Oct 01, 2015
Russia’s direct military intervention into Syria
has dramatically changed the dynamics of a
war that has raged since 2011. The fighting
during the last four years has torn this historic
Arab country to shreds, made millions of
Syrians into refugees, and left more than
200,000 people dead.
The stage has been set for a possible major
military counteroffensive against arch-
reactionary Islamic military organizations who
have been gaining more and more territory.
After four years of fighting against these
groups, the Syrian army has been forced into
an ever smaller portion of western Syria. The
Russian intervention is meant to bolster their
effort, stop the retreat before the armies of the
so-called Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL), Al-
Qaeda and others, in preparation for a military
counteroffensive.
The main force preventing Syria from being
completely overrun by ISIS and Al-Qaeda
has been the Syrian Arab Army, the national
army of the country. Between 50,000 and
85,000 Syrian soldiers have been killed in this
fight already. Syrian Kurdish forces under the
leadership of the People’s Protection Units
(YPG) have also been heroically battling
against ISIS. The YPG had earlier fought
against the Syrian army in an effort to create
a Kurdish-ruled autonomous area in the
northern part of Syria.
Now the Russian military has directly entered
the battle on the side of the Syrian national
army. Russia may directly give assistance to the
Kurdish fighters as well. Russia’s intervention
was formally requested by the sovereign Syrian
government led by Bashar Al-Assad and thus
conforms to international law.
The stated position of the Russian government
is that a long-term solution to the Syrian crisis
is through political change, based on dialogue
between the Baathist government and some of
the opposition but not ISIS or Al Qaeda, and
the retention and defense of Syria’s core state
institutions.
The Russia-Syria connection
Russia and before it the Soviet Union
were historic allies of the secular Baathist
government in Damascus, with deep military,
social
and
economic
ties to the
country.
It is
critically important that
progressive forces abandon the false language
and political characterizations being spoon-
fed to the public by the pro-imperialist media.
Assad is characterized as a “dictator” who
is “killing his own people.” That works for
demonization purposes, but it cannot help
anyone establish an informed position about
the social and political character of the
different forces in the Syrian war. When
reading the Western news, one would think
every death has been at the hands of the
Syrian government. There has been almost
no mention of the social base of support
for the Syrian government, or the 50,000-
80,000 Syrian soldiers who have died fighting
sectarian armed groups, including ISIS and
al-Qaeda.
The Syrian Baathist government, like the
Iraqi Baathist regime, banned sectarian-based
religious parties. Saddam Hussein also banned
the Communist Party while establishing a
secular-based social democratic economic and
social program. In Syria, the Baathists worked
with some Syrian leftists and repressed others.
In 2011 and 2012, the Russian government
hosted meetings in Moscow of Syrian
opposition groups that stood politically
against Assad and demanded far-reaching
political reforms from the regime but rejected
foreign intervention and armed struggle. Most
of these opposition groups were secular.
U.S. policy and the rise of ISIS
The United States, France, Britain and their
allies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia took a
different path. The United States and its NATO
and regional allies have funneled weapons and
money to right-wing armed sectarian groups
since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. This
quickly morphed into the dominance among
the
armed
opposition
in Syria of
the Islamic
State, Al-Qaeda
and other groups.
In its reckless effort
to smash the Assad
government, as it did to
Qaddafi’s in Libya, the
Obama administration
cared little about the
political character of the
“rebels.” In so doing, they
created a monster they
could not control.
Even as ISIS and Al-Qaeda
grew stronger and grabbed more
and more territory from the besieged
Syrian army, the Obama administration
aimed its fire at the Syrian government. The
CIA kept coordinating massive weapons
shipments from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and
Qatar that allowed the armed opposition to
get ever stronger. In August 2013, John Kerry
and the Republicans in Congress demanded
the bombing of the Syrian national army and
government military assets, not ISIS or the
armed opposition groups.
Then in June 2014, ISIS shocked the United
States by defeating the Iraqi army and seized
control of Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city,
and much of Anbar province, and seemed to
threaten U.S. assets in Iraq. In a panic, Obama
suddenly changed course, sent thousands
of U.S. military personnel back to Iraq and
announced the open-ended bombing of ISIS
positions in Syria and Iraq.
Obama announced the new military
campaign against ISIS on September 10,
2014 but also reiterated that the United States
would continue to work to topple the Assad
government in Syria.
When he spoke to the people of the United
States about the plan for “endless war” against
IS in Iraq and Syria, Obama refused to tell
the truth about the situation in the Middle
East. He refused to acknowledge how his
administration’s strategy for regime change in
Libya and Syria, like George W. Bush’s earlier
war in Iraq, were the fundamental factors that
had led to the rise of ISIS and other extremist
organizations in three out of the four most
important secular states in the Arab world.
The feckless, reckless and shortsighted policy
of the Obama administration in Syria and
Libya was no less breathtaking in 2011 than
had been Jimmy Carter’s and Ronald Reagan’s
in Afghanistan in the 1980s when the CIA
and Pentagon provided massive support to the
“mujahadeen” fighters—among them Osama
bin Laden—in a clandestine war against the
socialist government that had taken power
in Afghanistan. The U.S.-supported anti-
communist guerrillas morphed later into Al
Qaeda and the Taliban.
Failed U.S. military efforts: ISIS has been
winning
Not only did U.S. interventions open the
political space for the rise of ISIS in Iraq,
Libya and Syria, but Obama’s latest effort
against ISIS has proven a miserable failure.
If the goal was to “degrade and defeat ISIS”
as promised, they have failed completely. ISIS
is stronger. Tens of thousands of new fighters
have joined ISIS in Syria during the past 12
months. Money and weapons kept pouring in.
It is the Syrian army that lost ground, not ISIS.
Obama promised “no boots on the ground”
in Syria. His even more right-wing and
militaristic critics in Congress are also not
calling for thousands of U.S. troops to go and
do battle with ISIS. Public opinion in the
United States will not allow another mass
deployment of troops to fight and die in
another Middle East war.
But from a military standpoint, the armies of
ISIS and Al-Qaeda cannot be defeated by air
assault. They can only be defeated by other
forces on the ground.
When Russian President Putin spoke at the
United Nations General Assembly on Sept.
28, he implicitly blamed the United States
for creating the current crises in the Middle
East by invading and destroying the secular
government Iraq in 2003, militarily destroying
the secular Libyan government in 2012 and
fomenting civil war in Syria.
At the UN, Putin called for an international
coalition to defeat ISIS, similar to the “anti-
Hitler” coalition in World War that allied the
Soviet Union, the United States and Britain
during World War Two. He also emphasized
the need to stand with the sovereign
government in Syria battling ISIS, Al Qaeda
and the other armed organizations.
The Obama administration immediately
rejected this proposal because it included
collaboration with the Syrian government.
This is merely a demonstration of arrogance
and hubris by representatives of the Empire. In
their eyes, Assad was not supposed to survive
after they declared that his government
must fall. Since Obama, Kerry and Hillary
Clinton declared “Assad must go,” they are
now unwilling to accept responsibility for the
“humiliation” of their “great power” that would
be implied by entering into an open alliance
with the same government they declared had “no
future” in Syria.
Contradiction and hypocrisy
Obama’s secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, says
that Russia’s efforts in Syria are “doomed to fail”
because Russia believes the fight against ISIS
and other terrorist forces requires support for the
Assad government and the Syrian military.
But the logical contradiction lies not with the
Russian position but with the one espoused by
the White House. ISIS and the Al-Qaeda-led
coalition, while they sometimes fight each other,
are fighting the Syrian army. The only reason they
have not seized the entire country is because of
the battle waged by the Syrian army.
The United States says it wants to degrade
and defeat ISIS, and is bombing some of the
ISIS positions, but it won’t send U.S. troops to
defeat ISIS. It won’t support the Syrian military
that is actually fighting against ISIS and an
array of other terrorist groups. In fact, the U.S.
government is sending arms and weapons and
paying the salaries of anti-Assad fighters who are
then fighting alongside Al-Qaeda.
The U.S. position appears not just as a “logical
contradiction” or hypocritical but downright
nonsensical.
Just step back and look: Obama officials are
condemning the Russian bombing because it
has targeted Al-Qaeda. Russian aircraft are
bombing positions of several armed opposition
groups including the Nusra Front, an affiliate of
Al-Qaeda, which the United States recognizes
as responsible for hijacking and flying airplanes
into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
on Sept. 11, 2001.
The need to destroy Al-Qaeda has been the
principal rationale used by the U.S. “war on terror”
conducted for the past 14 years in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen, Somali and elsewhere.
Thus, the irony is unmistakable when the
Pentagon and U.S. media now denounces the
Russian bombing of the Al-Qaeda affiliate in
Syria. And the irony goes deeper. The Russian
bombing has also struck CIA-funded armed
groups fighting alongside Al-Qaeda.
That’s right. U.S. taxpayers are paying for arms
and training and salaries for armed combatants
who are fighting with, and not against, Al-
Qaeda. Apparently Al-Qaeda is okay as long as
they kill Syrians and not Americans, and help the
U.S. overthrow independent governments in the
Middle East.
This seeming contradiction and weirdness in U.S.
policy regarding Al-Qaeda is not exaggerated by
those of us in the U.S. anti-war movement who
successfully mobilized to stop Obama and Kerry’s
projected bombing campaign against the Syrian
army that was planned in August 2013 and was
only narrowly averted when Obama stepped back
from the precipice at the last moment.
This is from the Oct. 1, 2015, New York Times:
“The strikes on Thursday targeted the Army
of Conquest, a coalition of insurgent groups
that includes the Nusra Front, the hard-line
Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham and a range of
less extreme Islamist groups—all of which are
opposed to the Islamic State. Often fighting
alongside the Army of Conquest are relatively
secular groups from what is left of the loose-
knit Free Syrian Army, including some that
have received United States training and
advanced American-made antitank missiles.
At least one C.I.A.-trained group was among
the targets hit on Wednesday, which drew an
angry response from Washington.”
John McCain himself confirmed strikes
against “our Free Syrian Army or groups that
have been armed and trained by the CIA,
because we have communications with people
there.”
Stop the U.S. campaign for regime change
in Syria
The position of the Russian government is that
the survival of the Syrian army is indispensable
for a viable political solution to emerge that
could end the war in Syria and prevent the
country from being fragmented. That is
precisely what happened in Libya and Iraq
following the imperialist-led destruction of
those two countries in 2003 and 2011, when
the existing state structures were shattered.
Far from being a “logical contradiction,”
this is fully rational. In his CBS interview
with Charlie Rose on Sept. 24, Putin stated:
“There is no other solution to the Syrian crisis
than strengthening the effective government
structures and rendering them help in fighting
terrorism. But at the same time, urging them
to engage in positive dialogue with the rational
opposition and conduct reform. ... ” As a
rejoinder to U.S. policy makers who insisted
that “Assad must go,” he told Charlie Rose,
“It’s only the Syrian people who are entitled
to decide who should govern their country and
how.”
The Syrian war has entered a new stage.
The stakes are high. Russia’s intervention
constitutes a pledge that the entire country
will not be overtaken by ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
The fact that Russia has entered the Syria fray
through the creation in Baghdad of a new
international center for military coordination
against ISIS that includes Russia, Iran, Syria
and the government of Iraq must be regarded
as a historical irony of the first order. When
Bush and Cheney ordered the criminal
invasion of Iraq in 2003, the last thing they
could have foreseen a decade later is a post-
occupation Iraqi government providing a
military headquarters in Iraq for Russia,
Syria and Iran. The words “feckless,” “reckless”
and “short-sighted” are not really adequate
to capture the degree of incompetence of
a foreign policy based ultimately on the
arrogance of imperial power.
Original article appears at
www.liberationnews.org
*Brian Becker is the National Coordinator of U.S.
anti-war coalition, ANSWER
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