It's a judgement that thousands of other professed leftists have made about the Syrian conflict: that it's possible to "support" ISIS in a real but limited sense--to hope that ISIS defeats Assad in this particular conflict rather than vice-versa--without being an ISIS supporter in a more general sense. And, yes, they must take responsibility for that real but limited "support." Saleh and his comrades are claiming to maintain a secular, atheist, leftist rejection of ISIS and similar jihadi groups, while asserting that it's possible, and acceptable, and necessary, to defeat Assad, and ISIS later.
Well, I, along with thousands of other sincere leftists, am no more an "Assad apologist" for preferring in this particular conflict that the Syrian state defeat ISIS rather than the reverse. There are plenty of good secular, leftist, respectful-of-the-Syrian-people reasons for thinking it acceptable and necessary to defeat ISIS and its jihadi ilk now, and get rid of Baathist authoritarianism later. They are based on a political judgement that the authoritarian Syrian state is under attack by imperialism, Arab reaction, Zionism, and anti-democratic jihadi proxy forces--the latest battle in a long-term project to destroy recalcitrant states and replace them with a kind of regressive horror that must be stopped.
So I do support the Syrian government--just as Yassin al-Haj Saleh supports ISIS--in the real but limited sense that I hope the government defeats, rather than loses to ISIS, al-Nusra, and allied jihadi "strangers" and "spectres of horror"--whom, I judge, shrewdly or mistakenly, to be the dominant forces on the ground arrayed against the Baathist regime, and not likely, after they overthrow Assad, to be shooed away by unaffiliated leftist revolutionaries. I also, perforce, support the Russian military aid that has prevented the victory of those forces.
"Assad apologist" is a weak response to that. It's those who find their position the hardest to justify with evidence and arguments who are most likely to revert to moral shaming, the purpose of which is to get their interlocutors to shut up and slink away. Louis Alday nailed this, in a trenchant Monthly Review article: "The policing of acceptable opinion in this way has a simple and practical function: to foster a climate in which people feel too intimidated to speak out, thus allowing the dominant narrative to remain unquestioned."
This kind of rhetorical tactic only works on people interested in what's now called "virtue signaling," or what I describe as the favorite liberal pastime of shedding and assigning guilt. On my map, the road to political clarity, let alone political power (Perish the tainted thought!), isn't a guilt trip (through the land of identity politics).
Guilt-tripping is the opposite of ethical responsibility. Certainly, ethical questions are ultimately paramount--not just embedded in, but the heart of, politics. But this heart is not worn on history's sleeve. Socially-persistent ethical outcomes will be results of a series of inevitably imperfect political judgements whose long-term effects we can only, and must, surmise in the instant. And "monster" doesn't help at all in that regard.
Again, the urgent point of this debate is to encourage people to support or oppose American military intervention. For me, that's not a question of which choice makes one feel less guilty.
Encouraging American military intervention poses a particular problem for "anti-Assadist" leftists, especially now that the savior to whom they're appealing is no longer the peace-prized Smooth Operator but the left-reviled Shameless Huckster.
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