Yesterday, Israel reportedly struck a car traveling to the Damascus airport, killing the Hizballah officer responsible for coordination with the Syrian military. Meanwhile, the rebel offensive begun last week continues, and various other anti-regime militias have made gains elsewhere in the country. Brian Stewart looks at the big picture:

The Assad regime has always gambled that its power would be best preserved, not by political or economic reform, but by fomenting armed resistance to America and Israel. This bellicose posture was based on the calculation that the Arab masses would tolerate oppression and cruelty, but that the regime could not survive if it gave up its permanent war with the Jews. In his first-rate book The Syrian Rebellion, the late scholar Fouad Ajami summarized this destructive attitude with the words: “Let them eat anti-Zionism.”

While this strategy may have worked under Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez, it has collapsed over the course of the last decade—as evidenced by videos of Syrians celebrating the recent defeats Israel dealt to Hizballah, which joined Assad in the bloodstained repression of the revolt that began in 2011. Stewart also considers the American role:

Syria was a terrible casualty of President Obama’s grand strategy for the Middle East. During his second term, it became clear that his objective was to create a “geopolitical equilibrium” that would balance traditional American partners like Saudi Arabia and Israel with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Successive U.S. administrations have accepted the proposition that, if he fell, Assad would either be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime or a failed state. In either scenario, the prevailing view in Washington was (and remains) that Syria would become an even more dangerous and tormented country, more likely to export violence abroad. The more prudent course of action was therefore to stick with the devil we know.

That analysis never withstood scrutiny, and it looks downright fanciful today.

In fact, Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden didn’t try to counter Assad and his Iran- and Russia-backed allies for fear of empowering Sunni jihadists, leaving Christian communities vulnerable, and fomenting further instability—and nonetheless Sunni jihadists grew powerful, Christians were slaughtered, and instability spread.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”