Warming to Al Qaeda
As Israeli officials shifted toward viewing Al Qaeda and even ISIS as the lesser evils and built a behind-the-scenes alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Sunni states, American neoconservatives also began softening their tone regarding the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
Across the U.S. foreign policy establishment, pressure built for "regime change" in Damascus even if that risked handing Syria to Sunni jihadists. That strategy hit a road bump in 2014 when ISIS began chopping off the heads of Western hostages in Syria and capturing swathes of territory in Iraq, including Mosul.
That bloody development forced President Barack Obama to begin targeting ISIS militants in both Iraq and Syria, but the neocon-dominated Washington establishment still favored the Israeli-Saudi objective of "regime change" in Syria regardless of how that might help Al Qaeda.
Thus, Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and its jihadist ally, Ahrar al-Sham, faded into the background under the fiction that the anti-Assad forces were primarily noble "moderates" trying to save the children from the bloodthirsty fiends, Assad and Putin.
Grudgingly, The New York Times, deep inside Saturday's newspaper, acknowledged at least part of the troubling reality, that the U.S. government has, in effect, allied itself with Al Qaeda terrorists.
[For more background on this issue, see Consortiumnews.com's "New Group Think for War with Syria/Russia."]
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