Bashar al-Assad

Peace isn’t exactly blossoming like rosebuds in the Middle East. The region is still host to a devastating civil war in Yemen, a humanitarian crisis in Syria, sporadic terrorist attacks in Iraq and an endless tit-for-tat between the US and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. Indeed, just last night, President Biden authorized several airstrikes against three militia locations in retaliation for a drone attack on an American base in Syria that killed one contractor and injured six others. But for an area of the world so often regarded as hopeless, the Middle East is suddenly looking like an epicenter of diplomacy.

Northwest Syria is one of the most wretched places on earth. The Syrian province of Idlib, straddling the border with Turkey, is a haven for the internally displaced and is in all practicality a state within a state. Throughout Syria’s twelve-year-long civil (and proxy) war, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has treated the area as a dumping ground for fighters who refuse to lay down their arms and civilians who want nothing to do with Assad family control. Idlib, representing 4 percent of Syria’s total land, is now host to 25 percent of its entire population. And that was before the earthquake hit. If Syria’s northwest was a gateway to misery before the tremors, it’s now a hellscape. Entire families have been wiped out. Buildings have been reduced to rubble.

There is a drug war brewing in the Middle East, and Syria is at its center. The country has been destroyed by its eleven-year civil war, and in the ruins of what was once a prosperous country, an entirely different economy now takes shape. It’s an economy of poverty and privation, where food and energy prices are perpetually high, and supplies of basic commodities are uncertain. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, now unlikely to be overthrown, has become the Middle East’s biggest moocher — a rent-seeking entity that begs for “reconstruction” funds from nearby monarchies to keep its own corrupt machinery in operation. Wartime brings its own economic calculations.

It was lucky for the New York Times and the Washington Post that they did not uncover the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate Scandal in this unhappy age. They would have found themselves mercilessly beset by ‘citizen journalists’ denouncing them as tools of the Soviet Kremlin or the Red Chinese. Perhaps the same self-appointed guardians of rectitude would also have gone through the past writings and sayings of the journalists involved, and found they were insufficiently loyal to the fashionable opinions of the time. It is a form of McCarthyism. And if you scoff at that, you have to ask yourself honestly if you would have recognized Joe McCarthy for what he was in his own time, or stood up to him, as so few actually did?

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I suspect the Third World War will begin with a claimed atrocity — probably the use of poison gas by a ‘regime’ against ‘its own people’. Such things are now the favorite way to make wars where there was peace. Border violations went out of fashion years ago. Invasions are illegal under the UN Charter. There are no Archdukes left to assassinate. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ will forever evoke hollow laughter. But democracy needs a popular pretext for war, and righteous mass outrage about the inhumanity of the enemy is almost invariably effective. This is why it is rather important that the people we trust to verify such claims are honest and trustworthy. For who will verify the verifiers?

The other evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson appeared to be on the point of literally tearing out his hair as he railed against the relentless and near-universal negative reaction to President Donald Trump’s decision to relocate a few hundred US troops in northeastern Syria. At first glance, it is indeed baffling, even perhaps hinting at a kind of mass psychosis. On the ground in Syria, after all, the fallout thus far has been anything but catastrophic. The Kurds are now protected by the Syrian and Russian armed forces. These countries’ leaders, on the back of US sanctions against Ankara, are negotiating a ceasefire with Turkey.

Donald Trump is the only peace president the United States has had since the end of the Cold War, and his enemies hate him for it. ‘Peace president’ is a relative term, of course, but as yet there is no Trump war comparable to George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War, Bill Clinton’s war against Yugoslavia, George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Barack Obama’s gruesome regime-change bungle in Libya. Instead, the most conspicuous foreign-policy achievement of the Trump administration to date is de-escalation on the Korean Peninsula, along with the stamping out of ISIS.