A Case of the ‘Empire First’ Folly In Spades

If there was ever a moment that laid bare the utter stupidity and futility of Washington’s Empire First policy it surely is the smoking ruins of Syria that emerged last week. The latter was the desultory culmination of Washington’s 13-years-long effort to destroy the legitimate government of Syria on the grounds that Assad was a brutal tyrant and plunderer of the country’s paltry wealth.

The fact is, he probably was just that, and might well have been among the worst of the dozens of tyrants who oppress their citizens in nations large and small around the world. But then again, did God Almighty anoint Washington as some kind of planetary Good Shepard charged with bringing just and kind rule to all the peoples of the planet?

We think not. Indeed, maintenance of a sustainable, prosperous, free constitutional Republic requires fidelity to the opposite – a regime of small, solvent government including on the Pentagon side of the Potomac. Accordingly, the sole end of foreign policy should be safeguarding the security and liberty of the homeland, not proctoring the governing etiquette of rulers halfway way around the globe that pose no military threat whatsoever to homeland security.

Yet Washington has seen fit during the last decade and one-half to pump-in upwards of $40 billion of overt and covert military aid, economic support and humanitarian assistance to a plethora of opposition Syrian forces for no discernible purpose of homeland security. To the contrary, the expenditure of all this treasure and political capital was designed for no purpose other than to effect Regime Change in Damascus and to eject the Assad government from its control over the what were the remaining white areas of the Syria map below as of just a few weeks back.

Yet the color coded regions all around what is now the vacuum of Assad’s fall tell you all you need to know about the sheer folly of this enterprise and why in truth Washington has mid-wifed yet another failed state; and has done so once again on the pretext of fighting terrorism – this time the ragged band of ISIS jihadists who briefly planted their black flags and brutal rule on the dusty towns of the Upper Euphrates centered in Raqqah, as roughly depicted by the purple area of the map.

The truth, however, is that the white areas including the Damascus region previously controlled by the Assad government were the true bulwark against a resurgence of the ISIS head-choppers, who had emerged in 2014 from the ashes of Washington’s failed regime change intervention in Iraq.  So even if the choice was between the lesser of two evils, anyone with his head-screwed on straight could see that bolstering, or at least tacitly tolerating, the secularist, pluralist Alawite regime in Damascus was far preferable to the ISIS Caliphate fanatics.

Stated differently, one failed Regime Change fiasco in Iraq surely warranted second thoughts about continued pursuit of a second attempt at Regime Change next door in Syria. After all, the menace of ISIS which had afflicted Eastern Syria was the spawn of Washington’s disastrous intervention against Saddam Hussein. Yet like in the case of Assad, Hussein had posed no threat to America’s homeland security whatsoever but was nevertheless treated to the “shock and awe” of massive military attack and the gallows because he was alleged to be a plundering tyrant who wouldn’t play nice with the greedy Emirs who ruled the shared deserts and oilfields next door.

Alas, the Empire First geniuses on the banks of the Potomac didn’t get any of this. Their swell plan was to get rid of both the ISIS jihadists and the Assad regime at the same time. But in attempting to do so they ended up creating two new militarized monsters out of the economic dislocations and tribal clashes that resulted from the very civil war they had unleashed.

The previous ISIS controlled territory in purple is now controlled by the US funded Kurdish SDF militias (Syrian Democratic Forces). The latter, of course, are the mortal enemy of Washington’s ostensible NATO ally next door in Turkey, which had been fighting its own Kurdish insurgents for decades.

Indeed, owing to that threat, Turkey has supported and funded the anti-Kurd SNA (Syrian National Army), which occupies the border lands in yellow. A few years ago, however, the SNA was called the FSA (Free Syrian Army), which was a CIA-supported and operated brainchild of the late Senator John McCain, who never met a country in the middle east that he didn’t wish to invade and occupy.

Meanwhile, the jihadist hadn’t been eliminated, either, as had been triumphally claimed by Trump when Washington bombed Raqqah and surrounding areas to smithereens in 2017, and also finished off its terrorist leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in 2019. Like the SNA, the jihadist contingent had simply morphed. Twice.

What is today HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham), which is ostensibly in control of the red-colored corridor from Aleppo down to Damascus, was previously known as the Nusra Front. That’s back when its current leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was a strict jihadist. In 2011 he had been sent to eastern Syria to foment an uprising by his mentor and terrorist, the aforementioned al-Baghdadi. Both had been graduates of what amounted to the massive prison-based training school for Sunni jihadists at Camp Bucca in Iraq, later dubbed as “Washington’s Jihadi University”. The latter 20,000-prisoner monstrosity had been established by Washington’s proconsuls after Saddam’s demise as part of the foolish de-bathification campaign in 2003.

As it happened, by the end of the decade Washington had soured on its Iraq liberation campaign and was attempting to extricate itself from its failed multi-trillion misadventure. In conjunction with this wind-down it undertook to substantially empty this bulging prison in what became known as the “Great Prison Release of 2009,” freeing 5,700 high-security detainees from Bucca Prison. Among these was Baghdadi and Julani.

While the former organized and led the Sunni uprising in Mosul and Anbar province of Western Iraq, the Nusra Front was established as a separate entity in Syria by al-Julani. Initially, it was an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, but in April 2013 al-Baghdadi announced that the Nusra Front had merged with ISIS to form the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

However, al-Julani and the Nusra Front rejected this merger and went their separate way, taking on a role as an independent jihadist force based in western Syria with strongholds in Idlib and Aleppo. Thereafter his Nusra Front spearheaded the 2015 conquest of this region under the banner of Jaish al-Fatah (the Army of Conquest). The latter was, in turn, described at the time by Foreign Policy magazine as a wonderful “synergy” of jihadists and western arms.

Years later, US official Brett McGurk didn’t hesitate to label al-Julani’s Idlib base as “the largest Al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Of course, the crucial role of US weapons and strategic aid in fostering this jihadist success went unmentioned.

So why did the US provide what one analyst called a “cataract of weaponry” to Nusra Front, just the same? An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, infamously written under the auspices of General Michael Flynn, let the cat out of the bag quite dramatically. It revealed, in fact, that the Washington neocons and hegemonists had determined to support the establishment of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and western Iraq as part of the effort to depose president Bashar al-Assad and divide the country.

The DIA report said a radical religious mini-state exactly of the sort later established by ISIS as its “caliphate” was the US goal, even while admitting that the so-called Syrian revolution seeking to topple Assad’s government was being driven by “Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda.”

Indeed, as indicated above, the seeds of this Salafist principality had been planted when the then ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had dispatched Julani to Syria in August 2011. Prominent Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada, who was embedded with Al-Qaeda fighters from Lebanon in Syria, met Julani in the central Syrian city of Homs at this time. Mortada informed his readers that Julani was being hosted by the Farouq Brigades, an FSA faction based in the city, which was a sectarian Salafist group that included fighters who had fought for Zarqawi’s brutal Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) after the 2003 US invasion.

A few months later, Julani and his fighters entered the war against the Syrian government by carrying out multiple terror attacks. In Damascus during December 2011 Julani sent suicide bombers to target the Syrian government’s General Security Directorate in Damascus, killing 44, including civilians and security personnel. Two weeks later, in January 2012, Julani sent another suicide bomber to detonate explosives near a bus in the Midan district of Damascus, killing some 26 people.

These bloody doings coincident with the establishment of the “Support Front for the People of the Levant,” or the Nusra Front, was revealed after a videotape was provided to journalist Mortada showing Julani and other masked men announcing the group’s existence and claiming responsibility for the attacks.  So such is the lineage of the leader and group which purportedly “liberated” Syria from the clutches of the Assad family last week.

In any event, when the Raqqah-based epicenter of ISIL was demolished after 2017, the Nusra Front hung on, changing its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in October 2017. This rebranding was part of an effort to distance itself from al-Qaeda and to restructure the group by merging with several other jihadist factions.

For several years HTS remained contained in its narrow Idlib territorial base, even as it was assaulted by constant attacks from the forces of Assad and his Russian allies in the area. In effect, they were doing god’s work taking on the real enemy of civilization.

Nevertheless, al-Julani preserved, recently reinventing himself as Ahmed al-Sharaa – which is his real name. He now wears an even shorter beard than in the second picture below and sometimes even dons a tie, while claiming to be a  “diversity friendly” pluralist friend of all Syrians – Christians, Alawites, Druze etc. That is, the very former infidel enemies of the  Caliphate who al-Julani had previously decreed were to be put to death on the ancient orders of the Prophet himself.

In short, Syria is now destined to become even a worse mess than Libya became after it was liberated by Hilary Clinton in 2011. As is evident from the above, you actually need a roster-sheet to even begin to grasp the madness now unfolding there, but the always astute Moon of Alabama has summarized the state of play as well as can be done:

It is now highly likely that the country will fall apart. Outside and inside actors will try to capture and/or control as many parts of the cadaver as each of them can.

Years of chaos and strife will follow from that.

Israel is grabbing another large amount of Syrian land. It has taken control of the Syrian city of Quneitra, along with the towns of Al-Qahtaniyah and Al-Hamidiyah in the Quneitra region. It has also advanced into the Syrian Mount Hermon and is now positioned just 30 kilometers from (and above) the Syrian capital.

It is also further demilitarizing Syria by bombing every Syria military storage site in its reach. Air defense positions and heave equipment are its primary targets. For years to come Syria, or whatever may evolve from it, will be completely defenseless against outside attacks.

Israel is for now the big winner in Syria. But with restless Jihadists now right on its border it remains to be seen for how long that will hold.

The U.S. is bombing the central desert of Syria. It claims to strike ISIS but the real target is any local (Arab) resistance which could prevent a connection between the U.S. controlled east of Syria with the Israel controlled south-west. There may well be plans to further build this connection into an Eretz Israel, a Zionist controlled state  “from the river to the sea”.

Turkey has had and has a big role in the attack on Syria. It is financing and controlling the ‘Syrian National Army’ (previously the Free Syrian Army), which it is mainly using to fight Kurdish separatists in Syria.

There are some 3 to 5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey which the wannabe-Sultan Erdogan wants, for domestic political reasons, to return to Syria. The evolving chaos will not permit that.

Turkey had nurtured and pushed the al-Qaeda derived Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to take Aleppo. It did not expect it to go any further. The fall of Syria is now becoming a problem for Turkey as the U.S. is taking control of it. Washington will try to use HTS for its own interests which are, said mildly, not necessary compatible with whatever Turkey may want to do.

A primary target for Turkey are the Kurdish insurgents within Turkey and their support from the Kurds in Syria. Organized as the Syrian Democratic Forces the Kurds are sponsored and controlled by the United States. The SDF are already fighting Erdogan’s SNA and any further Turkish intrusion into Syria will be confronted by them.

The SDF, supported by the U.S. occupation of east-Syria, is in control of the major oil, gas and wheat fields in the east of the country. Anyone who wants to rule in Damascus will need access to those resources to be able to finance the state.

Despite having a $10 million award on its head HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani is currently played up by western media  as the unifying and tolerant new leader of Syria. But his HTS is itself a coalition of hard-line Jihadists from various countries. There is little left to loot in Syria and as soon as those resources run out the fighting within HTS will begin. Will al-Golani be able to control the sectarian urges of the comrades when these start to plunder the Shia and Christian shrines of Damascus?

During the last years Russia was less invested in the Assad government than it seemed. It knew that Assad had become a mostly useless partner. The Russia Mediterranean base in Khmeimim in Latakia province is its springboard into Africa. There will be U.S. pressure on any new leadership in Syria to kick the Russians out. However any new leadership in Syria, if it is smart, will want to keep the Russians in. It is never bad to have an alternative choice should one eventually need one. Russia may well stay in Latakia for years to come.

With the fall of Syria Iran has lost the major link in its axis of resistance against Israel. Its forward defenses, provided by Hizbullah in Lebanon, are now in ruins.

Then again, the question recurs. What exactly was the point of wrecking another tiny, mostly land-locked country in the middle east with a population of just 20 million people, a GDP of only $40 billion, a per capita income of barely $2,000, no significant natural resources beyond a 2.5 billion barrel pittance of oil reserves (equal to about 30 days of global oil production), no significant steel or other industrial capacity, no tech sector, no capability to project any military power whatsoever beyond its own borders and a consumer sector so devastated by the Washington-instigated civil wars that total auto sales in 2022 were 478 units?

That’s right. No zeros missing!

At the end of the day, not even Washington is stupid enough to waste $40 billion on that. What has really been going on here is that by the lights of the Empire Firsters, Assad had to be removed because he had the wrong allies and the wrong neighbors. The demonization about his tyranny and plunder was just a cover story for the real objective, which was undermining his Iranian ally.

As a minority Alawite, which is a branch of Shiite Islam, Assad had aligned with his Shiite kin in Tehran and permitted Syrian territory to be used by the latter to transport arms and materiale to Iran’s Hezbollah allies in southern Lebanon, which was fully within its sovereign rights – especially since Hezbollah played a leading role in the coalition government of Lebanon. So destroying that Shiite nexus was the real reason for the relentless Washington war on Assad, and its incessant embrace and financing of all of the unsavory flotsam and jetsam which percolated up from Syria’s devastating civil war.

Still again, however, there is no way that the homeland security of America was imperiled either by the Shiite-based Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance or the fact that one sovereign state member of that alliance (Syria) permitted its territory to used to transport weaponry and materiale. The only possible reason for Washington’s two decade folly in Syria, therefore, is the proposition that Iran is an existential threat to the liberty and security of the American homeland, way over here 6,400 miles from Tehran.

That’s a ludicrous joke, to say the least. Iran’s GDP of $400 billion is equal to just 1.5% or five days worth of US GDP. Likewise, its $25 billion military budget is just 2.5% of the the $1 trillion monster domiciled in the Pentagon.

Even more to the point, Iran’s tiny Navy consists of 67 mostly coastal patrol boats and fast attack crafts, none of which can operate much outside of the Persian Gulf. Also, it has no long-range aircraft and its longest range missile, the Soumar cruise missile, is non-nuclear and has a maximum range of 1850 miles. That is to say, it can barely reach the Mediterranean basin, and can’t even reach European cities like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Stockholm or Oslo – to say nothing even remotely on our side of the Atlantic moat.

Finally, Iran is not a rogue nuclear power or wanna be nuclear threat – even according to the 17 Deep State intelligence agencies which write the so-called NIEs or National Intelligence Estimates. These NIEs have said time and again that Iran abandoned even its nuclear research program in 2003, abided by the Obama nuke deal to the letter prior to Trump’s unilaterally shit-canning it in 2018, and even now is only enriching modest amounts of uranium to legal levels as is its prerogative as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

In short, Iran is Bibi Netanyahu’s political pinata, not an enemy of America’s liberty and security.

If Washington were not in the Empire First business and, most especially, not in the entangling alliance business in which allies and clients drag America into conflicts that have no direct bearing on its homeland security, Washington would have all along been following Thomas Jefferson’s advice: That is, it would have pursued peaceful commerce with Iran and Syria, not punished them with crippling sanctions and endless attacks on their own sovereignty and right to pursue foreign policy arrangements by their own best lights.