An old favorite of mine finds the collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime "stunning" and thinks that it exposes "the lies at the heart of a variety of unfounded assumptions about the world." I used to read (nay, learn by heart) every line it would print when it was still "standing athwart history, yelling Stop at a time when no one is inclined to do so," when it was only "conservative" without any adjectives added to it. I mean the National Review magazine.

Noah Rothman’s four examples of those lies that prove that America’s enemies are not steadfast at all. (How could they be? They are a bunch of "illiberal adversaries"; of those, Assad and Russia were, in fact, not fighting terrorists – so by the help logic of "a friend of my enemy is my enemy" – the Assadists and Russians were simply fooling Barrack "The Useful Idiot" Obama!).

Another myth, Assad’s (with him the Russian and Iranian) paper tigers’ collapse proved that the liberal and democratizing axis of the United States doesn’t have to coexist with the Iranian axis; the Islamic Republic cannot fool us anymore as it did Obama and Biden administrations. (By the way, "the semi-hostile powers like Türkiye" should not get their hopes up to influence the successor regime in Syria!) And finally, the lie that the U.S. is the clandestine author of events in the Middle East was busted by the Assad regime’s collapse.

In summary, the "new" conservatives at the NRO, following the demise of Assad’s regime, find solace in the fact that the U.S.-backed terrorist group YPG will continue to keep "50,000 or so Islamic State captives in custody," using an alternative acronym for Daesh. The full-page photograph of the PKK/YPG-related terrorists waving flags with the PKK terrorist ringleader Abdullah Öcalan’s image on them actually evinces the hidden agenda of NeoCons: no matter what, they will create that terrorist state in Iraq and Syria, which hopefully stir up ethnic separatism in Türkiye and Iran.

Gentlemen and five ladies of my old favorite magazine! It is over, whether you like it or not. Please stop daydreaming about dismembering Iraq and Syria and redesigning the Middle East. The Ottomans had fallen into an exhausted slumber, thanks to the geopolitical ploys and plots of what they used to call the "düvel-i muazzama" (the great powers).

No, I am not one of those self-orientalists who blame all their ills on hegemonic imperialism; I know the mistakes, miscalculations, misconceptions and missteps during their last century invited all the bad things that happened to the Ottomans. On the top of the list is their emulation of something that they were not. We can discuss this some other time: for now, suffice it to say that those great powers had ample opportunity to create new nations and countries on the lands that the Ottomans had administered for more than 500 years. So, dear editors and columnists in the sacred relic of William F. Buckley, it happened once, and it lasted almost a century. Not anymore!

Stop creating stirs!

Syria belongs to the Syrians, Iraq to the Iraqis and Iran to the Iranians.

It was not easy to come to this safe point where we can say that not only Syria but, thanks to its Revolution, Iraq is free from the danger of dismemberment. Let’s refresh our memory and try to remember the last couple of decades in which some of those Neocon myths were built.

The Turkish Parliament tried nicely to remind the U.S. and those others who were sitting on its tails in 2003 that any operation to break into pieces the already fragile balance of denominational differences and tribalism would affect not only Iraq but also the entire region. Parliament, rejecting the government’s ordinance request to send Turkish forces to Iraq as part of the U.S. forces and to authorize the presence of foreign armed forces in Türkiye, practically shut the door in the face of America.

The U.S. Marines were waiting in landing crafts, and the U.S. Air Force on the Sixth Fleet aircraft carriers. Türkiye’s rejection was a major disappointment for the Americans; unable to use Turkish airspace, ports and territory, the U.S. suffered a major failure during the invasion of Iraq. Yet, paying a heavy economic bill, the U.S. was able to ruin Iraq, carving an area for separatism.

Of the two aldermen of major Kurdish tribes, not Barzani but Talabani fell into the trap of an "independent Kurdistan." The U.S. Central Command, under the command of the neoconservative Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis, commander of the U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (later President Obama’s defense secretary), had different plans with PKK. This terrorist organization from Türkiye catered for those who paid more. Iraqi Kurds had to wait a little more: the NeoCons had to go through Syria and carve another autonomous area to merge with KRG.

Good cop, bad cop

But, first, they needed an enemy to fight and defeat so that a sizable portion of Syria would be in the hands of those separatists. The Taliban to the rescue! The "Islamic Army," the British and American intelligence organizations created in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation, the commodious young men with their unimaginable ferocity, like probing eyes of their adversaries and beheading people on camera, were out of a job in Afghanistan. They began materializing in the middle of Syria.

Don’t ask how that bare-ass, penniless people traveled all the way from Afghanistan, jumping over Pakistan, Iran and Iraq to Syria, or where they got those arms, guns and rockets to blow away Bashar Assad’s army... But they did. In the blink of an eye, there was a strong extremist state named Daesh in the middle of Syria. But not to worry! The U.S. CentCom’s cavalry, the YPG came to the rescue. Where those "heroic warriors" got their weapons, uniforms and training is not as secret as their extremist adversaries. The U.S. CentCom, operating hundreds of jumbo transport planes from the U.S. and thousands of semi-trailers from Iraq, provided an army of trainers to create a fighting army out of the PKK terrorists. Not only that, the U.S. Army even provided them with a name that was, according to U.S. Army Gen. Raymond Thomas, then-head of Special Operations Command, a little ironic!

Gen. Thomas said that Türkiye viewed the YPG as an extension of PKK militants waging an insurgency on Turkish soil and has sharply criticized U.S. support to the group, which had increased over time, so he asked them "to change your brand." It was renamed the "Syrian Democratic Forces." He said he offered the word "democratic" to be added to that name: "I thought it was a stroke of brilliance to put democracy in there."

What a brilliant show(!)

Brilliant, indeed. Not only the name but also the actions: The terrorists defeated the Daesh and took 50,000 of them as captives. They are in the hands of the so-called "The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria", also known as Rojava. Where? Well! The YPG commanders (and their American handlers, and Brett McGurk, an American diplomat, attorney, and academic who served in senior national security positions under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden) should know how to keep and feed 50,000 captives!

Perhaps, soon, when the Syrian Revolution finally reaches the Rojava, the PKK extensions and their American patrons will leave the east of the Euphrates as they did with the West and the regional peoples will find out! Fifty thousand extremist Daesh militants must be something to see!

This brings us back to the subject: the Neocon idea of a "Kurdistan" (President Erdoğan calls it with a prankful name: Terroristan) comprising the Iraqi and Syrian elements that would incite Turkish and Iranian Kurds to join and provide a strong (and secular, democratic) ally for Israel. If the Neocons’ plans to redesign the Middle East had stemmed from providing Israel a shield from Iran, then they should see the wisdom of having two strong countries, Iraq and Syria, in between.

Anyhow, that false dream of shredding into pieces Syria (and hence, Iraq) has been proven false. It is gone. The U.S. and all those sitting on its tails should wake up and smell the Arabian coffee. Well, is there a whiff of Turkish coffee in the air, or is it me?