The Myth of the Modernate Rebel

From: Washington's Long War on Syria

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When the Daraa riot broke out in mid-March, 2011, two armed Islamist groups, which would play a lead role in the war against the Syrian government, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, had already been formed. As violence began to spread, at least one Western news report noted that Islam was playing a prominent role.” Within a year, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamic State’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, were the driving forces of the insurgency. This accorded with the larger myth that the foreign policy of the United States was inherently virtuous and motivated solely by Olympian aims—in this case, the realization of the Arab Spring goal of a creating democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. But as we’ve seen, Syria was closer to the Western model of a pluralist, multiparty democratic state than were any of Washington’s Arab allies and had moved even closer to that model by 2012, when the secular Arab nationalists amended the country’s constitution to allow multiple candidates in presidential elections. There were great ironies here. If the uprising truly represented an outcry for democracy, it was happening in an Arab country in which democracy, at least by Western standards, had already sunk roots. In point of fact, the insurgency was animated by the goal of reversing Syria’s democracy, and replacing it with an antidemocratic Islamic state. Among the major backers of the insurgency were the Arab world’s anti-democratic monarchies. And while Washington professed to be on the side of democracy in Syria, it backed jihadists who scorned democracy and drew their support from the Arab world’s kings, princes, emirs and sultans, all of whom held democracy in contempt.

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