Rally in support of the Assad regime.

Rally protesting the Assad regime.

When westerners see ‘enemy’ governments fall,
or civil wars erupt, they are led to think they are
the geopolitical equivalent of a natural event.
Nothing could be further from the truth
Jonathan Cook / Middle East Eye

(December 13, 2024) — The long-harbored aspirations of the US, Turkey and Israel to topple the Syrian government, mainly through their rebranded al-Qaeda allies, succeeded at lightning speed.

Damascus fell days after Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces under Abu Mohammad al-Jolani surprised observers by breaking out of their small north-western enclave in Syria and seizing the country’s second city, Aleppo.

Bashar al-Assad’s government and his army, it turned out, were paper tigers. Or they were, once their chief allies — Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon — had been forced onto the back foot. Preoccupied with troubles closer to home, they could no longer offer the military support Assad depended on.

Israel’s rampage across Lebanon and its military intimidation of Iran — as well as NATO increasing efforts to pin Russia down in Ukraine — unfroze the main battle lines in Syria, arrived at several years ago between Assad’s army, al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria and Kurdish forces in the north-east.

Backed by Turkey, a member of NATO — and more covertly by the CIA and MI6 — HTS and the so-called Syrian National Army (SNA) were able to drive south unhindered.

HTS is proscribed as a terrorist group by both the US and Britain. The CIA has placed a $10 million bounty on Jolani’s head.

Strangely, amid the excitement, the BBC and the rest of the western media forgot to mention HTS’s status as a proscribed organization — as they do in kneejerk fashion every time the Palestinian resistance group Hamas is referred to.

Notably, the very western politicians and media now celebrating the “liberation” of Syria by HTS are the same ones insisting that the eradication of the “terrorists” of Hamas in Gaza is so important it justifies the bombing and starvation of the enclave’s two million-plus Palestinian population.

There are difficult questions that any rational observer ought to be pondering right now.

How are we to believe that the same ideological groups who are head-chopping, women-abusing, minority-oppressing terrorists when they operate in US-occupied Iraq, are now “moderate”, “diversity-friendly rebels” when they operate next door in Syria?

How are opponents of western complicity in Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, as the World Court describes it, supposed to feel about the West helping to shatter the “axis of resistance”, which stood alone in offering material support to try to stop it?

Is HTS pursuing a nationalist agenda that is truly about liberating Syrians from western imperialism, or is western imperialism — wielding both the stick of an Israeli attack dog and the carrot of the rich Gulf lapdogs — once again in the driving seat in Syria?

How much of what we see is the reality of the situation and how much perception management?

Iran in Cross-hairs
There are plenty of clues to help us answer these questions if we go looking for them.

Wesley Clark, a former US Army general, recalled a moment weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 when he visited the Pentagon.

He was shown a classified document that set out how the US was going to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran”.

None of these states had any obvious connection to the events of 9/11. The one that did have such a connection — Saudi Arabia — was not on the list and has remained one of the United States’ most favoured client states.

The order of targets prioritised by Washington had to be modified — and the timeline was way off — but the realisation of that 2001 blueprint is closer than ever.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the US and UK, on false pretences, led to the removal of dictator Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state. The country was plunged into a devastating sectarian war from which it is still struggling to recover.

NATO meddling in Libya, again on false pretences, led to the removal of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the collapse of the Libyan state in 2011. It has been a failed state run by warlords ever since.

Sudan and Somalia — the latter subject to a US-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2007 — are both basket cases, riven by all-consuming, horrifying civil wars that the US helped to stoke rather than resolve.

The destruction of these various states created the space for new ultra-violent, intolerant Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) group to flourish.

Turkey’s open backing of the rebels in Syria — plus more concealed support from the CIA and MI6 — led to the removal of Syrian dictator Assad at the weekend and the collapse of what was left of the Syrian state. It is hard to imagine a unified authority emerging there.

Meanwhile, the terms of surrender foisted on Beirut to end Israel’s savage bombing of Lebanon do not look designed to hold. The already fragile sectarian arrangements barely glueing the Lebanese state together are almost certain to come unstuck in the coming months.

Iran, the last target on the Pentagon’s list, is now fully in the cross-hairs. Deprived of allies in Syria, and now largely cut off from its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, Tehran is as vulnerable as it has ever been.

Bigger Picture
None of this is accidental.

Were western publics not so deeply influenced by years of disinformation from their politicians and media, they might by now be starting to see a bigger picture gradually coming into focus.

One in which the fates of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iran hang in the balance together. One in which the western powers, led from Washington, are once again meddling, in violation of international law, to destroy the territorial integrity of each of them. One in which Israel and the West’s geostrategic interests are paramount, not the freedoms or welfare of the region’s people.

Dictators are bad. Killing civilians is bad. But these truisms, selectively prioritized by our feckless media class, have been weaponized to obscure the wider picture.

When westerners see “enemy” governments fall, as Assad’s has just done, or civil wars break out in far-off lands, they are led to assume that these are the geopolitical equivalent of a natural event.

The unexamined premise is that the world is ultimately heading, in fits and starts, towards a liberal democratic order. That is why HTS is repackaging itself, ably assisted by the western media, as newly pragmatic and moderate.

“Moderate”, presumably, in the sense that Saudi Arabia is considered “moderate” in western coverage.

When the West intervenes, so this narrative goes, it is simply to assist the laggards on their path to a final utopia: something akin to the United States, but without Donald Trump, gun crime, opioid and mental health crises, and nearly half of working-age adults deprived of proper healthcare.

Such changes of power, westerners are encouraged to believe, only ever rise from the bottom up, signaling a dictator’s illegitimacy, or maybe the incremental trajectory of political systems from backwardness to greater enlightenment.

Sadly, world events — especially in circumstances where there is only one military superpower, the US, with some 750 bases around the globe — rarely follow such a straightforward path.

Access to Oil
The 2001 Pentagon memo shown to Clark was, in fact, a reworking of a military blueprint for the Middle East that had been circulating in Washington for even longer — and had nothing to do with responding to 9/11 or terrorism.

It was all about securing Israel’s place as a forward base for US interests in the oil-rich region.

The champions of this idea were an increasingly influential group called the neoconservatives — or neocons for short.

By 1996, they had formalized their plan for “remaking” the Middle East into a document called A Clean Break. It proposed that Israel should tear up the Oslo Accords and any moves towards peacemaking with the Palestinians — the title’s “clean break” — and instead go on the offensive against its regional foes, with US backing.

What did that mean? Israel had to be helped to begin “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria”, observed the authors, and then “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”. The next stage would be to “wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran and Syria”.

Four years before A Clean Break, the neocons explained that the primary aim of US foreign policy in the Middle East was to “preserve US and western access to the region’s oil”. A close second was easing Israel’s path to ridding itself of the so-called “Palestinian problem”.

Later, in a document published in 2000 titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, they clarified that the US must ensure it retained “forward-based forces” in the Middle East to maintain military dominance there “given the longstanding American interests in the region”. Those interests primarily being, of course, oil.

The ultimate concern, the paper explained, was stopping China from developing closer ties to key oil states such as Iran.

The authors of these documents would soon be holding key positions in the George W Bush administration that took office in January 2001.

Ensconced in the Pentagon and State Department, they were only too ready to exploit 9/11 as the pretext to fast-track their pre-existing agenda, as Clark understood from the Pentagon memo.

Hezbollah’s presence in Syria.

Bloody Nose
Syria was viewed by the neocons and Israel as the lynchpin, the supply line, between Iran and Hezbollah, Tehran’s critically important military ally in Lebanon. Severing that link was a priority.

It was chiefly Hezbollah’s well-fortified and concealed positions in south Lebanon, as well as its large stockpile of rockets delivered by Iran, that kept Israel in check militarily.

Israel received an unexpected, bloody nose when it tried to reoccupy south Lebanon in 2006. It was forced to beat a hasty retreat within weeks. Israel also had to abandon plans to expand that same war into Syria — a failure that infuriated Washington’s neocons at the time.

Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal was also a brake on Israel’s ambitions to ethnically cleanse — or worse — the Palestinians from their lands in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as current events have demonstrated.

Ultimately, Israel realized there was no way to complete its genocide of Gaza without neutralizing Hezbollah and Syria, and containing Iran.

So how involved in practice was Washington in Assad’s fall?

There are plenty of clues marking the way.

After Israel’s 2006 failure, the US looked for a new route to reach the same destination. Operation Timber Sycamore was born in secret shortly after the Arab Spring erupted in 2011.

This covert military operation was designed to work in conjunction with an increasingly draconian sanctions regime to throttle the Syrian economy.

The CIA, supported by Britain’s MI6, began working in secret to topple Assad. Saudi Arabia was intimately involved too, presumably because of its deep ties to extreme jihadist groups across the region, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State, that would soon become central to the regime-change operation.

Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was clear about who was going to help. In an email in late 2012, as Timber Sycamore was being put together, he wrote to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to avoid any confusion about Washington’s allies: “AQ [al-Qaeda] are on our side in Syria.”

An email sent to Clinton earlier, in spring 2012, had laid out the emerging thinking in the State Department.

“US diplomats and Pentagon can start strengthening the opposition. It will take time,” the email asserted. “The payoff will be substantial.

“Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East… Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsors since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles.”

The chief beneficiary was clear too: “America can and should help them [Syrian rebels] — and by doing so help Israel.”

Building the Rebels
According to US officials, the CIA had trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters by summer 2015, at an annual cost of $100,000 per rebel.

Riyadh supplied yet more money and weapons, drawing in Islamist fighters and mercenaries from the wider region. Jordan hosted the training bases. The CIA and the Saudis jointly supplied the rebels with the intelligence needed to guide their operations in Syria.

Israel, which had long been lobbying Washington for such a covert programme against the Syrian government, took a leading role, too. It supplied weapons, and dropped thousands of bombs on Syrian infrastructure to keep Assad under pressure.

It supplied its own intelligence to the rebels and offered medical facilities to treat wounded fighters.

In 2012, Ehud Barak, then Israeli defense minister, explained Israel’s thinking to CNN: “The toppling down of Assad will be a major blow to the radical axis, major blow to Iran… and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.”

After the CIA operation finally came to light in 2016, Washington formally shut it down.

But the effectiveness of Operation Timber Sycamore had already been severely hampered by the Russian military entering Syria in late 2015, at Assad’s invitation.

Eventually the battlefronts hardened into stalemate.

‘We Love Israel’
Now, years later, the battle lines have suddenly come undone. As Washington envisioned 23 years ago, Assad is the latest Middle Eastern dictator not to Israel’s liking to be overthrown.

HTS is eager to reassure Washington that it poses no threat to Israel — or its continuing genocide in Gaza.

Interviews on Israeli TV showed rebel commanders praising Israel’s air strikes on Syria, citing them as among the factors in helping the rapid advances made by HTS.

Channel 12 interviewed an unnamed commander who also noted Israel’s ceasefire with Hezbollah had been critical to the timing of the HTS attack on Aleppo.

“We looked at the [ceasefire] agreement with Hezbollah and understood that this is the time to liberate our lands,” he said, adding: “We will not let Hezbollah fight in our areas and we will not let the Iranians take root there.”

In a separate interview with Israel’s Kan TV, a fighter said: “We love Israel and we were never its enemies.”

Both the US and Britain, caught by surprise by the speed of the rebels’ success, are scurrying to remove the $10m CIA bounty off Jolani’s head and take HTS off their terror lists.

Israel lost no time overrunning — and effectively annexing — swaths of Syrian territory to add to the areas of the Golan it seized in violation of international law in 1967. Contrast the West’s muted response to this Israeli invasion of Syria with the West’s outrage at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

At the same time Israel launched hundreds of air strikes across Syria, bombing the country’s military infrastructure to ensure the next government — if such a government ever emerges — will have no means to defend itself. Israel wants Syria as impotent and vulnerable as Palestine, where it is committing a genocide.

According to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is “changing the face of the Middle East.”

The Giant Chessboard
Rather than viewing the world in simplistic terms as a battle between good and evil — one in which the evil ones suddenly become good guys, if the BBC says so — analysts of international affairs have traditionally used a different framework.

They understand world affairs as taking place on a global, geostrategic chessboard, in which the great powers of the day try to checkmate their rivals, or avoid being checkmated.

Surprises happen, as they do in chess, when a player doesn’t foresee, or can’t evade, the next move of its opponent.

Syria, very obviously, is not a great power. It is a pawn. But a critically useful one, nonetheless. As critically useful as Ukraine. The battlefields may look separate, but they are, of course, on the same chessboard.

And the players — the US, Russia and China, and to a lesser extent Iran, Israel and Turkey — must each use these pawns wisely to advance their strategic goals.

Ordinary people have agency. But the job of great powers is to limit, tame, and recruit that agency to advance their own interests and damage the interests of rivals.

Israel is the big winner of this round. Syria emerges broken from its long years of a proxy civil war and western sanctions. Either it will collapse into further sectarian discord, consuming all its energies — Israel can readily meddle to inflame such tensions — or its new government will seek rehabilitation from the West. A peace accord with Israel would doubtless be the entry requirement.

With Syria removed from the “axis of resistance”, Hezbollah in Lebanon has been severed from Iran, leaving both Israel’s surviving, main regional foes isolated and weaker. And in the process, Israel has opened the way to completing its genocide of the Palestinian people undisturbed.

Turkey’s interests in Syria do not conflict with Israel’s or Washington’s. It wants to return to Syria the millions of refugees it currently hosts and to eliminate any base for Kurdish factions in Syria to ally with, and assist, its own Kurdish resistance groups.

Avoiding Checkmate
The losing side will now have to rethink their strategy.

Stripped of its Syrian ally, Russia is now more exposed on the chessboard. Unless it can win over the new government in Damascus, it risks losing its strategically important Mediterranean naval port at Tartus, on the Syrian coast.

Washington will be aggressively arm-twisting whoever leads Syria to force Russia out.

It was the threatened loss of its other warm-water naval port, on the Black Sea, at Sebastapol in Crimea — after Washington’s meddling to help overthrow Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly government in 2014 — that led to Russia annexing the peninsula.

It was Washington’s tearing up of missile treaties and the threat of Ukraine being recruited into NATO fold so that the West’s nuclear arsenal could be placed on Moscow’s doorstep that led to Russia’s invasion in 2022.

The events of the last few days in Syria underscore how much the western narrative about Russia’s actions being entirely “unprovoked” is self-serving rather than explanatory.

Nato is working behind the scenes to move its pieces. And so is Russia to avoid a checkmate.

In this “game”, there are no good guys. There are only power plays. And the US has far more pieces on the board: 750 military bases encircling the globe to impose by force a policy of “full-spectrum dominance”.

Russia’s new advanced missile systems, the hoped-for deterrence of its nuclear arsenal, its alliances of convenience with others threatened by the undeclared US empire — chiefly China and Iran — are its remaining strengths.

Iran, now isolated from allies in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, will have to think what other resources it can bring to the game. The voices calling for it to forego religious scruples and develop a nuclear weapon, to neutralize Israel’s existing arsenal, will grow much louder.

And, finally, China is only too aware that, in seeking to weaken and isolate Russia and Iran, the US is ultimately gunning for it. There can be no “full-spectrum global dominance” until China is cornered — until Washington can declare, “checkmate”.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.