Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (20 page)

Having helped drive Syria into a civil war, Saudi Arabia continued to supply money and arms to various jihadi groups there until March 2014, when Riyadh finally took fright at the monster it had helped create. Bin Sultan was dismissed and replaced by his deputy at the Saudi equivalent of the CIA, Youssef bin Ali al Idrisi. Islamic State, al
Qaeda, the Nusra Front and other jihadi groups were condemned as “terrorist,” and Saudi citizens who offered them public support or gave them moral or material aid would thenceforward face long prison terms. It was made a crime for a Saudi citizen to fight in a foreign conflict, and Riyadh called on all other foreign fighters (an estimated seven thousand at that time) to leave Syria as well. “Caliph Ibrahim” of Islamic State responded by calling for ISIS fighters to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia and, despite arrests of hundreds of suspected jihadis in the kingdom, the attacks duly began. Yet the Saudi elite remains firmly committed to the overthrow of the Assad regime at almost any cost, because it will never accept that an Alawite (that is, a Shia) regime closely allied to Iran should continue to control Syria. This means that it will not actively collaborate in the destruction of the Islamist organizations that now dominate the Syrian insurgency, even though the cost of this policy for the Saudi regime could ultimately be very high.

Turkey, the other most influential Muslim member of the motley “coalition” that President Obama cobbled together in late 2014, has until recently been equally determined to see Assad fall. Although a large majority of Turks are Sunni Muslims, it was, and formally still is, a secular and democratic republic. For the past decade, however, Turkey has been governed by the Justice and Development Party, an Islamic and conservative grouping that has finally broken the secularists’ long stranglehold on power. Its
leader and Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, gradually let his religious and specifically Sunni impulses off the leash as he consolidated his hold on power, and when the Syrian civil war broke out he publicly aligned Turkey with the Sunni rebels and against the Assad regime.

In practical terms, Erdoğan’s most valuable and indeed almost indispensable contribution to the jihadi cause was to keep Turkey’s 500-mile (820-kilometre) border with Syria open. Most of the foreign arms, money and supplies that reached the Syrian rebels came in across that frontier, as did the great majority of the foreign volunteers coming to fight for Islamic State or the Nusra Front. Erdoğan presumably allowed this because he would even rather see Islamic State survive than see Syria’s Alawite ruler, Bashar al Assad, stay in power. Since he could not justify the open-border policy to Turkey’s allies on those grounds, he simply pretended that he was unable to close it. “We cannot put troops everywhere on the border,” is how Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu put it.

This is nonsense. Turkey could station a soldier every ten metres along the full length of its border with Syria, and it would only require a quarter of its army’s soldiers (who do not have a great deal else to occupy their time) to do the job. Obviously, that’s not exactly how you would actually go about closing the border, but the point is that the manpower to do the job was not a problem—and neither, given Turkey’s new status as a major developed country, was the technology you would actually deploy
along the border. The border stayed open because Erdoğan wanted it that way.

It’s hard to see how a Syria under the control of fanatical Islamists would be to Turkey’s advantage, or even to Erdoğan’s personal political advantage, and the only thing that their take on Islam and his own have in common is that they are both Sunni Muslim. Nevertheless,
al Jazeera
reported in May 2015 that Turkey and Saudi Arabia had signed a pact two months earlier to coordinate assistance to rebel forces trying to overthrow the Assad regime. The forces to be aided may have excluded Islamic State’s troops, but they would certainly have included the Nusra Front’s fighters, who now dominate rebel operations in western Syria. But all of this has become quite uncertain after the disappointing outcome for Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party in the June 2015 parliamentary elections in Turkey.

After eleven years as prime minister, Erdoğan chose to run for the presidency in 2014. He was duly elected to this largely ceremonial office—but his intention was to follow that with a constitutional amendment that would turn it into a powerful executive presidency. In the 2015 parliamentary election, quite unexpectedly, his party not only failed to achieve the 60 percent “super-majority” of seats that is required for constitutional amendments; it actually didn’t win even half the seats, and will either have to form a coalition or force a new election. Erdoğan seems to have chosen the latter course.

On July 24 Erdoğan’s caretaker government announced that its aircraft had attacked ISIS targets in Syria; on July 25 it also began bombing the former separatists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq. It linked the two groups under attack as “terrorists” who threatened the Turkish state, but there were two big differences. One was that ISIS is a genuine terrorist state—though one that Turkey has indirectly aided in the past—whereas the PKK has been engaged in peace talks with Erdoğan for the past two years and observed a ceasefire for the last four. The other was that in the last five days of July Turkey bombed only half a dozen ISIS targets of no great significance, but it hit 186 Kurdish targets with over 400 missions.

A cynical but obvious conclusion would be that Erdoğan is making token attacks on ISIS (and even making Incirlik air base available to “coalition” aircraft, which halves the distance they must travel to ISIS targets) as a sop to the United States, in order to obtain American support for his attacks on the PKK. Moreover, that he is making an essentially unprovoked attack on the Kurdish organization as the key part of his strategy for forcing and winning another election.

Erdoğan lost the June 2015 election mainly because conservative Kurdish voters abandoned his party for a new one that favours reforms that would give Kurds in Turkey full political, social and cultural rights. The only group he might win over to replace them is ultra-nationalist right-wing voters, who were furious at his peace talks with
the PKK. So he needed to end his dalliance with the Kurds in a dramatic way, and what better to do it with than bombs? The rest is window-dressing, mainly to keep the United States happy. So long as he is in power, ISIS need not fear a full-scale Turkish attack, and even the Turkish-Syrian border may remain porous.

The only other potential American ally of any military consequence in the region is Iran, which would certainly like to see the destruction of Islamic State, but Iran has no common border with Syria and is not a politically acceptable partner for Washington. It is a de facto ally of the United States in the struggle against Islamic State in Iraq, but it is not a member of the “coalition” because the Saudi Arabians would never permit it (nor would American domestic politics let the Obama administration allow it). On several occasions when the Iraqi army has got into trouble fighting ISIS, only a combination of U.S. air power and Iranian ground troops has been able to save the day, but these two most powerful supporters of the Iraqi government will not exchange even time-sensitive information about incoming air strikes and the like directly. At the insistence of the U.S. government, they only communicate through official Iraqi intermediaries, however long that may take. And in Syria, Iran is Assad’s most important ally, while the United States remains pledged to the overthrow of the Syrian regime.

A coalition with divisions and contradictions as deep and complex as these is never going to destroy Islamic
State by a decisive ground offensive, so the United States is quite rightly determined not to commit large numbers of American troops to the task. The option of “doing a lot” does not really exist.

Doing nothing, or at least doing as little as possible, is also a tempting option. It would have been the right choice in almost every “terrorist” crisis of the past fifteen years: Western military interventions have always made things worse. What happens in Syria is not a vital national concern of any Western country. Indeed, what happens in the entire Middle East is of much less importance to the rest of the world than the media and the hawks in Western capitals pretend: the entire region accounts for only 10 percent of the world’s population, and only half of the region’s population is Arab. In economic terms the Middle East is practically irrelevant, except for its oil. Nor does it really matter to the rest of the world who the leaders of the oil-exporting countries are: no matter who is in charge, they would have to go on selling their oil in order to feed their populations.

On the other hand, doing absolutely nothing might be enough to bring about the fall of the Assad regime and an Islamist takeover of all of Syria, which could mean the death of millions. Preventing that is obviously not a national interest for Western countries, and whether it is a moral obligation or not is a matter of opinion. The West did nothing to interfere with the genocide in Cambodia in 1975–79, and next to nothing to stop the genocide in
Rwanda in 1994. It was very slow in intervening to stop the slow-motion genocide directed against Muslims in former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s, although it finally did use air power to stop the Serbs after Srebrenica in 1995, and again in Kosovo in 1998–99. So you might say (if you are very cynical) that intervention is a moral obligation for the West if it can be done from the air, without risking the lives of its own troops in ground operations. Which brings us to the third option: doing just a little.

If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons
.

Winston Churchill just after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, June 21, 1941
³⁶

You don’t get the choices you would like to have; you get the choices that are on the table. Anything the West does to curb the activities of Islamic State in Syria automatically increases the survival chances of the brutal Assad regime. Churchill did not think that Stalin was a good man, and he knew that the Soviet Union was a terrible place. But in mid-1941 Britain was still effectively alone in the struggle against Hitler, and Churchill knew that it needed a powerful ally to win, maybe even just to survive. So he unhesitatingly recommended an alliance with the Soviet Union to his cabinet and to Parliament.

The analogy is not perfect. If Islamic State and/or al Nusra drove Bashar al Assad from power and took over Syria, the West would survive anyway. In fact, it wouldn’t even suffer that much damage: this is not an existential issue for the West. But terrible things would happen to Syrian minorities, and with Syria and much of Iraq as a base, the Islamist militants might be able to conquer or subvert other Arab countries, or at least frighten them into silence. These are not desirable outcomes, and if it is possible to avert them at a reasonable cost, then the appropriate course of action to achieve that end should be considered.

The appropriate course of action is to ensure the survival of the Syrian regime. Yes, Assad and his Ba’ath Party have done terrible things (as Stalin did), but they are still preferable to the alternative (as was the survival of the Soviet Union in 1941). The Assad regime’s cruelty and tyranny are comparable to Saddam Hussein’s record in Iraq but, at least in retrospect, it is clear that it would have been preferable to leave Saddam Hussein in power. Any reasonable observer would agree that Iraq would be a far better place, and that hundreds of thousands of people who died would still be alive, if the United States and its sidekicks had not invaded the country in 2003. The best of the bad options now is to leave Assad in power in Syria, although—horror of horrors!—that would mean the United States was helping a dictator.

It is not at all unthinkable that the United States might help a dictator to survive. It helped Saddam Hussein survive
his foolish war against Iran. It backed the Algerian regime in its brutal war against Islamist rebels there in the 1990s. It protected Pol Pot and the remnants of his regime long after the Vietnamese army had ended his reign of terror in Cambodia. It sheltered various South Korean military dictatorships from invasion by North Korea for decades. Some of these decisions were wise and some were not, but there’s no principle at stake here. The only relevant question is whether the choice does more good than bad.