Nobody really knows what will come out of the current confusion in Syria. It could be years of struggle between rival Islamist and secular groups. Or a smooth, or bumpy, transition to a Western-style democracy. Or some kind of moderate, Turkish-style Muslim Brotherhood rule.
Outside powers will try to tug or coax the country in one direction or another. There could be chaos, or stability.
All of that will matter hugely to Syrians on the ground. But strategically, it doesn’t much matter: the seismic change is already there. Things will never be the same.
When I arrived in Beirut very nearly 50 years ago, Syria was like a huge, impregnable castle, ruled with an iron fist by Hafez al-Assad. He relied on a raft of competing Mukhabarat intelligence agencies, each more ruthless than the next, and backed by a powerful military.
In 1980, he did the unthinkable. He stretched a hand out to revolutionary, non-Arab Iran and struck an alliance with Tehran in its eight-year war with Arab Iraq, because they both hated their mutual neighbour Saddam Hussein.
For decades that Tehran-Damascus axis was the only fixed element in the region’s shifting political sands. It was crucial to the creation of Hezbollah to hit back at Israel and the U.S. after the invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut in 1982.
When the Syrian castle began to crack after 2011 and Hafez’s son Bashar was in imminent danger, it was Iran and Hezbollah – and the Russians – who sprang to his rescue.
It worked for a while, up to a point. But ultimately the axis failed. After Gaza, Hezbollah was decapitated and filleted by the Israelis in Lebanon, Iran cowed and isolated, while Russia was being bled white in Ukraine. It only needed a kick from the rebels to bring Assad’s flimsy cardboard citadel tumbling down.
Now the Israelis are systematically destroying any chance that Syria will again be a military power. Its navy, air force and any serious military assets have been taken out by the most intensive airstrikes Israel has ever mounted. Syria is thoroughly defanged.
And so Syria, the dawlat al-mumana’a – the State of Resistance, or defiance of Israel – is forever gone. Even if that resistance was largely fictional. Also broken is the Axis of Resistance that linked Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as distant Yemen, in a ‘Shia Crescent’ made possible because the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed the major obstacle to its formation – Saddam Hussein.
Iran will no longer be able to pump arms and money through Syria to Hezbollah, which survives in Lebanon as a shadow of its former self.
“This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s main supporters,” crowed Israeli PM Netanyahu. With full U.S. support for this restructuring of the region’s architecture (with probably more to come when Trump is back in the White House), the Israelis roam the skies unchallenged. Only Iran and Yemen remain. And for how long?
While most Syrians celebrate the demise of the hated, bloodstained dictator, the Palestinians are left even more alone, at the mercy of the region’s masters, and their American enabler, as never before.
