Of course it was 'surreal.' What did you expect?
Donald Trump, "Joe" Jolani and Bibi Netanyahu walk into a bar. . . UPDATE.
Some opening notes, to all subscribers.
(Update for subscribers below paywall, under subhead The war on Israel plods drearily along.)
I’m trying to keep up, honest, and I pledge to do better. It’s just been crazy busy lately and I’ll be in Ottawa all next week, for duties related to my efforts to illuminate the dank and foetid corners of malign foreign interference in this country’s politics. I’m to pay particular attention to the encumbrances that enfeeble the news media. Details below the paywall.
Also down there, and so far unreported as I write this: How Canada’s Senate Chamber became the venue for something called “The Palestine Tribunal,” currently in progress.
It’s a two-day affair featuring speakers with ties to terror groups and all the usual antisemitic bona fides and cirriculum vitae in Hamas apologetics that you’d expect. Some of the luminaries come with rap sheets that include Israeli terror listings, U.S. sanctions, and of course public expressions of glee over the October 7, 2023 Simchat Torah pogrom that kicked off the bloody war in Gaza.
And they’re all there, right now, in the Canadian Parliament’s Upper House. How has it come to this?
Looking at you, Senator Yuen Pau Woo.
Real Story subscribers cannot say they weren’t warned. See especially Stigmatize, Vilify, Detest: Do Not Obey. Canada’s Beijing-aligned Mandarin bloc is the 21st century version of the Nazi-aligned Deutscher Bund from the 1930s. Discuss, while you still can.
I mean, just look at them all.
On to today’s main attraction.
You want ‘surreal’? I’ll give you ‘surreal’?
In the National Post I have a go at this week’s strange promo event for the Trump corporation (“Buy two or more fragrances and receive $50 off each bottle! Don’t miss out!”) at the White House featuring Perfumer-in-Chief Donald J. Trump and Scary Jihadi Terrorist Man Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose street name used to be Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. Thus, Trump: Just take that perfume there, Joe.
“The other one is for your wife. How many wives. One wife? With you guys I never know. I never know, right?”
Gotta say, that Trump guy cracks me up.
The Post piece ran under the headline Trump welcomes Syria to the fold, where it belongs. It is the most encouraging development in the Middle East in 15 years. To be clear, the “it” there doesn’t refer to the certified Amazing Event At The White House that the consensus among American journalists requires us to describe as “surreal.”
The “it” refers to last December’s overthrow of the Hitlerian Assad regime, the end of a barbarism that built a corpse pile of roughly 650,000 dead Syrians and disappeared another 350,000 or so, the end ot it all and the return of 1.2 million Syrian refugees so far, and the return of a further 1.9 million “internally displaced” Syrians to their home towns.
The “15 years” bit refers to the course of the Arab Spring across the Maghreb and the Levant. It erupted and sparked and crackled and mostly flamed out in ways that most of Euro-America could never quite comprehend. Americans were especially confused. It was complicated, but it was also straightforward, especially in Syria, where the demand was uncluttered: Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-nizām. The people want to bring down the regime.
Who the hell are we to complain about ‘Joe’?
The people finally brought down the regime last December, and I must say I find it a bit rich when certain Americans express shock and outrage about the White House hosting Al-Sharaa. You can’t bitch, because the Syrian catastrophe began when your swaggering president Barack Obama and his jetsetting secretary of State John Kerry left all those young fighting-age Syrian males with no choice but to enlist with Al-Sharaa’s Jabhat Al-Nusra, or find some way to get into a leaky raft bound for Europe.
You can’t bitch when your Republican Party wanted to sell out the Syrian people even without the false promise of a Khomeinist regime giving up its nuclear-bomb ambitions. You can’t bitch when Democratic Party icon Obama sacrificed the Syrian people on the bloody altar of rapproachment with Tehran, and the Democrats’ foreign policy establishment invited the Kremlin to police Obama’s “red line” on Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
And then all of you looked the other way when Vladimir Putin immediately ordered his air force to begin a merciless campaign of bombing Syria’s towns and cities and schools and hospitals.
You abandoned the Syrian revolutionaries of the Free Syrian Army in exchange for Tehran’s commitment to persist in the nuclear-talks pantomime, which was a whited sepulchre from the beginning. And you rendered yourself incapable of owning up to what you did in clearing the field for a wider war waged by the “Axis of Resistance,” with Bashar Assad its lynchpin, against the people of Israel. For a deep dive into all that: The War the White House Won’t Talk About.
Do let’s give some side-eye to Trump here, but this is how bad Obama’s Syria “policy” was: His senior Syria adviser, Frederic Hof, resigned in disgust. His ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford also resigned. Obama’s policy was publicly opposed by Ryan Crocker, Bill Clinton’s former ambassador to Syria, and Obama’s own anti-ISIS coalition leader General John Alan. His CIA chief, Leon Panetta, was against it, too.
Americans would prefer to forget all that. They don’t like to remember that President Joe Biden revived the Iran talks folly after Donald Trump the First bailed on it. Into the bin went the Syrian National Council, the Syrian Coalition of Revolutionary Opposition Forces, and dozens of Syrian non-combatant organizations. Roadkill.
I have a bit of a history with Syria’s agony so I’m afraid I’ve acquired an opinion or two over the past 15 years along with a bit of an attitude about the postures of the NATO countries. As in This is what it’s come to: Letting Syria die, watching Syrians drown. Or Our day of reckoning for Syria is coming. The mass murder and madness in Syria has opened a great gaping wound in humanity. Repairing it is going to cost us all deeply.
In money costs alone, by the way, the World Bank reckons that Syria’s reconstruction expenses involving “damaged physical assets” will range around a conservative best estimate of $216 billion. The human costs can never be calculated.
It’s not an easy story to tell. But a fella’s gotta try.
I’ve tried my best to tell the story in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, Macleans and elsewhere, not least by reporting directly from Northern Syria, from Turkey, Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan and Israel. Also there was that fun time when I got picked up off the street in a Turkish border town by plainclothes police who were convinced I was a Euro-jihadi en route to join ISIS. That was pretty surreal, let me tell you.
Because it’s not quite true that “the internet never forgets,” there’s a bit of an archive here that draws from the Wayback Machine. From WSJ: With the Kurds Fighting Islamic State in Syria.
The surreal thing about Al-Sharaa isn’t so much the contrast between where he was in his early 20s and where he is now. It’s that you’d never know it, but he’s been fighting ISIS for nearly a decade, and cooperating with US Forces for several years. It’s that his Jabhat al-Nusra “Al Qaida affiliate” broke with Al Qaida nearly a decade before he folded the Nusra Front into his Hayat-al-Sham coalition.
It’s all that, but I’m still haunted by what a young Free Syrian Army fighter told me more than a decade ago after the great American betrayal: “In the Syrian reality, people know who is against us and who is for us. Jabhat al Nusra is helpful to us. I have met with them personally to find the truth. . . Everybody knows that the western world will do nothing to help us. The people of Syria are sure now that the western world is of no use to them at all.”
So yes, I have a bit of an attitude problem. Not apologizing for it.