Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
12-24-24
Following on from Owen Jones' extensive report about the western media bias, particularly the BBC,and the US when it comes to the Israeli genocide in Palestine; we need to recognize that this is not new and not confined to that one issue.
As Israel, the US, and Britain bomb Yemen, (did you vote for that?) it’s important for working people to reflect on Syria for a bit and the video above is an important contribution to an understanding of the underlying causes of the Syrian crisis and US imperialism’s role in it.
As the narrator points out in the video, the western mass media is praising the overthrow of Bashar Assad by the Islamist fundamentalist group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Al Qaeda offshoot which translates to the “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”. The group is led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, known more familiarly as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani who until last week had a $10 million bounty on his head. HTS was also designated a terrorist organization by the US.
With Assad’s overthrow, numerous forces are seeking to strengthen their positions, some local like the Kurdish YPG that the US has been supporting but as the narrator above points out, the Kurds have been betrayed by the US on more than one occasion and, in this case, what complicates matters is the Turks, who controlled the region prior to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WW1, consider the YPG a terrorist group. There are some 25 million Kurds in Turkey as well as others in Iraq and Syria and perhaps Iran. Turkey will not be favorable to any strengthening of the Kurdish presence in an Assad free Syria.
Last week, the US state department’s senior diplomat for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, met with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and its leader and removed the $10 million bounty. This has all the trappings of yet another US/ NATO catastrophe written all over it.
The Islamist group’s meeting with US imperialism’s representatives in the region is like a kiss of death for the Syrian people. Neither group at the table has the interests of the workers in Syria or the region in mind. Nor are they acting in support of US or British workers.
The US proxy in the region, the Zionist Apartheid state, has been bombing Syrian infrastructure, installations, its navy and air force, in order ensure that whatever government follows Assad will not have the capability to defend itself against Israeli aggression.
From what I understand, Jolani wants to create Sharia law in Syria but at the same time is claiming to be supportive of minorities and other religions. Why would he not? The US wouldn’t give him any of our money otherwise. But he’d better be careful. The US has no problem with supporting jihadists, religious fanatics and despots of all stripes but, only if Wall Street interests are protected. Hussein, Ben Ali, Mubarak who Hillary Clinton considered “like family”, and many other so-called friends of the US have not fared well over time.
Syria, a Nation state created in secret by the French and British through the Sykes/Picot agreement after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, has faced many efforts by the US to foster and promote destabilizing sectarian divisions over the past 25 years.
In 2006, five years before the Arab Spring that forced numerous ruthless US backed dictators from power in 2011, “….destabilizing the Syrian regime was a central motivation of US policy.” Robert Naiman wrote in the Wikileaks Files. Thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks, we have access to cables sent by William Roebuck, chargé d’ affairs at the US embassy in Damascus, to the US State Department and White House.
In a December 2006 cable Roebuck stressed that there were a number of weakness in the regime that could be exploited including the Kurdish threat and Islamic extremists. Bathist regimes were traditionally hostile to Islamic fundamentalists but the US clearly has a much more flexible approach as the makeover of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani shows.
“The cable suggests….”, Naimann writes, “…that the US goal in December 2006 was to undermine the Syrian government by any available means and that what mattered was whether US action would help destabilize the government, not what other impacts the action might have.” My added emphasis. Let’s not forget that the first Americans in Vietnam were CIA, and their job was to disrupt that society.
Publicly, the US was then, and still is apparently, opposed to Islamic extremists unless they serve Wall Street’s interests as Osama bin Laden did for a while. In Syria, as in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, US imperialism saw the possibility of Islamic extremism as a potential threat to the Syrian government and an opportunity that should be taken.
Syria is a very diverse nation composed of Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Kurds, Jews, Christians and US representatives would be failing in their duties if they didn’t foster sectarian divisions when it suited US interests.
With the growing influence of Iran and the ongoing tensions between the Iranian Mullahs and the Saudi’s, Roebuck saw an opportunity and suggested that the US should try to destabilize the Syrian government by joining forces with Egypt and the Saudi’s to “fan sectarian tensions between the Sunni and Shia.”, writes Naiman.
Roebuck’s cable to the White House makes that pretty clear: “Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here…….are giving increasing attention to the matter and, we should coordinate more closely with their governments on wats to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue” added emphasis.
The US ambassador to Syria was recommending cooperation with two of the most corrupt regimes in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in an effort to undermine the Assad regime in the hope of creating a more reliable pro-western ally.
Eight years later as Syria was engulfed in civil war that had sectarian Shia/Sunni elements in it, the US, and most likely other western nations, criticized this conflict as an unfortunate development, a product of Arab/Muslim backwardness. These former colonial subjects simply don’t know how to govern themselves. The Irish, the black South Africans, the numerous colonized states of Latin America, all of them unable to govern, were desperately in need of a colonial overseer to save them from themselves.
Their political instability and relative backwardness, economically, the inability to develop “healthy” capitalist democracies along the lines of Britain or Germany, was not a product of colonial occupation, restricting this development, but inherent in the racial or religious makeup of the population.
As I read some of the cables detailed in The Wikileaks Files, I am reminded of the debt we owe to Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and others who have pulled the mask from the ugly face of capitalist politics. There are others mentioned in Julian Assange’s excellent book, When Google Met Wikileaks
The developments in Syria will not benefit the Syrian working class and we will see more bloodshed as the forces determining the outcome are the enemies of the Syrian workers and workers throughout the world.
But this is not unique to Syria. Sudan, Kashmir, Eastern Europe, Argentina, Mexico, India and throughout the world we are witnessing the by-products of a global social system that has reached the limits of its ability to take human society forward. China too will be engulfed in struggle as the Chinese working class pushes back against the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing. There is no human or environmentally friendly capitalism and China will confirm that as time goes on.
Most of the nation states in the former colonial world are relatively young, created from without. Nigeria for example only became a state in 1960 as British colonialism put a box around hundreds of different tribal communities and told them they are all Nigerian now; national consciousness takes time. Syria and all the problems we are witnessing in former European colonies are a direct result of colonialism and will never escape endless war, poverty and famine within the framework of global capitalism.
National borders are not a divine creation but workers cannot ignore them. The vast majority of the world’s people possess no working capital. Yes there are huge differences in living standards and conditions are so bad in some regions that slavery is a norm. But we have much in common as an exploited class and there is an inherent tendency for oppressed peoples to unite and seek allies beyond their immediate borders. The attack in immigrants is an attempt by our enemies to undermine this tendency. But we can, and must build an international movement to combat and eliminate the system that is waging war against humanity and nature.
The only answer is a global federation of democratic socialist states that can work cooperatively to produce the necessities of human life in a way that is in harmony with nature not in conflict with it. As things are going, there will be huge swathes of the planet that will be uninhabitable due to climate change, a product of industrial society and capitalism.
We have a future to fight for, a future for our children and grandchildren. We owe it to them.
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