Assad, both father and now son, made some very, very bad decisions, alienating just about everyone, from fellow supposed Ba'athists to Sunnis, to Palestinians, to Alawites, to their own damn family. This has been a long time coming. Bashar himself is a painfully transparent hypocrite, contrarian, and petulant fascist. On one hand, he was always blathering about finding some kind of political solution to these problems, and then in the next part of the sentence, insisted there were no problems and that it was all invented by foreigners and the protestors were all terrorists. This goes much further back than 2011. He is a violent and terrible man, as most men of power are, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for him or his successive failings, whether external forces were responsible for them or not. Syria means nothing to him, and meant nothing to his father. Personal loyalty is the name of he game, like most intellectually bankrupt dictators. He has no ideology, no dream, no goal for the Syrian people, just personal power. Trying to say whether he is better or worse than any other bad leader is beside the point. Quibbling over who has the moral high-ground in all of this is so...bourgeois...it's cringe-worthy. Syria hasn't ever been stable, either. Losing Golan Heights, assassinating Lebanese leaders, waging covert campaigns of arrest and torture of dissidents, massacring your own people...that's not stability, that's living on the edge, and they've been doing it since the fall of the Ottoman empire.
The colonizers, so-called Western powers, are instrumental in the conditions that precipitated all of these situations in the Levant. They are brutal in conquest, condescending, racist, and abject liars. By the same token, the Ottoman Empire was the very definition of imperialist...it was, in fact, an OG empire. Fuck man, you could even argue that it was Ottoman imperialism that led to the rise of Serbian nationalism, which in turn led to the events that started the bloody Great War in the first place. I'm not saying that's how I see it, it's far more complicated than that, but it's an angle based on at least some historical reality.
Those 600-odd years of empire, followed by spectacular collapse in a global war, didn't leave much of a real national identity for millions of people in a world defined, whether we like it or not, by the nation-state. Every ideology formed thereafter, whether socialist, communist, fascist, Islamist, Ba'athist, or otherwise, was immediately compromised for even the slightest hint of a leg-up. Whether it was from the USSR, the CIA, the French, the Brits, or whoever, sides chopped and changed so fast that no real identity could have been formed.
So much of the trouble came from the very Arab Revolt that is so celebrated. Lawrence may have been an agent of the West, but the Islamist call to action by the Hashemites against the Ottomans was the precursor for their own various demises at the hands of Wahhabi Saudis, whose destabilizing presence alongside Sykes-Picot should really not be underestimated. The Hashemites appealed to fundamentalist leanings in the Arab world to destroy a nation that was a bridge between East and West politically, geographically, and culturally. Externally, it was a secular, Arabist movement, while internally it was about establishing a Sunni empire that originated from Mecca rather than Constantinople. That France and Russia basically told the Brits that their deal with the Arabs was not on, and that their interests in the region had to be addressed as well, didn't change the imperialist goals of the bloodthirsty power growing relatively unnoticed on the Peninsula. The idea that the Levant should be Arab in identity is hugely problematic anyway. "Giving" the Hashemites some version of Syria for their part in the War was likely to result in just as much chaos as Sykes-Picot. Maybe a bit less, but maybe even more. The actual people of the Levant are the ones for whom there was no good outcome, no possible solution. No national identities, confused ethnicities, hybrid religions...they were the remnants of a conquered empire, not a coherent people with a clear sense of where their borders actually lay.
Funding the wrong people for the wrong reasons is wrong, but they are still the wrong people today, and they must bear a large share of the responsibility in all of this. The foundation of the Saudi state is on the idea of Jihad against fellow Muslims, and in particular, that raiding and seizing property for the sake of expanding your own area of control is considered Jihad. Al Wahhab gave them a religious excuse for imperialism, like many before him all over the world. It's a covetous ideology that only looks to the outside. Materialist lunatics of the highest order, much like the Imperialism of the US. They used the Arab Revolt as a distraction, formed strategic alliances, and when Sykes-Picot happened, in combination with the Balfour Agreement, it couldn't have been better for them! They overthrew the Hashemites in the post-war confusion and chaos, slaughtered the folks they were ostensibly allied with, and started cranking out oil. If Daesh or any other fundamentalist movement they bankroll were actually serious about reversing Sykes-Picot, it would ostensibly be in the name of Abdullah II of Jordan. They're not taking anything back, because they never had it in the first place. They're conquerors and colonizers just as bad as the rest. No wonder they're so cozy with the US.
I really think that colonialism is a necessary and perpetual state of humanity, and that there is no post-colonial world nor can there be. To decolonize is to break down the colonial mindset, not the colonial reality. It can create the possibility for empathy, realization, and understanding, but it cannot reconcile the fundamental nature of difference, which itself is a powerful creative force with great potential for productive transformation. There wasn't a magical moment in history where everything was just so, and the people who were there had a right, from some higher power, to be there. Why is it so certain that French control of Syria was entirely wrong, yet Hashemite control would have been somehow more right? I don't buy it, not for a second. And then people say, why not give Syrians control over Syria? Well, I'd ask, what Syria? What Syrians? That's the question the French asked, and it demanded the hasty construction of a Syrian national identity in order to effectively expel the French and free "Syria", which is still part of the problem right now.
The trouble with freedom, as a revolutionary ideology, is that it is so ill-defined, and almost always comes to mean the freedom to exercise one's will over another in the guise of the impossible dream of self-determination. Freedom as a nation-state, especially for contemporary multi-ethnic societies, means the freedom to be a state in the statesman's image, a state that imposes it's will over those for whom that image is not representative. The justification may be religious, it may be anti-colonial, it may be utilitarian (i.e. we must operate in this manner to survive, a subsistence economy is a moral economy, etc.), but it is always a faulty rationalization of what it means to be a true citizen when it becomes conflated with what it means to be human. When you are no longer a true citizen, you are no longer human, and when push comes to shove, citizenship is stripped from whole swathes of the population and they are declared to be either foreigners, acting under foreign influence, or terrorists. Easy, then, to declare a state of emergency, and further increase your own free-ness at the expense of others. All of this is magnified by hastily constructed national identities that fail to account for historical realities. Agamben deals with all this quite well in his theories of the Homo sacer and the State of Exception.
There is a fundamental incongruity between the idea of human rights, and the idea of the nation-state. I don't think they can properly co-exist, or at least, that the nation-state can be the guarantor of human rights. We have to derive and maintain our rights from somewhere other than a central, governing authority or identity (religion, ethnicity, God, autochthony, the state, humanity, etc.).
For me, this is where the conflict in Syria really comes from: the two-fold failure of the post-war nation-state as 1) the primary organizational principle for humanity, and 2) both the means to and guarantor of freedom qua self-determination.
An organizing principal which cannot guarantee something that is, in effect, impossible to guarantee, is in its very construction designed to fail. We could at least try to achieve something that is a bit nearer to the edge of possibility.
My overall point, I guess, is that people are dying, and they don't necessarily need to be identified as Syrians. Syrians are a construct of a fluid region that comprises infinite possible identities, boundaries, and governments. The notion that Assad is ruling over the sovereign nation of Syria is just as untenable as the idea of the sovereign nation of Israel, or the United States for that matter. These are eternally shifting and changing boundaries. In what world would the conquerors not demand control? In what world would an Arab super-nation have been somehow a lesser evil? I don't fully understand what people expect to happen after the unbelievable atrocities committed by just about every party involved in this conflict...yes, the French, Russians, Germans, British, and the US, but also Turkey, Iraq, China, Egypt, Persia, and of course, Syrians, have all had their own terrible parts to play across centuries of strife that have been too rarely punctuated by periods of peace and the sense of stability. That is the human condition, overall. It wasn't invented by "the West". I am not making excuses for the US, Britain, Russia, China, and co. Especially the US. We've made a bad situation worse, and we fund both sides of our own wars. We're a stupid country, overly rich in bullets and brawn, run by idiots, who have been waging the most inefficient and illogical campaign in the Middle East for the last however many decades. Hugely to blame. But it's just not the whole story here.
I get that people want someone to be wrong, the bad guys, or whatever, but it's reductionist and it's just historically incorrect. Worse, it doesn't do justice to the lives lost when you reduce their situation to an erroneous axiom based on a blinkered version of a vast and complex chain of events. I disagree with how the fallout after WWI was handled, but I also genuinely don't know how it could have been handled better. There shouldn't have been a bloody Great War to begin with. I disagree with the recent strikes on Syrian government targets, I disagreed with the invasion of Iraq, I am against the US, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Great Britain meddling in the affairs of a region that has never been given the time to draw breath, let alone discover it's place in global society after the ills that have befallen them, and indeed, that they have also perpetrated. I'm a pacifist, but not an idiot. I don't believe that the world would be better if specific nations didn't involve themselves in other specific nations' affairs. It doesn't work like that. We are all involved, we are all connected, there will always be competing interests, and there will always be violence. We should account for it, minimize it, but we shouldn't deny that it exists. It's too fucking easy to just blame it all on US imperialism, but I hate to say, it started long before the US even existed, and it will continue long after it's gone.
None of this will end by taking sides in the wars between states. At best, it can only be mitigated by an honest effort to create a genuine world of people, rather than a world of nations. When all of this ends in Syria, it will flare up somewhere else, because human society is governed by a fundamentally flawed system that creates an impossible goal, which in turn fosters, even demands, violent conflict.
If all we're supposed to be doing here is arguing about who did the worst thing most recently, then have at it. I personally think it's a load of nonsense.
