Secular strong men have historically our best allies in the Middle East (after Israel, of course). We keep overthrowing these people and then we get “surprised” when Muslim fanatics take over and make things worse.
Assad is no Sunday school teacher but he’s the best of the bad options to run Syria.
“Secular strong men have historically our best allies in the Middle East (after Israel, of course). We keep overthrowing these people and then we get “surprised” when Muslim fanatics take over and make things worse.” — Totally agree. You’d think they learned from Carter’s mistake in helping overthrow the Shah of Iran. But, noooo! Still helping with the islamization of that region & of course our terror threat alert keeps going up in the west too.
At least Christians could live under Assad.
We don’t “keep overthrowing these people”. We’ve had only one successful longterm alliance with a somewhat secular strongman in the Middle East — Egypt.
The allies of the USSR/Russia include or included Ghaddafy in Libya; Boumeddienne in Algeria; the Assads (a hereditary dictatorship) in Syria (still holding on to part of the failed state, with help from an Iranian force and Iranian proxy thugs out of Lebanon, as well as Russian advisors and mercenaries); Saddam Hussein in Iraq — literally the only one overthrown by the US, unless one counts the Shiite-head the CIA helped overthrow to install the Shah — and Nasser in Egypt.
Nasser died. Nasser and Sadat were socialists, but also members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat was a member of Egypt’s armed forces, and if memory serves was the first face the world saw of the Egyptian coup against King Farouk, as Sadat announced the new regime.
Sadat engineered a military victory of sorts against Israel, forced his own country into peace talks, expelled the Russians, allied Egypt with the US, and in order to counteract a rising tide of pro-Soviet/anti-Israel sentiment among his political colleagues, released jailed Islamofascists who wound up gunning him down in broad daylight in front of thousands of Egyptians.
His successor was ousted by the military machinery which runs Egypt, and replaced by another old-timer. Money flowing in to the Muslim Brotherhood from Qatar — an ally of Iran, and engineer of the overthrow of Saddam and the Gulf War — resulted in an uprising that led to elections and the installation of MB’s own Mohammed Morsi.
The other US allies of sorts have been the monarchies in Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf States (Qatar viewed us as an ally of convenience). The GCC bankrolled the coup that ousted Morsi.
The Reagan administration botched the restoration of the constitutional republic in Lebanon by allowing the elder Assad’s Syrian army to murder the Christian leader.