The Syrian Civil War is Over: Now welcome to the 2020s. The decade of decline in the West and the rise of the East.

"They created a desert and called it victory."

That's easily my favorite quote from antiquity. It's by the Roman writer Tacitus quoting a defeated general at the hands of the legions 2000 years ago. And look how nothing has changed. The point being that even when you win the war, often you lose the things you fought for. Nothing has changed in the modern war fighting environment. Many times all that's left is rubble and sand. And because nukes are in play, there's a limit to how much of the desert the big players can take. Back in the day, you could marshal superior forces and take what could be taken. Land, resources, cities. Alexander did it. Caesar did it. Khan did it. The strong will take from the weak and that is the truth of warfare going all the way back to the Stone Age tribe when those with the longest spears ran off their rivals from the nearest watering hole.

Of course it's harder to do that these days because plutonium packs a bigger punch.

So proxy wars it must be.

And surely Syria is the nexus of all proxy wars. It was the necessary domino to fall before Iran, the ultimate target of all of this Middle Eastern mess. Syria had to be tackled on the march to Mesopotamian hegemony. With the US/Israeli/Saudi failure to topple Assad, the Middle East has been tossed into disarray like has never been before. Assad held on because those who could obviously see an aggressive move played against him by foreign forces became his allies and rushed to his defense. Not because those allies are the good guys but precisely because those forces that came to his defense know that nobody is.

Who are the good or bad guys in any war?

That's for the victors to write.

For now, all nations act in self interest. Like they have done for all time.

Russia could not allow Damascus to fall and lose their Mediterranean naval base at Tartus. More importantly, they could not allow a natural gas pipeline from the Persian Gulf through Syria to the Mediterranean which would kill their whole pipeline to the EU that will bring in billions a month from Germany to everywhere in the EU where it gets cold... (meaning all of it in winter). So, to protect Nord Stream 2, Russia equipped Damascus with the means to defend itself. That has resulted in the world's third most defended airspace thanks to Russian S-200 S-300, Pantsir S-1 and a lot more other toys the Russians have provided secretly. The Israelis are testing these defenses every night with drones and US provided stealth F -35s. They've been getting a 50% attrition rate on drone strikes launches  and they did lose a pilot already when they tried the low level ground hugging under radar fighter attack probably with late generation F-16s. There are rumors that the Russians are deploying their latest S-500 system as a test bed around Damascus which they hope to sell to Turkey and possibly China. The hype says it can detect stealth aircraft; it's proven that it can shoot down LEO satellites (a must for future WWIII) and it's an all around monster AA  system to compliment the S-400 platform which is more concerned with local (250km) ranged targets.

But none of this military tech porn is really the point is it?

Damascus. Before the fall.

The geopolitical failure of Syria to fall to the "Arab Spring" was a major blow to Western neoliberal power. Was the Arab Spring ever real or just a psy-op? To question it is almost a conspiracy theory. "Conspiracy theory" these days meaning anything not on TV and something you watched on a YouTube channel that has been strangely banned off the platform for spouting crazy talk. In Roman and Medieval times the town loony was left to his own devices because everyone knew he spouted crazy talk. Locking up the town loony and silencing him meant he was hovering somewhere over the target. By this action, leaders do not win victory over truth. For those with eyes to see, by their imprisonment of the town loony; they reveal the truth of his argument.

The Western powers and their compliant states in Arabia broadcast the "Arab Spring" and 'freedom' on satellite television to the Arabs (who all have satellite dishes these days) and quietly under-reported the massacre in Tripoli and dismembered Gaddafi just before they called it victory. In fact, they stopped calling it anything once the result of the action in Libya found its way to its present state which is open air slave markets and a population terrified to go to the store for food lest they be targeted by roving marauders in Toyotas with opiate addicted lunatics manning 20mm cannon from a truck bed. Of course, this has all disappeared down the Western media memory hole quicker than a billionaire who ran a child fucking ring on a private island and recorded world leaders and influencers doing the same; for leverage and blackmail.

We live in a fucked up reality.

But it's been this way for a while now. Since WWII we've had 70 years of not total death; just acceptable continuous low level death that most people can live with. As the whole "Arab Spring" narrative went south, it became harder and harder to say who the good guys were. 

2000 years ago, Tacitus would have laughed and cried.

Violence is the main motive force in history; once you unleash it, he would say be careful. Killing changes things. From teenage shooters to world leaders, killing is what gets things done. The difference between Bush/Obama/Trump or similar world leaders and some disenfranchised school shooter is not the body count. The state can kill a million in Iraq; the other at best killed fifty. Yet it's never a matter of degree; it's a matter of how you define what murder is when you hold the power.

They admitted it before they even 
did it.

When you hold power, you get to say who gets killed.

Syria is a wasteland now but Assad is still there. Let's face it, it's a major achievement that he held on. If Assad were a soccer team, he'd be Jamaica winning the World Cup. Anyone left today who thinks ISIS were some kind of organic Sunni Arab people's movement has been watching too much corporate news media. Yes, ISIS were a bunch of lowlife drug addicted thugs funded by "front corporations". The conquest of Libya made its Mediterranean ports ripe for weapons exportation to Syria on ships with zero manifest and no obligation to report. In other words, a captured square on a world chess board. All of that Arab Spring stuff was media fog to keep the consumerist masses placated and continue buying shit. And worse still, they got to feel their governments were "good" and doing their best to fix the chaos in the desert.

The lies today abound and the media is in league with power. Its job of questioning it is over.

The riches of Araby (oil, natural gas, fell into the fists of the elite while European and American populations looked the other way not because they did not care but because they had no say in the matter. Democracy today has become a word repeated through media to make populations feel they have a say when they do not. Yet blood leaves a stain and even when you're not directly responsible for the bomb; you paid the taxes and your politicians have used your labor and twisted the blade so none of our hands can be clean. They did it in your name.

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

Libya is history now. War has a habit of memory holing even the most egregious acts. Especially these days. We all remember WWI. But who remembers Sudan?. Ask the average person and they couldn't point Sudan out on a map and yet two million died and where was the outrage? The 2020s will be more of the same but the decline of the West to police it and the rise of the East, China, not to give a fuck as they ruthlessly extract resources from Africa to South America. (More on that in Part II). 

Syria

"I like the desert... because it is clean"  T.E Lawrence.

   Assad has won this war.

  And that is quite a thing for a mild mannered eye doctor never groomed by his father to rule.  But he didn't really win did he? Syria isn't really even a country in the modern sense. It was just an offshoot of the post WWI Sykes-Picot agreement. And that's been the problem since 1916. It's a piece of desert foreign powers get to play with. And once the Arab Spring happened all bets were off and Syria became the next bull's eye for Western avarice.

   It was low hanging fruit and the nexus of oil and gas pipeline routes.

   The only thing that stood in the way was Assad.

   When Libya evaporated and Gaddafi melted so easily on your TV screen, the French, the British, the US and with the tacit approval of the EU, all saw Syria was ripe to fall. Through shell corporations and dodgy warehouses, a wrecked, bombed and failed state like Libya would be the perfect place along the Mediterranean to ship some state of the art weaponry (TOW wire guided anti tank missiles) perfect for taking out Assad's tanks. Such an easy shipping point without oversight once you've created a failed state. And Libya today is surely a failed state if you consider open air slave markets as an example of anything failed. For a million dollars a pop, which is peanuts for state actors who print the paper in the first place; you can buy or transport anything.

  Yes, the darkness is that dark.

As much as war and the casualties of it are damaging; staging suffering is almost worse than the real thing.
It's calculated to create more.

The Wikileaks Hillary Clinton email leaks prove all this to be true. That's why Assange will be in jail forever. He lifted the lid on the cauldron and showed everyone the fire inside. So all those ISIS beheading videos they blurred on network TV but not on Liveleak were supposed to tell you who the bad guys were. And we believed it in 2016. Hell, they even gave an Oscar to some guys called the White Helmets supposedly helping children out of the big bad Syrian rubble. Oh yeah, and then there was the "gas". US and European media pushed the gas angle because in the European psyche gas is bad because Auschwitz. 

    I know war and many veterans of it and I can I promise you an artillery barrage kills more people via ball bearings travelling at Mach 5 then a dissipating cloud of gas ever can. WWI trench lines proved this a century ago but modern audiences fall for "the gas" angle because for some reason it seems unfair. Blow my arms and legs off via bomb and let me bleed out seems fair, but suffocate me and make my lungs stop working via nerve agent is just plain unfair.

   This is the logic of Western liberal democracy. It's absurd, but it works.

   And for those who rule and make war the view is... if it works; it ain't stupid.

   Syria will attempt to rebuild now and Turkey will empty it's refugee camps now that ISIS are wrecked. The pocket of ISIS around the Idlib region will be wiped out in the spring. Going all the way back to Caesar, no one fights in winter unless they have to. And in Syria no one has to.

   The Syrian Civil War, whatever the historians or Wikipedia writes about is a lie of epic proportions in the popular imagination, but then again, isn't that all wars and most history. The victors writing the truth is a cliche but like most cliches it also happens to be true. No one who studies human conflict is standing on solid ground.

RUSSIA

Russia wiping out ISIS via air power was a no brainer from their strategic point of view but it was done so efficiently that it left Western media in a conundrum. Why couldn't we do that?NATO claimed to be doing it (fighting the bad guy ISIS "terrorists" that chopped peoples heads off on the Internet) but that was just the gore they ran on US and Euro TV so their domestic populations didn't get upset about blasting desert people. However, once Russia got involved in the air war and actually became effective killing the well supplied Toyota driving madmen (who supplied ISIS with all those brand new Toyota trucks by the way?) bad guys, Western media changed tack. Ammo dumps, staging areas, supply routes, everything a modern militia needs started falling apart via precision bombing and Assad's forces and Tiger divisions started knifing their way into the rubble taking zero prisoners. All it took was a little satellite intel, some SIGINT and ISIS began falling apart.

All of which makes you wonder. Who was funding these savages in the desert in the first place?

Russia's interest in the 2020s is to get rich via its vast oil and mineral wealth. Its arms industry too is potent. Its social problems are rife. Wealth distribution is at Victorian levels of justness and oligarchs run the country. (The West is headed in that same direction but the techno entertainment complex they've created hides it better).

Russia's aims are to contain the EU, resist NATO encroachment in Ukraine, develop weaponry that can counter US naval power and hamper US machinations as the frays develop on the post WWII Western hegemony that has endured. As the dollar weakens, Putin and the great Bear will be watching and not leaving the chessboard anytime soon.



IRAN

And here we come to the crux of the matter. The Persians.

This is the war the Israelis and Saudis fear and want. It might be unwinnable but it is sure to throw the world into chaos in the 2020s and sometimes chaos is an end in itself. Iran is a country of 82 million people, dwarfing the populations of Israel and Saudi Arabia. They control all of southern Iraq (thanks America for killing Saddam for us), they run supply lines across Syria, have ousted the Kurds from the oilfields of Kirkuk, and are in an alliance with Assad. The weapon and supply run to Hezbelloh in Lebanon is open and the trucks full of anti tank/ anti air shoulder mounted weaponry are flowing. 

If they get a nuke than theater parity will have been achieved and this is what Israel fears most of all. Mutually Assured Destruction is a wonderful thing because it makes war impossible. And this terrifies those with eyes on Iranian oil and gas and its theocratic opposition to the Western world which it sees as decadent, satanic and wrong. Try being a transgender in Iran and see what happens to your dick. 

Yes, it's not a perfect society in a liberal democracy type of way but who said the world has to be the same?. Isn't that the whole idea behind diversity? People get to live how they want even if others oppose it? Well the Saudis and Israelis certainly oppose the Iranian oil and natural gas fields. With sanctions in affect (and lets face it sanctions are just a kinder word for a blockade which last time I checked in every history book I ever read is in act of war). Cutting off a country from international trade is war. But the Persians are the bad guys because they refuse to become behest to the international banking system. SWIFT payments have been cut off, inflation is rampant and the CIA and Mossad are encouraging the kids to wear green and get themselves shot in street protests so the TV screens in Europe and the US can say Ayatollah man bad.

You know what it's all really about?

The straits of Hormuz.

The bottleneck the Iranians control by geography alone.

Forget the logistics.

Saudi Arabia, despite the billions in reciprocal petrodollars Trump and Obama has been dumping into their military, the Saudis couldn't fight their way into Yemen; goat herder territory.  Still, in war as in life, if you can't win it, you can't have it and Saudi Arabia will not have their Yemen southern oil exporting terminal unless the US comes to the rescue. And the US, quiet rightly, no longer has the stomach for it. Fracking alone has made the US self sufficient in oil. 

McCain the patriot hero https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/try-as-he-may-john-mccain-cant-shake-falsehoods-about-ties-to-isis.html

CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and the NYT are merely the US elite consensus view hand fed to you and you're job is to consume it and worse still, agree with it.

The entire US military complex is basically a taxpayer subsidy to Israel and Saudi Arabia in a reciprocal dollar cycle where Saudi Arabia swaps oil for military tech and Israel swaps... not much other than the fact that they own the US government through money power.

The whole aim is to stop an Iranian nuke.

If they get a nuke than theater parity will have been achieved and this is what Israel fears most of all. Mutually Assured Destruction is a wonderful thing because it makes war impossible. And this terrifies those with eyes on Iranian oil and gas and its theocratic opposition to the Western world which it sees as decadent, satanic and wrong.

Forget the numbers. Saudi Arabia despite the billions in reciprocal petrodollars couldn't fight their way into Yemen; goat herder territory. Who in the Saudi military has an espirit de corps when you're fighting for a paycheck so a bunch of hooded Saudi royal billionaires can fuck supermodels on yachts in Monte Carlo? The reason the whole Yemen war is happening is that the Saudi Sheiks are trying to cut their way to the ocean and bypass Hormuz which is the choke point their oil exports are constrained by Iranian proximity and power. But the Saudi's are failing miserably. Equipped with the best military tech that money can buy at some  arms dealer comic con in Jordan and Trump's idiocy, their troops keep getting wrecked by lads in the hills with AT and AA shoulder mounted weaponry (supplied by Iran via Russia and China of course).

So like all armies, the Saudis went for the soft targets, famine and children. Sure to win right?

Reality is about as real as living in a world where you believe Jeffrey Epstein hung himself in a jail cell on suicide watch. The point being, everything on TV is bullshit and it isn't even funny anymore. 

If they can kill/silence one man in a maximum security prison because he might name names ; just imagine what the can do and have done to millions  in far flung countries. What we're confronted with now as a species is an overpopulated world, approaching 8 billion with mass flora and fauna extinction. And none of it is global warming or a globalist funded war against the environment Greta Thunberg can win.

The darkest dark for this writer about war is that conflict itself may not kill us.The darkest dark is that someday soon this planet's biosphere combined with species extinction and bio weapons may finally have enough of us.

And that is a battle even Alexander the Great couldn't win.