Turkey has been up to quite a lot recently, having played an important role in helping the Syrian insurgent groups that have, over the past week, scored a series of remarkable military successes. They now control both Aleppo and Hama, two of Syria’s four major cities. While one cannot but take heart at the defeats inflicted on Bashar al-Assad, a monstrous dictator and a crucial member of the Iranian-led axis that has been terrorizing Israel, commentators have warned that these insurgents are largely radical Sunni Islamists, with ties to al-Qaeda and even Islamic State. Their possible victory should also be cause for concern.

Nonetheless, argues Amos Yadlin, this is a case where Assad, the devil we know, is undoubtedly worse than the devil we don’t. Thanks to the insurgent victories, the chances that the Israel-Lebanon cease-fire will

restrain Hizballah in the long term are increasing—as the process of its military recovery, after the war with Israel, will be slowed, and its residual capabilities may be redirected to the Syrian civil war. At the same time, Iran’s appetite for continuing cycles of threats and blows with Israel is expected to wane further after Israel’s effective strikes within its territory in October, which have already cooled its enthusiasm.

As the entire axis weakens, and its updated priorities focus on Syria, Hamas in Gaza is pushed to the bottom of the list, after the connection between Gaza and Lebanon has already been severed.

As to the argument that stable rule under Assad (and the Iranian proxies who keep him power) is better than chaos, Yadlin writes:

Assad, who massacred half a million of Syria’s citizens and used chemical weapons against them, is not exactly preserving stability in the country. He is a central figure in the axis that poses the most significant strategic threat to Israel, and most of Hizballah’s weapons have come from his production lines, his warehouses, or from Iran through Syrian territory. The ties between the Alawite regime in Syria and the mullah regime in Tehran are deep, and all the efforts by Israel, pragmatic Arab countries, and Western powers over decades to distance Syria from Iran have been in vain.

Most importantly, unlike Iran and Assad’s regime, the rebels do not have a nuclear program, ballistic missiles, or advanced weapons factories, nor do they have global or regional powers behind them willing to invest billions in them.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”