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In a lightning campaign lasting a week, the Ba’athist regime of Bashar al-Assad was routed, al-Assad exiled to Moscow, Russian forces expelled from the country, and a new government installed, bringing the thirteen-year Syrian civil war to a surprising denouement. The fact that the new government is led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group with roots in al-Qaeda and it’s Syrian spinoff, the al-Nusra Front, gave pause to many. 

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The al-Nusra Front was led by a Syrian jihadi with the nom de guerre of Abu Mohammad al-Julani; his real name is Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. Al-Julani traveled to Iraq in 2003 to fight US troops. He was captured by US forces in 2006. From 2006 until his release by Iraqi authorities in 2011, he was a prisoner of war and seems to have moved from the suicide vest guys to the political class during that imprisonment. When he was released, he was given the task of ginning up an al-Qaeda subsidiary in Syria, which became the al-Nusra front. At some point, ISIS attempted a hostile takeover, and al-Nusra went to war with them. He broke from al-Qaeda to go independent, allied briefly with the Russians during the latter Obama years, and finally came under Turkish patronage around 2017. 

HTS emerged in 2017 through a series of mergers between Syrian factions. Al-Julani became the de facto battlefield commander and consolidated his position as he purged jihadist elements from HTS. When its founder decided to retire, al-Julani became the leader. By this time, HTS had become one of the leading opposition groups, and al-Julani found himself bombed by his former buddies, the Russians.

The predictions of chaos and bloodbath have not materialized; in fact, al-Julani has shown much more interest in stabilizing Syria and building a nation than he has in fomenting jihadi or fighting Israel. Let’s just take a brief look at what has happened in Syria since al-Bashar caught the first thing smoking for Moscow.

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Religious Pluralism Exists

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Reconstruction is Happening

Government Economic Controls are Being Dismantled

Women are not Officially Oppressed

HTS is Disbanding, and a Single National Army is Forming

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No War With Israel

Distance from Iran

Major Diplomatic Offensive

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What It Means

While it is much too early to tell what will happen in Syria, the initial signs are encouraging. Unlike nearly any other Arab civil war, reconciliation is given a priority over vengeance. An effort is being made to bring all parts of Syrian society together. While there is no doubt it will be a distinctly Islamic society, al-Julani seems to understand that Syria has enough religious and ethnic diversity that the “one size fits all” model we see in most of the Islamic world will not work. The Russians have abandoned their naval and airbase, removing the Kremlin’s meddling in a delicate situation.

In his Farewell Address, Washington left us with this warning.

In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and in tractable when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur.

Hence frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation prompted by ill will and resentment sometimes impels to war the government contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject. At other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility, instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim.

So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

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Lord Palmerston treats the same subject in a much pithier quote, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

I fear that many on the right have fallen into the trap of seeing American and Muslim relations through the lens of 9/11, and they are willing to see the change of government in Syria as the creation of yet another terrorist breeding ground. Indeed, on social media, some of the accounts most adamantly against US support for Ukraine and so-called “forever wars” by the “neocons” are also in favor of doing nothing to influence the outcome in Syria because of 9/11 and the 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan that they decry.

The initial moves of al-Julani seem to be focused on keeping much of the same multicultural tolerance of the Assad regime without, so far as we can see right now, the terror and repression. Whether al-Julani can ride that particular tiger remains to be seen, but this does seem to be a brief opening where American “soft power” could go a long way toward achieving regional stability. At the least, we should be able to let Syria take the lead in eradicating ISIS and return American troops home; see Yikes: Pentagon Spox Makes Shocking Announcement – ‘Recently Learned’ There Are More US Troops in Syria – RedState. Labeling al-Julani as al-Qaeda or pro-ISIS is somewhere between nonsense and dishonesty. Al-Julani’s service with the Iraqi insurgency was not unusual for young men of that place and time. The fact is that when given the opportunity to break with al-Qaeda, he did. And he fought ISIS even when it got him nothing of value. 

If we ignore Washington’s words and treat al-Julani reflexively as an enemy, we risk repeating the same mistake we made when dealing with Ho Chi Minh. We rejected his pleas to achieve Vietnamese independence, and he went elsewhere for help. We owe it to ourselves to take the win we’re being offered. Should al-Julani’s actions reveal something darker, we can always go back to hostilities knowing that we at least gave our best efforts to create a stable Syria, probably under Turkish influence, that is no longer a threat to Israel or a semi-client state of Iran.

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There is still a lot of work to do. The State Department lifted a $10 million bounty on Al-Julani, but his HTS group is still under extensive sanctions. Likewise, Syria’s banking sector is under sanctions and will probably need some sort of international oversight to bring it back into the global financial network.

There are reports that some US humanitarian aid is making its way to Syria.

I think the incoming Trump administration is much better suited in talent and philosophy to make the most of Syria’s new government than the collection of nitwits, lackwits, midwits, and f***wits that is Biden’s foreign and defense policy operations. If they are successful, that could be a multi-generational game-changer in the region.