Middle East 201

The rekindling of the Syrian Civil War. Part I.

I was amazed and delighted when I saw how many readers took us up on our Black Friday special. Thank you so much—that made my week.

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The Plan

If you missed class last Sunday, here’s the plan.¹

In light of the dramatic news from Syria, we’re going to skip ahead of the reading we’d planned to do this week and focus, instead, on the Syrian Civil War.

I’d already written a short Note on the News² about these events, but I decided to integrate it into the week’s lesson plan, which I meant to finish and publish yesterday. Then a coup in South Korea threw me off schedule.

The Syrian Civil war isn’t something you can master by watching a single YouTube video, and I don’t want to drop a significant reading list on you mid-week. So what I propose is this: Let’s take two weeks and do this properly. Your reading list for this coming Sunday, therefore, is everything below. Please read all the linked articles.

I’ll send the full lesson plan—the one I meant to send today—on Friday. That will be your reading list for the following Sunday, which you’ll then have more than a week in advance. (I’d send it tomorrow, but my priority is putting out a full issue of Global Eyes. There’s so much rapidly moving, interconnected global news breaking right now—of huge significance—that I’d be remiss if I failed to draw everyone’s attention to it. Syria is one of the moving parts, and a very significant one.)

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I remember studying the Spanish Civil War as an undergraduate and feeling so overwhelmed by the number of acronyms that I decided my exam strategy would be to play the odds, skip the Spanish Civil War, and instead master every other topic that might come up on the Modern European History finals. To this day, I can tell you all about Béla Kun, but my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War remains limited to what I learned from reading Homage to Catalonia. I suspect many people feel this way now about the Syrian Civil War.

The conflict is fiendishly complex. Since 2011, rebels and insurgents in a bewildering array of of sects, ethnicities, and nationalities have formed and unformed an inexhaustible list of movements, parties, fronts, alliances, umbrella groups, militias, gangs, terrorist groups, and brigades. Most of these formations are denominated by an acronym. No small number of these groups have changed their names, some several times. Fighters have switched sides, or taken new noms de guerre. Many of these groups have been state-sponsored, the state sponsors probably numbering no less than a dozen. Turkey, Russia, Iran, the US, and the Gulf States, in particular, have all supported, to greater and lesser degrees, different groups, sides, and alliances, while Israel has watched from the sidelines in horror and drawn up plans for bombing whatever emerges.

The story involves Kurdish nationalism, Ottoman revanchism, Russia’s quest for warm-water ports, the United States’ desperate efforts to retreat from the region after touching off and only barely quelling an insurgency in Iraq, and Iran’s plans to achieve regional hegemony by building a land bridge to the Mediterranean and an overland supply route for its terrorist proxies. The conflict has turned Syria has been a flytrap for spies, adventure-seekers, jihadists, and warlords. Syria did not just implode, it exploded, the refugee exodus destabilizing not only Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, but Europe and the United States.

The growth of the obscene ISIS caliphate ensured that American fantasies of leaving the region and pivoting to Asia would be short-lived. It exposed the United Nations, the United States, and the “rules-based international order” as—serially—impotent, feckless, and non-existent in the face of industrial rape and torture, cruelty beyond words, mass slaughter, and genocide.

The war has been Russia’s testing ground, not only for its new weapons systems, but for its new-generation disinformation techniques. The lies and propaganda Russia sowed are sunk so deep into our information ecosystem that they still impregnate everything. Some otherwise competent journalists lost their heads, allowing themselves to be suckered by Russian fairy tales. Others lost their heads, literally. Russia has hardly been the only one spreading lies and propaganda: Every party to the war has done so. No one knows how many have died. Official estimates suggest the number is about 650,000. I have Syrian friends who believe the real number is probably closer to a million, and I expect they’re right.

So if you find the news from Syria confusing, it is no surprise. Ideally, we’d take this from the beginning, and only then would we read the past week’s news. But the down side of making up the schedule on the fly is that it’s not perfectly logical. Just do your best with it this week. It will come into clearer focus next week.

Even if you don’t mean to join us in Sunday’s class, I think you’ll find the complete chronology and the reading I’ll send on Friday helpful. It’s worth understanding what happened in Syria, because there’s no way to understand where we find ourselves now without understanding it.

Nicolas Tenzer

has written about this more clearly than anyone else:

A strategic disaster that no government seems to have understood:

I am not going to recall here the balance sheet, still provisional, of the war in Syria: probably more than a million dead, of which more than 90 percent civilian deaths can be attributed to the Assad regime, crimes of humanity that still persist in the prisons where more than 100,000 people remain detained and where torture and summary executions are the rule, about 12 million displaced people, half of them outside the country, Russian war crimes, still, which have caused more civilian victims than even those of IS,³ a destroyed country under the rule of a predatory mafia and a testing ground for new Russian weapons, but also for propaganda, first of all from the Kremlin, which is probably the most repugnant ever—and sometimes murderous.

If—let us never forget this obvious fact—the most abominable consequences are for the Syrian people, the international system has been critically affected. This was, moreover, one of the blinding intentions of one of the parties involved: Putin’s regime. Tragically bogged down in their lack of understanding, most Western leaders have still not understood this.

Please read that article in full, and please also read this one, which he wrote in French, so I’ve translated it for you. (I’ve shortened it somewhat). Note that he wrote it in 2016. He was all too prescient, and painfully right.

The Russian war in Syria changes the global order and the face of the 21st century:

When does the 21st century begin? The academic debate seems pointless, and, as Zhou Enlai might have said—paraphrasing his response on the effects of the French Revolution—we will not know until after 2400! However, for those who contemplate the ruptures that mark changes from one era to the next, the Russian war in Syria—because that is primarily what it is—ushers in a new era in international relations. It plunges us into a new global reality. …

Russia’s intervention in Syria marks the most comprehensive strategic turning point, one that to our collective misfortune, the world's leaders have yet to fully grasp.

It entails four profound changes for the decades to come:

1. The return of overt warfare by a great power: This is an openly declared war, conducted according to that power’s own war plans, with the primary aim of dominating a region. This is unprecedented since World War II. This is no longer merely a case of supporting a criminal regime, as it might have been before Russia’s intervention in 2015, but an operation planned, in its most significant aspects, in Moscow, not Damascus. To be sure, Russia’s assertiveness through brute force began in Ukraine two years before, when for the first time since Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, a major European state invaded and annexed part of another, causing over 10,000 deaths and more than a million displaced. But the Kremlin initially sought to obscure its actions in Ukraine by cloaking its annexation of Crimea in far-fetched historical justifications, and it attempted to legitimize them through a referendum, albeit one both flawed and rigged. It is no coincidence that, two months ago, Putin undertook the intervention in the Donbass—an extension of the war in Ukraine. The withdrawal of Russia’s signature from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, though legally inconsequential, is the symbolic crescendo in this evolution. Putin now feels free to act without providing so much as a pretense of a justification. Open warfare has returned.

2. Widespread war crimes by a major power: Russia, the world’s second-largest nuclear power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is openly committing mass-scale war crimes. After using its veto six times (four times in tandem with China) to block all condemnation of the genocidal regime it supports, Russia has crossed a new red line, no longer merely complicit in crime, but directly perpetrating it. The deliberate and systematic targeting of civilians by a great power on such a scale is unprecedented since Nazi Germany.

3. The lack of meaningful opposition: Russia’s war faces no serious opposition, particularly not from the United States, the only military power capable of countering it, nor from Europe. … Thus we enter an era in which the weak—a Russia destined to economic and demographic decline—dominates the strong—the United States. The decay of American power under Obama, likely to continue in a different way with Trump, not only turned Putin into a superman admired by dictators and populists, but made Russia the paradoxical winner of recent world conflicts, even if it is destined, both now and in the long term, to impoverishment. This marks the definitive death of what was once called the balance of the powers.

4. The near-collapse of the UN as a political organization: This war signals the near-death of the UN. While organizations can sometimes survive despite losing their raison d’être, the hope for peace that underpinned the UN has been shattered. The idea of the rule of law has become laughable, and the ideals of liberty, justice, and truth—once thought destined to triumph—are being systematically undermined. The diplomatic theater at the UN has become the gravedigger of postwar ideals.

This strategic shift in Russian policy suggests a future order we may face for decades. Free powers must respond accordingly. If the United States and liberal powers in Europe and Asia do not counter this trend, dark days lie ahead, and the weakest will suffer first. By contagion, this breakdown of norms and the insecurity tied to the rise of anti-liberal forces may become the reality for democratic states.

The first consequence is that we will, increasingly, have to bypass international organizations for peacekeeping operations. This prediction, which I made six years ago, is now becoming reality: Russia’s deliberate sabotage of the international order will necessitate interventions by free powers outside the UN framework.

The second consequence is diplomatic. Negotiations, the traditional foundation of international relations, have no meaning with Russia. Discussions were more serious during the Cold War than they are today. The only justifiable area for negotiation now concerns preventing nuclear accidents. The old doctrine of containment—and even rollback, in places like Ukraine, Syria, and Georgia—must be revisited and adapted. As regrettable and risky as it is, power politics has returned as the norm in international relations.

Finally, the question of values has reemerged as central to the global order. This is no longer a battle against a monolithic ideological system but against an array of illiberal tendencies that oppose freedom, law, and human rights. Combating them requires a renewed commitment to promoting liberty and justice, both domestically and internationally.

Unless we meet this challenge, the 21st century will be an era of unprecedented dangers.

We have entered dark times again. It is urgent to act before the night completely envelops us.

Again, he wrote that in 2016.

Yes, the Syrian civil war is where this century begins. Like the Spanish civil war, anyone who cared to look could grasp its meaning: It signified the violent death of an international order. It was both a prologue and a preview.

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As always, begin with the map.

➪➪ Acquaint yourself with this live map and consult it frequently. It’s an amazingly useful way to visualize the conflict and the best way to stay abreast of what’s happening.

The still maps, below, were accurate a few days ago, but they’ve already changed. Make a mental note of the names and rough locations of all the cities below, because they’ll come up again and again.