To Biden’s many messes, add another in Syria.   

di Patrick Lawrence

“Wherever in the world you find a mess,” Le Carré once wrote, “you can be certain the Americans have been there.” I cannot recall, forgive me, if the famed English novelist said this directly or put it into the mouth of one of his characters. But no matter: This truth holds ever-truer as Joe Biden prepares for his final, thank goodness, exit from American political life.

Biden has traveled on a succession of fraudulent poses the whole of his long political life. He pretended and continues to pretend he is a friend of the working man while passing one piece of legislation after another favorable to the banks, Wall Street, and large corporations. His yet-greater sophistry, given its consequences over many years and in many places, has been to affect a grasp of global affairs and, so, masquerade as a foreign policy “expert.” It was this latter posturing that prompted Barack Obama to remark, as the Democratic Party chose Biden as its candidate in 2020, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

We shall not. If my editors will permit the vulgarity, America’s forty-sixth president is purposefully determined to fuck things up to the fullest extent he can as he exits the political stage.

Joe Biden leaves office a very bitter man. He is bitter because the elites of the Democratic Party abruptly pulled the plug on his re-election campaign last summer in favor of a candidate yet less competent than he is, a candidate—insult added to injury here—who then lost. And he is bitter because even he is not too stupid to recognize that his “legacy”—all American presidents tend to their legacies as one would a flower garden—must stand high among the many messes he has made.

Relations with China, the war in Ukraine, the support for terrorist Israel’s sadistic brutality against the Palestinian people and its genocide in Gaza—these are all messes we can mark down to Biden’s incompetence, corruption, or both. Now comes a grave new turn. On Wednesday, 27 November, the murderous jihadists long present in Syria suddenly, out of nowhere, renewed their attacks on the Assad government in Syria after four years of subdued violence. These groups, chief among them Hayat Tahrir-al–Sham, HTS, are descendants of those the C.I.A. previously financed, armed, and trained in what was probably the agency’s largest covert operation of the post–Cold War era.

There are two ways to read this development at this early moment. One, Biden appears to have authorized the American intelligence apparatus to recommence its long, savage, “regime change” war against Damascus. Two, Biden appears to have authorized the American intelligence apparatus to recommence its long, savage, “regime change” war against Damascus and this is now part of the “seven-front war” Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, openly declared his intention to wage on numerous occasions in the course of the autumn now ending.

The implications here are almost too dreadful to contemplate. The reactivation of HTS and other such Sunni militias suggests that Washington has determined to set loose the Israelis until the Zionist state attacks Iran and the Islamic Republic, the seat of Shi`a Islam, falls. The seven-front war, in other words, will no longer be a figure of speech. This makes West Asia the second region, after Ukraine and the eastern edge of Western Europe, where the danger of a global conflict involving nuclear powers has already begun to escalate.

The American system has many peculiar features to it, and one of them is what happens after a presidential election. When an Italian premier is vote out of office he or she departs immediately in favor of the incoming government. Not so in the U.S.: The exiting president remains in the White House until the successor is inaugurated the following 20 January, 11 weeks after the elections. Much can happen during this interim. Should the outgoing president be so inclined, he has considerable opportunity to sabotage his successor’s plans and leave behind messes of various kinds. Joe Biden, just as Barack Obama warned, has wasted no time making many for Donald Trump.

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It has long been evident than Biden and his national-security people have radically overinvested in the 10–years-and-running proxy war in Ukraine. And within months of the military operation the Russians began on 24 February 2022, which the corrupt regime in Kiev has never had a chance of defeating, the pressing question became how the Biden regime will manage to lose a war it cannot afford to lose.

Since Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris on 5 November, there has been an added question: What will Biden do during his remaining weeks in the White House to subvert Donald Trump’s announced plans to bring the Ukraine war to a close?

We got an answer on 18 November, when Biden authorized Kiev to launch U.S.–made and British-made missiles into Russian territory. This was in the face of clear warnings from the Kremlin that Moscow would consider any such attacks an escalation that puts the Russian Federation into a direct conflict with the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Pentagon and various senior officials in Washington warned Biden and the ideologues who plan and execute his national-security policies against this move, but to no avail. Biden’s preoccupation with his legacy and with leaving an intractable mess on Donald Trump’s desk prevailed over all the obvious risks.

Moscow’s retaliatory strikes, using powerful new-generation hypersonic missiles capable of bearing nuclear warheads, have been severe, let there be no question of this. The first of these, launched two days after Kiev fired its first Western-supplied missiles, seems to have been of shocking, unprecedented power. But these launches have been limited so far to carefully chosen targets in Ukraine—weapons plants and energy infrastructure. There is now little other than Russia’s restraint, to put this point another way, to prevent an unwise and unwinnable proxy war from escalating into something very like a third word war.

Will this frustrate Trump’s plans to end the war, as Biden obviously intends? This is hard to say, in part because Trump’s plans are, per usual with Trump, uncertain. Last week he nominated Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general, as his special envoy to Russia and Ukraine. Kellogg will thus design and execute whatever may comprise the new president’s peace plan. Here’s the thing: Kellogg co-wrote a paper last spring indicating that this should rest on a confrontational threat to send Kiev magnitudes more weapons if Moscow does not agree to negotiate a settlement to the incoming administration’s liking. Kellogg’s co-author, parenthetically, is Fred Fleitz, a notoriously hawkish former C.I.A. analyst.

This is not a winning proposition, to put the point mildly. Trump is much given to what we can call diplomacy by threat, which relies on the assumption that the U.S. is the world’s superior power. But it is highly questionable, at the very least, that the U.S. could defeat Russia in an open conflict. Trump and Kellogg, assuming the Senate confirms his nomination, as required by U.S. law, may have needed no assist from Biden to worsen the mess in Ukraine. But it is Biden who has brought it all too close to a great-power conflict involving nuclear-armed adversaries.

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Reports of renewed jihadist attacks in Syria arrived abruptly last Wednesday from the Syrian Arab News Agency, the Damascus government’s state-run wire service. SANA reported that Hayat Tahrir-al–Sham militias had mounted an offensive in Aleppo and Idlib provinces, both of which endured severe and sustained attacks from a variety of fanatical Sunni groups during the years the C.I.A. and MI6 armed and trained them. Later reports indicated HTS forces took considerable areas until now controlled by the Syrian Arab Army, including many villages and towns. Some press reports said HTS had taken over the largest SAA military base in the region amid casualties on both sides. These attacks appear to continue as I write.

There is no certainty now—and this is a point I wish to emphasize—as to the involvement of outside powers. We are limited to surmise. But there is plenty to surmise, let’s say—plenty to suggest that the Biden regime has restarted a conflict that had abated years ago and that these HTS operations also reflect the Zionist state’s determination to expand its more or less declared war in West Asia from Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon to the Syrian Arab Republic. In the seven-front war, Iran cannot be but next.

I recall how odd it was to keep track of the true identities of these murderous groups in the decade following 2012, when the C.I.A. and MI6 turned a legitimate democracy movement against the Assad government into a vicious covert operation that cost—the most reliable figures are only approximate—three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand lives and forced millions of Syrians into exile. These militias changed names frequently either because of ideological rivalries or because the Western powers could no longer cast them as the “moderate rebels” one read of incessantly in the press.

HTS is a case in point. This is the most recent name of a jihadist militia previously known as Jabhat al–Nusra. Jabhat al–Nusra was a descendant of al–Qaeda and was among the various Sunni militias the U.S. trained, armed, and financed. Let us follow the bouncing ball, as we say, when we read this following in The New York Times’s initial report of the new HTS offensive. It quotes one Charles Lister, a fellow at the Middle East Institute, which—The Times does not mention this—is funded by the State Department and the United Arab Emirates, which have in the past supported Sunnis groups opposed to the secular government in Damascus:

“Years ago, an offense of this size would have been pushed back by the regime,” Mr. Lister said. But opposition forces like Hayat Tahrir al–Sham, which traces its origins from the Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al–Nusra, have invested heavily in resources and training for night operations. “That basically levels the playing field,” he added.

Investing heavily in resources and training? What resources and who is doing the training? I leave readers to ponder these questions.

Four years ago, Russia and Turkey, who stood on opposing sides of the Syrian conflict, acted over the heads of the Americans and British to broker a ceasefire between the “rebels,” as the jihadists are euphemistically called, and Damascus. It was plain by then that the C.I.A. operation, on which the U.S. had spent more than $500 million, had failed. Something approximating peace thus prevailed until last week.

Why now? Another think tank hack The Times quotes put it as follows. The reference to “pro-regime militias” is intended to diminish the credibility of the SAA:

“Pro-regime militias have been upping their attacks in the area, trying to deter the rebels because Israel has been weakening the Syrian regime’s allies like Hezbollah and Iran.”

You have to know how to read these sorts of people, as they speak in what I call cotton-wool English. A plain translation, and these are often required, would be, approximately, Israel is proceeding with its seven-front war. It is now making common cause with Sunni jihadists as they fight the Damascus government and oppose Shi`a Iran, two fronts in the Zionist state’s West Asia plan. Israel, indeed, has been attacking Damascus and other Syrian cities periodically for years. Ten days ago it mounted a major operation against Palmyra, the ancient city in central Syria that came under attack by none other than the Islamic State nine year ago.

I find the renewal of attacks on the Assad government in Damascus at least as alarming as the unfolding escalation of the Ukraine crisis, and maybe more so. Three reasons.

One, it appears—again no hard evidence yet—the C.I.A. has restarted its most extensive covert operation in the post–Cold War era. Two, it also appears the Biden regime has given the Israelis full dispensation to advance its hostile attacks in the region in the cause of making itself a regional hegemon.

And three, Robert F. Kennedy, who is close to Trump’s thinking and is now a nominee for a cabinet position, said in early November that the president-elect intends to withdraw American troops from northern Syria, where they have been illegally based for roughly a decade. If my reading is correct, the new attacks in Syria reflect another of the messes Biden is determined to leave his successor.

For the most pitiful of reasons, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. will leave behind a regime of sprawling, dangerous disorder in the world. Don’t underestimate Joe in these matters.