Really, IS and the Syrian régime are enemies

Two claims about some purported ISIS-régime alliance refuse to die.  One can be disposed of in short order.  Yes, too-clever-by-half Syrian intelligence agencies supported various extremist Islamists in 2008-2011 or so.  But this is hardly the same as supporting ISIS, which had no independent identity back then.  It's not even as damning as, say, Israel's early support of Hamas.  No one supposes Israel and Hamas are, therefore, buddies in secret.

The other claim requires only slightly more attention.  With the dogged sophistry of 9-11 conspiracy theorists, some still hold that, if now IS and the Syrian régime do fight one another, this is new.  Before, they were in a tacit alliance.  They didn't really fight one another.  Indeed the régime and IS ganged up on the rebels.

It's true that the Syrian régime, not being insane, probably did on occasion see in IS attacks on the rebels an opportunity to mount their own assaults.  But to take advantage of fighting between your enemies doesn't mean they're not your enemies.  The reason for the current régime campaign against ISIS has nothing to do with a change in alignment.  It has to do with obvious strategic priorities.

The régime, all along, has fought its battles where it was most threatened.  This meant securing, as much as possible, its coastal enclave (Latakia/Tartous), Damascus, and population centers near Damascus.  That's why it made little effort in the extreme South, where the rebels did well, or the remote Northeast, where IS established itself in Raqqa.  In the Northwest it lacked the resources to retake Aleppo at a time when that would have meant confronting the US-backed rebels, the Kurds and perhaps Turkey.

With Russian support, things have changed radically.  Homs, once the most important rebel stronghold in the core region, is under régime control.  The Western enclave is secure.  Even the less important areas are no concern.  In the South the rebels' US and Jordanian backers are interested only in diverting anti-Assad militias into anti-IS proxies.  US support in the Northwest has come to have much the same objective.  What's more, America's (and Russia's) Kurdish allies can be counted on to neutralize the rebels not only in Aleppo, but all along the Turkish border.  Russian support also means far fewer casualties for the Lebanese and Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, so that Assad no longer has manpower problems.  The one remaining problem area is Idlib, where Jabhat al Nusra refuses any truce with the régime - but there the US-backed rebels know they cannot support a Nusra-initiated offensive without losing their backing.  This means that the danger from Idlib is very moderate.  Finally Russia is very successfully making problems for Turkey via the Kurds, so that Turkey, and therefore Gulf State powers who supply the rebels through Turkey, are in no position to give the rebels serious support.

That's why the régime fights IS now, and why it didn't fight IS as much before.  It has nothing to do with alliances or cooperation.  It's because the major threat to the régime, the rebels, became a very minor threat.  The change in strategy occurred as soon as that became clear.

The insistence in the face of these indisputable facts that IS and the régime have some covert relationship, or some de facto alliance, is disturbing, because it is so clearly false.  When the rebels' supporters display delusional behavior, it can hardly help what's left of the rebels' cause.

Get serious about removing Assad: disengage from Syria

                                                                              

The 'German idealist' Immanuel Kant could be hard-headed.  "Whoever wills the end, wills the unavoidably necessary means," he said.

There are many non-Syrians who rant and rave against Assad.  They demand that the world 'do something' about him.  They 'support' the rebels, or some of the rebels.  These people allegedly want Assad gone.  But they do not will the unavoidably necessary means to remove him, so they do not will the alleged end.  Their ranting expresses mere dislike, not serious intention.  Since they will not so much as advocate what it takes to end the catastrophe, even their dislike can't run so terribly deep.

What it takes to end Assad's catastrophe is support for all the rebels, including some radical, anti-democratic Islamists who have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.  It takes willingness, directly or indirectly, to supply these extremists.  Try, if you like, to find one single commentator who doesn't espouse some sort of falsehood or sophistry to avoid this conclusion.

The main maneuver is to claim that there is a secularist democratically-minded rebel force, usually called the Free Syrian Army, sufficient to defeat Assad.  Sometimes it is said, approvingly, that this force is 'vetted' by the CIA.  With more backing, some say, this force is also the best bet against ISIS, far better than Assad.  Or, even if they're not the best bet in the short run, they're the best bet in the long run:  even if Assad might do as well as a weapon against the immediate threat of ISIS, only the FSA could provide a long-term, solid counter to ISIS - by eliminating the Assadist tyranny that spawned ISIS in the first place.

None of this is right - it's false, misleading or incapable of making its case.

There are incorruptible secularist democratically-minded forces, but they are small; on their own they couldn't even hold their own.  In the South, where they are strongest and most independent of Islamist influence, big things have been promised for years.  The promises faded and now, with Russian assistance to the régime, they have vanished.  In the North, also for years, the FSA has needed help from and alliance with radical Islamists.  Fear of these Islamists is why the US is so squeamish about supplying arms, in North and South alike.  Now, with Russian-backed attacks from the régime and the Kurds, no one seriously suggests that the FSA is going to overthrow Assad.

But suppose, somehow, the FSA were generously reinforced and redirected against IS - presumably in exchange for some sort of shameful deal with the régime.  Would they be the best military answer to ISIS in Syria?  This would be as much as to say that a heavily reinforced Syrian army, backed by Russian close air support, Iranian regulars and Shia militias, would not do as well.  There isn't the slightest reason to suppose this.  What's more, it's not even clear that Iran, Russia, the Kurds and Assad won't put an end to ISIS on their own.

But what about the long term?  Wouldn't the FSA offer a better solution than the régime, whose oppression spawned the extreme Islamists in the first place?  In the long term there is little reason to suppose so.  Assad's oppression was far from the only factor that spawned extremist Islam, which took root and flourished much earlier.  The West's gratuitous assault on Iraq, following decades of  foolish interventions in the Middle East, had much to do with it.  The FSA can't undo these injuries, and it will not easily shake its association with the Americans held responsible for them .  Nor do the programs of the FSA testify to the slightest interest in addressing the poverty and inequality that are probably the deepest causes of the Islamist surge.  Instead FSA & its supporters issue declarations  that voice commitments to liberal and democratic values.  They are sometimes mildly welfarist but offer no economic or social transformation likely to interest poorer Syrians.  So the idea that the FSA, as opposed to Assad, offers some lasting solution to the problem of extremist Islam is implausible.

The military and political shortcomings of the FSA begin to make the case for un-vetted support for the rebels, including the extreme Islamists.  Contrary to received opinion, it is a strategy which holds very little risk to the West, very little cost, and some benefit.

Vetting

Consider the whole idea of vetting Syrian fighters, as pure a product of American insularity and ignorance as you're likely to find.  For one thing, anyone born and raised under a brutal police state has learned to conceal his opinions and leanings from much tougher and wilier intelligence authorities than a CIA officer.  For another, the vetting project flies in the face of Syrian realities.

Vetting has never been wonderfully effective.  The latest notable failure in the region became apparent when "a Jordanian physician named Humam Khalil al-Balawi" blew up seven CIA officers at a meeting in Afghanistan.  I knew someone who vetted French resistance fighters for the OSS and considered the whole exercise a joke.   But Syria is far, far less favorable terrain for vetting than Nazi-occupied  France.  It is far, far less favorable terrain than contemporary Middle Eastern countries that have experienced unrest such as Algeria or Egypt.

In wartime France there were maybe two or three factions to which you could belong.  In Egypt or Algeria, there have been two or three radical Islamist factions, and it doesn't even matter too much which one has your allegiance.  In Syria there are literally hundreds of opposition groups, many of them ephemeral.  Not only do these groups have very different orientations; the groups themselves quite often change their orientation.  Even CIA-vetted groups have done this.  So vetting can easily be invalidated both at the group and at the individual level.

It's not just that these opportunities for 'deviance' exist:  it's also that constantly changing circumstances provide powerful motives to deviate.  Groups may change for ideological reasons:  they are disillusioned with the Islamist or secularist movements, or they come to adopt the agenda of some external supporter.  Individuals may change for these reasons too, but also for many non-ideological reasons.  They find that another group has come to be far more effective against Assad, or they become disgusted with the tactics of their own group, or they come to consider their current leaders corrupt, or they are attracted by the salaries of some other group, or they find that their own group simply isn't militarily viable any more.  Finally and perhaps most important, vetted groups may and frequently do find alliance with un-vetted groups a pressing strategic necessity.  So even if vetting produced correct conclusions today, those conclusions quite frequently don't hold tomorrow.  The plethora of options afforded to groups and individuals in Syria is likely unique and completely undermines the vetting project.

This makes me impatient with analysts' and commentators' suggestion that such-and-such group or individual might not be really sincere in their professed commitment to this or that Western Value.  Of course they might not be; what adult isn't aware that you can't really see into others' hearts?  Syria analysts seem to live in a world of rebel statements and organizational charts which they treat like a window on reality.  Better not to take the statements and charts too seriously in the first place, and look instead at actions and the immediate pressures of circumstances.  When you do this, it's immediately clear that in Syria, individuals frequently and radically change their minds.  Rather than fuss about depth of commitment, policy makers should think about how to give people reason to commit.

Risks

Since rebel groups and individuals cannot be effectively vetted, they can be supported only un-vetted.  This is the only real alternative, largely because once the US starts vetting, its hysteria about al Qaeda deters it from delivering even minimally adequate support, even to those it distrusts least.  But isn't unvetted support terribly risky, particularly in the case of 'al-Qaeda affiliated' Jabhat al Nusra?  The short answer is no, if by 'risky' is meant increasing the risk of attacks on the West.  Only the same sort of bad analysis that underlies vetting can make it seem otherwise.

From the West's point of view, the main risk posed by Nusra lies in the threat of attacks on the West.  (The West has certainly shown it is not overly concerned about attacks on Syrians.) 

To be clear from the start, there is absolutely no doubt that Jabhat al Nusra does indeed pose a terror threat to the US.

Immigrants and indeed visitors to the US also pose a clear and documented terror threat.  Of course there are some other threats.  Hezbollah is a threat.  Unlike Jabhat al Nusra, it has actually carried out a truly massive terror attack against US troops.  So Assad, Hezbollah's close ally, is also a threat.  The Druze, since many are allies of Assad and therefore of Hezbollah, also pose a threat.  So do many Syrian Christian groups, for the same reason.  Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey, all linked to groups linked to Jabhat al Nusra, must pose a threat as well.  Arguably the US poses a terror threat to itself, because it trains soldiers knowing some will go nuts and kill people at random.

In other  words, it is not enough just to say something is a threat.  You need to know the scale and nature of the threat.  Even more important and usually ignored, you need to know whether the existence of the threat actually increases the risk of an attack on the West.  We'll see that the answer isn't obvious.

The scale and exact nature of Nusra's threat to the US is, of course, unknown.  We can only look at the evidence that Nusra plans to attack the US, or is likely to do so in the future.  That evidence hardly exists.

The principal ground for seeing Nusra as a threat is that it is 'affiliated' with Al Qaeda.  That at least is actually confirmed by official Nusra statements.  What does it mean?

In the first, place, affiliation with Al Qaeda does not mean subordination to the Al Qaeda leadership.  Al Qaeda's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, does give orders or at least exhort affiliates to do or not to do certain things.  Whether they pay attention is an entirely different matter.

Al Qaeda is now frequently characterized as a brand - in the loose sense of some set of names and symbols un-enforced by some sort of intellectual property police.  As Richard Reeve, terrorism analyst at the UK based Oxford Research Group, puts it:  "Brand franchising is essentially what the AQ 'central' leadership now does..."  And according to Myriam Benraad, policy fellow on the European Council on Foreign Relations, the al Qaeda affiliation no longer has the impact it was designed to have.  "What we see... very clearly is the fracturing of what is called al Qaeda, which has more or less become a brand."  Yet this characterization of Al Qaeda's relation to its 'affiliates' does not begin to provide an assessment of the strength of such links.  To assess that, you have to look at the affiliates themselves.

Matters may be very different in North Africa, but in the case of Jabhat al Nusra, what the leadership maintains is not, for the membership, written in stone.  As we've seen, people join Nusra for all sorts of non-ideological reasons.  What they have in common is a desire to fight Assad, not some Al Qaeda dogma.  So it is not as if Nusra provides hordes ready to do anything the leadership says.  The idea of its rank and file suddenly devoting themselves to attacking the West is a non-starter.  And since the leadership depends on its rank-and-file, there is a definite limit to its capacity to turn anti-Western sentiments into anti-Western plans of action.

Evidence

But aren't there some serious anti-Western terrorist operatives within Nusra?  The chief proponent of this claim is Charles Lister, who tells us that Nusra is a bigger threat than ISIS.  Why does he say this?  What follows does not review all his case, but portions representative, I think, of its character.

The overwhelming bulk of Lister's evidence for his contentions comes under the rubric of:  some people said some words.  It should be obvious that anywhere, but especially where the Syrian conflict is concerned, this has little weight.  But Lister's claims get credibility because, in part, they conform to facts on the ground. For the hostility of Jabhat al Nusra to Western ideals, it is not just a matter of their statements;  it is apparent from, for example, their regulations about women and their modes of governance.  But for the claim that Jabhat al Nusra is a threat to the West, there isn't one single fact on the ground to support, let alone confirm it.

Lister notes that Jabhat al Nusra has bomb experts and that it has planted bombs in Syria and Lebanon.  Yes, it is fighting a war in Syria and like other groups this leads to occasional conflict with Lebanese government forces.  In this conflict, everyone uses bombs:  that hasn't the slightest tendency to suggest that any of these parties will use bombs in the West.  Indeed it undermines Lister's identification of  the presence of Al Qaeda bomb experts in their ranks.  Given that Jabhat al Nusra actually does use bombs in Syria and Lebanon, and nowhere else, might not they need bomb experts for this purpose, and not for attacks on the West?  Certainly it is possible that Jabhat al Nusra will in some distant future blow up a shopping mall in Kansas; it is also possible that the US will invade Canada.  These possibilities become serious worries if and only if there is something more than the presence of individuals who theoretically could help make these possibilities a reality.

Well, then, is there some reason to suppose that these individuals have ever planned an attack on the West?  No. 

The basis for claiming otherwise is laughably thin.  Lister tells us that "The first public recognition of this came in early July 2014, when security at airports with direct service to the United States was tightened due to “credible threats.”For one thing, this is not only the first but also the only 'evidence' that the Khorasan group - alleged super-terrorists whose members Lister has laboriously documented as belonging to Nusra's core membership - planned an attack on the US.  But this is no evidence at all; it is a claim that there is evidence.

What then is the actual content of that claim?  Lister points to an article which has some US-based fans of Nusra doing exactly nothing, plus a government warning about the July 4th weekend. The warning, however, stated that "At the moment, U.S. officials say there is no specific, credible threat to the homeland."  Here is an evaluation of such warnings from Buck Sexton, a former CIA intelligence officer who was assigned to their Iraq and Afghanistan offices and later joined the NYPD intelligence division.  He is now a TV commentator, loud and aggressive about terrorism.

The overall odds are low that a major terrorist attack will be attempted over the July Fourth weekend. Authorities say there is "no specific, credible threat," which is bureaucrat-speak for "we don't really know" and is a strong indicator that our intensified counterterrorism posture is based more on gut instinct than actionable intelligence.

As for reports from Syria itself, they seem more like hints than evidence.  Consider the basis for the US threat assessment regarding the Khorasan Group. 

The assessment's character is suggested in Kevin Jackson's "From Khorasan to the Levant:  A Profile of Sanafi al-Nasr", posted by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.  Jackson, says Lister, is one of those "experts whose consistent excellence in researching and analysing international terrorism has influenced my work."  Jackson states that

[al-Nasr's] writings reflect a deep-seated animus toward the United States that has both ideological and personal components. In the years after 9/11 one of his brothers was killed and two of his brothers were imprisoned by the United States.

Allegedly in 2007 he went to the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal areas, where he allegedly befriended Al Qaeda leaders. 

What did he do there?  Oh, as far as anyone knows, mainly media stuff:

There is little documentation of al-Nasr’s engagement in al-Qa`ida’s military efforts. He is said to have featured in an al-Sahab production showing rocket attacks in Paktika, a province in southeastern Afghanistan.[26] Al-Nasr also provided a vivid account of a multi-pronged attack he had been charged with filming in 2007.[27] This supports other sources in which he was characterized as one of the “media men of Qa`idat al-Jihad in Khorasan” by a fellow member of the organization.[n] Al-Nasr’s only other appearance in al-Qa`ida’s official media was his later article for the group’s magazine Tala`i’ Khorasan in which he addressed the issue of Saudi women in custody.

To shorten the tale, he then went to Iran for a while, did media and supposedly financing, was arrested, released, and did some more media stuff.  Later he went to Syria, and in Jabhat al Nusra engaged in combat, against Assad of course.(*)  He was involved in Nusra internal politics.  There is no reason to doubt his importance in the organization (before his reported death).  But Jackson tell us "It is unclear if al-Nasr had any operational role in the alleged plotting of international attacks by the Khorasan Group."

If I may translate:  there is not the slightest, tiniest scrap of evidence that he ever had such a role or that any such attacks were planned.  All Jackson can muster is the observation that, in the case of any such attacks, it is most likely that he was involved, because he had "close working relationship with al-Fadhli, who headed external operations for al-Qa`ida Central in Syria."  Jackson offers no reason to suppose there was any such "case", and admits that Jabhat al Nusra doesn't seem to be planning any such attacks, but well...  you know... Jabhat al Nusra did use bombs in Lebanon during fighting there.

So this is a mostly media guy who really doesn't like the US and has fought Assad a bit.  There is no evidence, specific or general, of any planning whatever of any attacks against the US.  This is not like the level of intelligence available to the US before 9/11, and ignored.  It is like the level of intelligence that would justify Russia acting on 'reports' that the US was about to strike Russia.  After all, some high-ranking US military guys and influential congressmen no doubt know some guys who hate the Russians and talk a lot about nuking them.  And typical of these analyses, we get extensive, minute detail about individuals who, for all anyone knows, are up to approximately nothing, followed by stern conclusions about the menace of the organizations to which they belong.

What about something more like hard evidence?  Well, not a single Nusra sleeper cell has been identified.  No one even states that such cells exist in the West.  Western police forces have discovered no Nusra-linked documents or arms caches or laptops or cell phones.  So the entire case for the Nusra threat is based on what are essentially mutterings about some members of the group, or some statements someone associated with the group has at some time made.  That's enough, I suppose, to say a threat exists, because for all we know Nusra might attack the West tomorrow morning.  But threats based on such evidence are not rational grounds for policy.

The terror threat

However, absence of evidence is far from the main reason support for Nusra should  not be considered risky.  The main reason is that the obsession with this or that potentially terrorist group is futile.  The terrorist threat will not change in any substantial way because this or that group is strengthened or weakened.

Most groups affiliated with Al Qaeda have little or nothing to do with terrorist attacks on the West.  They are almost invariably opposing local governments and use terrorist tactics because they cannot achieve much through conventional warfare.  ISIS itself has that origin.  Oddly enough, any slight shift they exhibit to attacks on the West occur after the West has sent planes and weapons to kill and mutilate as many of them as possible.  What's more, in any particular area, the suppression of one group actually causes another to emerge.  Now there are anti-Western terrorist or potentially terrorist groups in at least Somalia, Algeria, Mali, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.  Anti-Western terrorists move among almost all these countries with ease.  They have “a huge reservoir of sympathizers who all have western or European passports and who were born or raised” in the West.  The idea that eliminating the very slight terrorist threat posed by Nusra will make a noticeable difference is absurd.  Eliminate Nusra, and it will strengthen IS in Syria by quite a lot, as well as most certainly fostering another Syrian al Qaeda branch, most likely more anti-Western than Nusra ever was.  So Nusra's existence makes does not increase the overall terrorist threat to the West one bit.  So it does not, after all, increase risk to the West if Nusra gets its hands on Western arms.  The claim that you can substantially reduce the terror threat only by addressing deeper causes such as invasion, poverty, inequality and oppression may amount to useless preaching: no, these woes will not be eliminated.  That doesn't change its truth.

Suppose then that the West and particularly the US doesn't care about what happens to Syrians and doesn't care that much - since Obama wants to 'disengage' from the region - about what happens in the Middle East.  What the West does care about are attacks on Western soil.  We've seen that backing Nusra doesn't appreciably increase the risks, because deep injustices assure that the threat will remain robust and widespread.  So the terror threat can be reduced only by addressing these deeper causes.

Disengagement

The problem is that the West can do nothing positive to remedy these  injustices:  its destructive incompetence at the silly project of 'nation-building' is almost universally acknowledged.  But the West can do something negative that will help:  it can remove itself as an obstacle to any remedies.

If the West cannot improve conditions in Middle Eastern nations, the best it can do abroad to ward off terror attacks is to remove the grievances that help spawn them.  Un-vetted backing of the rebels can help the West and especially the US achieve what may seem like incompatible goals:  reducing the threat of terror attacks and disengaging from the region.

 The key to seeing how this works is to note that, apart from anti-IS campaigns, the only essential function performed by the US in Syria is to obstruct regional powers from aiding the rebels.  The futile vetting project is complemented by a far-from-futile project to stop the regional  powers from supplying whom they please with what they please.  To achieve the 'activist' goal of removing Assad - and incidentally to curb both  Russian and Iranian influence - the US doesn't have to do anything.  It simply has to not do something, to remove the constraints on the Gulf States and Turkey.  The massive aid they can and should provide wouldn't even need to come from the US; both nations have ample stocks of arms.  That the US would very likely be the main replenisher of these stocks is hardly the sort of risk that wannabe policy wonks invoke when they speak of quagmires or 'boots on the ground'.  So massive support for the rebels isn't just compatible with disengagement; it is disengagement.

Might this disengagement also reduce the risk of terror attacks - always assuming that Syria generates appreciable risk in the first place?  Here's the correct answer:  no one knows.  But that is also the correct answer to the same question about current US policies, including the campaign against ISIS.  That said, there is reason to suppose that any such risk would be reduced.

If the deeper roots of terrorism are beyond the reach of Western efforts, the same doesn't seem to hold for the reasons terrorists attack the West.  The main grievances against the West are said to be that its forces occupy the region and it supports repressive secularist régimes.  In Syria, despite US evasions, this is certainly the case:  the US has explicitly said it prefers the régime to an Islamist takeover.  Well, disengagement from Syria is at least a small step away from the status of an occupying power in the region.  It is a large step away from supporting repressive secularist régimes.

Looking at the longer term, US disengagement in support of the rebels and against Assad seems to go quite far towards neutralizing extremist resentment of the West.  Recent experience throughout much of the region suggests that, absent brutal repression, the future of Syria and other states is Islamist.  This cannot be stopped; it can only be delayed by shedding oceans of blood.  For the US quite clearly to indicate that it prefers even a radical Islamic presence in the region to atrocious secularist régimes addresses fundamentalist grievances pretty directly.  If indeed foreign policy can do anything to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks, this would seem the most promising direction it could take.

There are other advantages to  the sort of disengagement that gives regional powers a free hand against Assad.  Middle Eastern people, like people everywhere, are selective in their moral outrage - but no less serious about it for all that.  Just as, say, many Americans care deeply about police murders of black people, but don't give a shit how many Syrians die in agony, so Middle Eastern people are genuinely outraged that the West is indifferent to atrocities in Syria, where more innocents can die in a day than are murdered by US police in a year.  So at some primitive level, morality and Western self-interest converge.  Terrorists, we often hear, are at least in part motivated by a well-founded sense of justice that, it seems, is baffling to many Westerners.  Perhaps if these terrorists were humoured by genuine, consequential Western opposition to Assad's off-the-charts atrocities, the West would be hated a little less.  This too might undermine anti-Western agendas.

Finally, disengagement would improve US and Western credibility.  Given all the fine words uttered against Assad, it would be a bit less confidence-destroying if the West actually allowed him to be removed, rather than fussing about the Values of those involved in removing him.  Syrians are probably not impressed by world powers that tut-tut about Nusra's democratic credentials but apparently accept the democratic credentials of a man who killed over 100,000 dissidents to stand for election. This is, indeed, speculation.  But again, so are any claims about the virtues of current US policy, assuming always there is one.  In any case, with Russia's entry into the conflict, those claims have relapsed into silence. (*)

How, then, does all this bear on the panic about Jabhat al Nusra's Al Qaeda affiliation?  Many in the group are not fanatics; they joined to fight Assad or even for a salary to feed their families.  None, so far as any hard evidence suggests, have joined to attack the West:  that would be a very odd way to go about such a project.  The leadership may possibly be a different story, but the leadership must depend to some extent on its membership, and it's hard to believe its membership would want to attack Western nations that, finally, had make removal of Assad possible.

And even the leadership are people.  People change their minds, their loyalties and their strategies.  It used to be considered naïve to suppose your alliances had to be with those who like you and share your moral outlook.  Perhaps that attitude is worth revisiting.  At this moment Hezbollah is an essential ally of Bashar al Assad despite the fact that its militants were slaughtered by his father Hafez.  And the US is in a de facto anti-ISIS alliance with Shia militias who killed American soldiers.

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(*)  Jackson's references to al-Nasr's alleged combat role simply name interviews with Charles Lister and Aimen Dean, so one has to guess how they provided confirmation.  Aimen Dean is a defector from Al Qaeda turned MI5 spy.  However I have found no indication that Dean ever set foot in Syria, much less Latakia or Idlib.

(**) Backing rebels who may well come to be dominated by extreme Islamists does pose one very real risk, to Syria's minorities.  On this score there is reason for optimism.

The West and especially the US loves to defend minorities against Arab Muslims.  This is because while involvement in Syria generally goes over poorly with the voters, who couldn't care less about Muslim Syrians, that same electorate is always in favor of defending someone, anyone, against them.  So here there is no political risk to the US president, which is all that really concerns him.  So non-Muslim minorities will very likely get Western protection if they need it, and, since Russia tends to favor these same minorities, probably under UN auspices.  As for the Shia, Iran and Hezbollah can and almost certainly will protect them.  So even assuming ill will and fanaticism among the rebels, any threat they pose to minorities will very likely be addressed.

Too late for a no-fly zone

Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier, in a passionately moralistic Washington Post piece, have revived interest in the idea of a no-fly zone in Syria.  This proposal, once attractive, has become preposterous.

Even before Russian intervention, the no-fly zone idea was dubious, if only because the Syrian army possesses many long-range weapons which would cover the entire zone from the ground.  But when only the Syrian air force was in question, it was certainly possible, both militarily and politically, to establish such a zone.  Today, the strategy is a non-starter.

A no-fly zone would have to be established either with or without Russian cooperation.  If with, it would be nothing but an oblique agreement to bomb IS.   Russia would certainly carry on much like today - it would insist on its right to bomb 'extremists', that is, whoever it liked.  So Russian-supported no-fly zone would not deserve the name.

Suppose then, as Ignatieff and Wieseltier imagine, it would be established in defiance of Russia.  It would then come with a commitment to shoot down Russian air assets.  The US would foresee sustaining some losses from advanced Russian anti-aircraft installations, and would therefore want preemptively to bomb these installations.  In other words there would be a great deal of flying in this no-fly zone.  After all, a simple Russian capitulation would be utterly disastrous for Putin and indeed for Russian prestige.

These are the military likelihoods.  What matters even more are the real military possibilities.  It is one thing to talk of a no-fly zone imposed on the Syrian air force, which Israel proved a pushover decades ago.  It is quite something else to initiate violent confrontation with the world's second nuclear power.  Even supposing this step could not possibly lead to nuclear Armageddon, nuclear powers have less disincentive to engage in serious conventional warfare:  they feel that their opponents will never dare push them to desperate measures.  Despite the apparent US lead in high-tech weaponry, it is by no means clear that the US would do well in a ground conflict against a formidable enemy thousands of miles from its shores.

These military uncertainties make the idea of a no-fly zone politically absurd.  Europe would never even consider consenting to such measures - and whatever the true importance of Europe to US interests, America would never risk offending Europe on such a serious matter.  Perhaps more important, China would have to take clashes with Russia as proof positive that preparation for a full military confrontation with the US was a pressing necessity.

Yet this obstacle is as nothing compared to the domestic political barrier.  The American people couldn't care less about Syrians.  They could never be sold on the measure as a wise step against terrorism, because they are convinced that the Syrian opposition is in bed with terrorists.  They could never accept making enemies of Russia and Assad, who fight the Islamic State as well as rebel units that allegedly pro-rebel commentators insist on calling 'Al Qaeda'.  There isn't the slightest, tiniest chance that establishing a no-fly zone against Russia could get Congressional approval.  A country that wouldn't aid the rebels when the cost was almost zero is hardly going to aid them when the cost is potentially astronomical.

Is it really possible that Ignatieff and Wieseltier don't realize this?  Perhaps their screed is just empty posturing.  If not, it suggests something very different from its apparent humanitarianism.

The presupposition of their no-fly proposal is that the US must take the Syrian conflict in hand rather than entrust it to regional powers.  Better clean-shaven American Top Guns at 30,000 feet than a bunch of crazy Arabs running around with Kalashnikovs on the ground.  This is amusingly obtuse given that the Russian's Ukrainian adventure has just given the world an excellent lesson in how to intervene 'asymmetrically', without provoking a serious great power confrontation.  The US could turn this strategy against Russia through massive, whole-hearted support of local anti-Assad ground forces via the states who back them.  Indeed this is the only possible way to end the war that so appalls Ignatieff and Wieseltier.  But most likely their contempt for the people of the region blinds them to this opportunity.

US-backed Kurds coordinate with Russia, Assad to attack rebels

On February 6th, 2016, a Washington Institute for Near East Policy piece  brought into full light an aspect of the Syria conflict long shrouded in willed obscurity.  Kurdish units - US armed, trained and financed - attacked FSA positions in Western Aleppo.  The attackers were aided by Russian bombs and a simultaneous attack by the SAA, Assad's army.

Some details and implications:

The attacking units apparently belong to the all-Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Units) and the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), a  mostly Kurdish militia with a sprinkling of Arab recruits.  The SDF is simply an unofficial asset of the PYD ( Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party), a Syrian Kurdish party fighting and holding territory in Northern Syria.  The PYD and its YPG units are to all intents and purposes an arm of the Turkish PKK, one of the two main Kurdish insurgent groups in Iraq, Syria and Turkey itself.

The PYD has for over a year been a major recipient of US military support, including close air support, most notably in Kobane.  Its territory is centered in Hassakeh province.  It has had minor turf disputes with Assad, diligently inflated by pro-Kurdish propagandists.  It has also clashed the Syrian rebels, including the FSA.  More important, it has had at the very least a long-standing modus vivendi with the régime.  More recently, collaboration with Assad through his Baath party has almost come out into the open:

LCC [a rebel information agency] was informed that Hilal al-Hilal, Assistant Regional Secretary in Baath Party, visited Hasaka city (northeast of Syria) in Feb 02 and met with Kurdish Units accompanied by party leaders and security personnel of the regime in the city. LCC sources said that the attendees discussed coordination between both sides on city administration. Al-Hilal promised the Kurdish Units in the meeting with ammos and weapons support to fight against ISIS in the southern suburbs. The source mentioned also that regime’s forces is about to form a new military troop of “Volunteer Brigades”, and supervised by Hezbollah to support the Kurdish Units in their war with ISIS.

Like every announcement of Western support for the PYD, this report portrays régime-Kurdish collaboration as part of the fight against ISIS.  However Hezbollah is, of course, a Iranian-backed militia that has been the most prominent among Assad's non-Syrian support troops.  It virtually never fights ISIS but only the rebels.

From these reports it follows that the US is now underwriting a Kurdish movement which attacks, not only ISIS, but the rebels.  In particular it is now part of a major joint assault on crucial positions of the FSA (Free Syrian Army), the very group the US purports to support.  This assault is backed by Russian air strikes and complemented by simultaneous régime attacks.  The Kurdish attackers belong to an extension of the very same organizations whose main support, up to now, has been the United States.  Wherever Obama renders these organizations stronger, including all advances against ISIS, he frees up resources for attacks on the FSA.  He does so, not in a small way, but to a crucial extent.  So while the US condemns Assad and Russia, at the same time it backs attacks on the opposition to the régime - not just any part of the opposition, but the part which the US has 'vetted' as free from extremist leanings.

This is not entirely surprising.  It has long been clear that, at the end of the day, the US prefers the atrocious reality of Assad to the possibility that a rebel group, any rebel group, comes to power.   That's because the US doesn't trust even 'vetted' rebel groups to remain free of Islamist taint.

Perhaps more surprising is the curtain of silence drawn across the scene by almost every source of information allegedly disgusted with Assad and sympathetic to at least some of the rebels.  Even genuine experts on the situation don't say plainly that the Kurds are attacking the FSA with régime and Russian support. On the contrary they express themselves so obliquely the average reader could never know what's going on:

YPG forces in Efrin appear to be receiving Russian air support, particularly near Azaz, a key city currently occupied by elements of the Turkish-backed anti-Assad insurgency. Open source airstrike data suggests that the SDF could seize Manbij with US backing, while the Assad regime moves north from Aleppo to Al Bab. The YPG, in turn, could then cut a deal with the regime to travel through regime held territory to Efrin.

Thus the FSA becomes 'elements of the Turkish-backed anti-Assad insurgency', which could mean extremists.  There is not even a clear mention of any Kurdish offensive - just the support they 'appear' to be receiving which 'could' enable them to seize some locations.  But passages like this, buried in peripheral information sites, are a model of forthrightness compared to what appears, or rather doesn't appear, elsewhere.  No major newspaper speaks of the Kurdish offensive - surely one of the biggest developments in the entire five-year conflict.  None of the prominent supposedly anti-Assad analysts mention it.  Expert military observers who seem to know the movements of every tank in Syria say nothing.  Almost invariably, Kurdish attacks on the rebels are studiously ignored in favour of imprecations against Russia and Assad.

We seem to be in a media climate that mimics the McCarthy or Stalin eras.

Egypt's Arab winter

The reflections on January 25th, the date of Egypt's failed revolution, are painful to read.  Far more painful the experience of those now entombed in the military's prisons.   Alaa, in a truly heart-rending piece, decides he has nothing more to say.   Few even try to be hopeful.

Perhaps one reason the situation today seems so utterly hopeless is that none of the commentators show any sign of having learned the one sure lesson of Egypt's 'Arab Spring'.  This is not at all for lack of insight.   It is because that insight itself is, for the secularist revolutionaries who write now, painful indeed.

I do not claim to know if Egypt's revolution could have succeeded.   I do know what, I am quite sure, every Egyptian knows.   There can be no real change in Egypt unless the army is defeated.   That may be impossible, but it is certainly impossible unless secularists are fully committed to supporting the main opposition in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Secularists deceived themselves when they could not make this hard choice.   They pretended there were other choices.  They can pretend no more.  The record of secularism in the Middle East, thanks in part to Western interference, has been abysmal.   Even today, bloodstained, stagnant Egypt is not the worst of the secularist bunch; it is probably among the best.

Lebanon and Algeria had civil wars in which over a 100,000 died.  Libya is in chaos.   Syria and Iraq experience catastrophic slaughter.  Jordan may have killed as many Palestinians as any other nation before abandoning its West Bank to Israel's tender mercies.  It retains some measure of stability largely due to its smug and total subservience to the US.  It is always ready to connive with Israel,  itself a disgrace to decency and 'democracy'.  Then there are the despairing societies of Morocco and Tunisia.  Those who still champion a secularist alternative are following their heart or their faith, but not the evidence.

Secularism may be the best solution everywhere, but nowhere do the populations of the Middle East have good reason to believe it - and they don't.   Change, if it comes, will be Islamist.   Those who don't accept this, might as well join the forces of repression.

No Military Solutions?

 Anne Barnard is one of many well-informed commentators who feel that you can't overcome unconventional military opponents by purely military means.  This almost unqualified claim is often applied to Iraq and Syria.  It is essentially an argument for doing nothing, because no one even believes the West is really going to implement broad, deep, political and social 'solutions'. I will argue that (i) it's false, (ii) the opposite is true - in most relevant cases there are only military solutions, (iii) there are two military solutions in Syria, but only one is a live option.  It consists in massive support for the rebels, without vetting.

There are military options.

 The evidence Barnard offers for 'no military options' makes it unclear exactly what she has in mind.  She gives the example of Israel's failed campaign against Hezbollah in 2006.  She calls Israel's opponent "a guerilla force".  She quotes Andrew Bacevich, who says that the war on terror isn't working.  She of course applies these claims to ISIS.

It's puzzling because a war on terror seems to mean stamping out terrorist attacks within countries, especially in the West:  no more 9-11s or Paris massacres.  Her examples have only indirect bearing on that.  She talks of a guerrilla war, but Hezbollah's resistance in Lebanon was more like in-depth defense of permanently held territory from well-prepared positions.  ISIS isn't fighting a guerrilla war either; like Hezbollah it holds territory.  But if Barnard's specific message is unclear, the general lesson isn't.  It's what we hear all the time: we need to think beyond the battlefield to what one quoted analyst calls "a comprehensive political solution".  We need somehow to encourage good governance, address deep grievances, win hearts and minds.  In the current situation, we need to make Syria and Iraq better, more or less.

Well it's true that, if we don't make the world better, the angry and oppressed will always find ways to make trouble.  If ISIS goes, something about as troubling will eventually emerge.  But this truth masks an absurdity - that what we should be looking for are 'comprehensive solutions'.

Why?  We are unlikely to make the world, or the Middle East, or even Iraq and Syria, all that much better: the West's record for such attempts is far, far worse than its military record.

This is not a coincidence, because the West's political meddling has been built, not on military success, but on failure.  You can't improve a mess you can't control, and the West has never, in recent times, established territorial control in any of its military campaigns.  But Barnard is wrong to infer from these failures that there are no military solutions.  She doesn't go as far as to say that military means never work in asymmetrical conflicts, but she and those she cites clearly think the historical record supplies all but conclusive 'evidence' - she uses the word - that more military force just makes things worse.

That's false.  The historical record shows that military means typically work just fine if you fight your own wars rather expecting someone else to fight them.  When advanced nations use their own troops and not proxy forces, they often succeed - maybe always, but there are so many possible cases I won't go that far.  And when advanced nations want others to fight for them, they generally lose - even if they themselves commit large forces to the battle.  The gospel of hearts and minds is just a symptom of unwillingness to face this reality.

Look again at the evidence.

Barnard cites the 2006 Lebanon war as a case where Israel's overwhelming force couldn't overcome its irregular enemy.  Israel may have possessed overwhelming force.  Like all modern major military powers, it was happy to use that force from thousands of feet in the air, with predictably atrocious and unfruitful results.  But it only got a taste of ground fighting, and decided that wasn't for them:

The Israeli cabinet agreed to the cease-fire on August 13, almost immediately after it committed the IDF to a full-scale ground attack. (*)

Barnard says:  "If overwhelming firepower alone could guarantee success, the United States would have won the Vietnam War and emerged victorious from Afghanistan and Iraq."  Here we have cases that go to the heart of the matter.  In all these conflicts, the US, with touching faith, expected proxy forces to make the difference.

Vietnam showed that even with large troop commitments, that doesn't work.  Proxy forces are at best collaborators with foreign forces, at worst, corrupt marauders.  Such forces are always undermined by the hatred they inspire and by their lack of serious commitment to the Western cause, whatever it may be.

The French experience in Algeria is another example of how, even with large commitments of your own troops, the use of proxy forces prevents sustainable triumph.  Wikipedia notes that

According to French government figures, there were 236,000 Algerian Muslims serving in the French Army in 1962 (four times more than in the FLN), either in regular units (Spahis and Tirailleurs) or as irregulars (harkis and moghaznis).

Four times as many proxies as their opponents' total forces!  The French did, in a way, win on the ground - resistance at least went dormant - but failed in their objective of keeping Algeria French:  they could not see how to sustain the troop commitments necessary to secure that goal.  In conventional military terms, not attaining your objective means you've failed.

What then of US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Overwhelming force from up in the air and commitments of US ground troops a fraction of what military analysts required.  How to make up the difference?  oh, proxies.  We know how that worked out.

But this does not mean there are no conventional, non-political military solutions in 'asymmetric' warfare.  To find them you have to start with the 19th Century when colonizers and imperialists fought their own battles.  They did use some 'colonial troops', but these were not, as in Algeria, special-purpose auxiliaries recruited from the target area on an ad hoc basis.  They were, like the Gurkhas, full-fledged units of the colonial army, deployed all over the world.  The imperialist/colonialist forces bore no resemblance to the proxy armies of recent times and often did without colonial units of any kind.

History has partially obscured the success of colonialist armies by focusing on lost battles in won wars.  One hears how a British force was wiped out by Afghans in January 1842, but not how the British returned and crushed their opponents in August of that same year - and again in 1878-1880.  Similarly the Sepoy mutiny and rebellion of 1857 did have initial success, but was decisively suppressed.

In virtually every case where the colonizers or imperialists fought their own battles, they won.  The British overcame the Boers and the Zulu rebellions in South Africa. Later they defeated the Mau-Mau.  The indigenous population was consistently defeated throughout Central and South America and throughout the Caribbean.  The North American Indians were all defeated with infamous finality.  Perhaps the last time colonizers took on a rebellion with their own forces, they also won - in the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960.  In those days, somehow, the West didn't realize there were 'no military solutions'.

The reason this absurd doctrine has gained currency is that the military solutions are not only not tested, they are not even contemplated.  No one suggests that maybe the US should send 600,000 Americans to fight in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or anywhere else.  This is unfortunate because it substitutes fantasies about hearts and minds for a realistic assessment of the situation anywhere the West thinks it ought to 'fight terror'.

There are only military options.

The truth is that the West is utterly, permanently unwilling to commit the forces needed to effect the military solution that must precede any political solution in Iraq, Syria, or anywhere else.  Yet these solutions are often needed, even if it is to solve problems the West itself has created.  What's more, the whole world knows this and, as one acute analyst has observed, this unwillingness in practical terms amounts to inability.  Militarily the West is not powerful any more; it just has a lot of powerful military equipment.

Unfortunately the fact that the West is unwilling to undertake military solutions doesn't mean they're unnecesssary, or that somehow, proxy forces with a sprinkling of colonial advisers will do the trick.  Military solutions are required because there is no other sort of option.

In Iraq, the decision has already been made.  Dealing with ISIS has been left with the Iraqi government, the Kurds, and the Iranians.  It is unlikely this will go well, but the West will not and for all practical purposes cannot do anything about that.

Syria is a very different matter.  Syria's warfare is not particularly 'asymmetric' since the rebels, ISIS and the régime all hold territory and fight with heavy weapons.  The Syrian conflict began with and continues to be a revolution that has taken on much of the character of a civil war.  In this conflict ISIS is not, as it is in Iraq, insurrectionary.  It is more like a rogue third element which would have no future if either the régime or the rebels effect a decisive victory.  This is not a conflict where the combatants can just melt away or go elsewhere.  If they lose, it will be a disaster for them unless there is just the sort of international policing and intervention that no one can rationally expect given the reluctance of the West to commit ground forces.  Indeed that's why the war goes on and on.  This is a conflict that will be decided only when someone wins.

Never in history, so far as I know, has a full-tilt civil war ended without one party achieving military supremacy.  This isn't surprising:  in civil wars, unlike many cross-border wars, the stakes are always very high.  In some cases, like the English civil wars and the French Revolution, there were no negotiations at all.  In others, like the US and Sri Lankan civil wars, there were token negotiations or formal acknowledgement of defeat, but only after vicious and prolonged warfare finally convinced one side they couldn't win.  It is just the opposite of the 'no military solutions' trope:  there is no political solution, only a military one.  No one can build political institutions unless someone is in physical control of the territory on which those institutions are to be built.  Establishing physical control is a military task that comes prior to any political tasks.

The live option

The West, frightened by ISIS and annoyed by refugees, at long last believes it must actually respond to this situation.  Proxies, we've seen, won't do, but neither will neutrality: this once-popular option has to its credit nothing but futile negotiations and the desperation that fuels ISIS.

At this point the West seems inclined to join Russia in backing Assad, but this is irrationality motivated by distaste for involvement.  Neither Russia nor the West is going to give Assad the massive support he'd need to win.  Were they to do so, it wouldn't do anyone any good:  the record of promoting murderous dictators is not encouraging. Though a Pinochet did last quite a while, in the end he failed to attain his objectives.  So did the brutal Greek and Argentine and Brazilian military dictatorships.  But these examples are inappropriate. What fans of Assad need to understand is that he is not even like the murdering, torturing, sadistic Pinochet.  He does not belong on the political spectrum at all.  He is like Idi Amin or Pol Pot - who like Assad may once have had objectives or even principles but who descended into madness.  Pinochet killed something like 3000.  Assad killed 200,000 in an only slightly more populous nation.  His forces murder babies and inflict indescribable tortures even on children.  The idea that the survivors of such horrors will kiss and make up with their tormentors to build a stable democratic society is laughable.

Elections are a non-starter because, again, you cannot have meaningful elections when no one controls the whole territory, so that voters everywhere are in the power of one faction or another.  Nor will the families of those so atrociously murdered be up for a sprightly electoral contest.  The alternative is partition, and the West half-expects this.  It hopes for a stalemate in which exhausted rebels get enclaves and the régime gets the rest.  So the 'political solution' is either to leave the régime to govern its remaining territory, or to legitimate that régime nationwide through bogus elections.

Perhaps the US is unaware of this strategy's costs.  In 2011-2012, Syrians did not chant "Assad must go"; they didn't feel they had a basically good government corrupted by a bad leader.  They chanted "The people want the fall of the régime".  Now that both the US and Russia explicitly reject 'regime change', the US can no longer be seen as merely lukewarm in its support of the rebels.  It has come out against the rebellion's objective, which in rebel eyes must amount to coming out against the rebels themselves.  That means everything done to preserve the régime - if not in the past, from this time on - shall be laid at the door of the US.

Every bomb dropped by Russia on civilians and every régime offensive proceeding under Russian air cover must now be seen as an implementation of joint Russia/US policy.  Every Syrian with murdered relatives, every Syrian displaced, everyone living under barrel bomb attacks, everyone starving in besieged Damascus suburbs, everyone who is actually still in rebellion ...all of these must now see America as set against them and ready to condone any atrocity, however horrifying, ever committed against them.  And of course it is a metaphor to say any of these atrocities were committed by Assad.  They were committed by the régime he heads, the one the US doesn't want to change.

 

What possible benefit the US expects to reap from this policy is a complete mystery.  They have adopted a stance which forces every genuine rebel against the régime to choose between ISIS on the one hand and Nusra/Ahrar on the other:  any US vetted or supported groups are now hopelessly compromised because they are aligned with a backer who explicitly rejects régime change and therefore rebellion.  What's more, at least every Sunni Arab and many other Muslims world-wide will now see the US as an enemy who idiotically supposes it can make up with a little political correctness for the horrors it allows to be visited on Syria.  Is this America's 'hearts and minds' strategy to counter ISIS?  One can only conclude that the US is not looking for benefits, but simply for a way to do as little as possible whatever the price.  This is irrationality in pure form.

As if this were not enough, the strategy of angling for a partition of Syria cannot succeed.  Any such partition, to endure, would have to be enforced.  But the outside parties don't want to send ground troops; that is the whole point, if any, of their responses.  How then do they expect partition to be maintained?  from 5000 feet in the air?  Do they think that somehow Iran, Saudi, and Turkey will join hands in fervent desire to undertake one of the most costly police operations conceivable?

So the only realistic choice is one the US has decisively rejected:  to back the rebels, not with an ass-covering trickle of arms to allegedly sanitized factions, but with hundreds of tanks, thousands of other heavy weapons, and millions of rounds of ammunition.  To resolve the conflict, 'backing' must involve supporting rebels who are by no means proxies, so without the niceties of 'vetting'.  We have already seen that the vetting process, in its eagerness to see that no one with any taint to Islamism receives supplies, results in a negligible weapons flow and, increasingly, a flow to forces that are not rebels at all, but US proxies against ISIS.

There is a slight chance Turkey and the Gulf States will pursue this course of action.  They must now see that the US cannot be relied on even to stick to its own stated objectives.  This is also a case where immorality is a political liability.  When so much of the world sees America as irresolute, cowardly, selfish and unjust, governments will not find it wise to maintain their links to US policy.  So perhaps there will be a regional push to overthrow the régime.  Perhaps too it is worth looking at the reasons the US will doubtless consider when it decides whether to obstruct such a push.

If it does consider the consequences of supplying unvetted rebels, it will find many analysts in hysterics - after all, some of these radical Islamists call themselves Al Qaeda!  Their reaction is based on two things - justified but irrelevant apprehension, and relevant but unjustified apprehension.

First, they present evidence these groups are anti-liberal, anti-democratic, sectarian and repressively orthodox.  Since analysts work with the groups' official statements and interviews with its leadership, they are looking at the official stance of the groups, and they are correct in their verdict.  But you can't parlay dislike of their domestic agenda into some danger to the West.  So apprehension about their agenda, though justified, is irrelevant to Western policy concerns.

What is relevant to those concerns is any likelihood of attacks on the West.  But the evidence supporting apprehension about attacks is very weak.  One problem in linking Jabhat al Nusra to official Al Qaeda statements - which these days are in any case not very threatening - is this sort of analysts' material needs to be balanced by facts on the ground.

The core of Jabhat al Nusra is of course not its officials who issue statements but its fighters, mostly Syrian.  Here it's worth heeding Mowaffaq Safadi:

As a Syrian who lives abroad but still closely follows the dynamics of the civil war in my country of birth, it has became clear to me that for many young men being a fighter has become more of a job than a calling – a career path they feel they have to follow for lack of alternatives. As in any job market, employers will compete for the biggest talent by providing different benefits.

Many rebel fighters simply do not care about the affiliation of the group they are joining – whether it is with al-Qaida, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the international coalition, the British government or anyone else. The international geopolitical situation simply isn’t the first thing on a rebel fighters’ mind when considering joining this group or that one.

To give you some idea of just how divorced from ideology are many of these fighters, one such fighter, interviewed at age 16, said he loved Bin Laden "but also George Bush".   The idea that Jabhat al Nusra is a robotic brigade of stern Al Qaeda ideologues is not borne out by the facts, and this bears on both their domestic and their foreign agendas.

Beyond this, the analysts have nothing more than guilt by association and innuendo. Yes, some Nusra guy hung out with some guys who somewhere else at some other time liked the idea of attacking Western targets, but did not do so.  Yes, some media guy in the Khorasan group did once fight in Afghanistan. Yes Nusra has "bomb experts", not surprising since they use bombs when fighting in Syria and sometimes over the Lebanese border.  So here we have a valid but not a justified concern.  None of this is serious evidence, unlike the dead bodies of Westerners actually killed in Western cities by actual attackers who actually heeded ISIS' exhortations to attack Western countries.

It is probably true that, if you bomb Nusra enough, they will develop an interest in retaliating - after all, they are not masochistic or irrational.  But for them, at least, Al Qaeda seems merely, as many security analysts say, a brand.  The last time the US government issued a warning which mentioned Nusra was on the July 4th weekend of 2015.  Yet they said there was no specific, credible threat.  Does that mean they were warning about a general threat? was that threat credible?  Yes Jabhat al Nusra may pose some risk to the West, though not nearly so much as the pro-régime strategy, and far less than the complementary strategy of treating them as enemies.  As might be expected, there are only risky alternatives, but the assessment of risk mustn't be one-sided.

In broader terms, there is a difference between disliking someone's domestic agenda and expecting them to plant bombs in Times Square.  Analysts seem to have forgotten this distinction when they never worry about Assad, the head of a régime which for decades was excoriated as a sponsor of terrorism abroad, but trumpet the danger of Nusra, which has only tenuous connections to anything of the sort.  Perhaps if Nusra fighters wore suits...

Risk is not a reason to throw up your hands and run away.  You can try to affect what will happen when the rebels succeed.  In the aftermath you can try to come to an understanding with hostile groups, or build up their rivals: this would be a very different matter from siphoning off rebels to fight ISIS rather than Assad.  But in Syria at least, to deny support to groups tainted by association with people you don't like is unrealistic and childish.  Nothing in recent years has disposed Syrians to abandon groups who have fought with them side by side while the world stood by and let Assad slaughter at will.  It is the West that needs to earn the trust of Syrians, not the other way around.

(*)  Andrew H. Cordesman, “Lessons Of The 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War”, Washington DC (The CSIS Press), 2007, p.5

And the Darwin Award goes to...

In Syria, day after day after day, on average about 120 people die.  Some would envy the deaths of the Parisians.  A 13 year old boy is beaten and burned until he is hardly more than a blackened lump.  He is castrated and dies.  Women have rats inserted into their vaginas.  Babies have their throats slit.

The West tut-tuts, does nothing.  The UN tut-tuts, does nothing.  Human rights organizations call for nice, orderly, legal measures against Assad.  They know with absolute certainty these measures won't be taken, except perhaps years later, after many thousands more die.

The régime uses poison gas.  Obama draws a red line, against the use of poison gas.  The régime uses poison gas on a larger scale.

Obama does nothing, seeks approval of Congress which he knows will reject any action.  The UK makes noises, does nothing.  France makes bigger noises, sees America will do nothing, does nothing.

These governments are ahead of the opposition, who think the West should be nicer to Assad.  Overwhelmingly, the people of Europe want nothing done.  They aren't interested in protecting the Syrian people.  Some just want to indulge themselves with charity projects for the ever-growing number of victims.

The US gives a trickle of aid to the resistance against Assad.  It won't provide anything like enough arms to overthrow him, much less the air support it provided in Libya.  It fears that some fighter's third cousin threatened the West.  It does nothing against Hezbollah, which actually does attack the West, but which fights for Assad.

Assad doesn't just bomb apartment buildings, schools, bread lines and hospitals.  His planes return to bomb the rescuers.

The only countries that help the rebels are Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.  They are condemned because they're Islamist and not democratic enough for those who condone or support Syria's dictatorship.

Betrayed by Obama, abandoned by Europe, the Syrian people see that the secularist West is content to watch them die.  They are in agony.  They grow more and more religious, as often happens when people are abandoned by the secular powers and aided by religious ones.

The Syrian rebels find that their strongest allies are radical Islamists.  One such group, ISIS, goes crazy, starts attacking them, insists on restoring a Caliphate to bring justice and destroy the secular enemies.

The crazy group grows and routs the forces of the West's pet government in Iraq.  Now the West reacts.  The US bombs Iraq.  So do Britain and France.  The US falls in love with Kurdish groups who are bitter enemies of Turkey, the only serious opponent of Assad on Syria's borders.  It showers the Kurds with support.  The Kurds fight ISIS, the enemies of both the rebels and Assad.  The Kurds do not fight Assad.  The West does not fight Assad.  The US trains Syrians on condition they don't fight Assad.  The US improves relations with Iran, which fights for Assad.  It keeps backing the Iraqi government, which supports Assad.

France intensifies its bombing of ISIS.  To be clear, from a safe distance it kills human beings who belong to ISIS.  And probably a few who don't.  France still does not bomb Assad.

After hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands murdered by torture, millions homeless, starvation, gas, barrel bombs daily, some radical Syrian Islamists inflict on Paris, for one day, less than Syria suffers every day.  They say this is because of Syria.

The West is shocked.  Hollande takes a moment out from his bombing campaign to call it an act of war.