The best I've come up with is a situation that conventional liberal history recognizes as one of the more outrageous and ominous crimes of the twentieth-century. It was an attack by a country that was the seat of Western civilization on one of the world's poorest and most despotic regimes, ruled by a dictator who styled himself King of Kings and Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and had his own self-aggrandizing religious cult: That despot, Haile Selassie, was nonetheless feted for his resistance to Italian fascist imperialism.
Is Bashar al-Assad a worse tyrant than Haile Selassie? Does Syria deserve less protection from Washington-Riyadh-Tel Aviv's twenty-first century imperialism than Ethiopia did from twentieth-century Rome's? Who's afraid of "Selassie apologist"?
Timeline Review
The jihadi-imperialist threat to the Syrian state has been interrupted, but it is decidedly not over. Syria has already been devastated, and the U.S. and its allies have enough resources to keep the pot boiling for a long time.
The most positive recent development has been Turkey's seeming turn, propelled by the predictable blowback, away from the jihadi game. Without Turkey's help, ISIS and other jihadi elements will lose important supply lines. But Erdogan is the epitome of a fickle friend, and can turn back on an American dime tomorrow.
Any lessening of regime-change aggression against Syria, as Donald Trump seemed to favor in his campaign rhetoric, would be a serious blow to the jihadis, and would probably lead to Saudi and Qatari support for them drying up. But anyone who trusts anything that Trump says right now should wait a few minutes. Even if he backs off on Syria, Trump's cabinet choices make clear that he will likely ratchet up aggression against Iran and the Palestinians, or maybe go back and take Iraq's oil.
Besides, imperialism is a mandatory bi-partisan project. Congress has already voted 375-34 in the House, 92-7 margin to continue the Pentagon training for Syrian insurgents, and, for the first time, to supply them with anti-aircraft missiles. Let's see if Trump and "Mad Dog" Mattis put a stop to that. My bet: Despite what some wishful-thinking paleo-conservatives think, Donald Trump is not going to oversee a less imperialistic American policy in the world.
What has happened, and is probably irreversible, and will be exacerbated by the presence of Trump, is that the incoherence, failure, and utter ridiculousness (from the perspective of reasonable standards of global peace and security) of American policy is now on embarrassing display.
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