Don’t make a virtue out of not understanding Syria

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

One of the scariest aspects of the war in Syria is that so many supposedly interested people are willing to admit that they don’t understand it. A supremely intelligent friend of mine told me after the Paris killings he was worried that “it was all about to kick off”.

Have to say I was a gobsmacked. The fact that he didn’t realise the situation had already ‘kicked off’ was disturbing.

Last week I watched the BBC news after the Commons vote on bombing Syria. Interviewed on the street, person after person said they didn’t really get it, but that’s what they’d got politicians for, so they had to trust the politicians.

Hoh mumma! Why would you do that? Because it worked so well last time in Iraq, where British planes are still bombing; or in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are on the verge of retaking the entirety of Helmand province?

Taking only one strand of this apocalyptic bowl of spaghetti, what part of the USA and Russia simultaneously being on the same side while not actually fighting the same war feels good?

Come again? Exactly: it’s complex, but we do not have to understand everything. The warring factions have so many splits and splinters they could fry your mind, so let’s not go there.

The simple and sad truth is that there are many different wars going on, in the same place, at the same time, which is precisely why we need to grasp at least the fundamentals of the situation.

This being the Middle East, we don’t try to find the beginning, because this area of the planet has had more border lines engraved in it and erased from it than Gordon Ramsey’s chin. There have been Assyrians and Romans and Macedonians and I’ll spare us the full list, as it would fill the rest of this space.

Suffice that we understand that the most recent lines drawn, the modern borders of Israel, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are only part of an historical chain. After the last Iraq war and the Arab Spring, there grew a collection of rebels in Syria who wanted to overturn President Assad and his brutal regime.

Under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army, they had the spoken support of the West and were doubtless given covert intelligence and arms by NATO countries.

Russia, Iran and Hezbollah (based in Lebanon) all support President Assad, while 30 million Kurds long for the return of Kurdistan, tragically now split into parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Armenia and Iran.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.