A Conversation With Jeffrey Sachs

Thoughts on the Downfall of Bashar al-Assad

History happens when least expected, in a flash.

Last Sunday, December 8, after almost 25 years of rule, and against all odds, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was deposed by a small army of jihadist rebels. Assad, a reportedly soft-spoken ophthalmologist, has taken refuge in Moscow.

Assad’s ouster brings to an end 54 years of dynastic, authoritarian, and exceptionally brutal rule. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1971. Memories of his crackdown on grassroots opponents affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, back in February 1982, still linger on.

As many as forty thousand people were massacred by Assad’s military in the central Syrian town of Hama.

Bashar-the-son may have been more easy going than dad, but Syrians are reportedly very happy to see him go.

As Assad’s tyranny fades, its supporters, opponents and back-door facilitators move in like wolves.

The Turks, Russians, Saudis, French, British and, of course, the Americans and their conjoined twin, Israel, are now turning Assad’s downfall to maximum advantage; hedging their bets; assisted on the fringes by assorted US/Israeli-cultivated toadies across the region, claiming to yearn for ‘security’ and ‘stability’.

Israel-USA and the Turks have been violating Syrian territory and airspace for years. So have the Russians.

The nation with the most at stake as Syria’s ‘liberation’ is twisted, corrupted, and undermined — Palestine — has no leaders to stand up for its interests. Exceptionally talented diplomats, for sure, but no political leaders.

All but annihilated in Gaza, and wherever else its leaders now shelter themselves, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas; no friend of Bashir al-Assad), has applauded the dictator’s downfall — for whatever that’s worth.

The ultimate outcome/upshot of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall is anyone’s guess. Everyone’s got an informed hunch, shared on a host of popular podcasts across the political spectrum.

To talk about all this (scratching the surface), the GPM reached out to American economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is a professor at Columbia University, with a lengthy resume: former director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute; current Director of its Center for Sustainable Development; President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a nonprofit dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger; advisor to several UN Secretary Generals.

Sachs has written several books, and is the author of numerous articles about COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, and the grievous, unconscionable, and incompetent state of US public policy.

Read here and here and here.

Sachs’ most recent writing focuses on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grand strategy to depose regimes across the Middle East, North Africa and wider Southwest Asia — a strategy well received in the halls of neoliberal, permanently war-fighting power, over in Washington.