Anatol Lieven: The real goal of the US and Israel was to weaken or destroy Arab states

The US has given the Syrian jihadists a free pass. We remember Jake Sullivan's report that al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria, says British professor Anatol Lieven.

Anatol Lieven. Foto: Dmitry Feoktistov / TASS / Profimedia

On Sunday 8^th December the Syrian Ba'ath regime – led by the Assad family since 1971 – collapsed, as an army of Syrian rebel groups – in an offensive launched a mere 10 days earlier near the Turkish border – entered the capital Damascus, encountering no resistance from the Syrian army. Rumours that President Bashar al-Assad had flown to safety in Moscow, where his family had already been relocated, were later confirmed. The rebellion was organised and funded by the Turkish government and spearheaded by Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as al-Nusra, a Sunni Islamist group with roots in al-Qaeda and ISIS. Although the US State Department has designated HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani a terrorist, and still offers (at the time of writing) a 10 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture, Western governments and media have reacted with jubilation at his successful toppling of the regime.

Many, however, are sceptical. Despite the fact that al-Jolani in recent years has distanced himself from al-Qaeda and ISIS, and made efforts to reform his image in the West, voices from within the rebel factions are still loudly proclaiming jihadist sentiments, and reprisals against Syrian opponents have already been reported. A typical refrain among Western leaders is: al-Jolani is saying the right things now, but we'll have to watch and see what he does. Everyone seems to agree that whatever the new regime does, the Syrians themselves face a radically uncertain future – with a devastated economy, virtually all of Syria's military infrastructure now destroyed by Israeli air strikes immediately following the coup, and a strong potential for sectarian violence between the various factions and foreign powers now in control of swathes of Syrian territory.

The impact of all this on the wider region and the foreign actors involved seems equally hard to predict. In the very complicated scenario which has emerged, a number of state and non-state actors are currently being seen as winners or losers in this momentous development. Turkey, Israel and the United States are seen as the main winners, at least in the short term – while Iran, Hezbollah, and to a lesser extent Russia are seen as the losers. Turkey's traditional enemies, the Kurds in Syria's north-east, have also seemingly been placed in an ambivalent position, with Turkey gaining the upper hand and the Kurds' long-term US support somewhat in question.

In order to gain a bit more clarity as to how all this came about, what's happening now, and what the future might hold for Syria and the larger region, we spoke with Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he's recently published this piece. Formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London, Lieven has also served on the advisory committee of the South Asia Department of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and on the academic board of the Valdai discussion club in Russia. For well over a decade he worked as a journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and covered the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and the southern Caucasus. He also worked for some years at think tanks in Washington DC and is the author of numerous books, including The Baltic Revolutions: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (1993), Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power? (1998), and Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry (1999). His book Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011) is on the official reading lists for US and British diplomats serving in that country.

A lot of people in the West are celebrating the fall of Assad, even though it means Syria has been taken over by an Islamist group, HTS, with ties to al-Qaeda and ISIS. Up until now Syria, for all its faults, has been a somewhat multicultural country with lots of Christian and Shia minority communities, who are now under threat. It's being claimed that HTS's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has reformed and wants peaceful relations with these communities and with Syria's neighbours, including Israel. How realistic is it to expect that he'll be willing and able to deliver on that?

It's possible that he himself may be willing. He certainly ''talks the talk'' from that point of view. But whether he can or will control his followers is a very different matter. There have already been reports of revenge killings. And that is indeed to be expected after the fall of a regime as brutal as that of the Ba'ath in Syria. But of course, precisely because the Assad regime was an Alawite regime, and also depended heavily on Christian support, the revenge killings will be concentrated on those communities. And all the evidence is that, understandably, they are very nervous indeed.

It seems some of them are already leaving the country.

Yes.

There are reports that Assad likely saw this coming months ago. And we know that Syria was in very bad shape economically. What do you think were the factors that led to his being essentially too weak to resist the rebellion when it came?

Well, three things, really. One is obviously the civil war and the American sanctions, which crippled the Syrian economy. Then there was the Kurdish – and therefore de facto American – control of Syria's oil and gas reserves in eastern Syria, which both deprived the government of revenue and deprived it of energy. You had colossal power cuts. And so he couldn't pay his soldiers – we see accounts of officers earning eight dollars a month, generals earning twenty dollars a month. And then, of course, at first he had two great international backers – one being Russia, and the other being Iran via Hezbollah. Well, since the Ukraine war, Russia's capacity to reinforce Syria has diminished hugely. Russia just does not have the troops to do that. And of course, in recent months Israel has really crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon, and greatly damaged Iran. So Iran was no longer in a position to give critical aid. And so, yes, I would imagine that certainly for some months previously, not just Assad but clearly a great many of the regime's ordinary soldiers and officers realized that it was game over.

Yet most people were surprised by it. Is this sort of sudden collapse unusual?

Well, in many ways it was very much like the surprisingly rapid collapse of the American-backed regime in Afghanistan. It was slightly different there, perhaps – because there the Taliban had been doing deals for years with regime soldiers and units to prepare the way for surrender, and I don't know how much of that there was in Syria. I mean, undoubtedly in the immediate run-up to the collapse there were many local deals. But yes, a state as poor as Syria, which had then become as isolated as Syria, was not going to be able to survive in the face of a really determined putsch – and a determined putsch strongly backed by Turkey. It's not as if the HTS rebels were doing this on their own.

I want to get to Turkey, but first I want to ask about the US and Israel, because they apparently also had some hand in this. Netanyahu has openly taken credit, and of course everybody in the West seems to be very happy about it. How involved do you think the US and/or Israel were in this whole operation, particularly in terms of direct or indirect support for the various al-Qaeda and ISIS-type groups involved?

Well previously, through the operation called Timber Sycamore, US administrations had done a great deal to arm the Syrian opposition – although that appears to have gone down in recent years, because the groups that were being directly armed by the Americans were very ineffective. But clearly a lot of the arms that America provided did find their way into the hands of al-Jolani's people. So clearly, America either allowed this to happen or facilitated it. Obviously, critical to that was the fact that al-Jolani publicly broke with al-Qaeda and ISIS. And of course there was that memo by Jake Sullivan, which has been widely quoted, saying that now, objectively speaking, al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.

And the Israelis?

I haven't heard that the Israelis were directly involved in funding or supplying HTS, but clearly what the Israelis did was to destroy Hezbollah and cripple Iran. So indirectly they were absolutely essential – as was also the US, as I say, through sanctioning Syria and depriving the Syrian state of revenue. It should be said, however, that at the same time, Israel – as usual with full American backing – has now set out to destroy, through air strikes and missile strikes, all the Syrian military equipment that it can possibly target, precisely because it doesn't want it to fall into the hands of HTS. And the other point to keep in mind is that Muslim populations in Europe are boiling with rage about what has happened to the Palestinians, at the hands of Israel and its Western backers. It would be very surprising if this doesn't lead to a new wave of terrorism at some stage.

In Europe?

In Europe, yes. And it will be, not necessarily organized by ISIS – because that's not really how this works anymore – but certainly linked to ISIS, and ISIS will take responsibility. And then you will have Europeans once again – I mean, as in Afghanistan – beginning to say: Oh dear – Syria under the Assads was not carrying out terrorism against us, nor was Iran! – Once again, we appear to have backed the wrong horse. So it's striking from that point of view as well.

You'd think they would have seen that coming.

Well it's a sign, I think, of how security establishments find it very difficult to concentrate on more than one enemy at a time – partly for political reasons and political direction from above, but also from lack of money. The leader of the British domestic security service, MI5, has just announced that basically they have to concentrate on Russia. And on deterring Russian attacks on Britain – which so far, with small exceptions, remain only a potential threat, not an actuality – and at the expense, he has openly said, of combating terrorism. Which has certainly killed hundreds of British people over the years. Well, if there is another major terrorist attack in Britain, there will certainly be questions asked about that – about priorities. And then, of course, the result will be that the security services will get a lot more money.

Was some of this in Syria, from the American point of view, part of a wider effort to further weaken and overextend Russia?

Yes, that was part of it. And the pathological, entrenched hatred of Iran in the US establishment is part of it. And of course, the Israel lobby in the US and its particular focus on Iran were all part of it. And it must be said that in the short term, from the point of view of these objectives, it has worked. But of course, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and then the Soviet Union collapsed, Western support for the Afghan Mujahideen looked as if it had been a magnificent success. It didn't quite look that way after 9/11.

A lot of people have talked about this being part of a long-term project undertaken by Israel and supported by American ''neocons'', with the goal of remaking the Middle East into a region more Israel-friendly, or at least more tolerant of Israel's presence there. Most recently I heard Jeffrey Sachs talk about this, pointing out that Netanyahu wrote about it way back in the 1990s, and was more or less claiming victory a few days ago as the culmination of that plan. How do you see this?

Well, yes, except that I've never been sure how many of the neocons really believed that what they were supporting was going to make the Middle East ''Israel-friendly''. Because clearly, the real point was just to weaken or even destroy Arab states. Which is what has now happened. Certainly Iraq, for example, is not friendly to Israel, but it is so weak and divided that it cannot threaten Israel in any way. And of course, the Kurds in Iraq control a large chunk of Iraq's energy infrastructure. The new Syrian government will not be friendly to Israel, given its ideology. But it will be confronting such a mass of challenges of every kind, that there will be nothing it can do to threaten Israel. Hezbollah has been defeated in Lebanon and now driven out of Syria. Iran is evacuating its people from Syria. And Egypt and Jordan and the Gulf states are American client states. Saudi Arabia of course is independent, but Saudi Arabia is not going to challenge Israel.

The New York Times had a front-page article back in 2013, which some people today still point to, where certain Israeli officials were asked about Syria's civil war at that time. One of them said that from Israel's perspective, ''the best outcome is no outcome,'' meaning let them keep fighting: ''Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.'' That seems to go along with this same kind of strategy that you're talking about.

Yes, I think it does. And as far as ordinary Syrians are concerned – well, so much the worse for them.

What were Turkey's goals in funding and organizing this rebellion?

Well, Turkey wants the Syrian refugees in Turkey to go home. They have been a considerable burden on the Turkish economy, and they've also caused a certain degree of social unrest and strife in parts of Turkey where they have taken refuge. So that's part of it. And Turkey also wishes to do two things. It wishes to expand its general influence in the Middle East, and it wishes to push back Kurdish influence. And it has taken this opportunity to launch a much more openly Turkish-backed offensive, to push Kurdish forces out of some of their positions close to the Turkish border. Because the central Turkish security concern has always been the fear of a Kurdish rebellion within Turkey. This was true under the previous Turkish military regimes, and it's been true of Erdogan. And that fear has risen enormously as a result of the US overthrow of the Iraqi state and the creation of a de facto independent Kurdish area in the north of Iraq. And of course, with US backing, a Kurdish area in eastern Syria has been created far beyond the actual Kurdish ethnic territories – an area which, as I say, controls the wealth of Syria's oil. So Turkey regards this as a very serious danger. And this, of course, is also a key reason why Turkish-US relations have declined to such an extent.

Will the US remain in the Kurdish region in Syria? Obviously there's oil involved, which I assume is an incentive for them not to leave. Will they stay and protect the Kurds?

Well, if Kurdish history is anything to go by, I think they would be unwise to rely too heavily on US promises. But on the other hand, they are a very useful US base. In Iraq, I think certainly the US will want to retain bases in the Iraqi Kurdish area, because they are by far the most reliable US allies in the region. In the Syrian Kurdish area, I think it will depend largely on just how ruthless the Turks are prepared to be, and just how far they are prepared to go in alienating the United States. Because if Turkey were really to back offensives against the Kurds – whether by its own directly armed militia in Syria, or by the new Syrian state – they could create a situation in which the Kurds of Syria could only be saved by direct US intervention – which Trump might not be willing to do. And that, of course, would create a big crisis in relations between Ankara and Washington. In such case the Turks would have to work out some arrangement with Russia – or be very confident that the war in Ukraine would continue, and very bad relations between Russia and the US would continue. Because I don't think Turkey would wish to find itself in a situation where it was deeply at odds with both America and Russia.

Let's talk a bit about Russia and their response in Syria. At first, when the rebellion started, they supported Assad as usual, bombing the rebels and so on. But at some point they stopped – some say because they saw it was a lost cause. Then the foreign ministers of Turkey, Russia, and Iran met together in Qatar to discuss the situation. People have speculated about what may have happened at this meeting. Do you think it's possible that Russia and Iran made some sort of deal with Turkey?

Not as far as I'm aware. I mean, once the rebel offensive started, I have no doubt that Russia got in touch with Turkey and said: Look, you've got to make sure that your boys don't directly attack us – you know our positions in Syria. But I very much doubt this was coordinated in advance. Although I don't suppose any of this took the Russians completely by surprise, because it's now beginning to come out that Russia was very worried about the fate of the Assad regime for at least several months. And I think it's pretty clear from what has happened that Moscow had decided, in effect, that there was no point in investing a lot more effort in trying to prop up the Assad regime – even if Russia could have done so.

So you don't think the Russians could have saved Assad even if they thought it was a good idea?

Well it's partly that Russia just doesn't have the means, because of the Ukraine war. But also – as America found in Vietnam and in Afghanistan – if you know you are faced with propping up a collapsing regime, you have a choice between doubling and quitting. Doubling means sending in more and more and more of your own troops, with all the disasters that are likely to follow from that. Or you quit. And I think that increasingly, after all these bad experiences – Russia's experience in Afghanistan, America's experience in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and so on – increasingly, countries are coming to the conclusion that direct intervention to save crumbling client states is just not worth it. Unless of course it's somewhere really tiny, where minimal effort is required – otherwise the overwhelming evidence is that it's not worth it.

How would you say this whole situation has impacted Russia, in terms of the larger geopolitical picture? On the one hand it seems to be a big setback in terms of their influence in the Middle East. And of course, they've got those two military bases in Syria that could be in jeopardy. But on the other hand, some people are saying that the Russians will be relieved not to have to support Assad's government, and that anyway influence in the Middle East should not be their priority – they've got problems in their own neighbourhood. What's your view?

Well, a lot does depend on the bases. I mean, undoubtedly, Russia has lost an ally. If Russia loses its bases and cannot develop new ones, in Libya for example – by means of a deal with one or other of the groups fighting there, which is now being talked about – then this would be a serious blow. Russia would no longer have any military presence in the Mediterranean, and it would lose a critically important staging point for supplying Russian forces in Africa – largely mercenary forces, but still in effect Russian. So yes, it would be a big setback, unless the Russians could develop a base elsewhere. Which won't be at all easy.

Could Syria end up like Libya?

Well, so far, the collapse of the regime has been so complete that at the moment, it looks rather more like Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. Basically all the pro-regime forces just melted away. But it's not all together like Afghanistan, because unlike in Afghanistan, other anti-regime forces are still there – the Americans are still in eastern Syria with the Kurds, and of course the Turks are still in northern Syria.

That's why it seems to me possible – though I have no idea whether this is really going to happen – that the new Syrian regime may allow the Russians to stay on, just by way of multiplying their geopolitical options. In any case, America can keep the Kurds going, and Turkey will presumably go on backing its militia – although they may formally enter into government in Damascus. And then we'll have to see how things go. It's very, very difficult to predict with so many players involved, not to mention the many armed insurgency groups.

Yet people are talking about a democratic Syria emerging from all this.

Oh, please. You know, I'm not quite sure what it is – whether it's the perennial optimism of commentators, or journalists wanting to celebrate the revolution, or whether it's our Western democratic ideology – which people still believe must and will be spread all over the world. Or whether it's this thing that has now become, frankly, a democratisation industry – National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, International Republican Institute – all of which live off this business of spreading or pretending to spread democracy. It just seems insuperable – I mean, no number of lessons to the contrary will ever teach these people. Look, sometimes it works. It obviously worked in Eastern Europe – but Eastern Europe and the Middle East are very, very different places.