National Post (National Edition)
PUTIN’S PUPPET?
‘Until this week, Trump had given every impression of being happy to be Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man in the Middle East.’
The Kremlin is furious. The Khomeinists in Tehran are beside themselves. U.S. President Donald Trump’s alt-right fan base has joined leftish anti-imperialists in paroxysms of betrayal and outrage. Awkwardly, Chinese president Xi Jinping was Trump’s guest at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida when those 59 Tomahawk missiles were sent flying towards the Syrian airbase at Al Shayrat, 45 kilometres from the city of Homs, so he was taken by surprise, and didn’t quite know what to say.
“The Syrian people? The Syrian people are very happy now,” George Sabra, the 70-year-old routinely jailed dissident and founding president of the revolutionary Syrian National Council, told me in a telephone conversation from Istanbul in the hours after Al Shayrat was hit. “This should have been done a long time ago,” he said.
“This might push Russia and Iran and the Syrian regime and send them the message that they have to stop the open massacres that have been happening in Syria for six years now,” Sabra said. Trump’s out-of-left-field missile attack might send a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that his days are numbered, “that there is no solution by war and by weapons.”
After having counselled a hardline isolationist policy going back several years, Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Russia and China threatened on Wednesday to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning the poison gas massacre of at least 100 people in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province. It wasn’t just Xi Jinping who was taken by surprise.
For Syria’s opposition, it was an especially welcome surprise. It is believed that Tuesday’s atrocity in Khan Sheikhoun was carried out by warplanes that took off from Al Shayrat, a joint Russian-Syrian installation with several dozen fortified bunkers that was expanded by Russian engineers shortly after Moscow directly intervened in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime nearly two years ago. Until it was hammered Thursday evening, it had been one of Assad’s most important launching pads for airstrikes against rebel-held towns and villages throughout central and northern Syria.
Faisal Alazem of the Syrian Canadian Council was jubilant at the news of Al Shayrat’s bombing, and he was as surprised as everyone else by Trump’s turnaround. “If there is no threat, the regime will never do any concessions, so it’s a start. We’re hoping for more, and we’re watching things very closely.”
Sabra and Alazem say their greatest hope is that Trump will continue to force Assad’s hand, because one punch won’t be enough. They both say they don’t expect Assad to relinquish power unless his ability to wage his air war is finally brought to an end. Most of the half million people who have died in the Syrian carnage, which began with a non-violent democratic uprising in 2011, have been killed by the regime’s fighter jets, or by Russian bombers, or by crude barrel bombs routinely laced with napalm and chlorine gas, dropped from regime helicopters.
In just one of the bizarre twists and turns in America’s Syria policy this week, Hillary Clinton, former president Barack Obama’s secretary of state and Trump’s Democratic Party challenger in last November’s presidential election, was urging Trump to break with Obama’s hands-off policy and take a stand. Clinton had earlier parted ways with Obama over his nonintervention policy. During her campaign against Trump, Clinton argued for a no-fly zone in Syria, humanitarian corridors, and more robust support for Syria’s democracy-oriented rebel groups. Trump routinely ridiculed the idea.
In the hours before Trump announced that he’d ordered a missile launch from U.S. Navy destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea, Clinton was giving her first extensive interview since her defeat at the polls last Nov. 8. Clinton told The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof: “Assad had an air force, and that air force is the cause of most of the civilian deaths, as we have seen over the years, and as we saw again in the last few days. I really believe that we should have, and still should, take out his airfields, and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.”
Sabra said he agrees with Clinton that Trump will have to obliterate Assad’s air power if he wants to exert any useful influence on events in Syria. But at least the attack on Al Shayrat is something. “It was a bombing, but this time there were no injured civilians. It was a military installation. We are happy. It means it might begin to push a political solution.”
The last time I spoke with Sabra was three years ago when we met at the Syrian National Council’s headquarters in Istanbul. It was a time when the SNC was still touted as the potential government-inexile for a new democratic Syria. There was still a glimmer of hope that the United States and the rest of the NATO countries would join with the region’s Arab states in bringing Assad to heel and building a multi-ethnic Syria that respected religious pluralism. Sabra comes from a leftist, Orthodox Christian background.
But by then, Obama had capitulated to Russia following Assad’s sarin-gas massacre of more than 1,000 people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. And Obama had become hostage to his own efforts at negotiating a nuclear deal with the Iranian ayatollahs, who were insisting that the deal was off if the U.S. played too rough with Assad, who had become a Russian-Iranian puppet in Damascus. Young fighters with the SNC-aligned Free Syrian Army were beginning to desert in droves to Ahrar al-Sham, the Nusra Front, and even Daesh — the Islamic State.
“If you leave Assad to destroy the country, not just every day but every hour, this is what will happen,” Sabra told me back then. And that is exactly what happened.
Until this week, Trump had given every impression of being happy to be Vladimir Putin’s righthand man in the Middle East. With all the revelations of Kremlin hacking, its pro-Trump disinformation campaigning and possibly even electoral subterfuge via collusion with several of Trump’s closest advisers and cronies, those Tomahawk missiles came straight out of the blue. The Kremlin now says it’s breaking off all the Obama-era co-operation in Syria and Iraq that Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, had spent so much time convincing the Russians to accept.
“I am hopeful,” the Syrian Canadian Council’s Faisal Alazem told me. “There is no way we can ever return to Syria, my parents my friends and these millions of refugees, if this regime is still in place. Watching Syria being blown away by this tyrant, there is no way we will ever get Syria back or even visiting it so long as this guy is power, so this is hope for us. But I’m hopeful. It is all we have.
“I just never, ever thought I would say that it was because of Donald Trump.”