In a reversal of the old proverb “Better the devil you know,” the U.S. and its partners in the Political West have embraced the devil they don’t. In Syria, they have traded Iran for al-Qaeda.
When Bashar al-Assad fell, many of his international partners suffered injuries. But none was hurt so badly as Iran. Unable to compete militarily with its far better armed enemies, Iran relied on a series of regional proxies. That front line of defense and deterrence has now been dismantled.
If Hezbollah was the heart of the proxy system, Syria was the logistical bridge between Iran and Lebanon upon which it depended. The effectiveness of Hezbollah was contingent upon the security of Syria. Syria was the bridge over which Iranian arms flowed to Lebanon. That bridge has now been broken.
Iran relied heavily on military bases and missile factories in Syria that have now all been lost. They have been lost both politically and physically. They have been lost politically because the new rulers of Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have sworn enmity to Iran. In his victory speech, HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani said that Assad had made Syria “a playground for Iranian ambitions.” No sooner had Damascus been captured than the Iranian embassy was stormed by Syrian rebels. Al-Jolani, has said, “We are open to friendship with everyone in the region – including Israel. We don’t have enemies other than the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Iran.”
They have been lost physically because, now with no air defenses at all, hundreds of air strikes have eliminated virtually all the military structures and weapons in Syria to ensure a toothless new regime. Israel has warned that “If the new regime in Syria allows Iran to re-establish itself, or allows the transfer of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah – we will respond forcefully and we will exact a heavy price.”
Asaad was a was an ineffective and brutal dictator. In the end, he fell, in large part, because he lost the support of his military and his people. The Syrian Army was not willing to die to save Asaad. But Asaad has been traded for al-Qaeda.
HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani began his radical opposition career as a fighter and member of al-Qaeda in Iraq before becoming the founder of the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. In 2016, Jolani claimed to have cut his ties with al-Qaeda. But he has a reputation as a pragmatic radical, and, at the time, there was much skepticism about the split. The U.S. recognizes HTS as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and the State Department has a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture.
Since then, Jolani has been selling his reformation to the West. He has promised no terrorist attacks on the West and no revenge massacres in Syria. While governing the Syrian province of Idlib, he did not force women to completely cover up, and he did not carry out massacres in the style of ISIS. But he did rule autocratically and conservatively, and he did crush his rebel rivals. He has been accused of abusing dissenters in a manner that the UN classified as war crimes. A European Union Agency for Asylum report from September 2020 lists reports of “serious human rights abuses, including harassment, assassinations, kidnapping, and torture, as well as unlawful detention of civilians” for HTS while ruling Idlib.
It remains to be seen whether Jolani’s claimed maturation and transformation can be trusted. There are already reports of armed fighters executing loyalists.
With Syria lost to Iran and the disintegration of the proxy policy of defense, Iran will be forced to find a new security strategy. There seem to be two possible paths open to it.
The first would be to take the final, reluctant step to developing a nuclear bomb. But Iran has consistently ruled that path out on religious and moral grounds, starting with the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The current supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently reiterated that ruling. Khamenei has insisted that “from an ideological and fiqhi [Islamic jurisprudence] perspective, we consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful. We consider using such weapons as a big sin.” In 2003, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa that declared nuclear weapons to be forbidden by Islam.
And Khamenei was neither going rogue nor the exception: “There is complete consensus on this issue,” Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, one of the highest-ranking clerics in Iran, has said. “It is self- evident in Islam that it is prohibited to have nuclear bombs. It is eternal law, because the basic function of these weapons is to kill innocent people. This cannot be reversed.”
So, that path seems to be closed to Iran, both by Islamic jurisprudence and by the reality that the U.S. would detect such a decision very early and dramatically put a stop to it.
But the matter is quickly becoming existential for Iran, and the West seems bent on daring Iran and pushing them to the edge.
That leaves just one more likely path. Iran could take the more conventional route of building up its own defensive capabilities. To do so, it would likely turn even more emphatically to Russia and China.
The unfortunate part is that none of these needed to have happened. As is so often the case, diplomacy could have worked more efficiently than aggression if the U.S. wanted to separate Syria from Iran. There was a time when that diplomatic window was open had the West not missed the chance.
From the first years of his rule, Asaad let it be known that he wanted a relationship with the West. Then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry came back from a meeting with Assad saying that Asaad “wants to engage with the West… Assad is willing to do the things he needs to do in order to change his relationship with the United States.”
When it became clear that part of what Syria needed to do to improve relations with the West was distance itself from Iran, Assad seems to have been willing to do even that at the time. Professor of Political Science Jerome Slater reports that in 2006, senior Syrian officials told Israeli journalists that, in the context of a peace agreement, Syria would distance itself from Iran. In July 2008, Slater reports, Israel’s lead negotiator said that Assad was “increasingly open to a peace deal with Israel which could greatly weaken Iran’s influence in the Middle East.”
The West turned its back and missed that opportunity to distance Syria form Iran diplomatically. Instead, they have traded Iran for al-Qaeda.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
