Will David Cameron hug a jihadi?

Like it or not, jihad is back. And by back, I mean back like it was in the eighties; back in vogue, back in the mainstream, back in terms of general foreign policy usefulness. Back then, jihadists were used to get rid of communists. Now we’re using jihadists to get rid of socialists. It all makes sense; trust me.

“Seventy thousand moderate rebels” are on the ground in Syria, David Cameron has told us, rather infamously; they’re willing to take back the land that Daesh now controls. Amongst them are, without doubt, jihadists. The capable young analyst Charles Lister popped up in The Spectator1 magazine days before the British parliamentary debate on extending air strikes to Syria and said, “Yes, there are seventy thousand moderate opposition fighters in Syria.” He is almost certainly wrong about the numbers (the rebel commanders have every incentive to lie about their real troop strengths) but Lister was right to tell Spectator readers one thing; there are jihadists amongst these moderate rebels. He explained a little bit about their ideologies and why it was OK for them to ally with us, at least for the time being. He is mostly right; some of these people are jihadists, and some of these jihadists are well-meaning, fair-minded and reasonable people. The problem is, we don’t know which ones.

Now alarm bells might be ringing for any Daily Mail readers whose experience of the Middle East extends to watching Aladdin on Christmas Eve, but the word “jihadists” is not as bad as it sounds. A jihadist is just practicing jihad, and jihad is, more or less, a struggle, and can include self-defence. So if you replace the word “jihadist” with “angry Syrian struggling to defend himself”, Cameron’s policy starts to make sense.

In 2007, possibly one of the coolest writers on the planet, a guy named Aaron Sorkin, wrote the “comedy-drama” (according to its official Hollywood classification), “Charlie Wilson’s War”. Strangely, the film failed to be distributed in Putinist Russia, so for our Russian friends, here’s how the film ran.

Senator Charlie Wilson was cool. He was so cool that he spent most of the film hanging out in hot tubs, slapping the posteriors of his harem of stunningly beautiful secretaries, and shouting “Yee-ha” every time he heard that one of his cool new jihadist friends in Afghanistan had blown up a Soviet helicopter.

Wilson was even cooler when he went to Afghanistan himself to see how cool these jihadi guys were in real life. There, he learned about these new weapons; like bazookas, but cooler. So cool in fact, that they had a cool name: “Stingers”. Stingers could shoot down Soviet helicopters faster than Senator Wilson could lose a thousand dollars on a blackjack table. So the Texan thought, “Hey (taking a puff from his jihad-enormous cigar), these jihadists guys need more of these explosion sticks, let’s get ’em over to ‘em.”

Then you saw Senator Wilson all cool, back in Washington, telling everyone that jihadists were totally cool and wouldn’t it be just so cool if the United States government gave them more Stingers and other fancy guns, and crates full of ammunition. The reaction from the men holding the purse-strings was cool at first (see what I did there?), but Wilson got his way in the end.

Loads of Stingers and loads of cash; it all got sent over to Pakistan, and then over the border into Afghanistan. Loads of teenage Soviet conscripts died in the explosions that followed, but because it was a proper Hollywood film, mothers losing their sons was made to look really cool. Wilson had been sceptical at first, but now he was convinced; jihadis were really, really cool. He still had to do a lot of hard work to convince the government that it was worth spending money on these jihadists, but by 1987, the US government was spending $600m per year. Boy, was it cool.

What we learned from Senator Wilson is that when they advocate working with jihadists, honourable politicians put their money where their mouth is. They put themselves on the record, proudly and unequivocally, that they are proud of fighting alongside jihadists. Yet David Cameron hasn’t done this, yet. Why?

Today, Cameron could be playing Senator Charlie Wilson. He could be going out there and meeting these jihadists we’re supposed to be fighting with, if he’s so confident that they are worthy long-term partners for peace and justice. He should be inviting them to a hotel in Istanbul and doing a photo shoot, getting it on the record that he thinks they are appropriate allies for this country. Unlike “Charlie Wilson’s War”, the war in Syria is public knowledge, so why isn’t he announcing that, “Yes, they’re jihadis. And I’m cool with that.” The silence from Number 10 on this is deafening.

If Cameron wanted to make jihad cool again though, how might he do it? It’s a tough challenge; you need to “craft a narrative”. That’s spin doctor-speak for, “talk rubbish about something in a way that makes it sound absolutely, jihadi awesome.” It would include something like, “Jihad is a call to defend Muslims wherever they might be.”

What’s controversial about that? The right to self-defence is enshrined in international law. Although you find some turn-the-other-cheek pacifists in Christian Europe and North America, you won’t find many. And on a human level, if someone slaps your spouse or partner, are you really just going to stand there and watch? So there’s not much that is controversial about the right to self-defence.

Fighting to protect people of one’s own religion is also not unique to Muslims. Feeling any sort of positive affinity with someone halfway across the world is a magical feeling that characterises miraculously and wonderfully the practice of all faiths. The Archbishop of Canterbury, a former oil executive named Justin Welby, told his congregation on Christmas Day (as did the Queen during her Christmas speech), that Christians need to be protected in Syria, implicitly over and above those of other religions.

So, in recent years, jihadists have got a bad name – I get that — but Charlie Wilson managed to make them cool, so why can’t David Cameron? Our prime minister used to be a publicity guru, according to his CV. Perhaps he can screen “Four Lions” for a clutch of friendly Fleet Street journalists. They can interview him afterwards for front page spreads with his picture on it: “Cameron interview: Jihadis are cool” it would declare. Or he could get some t-shirts printed, like the Nelson Mandela ones, but without the nooses. Maybe Hollywood can buy the rights to the film; we can call it, “Davey Cameron’s War”. I know that you might be worried about future embarrassment if it turns out that you’re wrong, but let’s see you hug a jihadi, Dave, and show us how confident you are that these seventy thousand moderate rebels are as well-intentioned as you say they are. Best of luck.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.