America has lost the proxy war in Syria and is now looking at punishing ordinary Syrians for the actions of the Syrian government. The so called ‘Caesar Act’, officially known as the Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act, aims to cut off multilateral or direct commerce with Syria’s ruling Baath party, effectively inducing record inflation, poverty and market exclusion.
Rebuilding the country after ten years of fighting would be near impossible if external contractors cannot be engaged without American economic retribution. That is effectively what the Caesar Act is designed to do, target the rebuilding of infrastructure, energy and state services. That means schools, hospitals and electricity plants.
Neighbouring Lebanon, which is facing its own economic collapse, would benefit from the rebuilding of Syria as one of its main trading partners, as such many Lebanese see America’s actions as also targeting their livelihoods. In the past few months American dollars have been withdrawn from Lebanese banks at record rates, which has led to the collapse of the Lebanese lira. Both Syria and Lebanon are now struggling to get access to the US dollar making it extremely difficult to trade internationally and access commodities.
The leverage America has with the US dollar being the reserve global currency forms part of its economic sanctions regime which has been in place since at least the Cuban missile crisis. Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Iraq, to name a few, have all and continue to be targeted by economic sanctions, often unilaterally by the US. As of 2019 America has almost 8000 sanctions in place globally. In Iraq alone US sanctions in the 1990s caused the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi kids. Madelaine Albright, US ambassador to the UN at the time, said the price was worth it.
Sanctions rarely accomplish the desired effect of changing a government’s political stance or their actions. One only needs to look at countries like Cuba, which have been under embargo for more than 50 years, to realise that their effectiveness is dubious and their consequences to ordinary people severe. In the age of the COVID-19 for example, sanctions on Iran meant that people and health professionals could not access essential medical supplies and medicines. In a paper published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, it was estimated that US sanctions in 1995 cost the American economy $15 to $19 billion in lost export revenue which translated to a loss of 200,000 plus jobs. In today’s sanction heavy global economy that loss is likely to be much higher.
The war in Syria was however part of America’s larger project for the region, the so called new Middle East, which started with Iraq 2003, Lebanon in 2006, then Libya 2011 and was to continue beyond Syria into Lebanon again and eventually Iran. Basically, a reshaping of the power dynamics was being played out to remove any resistance to American hegemony in the region with the help of the petro-monarchies in the gulf namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar for money and Islamist fighters and Jordan and Turkey for logistics.
'America’s war of attrition against Syria has destroyed the country but not overthrown the government.'
Had Syria been defeated by the Islamist fighters, who hijacked the reform movement, Syria today would resemble Libya, a country run by mercenaries and warlords. While the Western media was cheering the ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria, the Islamists were chanting ‘Christians to Beirut and Alawis to the grave’. Ethnic and religious minorities would have been either driven out or killed by the so called ‘moderates’. Father Frans Van der Lugt, a Jesuit priest, was killed in 2014 for speaking out against the violent opposition groups in Syria as was Sheik al Bouti along with 40 others in a mosque in 2013. To suggest that these violent actors operating in Syria were ordinary protestors discontent with the authoritarian government seems naïve.
Tim Anderson, in his book The Dirty War on Syria, outlines how a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign was instituted against Syria and its President Bashar Al Assad. Anderson challenges the accepted, largely uncritical, narrative that what was happening in Syria was some kind of organic grass roots revolution. Rather in his estimation it was and still is a proxy war to defeat the remaining secular pluralist state in the Middle East. Syria remains the only independent Arab nationalist state that does not take orders from Washington, nor has it fallen into sectarian strife imposed from abroad.
America’s war of attrition against Syria has destroyed the country but not overthrown the government. The US has however won the media war and is in the process of making sure no one can assist the government or its people to rebuild. If lucrative contracts cannot be secured by America in post war Syria, then it will prevent others from doing so and the Syrian people will continue to suffer.
Daniel Sleiman is a freelance writer and journalist based in Canberra.
Main image: Syrian refugee camp (Burak Kara/Getty Images)