Four Syria Myths Busted by the Assad Regime’s Collapse

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 09, 2024

 

The stunning collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been met with a mixture of guarded optimism and anxious trepidation in the West. But before the world focuses its attention on what’s in store for Syria, let’s take stock of some illusions that Assad’s ouster dispelled.

 

The dissolution of the last Arab Socialist Baath Party regime in the Middle East exposes the lies at the heart of a variety of unfounded assumptions about the world. For example:

 

Myth No. 1: America’s Enemies Are More Steadfast Than America

 

Critics of the U.S.-led post–Cold War order as well as its supporters are keen to note that America is a fair-weather friend. Its partners abroad can count on American support only until their cause becomes déclassé among domestic political elites, at which point the United States reliably bugs out of the conflicts to which it has committed treasure and prestige.

 

By contrast, America’s illiberal adversaries make more stalwart allies. Unbeholden to domestic political pressures, Iran, Russia, China, and their satellites will stand by odious dictators and barbarous thugs if that posture advances their permanent interests. America and her allies are mercurial. The anti-American axis is predictable.

 

Well, not so much when it comes to Syria. The multi-axial lightning rebel advance that took down Assad’s regime did not progress entirely unmolested by Damascus’s Iranian and Russian benefactors. Iran deployed Revolutionary Guards Corps forces to stave off the onslaught, and Moscow’s forces mounted counterattacks on the advancing insurgents. But both rapidly concluded that they were committing valuable resources to a lost cause.

 

The Financial Times set the scene in Damascus last week, in which Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi cut Assad off at the knees after Aleppo fell to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) insurgents. “Continuing to support him simply didn’t make sense and would have had unaffordable costs,” said one source described as a Tehran “insider.” Iran “did not expect the collapse to come so quickly or expose such hollowness in the regime,” the source added. But Tehran “was no longer in a position to send forces to support him anyway.”

 

With Assad gone, the Kremlin could lose its military outposts on the Mediterranean. But it barely lifted a finger to prop up Assad in the last week, sacrificing a decade of costly contributions to its longevity in the process. Both Russia and Iran have lost a critical ally in the region, demonstrating their weakness and — perhaps more important — that the United States isn’t the only great power prone to cut and run.

 

Myth No. 2: Assad and Russia Were Fighting Islamists

 

This is a chestnut preferred by critics of Western goals in the region. Sure, the Assad regime was a vicious tyranny that tortures and mutilates children, gasses whole communities, and facilitates the murder of Americans wherever it has the chance. But at least he was fighting terrorists.

 

This binary dichotomy — a brutal secular dictatorship vs. the Islamist theocrats who attacked the United States on 9/11 — is one that is preferred by Assad and his backers. The dithering they encouraged allowed the regime and its Iranian and Russian backers to neutralize pro-Western elements among Syria’s rebel ranks, but Assad’s flatterers were promulgating a fiction.

 

Even as Damascus’s friends in the West insisted that the Assadist/Russian/Iranian concordat was dismantling Islamist elements, Assad was incubating Islamist groups like what became ISIS, allowing Islamic State forces to maneuver and reconstitute themselves, and even coordinating with the terrorist outfit to eliminate Free Syrian Army elements. That behavior continued long after the United States reluctantly concluded that it could not rely on Moscow to preserve its interests in the region. And we’re about to learn more about the nature of the Assad regime’s support for terrorism.

 

Following the fall of Damascus, the United States and Israel conducted a series of airstrikes on Assad’s chemical weapons facilities (the stuff Barack Obama said Russia would dispose of for us) and on Islamic State targets inside erstwhile regime-controlled areas of Syria. CENTCOM forces “conducted dozens of precision airstrikes targeting known ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria,” a December 8 press release read. With the opening of the archives in Damascus, we’re likely to learn a lot more about the Assad regime’s permissive approach to Islamist terrorism.

 

Myth No. 3: We Have to Learn to Live with the Iranian Axis

 

The Obama team’s fixation on the notion that the Islamic Republic could be bribed into behaving like a responsible country compelled them to engage in a lot of motivated reasoning. The hands-off approach the Obama White House took to the Syrian civil war was just one outgrowth of that ill-considered project.

 

“Instead of helping to topple Assad, the mass-murdering goon who drops barrel bombs on civilian areas, the White House launched a phony train-and-equip program that required rebel fighters to sign a document that they wouldn’t use their weapons against the dictator who was murdering their families,” Lee Smith documented in 2016. “The administration’s anti-ISIS campaign has allowed Assad to ignore ISIS nearly altogether and focus his attention instead on destroying other opposition groups, and indiscriminately targeting Sunni towns and villages.”

 

Even if the events of October 7, 2023, finally convinced Joe Biden’s administration of the need to isolate Iran, this White House still regarded Assad as an immovable presence in the region. As recently as one week ago, Reuters revealed that the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates had discussed the possibility of relieving sanctions on Damascus in exchange for promises that it would limit ties with Iran and interdict weapons shipments to Lebanese Hezbollah.

 

The hopelessly confused Obama-Biden approach to relations with Assad — declaring him illegitimate while reinforcing his legitimacy — alienated the elements that may soon cobble together an interim successor regime, ceding undue influence in the post-Assad Middle East to semi-hostile powers like Turkey. America will have to formulate a more consistent and defensible approach to the region.

 

Myth No. 4: The United States Is the Clandestine Author of Events in the Middle East

 

You can count on cranks and paranoiacs to never take events at face value. This sort is particularly likely to attribute occurrences abroad to the malign influence of the United States. Washington, they imagine, is a virtually omniscient and hypercompetent actor eagerly pulling the strings behind the scenes.

 

It’s not hard to find Assad boosters and reflexive skeptics stealing from Syrians their own agency and assigning blame, such as it is, for the dictator’s ouster to a shadowy cabal of U.S. intelligence agencies. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Donald Trump’s pick for director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has always been good for that sort of irrationality.

 

She allowed herself to star in pro-Assad propaganda videos during her “fact-finding” mission to Assad’s open-air prison in 2017. She has long held that the violence was a result of the West’s effort to engineer “regime change” in Syria. She even seemed to hold out the possibility that the West forced Assad to gas his own citizens. “There is responsibility that goes around,” she said in the wake of one of the regime’s atrocities. “Standing here and pointing fingers does not accomplish peace for the Syrian people.”

 

But that didn’t stop her from pointing fingers at the United States. “Our counterproductive regime-change war does not serve America’s interest, and it certainly isn’t in the interest of the Syrian people,” Gabbard told CNN in 2017. “The U.S. must stop supporting terrorists who are destroying Syria and her people,” she later added in defense of her bill that would compel the U.S. to cease funding to anti-Assad groups.

 

But America was not the author of last week’s events in Syria. Indeed, Western intelligence agencies appear to have been caught off guard by the rebel offensive. “I think everything that’s happening caught them by surprise,” the Atlantic Council’s Qutaiba Idlbi speculated. The scattershot contingencies in which the U.S. and Israel are now engaged in Syria expose the folly of those who attribute events abroad to meticulously planned Western initiatives. It was not the United States but the Syrian people who were the executors of their own liberation.

 

What Comes Next

 

The exigencies to which the United States must now respond are alarming. Immediate imperatives include securing the loose chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, eliminating their production facilities, and ensuring that the 50,000 or so Islamic State captives in the custody of U.S.-backed Syrian-Kurdish forces don’t escape. In the medium term, it will be crucial to help establish a more durable and secure status quo in Syria that prevents the rise of an Islamist successor regime bent on exporting terrorism. Given the stakes, it would be extremely unwise for the West to wash its hands of the place and hope for the best.

 

But it’s possible that the U.S. wouldn’t find itself in this disadvantageous position — one in which there are no good outcomes, only less bad ones — if these myths had not held such power over Western policy-makers in the past decade. We can learn from our mistakes only if we acknowledge them as mistakes in the first place.