Blame it all on the US
By Mark Christian, AMERICAN THINKER
What is to be made of the mess that is Syria? Does there exist a side with which America might prudently align? To decipher this puzzle, it’s important to recall a little of Syria’s history and how that history continues to shape its people.
Syria is a nation with a diverse collection of ethnicities and a multitude of religious affiliations. Its capital, Damascus, is the oldest still existing city in human history. Since 1970, when a coup led by then-family patriarch Hafez Assad brought them to power, the Assad family have enjoyed uninterrupted rule, despite repeated attempts to dislodge them.
The Assads are Alawites, a small minority sect of Shia Islam. Hafez Assad was the first Shiite head of state since the 11th century, and his ascension to power served as inspiration for the Shiite Iranian revolution less than a decade later.
Indeed, Assad sheltered Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini during part of his exile and, having become close friends, Assad provided logistical, political, and financial support to Khomeini during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
While Syria is 87 percent Muslim, Shias are a mere fraction of those at only 12 percent. President Bashar Assad belongs to a small minority in the country he rules, maintaining power through the support of fellow Shia adherents Iran and its terror proxy, Hezb’allah.
The Shias are natural enemies of the Sunnis, as the Sunnis consider themselves the only true Muslims. Today, the interests of the Sunnis are represented in large part by the Muslim Brotherhood, which believes in the return of the caliphate and total world domination by Sunni Islam. In their view, Shiites are infidels and apostates; hence, they must be killed. However, don’t feel too bad for the Shias; they feel just the same way toward the Sunnis.
There have been four bloody uprisings against the Assad regime between 1979 and 1982. All were prompted by the Muslim Brotherhood, resulting in nearly 60,000 Brotherhood adherents being massacred by the brother of Hafez Assad.
The Assads have much at stake when confronting the Brotherhood-aligned Sunnis. If they are defeated, the entire population of Alawites will most certainly be exterminated. Since the failed uprisings, both sides have shared a tense but relatively peaceful co-existence. That all changed in 2011 when the machinations of political outsiders once again transformed Syria into a powder keg.
The Muslim Brotherhood has spent decades grooming the United States to be an ally in helping it achieve dominance in the Middle East. Through the false narrative that they offer sound ideology, superior organization skills, and adequate numbers to maintain peace in the region, they have effectively duped the last four U.S. administrations into following their advice and implementing their suggested policies.
However, they found their huckleberry in Barack Obama. Under the leadership of the Obama White House and the Clinton State Department, working in concert with the Brotherhood, the Arab Spring was ignited, and one by one, nations fell – Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen. Each secular dictatorship was replaced with an Islamic dictatorship, as the Muslim Brotherhood began assembling the components of its long awaited caliphate.
The plan was moving along without a hitch – until Syria. Assad – backed by Russia and aided by his Shia allies – fought back, refusing a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the nation. The “rebels,” armed and funded by the Brotherhood and the United States, found themselves stymied in the face of a dictator willing to sacrifice the lives of vast numbers of his own people to retain power.
News coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings reported that leaders were being overthrown by a “spontaneous grassroots movement,” interested in establishing democratic rule. What was billed as spontaneous was in truth a carefully crafted plan known as the 21st Century Statecraft Project, developed by two Clinton State Department staffers, Jared Cohen and Alec Ross. Their project leveraged technology and social media to facilitate regime change.
In March 2011, Clinton’s State Department began posting information designed to mobilize youth and opposition parties in Syria, and Assad’s government began to wobble. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of the failed uprisings of the past, the Obama-Clinton cabal began arming the underground opposition (rebels), providing millions of dollars in weapons.
By September, the battle for Syria was spiraling out of control. Iran and Hezb’allah exposed the covert involvement of the United States in shipping arms through Benghazi, and President Obama sensed a growing potential for disaster but chose to double down on his gambit.
In October, he drew his “red line,” threatening full regime change in Syria, but gravely miscalculated Assad’s response. Never intending to back up his threat, Obama found himself hopelessly outmaneuvered and thoroughly embarrassed. Iran and Hezb’allah called on their ally Russia to come to their aid, and the Russians responded to the red line threat by officially entering the Syrian civil war.
By the time of President Trump’s election, Syria was in shambles. Seven years of civil war, the deaths of countless Syrians, and the destruction of many of their key cities posed a significant problem for the incoming administration, which had vowed to reverse the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
After years of feckless foreign policy, there remain few options for dealing with Syria. None of them is particularly good.
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