The fall of the Asad regime in Syria is very good news for many reasons, some strategic, some moral. But the best reason, unfortunately, is likely to be squandered: the chance to build a new Syrian political order with the participation of Syria’s neighbors—especially its Arab neighbors—for the lasting benefit of the Syrian people. In the best of all worlds, or even in a merely ok world, with a bit of American leadership and European cooperation (especially from France), this is very theoretically possible.
Alas, we do not live in such a world right now. At the moment we have an elderly lame duck American President whose senior policymaking entourage has only about six weeks left in office, and we await the moment next month when we will have instead a diplomatically clueless and risk-averse American president with a cabinet likely composed or greater and lesser clowns and policy klutzes. France, just to note, doesn’t even have a government at the moment.
What might genuinely bold leadership do with regard to Syria, if such genuinely bold leadership existed? Well, some years ago, as COVID-19 was burgeoning among the refugee population of Syria in Idlib province, on Syria’s border with Turkey, I suggested a way to accomplish several benign near-term outcomes at once: topple Syria’s heinous and refugee-producing regime by dint of U.S.-coordinated and Saudi/UAE financed Turkish-Israeli military action; bring medical and humanitarian aid to the distraught refugee population the regime had created in the extended wake of the wildly misnamed Arab Spring; and staunch the flow of refugees and COVID into Turkey and from there into Germany and the rest of Europe.[1]
According to my plan, work would then turn to reconstituting Syria’s broken politics by convening a constitutional convention in Damascus presided over by the Kings: the two big kings, of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and the little kings of Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. These kings would lend pan-Arab legitimacy and support for whatever outcomes the Syrian communities in conclave would decide, and their presence would precede generous aid to rebuild the shattered infrastructure and lives of the Syrian nation. In that context, too, I argued, a chance for Israeli-Syrian peace might be rekindled with broad regional support. At the summit in Damascus, as I saw it, there would be speeches, parades, and pageantry aplenty—but on the stage there would be no Turks, Americans, Europeans, Russians, or certainly any Iranians. Only Arabs.
This was my glorious dream, the set decorated in my mind’s eye just after the day when T.E. Lawrence arrived in Damascus in 1919 nearly side by side with General Edmund Allenby and the Hashemite Prince Feisal—soon briefly to become King Feisal of Syria…before the French army almost exactly 104 years ago destroyed his royal Hashemite government aborning and sent him in due course, with British assistance, to become King of Iraq. (What, young reader? You did not know this?! So you have much remedial history work to do.)
And why not? After the fall of the Ottoman Empire new projects became possible; for better or for worse—we still debate this—those projects formed the modern Middle East. Now, with the fall of the Asad regime, new projects on a smaller scale are possible. All it takes is able and foresightful leadership in the United States, Turkey, Israel, and some of the Arab countries…..and so you immediately see the problem here. But I will continue anyway, so that no one will be able to honestly say that constructive ideas suited to the current challenge before us, rather the current opportunity before us, did not exist.
* * *
My basic idea, reformulated from March 2020 to December 2024, now requires no Turkish-Israeli military action to get rid of the Syrian Ba’ath and its monstrous Alawi overlords. My March 2020 proposal assumed the corrupted and narcotics-addled rottenness of the Syrian regime and military, and so projected an easy and quick military operation as these things go; now Ahmed as-Sharaa (aka Abu Muhammed al-Julani) et al. have proved my assumption to have been justified.
But Syrian politics today is like an old agricultural machine left to rust in a dank garage for fifty years. The rebels have managed to find the machine, and with effort have been able to jump-start the engine. But none of the levers, gaskets, wheels, and blades are in working order. New replacement parts must be acquired from somewhere, and skilled mechanics need to clean and reassemble the machine, perhaps with some new attachments, to get it working properly again. Here is where the U.S. Government and Syria’s neighbors—especially the Arab Kings—could play a major role.
Radical Islamic groups, particularly the main one, Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham (HTS—Movement for the Liberation of the Levant), formerly al-Nusra, are but a fraction of the rebel coalition, albeit in the forefront today. Julani knows, too, that his way of thinking about politics represents at most 5 percent of adult Syrians, and so he realizes that in a far more modern society like Syria he cannot do what the Taliban have done in a place like Afghanistan: He cannot rule a nation of more than 22 million people—the most confessionally heterogeneous of all the Arab countries, not to mention its Kurdish and Armenian communities[2]—without massive coercion, repression, and internal terror, the resources for which are far beyond Julani’s small HTS faction.
And he has no potential Iranians or Russians to help him do any such thing; no one on this planet exists who will help him do any such thing, even if his claims to have broken with al-Qaeda as long ago as 2016 turn out to be not true. That is likely why Julani has been trying to rebrand himself as a moderate in recent days and weeks; he has even reportedly reached out to Israel to help in the reconstruction of the country. And that is also why the residue senior personnel of the Asad regime still in Damascus proclaimed yesterday that they will work with the rebels. They realize that the rebel coalition lacks the ability to govern Syria and so it needs them (and, anyway, what practical alternatives do most of them have under the circumstances?).
But work toward what end goal? That is unclear, and it will take time after a half century of stultifying Alawi frosting to work out. In the meantime, with the Syrian Army melted away and the rebels too small a force to keep order in as vast a place as Syria, a multinational Arab force, blessed insofar as possibly by the Arab League, should assemble in Jordan and make its way into the four main urban centers of the country running on a south-north axis: Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo. From there the force will move also west to the Mediterranean coast and east into the desert to secure Syria’s borders. The Kings should finance it, and the Egyptians, Moroccans, Jordanians, and perhaps some others should man it.
Of course, whatever passes for an interim Syrian authority would have to invite such a force into the country. Pride will contend against it, but necessity is likely under the circumstances to win out anyway. A high priority for this force would be to find, secure, and put an end one way or another to the chemical weapons stocks assembled over the years by the Asad regime.[3]
Once order is established and the preparations for a constitutional convention are underway, the rebuilding of Syrian military and police forces must commence, for the multinational Arab force is meant to be only temporary. On the day the new constitution is ratified and an election date set, that multinational Arab force should be collecting its gear and preparing to leave the country.
Within one year after elections are held and a new government is installed, the Syrian and Israeli governments should begin negotiations to establish a peace treaty. As part of those negotiations, or as a follow-on to their successful conclusion, the two sides may give consideration to the possibility of eventual voluntary resettlement of some Gazans to Syria. Only in the context of a peace agreement and a significant shift in attitudes is such a possibility even imaginable. It is not imaginable yet today. Clearly, even voluntary resettlement is a bitter concept, but it may prove in the end to be the least distasteful of all the other practicable options.
Even without the prospect of an Israeli-Syrian peace, the rest of the plan still makes eminent good sense. Without support from its neighbors, backed by the United States, it is hard to see a route from the current natural chaos in the wake of the fall of a tyranny 50 years in the making to a stable and possibly even democratic new political order in Syria.
The Syrian people might get there on their own, but then again the record of the country’s post-1943 independence-period history is not hopeful in that regard. That is why U.S. failure to act now to devise a plan to bring about a stable and legitimate order in Syria will leave open the danger of further violence, division, and civil war that could and probably will again plague the entire region with massive refugee flows and terrorism. Of course we will seek to re-open the U.S. Embassy in Damascus; we will quickly get rid of the sanctions aimed at the Asad regime; we will redeploy some intelligence gathering assets; we will do several other normal and sensible things—and that will not be nearly enough.
Were we to act boldly we would have help. All of Syria’s neighbors, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan perhaps most acutely (more than a million Syrian refugees are already in Jordan; both they and their hosts are deeply unhappy about it, too), as well as those concerned with the international security commons as a whole (us, one would think), have a strong self-regarding interest in preventing the return of Syria to the status of “sick man of the Levant.”
All that considered, one would think that a plan of this general design would be a no-brainer to conceive, even if of course it would be a challenge to implement. (In Syria it is a challenge to implement anything, even garbage collection.) Alas, “no-brains” exactly seems to be the main impediment to assembling this or any other plan properly sized to suit the current situation. Who can tell me why this is so?
[1] See my “What To Do About Idlib,” Foreign Policy Research Institute Analysis, March 13, 2020.
[2] For some details, you may consult my “The Forces Behind Syrian Politics,” Middle East Review, Fall 1984.
[3] For the ignominious history of U.S. involvement here in the Obama era, for those with either strong stomachs or maudlin dispositions, see my: “Syrian Lies, and An Iranian Surmise,” The American Interest, May 13, 2015; “Meanwhile, in Syria…..,” The American Interest, March 8, 2016; “Russian Motives in Syria and the Implications for US Policy,” in The Kremlin’s Actions in Syria: Origins, Timing, and Prospects, John Herbst, ed. Washington: Atlantic Council, Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, March 2016; “The Chemistry of Syrian Lies and U.S. Credulity Revealed,” The American Interest, October 31, 2016; “The Trouble with Optimism: Syria in the Rear-View Mirror,” FPRI E-Note, February 16, 2018; “The Syria Weapons Portfolio Thickens,” The American Interest, March 1, 2018; and ;“The Meaning of ‘Hard’ in Syria,” The American Interest, April 17, 2018.