"That place, it was absolute death”, said a man as he fled Mosul’s Old City in search of safety. “We will never be the same. Once the fear has been planted in your heart, you can’t get rid of it.”
The US-led drive to eradicate the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from Mosul has succeeded in that objective – but at a terrible price to the people who live in what was once Iraq’s second-largest city and home to 2 million people.
The devastation left behind by the US-orchestrated assault is mind-boggling. Whole blocks of the Old City have been razed to the ground. Operations to clear out as many as a couple hundred ISIS holdouts are ongoing.
The US military admits it has killed 603 civilians since it began its bombing campaign against ISIS in August 2014, but this is an unvarnished lie. According to Airwars, a journalist-led nonprofit organisation that monitors air strikes in Iraq and Syria, US air strikes killed more civilians than that – between 900 and 1,200 – in just the nine-month campaign to retake Mosul.
Airwars estimates that the total number of civilians killed by US-led coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria between August 2014 and June 2017 to be at least 4,354.
According to Belkis Wille, senior Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch, US-backed forces used a “massive uptick in ground fire” and large 500- to 1,000-pound crater bombs that cause huge destruction and many deaths to carry out the final assault on Mosul.
When Human Rights Watch called for not using those powerful weapons, it was rebuffed, Wille said. There was a “general feeling among the military forces, ‘We need to keep the momentum up. It’s better for the civilians of Mosul if we can get ISIS out’”, she said.
Beyond the casualties is the latest of many refugee crises in Iraq – more than 900,000 of the city’s residents were forced to flee, according to estimates.
Though the Trump administration has taken most of the blame for the spike in civilian casualties coinciding with the drive to retake Mosul, the truth is that the Obama administration’s changes to the US military’s rules of engagement – in April 2016 and in December 2016 – led to the increase.
The first change by the Obama administration’s Department of Defense relaxed the rules of engagement so that air strikes could endanger the lives of up to 10 civilians if they were considered strategically important. Before that, commanders were barred from ordering strikes that were likely to kill innocent bystanders in most cases.
At that time, the US also began deploying B-52 bombers in the Middle East for the first time in 13 years, signalling a major escalation. The Cold War-era bombers are infamous for carrying out the carpet-bombing of Vietnam in the 1970s. This coincided with an uptick in coalition air strikes.
The second change – a directive issued by the US Army as the Obama administration was preparing to hand Trump the keys to the White House in December 2016 – allowed US commanders to directly order artillery and air strikes in support of the Iraqi military units they were partnered with without getting clearance from higher up the chain of command.
By late December, as Iraqi troops got bogged down after weeks of heavy fighting, the Pentagon confirmed that US troops were themselves deployed in the battle for Mosul, not just supporting Iraqi forces as advisers.
Another reason for the massive destruction of Mosul is that US officials made a conscious decision not to allow an exit corridor for ISIS fighters willing to abandon the field of battle. By contrast, in Fallujah, the US did establish an exit corridor for those fighters willing to retreat, and the city was largely saved.
ISIS took control of Mosul in June 2014 when its forces quickly overran the US-trained Iraqi army troops assigned to defend the city.
ISIS dispatched about 1,200 fighters to take Mosul from some 30,000 Iraqi army troops. When the Iraqi troops fled, they left behind an enormous cache of military hardware, including Humvees, helicopters and machine guns. Some $500 million in assets in Mosul’s banks also fell into ISIS’s hands.
But as Ashley Smith wrote at SocialistWorker.org at the time, the key reason for the Iraqi army’s rapid collapse was that years of abuse by the Iraqi military had alienated a majority of the city’s residents, leaving the military without substantial support:
“Half a million people have fled Mosul in terror, according to the International Organization for Migration, searching for refuge in other cities of the Kurdish-controlled North. But most of Mosul’s population was happy to see the Iraqi Army depart. The majority look on it as an occupying Shia force.”
As one Mosul resident told the Guardian at the time:
“I feel we have been liberated from an awful nightmare that was suffocating us for 11 years. The army and the police never stopped arresting, detaining and killing people, let alone the bribes they were taking from detainees’ families. Me and my neighbours are waiting for the news that the other six Sunni provinces have fallen into the hands of the ISIS fighters, to declare our Sunni region, like the three provinces in Kurdistan.”
Already, reports of revenge killings of ISIS fighters as well as anyone suspected of collaborating with ISIS are trickling out of Mosul. The situation could get much worse, as the Iraqi army re-imposes its rule over the city.
In this way, the drive to retake Mosul has exacerbated the dynamics that allowed ISIS to take the city in the first place, as the Shia-dominated Iraqi military lashes out at the city’s Sunni residents.
The military also works with Shia militias that have targeted people based on flimsy accusations of “sympathising” with ISIS, carried out torture and disappearances, and meted out horrific violence.
All of this ensures that, despite the uprooting of ISIS, the resistance to the Iraqi military by insurgent forces in the area won’t come to an end anytime soon.

Eric Ruder

The US destroys Mosul in order to not save it

They came to Washington, DC, by the hundreds and thousands, packing trains, buses, vans and cars. They washed over streets and through parks as a torrent of humanity flooded into the National Mall to express their rage and sadness at the new presidency of Donald Trump – but also their joy at finding one another.
Similar scenes were repeated in cities and towns across the US, making January 21, 2017, the largest day of protest in American history – over 3.3 million people and counting, according to an Internet attempt to gather information on all of the protests.
And there were hundreds of thousands more marching around the globe, all seven continents, even Antarctica – from Berlin to Buenos Aires to Bangkok, from London to Lisbon, and from Rome to Rabat.
After a presidential campaign that put the question of sexual assault front and centre, one that most people figured would end with the inauguration of the first woman president, it was President Donald Trump who took the oath of office on January 20, to the dread and revulsion of many millions of people.
So it was only appropriate that millions upon millions of people raised their voices in a collective cry of outrage at the inauguration of a brutish, boastful sexual predator as commander in chief.
The sea of handmade signs expressed the point in countless clever and cutting ways: “Girls just want to have fun-damental human rights”; “You can’t comb over misogyny”; and simply “This is not normal”.
But it didn’t stop there. Women and men alike mobilised to stand for women’s rights, but they raised many other issues – climate change, racism and police brutality, free speech and freedom of the press, immigrant rights.
In their size and sweep, the most fitting comparison for this global outpouring of resistance would be to the mass protests on February 15, 2003, weeks before the administration of George W. Bush launched the US invasion of Iraq. Socialist Worker’s headline was “The whole world is marching”.
This time, it was the sense that Donald Trump had declared war on all of us – the undocumented, the environment, women and girls, Arabs and Muslims and all people of colour, the LGBT community – that left people saying they felt they had no choice but to march.
Isaura Amezcua, a student at Georgetown University who grew up in the Los Angeles area, carried a sign reading, “Respeta mi existencia o espera resistencia”. (“Respect my existence, or expect my resistance”) As she said in an interview:
“We are here to march for women’s equality. We are here to support a worldwide movement to bring women together. A lot of immigrants are domestic workers, and they don’t have a voice – they don’t have a union or the ability to join this march. So I’m here to be in solidarity with them. In my community, there is fear, but this march shows that we’re stronger together, and that if we organise together, there is potential to grow and take this country to a better place.”
The historic size of the protests should serve as an important boost for everyone horrified by the incoming Trump administration.
For two months, the world watched as the president-elect who claimed to stand for ordinary people assembled a new administration made up of reactionaries and establishment figures committed to an agenda of tax cuts for the rich, increased military spending, and attacks on health care and other social services – policies that serve the interests of the super rich at the expense of the rest of us.
The day after his inauguration, though, it was the basic decency of ordinary people all across the US that was on display. One group of six men and women in their 50s and 60s, for example, drove 18 hours from southern Louisiana after one of the group said she couldn’t stand the idea of not doing something to register her abhorrence of President Trump.
The man who reluctantly agreed to be the group’s spokesperson told us:
“I was sitting in front of the TV, and I saw that idiot come on, and I got to speaking in tongues. And my wife said, ‘We need to do something about this’. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s go’. This was on Monday before the inauguration. We got on the phone, and we had a bunch of people ready to go in a heartbeat. We started driving on Wednesday. We just wanted to throw a rock at that guy – metaphorically speaking, of course.”
A woman from the group piped up: “We’re against everything Trump stands for: women’s rights, abortion, his Supreme Court nominees, environment, climate change, health care, everything.” Another said: “When my 10-year-old woke up the day after the election and heard Trump won, he cried. I cried, too”.
Stories of this sort explain why Trump enters the White House with the lowest approval rating – around 37 percent – of any president in modern history.
It also explains why Trump’s spokesperson Sean Spicer lashed out at the news media for acknowledging the plain fact that something like 15 times more people demonstrated against Trump that came out to support him over inauguration weekend.
In a bizarre press conference in which the press wasn’t permitted to ask any questions, Spicer called the widely circulated photos showing the paltry crowd at Trump’s inauguration compared to the massive throng at Obama’s 2009 inauguration ”shameful and wrong”.
In contrast to the false unity of nationalism presented by Trump during his speech, the National Mall literally and symbolically pressed together an incredible diversity of people into a single, jubilant crowd brought together in a display of solidarity for the ages: women and men, people of all races and colours and ethnic groups and religious affiliations, LGBT people, disability rights activists, antiwar military veterans, and on and on.
Especially noticeable were the varied ages and fashions, reflecting the many times and places people have radicalised during the last four decades – anti-Vietnam War marchers, veterans of the women’s movement of the 1970s, anti-nuke activists from the 1980s, global justice activists, and the recent generation radicalised by immigrant rights struggle, the Occupy Wall Street movement and, of course, Black Lives Matter.
Scattered through the crowd were some formal contingents and more informal groupings of people who came to the march together.
Several labour unions, including the New York State Nurses Association, AFSCME District Council 37, United Federation of Teachers, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, United Auto Workers District 9A, Communications Workers of America and SEIU1199, organised buses and contingents. Then there were clusters of student groups, climate justice activists and other left wing organisations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America.
The International Socialist Organization contingent swelled to hundreds of people, attracting large crowds with energetic and left wing chants. Favourites included “Black, Latino, Arab, Asian and white! Unite, unite, unite to fight the right!”, “Trump, escucha, estámos en la lucha!” (“Hey Trump, we will fight you!”), “We do not consent, Trump is not our president!”, “Trump says build a wall, we say amnesty for all!” and “We don’t really want your borders, taco trucks on every corner!”
Also popular was a call-and-response chant in which women began, “My body, my rights!” and men answered, “Their bodies, their choice!”
Saturday’s protest wasn’t like some previous demonstrations in which the crowd was dominated by contingents mobilised by one or another organisation on the basis of a commitment to a particular issue or ideological orientation. The vast majority of the crowd in DC came with friends or family, bearing handmade signs variously expressing hope, snark, anger and dark humour.
It was still possible to identify different political currents flowing through the crowd. There were those still lamenting Clinton’s defeat. One handmade sign, for example, proclaimed, “Her Revolution Continues”, with the letters HRC highlighted.
There were also many supporters of Bernie Sanders, still disturbed by the Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks to torpedo Sanders’ campaign and shaking their heads at Clinton’s failure to offer anything positive to working class voters.
Louis Koutras, a resident of Silver Spring, Maryland, was one of more than 5,000 people who participated in the permitted Disrupt J20 march on Inauguration Day itself. The Disrupt march took place along a route running parallel to Trump’s inaugural parade.
Koutras placed the blame for the election result on the bankruptcy of the Democrats’ strategy, and particularly the neglect of the party’s working class base:
“Trump at least directly addressed that constituency, saying you don’t have jobs, and you have bad health care. He’s right – they don’t have jobs or good health care, and it’s because of people like Trump! But he was able to harness that, while all the Democrats offered was, ‘We’re not Trump’. The Democrats used to be the party of the common person and of labour, but they have abandoned their base.”
Later that night, a capacity crowd filled the Lincoln Theatre for “The Anti-Inauguration”, a forum co-sponsored by Jacobin magazine, Haymarket Books and Verso Books that featured independent journalists and activists who addressed many of these same themes.
Even the most brilliant master of propaganda – which Sean Spicer certainly is not – would have a hard time denying what this weekend’s protests have made obvious: that millions of people in the US and around the world are determined to stand up against the grave danger represented by Trump’s power grab.
The day after the giant antiwar protests on February 15, 2003, New York Times reporter Patrick E. Tyler famously wrote that the demonstrations were a reminder that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion”.
But those demonstrations, as big as they were, didn’t stop the Iraq War from taking place. The fact that the horrific results of the war vindicated all the warnings made by protesters doesn’t change that. We have to understand why the antiwar movement of 2003 wasn’t strong enough to achieve its goal.
The Bush regime was committed to pursuing its agenda of global domination – even in the face of widespread opposition – and so it was willing to endure a significant degree of public wrath.
Likewise, the cabal around Trump, the most unpopular president to be elected in memory, is obviously comfortable with being disliked – even if Trump himself gets testy about it – so long as they can achieve their smash-and-grab agenda of looting public coffers, driving down wages and reversing the gains of African Americans, women and LGBT people won through decades of struggle.
It has become commonly accepted on the left that protests don’t give our side the necessary power to achieve our goals.
But what type of power do we need? The default assumption is based on the way we’re taught that power works in a democracy: by working in official politics to get the right people elected.
But that plan has failed far more spectacularly than taking to the streets. Going back to the antiwar movement of the Bush years, after the early years of protest, most of the movement prioritised winning back Congress and the White House for the Democratic Party, which they achieved in 2008.
Yet the wars continued under Barack Obama, including a surge into Afghanistan, the dramatic escalation of drone strikes, and stepped-up use of US Special Forces around the world.
Obama also oversaw a dramatic increase in economic inequality, mass deportations and police violence, disillusioning many supporters and giving Republicans like Trump the opening to pose as anti-establishment populists.
Our problem is that the US is not a real democracy, but, as a recent study by two professors concluded, an oligarchy in which “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”.
Only in a pseudo-democracy – where elites pull the strings and millions of ordinary people’s votes are discounted by the Electoral College, not counted outright by broken voting machines, and suppressed by racist election officials – could a despised creep like Trump win the presidency.
Now that Trump is in office, it’s true that protests alone – even enormous ones like the Women’s March on Washington and its sister demonstrations – won’t be enough to stop him. But they are a vital part of building effective organisations of resistance rooted in the strength of our numbers and our social power as workers, students and community members.
The great left wing author and art critic John Berger made this crucial point in a 1968 article called “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations”:
“Theoretically demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist.
“If the State authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat …
“The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality – the intensity of rehearsed awareness – may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.
“A demonstration, however much spontaneity it may contain, is a created event which arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its artificiality, for therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities …
“Demonstrations express political ambitions before the political means necessary to realise them have been created. Demonstrations predict the realisation of their own ambitions and thus may contribute to that realisation, but they cannot themselves achieve them.”
It’s the role of the socialist movement to advance the idea that we can’t fight Trump’s right wing agenda while we’re tied to the Democratic Party. Rather, it’s crucial to advance an unapologetically left wing agenda that millions of people actually support.
Mass protests are one part of a larger process of political radicalisation that is driven by economic and political events, some of which we may be able to influence, but many of which are outside of our control. The main task facing our side today is to build a larger and more influential political foundation so we have the best leverage in the face of the Trump administration’s assaults.

Danny Katch

Trump made America protest again

A nightmare in the making for Mosul

With Vladimir Putin’s Russia carrying out air strikes in Syria, Eric Ruder, in an article for US website <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/">SocialistWorker.org</a>, explains the backdrop to the conflict and the consequences of this new stage in the violence.
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Russia’s intervention in the civil war in Syria marks the beginning of an ominous new chapter in a conflict that has already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and scattered more than 10 million people within and beyond Syria’s borders.
President Vladimir Putin dressed up Russia’s entry into the conflict as “similar to an anti-Hitler coalition” to include the US and other Western countries, against the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which controls eastern Syria.
However, Russia’s first air strikes on September 30 didn’t target ISIS, but rather rebel groups – some of them supported to varying degrees by the US – that have been fighting a war on two fronts: against the Syrian regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad on the one hand, and against ISIS on the other. Reports of <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/russia-accused-striking-civilian-targets-syria-151002072135928.html">civilians dying under Russian bombs</a> have been emerging ever since.
Not only did these early air strikes reveal Putin’s real aim – to bolster the Assad regime, Russia’s last significant ally in the region – but they also illustrated the potential for a stepped-up confrontation between the US and Russia, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/01/russia-targeting-non-isis-groups-syria-airstrikes">despite “de-confliction” efforts by the two nuclear-armed powers</a>.
For its part, the US government has publicly opposed the Assad regime – not because of its repression and violence against a popular uprising, but primarily because of its alliance with Iran, another enemy of Washington – while <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/09/30/dispelling-illusions-about-syria">never providing the level of support for anti-Assad rebels</a> that would allow them to match forces with the Syrian military.
The entry of Russian military forces on the side of the regime has left the US government casting around for a response – while the human toll in Syria grows.
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The re-emergence of the confrontation between imperial rivals Russia and the US now must be placed at the top of the many layers of hostilities that are tearing Syria apart.
The roots of the conflict lie in <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2011/08/03/protest-in-the-face-of-syrias-tanks">a popular uprising against Assad</a> that took inspiration from the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and other struggles that were part of the Arab Spring of 2011.
Unlike the dictators who were swept aside, Assad was able to strike back, slaughtering peaceful protesters, forcing a militarisation of the conflict, and portraying all resistance as driven by the US, Israel and/or Sunni rebel groups bent on destroying Shia and other religious minorities. To help demonise the opposition, <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/former-prisoners-fight-in-syrian-insurgency-a-927158.html">Assad cynically released Sunni extremists from prison</a>, gambling that these fighters would target the same democratic forces he was confronting, while simultaneously serving as the perfect enemy to point to while shoring up support.
The conflict in Syria is a three-way war between the Assad government, rebel forces of varying backgrounds, and ISIS. It includes Syrian Kurds fighting both ISIS and Turkey on Syria’s northern border, plus proxy clashes between various armed rebel and jihadist groups backed variously by the US, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.
Now, with Russian air strikes serving as cover, Iranian troops will join Lebanese Hezbollah fighters alongside Assad’s government forces in an escalating war to regain control by the central government.
The fighting has so far taken the lives of some 250,000 Syrians – and turned half of Syria’s population of 22 million into refugees. About 7 million people are internally displaced, and some 4 million have fled the country, ending up in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and – <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/23/europe-wages-war-on-war-refugees">in smaller numbers, but with much higher-profile political fallout</a> – Europe.
Since the Syrian uprising began in 2011, US officials have stated publicly that a political settlement to the conflict must remove Assad from power. But the US and Israel are keen to keep the machinery of the Syrian state intact. The reason is simple: From the point of view of Western imperialism, all the alternatives to Assad seem far worse.
In 2012, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/15/the-west-dismissed-russian-offer-to-help-remove-assad-in-2012-says-top-diplomat/">Russia reportedly offered to negotiate Assad’s removal from power</a>. But with his regime seemingly about to fall, the US and other Western powers ignored the offer, and spent their time promoting the political and military forces they thought would bring about a stable post-Assad regime.
But Assad managed to hang on, by means of the utmost repression and violence: barrel bombs and other scorched-earth tactics that laid waste to entire neighbourhoods and regions, as a warning to others that resistance would be met with an iron fist.
Meanwhile, ISIS – the product of the barbaric civil war in neighbouring Iraq, largely instigated by the US to keep the upper hand as colonial overlord – gained a stronghold in eastern Syria, where millions of persecuted Iraqi Sunnis fled. Built out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS recruited fighters, gained battlefield experience and seized sufficient arms and money to become a formidable force.
Today, Assad may have clung to power, but his regime controls only about 25 percent of Syrian territory, in a strip along the heavily populated western third of the country – while ISIS, based in the east, controls about half of the country.
Neither US air strikes against ISIS nor support for Kurdish and other fighters have changed the balance of forces. Another component of Washington’s strategy – a $500 million program to train a fighting force of 5,000 against ISIS – failed even more spectacularly. Last month, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of US Central Command, admitted that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/16/us-military-syrian-isis-fighters">the program had so far only produced “four or five” fighters</a>.
If the additional $600 million requested by the Pentagon to continue funding the training program meets with the same success, the US will have organised a $1.1 billion army of 11 individuals.
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Enter Putin with his soaring rhetoric about leading a coalition to confront ISIS – tailored, of course, to win support at home for reasserting Russian imperial power.
Putin’s gambit led to much handwringing in Washington, with the “hawk” faction of the foreign policy establishing calling on Obama to react forcefully to Putin’s “interference” in Syria – as if the US alone had the inalienable right to determine which countries should be allowed to operate there.
The debates likewise began in the media about whether Russia was acting out of strength or weakness or desperation. The answer is probably all of the above.
To some extent, Putin’s hand was forced by <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/24/appeasement-peace-or-neither">the recent nuclear deal between the US and Iran</a>, which pulled Iran back toward normal relations with other world powers – and thus out of Russia’s orbit. For Russia, this further elevated the strategic importance of the Assad regime.
But if Putin’s most ambitious goal of restoring the Russian empire might be out of reach, the Syria intervention has gained Russia a place at the table in discussions about what the endgame in Syria might look like.
And whatever weaknesses Putin may face, the US grip on the Middle East has been severely tested – in both military and political terms – since its disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
That war toppled Saddam Hussein and created the beginnings of a US puppet regime, but ended with a humiliating withdrawal of combat troops in 2011 and an inadvertent strengthening of Iran as a dominant power in the region. Al-Qaeda, which didn’t exist in Iraq before the US invasion, thrived amid the resistance to occupation, and re-emerged from the catastrophic sectarian civil war stoked by the US in the form of ISIS.
And through it all, the standing of the US as the dominant imperial power of the region, ruling through a combination of its own economic and military power, combined with a network of allied regimes, has been severely damaged.
Putin’s latest grab for power and influence in Syria has further revealed the slippage in US power. As conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-is-putin-winning.html">summarised some of Putin’s accomplishments</a>:
“His annexation of Crimea, for instance, saddled Moscow with all kinds of near-term and long-term problems. But it established a meaningful precedent regarding the limits of American and Western power, a kind of counterexample to the first Gulf War, by proving that recognised borders can still be redrawn by military force. His Syrian machinations, similarly, haven’t restored the Assad regime’s control of that unhappy country. But they have helped prove that America’s “Assad must go” line is just empty bluster, and that a regime can cross Washington’s red lines and endure.”
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Russia’s intervention in Syria also provides a lesson in the limits of historical analogy – specifically, the Cold War conflict between the US and the former USSR that political commentators of all kinds reached for to make sense of the Syrian tragedy.
The Economist, for example, longed for a reinvigorated and more muscular American military campaign, from Syria to Afghanistan. “Even if this is little more than political theatre, Russia is making its biggest move in the Middle East, hitherto America’s domain, since the Soviet Union was evicted in the 1970s”, <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21669950-danger-russias-intervention-syria-and-americas-timidity-afghanistan-putin-dares">the magazine argued</a>.
Meanwhile, Independent journalist and Middle East expert Patrick Cockburn <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-crisis-lets-welcome-russias-entry-into-this-war-a6678526.html">celebrated the return of Russia to the grand stage of diplomacy</a>:
“The US-Soviet Cold War, and the global competition that went with it, had benefits for much of the world. Both superpowers sought to support their own allies and prevent political vacuums from developing which its opposite number might exploit. Crises did not fester in the way they do today, and Russians and Americans could see the dangers of them slipping wholly out of control and provoking an international crisis.”
In reality, the superpower standoff of the past threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, and the “global competition that went with” this threat was far from positive for the countries where it was played out. But even leaving that aside, the yearning for its replay is based on a false hope of returning to the past, while ignoring the casualties caused by an escalation of a conflict in the present, <a href="http://pulsemedia.org/2015/10/04/a-masterclass-in-sophistry-patrick-cockburn-on-the-russian-intervention-in-syria/">as Marxist author and activist Gilbert Achcar pointed out</a>.
Even more puzzling than Cockburn’s nostalgia for the Cold War is the self-delusion of outright supporters of the Assad regime and its new protector in Moscow. Brian Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and its front group ANSWER <a href="http://www.answercoalition.org/russia_enters_syria_war_exposing_hypocrisy_and_contradictions_of_u_s_policy">simply echoes Putin’s rhetoric in his latest statement</a>:
“The main force preventing Syria from being completely overrun by ISIS and al-Qaeda has been the Syrian Arab Army, the national army of the country … Now the Russian military has directly entered the battle on the side of the Syrian national army … Russia’s intervention was formally requested by the sovereign Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad and thus conforms to international law.”
In order to imagine Russia’s intervention as a challenge to the US empire on behalf of the “anti-imperialist” hero Assad, Becker has to ignore the barbarism of the Syrian dictatorship, responsible for the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the civil war – and the ugly history of Russia as an <a href="http://bennorton.com/vladimir-putin-the-fascist-supporting-neoliberal-faux-anti-imperialist/">outpost of neoliberalism serving the Russian oligarchy</a> and an imperial power in its own right, with <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/04/24/fog-of-prejudices">a savage record in Chechnya</a> among other conflicts to prove it.
The old slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow” has become newly relevant. <a href="http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article4241">As Syrian revolutionary Joseph Daher wrote:</a>
“There can be contradictions between … different regional actors, but at the end of the day, the US wants to maintain an imperialist status quo in the Middle East, maintaining its interest in the region. This is why we should oppose all imperialist (USA, Russia and others), and sub-imperialist powers (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar and Turkey) because they all oppose the interests of the popular classes, and not choose one or the other because we consider it the lesser evil.”
[First published at <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/">SocialistWorker.org</a>.]

Why is Russia dropping bombs in Syria?

At below $USUS50 a barrel on 7 January, the price of benchmark crude oil was well under half its high of $USUS107.68 less than seven months before. The price plunge has been so rapid that even Wall Street’s seasoned traders are alternately downing shots of whiskey and Pepto-Bismol – and that’s before noon.
Lower oil prices are shaking up global markets, making once attractive investments downright ugly and scrambling the national economies of oil-dependent countries. And like oil price fluctuations of the past, the changing fortunes of global energy players are reshaping regional alliances, diplomatic calculations and power politics all over the world.
Venezuela, for example, relies on oil exports to finance its spending on anti-poverty programs and generate foreign currency reserves, which in turn allow the country to pay for the 75 percent of consumer goods that must be imported. At current prices, Venezuela will face a budget shortfall of $USUS25 billion next year.
The Venezuelan government and the state-run oil company will owe a combined $US21 billion to foreign creditors by the end of 2016 – an amount equal to the country’s total foreign currency reserves.
Judging by prices on derivatives pegged to its solvency, investors are betting that Venezuela has a 65 percent probability of default by the end of this year. These dire economic straits could translate into social unrest if finance officials attempt to push through deep cuts in spending on the country’s social safety net.
When oil was at $US110 a barrel, Venezuela was also able to enlarge its regional influence by sending money and cut-rate oil shipments to various Caribbean nations. But as prices began dropping this summer, it had to curtail these measures, a factor that no doubt played a part in Cuba’s willingness to forge a rapprochement with the US as it sought some way to replace revenue Venezuela had until recently supplied.
Then there’s Russia. In December, its central bank took the extraordinary step of raising interest rates overnight from 10.5 percent to 17 percent. This was in reaction to a one-day run on the ruble that drove the value of the currency down 13 percent and an 11 percent slide in stock prices. Combined, these two changes wiped out a quarter of the dollar value of companies traded in Russian equity markets.
But instead of halting the ruble’s collapse, the central bank’s intervention seemed to further panic traders, and many everyday Russians rushed to stores to purchase durable goods that they hoped would hold onto their value even if the ruble kept tanking.
All in all, the ruble fell a total of 46 percent against the dollar in 2014. Low oil prices could drive a stake through the crony capitalist business model that has allowed Vladimir Putin to remain in power for the last 15 years, as he doled out lucrative deals to his inner circle (and used repression against those who wouldn’t “cooperate”).
As he struggles to maintain his grip on power, Putin could also opt to pursue more military adventures to deflect attention from domestic doldrums and whip up anger at foreign adversaries. As in Venezuela, the consequences for ordinary people will be dire – dramatic price increases for imports, layoffs at companies unable to repay foreign loans, rising unemployment and falling wages.
Decline of OPEC
The oil price plunge has also further exposed the declining influence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Venezuela and Russia had both hoped to forge an agreement at OPEC’s November meeting to reduce supplies in order to prop up prices. But Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, broke with years of past practice by refusing to tighten the spigot, fearing the continued loss of market share to hydraulic fracturing operations more than lower oil prices.
Venezuela, Russia and Iran griped that Saudi Arabia’s decision was part of a joint US-Saudi strategy to hurt their economies as part of the larger jockeying throughout the Middle East around a number of flashpoints, including Iraq, Syria and Ukraine.
But in truth, Saudi Arabia with its massive foreign currency reserves of $US700 billion and vast supplies of oil that are profitable at relatively low prices, is willing to take a short-term hit in the hopes of driving out of the market the higher-cost fracking operations of North America and elsewhere. Thus, Saudi Arabia’s decision not to prop up prices is the product of its rivalry with US oil producers, not coordination with US policymakers.
Meanwhile, countries not heavily dependent on petroleum exports are hoping that lower prices will stimulate their lackluster economies. “At current prices, the annual revenue of OPEC members would shrink by $US590 billion, money that will instead stay within the borders of the world’s biggest oil importers, led by the US, China and Japan,” according to the Washington Post.
Lower fuel prices, for example, are the equivalent of a massive tax cut for US workers, who are poised to spend on average $US750 less per year, leaving room in personal budgets to make other purchases that will in turn stimulate economic growth. US corporations are also looking to fatten their bottom lines with cheaper energy costs – especially transportation corporations such as airlines.
But the prospect of oil prices hovering below $US70 a barrel or lower for the coming year will also drag down states like Texas and North Dakota, which have seen boom times during the massive expansion of energy extraction.
Thus, lower oil prices could transform one of the few engines of US job growth into its opposite, as oil and gas firms curtail production plans, lay off workers and cancel contracts with other firms, such as sand producers, that provide essential production inputs.
Indeed, market watchers expect that even if oil prices have hit bottom, they aren’t likely to rebound significantly in 2015 and possibly even in 2016. Understanding why oil has fallen so far so fast helps explain why prices are likely to remain low for some time.
Another market failure
In the early 2000s, economic growth, especially in developing economies like China and Brazil, along with instability in the Middle East, combined to drive oil prices above $US100 a barrel. While the Great Recession of 2008 temporarily pushed prices down, they rebounded quickly enough.
In the years since, triple-digit oil prices became common enough that firms started planning for them. There has been a massive boom in shale-oil production as well as expanded production at traditional oilfields, with energy firms scrambling to turn record-high prices into world-historic profits.
In 2008, for example, ExxonMobil made the largest profits of any corporation in world history. It is now sitting on cash reserves of nearly $US5 billion. In recent years, US oil production has risen 80 percent, to 9 million barrels per day. The US increase alone is greater than the output of every OPEC country except Saudi Arabia.
Then, just as years of investments in oil extraction came online, the European Union, China and other developing economies showed signs of economic slowdown, shrinking demand just as energy supplies were growing. Suddenly, prices began plunging.
So even though Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at $US106 per barrel to generate enough revenue to balance its budget, it is prepared to use its foreign currency reserves to ride out the price plunge.
So far, the strategy seems to be working, at least somewhat. At current prices, US shale oil output won’t disappear, but it will grow 30 percent less than expected, according to a Citibank analysis. But how low oil prices stay – and for how long – will determine what happens next.
Goldman Sachs analysts, for example, found that at $US70 a barrel, nearly $US1 trillion in planned investments might be scuttled. The price slump means that “oil projects planned for next year are the undead – still standing upright, but with little hope of a productive future,” according to BloombergNews. “These zombie projects proliferate in expensive Arctic oil, deepwater-drilling regions and tar sands from Canada to Venezuela.”
In fact, oil is only the most glaring example of the crisis of overproduction that is hitting commodities of all kinds, such as metals, and the developing economies that are dependent on exporting them to generate revenue.
The wild swing in the price of oil highlights the destructive economic dynamic at the core of capitalist competition. The unplanned, anarchic nature of capitalist production means that every energy firm seeks to expand production while prices are high, but because it takes years for new investments to generate new supplies, firms hoping to grab profits and market share end up undermining each other, plunging the economy into a destructive crisis in the process.
What’s more, the capitalist market allows for no considerations other than profitability – even though the continued burning of fossil fuels threatens to render the earth uninhabitable.
Unless and until democratic socialist planning replaces the anarchy of capitalist production, the boom-bust cycle and worsening crises of overproduction must be expected. Meanwhile, the gyrations in the price of oil are upending the circuits of global production, and this is just the beginning.
 [First published at <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">SocialistWorker.org</a>.]

Winners and losers in the global oil crash

Gilbert Achcar is an expert in the Middle East and author of The people want: a radical exploration of the Arab uprising. He will be speaking at <a href="http://www.marxismconference.org/">Marxism 2014 Conference</a> in Melbourne 17-20 April. The following is an edited transcript of a discussion Achcar had with <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2014/01/16/the-fire-of-revolution-still-burns">SocialistWorker.org</a>’s Eric Ruder on the eve of the third anniversary of the Arab uprisings.
At the beginning of 2011, the Arab uprisings generated enormous hope. But today, the euphoria seems to have transformed into deep despair. How do you make sense of the Arab uprising three years on?
I think the euphoria that was aroused by the events of early 2011 was actually unwarranted – as is the very gloomy perception that one now finds.
Of course, the initial moment of the uprising, with its huge mass mobilisation raised a lot of hope, and that’s understandable. But it was and it remains important to acknowledge that what is at stake is more than a change in the form of the political regime – i.e., a so-called democratic transition. Ultimately, these uprisings are coming up against the challenge of how to carry out much more radical changes in the face of the hard core of the state, which is the armed forces.
This is a much tougher nut to crack than just the removal of a Mubarak in Egypt or a Ben Ali in Tunisia in the first weeks of the uprising. Mass mobilisations managed to topple the ruler in both these countries, but the “deep state” – the backbone of the old regime – is still there, which means that the ancien régime is still very much in place, and there is more continuity than discontinuity between present conditions and previous ones.
In Syria, where the armed forces are organically linked to the ruling family, even this initial step of toppling the regime cannot be realised without defeating the hard core of the state – and thus, we have seen events evolve into a civil war after months of bare-handed uprising were met with increasingly bloody repression.
The key point to understand is that what started in 2011 is a long-term revolutionary process, rooted in decades of economic blockage due to the nature of the prevailing social order. We are actually in the early stages of this revolutionary process.
Can you talk more about the challenges in Egypt?
What happened in Egypt in 2011 was a superficial change. Only the tip of the iceberg was removed: the Mubarak family and their most narrowly linked cronies, and that’s it. We shouldn’t forget that Mubarak was not overthrown by the mass movement alone, but by a combination of the mass movement and a military coup.
What happened on February 11, 2011, was actually even more of a coup than what we saw on July 3, 2013 – in the sense that the military removed Mubarak from power and took power directly in its hands. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took power as a military junta, so this was a coup in the most classical sense, set against the backdrop of a huge mass mobilisation.
The real backbone of the Egyptian state and of the regime that has been in place for several decades is the army. Thus, the idea that the whole state of affairs that the Egyptian population was rising against would be changed by the mere removal of Mubarak was a total illusion.
In fact, Mubarak’s removal was aimed at preserving the continuity of the state. It was a conservative coup in that sense. Trying to preserve the regime by sacrificing the head of the regime was possible in the case of Egypt because of a relatively high degree of institutionalisation of the state – in other words, the institution is more important than the ruler.
The ruler himself was but a product of the institution – that is, the army. This characteristic of the Egyptian state also applied to the Tunisian state. But you don’t find it in most states of the region, such as the oil monarchies or the de facto monarchies calling themselves “republics”, as you had in Libya or Syria.
In Egypt, after a relatively short period of euphoria, the people started confronting the harsh reality of the continuity of the regime ... and then you had the election of the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed Morsi as president. Morsi was the victor in the second round of the presidential election because the voters wanted to stop the ancien régime from reasserting itself.
For those, as well as for a large part of the people who voted for him in the first round in the hope that the Muslim Brotherhood would solve the key problems of the country, Morsi turned out to be a huge disappointment.
Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood behaved in such an arrogant manner that everyone became convinced they were trying to seize control of all of the institutions of the state.
Anger at Morsi renewed the mass movement, as well as labour strikes, other struggles and social tensions generally, which culminated in the largest demonstration Egypt has ever seen on 30 June, 2013. And again, the same scenario that took place in February 2011 repeated itself. The army intervened to remove the president.
The fact that Morsi was elected in free elections, unlike Mubarak, doesn’t change the fact that in both cases, you had a coup. And it also doesn’t change the fact that Morsi lost legitimacy, even though he was elected in relatively free and fair elections. He was elected under revolutionary circumstances with a mandate from the people, and he betrayed this mandate – therefore, the people wanted to get rid of him. In this sense, his removal was the product of a mass movement carrying out the profoundly democratic right to recall an elected official.
The problem is that in today’s Egypt, there are only two major organised forces. One, of course, is the army, the backbone of the ancien régime, which is at the same time a social and political force and not just a military institution. Second, and in opposition to the ancien régime, is the Muslim Brotherhood, with its huge organisational machine.
The young people of the Tamarod movement succeeded in initiating a gigantic mobilisation, but they didn’t have the organised leverage to topple Morsi, who was backed by the considerable political apparatus of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, like in 2011, the popular movement relied upon the army to remove the president.
The big problem is that now, even more than in 2011, people have illusions in the army again, as if the army is somehow an institution in the service of the people that intervenes simply to execute the will of the people. This is, of course, completely preposterous. The army is definitely not the tool of the people.
To get back to our initial point, the euphoria of 2011 has turned very gloomy, to the extent that many started publishing obituaries for the Egyptian Revolution – or even pretending that it was never a revolution. But the idea that what started in 2011 has now ended and we’re back to square one, if not worse, is deeply wrong.
The key issues in Egypt are social and economic, and they carry an explosive potential. But the military has no conception of how to address these demands, except to repress them. So although there have been a lot of illusions in Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the head of the military, the belief that this will last is very short sighted.
As you mentioned, some Middle East commentators have asserted that no revolution took place in Egypt – or anywhere else in the region, for that matter – because there hasn’t been a transfer of political power from one class to another. How would you respond?
Revolution is a term that applies to different forms of transition, but revolutions share common features in that they involve the participation of masses of people in overthrowing the institutionalised political forms of the moment.
A revolution takes the form of an upheaval, which in some cases leads to very deep and radical change, including a change in which social class holds predominant political power. But if we place the bar so high, then the term “revolution” applies to only a very limited number of historical episodes.
If a mass mobilisation topples a president, even if this is combined with a coup, the perception of those involved that they are participating in a revolution is correct. You can’t deny them the pride that they are engaged in a revolution. The essential point about what is happening in the Arab region is that this is indeed a long-term revolutionary process.
Most revolutions in history are very long processes – all the more so when a whole geopolitical region is involved in the process. But even if you focus on one country, it’s clear that revolutions don’t occur in days or weeks.
The French Revolution or the English Revolution took place in the course of several years or decades, depending on when you believe they ended. It is important to grapple with the whole historical process, and even if you can more or less identify a date when it all started, the point is that it becomes a protracted process of change.
If the key problem in Egypt is indeed that development is blocked by a particular socio-political structure, it is clear that ... what’s at stake is the removal of the socio-political structure that is currently in power and replacing it with something different. For that to happen, it is essential to be clear about what needs to be changed. The ruling socio-political structure, like every social power, is backed by armed force. And in order to remove this obstacle, the mass movement must be able to win over the soldiers in order to prevent their use in defence of the old regime.
But in order to accomplish this, it is necessary to work for the emergence of a mass movement with some degree of organisation, coordination and strategic clarity. At present, this kind of organised force is missing, and it won’t be built in a matter of weeks or months. That’s why revolutions are very long processes.
The revolutionary challenge to the Syrian regime seems to face even more difficult circumstances. What accounts for this?
Syria is a tragic illustration of one of the shared characteristics of the Arab uprisings generally – namely, the challenge of multiple, overlapping counterrevolutions. Revolutionary movements must, as a rule, confront the counterrevolutionary challenge of the old regime, but in this region, this is just the beginning.
In addition to the counterrevolution organised by the state, there is also the regional counterrevolutionary role played by the oil monarchies of the Arab-Iranian Gulf. On top of this, there is the international counterrevolution, which is represented in the region above all by the United States. But in the case of Syria, there is also Russia and Iran, which are the Syrian regime’s chief backers.
And on top of this combination of local, regional and international counterrevolutionary forces, there’s something even more pernicious: namely, a segment of the forces that emerged in the course of the uprising and appeared to be participating in the revolution had a reactionary agenda. I’m here speaking of the Islamic fundamentalist forces. Whether they are the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafis or any of a number of jihadist elements, these forces have proliferated in the region since the 1970s and ‘80s.
They have managed to tap into the major part of the popular resentment, because of the decline of the forces of the left – the left nationalists, the communists and the rest. This vacuum has been filled by Islamic fundamentalist forces, which are actually reactionary, not progressive forces.
From the beginning of the uprisings, the United States was faced with the thorny question of how to respond ... In the case of Syria, [it] has deployed the same strategy as it has in Egypt and everywhere else, which is to prevent the revolutionary movement from getting too radical – to try to keep it within prescribed limits.
In this regard, they invoke the lessons of Iraq. In Iraq, the option rejected by the Bush administration was the right one, as far as the aims of US imperialism were concerned, or so it is believed in Washington today. That option was Saddamism without Saddam – in other words, the preservation of the Baathist state and the various structures of the old regime, but without Saddam Hussein at the top.
Today, this is the US blueprint for Syria – Assadism without Assad. In fact, this is what they contemplate for every country in the region where the movement reaches a level that makes the continuation of the old order no longer possible.
This is basically what they tried to get in Egypt, and you see all the contradictions that entailed.
In Syria, they see imposing some kind of agreement to preserve the key structures of the regime as their preferred outcome, but with the minimum condition to preserve credibility that, like in Yemen, Bashar al-Assad steps down.
For the Gulf monarchies, a democratic and progressive uprising in Syria – or anywhere else, for that matter – is extremely dangerous. So whenever they can oppose such an uprising by supporting the regime itself, they do, as in Egypt – or, of course, in Bahrain where they even intervened militarily to uphold the monarchy.
But in cases where they can’t back the regime directly, the next best option is to try to control the movement and defuse its progressive potential, and Islamic fundamentalist forces are well suited for this because they represent absolutely no threat – ideologically at least – to the oil monarchies, especially the Saudis, whose official ideology is the most reactionary fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.
The Syrian regime, too, wished for such forces to dominate the uprising because they constitute its preferred enemies: they are the best way to dissuade a sizeable section of the population as well as Western powers from supporting the uprising. This explains why the Syrian regime released from jail more than 1,000 jihadists a few months after the beginning of the uprising in 2011. The regime’s intent was to allow the Islamic fundamentalist currents to become a major force in the uprising in order to discredit it.
Can anything change this dynamic in Syria?
The progressives in Syria are rather isolated while the other forces have their various patrons: the regime is heavily backed by Russia and Iran, and the fundamentalist forces receive funding and support from the Gulf. We have seen an evolution in the situation that is definitely worrying, one in which gloomy assessments seem legitimate.
But even in Syria, it is essential to think beyond the present moment. We shouldn’t forget that the reversal of the military situation is relatively recent.
Until a few months ago, the Syrian regime was losing ground, and losing ground in such a way that it prompted Iran to intervene massively to rescue it. This included sending thousands of fighters from Hezbollah in Lebanon and from Iraq to fight alongside the regime in order to rescue it. This allowed the regime to reverse the tide militarily and to go on a counteroffensive, which was accompanied by the growing visibility, if not dominance, of Islamic forces within the armed opposition.
There is still a potential for a democratic and progressive movement to manifest itself again, as it did in the first year and beyond of the uprising. This movement is still there. The Syrian population is definitely not seduced by the prescriptions of the fundamentalist forces.
As long as there is an armed conflict, those who have the means will prevail on the ground. But at some point, the armed struggle will stop, and the socioeconomic crisis will reassert itself, as will the social aspirations of those who made the uprising in the first place.
Ultimately, these are but phases in a long-term revolutionary process, and from that angle, I think the key point is that the whole despotic and reactionary order that has ruled over the region for decades and looked as if it would remain there for eternity has since 2011 been set on fire. The flames of revolutionary change have been unleashed, and it won’t be easy to put them out.
Of course, various reactionary forces have also been set loose. There is, alas, no certainty that all this will end with victories and progressive outcomes all over the region. There can also be major defeats and reactionary setbacks, if not historical regressions, but the key point is that the process is ongoing for now, and it’s a time for action, for organisation, and for political and strategic clarification.
So many observers from afar merely reflect the most recent developments and speak of them as if they represent the final outcome. It is essential to resist this impulse, engage with the process as it unfolds and strive to steer it toward progressive outcomes.

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