The enemy of an enemy is not always a friend. The Middle East can be quite a bit more complicated. It is easy to celebrate the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. The Assads, backed by Russia and Iran, dominated Syria for more than a half-century. After a 1982 uprising in Hama, Hafez Assad surrounded the city and killed upwards of 12,000, though he liked to brag that the true figure was actually higher.

In 2007, Israel destroyed a plutonium processing plant that the Syrian regime was building in cooperation with North Korea. Had the Israelis not acted, Bashar Assad would have had nuclear weapons at his disposal rather than the chemical weapons that he used to great devastation against the civilian population during former President Barack Obama’s administration. Assad’s brutality and his deliberate targeting of the civilian population to change local demographics destabilized the region and sent more than 5 million refugees out of Syria. Through it all, Assad enabled Iran’s land bridge of weaponry to Hezbollah, leased Russia a naval base to operate in the Eastern Mediterranean, and allowed the Russians to build an air base in northern Syria. Simply put, the Assad regime’s fall is cause for applause.