It has been a week since the Russians began their airstrikes in Syria, and the countries that have already been bombing there for over a year — the United States and other NATO countries — are working themselves up into a rage about it. The Russians are not bombing the right people. They are killing civilians. They are reckless, dangerous and just plain evil.
A statement issued last weekend by NATO’s 28 members warned of “the extreme danger of such irresponsible behaviour” and urged Russia “to cease and desist.” When a Russian warplane attacking Islamist targets in northwestern Syria strayed across the frontier into Turkey for a few minutes, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the Turks would have been within their rights to shoot it down.
The weather was poor, the target was close to the border and the Russians apologized afterwards, but NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the incursion “does not look like an accident.” So what does he think the motive was, then? Russian pilots are getting bored, and are having a competition to see who can stay in Turkish airspace longest without getting shot down?
But the biggest Western complaint is that the Russians are bombing the wrong people. Contrary to American and European assertions, they are indeed bombing the “right” people, the troops of Islamic State that Western air forces have been bombing for the past year. But the Russians are also bombing the troops of the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. They might even bomb the troops of the Free Syrian Army, if they could find any.
Western propaganda makes a systematic distinction between Islamic State (bad) and the “opposition” forces (all the other groups). The problem is that there is really little difference between them: They all want to overthrow the Syrian regime, and they are all Islamist jihadis, except for the tattered remnants of the Free Syrian Army.
The Nusra Front was created in 2012 as the Syrian branch of the Islamic State, and broke away early last year in a dispute over tactics and turf. It is now the Syrian branch of al-Qaida. Ahrar al-Sham was also founded by an al-Qaida member, and is a close military and political ally of Nusra. And until the propaganda needs of the moment changed, even the U.S. admitted that the “moderate” elements of the Syrian opposition had collapsed.
There are no reliable statistics on this, but a good guess would be that 35 percent of the rebel troops confronting Assad’s regime belong to Islamic State, 35 percent to the Nusra Front, 20 percent to Ahrar al-Sham, and 10 percent odds and sods, including the Free Syrian Army. In other words, at least 90 percent of the armed opposition are Islamists, and probably no more than 5 percent are secular, pro-democratic groups.
There are not three alternatives in Syria. There are only two: either Bashar al-Assad’s regime survives, or the Islamists take over. Really serious Islamists, who hate democracy, behead people and plan to overthrow all the other Arab governments before they set out to conquer the rest of the world.
They are probably being a bit over-optimistic there, but they would be seriously dangerous people if they commanded the resources of the Syrian state, and they would be a calamity for Syrians who are not Sunni Muslims. The Russians have accepted this reality, decided that it is in their interests for Assad to survive and are acting accordingly.
The U.S. and its allies, by contrast, are hamstrung by their previous insistence that Assad must go on human rights grounds. They cannot change their tune now without losing face, so they don’t bomb Assad themselves, but they persist in the fantasy that some other force can be created in Syria that will defeat both Assad and Islamic State.
Moreover, the leaders of America’s two most important allies in the Muslim world, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are determined that Assad should go (mainly because he is Shiite, and they are Sunnis), and they would be very angry if the U.S. helped him survive.
That, plus American anger at Russia over Ukraine and lingering hostility from the Cold War, is why NATO is condemning the Russian intervention in Syria so vehemently. But it is all humbug and hypocrisy.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose commentary is published in 45 countries.