Not so long ago the Canadian government was pleased to denounce Assad as a butcher. Now we are part of his air force.
No government in the West will admit this, of course. When the Assad regime announced a few weeks ago that the U.S. government had given it advance warning of its first air strikes against Islamic State on Syrian soil, the State Department was quick to deny it.
But for Assad, what a relief! Not long ago there was serious discussion about whether the West should be attacking Assad himself rather than his enemies.
This new anti-Islamic State campaign helps Assad in three ways:
Most obviously, it strikes directly at the most potent rebel force that rose up in opposition to his regime — the one that has acquired the most territory and has the strongest fighting force.
By targeting Islamic State, it allows Assad to divert military resources to fight other rebel groups, including the al-Qaida linked Al-Nusra Front and the so-called ‘moderate’ rebels we supposedly support.
The anti-Islamic State mission also creates a diplomatic opening for Assad to begin rehabilitating his regime from pariah state to unlikely Western ally.
Indeed, in all the talk about the failure of the Obama-led coalition to think through the issue of “boots on the ground”, one element is often forgotten. The Assad regime has plenty of boots, they are on the ground, and they are ready to march as soon as the U.S.-led air campaign against Islamic State shapes the battlefield to their advantage.
This wouldn’t be the first time in history that we have recruited an unsavoury ally in what we deemed a righteous struggle. Remember Stalin? One of history’s greatest monsters, he was also critical to the Allied defeat of Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War. Few people regret now that we made common cause.
But it does at least complicate the foghorn moralism of the Harper government’s justification for going to war on Islamic State. A few facts:
The U.S. government recently said that Islamic State had abducted between 1,500 and 4,000 Yazidi women, some of whom were apparently sold as “brides”. That’s awful — but how does it compare with the record of the Assad regime?
Although it’s notoriously difficult to assemble statistics on sexualized violence, there is substantial evidence that the Assad regime has used rape as a weapon, and on a scale yet to be matched by Islamic State. It also has a ghastly record of torturing and murdering civilians — including children.
At least three million refugees have fled Syria since the start of the uprising against the Assad regime — a figure the UN says has jumped by about a million in the last year. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled Islamic State, but they remain a minority among those displaced by the Syrian civil war.
Best estimates of the number of people killed in Assad’s war so far are in the neighbourhood of 300,000. The number killed by Islamic State to date may be in the tens of thousands.
None of this is meant to diminish the wickedness which is the Islamic State. What it should do is point out that our mission in Iraq cannot be defined — as the Harper government would like to do — as a simple expression of moral horror. If that were the case, we would have been attacking Assad last year instead of Islamic State now.
What actually got the West off its collective butt was not compassion but fear — of jihadi terrorism. If Islamic State actually consolidates its grip on the territory it now controls, it could become a training ground for terrorists heading for where we live — just as the Taliban in Afghanistan once allowed al Qaida a place to plot and train and grow.
There is a wondrous irony embedded in this. We sometimes forget that Assad’s Syria was included as a kind of auxiliary member of George Bush’s Axis of Evil.
Unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — a charter member of the Axis — Assad’s Syria has long had a policy of funding and supporting groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas as an extension of its foreign policy. Another irony: In some ways, Islamic State mimics Hezbollah and Hamas more closely than it does al Qaida. Its first practical aim seems to be the exercise of local state power, rather than mounting an international terror campaign.
It is true that Islamic State seems to threaten the West generally rather than just Israel, as is the case with Hezbollah and Hamas. The potential is real and terrifying. No doubt about it.
But if you haven’t already got a headache, let me introduce a couple more wrinkles.
The coalition of which Canada is now a part supports so-called “moderate” rebel groups who oppose Islamic State, such as the Free Syrian Army. What is confounding, though, is that these groups were formed not to fight Islamic State, but to fight Assad. To the degree that they do what we are supporting them to do — fight Islamic State — they are neglecting their core mission. To the degree that they use the support we give them to fight Assad, they will indirectly help Islamic State — supposedly our target.
Moreover, our moderate Syrian friends are interlaced with the al-Nusra Front, with whom they have shared not only tactical goals but at times fighters and military ordinance. What makes all this really rich is that Al-Nusra Front, with its links to al Qaida, has been supported and funded by Qatar, which (incredibly) is now part of the American coalition against Islamic State and provides a critical airbase for the bombing campaign.
In this situation of such exquisite complexity, the only thing clear is that Bashar Assad is in a much better position today than he was a month ago.
How the Harper government can achieve its self-proclaimed moral and strategic clarity is harder to discern.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: By Paul Adams
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