[Midden-Oosten] Michael Karadjis on Trump, Biden, and the Syrian Revolution

[Jeff]

Trump’s record on Syria: Enabler of Assad’s victory, enemy of Syrians
By Michael Karadjis
October 31, 2020

URL:
https://mkaradjis.com/2020/10/31/trumps-record-on-syria-enabler-of-assads-victory-enemy-of-syrians/

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EXCERPT:



Trump’s record on Syria: Enabler of Assad’s victory, enemy of Syrians

90 percent of Assad’s Reconquista under Trump’s watch

By Michael Karadjis
October 31, 2020

With US elections approaching, Syrian people wanting to end the 50-year 
tyranny of the Assad dynasty are looking for any light from either 
candidate of the US ruling class. The fact that most conclude there is 
little to be excited about, and search for the tiniest seeming advantage 
from either side, highlights the plain fact that the US rulers have 
never had any interest in supporting the Syrian struggle for freedom.

Now that Assad has largely won the so-called ‘civil war’ – mostly a 
one-sided slaughter he waged against the Syrian people – the only real 
debate going on is whether a victorious, yet highly unstable, Assad 
regime can be pushed into some kind of political compromise via a 
“constitutional commission” process.

Compared to the heady days of one of the vastest and most inspiring 
popular revolutionary uprisings of the 21st century, having to ponder 
such questions is dull indeed.

Nevertheless, reality being what it is, these questions can hardly be 
avoided. Assad’s victory is no ordinary case of a dictatorship 
successfully cracking down on its people, not wanting to underestimate 
the terror involved even in such “simple” cases. In Syria, we need to 
consider the whole Syrian people, not only those forced to live under 
the dictatorship’s heel in the regions it controls.


Assad’s military victory: Counterrevolutionary stability or ongoing 
catastrophe?

First, of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million, there are 6.6 
million refugees outside the country (of whom 3.6 million are in 
neighbouring Turkey), over a quarter of the population, plus an equal 
number internally displaced (IDPs) within Syria. Then there are over 5 
million people living in the northwest (Idlib and northern Aleppo 
regions) still outside of Assad’s control, under what remains of various 
rebel groups, mostly under Turkish influence, and this includes over 1.7 
million internally displaced from elsewhere in Syria. Then there are 
another 3 million people, including 700,000 internally displaced, in the 
northeast, under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces 
(SDF), backed by the US military, who entered Syria to help the SDF 
defeat ISIS.

Therefore, some 14.5 million people – 63 percent of Syria’s pre-war 
population – are outside regime control. When we add some 140,000 people 
estimated to have been incarcerated in Assad’s torture prisons or 
disappeared, of whom tens of thousands have been killed, and an 
estimated 670,000 people killed in the war, along with the physical 
destruction of much of Syria’s infrastructure by years of relentless 
regime and Russian terror bombing, it becomes clear why Syrians are not 
ready or able to say “OK, the dictatorship won, we lost, that’s bad, but 
now there’s no choice but to get on with our lives under 
counterrevolutionary stability” – any kind of “stability” is impossible 
under such conditions.

At the very least, those pushing this view – not only Assadists, but 
other well-meaning people who see the reality of defeat – need to take 
into account that if it is the interests of “the Syrian people” they are 
concerned about, then these “Syrian people” are not only the 8-9 million 
under regime control (even if we assume that these people are content 
with the situation, a likely erroneous assumption); but also the 6.6 
million outside Syria, most of whom will not return with the regime in 
power, and the 8 million living in the northwest and northeast outside 
regime control.

For those concerned with ameliorating this situation, does a Trump or a 
Biden in the White House make any difference?


Trump versus Biden?

Various articles indicate that among Syrian exiles in the United States, 
there is little consensus, and this reflects the fact that the 
differences are very narrow. This is hardly surprising; there is little 
difference on many issues.

For example, Trump is clearly worse on Israel/Palestine, having 
recognised occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s ‘capital”, put forward a 
anti-peace process that gives everything to Israel, cut off funding to 
UNWRA, recognised Israeli sovereignty over the illegally stolen Syrian 
Golan and so on. Yet Biden and Harris are also extremely pro-Israel. No, 
they may not have recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and they 
claim to support UN resolutions and the traditional, meaningless, “peace 
process”, but Biden has also stated he will nevertheless not move the US 
embassy back to Tel Aviv.

As the Trump and Biden camps are saying very little different in terms 
of Syria policy going forward, much of the debate inevitably looks at 
the records of the Obama administration (in which Biden was 
vice-president) and the Trump administration. And neither offer any 
inspiration whatsoever. Though my argument here is that Trump is worse, 
it is understandable that some view Obama more negatively.

Obama’s support for the Syrian opposition was tepid at best; the CIA 
program to train and equip “vetted” rebels was largely aimed at 
co-opting and taming them, putting the CIA in a position to pressure 
them to stop fighting Assad, and enlisting them for the “war on terror” 
against ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra only (the Free Syrian Army – FSA – 
already fought ISIS, and often Nusra, but resisted dropping the fight 
against Assad). In other words, bringing real rebel formations around to 
the same position as the concurrent Pentagon program, which explicitly 
only armed ex-rebels to fight only ISIS or Nusra and not Assad – but 
therefore had difficulty finding many real rebel forces to enlist! 
Further, from 2012, the US placed spooks on the borders to ensure that 
shoulder-held anti-aircraft weapons (manpads) – the defensive weaponry 
most needed in a war of aerial slaughter – did not reach the FSA. Above 
all, Syrians disapprove of Obama’s nuclear deal – the JCPOA – with Iran, 
believing this encouraged Obama to turn a blind eye to massive Iranian 
support to Assad.

Those viewing Biden as a better choice might note things such as Trump 
ending all Obama-era assistance to the FSA and to Syrian civil society 
organisations, Trump’s view that the only US fight in Syria is against 
ISIS, the fact that 90 percent of Assad’s reconquest of much of Syria 
took place under Trump’s watch, the gutting of the Geneva process, and 
Trump’s overly friendly relationship with Russian Tsar Vladimir Putin, 
Assad’s main backer. The strongly pro-Assad orientation of Trump’s 
far-right base of support can also be noted. Trump also signed the ban 
on travel and migration from seven Muslim countries, including Syria; as 
Syrian-American Zaher Sahloul points out, “in 2020, fewer than 100 
Syrian refugees were resettled in the U.S. compared with 12,500 in 
2016.”

However, those who see Trump a better bet, regardless of his 
motivations, point to things such as Trump’s anti-Iranian orientation 
(including ripping up the nuclear deal), given Iran’s role as Assad’s 
second main backer, Trump’s two pinprick strikes on Assadist facilities 
to enforce the “red line” against Assad’s chemical warfare, which Obama 
had not enforced in 2013, and the current harsh sanctions imposed on the 
Assad regime in the post-reconquista phase.

This view, that opponents of Assad should wish for a Trump victory, 
seems counterintuitive, given Trump’s initial declarations of support 
for Assad and assurances that his administration was no longer focused 
on removing Assad “like the previous administration was.” And the idea 
that any degree of human liberation, in Syria or elsewhere, is more 
easily achieved by having a far-right, white-supremacist in the White 
House appears illogical.

But what if Trump’s greater tendency to enforce “red lines” leads him to 
stumble, by accident, into ousting Assad, or if his anti-Iran policy 
tipped the scales against Assad even if that were not the intention? 
Syrians are as entitled as any other oppressed people to exploit the 
contradictions among imperialist powers and reactionary states. It may 
place their interests in opposition to those of virtually anyone else in 
the world, from Palestinians to black and working-class Americans, 
fighting for their liberation, but that is hardly the fault of Syrians; 
rather, that would be the fault of those who have waged genocidal war 
against them, or helped this by ignoring them, slandering them and 
stabbing them in the back.

Nevertheless, this is a complete illusion. The interests of Syrians 
fighting Assad are not in the slightest aided by supporting an enemy of 
human liberation like Trump, neither on the Iran issue, not that of 
‘red-lines’, nor on the issue of sanctions.


First let’s look at Trump’s record

In the lead-up to the 2016 US elections, Trump asserted that in Syria, 
the US should be on the same side as Russia and Assad in “fighting 
ISIS”, and said the US would cut off any meagre “support” still going to 
the anti-Assad opposition under Obama.

Trump fulfilled his promise, fully ending the long-dormant CIA program 
to arm and train some “vetted” rebels. While, as shown above, this 
program was already tepid and ineffective, its continuation at some 
level under Obama gave the FSA some room to manoeuvre and occasionally 
take advantage of the arms, which was too much for Trump: in abolishing 
it, he declared the program “dangerous and wasteful.”

With this cut-off of aid to the FSA, any US aid to Syrian “rebels” now 
was only to those who do not rebel: US Central Command spokesman Major 
Josh Jacques explained: “vetted Syrian opposition groups all swear an 
oath to fight only ISIS.”

Trump also ended US “stabilisation” funding for civil society in regions 
outside Assad regime control. Trump declared “the United States has 
ended the ridiculous 230 Million Dollar yearly development payment to 
Syria,” referring to the Obama-era funding for a vast array of 
opposition local governance and civil society organisations, independent 
media and education projects which kept society running in the regime’s 
absence. The State Department explained that US assistance in northwest 
Syria was being “freed up to provide potential increased support for 
priorities in northeast Syria,” ie, to where the fight is only against 
ISIS rather than the regime.

Thus Trump put an end to all US funding to both the civil and military 
sides of the revolution.

 From the start, Trump declared “We’re there for one reason: to get rid 
of ISIS and to go home. We’re not there for any other reason.” His 
secretary of state Rex Tillerson virtually declared Assad an ally: “We 
call upon all parties, including the Syrian government and its allies, 
Syrian opposition forces, and Coalition forces carrying out the battle 
to defeat ISIS, to avoid conflict with one another and adhere to agreed 
geographical boundaries for military de-confliction.” Assad’s future was 
declared Russia’s issue, the US agnostic about “whether Assad goes or 
stays.”

Tillerson’s speech in January 2018 focused on supporting the Geneva 
process for a “political solution,” but the US no longer expected Assad 
to stand down at the beginning of a transition phase as under early 
Obama, or even at its end as under late Obama; rather, Tillerson claimed 
that Assad could be voted out in a “free election,” which would 
presumably occur with him in power, though the process may ‘take time” 
for which he “urge(d) patience.”

Before Obama left office, Assad’s reconquest of opposition-controlled 
regions had netted iconic democratic revolutionary centres south and 
west of Damascus such as Darayya, Madaya and Zabadani, and East Aleppo 
city in the north, by 2016. However, the fact that some 90 percent of 
Assad’s Reconquista took place under Trump was not accidental or the 
result of Trump’s alleged “isolationism”: it was based on US-Russia 
agreement, the fruits of Trump’s pro-Putin politics. In mid-2017, a 
“new” US strategy was presented by Defence Secretary James Mattis, State 
Secretary Tillerson and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph F. Dunford 
Jr., conceding Assad’s control of Syria west of the Euphrates River and 
most of centre and south. Discussing “a proposal that we’re working on 
with the Russians,” Dunford noted “the Russians are as enthusiastic as 
we are.”

How did that play out in different parts of Syria?.....



FULL ARTICLE:
https://mkaradjis.com/2020/10/31/trumps-record-on-syria-enabler-of-assads-victory-enemy-of-syrians/