Turkey is a Winner in the New Syria

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Chief among the rebel forces that have ended President Bashir al-Assad’s rule in Syria is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HST), a Sunni Muslim group that was previously affiliated with al Qaeda. Their victory is being shared by Turkey.

Ankara has provided indirect assistance to HTS. The Turkish military presence in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed for years. Turkey managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, which increased the group’s legitimacy among locals. Trade across the Turkish border has provided HTS economic support, too.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once close to Assad, had in recent months urged disparate rebel groups in Syria to unite. That included HTS, whose shock advance from its stronghold of Idlib in the northwest near Turkey led to the fall of Damascus.

Erdogan’s government said it told Assad that he had to make concessions to opponents or risk the 13-year Syrian civil war, frozen for years, erupting anew. Turkey said Assad ignored its warnings, to its ultimate cost.

Rather than worrying about Syria’s prospects after more than a decade of conflict, President Erdogan now sees opportunity in a post-Assad future. His optimism is well founded: out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise.

Since 2016, Turkey has occupied chunks of northern Syria. In 2017, it helped create a coalition of armed opposition groups called the Syrian National Army (SNA) to counter Kurdish militants there. In post-Assad Syria, Turkey ultimately wants to prevent Kurdish interests from taking root in a new Syrian government.

Turkish-backed rebels have wasted no time in pushing out Kurdish forces from two northern Syrian towns. That was in line with Erdogan’s long-held goal of creating a buffer zone inside Syria to exclude militants affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization waging a war for autonomy in Turkey’s southeast.

The success of opposition groups against Assad with Turkey’s long-standing support points to Ankara potentially having more influence in Syria going forward. With Assad out of the picture altogether, Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment in the Syrian opposition. If it can avoid potential dangers ahead, Turkey could end up a clear winner in Syria’s civil war.

After all, Iran and Russia, Turkey’s main rivals in Syria, are humbled, and a friendly government could soon be set up in Damascus, ready to welcome back refugees. And the downfall of the Assad regime is set to change a delicate balance of interests between Turkey and Iran.

It fell to Mohammed al-Jawlani, head of HTS, one of the several Syrian anti-regime groups, to test Iran’s residual power. He chose as his target Aleppo, historically Syria’s most important city and second in population only to the capital Damascus. Yet with Iran’s proxy Hezbollah weakened by Israel and unable to come to Assad’s aid, the Damascus regime crumbled.

That left Iran with no quick-reaction options at all. Nor could Iran risk trucking troops into Syria overland across Iraq. Not even its own Shi’a militias, with tens of thousands of armed men, could have secured their passage across Kurdish controlled north-east Syria.

Iran and Turkey, who for years have maintained a delicate geopolitical balance, are now faced with competing interests in a post-Assad Syria. For Iran, the Assad regime was a critical strategic ally in the Middle East, and as Turkey is poised to gain influence, Iran’s ability to project power in the region has been steadily diminishing.

Tehran had long kept the Assad dictatorship in power, along with its Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, the largest non-state army on earth. And now, perhaps, the revolutionary wind that engulfed the Assad dictatorship could blow all the way to Tehran.

Iran and Russia lament the loss of a key partner in Assad, while Washington is still figuring out what the situation means for its own interests. But for Erdogan, it’s another step up in regional influence, and a signal of his growing global clout.

 

America’s Educational Caste System

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

America’s Educational Caste System

By Henry Srebrnik

In late March of every year, American students across the United States are notified of their acceptance or rejection from the Ivy League schools to which they applied.

“Ivy Day,” as it is called, provides a picture of admissions at the seven most elite and selective institutions of higher education in America: Harvard, Princeton and Yale first and foremost, followed by Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania. Their acceptance rates are in single digits and undergraduate enrollment at the eight Ivies averages around 8,500 students each.

(Prior to co-educational teaching, their women’s counterparts were the “Seven Sisters,” Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley.)

Along with peer universities such as the University of Chicago, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they are the pathways into the country’s elite. That’s because the United States has one of the steepest educational hierarchies in the world.

They are all private universities and, no surprise, incredibly expensive. The cost of attending an Ivy League school without financial aid is more than US$90,000 per year, including tuition, fees, housing, and other expenses. Tuition alone starts at US$52,659 for the least expensive of them. In 2023-2024, tuition at Columbia University cost US$69,045.

As their name implies, “Little Ivies” are small prestigious liberal arts colleges scattered across the Northeast, comparable to the Ivy League in terms of their academic excellence and selective admission standards. Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Haverford, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Williams top the list. They too are known for their large financial endowments in comparison to their size, and their students come from very wealthy backgrounds. (A study conducted in 2013 found that 41 per cent of Swarthmore students came from families sitting in the top five per cent of the U.S. income distribution.)

Top state schools such as the Universities of California’s campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles, along with Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, and Wisconsin, may provide as excellent an education, but nowhere near the same social cachet. They are all far bigger in terms of enrollment. Berkeley and Michigan, for example, each enroll over 33,000 undergraduates.

Using hierarchical terms similar to those used in many sports, all these schools, armed with billion-dollar endowments, are in the “first division.” They are followed by at least three more “divisions,” extending down to unranked schools of dubious academic value.

Canadian universities, on the other hand, whatever their relative merits, are all within one grouping – call it the “University of Canada,” similar to the Canadian Football or National Hockey leagues. Higher education is not nearly as stratified in this country. It’s therefore less of a signifier by which people are streamlined for life depending on the university they attended.

The status of the top American institutions is not derived from their stellar academic departments or pedagogical commitment, but rather from the signalling value of their credentials, the wealth of their alumni networks, and their relative importance to corporate and government research apparatuses. Elite colleges simultaneously reproduce class inequality and belief in the justness of that inequality.

What first and foremost distinguishes the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons from other colleges are not the syllabi, lectures or undergraduate libraries but the access they provide to the economic, political, and cultural capital that one’s fellow students possess by virtue of their upbringing, prior education, family relations, and wealth.

Graduating from an elite school provides symbolic, social, and cultural capital, according to Shamus Khan, a Princeton professor of sociology.  “It affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquette of high-status settings,” he contends in “Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You think they Do.” Your entire future may depend on it.

Recruiters for firms in finance, consulting, and law are obsessed with college prestige, typically identifying three to five “core” universities where they will do most of their recruiting. The résumés of students from other schools will almost certainly never even get read.

“Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities,” University of Texas Professor Lind writes in “Break Up America’s Elite,” “can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation. The lateral circulation of members of the same elite through revolving doors in the public, private, and nonprofit realms is a formula for oligarchy. They go on to dominate the rest of society when it comes to income.

“Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines,” notes New York Times journalist David Brooks, in “How the Ivy League Broke America.” As a result, maintains Columbia University political scientist Mark Lilla, today the cultural gap in America is the function of education. And the consequences, he explains in “America’s New Caste System,” are not just economic.

 “University does not only provide training for entering lucrative professions, it also socialises students into new styles of living,” in effect producing a caste system. And for those on its lower rungs, their “widely shared sense of exclusion, with all the attendant emotions of shame and resentment,” becomes toxic to democracies. We see these results clearly now.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

 

 

Donald Trump, Israel, and a New Political World

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

There are a lot of foolish Jews in Canada and the United States. They have voted for, among other fair-weather friends, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris (all now thankfully out of office) and Justin Trudeau (hopefully also soon on the way out). They also despise Benjamin Netanyahu.

But October 7, 2023, the Hamas attack on Israel and the horrific and pervasive antisemitism we have seen across both countries, led to November 5, 2024, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. And change has already begun.

There will be fewer mealy-mouthed statements about how “Israel has the right to defend itself” while refusing the Jewish state genuine military support and, in the case of Canada, supporting the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for the Prime Minister of Israel, who along with Yoav Gallant, the former Minister of Defence, was charged with being genocidal war criminals, on a par with Milosevic, Putin, numerous other satraps, and perhaps even Hitler!

Trump’s victory has given Israel political breathing space, and without the American foreign policy establishment breathing down its neck, it has allowed Jerusalem to continue degrading Hamas’ terrorist base in Gaza and to neutralize Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Syria’s tyrant, Bashir al-Assad, was quickly overthrown – though we must be careful not to regard the victors, backed by Turkey, as “democrats” – and this means that the Iranian regime has lost its most important ally and its land route to Lebanon.

With Russia distracted by its war in Ukraine and Hezbollah weakened by Israel to the point where it lost its ability to defend Iranian interests, the Syrian rebels were able to turn the tide of a war that most of the world thought had ended years ago.

Tehran believed the assaults launched against the Jewish state by its terrorist proxies would fundamentally alter the balance of power in the region. It has indeed – but not in the way Iran hoped!

The ring of fire that Iran had planned to establish around Israel has been dismantled with the loss of the single most important link in the chain, Syria. Hezbollah is now locked in an isolated enclave in south and west Lebanon. Hamas is transformed from a well-equipped terrorist army based in tunnels into a scattered armed underground. 

Assad’s downfall was made possible by a year of Israeli strikes on Iranian targets, military industries and air defence systems in Syria. Netanyahu warned during a meeting at the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces in Tel Aviv December 10 that if the new Syrian regime befriends Iran, Israel will take decisive action against it.

“If this regime allows Iran to regain its foothold in Syria, or allows the transfer of Iranian weapons or any other weapons to Hezbollah, or attacks us, we will respond forcefully and we will exact a heavy price from it,” he declared. “What happened to the previous regime will happen to this regime as well,” he warned. Israel has no intention of interfering in Syria’s internal affairs but would take action it deemed necessary for its security.

Indeed, Israel took advantage of the chaos in Syria to quickly damage and destroy much of that country’s air force and navy. Netanyahu authorized the Israeli Air Force to bomb “strategic military capabilities left by the Syrian army so that they would not fall into the hands of the jihadists.” The aerial assault targeted air force bases, including entire squadrons of fighter jets.

Israel is systematically dismantling Iran’s axis of evil, Netanyahu said, referring to the Islamic Republic’s attempt via its proxies to build a “path of terror from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea: from Iran to Iraq, from Iraq to Syria, and from Syria to Lebanon.”

As for Trump, unlike his Democratic presidential predecessors, he will not engage the region with a new round of appeasement of Iran or by pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians or any of its other enemies. This will be a non-starter in an administration packed with friends of the Jewish state.

Trump exercised a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran through heavy sanctions during his first term, which included the United States withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal in May 2018. His nominees for senior positions in his forthcoming administration suggest that he intends to remain tough on the Iranian regime.