The difference between retribution and justice can be argued and most likely will be. For my money, the difference is whether or not the rule of law is followed. The left has opted to use the law when it suits their aims and abandoned it when it conflicts with their agenda. This creates a conflict for those who see the rule of law as the Gold Standard of official conduct.
Although we won the initial battle, (AKA the election), to think that this war of differences is over is delusional. The left has already begun to look to avenues to thwart President elect Trump’s agenda. This goes against the standards of official conduct setting up what is looking to be a major conflict between the left and Trump’s supporters.
Our system of government is set up to be governed by “We the People” under the auspices of a representative Republic, but this does not comport with the aims of the left. They see this as reason to try to subvert and deny the wishes of the electorate if it does not agree with their twisted agenda.
To say that we are headed for a conflict is an understatement as this will end up being a rough and tumble contest of wills. That unlawful acts have been perpetrated against the American public is not up for discussion, what is up for discussion is whether we citizens are willing to act as lawless as the left, or whether or not we will adhere to the rule of law and civil discourse rather than a tit for tat response. I for one am not amendable to a tit for tat response as it leaves us as vulnerable as the left and its lawless acts.
Rudy Giuliani said that our system of justice uses retribution as a deterrent to unlawful action. To excuse, or otherwise allow egregious acts to go unpunished will only embolden the left to more vicious and unlawful acts. Trey Goudy has recommended that Trump pardon Hunter Biden when he enters office.
To this I say NO!!! The rule of law must apply equally to ALL citizens, regardless of their affiliations or station in life. The list of miscreants that have abused and or subverted the rule of law is long, but if we are to see our Republic restored to its promise of equality under the law, we must be vigilant and willing to be fair but harsh.
Addendum: Matt Gaetz has threatened to go full, “Harper Valley PTA” on the congress. If the law means anything at all, its Justice must fall on all equally. “Retribution is one of the grand principles in the divine administration of human affairs; a requital is imperceptible to the unobservant. There is everywhere the working of the everlasting law of requital; man always gets as he gives”.
Back in 2016, Tevi Troy wrote a book called Shall We Wake the President? The title references Hillary Clinton’s campaign ads asking whether she or her opponent should be the one to answer 3 a.m. phone calls at the White House. But aides to the current president had a bigger challenge: “Shall we wake the president” was a 24-hour riddle.
The Wall Street Journal’s report on Biden’s presidential hibernation adds to what we know in two crucial ways. First, it tells us that Biden wasn’t up to the job on day one, let alone day 1,000. Second, the reporters provide us with examples of how global conflicts were affected by the White House staff’s cover-up of the president’s condition.
In the early months of Biden’s term, advisers “noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.” From then on, they ordered, one-on-one time with Biden would be limited in time and scope even when it came to “powerful lawmakers and allies.”
That meant the global crises that arose during Biden’s presidency were dealt with by reducing the flow of information to and from the president—a recipe for disaster. In 2021, the first such disaster struck: the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Rep. Adam Smith, “a Democrat who then chaired the powerful House Armed Services Committee, was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation,” the Journal reports. So he tried to get a word with the president, to no avail. In the event, 13 Americans and 170 Afghans were killed in the clumsy and ill-conceived operation.
Yet the administration had the temerity to scold Smith when the congressman criticized the withdrawal.
Smith, as well as Democrat Jim Himes, who led the Intelligence Committee, both told the Journal they had interacted far more with Barack Obama during Obama’s presidency despite the fact that neither were committee chairs at the time.
Rather than being an anomaly that was quickly corrected, the Afghanistan pullout set the course for the administration’s handling of foreign affairs.
In fact, as the president’s condition worsened, he needed more time, not less, with key Cabinet secretaries. But because a coverup was in place, the White House went in the opposite direction.
For the first two years of the term, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin attended the president’s briefings weekly, and then would meet Biden one-on-one afterward. “But in the past two years—a period when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza demanded the president’s attention—Austin’s invitation to the briefing came less frequently, to the point where the one-on-one meeting was seldom scheduled.”
The Journal then drops the revelation that from that point on, one-on-one meetings (already rare) were not in person but “were more typically virtual meetings.” Which means the meeting wasn’t really one-on-one, doesn’t it? Nor is there any expectation that a president who can’t pay attention in person will be productive in a Zoom setting, presumably with aides within earshot, further splintering his attention.
This means, above all, that most people stopped seeing the president entirely.
There was a land war in Europe, Americans were taken hostage in Gaza after dozens of Americans were among the 1,200 killed in Hamas’s brutal rampage. And yet, the president was stored away in some utility closet somewhere.
Meanwhile, we can gather more information about his handling of foreign-policy crises from the details regarding his reelection campaign—which went on as planned, despite everything, until the president imploded in public: “Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.”
He didn’t know he was on pace to lose in a landslide because, apparently, no one told him. At some point, his reelection campaign looks more like elder abuse than anything else.
It also tracks with what the Journal reported about Biden’s insulation from criticism more broadly: “Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president.”
We don’t know exactly which stories those were, but we know the president’s aides were avoiding giving him bad news. Did Biden even know what was really happening on the ground in Ukraine? When the administration froze the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza for months, dooming a number of the hostages and allowing Hamas to regroup and thus prolonging the war, who was responsible for that freeze? Who tried to hit “pause” on reality like it was Netflix? And if the president was the one who made that call, what kind of information was he going on?
The fact that we have to ask the questions at all, as well as the fact that we know we won’t get answers until the administration leaves office and the subpoenas start flying, is perhaps enough of an answer to know that the world paid a dear price to protect the fragile mental state of the American president.
What can be said about the speaker not much, besides he’s just one of paul lyin ryan’s buttbabies. That’s enough of inside stuff, said plenty right there.
See this, some would say something like, how about few days in an Airbnb cabin in the woods, it would be so romantical and stuff. Like a mini vacation.
People who think like that, makes one wonder what the hell kind of life have they built that requires a vacation of it, makes zero sense
Deeper into the Pines
went seen a Nam vet, 65-67, I once shared a picture of his shack in the woods that he built. His favorite word to use is asshole. An example asked him once where he met wifey, ohh she was 2nd shift nurse looking after me in hospital when I got back, so you married your nurse “yeah, some asshole was going to so I decided I’ll do it first, you know Brother, you just called yourself an asshole, ” I can be”.
Broke a binding on a snowshoe
He used tire tubing, fashioned a new one in no time , looks likes this
How much I owe you, ” don’t be an asshole Chance, did you bring jerky?” 2 pounds ” that’ll do”
I’ve known him for a very long time, never known him and his lady to take a vacation… a vacation… from what, this
Lots of hate out there, not in these woods, to busy living
With Bitcoin climbing over $100,000, both investors and government officials are taking a closer look at digital money. The problem is that there’s a huge difference between an independent currency designed to resist surveillance and control, and one crafted by a central bank to enable exactly that. A new handbook from the International Monetary Fundembraces the potential of cryptocurrency while highlighting the dangers inherent in state dominance of the means of storing and exchanging value.
The IMF handbook’s opening chapter discusses how central bank digital currencies (CBDC) could keep government financial institutions relevant. “With digitalization and falling cash usage in parts of the world,” the authors write, “central banks are considering CBDC to ensure a fundamental anchor of trust in the monetary system.” Also discussed is the potential for CBDCs to “potentially help lower barriers to financial inclusion in countries with underdeveloped financial systems,” to “channel government payments directly to households,” and “to help reduce frictions in cross-border payments.”
The IMF and the central banks it serves see cryptocurrency as the wave of the future and want in on the action. But central banks are government entities, and what officials want is not necessarily what is desired by people needing reliable means of making and receiving payments. Putting it bluntly, government officials generally regard those they nominally serve as subjects to be monitored and controlled.
Following the CBDC Digital Trail
In a chapter on data use and privacy protection, the authors note that CBDC “may allow for a ‘digital trail’—data—to be collected and stored. In contrast to cash, CBDC could be designed to potentially include a wealth of personal data, encapsulating transaction histories, user demographics, and behavioral patterns. Personal data could establish a link between counterparty identities and transactions.”
That stands in stark contrast to Bitcoin, whose users often debate whether the digital currency is sufficiently anonymous or if it leaves too much of a data trail that sleuths can follow. For fans of Bitcoin and its competitors, privacy is considered a desirable trait. They want to conduct their financial lives relatively free of scrutiny by using an online version of cash.
By contrast, for the IMF authors, “CBDC data use could allow for increased traceability” that would permit authorities “to track or prevent illicit and fraudulent activities.” They acknowledge that “CBDC data use, however, could pose risks to privacy, which, in turn, can undermine the trust in central bank money” and that “CBDCs could be perceived as an instrument for state surveillance.” They point out that existing payment systems—think credit cards or PayPal—also lack privacy. But they admit that, in most countries surveyed, people generally “trust commercial entities more than government institutions.”
Governments Could Control or Restrict Payments
Also of concern to many people is the ability to make transactions as they please without interference from third parties. That’s an issue with intrusive governments that might want to restrict trade in disfavored goods and activities, or block donations to political opponents as Canada did with the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters.
But private payment systems can also be a problem. Under government pressure, GoFundMe refused donations to the Freedom Convoy. PayPal disallows a whole range of transactions, including purchases of cigarettes, drug paraphernalia, some sexually oriented materials, and just about anything gun-related.
People trying to make use of their own money hate such meddling. But for government officials, this is all a feature, not a bug.
“Some may worry that the government or the central bank could use it to control or restrict payments users can make with CBDC, thereby undermining public trust in central bank money,” concede the IMF authors. Nevertheless, a separate chapter on capital flow management(CFM) discusses all the different ways CBDC can be manipulated to implement policy, and the data collection needed to do exactly that.
“Different types of CFMs require varying amount of information,” they write. “For instance, prohibiting the purchase of more than 1 million dollars of foreign assets per transaction requires less information than prohibiting the purchase of 1 million dollars of foreign assets by the same person, each year, for a specific purpose.”
Among CBDC characteristics, according to the handbook, is programmability that restricts where and how digital money can be used: “Several central banks have either launched or piloted CBDCs that have digital wallets with different caps on how much CBDC can be stored in them and how many transactions can be made within a specific period.” But they warn that “alternatives without such constraints, for instance, potentially unregulated crypto assets, could be seen as more attractive to some users.”
Framed in dispassionate language, the IMF discussion of the potential benefits and risks of CBDC reads like a fulfillment of every warning about letting government expand its control of this sector.
The Power To Record and Monitor Everyone’s Transactions
“A government with the power to record and monitor everyone’s transactions is powerful enough to impose its own version of morality on those transactions,” Paul Jossey of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned in 2022. “Curtailing them, banning them, stopping them, erasing them, denying the ability for a company or individual to send or receive funds for disfavored people or causes.”
The same year, the U.K. House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee warned in a report that “government might use a CBDC as an instrument for state surveillance.”
In the U.S., the Federal Reserve remains on the fence about implementing a CBDC and says it is “committed to hearing a wide range of voices on these topics.”
Among the voices it has heard is that of the House of Representatives, which earlier this year voted to prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC.
“My legislation ensures that the United States’ digital currency policy remains in the hands of the American people so that any development of digital money reflects our values of privacy, individual sovereignty, and free market competitiveness,” claimed Rep. Tom Emmer (R–Minn.).
Unfortunately, the bill stalled in the Senate. And so, an important element of freedom remains up in the air as government officials around the world consider the temptations of digital money that allows them to monitor and control people’s financial lives.
Anyone who does not think governments are not rubbing their grubby paws together at the idea of more control is delusional!
Fellas, you ever notice when there is a gathering, doesn’t take long for the Ladies to gather in one area like the kitchen while us dudes are in another area, for whatever reason you venture into the kitchen they all be yacking at once knowing what everyone talking about, ever listen closely what they are sayin, much like this
Walk back as fast possible or I could be making more patches
What follows could be viewed as a weapon of War, the Big E, Enterprise, she was built for War, she was scrapped after the War (plough). It’s how we Americans operate
this also can be filed under
Does this not sound like exactly what Americans for America
Something to stick in your eggnog
Now get out there, always keep a song in the heart, you be fine
Sloppy joes on on toasted garlic bread, one can use venison to make that. Was looking through a cookbook, actually lots of good recipes in it, trying to IGNORE whatever new wreck on the road will be top story today, there’s always a new wreck, never mind about the old wreck. See this, inside cover
Maybe they waiting on congress to get blown up
Ack! Ack!
You wait, you’ll see a new wreck today will be top story while the drones are still flying around. They don’t know what they are, but if you shoot one, they will arrest you.
Stuff you know
I was walkin outback with song playin in my head, you’ve heard it before
See his smile, I was smiling, it wasn’t me in the trap, around here, I’m at the top of the food chain
Rabbit goes in, soon to be supper comes out, made from all scrap stuff, there’s a bonus having those, you need need to go to the store so often to buy this stuff
Think of corn, who should get the corn, the deer, the gas tank or your table,
that rabbit isn’t so different, who should get it, me or whatever is in the spooky woods, something will get it, might as well be me
Is pumpkin spice season over with, that stuff will rot your gut, most health problems start because people always sticking thier dirty ass fingers in the mouth. don’t take much to spice up the coffee or any liquid.
ole Eleanor mentioned something Marines about cleanliness
A sediment you probably know, spoken or posted here and there
” I love my country, hate the government” Maybe what you don’t know, it’s a hand me down item, we’ll get to that soon enough.
Here we a Top Man explaining the drone situation
A hypothesis I seen somewhere, those drones are “sniffing” for something, ok say they are, who’s operating the sniffers. What they sniffing for, how about traces of a dirty bomb brought in, of all the countries in the world, a dirty bomb brought from the Ukraine, imagine that.
A book from the shelf over there, anno I didn’t see the film, books are always better
That is what the book was about, a dirty bomb brought in
No one knows anything about nothing, BS, how many days we got before Jan20th,
scenarios man, scenarios
Could America be viewed over-all has been run by democrats since FDR, with help of spinless gop, heard tell, if you want to change something, you have to do the change from inside. Inside like the “institutions”. If those institutions don’t want change, how far are they willing to go to keep control.
An example of that
Very few understand the evil of Wickard v. Filburn; most people have never even heard of the case. But the case essentially gave the government the right to regulate the entire economy and everything in it with basically no limitation. This is one of the worst Supreme Court opinions in history, up there with Roe v. Wade and Dredd Scott v. Sanford. With the Chevron doctrine recently overturned, Wickard v. Filburn is next maybe.
Discipline
it’s training your mind not to give a shit if it’s hard, if it hurts or sucks
if it needs to get done, it gets done
God speed President Trump and the American People to getting this done and over with, we’ve had it up to our G’damn eyeballs.
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has renewed the debate over “ghost guns,” according to some news reports. More accurately, the usual control freaks are using the killing as a convenient hook on which to hang their authoritarian arguments. While there’s plenty to find horrifying in this crime, that alleged murderer Luigi Mangione made his weapon using a 3D printer isn’t one of them, no matter that a few people see in the act an opportunity to advance restrictive legislation.
“The homemade handgun and suppressor that police say was used in last week’s killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive is intensifying the debate over the growing presence of such firearms in the U.S.,” Cameron McWhirter, Jacob Gershman, and John West reported for The Wall Street Journal.
“The Maine Gun Safety Coalition is asking state lawmakers to ban ghost guns after an untraceable firearm was used by the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter,” added AnnMarie Hilton of the Maine Morning Star.
Hilton clarified that “firearms known as ‘ghost guns’ do not have a serial number as they are usually constructed at home with a kit or with the assembly of separate pieces. They could also be made with a 3D printer.”
‘Ghost Guns’: Misunderstood and Resistant to Regulation
Mentions of 3D-printed firearms seem to set people off, as if printers spit out guns like Star Trek replicators. So does the word “kit,” creating the impression that people go on Amazon, order packages of gun parts, and assemble working firearms as if they’re putting together flat-packed shelving units. I ran into that misconception when I showed a home-built AR-15 to friends. They asked, “So you just put together a kit?” and were astonished to learn the project required drilling and milling in my workshop.
Kits package together some unregulated parts. But the mechanism that makes a gun go “bang” is regulated and must either pass through the same channels as a commercially manufactured firearm or else be constructed from scratch or from unfinished blanks. That’s not necessarily difficult, but it means there’s really no magic legislative wand that can be waved to make DIY guns disappear.
After the high-profile assassination of a political figure in 2022, Reuters’ Ju-min Park and Daniel Leussink reported, “the man suspected of killing former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe with a hand-made gun on Friday could have made the weapon in a day or two after obtaining readily available materials such as wood and metal pipes, analysts say. The attack showed gun violence cannot be totally eliminated even in a country where tough gun laws mean it is nearly unheard of for citizens to buy or own firearms.”
The weapon the assassin used in Japan was a crude but effective two-shot firearm that looked more like an old-fashioned zip gun than the 3D-printed pistol used to kill Thompson. But while not pretty, it was just as effective.
In 2019, TheFirearmBlog published a retrospective pointing out that during the zip gun heyday in the 1950s, “a mechanically inclined youngster might upon obtaining ammunition, most often widely available .22 rimfire, find that such rounds will fit into a section of suitably sized steel tubing, often a section of the salvaged car radio antenna. From then on it is a simple matter of fabricating a means of striking the rear of the cartridge while ensuring the entire assembly is held firmly together.” The article included photographs of homemade firearms discovered in the tightly controlled confines of prisons, crafted by inmates from found materials including pipes and plumbing fittings.
DIY Guns Have Existed as Long as Firearms
A 2018 Small Arms Survey report on improvised and craft-produced weapons noted that such “weapons have been manufactured for as long as firearms have existed, typically by hand or in small workshops.” Among the weapons manufactured by craft producers, the authors noted, are “mortars, recoilless guns, and grenade launchers.”
Revisiting the subject last year in the context of Europe, Small Arms Survey noted that evolving technologies make it much easier to share plans for privately manufactured firearms and to create sophisticated devices at home without specialized skills.
“If production technologies continue to improve and proliferate, [privately made firearms] will increasingly erode the effectiveness of export controls and other key elements of national and international small arms control regimes, and may eventually pose an existential threat to these regimes,” warned the authors.
The production technologies referenced in the report included 3D printing, as well as CNC machining, in which computer programs guide tools. But at least as important is the internet itself, which allows enthusiasts to share designs, techniques, and experience. That eases the development of plans for sophisticated firearms that are highly resistant to government restrictions.
In September, Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote for The New York Times about the worldwide proliferation of designs for the FGC-9, a partially 3D-printed weapon that can “be built entirely from scratch, without commercial gun parts, which are often regulated and tracked by law enforcement agencies internationally.”
As one expert told the reporters: “Now you have something that people can make at home with unregulated components. So from a law enforcement perspective, how do you stop that?”
You Can’t Stop the Signal
You can’t stop that. That’s always been the motivation of those who design and build what have variously been called “improvised,” “craft-produced,” and “privately manufactured” firearms and are now referred to in the U.S. as “ghost guns.” People make their own guns because they want them and somebody in power seeks to prevent them from possessing weapons. The result has inevitably been people who arm themselves in defiance of the law, using whatever tools and materials are available.
The murder of Brian Thompson would have been no less horrible if the weapon was a legally purchased firearm, a knife, an incendiary device, a club, or any other of the many means of destruction humans have historically wielded against one another. The fault lies with the criminal, not the tool.
And people, being clever and defiant towards authority, will always gain access to forbidden objects that they want, including weapons. They’ll do so even if they have to manufacture them at home.
It is never about the person using the gun. It is always the gun, as if it went out and committed the act all by its little self.
Politicians and pundits spent much of last week commenting on President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter for lying on a federal gun purchase form, failing to pay taxes, and any other offenses he may have committed over the past decade. Much of the controversy is because President Biden repeatedly pledged that he would never pardon his son.
Some have also observed that the pardon’s timeline starts the year Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukraine energy company Burisma. This has led to speculation that President Biden is trying to block any investigation into links between his son’s business dealings and President Biden’s Ukraine policy.
What has not been widely discussed is the fact that Hunter Biden may be the only American President Biden has pardoned for violating unconstitutional federal gun and drug laws.
Hunter Biden was convicted of lying on federal Form 4473. This is a form Americans must fill out to get federal government “permission” to purchase a firearm. Specifically, Hunter Biden gave a false answer to the question, “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”
The Second Amendment forbids the federal government from limiting the ability of any American to exercise his natural right to own a firearm. Furthermore, federal drug laws are themselves unconstitutional.
The Constitution only creates three federal crimes: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. All other crimes are under the jurisdiction of state and local governments. So, the required use of this form is a constitutional violation of the rights of Hunter Biden and all other Americans who are subjected to it when they seek to obtain a gun.
Form 4473 warns Americans that “the use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where you reside.” Thus, someone could be prevented from exercising his Second Amendment right because of his activities that are perfectly legal in his state. This turns federalism on its head.
Hunter Biden was also convicted of, and pardoned for, tax evasion and the filing of fraudulent tax returns. It is hard for anyone who values liberty to get upset at those who violate the tax laws since the income tax is a form of theft by the government of people’s hard-earned income.
An outrage of Hunter Biden’s pardon is President Biden’s hypocrisy. When he served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, then-Senator Biden played a major role in getting through Congress the Brady Law that created the federal gun purchase background check system that Hunter Biden was convicted of violating. Senator Biden also was a leading drug warrior who led the fight to pass the 1994 crime bill and was a champion of mandatory minimums and other infringements of civil liberties in the name of the war on drugs. President Biden also supported hiring more IRS agents to squeeze more money from taxpayers.
Then-Senator Biden wrote large parts of the PATRIOT Act. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Biden also led the effort to pass the unconstitutional (and disastrous) “authorization for use of military force” against Iraq.
President Biden should spend his last month in office pardoning more Americans for violations of unconstitutional drug and gun laws. This would serve as a small gesture of atonement for a political career spent advocating policies destructive of peace, prosperity, and liberty.
Interview: What Syria Did Wrong, and What its Defeat Means For Russia, Israel and Wider Global Security
From Military Watch Magazine.com
World War in Syria: Al Nusra Front and Syrian Army Forces
In the aftermath of the decisive defeat of the Syrian Arab Republic on December 8, which marked an end to the 13 year insurgency in the country, we interviewed expert on international security A. B. Abrams to provide insight into both the causes of Damascus’ sudden fall, as well as the longer term consequences for international security. Abrams is the author of the book World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields, which provides a comprehensive study of the first ten years of the Syrian War, as well as an extensive background into the history of Damascus’ longstanding conflicts with the Western world, Turkey and Israel. Abrams’ work on Syria has been strongly endorsed by prominent figures including former Senior Adviser in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama State Departments David Philips, British Army Major General and Director Special Forces (ret.) John Holmes, former British Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford, and former Netherlands Special Envoy for Syria Nikolaos van Dam.
Military Watch: What do you project will be the future of Syria itself?
A. B. Abrams: Syria draws multiple close parallels to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, as a socialist state closely aligned with Moscow which was assailed effectively by Western Bloc states and their allies through support for Islamist insurgents. Indeed, many of the Islamist groups that have played a central role in the Syrian War can trace their origins back to the Western-sponsored war against the Afghan state, with the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham originating as Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Much as was the case in Afghanistan, Syria is likely to devolve into conflict between the multiple rival jihadist groups in the country. The Syrian Idlib governorate, where Hayat Tahrir Al Sham and other groups that now control Syria are based, previously saw extreme repression of minorities and women, including ethnic cleansing of Shiite areas. This mirrored the large scale attacks on Afghan minorities, such as the Shiite Hazara, after similar Islamist groups took power in 1992. The consolidation of defensive militias from minority groups, most notably Kurds, Christians and Shiites, remains a very high possibility to defend their communities. Much like Afghanistan, and more recently Libya where jihadist groups were also empowered by Western and allied intervention, human development indices ranging from healthcare to life expectancy are expected to diminish. The United States, Turkey, and Israel are expected to maintain military presences in the country and close ties with various Islamist groups.
Military Watch: What are the primary factors which made the Western Bloc and their allies take over 13 years to defeat Syria, while they managed to defeat Libya in just eight months?
Abrams: While the Western and allied campaigns to overthrow both governments have strong parallels between them, a significant difference is that Western and Turkish air support for anti government insurgents in Libya were a central part of the war effort, and allowed the insurgency to gain ground far faster than it did in Syria. Two primary factors influenced this, including the fact that Libya for multiple reasons posed a much more immediate threat to Western interests, and the fact that Syria maintained a powerful air force, air defence network, ballistic missile arsenals and chemical weapons stockpiles. This allowed it to deter direct Western or Turkish intervention by air in ways that Libya could not. The insurgency in Libya was considerably weaker on the ground and had far less popular support, but benefitted from tremendous air support that more than compensated for this. The Libyan government’s decision to relinquish its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles in the 2000s, and to neglect investment in its air force or air defences, contrasted sharply with Syria’s significant investments in these areas.
MW: What are the consequences of Syria’s defeat for Israeli security interests?
Abrams: Syria’s defeat marks one of the most significant gains for Israeli interests in the country’s history. Syria has been Israel’s oldest consistent adversary, with Syrian forces having played central roles in the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War, before becoming Israel’s primary state adversary during the Lebanon War. Syria’s large air force and air defence network, as well as its significant arsenal of North Korean ballistic missiles, allowed it to challenge Israeli forces despite the decline of its conventional forces in the 1990s. The destruction of the Syrian Arab Army takes significant pressure off Israel’s armed forces, while also isolating the country’s primary remaining adversaries Hezbollah and Iran. As the only Israeli adversary state bordering Lebanon, Syria was vital to the transfer of supplies to Hezbollah, with its defeat leaving the paramilitary group isolated. The empowering of jihadist militias, which Israel has played a central role in supporting alongside Turkey and multiple Western states, could allow these groups to play a more active role in supporting the collective security interests of Tel Aviv and its strategic partners in Ankara and the West, most significantly by opening a second front against Hezbollah which Israeli forces have struggled to themselves counter.
MW: Why didn’t Syrian forces perform better in their last two weeks of engagements with Islamist insurgents?
Abrams: This remains highly uncertain, but there are multiple reports from a range of sources of varying reliability. One significant possibility is that the effective use of psychological warfare against Syria frontline units, namely the issuing of orders on secure channels calling on units to withdraw. Any of Syria’s adversaries, including the United States, Israel or Turkey may have been responsible for such operations, which would follow the precedent of highly effective American psychological warfare against Iraqi units both in 1991 and in 2003. The Syrian Arab Army has proven to be a highly effective fighting force in the past, not only historically such as during its clashes with Israeli forces in Lebanon, but also more recently when combating Islamist insurgents. This was seen in 2011-2015 when Syrian forces prevailed without Russian support. Islamist militias were far from heavily armed, and were facing a force that had defeated them multiple times, and against far worse odds, in the past, which makes the effective collapse of Syrian government forces highly unusual.
MW: What will be the immediate geopolitical consequences of Syria’s defeat?
Abrams: The consequences are wide ranging and far reaching. Syria’s defeat could lead the United States and its allies to support the creation of a Kurdish state in the country’s oil rich northeastern regions, much as was done in Iraq, with the U.S. having maintained a large military presence in the region since the mid-2010s. Such a state could be a particularly valuable ally for Western and Israeli interests in future, with the Syrian government having been the only significant obstacle to its creation. It is expected that a priority target will be the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah, which was previously targeted extensively by Islamist groups on Syrian territory. The recent frustrations Israel has faced in its war with Hezbollah, much as it did in 2006, creates a strong incentive for its Western and Turkish strategic partners to press for a jihadist offensive to open a new front against the paramilitary group from Syria. The cutting off of Hezbollah’s land bridge to Iraq will also limit its access to armaments.
Russian investments in expanding Khmeimim Airbase on the Mediterranean, including to host Tu-22M3 strategic bombers and MiG-31K/I fighters with ballistic missiles, will be set back considerably. As jihadist groups now controlling Syria’s Latakia province are under the strong influence of NATO member Turkey, it is likely that once their control of Syria is fully cemented they will request that Russian forces depart. This will represent a further major gain for NATO and Israeli interests. Much as was the case after the defeat of Libya, Syria’s large arsenals may well be diverted to support future war efforts in line with Western Bloc interests, possibly to Ukraine. Plans to build a Qatari gas pipeline through Syria and Turkey for exports to Europe, thus reducing Western reliance on Russian gas, is also likely to be considered depending on how stable the situation within Syria becomes. The trans-national jihadist groups could be emboldened to use Syria as a base of operations for terror campaigns abroad, with a notable example being the Turkish-backed East Turkestan Islamic Party which seeks to wage a jihad against China and ethnically cleanse its Xinjiang region.
MW: How can Syria’s defeat be interpreted in the context of broader geopolitical trends?
Abrams: During the Cold War multiple Arab states moved out of the Western sphere of influence, with various coups and revolutions from the early 1950s toppling Western aligned governments. From the mid-1970s, however, this trend was reversed beginning with an internal coup in Egypt that realigned it as a Western client state. The defeat of Soviet aligned South Yemen in 1990, U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the successful NATO campaign against Libya in 2011, were followed by the overthrow of the Sudanese government in 2019 in Western backed riots. Syria is thus one of the last Arab states outside Western influence to fall, with only Algeria remaining as a major Arab actor that is not aligned with Western Bloc interests. Thus in contrast to Africa, and particularly West Africa, where Western domination is increasingly challenged, the trend in the Arab world has been highly favourable for Western interests, with Syria’s fall representing a part of this trend.
MW: How would you summarise some of the policies which the Syrian government could have pursued differently to better ensure its security?
Abrams: The Syrian state made a number of serious errors in its conflict with the Western Bloc, Turkey and Israel, many of which date back to the 2000. The most significant failure was that it did not exert sufficient control of its information space, which in turn allowed Western countries and Turkey to use social media and other means of communication to win over large segments of the population. This information campaign used a wide range of messages, with different segments appealing to different constituencies within Syria, from radical Islamists to westernised liberals, promoting different idealised futures should the Syrian state be overthrown. The dangers that stemmed from complacency towards information security were exacerbated by the effects of economic policies in the 2000s, including large scale privatisations, which worsened economic conditions for many of the most vulnerable. Following the outbreak of the insurgency, tremendous Western and allied economic sanctions combined with the U.S. Military’s control and appropriation of Syrian oil fields further deprived the country’s economy, and allowed the message to be further propagated that the only way for the Syrian population’s economic hardship to end was for the Syrian state, which resisted Western interests, to be overthrown.
Other errors included failing to invest sufficiently in the armed forces, and particularly in counterinsurgency capabilities, as before 2011 the Syrian Arab Army was heavily focused on deterring Israel and the West. Although Syrian forces were too weak to effectively manage escalation, launching some form of retaliation using its missile arsenals against Turkish, Israeli and Western attacks may have served to deny them a free hand in launching further strikes on the country. Surrendering the country’s chemical weapons arsenal in 2013, which had added new levels to the country’s missile deterrent, was also arguably an error. Nevertheless, the causes of Syria’s fall can be more heavily attributed to the shortcomings of many of its strategic partners, including Egypt and Iraq which realigned against Damascus in the 1970s, the Soviet Union which disintegrated, and Russia which allowed the insurgency in Syria to gain momentum for four years before providing support to the Syrian state. As a relatively small country without significant natural resources, and surrounded by Western-aligned adversaries on all sides, the Syrian state’s security situation was highly unfavourable from the outset.
