Ashley Smith

Imperialism and anti-imperialism today

As the New Year dawned, Donald Trump’s regime appeared to be coming apart at the seams.
The billionaire’s tariffs against China and threats to fire the head of the Federal Reserve Bank sent the stock market into a panic. Trump then shut down the government over his demand for a racist border wall and spent his holiday home alone in the White House, munching on burgers and binge-watching Fox News.
The political establishment, which had until recently tolerated Trump’s impulsive statements and erratic policy swings, decisively turned against him over his surprise announcement to withdraw all US troops from Syria and half of the 14,000 occupying Afghanistan.
Everyone from the generals in his cabinet to the state bureaucracy, the corporate media and both the Republican and Democratic parties have denounced Trump’s withdrawal as nothing less than the abandonment of US imperialism’s bipartisan strategy to defend global capitalism through a system of alliances against terrorism, so-called rogue states and great-power rivals.
Trump’s decision, while made in haste and reportedly over a phone call with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, isn’t the accident it has sometimes been portrayed as, but a campaign promise that flows from his America First nationalist strategy to put US interests before all else, even if that means disrupting alliances and cutting deals with rivals.
The establishment’s opposition to his decision – and, indeed, his whole America First strategy – began within his own administration. Defense secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest and was soon followed by Brett McGurk, Trump’s envoy to the global coalition to fight ISIS.
Mattis and McGurk denounced Trump for betraying the Kurdish-led Syrian Defence Force – the Kurds are now threatened with destruction by an invasion from Turkey – and failing to finish the war against ISIS, which, while it lost its capital in Raqqa, still retains over 30,000 soldiers in Iraq and Syria.
But their main criticism was that Trump’s decision was a surrender of American imperial influence in Syria to Russia and Iran. In particular, they and other sections of the establishment are concerned that Iran will gain an upper hand in its regional power struggle with the US’s main allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
In his letter of resignation, Mattis further excoriated Trump for trashing the traditional US strategy of superintending the neoliberal world order and thereby compromising Washington’s ability to dominate the world system.
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues”, he wrote. “We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.”
Mattis was backed up a chorus of retired generals. Former admiral James Stavridis impugned Trump’s intellectual capacity to absorb information in an article in Time magazine. Retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal told ABC News that he considered Trump immoral and would never accept an appointment in his cabinet.
The foreign policy establishment was just as critical. Barack Obama’s favourite neoconservative, Robert Kagan, warned that Trump had opened “an era more destructive of the world order than in the 1930s. Back then, at least Britain and France were responsible for keeping part of the order. Now we are the responsible world power – and we are undermining it”.
Surprisingly, the Republican Party establishment, which has heretofore tolerated Trump’s erratic rule in order secure tax cuts for big business, further deregulation of Corporate America and right wing judicial appointments, condemned Trump’s decision almost unanimously.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who most recently made headlines as the Republicans’ rabid attack dog against Dr Christine Blasey Ford in defence of now confirmed Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, declared that Trump’s withdrawal was a “disaster”, a “stain on the honour of the United States” and a decision that risked “another 9/11”.
Graham penned a bipartisan public letter to Trump signed by six senators that decried the decision as a threat to American dominance of the Middle East that would “bolster two other adversaries to the United States, Iran and Russia. As you are aware, both Iran and Russia have used the Syrian conflict as a stage to magnify their influence in the region. Any sign of weakness perceived by Iran or Russia will only result in their increase presence in the region and a decrease in the trust of our partners and allies”.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, signed on to the letter, but she wasn’t alone among the Democrats. In fact, the party staked a position almost to the right of the GOP, denouncing Trump for his misleadership of the empire and for capitulating to Russia and Iran.
Nancy Pelosi pointed to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s statement in support of Trump – “Donald’s right. I agree with him” – and railed: “Imagine. That is the comment of Vladimir Putin on the actions taken by the president of the United States in relationship to Syria, an action that was taken without the benefit of the thinking of our national security establishment and out intelligence community included in that, a decision made in a cavalier fashion in terms of our allies in the fight against terrorism, a decision that is dangerous”.
Daniel Feldman, Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, recognised the ironic unity in the establishment across the political spectrum, admitting, “I hate to ever feel like I’m in the company of neocons, and I’m no proponent of a forever war in Afghanistan, but pulling troops out in this way is completely irresponsible and nonstrategic”.
The establishment has come out swinging because they are worried that now, after the resignations of Mattis, McGurk and former general John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, Trump will be completely unhindered from implementing his America First program.
The two parties had hoped that the administration’s so-called adult faction – which also had included H.R. McMaster, and CEOs Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn – would restrain Trump and channel his foreign policy into a more orthodox, if muscular, version of the traditional one of superintending the neoliberal world order.
The deceased warmonger John McCain had greeted this grouping’s appointment by declaring he “could not imagine a better, more capable national security team”. Even socialist Bernie Sanders and progressive Elizabeth Warren voted to confirm Mattis and Kelly to Trump’s cabinet back in 2017.
Sanders justified this by stating that they “may not be the nominees I would have preferred for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, but in a Trump cabinet likely to be loaded up with right wing extremists, all of whom I will oppose, I hope general Mattis and general Kelly will have a moderating influence on some of the racist and xenophobic views that president Trump advocated throughout the campaign”.
It’s a sign of the times that the bipartisan political establishment would look to a war criminal whose nickname is “Mad Dog” as an adult who could discipline Trump. Mattis infamously told his troops in Iraq to “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet”. With such instructions, it should come as no surprise that he oversaw a massacre in Haditha and the destruction of Fallujah, which included the illegal use of the chemical weapon white phosphorous.
In fact, the CEOs and generals did at first manage to contain Trump and his America First faction, spearheaded at the start by the dark prince of the alt-right, Steve Bannon. They took credit for stopping Trump from withdrawing from NATO, pulling troops out of South Korea and, until now, doing the same in Syria and Afghanistan. They were so successful that, after the billionaire fired Bannon in a fit of egotistical rage, it looked like the establishment had won the faction fight.
But Trump grew frustrated about the restraints on his agenda imposed by the generals and CEOs. In March of last year, Trump got rid of most of them, firing Cohn, McMaster and Tillerson. They were replaced by like-minded hawks and nationalists like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. Now, with Mattis, McGurk and Kelly gone, the establishment has few reliable agents left within the Trump regime.
While Trump railed against all his critics, trashing his military critics as “failed generals”, he did agree to slow down the removal of troops from both countries after Lindsey Graham came to the White House to beg for a change of course. Nevertheless, Trump’s nationalist backers know they’ve won a victory. Steve Bannon told a reporter that “the apparatus slow-rolled him until he just said enough and did it himself … Not pretty, but at least done”.
No one on the left should oppose US troops being removed from Syria and Afghanistan. But the fact that Bannon was delighted with Trump’s announcement should be a warning if anyone has any illusions that anti-war motives, let alone anti-imperialist motives, are involved.
The US forces in Syria were never there to aid the now-defeated popular uprising against the Bashar al-Assad regime, to protect Syrian civilians from Assad’s atrocities or to advance the Kurdish struggle for self-determination. Their sole mission was to wipe out ISIS, and this was the purpose to which the US tried to bend all its allies.
Even that war aim should not be seen as humanitarian in any way. Remember that ISIS did not exist before the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Like al-Qaeda before it, ISIS emerged as a reactionary opposition to US intervention.
The US war against ISIS was destined to backfire. It caused death and destruction for untold numbers of civilians in both Iraq and Syria, and those war crimes have increased the breeding ground for opposition to imperialism in any form.
The occupation of Afghanistan – now the US’s longest war – had similar consequences. The US invaded and toppled the former Taliban government, killed thousands of innocent Afghans, and installed an utterly corrupt and unpopular regime of warlords and crooks. The occupation and its quisling government is so despised that large numbers of Afghans have rallied in despair back to the Taliban, which is likely to return to power when US troops withdraw.
Nor does the withdrawal mean an end to US imperial intervention in either country. The Pentagon has already drawn up plans to use their Special Forces and air power to strike against ISIS in Syria. Trump’s super-hawk national security advisor John Bolton reportedly told Israel that the US would support its attacks on Iranian targets in Syria – and for good measure, he threatened the Assad regime with air strikes if it used chemical weapons again.
Thus, Trump’s America First policy does not, in the misleading words of liberal commentator Gareth Porter, offer “the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state”.
As left wing journalist Jeremy Scahill tweeted, “For those who somehow think this is Trump opposing the war machine, I point you to his massive escalation of drone strikes, his easing of rules for killing civilians, his use of ground troops in Yemen and Somalia and his use of criminal weaponry like the MOAB in Afghanistan”.
Trump merely wants to extract the US from losing positions, compel other nations to shoulder the burden of fighting and bend relationships with both allies and enemies to what he perceives to be the interests of the US state and American capitalism.
This is what led him to rip up the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran and threaten it with war, back Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen – and, most importantly, launch a new cold war with China.
But being opposed to Trump’s erratic nationalism should not lead anyone on the left to follow the Republican and Democratic establishments’ defence of the traditional imperial strategy of ruling the neoliberal world order. While that status quo brought riches to ruling classes around the world, it has produced nothing but misery for workers and oppressed peoples.
Indeed, few if any great powers rival the crimes that US imperialism committed in establishing and running that so-called rules-based international order. It was founded at the end of the Second World War with two of the greatest acts of barbarism in human history: the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After that, during the Cold War, the US and its superpower rival, the Soviet Union, trapped the world in fear of total destruction through nuclear war. The US even called its policy, which promised to ensure peace through the arms race, MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).
Faced with rebellion within its own sphere of influence, the US was the principal enemy of national liberation struggles, backing reactionary dictators throughout the developing world and, when that didn’t work, launching wars like in Vietnam that laid waste to whole countries in a vain effort to preserve imperial dominance.
Since the collapse of the USSR, Washington’s unchallenged rule over the world order has been no better. The US used the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank to impose free trade globalisation for the benefit of capital and to the detriment of workers throughout the world.
It deployed its military to put down all opposition, whether progressive or reactionary and to impose its rule on sections of the world reduced to chaos by neoliberal economics.
Neither Trump’s “America First” nationalism nor the establishment’s neoliberal imperialism offer anything but austerity, war and state terror for the workers and oppressed of the world. Meanwhile, on the central question of imperial competition with China, both Trump and his critics agree on the need to confront a rising threat to US dominance over the world system.
One mainstream commentator, Robert Samuelson, went so far as to argue that the US is spending too much on the welfare state and underfunding the military, thus causing it to fall behind its competitors in China and Russia. He ominously warned:
“It’s hard to miss the parallels with the period before World War II, when England, France and the United States allowed Adolf Hitler to rearm Germany, altering the global balance of power … This is not a call for war. It is a call for stopping many self-inflicted wounds. We need to stop underfunding the military, especially on research and cyberwarfare, even if that means less welfare.”
These developments make the question of imperialism and anti-imperialism unavoidable and central for the new socialist movement in the US. So far, it has been ill-prepared to answer it for two reasons.
The first is the influence of pro-Democratic Party liberalism, which led the main forces of the anti-war movement that protested the “war on terror” invasions of the Bush years to dissolve themselves when Barack Obama won the White House in 2008 as a supposed anti-war candidate.
As should have been obvious then and certainly is in retrospect now, Obama never intended to be an anti-war president. He sustained the occupation of Iraq, increased the troop presence in Afghanistan, launched a global drone war and attempted to confront China through his administration’s failed Pivot to Asia.
The dissolution of the anti-war movement meant that many lessons about US imperialism have not been transmitted to a new generation of radicals.
Second, among the radicalisation taking place to the left of the Democratic Party since 2008, imperialism has been downplayed.
Most of the socialist radicalisation associated with Bernie Sanders, for example, has focused on domestic reforms like Medicare for All. But there is a connection between anti-imperialism and the struggle for such reforms – and as the ruling class, as Samuelson signals, puts the demands of imperialism first and social reforms last, it becomes impossible to separate them.
Sanders’ lead on the question of US foreign policy is inadequate. Recently, he laudably called for a progressive internationalism that puts human rights and democracy at its heart. But on key issues – like supporting Trump’s protectionism against China – he falls short, following the traditional social democratic practice of promoting a left version of nationalism.
Some in the new left have fallen under the sway of another inadequate doctrine: a form of Stalinist anti-imperialism inherited from the Cold War. This position, known as “campism”, uses the idea that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” to justify support for any and all antagonists of the US, no matter how oppressive and capitalist. This had led some to unconscionably support Assad’s regime in Syria and even Xi Jinping’s in China as somehow anti-imperialist.
Instead of these models, the new left must recover the genuine socialist tradition of anti-imperialism that opposes the US state, first and foremost, but also its rivals like China or Russia – and instead builds solidarity from below between workers and oppressed nations and peoples of the world.
Only this approach can provide the new left with a solid foundation to oppose Trump’s unbound nationalism and the establishment’s neoliberal imperialism.

The wrong kind of unity against Trump

They’re back.
After nearly a decade in exile from the headquarters of US imperialism, foreign policy extremists so radical that even known neoconservatives dismissed them as kooks have returned to power in the Trump administration.
Together with Trump, they have set the US and its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia on a path to intensified conflict with Iran by ripping up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the nuclear accord – with Tehran.
Trump’s latest appointees to his cabinet of horrors, Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security advisor, have long been on record as calling for military action against Iran.
Just last year in a meeting in Paris, Bolton thundered that “the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran”.
Trump’s regime change fanatics hope to restore US foreign policy to what it was during their glory days under George Bush Jr.
Bush’s ‘strategic disaster’
At the tail end of the administration of Bill Clinton, the self-described neoconservatives came together to form the Project for a New American Century. Its signatories included past and future war criminals Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps the most radical of them all, Bolton.
The neocons agitated for the US to adopt a policy of rolling back any and all rivals and so-called rogue states that opposed the Washington consensus of free trade globalisation.
While championing unilateral tactics in pursuit of this project, the neocons were careful to stress that such aggressive assertion of American power was in the interests of US allies and the world system.
They identified Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as one of the pivotal regimes that had to be overthrown to christen a new epoch of US hegemony. The neocons reached their pinnacle of dominance under the Bush administration, especially after 9/11, which they used as a pretext to try to enact their regime change fantasies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Their aim was to impose US supremacy over the Middle East and Central Asia, and their strategic oil reserves. Washington hoped to thereby lock in US control over its European allies, as well as its rising rivals, especially China, all of which relied on the region for their energy supplies.
In the Middle East, the neocons, especially Bolton, agitated for regime change not only in Iraq, but also in Syria – and, most importantly, Iran. As one British official put it at the time, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”.
The neocon’s imperialist fantasies collapsed in Iraq. The 2003 invasion produced mass resistance, which bogged down the US occupation in endless counter-insurgency warfare.
Ironically, instead of imposing a new government loyal to the US, Bush ended up backing a sectarian Shia government whose leaders’ allegiance was to Iran.
Iran, one of the countries on Bush’s so-called axis of evil, along with Iraq and North Korea, emerged as the real victor of the Iraq War, with the predominant influence of the Shia-dominated post-Hussein government. 
Thus, the war, the intent of which was to impose US rule throughout the region and the world, turned into, in the words of retired general William Odom, the single “greatest strategic disaster in United States history”.
Obama’s balancing act
With the US defeat in Iraq compounded by the Great Recession, the US ruling class turned to Barack Obama to restore and rehabilitate the power and credibility of American imperialism. Taking up the Bush administration’s own retreat in his second term, Obama abandoned regime change as a policy.
Instead, he developed a new imperial strategy of extracting the US from ground wars in the Middle East, not as an abandonment of the project of American imperial domination of the world, but so that the US could conduct what his secretary of state Hillary Clinton called a “Pivot to Asia” to contain China’s rise and force it to accept Washington’s hegemony and its free trade policies.
Unfortunately for Obama, the Arab masses weren’t content with the existing Middle East order of despotic capitalist states co-existing with Israeli apartheid. In 2011, they rose up in the Arab Spring, staging mass protests for democracy and equality that challenged both US allies and antagonists.
The Obama administration at first tried to back the existing order. When that proved untenable, the US opted not for regime change, but an “orderly transition” – getting rid of dictators (mostly), but preserving the repressive core of the state. This was the outcome of the pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and of the US intervention in support of a rebel army in Libya.
Elsewhere, the US tolerated suppression of democratic risings, ignoring, for instance, Saudi Arabia’s orchestration of a brutal counter-revolution in Bahrain. Then, when the nightmare in Iraq led to the rise of ISIS, the Obama administration focused all its military firepower on the self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
As part of this retrenchment, Obama opted to reach a negotiated deal with Iran over its nuclear program. In return for a shutdown of the program and stringent inspections, much of the onerous sanctions regime on Iran was lifted.
In the process of all of this, the US suffered a relative decline as the region’s imperial overlord, while Iran continued its rise as a regional power, consolidating its network of allies – from Syria, where it and Russia helped the Assad regime crush the Syrian revolution, to Iraq, to Hezbollah in Lebanon and its Houthi allies in Yemen.
Faced with the rise of Iran as a regional power, its bitter regional rivals Israel and Saudi Arabia intensified their effort against Tehran. Israel increased its strikes against Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, and Saudi Arabia intensified its proxy war with Iran in Yemen.
Enter Trump
Trump seized the presidency with the promise that he would “make America great again” by implanting a unilateralist strategy he called “America First”.
In the administration’s National Security Strategy document, it made its intentions plain: abandon free trade globalisation for economic nationalism, including protectionism; impose racist and Islamophobic border controls; downplay the so-called War on Terror to focus on the great power competition with China and Russia; and confront so-called rogue states Iran and North Korea.
For the first year of his presidency, the establishment faction in the administration prevented Trump from implementing the full conclusions of these stated goals.
This past March, however, Trump conducted a housecleaning. Out were figures closely associated with the Republican and corporate establishment, such as Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson and HR McMaster. Their rivals – neocon hawks Pompeo and Bolton and the arch-protectionist Peter Navarro – took the helm.
This team has begun to push further toward implementing Trump’s America First program, starting with protectionist measures against China, and continuing with the war threats against North Korea and Iran.
With the regime changers back in power, Trump ripped up the nuclear accord, based on the erroneous claim that Iran has continued to develop its nuclear weapons program.
Trump and his Israeli fellow reactionary Benjamin Netanyahu are lying – the UN watchdog assigned to monitor Iran’s program has repeatedly verified that it is in compliance, and US intelligence and military officials confirm this.
Never guided by fact, however, Trump nixed the agreement, throwing the Middle East and indeed global structure of imperialism into chaos and conflict. 
The revived regime changers believe that, despite Iran’s gains in the region, its regime is weak. It has run up debt to pay for the counter-revolutionary war in Syria to prop up Bashar al-Assad; its economy, though growing, has failed to benefit the country’s workers and poor; it faced insurrectionary protests at the end of last year; and it now confronts a wave of strikes.
Eager to take advantage, the Trump administration has begun to take us all down the path to war with Iran similar to that blazed by Bush in Iraq.
Trump has long been encouraging Saudi Arabia and Israel to confront Iran to stop it from consolidating its position in Syria once ISIS is finally defeated. Both states have taken his termination of the nuclear accord as a green light to attack.
The day after the announcement, Israel conducted a massive campaign of air strikes against Iranian military bases in Syria. Similarly, Saudi Arabia intensified its bombing campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Trump’s reneging on the nuclear accord has also disrupted Washington’s system of alliances.
Trump snubbed the four other United Nations Security Council members, including Germany’s Angela Merkel and especially French president Emmanuel Macron, who went out of his way to visit Washington and beg Trump to renew the treaty.
Not only that, but administration officials have threatened France and Germany, who have made significant investments in Iran over the last few years, with sanctions if they don’t heed American dictates and terminate those contracts.
The US has done the same with China and Russia. These imperial rivals will be forced to choose between backing sometime ally Iran and facing yet more intense conflict with the US – or conceding to the US and losing important ground they’ve gained in the Middle East.
It’s impossible to predict the consequences of all of this. The regime changers may not get their way in the end.
But we do know this much: if the US attempts to crack the Iranian regime, it could detonate a war far more severe than anything we’ve witnessed, including the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The US would not be taking on a collapsing regime like Saddam Hussein’s. Iran has a strong state, buttressed by a modern economy, with significant backing from Russia and China, and a popular base that the hard-liners in the ruling class have already started to mobilise to stand up against US and Israeli war threats.
Even if Trump doesn’t start a direct US war, his administration has intensified a regional conflict between, on one side, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and on the other, Iran. So far, this conflict has been fought out over Syria and Yemen, but with sabre-rattling on all sides, it could degenerate into a larger war between these rival powers.
The consequences for relations among the imperialist states are similarly unpredictable. Will Germany and France buckle under US pressure? Already, French finance minister Bruno Le Maire has threatened to break with Trump and uphold the Iran nuclear accord and France’s investment in the country, declaring: “We have to work among ourselves in Europe to defend our European economic sovereignty”.
What will Russia and China do? And what will be the spillover effects of ending the Iran nuclear accord on Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un over North Korea’s nuclear program? Any rational actor, which Kim certainly is, would certainly doubt the credibility of Trump in making any agreement with North Korea.
What’s more, the US and North Korea are miles apart to begin with. Trump is demanding rapid denuclearisation, while Kim wants a slow process so that he can use his missiles as a bargaining chip to preserve his regime.
A test for the left
Faced with the Trump administration’s implementation of America First unilateralism and threats of regime change in Iran, the international left will yet again be tested on the question of imperialism.
Much of the so-called anti-imperialist left failed that test in Syria, betraying international solidarity with a popular revolution to line up with Assad’s regime, Iran and Putin’s Russia.
The left can’t afford to fail this even more consequential test. Here in the US, we must first and foremost oppose the cancellation of the Iran accord, Trump’s threats of regime change and the encouragement of Israel and Saudi Arabia to launch attacks on Iran and its allies.
There should be no illusions about Trump’s Democratic predecessors in the White House. While they may have different strategies and tactics than Trump, they were no less committed to US imperialism’s domination of the world.
In particular, Obama’s Iran accord was negotiated not out of some pacifist morality, but to protect the US and Israeli monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region and set the stage for the so-called “pivot to Asia”.
At the same time, the left can’t give any political support to other imperial powers like France or Germany, Washington’s rivals like China and Russia, or regional powers like the Iranian state. Instead, we should build international solidarity for Palestine and for popular struggles for equality and democracy, like those of Iranian workers.
Only this combination of anti-imperialism and international solidarity is an adequate response to a system that is intensifying conflicts between imperialist and regional powers throughout the world.
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First published at <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">www.SocialistWorker.org</a>. Edited for length

The return of the regime change hawks

After a weeklong Twitter storm of threats from Donald Trump, the US government, in alliance with Britain and France, launched air strikes against Syria late on 13 April.
This mainly symbolic display of military might will intensify geopolitical conflicts in the region and internationally, bringing the world closer to a wider war – and it sets the stage for Trump and his war cabinet to ramp up hostilities with Iran and North Korea in the weeks and months to come.
The US-led attack reportedly targeted three sites in Damascus and Homs where the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is accused of developing, manufacturing and storing chemical weapons.
This was in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against rebel forces and the civilian population in the town of Douma in Eastern Ghouta. In an act of state terrorism, the regime killed over 70 and injured close to 1,000, mainly women and children. The poison gas attack succeeded in compelling the withdrawal of the Islamic fundamentalist militia Jaish al-Islam within days.
British prime minister Theresa May justified the attack as a “humanitarian intervention” designed to save Syrian lives. In reality, the US, Britain and France don’t care about Syrian civilians. They have stood by while Assad laid waste to the country and massacred Syrians with “conventional” weapons.
For a second time, Trump has launched a military strike on Syria over the regime’s use of chlorine or sarin gas. He wants to deter the regime from using such weapons again, as well as demonstrate US military power. Any pretence of humanitarian concern from May or Trump is rank hypocrisy, rivalled only by the propaganda churned out by Assad, Russia and Iran in defence of their ongoing war of terror on the Syrian people.
Hypocrisy and bombast
The US, in particular, is in no position to claim the moral high ground. Just in the recent past and present, the US war and occupation of Iraq led to the deaths of well over a million people. Some of those in Fallujah were victims of American chemical weapons: white phosphorus bombs.
Washington is currently backing Saudi Arabia’s campaign of mass slaughter in Yemen and Israel’s terror against nonviolent Palestinian protesters.
In Syria itself, the US has proved its callous disregard for people’s lives. Although strangely ignored by many in the anti-war movement, the US has been at war in Syria since 2014, but not against the regime, the main culprit for the carnage and destruction in the country. Instead, the US has aimed its missiles and bombs at the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), operating in a de facto alliance with the Assad regime.
Toppling Assad is not a US war aim. May made this abundantly clear when she announced that the bombing campaign did not have the goal of “regime change” – something confirmed by Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White, who stated the strikes did not represent “an attempt to depose the Syrian regime”.
Trump and his British and French accomplices have done nothing to help the Syrian people rising up against Assad.
Even worse, Trump has demonised the refugees from violence and repression in Syria, using the worst Islamophobic and racist terms. During his presidential campaign, Trump denounced Syrian refugees as a terrorist “Trojan horse”, and as president, he has taken numerous measures to try to bar their entry.
The number of Syrian refugees allowed into the US has slowed to a trickle: only 11 so far this year.
Truth be told, Trump’s air strike was morally bankrupt political theatre. Repeating the erroneous boast that George W. Bush made at the beginning of the Iraq War, Trump declared “Mission accomplished”. The Pentagon claimed it struck at “the heart” of the regime’s capacity to produce chemical weapons.
All of this is bombast. The attack, like the one last year, was limited and will have little to no effect on the regime’s prosecution of the civil war – and even its use of chemical weapons.
Trump delayed the attack for days, giving the Assad regime plenty of time to move war materials into population centres and Russia military bases, both of which the US was unlikely to attack. The targeted facilities were reportedly evacuated days before the attack.
Chemical weapons are only one part of the arsenal of weapons wielded by Assad and his allies. The vast majority of Syrian lives have been lost to conventional weapons and forces.
Trump and his allies scrupulously avoided targeting those in their air strikes out of fear of triggering a wider conflict, especially with Russia.
If anything, the regime and its backers are today more confident to prosecute their genocidal war to re-impose the dictatorship’s rule through the rest of Syria. Indeed, refugees from Douma are worried that they will again face the regime’s terror in Idlib.
Meanwhile, defense secretary James Mattis made it clear that the missile strike was a “one-time shot”, and no more attacks were planned. That would be in keeping with Trump’s announcement, just before the US strike, that he wanted to withdraw American troops after the final defeat of ISIS.
Tensions mount
The latest lashing out of the US military commanded by Trump reflects the contradictions that Washington faces in the world overall and in the Middle East in particular.
The US emerged from the collapse of the USSR that ended the Cold War in the early 1990s as an unrivalled colossus, overseeing an informal empire of states that accepted its terms of neoliberal globalisation.
But a succession of crises has led to its relative decline as an imperial power and the rise of both international and regional competitors.
Following the September 11 attacks in the US, the invasion and occupation of Iraq under George W. Bush was designed to lock in US dominance over the Middle East and its strategic energy reserves. Instead, it turned into US imperialism’s biggest setback since Vietnam, weakening Washington’s hand in the region and emboldening regional antagonists, especially Iran.
Meanwhile, on the basis of its growing economic strength, China has become more and more assertive of its own imperial ambitions – and Russia has rebuilt itself under Vladimir Putin as a nuclear-armed power buttressed by an economy based on oil, natural gas and the arms trade.
The US remains the dominant world superpower, but it faces challenges from an international rival in China, a resurgent Russia, a host of regional powers like Iran and antagonists like North Korea.
All of these contradictions have come to a head in the Middle East.
The Bush regime had intended to follow a triumphant invasion of Iraq with regime change in Iran and Syria, but the mass resistance to colonial occupation in Iraq crushed those fantasies.
The main beneficiary of the US setback in Iraq was Iran, which gained influence as the sponsor of the Shia political forces that dominated the new government. Under Barack Obama, the US extracted huge concessions – but Iran was able to achieve an international accord that ended its economic and political isolation in return for agreeing to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
If the policy of regime stabilisation seemed to prosper for a time under Obama, the people of the region upset the entire state system when they rose up in 2011’s Arab Spring in a struggle for democracy and equality.
US-backed dictators were overthrown in Egypt and Tunisia after reigning for decades, while pro-US regimes like Bahrain were threatened, and American “frenemies” in Libya and Syria faced popular uprisings.
US imperialism did its best to respond to this threat from below. It stood by the existing order in Bahrain, where it backed neighbouring Saudi Arabia’s brutal suppression of the uprising.
Elsewhere, it tried to co-opt the movement. In Egypt, Washington abandoned its old friend Hosni Mubarak, while trying to preserve the core of the old state. The US likewise attempted to co-opt a popular rebellion against Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, but that ended in a disaster for the US, and the Obama administration quickly returned to a policy of regime preservation.
At the same time as the US backed Saudi Arabia’s savage war against Iranian-backed opponents in Yemen – one of the largest unrecognised humanitarian catastrophes in the world today – the Obama administration made its deal with Iran over its nuclear program.
This was supposed to stabilise the region by balancing between the various antagonists so the US could turn its eyes to containing China through the “Pivot to Asia”.
But the strategy failed on both fronts. The US never managed to make the “pivot” – because the relative decline of American power left Washington unable to contain the growing aggressions of various powers in the Middle East, especially Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Syria
All of this shaped the revolution, counter-revolution and civil war in Syria.
Like elsewhere in the Middle East in 2011, impoverished Syrians rose up against the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. The initial stages looked very much like the mass uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.
But the Assad regime remained capable of mobilising the utmost brutality, indiscriminately gunning down nonviolent protests; arresting, torturing and killing activists in the vast prison system; destroying whole areas with barrel bombs; and terrorising the population.
Meanwhile, Assad did what other leaders of the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring did: he played the sectarian card. Assad falsely postured as a defender of the country’s religious minorities – including the country’s oppressed Kurdish population – to try to divide the revolt along ethnic and sectarian lines.
As the pro-democracy uprising was forced to militarise in the face of Assad’s murderous assault, regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Turkey backed Islamic fundamentalist forces within Syria, exacerbating the sectarian divisions.
The US played an absolutely cynical role in this process. It provided limited support to the rebels of the Free Syrian Army, but as left wing author Gilbert Achcar documents in his book Morbid Symptoms, the US denied progressive forces the anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons that could have countered Assad’s unrelenting air war.
At first, the US hoped to use the rebels as pawns in a plan for an orderly transition that would replace Assad, but preserve the core of his oppressive state, with some representation for moderate opposition forces.
But Washington quickly abandoned that limited support once ISIS rose in Iraq and Syria. From 2014 on, the US waged a war in both countries against this reactionary Islamist force that threatened the stability of the whole Middle East. The cost of this war on ISIS was untold US atrocities in Iraq and in Syria.
Nevertheless, it is very likely that Assad would have fallen to the revolution if not for the intervention of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. This alliance of outside forces provided the military intelligence, airpower and ground forces to make up for the near-collapse of the Syrian Army. With their aid, the regime has been able to re-conquer most of the country.
The cost of Syria’s counter-revolution is hard to comprehend.
Out of a pre-war population of some 22 million, more than half a million people have lost their lives, 6 million have been displaced from their homes, and 6 million have been driven from their country as refugees, mostly to other countries in the Middle East. Assad, Russia and Iran are largely responsible for this humanitarian catastrophe.
Now, with the defeat of ISIS at hand thanks to the US-led war, all the conflicts between the imperial and regional powers in Syria have intensified.
The Assad regime, backed by Russia and Iran, is in control of most of the population centres of the country and is poised to re-conquer the main areas out of its control.
To win the war against ISIS, the US backed Kurdish forces in the north of Syria – the Kurds’ Democratic Union Party (PYD) dominated the military front called the Syrian Democratic Forces that, with US air support, conquered ISIS’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.
But Washington’s long-time ally Turkey considers the PYD and the Kurds a mortal threat. Turkey fears a Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Syria would inspire a similar uprising for national self-determination within its own borders.
This led to Turkey’s invasion of Syrian territory earlier this year to displace the PYD from the city of Afrin. The offensive is likely to continue against the rest of the majority-Kurd region known as Rojava.
In another grotesque twist, the PYD has appealed to the Assad regime, which has oppressed the Kurds for decades, to back it in defence of Syria against Turkey.
The US seems certain to abandon the Kurds, as it has done on many other occasions – while Russia has postured as the friend of the PYD, while also striking deals with Turkey, in an attempt to woo the NATO country out of the US orbit.
Then there is Israel, which has also intensified its intervention in Syria.
Israel fears that Iran and Hezbollah have established bases and shipment routes that could be used to support Hamas in Palestine. This is the reason behind increased Israeli military attacks against targets in Syria.
Saudi Arabia – the historic rival of Iran since the overthrow of the US-backed Shah in 1978 – is also upping the ante. The Saudis went so far as to volunteer forces to help with the latest US assault on Syria.
Conundrum
Thus, Syria is a cauldron of imperial and regional conflicts that poses intractable problems for US imperialism. This explains the strategic confusion exposed by Trump’s vacillation between threats of withdrawal from Syria and his order for military strikes.
If the US leaves, Russia and Iran will emerge strengthened, regionally and internationally. If Washington intervenes more aggressively, the US comes into conflict with Russia, a nuclear-armed rival determined to retain its increased regional power in the Middle East.
This is why Trump and his war cabinet settled for largely symbolic and inconsequential air strikes in Syria. But it would be a mistake to think that the threats from this latest development are inconsequential.
Trump’s new war cabinet is filled with bomb-first hawks who want a more militarist foreign policy toward not only Iran and North Korea, but also Russia and China.
The Trump administration has already doubled down on an alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a bulwark against the further spread of Iran’s influence. And for all the chatter about the bigot billionaire’s bromance with Putin, the US under Trump has intensified its conflict with Russia, imposing sanctions, expelling diplomats and making open threats.
Even more ominous is the administration’s determination to confront China, not only over trade, but also its increasing assertion of imperial power in Asia and the rest of the world. The two most prominent new appointees to the administration, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, both see the US as locked in an imperial conflict with China.
Though it goes against the grain for many opponents of Trump, the truth is that these sentiments are shared in content, if not in rhetorical form, by many Democrats, including liberals like Elizabeth Warren.
Trump’s display of military might in Syria sets a precedent for intensifying geopolitical conflicts in the region and internationally.
These could well come to a head this May over the renewal of Iran’s nuclear accord, which Trump and his new sabre-rattling advisers like Bolton want to scrap – as well as the summit meeting with North Korea over its nuclear missile program, which could be a ruse for the US to ratchet up the conflict, as it has before.
In these ominous times, the left must take a principled stand that upholds both anti-imperialism and internationalism.
Far too much of the existing left supports imperial powers like China and Russia and dictatorships like Assad’s merely because they oppose the US. In the process, they have become apologists for counter-revolution, recycling conspiracy theories and fake news churned out by oppressive states and their media mouthpieces like Russia Today. The old left slogan “the main enemy is at home” is being used as a cover for refusing to extend solidarity to those struggling against tyranny.
The new left needs a radically different approach. We oppose our own imperialist state, but we also oppose its rivals, like China and Russia – and we have a responsibility to build solidarity with progressive struggles for liberation and democracy, regardless of the state where they take place.
In the case of Syria, this means standing against US intervention, but also opposing that of Russia and Iran. We condemn Assad for his counter-revolutionary violence and repression, and we stand in solidarity with the pro-democracy uprising of the Syrian people. And most importantly, we demand that the US government open its borders to desperate refugees and support them as they rebuild their lives.

Will Trump set off the Middle East powder keg?

The Trump administration is one of the most reactionary governments in US history. It is a shotgun marriage of the far right, the Republican establishment, Goldman Sachs Democrats and Pentagon generals, each intent on implementing a different agenda.
Trump stands astride this chaotic faction fight like Jabba the Hutt in a suit, vacillating between the various camps and lashing out in tweets and bizarre rants against his enemies, real and imagined.
He is, as Princeton University associate professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor famously dubbed him, “a racist, sexist megalomaniac”. His recent outlandish description of Haiti, El Salvador and the entire African continent as “shithole countries” is only the tip of the iceberg of bigotry.
<img alt="Featured at Marxism 2018" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/RF%20articles_1_2.jpg" />
He’s ranted against Muslims, ridiculed people with disabilities, denounced the 16 women charging him with sexual assault, ritually derided immigrants, given coded compliments to the far right and threatened nuclear annihilation of the entire Korean peninsula, boasting that he has “a bigger button” than North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
Amid this eruption of crude prejudice, his administration has issued a stream of executive orders to let capital run roughshod over the rights of workers and oppressed people. He’s also repealed countless regulations that restrict capital from ravaging the natural world. And he ended his year in office with an enormous tax cut for billionaires and corporations, disproving for the nth time that he has workers’ interests at heart.
His reactionary, vengeful, incompetent administration has not made “America great again” but accelerated its relative decline abroad and, at home, at least for the vast majority of its population, turned it into the world’s biggest shithole.
A year of misrule
In power, Trump has attempted to implement a program to “make America great” by putting “America first”. But his administration has been torn apart from day one by unending conflicts between its various factions. On one side, Steve Bannon, the self-appointed consigliere to Trump, went to war with the Republican establishment to push for the implementation of his program of immigrant bashing, isolationism and confrontation with China. On the other, the establishment, corporate executives and generals wanted to continue a more muscular version of the Democrats’ program of superintending the neoliberal order.
Their unending war, exacerbated by Trump’s unpredictable swings from one camp to another, has driven record numbers of appointees to resign or be fired, most dramatically with Bannon returning to his right wing website, Breitbart, to uphold Trumpism against Trump – at least briefly; he was fired for his damning indictment of the administration in a new book, Fire and Fury, which documents the turmoil in the White House.
Increasingly, the generals and bankers have attempted to control Trump, but to little avail as he continues his bigoted comments, tweets and public rebukes of even his most loyal lieutenants.
Despite this three-ring circus, Trump has passed executive orders targeting Muslims, immigrants, women and other oppressed groups. He has used this rampant scapegoating as cover for his regime’s other agendas – further deregulating the US economy, gutting whole departments of the US state, from the Environmental Protection Agency to Housing and Urban Development, trying but failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act and, in one of the greatest giveaways to the rich in the history of the country, ramming through an enormous corporate tax cut, mandating deep austerity measures against social programs for the working class majority in coming years. Already, he’s issued an executive order allowing states to require impoverished recipients of Medicaid to work or volunteer.
And that’s just his impact on domestic policy. Internationally, the Trump administration has tried to break with the US imperialist strategy of superintending a neoliberal world order and replace it with a nationalist one designed to compete principally with China.
It has scrapped free trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrawn from the Paris agreement on climate change, adopted a confrontational posture toward its competitors large and small, threatened nuclear war with Korea and is poised to impose sanctions on Iran and China.
Far from restoring US power, however, Trump’s bellicose nationalism has, if anything, discredited US imperialism, alienated historic allies such as Germany and opened more space for its competitors, especially China, to exert their own imperialist ambitions. The New Yorker went so far as to title an article about Trump’s foreign policy, “Making China Great Again”.
Resistance and a new left
The Trump administration has intensified the political polarisation of US society. It has triggered the emergence of “the resistance”, a wave of radicalisation and protest against the billionaire bigot.
This has not been led by the Democratic Party, which has been remarkably quiescent, believing that it needs to promise little because Trump is so bad and so unpopular. Indeed, he is the least popular president after one year in office in US history, with an approval rating of 39 percent.
Comfortable in their business as usual posture, Democrats floated as an election slogan, “Have you seen the other guys?” They have been content to focus on portraying Trump as Putin’s Manchurian candidate and backing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the campaign’s collusion with Russia, a strategy that enables them to avoid taking responsibility for his election and therefore changing their neoliberal program in anything but cosmetic ways.
The actual resistance has been led from below by forces largely outside the establishment. It produced the Women’s March – the largest protest in US history – the day after the inauguration. Soon after came the March for Science and the Climate March. On the heels of these protests, other smaller but no less significant actions exploded across the country. For example, activists staged sizeable actions that shut down airports against Trump’s executive order barring Muslims from entering the country. These compelled the courts to block the ban.
During the northern summer, activists swamped meetings of Republican representatives and stopped Congress from repealing the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps most dramatically, spurred on by the Women’s March, the #MeToo campaign against sexual assault and harassment has exposed and brought down scores of bourgeois men, from media moguls such as Harvey Weinstein to politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Amid this resistance, a new left has emerged, most dramatically exemplified by the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has exploded from a small paper membership to 30,000 largely young and working class members. It has a reformist outlook and is oriented mainly to elections, and it has not made a clear break with the Democrats. Most organisations of the left are now growing, including revolutionary ones such the International Socialist Organization.
The far right
Trump has emboldened the far right, which views the situation as the biggest opening in decades. A host of figures and organisations have gained national prominence – from bigoted buffoon Milo Yiannopoulos and pseudo-scientific racist Charles Murray to the fascist Richard Spencer (who infamously led chants of “Hail Trump” in a speech in Washington, DC) and neo-Nazi groups such as the Traditionalist Workers Party.
These came together in August in a carnival of reaction in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a Unite the Right rally. It culminated in the brutal murder of left wing activist Heather Heyer. Most everyone in the US reacted with horror and outrage. Not Trump, who condemned both sides and declared that there were “very fine people” on the right in Charlottesville. Former KKK grand wizard David Duke and Richard Spencer read this correctly as telegraphed support for their bigotry and violence.
The shock of Charlottesville focused the resistance for the first time on the threat posed by the far right. When another right wing demonstration was called in Boston 10 days later, more than 20,000 people marched and forced a tiny demonstration of a dozen fascists to run for cover. The result of Charlottesville was thus contradictory. It consolidated the fascist right, showing its ability to field a cadre of thugs prepared for street battles. But the popular condemnation, and especially the mass march in Boston, splintered this hard core from its softer supporters.
Setback should not, however, be confused with disappearance. The unhinging of a section of the middle classes from the ruling class parties will keep replenishing the fascist right in the US and internationally. They are already planning more provocative meetings on college campuses across the country this semester.
Left limitations
The resistance to Trump and the far right has, however, not sustained its mass character. This is true for three key reasons. First, Trump’s attacks initially provoked people into protest and organising, but their unrelenting and almost daily character has also demoralised many. New activists alternate between bouts of hyper-activity and depression.
Second, our side is not yet sufficiently and independently organised. Our social and class organisations are weak after three decades of defeat and retreat. We have hardly any strikes, the key indicator of our side’s confidence to fight. And the new left, however exciting and promising, is still in its earliest stages of formation. So the militant minority inside the resistance is not yet clear enough politically and influential enough numerically to provide leadership for more sustained struggle.
Third, many if not the majority in the resistance, including whole layers of the emerging left, still view the Democratic Party, however critically, as an electoral alternative to Trump and the Republicans. The DSA and others hope to use the Democrats’ ballot line to advance a socialist agenda, and many even believe the Democratic Party can be reformed into a social democratic one.
Throughout autumn, much of the left was oriented not to organising struggle but to the November special elections. Liberal figures in and around the Democratic Party, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, encouraged this transformation.
While the elections signalled a sweeping rejection of Trump, including satisfying victories such as the one in North Carolina, where transgender woman Danica Roem defeated the author of a bill that would have restricted trans people’s access to bathrooms.
But the emerging left will have to come to terms with the fact that the Democratic Party is not a vehicle for the resistance against Trump, Trumpism or the capitalist system that spawned them both. First, Democrats and their policies are largely to blame for his election. Second, their return to office would not deliver on the demands of our side, and their business as usual neoliberalism would stoke the flames of the far right.
The Democratic Party is a liberal capitalist party devoted to the system. It exists not to reform or get rid of it, but to co-opt those who desire fundamental change. The lesson of its 200-year history is, as Malcolm X rightly proclaimed, “You put them first, and they put you last”. Or, as Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi infamously declared on CNN, “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is”. It remains the graveyard of social movements and the left.
The contradictions between the Democrats appeal and popular protest were apparent on the anniversary of the Women’s March. The liberal leadership failed to call a national demonstration and encouraged local protests oriented to organising support for Democratic Party campaigns.
These, however, connected with the red-hot moment of #MeToo and produced a multi-issue outpouring of rage against Trump that numbered in the hundreds of thousands if not millions in countless cities across the country.
Some local leaders pushed the Democrats, but others did not. And the ranks of protesters had a far bigger vision of social change and were quite critical of the Democratic Party, even though many if not most will vote for it despite its betrayals.
The revolutionary left must not write off such contradictory protests but join them and agitate for a strategy based on struggle against Trump’s attacks and against the far right he has inflamed. As the airport protests showed, mass struggle, especially if it extends to strikes in the coming years, is where we have the greatest power to roll back Trump’s assault on us all.
And amid these actions, we need to convince the rest of the left and the resistance to build an alternative to both capitalist parties, a new workers’ party to lead the struggle against class inequality and oppressions on all fronts – from the workplace to the community and the ballot box – to win reforms in the here and now on the road to a new and international socialist society.
<a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/program/politics-in-trumps-america/">https://www.marxismconference.org/program/politics-in-trumps-america/</a>

Fear, loathing and resistance in Trump’s America

The combined forces of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Russian air power and Iranian-backed Shia death squads are reconquering eastern Aleppo, according to reports – and with it, the last of the major cities liberated by the Syrian Revolution since 2011.
“Aleppo is being destroyed and burned completely”, Mohammad Abu Rajab, a doctor in Aleppo, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/12/syria-assad-forces-close-to-capturing-east-aleppo">said in a voice message quoted by the Guardian</a>. “This is a final distress call to the world. Save the lives of these children and women and old men. Save them. Nobody is left. You might not hear our voice after this. It is the last call, the last call to every free person in this world. Save the city of Aleppo.”
After it was freed from regime control in 2012, Aleppo was “a symbol of the democratic alternative that could be Syria”, <a href="http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article4795">as Syrian revolutionary Joseph Daher put it</a>.
That’s why Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies declared unremitting war against it. They subjected eastern Aleppo to a siege to starve its people and force them to flee. Aleppo’s population, once greater than the Cleveland metropolitan area, collapsed to an estimated 250,000 earlier this year.
In the past month, Assad’s forces moved in for the kill. Everything from schools to hospitals to homes and more have been bombed, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gareth-bayley/aleppo-assad_b_13424390.html">reducing a whole section of Syria’s once-largest city to a pile of rubble</a>. Ground operations have retaken one section of the city after another.
While <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2016-10-13/assad-says-aleppo-to-serve-as-springboard-for-liberation">Assad claims to be liberating Aleppo from terrorists</a>, he is, in fact, slaughtering not only armed rebels fighting government forces, but untold numbers of civilians.
<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38155936">Stephen O’Brien, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, said</a> Aleppo was becoming “one giant graveyard”. Abdul Kafi Alhamado, an English teacher in Aleppo, gave the same assessment to the BBC: “The situation inside the eastern part of Aleppo is literally doomsday. Bombs are everywhere, people are running, people are injured in the streets, no one can dare go to help them, some people are under the rubble”.
The regime reportedly considers civilians who escaped the siege as suspected supporters of the anti-Assad revolution. Hundreds of men and boys have been <a href="https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2016/12/9/syrian-men-and-boys-missing-after-entering-regime-held-aleppo">rounded up and thrown into Assad’s jails</a> to suffer torture and death.
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With this victory, Assad has restored his rule over the major cities of Syria – but at an enormous humanitarian cost.
His regime is responsible for the vast majority of the 400,000 lives lost in five years of warfare. Countless cities and villages have been destroyed. Fully half of the country’s pre-war population – 11 million people – have fled their homes. There are 5 million Syrian refugees scattered throughout the region nearby, and 1 million have made treacherous sea and land crossings to Europe.
<a href="https://socialistworker.org/2016/05/23/why-are-syrias-refugees-going-through-hell">Assad had to turn to this kind of barbarism to crush the revolution</a> that began in 2011. It was a popular, pro-democracy uprising, just as legitimate as the other rebellions against the autocracies throughout the rest of the Middle East and North Africa collectively known as the Arab Spring.
Syrians rose up against Assad’s neoliberal dictatorship, <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2016/03/31/how-did-syria-become-a-burning-country">organising a tide of non-sectarian, multiethnic demonstrations</a> throughout the country. They were confronted by three forces of counterrevolution.
First and foremost was the regime itself. Assad responded to the uprising by sending his police and military to fire on peaceful protests and search out activists to arrest, jail and torture in Syria’s vast gulag of prisons. <a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2016/05/excerpt-syrians-revolution">Their slogan was</a> “either Assad or we burn the country”.
Instead of deterring the revolt, Assad’s brutality led opponents to take up arms in self-defence. Whole sections of the Syrian military defected to form the Free Syrian Army. The popular revolt and the armed resistance liberated large areas of the country, where Local Coordination Committees and regional Local Councils <a href="http://www.socialistproject.org/issues/august-2016/self-organisation-syrian-revolution">were set up to begin to remake Syrian society democratically from below</a>.
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Faced with the real possibility of defeat, Assad turned to the classic strategy of all tyrants: divide and conquer.
His regime, while nominally secular, is well versed in manipulating religious and ethnic divisions. Its chief base is among the minority population of Arab Alawites, who practice a version of Shia Islam. Assad has always postured as a defender of the Alawites and other religious minorities against the threat of the country’s Sunni majority.
But Assad established a relationship with reactionary Sunni fundamentalists in the early 2000s. He allowed them to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/assad-used-to-let-jihadists-move-from-syria-to-iraq-to-kill-americans-heres-how-us-special-ops-spies-went-after-them-2015-8">use Syria as a base to conduct attacks against the US occupation of Iraq</a>. When the occupation ended and some of the jihadists turned on Assad, he jailed them.
After the revolution broke out in early 2011, <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2016/12/03/addressing-the-oireachtas-me-and-hassoun">Assad released thousands of these prisoners</a> in the hopes that they would coalesce as a rival to the mainly secular, pro-democratic uprising. These included Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, leader of Jabhat al-Nusra (now called Jabhat Fateh al-Sham); Zahran Alloush, founder of Jaysh al-Islam; and Hassan Aboud, founder of Ahrar al-Sham.
Assad hoped the reactionary fundamentalists would target more secular revolutionaries and turn the revolt into a sectarian one, while he postured as a defender of Alawites, Christians and other religious minorities against terrorism. But all of this was a cover to attack revolutionaries, their Local Committees and the Free Syrian Army.
The Assad regime also manoeuvred to prevent Syria’s oppressed Kurdish minority from uniting with the predominantly Arab revolt. Though it has repeatedly betrayed and oppressed the Kurds over many years, a whole section of northern Syria was effectively ceded to the Syrian wing of Turkey’s Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), called the Democratic Union Party (PYD).
The regime’s divide-and-conquer strategy aided and abetted the second counterrevolutionary force: the various Islamic fundamentalist forces. The jihadists released from jail near the beginning of the uprising helped form both the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front (now rebranded as the independent organisation Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) as well as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
For its part, Nusra did fight the regime, and while imposing its reactionary rule in areas it dominated. ISIS, which established its base in Raqqa, didn’t even fight the regime, but actually <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/isis-oil-deals-assad-regime-revealed-us-special-forces-raid-452426">established a de facto non-aggression pact that included oil sales.</a>
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These two forces of counterrevolution – the Assad regime and the Islamic fundamentalist semi-opposition – were bolstered by a third: the imperialist and regional powers. Both Iran and Russia intervened in Syria to save Assad from what appeared to be certain downfall.
Iran, which views Assad as a regional ally, <a href="http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Assad-relies-on-foreign-fighters-in-push-to-10787485.php">sent military advisers, its own Shiite militias and those of its Lebanese ally Hezbollah</a> to bolster the Syrian government’s depleted ground forces.
Russia, with the aim of projecting itself as an imperial power in the region, deployed its air force, targeting not ISIS, as it claimed, but Syrian revolutionaries. Indeed, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/07/russia-airstrikes-syria-not-targetting-isis">90 percent of Russian bombing runs were carried out against targets other than ISIS</a>.
Other regional powers, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey intervened against the Assad regime, but not in support of the revolution. Instead, they backed various Islamic fundamentalist forces.
Finally, the world’s biggest imperialist power, the US, also intervened as a counterrevolutionary force.
Contrary to the claims of some on the left, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324345804578427190797966234">the US did not want regime change in Syria</a>. At best, it aimed for an orderly transition that would get rid of Assad, but preserve his state, while adding some elite elements of the opposition – a similar outcome to elsewhere in the Middle East, which the US turned to more explicitly after the disastrous intervention in Libya.
The US did fund some handpicked rebel groups. But <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443684104578062842929673074">it denied them crucial anti-aircraft weaponry</a> that would have enabled the rebels to overcome the Assad regime’s sole military advantage: airpower.
The last thing the US wanted was a successful revolution from below. Instead, it used the rebels as a bargaining chip in fruitless negotiations to achieve an orderly transition to pacify the country. <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2014/08/28/obamas-new-war-in-iraq">And since the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria</a>, the US has abandoned most of its support for the rebels and focused on defeating the so-called caliphate. To do so, it was more than willing to engage in de facto collaboration with Russia and the Syrian regime.
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As a direct result of US policy, the popular revolution and its military wing dwindled while the counterrevolutionary Islamic fundamentalists funded by Turkey and the Gulf States grew in force.
Nevertheless, as recently as last March, <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2016/03/10/syrias-revolutionaries-return-to-streets">Syrian revolutionaries were still able to mount demonstrations</a> against both the regime and the Nusra Front during a brief ceasefire. Since then, however, the revolutionary forces have lost further ground to Islamic fundamentalist forces as the Assad regime’s sieges and the relentless bombing of Russian warplanes took their toll.
Assad thus got the scenario he always wanted; he and his Russian and Iranian backers can now claim they are fighting a “war on terror” against Sunni jihadists.
This result has exposed the US as a weakened power in the Middle East. To be sure, it is still the region’s dominant power, but it is no longer able to dictate the region’s politics. Meanwhile, Russia’s position has gained in strength, while <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/russia-and-china-block-syria-truce-in-un-vote/2016/12/05/bea48ff8-bb2a-11e6-ae79-bec72d34f8c9_story.html">US officials have been able to do little other than propose resolutions for cease-fires</a> in the UN Security Council, which Moscow has vetoed.
Russia has managed to outfox the US and ensure the survival of its ally Assad against any orderly transition sought by Washington. And now, with the surprise election of Donald Trump, US policy in the Middle East is about to change.
Trump advocates an explicit alliance with Russia and Assad against ISIS and al-Qaeda. But in a sign of the total incoherence of his ideas, he also proposes scrapping the nuclear treaty that the Obama administration negotiated with Russia’s ally Iran – a move that could disrupt any U.S and Russian collaboration in Syria.
With US policy in tatters, various parties involved in the conflict – including long-standing American allies – have struck deals with Russia.
For example, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who used a recent botched coup attempt as a pretext to curtail democracy and re-launch the government’s war on the Kurdish minority, has worked out a pact with Russia. The strategic aim is to use the cover of their common war against ISIS in Syria to prevent the Kurdish PYD from consolidating territory.
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The Syrian government, Russia and Iran will likely agree to a negotiated settlement brokered with the US and other powers at some point. But <a href="http://mebriefing.com/?p=2629">it will be an unstable deal</a>.
Even after the victory in Aleppo, Assad’s regime will still only control only about a third of the country. The Kurds control a large part of the northern region; ISIS still retains power in Raqqa and its surroundings; and Islamic fundamentalist militias like Jabhat Fateh al-Sham retain power in Idlib.
Turkey will fight to stop the consolidation of any Kurdish autonomous zone. The US, Russia and Assad will continue their war on ISIS, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar will continue to back their fundamentalist allies to conduct a guerrilla resistance against the regime.
Apart from the interests of imperial and regional powers, any kind of settlement will ultimately be based on the betrayal of the Syrian people’s hopes for democracy and equality – thought it will at least provide Syrian revolutionaries at home and abroad space to rebuild their forces for a struggle in the future.
Such struggles will no doubt come. The Syrian regime, like those in the rest of the region, has little to offer but repression and austerity. Amid the counterrevolutionary settlement, Syrian revolutionaries will have to build a new left based on the multiethnic and non-sectarian solidarity of the early stages of the revolution.
Internationally, the left must reckon with its failure to unanimously support the Syrian Revolution, and it needs to re-learn how to <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2016/08/25/anti-imperialism-and-the-syrian-revolution">combine opposition to all forms of imperialism with solidarity with revolution from below</a>.
As part of that effort, we must oppose the tide of xenophobia and Islamophobia, and demand that our own governments admit any and all Syrian refugees who want to come to the US, and provide them with sanctuary and assistance to rebuild their lives.

The counterrevolution crushes Aleppo

Ashley Smith analyses the complex conflicts driving the crisis in the Middle East – and fuelling the drive for an intensified US intervention in Iraq, and possibly Syria. A longer version of this article originally appeared at <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/">SocialistWorker.org</a>
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The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) horrifying execution of American photojournalist James Foley has given the Obama administration cover to intensify its military intervention in Iraq, and possibly Syria.
Obama cloaks his new war in the mantle of humanitarianism to defend ISIS victims like Iraq’s Yazidis and Christians. And now he is doing his best to channel George W. Bush’s rhetoric about a civilizational holy war in the wake of Foley’s murder:
“No just god would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorise their neighbours and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any definition of civilized behaviour.”
No one should doubt the barbarism of ISIS’s violence against its enemies – but Obama’s pretensions of humanitarianism and countering terror are cynical posturing to win support for US warmongering. Such posturing is contradicted by actual US policy – at the same time he claims to defend Iraqis against ISIS, he is backing Israel’s state terrorism against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Rhetoric aside, Obama has a clear imperial agenda. He aims to contain and crush ISIS, prevent the break-up of Iraq, stabilise the Middle East and ensure the uninterrupted flow of oil. To achieve these goals, he has sent hundreds of military advisers, mobilised aircraft carriers and launched a wave of air strikes against ISIS in Iraq – and he is considering doing the same in Syria. He is now the fourth president in a row to wage war in Iraq.
The stakes for the US are high. ISIS threatens the entire state system that European and American imperialism have overseen since the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. ISIS aims to establish a Sunni caliphate, first in Syria and Iraq, and then throughout the rest of the region. Right now, it controls about a third of Syria and as much as a quarter of Iraq.
ISIS has established itself as a new state power in this territory. It possesses a military force that initially totalled about 12,000 fighters, and after its conquest of Iraq, it has added thousands of new recruits for a total force of as many as 50,000.
It has established governmental structures, including a court system that enforces its reactionary interpretation of Sharia law. And it now controls and taxes the economy of its territory. It sells oil on the black market to generate revenues. It is thus a formidable capitalist state in the making, and has designs of regional conquest.
Child of imperialism …
Contrary to various conspiracy theories on the so-called anti-imperialist Left, the US did not back or fund ISIS in Syria against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. ISIS is an unintended, bastard child of US imperial policy.
The US has long cultivated an alliance with Saudi Arabia as one of its key regional allies besides Israel. It used the Saudi state as well as Pakistan to combat secular nationalism and Communism. This helped to spread the Wahabist ideology and even its more extreme Sunni Salafist offshoots – the very forces that Obama now condemns for standing for things “no just god would”.
Thus, Democratic president Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan both collaborated with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to back the fundamentalist Mujahedeen during the popular uprising against the USSR invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. One of the so-called Afghan Arabs who participated in this insurgency was none other than Osama bin Laden. He built al-Qaeda out of veterans of the resistance against the USSR.
Soon bin Laden turned al-Qaeda against the US, finally launching an attack on September 11 against the World Trade Center and Pentagon. That tragedy was “blowback” – the CIA’s term for the unintended consequences of a covert operation suffered by the civilian population of the aggressor government.
September 11 gave George W. Bush the alibi to launch his imperial plan for a “New American Century.” Bush wanted to project American power in Central Asia and the Middle East; establish military bases; replace regimes in Iraq, Iran and Syria with new clients; and thereby lock in American control of the region’s oil. This would ensure US domination over all potential rivals that depend on that oil, China in particular.
Of course, Bush justified these imperial ambitions with a set of lies. He claimed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), was a threat to the US, and collaborated with al-Qaeda. In reality, Iraq had no WMDs, it was in a state of collapse in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and a decade of stringent sanctions, and it had no relationship with the terrorist network.
In fact, Bush’s occupation brought al-Qaeda to Iraq. The Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had served with bin Laden in Afghanistan, founded al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2004. This became the foundation for ISIS – which today, having declared a new caliphate to rule over a large territory in both Iraq and Syria, calls itself simply Islamic State.
Bush’s occupation of Iraq provided the predecessor organisations of ISIS with a stream of Sunni recruits. Iraq’s three great communities – Sunnis, Shia and Kurds – were happy to see Saddam toppled. But the Sunni and Shia elite and masses quickly built separate resistances against the American occupation.
Among the Sunni population, the jihadists developed into a counterrevolutionary force that targeted not only US forces, but also the Shia and their holy sites. They drew on Sunni resentments that the Shia had supplanted them as the new rulers of Iraq. Bush took advantage of this extreme sectarianism to divide and conquer the fractured resistances.
To protect themselves against such attacks, the Shia elites established militias to defend their population. The US then encouraged these Shia militias to join the security forces. Soon, the US and the Shia-dominated state had turned the security forces not only against the extremist groups carrying out assaults on Shia, but also against the Sunni resistance and population as a whole.
This divide-and-rule strategy detonated a civil war that raged from 2006 to 2008. The fighting killed tens of thousands, drove 4 million people from their homes and ethnically cleansed whole sections of Baghdad. The Sunni tribal leaders finally called off the fighting, set up the so-called Awakening Councils, and turned on the jihadists, driving them underground.
During his so-called surge of troops into Iraq, Bush put the Awakening Councils on the American payroll. He and his successor Barack Obama promised to convince Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to integrate them into the new Iraqi Army. But Maliki, supported by the Shia elite, refused, as he set about consolidating a Shia-dominated state.
… and defeat
ISIS re-emerged as part of the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring.
In early 2011, the revolutionary wave began with hope and unity throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Workers, students and peasants rose up against the autocracies in each country. The “Arab Spring” was characterised by efforts to overcome sectarian and ethnic divisions to forge a united fight for democracy, equality, and redistribution of wealth.
Initially, the Obama administration supported the old order. But under the pressure of events, it opted to sacrifice old friends like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to preserve the core of the capitalist states over which they had presided. The US cynically co-opted the revolutionary upheaval in Libya, choosing to get rid of its sometime ally, sometime opponent, Muammar el-Qaddafi, in the hopes of creating a more reliable regime.
Once its core allies were threatened, however, the US backed a savage counterrevolution to drown the Arab Spring in blood. Obama turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s invasion to defend Bahrain’s Sunni regime and smash the predominantly Shia rebellion, with untold numbers killed, tortured and arrested. Soon, Shia mosques were being levelled in Bahrain.
Like the US, Russia and China backed the counterrevolution. They supported Bashar al-Assad’s repression of the pro-democracy uprising in Syria. While Obama claimed to support the Syrian rebels, he did nothing to help them. He hoped for a “Yemeni solution,” modelled on the arrangement that got rid of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but retained the regime he headed – in Syria, Assad would go, but the core of his state would continue to rule.
Assad took advantage of Obama’s hesitation to launch his own divide-and-conquer strategy. He released 1,000 Salafists from Syrian jails, knowing they would attack the Alawite (a branch of Shia Islam) and Christian minorities. Assad postured as the protector of these populations against Salafist terrorism.
ISIS played exactly the role of a fifth column for Assad inside liberated territory. It regrouped its scattered forces from Iraq inside al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, the Al Nusra Front, but soon split to form ISIS in 2013. Unlike Al Nusra, which, while reactionary, actually fought Assad’s regime, ISIS did not. It waged war on the anti-regime revolutionaries and their mass supporters.
The Assad regime and ISIS have thus been de facto collaborators in counter-revolution, while all the while claiming to be mortal enemies. Even as ISIS gobbled up whole regions of Syria, Assad has up until recently not attacked it, but instead focused on bombing Syrian revolutionaries and their supporters. In exchange, ISIS, which has seized control of much of the country’s oil industry, sold crude oil to the regime.
America’s Sunni allies intensified this sectarian counter-revolutionary dynamic in Syria. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Kuwait supported the various moderate Islamist forces against Assad, though not ISIS. However, Salafist clerics and the devout bourgeoisie, especially in Saudi Arabia, supported ISIS with money and recruits.
At this point however, ISIS is a self-supporting emerging state with its own sources of revenues, derived from taxes, ransom for hostages and the sale of oil on the black market, which by some estimates nets as much as $3 million a day – and that’s not to mention what it has seized during its more recent offensive in Iraq, especially weapons and military equipment.
Expansion
With its base established in Syria, ISIS plotted the expansion and establishment of its caliphate in Iraq. It postured as a force that would stand up for Sunnis against Maliki’s increasingly sectarian Shia state.
After US forces left at the end of 2011, Maliki used his Dawa Party to consolidate a Shia dictatorship against both Sunnis and Kurds. He purged the Sunni elite from key positions in the state and cut off the flow of state funds to Sunni cities. Similarly, he confronted the Kurdish Regional Government over its oil sales to Turkey.
The Sunni rose up against the Maliki regime in what some called the “Iraqi Spring” in 2013. Amid this wave of protest, ISIS struck a tense alliance with former Baathists organised in the Naqshbandi Order and a section of the tribal leadership. Maliki sent the mostly Shia Iraqi Army to attack protests, arrest thousands and torture those they abducted in jails like Abu Ghraib.
ISIS forces took advantage of this repression to pose as fighters against the Shia state. They took control of Fallujah and Ramadi in December 2013 and then seized Mosul and other areas, starting in June. ISIS expropriated nearly $500 million from banks in Mosul, captured a vast stockpile of US-made weaponry from the collapsing Iraqi Army and took control of oil wells and refineries near the city.
ISIS then advanced throughout western Iraq, reaching as far as the country’s borders with Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Today, ISIS rules over an area of Iraq and Syria that is about the size of Great Britain, with at least 6 million inhabitants.
The Kurds reacted by seizing the contested city of Kirkuk, with its strategic oilfields. This established a border with ISIS territory. Meanwhile, the Maliki regime called up 40,000 volunteers from Shia militias to bolster the collapsing Iraqi Army. That mobilisation likely persuaded ISIS not to attack Baghdad. Instead, ISIS has focused on attacking Kurdish-controlled territory, scoring significant victories against the Kurdish Peshmerga militia.
Iraq thus stands on the verge of a three-cornered civil war that could tear the country apart – with the metastasising conflict threatening to engulf the entire region.
Iraq and Syria can no longer be said to operate as unitary states. ISIS has its sights set on regime change in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon. On top of that, the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq has flirted with the idea of declaring independence, something that could inspire Kurds to rise up in Syria, Iran and Turkey.
Shifting alliances
The US hopes to take advantage of potential Sunni opposition to ISIS – as it did back in 2008, when Washington got the tribal leadership’s Awakening Councils to turn on the Salafists and align with the US. But the division between the Sunni elites and the Shia state is far deeper now than ever before.
The US military strategy is to conduct an air war against ISIS in Iraq and strengthen the Peshmerga and Iraqi Army as surrogate ground forces. Already, the US has conducted more than 90 bombing runs, mainly to help the Peshmerga and Iraqi Army retake a strategic dam near Mosul that supplies the bulk of water to the country.
But if the US wants to defeat ISIS, it will have to expand its war into Syria. This presents the Obama administration with a thorny problem, however. On paper, the US stands for regime change in Syria and supports the moderate resistance against Assad. If the US takes the fight against ISIS into Syria, it will mean collaborating in some way, shape or form with Assad, even if unspoken.
Assad knows this, too. He is thus trying to corner Obama into cooperating with him. The Assad regime has for the first time really started to attack ISIS forces in Syria. Seeing this, some in the American establishment – including the former ambassador to Iraq under George W. Bush – now advocate an alliance of convenience with Assad.
Obama has so far rejected this and also has ruled out any escalation in Iraq from an air war to a ground invasion. But it remains to be seen if the Peshmerga and Iraqi Army will be sufficient to defeat ISIS. It is also unclear whether Assad has the capacity to defeat ISIS, which just scored a major victory in Syria by seizing the Tabqa Airport, along with several fighter jets. Thus, however much Obama rules it out, there are strong pressures toward mission creep.
The US hopes to unite all regional powers against ISIS. But it must find a way to overcome or neutralise the very sectarian conflicts, extending across borders, that it enflamed. To defeat ISIS, Washington needs help now from governments and regimes on both sides of the sectarian divide – but any deal with states on either side would likely antagonise the other.
The US needs Iran to help it bolster the Iraqi regime. It may even be compelled to collaborate with Assad against ISIS in Syria. But such collaboration poses the danger of confirming ISIS’s contention that the US is at war with the Sunni population. Any such rapprochement with Iran and Syria would infuriate America’s Sunni allies, especially Saudi Arabia – not to mention Israel.
Thus, it is hard to see how the US will be able to forge a common front against ISIS. For example, Israel launched its air strike in Gaza to disrupt the unity deal between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, wreck the so-called “peace process,” and attempt to crush Hamas. Israel will also do everything in its power to disrupt rapprochement between the US and Iran, which Israel deems its mortal enemy.
Similarly intractable conflicts are obvious between the chief Sunni sectarian state, Saudi Arabia, and its Shia opponent, Iran. The US will therefore be hard-pressed to curtail the myriad sectarian state conflicts and proxy hostilities it enflamed.
Clarity needed
The situation in the Middle East today is complicated. But the left must be absolutely clear on a series of propositions.
The first is that the US is the principal cause of this metastasising crisis. It has no solution to it. It hopes support for counter-revolutionary states will ensure its control over the flow of oil that fuels the world capitalist system. We must therefore oppose any and all US intervention in the region – whether unilaterally or multilaterally through the United Nations, and whatever the “humanitarian” justifications it gives for its wars.
Second, the tendency of some sections to the left to support rival imperialisms to the US as the best way to oppose the “main enemy” is a disaster. This will discredit the left in the eyes of the masses in the region and here at home. Russia and China are just as counter-revolutionary as the US in the Middle East – most obviously, they have backed the murderous Assad regime in Syria in its war on a pro-democracy uprising.
Third, we should also oppose intervention by any of the other states of the region, from Iran to Saudi Arabia. These capitalist states have their own imperialist ambitions and are all part of defending the counter-revolutionary order.
By opposing intervention, we can provide space for the genuine forces for liberation that we saw emerge in the Arab Spring to regroup and build so they can provide an alternative to sectarian religious forces. Undoubtedly, the masses will rise again, because the counter-revolution offers nothing to their demands for democracy, equality and liberation.
Finally, we must oppose the intensifying Islamophobia the US will use to justify its intervention in the Middle East – and the resulting restrictions on the civil rights and civil liberties of Arabs, Muslims and all of us here at home. In that sense, we share common cause across borders in the struggle for liberation from the American empire.

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