Al-Sharaa, Do Not Lower Yourself on Trump’s Severed Rope

By Samir al-Taqi

It is no longer a secret: the American-Syrian decision to impose a Syrian tutelage over Lebanon. It has already become a practical fact, its features visible in the movements of “undisciplined” fighters in northern Lebanon. The Syrian authorities, it seems, are walking willingly into one quagmire after another.

In his recent interview with Al-Mashhad, Ahmad al-Sharaa cast himself as the holder of some superior diagnosis of the Lebanese crisis: “some Lebanese” are “prisoners of the past”; the traditional solutions are exhausted; Lebanon needs a toolbox of political, economic, social, and security remedies; Hezbollah must find its place within the state; the Shiite component needs reassurance; and Israel’s concerns cannot be ignored. Fine words—no less tender than those Hafez al-Assad offered when he marched into Lebanon. But this is not the language of an aggrieved neighbor; it is the language of an appointed guardian over Lebanon.

Does al-Sharaa truly believe this rhetoric will persuade Hezbollah to lay down its weapons? And if it does not? Does he imagine the Syrian army capable of managing yet another internal civil war?

In Assad’s day, the Syrian people learned what it meant for Syria to become the region’s chief enforcer—its head thug. The experiment turned into the blind savagery of the security apparatus at home, the entrenchment of corrupt cross-border mafias, and a deepening fragmentation on both sides of the frontier.

For his part, al-Sharaa no doubt needs recognition, funding, and a role—and here he is, offering the services of “his army” to Washington and Tel Aviv as a “reliable” regional policeman. And while Syria still boils and erupts with contradictions and crises, while it stumbles along the road toward building a state, its legitimacy, its social contract, and its national unity, al-Sharaa prefers to flee forward.

He is tempted, indeed, by the game of civil wars in other people’s lands—entering, under the pretext of sponsoring a settlement imposed from above by force of arms, a country whose own legitimate authorities struggle even to monopolize weapons and the decision of war and peace.

As Trump washes his hands of the Middle East, he goes looking for proxies. And that, frankly, is the essence of the mission to which Trump is now appointing al-Sharaa in Lebanon. The proxy is theoretically tasked with disarming Hezbollah—and that will not be achieved with the tender words of the Al-Mashhad interview, but with iron and fire and jihadist fighters. It will be done at the expense of the Lebanese state, to teach the Lebanese the art of “national reconciliation” and civil peace.

What looks like an opportunity from Washington is, without doubt, nothing but a trap for Damascus. Trump can switch his alliances at any moment; a man who turned on Germany, France, and Britain will not be restrained by Tom Barrack’s whispers from flipping the table on the Syrian authorities—even as Trump himself already looks like little more than a lame duck. So where are you leading yourself, and your army?

Trump will leave soon; Syria and Lebanon cannot leave geography. What begins as a political assignment will inevitably turn into clashes, killing, and war. With whom, and against whom? With Israel? With Iran? With Trump? What irony. And what begins as a soft tutelage will end in a war whose off-switch no one holds.

Under those very same banners, Assad entered Lebanon in 1976: “preventing collapse and containing the civil war.” What followed was the spilled blood of Syrians and Lebanese, and the conversion of the Lebanese economy into a branch of the Syrian mafias. It produced no national reconciliation; it built a system of security balances that fed a latent sectarian war. It fought the Palestinians at one moment, counterbalanced the Maronites at another, contained the National Movement at another—leaving each sect with just enough fear to keep it needing Damascus.

The result was that Lebanon was hollowed out, and Syria rotted from its own heel. The Syrian presence prevented neither Israel’s invasion nor Hezbollah’s expansion; what it entrenched in Lebanon was a diminished state and one more circle of corruption and failure—and a sustained, self-perpetuating civil war.

Today’s dilemma is graver still. In Assad’s time, Syria was a centralized security state with a cohesive army, formed and armed by the Soviets. So how could the new army of a state still under construction—a state emerging from a long civil war, its security and military institutions factional, ideological, and vengeful, with a significant part of them still beholden to disparate sources of funding—succeed at a mission in which America, France, Israel, and Iran all failed, in a country whose memory still bleeds from the previous Syrian tutelage?

Hezbollah loses if it confronts the Lebanese state over its weapons; but it wins if the pressure comes from outside. Its arsenal would reacquire the legitimacy of resistance to the American-Israeli project—this time wearing a Syrian face. The Syrian role would become a political gift to Hezbollah.

From there we move to a regional civil war. Lebanon is no purely internal arena. Sunnis and Shiites, Christians and Druze, Palestinians and Syrians, Iranians, Israelis, Americans, Turks, and Arabs would all enter the maps of fear and conflict. Any friction between Syrian factions of a jihadist Islamist background and Hezbollah would not remain a border skirmish. It would summon the memory of the Syrian war inside Lebanon, the memory of Hezbollah’s war against the Syrian revolution, the memory of the Arab-Iranian conflict, then Israel’s anxieties and Turkey’s calculations. At that point every ingredient of a regional civil war is in place: societies fighting by proxy on behalf of states, states moving militias, and militias swallowing states.

In the end, there are two scenarios: either Sunni and Shiite jihadist Islam ally against the national state, citizenship, and freedom across the region, or the two projects collide in Lebanon and beyond. Either way, Syria and its state will not be spared their fire.

In wars, politics is not measured by “tender” words, but by the claws it sinks into the body of the region. At a moment when the world stands on the threshold of a third war—part cold, part hot—it would be naive to imagine that the logic of tutelage can hold, now that the region’s gates have been thrown open to the world’s demons, waging their wars by proxy and in person alike. The Levant is masterful at turning instruments into burdens.

Perhaps Lebanon will grasp that it is not enough to reject Syrian tutelage; it must reject every other tutelage as well. Sovereignty is indivisible. Lebanon does not need someone to rescue it from above. It needs a state that reclaims itself from within—through support, not foreign guardianship.

For Washington, tossing Syria as a card into this furnace may look like a clever tactic, but this adventure will last no longer than Trump himself—who is already a lame duck. And sooner or later, Israel will not tolerate a jihadist force running the length of its northern border.

As for Syria, it has no need for the rent of some new regional role before it has built itself. Everyone who ever entered Lebanon believed the solution lay there—only to leave soon after, having burned Lebanon and been burned in turn.| Article link https://www.annahar.com/articles/annahar-writers/323004/%D8%A3%D9%8A%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%B1%D8%B9-%D9%84%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%B2%D9%84-%D8%A8%D8%AD%D8%A8%D9%84-%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%82%D8%B7%D9%88%D8%B9