The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Michael Weiss: how Assad's fall is reshaping the Middle East

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Bashar al-Assad has fled to Russia. Rebel leaders have taken over Damascus. And hundreds of thousands of refugees from the country's long civil war are making their way back home.  And while many in Syria and around the world are rejoicing at the downfall of Assad and his brutal regime, there are growing concerns that the country could go the way of Libya, Yemen, and Iraq, where insurgent groups and sectarian strife have wreaked havoc on the civilian population and created failed states, which in the case of Syria, could threaten to further destabilize an already volatile Middle East. And beyond Syria, how does Assad's regime collapse affect broader conflicts and regional powers like Iran, Israel, Russia, the U.S. and Turkey? To make sense of this moment, and the seismic changes taking place, we are joined by Michael Weiss. Michael is an investigative journalist who focuses on international affairs,  specifically the wars in Syria and Ukraine. His understanding of this region and its players gives him a unique insight into this rapidly evolving situation.  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Both Iran and Russia were completely surprised by how non-existent the Syrian Arab army and Assad's military was. The fact that they didn't fight and put up a fight at all meant that the writing was on the wall very early. Hello, monk listeners. Welcome to this. Our continuing conversations called the monk dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each monk dialogue, we go deep into the big, issues and ideas driving the public conversation. Syria is undergoing a historic sea change.

Bashir al-Assad has fled to Russia. Rebel leaders have taken over Damascus and hundreds of thousands of refugees from the country's long civil war are making their way back home. While many in Syria and around the world are rejoicing at the downfall of Assad and his brutal regime, there are growing concerns that the country could go the way of Libya, Yemen, and Iraq, where insurgent groups and sectarian strike wreaked havoc on the civilian population and created failed states that threatened regional security. And beyond Syria, how does the Assad's regime's collapse affect broader conflicts in the region and the struggle between powers like Iran, Israel, Russia, the United States, and Turkey? To make sense of this moment and the seismic changes taking place, we are joined by Michael Weiss.

Michael Weiss is an investigative journalist who focuses on international affairs, specifically the wars in Syria and Ukraine. His deep knowledge of the region and its players allows him to give us some really profound insights into this rapidly evolving situation. Michael, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Let's pull back at the beginning of this interview and go kind of big picture with you. I think a lot of people are struggling how to kind of quality, and quantify the events that have unfolded in Syria over the last 72 hours. How historically significant do you think this is, not simply for the people of Syria,

but for the region, for the Middle East, for what we're seeing unfold on our screens right now? Well, let me say that I am still trying to grapple with the enormity of what's occurred and the speed with which it has occurred. But I think at a very basic level, we can make a very confident statement with respect to how important this is for Syrians who have fought and struggled against the Assad regime, not just over the last 13 years of one of the most brutal and horrific civil wars in modern history, which resulted in the regime killing hundreds of thousands of its own people. But for 50 years, I mean, this was a dynastic dictatorship that has been. founded on terror, a true totalitarian regime. And you don't have to take my word for it. You can simply look at the images that are coming out of Syria, both in terms of the jubilation experienced by ordinary people across all confessions and ethnicities. Christians are cheering this, despite

years of propaganda that Assad was the protector of minorities. You are seeing images, frankly out of the end of the Third Reich and the end of Stalinist Soviet Union in terms of what has emerged from Sedanaya prison, a torture and really a complex a complex of dungeons and an infrastructure of pure sadism with bodies dipped in acid to dispose of corpses presses to crush corpses after they've been mutilated and tortured people who have complete memory lost because they've spent decades of their lives essentially buried alive. These were rumors. These were, there were some documentation, but to experience the full extent of it now and

to see these horrifying images is nothing short of breathtaking. So I just want to start with that. at a very basic level. Now, in terms of how this all took place and where things are headed, we have some information. I did a piece with my co-author, Hassan Hassan, about the preliminaries of what was meant to be a very limited offensive by HTS, which is the rebel group that is really the spearhead of all of this, whether or not it maintains its grip on power. given that it does not constitute very many people on the ground. I mean, maybe 60,000 armed fighters. It's not a, you know, sufficient numbers to hold together an entire country by itself.

That remains to be seen. But HTS is a former Al-Qaeda affiliate. People can debate whether or not it is truly former, but there's sufficient evidence to show that it has gone to war with the current Al-Qaeda affiliate in Idlib province. The leader of this group, Abu Muhammad, Adal Jalani has certainly talked a very pragmatic game of late with respect to respecting the rights of minorities, being an inclusive government, not taking revenge on defectors or deserters from the Assad regime. I mean, he's already talking about truth and reconciliation, which isn't really one of the motifs of al-Qaeda or any jihadist franchise for that matter.

However, there's also sufficient evidence and reason to be wary of his intentions, his motives, given HTS's human rights abuses. I mean, they have killed activists. They have killed secular Syrians in the past. So their reformation, the burden of proof is on them here. But what it happened was as follows. For many years, HTS has been occupying about two-thirds of Italy province in the northwest of Syria under Turkish protection, right? There are one border crossing, or rather the border crossings that they maintain on their side. On the opposite side, it's the Turkish government that allows everything to pour in, money, humanitarian aid, there's cross-border commerce, weapons, military uniforms, stuff like that. Turkey also maintains a garrison in Northwest

Idlib, including with heavy artillery. Turkey has skirmished with the Assad regime's attempts to retake Idlib, including wiping out basically all of the regime's military infrastructure. Turkey has had an ongoing confrontation with Russia, which has looked to essentially annihilate Jolani's franchise in Idlib. And yet, HTS maintains a level of autonomy. They have been in the past seven to eight years engaged in a state building and an enterprise. Now, this sounds sort of bizarre. I mean, a jihadist organization looking to actually build a state. Well, frankly, they learned a lot of hard lessons from the failure of the ISIS so-called caliphate, also the failure of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. One of the things that has sort of been an unintended comment,

of the war on terror over these last 20 some odd years is we have not eliminated jihadism from the face of the earth, but we have transformed it in the sense that a lot of these guys now believe that they have not given up their Islamic fundamentalism or their authoritarian tendencies, but they realize that they, by engaging in transnational terrorism, which is to say, going beyond their own borders, killing civilians, rampaging through discothex and pizza parlors and so on, they have invited an overwhelming military response, which basically has destroyed all of their capital and currency amongst their core constituency. So now there's this idea of basically an in-gathering, build up what you have at home and don't pick quarrels with your neighbors. Jolani seems to have

genuinely bought into this idea now. And the proof of that is in his outreach already, a kind of foreign policy with respect to Iraq, which is a Shia majority country. He's, told Baghdad, we have no quarrel with you. And again, keep in mind, this guy comes from, even before Al-Qaeda, he was one of the lieutenants of ISIS dispatched into Syria to build the ISIS brand there. ISIS has a genocidal project against the Shia. So for Jalani, even to say, we're not here to pick fights with the Shia, we want to be an inclusive state in Syria, is, is extraordinary. And so Turkey for the last few years has been having this sort of padidou with Assad. Assad was on the cusp of total reconciliation and normalization with not just the Gulf Arab states,

but frankly, I mean, with the world. Italy has recognized him, we put an embassy back in place in Damascus. The U.S. government, despite what the Biden administration is saying now, was engaged in a kind of creeping normalization with Assad turning a blind eye to enforcing sanctions as built by the Caesar Act here, trying to kill the anti-eastern. normalization bill, which would have forestalled this process. This was all taking place in the background, and yet there was one holdout to Assad being brought back in from the cold, as it were, and that was Turkey. And Turkey has one overriding national security interest, beyond ISIS,

beyond al-Qaeda, and that is the PKK, which is stands for the Kurdistan Workers' Party. PKK has been a separatist movement within Turkey that Turkey has gone to war with off and on over the past 40, 50 years. It is a designated terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, the European Union. Its Syria franchise, early days when ISIS was sweeping across the Levant and Mesopotamia, became one of the most significant proxy forces that the United States had to fight ISIS. As we speak, there's now an effort by Turkish-backed, essentially Janissaries, to retake Kobani. The Battle of Kobani, some of you may remember, this is where the U.S. really first got involved in Syria against ISIS. And it was the Kurds of this PKK-aligned militia that did all the heavy lifting and that fought this siege against ISIS.

I'm sorry, lifted the siege that ISIS had been placed on the town. So there was an inherent contradiction in our policy with respect to Syria here, which is our best ally on the ground in Syria is our NATO allies' worst nightmare, right? And this was always going to come to ahead. This was always going to lead to some kind of confrontation. Turkey was hoping with this process of normalization with Assad to resolve it half diplomatically and half militarily. So the diplomatic part would be recognize Assad, reengage him at all levels, and then work with the Syrian Arab army to basically clear out the borderland region of the PKK or the Syrian Democratic forces or the YPG militias, take your pick, right? Erdogan was banking on the fact that now that Donald Trump has been elected president for a second time and has made it very clear he wants to withdraw all American forces from Syria. This is his golden opportunity. The U.S. leaves, pulls out its 900 troops, stops providing air power to the Syrian Democratic forces,

which control all of the territory that was cleared from ISIS in the east of Syria. And the Turks will simply roll in. And they'll roll in and they'll go to war and destroy the SDF, right? And they will allow the return of some three million Syrian refugees who have caused all kinds of populist ferment and political crises for Erdogan and his party, Ekipi, which has ruled Turkey now for 20 some odd years. So there was all this kind of geopolitical maneuvering and skull dougary taking place in the background. And what happened was Assad, even though through the course of 13 years of civil war, sanctions, corruption, international drug trafficking, I mean, the true sclerosis of his regime. And the fact that he had mortgaged his country to Russia on the one hand and Iran on the other hand seems to have. of kind of, he'd lost sight of the fact. He was arguing from a position of peer to peer with Erdogan,

putting demands on Turkey when he was the one who ought to have capitulated and, you know, ceded the point to Ankara. Frankly, Turkey got fed up and exhausted. And for many months, HTS in its little pocket of northwest Syria has been champing at the bit to go on the offensive against the regime, because the regime all this time was conducting air strikes and and chivying the HTS enterprise. The Turks said no in October. And then finally in November, they said yes. Now, the level of coordination between Turkey and HTS is a, I would say, a matter of speculation,

but informed speculation. And I'll get to this in a minute. But the bottom line is the Turks lifted their opposition to this offensive. What they did not reckon with, I think what Jolani did not reckon with, and what Bashar al-Assad certainly did not reckon. with was just how incredibly hollow and flimsy, Syria's meaning the regime's purchase everywhere in the country, starting with Aleppo was. I mean, Aleppo was taken by HTS in about three days. There was no presence. The regime kind of melted into the air. Soldiers took off their uniforms,

put down their guns, ran back home. In some places, there were defections of soldiers to the HTS-led rebel onslaught. Taking Aleppo in three days is, I mean, it's sort of beggars belief if you consider what it took for a consortium of rebel groups, including HTS's prior incarnation, Jabot al-Nusra, to occupy Aleppo at the start of the civil war, and then what it took for Assad, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps proxies, and Russian air power to recapture Aleppo several years ago. So this was sort of extraordinary. Now, the question at that point was, and again, we're talking two weeks ago, not even, right? A lot of history has been jam-packed into this last fortnight. The question was, okay, they took Aleppo. Where's it going to go from here? And every analyst, everybody I was talking to is, you know, they're going to make a play for Hamma. Oh, it's going to be a battle for Hamma. There was really no considerable battle for Hamma. Well, but hang on a minute, Assad cannot afford to lose Homs. If he loses Homs, that's it. They're going to bifurcate the country and cut off his access to the coast and the Alawite Heartland. And, and, in Latakia, et cetera. I went to bed one night. I woke up and Holmes had gone over to the other side. And then all of a sudden, Damascus has fallen. And Damascus, what's interesting about this is,

you know, HTS, as I mentioned, is not the only game in town, perhaps 60,000 armed fighters. There's other groups in Syria, including reconciled rebels. Now, these are former Free Syrian Army actors who Russia had persuaded, I mean, at the barrel of a gun, to disarm and kind of go off into their own little autonomous zones in southern Syria. These guys sprang back into action. Other rebel groups that had abandoned or seemingly given up the fight against Assad also swept, you know, leapt to the fore, rearmed. And they made a play from southern Syria into the sort of soft underbelly of Damascus. Now, the reporting I've seen suggests these guys, the southern front rebels were the first ones to take the capital. What's interesting about that is southern front rebels consist of actors who were

formally assets of both the CIA and Jordanian intelligence. So these are players that the Western is familiar with, which I think is guiding some of our tentative approaches toward the new Syria that has occurred. Meanwhile, in the East, Syrian army garrisons just dissolved and moved west. Russia pulled out its forces, its forward operating bases. They began an evacuation. And from into this vacuum, the SDF, the Syrian Democratic forces, again led by the PKK Kurds, rushed in, essentially taking over more terrain and occupying more areas of, this is the Arab tribal heartland of Syria, taking over places that they're not going to be able to hold and indeed already are beginning to lose because the Arabs are now revolting and seeking to join the HTS-led Syria in

in the center and west of the country. So what we have now is no cohesive state, a sort of consortium of contradictory rivalrous actors, on top of which Turkey is now implementing its policy of trying to rid its borderland region of all PKK presence. They have taken over Menbidge. They are now making a play for Kobani, which I just mentioned was sort of where the U.S. PKK relationship was forged. And in southern Syria, the Israelis have invaded. And not only have they invaded to create a kind of defensive buffer zone, they, in the space of the last 24, 48 hours, have wiped out all of Syria's chemical weapons infrastructure. They have essentially destroyed whatever was left of the Syrian Air Force. So all of Syria's heavy weaponry is now gone,

It's been demilitarized by the Israelis who fear this sort of jihadist rebel-led government in the making. So the question of where is this all going to go and where is this going to end? Anybody who tells you they have an answer is lying. And I'm not going to try and venture one because it's going to get messier. It's taken quite a lot of intellectual energy for me to describe the Middle East how we got to this place. You know, to try and project chaos and energy. But let's not lose sight of, I think, one of the most important things here, which is the fall of a truly horrific totalitarian regime

and the fact that quite a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people, can breathe easier. They are crawling out of the darkness, right? They are beginning to talk to international media for the first time about what they really think, what they really feel. People are coming home. There's convoys of cars coming from Turkey. They feel as though they now have a chance to, create their own state, their own nation, and to be a free people. And we shouldn't lose sight of that.

I see a lot of cynicism. I see a lot of, you know, very kind of leery-eyed counterterrorism-driven appraisals that this is all going to go to hell. And it may well. But let these people catch their breath. I mean, they have already been through hell. And for most Syrians, they cannot imagine a life worse than that which they endured under Assad. But masterful summary, Michael, thank you so much. It's kind of has situated the last few weeks beautifully for me. If we pull back and talk a little bit about the regional players, because I think you would agree that while there's a series of different probabilities

and fates and futures for Syria, a lot of that will depend on how the different regional actors and some international actors like Russia behave. So let's start with Iran first. because it probably is the country that had invested the most in Syria, really a 40-year campaign to turn Syria into the funnel to feed its various proxy armies and forces primarily targeting Israel. Where does Iran stand today?

How are they looking at this sudden rapid implosion of the Assad regime? and what do you think their next move is going to be? Well, it's been a pretty rough year for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their ring of fire, as it was known in the Levant, which is to say a project that was many decades in the making to really put pressure on Israel through the arming and enfranchisement of Hamas in Gaza, but more important than Hamas, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, which was a state within a state, not just a terrorist organization. I mean, a full infrastructure, an apparatus that had administrative capacity and et cetera. That ring of fire has been doused. Sinwar is no more. Hamas has been decimated to a humanitarian catastrophe as a result in Gaza. And Hasbalah's leadership is gone. The Shura Council wiped out. The middle cadres neutralized

through this rather incredible intelligence operation of infiltrating a supply line of a pager company and then just detonating the pagers, you know, in one go and, you know, blowing people's, you know what's off, essentially. And their arsenal has been destroyed. If you believe the Israelis, 80% of short and mid-range rockets that Hezbollah had been building up or saying it had been building up since the second Lebanon, excuse me, the second Israel, Lebanon war ended, was neutralized through airstrikes and so on. So Hezbollah was the prize for Iran in the region. And one of the ironies of this, which I think historians will have, you know, ample material to delve into, especially now that all the intelligence files in Syria are

being recovered, is Hezbollah's deployment to Syria to prop up Asa? I mean, I remember the Russians telling me, we provide the air cover, Hezbollah provides the ground army, right? That intervention will be seen as the beginning of their unmaking and possibly the beginning of Iran's unmaking because it allowed the Israelis to infiltrate Hezbollah. One of the reasons Israel was caught blindsided by the October 7th is they weren't paying that much attention to Hamas because all of their efforts at the intelligence level, strategic level, was focused on Hezbollah. They completely ate their lunch. They recruited spies. They had, had superb SIG-int, and indeed, I mean, they managed to do this, this pager caper, which was

extraordinary in its own right. So, Hezbollah's deployment to Syria was sort of the beginning of the end. And now I think what happened with the Iranians is they were so exhausted and they've been so battered. And they themselves are worried about getting into open confrontation with Israel, I mean, which they have, right? There have been a series of missiles and drone strikes launched by Iran into Israel in retaliation for Israel taking out Iranian proxies or Iranian generals, Israel responded most recently by essentially wiping out Iran's advanced air defense platforms, most of them Russian built, by the way, overnight using fewer than 100 missiles and about 100 planes. So Iran is worried that any open confrontation with Israel, which may drag the United States in, would be the end

of their regime. And that's game over for everything. I think what happened in Syria was, both Iran and Russia were completely surprised by how non-existent the Syrian Arab army and Assad's military was. The fact that they didn't fight and put up a fight at all meant that the writing was on the wall very early. And this became a fait accompli very quickly. I mean, Iran had to make a swift calculation. Are we going to deploy again the same resources we did several years ago to retake Aleppo and to basically wipe out the Free Syrian Army and other actors that were looking to topple Assad, no, because to do so could risk everything. I mean, it could have led to the regime change in Tehran. The Russians, similarly, preoccupied by a brutal, devastating war in Ukraine that was meant to last about two weeks,

and we're now heading into, I think, year four, or I'm sorry, year three. For them, sort of their little adventure in Eastern Mediterranean, which was really undertaking in 2015, not to defeat ISIS, as Putin said, and as their propaganda would have you believe, but really to save Assad's bacon from Western Turkish and Arab-backed rebel groups that really did threaten at one point to topple his regime. And also to project power and to show that Russia was now a great power in the making again that could project. itself beyond Europe and its near abroad, quote unquote, and back into the Middle East. That project seems to be crumbling. If you listen to what some of the most influential Russian foreign policy

voices are saying, they think that this is all folly. They think it's time for Russia to pack up and go home. Now, I've seen very little indication to suggest they're looking to forfeit their air base in Latakia, much less their only warm water port and naval base in Tartus. These are very important logistics hubs for what Russia continues to do in Africa. Losing them is more than a symbolic defeat. There's a material cost here. However, there seems to be a growing chorus in Russia in terms of, you know, the messaging around the Kremlin and by extension through the Kremlin, that maybe it's time we retrench and consolidate and focus all of our energy on Ukraine, which is not, I mean, they're succeeding tactically in Ukraine. but not strategically, and they need all their resources for that theater of combat.

Yeah. So I think basically Russia and Iran decided they have no play left. And already what they're doing, it's quite funny because it went from one day they were fighting Takfiri genocidal jihadis. The next day, this is the armed opposition. The free Syrian flag now flaps above the Syrian embassy in Moscow, which has got to be an added humiliation for Bashar al-Assad, who is living in Russia now under. quote, humanitarian asylum. The Iranians are already engaged in talks with HTS, most likely

through the Turks, but perhaps directly. The Russians are negotiating both with the Turks and HTS for safe passage of their remaining forces out of Syria, or at least to the coastal region where they have these two military installations. They are the first to kind of de facto recognize the new sheriff in town, even before Western governments are prepared to do so. Remember, HTS, I should have said this earlier, is a sanctioned and designated terrorist organization, according to the United States. Jolani has a $10 million bounty out on his head. So what does this lead the U.S. and European countries to do? Are they going to lift this designation? Are they going to start talking directly to Jolani? Or my guess is, which they're no doubt already doing, is using regional interlocutors, such as the Turks,

to try and get, you know, see the cut of his jib, if you like, and what his long-term intentions are and his short-term intentions, for that matter. But, yeah, I mean, Iran and Syria are two of the biggest losers in this scenario. There's no question about that. Any concern, Michael, that the Iranian response could include now pressure to sprint towards a bomb, that the regime is feeling, incredibly weak, and you've painted the picture, why. They probably look at what happened in Damascus,

and they see a lot of parallels to their own country, hyperinflation, economy that's been gutted by sanctions, a population that really has very little, if any, real support for a government, a government that has been horribly abusive, especially towards its women. There's a lot of parallels there. Do you worry that this is the moment where Iran potentially makes the biggest miscalculation of all?

There are reports that they have increased their enrichment suddenly, taking their stockpiles up to the critical 60% level, according to the International Atomic Agency. What's your sense, Michael, should we be concerned that Iran is the next potential tripline in these series of dominoes that seem to have been falling over the last? few months, if you go back to what happened in Lebanon, what's happened to Hamas, now Syria, right? There would seem to be a momentum here, a worry that Iran could be next. Yes. And I, you know, I went back and I read what General Mattis said to Congress, I think, in 2013, you know, when the United States was weighing whether or not to enforce Obama's so-called red line on the use of chemical weapons or to install a no-fly zone over Syria or to really

take a policy that we got to get rid of Assad. He said at the time, and again, this is 2013, so we're going back now 10 years, that Assad falling in Syria would be the biggest strategic hammer blow to the Islamic Republic of Iran in 25 years. Well, I painted a picture of what they've suffered in the last year alone, and now, indeed, Assad is gone. So the question for the Iranians is, do they similarly look to do retrenchment and consolidation rather than? then this sort of projection of power, this IRGC expansionism, which was really led by the late Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, who the United States assassinated in 2020 in Iraq. Or, you know, do they try to pick up the pieces and salvage this project in some way?

The question of the nuclear program, I am the last person you should ask about this because I am not an expert on this. I fully confess. Yes, this has been the sort of perennial threat. national security interests for the United States. Barack Obama has a strategic communication advisor, Ben Rhodes, said that an Iranian nuclear deal was going to be to term two of the Obama administration, what Obamacare had been to term one. Clearly, this is something the Biden administration is worried about. Donald Trump is making noises, despite the fact that his first term was, you know,

the term of maximum pressure, meaning total sanctions enforcement on Iran, really looked at one point like the Trump people were angling for a war with Iran. Now he is suggesting perhaps let's reset our relations or have a more normalized kind of set of conditions remains to be seen. Keep in mind, the IRGC is trying to assassinate Donald Trump because he assassinated Qasem Soleimani. And Donald Trump is not a guy who takes personal slights lightly to say the least. So Iran finds itself in the weakest position it has been in decades. Could there be, some kind of ferment, popular, uprising, revolutionary action taken? Absolutely. I mean, I don't think after witnessing what's happened in the last two weeks, when Bashar al-Assad was sitting pretty

and we thought he's won the war, it's game over, and now he is living in Russia, I don't think anybody can foresee what's going to happen with great clarity or certainty. But yes, this is going to be kind of the big question in terms of a Middle East policy. What's going to happen in Syria and does has become a playground for all sorts of riffraff and international terrorists, et cetera, et et cetera, and what's happening with Iran? What play are they going to make? They could very well decide that, you know what, it's in our best interest to try and lower the temperature with everybody, which they seem to be doing now with Jolani's new fief in Damascus. Or they could get very, very aggressive, very quickly. I don't pretend to know the answer to that. Yeah, I think it'll be a

question of what happens within the regime, the extent to which the Revolutionary Guard versus, you know, more moderate forces who wins out at what it sounds like a moment of intense recrimination and kind of internal stresses afflicting the regime. Two final questions for you. The first is on Israel. Israel, understandably, would be worried. You've talked about it already about Assyria on their board. or controlled by, let's be generous and say it's a former Al-Qaeda leader.

We'll see if the former is earned or not. Was Israel almost too successful? Do you think this collapse in Syria was as much so surprised to them as anyone else? And maybe if we wanted to be real politic about this, that they might have, in fact, preferred the Assad regime to remain in power there for, in a sense of, a frozen border with Syria. Now instead Israel has to consider where does this go from here? There's been some ruminations about concerns in Israel that this could become a magnet for the larger global jihadist movement that would funnel men and material from around the world onto a jihadi border, which is now budding up against the Israeli state. I mean, that doesn't

sound good. No, and, you know, I think this is very much an unintended consequence of Israel's response to October 7th, which, as I said, you know, dousing the Iranian ring of fire in the Levant. It is very clear, and already I can get into some of the intelligence files that have been recovered in Syria. It is very clear to me that the Israelis preferred a weakened and predictable Assad in power, somebody who, I mean, posed. no real strategic threat to them. They, you know, the IAF flew, I forgot how many sorties, you know, not even necessarily into Syrian airspace to annihilate, has Bala weapons depots and convoys and take out IRGC generals. I mean, remember, they bombed the embassy in, or the consulate,

I think, in Damascus, was it, or Aleppo? Sorry, there's just so many events have taken place. but basically they wiped out an IRGC facility. One of the reasons Iran felt the need to retaliate against Israel. But their capability to do these things was almost infinite. And I alluded to the intelligence file that's been recovered. They had an operative, apparently, code named Moses, who was conveying to the Syrian regime under Russian supervision what the regime could and could not allow the Iranians to do. Hamas cannot operate from southern Syria.

That is a red line for us. We will wipe them out and we will take out X, Y, and Z. The IRGC can't do this. Hezbollah can't do that. So in a way, the Syrians were negotiating all the time with their mortal enemy, the Israelis. And the Israelis were basically Assad was almost a deterrent factor for what they feared most, which was, you know, Iranian provocations. Now Assad is gone.

and what's the first thing they did? Take out basically the entire military, right? They could have done that at any point. They chose to do it only after he was gone. So I think it's clear. This has been the conventional wisdom, but it's a rare instance in which I subscribe to conventional wisdom. They much preferred him in place because they could manage him as a problem.

Now the problem for them is the unpredictability. You know, where do we go from here? Who is Jolani? what kind of designs does he have on us? Is he going to turn Damascus into, you know, the most icely canteena of international terrorism? And does that include perhaps giving safe harbor to elements from Hamas? Who knows? I mean, reconciliation between Sunni jihadists and Shia jihadists has happened before.

It may happen again, yeah? So there's a great deal of concern on their part. But again, I don't think they necessarily have the answer. answer here. I think they're very skeptical and wary of where Syria is headed, but they're not necessarily looking to do anything too precipitous beyond what they've already done. I don't see Israeli tanks rolling into Damascus in the near future. And I say that, having said, I can't predict the future. But as of now, it doesn't look like they're, you know. Final question. If we think back of other moments in the last few decades from Afghanistan

to Iraq to Libya. Yeah. The West has a somewhat besmirched record, to say the least, about its intervention into these different countries. And unfortunately, the chaos that ensued as a result of either the direct or indirect application of Western military force. if we wanted to do Syria different, if the West genuinely wanted to maybe try to make a tone for maybe Libya might be the most egregious example of where we've plunged a country into now a decade of civil war and economic and social collapse.

What could we do in Syria that would be different? What could be constructive? How can we approach this in a different way? I think the humanitarian imperative is essentially what the United States should focus on now. I am operating under the assumption that Trump is going to stick to his word and withdraw, which means only bad things for the Kurds that we have empowered. I think that we made a mistake in allowing the PKK to believe that we were there to help them build their state-lit or state of Rojjjah. The PKK also got high on its own supply, refused to cut deals, including with Iraqi Kurdistan,

which has fairly good relations with Turkey. There was a program in place called the Hewler Accord from 2012, which would have lowered the PKK influence in northeast Syria and allow for Syrian Peshmerga, trained by, you know, Barzani's Peshmerga in Iraq to come in. And that would have appeased the Turks to some degree, because as I say, they, Ankara and Erbil have pretty close commercial and diplomatic ties now. I think a lot of people are going to get killed. You know, I think Turkey will roll in. They will use their Janissaries, the Syrian National Army, and they will put a lot of the Kurds to the sword. already there's indications that the Arab constituents of the Syrian Democratic forces.

U.S. officials have told a lot of porkies over the years saying, oh, no, this is a very pluralistic and well-represented. No, nonsense. The PKK runs the SDF, right? A lot of the guys that are in the SDF from the PKK aren't even Syrian. There are Kurds from the Condal Mountains who come down and they take their PKK patches off when U.S. Special Forces leave, whatever, you know, forward operating base that they're sharing. And, you know, it's kind of a masquerade, yeah. Arab tribes in the Jazeera are going to rebel because now they have an alternative. They're going to see that they don't. And the Turks are going to exploit that fact. Yeah. Now, you're asking what is to be done? What role does America have to play here?

I honestly, I don't know because if the U.S. pulls out militarily, these things are going to happen. Russia will probably try to exploit this kind of chaos and anarchy, probably try to come back in and cut deals with the new power brokers, do a deal with the Turks, who they feel have betrayed them, by allowing HTS to run rampant. The Iranians might also try to provoke the situation further. So I think the best and possibly only thing the United States should concern itself with is how do we help Syrians who have, as I said, been emerging from this sadistic nightmare of 50 years, how do we help them in their struggle? You know, civil society actors, human rights monitors, archivists who should be, I mean, you know, one of the really terrible things I think about

destroying even the chemical weapons research facilities is you're not just destroying the material by which sarin and chlorine gas, you're also destroying the records, yeah? Historians need this stuff to really kind of hold these actors to account. A lot of these, you know, Syrian sadists are they skedaddle to Lebanon. They're going to wind up living in Europe and South America and they should be brought to justice at some point. I think, honestly, America has to be very, very modest. You know, I mean, I was an advocate for intervention early days, and I thought we could

have done a good, a great deal of good for Syria, because unlike Iraq, which was sort of revolution from above or revolution at the end of a bayonet, Syria was a bottom-up thing. You know, there's a lot of nonsense conspiracy theorists and, you know, left-wing anti-imperialists and right-wing MAGA people who think that this was some kind of CIA concocted nonsense. It was a protest. I mean, I was there. I was in Aleppo in 2012 when rebels had just taken over a good chunk of the city. I saw the actual popular sentiment on the ground.

Syrians wanted to overthrow their regime. They were begging the United States to help them, and we said, no, we made a big talk about transitional governments and putting pressure on Assad to negotiate. And we, you know, you mentioned going sort of half cocked with these interventions. Yes, there was a CIA program to work with rebels. But I remember talking to those rebels who said, you know, every time we do so very well and we start to really put the pressure on the regime and creep up into this, as I mentioned, the soft underbelly of Damascus, we noticed that our ammunition runs dry because it was this game.

The Obama administration was playing. They didn't want to see Assad toppled. they thought that they could sort of massage him out of power. And that led to more chaos and more suffering and more death. And so I think the United States needs to be very humble here and realize the limitations of its influence and its power. Ironically, the regime was toppled not through American intervention, which so many Syrians wanted, but through American non-intervention.

So maybe that's the answer. Maybe keep out of it for a little while. Don't interfere. Let Syrians figure this out. And unfortunately, yes, other actors are going to get involved. But again, what is the extent of our leverage here? I don't think we have very much. Well, Michael, thank you for a fascinating conversation. We covered everything I hoped. What's happening on the ground. We took it out to the region. And I think we ended with some really thoughtful analysis of how we could actually make a difference. And maybe making a difference in this case, as you say, is being. careful, calibrated, and certainly hopefully surging on the humanitarian front to meet the urgent needs of the people of Syria. So thank you so much for coming on the monk dialogues today and sharing your wisdom and expertise with our community. Greatly appreciate it. Sure. Thanks for having me. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Michael

Weiss. He certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's Amher. U and K, DebateswithanS.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of civil and substantive conversation, one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your

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