My Enemy’s Enemy

Ben Wildsmith

Between Muammar Gaddafi’s vilification for the Lockerbie atrocity and his eventual slaughter during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, there was a moment where his apparent contrition coincided with the west’s need for allies in the Arab world.

In 2004, Tony Blair travelled to Libya and met with Gadaffi in a Bedouin tent, symbolically welcoming the Libyan leader back into the family of nations by means of a £110 million deal for Libyan gas.

The two men smiled and shook hands for the cameras, with the man Ronald Reagan had described as a ‘mad dog’ emphasising the need for solidarity against a common enemy in Al Qaeda.

Arab Spring

Whilst the American-backed Arab Spring did for Gadaffi, leaving Libya as a slave-trading failed state, Russian intervention kept his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Al Assad, in power until this week, when his regime was overwhelmed by Jihadi forces backed by Turkey, alongside Kurdish groups supplied by the USA.

Within hours of their victory, the Israeli military had moved to destroy the Syrian navy and Air Force in their entirety, effectively removing the nation from an active role in the geopolitical scene.

Iran’s supply routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have gone, leaving them exposed and Iran’s strategy of multipolar resistance in tatters.

It’s a big moment that seems to have revealed both Russia and China as paper tigers in the region. For now, at least, America is ascendant, and Turkey restored to the top table.

Rebels

As forces advanced on Damascus the UK press reported them first as ‘rebels’ before settling on ‘insurgents’. Their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, is man with a past that includes senior roles in Al Qaeda and public statements warning that Syria’s Druze, Alawite, Christian, and Shiite minorities would be purged under his leadership.

He was a close ally of ISIS founder, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, before defying him to lead his own Jihadi movement: the Nusra Front.

He had a £10 million bounty placed on him by America and his current organisation, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is considered an alternative name for Al Qaeda and thus proscribed across Europe and by the USA.

With a newly trimmed beard, sometimes sporting a western blazer, al-Golani now presents himself as someone whom the west can trust. He speaks of his stance mellowing with age and governments seem ready to legitimise HTS as a bona fide regime in Syria.

How this will work isn’t clear. In particular, Turkey’s relationship with the Kurds doesn’t augur well for peaceful coexistence in a federal settlement. Also, whilst al-Golani may have become the acceptable face of Salafist expansion, who knows the ambitions of the fighters he currently directs?

Jihadis

Many are non-Syrian jihadis from China and Turkmenistan. All have emerged from the brutality of the Syrian war and subsequent deprivations in the camps of Idlib. It is fanciful to hope that all of them will go along with a pluralist Syrian state and an end to violent jihad. It’s not what they signed up for.

For now, though, we find ourselves tacitly aligned with Al Qaeda as it dismantles a nation state with the assistance of Benjamin Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The tectonic stresses of conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have funnelled NATO countries into common cause with people who may yet turn out to be agents of unfathomable chaos. Recent experiences in Libya and Iraq do not suggest a predictable outcome to this week’s events, and Syria’s proximity to Israel and Europe means that its failure as a state would be impossible to contain.

As al-Golani’s public relations makeover began, another fervent image flashed around the world’s screens. Luigi Mangione, the apparent murderer of insurance executive Brian Thompson, appeared to solemn condemnation in the legacy media and hero worship across the internet.

The division of the USA finds expression in every event, and this was no different.

Tribes lined up behind either Mangione or the system he sought to expose with his murderous act, a zero-sum standoff between citizens who no longer speak the same language.

Events are moving so quickly in the world that alliances and ideologies become meaningless almost as soon as they are forged. From Syria to the streets of New York, unthinkable agreements ae being made between people whose traditional certainties have crumbled to dust.

You can support the US government, Israel, Al Qaeda, Erdogan, and private healthcare bosses without accusations of contradiction or hypocrisy.

As things stand, that is the position of mainstream western thought – as American as apple pie and as British as queuing. It’s going to be difficult to defend, let alone maintain.