Having outplayed Russia and outsmarted Iran, Turkey is reinvented from Syria revolution - opinion

The drama is intense, and the losers are obvious: Russia, Iran, and the Syrian tyranny in which they invested so much treasure, energy, and prestige. 

The Assads and their fate hardly warrant a discussion. This column warned already in the days of the elder Assad that he stood on “shaky social infrastructure” and that any Israeli deal with him “must take into consideration the prospect of his regime being toppled one morning” (“What to do with Syria,” The Jerusalem Post, September 3, 1999). 

The ruthless general’s imposition of his Alawite minority on the Syrian majority could only last that long, as did his reckless policy of “strategic parity with Israel,” an economic absurdity shouldered by a huge army that was built over decades, only to unravel in hardly three days.  

The Assads’ Baath regime has come and gone and will soon be historical trivia. That cannot be said of its sponsors in Moscow and Tehran.

Russian investment in Syria

THE RUSSIAN investment in Syria harks back to the 1950s, when the Syrian army received arms shipments from Czechoslovakia, obviously by Soviet command. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship that later mushroomed into shipments of thousands of Soviet-made battle tanks, artillery barrels, fighter jets, and helicopters, as well as missiles, frigates, submarines, air defense systems, and whatnot. 

It was a meeting of imperial delusions. The Syrians dreamed of reviving the Damascus-based Umayyad Empire that once ruled the Muslim world. The Soviets were out to snatch the Middle East from America’s global sway.

When the Soviet Union unraveled, the dream of Russian imperium was revived by President Vladimir Putin. Having both become their countries’ presidents in 2000, Putin and Bashar Assad became strategic partners who happily served each other’s unholy cause: Assad would grant Putin’s neo-czarism its Mediterranean foothold by handing him the Tartus seaport, while Putin would arm and shield Assad’s tribal tyranny. 

Since both men couldn’t care less about the people’s will, when the Syrian people rebelled last decade, the man who shelled, gassed, and displaced them by the millions was generously helped by Russia, whose pilots helped massacre the Syrian people and, in return, got a big airbase in western Syria, in addition to the naval base it already had. 

Now this elaborate structure is gone, so much so that aerial photos show the Russian naval base at Tartus as empty as a lunar crater. 

Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has a Russian naval flight been so sudden, visible, and humiliating. Defeat, the perfect opposite of the glory that guided Putin’s dreams and stratagems, is now written all over his imperial scheme. 

Even so, Russia’s Syrian debacle dwarfs when compared with Iran’s. Russia lost its imperial sprawl’s distant edge. Iran lost its imperial project’s linchpin. 

For the ayatollahs, Assad’s Syria was the geographic buckle and political nucleus of an imperial belt that led from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut, thus connecting the Mediterranean to the Gulf. Now this belt is gone, along with Syria’s anti-Sunni regime and the ayatollahs’ messianic designs. 

This, in brief, is why the Syrian drama’s losers are obvious. The question is who this mayhem’s winner is, and the answer is one: Turkey.

ON THE face of it, Israel emerges from Assad’s downfall a big winner, as many this week claimed. They are right in many ways, but only up to a point. 

Israel gained twice: First, it saw the breakdown of the Iranian axis that gathered around it for the better part of half a century. And second, Israel used the twilight situation to destroy most of the abandoned Syrian military’s missiles, tanks, vessels, and jets.  

The largest hostile army on the Jewish state’s borders thus vanished, a scenario that for the 76 years up to this week would have sounded to any Israeli like science fiction. Whoever emerges as Syria’s new leader will need decades to build anything like the army the Assads built – if they can even find an imperial sponsor willing to create such a behemoth free of charge. 

Even so, Israel’s Syrian gains should be kept in proportion. While militarily reprieving, politically, the Syrian earthquake does not reinvent Israel’s situation because the old Iran remains intact, and the new Syria will, in all likelihood, be as anti-Israel as the Syria it will replace.  

Israel’s gains in Syria are, at the end of the day, tactical. Turkey’s, by contrast, are historic. 

Rebels attack on Aleppo

THE REBELS’ swift assault on Aleppo and their lightning procession from there to Damascus were impressively planned, supplied, and led. Someone engineered all that, and it wasn’t the rebels, who during the Syrian civil war were politically disjointed, strategically unplanned, and militarily inept. It was, intelligence organizations agree, the Turks. 

Back in 2018, Turkey struck a deal with Russia and Iran that ended the civil war by offering the defeated rebels a haven in the Idlib province, close to the Turkish border. It now turns out that this was a Trojan horse from which the Assad regime’s liquidators in due course emerged.

Turkey, in other words, outplayed Russia and outsmarted Iran, dealing Vladimir Putin and the ayatollahs a blow from which they might never recover. 

Syria is now set to become, sooner or later, one way or another, a Turkish vassal. Damascus will take orders from Ankara and be fashioned as a domineering Turkey bridgehead to a suspicious Arab world. 

Turkey thus emerges from the Syrian revolution geopolitically reinvented. Kemal Ataturk’s vision of a post-Ottoman Turkey that turns its face to secular Europe and its back to Islam, imperium, and the Arab Middle East has been elbowed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-embrace of Islam, imperialism, and the Arab Middle East. 

The Ottoman comeback, once a ridiculed mixture of nostalgia, hallucination, megalomania, and farce, is now underway.