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Nine times out of ten, you should be skeptical that the fall of a bad guy means that the people who ousted him are the good guys. 

The world rarely works that way, which is why I am more than a little confused by the celebration of the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. 

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Don’t get me wrong; in principle, I think it is wonderful that after more than five decades, the Assads have been unceremoniously ushered off the world stage and exiled to Russia. It wouldn’t bother me in the least to see Assad tried, convicted, and executed for his crimes against the Syrian people. 

But in the real world, I worry that what replaces Assad’s rule in Syria will not be a decent government that rebuilds the country into something more humane but a chaotically-run failed state that breeds and shelters terrorists, exports violence, is filled with even more atrocities committed against innocents and descends into even more violent conflict than already existed. 

Perhaps I have lost my former knack for optimism, but after living through the past few decades, my willingness to suspend disbelief has been exhausted. 

Consider Libya, where the US-backed opponents of Qaddafi drove him out of power and executed the tyrant. The US foreign policy establishment was thrilled as we had engineered the whole thing. 

How did that work out for us? 

Well, let’s see…our Ambassador was killed and dragged around Benghazi, slave markets opened up in Libya, and a massive refugee crisis was sparked. 

It’s a story that keeps being repeated. We here in the United States see injustices and rightly want them corrected. But for some reason we never learn the lesson that our power to do so is limited because the world is filled with bad guys and we can’t kill them all. 

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I worry we are making the same mistake in Syria, celebrating one group of bad guys because they fought a different group of bad guys. 

Aformer Al Qaeda commander has seized power in Damascus, bringing great jubilation and relief to Washington, D.C. regime-changers who pined for this day. Bashar al-Assad has fled ingloriously to Russia in the dead of night without so much as making a statement to bid farewell.

It’s certainly interesting how quickly the profane ideological origins of militant groups can be ritualistically forgotten, so long as the erstwhile extremists appear to align with U.S. geopolitical interests—of which liberals in particular have styled themselves such passionate proponents in recent years, for among other reasons to counter the perceived “isolationism” of Donald Trump and his MAGA cohort.

In 2018, an entry in the Federal Register declared Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the new rulers of Syria as of this weekend, to be a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization, given its lineage with Al Qaeda. One amusing parlor game in D.C. will now be to predict how long it takes for this designation to be officially stricken from the record and flushed down the memory hole.

The swift rehabilitation of the Syrian militants is analogous to the PR makeover afforded to the Azov Regiment in Ukraine, once decried by ever-perceptive Progressive Democrats in that same bygone year, 2018, as a “Neo-Nazi” formation engaged in “government-supported Nazi glorification.” Then, in short order, Azov were treated to their own glorification process, rebranded as Freedom Fighters battling the Russian hordes in defense of liberal values.

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I freely admit to not knowing who the good guys in Syria are, although my sympathies tend to lie with the Kurds out of habit. They have been good allies to the US, and from what I have seen our soldiers for the most part say good things about them. But that is just prejudice, not considered judgment based on research. 

What I do know is that people we have relied on to make those considered judgments based on research and experience have a terrible track record of making such judgments. It seems we lurch from favoring one group or another for obscure reasons, get tangled up in messes without understanding what we are getting into, and wind up paying huge prices for little gains. 

Somalia, anyone? 

We already have 900 US troops in Syria–how many of you knew that, by the way?–and I fear that before this is all over there may be more. 

They are there on an anti-ISIS mission, which may make sense, as the airstrikes the US and Israel are conducting almost certainly do if we can disarm the entire country and deny terrorists the ability to cause trouble outside Syria’s borders. 

But I hope that nobody in the foreign policy establishment is actually under the illusion that we can “save” Syria, because the evidence is that we can’t. There are no important resources in Syria we must protect, and our interest seems to me to contain any fallout rather than repair any damage. 

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I am not an isolationist–but I have become a skeptic that we can solve the world’s problems. We rarely do, and when we actually accomplish something good it seems miraculous to me. 

I don’t expect any miracles to occur in Syria, and neither should you.