When in comes to moral conflicts and dilemmas, the issue of support is often called upon. As John Stuart Mill claimed, 'Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.' There is, however, a more fundamental riposte to this: evil comes from an overenthusiastic desire to do good, to right the dispute with imperfect knowledge and awareness.
It is the greatest of historical lessons that is never learned: sponsor at your risk. Un-civil wars do not yield reliable agents or factions. Money and finance for conflict is the necessary expediency to win battles and the conflict. Guns and mortars have no soul, agency or ideological outlook. They are used whenever they are obtained, against whoever the enemy of the moment is.
The Middle East is rife with such arrangements and Western powers should know. US and European powers supplied Saddam Hussein's brutal regime through the 1980s as it fought the Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam got too big for his boots, and suffered two defeats – over his invasion of Kuwait, and in the 2003 invasion of his country by the clumsily termed 'Coalition of the Willing'.
Through the 1980s and persisting into the 1990s, the Islamic fighters in Afghanistan received backing from Washington. The now maligned Taliban received backing from Washington via traditional Saudi and Pakistani assets. The motivation there was keeping some form of centralised authority to protect gas and oil interests.
The game of backing and supporting misunderstood – and dangerous – groups persists. This is reflected in the near-schizophrenic frame of US alliances in the Middle East. On paper, it backs the state of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are backing the Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq. This problem became absurd in exposures made in the light of 9/11 Commission Report which condemned the intimate ties between Washington and Riyadh. The Saudis have proven not so much prickly as duplicitous in their dealing with the noisy advocates from the free world.
The Islamic State is treated with a degree of mixed, if ambivalent support when it comes to their battle against the Assad regime in Syria. European powers and the United States draw the false distinction that there are good Islamic militants and bad ones, with the bad ones supposedly against the Western military program. It matters that they are our nasties, not theirs.