Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!
In this episode, Omar and Mukunda talk to Hussein Ibish about the recent events in Syria and their impact on the Middle east. Interestingly, Hussein mentions India as a potential host for Iranian uranium if a new deal is to be made..
Our friends at scribebuddy.com have prepared a transcript. I am posting it below, unedited.
Dr. Ali: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Brown Pundits broadcast. We have with us again 1 of our guests, Hossam Aibish. Mr. Aibish is a resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, and he is a regular columnist for The National in UAE. He writes for several other publications, has hundreds of speeches and videos, is a very well-known commentator on Middle Eastern issues.
Dr. Ali: And we want to ask Hussain today to bring us up to speed on what is going on in the Middle East where dramatic things seem to be happening. So Hussain, if you can just sort of paint a picture for us of where we are in the Middle East right now. Specifically.
Hussein Ibish: Well, it depends, really. I mean, where you want to start, you have to give me some direction because I could begin anywhere and talk for 3 hours. So you have to give me some more.
Dr. Ali: Let’s start with what happened recently, which is the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria. So I think it’s fair to say that Israel has won at least a military victory against Hezbollah, and a direct consequence of that seems to have been the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, but there may be other factors involved as well. So if you can first comment on that, what happened there and why do you think it happened now?
Hussein Ibish: Well, yes, I mean, clearly, look, Assad has been living on borrowed time for a while. It looked like his regime was going to fall under relatively similar circumstances back in 2014 and 2015. What happened is that the Iranians dispatched a couple of delegations separately, you know, really the same delegation essentially twice to Moscow led by Qasem Soleimani, the late Quds Force commander who was assassinated by the Trump administration at the Baghdad airport to explain to the Russians how dire the situation was for Assad in Syria and how they could launch a joint intervention to save him. And the Iranians proposed a joint intervention really spearheaded by Hezbollah fighters on the ground, backed up by Russian air power and by other Iranian-backed militias, mercenaries from Pakistan and Afghanistan and what have you. But anyway, mainly that was the go-to force in Syria to save Assad was Hezbollah on the ground and Russia in the air.
Hussein Ibish: That’s not available this time. Obviously, Hezbollah spent most of the last year getting decimated by Israel, and Hezbollah was in no position to repeat the regime-saving mission that it had undertaken successfully in the past, so in 2016. So really, I think, you know, the, how should I say, it became obvious to the anti Assad forces led by this group, Hizb al-Tahrir, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Sham, which is Turkey backed Hezbollah, which is Turkey backed and was sort of trapped in Idlib province. What after the Iranians and Hezbollah and Russia had combined to save Assad the first time. What ended up happening is that the war kind of came to a stasis with an Assad victory in most of Syria, but a kind of stasis in most of the country.
Hussein Ibish: And 1 of the little fiefdoms within Syria was an HTS-controlled small province in the northwest of the country near Turkey called Idlib province, very small and sparsely populated. But from there, they built up their forces, built up their government, and, you know, built up their relations with Turkey. Now HTS, 1 should note, was originally known as the Nusra Front and it was led by a man called Abu Muhammad Jolani. And Jolani was 1 of the fighters who was dispatched by the leader of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, just as it was about to become ISIS, Baghdadi, Abu Bakr Baghdadi. And he dispatched a bunch of fighters from Iraq into Syria to see what could be done to take advantage of the unrest in Syria on behalf of ISIS.
Hussein Ibish: Jolani, as his name, Nomdeguer, would suggest, actually has family roots in the Golan Heights. Jolani, Jolan. His actual name is Shara, which he’s gone back to. But his nom de guerre, as usual, indicates his birth, his family origin or birthplace or whatever. That’s the normal thing among the jihadists.
Hussein Ibish: And so he went into Syria and he formed the Nusra Front and originally it was kind of an offshoot, an affiliate of ISIS. And Then they found that that was really not acceptable because Baghdadi kept trying to assert his primacy over Nusra and Jolani. And Ayman Zawahiri tried to mediate between the 2 and say, well, Baghdadi will be in charge of Iraq and Jolani will be in charge of Syria. Baghdadi was having none of it, and he refused. So Jolani ended up jumping ship and going over to Al-Qaeda.
Hussein Ibish: And In 2016, Nusra found that they really could not make much headway being associated too strongly with Al-Qaeda in Syria. It was just a bad brand name. And so was, obviously, ISIS. So they met with a bunch of other jihadist organizations and renamed themselves, and this was the last of a series of renamings, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And that is the organization that ended up taking over in Idlib, running it as a small, you know, provincial governorate, and planning a new offensive against Assad.
Hussein Ibish: Now they and their Turkish backers and the main militias they are in bed with are even more pro-Turkey than they are. But they’ve been closely associated with the Turks, even though the Turks officially consider them a terrorist group. But you know, that never stops anybody. And what ended up happening is, as they watched Hezbollah going into disarray, and also calculating that Iran could not be an effective force under current circumstances, and that Russia, too, was occupied in Ukraine and would be loath to get into another major crisis in Syria, that now might be the moment to strike. So they cooked up the idea of an offensive against Aleppo to expand their control and take over a major Syrian city again.
Hussein Ibish: Aleppo has always been the most contested city. It was held by the rebels for a long time, and it was when eastern Aleppo fell to pro-government forces led by Hezbollah on the ground in January 16, or sorry, the end of 2016, the very beginning of 2017, that we knew the war was over in most of Syria and that Assad had prevailed for the meanwhile. Now, having calculated that Assad’s backers were no longer around, HTS and its fellows were planning an offensive against Aleppo in October. And what’s fascinating is the Turks told them to hold off because Turkey was engaged in some high-level diplomacy with Assad. And they told HTS and the SNA, which is the Syrian National Army, a militia that Turkey tightly controls rather than has influence over, as with HTS.
Hussein Ibish: No, wait, don’t do it yet. We’re talking to this guy, maybe we can get something reasonable out of him. And that was in October. By late November, by Thanksgiving time in the US, They had more or less concluded, and here I mean Ankara, the Turkish government had more or less concluded that the same thing that everyone who tries to negotiate with us discovers, this guy’s impossible, and he won’t budge, and he won’t compromise, and he’s hopeless. So they told HTS and the SNA, go ahead, you know, go for it.
Hussein Ibish: And they assaulted Aleppo. And they found that it fell in about 1 day, day and a quarter, really. And they thought, my goodness, this thing is hollower than we thought. It’s getting no support. Well, first the Russians started bombing them heavily.
Hussein Ibish: But then all of a sudden that stopped. And it stopped, I think, because Russia got word from Turkey that if its air force backed off, there would be no immediate move to strip them of control of the naval base they have at Tartus in the northwest, but also the Hmeim air base and some other assets. But really, the port is most important. And I think there was some kind of deal there, whether it, you know, how actionable it is into the future is very dubious. But, you know, there was, I think, this sense that, well, Turkey has said, so why not?
Hussein Ibish: And the situation anyway was hopeless. Russia was not going to commit much to Assad. Iran was told, I mean, by the way, Assad spent that week after Aleppo fell, going around the Middle East and the rest of the world asking his backers for help. He asked Moscow for help. And they said, sure, but then they stopped the bombing.
Hussein Ibish: And as I say, I think that’s why. He asked the Iranians for help and the Iranians said, no, we can’t do it. We don’t commit our own troops, only proxies like Hezbollah and we’ll send some of them, but obviously that’s not going to be effective under current circumstances. And also, you know, it’s a factor that the Israelis told Iran that they would bomb the Iranian military if any Iranian troops entered Syria in large numbers, that the Israelis wouldn’t stand for it. So it really, in a way, the Israelis intervened on behalf of the rebels as well, at least with that threat to Iran.
Hussein Ibish: And then finally, he asked the Iraqi government to release the popular mobilization front groups that are loyal to Iran, the Hashd al-Shaabi groups like Qatar, Hezbollah, and the others, to release them to go into Syria en masse, in total almost. And he has to ask the Iraqi government because those groups have been, you know, are paid and equipped by the Iraqi Defense Ministry. They are nominally part of the Iraqi state. They aren’t actually part of the Iraqi state. But, you know, if they leave Iraq on a foreign adventure en masse and in total, it’s something that won’t really work without, you know, if it comes with the opposition of the government in Baghdad, it’ll create a crisis for those relations and those groups probably won’t do it, because it would mean the end of their funding and the end of their equipment and uniforms and all the stuff that the Iraqis give them, the Iraqi government gives them.
Hussein Ibish: He was told no by everybody. So he was left defenseless, weaker than he appeared. And so the rebels decided, no, we’re going to go and overthrow Assad. And having found that he was totally alone and concluding that even his military was not wholly reliable, if reliable at all. Even though he had some means in Homs and considerable forces left in Damascus, he fled in the middle of the night.
Hussein Ibish: He didn’t tell anybody. It’s becoming clearer and clearer how few people knew that he was going when he went, presumably because he didn’t trust them and he didn’t care about them. And you know, he didn’t want to make a final stand in Damascus or even try to take the 4th armored brigade and the presidential guard and Shabiha militia units loyal to him and go and hook up with the Russians in the in the coastal and mountainous northwest of the country, which is the Alawite heartland, if not around the city of Latakia, at least around the city of Tartus, which is heavily, overwhelmingly Alawite and Christian, almost entirely. And that’s where Russia has its naval base. And that presumably was something a more gutsy leader could have tried, but he didn’t want to risk anything.
Hussein Ibish: Images of Gaddafi being dragged out of a hole and brutally, you know, beaten to death and worse by a crowd of angry Libyans, probably, you know, danced in his mind. And he knew that if he took his money and his family and fled to Russia, he could have a soft, comfy life in Russia for the rest of his days. And even if he lost power, well, you know, at least he’s all well and everything’s, you know, life is still peaches and cream. And that’s what happened. So you now have this new government run by the rebels in Syria, but the nature of it is not clear because it’s being formed and even the rebels, I think, were surprised to discover that they ended up in Damascus in a week.
Hussein Ibish: The Turks, I think, were taken aback, and certainly everyone else was sort of taken aback. And all of a sudden, they have to rule. Now, they did run Idlib province for several years. They didn’t distinguish themselves as very tolerant. They didn’t brook any dissent and they used systems like what’s called Islamic taxation practices as elements of extortion and shakedown when they needed money.
Hussein Ibish: On the other hand, they did not impose harsh, you know, reactionary versions of Sharia law, making women cover and banning smoking and all that kind of thing. And technically, alcohol was not allowed, but you could get it and drink it. You’re not going to be flogged. Nothing, you know, nothing much is going to happen to you if you were discreet, you know, whatever. They were more interested in preparing for the next round of the war.
Hussein Ibish: Now, how will they govern Syria is less to do with how reactionary their interpretation of Islamic law is from the point of view of governance, and more importantly, their attitude towards communal minorities, especially the Alawites. So we’re waiting to see how they will treat the Alawites and the Shiites and the Christians and the Druze and other groups that were often associated, rightly or wrongly, with the regime by many Sunnis, and for that matter, urban Sunnis, who also were associated with the regime in the minds of many rural Sudanese. And there so far has not been any sign of score settling, vendetta, or purging. So that’s good. On the other hand, there wouldn’t have been, because it’s very soon.
Hussein Ibish: So everyone’s waiting to see. The Americans have reached out to make contact with HTS, even though HTS is a designated foreign terrorist organization by the State Department, and Abu Mohammed Jolani, as he used to be known, is on a specially designated foreign nationals list, the Treasury Department. So you can’t give him anything of value without breaking the law. There are exemptions for humanitarian stuff and diplomacy, but it’s very dubious legally to do it. And so, you know, we’re waiting to see.
Hussein Ibish: Everyone’s waiting to see. 1 of the biggest questions is, you know, how much influence will Turkey have in the new Syria and how much will they try to have? And if they try to have considerable influence, will they succeed? Will their former allies or current allies, will the rebel groups and others in Syria be receptive? I mean, this is a new phase for HTS, the SNA and the others.
Hussein Ibish: They’re being challenged to engage with the rest of Syria in a way they never had to in Idlib. And it’s a new task for them. So we’ll see.
Mukunda: So Hussein, on that note, I have a question. Do you have any knowledge or sources around what are the minorities in Syria at this point feeling and how are they approaching this change?
Hussein Ibish: They seem to be optimistic, but wary. I think the Alawites, I think the others, Christians and Druze, are more positive. They’re more glad to be rid of Assad. A lot of Alawites are very glad to be rid of Assad, too. I mean, when people say that the Assad regime served the interests of the Alawite community, that’s both true and not true, meaning that more Alawites benefited from the corruption of the regime and the organized crime that it oversaw and facilitated than any other community.
Hussein Ibish: But the Alawite community also was subject to the same repression as everybody else. And the Alawite community in general did not feel particularly in love with the Assad regime either. Right? So it’s 1 of those things where it’s both true and not true that the Alawites were a favored minority group in Assad’s Syria. There’s truth to that, and also it can be taken very much the wrong way.
Hussein Ibish: On the other hand, the other Syrians in general tend to see Alawites in that light as, you know, sort of like the darlings of the of the dictatorship and the source of the trouble. And the people can be very intolerant of them as a consequence. And they’ve been very fearful. And the former regime, the Assad family, spent a lot of time making Alawites, Christians and others, feel very fearful of groups like HTS or the SNA coming to power in Syria. Well, right now, I think a lot of individuals are very glad to see the back of us and hopeful for the future.
Hussein Ibish: But I think they’re wary. I think they fear that retribution and score settling may be coming. I mean, it would have to be organized. They’re trying to keep law and order so far. So, you know, there hasn’t really been an opportunity to organize purges and stuff like that yet.
Hussein Ibish: And it may come. Or it may look different than that. But I would imagine that there are people making contingency plans for creating an Alawite enclave and possibly other enclaves. There’s already a large Kurdish enclave in the north, which is under considerable attack from the SNA, which is a Turkish front organization, which regards the Syrian Kurdish militia, the SDF, which is very close to the United States and is considered a hero of the or heroic fighters in the battle against ISIS. And therefore, as heroes of counterterrorism, in the eyes of Turkey, they’re terrorists who must be crushed because they have links to the PKK and they are Kurdish, they’re armed Kurds and that’s a no-no.
Hussein Ibish: And so, already there’s a battle going on between the SNA and the SDF. And the SDF’s answer has been to turn over towns like Kobani and other strategic locations directly to the HTS, rather than lose them to the SNA, you see? So in other words, they’re strategically ceding to the less dangerous enemy. And that’s something Assad used to do with the Kurds, by the way. When he wanted to bedevil the Turks, he would cede territory to armed Kurds to annoy the Turks, precisely.
Hussein Ibish: I mean, he was doing that in the early days of the Syrian war. So this is something that happens in Syria, but it does mean that even in the aftermath of the fall of the regime, the struggles, communal struggles, that lead to fragmentation in the first place are continuing. And so, I’ll tell you 1 minority that’s very displeased already, that’s the Kurds. They have every reason to be displeased. They’ve lost several key positions and their control over the north, their northern enclave as a contiguous strip along the Turkish border is deeply threatened at the moment because of gains made by either the SNA or by the way in which Kurdish forces have had to cede control over key towns to HTS and without any guarantee about what HTS is going to do with them in the long run.
Hussein Ibish: Right? You see what I’m saying? So, yeah, I think minorities are of a very mixed mind at the moment. Kurds are particularly unhappy.
Dr. Ali: What is the, you know, the people who are more cynical about this region would say that behind all these proxy organizations, the states still matter more. That would not have happened without Turkey playing a fairly active role behind the scenes.
Hussein Ibish: That is correct. Well, obviously, I mean, the October holdup proves that.
Dr. Ali: Right. But now that they have sort of their proxy or at least a group that they influenced and helped and…
Hussein Ibish: Yeah, it’s at a minimum, you’d have to call it a client. We don’t know if it’s a proxy or a client, but at least it’s a client.
Dr. Ali: But now that they have a client in control of Damascus, they do have their own ambitions in Northern Syria, which the client also will be unhappy with, but I don’t know if they can stop them or not, but they practically want to annex part of the Northern Syrian- Well,
Hussein Ibish: what they want to do is 2 things. They have 2 ambitions in northern Syria. I don’t think they have territorial ambitions. They have hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East in general, especially in the northern Middle East and the Levant, in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon and possibly into Jordan, they have hegemonic ambitions there, Palestine. But beyond that, they may have in the whole Southeast Asia, they may have hegemonic ambitions.
Hussein Ibish: But in northern Syria in particular, there are 2 things. Number 1, they want to either weaken or eliminate, if possible, eliminate, and if not, then at least weaken the Kurdish autonomous region, because that’s perceived as a threat to Turkey’s control, ultimately, of its southern Kurdish areas. I mean, you know, the Kurdish majority areas in the northern Middle East are fairly contiguous. They are merely broken up by artificial borders. There was going to be a Kurdish state, and the Turks put a stop to it at the Treaty of Sevres, I believe it was, where the borders were renegotiated and Kurdistan was eliminated after World War II.
Hussein Ibish: And the aftermath of that is that you have the bulk of Kurds in Turkey, but sizable populations in Iraq, especially, but also in Syria and Iran. Why? Because Kurdistan was broken up in between those areas, and most of it went to Turkey, but certainly there were big chunks in other areas. And so if you, you know, since Turkey always seeks to repress Kurdish nationalism as part of its constitutive national ethos, because it tried from the outset of the Turkish Republic to swallow up this big chunk of Kurdistan. So the anti-Kurdish project, the anti-Kurdish national project has been 1 that has been, you know, congenital to Turkey.
Hussein Ibish: It’s there at birth, right? It’s there from the outset, and it’s sort of the biggest national anti-national project in Turkey, whether it’s Kemalist Turkey or AKP Islamist Turkey or any other Turkey, probably a Turkish Republic, would be challenged to deal with Kurdish nationalism because Kurds, especially in Turkey, are not satisfied to be second-class citizens of these states. Now in Iraq, they’ve managed to create a de facto autonomous zone that functions in many ways like an independent country, and in some ways not. But it’s certainly like the Iraqi army can’t go there or doesn’t go there. They have their own de facto foreign policy or diplomacy, things their own trade in a way, but then they get money from Baghdad.
Hussein Ibish: It’s very complicated. But like in some ways they’re independent and in some ways they aren’t. There’s this autonomous zone in and the Kurds, the Turks can live with that because they decided at the beginning of that well should they view this as a threat to Turkey or should they view it as an opportunity to give Kurds a quasi-national experience venting a place where they, you know, outside of Turkey, where Kurdish nationalism could be practiced in a way that maybe was not threatening to Turkey. And so by becoming friendly with Erbil for a long time, which is the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, the Turks managed to sort of defang the KRG as a threat to Turkey. And there was no PKK activity, It was all Iraqi Kurds, and it didn’t really matter.
Hussein Ibish: So the Turks made a wise decision to view it as an asset rather than a liability. Okay, in times they’ve shifted and seen it as a liability. But Once the Kurdish forces in Syria, the SDF and others, took control of the Kurdish north, in part because Assad ceded it to them deliberately, as I said, ceded certainly key areas to them in an effort to annoy the Turks, a very successful effort, extremely successful effort to annoy the Turks back in like 2012, even late 2011. The Turks have been unremittingly hostile to this Kurdish project in northern Syria. Partly it’s because it runs all the way along.
Hussein Ibish: It’s a strip running all the way along Turkey’s exposed Kurdish southern border, right? So it’s very dangerous in that regard. And even worse, the, a lot of the Kurdish groups that run and dominate that area, though there are many, but Among them are groups loyal to the PKK, which is the quite radical Kurdish group in Turkey, which Turkey has come to regard and still regards as a pathological terror organization dedicated to the destruction of the Turkish state. And there is no compromise between the PKK and Turkey. It’s just an absolute, from Ankara’s point of view, it’s 100% contradiction.
Hussein Ibish: It’s a straight binary. It’s not something where you can be kind of, you know, 60% friendly, 40% wary, like with the KRG in Iraq. You know, when they see pictures of Ocalan, the PKK leader who’s been in Turkish prison for decades. And when they see great huge portraits of him going up all over what the Syrian Kurds called Rojava, which is their autonomous area, the Turks become a little bit crazy and go on a rampage. So they want to try to eliminate it.
Hussein Ibish: And if not eliminate it, at least weaken it as much as possible. So that’s the first aim. The second aim is to carve out as big an area as possible. And now it looks like it could be most of the country in which they can repatriate the approximately 3000000 Turkish, sorry, Syrian refugees that have come into Turkey. Most of them, I think, do want to go home.
Hussein Ibish: The Turks very much want them to go home. It’s a huge burden. There’s another million or so in Lebanon. There’s another 1.2 million in Jordan. These countries cannot sustain this.
Hussein Ibish: So if 1 of the upshots of the downfall of Bashar is the ability of, particularly Turkey, with 3000000, no less, Syrian refugees inside its borders, then I think that would be another major, at least let’s put it this way, repatriation of most, if not all, of the Assyrians, especially those who want to go home, who are willing to go. And I think that’s most of them, really. I mean, they really do. They didn’t go to Turkey because they wanted to live in Turkey. They fled the war and they fled Assad.
Hussein Ibish: And so there’s no more war, and there’s certainly going to be no more Assad. Then I think, you know, they would, for the most part, want to go home. Maybe a few people here and there have established family ties and marriages, and some few people have businesses that are so great they’d want to stay. And if it is a business matter, then I think that the Turkish government would not mind that necessarily, because those are tax producing ventures. But mostly that’s not what the Syrian refugees are doing in Turkey.
Hussein Ibish: Mostly they are living as refugees and they would want to go home and the Turks would want them to go home. So that’s the other big plan. And at the start, when the rebels were thinking about just taking Aleppo, the Turks were thinking about just carving out an area that they could, into which they could expel, you know, these Syrian refugees.
Dr. Ali: Now, obviously, 1 other big thing that has changed is the geo strategic situation in Lebanon itself. Syria was the biggest player in that country for the last years and suddenly Syria is gone. Right. Jalani is going to, you know, project influence into Lebanon or something. Right.
Dr. Ali: So what’s going to happen to Lebanon?
Hussein Ibish: Well, that’s a really good question. I mean, I don’t think we really can tell very much. Look, the Lebanese situation is really complicated, right? On the 1 hand, you’ve got this situation where Hezbollah is greatly weakened, and that creates potentially the opportunity for other Lebanese to rein in Hezbollah and re-assert the authority of the state, because Hezbollah as a non-state actor has hampered the ability of the state to express many aspects of its sovereignty. For example, a monopoly on the use of force, because Hezbollah is as strong or has been as strong or stronger than the Lebanese military.
Hussein Ibish: Or decisions about war and peace, which have really been Hezbollah decisions and not Lebanese government decisions. Hezbollah plunged Lebanon into 2 major wars in the past quarter century, major wars, devastating wars, 1 in 2006 and 1 in 2024, which have been absolutely crippling to the country, to its economy, to its people, to its everything, without consulting anybody, and not in the interests of any Lebanese national consideration, in the interests of, in both cases, in the interests of Iran, and in the first case in its own interest, and in the second case it was very much against its own interest, but they wanted to have, you know, when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, they demanded Hezbollah rise and shine and live up to the moment and join the war and come on, this is it. And Hezbollah, of course, wanted nothing to do with that, because the idea of going to war on Hamas’s schedule, on Hamas’s terms, and for Hamas made no sense. To them, Hamas was an unreliable ally, a Muslim Brotherhood group that fit very badly into their Shiite pro-Iranian alliance that was in a marriage of convenience, that went ahead and did something that surprised them and they weren’t ready for it.
Hussein Ibish: And they had no reason to go to war for an unreliable ally, risk everything going to war with Israel, for an unreliable ally in Hamas, which had broken with Iran and Hezbollah over the war in Syria in 2012 and didn’t really fix it up until 2019 or so. That’s a long time. And when something as simple as a war they weren’t involved in can force Hamas out of the alliance because their identity doesn’t allow it. They had to choose between their marriage of convenience, which was very helpful to them, versus their identity. As a Muslim Brotherhood organization, because the Muslim Brotherhood was a key part of the early uprising against Assad in 2011, they had to choose their identity.
Hussein Ibish: They could not but choose their identity. Of course they did. But what it meant is their identity was easily rendered incompatible with their alliance with the Iranians and with Hezbollah. So that means there’s something fundamentally fake about that alliance. It’s jerry-rigged.
Hussein Ibish: It’s not real at all, right? And or at least it’s not organic. It’s very fabricated. And under such circumstances, the Hezbollah was not interested in going to war for Hamas. And the Iranians didn’t want them to go to war for Hamas either.
Hussein Ibish: On the other hand, they didn’t want to look completely pathetic. They needed to, they needed to recuperate or maintain their, I think maintain is a better way of putting it, their revolutionary bona fides, right? Their credentials as a leader of the axis of resistance in the Arab world, so-called. Resistance to whom? To Israel, to the United States, right?
Hussein Ibish: It’s this revolutionary front they put on. And they needed to keep it up and to do that, Nasrallah, but avoid, you know, but not risk everything. Nasrallah, their leader, now dead, tried to square the circle by having a limited confrontation with the Israelis, but not an all-out war. So his response to October 7th of last year was to increase rocket fire into Israel, but try to keep it very limited to avoid an all out war with the Israelis. But of course, what ended up happening, especially as Israel wound down the main parts of the war in Gaza, Israel was, you know, able to demand they stop and then they didn’t want to stop until there was an end to the war in Gaza.
Hussein Ibish: So then Israel would escalate and Hezbollah would match it in a limited way and then Israel would escalate and Hezbollah would reply and then Israel would escalate and then all of a sudden the bluff was called And Hezbollah, when the pagers went off in September, 4, 000 pagers will be trapped, little bombs all over Lebanon, 4, 000 little terrorist attacks aimed at a terrorist group, both, went off in Lebanon in September, and that signaled the beginning of the all-out war. And after that, Nasrallah was assassinated, his successor was assassinated, Most of the Hezbollah leadership was killed. Most of its battlefield commanders were killed. A huge percentage of its most rough-and-ready fighters were killed. And so now You have this situation where Hezbollah is greatly weakened and seriously discredited by dragging Lebanon once more into a devastating war, which they lost very badly against Israel for no other reason other than serving Iran’s interests, you know, by remaining a viable revolutionary proxy in Iran’s network, right?
Hussein Ibish: Nothing and nobody in terms of Lebanese national interest benefited from any of that. No 1 in Lebanon had any, anything particular to gain in a Lebanese national sense by Hezbollah maintaining its revolutionary bona fides in the axis of resistance. That’s Hezbollah’s foreign policy taking, you know, and national and regional reputation and political machinations beyond Lebanon, right? Regional political machinations, taking primacy over anything that vaguely, even vaguely resembles Lebanese national interests. So enough is enough, right?
Hussein Ibish: So it’s time now for the Lebanese, I think, to take a deep breath and begin to reassert their national sovereignty. But they have to be very careful because the Shiites in Lebanon right now are a traumatized community. You have to be careful with what you do. I think if you come with any force whatsoever and try to take away anything they have left over as an asset, you’ll get a civil war very quickly, and you don’t want that. That’s the worst possible outcome.
Hussein Ibish: So you have to tread very carefully and avoid that at all costs. But what you can do, I think, without triggering a hysterical response and a kinetic response leading to another civil war in Lebanon, is have the state and others move to deny Hezbollah the opportunity to rebuild in ways that are incompatible with Lebanese law and Lebanese national interests, Like their independent telecommunications system, things like certain weapons, you know, stuff like that, which Israel would destroy anyway. And I do think it’s time for the Lebanese parliament, which elects a president and which has been unable to elect a president for almost 2 years now, because Hezbollah is insisting on this Maronite from the north, Ksemen Frengie, whose father was the president in the 70s, disastrously, a president who led to civil war. It wasn’t really his fault, but he certainly did his best to contribute to it. And so did everyone else, by the way.
Hussein Ibish: Anyway, this guy is very pro-Hizballah in a marriage of convenience, and they want him. And I think it’s time for his presidency, his presidential bid to be over and for someone else who’s more acceptable to everybody else to finally take over and for the ability of Hezbollah to hold the nation hostage to be finally that that should be the next bluff that’s called right so that Lebanon can begin to recover from this 35 years of failing state status since Hezbollah won its decisive victory over Israel in May of 2000 and the Israelis finally withdrew from southern Lebanon.
Dr. Ali: Do you think there is a strong enough Lebanese national idea to even do that?
Hussein Ibish: Yes, there is potentially. I think it’s possible. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, obviously, it wouldn’t necessarily be genuinely patriotic. Other people would be acting in part in their own interest.
Hussein Ibish: But if you look at the cost of Hezbollah’s wars in 2006 and now in 2014, 2024, excuse me, and if you look at the cost of those to the country and to other communities and other leaders and what they have in control, I think the imperative to stop that from ever being a possibility again is imperative. I don’t think you need to be sincerely patriotic and put Lebanon’s interests above your own to say, you know what, we can’t have that. We just can’t have that again. We’ve had it twice and it’s just too calamitous.
Dr. Ali: Would you say that in geopolitical terms, the 2 powers that will have to sort it out though would now be Turkey and Israel? In Lebanon? No. I
Hussein Ibish: don’t see Turkey necessarily. I mean, the Turks may have ambitions, but they don’t have it prepared yet. No, I don’t think so. And I don’t think Israel doesn’t have any clients in Lebanon, right? Israel is completely outside of Lebanese domestic politics.
Hussein Ibish: It doesn’t have any sway. The Maronite experiment with an alliance with Israel ended extremely badly and in fairly short order. I mean, it really didn’t last more than a decade. It was less than a decade long, and it ended with very hard feelings on the Maronites. Hard feelings on the Maradona.
Dr. Ali: And we know that these 2 states being competent states, not just small militias, can both spoil any deal that’s about to be done.
Hussein Ibish: No, no, Israel can’t spoil any deal. They don’t have any sway inside Lebanon. The only thing they can do is blow stuff up. They don’t have anyone on their payroll. They tried to get a foothold in Lebanese national politics, and the 1 group that tried to play their game regretted it deeply, and no 1 else has been willing to deal with them at all because they behaved so badly towards Lebanon and towards the Maronites who allied with them.
Hussein Ibish: They had terrible conduct. So they’ve inspired no confidence and no one’s been willing to take up the de facto offer that’s always there of, well, you can always work with the Israelis. Well, no, no one’s willing to do it. The Turks do have some friends in Lebanon, but that is not—no, I don’t think so. I think you’re looking at, you know, Iran, still as a significant player.
Hussein Ibish: I think Assad’s Syria was still a player, so it’s possible the new regime will inherit some of that or not. We’ll see. Certainly there’s a lot of fear in Lebanon that if The new regime proves to be very Islamist and goes on a kind of a campaign that this fighting in Syria between Islamists and non-Islamists could spread into Tripoli and northern Lebanon. That’s a very big fear. I think the United States remains a player in Lebanon.
Hussein Ibish: France definitely remains a player in Lebanon. Turkey is less so, and Israel is not at all. The only thing the Israelis can do is blow stuff up. Doesn’t help determine who’s going to be president or not, except when you go so far as to render a 1 party like Hezbollah much weaker than it was before militarily, and that may not have that much political effect. It may or may not.
Hussein Ibish: It requires the other Lebanese to try to cash in those chits, and That’s a gutsy thing to do. So they may or may not be willing to do it. There’s a lot of political cowardice in Lebanon all the time. And it may be that they’re simply not bold enough to take advantage of Hezbollah’s weakness. I don’t know.
Mukunda: So on another unrelated note, where does this leave Assad? Does it leave him powerless in Russia?
Hussein Ibish: Yes, yes, yes. He’s done. Yeah, finished. No, if the Alawites ever did decide to create an autonomous zone around Latakia or a smaller 1 based around Tartus or something like that, it would not be Assad leading it. Or anyone can.
Hussein Ibish: I mean, it might be a former regime figure. But Assad is in Moscow, where he will stay and I bet you his grandchildren and great grandchildren will grow up speaking Russian.
Mukunda: So he probably, would you say at this stage he has no supporters on the ground there?
Hussein Ibish: Not anymore, no. No. Even the people who used
Dr. Ali: to support him are gone.
Hussein Ibish: No, the people, sorry, I didn’t hear what that was, but I do want to say even the people who supported him When he fled the country, that’s it, they’re done with him now. He left them high and dry. You know, I think the 4th Mechanized Division and the Presidential Guard would have maybe fought, and not for him, but for themselves, right? They still may face retribution. They still may face accountability for the torture centers they ran, for dropping, you know, chemical weapons on Ghouta and other cities, killing thousands of people and hundreds and thousands of children and whatnot, they may face a reckoning, right?
Hussein Ibish: I think they might have fought for their own survival, but he didn’t give them the chance. He just ran away at a very early stage in my view. But, you know,
Mukunda: Do you think at this stage, this opens him up to like, say, criminal prosecution?
Hussein Ibish: Yeah, I’d be amazed if there weren’t an arrest warrant sooner rather than later for him. But he’s not, I’m sure going to leave Russia unless it’s to go on vacation in Belarus or something. He’s not going to go anywhere where he might get arrested. He’s going to stay in Moscow. What else does he need?
Hussein Ibish: Russia is like a whole universe. I mean, he’d be just fine there.
Dr. Ali: He’s done. But coming back to now the problem that started everything, Israel is feeling very confident, obviously. They have also expanded into a buffer zone in in in Syria
Hussein Ibish: overconfident. Yeah, they’re trying to do a land grab in Syria. I’m not I don’t know how well that’ll go but hey why not, you know, Do
Dr. Ali: you think they will attack
Hussein Ibish: Iran? Attack Iran?
Dr. Ali: Yes.
Hussein Ibish: You mean to try to destroy their nuclear weapons?
Dr. Ali: Yes.
Hussein Ibish: Yeah. Something like that. They don’t have the ability to do that. They lack, they have some bunker buster bombs, but not the big ones the US has, and they don’t have very many of the ones they do have. And they don’t have B-2 bombers.
Hussein Ibish: It’s only the Americans who have the ability, and they have the plan ready, they could do it tomorrow, to do, you know, round-the-clock bombing, bunker busters and others from B-2s and other bombers for different types of, you know, projectiles, cruise missiles, etc. Just devastating bombing, it would take a couple days, a few days, and they could wipe out the Iranian nuclear program, you know before you know it and Israel’s can’t do that. All Israel can do is escalate in a way that could create as much of a crisis with the Americans as it does with the Iranians. And they really are not in a position to do this. They know it’s the Americans who will
Dr. Ali: do it. And is it your feeling that Trump has no intention of changing that either, that Trump is not
Hussein Ibish: going to change it? I don’t see any indication that Trump wants to do that. As a matter of fact, if Trump is smart, he will sit down with the Iranians sooner rather than later and see what he can do, because he was very critical of the JCPOA and he always said he could get a better deal and that was sort of ludicrous at the time but now if he can’t get a better deal than the JCPOA he’s totally incompetent. Any fool could get a better deal. And they would put, I believe, you know, there are 2 issues beyond the nuclear ones that were excluded from the JCPOA talks, the 2015 and 2016, even 2014, talks with Obama, where the Iranian said, we will talk about our nuclear weapons, but we will not discuss the 2 other files, our missile project and our aid to militia groups in the Arab world.
Hussein Ibish: We won’t talk about it.” And Obama said, okay, because they just wouldn’t have talked about anything if he tried to make them talk. He just couldn’t shift them on it. Now, I think you can put those things back on the table and the likely response from Iran is, all right, we’re not going to talk about our missiles because everyone has missiles. We have a right to have missiles and unilateral missile disarmament is very unusual in international relations. It’s always mutual.
Hussein Ibish: No one’s going to be mutual on this. And look, everyone has missiles. We have missiles. We have a right to have missiles. So just forget about the missiles.
Hussein Ibish: The militia is that we will talk about, Because why not? Because the whole strategy based on, you know, their national security strategy has just fallen apart. It was based on a forward defense created by militia groups like Hezbollah, run with the cooperation of Assad. And all of this is gone. Hezbollah is battered to smithereens, Assad is gone, there’s no way of getting direct support to them.
Hussein Ibish: Everything is in complete shambles. The only militia group still in their orbit that poses a significant threat to anything really valuable are the Houthis. And the Houthis in Yemen have kind of 1 foot in and 1 foot out of the Iranian alliance. They’re not Muslim brothers like Hamas that are totally unreliable. They are Shiites.
Hussein Ibish: But there are 5 Shiites rather than 12 Shiites like everybody else in the Iranian alliance and except for the other ones, but they’re gone now. So The lone force that still remains potent, which is the Houthis, especially targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea, first of all, they’ve gone fairly quiet on that because they’ve gotten hit so hard. But in addition, they are just not that reliable either. They’re not unreliable the way that Hamas was, but they’re not reliable the way Hezbollah was either. So, you know, Iran is so greatly diminished.
Hussein Ibish: And the whole strategy of forward defense based on, frankly, stupid Arabs you’ve convinced to fight your war for you and to die instead of Iranians for Iran’s wars. And I insist on the word stupid in this case. I would say extremely stupid Arabs who agreed to do that. You know, it’s a matter of little consequence now for them to agree to limitations on what they will do And with regard to, they’re not going to walk away from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a 45 year project for them, or 42 year project for them.
Hussein Ibish: They’re not going to abandon it completely. But there’s no point in dying on the hill of no restrictions on their support to Hezbollah because all-out support for Hezbollah proved useless. So why not agree to some restrictions? You know, you’re probably putting restrictions yourself Because why would you dump huge amounts of money in to try to get them back to where they were, which proved to be of no help? It’s much better to have a very low and slow approach to Hezbollah, in which case you can agree on restrictions on, you know, voluntarily agree to hold off on certain things regarding Hezbollah and the Hashish Shabi groups in Iraq and to dismantle the Fatemehoun brigades and the others that are probably already being dismantled because they again failed in Syria to have any consequence.
Hussein Ibish: And also your relations with the Houthis. You can agree on all that without losing anything of tremendous value. They thought it was of tremendous value. It proves it’s not of tremendous value. So why not negotiate it, right?
Hussein Ibish: And get something of tremendous value. The tricky part, the trickier part might be how much further they’ve gotten towards a nuclear weapon. They’re now a year away from not just weaponizing, but having a bomb that they could put on a warhead, a bomb that has been tested, that has been weaponized, that has been put on a warhead, and that is ready to go on a missile aimed at some target somewhere. That’s a year away at this point, people think. Right?
Hussein Ibish: It’s a matter of a few weeks before they could start making a bomb. But then you have to go through all the process of testing it and making sure it works and then weaponizing it and creating a warhead and then fitting the warhead on the missile. And, you know, it’s it does not overnight. There are steps you have to go through for all of that. And So, you know, for them to be a year away is awfully close.
Hussein Ibish: And so I think they could negotiate with Trump a deal that looks much better than the JCPOA, even though it really isn’t, you know, that much. And he wouldn’t give Biden any credit for anything that’s happened over the past year, but he would say his genius as a negotiator, which is non-existent, but he could claim this, resulted in the much better deal that he always talked about. And here it is, and in many ways, it would look better. And I think 1 of the interesting questions is, you know, a lot of the Iranian stockpile of highly enriched uranium would have to be held in escrow outside of Iran by somebody. And it back in the era of the JCPOA, it was Russia.
Hussein Ibish: But Russia can’t play that role anymore for various reasons, not really trusted by either side, certainly not by the West. And it can’t play that role. Who could? Well, India could. I think India definitely could.
Hussein Ibish: And seems to me the Indians could, you know, right in the middle diplomatically, right between Iran and the Americans, they could be trusted by either side, not to side too much with the other side, and could play more or less the role that Russia played in 2016. And I think there’s a deal to be made here, in other words.
Mukunda: A follow up on that question, right? It seems like the Trump, the next Trump administration seems to be taking a more hands off international policy, maybe in particular to the Middle East.
Hussein Ibish: Well, I don’t think we know.
Mukunda: Oh, yeah. But I mean, indications are like, it seemed to be that way.
Hussein Ibish: I don’t know. I don’t I, I can’t tell. I don’t see that. I don’t think we know.
Dr. Ali: I don’t think we know.
Hussein Ibish: There seem to be strong indications either way. I mean, I do think, look, let’s put it this way. I think it’ll be a miracle if Trump does not try very early on in his second term to withdraw all the US forces from Iraq. Now he tried, from Syria, excuse me. Now he tried that in, I guess it was 2019, 2018, something like that.
Hussein Ibish: And the military told him, no, we have about 2, 500, we need to keep at least 1, 000. And they told him a couple of things. They said, look, we need to keep control of the oil fields because that’s $45 million a month. And he was like, yes. And he came out and he made this disgusting comment, which is pillaging a crime under international law.
Hussein Ibish: So we’ll keep the oil. We’ll keep the money, $45 million a month. We’re keeping it. Keep the oil, keep the oil. But what they really wanted was to keep, above all, well, there are 2 things.
Hussein Ibish: They wanted to, I mean, that’s a card worth keeping as leverage, But more important was to keep Americans in Syria to maintain the viability of the SDF and the Kurdish forces vis-a-vis ISIS and vis-a-vis Turkey and to keep them viable for some negotiated settlement and if the US leaves altogether Abandoning the SDF it’ll be yet another time that the U.S. Has relied on Kurds to do its dirty work and then turned its back on the Kurds without so much as a very well. And, you know, you can see it coming a mile away. And I think the US military feels badly about it, but Trump won’t give a damn about Syrian Kurds or any other Syrians. And the other reason was the American garrison at Tanaf in north, well, sort of central, almost, eastern Syria, is right beyond the border crossing, the big border crossing with Iraq.
Hussein Ibish: And it sits alongside the M2 highway, which is absolutely crucial. It’s a big highway linking Baghdad and Damascus. And for the US to have the ability to seize control of it, meant, first of all, it was taken from ISIS in 2014. So keeping it means ISIS couldn’t get it back. But more to the point, I think over time it became more a matter of preventing Iran from seizing it.
Hussein Ibish: Because if Iran got hold of that crossing back in the day, it could have had then a secured military corridor from Iran leading through Iraq and Syria down into Lebanon and Hezbollah in the Mediterranean Sea. Now, That is no longer as big a threat, obviously, as it was because of the change of government in Syria. However, it’s still the hinge of the northern Middle East, right? That crossing and that highway after the crossing, you can imagine it as something that folds the eastern Middle East, Iraq and Iran, against the western Middle East, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestine. And you can imagine it folding up like a book, right?
Hussein Ibish: And that’s the hinge, that’s the spine, right? It really is the central nodal point. It’s like the navel of the, or let’s say the infrastructural navel, because there are others, but it’s where the Middle East, it’s like the naval of the of the northern Middle East in infrastructural terms. Now, you want to control that or have guardianship over it because you sit right there. And you want to give that away to whoever wants to come in and take it away from you?
Hussein Ibish: Are you mad? And all it takes is 900 soldiers, and let’s say they’re lying. Let’s say it’s 1, 500. That’s still an incredible strategic bang for a very small American buck. But everything I just said is, I believe, way too complicated for the mind of Mr.
Hussein Ibish: Trump, who is a simpleton at best. And When it comes to international relations, he seems particularly foolish. And I’m not saying he’s a stupid man. I don’t think he’s a stupid man. But he’s incredibly ignorant, absolutely uncurious, and fundamentally non-serious, especially when it comes to international relations.
Hussein Ibish: So I think he may try to remove US forces from Syria. And that would be a colossal blunder. And it would be a grand American contribution to the potential process of things going badly in the new Syria, and rather than reunification and rebuilding and revitalization of the Syrian state, instead further fragmentation, further dissolution and national disintegration, which is entirely possible. And the Americans could greatly aid that by leaving, abandoning the SDF and the Kurds on the 1 hand, and throwing control of a tenth and that whole area next to the Iraqi border into, you know, for free for all, for control of that absolutely all-important little space in the Middle East. Because there isn’t another highway.
Hussein Ibish: I mean, there’s a big border. The other highway, there’s a small highway to the north that goes through the Kurdish controlled areas. But the real 1 is the M2. And yeah, if you want to create a free-for-all for control of the M2 at the Iraqi border crossing just after it, then be my guest, leave and see what the hell happens.
Dr. Ali: So we are running out of time, but all of this obviously in this particular iteration started with Gaza. And now that Israel has won what it considers a strategic victory in the north, what is going to be the next step in Palestine?
Hussein Ibish: Well, I don’t think they know if it’s a strategic victory or not. These smart Israelis I’ve talked to are calling it 60% obviously great because no more Assad and big blow to Iran, but 40% maybe not so great because they don’t know what the attitude of the new rulers of Syria towards Israel will be. And they’re being very obnoxious by destroying all the heavy equipment that the Assad regime has left behind, like missiles and air defenses and aircraft and radars and signals intel and everything that would cost a lot of money to replace and be hard to replace, they’re blowing up in advance because they don’t know if an HTS led government will be friendly or not. And they look at its resume of being the Nusra Front, you know, in the evolution of the Nusra Front, and remembering the Nusra Front began as an ISIS group and then became an Al-Qaeda group. You know, and you can understand why they would have qualms.
Hussein Ibish: But they’re also making a huge land grab into, you know, out of their normal kind of border area with around the Golan Heights, which is already occupied Syrian territory, which no Syrian is going to agree Israel had a right to annex. Now they’re biting off more of Syria. And they have grabbed not only another chunk of Syria, but also the highest point in the country, Mount Hermon, and quite a big chunk of Syria. And they say they’re going to stay there through the winter. And you know, as Carl Schmitt, the great Nazi philosopher, and he was a really interesting theorist actually, in spite of being kind of a Nazi.
Hussein Ibish: But his great contribution to political philosophy is serious enough that people still quote him despite his Naziness, which is the idea that the temporary always becomes permanent. That was a core tenant for the Nazis. They would do something and call it temporary, and then it would never go away. They loved that. But it’s still true.
Hussein Ibish: And I’m not trying to call the Israelis Nazis here. I’m just saying that wherever you see people doing something and it’s temporary, just assume it’s going to be permanent because you’re most likely it will be. And in politics, the temporary is permanent much more often than not, which was Schmitt’s point. And he was absolutely right. And, you know, you can make use of it, like the Nazis, as a sort of like cynical tactic, or you can simply, you know, use that analytical understanding as an observer and not get fooled.
Mukunda: So just before we go, I have a question on what the Europeans would call the microcrisis. How do you think this will affect Europe in relation to their internal politics on this because they’ve been rallying around some of this and going forward. Yeah.
Hussein Ibish: Now, by this, what do you mean this? What did they rally around? Well, I mean, I just want to know what you’re thinking of.
Mukunda: What I’m thinking of is quite a bit in the past few years, you’ve seen them. Well, a lot of the far right in Europe has rallied around the idea of migrants coming from Syria and the impact it’s having on their culture and communities and and the role of migrants in Europe at all.
Hussein Ibish: So in Europe. Yeah.
Mukunda: Yeah. Yeah, of course. So I what I mean is, is this going to affect the migrant population in Europe the way you’re talking about in Turkey?
Hussein Ibish: You mean, will they go home?
Mukunda: Will they go home or so on? Yeah.
Dr. Ali: I
Hussein Ibish: think, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. I guess I think if Syria becomes a tolerant and relatively unified country, which seems to offer people a reasonable life, a lot of them would. A lot of them wouldn’t because these countries in Europe are OECD countries, first world countries, and it’s just hard to replicate the opportunities in a country like that, in any developed country, with those that exist in any developing country, especially for people with limited skills, people who are farmers, people who are low-skilled workers or what have you. And it becomes very difficult to justify going back unless you’re forced to go back.
Hussein Ibish: And you might consider it if the country seems very safe and very stable and very calm. If not, not. And I think the idea that it will be, I mean, the euphoria is fine. The Syrians, after 54 years of brutal dictatorship and years of coups and all kinds of crap before that, it’s not like Syria was stable and peaceful before the Assad’s. In fact, they brought stability to a country, I mean, not in a good way, but you know, through force.
Hussein Ibish: They did bring stability to a country that had been going through coups, like people change socks, you know, and it was totally unstable politically, because people kept getting overthrown. It was like a banana republic. And Assad put a stop to that through force. But either way, I think it’s going to have to look fairly safe and fairly stable. And that’s going to be a departure for Syrian history.
Hussein Ibish: And it’s going to mean a departure from recent Middle Eastern history, because Look, you would look for a democracy in the Middle East in vain. Israel claims to be 1, but it’s not because it rules over. It’s a Jewish democracy with a couple of million Palestinians who are kind of included on the side. But there are 6000000 others who lived in greater Israel for the de facto Israeli state for the vast majority of its existence who are not citizens of Israel or anything else. And the Israelis won’t let them have their own country, and it won’t give them citizenship.
Hussein Ibish: And it runs in the occupied West Bank, arguably the most repressive regime in the entire region, or at least 1 of them. And then you’ve got Turkey, which is an illiberal democracy, where it’s a phony democracy like Hungary’s. It’s very repressive. And you’ve got Iran with its theocracy, with its fake elections, where only people approved by the Guardian council can run for elections, and that includes former presidents and all kinds of things that they don’t allow. Anyone who they don’t think is reliable at any given moment is not allowed to run.
Hussein Ibish: It’s a totally fake system. And all the decisions are made in the supra-political register by the clerics. And then you look for tolerance. And you can find ethnic and religious tolerance in the UAE, but no democracy. And a lot of migrant workers with limited rights and things like that.
Hussein Ibish: But still, yes, you have a lot of tolerance in the UAE, but 0 input. And no rule of law, right? No accountability to speak of, right? It’s just tolerance because it’s decreed from the top down. In the rest of the Middle East, I think you look for tolerance in vain.
Hussein Ibish: The Israelis are the height of intolerance against Palestinians. The Turks are incredibly intolerant against the Kurds. The Iranians are very intolerant of anyone who doesn’t agree with them and of all non-Shiite, what have you. It’s quite repressive. And you look at the Arab world and it’s full of intolerance and full of dictatorship.
Hussein Ibish: And Tunisia was the last best hope and its democracy fell by popular demand. The parliament couldn’t get anything done and people got fed up with it. And so they were happy when Qais al-Sayyid, this weirdo political scientist, decided he was just going to abolish the constitution and put in his own weirdo constitution and get rid of Tunisia’s democracy. And people were happy about that because they thought, at least this guy could maybe get something done. I’m not sure they think he has or not.
Hussein Ibish: I don’t know. But it’s too late now. So my point is, What the Syrians are trying to do is a very heavy lift. I mean, I don’t think we should overstate, we should underestimate, let’s put it that way. I don’t think we should underestimate how unusual a, forget about democracy, a regime in Syria that’s tolerant enough for its and towards its many communal, ethnic, and confessional minorities to be stable and relatively inclusive and avoid further national fragmentation and begin the process not just of rebuilding but national reintegration.
Hussein Ibish: That will be not a minor miracle, that’ll be a major miracle in the Middle East. They will have bucked the whole regional trend, and that it would be done by, led by, a group that began as an ISIS front group and then became an Al-Qaeda front group would be a miracle of all miracles. Weirder things have happened, but not much. We’re going for the macro-historical weirdness index here. I want people to understand that.
Hussein Ibish: The statistical likelihood of anything like this happening is quite low. I mean, you might as well buy lottery tickets, right? It’s a very—look, I’m very skeptical. I’m a Syrian citizen as well as a Lebanese and an American citizen, right? I have not allowed myself to feel euphoric in this case because I’ve been bitten too many times.
Hussein Ibish: And I just look at the equation, The cold calculating eye and I say, I’ll be amazed. I hope so. Anything I can do to make it happen I will. I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but honestly, Yeah. You know, I don’t see, I’m not very optimistic at the moment.
Hussein Ibish: Now, I would so love to be proven wrong, and I’m not going to do a thing to, you know, every single thing I do that’s consequential, which may be 0 because who am I? But you know, insofar as I have any ability to do anything ever in my life, I will push in that direction. You know, But right now, it’s the Turks and the former ISIS and al-Qaeda guys who have sway in Syria. And in parts of Syria, no. These subnational enclaves exist.
Hussein Ibish: And the question is, will there be less of them or more of them in 5 years’ time? I’m guessing more, but I’d love to be wrong about that.
Dr. Ali: On this semi-pessimistic note, we will have to end today’s talk, but it was very nice having you again, Hussain, and we look forward to talking to you again in the coming months.
Hussein Ibish: Anytime, yeah. It’s always great.
Dr. Ali: Thank you, Mukunda. I
Hussein Ibish: love doing this, so I appreciate it. Invite me back and thank you to all your listeners.
Dr. Ali: Thank you.
.
