It's been a week since the Russians began their air strikes in Syria, and the countries that have already been bombing there for over a year — the United States and some other countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation — 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 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, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that 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 apologised afterwards, but Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the incursion “does not look like an accident.” So what does he think the motive was, thenIJ Russian pilots are getting bored, and are having a competition to see who can stay in Turkish airspace longest without getting shot downIJ
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 the Islamic State that Western Air Forces have been bombing for the past year. But the Russians are also bombing the troops of the Al 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.
The Al 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 Qaeda. Ahrar al-Sham was also founded by an Al Qaeda member, and is a close military and political ally of Al Nusra. And until the propaganda needs of the moment changed, even the United States 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 per cent of the rebel troops confronting Syria's President Bashar al-Assad's regime belong to the Islamic State, 35 per cent to the Al Nusra Front, 20 per cent to Ahrar al-Sham, and 10 per cent odds and sods including the Free Syrian Army. In other words, at least 90 per cent of the armed opposition are Islamists, and probably no more than five per cent are secular, pro-democratic groups.
There are not three alternatives in Syria. There are only two: Either Mr 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 own interests for Mr Assad to survive, and are acting accordingly.
The United States and its allies, by contrast, are hamstrung by their previous insistence that Mr Assad must go on human rights grounds. They cannot change their tune now without losing face, so they don't bomb Mr Assad's forces, but they persist in the fantasy that some other force can be created in Syria that will defeat both Mr Assad and the Islamic State.