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| Syrian rebels in City of Hama. Source: FMT / cropped from original / CC BY 4.0 |
Kevin Ovenden outlines the rise and fall of Arab nationalism and asks what are the options now for Syria and the region
The outcome of the Second World War brought the end of the colonial and mandate period of direct Western imperialist control in the Middle East. It did not bring the end of imperialist domination. That was refashioned to meet the realities of formal state independence.
It was done in order to push back and then contain revolutionary developments in one state after another across the region. The Egyptian victory over nationalising the Suez Canal in 1956 was a global boost to all standing against the old colonial powers and new imperialist order. It spurred a massive wave of radicalism throughout the Middle East from Algeria fighting French colonialism to Britain’s colony in Yemen.
The first enervation of that post-war radical Arab nationalist movement in Syria, which had grown in the 1950s and of which the Baath party was one major expression, came the following decade. The failure of the short-lived United Arab Republic uniting post-colonial Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961, and dominated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, was followed by three coups in Syria. There were many internal factors driving the split between Syria and Egypt. But it was still a triumph for imperialist diplomacy.
The Syrian coups brought the Baath party to power and as part of that the rise of airforce commander Hafez al Assad. Already by 1971 he led a sharp turn to deradicalisation of the regime. It abandoned the ‘Arab Socialist’ orientation that was part of the contradictory original Baath programme and moved in a more openly capitalist direction. That also happened in Egypt under Nasser’s successor.
There was a violent purge of the left and radicals in Syria. With it came the institutionalisation of sectarian and patrimonial rule. Into the growing void of any radical transformative policy for ordinary people within Syria, and thus across the Arab nation, came a rejuvenation of the old colonial methods against which revolutionary Arab nationalism had set itself in the 1930s and 1940s.
So military intervention in Lebanon in 1976, which was gripped by civil wars and then outright Israeli invasion, led not to Syria pressuring Israel and strengthening the Palestinian movement, but instead to a resented occupation of part of the country. Long forgotten now is the fact that after Hezbollah was founded in 1982 to destroy Israel’s continuing occupation of the south of Lebanon it also had to fight the Syrian presence in the centre and north, which tried to crush resistance.
Behind Arab nationalist rhetorical flourishes there was the consolidation of an increasingly repressive state representing the interests of a narrow core of capitalist, ruling class families. That was centred on the Assad family and state-military bureaucrats making compacts with other powerful figures and relying on sectarian religious and ethnic division. That, and on navigating the last years of the Cold War.
The massacre of the Muslim Brotherhood and the uprising in the city of Hama in 1982 was the bloodiest illustration. Probably 25,000 people were killed by Assad’s forces. They were commanded by his brother Rifaat – who was welcomed in the West having fled with billions of dollars following a failed coup in 1984.
At the same time Saddam Hussein in Iraq, ostensibly also leading a fellow Baathist ‘Arab Socialist’ state and urged on by the US, had invaded Iran in order to prevent the impetus of the 1979 revolution destabilising regimes across the Middle East. Whether those regimes were considered Soviet- or US-aligned.
Saddam, like Assad, was also engaged in a brutal internal purge of opponents – Communists who refused to capitulate, residues of the left of the Baath party, Nasserists, religiously inspired movements, independent intellectuals, the Kurdish rights groups and certainly any trade union or popular organisation.
Despite all the talk of Arab unity, the Syrian regime endorsed the US-led Gulf War of 1991 against its Iraqi rival. Both the Assad regime and Saddam’s did find themselves at odds with US imperialism, especially after 9/11 and the hubristic declaration of a war on terror to remake the whole Middle East as compatible with US interests. Decades of accommodation by both Damascus and Baghdad meant acceptance of the imperialist order internationally and the full adoption of capitalist and authoritarian dictates domestically.
Two decades more of degeneration followed, such that the Syrian state increasingly stood mainly upon an apparatus of repression. Its own divide and rule methods and tribalist clientelism made it easier for outside powers of all kinds to shift popular discontent along those lines.
That happened devastatingly as the initial wave of the ‘Arab Spring’ reaching Syria in 2011 gave way to civil war. The regime turned to the most violent repressive methods. Local and imperial powers backed favoured groupings – oppositional or regime malcontents – for their own ends. It was one aspect of a three-faced strategy in dealing with the Arab revolutionary uprisings that had toppled Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt.
First was to rally to the key western allies in the Gulf and to back their military-state repression, as in Bahrain and Yemen. Second was to seek to suborn various revolutionary forces, as in Libya, and then Syria, to direct them along channels that did not threaten western interests and to play on sectional and sectarian division. The third strand was to bury popular revolutionary impetus under a deluge of regional conflict and sectarian strife – enabled also by other powers, local and imperialist. Israel has played a vital role in this.
It was the US invasion of Iraq and its defeated occupation that strengthened Iran more than anything that the Islamic Republic did of its own accord regarding US imperialism or Israel. Establishment opponents of the Iraq war warned that this would be the result as a violent unstable equilibrium of sorts had operated since 1979 by playing off Iraq and Iran against each other. That is the root of the US and Israeli obsession with Iran today. It is the shadow of their own failures.
We see now that there was nothing left underpinning the Syrian regime as it fell and its army evaporated, even though many people fear now with good reason further sectarian civil war and manifold intervention. Everything that the West has done makes that more likely. It is what it did in Libya by usurping the fall of another state, Muammar Gaddafi’s. Its underpinnings had also rotted away and no amount of prison torture was able to compensate.
Now the torture is done by rival militias and paid for by the European Union to stop Africans from crossing the Mediterranean to seek sanctuary or a better life in Europe. The mechanism has been extended to Tunisia, where the first advance of the Arab Spring 14 years ago has been turned back. There is an authoritarian, pro-western president in power. The opposition Muslim Brotherhood and secular figures are heavily repressed. There is a regime of racist violence against black Africans.
There are lessons here. The first one is for all authoritarian regimes. That includes those that authenticate themselves in one way or another through a history in which they could once lay claim to be embodying revolutionary and newly independent hope. That is true of Algeria today, for example. It ought to be even more of a lesson for those such Saudi Arabia and General Sisi’s Egypt. They have no such fabled backstory – only one of subordination to the US and its imperialist alliance, with Israel as its centrepiece. That is the dominant axis in the region and the biggest counter-revolutionary force.
A second axis is centred on Turkey and Qatar. Turkey is a Nato member. But in the words of Erdogan’s former foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu it seeks to ‘draw the bow deep to the east in order for the arrow to fly farther to the west’. That is to advance Turkish capitalism’s interests in the EU and Nato through leaning upon the historic Ottoman Muslim influence in the Middle East and Central Asia. It is the Russia-Iran axis that ranks as a weakened third. But it is that that we are supposed to focus on almost exclusively – along with North Korea and China.
Uprisings in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Morocco, of course, are not what Western politicians have in mind who have suddenly, and once again, discovered an affection for people toppling statues. (Just don’t try doing that at home – the British state will hand out longer sentences than for rape.)
These are the same people also urging calm in Seoul and an orderly retirement for a right-wing strongly pro-US president who tried to introduce martial law last week. They do not want him swept out in a process of popular revolt to win a kind of radical democracy that South Korea has never had. Those protesting in Romania against judges cancelling a presidential election are considered ‘Putin stooges’ because the ‘wrong candidate’ was winning the election due to conclude today.
The people of Syria have had to put up with decades of repression and many-sided interference in their country designed to prevent socialist change and instead to channel efforts in the interests of one or other elite, domestic and foreign.
A second lesson from the last decade and much longer, unfortunately, is that foreign and local reactionary manipulation continues despite the overdue fall of the Assad regime. It does so in conditions of widening war across the region – driven above all by Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and the support for it by the US state and allies such as Britain.
The West would like to turn the joyous scenes of popular statue-topping in Damascus today into Syrian acquiescence to Israel and its expansionism. Trump (and the Democrats) are committed to normalisation of Israel over the corpse of Palestine.
They want to return to the process that 7 October last year violently interrupted of the embrace of Israel by Egypt and Jordan 40 years ago, and recently Morocco, to extend fully to Saudi Arabia, Syria, a vassal Lebanon and eventually a broken, Balkanised Iran.
The US has troops in Syria and in Iraq. If they were meant to be liberators from the Assad and Saddam regimes, why are they still there? And what of the fate of the Kurdish forces who Turkey’s Erdogan makes no secret of wanting to annihilate and who the US cynically pledged an alliance with. That was when the enemy was supposed to be ISIS. But the enemy of the day shifts all the time.
Abandoning Palestine and accepting a different overlordship more compatible with US-led imperialism is not the sentiment among most Syrians or Arabs – or Kurds or others in the region. But in conditions of sectarian militias degenerated by reactionary civil war and dependent on rival foreign sponsors, the collective voices and interests of ordinary people, workers and peasants, are usually suppressed in one way or another. That is a bitter truth from seeing throughout history one day of popular joy after another turn into grief.
It is to be hoped that the revolutionary and socialist voices in Syria, who have a history of internationalist, anti-imperialist radicalism and popular unity to draw on, can find ways to make themselves heard.
We who are in Nato countries can contribute above all by fighting to curb our states and their proxy forces from doing as they have done for over a century of malign interference in the Middle East. That imperialist domination today is realised in the Palestinian genocide.
Palestine and the unprecedented international solidarity movement remain a lodestone above and beyond all the other social, political and military battles in the Middle East – however important they are for progress – and they provide a cardinal compass point.
A litmus test of any politics claiming to stand for freedom and social advance in the Middle East is the extent to which it brings nearer the liberation of the Palestinian people.
The US state department has boasted that the Pentagon may not occupy most of Syria, but it does have the best wheat growing land and the oil fields under its control. Those belong to the Syrian people. Not to the US. Not to Turkey. Not to any other state. Not to Shell or BP. And not to one or other aspirant state structure looking to replace the Assads in coming months – perhaps by grafting on to remnants of the last one.
The people of Syria deserve better. So do those across the region, above all in Palestine. And so do all of us.
Kevin Ovenden
Kevin Ovenden is a progressive journalist who has followed politics and social movements for 25 years. He is a leading activist in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, led five successful aid convoys to break the siege on Gaza, and was aboard the Mavi Marmara aid ship when Israeli commandoes boarded it killing 10 people in May 2010. He is author of Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth.
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