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While it is much too early to tell what will happen in Syria, the initial signs are encouraging. Unlike nearly any other Arab civil war, reconciliation is given a priority over vengeance. An effort is being made to bring all parts of Syrian society together. While there is no doubt it will be a distinctly Islamic society, al-Julani seems to understand that Syria has enough religious and ethnic diversity that the "one size fits all" model we see in most of the Islamic world will not work. The Russians have abandoned their naval and airbase, removing the Kremlin's meddling in a delicate situation. //
In his Farewell Address, Washington left us with this warning.
In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. //
Lord Palmerston treats the same subject in a much pithier quote, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
I fear that many on the right have fallen into the trap of seeing American and Muslim relations through the lens of 9/11, and they are willing to see the change of government in Syria as the creation of yet another terrorist breeding ground. Indeed, on social media, some of the accounts most adamantly against US support for Ukraine and so-called "forever wars" by the "neocons" are also in favor of doing nothing to influence the outcome in Syria because of 9/11 and the 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan that they decry.
The initial moves of al-Julani seem to be focused on keeping much of the same multicultural tolerance of the Assad regime without, so far as we can see right now, the terror and repression. //
The fact is that when given the opportunity to break with al-Qaeda, he did. And he fought ISIS even when it got him nothing of value. //
Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell story that convulsed the nation. No, I’m not talking about his recent Atlantic magazine piece claiming, based on the testimony of four anonymous sources, that President Trump had grossly disrespected America’s dead and wounded warriors in 2018.
I’m talking about Goldberg’s New Yorker feature claiming that “the relationship between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.” Published less than a year after 9/11, the story fed into the fervid pro-war atmosphere that then gripped the nation.
Headlined “The Great Terror,” the essay was based on a reporting trip to Iraq’s northern Kurdish zone. It recounted, in terrifying and admirable detail, Saddam Hussein’s 1988 poison-gas assault against Kurdish civilians in the village of Halabja.
Along the way, Goldberg did other things, too — chief among them, speaking to alleged terrorist detainees in a prison run by a pro-regime-change Kurdish faction.
The mostly unnamed prisoners, per Goldberg, informed him “that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over [a local jihadist faction]; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al-Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of al-Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by [the local jihadists]; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.” //
Pretty chilling stuff. The Bush administration made Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda a key plank of its case for regime change. The war happened. Saddam was toppled. But in the years that followed, the Iraq-al-Qaeda link posited by Goldberg unraveled.
There are things we take for granted until, one day, we are made to realize how unique they are. For atheist and historian Tom Holland, a trip to the war-torn Iraqui town of Sinjar gave him a different perspective on one of the most commonly accepted symbols of our culture: the Christian cross. //
If we take a deeper look at the fundamentals like Holland did, there can be no comparison. Holland was working on a book about the impact of Christianity on history when he was invited to visit Sinjar, a town that had been held captive by the Islamic State for two years. When he arrived with the film team, they encountered destruction beyond belief.
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