The era of Assad is over. Turkish-aligned Syrian rebels, first coming out of a small pocket in Idlib, captured Aleppo before driving south without being stopped. At the same time, rebels that had gone to ground in the south rose up and seized Damascus. What seemed like a permanent stasis only two years ago has sprung to life. Historical change is occurring minute-by-minute. In Syria, the old view of the world cannot be restored. Chateaubriand would tell us that the world before these last two weeks is one we cannot return to having lived through these historic events.
Is the collapse of the Assad regime equal in scale to the great French Revolution of 1789? No. It has, however, destroyed how we ought to see the world. The late Andrew (Weeks) liked to think in terms of political generations and the events that defined them. For him, it was 1968 and the Vietnam War, for a friend of his, it was the Euromissile Crisis of the early 1980s. For a generation of many of us on this blog—of which I include myself—it was the Syrian Civil War that was fundamental to our political development. For those of us who went from a left-liberal fascination with world affairs to a socialist rejection of American hegemony, the Syrian specter was our window to understanding the world. The war was a quasi-permanent feature of our geopolitical understanding of the world. I was just 13 when the war broke out, just as I arrived at a political consciousness. As long as I have thought about the world there has been the Syrian Civil War. The stasis created by the war’s most recent ceasefire in 2020 was symbolic of the political stasis created by COVID. The war provided a framework around which the world could be understood: continuity’s victory over change. The collapse of Assad shatters the whole edifice.
Returning to Chateaubriand, the connections to the French Revolution are important. Starting with two distant events: the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Biden administration’s push toward a Saudi-Israel normalization deal. The failure of the Russian coup de main and Zelenskyy/NATO’s refusals to negotiate damned the federation’s long-term position in Syria; a hot war on the border is much more important than a proxy war in another region. The Biden administration’s push towards a second “Abraham Accords” between the Saudis and Israel led to October 7 (Al-Aqsa Flood), Israel’s reaction to the attack was met with the Islamic Republic of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” including Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, various Iraqi militias and the Assad regime in Syria, the latter providing the perfect logistics hub for strikes against Israel. Although presented to the public as a great anti-imperialist force the “Axis of Resistance” must go down in revolutionary history as a failure comparable to Stalin’s introduction of Socialism in One Country. Iran, cowed by airstrikes and imperial threats refused to retaliate. Hezbollah, blamed by the Lebanese public for bringing Israeli airstrikes to the country, agreed to a ceasefire, divorcing their fight from the struggle against genocide in Gaza. With Assad’s two benefactors focused elsewhere, the Turkish-backed Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched what we now know was the final push against his regime.
Events lead to events. The American War of Independence led to a financial crisis in the Kingdom of France. That financial crisis led to angry parlements who then refused to ratify royal decrees. Louis XVI, faced with a growing political crisis was forced to call the Estates General eventually leading to the French Revolution of 1789. Events facilitate events. Without the geostrategic miscalculation of the decade and without a Democratic obsession with beating Trump at his own game Assad stands.
The permanent partition of Syria was the logical outcome of that previous balance of powers. What is obvious in hindsight is that it was not permanent. Having lived through an (Islamic) revolutionary moment we are forced to see that the world has changed. But we cannot go back to the way things were because a historical event has now occurred. Change is in the air, the stasis has been broken.
What happens now in Syria? I have heard it argued that the war will continue, and while I concede that this is highly likely, it is not guaranteed. Change is in the air, the common enemy of all rebel groups, Assad, is now gone. I will propose two possibilities for the coming weeks. The first is a violent end to the war. Turkey, HTS, and rebel groups who see the writing on the wall will advance into Rojava and crush the Kurdish experiment. This seems likely since the Turkish government has already begun to make small advances in Rojava. But Syrians, like so many revolutionary subjects before them, are flush with the possibilities of the current moment, making a second possibility clear to those who are willing to look: a constitutional convention. While a convention is unlikely and can easily lead to renewed civil war (look no further than Libya on this point) it cannot be discounted. We are now living through a moment where minds can be changed, and possibilities (both positive and negative) are everywhere.
This must all be said with a major caveat: I will not concede that these changes will be inherently positive or progressive, the fact that the Taliban is celebrating an Islamist conquest of a secular government is telling. We must also note that Baathism has now been fully consigned to history and it is the historian’s job to make the final tally of the region’s last great ideological movement. Islamic fundamentalism—religious fundamentalism more generally in the cases of Lebanon and Israel—has proven itself to be the ideology of this moment as Communism was for the 1920s, Fascism for the 1930s, and social democracy for the 1950s and 60s.
What is left, at least for those of us who have only lived with Syria in the background these last thirteen years, is to acknowledge the obvious: a historical event has just occurred. The stasis has been broken. We must not attempt to fold these previous weeks’ events into a comfortable narrative into which they do not fit. The world has changed in ways we could not imagine a few weeks ago. We must, like Chateaubriand, come to terms with this new reality and understand the world as it now exists.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 