Bad news for the bad guys

It's hard not to feel some glee at the fall of Damascus and the flight of Bashar al-Assad, the second-generation dictator of Syria who blithely ignored Barack Obama's "red line" and deployed chemical weapons against his own people. Assad has been propped up for the past ten years by Vladimir Putin, while three successive American presidents did little or nothing to rein him in. (The US has some 900 troops in Syria, where they serve mostly as implicit hostages.)

The great winners here are Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli people, who have so degraded Hezbollah that it can no longer help Assad with troops and training, and who can hope Syria will cease to be a pipeline for Iranian rockets to reach Lebanon and from there be fired against Israel. Next in line is Recep Erdogan, the semi-dictator of Turkey, who has been supporting the rebels for a long as Vladimir Putin has been trying to destroy them, and who can now hope that Syrian refugees will no longer destabilize his country.

The Syrian rebels might also send a note of thanks to Volodymyr Zelensky and the gallant Ukrainians who have kept Russia bogged down in a war of attrition since February 2022.