Neocons Urge Embrace of Al Qaeda

[yurbud]

I'm having a hard time keeping track of which terrorist group we are supposed to be afraid of, which are now freedom fighters, and how much it depends on what our government thinks of the government they are terrorizing.

But since al Qaeda is supported by our close ally Saudi, there's no way neocons were tempted to use them for a little terror here in 2001 to give Americans an attitude adjustment in favor of war.

The latest evidence of a sea change in establishment thinking is a blog that Ahmed Rashid, a prominent Middle East correspondent, recently published on The New York Review of Books website. Entitled “Why We Need al-Qaeda,” it argues that Al Qaeda and its Syrian affiliate, Al Nusra, are evolving in a more moderate direction in growing contrast to its rival, the super-violent Islamic State. So why not use Al Nusra as a counterforce against both Bashar al-Assad and ISIS?

As Rashid puts it: “Unlike ISIS, which demands absolute subjugation of the inhabitants of any territory it conquers (surrender or be executed), al-Nusra is cooperating with other anti-Assad groups and recently joined the ‘Army of Conquest’ alliance of rebel militias in northern Syria. Moreover, in contrast to ISIS’s
largely international and non-Syrian fighting force, al-Nusra’s fighters are almost wholly Syrian, making them both more reliable and more committed to Syria’s future.

***
This is dramatic stuff. After all, Rashid is not taking aim at some minor doctrine, but one that has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. Moreover, he’s not the only one talking this way. Since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew to Riyadh in early March to meet with Saudi King Salman and discuss ways of upping support for the Syrian Islamist opposition, there has been a veritable boomlet in terms of calls for a rapprochement with Al Qaeda.

Within days of the Riyadh get-together, Foreign Affairs went public with an article arguing that even though “the United States is the closest it has ever been to destroying al Qaeda, its interests would be better served by keeping the terrorist organization afloat.” Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, wrote a few weeks later that “while not everyone likes Nusra’s ideology, there is a growing sense in the north of Syria that it is the best alternative on the ground – and that ideology is a small price to pay for higher returns.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/26/neocons-urge-embrace-of-al-qaeda/

[GeorgeGist]

1. Neocon. Same as the old con ...

crazy.

[get the red out]

2. What they support

Is whatever will keep the money rolling into the defense industries and their own coffers.

[yurbud]

3. and oil profits going to the "right" people, and Western bankers in control of everything...

[MisterP]

4. reminds me of their "authoritarian vs. totalitarian" line: Pinochet good because he'll usher in

democracy in 20 years, revolution BAD because it's revolution

[marble falls]

5. See, this is how it works, see ... my enemy's enemy is ......

<snip>

"My enemy's enemy is my friend" has been a staple of realist statecraft since time immemorial. During the Napoleonic wars, Britain subsidized any government that would oppose the Corsican upstart. In 1941, responding to criticism over his embrace of Stalin's Russia, Winston Churchill declared that "if Hitler invaded hell, I would at least make positive reference to the devil in the House of Commons." At the height of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon sent National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on a secret mission to Beijing in order to forge an informal alliance with Mao's China against the Soviet Union.

This same maxim drove American policy toward the Middle East throughout the Cold War. In the 1950s, as left-leaning regimes like that of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser veered toward the Soviet Union, the United States engineered a coup in Iran in order to install the conservative regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. When the shah fell to revolutionary Islamist forces in 1979, the U.S. shifted its support to neighboring Iraq, ruled by the leftist but secular Baathist government of Saddam Hussein.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/opinion/27iht-eddobbins.4735925.html?_r=0


Who's the enemy we can make some sort of accommodation with? al Qaeda or ISIS?