The ‘necessary evils’ of Australia’s allies

Jun 27, 2024
Syria on antiqued globe

“At a public meeting in 1971, C.P. Ellis – head of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, North Carolina – tore up his KKK membership card in what was basically an act of love.

Some may know this story from the 2019 movie ‘The Best of Enemies’. One telling scene in the film is when a powerful Durham city official tries to reassure Ellis:

“Sometimes there are necessary evils for the greater good. …You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

In the film, we witness Ellis’s transformation from KKK leader to civil rights activist after his involvement in community meetings with Black Americans.

Years later, Ellis recounted how he learned to see Black people as ‘human beings’.

Such lessons are needed today when Australia’s allies are committing what they might claim to be ‘necessary evils’ in the Middle East.

Today’s war in Gaza might be uppermost in our minds, but Syria provides us with a challenge, too. Evidence points to Australia’s allies having worked with groups that committed acts of terror in Syria not dissimilar to those committed by the KKK.

The efforts of Australia’s allies to impose their will on Syria stretch back more than a century. However, if we take 1996 as a starting point it helps place Syria in the context of the current war in Gaza.

In 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neoconservatives led by Richard Perle drew up plans to reshape the Middle East. The plans included the ‘weakening, containing, and even rolling back’ of Syria. Co-opting Turkey and Jordan and tribes on their borders with Syria was one suggested way of doing this.

Such a conspiracy to undermine Syria was nothing new. In the late 1970s, two of America’s ME allies – Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Jordan’s King Hussein – supported the Muslim Brotherhood in its campaign of terror aimed at regime change in Syria. This was most likely done at the behest of the CIA and MI6, who had a history of covert actions aimed at regime change in Syria.

Today, Netanyahu rails against Hamas, but under his leadership, Israel aligned with designated terrorist groups in Syria.

It not only provided assistance to Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliated group in Syria, as confirmed by a former head of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad, but Israel also appears to have worked with the Islamic State.

In June 2014, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington and adviser to Netanyahu, Michael Oren, expressed his disdain for all Muslims but intimated that Israel was prepared to work with the Islamic State, describing Sunni Islam as ‘the lesser evil’.

According to Oren, Israel “always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran”. Oren didn’t think working with terrorists would prevent his wife in Tel Aviv from going to the opera. The “madness” would hardly disturb Israel, he contended.

However, the ‘madness’ was certainly causing enormous pain in Syria, where insurgents fired missiles into cities, and so going to the opera there was perilous.

Of course, Netanyahu wasn’t America’s only ME ally supporting terrorist groups in Syria. In 2014, then US vice president, Joe Biden accused Turkey and some Gulf States of aiding militant extremists in Syria.

One powerful player Biden might have had in mind was former Saudi Ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a close friend of the Bush family. In 2012, Bandar had been appointed Saudi Head of General Intelligence.

Arguably, the most heinous act in Syria in which Bandar played a role occurred in Ghouta, Damascus, on 21 August 2013. On that day, Syrian government forces were accused of carrying out a sarin gas attack that caused hundreds of deaths. Fortunately, US military strikes against Syria were averted: President Obama was warned that the Syrian regime was possibly not responsible for the alleged attack. Later, independent investigations pointed to the involvement of Bandar, the radical Islamist group working under him, and the CIA and Mossad.

Deepening divisions within the Muslim world were either an unfortunate by-product of US-led wars in the ME or an intended consequence of those wars.

Before 9/11, Bandar reportedly told Britain’s intelligence chief, “The time is not far off in the Middle East… when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.” Bandar did not speak for a billion Sunni Muslims, but, unfortunately, he held an influential position in the ME.

As for Britain, even before the ‘Arab Spring’ it reportedly planned to send fighters into Syria. Once the war started, it spent millions of pounds promoting ‘rebel’ groups, and its Intelligence agencies even worked with ‘jihadists’ who travelled to Syria.

The surreal nature of the war in Syria was displayed in 2016 when Australian Defence Force personnel were involved in an airstrike that killed nearly 100 Syrian soldiers who had been fighting the Islamic State.

We may never know if the targeting of the Syrian soldiers was intentional, but it conformed with the policies of Australia’s allies and their support for radical Islamist groups.

Australia’s involvement in such a cynical war inevitably has ramifications for our social cohesion and security, with the federal police having to concern themselves with the radicalisation of young Australian Muslims and the repatriation of wives and children of jihadists.

Unfortunately, since the start of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Syria, the ABC’s bias favouring the ‘revolution’ in Syria could well have contributed to the radicalisation of young Australians and made the work of school teachers wanting to present a nuanced, objective understanding of the war in Syria very difficult.

Getting to know people in the Black community led C.P. Ellis to resign from the KKK and oppose ‘necessary evils’. If Australian MPs met people who have been impacted by the ‘necessary evils’ of Australia’s allies, whether in Damascus, Gaza or the West Bank, they might take a stand as courageous as that of Ellis’s all those years ago.

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