How to Kill Terrorist States

Top Stories of the Year: #2

Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Gone is the turban, then the military fatigues. What’s next—is he gonna shave the beard? (SANA/AFP)

I’ve been counting down the top stories of 2024, and for a year that has ended pretty badly, a surprising number of the stories are positive. At #5 is the fading of Christianity in favor of secular alternatives to Christianity, which from my perspective is a good thing. At #4 is the rising profile of the YIMBYs. The “Crank Realignment,” at #3, is a less happy story. But we’re back to good news with top story #2: the dismantling of Hezbollah, the big setback for Iran in Syria, and the subsequent collapse of Russian influence in the Middle East and possibly beyond.

Let’s take a look at how this unexpected bit of good news unfolded over the year.

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The Generators of War

Early this year, I noted the comprehensive failure of the “Palestinian cause” following last year’s October 7 mass terror attack. The Hamas attack plan definitely succeeded in its immediate aim—to satisfy the bloodlust of terrorists—but resulted in the near-total destruction of the organization that planned it and immense suffering for the people on whose behalf they claimed to fight.

I also noted who were the “generators of war” stoking these conflicts.

There are certain countries—and kinds of regimes—that function as generators of war, stoking and maintaining conflict in a ring around them, as far as their reach extends. The “long peace” we have enjoyed since 1945, which may just now be drawing to a close, began when the fascist regimes were defeated in World War II. The number of armed conflicts dropped even lower after the collapse of the Soviet Union, another global driver of war. The two largest remaining war-generating regimes are Russia—which has surrounded itself with a ring of “frozen conflicts” and is trying to make Ukraine into one of them—and Iran.

I made a further note about Russian weakness in response to a massive Islamist terrorist attack in Moscow, which the Russians failed to prevent despite the fact that we warned them about it (based on our own intelligence) well ahead of time. It revealed Russia’s internal weakness.

Once again—remember Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted drive to Moscow last year?—this reveals how Putin’s war in Ukraine has left Russia weak and its heartland essentially undefended. ISIS-K saw this opportunity and took advantage of it. And with what forces will Russia strike back at them

Remember that Putin’s rise to power twenty years ago was based in large part on his response to big terrorist attacks by Chechnyan Muslim fanatics. But the actual measures were ineffective and just served as a cover for seizing power and looting the country.

For Russia to be suffering the same kind of attacks all these years later is a massive failure of Putin’s central claim to authority—and a reminder for everyone who needs it that a strongman’s claims to power are always an illusion. If we don’t have the will to puncture and deflate it, that’s our fault.

I also noted that the current US administration has actually been surprisingly effective at building up alliances in the Middle East to counter Iran, which was demonstrated in a massive Iranian missile and drone attack against Israel that fizzled.

When I say that “we” prevented this attack from succeeding, I mean we. This was a massive coordinated effort between the Israeli air force, the US Air Force, the RAF, and even the French, with help from the Saudis and Jordanians….

The response to this attack revealed the broad US-led coalition that we have built in the Middle East. Here’s an eye-opening report in the Wall Street Journal.

The formidable display of collective defense was the culmination of a decades-old but elusive US goal to forge closer military ties between Israel and its longtime Arab adversaries in an effort to counter a growing common threat from Iran.

Israeli and US forces intercepted most of the Iranian drones and missiles. But they were able to do so in part because Arab countries quietly passed along intelligence about Tehran’s attack plans, opened their airspace to warplanes, shared radar tracking information or, in some cases, supplied their own forces to help, officials said.

The operation was the culmination of years of US effort to break down political and technical barriers that thwarted military cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab governments, officials said. Instead of a Middle East version of the NATO alliance, the US has focused on less formal regionwide air-defense cooperation to blunt Tehran’s growing arsenal of drones and missiles—the very weapons that threatened Israel Saturday.

The Gulf Arab states have been in a cold war with Iran for a long time, and this is drawing them into a not-quite-open alliance with Israel. But their larger goal is to secure for themselves the kind of protection we just provided. As an expert quoted by the Journal put it, “Gulf countries know they still don’t have the same level of support that Israel gets from the United States and see what they did as a way of getting it in the future.”

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“Eternity Has Fallen”

The only thing our enemies really have going for them is that they can count on some strong pockets of support back here in the US.

As for the left, I had some tart comments about the pro-Hamas protests on college campuses in the Spring (which did not really return in the Fall).

This is a historical re-enactment of the counterculture protests of the 1960s—but not our hazy, glamorized cultural recollection of those protests. This is a smaller-scale re-enactment of the real counterculture, with all its ugliness, its outside agitators, its insane far-left agenda, its authoritarian conformity masquerading as rebellion—and its admiration for truly evil, mass-murdering foreign dictatorships….

This is a full, unvarnished re-enactment of the 1960s counterculture, which play-acted “rebellion” while actually being fascinated with totalitarianism.

Yet there has also been a lot of support for dictatorship on today’s right. I guess Tulsi Gabbard counts as “the right” these days as she attempts to complete her journey from the Bernie Sanders campaign to the Trump cabinet. At any rate, she has a long history of being sympathetic toward Russia and downright friendly with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. There is no doubt that Tucker Carlson represents today’s right, and he just came out in defense of Assad in much the same terms that he has defended Putin.

But the events of the past year show how easily these regimes can be knocked down if they meet only a little bit of stiff resistance.

Israel demonstrated this with a stunningly successful operation against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon that reached its climax in September.

[I]f you’re keeping track, here’s the progression. Israel tracks Hezbollah cellphones and uses them to target its fighters, so they resort to using pagers. Israel intercepts the pagers, loads them with small explosive charges, and blows them up en masse. Hezbollah switches to walkie-talkies, only to discover Israel has rigged those, too. They meet in person and the meeting is bombed. And then Israel manages to track down the hidey hole of Hezbollah’s top leader and send him to Allah.

Here is what the organizational chart for Hezbollah looks like now. The only guy left is that one guy down on the lower right. And I’d be pretty nervous if I were him.

This is a stunningly successful intelligence operation that will be followed up by an Israeli ground operation to clear out Hezbollah missiles within range of Northern Israel. And it’s likely they will face little organized resistance, because hardly anybody is left to organize it.

This turned out to have effects far beyond Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah had been crucial as a source of fighters and vicious enforcers for the Assad regime in Syria. With Hezbollah suddenly out of commission, and with the Russians tied up in their own quagmire, the supports were knocked out from under the regime. Hence its sudden collapse within two months.

I drew some wider lessons from Assad’s collapse in Syria, particularly about the relative strength of free societies and dictatorships.

Pointing to South Korea, someone recently said to me—regretfully—that “democracies usually die.” I think it’s very premature to say that. Modern democracies are still very young on a historical scale, and while they have their turmoil and their backsliding, free societies are still stronger than they have been in most of history….

I’ll give the last word to a Syrian refugee in Turkey who describes the euphoria of the Syrian diaspora and looks back on the Assad regime.

One thing that was particularly awful about it was how permanent it made itself out to be. The official line was that Hafez Assad’s presence was with us “for eternity.” Well, no more. My social media feed has been buzzing with the slogan “eternity has fallen.”

I don’t know whether free societies are eternal—but we know damn well that dictatorship is not.

Oh, and speaking of South Korea, the parliament initially failed to impeach the president who impose a brief, failed martial law. But then they tried again and succeeded, and now he is facing a criminal investigation for the coup attempt. South Korea has lived under dictatorship within living memory, and perhaps that’s why they’re doing a bit better than we are at responding to this kind of threat to their constitution.

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What Comes Next?

As a follow-up in Syria, the big question is: What comes next? Can the various factions in Syria live in peace with one another? Will a secular dictatorship just be replaced by a religious one?

A lot of this hinges on a guy named Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of the Islamist faction that launched the final assault that collapsed the regime. He has dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and he swapped out his turban for military fatigues and then his fatigues for a suit. Since taking power in Damascus, he has been going around acting like George Washington, promising amnesty for soldiers of the old regime, freedom for women, a new constitution drafted by respected jurists, religious freedom, democracy, the rule of law. Those seem like funny things for an Islamist to do, don’t they?

Here's a CNN report:

Striking a more moderate tone, Sharaa has vowed to usher in an era of change driven by a vision of an inclusive Syria in which the country’s many religious and ethnic groups will be represented.

But with a $10 million US bounty on his head and as the current leader of a group that has been designated a terrorist organization by Washington and others, he faces an uphill battle to convince people that he is a changed man.

Unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan, which barred women from higher education, public spaces like parks and most jobs, the BBC reported that Sharaa said he would be much more inclusive and had pointed to HTS' record in regions it has governed in recent years, particularly in the city of Idlib in Syria’s northwest.

There, he said, universities had been teaching “for more than eight years,” adding, “I think the percentage of women in universities is more than 60%.

Sharaa also promised that a Syrian committee of legal experts would be formed to write a new constitution for the country. “They will decide. And any ruler or president will have to follow the law,” he said.

“He’s saying all of the things that I think Washington and Europe want to hear in terms of a transition leading to a government that’s inclusive and reflective of the will of all Syrians,” said Dana Stroul, a former senior Defense Department official who served in the Biden administration.

Then again, as the Middle East Media Research Institute documents, his faction has a real history of pro-al-Qaeda sentiment. A MEMRI analysis proposes what is perhaps the most likely outcome: a lightly oppressive moderate Islamist system modeled on authoritarian democracy in Turkey—which is, after all, Sharaa’s chief sponsor.

The scenario would be something like this:

The interim period produces some sort of constitutional document guaranteeing certain freedoms and setting up UN-supervised democratic elections in 2025. The dynamic and modest 42-year-old Ahmed Al-Shar'a wins them easily and becomes Syria's first Sunni Muslim, non-Baathist President in 60-plus years.

He rules as a democratically-elected illiberal authoritarian but with a relatively light hand. He already controls the country's new military, which were the former Syrian Islamist rebels. There are already inklings that this sort of "Islamist Light" model would be his preferred path to follow. In a discussion from April 2023, Al-Shar'a discussed the drawbacks of following a Saudi or Afghan model of enforcing Islamic norms that he saw as unsuitable for Syria….

We have a sense of how all of this could play out because we have the historical record of a decade of Islamist rule of rebel-held Idlib since 2015, especially since the Al-Shar'a-led HTS took all of Idlib city in July 2017. This is rule that was first more radical and disorganized but became more orderly and systematic over time but not without some degree of public dissatisfaction. Many of the civilian officials put in place by Al-Shar'a in Idlib then are now in new positions of authority, as interim ministers, in Damascus. The combination of Al-Shar'a political savvy, Qatar's money, and Turkey's security umbrella could actually succeed in delivering a better situation on the ground for most Syrians than the late-stage Assad regime. The new regime would be fortunate indeed that Assad has set the bar so low.

Such an outcome would be a threat to other countries. Not by failure but by success. Jordan, an authoritarian ally of the West with a restive, unhappy Sunni-majority population would be directly influenced by such events. Non-Islamist authoritarians in the region will be very unhappy at the success of such a provocative model.

This model was a step backward for Turkey, but it might actually be a step forward for Syria.

For now, the main thing is that this is a loss for the more radical and warlike regime in Iran—which this setback has helped push into a new and deeper economic crisis.

Although Iran has one of the biggest supplies of natural gas and crude oil in the world, it is in a full-blown energy crisis that can be attributed to years of sanctions, mismanagement, aging infrastructure, wasteful consumption—and targeted attacks by Israel.

“We are facing very dire imbalances in gas, electricity, energy, water, money and environment,” said President Masoud Pezeshkian in a live televised address to the nation this month. “All of them are at a level that could turn into a crisis.”…

For most of last week, the country was virtually shut down to save energy. As ordinary Iranians fumed and industrial leaders warned that the accompanying losses amounted to tens of billions of dollars, Mr. Pezeshkian could offer no solution other than to say he was sorry. “We must apologize to the people that we are in a situation where they have to bear the brunt,” Mr. Pezeshkian said. “God willing, next year we will try for this not to happen.”

More broadly, it is yet another reminder of the weakness of dictatorship. In Damascus or in Tehran or in Moscow, they tend to look very powerful and permanent right up to the moment they collapse.

I expect the incoming Trump administration to give Russia every chance to recover. More on that in top story #1 tomorrow. But we should always bear in mind how weak our enemies really are—so long as we have the will to confront and resist them.

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A lot of these developments are at their beginnings, not their ends. So stay tuned in the New Year, when I will be covering all of this as it happens.