Justice in Defeat: For Syrians, what now?

 

Assad, a monster, has won.  He has a firm grasp on all major cities and ports:  Aleppo, Damascus, Hama, Homs, Tartus.  He has enough control of even the most restive regions, the Daraa and Sweida Governates, to ensure his survival.  His lack of control near the Turkish border is a mere annoyance.

No military force poses any threat to him, not least because no regional or international power has any desire to unseat him.  He knows that he has nothing to fear from the US and its subservient ‘allies’.  For one thing, they want him in power because they fear Islamists would replace him.  For another, were there the will to unseat him, there isn’t the way.  The West has the military means to crush him, but those means are unusable for domestic political reasons.  To unseat him and destroy the régime would require a long-term commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops.  No Western government would dare to propose any such thing to their electorates.

Assad and the whole world know this.  They saw US ‘coalitions’ first effectively deliver Iraq to Iranian proxies, and then suffer humiliating expulsion from Afghanistan.  Clawing back his territory inch by inch, Assad has never wavered in his determination to repel forces that once occupied districts of greater Damascus.

The few who predicted this, two or three years after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, were condemned as blinded by cynical prejudice.  But they were right.  The defeat is no less real for all the objections raised by those in denial.  It does not matter that the country is in ruins: so were some victorious nations in 1918 or 1945.  It does not matter if Assad exists at the good pleasure of Russia, Iran and, if the truth be told, the US and Israel.  It does not matter that, given the support or connivance of these external powers, it was never a fair fight.  It does not matter that, in the minds of some powerless expats, ‘the struggle continues’.  The reality is that Assad has obtained his objectives, and the rebels have not, nor have they any prospect of attaining theirs.  None of this is likely to change, unless it be in Assad's favour.  This is apparent in the current push to normalize relations with his régime.

In this grim situation, some Assad opponents seem fully occupied with their outrage.  They fail to address the most pressing question:  what can be done for Syrians, not only those who live a miserable existence in fragile, imperfect refuge from Assad's operations, but also those who must live fully within his grasp.

For those fully outside Assad's reach, the answers are clear:  they are refugees.  The ways to help refugees are well-known.  If there is a big gap between knowing what should be done and seeing it is done, at least there is no mystery about making progress towards the objectives.  And some work tirelessly to achieve these goals.

But what of those who must live in areas under his control, or in areas where he still can inflict atrocities on those he detests?  These amount to millions of innocent people.  And once the realities of defeat are taken into account, their prospects are even worse, much worse, than normally supposed.  That's because Assad and his régime will almost certainly continue to commit atrocities well into the foreseeable future.  Since he has won, why wouldn’t he?  There will be thousands more victims, perhaps some yet unborn.

Picture a determined opponent of the Syrian régime, looking for a course of action with some chance of putting an end to this catastrophe – to overthrow Assad.  It is hard to imagine anyone coming up with a winning strategy today.  Assad’s opponents must now operate from a position of weakness.  Winning strategies would therefore have to come from a close watch on current realities, and a search for whatever opportunities the future may hold.

Unfortunately most of what we hear today about Syria has nothing to do with some future attempt to overthrow Assad.  It isn’t even aimed at helping Syrians living under his rule.  Instead of strategic thinking, we hear moralizing, dreams of vengeance and other varieties of wishful thinking, all wrapped up in talk of justice.  But it is just talk.  It has little to do with justice in any real-world sense.  It has little to do with even an intention to alleviate the suffering or restore the rights of the Syrian people.

Western media have - The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian, and more centrist outlets like CNN - have been sympathetic to the Syrian revolution since its outbreak in 2011.  But this support has a particular slant.  There have been admiring portrayals of the democratic Syrian opposition - the Westernized, secular or liberal Muslim activists and politicians, the artists, the writers, overwhelmingly non-military figures.  There have been respectful accounts of brave journalists who bring back the news from these unthreatening sectors of the opposition.  There is much investigative work, documenting Assad’s atrocities and arguing, at great length, with those seeking to deflect guilt from the régime.  In defeat, these investigations tend to turn away from the present and towards the past.  Opposition has become, more and more, a matter of analysis and indignant commentary.

These efforts must at some point have had a role in the condemnations issued by important Western institutions – in official government statements, legislated sanctions like the American Caesar act, international arrest warrants, and the degradation of diplomatic relations with the Syrian régime.  These developments are sometimes described as victories, triumphs.  Indeed you can find defenses of Assad only in the ever-insignificant American left.

Yet Assad is no less a victor for all these declarations, researches, loud condemnations and dramatic gestures.  Not one of his captive subjects is any better off or more protected by this incessant outpouring of cruelly empty ‘support’.  Not one of them is helped by elegant commentators offering acidic observations about Gulf State, Egyptian or Jordanian, even Turkish cynicism.  This ‘support’ has indeed produced some results – the sanctions, the international indictments, the refusals to normalize.  It’s just that the results are valueless, as is the entire effort that produced them.

This does not mean that trying to help the Syrian people is hopeless.  It means that no one so much as contemplates the decisions that might offer some hope.  Instead, we have moralizers pontificating as if they were victors.  They pretend to mistake Assad, a victorious sovereign, for a hunted criminal.  They scorn the prospect of allies who do not espouse their high principles or standards of behaviour.  This refusal to back Assad’s most dangerous enemies helped him wreak his atrocities during his battles.  It continues to do so.

It’s only when this moralistic fantasizing is thoroughly discredited that it will become possible even to think about stopping Assad.  That means grasping the futility of attempts to bring him to justice, or to cement his isolation on the international stage.  What follows describes the absurdity pursuing these goals from a position of defeat.  Then it becomes clear that any chance to weaken the Syrian régime has to involve its strongest regional opponents – Turkey and the Islamist militias in Idlib – whatever their moral failings.

I will examine first the attempts to make the régime pay for its past atrocities, and then the measures designed to weaken Assad.

Justice

The current campaigns for justice aim address two horrors – Assad’s human rights violations and his war crimes.  The prospects of success in these ventures are, at most, negligible.

Human rights violations

The nicely calibrated, meticulously implemented version of justice popular among Assad’s Western opponents is entirely incapable of making a dent in the criminality so deeply entrenched within the Assadist régime.

Yes, a handful of incautious régime emigrants and government officials are captured and and judged.  This simply has no relationship to the scale or character of the injustices supposedly being addressed.

The official Syrian Security Services, responsible for most of the torture and murder, number around 120,000, not counting presumably thousands of informers, not counting the secretive and fearsome Air Force Branch.  The unbridled viciousness of these forces is not some secret, recently revealed by plucky investigators.  Indeed, Human Rights Watch issued a report decrying the situation the year before the start of the Syrian uprising.  Syria's security services were notorious at least back to 1980, when Tadmor (Palmyra) prison became the scene of a well-known massacre.  For those with even longer memories, there was the brutal terror of essentially the same régime in the mid-1950s.

This brutality bore no resemblance to the Nazis' intermittent efforts to conceal their crimes, much less with any "I was only following orders" protests of the Nazi torturers and their complicit bureaucrats.  On the contrary, the security services were happy to make their cruelty known.  So here is a state of affairs where the quasi-totality of 120,000 personnel were significantly involved, especially according to the current norms about complicity in such crimes.

This ongoing horror has all taken place within a régime that has beaten off the most determined revolutionaries, and which learned from Obama that it has nothing to fear from Western military intervention.  Out of 120,000, a dozen or so security force criminals have been foolhardy enough to get themselves brought to trial in Western Europe.  The idea that this constitutes even a hint of justice for the victims is absurd.  The idea that these arrests might be some harbinger of a deterrent effect is, well, a descent into madness.

War crimes

The same impunity that applies to Assad's torturers, also applies to his war crimes.  It must not be thought that these were the top-down strategies of a sophisticated military power, like the gas warfare of World War I or the Allied bombings of Axis cities.  The Syrian army is probably capable of sophistication, but the war crimes it committed beginning in 2012 did not, for the most part, have that character.  In a brilliant piece by Kheder Khaddour, the Syrian army emerges as something like a corrupt bureaucracy, divided into localized fiefs that react to threats with considerable flexibility and autonomy.  This has much to do with who is responsible for the crimes that some, dreaming about justice, imagine prosecuting.

The main crimes attributable to these Syrian armed forces are massacres, poison gas attacks, and barrel bombings.

The massacres have been carried out by thugs belonging to roaming militias.  These shabiha are sometimes steroid-crazed monsters, slitting throats with huge garish knives or perpetrating other atrocities.  They sometimes act in cooperation with Syrian army units, but not as Syrian army members.

The gas attacks are carried out by Syrian army members, or possibly allied forces with access to Syrian army stockpiles.  It is not clear how high in the army command chain the plans have been initiated.  What is clear is that the attacks were not the project of a disciplined modern army.  The delivery systems were extremely crude improvised munitions (IRAMs), rocket-assisted gas canisters, quite dangerous to the perpetrators.  No modern army would use such weapons.

In terms of lives lost, air attacks on hospitals, residential areas and breadlines were the worst.  The breadlines, crucial to Syrians, were hit with double-tap attacks, where a second munition was dropped once rescuers showed up.  Here again, most of the attacks were nothing like the work of a modern army.  They involved barrel bombs, improvised munitions not much above the level of a pipe bomb, un-aimable and typically dropped from helicopters.  Once more, the atrocities have the earmarks of disjointed, loosely directed, unsophisticated military forces.

For the purposes of justice, what matters here is that responsibility spreads throughout the Assadist forces to an unusual extent.  The issue is not whether Assad himself is responsible.  If he had only %1 responsibility in all the slaughter and torture, it would more than enough to merit the most severe punishments justice could impose.  But the ragged, diffuse nature of the atrocities means that, again to an unusual extent, a heavy burden of responsibility is diffused throughout the hundreds of thousands that formed the military resources of the Syrian régime.

Could Assadist outrages ever meet with just retribution?  The verdicts of the Nuremberg trials, followed by decades of lesser prosecutions, imposed penalties on only a fraction of those responsible for Nazi war crimes.  But compared to what international tribunals can deliver to Assadist criminals, the Nazi war crimes prosecutions would count as a stunning success.  The decentralized, anarchic, undisciplined bunch - one could say, a population of war criminals in Syria - will never show up before tribunals hundreds or thousands of miles away.  They will all get away with it.  Only a prolonged and very determined military occupation would change that, and the prospect of such an occupation simply doesn’t exist today.

In short, criminal investigation and prosecution will do absolutely nothing to restore the rights of the Syrian people - much less offer protection from brutal murder.  The prosecutions of Assadist criminals will reach a vanishingly small proportion of the culprits.  And that means a level of justice approaching zero.  Though much is made of 'holding Assad accountable', or anyone else accountable, this is an equivocation.  It only means identifying a very, very few of the culprits, who will go on to lead untroubled lives.  It does not mean imposing appropriate punishment on them.  Talk of accountability offers only the most fragile illusion of justice, not the reality.

The whole enterprise of research, documentation, investigation, analysis and prosecution of Assadist crimes will, in short, do nothing at all for the Syrian people.  It will not do anything to restore their rights.  It will not deter future atrocities.  It will not even bring some vastly inadequate consolation to the tiny proportion of families who see their persecutors condemned.  But will anything else help those suffering under the régime?  What about sanctions?  What about normalisation?

Sanctions

The appeal to sanctions must be that, somehow, they will make things better for Syrians:  sure, there will be some negative consequences, but overall, the régime will bend, and comply with something resembling minimal standards of decency.  Anyone believing this could hardly venture further into the depths of denial.

Assad won his war under sanctions, and Syria has been under sanctions since 1979.  Some argue that sanctioning Syria “hurts the people much more than the regime.” 

It's hard to see how this could be false, but suppose it is.  Even so, sanctions have failed to bring any substantial change anywhere, it seems.  No doubt the régime is hurt in the sense that it doesn't get the latest and greatest technology, and its backers have trouble getting desirable consumer goods, or doing business.  But the régime doesn't need any of this to continue its oppression or cement its rule.  No doubt sanctions give the régime less power to resist Western military action, but it's precisely this action which Western nations are steadfastly resolved to avoid.

This has been the net result of sanctions everywhere.  Here is a specialist commenting on the evasion of current sanctions against Russia.

“I don’t think there’s any secret what’s going on,” said Gary Stanley, a trade compliance expert who advises businesses in aerospace and other industries. “How long have we had Cuban sanctions? How long have we had North Korean sanctions? How long have we had Iranian sanctions? It never seems to put these folks out of business.”

It seems that demand for sanctions, and the sanctions themselves, are best understood as an expression of outrage.  Promoting sanctions seems unrelated to any expectations about making anything better for Syrians, or indeed to any concern about making things worse.  It complements the futile reliance on internationally imposed justice.

Normalisation

Maybe the idea about sanctions is not so much that they work, but that lifting them would be a sign that we weren't outraged any more.  Much the same might hold with other aspects of normalisation.

Many reports have focused, not on Westerners' outrage, but on the pain which many Syrians experience to see Assad rehabilitated in the region.  This focus gets us nowhere, because nothing can be done to alleviate their pain.  Indeed much of the commentary from anti-Assad sources stresses the callousness of, for example, the Gulf State rulers, who obviously care nothing for the suffering of the Syrian people.

This isn’t news.  No one, in the entire course of the Syrian revolution, has ever suggested that those who came to promote normalisation were anything but callous in the face of Syrians' agony.  Where Syrian rights and Syrian well-being are concerned, nothing has changed.

The only other question has to do with the effects of normalisation.  One aggrieved party says that "This weekend’s Arab League summit will embolden the regime to continue its crimes, including the forced disappearances of hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians."  The sentiments behind the claim deserve respect, but the claim itself isn't plausible. 

The Syrian régime has never, at any point in seven decades, showed any hesitation to engage in its atrocious practices.  It has never shown the slightest sensitivity to international indignation, or any response to stigmatization.  It has at most offered some paper-thin imitation of human decency when playing on the international stage.  Nothing suggests even a remote chance that external pressure would bring change for the better.  Nothing suggests that normalisation will make things worse, because the régime in its isolation already allowed itself the full measure of horror.

Normalisation may bring some changes.  Perhaps it will expand imports of Western consumer products.  It might boost the economy.  It might mean that some humanitarian aid gets though - to the Syrian government, which will know how to turn that aid to its own advantage.  Syria might be stronger; this might help the Syrian people, or it might make things even worse for those exposed to Assad's vengeance.  Most likely, it is as with sanctions: on balance lifting them will do no good, and not lifting them will do no good.  Normalisation won't help, and withholding it won't help either.

Hopeless, but for whom?

In summary, for those who demand nothing less than justice, there is no hope at all.  And this would mean there is no hope at all for the Syrian people.  They will continue to suffer at Assad’s good pleasure.  This could go on for years, even decades.

When the lives of so many Syrians are under such atrocious and open-ended attack, it seems natural, reasonable to suppose that what matters most are Syrian lives: saving them, perhaps improving them, should count most in decisions affecting them.  But for many Westerners, and some Westernized Syrians, saving Syrian lives is by no means what matters most.  What matters most is to make choices that affirm various high principles, and reject choices that don’t.  It is the mentality of someone who sees an apartment block set ablaze by arsonists, hears the screams of the occupants, but won’t call in the police and fire, because they’re dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters.  Thus even the most vocal refugee advocates didn’t offer so much as a murmur in support of Erdogan, whose continued rule shields the lives of many Syrians outside Assad’s grasp.

This perverse fastidiousness is most apparent in decisions about Syria itself.  If the terrible state of Syrians represents the problem, no one now can suppose that prosecutions or sanctions constitute the solution.  A solution, then, would have to involve a full-scale, long-term military intervention, one that ends the régime once and for all.  But then the problem becomes:  who’s going to intervene?  Here is where every public analysis of Syria’s agony simply freezes up, and has done so ever since it became apparent that the pro-democracy, Westernized Syrian factions were not going to enter Damascus in triumph.

Yet the prospects for military intervention, were Western countries to support it, have got better, not worse.  Russia will certainly emerge weaker from the Ukraine conflict, not stronger.  Just two years ago, the prospect of serious confrontation with Russia made military action in Syria a non-starter, because it posed a tiny but still unacceptable prospect of all-out world war.  Today, that prospect is tinier still, and seems acceptable to many political actors - as the Ukraine conflict, again, has shown.

The trouble is that Western reluctance to intervene in Syria has increased at a rate that far outpaces the increasing ease of intervention. There are several reasons for this. The West’s humiliation in Afghanistan makes another mission supremely unattractive to Western publics.  The discovery of vast natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean makes Syria irrelevant to Western concerns about energy supplies.  And the need to replenish Western armaments sent to Ukraine, combined with concerns about China, make Western militaries ever more reluctant to take on another large-scale burden.

But this does not mean that there can be no hope for Syrians.  It only means that hope cannot rest on Western military intervention.  It does raise the possibility that the West would finally back a regional power, Turkey, in such a venture.  This would mean military assistance to Turkey, in quantity and quality, orders of magnitude greater than today.  So armed, Turkey would be in a position to end Assad's rule.  To be clear, this would require cooperation with some sector of the Syrian revolt.  That means Syrian Islamists because, in the words of one specialist,

As it stands, the most capable and powerful factions which are able to launch an offensive against the Assad regime are the Islamist rebel groups in north-western Syria.

For the West, backing Turkey to the hilt is far, far cheaper than any of America’s recent wars.  Turkey already has a large and capable army.  It would be happy to get the F-35s it was promised, and could therefore achieve air superiority: the sticking point was supposed to be its S-400 anti-aircraft system, yet there was no fuss about Greece’s S-300.  Strengthening Turkey, which controls all access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, would also strengthen an important counterweight to Russia in the region. 

Even better, Turkish intervention would allow the US to withdraw from Syria altogether.  This might be a good idea, especially for those appalled by Assad.  In the Northeast, the US backs the SDF, a front for the PKK.  The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by both the US and the EU.  Much more important, the PKK/SDF and its political counterpart the YPG are intermittent, discreet and fractious but crucial allies of Assad:  They have played an important role in his victories ever since 2012.  They are also proponents of the normalisation so deplored when Arabs propose it.  There is strong pro-Kurdish sentiment in Europe, but there are other ways of satisfying it, for example by backing the PKK rival, the KDP.  Yet Western nations affect bemusement when Turkey seems to object to NATO powers sheltering a PKK-dominated force in northwest Syria, a branch of an organisation conducting military operations within Turkey.

At the moment, this possibility is not a live option.  Perhaps it will never be.  The main obstacle is that no one so much as suggests it. The reason is unclear.

What’s clear is that, in Western eyes, Turkey, in the person of Erdogan, represents a kind of regional Donald Trump.  He is a ‘conservative’ Muslim, anything but LGBTQ-friendly.  Even after winning a “highly competitive and consequential” election, he is a dictator.  He consorts with Islamists, who fulfil the role of something like the Proud Boys in the US.  He is considered financially reckless and given to grandiose projects. His wife is veiled, perhaps submissive?  In short, his brand is terrible.

In contrast, his enemy the PKK has a wonderful brand:  the PKK is secular, a brave underdog, and features strong, attractive female leaders and fighters.  This is not sarcasm: branding really seems to be at the root of many commentators’ political choices, who after all have no skin in the game.  But why the partisanship?  No social or sexual minorities will be better off because Western decision-makers dislike Erdogan and Turkey.  While deploring Trump might have some effect on what actually happens in the US and even Europe, deploring Erdogan will change nothing for Turkey’s minorities. Its only effect is to make the most plausible route to helping Syrians unthinkable.  It is as if the value-based decisions affecting Syria are divorced from any consideration of cause and effect.

For there to be hope for Syrians, there must at least be people whose desire to end Assad’s atrocities outweighs their branding preferences and their pet causes.  They would recognize that if there are no good options, that’s not a cue to shake one’s head and walk out on Syrians’ agony.  This shouldn’t even look like a hard choice.  Leaving the Syrians to their awful fate is not going to produce some democratic, LGBTQ-friendly, feminist, journalist-respecting state in either Turkey or Syria.  Indeed it is hard to understand how hatred of Erdogan and the Islamists must somehow transmute into useless indignation that might as well be cruel indifference.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that Turkish-Islamist intervention has no real drawbacks.  It certainly would not satisfy all legitimate Kurdish demands.  There are impressive analysts and commentators who would agree with my pessimistic arguments but just shake their heads at the very idea of supporting an Erdogan initiative linked to his most likely potential ally, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the increasingly powerful Islamist leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).  But what could these knowledgeable writers suggest?

They could not, with a straight face, pretend to expect Western powers to intervene, after all this time and in this very tense world situation.  They would have to weigh misery under Assad against the possibility of something better under a Turkish-Islamist administration.  Jolani and Erdogan have both taken pains to give the impression of moderation.  Are they sincere?  Even if they are, could they keep the situation in hand?  Would the Western or regional powers cooperate in their efforts?  Could some solution placate the Russians and Iran?  The answers are simple: we can’t possibly know.  The choice is between the absolute certainty of unending disaster, for millions, and the distinct but lesser possibility of some other type of disaster.  It would be irrational to prefer the former.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan

These were all American defeats, but all different.  And the defeat in Afghanistan is much more than an American defeat.

In Vietnam, America and its Western friends were not alone, and they did not dominate technologically.

They did not have air superiority over the North, a crucial rear area for the Vietnamese.  The North had formidable missile defenses and useful fighter assets.  In the South, US air superiority was not complemented by technological superiority.  The Vietnamese had good, modern assault rifles, artillery, and other assets.   On the other hand, the US was not fighting alone.  There was something resembling a civil war, with the communists opposed by deeply entrenched and largely united governing classes.  That was why the South Vietnamese army was a real army with real desire and capacity to fight.  The defeat of the US was very important, even catastrophic for American morale and self-confidence.  American losses were considerable.  But that defeat was against an opponent with roughly comparable strength given almost unlimited Soviet backing.  This was the first war America lost that it really wanted to win, and it gave everything it had to defeat its enemy.  But it was nothing like the defeats to come.

In Iraq,  the US was fighting an opponent which, despite its pretensions, was aggressively secular and just plain aggressive.  It had made mortal enemies of most of its neighbours and all of its substantial ethnic groups, including a majority Shia population.  In the first Gulf war the US had therefore been able to assemble a genuinely international coalition.  Though the Iraqi forces were strong, they were overwhelmed.  In the second Gulf war, the Iraqi state was so weakened that it could not seriously resist.

The US was, nevertheless, defeated.  It never established control of the country.   It struggled to suppress the secular Sunni resistance.  When that threat was greatly diminished, Sunni resistance morphed into ISIS.  Here American air superiority enabled the US and its clients to retake all of ISIS territory, but - crucially - not without the active military support of Iran and its proxy militias, and not by eliminating ISIS itself.   The US decided it could not, at reasonable cost, maintain control of the country.  Therefore it turned the country over to Iran, which has dominated Iraq ever since.  The occasional application of US air power hasn't the slightest prospect of changing this political reality. No, this is no one's official story, but it does represent the facts.  Here too the US lost the war, because the US failed to achieve its objectives and Iran - an enemy the US acquired before the defeat of Saddam Hussein - did.

These defeats both mattered enormously.   Vietnam did permanent damage to the American spirit, and emboldened its enemies - but comparable enemies, with comparable support, haven't materialized.   (9-11 made its own generous contribution to the American malaise.)  The defeat in Iraq had only modest geopolitical consequences, but further indicated American weakness, in this case versus a third-tier military power, bolstered with extensive, popularly supported local forces.

Yet the defeat in Afghanistan was of a different order, probably a great catastrophe for the entire 'Western' world, with 'Western' denoting the US and the nations under its nuclear wing.  In Afghanistan, unlike Vietnam, the US had absolute air superiority, as it did in Iraq.  But in Vietnam and Iraq, the US eventually ceded the field to forces which, though inferior, had considerable military and technological strength.

Afghanistan was different.   Unlike Vietnam but like Iraq, the US had absolute air superiority, and the enemy had no vast jungles for concealment.  Unlike both Iraq (in the later Iran-sponsored militia phase) and Vietnam, the the US faced an enemy who had no secure sanctuary or extensive source of relatively advanced military material.  The US had allies from most of the Western world - why not? with air superiority, the involvement was cheap and great for sucking  up to the Americans.  The enemy had no militarily significant allies, much less a border with any of them.  Pakistan, while offering the Taliban very modest backing, committed almost nothing to the fight while providing resupply routes for the Americans.  Indeed the Taliban did not even have friends throughout the territory.   The struggle was about as uneven as, even in theory, it would be possible to construct.  Yet the enemy's victory surpassed all the victories of all the better-positioned US opponents.

Never before have the US and its Western allies been so thoroughly expelled, so quickly.  And never before have Western efforts to rely on proxies been so thoroughly held up to ridicule:  it does not matter whose fault that was; it matters that, despite gargantuan efforts, it failed decisively.  With almost nothing, the enemy reduced its Western opponents to almost nothing.   And the key to its victory is no mystery:  the enemy was willing to fight forever, at any cost the West was willing to impose.  The West was unwilling to fight, except at arm's length, and that wasn't even close to enough.

So events have established the following.  The US does not command 'unparalleled' military might, period.   The US can and often does establish air superiority, but not military superiority, in this case meaning the attainment of set objectives through military force.  Military superiority doesn't mean how much stuff or how many special forces sit on some list or on some bases.   If, for whatever reason, you're unwilling to use those resources, military superiority is a fantasy.  And the Afghanistan débacle has shown, conclusively, that the West is too averse to risk and suffering to use them.  What's more, that aversion has steadily increased since the Vietnam era.  It follows that in any conflict with a determined, intelligent enemy, whenever the country and population are large enough, the West is very likely to prove, in the old phrase, a paper tiger.

It's hard to say whether this has penetrated Western consciousness.   Certainly the embarrassing posturing about sanctions, conditions, Taliban technical deficiencies, and disaster in the wake of Western withdrawal all suggest a lust for distraction from the nasty, blatantly humiliating truth about Western weakness.  But the West's defeat should be frightening even for those who enjoy Western humiliation.

When so many forces in so many places can overcome Western military power, itself emasculated by societies' incurable distaste for bloody, open-ended engagement, what's going to happen?  Will future victories over the West usher in onlyTaliban-style Islamists, or a regionally dominant Pol Pot, or some even more vicious Pinochet?   Will the West, ever incapable of providing a serious military response to any serious problem, stave off ever-increasing, ever more extensive political, social and environmental disasters?  One may well ask.

False Autopsies in Syria

Liberal Syrians and others increasingly favour a certain analysis of why the Syrian revolution failed.   The analysis masks the mistakes that really did contribute to that failure.  This invites future disasters.  I apologize for bringing this up; it is not my place to do so.  But trying to prevent the next failure seems reason to speak out of turn.

The 'official' liberal version, palatable to Western commentators, runs like this.  The Syrian people came out demonstrating for freedom and democracy.  Their authentic revolution was hijacked by Islamists.  These Islamists, along with Assad, ISIS, and, often, Erdogan, destroyed Syria's dream.

The extent to which this analysis departs from reality is immediately apparent in its haste to put the Islamists (never mind Erdogan) in the same category as Assad, referring to " stupid Assadists, Islamists, Erdoganists".  This stoops low indeed.  Assad killed at least 200,000 civilians.  Even ISIS, which never claimed nor was considered part of the revolution, killed about 2% of that.  In the tally offered here, "the rebels", i.e. the nice ones who aren't too Islamist, killed a bit over 4000.  The Bad Islamists, represented by Jabat al Nusra, later HTS, killed 452.  "The Coalition", incidentally, killed around 3,000.  That "the Islamists" are lumped together with the likes of ISIS and, incredibly, Assad, is good reason to question the whole liberal Syrian narrative.

That narrative is mendacious from beginning to end.  No one really knows exactly why "the Syrian people" revolted - that is to say, what proportion of those out in the streets were there for which reasons.  The horror of Assad's response left no room for thorough surveys.  But most accounts allow that, at the start, people massed around the slogan "The people want the fall of the regime."  That certainly doesn't imply democracy.  It doesn't imply freedom in the democratic liberal sense - only freedom from spectacularly monstrous repression.  And it must be said that 'the Syrian people' included and still includes some substantial proportion of régime supporters. They obviously didn't want anything remotely liberal, unless by that is meant a triumphantly secular lifestyle that aspired to Western cultural norms.  The Syrian liberals are well aware of all this.

What we do know is that resistance to the Assads, in the decades preceding the revolution, was spearheaded by Islamists - the Muslim Brotherhood.  This did not stop Syrian liberal eminences like Hassan Hassan from telling us, in Western media, that the Muslim Brotherhood had 'hijacked' the revolution as early as 2013.   His evidence?  That the Brotherhood has aspired to dominate various revolutionary committees like the Syrian National Coalition at various meetings in various hotels.  Apparently these almost forgotten administrative constructs are supposed to be a valid stand-in for 'the Syrian people' who, it seems, made the revolution.  How quickly 'the people' cede the stage, in liberal eyes, to the notable individuals who purport to represent them.

The portrayal of Islamists as hijackers or even as enemies of the Syrian revolution mirrors what has undermined resistance to Assad almost all along.  It is not that secular or non-Islamist fighting groups refused to join with Islamists.   It is that the secular, bourgeois commentariat constantly incited secularists to do just that. They cheered every attempt - for example in Kafranbel and Maraat al Numan - to resist and undermine Islamist movements.  It's as if the necessity of unity in the face of a formidable enemy never crossed their minds.  Either that, or they thought their anti-Islamist takes would win them enough favour with the Americans to become dominant in the Syrian revolution.  This was a pipe dream.  The Syrian revolution was never going to be utterly sanitized to American standards.  It was always going to have enough association with Islamists (if only in the past) that the US was never going to trust even non-Islamist Syrians with serious military resources.

We'll never know how much difference, if any, that made.  But what seems clear is that the anti-Islamist commentary is the tip of a strategic iceberg that bedeviled the revolutions in both Egypt and Syria.   It is the reluctance to make hard choices, or even to acknowledge that there were hard choices to be made.

Secularist and liberal Muslim opposition to Islamists is only to be expected.  In Syria there were and are Islamist groups far more radical than, say, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.  The radical Islamist opposition in Syria - I don't mean the crazy Islamists, like ISIS - certainly ventured into policies the secularists found abhorrent.  Radical Islamist punishments for smoking, going about unveiled, just being homosexual, were harsh, sometimes appalling.  Radical Islamist governance often involved active suppression of free speech and local democratic institutions.  This governance included educational projects that were in some cases obscurantist. 

Furthermore, given the understated prominence of Islamists in the Syrian revolution, there was reason to believe that Syria, after Assad, might come under Islamist rule.  This could happen democratically, or undemocratically.  And given such rule, there was reason to believe that, quite possibly, religious minorities would be persecuted.  There might even be massacres, especially of Christians perceived as Assad loyalists.

Given all this, did the secular and liberal Muslim opposition really even have a hard choice?  It would be polite to say this, but untrue.  There was no choice.  To avoid unending mass torture and slaughter, the liberals would have to accept Islamists as allies, perhaps as leaders.  Given the absolute necessity of stopping Assad, no other course of action was even worth considering.

In the first place, Assad's determination and brutality, unprecedented in a region which has seen much brutality, was underwritten by a sizable professional army, an air force against which the rebels had no defence, and virtually unlimited supplies of manpower from Iran's proxies, as well as virtually unlimited resupply of equipment from Russia.  The very thought that the rebels could overcome this without full cooperation with Islamists, was absurd.  And a failed revolt meant more than defeat; it meant unlimited and unending slaughter, for decades.  So even if it meant submission to Islamists, there was no viable alternative.

In the second place, the anti-Islamists mislead when they put radical Islamists in the same category as extremists like ISIS, much less extreme monsters like Assad.  Many Islamists might be called extreme in their social or cultural doctrines, but that doesn't translate into extreme savagery.  While Islamists factions certainly have committed atrocities in the civil war, so have all the other participants, including 'The Coalition'.  It's the scale that counts, and by that criterion even the most 'extreme' Islamists are very moderate, despite what some consider their immoderate domestic agenda.

In the third place, the mere possibility of future atrocities carries no weight against the ongoing absolute certainty of present atrocities.  What the Islamists might do in power, what might be done to prevent atrocities, and by whom, are all purely speculative.  Taking the dangers seriously doesn't justify preferring possibility to reality.  There was no stopping the deaths of hundreds of thousands without full-fledged support for the Islamists - though even that might not have been enough.

This might be considered crying over spilt milk.  But what of the future?  Non-Islamists cling to fantasies about 'their' revolution.  It wasn't hijacked by Islamists.  There will never be a successful revolution in the Middle East without Islamists, because the oppressors are overwhelmingly anti-Islamist and because the small minority of nice anti-Islamists cannot muster enough strength to overcome cruel, well-equipped militaries.  In short, until nice people abandon their dreams and accept an Islamist future, there is no hope.

Nonsense about the US withdrawal from Syria

This attempts to counter some of the foolish comments made about Trump's withdrawal from Syria.

The least foolish of these is that the battle against ISIS is not won.  No it isn't, and Trump's claim that it is, is plainly false.  But to harp on this is absurd.

For one thing, there isn't the slightest possibility that keeping US troops in Syria would win the battle, or prevent an ISIS resurgence.   ISIS' ultimate strength lies, not in its Syrian or Iraqi enclaves, but in what the West and Arab authoritarian governments have done to the peoples of the region, and in the conditions in Muslim countries worldwide.  These conditions guarantee a literally unending stream of militants seeking justice and revenge.  The notion that 2000 US troops would affect this dynamic is ludicrous.  Equally foolish are the tiresome recommendations that the underlying conditions be addressed.   The sage pundits who say these things know perfectly well that the West will never, ever address these conditions:  it can't, because they occur in sovereign states.  It would take a Western occupation of those states, involving hundreds of thousands of troops for decades, to cure the injustices of the region, and even then it's not clear that the economic basis for healthy societies exists.  In other words, whatever the West is going to do, whatever leadership it has, ISIS won't be defeated.  What then is the point of warning us that Trump's withdrawal will not defeat ISIS?

For another, forget the mantra about how effective the Kurds have been against ISIS.  Their victories are almost entirely the result of overwhelming US air and artillery support.  Their actual capabilities are better assessed by looking at how even a much-weakened ISIS can rout Kurdish forces with attacks during storms and under other conditions inimical to air operations.  The Syrian rebels, not to mention the Turkish army, would be at least as effective as the Kurds in combating ISIS, and they wouldn't need a US ground presence to do it.

There is more foolishness.

It is said that withdrawal shows the US to be an unreliable ally, and that this is a dire mistake.

In the first place, nothing says you're unreliable like supporting, with weapons, troops and air power, the armed, active enemy of your ally.  That's what the US did when it backed the Syrian arm of the Kurdish PKK against its NATO ally, Turkey.  So Trump's withdrawal of this support could well be seen as a return to reliability, not the abandonment of it.

Second, it's unclear that appearing unreliable in this instance would make much difference to the US position in the world.  Nations are allied to the US, not because they have touching faith in America, but because they have little choice.  They don't want to fall under Russian or Chinese domination.   The idea that alliances are made and preserved on trust runs contrary to all historical precedent.  It's childish.

It is said that US withdrawal is a gift to Putin.

This carries absurdity into insanity.  The unspoken truth about the US' Kurdish 'allies' is that they are also allies of Russia and Assad.  In the 2015 campaigns against rebel Aleppo, Russia and Assad even provided air support to the Kurds.  Later, Assad secured for the Kurds a road whereby they could move between their Northeastern and Northwestern territories.  He also pays for much of the infrastructure in the Northeastern provinces.  This means that, in allying with the PKK/YPG, the US is allied to Assad, Russia...  and Iran.   It's true that Putin probably enjoys seeing the US leave; he doesn't want a US presence in Syria.  But it's also true that Obama, and until now Trump, have been fighting on Putin's side.  He now faces an expanded Turkish presence in Northern Syria, which threatens and complicates his relations with Assad and Iran.  Because Turkey backs the rebels, it even threatens the security of Russian bases in Latakia and Tartous.  Trump's withdrawal means the US will mend relations with Turkey.  That in turn means Putin can't expect to pry that country - a real strategic prize that until recently seemed almost within his grasp - away from its Western alliance.  Finally, the US retains its air bases and naval presence in the region, so that US withdrawal of 2000 troops from Syria makes not the slightest difference to the regional balance of power.  Some gift.

It is said, with feeling, that the Kurds have been betrayed.

Even if there is some truth to this, it is foolish.  For one thing, the Kurds have been supremely opportunistic in their choice of allies.   They feigned neutrality when the rebels were strong, yet with increasing frankness came out on Assad's side when the rebels faltered.  For another, the morality of betrayal depends on circumstances.  The Kurds chose to ally with a régime so monstrous that adjectives like 'brutal' can't begin to capture the extent of its atrocities.  When the King of Italy abandoned Mussolini in 1943 he betrayed Hitler.  Was that reprehensible?

The criticism of Trump's withdrawal, though couched in the language of morality and even honour, is curiously oblivious to the sort of humanitarian considerations that you'd think would belong to those values.  The most likely consequence of US withdrawal - should it really occur - is that Northern Syria will become a refuge for perhaps millions of Syrians, under Turkish protection.  Meanwhile in the rest of Syria, as widely predicted, Syrians in formerly rebel areas are subjected to arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and murder.  But sure, pontificate some more about the US withdrawal.

The Syrian failure: aftermath and legacy

The reaction to Syria's horrors did nothing to mitigate them.  They will continue for decades.   It may be useful to review just how throughly and deeply irredeemable is the failure.

To say that there were war crimes and human rights violations is like saying Charles Manson misbehaved.  Assad's crimes have been documented in heart-stopping detail, not least by the 'Caesar', who smuggled out prison files and fifty thousand photographs, at great risk of a fate worse than death.  His efforts, plus the meticulous work of the individuals and groups who proved that the régime was the culprit in chemical weapons attacks...   these efforts too are now, beyond any doubt or hope, in vain.

To  say that Assad and company should be brought before an international tribunal is self-deluding sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Let's be clear.  Assad and company will never be brought to justice.   Tribunal verdicts will have no effect at all.  All the evidence painstakingly assembled, sometimes at the cost of brave lives, counts for nothing.  There will be no reconciliation, and there is no truth to come out, because more than enough is known already.  There is no point in making more people aware of that truth, because it's too late.  That won't even produce useful sentiments, let along useful non-psychological reactions - sentiments don't stop homicidal rulers.  If someone declares, somewhere, that the Syrian repression was a genocide, so what - it's not even true.  'The world', the 'international order', some 'community', don't matter.  Assad is far too secure.  There is absolutely nothing to be done that any collection of worthy countries or institutions would ever be willing to do, and rightly so, because the only effective response would be a military intervention so massive as to risk, given the Russian presence, nuclear war.  It's great to help the refugees, the victims, but that's cleaning up after Assad, not something that could lead to restraining him or his ilk.  Indeed most refugees will stay or end up in Syria, left to his tender mercies.  As for reconstruction, that of course will make Assad much stronger.  It will focus on his supporters, not those most in need.

All that's left, all that might conceivably have some positive effect but won't, is to expose the thinking that encouraged the Syrian betrayal.  Try comparing the reaction on Syria to reactions to other horrors.

There are greater and lesser atrocities.  Pinochet murdered more than 3000 people, some tortured to death with terrible cruelty. There are people who approve of Pinochet, or brush off his slaughter.  They may be condemned, but like Henry Kissinger they continue to be accepted in the mainstream.   They shouldn't be, but this indicates that society, the mainstream, is prepared to accept this level of brutality.

Then there are major atrocities:  Cambodia, Rwanda are clear cases.   Anyone who brushes off those killings would not be considered normal, but treated as a pariah.  No one hears from such people.  No one suggested helping Pol Pot with reconstruction and reconciliation.   No one said that, well, realistically, we need to consider whether we have any vital interest in Rwanda.  Not even Kissinger.

The atrocities committed by Assad are very clearly in the second category, not the first.  Yet people who obliquely place them in the first group are considered not only mainstream-tolerable, but, quite often, intelligent contrarians.  One hears from them a lot.

But that's not the worst of it.   Assad apologists fall into three categories.  There are Iranians and Russians. Those countries have long-standing alliances with the Assads and might be considered to have some sort of security interest in the régime.  Their stance is disgusting but hardly worth highlighting, since no one will do anything about it.  Then there are members of Syrian minorities whom Assad has implicated in his crimes.   And then there are leftists, stuck in the 70s or so, who don't matter.  Obsessing about Assad apologists does no one any good.

Those who do matter aren't the obvious offenders, but respected observers whose attempts or pretense at objectivity or decency betrayed the Syrian people.  They obscure Assad's place in the second category, among the very worst of the monsters.  These people may condemn the régime in ringing terms, they may say 'doing something' about Assad's atrocities is 'urgent'.   But they nonetheless demote the urgency of the matter, because for them, everything is 'urgent'.   It is 'urgent' that an imprisoned journalist be released, that a child is reunited with its parents, that minority rights are respected, that 'genders' get the toilets they need, and so on.  And perhaps these things are all indeed urgent, but they do not compare in urgency with stopping a man who has murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands.

Human rights organizations are prominent in this morally and politically witless denial of priorities.  So are any number of analysts and commentators.  They talked about Assad as they would not talk about Rwanda or Pol Pot.  They would not, in those cases, have spoken of  'difficult choices', as they did about Assad and the Kurds and 'the jihadis'.  They would regard any accommodation with Assad as no more to be contemplated than with the fanatic responsible for so many dead, tortured Cambodians.  They would not have insisted the world weigh heavily that some rebels didn't believe in democracy and espoused a repressively conservative social agenda.  They would not have relentlessly conflated this social conservatism with, incredibly, some sort of terrorist threat.

These analysts should be treated as moral lepers if their warnings played a role in the West's betrayal of the Syrian revolution.  No one warned the world about Vietnam's rescue of the Cambodian people on the grounds that the Vietnamese were naughty communists.  No one thought it was a tough choice whether to back the murderers of Rwanda or their victims.  No one reduced the description of these régimes to "brutal dictatorship".

It is far too late for this to make any difference to Syrians.  Assad has won and he will endure. He will be condemned as a reprehensible leader, but a leader nonetheless.  He is protected by powerful allies, UN vetoes, and discreet commitments from 'indignant' Western powers not to challenge his rule.  But perhaps it is not too late to prevent this sort of kindler, gentler, 'hard choices' whitewash from recurring.  Those who preached caution, scepticism and realpolitik about the Syrian rebels made choices that should never be forgotten or forgiven.   It doesn't matter what nice things they now say about refugees.  It doesn't matter what righteous outrage they express about Assad.   When it counted, they didn't even begin to  impart to the situation the moral urgency, even the panic, that it deserved.  They were not willing to accept that their worries about extremist and terrorist rebels were as nothing compared to the importance of stopping a monster.  That is a poisonous legacy.

Let no one reply that these analysts were realistic.  At its limits, morality and even Realpolitik converge.   All nations have an interest in keeping barbarism within practical limits.  Slaughter and mistreatment may sometimes be genuinely advantageous, but for that very reason it's a good idea to act when slaughter and mistreatment become an open-ended, sadistic orgy, engulfing tens of thousands and exceeding anything plausibly endorsed by rational self-interest.  Mad tyrants, as we see, create floods of fugitives, and potentially destabilising wars.  They also create militants out to punish the comfortable nations who betrayed the victims.  Auden was right:

I and the public know,
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

This is likely the last post I will write on Egypt or Syria.   My sole aim has been, however ineffectually and wrong-headedly, to defend their revolutions.  Such attempts are pointless now.