“Aussies” make war on “our kind of people” – and on us.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

The day before we were hit by news of the Boston terror attack, Foreign Minister Bob Carr was winning accolades from his old Bulletin colleague Greg Sheridan. The headline over Sheridan’s article trumpeted, “Carr is right to sound alarm on extremists.” (The Australian, April 15, 2013.)

Both Carr and Sheridan were reacting to stories carried in The Australian over 13 – 15 April about how Australian security services were troubled by the estimated 200 “Aussies” fighting in Syria against the régime of Bashar al-Assad.  Of these, about 100 are supposed to have joined al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria which recently was absorbed into “al-Qaeda in Iraq” and now fully comes under its command. These al-Qaeda “Aussies” are our enemies. 

Released by “al-Nusra”, this photograph shows one of its fighters executing Syrian army soldiers.

Bad for Oz

The reason they are enemies is that they are making war with a view to turning Syria into a radical Islamic state.  The foreign and military policy of the new Syria would be directed at restoring the old Sunni-dominated Islamic caliphate based on Baghdad, while a key plank of domestic policy would be to subject the religiously diverse peoples of Syria to the fearsome demands of Sunni-interpreted shari’ah law.  In the new Syria Alawites, Shiites and Christians would be targeted as enemies of Islam and the state.

Such a radical (and reactionary) attempt to re-order the structure of the Middle East would have disturbing consequences for Australia. These would include an increased flow of refugees from the Middle East into our region and a potentially destabilising influence upon the delicately poised religious settlement within Indonesia, 87 per cent of whose population are Muslims, the vast majority of them Sunnis.

And yet 100 people have deployed from Australia to make jihad in Syria. This war on Australian interests by people described as “Aussies” is happening because of the folly of Australian public policy. There are two elements to this.

First, there is the fact that Australia operates culturally colour blind immigration, refugee, and citizenship policies.  This means that we play host to jihadist elements and advocates of shari’ah law that would find it difficult to survive in Australia were it not for strong anti-integrationist influences within the broader Islamic community which are condoned, in practice, by Australia’s intellectually muddled policy of multiculturalism.

Secondly, from the time of the Iraq war, Australia has been willing to justify the overthrow of dictatorships in order to spread freedom and democracy.

(Of course Iraq was not primarily about “making the world safe for democracy”, but we were ready to activate that kind of ideology to justify the misconceived strategic objectives of that war.)

Freedom and democracy won’t see the light of day in Syria.

Democracy in arms

During the Cold War Australia opposed, among other things – and rightly in my view – the overthrow, in the name of “international socialism”, of legitimate governments, even authoritarian ones.  Yet, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been prepared to back the overthrow of dictatorships in the name of – how shall we call it? — “internationalist democratism.”

Feeling ourselves thus morally justified, we engaged actively in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s régime in Iraq; we provided noisy advocacy for the Anglo-French military intervention on the side of revolution in Libya; and now, in the name of a “freedom and democracy” that will never see the light of day, we are lending support to the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Given this stance, Australian government ministers and security officials should temper their alarm over the prospect of war-trained “Aussie” jihadists returning to this country with some rueful reflections about how we managed to make it possible in the first place.

Our political leaders and “organs of state” should not, moreover, seek to diminish the problem posed for us by these 200 fighters by seeking to draw a distinction between “good” and “bad” rebels: between those who only want to overthrow the dictator al-Assad and those who want to erect a radical Islamic state. Both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are fighting to destroy what was, beside Egypt, a relatively stable and, internally, somewhat peaceful Middle Eastern state in which various ethnic groups and religions lived together with a degree of harmony: among these are those with the warmest (if misguided) sympathies toward the West, Syria’s Christian communities.

In other words, the “good guys” are waging a war in which the fall of the régime will develop into a war of all against all in which “our kind of people” — some 10 per cent of Syrian population — will be the biggest victims.

Role reversal

But “our kind of people”?

I am being ironic. How could the great proponents of “régime change” in Syria, those ethically ambiguous figures who lead the culturally liberal “free world” — David Cameron, François Hollande and Barack Obama – possibly comprehend the Orthodox Christians and Oriental-rite Catholics who together make up the majority of Christians in Syria and whose communities, with their ancient languages and mysterious religious rites, can be traced back to Apostolic times?

They don’t. They can’t. And they don’t care.

Western nations, that once defended the status quo against the armed export of communism, now promote, in the name of freedom and democracy, the destruction of the Middle Eastern (and North African) status quo by revolution and war.

Meanwhile, neo-Tsarist Russia, in imitation of our former Cold War strategy, is defending the Syrian status quo partly to defend “their kind of people” and partly to frustrate the spread of “Islamist internationalism” into the Caucuses and the “Stans”.

In strategic and ideological terms this is the equivalent of a reversal of the magnetic poles. How far, I wonder, are our political leaders and top foreign relations experts conscious of it?