Terrorists Liberate Terrorists From Other Terrorists

Good news from Syria.

In a stunning win for freedom, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni terrorist organization defeated the Assad regime and its Shiite terrorist groups to take over Syria. HTS is led by Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, a Saudi former associate of the caliph of ISIS who has a $10 million reward on his head from the U.S. while Assad was supported by Hezbollah whose leaders had multi-million dollar rewards on their heads until Israel killed them (but didn’t collect the money.)

Assad was backed by the Shiite terror state of Iran while HTS is backed by the Sunni terror state of Turkey. Geopolitical experts say that Sunni Islamists defeating Shiite Islamists to rule the pile of rubble that’s left of Syria is the biggest win for human freedom since the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt and parts of North Africa (before being ousted from Egypt and some other parts of the region) in the freedom phenomenon known as the Arab Spring.

The media broadcast scenes of Jihadists praising Allah for helping them defeat the other Jihadists who also praise Allah (but not in the right way) and liberating political prisoners to shortly replace them with other political prisoners (assuming that they even bother taking political prisoners or any kind of prisoners.) Talks are underway between the terrorists of the former regime with the terrorists of the current regime to see if they can work it out.

And maybe just focus on killing Christians, Jews and other infidels.

Some might suspect that a former ISIS associate tied to Al Qaeda (who admittedly turned on his former group to lead another Jihadist organization) taking over a country would be bad news. But they’re clearly bad people who don’t realize that Al-Jawlani is a changed man, an austere religious scholar who underwent a makeover courtesy of Queer Eye for the Syrian Guy and now, in the words of the BBC, wears a “more western style wardrobe”. At least if you count rocking Zelensky’s military fatigue hand-me-downs as looking like a regular western warlord.

The Biden administration has already made contact with the terrorist organization led by a man on whose head is a $10 million reward to offer to rebuild Syria just in time for the next civil war. Publicly, the administration has already taken credit for helping defeat Assad by insisting that the Israelis must stop attacking Hezbollah at once. Had the Israelis listened, Assad would still be in power. But the Biden administration was surely using reverse psychology and by threatening Israel with an arms embargo was really getting the Israelis to fight even harder.

Or at least that’s the story that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is going with.

While the world (or at least the parts of it that completely forgot about the Arab Spring) rejoices, the Israeli government which (for all its failings) has more sense than the State Department or a headless chicken, has begun bombing what’s left of Syria’s rocket factories and chemical warfare plants that Secretary of State John Kerry (despite promising Obama) somehow never got around to making sure that Vladimir Putin would dismantle and put away in cold storage.

The Israelis are also expanding their presence in Mt. Hermon and building their own security zone because they trust Syria’s new terrorist masters as much as they trusted the old.

What Jerusalem knows and Foggy Bottom has yet to learn is that the Middle East is a bunch of tribal factions, warlords and gangs pretending to be countries, but despite the flags, anthems, UN memberships, World Bank positions and invites to climate change summits, are all some version of Al-Jawlani bouncing between ISIS, Al Qaeda and a new governing coalition.

Over a thousand years of Islam comes down to some guy with a beard uniting a few key families with whose backing he then seizes a bunch of cities that used to belong to long lost great civilizations and then his men settle down to some murdering, looting and raping while thanking Allah for the privilege of a mission to kill, loot and rape the world. Or die trying.

The stationary bandit theory isn’t some abstraction in the Middle East: it’s everyday reality.

As we all should have learned in the last generation, every Arab Muslim country is one inflationary spiral away from some guy with a ‘nom de guerre’ or ‘kunya’ riding into town on a pickup truck with 300 fellow bandits and becoming the new government in Allah’s name.

Georgetown idiots with PhDs then cheer as statues of the old dictator are toppled as if Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Tripoli or Tunis were Prague, Berlin or any city where democracy means more than ‘my tribe has more guns than your tribe’. The old Pharaohs (not to mention Caesars) would tear down each other’s monuments too. That didn’t make old Tutankhamen a liberator or a democrat. At least not the kind who is acceptable outside Chicago.

Assad heading off to shop at Moscow’s GUM for more luxury handbags is no great loss and his replacement by other terrorists is no great gain. At least not for us. Or likely for Syria’s Christians. Or Israel. Or really anyone else except members of the new regime.

There’s no right side of history in the middle east and if the arc bends anywhere, it’s the arc of a sword over a prone prisoner’s neck. Islam is the driving force in the region and the driving force of Islam is conquering and subjugating all Muslims and non-Muslims under one caliphate. In the Ummah, all of history is one great game of thrones to determine who will rule over all the rubble.

The complicated chess game between rival Jihadist groups and nation-states is likely to end badly for everyone especially since Syria was really a showdown between Iran, which is developing nuclear weapons, and Turkey, which is a NATO member with a huge arsenal, and there can only be one ultimate Islamic ruler in the apocalyptic endgame scenario.

Terrorists replacing terrorists with more terrorists is only good news for the new terrorists and for the media which gets to breathlessly cover another foreign conflict between two groups of butchers who would behead everyone at CNN at their first sight of a DEI LGBTQ+ poster.

It’s also good news for humanitarian groups which have spent over a year lying about a famine in Gaza and after exhausting donor interest with AI generated photos of sad Muslim kids in Hamasville can now move on to relabeling those same photos as hungry kids in Syria.

Media baron William Randolph Hearst reportedly once bragged, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.” In the Muslim world, the Taliban, Houthis, Hamas and their comrades supply the war, the media supplies the pictures and taxpayers supply more money than they can count.

After sending $2 billion to Afghanistan after the Taliban took over, the Biden administration will be rushing money to Syria until the very moment the checkbooks are pried out of their hands.

It would be tempting to think that Syria is over, but in tribal cultures nothing is ever really over. Each conflict is based on past vendettas and generates new ones. The conflicts follow demographics and a complex mix of clan loyalties and factions whose shifts change the war. A new war is just a matter of the old coalition coming apart and forming new ones. If you doubt that, consider the speed with which the Jihadists took Kabul and Damascus. The Taliban and HTS are just groups of gangs whose allegiances can be bought and sold for the right price.

But the same proved to be true of the Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian armies. And many others.

Syria did not fall. Like Afghanistan and Iraq, it never really existed. We spend a lot of time and money propping up fictions because we want the rest of the world to be just like us. It’s not.

And it may never be.

Instead of hoping to civilize savages, we would be better off standing with civilized allies. The more we go on searching for progress in the Muslim world, the more we find that it’s terrorists all the way down.