Assad's fall: The awesome power of unintended consequences

Could Iran's mullahs be next?

On Sunday morning, a lightning offensive by Syrian rebels ended with the dramatic fall of Damascus, marking the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime after 13 years of devastating civil war. One of the most consequential moments in the Middle East's recent history was set in motion by a chain of events that few could have anticipated, least of all Hamas and Israel, whose war inadvertently played a pivotal role. Now comes the tough part, where the Middle East either gets better, or even worse.

The fall of Assad is a stark reminder of how unintended consequences shape history. Israel and the West were long ambivalent about Assad's fate. He is a butcher who used chemical weapons against his own people and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, yet his control over Syria offered predictability, even tacit stability, in a volatile region.

And critically, the coalition arrayed against him seemed dominated by Islamists – and, let's face it, the West has hated political Islam ever since the mullahs of Iran engineered the US hostage crisis 45 years ago. This is, at the end of the day, Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." It's real.

In the unintended consequences bucket, Assad's ability to cling to power for so long relied heavily on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia that until recently was one of the most powerful non-state armies in the world. But Hezbollah was thrashed by Israel in the recent fighting in Lebanon—and it is probably not a coincidence that the decisive rebel offensive came immediately thereafter.

The unravelling can be traced back to the catastrophic Oct. 7, 2023, assault by Hamas on Israel, in which the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group massacred 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 back into Gaza.