Will Morrisey Reviews

Book reviews and articles on political philosophy and literature.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

    Archives

    Categories

    Meta

    “Gone With the Wind,” Begone

    by

    First published in THE GAMBIER JOURNAL, Volume 4, No. 5, May 1985.

     

    It moves sour critics to cries of ‘film classic!’ It makes otherwise mature adults dream, with respect, of the old Hollywood. Four and a half decades after its first showing, it still attracts millions of viewers, none of whom is heard to emit event the politest complaint.

    Has no one noticed the elaborate silliness of Gone With the Wind?

    The silliness goes beyond the main characters—although, to be sure, they partake of it. It goes beyond Melanie’s idiotic benevolence, somehow confused with Christianity. It goes beyond Ashley’s despairing gentility—despite which, we are expected to believe, he commanded soldiers during four years of war. It goes beyond Rhett Butler’s heart-of-gold cynicism, with which he would seduce his beloved the better to redeem her. It even goes beyond the silliness of Scarlett O’Hara, whose name might be considered a pun on the Biblical Scarlet Whore of Babylon, were we to credit Miss Mitchell with acerb wit she displays nowhere else.

    While still in a relatively generous mood, let us credit Miss Mitchell and/or the scriptwriters with giving the title a dual meaning. “Wind” means the war, of course, particularly General Sherman’s incendiary expedition therein. It must mean rhetoric, too; if nothing else, the film exposes the silliness of Confederate orotundities. Judging from the antics at “Tara,” the old South had “gone with the wind” years before the rebels brought their case to Fort Sumter. Regrettably, the film wants us to admire not only admirable courage in a “lost cause” but the sham elegance of a “civilization”—so Miss Mitchell calls it—apparently compounded of little more than chattel slavery and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Worse, this anti-rhetorical film has an rhetorical afflatus of its own.

    For Hollywood substituted visual for verbal inflation, offering rather too much of something for everyone. We get, at first, grand photography of trivial persons—the O’Hara’s and the Wilkes’s—minor Dickens characters with Southern accents. We then see these persons impelled into a brutal context, also grandly photographed—which may distract us from their continued triviality. Spectacular improbabilities ensue. Finally, we see them during Reconstruction, repelling trashy whites and uppity blacks with the short sword of Scarlett’s petty Machiavellianism. (“If I have to lie, cheat, steal, or kill, I’ll never go hungry again!” she explains to God, Who has seen far more engaging purposes served by similarly dubious means). The photography remains grand.

    We are, I suspect, intended to learn something from this epic melodrama. The film’s makers conceive of illusion as a verbal phenomenon. Each character loves someone who doesn’t return that love, or who cannot return it openly, because words obscure passions, not only for the hearer but for the speaker. Even the self-styled realists, Rhett and Scarlett, manage to confuse each other in the end, with nothing but words.

    Done well, this might illuminate something. But Hollywood merely replaced deceptive words with deceptive images. The film is a big truck, a vehicle for carrying ‘scenes’; the ‘scenes’ are receptacles for ‘drama,’ that is, an effort to arouse sentiments. The film-makers load their truck with more and more drama, more and more scenes, and keep the tank filled with theatrical gas. Disasters multiply with each reel, and the last thirty minutes veritably teem with deaths, delusions, and broken hearts.

    I once watched the film with a woman of sense who endured it all until the Butler daughter died in a riding accident. “Everything happens to these people,” the lady murmured. One might say the same of Job and his family, but that plot had God, not Miss Mitchell, for its author, which tends to enhance its significance. With Miss Mitchell and the film-makers taking turns at the wheel, the rip only ends when their overloaded rig breaks down—prefigured by the horse that drops dead under Scarlett’s lash and symbolized perfectly by Scarlett herself, microcosm within the macrocosm, collapsed on the stairs, sobbing for the lost Rhett but truly in love only with her real estate. Love of land, of a thing that seems real and lasting, replaces love of unstable humans; love for something photographable overrides love of man, that verbal animal who cannot be captured whole in a picture. It is a Hollywood morality play, that is to say a contradiction in terms insofar as one can say that such a thing has terms.

    When Scarlett gets up to declaim, “Tomorrow is another day,” one may take it as a threat to film a sequel. And indeed, as the European philosophical tradition may consist of a series of footnotes to Plato, the Hollywood cinematic tradition may consist of a series of sequels to Gone With the Wind. André Malraux called the techniques of mass ‘culture’ “the arts of satiation”; a photograph, a representation of the surface of things, more nearly satiates us than words do because it shows the appetites what they want instead of trying to tell them about it. Words have a tendency to evoke reason (the Greek word for ‘word,’ logos, also means reason), or faith (“the Word”). Hollywood will not have them. At best, it can only celebrate the earth, beautiful but dumb.

    Israel on America’s Mind

    by

    Noam Chomsky: The Fatal Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Boston: South End Press.

    Sam B. Girgus: The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

    Peter Grose: Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

    The review was originally published in Chronicles of Culture. Vol. 9, No. 12, December 1985. Republished with permission.

     

    Most of the nations know all too clearly what they believe about Jews. Americans are less sure. This beneficial uncertainty inheres in the two major lines of thought that shape American souls: Christianity and modern political philosophy. Peter Grose writes that the Puritans “identified with the people of the Old Testament”; until 1787, Harvard College (which then promoted an identifiable morality) required its students to learn Hebrew. But a bit further south, in the name of Christianity, Peter Stuyvesant unsuccessfully tried to expel from Manhattan 23 newly-arrived Brazilian Jews. In general, “the early American was fixed in his belief that [for refusing to worship the Christ] the Jew had forfeited his full rights in Christian society.” Among the ‘moderns,’ Thomas Jefferson unhesitatingly extended his principle of religious toleration to Jews while privately lamenting, “among them ethics are so little understood.” John Adams endorsed the aspirations of Jews to return to Israel but imagined they might “possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians.” Among both Christians and ‘moderns,’ this desire to convert Jews was strong, exhibiting that mixture of esteem and hostility any proselytizer feels for potential proselytes.

    America’s contemporary ‘Left’ has not escaped ambivalence toward Jews and the Jewish state. Grose, Girgus, and Chomsky represent, respectively, the liberal, left-liberal, and leftist ideologies prevalent in late twentieth-century academia. Each writer illustrates the situation of world Jewry today not only by what he sees but by what he makes of what he sees.

    As the sort of liberal found on the Council of Foreign Relations and the New York Times, Grose presents the most accurate and least colorful of the three pictures. Although titled Israel in the Mind of America, his book is primarily a political history of Zionism in America between the First World War and the Israeli founding. As might e expected, during this period political Zionism—the desire for a Jewish state in Palestine—enjoyed the support of nowhere near the majority of American Jews, much less American Gentiles. American Jews wanted the right to settle peacefully in Palestine, but then as now not many wanted to exercise that right; as for Jewish sovereignty in the region, even fewer insisted on that. Ethnic, social, political, and religious divisions within American Jewry assured continued political incoherence. Typically, well-established “uptown” Jews of German origin preferred quiet, behind-the-scenes lobbying; they regarded Judaism as a religion without national/political content. Newly-arrived “downtown” Jews of Russian origin preferred political activism; to them, Judaism included nationality, if not national sovereignty.

    Louis Brandeis attempted to overcome these divisions by uniting Jews behind a particular form of Zionism. He added some of “downtown’s” political energy to the elitism of “uptown” in an effort to make Zionism a Jewish version of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Progressivism.’ This Zionism for middle-class liberals declined when World Zionist Organization leader Chaim Weizmann attacked it as still insufficiently political, too much a reflection of the American pragmatism that wants to ‘make the desert bloom’ without much caring who rules the desert. But Brandeisian Zionism lasted, albeit in different for. Brandeis and his allies left the Zionist movement and involved themselves in the Democratic Party politics that led, tortuously, to American support for the Jewish state in Palestine.

    The path proved tortuous in part because the State Department remained anti-Zionist up to and beyond Israeli independence, for motives ranging from anti-Semitism to timidity. (A young diplomat in Germany, George F. Kennan, best exemplified the latter when he advised against U. S. protest over Nazi anti-Semitism, “saying it would be an ineffective interference in another country’s internal affairs”—a refrain he would sing more than once in his long career. Kennan would later oppose Israeli independence out of fear of a Mideast war.) Unfortunately, the complacency of Americans, including American Jews, also added to the tortuousness of the path. The saddening fact is that only the Holocaust rallied American Jews to Zionism. As late as 1944, most Americans did not credit reports of mass extermination in Europe. Felix Frankfurter explained this most tellingly: “I do not have the strength to believe it.”

    Quiet diplomacy and behind-the-scenes lobbying could not work without public pressure, and this finally came through the energy of Rabbi Hillel Kook (better known at the time by his nom de guerre, Peter Bergson), who was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. Given his own ideology, Grose cannot help but undervalue the Jabotinsky branch, Zionism’s right wing; he is better on Silver, a brilliant political organizer who disdained courteous relations with Gentile politicians and, for that matter, with many fellow-Jews. Rudeness was what the circumstances required. Silver’s one blind spot was his failure to see and respond quickly to the disaster engulfing Jews in Europe. Nonetheless, “under Silver’s leadership, aroused and appalled by the ‘news from Europe,’ America’s Jews changed.” They learned to use the American political system. Congress and President Truman saw this and acted accordingly; political pressure caused such basically decent Americans to act with the vigor mere decency often lacks. While the major fight came ‘on the ground’ in Palestine itself, American support for Israel was indispensable, and it has endured for nearly four decades.

    Noam Chomsky condemns that support as one imperialism rewarding another. Had he written a generation earlier, he would not have done so, because initially the principal international ally of Israel, then firmly under the control of democratic-socialist Labour Zionists, was the Soviet Union, followed (after the 1956 Suez Canal War) by France. But in 1967, after crushing the massing Arab armies in the Six-Day War, Israel chose the United States as its main ally and arms supplier. That was enough for the American Left, which decided to back the Palestinian Arabs. Grose admires Israel but deplores Jabotinsky and his “zealot” follower, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; Chomsky, an anti-Communist left-winger, believes all Israeli governments infamous in their domination of ‘the Palestinians.’ In his view, Begin’s Likud Party descends from fascism, the Labour Party from Bolshevism. America’s “critical supporters” of Israel remind him of American Stalinists of the 1930s and 1940s. “[T]hose who exercise real power in the U. S.”—evidently, large business corporations and the CIA—find Israel a useful ally, he claims. He does not base this claim on any talk with oil company executives. Such criticism of Israel as heard, for example, during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon in response to terrorist attacks is merely an instance of “feigned criticism” that has “made an impressive contribution to indoctrination in the democratic societies.”

    Chomsky’s rhetorical legerdemain doesn’t end with that. Anyone who rejects Palestinian Arab claims—”rights,” in Chomsky’s vocabulary—to a state west of the Jordan River is a “racist.” Security concerns? He dismisses them by citing Israeli military prowess and by saying that the phrase, “a Palestinian state on the West Bank would be a dagger poised at the heart of Israel,” was “borrowed from Hitler, who used it with reference to Czechoslovakia.” With equal sobriety, he praises what he calls an “international consensus” held by Arabs, Soviet-bloc oligarchs, and oil-blackmailed West Europeans, for a return to Israel’s 1967 borders. Although he makes much of national self-determination, he cannot claim that the “consensus” in question arose without undo interference from other countries or native despots.

    Chomsky concedes that “Israel has been and remains a vibrant democracy on the western model for its Jewish citizens,” although his comments on news-media “indoctrination” must dilute his joy at such vibrancy. He also concedes that PLO terrorism is “surely to be condemned,” although it “hardly matched” that of the Israelis in Lebanon. He goes so far as to compare the PLO to the Zionists of the 1940s, without noting how ominous that must be in the blood-red light of his own polemic. Not only does he fail to explain how two ‘Zionisms’ could ever share the same territory peacefully, but he fails to show why two such regimes would be better than one. Governments generally are a bad lot, in Chomsky’s opinion, and those who attempt to defend them are “modern state-worshippers.” If states are so bad, why demand one for Palestinian Arabs? Would the PLO’s compaction of Islam and Marxism ever yield some for of anarcho-syndicalism that Chomsky might favor?

    The title of his concluding chapter, “The Road to Armageddon,” suggests a certain pessimism about all this. Israel “drift[s] towards internal social, moral, and political degeneration”—that is, towards the Bible. Israeli “Khomeinism” swells daily, as rabbis quote from “the genocidal texts” of the Torah. Chomsky expresses disgust at Israeli political scientist Mordechai Nisan who, in Chomsky’s words, would “put aside” the “Western Enlightenment” as a “heresy” against the Torah. Chomsky does not cite the Biblical texts in question, but presumably he refers to such teachings as the laws of warfare in Deuteronomy 20. While these are scarcely humanitarian in the modern, “Enlightenment” sense, they are not racist. Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites may be “utterly destroy[ed]” if they occupy the cities “the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance” (that is, cities located in the Biblical land of Israel) and if they refuse to make peace. This must be done “in order that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God.” Sin, not race, is the issue.

    Against this Biblical teaching, Chomsky praises the modern doctrine of “human rights, equal rights,” whereby Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs “have essentially equal rights within the territory of the former Palestine.” While the Enlightenment derives rights from what all men are, the God of the Bible judges men by what He wants them to do: live according to His regime, His “way.” The egalitarianism and toleration of the Enlightenment quells religious warfare by denying that religion is worth fighting for. But if it also tends toward denying that anything at all is worth fighting for, or living for, except comfortable self-preservation. Its reductionist materialism tends to undermine the foundations of its own doctrine of “human rights,” except as that may be defined in the least ‘righteous’ terms. This can do Chomsky’s formidable self-righteousness no good. Evidently, there are at least two roads to this Armageddon without revelation, and one of them passes very close to nihilism on the way.

    Sam B. Girgus describes the journey of certain Jewish writers in America whereby “Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America.” “America” is a compound idea consisting of “freedom, democracy, equality, and republicanism”; “in turn, Jewish writers, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea.” The two-sided metamorphosis amounts to a “new covenant,” one with rather less divine authority than the old one but welcome to a scattered and persecuted nation. The question one asks such writers must be, ‘Emancipation for what?” Unfortunately, Girgus can discover only the most general answers: “moral elevation” in “a competitive and brutal world,” egalitarianism, “consciousness.” His ideological hero is Brandeis, which explains some of the muddle; mixing in sexual ‘liberation,’ feminism, and ‘identity’-assertion obscures matters still more. For example, Girgus actually can countenance Norman Mailer’s puerile inflations of Marilyn Monroe and Gary Gilmore; “thus, Gary joins Marilyn as an important force in Mailer’s conception of the continuing powers of the American myth.”

    Occasionally, such misplaced reverence can help a reader discover something no one else has seen. While E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel hardly amounts to “a major work of contemporary literature,” Girgus does persuasively contend that most critics, across the political spectrum, failed to see past the novel’s treatment of the Rosenberg spy case. Like its Biblical counterpart, The Book of Daniel tells “the story of Jews in a foreign land.” But Doctorow’s Jewish martyrs “let their belief… become a new kind of orthodoxy that inflates their importance, disguises their vulnerability, and encourages a sort of moral myopia, which confuses immediate self-interest, personal status, and convenience with universal truth and justice.” To put it more harshly than Girgus does, Doctorow’s Rosenbergs are not true martyrs at all. Their son, Daniel, achieves a “fusion” of Jewishness and Americanness, finding an equilibrium in responsibility—as a father, and before the law. Because they require authority, neither fatherhood nor law comport easily with liberty and equality as (mis)interpreted in contemporary American politics. Girgus sees this and worries. In his postscript he finds both power and danger in Jewish “moral authority.” “Jews embody patriarchy,” and patriarchy is resented, according to Ellen Willis, one of the scholarly hens of feminism that peck Girgus’s deferential skull.

    However much one may deride his male feminism, a sort of out-of-wedlock uxuriousness, Girgus does uncover something important here. Radicalized or unqualified liberty and equality want no authority but mean nothing without it. That is, after an individual achieves liberty and equality, he has nothing left to do but defend them, and if he knows of nothing beyond them he may doubt them worth defending. Liberty and equality resent but need some authority. Brandeis and the other pragmatist-progressive intellectuals tried to solve this problem with the doctrine of pluralism. It proved unstable. Insofar as pluralism is coherent it is no longer pluralist, and insofar as it is pluralist it cannot cohere. America’s ‘Left,’ whether pluralist, Marxist, or merely indignant, cannot decide what it thinks of Jews because it cannot decide what it thinks of authority and liberty. In less abstract language, it cannot decide what it thinks of God and His relation to His most (as academics say) problematic creature. Or it decides, with Marx, not to think, not to ask.

     

    Syria and Its Civil War

    by

    Christopher Phillips: The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

     

    From the jihadi organizations Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, Middle-East politics has seen struggles over regimes, state forms, and geopolitics for more than a century. Syria’s civil war has combined all of these kinds of conflict in one cauldron. Civil wars are often the worst kind, as our own civil war demonstrated, inflicting more deaths on Americans that World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. In Syria, estimates are that as of the beginning of 2017, 470,000 had been killed, approximately five million exiled, and nearly seven million displaced within their country—a nation of 21 million before the war began. As I write this review in July 2017, no respite from this suffering can be seen, or anticipated.

    The ancient Greeks called the Assyrians the Syrioi, and the name became attached to their place, although they were neither the first nor the last to occupy it. The long list of its conquerors comprises most of the nations of the Bible: Amorites, Hittites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Egyptians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans—all have ruled it. The Israelites got as far as the port city of Tyre, now in Lebanon. Most famously for us, Saul of Tarsus met God on the road to Damascus, regaining his sight when he finally arrived there. Damascus has been called the oldest inhabited city in the world, with its origins in ‘pre-history’: its violent past and present suggest that human beings progress technologically but not so much morally or politically. Saul’s new-found inner light found some who attended to it, but not enough to bring peace to Syria. And even if he had found more converts there, men being what they are, they would have been just as likely to make war with one another over the legacy of the Prince of Peace.

    The map tells why men always fight over Syria. Not only does it form the northwest corner of the Fertile Crescent, but its coastline along the Mediterranean afforded access to one of the richest trading networks in the ancient world. Syria has much to love, but love is exclusive and the jealousy of rival lovers fosters hatred. And because each new band of loving and hating conquerors has left a remnant in this place, Syria encompasses dozens of tribal, ethnic, and religious groups—a kaleidoscope of factions some centuries old, many inclined to tear at one another. We need therefore to think about what it takes humanly to govern such a place, to make peace in it.

    To govern its factions, a community needs some overarching understanding of right; it also needs ruling institutions which derive their authority from that standard of right. This is to say that enemy factions need to find some common sphere of moral agreement. The United States of America (for example) has in it far more ethnic and religious groups than Syria does. It has lived in relative peace with itself for more than two centuries by acknowledging the laws of nature and of nature’s God as its overarching understanding of right. When too many Americans denied those laws, our one civil war resulted. This understanding has been instantiated in a set of ruling institutions approved by the American people—again, denied by a critical mass among us only that once. The American regime of federal and commercial republicanism was founded upon a source of right that does not require its citizens to adhere to any particular religious confession, or to belong to any particular ethnic group, in order to enjoy the rights of citizens.

    Another, and historically more common solution to the problem of factionalism has been (and to some degree remains) monarchic empire. Paul the Apostle’s mission was much helped by his status as a subject within the Roman Empire, wherein Syria stood as an important province. A monarch-emperor stations himself above the erstwhile warring factions and rules them by keeping them divided but balanced among themselves. He takes care to redress any imbalances that arise, rather like a parent governs a set of unruly children. And like such a parent, he also takes care that his subjects do not find common cause to unite against him. And so, traditionally, such monarchs have allowed each ethnic and religious community within their empires a substantial degree of self-governance in exchange for tribute and for loyalty in war.

    When in 640 A.D. Muslims arrived in Syria, they found a set of peoples that had found peace, when they found it, under imperial rule. The Muslim rulers changed nothing in that respect, and Damascus became the capital of the caliphate ruled by the Umayyid Dynasty, the largest empire in history to that point, spanning 5.8 million square miles from today’s Spain to today’s Pakistan. Enforcing the principle of dhimmitude or subordination, the caliph allowed the various religious groups to manage their own affairs insofar as these did not impinge upon tax collection and other activities reserved to the emperor. Among those subject to dhimmitude were the Alawite Muslims, a Shi’ite Muslim sect, founded in the 9th century. The Alawites are “Twelver” Muslims who especially revere Ali, whom they believe to have been the first of the Twelve Imams. Today, they number approximately three million, half of them in Syria, clustered along the coastline, but also in Lebanon (200,000), Turkey (500,000), and Germany (70,000).

    Syria’s longest time of peace in recent centuries came under the empire of the Ottoman Turks, who expelled the Egyptian empire of the Mamluks in 1516 and stayed for the next four centuries, making Damascus part of the pilgrimage route to Mecca. France replaced the Ottomans in the wake of the First World War, withdrawing finally in 1946. While there, the French had allied with the minority Allawites, using them as a counter to the majority Sunnis. The borders of Syria set by France in the 1920s had no regard for pre-existing social-political patterns; emperors, whether monarchic or republican, want to rule by dividing, and national unity in their provinces is anathema to them. Although France made some efforts to bring its mission civilisitrice to Syria, a young army officer named Charles de Gaulle was unimpressed; “I don’t think we are making much of an impression here,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, in the early 1930s.

    Thus, when finally independent, more than 70 years ago, Syria became a sovereign state without having a real nation—the peoples of the region never having existed as a single ethnic or religious entity. What kind of regime could hold it together, let alone bring Syrians some modicum of justice?

    For a brief time Syrians attempted republicanism. That regime collapsed after it and its allies failed to destroy Israel in the 1948 war. In their ‘civilizing mission,’ French imperial rulers had proved better at training the Syrian military officers than at preparing Syrians for self-government. A series of military dictatorships followed, with eight successful coups between 1949 and 1970. After aligning with the Soviet bloc in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Canal War, Syrians soon found themselves more and more at the mercy of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, which was funded and advised by Moscow. In neighboring Iraq, the Ba’ath Party was headed by Saddam Hussein; after another defeat by Israel in 1967, in which it lost the Golan Heights, Syrian was ripe for yet another strongman. The Assad family, long prominent among the Alawites, took charge of the Syrian Ba’athists and the government in 1970. Hafez al-Assad ruled until his death in 2000, providing some stability along with much tyranny. He was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad, who continues to rule the Alawite ‘rump state’ to this day.

    Syria as a nation-state reproduced (on a smaller scale) the sort of regime it had under imperialism—a monarchy—but without the advantages that imperial monarchs had enjoyed: military and economic power with resources drawn from beyond the borders of Syria itself. The Assads have attempted to rule like imperialists, taking the already-divided groups in the country and keep them both divided from one another and dependent upon the regime. This works, except when it doesn’t: the current civil war isn’t the first one. In the 1970s, thousands of Syrians died in a revolt organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Sunni Islamist organization that now rules in Turkey and also, briefly, in Egypt. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad had 10,000 of them slaughtered when they tried to seize the city of Hama.

    Syria is Iraq in reverse. In Iraq, Ba’athists who were Sunni Muslims ruled a much larger group of Shi’as and Sunni Kurds. In Syria, Alawite Ba’athists who are Shi’a Muslims constitute a minority who rule a majority of Sunni Muslims, including Kurds (who are about 10% of the population), among numerous other ethnic groups. To complicate matters still further, unlike Iraq there is a substantial Christian population (also about 10%, before the war), themselves divided into several sects and ethnicities.

    Whenever a state ruling such a heterogeneous population weakens, foreign states start circling, looking for advantage, and usually finding one or more factions eager for foreign backing. In the Middle East this is especially true in any conflict involving Sunnis and Shi’ites. Iran has close political and financial ties to the Syrian Alawites in addition to their other regional allies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. As U. S. troops began to withdraw from Iran’s eastern border, Afghanistan, and its western border, Iraq, the Iranian regime saw an opportunity to build an arc of influence throughout the region, encircling the great prizes of Mecca and the Arabian oil fields. This alarmed the region’s Sunnis, including the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the Turks—the latter two longtime imperial rulers of Syria. What is more, the Russians have retained their interests in the region and their ties to the Ba’athist Party, their Cold-War ally. Israel, with its concerns about Hezbollah, its interest in the Golan Heights, and its own worries about the Iranians, remains vigilant. Also regarding Iran, it is important to remark that the Iranian economy is heavily dependent upon Russia and China, to the point where it is regarded by those greater powers as a source of military support for their interests in dominating the ‘World Island’ described by Halford Mackinder, more than a hundred years ago.

    The League of Nations and then the United Nations were designed to control such interventions by providing a non-imperial, even commercial-republican, force in world politics. In the Middle East, this mean that the defunct Ottoman Empire would be divided into colonies controlled by the remaining commercial-republic European empires, which were to prepare the populations there for independence as responsible sovereign states in the dreamed-of ‘world community.’ As we know, the League of Nations collapsed under the pressure of political regimes whose moral principles were antithetical to those of President Wilson and his colleagues at Versailles. The United Nations has survived the regime incoherence of its members, but can rarely summon the firepower to do much. The exception was the First Gulf War in the early 1990s, when the United States stood dominant in a world newly free of the Soviet empire. President George H. W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ didn’t survive that decade, and both Russia and China have blocked U.N. military action throughout the course of the Syrian war. Although a smaller, regional organization might in principle act where the U.N. cannot, and although the Arab League has sanctioned Syria, its main action has been to send weapons to its Sunna Arab allies in the country. Members states also have happily allowed their home-grown jihadis to join the fight; after all, if the jihadis win the Sunnis will be rid of a Shi’a regime, to the disadvantage of Iran, and if they lose many will not live to return to their homelands to disturb the peace there.

    Had the Alawite/Ba’athist regime collapsed, we might have seen removal of many elements of Syrian military personnel and some equipment to their brother Shi’a in Lebanon, Hezbollah. That is, Shi’a power in the region would have regrouped, re-concentrated nearer Israel, but it would not have disappeared. Both Israel and Iran would have regarded their circumstances as diminished, a point that would not have improved the temper of either of these antagonists, although the Sunnis would have been content.

    But that’s not what happened. The Alawites hung on, and the war took a different direction. Why?

    After taking over from his late father, Bashar al-Assad did what new tyrants very often do: he moved to consolidate his power. He narrowed his support base to those he knew to be loyal. In doing so, he excluded some tribal networks he didn’t fully trust. Among those he didn’t fully trust were the Kurds, who have ties with Kurdish populations in Turkey and in Iraq, where they had achieved a substantial degree of self-government following the Second Gulf War. This exclusion understandably led to feelings of estrangement among these elements, making the newly-excluded groups more inclined to rebel, if the opportunity arose.

    It did, thanks to several converging factors. Between 1950 and 2010, the Syrian population increased six-fold. This brought urbanization, as young men sought jobs. But they weren’t finding them. High unemployment of military-age men is seldom wholesome in a religious culture which valorizes war. A severe drought in the years 2006-10 brought discontent to the countryside, as well. Added to corruption and increased nepotism in the regime (part of that regime-purging strategy of Assad), along the perennially factitious character of Syrian society itself, a volatile mixture was ready for a spark. That was the 2011 Arab Spring, which raised hopes of overthrowing tyrannical regimes throughout Muslim North Africa and the Arab Peninsula.

    Assad’s consolidation of power turned out to be the proverbial double-edged sword. It did give excluded groups incentive to abandon the regime. But it also made the core of that regime stronger. Tyrannies and oligarchies typically collapse when the ruling group or groups themselves start to factionalize, as seen in the Syria of the Fifties and Sixties, with its succession of coups. But Assad had (in Phillips’s word) ‘coup-proofed’ his regime. It was, in Lenin’s famous phrase when he purged the Bolshevik Party, “smaller but better”—better for the tyrant. Although some army units deserted early in the conflict, most stood firm, including the army officers and the Mukhabarat—the intelligence agencies which had been set up by the East German Stasi during the Cold War. The Stasi were the most feared (because the most ruthlessly efficient) of all the Soviet-era intelligence and security services, superior even to the KGB itself. No Syrian tyrant would want to be without an intelligence agency trained by them.

    As a result, during the Arab Spring, as other, less tightly-controlled tyrannical state apparatuses in northern Africa collapsed, the Syrian regime survived. Once Russia’s premier, Vladimir Putin, decided to increase his support for the regime in 2014, three years after the war began, he could tip the balance of forces in favor of Assad’s survival.

    Looking at the geopolitical dimension of the struggle, Phillips emphasizes that no one in or outside of the Middle East adequately understood Syria; no one had adequate ‘intel.’ Not the Americans or the Russians, but also not the Turks, the Saudis, or the Iranians. (Evidently also not the Assad regime or its enemies, for that matter, all of whom miscalculated when assessing the others). At the same time, ‘everyone’ wanted to jump in, perceiving risks if they did not and opportunities if they did. This ignorance was understandable. The tyrannical character of the Syrian regime made it hard to understand the conditions prevailing in the country; to this day, for example, estimates of the Alawite population are just that: estimates. Also, the foreign regimes had been preoccupied with other crises: the Chinese naval buildup in the South China Sea; the war in Iraq; a series of crises in Eastern Europe; the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The list was long, and no government has the ability to concentrate effectively on more than a few ‘issues’ at once.

    Begin with the United States. The Obama Administration assumed that Syria would be another flower to bloom in the Arab Spring. This assumption prevailed especially among those called the ‘idealist’ members of the administration—human-rights advocates like UN delegate Samantha Powers and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who argued with the ‘realists,’ including Defense Secretary William Gates and, yes, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who took a somewhat less optimistic view of any proposed American intervention. In Phillips’s account, only our ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, saw that Assad’s fall was not imminent, but his on-the-ground counsel was dismissed. Therefore, when Obama called for Assad’s ouster in August 2011, his administration embarked on a policy without a strategy. Just as the Bush Administration had intervened in Iraq in 2003 without a serious strategy for guiding the regime change it had begun, so the Obama Administration officials supposed that the political side of things would take care of themselves, and that the result would be democracy, or at least some more benevolent thing than Ba’athism. Phillips does praise Obama for rejecting any major military involvement, unlike Bush.

    Meanwhile, almost all of the regional forces, from the Syrian rebel groups to the Qataris to the Turks to the Saudis, overestimated U. S. power in the region and also overestimated President Obama’s willingness to use it, once the 2012 elections were out of the way. They had been profoundly impressed by the Americans’ capacity to overthrow that other Ba’athist, Saddam Hussein, while cynically underestimated Obama’s reluctance to repeat such an action in Syria. When no intervention materialized, they charged Obama with ‘betrayal,’ even if they only thing he betrayed was their own wishful thinking.

    Turning next to America’s regional allies, Saudi Arabia had viewed the U. S. intervention in Iraq as a setback. It had increased the power of the Shi’a in Iraq, and therefore the power of Iran in the region. Further, the Ba’athist Party is secular-socialist, whereas the Saudis are neither, and the Alawites are Shi’as; the two intertwined elements of the Assad regime are the enemies of the Saudi regime, in principle. When Assad’s regime seemed strong, in 200-10, the Saudis had sought détente with it. But when the civil war began they backed non-jihadi Sunni rebels, including the surviving remnant of the Muslim Brotherhood. In this, they sought to prevent yet another Iranian advance in the region.

    On the northern border of Syria, Turkey was by now itself a Muslim Brotherhood regime, thus aligned with that section of the Syrian population and the interests of the Saudis. On the other hand, no Turkish-Saudi alliance will ever be strong and lasting, inasmuch as the Saudis recall the Ottomans’ 400-year rule over their territory. The post-Ottoman Turkish regime of Mustafa Kemal had been secularist and Western-oriented, but the Muslim Brotherhood regime under Erdogan wanted to be more ‘Muslim,’ and consequently to redirect its geopolitical attention to the Middle East. They also wanted to keep a tight clamp on the Syrian Kurds, given the restive Kurdish population in their own country, and further to oppose the jihadi elements on the Syrian battlefield, including al-Qaeda. But the Turks had the same disadvantage as the Western countries and Russia: very few diplomats or other ‘operatives’ spoke Arab, and they generally had little knowledge of the country. Although the Arab Spring had on balance improved Turkey’s position in the region by eliminating secularist regimes, Turkish ability to exploit that position was limited by the same assumption shared by the U. S.—namely, that Assad was about to go away.

    The first foreign country to send substantial financial aid to the Syrian opposition groups was Qatar. It sent more aid in the first two years of the war than any other foreign country, and they also established a training base on their soil for the rebel soldiers to be trained by Americans, who have a military base there. Although very small, Qatar is also very rich, and its rulers are ambitious for regional influence. It has the advantage of being less factionalized than many of the other states in the region, so it can pursue coherent policies over a long period of time. Being a Sunni country which nonetheless has ties with Iran (they share a huge natural gas field), they try to maintain their independence from all other countries in the region—much to the displeasure of their fellow Gulf-state Sunnis. Because Saudi Arabia eventually eclipsed them as the principal Sunni backer of the rebels, and because the Saudis take strong exception to Qatar’s dealings with the Iranians, the Syrian opposition groups worry that they will be whipsawed between the two. With two different countries backing different rebel groups, fighting among the rebels—already damaging—may intensify.

    The two main foreign countries backing the Assad regime are Iran and Russia. Iran’s alliance with Hezbollah in Lebanon links them to the most effective Arab fighting force in the region. Iran sends money and weapons; Hezbollah fights. In the five years prior to the war, Syrian-Iranian trade grew four times. That level of economic benefit may never return, but they will continue to make serious sacrifices to keep Assad afloat, if only for sectarian and geopolitical reasons. Also, Syria was the conduit for Iranian supplies to Hezbollah, which aims at destroying Israel and getting rid of American and other Western powers in the Middle East—prime Iranian goals. In 2013-14, Phillips reports, the top Iranian military adviser, Hussein Suleiman of the Republican Guards, reorganized Syrian army forces, which he regarded as substandard. This accounts in part for the army’s improved battlefield performance in the last couple of years.

    Getting the Western powers out of the Middle East would make Mr. Putin happy, as well. You will recall that the first term of the Obama Administration, through 2012, was the period of the attempted ‘reset’ of U. S.-Russian relations. The Russians adroitly took advantage of such wishful thinking, stringing the Americans along with empty negotiations over Assad’s removal, something they never intended to agree to.

    Putin took the Arab Spring to be an Islamist, not a nationalist or democratic, phenomenon. As such, he disliked it, thinking of the 14% of the Russian population that is Muslim. He also rejected regime change as a policy, considering it impractical in the Middle East and potentially threatening to his own regime. Putin also saw that Assad and the Alawites were more unified than any other major group in Syria, whereas the opposition groups were not only torn by personal rivalries but lacking in political experience. Assad’s problem wasn’t that the Alawites were disunited in principle but that in ‘coup-proofing’ his government he had split up the military and security forces into several pieces, so as to prevent them from getting together to overthrow him. Nonetheless, Putin calculated that Assad was the better bet than any other group or combination of groups in the country; even in the worst case, the Alawites would likely retain control of the coast, where the Russians have a small but useful naval station. Finally, Putin correctly saw that the Western alliance was irresolute; unlike the Arabs, he took Obama’s reluctance to engage there to be real. He and the Iranian mullahs wanted victory more intensely.

    Among the opposition groups themselves, the jihadis were the most effective: more committed, better trained, less easy to buy off. As mentioned various foreign countries backed different groups, exacerbating the already-existing factionalism among them. ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) began as an extension of ISIL (the Iraqi-based Islamic State in the Levant), itself formerly called AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq). The group split from al-Qaeda over a strategic dispute. The late Osama bin Laden had argued that modern states are much too powerful to permit the founding of a new caliphate. The modern states first need to be critically weakened and discouraged by a relentless campaign of terrorism and guerilla warfare. Islamic State leaders disagreed, claiming that the Iraqi state was sufficiently weak to enable the founding of the caliphate, which they proceeded to do with some initial success. Civil-war-torn Syria looked like another excellent opportunity for expanding the caliphate into another chaotic landscape.

    As a result of all these forces and events, by summer 2014 the war was stalemated. It was a year later, in summer 2015, that Putin ordered a substantial Russian troop buildup in Syria, effectively mimicking the U. S. ‘surge’ in Iraq, a few years earlier. The Russian ‘surge’ successfully reinforced Assad’s regime, blocking any possibility of American-backed regime change while discouraging jihadist forces in Russia and boosting Russia’s drive for equal status with the United States (which he had signaled by his 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Not incidentally, he could now use his enhanced position in Syria as a bargaining chip with the West in Eastern Europe.

    What does the future look like?

    First, with the decline of ISIS, the al-Qaeda strategy stands as vindicated. The terror-and-guerilla-warfare approach will continue, not the caliphate strategy.

    Second, the destruction of civil society gives young men nothing much to do but fight. According to the geopolitical analyst David Goldman, who writes under the pseudonym of “Spengler,” in intractable conflicts like the one in Syria, this typically continues until about 30% of the military-age men in the society are dead.

    Third, Syria as we knew it may be gone, permanently. There is no single, legitimate authority there, none visible on the horizon, and hence no security. This means that the state will likely break up, with new borders. One estimate claims that to reconstitute the old Syria a force of 450,000 security personnel, probably under the prolonged supervision of about 150,000 foreigners, would be needed. That doesn’t seem likely. Woodrow Wilson had envisioned the League of Nations as enforcing peace with a military entity drawn from many nations representing “the major force of mankind.” The successor to the League, the UN, can’t muster that kind of force any more than the League did. Wilson supposed that the League would work because humanity had progressed, learning the horrifying lessons of the Great War. Evidently not. The several Muslim states and paramilitary organizations have supposed that Allah would side with them, reuniting the region. That hasn’t happened, either.