I had a nasty shock when I switched on my TV on Sunday. It was clearly a propaganda film with hijabed women standing amidst the rubble of their former homes extolling Hezbollah’s victory over the invading forces of Israel. Except it wasn’t a propaganda film; it was a BBC news report from Lebanon highlighting the plight of the de-housed Hezbollah-supporting Lebanese.
Of course, there was no report on the 60,000 Israelis who are still too frightened to return to their homes in northern Israel. They have good reason. Over the weekend, Hezbollah troops broke the ceasefire agreement and fired rockets into northern Israel. However, the anti-Israel bias of the BBC and western liberal media is a well understood fact of life. They support the perceived underdogs, Hamas and Hezbollah. This is a moral perversion of the facts of course. Israel, not Hamas and Hezbollah, is the real underdog in its war against Iran’s powerful Mullahs and their regional allies.
Morality and geopolitics do not work; realpolitik is the only logical partner for geopolitics
When it comes to picking sides in the Middle East based on moral values, things have become trickier in recent days. With a sudden flare up of jihadism in Syria, the west is going to have an even harder job in deciding who are the ‘moral good guys’.
Last week, an Al Qaeda splinter group called Hay’at Tahrir al-sham (HTS – or ‘Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant’), based in Syria’s northeastern Idlib province on the border with Turkey, launched an attack on Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and quickly took control. HTS and its jihadist allies, allegedly funded by Turkey, are now moving southwards. The main M5 highway between Aleppo and Damascus has been cut off. HTS are battling both Syrian forces and their Iranian-based militia allies.
Although HTS’s primary objective is the ‘liberation’ of the Levant, higher aims have been alluded to. Their leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has previously stated that ‘we will not only reach Damascus, but, Allah permitting, Jerusalem will be awaiting our arrival’. HTS reportedly host international terrorists. Their sudden aggressive emergence not only threatens Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad but also Iran: Syria is an Iranian ally. It is part of the ring of Iranian allies that encircles Israel. Crucially, Syria’s M5 highway is a supply route for Iran’s Hezbolah allies in southern Lebanon.
So, what side should the west take? Should we support the HTS jihadis against the monstrous dictatorship of President Assad? Or should we support President Assad against the monstrous jihadis? It comes back to the tricky issue of ‘morality’ in geopolitics.
I am reminded of my experiences in Syria during the neo-con presidency of George W. Bush. On a visit to Damascus to meet the Syrian finance minister, I also had meetings with the British Ambassador. It became clear that they were both lobbying for Syria to be taken under the western umbrella. Bashar al-Assad, it transpired, was keen to jettison his historic Russian and Iranian allies. This surprising revelation was confirmed in our discussion with Syria’s first lady, Asma al-Assad, at the vast Mount Mezzeh presidential compound, a hideous totalitarian bunker, that overlooks Damascus.
That the Assads were pro-western was no surprise. Asma had grown up in Acton, west London. Her father, a Syrian émigré, was a cardiologist at the Cromwell hospital. She studied at King’s and then Harvard before joining US investment bank, JP Morgan. In London she met Bashar, an ophthalmologist who was doing postgraduate studies at the Western Eye Hospital. The happy couple only moved to Damascus when the heir apparent, Bassel al-Assad, died in a high-powered Mercedes Benz while driving on the way to a skiing holiday in Switzerland.
In the event, the Syrian attempt to become a western ally, a move apparently supported by the US ambassador in Damascus, failed. The leitmotif for President Bush’s foreign policy had become the need to combat the ‘Axis of Evil’, a phrase coined by his neo-con speech writer David Frum. Originally defined as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the ‘Axis of Evil’, expanded to include their allies such as Syria. Bringing the Assads in from the cold was a non-starter. An opportunity to turn an Iranian ally was lost.
The west’s relations with Syria became frostier still after 9/11 and later still, the Arab Spring. Foolishly, backed by president Barack Obama, the disastrous dethroning of the Middle East’s dictators became apparent when President Mubarak was toppled in Egypt only to be replaced by the radical Islamic government of the Muslin Brotherhood in 2011. Meanwhile, in Syria a civil war led by the ‘pro-democracy’ Free Syrian Army was launched to depose Assad. It led to a brutal crackdown by the president that killed as many as 500,000 people.
As misguided as Obama, prime minister David Cameron also took a moral stance against President Assad and warned ‘I want a very clear message to go to President Assad that nothing is off the table’. Tired of the G8’s dithering on Syria, at Doha in June 2013 Cameron launched an attempt to orchestrate a coup against Assad. It was a plan that rested on the fantasy that the Free Syrian Army was competent and a ‘white horse’ of democracy.
This was quite clearly an illusion. As illustrated in authoritarian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia in the aftermath of the Pacific War, democracy comes about because of free market economic development, the nurturing of property rights and the gradual development of democratic institutions as well as cultural norms, such as free speech. Imposition of democracy on relatively poor countries, particularly ones with an Islamic culture predisposed to authoritarianism for socio-religious reasons, has never worked.
There were two forms of government available to the Middle East at the time of the Arab Spring: Jihadi dictatorship or secular military dictatorship. It is the same geopolitical choice that faces the west today. Take your pick. The geopolitical choice is not without complexity, but ultimately the choose is obvious. Syria may be an opponent of our ally Israel, but an Al Qaeda jihadi group is even more dangerous to the interests of not only Israel but the west in general.
So, let’s have the military dictatorship of the Assads any day. They may be repellently brutal, but they do not support international terrorism and global Jihad in the manner of Al Qaeda, Isis, Hezbollah and Hamas; indeed, the Assads are as fiercely opposed to these groups as we are. Morality and geopolitics do not work; realpolitik is the only logical partner for geopolitics.
The problem for politicians in the west, led by nose by the simplistic moral compasses of their media is that, other than the beacon of democracy that is Israel, there are no ‘moral good guys’ in the Middle East. We simply need to take the side of what works best in our interest.
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