US President Donald Trump has reassured supporters that he is “bringing soldiers home” from the “endless” war in Syria. But that is simply not the case.
While Trump has ordered a partial withdrawal of the approximately 1,000 American troops on Syrian territory — who have been enforcing an illegal military occupation under international law — US officials and the president himself have admitted that some will be staying. And they will remain on Syrian soil not to ensure to safety of any group of people, but rather to maintain control over oil and gas fields.
The US military has already killed hundreds of Syrians, and possibly even some Russians, precisely in order to hold on to these Syrian fossil fuel reserves.
Washington’s obsession with toppling the Syrian government refuses to die. The United States remains committed to preventing Damascus from retaking its own oil, as well as its wheat-producing breadbasket region, in order to starve the government of revenue and prevent it from funding reconstruction efforts.
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria and to carry on with so many sins that, actually, Obama has committed.
One does not need to defend Trump’s actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a “meltdown”. Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that “it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East”.
Hang on a minute! Let’s pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, or Daesh, didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. And I’m not even referring to the mountains of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I’m talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington’s local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn’t care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don’t have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian” wars violated each state’s integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as “the supreme war crime”.
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As Jonathan Cook well explained in his book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, these haven’t so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called “Washington consensus” since 9/11.
The first was Israel’s long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population’s energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school’s Shock Doctrine (must read Naomi Klein's book), as explained in Naomi Klein’s book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a US-controlled “colour revolution”.
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet’s Chile to Yeltsin’s Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush’s senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.”
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region’s finest public health services.
One can legitimately argue about the initial causes of the uprising against Assad that erupted in Syria in 2011. Did it start as a popular struggle for liberation from the Assad government’s authoritarianism? Or was it a sectarian insurgency by those who wished to replace Shia minority rule with Sunni majority rule? Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures? Or are all these factors relevant to some degree?
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture that must be addressed.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be found and that served as the pretext for Bush’s campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington’s policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west’s chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has “no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East” is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists’ state-building project is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army, which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds’ predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad’s protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army’s return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi’s purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump’s Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership’s bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party’s only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don’t care about Syria, or its population’s welfare. They don’t care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.
"In days gone by, I used to compare the Trump presidency with the Arab dictatorships. He took preposterous pleasure in the company of Egypt’s Sisi (60,000 political prisoners) and his inane ramblings had much in common with those of Muammar Gaddafi, who also “authored” a book he never wrote but whom Trump never met (albeit that Tony Blair and Gaddafi kissed each other on the cheek). But over the past week, I’ve begun to realise that the crackpot in the White House has much more in common with ancient Rome.
My former classics professor once told me – when I melodramatically called him on my mobile phone from the original Roman forum during the US occupation of Iraq under George W Bush – that the Romans were a “manic” people, but that they would have been pretty unimpressed with the American handling of the Iraqi campaign.
He was right. But I am now convinced that there is something distinctly “manic” about the Trump presidency. The hatred, the threats, the fury, have much in common with both the Roman republic (Rome’s version of popular “democracy”) and the Roman empire, when quite a number of emperors showed themselves to be just as insane as Trump.
Cato the Censor, a dangerous man, would end each of his speeches in Rome with the words Carthago delenda est. “Carthage must be destroyed”. Is this not exactly the language of Trump? Did he not say that he could have Afghanistan “wiped off the face of the earth”, that he could “totally destroy” North Korea, that Iran “will be destroyed” if it attacks the US?
Cato got what he wanted. Carthage was indeed razed, its people sold into slavery, although its lands were not in fact sown with salt as English historians would later claim. So far, Trump has been more Cicero than Cato, Pompeo more Pliny than Pompey. So far.
But the American retreat from Syria, its army’s greatest disgrace only ghosted over by its new role as Saudi Arabia’s mercenaries – for the new US military arrival in the kingdom is to be paid for by the regime which butchered Jamal Khashoggi – has dark echoes in antiquity.
Contrary to the Hollywood version of history, the Roman empire did not collapse in a couple of days. The Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths did not just gobble up Italy over a weekend. The fall of the empire came slowly, over years, in small incremental pieces: legions forgotten, tribal allies unpaid – and then betrayed.
One of Rome’s most troublesome provinces was Cilicia. It was always changing hands. Its people allied themselves to Rome – and were then abandoned when legions left or taxes ran out. Cilicia, by extraordinary mischance, lay almost exactly along the western border of what is today the Turkish-Syrian (Kurdish) frontier.
There are still a few Roman ruins in that ancient province to remind its present-day armies of what – they should have surely realised – would be their fate. I doubt if there is a single US soldier in Syria – who must, of course, negotiate their own way out of that equally ancient country – who knows of this. Institutional memory, let alone historical memory, has long ago been erased by the internet.
The Roman empire fell in bits. The senators, living in the political wreckage of the old Roman republic, knew that something was going wrong. The people understood their demise only in stages. The great Roman roads went unrepaired. The legions could not move so fast (even if they were still loyal to Rome). Then the imperial mail service from north Africa was impaired, even halted. The wheat for bread – often from what is today the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon – failed to arrive in Rome.
Amid popular unrest in Rome, where rival leaders could and did physically threaten each other, these matters often went unnoticed. Impeachment, alas, was not an option in the ancient world.
But the sword (or poison) could do its work. Political enemies would be accused of treachery. “Crucify them!” But is that not what Trump says of the American press, the Democrats or anyone who dares to confront him with his abominable lies and his assaults on American democracy?
No, I am not suggesting that the American empire will leave us quite like this. But last week’s deplorable abandonment of the Kurds, Trump’s wickedness in allowing the Turks – and their wretched “Arab” allies – to slaughter their way into northern Syria, will have the same effect as it did in antiquity. If you can no longer trust Rome, to which other empire do you turn?
Well, Putin’s, of course. Tyrant he may be – but at least he’s sane. And his legions stayed out of the war in Syria and saved the Assad regime. They cleared the highways of ISIS mines – they restored the roads, sometimes (incredibly) what were once Roman roads – and they learned Arabic. Perhaps, indeed, Putin now plays the role of the later Roman empire of the east, the Christian one which survived in Constantinople/Byzantium/Istanbul for hundreds more years after the fall of Rome itself. All the Middle East is now his empire, every capital welcoming the emperor: Tehran, Cairo, Ankara, Damascus, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi.
More than 20 years ago, I was in Washington, seeking to find the missile-maker who manufactured the rocket which Israel fired into a civilian ambulance in southern Lebanon, killing all inside. And I was much struck at how Roman Washington looked. Its great palaces of state (save for the State Department itself, of course) were self-consciously modelled on Roman architecture.
Washington was not built as the capital of a physical empire – more a philosophical one, I suspect, in my kinder moments – but it looks (like Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London) as if the early Americans of the independence era realised it might one day be the capital of the most powerful nation on earth. Well, it was.
But Trump has changed all that. To the despair of his few friends (of the non-”manic” kind) and the delight of his enemies, he has laid America low. The Syrians, whose history goes back far longer than America’s, have played their old political policy again: wait. And wait. And wait. And then drive into Manbij the moment the Americans leave. That’s what Rome’s enemies did when the empire’s frontiers crumbled in Germania and then in Gaul and then in the Balkans – of all places – and then in Palmyra and in what is today Syria.
As for Washington’s noble architecture, it now takes its place alongside the old capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the fine Viennese buildings of state seem shamed by their majesty. The powerful and historical walls to study today are those of the Kremlin."
Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared.
They were hot. Just to look at the flames make eyes hurt. That’s what burning tyres are supposed to do, of course.
For the most part, the men lighting these specific fires said they belonged to the Amal Movement, the Shia group controlled by Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament.
Some were very poor, and looked it, and it is hard to blame them for their actions. Lebanon has never been a very rich nation – save for their Sunni merchants and Christian bankers – and these were the people who did not have enough to eat. For days, they had been protesting their fate. The Lebanese pound had fallen, the price of food had rocketed – all true, I promise you – and they protested.
Beyond Beirut's riots, all this week, the mountains of Lebanon have burnt. Their great glory of pine trees and wonderful mountainsides have blossomed with flames. The government’s three anti-fire helicopters lay rotting at Beirut international airport – the government did not maintain them – and it needed Geece, Cyprus and Jordan to send its aircraft to quench the burning hills. My own apartment on the Beirut seafront stank of smoke. On Wednesday night, God visited Lebanon – he does go to the Middle East occasionally – and drenched the country in rain and tempest. On Thursday morning, the fancy buildings by the sea side were covered in sand and ash.
But there is something far more serious going on in Lebanon. The physical rage of Lebanese people is not just a militia outburst. It’s not because ordinary people are hungry – and they are – but because an unjust system (ever more taxes, ever higher prices) is making it impossible to work to bring home money and food.
On the fancy corniche seafront too many apartment blocks are empty. These buildings are owned as investments – by Iraqis, for the most part, but also by Syrians and Saudis – and no one lives there.
In a country where the poor of the Beqaa Valley and the refugees from Syria and the Palestinian refugees (of whom of course we no longer speak, since they are the wreckage of the Israeli state) exist in shacks, these mighty sentinels of cash stand triumphant: empty, rich and shameful.
So, although unusual, the display of discontent is understandable.
The streets are full of hundreds of thousands of people but the faces we are used to seeing are nowhere to be found. Anyone who has ever lived in Lebanon knows how politicians canvas our daily lives. Their posters and party logos adorn thousands of billboards on the streets; their chest pounding and finger-pointing speeches are all over television.
From early morning talk shows until the evening news, Lebanon's physical landscape is completely colonised by them, their loyal pundits and the talk show hosts that welcome them with open arms on their programmes, often laughing and smiling. This has been the case for decades, not years. So much so that any average Lebanese can recognise the politicians' voices if the news is on in another room. But over the last week, that situation has changed drastically.
There are almost no politicians on TV and no news of their daily whereabouts and dramas. Instead, what we see on our screens are the voices of thousands of ordinary citizens, people we have never seen before: men and women, young and old, even children speak to the cameras to get their 30 seconds in the national spotlight.
Some Lebanese channels have decided to cede directing entirely and instead turn their programming into an open mic with virtually no censorship. For hours on end, reporters for Lebanese TV channels such as LBC, Al Jadeed and MTV stand in place at protests around the country as crowds of people swirl around them, waiting for their chance to air their grievances, sometimes grabbing the microphone.
They tell personal, often anguished stories of not being able to pay for hospital care, school tuition, telephone, electricity and water bills. They are emotional, witty, profane and often humorous, showcasing the legendary sarcasm that Lebanese rely on to cope with a highly dysfunctional state.
The complaints underscore a pillar of the protestors' ire: the wide economic divide in Lebanon, where a majority of the population survives on a few hundred dollars a month, while much of Parliament is composed of millionaires. The past two prime ministers, Hariri and Najib Mikati have been billionaires. Both have amassed a fortune in the telecom industry, while Lebanese pay some of the highest phone bills on earth. The tax on WhatsApp calls, announced by the telecom minister, an heir to family-owned companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is what sparked the latest protests.
Pro-government media have tried to retaliate, painting the protesters as violent or misguided. OTV, the mouthpiece of the president's party, is also present in the crowd but its reporters are often aggressive, interrupting and arguing with interviewees. They disguise their affiliation by using a generic microphone that does not feature the channel's logo.
When a member of parliament affiliated to the president tried to address the crowds on Wednesday, protestors grabbed the microphone and shouted in his face to resign until he was forced off stage. Such scenes were unimaginable a week ago.
It is not just the president's party. A popular video circulating on social media shows a crowd of hundreds cursing the mothers of each member of parliament after their names are read over a megaphone. Many of their families have been in power for generations. Another video shows a massive crowd chanting: "Christians and Muslims together, f*** the politicians."
For a foreign journalist not used to Lebanon, this may appear crude and inappropriate. But for anyone who has followed the everyday suffering most of Lebanon's population face, it also feels empowering. Politicians, many of them former warlords, are notorious for flaunting their wealth, speeding around town in black tinted motorcades, armed bodyguards often leaning out of the window, cursing and threatening other cars that cross their path. Their children and cronies can often be seen in the latest Italian sports cars or dining at five star hotels and exclusive nightclubs as many Lebanese occupy rubbish infested ghettos, breathing in open sewers and stomach-churning landfills, dark streets, unclean tap water, choking diesel smog. The toxic environment has sent many to the hospital, but with no healthcare few can even afford treatment.
Ordinary Lebanese people are fed up and their voices are the only pressure valve. They have always cursed the elite classes privately, but never to their faces. There is a new boldness in Lebanon. It has built up not just over the last few days, but over the last several years of protests and worsening economic conditions.
It is unclear whether this uprising will achieve all or any of its many ambitious demands: a resignation of the entire government, including all the ministers and parliament, early elections, investigations into corruption, public services for all. But it will be impossible to unsay all that has been said, to unsee the determination in the streets, to unknow the public's ability to shut down an entire country, from its biggest cities to its smallest villages.
The revolt has only gone on for a little over a week, but the pain and anger fueling it has been building for months and years.
Hassan Nasrallah's televised speech on Friday may not calm the protesters, although the leader of Hezbollah is right. A government resignation could create a power vacuum which could lead the country into civil unrest or worse.
However, I fear it is too late to appeal to reason. The protesters are focused on their miseries and misfortunes and do not seem likely to look at the political big picture.
My former classics professor once told me – when I melodramatically called him on my mobile phone from the original Roman forum during the US occupation of Iraq under George W Bush – that the Romans were a “manic” people, but that they would have been pretty unimpressed with the American handling of the Iraqi campaign.
He was right. But I am now convinced that there is something distinctly “manic” about the Trump presidency. The hatred, the threats, the fury, have much in common with both the Roman republic (Rome’s version of popular “democracy”) and the Roman empire, when quite a number of emperors showed themselves to be just as insane as Trump.
Cato the Censor, a dangerous man, would end each of his speeches in Rome with the words Carthago delenda est. “Carthage must be destroyed”. Is this not exactly the language of Trump? Did he not say that he could have Afghanistan “wiped off the face of the earth”, that he could “totally destroy” North Korea, that Iran “will be destroyed” if it attacks the US?
Cato got what he wanted. Carthage was indeed razed, its people sold into slavery, although its lands were not in fact sown with salt as English historians would later claim. So far, Trump has been more Cicero than Cato, Pompeo more Pliny than Pompey. So far.
But the American retreat from Syria, its army’s greatest disgrace only ghosted over by its new role as Saudi Arabia’s mercenaries – for the new US military arrival in the kingdom is to be paid for by the regime which butchered Jamal Khashoggi – has dark echoes in antiquity.
Contrary to the Hollywood version of history, the Roman empire did not collapse in a couple of days. The Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths did not just gobble up Italy over a weekend. The fall of the empire came slowly, over years, in small incremental pieces: legions forgotten, tribal allies unpaid – and then betrayed.
One of Rome’s most troublesome provinces was Cilicia. It was always changing hands. Its people allied themselves to Rome – and were then abandoned when legions left or taxes ran out. Cilicia, by extraordinary mischance, lay almost exactly along the western border of what is today the Turkish-Syrian (Kurdish) frontier.
There are still a few Roman ruins in that ancient province to remind its present-day armies of what – they should have surely realised – would be their fate. I doubt if there is a single US soldier in Syria – who must, of course, negotiate their own way out of that equally ancient country – who knows of this. Institutional memory, let alone historical memory, has long ago been erased by the internet.
The Roman empire fell in bits. The senators, living in the political wreckage of the old Roman republic, knew that something was going wrong. The people understood their demise only in stages. The great Roman roads went unrepaired. The legions could not move so fast (even if they were still loyal to Rome). Then the imperial mail service from north Africa was impaired, even halted. The wheat for bread – often from what is today the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon – failed to arrive in Rome.
Amid popular unrest in Rome, where rival leaders could and did physically threaten each other, these matters often went unnoticed. Impeachment, alas, was not an option in the ancient world.
But the sword (or poison) could do its work. Political enemies would be accused of treachery. “Crucify them!” But is that not what Trump says of the American press, the Democrats or anyone who dares to confront him with his abominable lies and his assaults on American democracy?
No, I am not suggesting that the American empire will leave us quite like this. But last week’s deplorable abandonment of the Kurds, Trump’s wickedness in allowing the Turks – and their wretched “Arab” allies – to slaughter their way into northern Syria, will have the same effect as it did in antiquity. If you can no longer trust Rome, to which other empire do you turn?
Well, Putin’s, of course. Tyrant he may be – but at least he’s sane. And his legions stayed out of the war in Syria and saved the Assad regime. They cleared the highways of ISIS mines – they restored the roads, sometimes (incredibly) what were once Roman roads – and they learned Arabic. Perhaps, indeed, Putin now plays the role of the later Roman empire of the east, the Christian one which survived in Constantinople/Byzantium/Istanbul for hundreds more years after the fall of Rome itself. All the Middle East is now his empire, every capital welcoming the emperor: Tehran, Cairo, Ankara, Damascus, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi.
More than 20 years ago, I was in Washington, seeking to find the missile-maker who manufactured the rocket which Israel fired into a civilian ambulance in southern Lebanon, killing all inside. And I was much struck at how Roman Washington looked. Its great palaces of state (save for the State Department itself, of course) were self-consciously modelled on Roman architecture.
Washington was not built as the capital of a physical empire – more a philosophical one, I suspect, in my kinder moments – but it looks (like Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London) as if the early Americans of the independence era realised it might one day be the capital of the most powerful nation on earth. Well, it was.
But Trump has changed all that. To the despair of his few friends (of the non-”manic” kind) and the delight of his enemies, he has laid America low. The Syrians, whose history goes back far longer than America’s, have played their old political policy again: wait. And wait. And wait. And then drive into Manbij the moment the Americans leave. That’s what Rome’s enemies did when the empire’s frontiers crumbled in Germania and then in Gaul and then in the Balkans – of all places – and then in Palmyra and in what is today Syria.
As for Washington’s noble architecture, it now takes its place alongside the old capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the fine Viennese buildings of state seem shamed by their majesty. The powerful and historical walls to study today are those of the Kremlin."
Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared.
LEBANON
I hoped the days when I kicked burning tyres off the roads of Beirut had ended. They were hot. Just to look at the flames make eyes hurt. That’s what burning tyres are supposed to do, of course.
For the most part, the men lighting these specific fires said they belonged to the Amal Movement, the Shia group controlled by Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament.
Some were very poor, and looked it, and it is hard to blame them for their actions. Lebanon has never been a very rich nation – save for their Sunni merchants and Christian bankers – and these were the people who did not have enough to eat. For days, they had been protesting their fate. The Lebanese pound had fallen, the price of food had rocketed – all true, I promise you – and they protested.
Beyond Beirut's riots, all this week, the mountains of Lebanon have burnt. Their great glory of pine trees and wonderful mountainsides have blossomed with flames. The government’s three anti-fire helicopters lay rotting at Beirut international airport – the government did not maintain them – and it needed Geece, Cyprus and Jordan to send its aircraft to quench the burning hills. My own apartment on the Beirut seafront stank of smoke. On Wednesday night, God visited Lebanon – he does go to the Middle East occasionally – and drenched the country in rain and tempest. On Thursday morning, the fancy buildings by the sea side were covered in sand and ash.
But there is something far more serious going on in Lebanon. The physical rage of Lebanese people is not just a militia outburst. It’s not because ordinary people are hungry – and they are – but because an unjust system (ever more taxes, ever higher prices) is making it impossible to work to bring home money and food.
On the fancy corniche seafront too many apartment blocks are empty. These buildings are owned as investments – by Iraqis, for the most part, but also by Syrians and Saudis – and no one lives there.
In a country where the poor of the Beqaa Valley and the refugees from Syria and the Palestinian refugees (of whom of course we no longer speak, since they are the wreckage of the Israeli state) exist in shacks, these mighty sentinels of cash stand triumphant: empty, rich and shameful.
So, although unusual, the display of discontent is understandable.
The streets are full of hundreds of thousands of people but the faces we are used to seeing are nowhere to be found. Anyone who has ever lived in Lebanon knows how politicians canvas our daily lives. Their posters and party logos adorn thousands of billboards on the streets; their chest pounding and finger-pointing speeches are all over television.
From early morning talk shows until the evening news, Lebanon's physical landscape is completely colonised by them, their loyal pundits and the talk show hosts that welcome them with open arms on their programmes, often laughing and smiling. This has been the case for decades, not years. So much so that any average Lebanese can recognise the politicians' voices if the news is on in another room. But over the last week, that situation has changed drastically.
There are almost no politicians on TV and no news of their daily whereabouts and dramas. Instead, what we see on our screens are the voices of thousands of ordinary citizens, people we have never seen before: men and women, young and old, even children speak to the cameras to get their 30 seconds in the national spotlight.
Some Lebanese channels have decided to cede directing entirely and instead turn their programming into an open mic with virtually no censorship. For hours on end, reporters for Lebanese TV channels such as LBC, Al Jadeed and MTV stand in place at protests around the country as crowds of people swirl around them, waiting for their chance to air their grievances, sometimes grabbing the microphone.
They tell personal, often anguished stories of not being able to pay for hospital care, school tuition, telephone, electricity and water bills. They are emotional, witty, profane and often humorous, showcasing the legendary sarcasm that Lebanese rely on to cope with a highly dysfunctional state.
The complaints underscore a pillar of the protestors' ire: the wide economic divide in Lebanon, where a majority of the population survives on a few hundred dollars a month, while much of Parliament is composed of millionaires. The past two prime ministers, Hariri and Najib Mikati have been billionaires. Both have amassed a fortune in the telecom industry, while Lebanese pay some of the highest phone bills on earth. The tax on WhatsApp calls, announced by the telecom minister, an heir to family-owned companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is what sparked the latest protests.
Pro-government media have tried to retaliate, painting the protesters as violent or misguided. OTV, the mouthpiece of the president's party, is also present in the crowd but its reporters are often aggressive, interrupting and arguing with interviewees. They disguise their affiliation by using a generic microphone that does not feature the channel's logo.
When a member of parliament affiliated to the president tried to address the crowds on Wednesday, protestors grabbed the microphone and shouted in his face to resign until he was forced off stage. Such scenes were unimaginable a week ago.
It is not just the president's party. A popular video circulating on social media shows a crowd of hundreds cursing the mothers of each member of parliament after their names are read over a megaphone. Many of their families have been in power for generations. Another video shows a massive crowd chanting: "Christians and Muslims together, f*** the politicians."
For a foreign journalist not used to Lebanon, this may appear crude and inappropriate. But for anyone who has followed the everyday suffering most of Lebanon's population face, it also feels empowering. Politicians, many of them former warlords, are notorious for flaunting their wealth, speeding around town in black tinted motorcades, armed bodyguards often leaning out of the window, cursing and threatening other cars that cross their path. Their children and cronies can often be seen in the latest Italian sports cars or dining at five star hotels and exclusive nightclubs as many Lebanese occupy rubbish infested ghettos, breathing in open sewers and stomach-churning landfills, dark streets, unclean tap water, choking diesel smog. The toxic environment has sent many to the hospital, but with no healthcare few can even afford treatment.
Ordinary Lebanese people are fed up and their voices are the only pressure valve. They have always cursed the elite classes privately, but never to their faces. There is a new boldness in Lebanon. It has built up not just over the last few days, but over the last several years of protests and worsening economic conditions.
It is unclear whether this uprising will achieve all or any of its many ambitious demands: a resignation of the entire government, including all the ministers and parliament, early elections, investigations into corruption, public services for all. But it will be impossible to unsay all that has been said, to unsee the determination in the streets, to unknow the public's ability to shut down an entire country, from its biggest cities to its smallest villages.
The revolt has only gone on for a little over a week, but the pain and anger fueling it has been building for months and years.
Hassan Nasrallah's televised speech on Friday may not calm the protesters, although the leader of Hezbollah is right. A government resignation could create a power vacuum which could lead the country into civil unrest or worse.
However, I fear it is too late to appeal to reason. The protesters are focused on their miseries and misfortunes and do not seem likely to look at the political big picture.
PALESTINA
BRASIL
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