The Idealist Destruction of Syria

In the early-to-mid 2010s, a very strange debate broke out within the American left, the left-left, the supposedly anti-imperialist left. The debate was about Syria.

During the broad and vague period colloquially referred to as the Arab Spring, a revolt broke out against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Assad had long been one of the world’s crueler autocrats, although as is the case of almost all non-denominational dictators, there was a period in which the Assad regime was convenient for the United States and its intelligence community. But as part of a sweeping regional freedom movement that ultimately resulted in little additional freedom, the Syrian establishment government was subject to a serious internal armed resistance that quickly gained ground and seriously threatened to take power. This got a lot of “liberal interventionist” types hard; Samantha Power, who has more blood on her hands than Vlad the Impaler, was a prominent (and shameless) proponent of using American power to topple the Syrian regime.

Unfortunately for the neo-neocons, the situation in Syria was irreducibly complex, with the relative size of “the good guys” — that is, good little Westernized forces that were fundamentally motivated by f-f-freedom — compared to other factions a matter of constant debate. And this was an important debate! Because the non-freedom-loving rebels were mostly motivated by the exact flavor of Islamic fundamentalist jihadism that the United States had spent so much blood and treasure fighting after 9/11. This was awkward, and also the Kurds got involved, which ensured that Turkey did too, and the Turks are among the most capable and ambitious shapers of the entire Greater Middle East. What a mess.

The American experience in the Middle East, in my lifetime, has been a matter of a lot of big-idea types trying to impress their big ideas onto the region and finding that what they thought was simple was not. Like the fundamental cludgy nature of the concept of the Arab Spring itself — a Western idea of freedom imposed on a set of intensely local internal resistance movements in a region notorious for the immense complexity of its preexisting sectarian conflicts.

Anyway, the left opinion on Syria. Though not very meaningful in practical terms, obviously, the inter-left debate produced a lot of insights into what the 21st-century left would be. Where the invasion of Iraq had prompted near-unanimity in opposition — which was good because we were right — the broad far-left was deeply divided over Syria; the debate produced genuinely rancorous debate and a lot of shattered friendships. This isn’t new for the left-left, obviously; internecine combat is kind of our thing. Yes, yes, the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front, etc., etc. But it was rare, in my life, for so many socialists, anarchists, anti-imperialists and related types to be at each other’s throats to the degree that they were over Syria and support for the Syrian opposition. The nature of the argument pointed to the fact that, despite what a lot of outsiders might think, there’s a lot of military adventurism among some radical lefties. As well as too many people who possess the same opportunistic naivete that powered the neocons, to such terrible effect.

In any event, there was a debate: to support the opposition to Assad or not? Support them how? To what degree and with what effect? Again, the practical stakes were minimal. But it was a very legitimate and important debate for defining values. In particular, there was a fundamental question of whether American governmental support for internal resistance movements was ever valid, ever something the left should support. This is not a small matter for a revolutionary political movement. There were, of course, more opinions on the philosophical matters than you can imagine. But as I said at the time, when you got down to practicalities, there appeared to be four general camps.

1. Assad’s regime represented an alternative to Western hegemony, and we on the left were obligated to support him and the Syrian government on anti-imperialist grounds; this was stupid and wrong.
2. The Syrian revolution was a left-wing opposition to an establishment capitalist government, and we on the left were obligated to support them on revolutionary grounds, including by calling for the American military to invade and force Assad out; this was stupid and wrong.
3. Assad was a murderous dictator, but the rebellion was filled with jihadists and warlords, and as Iraq showed the postwar period would be filled with great violence and instability, and an insurgency against whatever foreign troops were in the country seemed like a certainty. There were no good options other than to advocate for taking in as many Syrian refugees as we could and for providing humanitarian assistance where possible. Assad was a monster, but American adventurism had proven to be no cure for monsters and to consistently leave the world worse off. This was my position. (That is to say, the correct opinion.)
4. This next one is a little mysterious but was very prevalent and expressed with unusual fervor — it was basically option 3, but angrier, more intense. They were relentlessly anti-Assad, but would (when pushed) express their opposition to an American assault. I have to stress that this really was a fourth position, though. I know, because the people in that camp constantly insisted it was. They were distrustful enough of the American government and its military, and aware enough of the recent Iraq catastrophe, to not advocate for direct American action, certainly not troops. But they were intensely idealistic about the anti-Assad opposition, theatrically supportive of the Syrian people, and certain that they were more caring and virtuous than people in my camp. And so they insisted that they were a distinct group, though it was very hard to say just how. To exist in certain lefty discursive spaces in that period was to constantly encounter people who were seeing the ghosts of the Assadist left everywhere, even though that tendency was tiny even by the standards of the American far-left. They were very angry that we weren’t more angry.

One name that immediately leaps to mind, when I think of the directionless rancor of the Syria debate, is Louis Proyect, who died in 2021. Prior to Syria, I knew Proyect to be an anti-imperialist lefty of a kind I’ve known quite literally my whole life. He spent a lot of the 1980s supporting the Sandinistas in their efforts against the Contras, CIA-and-Reagan-backed right-wing forces that used torture and assassination to try to squelch a left-wing movement. He wrote for CounterPunch, a lefty online magazine that I’m not going to comment on glancingly, given the complexity of its past and its deeply weird present, but which still symbolically represents a certain old guard Marxist approach to politics that tends to see (for example) Jacobin as an intellectual project of the ruling class. Proyect wrote pieces about Fred Hampton and reviewed movies from a hard-left perspective; he wrote a comic book with Harvey Pekar called “The Unrepentant Marxist.” I guess I’m just saying that this is a kind of guy that I am very familiar with, a classic American lefty figure. And yet Syria scrambled everything.

I’m afraid a lot of Proyect’s writing on the subject appear to have disappeared or gone behind CounterPunch’s paywall, but this piece is a good indication of his position; titled “A Short History of the Syrian Conflict,” it does not include any reference to al-Qaeda or al-Nusra, in fact barely mentions jihadist influence at all, and only then to complain that American weapons were pointing the wrong way. (Funnily enough, the letter to the editor in Harper’s here is a good example of his rhetorical style in this war of words.) As always with this subject, Proyect’s work emphasized the incredible naivete of other leftists and their supposedly bad motivations, constantly dismissing the idea of good-faith disagreement. Proyect’s history of the Syrian struggle was always motivated by a desire to see the opposition in the most optimistic light possible. He became fond of using phrases like “metropolitan anti-imperialism,” grinded an axe against figures who he perceived to be naively supportive of Assad (who usually explicitly stated that they weren’t), and in general wanted us all to be more angry at Assad and his atrocities. Proyect was a very singular guy, but he was part of a type that flared up in the mid-2010s, among the left, who all seemed to share the neoconservative addiction to simple moral narratives of goodies and baddies.

The smallest differences make for the harshest fights, of course, and so groups 3 and 4 warred constantly on social media. Nothing defined the latter tendency more than their extreme optimism about the anti-Assad opposition. They constantly insisted that any Islamist forces within that opposition, like al-Nusra or al-Qaeda, were incidental, vastly outnumbered by the forces that were secular and progressive and sought only to establish democracy. Some of them went so far as to refer to the civil war as the “socialist revolution in Syria.” There’s a lot you could say about the Western imagination and how it only conceives of progress that comes in a very Western form, but leave that aside — it wasn’t true. It simply wasn’t the case that the opposition was dominantly or even majority secular and liberal, to say nothing of economically left. As the war ground on, the preeminence of Islamist forces (of various flags and sects) became clear. And in the end, after a very long stalemate period that looked like it would be the new normal, the jihadists won. It was Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist movement designated by the United States as a terrorist organization, that won the future, which of course is why I’m writing about this today.

I’ve wanted to say something about Syria since Assad fell, but I decided to hold off until the initial news cycle passed. The point I want to make relates to the fractious, thick-headed fourth group I described above. For one thing, they represent a broad dynamic I seem to discuss around here more and more often: the commandment to feel harder, treated as a matter of tangible politics. More materially, I bring up these passionate idealists — socialists, anti-imperialists, deep and natural skeptics toward the military — because they demonstrate the degree to which the spirit of full-hearted self-righteous moral adventure will always play a role in foreign policy. I was amazed, back then, that regarding a region still rocked by the horrors of Iraq, in a movement of people who were so deeply divided from the neocons in explicit ways, the destructive simplicity of a particular kind of humanitarian arrogance bloomed. People really want to believe in the power of their own good intentions, and they’ve seen too many movies. They want the world to be filled with good guys and bad guys and, if they can’t quite imagine themselves to be one of the former, they can at least declare themselves to be on their side. And, as Peter Beinart said of his early, now deeply regretted support for the Iraq war, they’re willing to gamble.

I make no claims about Syria’s present or future. I have, however, observed that the American reaction has involved a certain yearning spirit — if not the actual headlong adventurism of the Bush years, then a certain wistful desire for that kind of simplicity of foreign policy sentiment, for that childlike belief in the power of the drive to do good that wells up inside of you. Plenty of people are throwing a caveat or two in about the potential for this new regime to do what Islamist groups do, but they can’t hide their hearts.

All I can say, as someone who lived through the entire post-9/11 period, this all feels really fucking wild. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s leaders have made a lot of efforts to appear to be moderates, but the organization is filled with people once affiliated with ISIS and al-Qaeda, and I don’t think people with that background just decide to give up on their commitment to bringing the world closer to a caliphate. They may very well just settle in as a quietly repressive fundamentalist government that keeps its various human rights abuses quiet enough that the “international community” will look the other way. Maybe. But, even if so, it is truly incredible to look at American foreign policy since Sept. 11, follow all of its twists and turns, think of those who have died, and ask … what was it all for?