Assad’s Downfall Proves Neocons Have Learned Nothing From Disastrous Middle East Meddling
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has fled his country, now under the protection of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In only a few days, a regime that had withstood over a decade of brutal civil war crumbled into dust before the onslaught of a new rebel offensive.
Now, Syria teeters on the brink of tribal mayhem as disparate factions espousing differing strains of radical Islamism begin to squabble over the carcass and jostle for power. ISIS has even reemerged as part of the victorious rebel coalition, prompting U.S. airstrikes over the weekend.
But, on cue, the neocons crawled out of the woodwork to gloat, finding some solace in the bloodshed and mayhem after their recent electoral drubbing. In a little over 24 hours, they proved that they’ve learned nothing from over two decades of disastrous American meddling in the Middle East.
Unrepentant warmonger and Never Trumper Bill Kristol wasted no time waxing poetic on the carnage, posting on X, “The fall of Assad. On some days, one can believe that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.” Perhaps the image of a toppled Assad statue reminded Kristol of when the same thing happened during the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq — back when people actually cared about what he had to say.
Never one to miss out on an opportunity to advocate that American soldiers go die in some desert hellscape, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., almost immediately called for more American involvement in the Syrian quagmire.
“I appreciate the air strikes against ISIS targets in Syria, but it will not be enough,” he said on X. “We have to ensure that the roughly 50,000 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria — being primarily held by Kurdish forces — are not released. We should not allow the Kurdish forces — who helped us destroy ISIS on President Trump’s watch — to be threatened by Turkey or the radical Islamists who have taken over Syria.”
National Review’s Noah Rothman assured any wary onlookers that “the West can allow itself a moment to celebrate the end of an anti-American regime with U.S. blood on its hands and the failures of his Iranian and Russian backers.”
But Rothman managed a bit of intellectual honesty in his column, noting that, “Western capitals will have to grapple with the reality of a potentially Islamist-flavored successor regime very soon.”
Given the makeup of the Syrian rebel coalition (al-Qaida and ISIS ties abound), a “potentially Islamist-flavored” seems like a rosy, even willfully naive, prediction. In reality, Syria will most likely become the Baskin Robbins of the Middle East, with a full 31 flavors of Islamic extremism.
Just look at the warlord who currently controls Damascus, the Syrian capital, and leads the largest group in the rebel coalition. Muhammad al-Jawlani has the resume of a lifelong jihadi. Inspired by the 9/11 terror attack, he got his start fighting U.S. troops for al-Qaida in Iraq in 2003. He then crossed over into Syria in 2011 to help lead the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s affiliate in the country. In 2017, he split with al-Qaida to lead Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a terrorist organization that preaches “popular jihad” and “a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law.”
After he became the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the State Department offered a $10 million reward for information that would lead to al-Jawlani’s capture.
Al-Jawlani has had conflicts with both al-Qaida and ISIS in the past, priming the Syrian powder keg for another explosion of violence and war. In recent days, al-Jawlani and his organization have claimed that a “council chosen by the people” will govern the new Syria and that ethnic and religious minorities, including Syrian Christians, will receive protection.
Amidst the confusion, President Joe Biden has assured the American people that their tax dollars will support the new Syrian government.
Calling the fall of Assad a “fundamental act of justice,” Biden proclaimed, “the United States will do whatever we can to support” the new Syrian government, “including through humanitarian relief, to help restore Syria after more than a decade of war and generations of brutality by the Assad family.”
Neither Biden nor the neocons seem to have learned from the string of disasters wrought by the United States’ interventions in the Middle East. The pattern of removing a “bad guy” from power only to hope beyond hope that a functional, pluralistic democracy will spontaneously generate from the wreckage has failed time after time.
The ouster of the Taliban and decades of so-called “nation-building” in Afghanistan yielded nothing of value to the U.S. The Taliban are still there, Afghanistan is still a medieval backwater, and the U.S. is weaker financially, militarily, and socially as a result. The only clear winners were the Taliban, who scored a huge morale victory over the U.S. and secured untold amounts of high-tech equipment thanks to Biden’s disastrous withdrawal in 2021.
The Israelis showed that they were perhaps the only ones who learned from Afghanistan by conducting operations to destroy valuable Syrian military equipment before it falls into the hands of the Islamic militants.
Few will deny Saddam Hussein’s cruelty and despotism as dictator of Iraq. But the U.S. invasion in 2003 caused a wave of violence that at least equaled if not surpassed the killings perpetrated by Hussein and reduced the country to a blasted ruin that can’t survive on its own.
The Arab Spring, fostered by the Obama administration in 2011, unleashed a further wave of uprisings against regional strongmen, including the Syrian Civil War.
Libyan rebels managed to topple Muammar Gaddafi, a U.S. foreign policy boogeyman since the 1980s, with the help of an extensive American bombing campaign. Absolute bedlam succeeded Gaddafi, casting the country into a civil war that transformed it into a nexus for the migrant crisis that rocks Europe to this day.
The removal of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011 paved the way for the devastating humanitarian crisis that arose amid the country’s civil war as well as the rise of the radical Houthi militants who have threatened American shipping in the Red Sea.
Even more “peaceful” revolutions like those in Tunisia and Egypt have mired the countries in political turmoil for over a decade now.
Assad’s regime no doubt visited terrible injustices upon the Syrian people, but the patchwork of mutually hostile Islamist groups that now rule Syria threatens to create yet another hellhole to breed terrorists and slaughter innocents. The Syrian debacle will almost certainly go down as yet another colossal blunder in the annals of U.S. Middle East policy.
But much like the communists, neocons seem convinced that “real neoconservatism hasn’t been tried yet.” Like a degenerate gambler, they just need one more shot, one more roll of the regime change dice, to prove the sunk cost fallacy wrong. Hubris and simple bloodlust propel these war hawks, and until there’s a shakeup in the foreign policy establishment (fingers crossed Trump’s cabinet picks get the job done), the U.S. seems doomed to be forever dragged into their Middle East misadventures.
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