How Washington’s Syrian Caper Debunks the Case for Empire

Sometimes a microcosm sheds a powerful light on large-scale macro issues. That was surely the case with respect to last weekend’s news that five US military personnel were involved in an ambush in Syria, which resulted in three deaths and three wounded. The incident apparently was caused by a member of the Syrian security forces, according to the Syrian Interior Ministry, who opened fire on a joint US-Syrian military patrol near the ancient ruins of Palmyra in central Syria (about 134 miles northeast of Damascus).

Needless to say, this news ignited a chorus of WTFs among the non-drinkers of the Deep State Kool Aid who post on X and elsewhere. After all, what other response was there when it became clear that these five servicemen were among more than 2,000 acknowledged US military personnel operating in the no count cipher of Syria; and that there are likely hundreds more covert forces working for the CIA and other US black operations there, as well.

And, yes, we do mean a spec of a country. After all, the tiny orange dot below is the essentially land-locked location of Syria on a representation of the global map. Relatively speaking, it has no economy, no technology, no military, no nukes, no oil, no minerals and, well, no nuthin’ that could possibly bear on the Homeland Security of America, way over here 6,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic.

Placement Of The Spec of Syria On A Global Map

Of course, Syria is just one of the the approximate 90 countries around the world where the US operates upwards of 850 bases and other military installations—-along with America’s massive globe-spanning Navy and Air Force.

Accordingly, last weekend’s incident should provide occasion for taking stock. To wit, what is it that the War Party on the Potomac saw in Syria that has any bearing at all on legitimate national security matters? After all, the unaccountable presence of American troops in Syria begs the larger question about the purpose of Washington’s overall Global Empire, stretching across the entirety of the planet as depicted below.

The fact is, you can find dozens upon dozens of “Syria equivalents” in this map of the Empire’s worldwide footprint. Interested readers, of course, are advised to grab a magnifying glass for further investigation of US military operations in Chad, Niger, Gabon, Namibia, Mali, Botswana, Guam, the Marshall Islands, American Samoa, Belize, Suriname, Aruba, Greenland, Wake Islands and the Republic of Paulau, to name a few.

However, we have asked Grok 4 to provide a summary of the major geo-political and economic characteristics of Syria as a test case as to why any of these non-nuclear statelets with tiny militaries, no long-range missiles or aircraft, no blue water navies and no global-scale economic importance matter to US national security at all.

In this context, we have racked up 17 features of Syria relative to its global counterparts in order to document that it is indeed a tiny spec in the great scheme of global economic, military and national security measures.

For instance, on six big picture variables, Syria amounts to far less than 0.3% of the global total:

• Population: 24 million vs. 8.16 billion or 0.293%.
• GDP: $21 billion vs. $117 trillion or 0.018%.
• Military spending: $1.4 billion vs. $2.718 trillion or 0.052%.
• Economic wealth (net worth): $51 billion vs. $454 trillion or 0.011%.
• Fixed domestic investment per year: $0.9 billion vs. $29.3 trillion or 0.003%.
• Exports: $3 billion vs.$32.2 trillion or 0.009%.

Likewise, Syria doesn’t have any so-called “strategic economic assets” whatsoever. Its puny oil production of 23.7 million barrels annually amounts to merely 65,000 barrels per day in a world economy that produce 83 million barrels per day of crude oil and 30.2 billion barrels per year. That is to say, its oil production and overall energy output amount to a scant 0.078% and 0.0005% of the global total, respectively.

And, no, it doesn’t have any strategic minerals, either. It has zero reserves of traditional core metals including copper, aluminum, iron ore and nickel; and also zero reserves of the new fad in rare earth minerals.

Likewise, what is left of its military after the destruction of the Assad regime amounts to some ragged army units, small naval boats embodying displacement tonnage equal to just 0.025% of the global naval fleets, and several dozen ancient, short-range Soviet era aeroplanes.

And that’s about all here is to be found in the broken state of Syria, domiciled as it is on about 0.126% of the world’s land mass.

17 Key Measures Which Prove That Syria Is A No Count Spec On Planet Earth

To be sure, this is all very quantitative and mechanical. Yet it actually overstates any plausible rationale for being there!

The truth is, there is one reason alone why 2,000 US forces are still in the Nowhere Land of Syria, and despite the Donald’s order to bring them home in 2018. To wit, they are foolishly stationed in harm’s way because the Washington neocons’ madman ally, Bibi Netanyahu, insisted decades ago that Iran is an enemy of the US and that since Syria had an alliance with Iran, it was an enemy, too. That is to say, Syria became an enemy of America because it was a third cousin consequence of the neocon-officiated nuptials between Washington and Jerusalem.

Of course, there never was any real Iranian threat to America’s homeland because like Syria, Iran doesn’t have any long-range aircraft or missiles or blue water Navy, either.

In any event, the alliance was originally one of shared religious kinship: Bashar Assad (and his father before him) was allied with the Alawite branch of Islam in Syria, which in turn is a first cousin of the Iran-based Shiite confession of the Muslim world. And the latter has been at war with the dominant Sunni branch on and off for, let’s see, 1,350 years!

Consequently, from the moment that the so-called “Arab Spring” took off in Syria in 2011, there has been an internecine war between a wild and shifting mixture of locally and regionally based religious, ethnic and political factions. Yet the outcome has never made a damn bit of difference to the liberty and safety of Americans way over here on the far side of the Atlantic moat.

If there was ever a moment that laid bare the utter stupidity and futility of Washington’s Empire First policy, therefore, it surely emerged last fall in the smoking ruins of Syria. The latter was the desultory culmination of Washington’s 13-years-long effort to destroy the legitimate government of Syria under the cover story that Assad was a brutal tyrant and plunderer of the country’s paltry wealth—even though the real reason is that Netanyahu wanted him gone.

The fact is, Assad probably was both a tyrant and thief. And he might well have been among the worst of the dozens of tyrants who today oppress their citizens in nations large and small around the world.

But so frickin’ what? Again, when was it that God Almighty anointed Washington as some kind of planetary Good Shepard charged with bringing just and kind rule to all the peoples of the planet?

Obviously, America is blessed with many dispensations but for crying out loud: One of them is not a heavenly mandate to bring long pants and peaceable democracy to all the nations. 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 America’s homeland security.

Still, Washington had seen fit during the previous decade 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 reason 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. The aim was to eject the Assad government from its control over the remaining white areas of the Syrian map shown below, as its fractured polity existed just a few weeks before the takeover in Damascus by Ahmed al-Sharaa. The latter had previously been known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and had been the head-chopping leader of one of the anti-Alawite factions called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) during the Syrian civil war,

Yet the color-coded regions all around what became the stateless vacuum after Assad’s fall tell you all you need to know about the sheer folly of Washington’s long-running Syria enterprise and why, in truth, Washington has midwived yet another failed state.

And it has done so once again on the pretext of fighting terrorism – this time the residue of the ragged band of ISIS jihadists who briefly planted their black flags and brutal rule in the dusty towns of the Upper Euphrates centered in Raqqah back in 2013-2014, as roughly depicted by the purple area of the map.

The truth, however, is that the white areas of the map, 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 2013-2014 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.

Alas, not Bibi Netanyahu, who was calling the shots in Washington. He had made himself the career ruler of Israel from the mid-1990s forward by rallying Israel’s numerous right-wing and religious factions in the Knesset against a falsely vilified Iranian regime and the existential threat it allegedly posed to Israel. Accordingly, Bibi’s enemy in Tehran meant that its ally in Damascus perforce became the false enemy of America.

Needless to say, one failed regime change fiasco in Iraq surely warranted second thoughts about the continued pursuit of a second attempt at regime change next door in Syria after 2011. That should have especially been the case because the menace of ISIS, which had afflicted eastern Syria, was the spawn of Washington’s disastrous intervention against Saddam Hussein.

The latter, in turn, had posed no threat to America’s homeland security whatsoever. Yet Saddam Hussein was nevertheless treated to the “shock and awe” of massive military attack in 2003 and eventually 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 learned not one damn thing from the eventual fiasco of Iraq. So their swell plan in 2014 and thereafter amounted to getting rid of both the ISIS jihadists and the Assad regime in Syria 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.

To that end, the previous ISIS-ruled 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 depicted in yellow on the map. 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, with two new US-funded militias competing for military dominance, the third Syrian anti-government force, comprised of the jihadist factions, hadn’t been eliminated, either. That latter illusion, of course, had been triumphantly claimed by Trump when Washington bombed Raqqah and the surrounding areas to smithereens in 2017, and also finished off its terrorist leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in 2019.

Like the SNA, however, the jihadist contingent had simply shape-shifted. Twice.

In fact, the new ruling party called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had originated as the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), which al-Sharaa founded in early 2012 specifically to wage jihad against Assad’s regime.

The group focused on targeted attacks against Syrian government forces, while providing social services in rebel-held areas to build local support. Over time, it rebranded: dissolving formal al-Qaeda ties in 2016 to become Jabhat Fataḥ al-Shām, then merging with other Islamist factions in 2017 to form HTS, which became the dominant rebel force in Idlib province by 2019.

HTS played a pivotal role in the 2024 offensive that toppled Assad, capturing key cities like Aleppo and Damascus. HTS’s relationship to ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) was one of intense rivalry and direct conflict. Al-Sharaa initially had roots in al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to ISIS, but rejected ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s 2013 attempt to merge Nusra into ISIS, publicly reaffirming loyalty to al-Qaeda’s central leadership instead.

This split turned them into bitter enemies: HTS viewed ISIS’s brutal tactics (e.g., mass civilian attacks) as counterproductive, while ISIS accused HTS of being too moderate and al-Qaeda puppets. From 2014 onward, HTS fought ISIS alongside other rebels to expel it from Syrian territory, particularly around Raqqa, and later cracked down on ISIS cells within its own areas, including handing over prisoners for Western interrogations.

Despite brief tactical overlaps early on (as “frenemies” in 2013), they competed fiercely for recruits, territory, and ideological dominance, with HTS actively targeting ISIS operatives even after rebranding. Post-Assad, the now ruling terrorist faction of HTS had continued suppressing ISIS remnants to prevent resurgence.

For reasons only known to the lunatics on the banks of the Potomac who control America’s foreign policy, therefore, three American servicemen lost their lives last weekend helping one set of head-choppers assault the other such faction.

Nevertheless, since Washington is now sacrificing American lives in the aid of HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham), which is ostensibly in control of the red-colored corridor in the above map from Aleppo down to Damascus, its history is important. As mentioned above, HTS was previously known as the Nusra Front back in the days when its current leader, the now suit-wearing and Oval Office visiting Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was a strict turban-headed jihadist.

In 2011, he had been sent from Iraq 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 “America’s Jihadi University”.

The latter 20,000-prisoner monstrosity had been set up by the clueless proconsuls Washington had sent to Iraq after Saddam’s demise, and who soon needed a massive human storage facility for the fruits of their misbegotten de-bathification campaign. So, as we will amplify in Part 2, last weekend’s utterly pointless death of three American servicemen has a linage that goes all the way back to the idiots around the Shock & Awe fool, who landed on the deck of an American aircraft carrier to pronounce, “mission accomplished”.

Actually, the pointless carnage had just begun and lives on to this day 23 years later as a reminder the the death and destruction that the Empire depicted in the map above has spread from one end of the planet to the other.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.