As the siege of Aleppo enters its final stages, and the reins of power in Washington are transferred to Trump, it is very likely that the Syrian conflict will result in Bashar Al Assad remaining President of the Syrian state under some negotiated “peace” deal at some point in the future. Western opinion has not been adequately prepared for this outcome and wishful thinkers in the corridors of the NATO allies are only now waking up to the realities of their own foolishness.
Just as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld foolishly imagined that they could emulate Johnny Appleseed and plant flourishing democracies all over the Arab world, the US State Department under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry somehow convinced itself that the so-called “Arab Spring” offered the opportunity to assist burgeoning democrats to oust strongman autocrats throughout the Middle East and to replace them with benign, inclusive pluralist regimes.
The State Department convinced itself of one particular piece of madness – that it was perfectly legitimate to depose autocrats who claimed, on the flimsiest of grounds, to be presidents elected by their peoples but that it was entirely illegitimate to foster or help any resistance to any Arab monarchs who serve Western purposes.
That mad rule of thumb meant that the West vigorously backs monarchies led by Kings, Sultans and Emirs in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrein, and the other Gulf States – some more despotic than others. At the same time, inconvenient and troublesome non-monarchical heads of states were fair game for regime-change removal – in Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt.
It is strange that the Western democracies are most relaxed with regimes formally based on monarchic autocracy and most hostile to autocratic regimes with democratic-sounding trappings of democracy such as the Baathist republics. Democracy is only to be imposed on states that purport to have democratic forms. They are, somehow, the greater threats to Western interests. Monarchs are more easily manipulated.
So the West plays its Game of Thrones. It is only in the non-monarchies that the West intervenes militarily by bombings, overt invasions, drones, or covert special-forces interventions.
This Western doting on feudal autocracies is explained or excused by our “strategic interests”. No-one else is entitled to have strategic interests or to project power in the region in support of their interests.
Syria is, however, the exception to this pattern. I had the fascinating experience of visiting and touring extensively in Syria just before the current “civil war” commenced. It was then a classic Arab police state in which modern and traditional co-existed. There was an uneasy but workable balance between Sunnis, Shias, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Turkmen, Druze and other minorities.
Syria then was a social compromise between secularism and religious tendencies. Downtown Damascus, Aleppo and Latakia were cosmopolitan cities where every form of dress passed on the pavements. The looming presence of the regime was everywhere; the pervasive influence of the security services was everywhere but mostly invisible to the stranger.
The Assad regime has its enemies – internal and external.
And so it was that we in the West decided to turn a blind eye to the despots in Saudi Arabia and Qatar when they began to funnel billions of oil dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood and to other Syrian Islamist groups in the hope of ousting Assad under the penumbra of the Arab Spring. The US, Britain and France encouraged those despotic states to foment a rebellion against Assad in the name of democracy! Turkey, another enemy of Assad, seized its chance to use its border to infiltrate arms and supplies to those who revolted against Assad. Even Israel lobbed the odd bomb at Assad’s forces. His fall seemed like a slam-dunk.
Except for a minor little problem; Iran saw the Saudi-Qatari initiative as a threat to the Shias ranging from Iraq to Lebanon. The Russians saw the fall of Assad as the end of their influence and bases in Syria. The Kurds were uneasy about allowing the Turks and the Islamists to take control of Syria. The Israelis began to realise that Hezbollah and Assad might be a lesser threat than a militant Islamic state on their northern border.
Likewise, Syrian secularists, moderate Sunnis, Christians and Alawites began to realise that, far from the Arab Spring giving them benign freedom, the real existential threat to their way of life came from the rebels.
John Kerry’s risible policy of creating and arming a “moderate” revolution was doomed from the start. He ended up, albeit unintentionally, arming and empowering the ISIS and Jamat Al Nusrah monsters – who, we sometimes forget, have spent a number of years engaging in mass executions and beheadings of fellow Syrians in the grounds that they were infidels. His policy was a calamity – even if Trump says so.
If only we could turn back the clock. If only the Americans and their allies had told the Saudis, Qataris and Turks to “butt out” of meddling in Syria. If only the Americans had realised five years ago what is so obvious today – that there were worse things than Assad and that they were unleashing forces in the Middle East that threaten Western interests far more radically than Assad ever did or could.
William Hague, David Cameron and Francois Hollande must share the blame as well. They and the Americans came within a whisker of bombing Assad and Damascus.
I have written here before – and repeat now – that the real threat to the West and to the world is the threat of Sunni Salafism. That is the force behind the World Trade Centre and 9/11. That is the force behind the slaughter of the Yazidis. That is behind Boko Haram and the destabilisation of North and West Africa. That drives the London, Paris and Madrid bombings and shootings. That is threatening Kenya and Somalia. That causes massacres in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Bali and the Bataclan club.
That ideology of hate emanates from cosseted Saudi Arabia – the womb of Salafist extremism. It is spread though Saudi-funded madrassas. It is the great weapon of mass destruction that George Bush and Tony Blair ignored when they invaded Iraq hunting for Saddam’s non-existent WMDs.
This week it drove a suicide lorry bomb into an innocent group of Shia pilgrims coming from Karbala, killing a hundred of them and maiming hundreds more.
What more proof do we need of Western folly and hypocrisy? Who unleashed these forces? Who ignored them in pursuit of “strategic” interests? Was it Assad?
Syria needs less of us – not more. From 1918 until now, the West has done its damage there. Now is the time for atonement.