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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Hunt for the Elusive “Moderates”

The U.S. shouldn't be trying to find suitable proxies in foreign civil wars in the first place.
free syrian army rebels

Nikolas Gvosdev likens the search for “moderates” in the Near East to looking for unicorns:

The elusive unicorns wandering the forests of America’s Middle East policy are the so-called moderates who will battle the extremists on behalf of the Western world. There is a touching faith among many parts of the U.S. foreign policy establishment in the existence of these moderates, who simply require sustained U.S. support in order to step forward out of the shadows of the stagnant status quo regimes and extremist movements that dominate the region.

That faith in the existence of these “moderates” serves a few purposes for those that want the U.S. to intervene frequently in the region. It makes intervention in one form or another seem more palatable. It offers the false promise that there is a third alternative to supporting either authoritarian regimes or Islamist groups. It conjures up an illusion of a friendly, “pro-Western” force that the U.S. is supposedly obliged to support. Finally, it gives interventionists an excuse to dress up their preferred policy with rhetoric about democracy and “values.” Most Americans have no desire to take sides in a foreign sectarian conflict, but if that fight can be recast as a battle between democrats and dictatorship it may become more attractive, or at least it will seem less repugnant. In order for this ploy to work, however, it is usually necessary to obscure and whitewash who the “moderates” are and what they believe, and interventionists have had plenty of practice with this over the years with the KLA, MEK, rebels in Libya, and now rebels in Syria. When it was necessary to pretend that Maliki was a secular nationalist and not the sectarian politician that he had always been, that is what Iraq war supporters did.

Because there are always some people that are relatively more moderate in their political or religious views when compared to some others, there is always some group or government that can be given this label without being completely dishonest, but the label is also inherently deceptive. When compared to ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra, for example, almost anyone would qualify as a relative moderate, but it doesn’t follow that the U.S. has a good reason to back them. In the American context, being “moderate” usually implies a preference for compromise, the rejection of most rigidly-held views, and an aversion to hard-line positions. When applied to people overseas it is supposed to convey some degree of sympathy for liberal and democratic values, and it is also supposed to indicate that they are “pro-Western” in their attitudes. That is what Americans are supposed to imagine when they hear that there is a “moderate” force that the U.S. can support. Those are the sort of people that interventionists want us to think the U.S. will be supporting, because they know that there won’t be much interest in providing support or directly taking sides in a foreign conflict once that illusion of “moderation” is stripped away.

As Gvosdev points out, however, the search for “moderates” that can serve as an effective proxy in the region’s conflicts is just a waste of time:

Simply put, there is no local group in Syria, Iraq, Yemen or anywhere else in the region that can be effective on the battlefield while also fulfilling Washington’s wish list.

The lesson to be drawn from this is not that the U.S. should be open to working with any group so long as it is effective on the battlefield, but that the U.S. shouldn’t be trying to find suitable proxies in these foreign civil wars in the first place. If we understood that there were no “moderates” worth supporting in these conflicts, we would realize much earlier that the U.S. had nothing at stake there and had no reason to take sides in so many foreign wars.

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