Syria and the Demise of the Arab Nation-State

The Rebellion Against Sykes-Picot is Over: Time for Creative Thinking

The Syrian situation moved so quickly because the Syrian army, like the armies of most contemporary tyrants, fights as well as its soldiers get treated. This came as a surprise to US, Israeli and other western intelligence services who, to a one, predicted two weeks ago that the Syrian army was strengthening. Once again this is Western intelligence putting western assumptions on non-Western peoples. More specifically, putting the assumptions of free countries upon autocratic countries. The Syrian army – like that of Saddam and all other tyrants fights because it has no choice. Once that choice is given it – it disintegrates. Western intelligence thinks there is a national ideology, a patriotism that surpasses everything else. True for free countries – false for dictatorships. The western elite can’t seem to swallow that.

That being said, why did the rebels unleash their offensive now? Much like Hamas they judged their enemies to be at their weakest point. The cease fire between Hezbollah and Israel came before the destruction but after the radical weakening of Hezbollah’s military and propaganda capabilities. Hezbollah was the main force that kept Assad in power and the cease fire allowed Hezbollah to regroup and rearm. Iran desperately wanted the cease fire in order to save Hezbollah to fight another day and the re-arming was already beginning. Hezbollah was clearly at their lowest point, from which they could only rise. Iran would have more arms and more forces into Syria in a matter of weeks and the rebels understood that this was their time to strike.

How right they were. The Russians did not have the manpower or firepower to help an army that didn’t want to fight. The Iranian militias are not the feared fighters they claim to be and there was no popular support for Assad in Syria – in spite of Western assumptions. What is Turkey’s role in this is an open question. This should come out in the future as a Turkish satellite is one of Israel’s fears as it tries to replace Iran as the go-to country for destroying Israel. Many of the rebels have already declared that the “liberation” of Jerusalem and Gaza are next.

This started of course with the beeper attack and the killing of Nasrallah and the Hezbollah senior leadership. In what is one of the few positive results of the “law of unintended consequences” these attacks, which the US administration opposed and the Israeli security elite opposed without first getting Biden-Blinken’s approval, showed the weak nature of both Hezbollah and Iran.

In the meanwhile, Israel, to my pleasant surprise, is moving quickly to turn this into a strategic gain. It has been bombing strategic sites of the Syrian army, destroying chemical weapons depots and research facilities, air bases and combat aircraft on the ground and has taken the Syrian part of Mt. Hermon – the highest point in the area. Israel has even started to sink the Syrian Navy, in port and its ground forces have also entered the DMZ that has separated Israeli and Syrian forces since 1974 in order to prevent any Syrian rebel forces from taking positions there. There are reports that Israel has tanks near the southern suburbs of Damascus

Israel is also apparently in touch with Druze leaders who are in two parts of Southern Syria. The main part is Jebel Druze, which borders Jordan as well as the areas in the Syrian part of the Golan Heights. Israel stopped short of guaranteeing the safety of Druze residents – a big mistake in my mind as that would have been the best gift Israel could give to Israel’s very loyal Druze community – but at least there is cooperation between the IDF and the Druze forces.

But I have stated nothing new above. The real question is what to do with Syria? But a better question is, why is there a Syria?

There seems to be a western assumption that because there was an Assyrian empire and a Babylonian empire 3,000 years ago there must be a modern Syria and Iraq. What was 3,000 years ago does not mean what has to be today. Just look at Israel and the Jews. Israel didn’t have to exist, it doesn’t exist because the UN decided it should exist (sorry Mr. Macron) or because of the Holocaust - it exists because the people of Isreal willed it into existence. The Jewish people’s history here is what prompted it but a history, ancient as it is, is not a sufficient condition for the creation of a modern nation-state.

Syria, Iraq, Jordan and much else was created due to French and British imperialism. What the Syrian civil war, not ended yet, has brought is the end of the Sikes-Picot agreement. This agreement created borders in the middle east that make as much sense as the borders the Europeans created in Africa. But what this really means is the death of the Nation-State experiment in the Arab world. The nation state is a wonderful idea that has works in Europe, in the Americas and in much of East-Asia. However, the nation-state in the middle east (and Africa for that matter) has been an utter failure and has caused much misery in the region. With a few exceptions, there are no nations per-se in the Arab world. That is why they are always held together by tyrants. Egypt is a nation in its own right (and still controlled by a tyrant ) and Morocco could be considered a nation-state, too. The rest of North Africa is artificial as is all of what was Mesopotamia as well as the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Oddly, Yemen has a national identity but the fact that it has been in a civil war for most of the time from the 1960’s onward means that it is secondary to the Sunni-Shiite split that has energizes the war.

That being said, the call of the Arab world and the west for the unity or integrity of Syria will only lead to more bloodshed. Syria, like Iraq, needs to be divided up by its natural religious and geographical boundaries into autonomous zones or Emirates. Not as nation-states. The Kurds, for example ought to be able to have control at least of Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish areas to form a Kurdistan.

The Druze, mentioned earlier can have an autonomous area of themselves in Jebel Druze – possibly extending to the Syrian Golan. A defense arrangement can be made with Israel in exchange for a unity of sorts with Druze communities in the Israeli Golan heights.

Of course, all of this would require the type of intellectual honesty not found in the world in general and the United Nations in particular. Entire levels of corruption and nepotism would be upended without the fallacy of the Nation-State in the Arab world. The UN is based on the lie that all peoples and all individuals in the world must live in a nation-state and it is that fallacy that is not only racist, but leads to violence, hardship and poverty. In the West, the nation state has developed and works, for the most part. But since there is no imagination in in the world we can only think in one model. That is another fault of globalization, in that it homogenizes not only culture into one unified blob of mediocrity but it creates too many incentives for corruption and cruelty – mostly in the name of human and national rights. Therefore, due to the UN Charter, Syria will most probably continue its descent into its own hell, all in the name of keeping an artificial country together. They will occasionally unify to fight Israel but that too will lead to more destruction.

The coming Trump administration might be able to think out of the box and encourage those people who live in what is called Syria to form something entirely different than what the world is used to. Maybe the Iraqis can follow suit.

The British and French imperialists created these states and the Baathists curated them into dens of cruelty and oppression. Maybe some brave and creative souls will realize that there is a better way - a way based on local traditions and not totalitarian ideas of control.