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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   30780 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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What’s the steelman for why the US historically was against Assad?

Geopolitical strategy. The US has Israel and Saudi Arabia as it's dominant regional allies.

Supporting the Sunni rebels is popular with Saudi Arabia, both it's government and it's people.

Syria was USSR aligned during the cold war and kept up Russian connections after.

The Ba'ath parties that ruled Syria and Iraq started out as the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which wanted to set up a Soviet aligned mega state in the Middle East. That didn't pan out.

Basically Syria has always ended up on the other side of US alliances in the Middle East.

Divide and conquer. The US has a long history of supporting jihadists and trying to undermine stable states in the region. The Iraq war wasn't nation building, it was nation wrecking. The goal was to turn the middle east into a buch of small clan structures consistently stuck in internal fighting. Assad provided a stable state which was difficult to dominate. Now we get the destruction of christian culture in the region and a flood of migrant to Europe.

That isn’t a steelman. That’s basically “the US is dumb” which I agree but trying to see the other side.

Assad was an enemy of Israel and the Gulf Arabs, and a friend of Iran. The US is an ally of Israel and the Gulf Arabs, and an enemy of Iran.

[edited to past tense. Welcome to the dustbin of history, Assad]

Perhaps but in a material way? Is he really worse compared to the new regime?

Is he really worse compared to the new regime?

In the limited way relevant to US interests, very much so. In the language of the Cold War, Assad is their son-of-a-bitch, whereas the factions taking over are our sons of bitches. (I do not claim that the new regime is better than Assad for the civilian population of Syria, although it could be).

  • The Syrian Free army (now controls northern Damascus) is an actual US client group, which allows the US to use the territory it controls to spy on Iran and launch airstrikes against ISIS.
  • The Southern Operations Room (now controls southern Damascus) is a coalition of militias which worked with various western and Gulf Arab countries until we stopped throwing good money after bad and decided (wrongly, as it turned out) that Assad had beaten them.
  • HTS (controls Aleppo, Homs and Hama) is a coalition of jihadi groups some, but not all, of which used to be affiliated to Al-Quaeda. They have been co-operating very closely with Turkish-backed secular groups to the point where they can probably be considered as part of the Turkish client faction. Turkey is, of course, a NATO member and western ally.

I think they have a lot of faith in democracy solving problems, and the new state more accurately reflects the makeup of the people.

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