad vanished like a ghost. His sudden departure marks the final end to the 20th century project of Arab nationalist secularism and socialism. It failed because it was led by ruthless, racist, and petty dictators who inherited ad-hoc colonial borders and implemented bad economic ideas.
Turkey is sweeping into post-Assad Syria just as easily as Iran did in post-Saddam Iraq because these were both artificial countries with no history of statecraft in recent memory. Their national origins were masterminded by greedy empires and held together with an iron fist. Upon breaking the Iraqi state was replaced by sectarian militias. Syria will experience a similar fate.
When Turkey and its pets in Damascus decide to invade northern Syria, western Iraq, and possibly Lebanon and Jordan in the near future, new maps will be drawn up. The process of remaking the Middle East has already begun. The Sultan in Constantinople is eying new international treaties, with new boundaries.
If the British and Americans have their way, and they have thus far, the Sultan and his band of terrorists will head east and north instead of south. They have no problem with the Turks and al-Qaeda making war on the Kurds, Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, Russia, and China. They welcome such a scenario.
They just want Israel untouched.
Israel has been on the neo-Ottomans' side in the war against Armenia. They were on the same side in Syria, with both assisting ISIS's rampage across the country for a decade. And they will be on the same side again in future wars against Shia Iraq and Islamic Iran.
In this process the grand artifice of Islam will come undone. Hezbollah and Hamas, and their regional backers in Tehran and Constantinople, have both failed to dissuade the genocidal Israeli state from waging perpetual war on the Palestinians.
Islam's collective answer to the psychopaths who rule in Israel has been a resounding defeat. It has proven to be weak, stupid, and divided, powerful only against women, and ethnic and religious minorities.
In the war between Israel and Islam, Israel has come out the victor. Israel has proven it will go to extreme lengths to safeguard its existence and seize as much territory as it can. Its massive bombing campaigns in Gaza, aimed mostly at innocent civilians and institutions of society, have drawn no answer from regional capitals. Its military victories against Palestine and various Islamic militias, which has come at great cost to its reputation and international standing, doesn't need to be accepted politically by the Islamic world or the United Nations since neither exists in spirit or reality.
We will sooner see a post-Islamic Middle East than a post-Israeli one.
