It’s a week since the Russians began their air-strikes in Syria, and the countries that have already been bombing there for over a year – the United States and some other NATO countries – are working themselves up into a rage about it.
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The Russians are not bombing the right people, they are killing civilians, they are reckless, dangerous, and just plain evil.
A statement last weekend by NATO's 28 members warned of “the extreme danger of such irresponsible behaviour” and urged Russia “to cease and desist.”
When a Russian warplane attacking Islamist targets in northwestern Syria strayed across the frontier into Turkey for a few minutes, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the Turks would have been within their rights to shoot it down.
The weather was poor, the target was close to the border, and the Russians apologised afterwards, but NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the incursion “does not look like an accident.”
So what does he think the motive was, then? Russian pilots are getting bored, and are having a competition to see who can stay in Turkish airspace longest without getting shot down?
But the biggest Western complaint is the Russians are bombing the wrong people.
Contrary to American and European assertions, they are indeed bombing the “right” people, the troops of Islamic State that Western air forces have been bombing for the past year.
But the Russians are also bombing the troops of the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. They might even bomb the troops of the Free Syrian Army, if they could find any.
Western propaganda makes a systematic distinction between Islamic State (bad) and the “opposition” forces (all the other groups).
The problem is that there is really little difference between them: they all want to overthrow the Syrian regime, and they are all Islamist jihadis except for the tattered remnants of the Free Syrian Army.
There are not three alternatives in Syria.
There are only two: either Bashar al-Assad’s regime survives, or the Islamists take over. Really serious Islamists, who hate democracy, behead people, and plan to overthrow all the other Arab governments before they set out to conquer the rest of the world.
They are probably being a bit over-optimistic there, but they would be seriously dangerous people if they commanded the resources of the Syrian state, and they would be a calamity for Syrians who are not Sunni Muslims.
The Russians have accepted this reality, decided that it is in their own interests for Assad to survive, and are acting accordingly.
The United States and its allies, by contrast, are hamstrung by their previous insistence that Assad must go on human rights grounds.
They cannot change their tune now without losing face, so they don’t bomb Assad themselves, but they persist in the fantasy that some other force can be created in Syria that will defeat both Assad and Islamic State.
Moreover, the leaders of America’s two most important allies in the Muslim world, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are determined Assad should go (mainly because he is Shia, and they are Sunnis), and they would be very angry if the US helped him survive.
That, plus American anger at Russia over Ukraine and lingering hostility from the old Cold War, is why NATO is condemning the Russian intervention in Syria so vehemently.
But it is all humbug and hypocrisy.
