By Bill Van Auken
Global Research, December 15, 2015
With the US political
establishment roiled by an increasingly acrimonious debate over how to escalate
the US military intervention in Iraq and Syria, and with one Western European
power after another joining in the assault, the overwhelming sentiment of broad
masses of people both in Europe and America remains decidedly hostile to war.
Despite the frantic efforts of the political
establishments in the US, Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere, along with
the campaign of the media to whip up fear and hatred in response to recent
terrorist attacks, millions of working people are conscious that, once again,
they are being lied to about a military intervention in the Middle East.
Amid the dizzying array of pretexts put forward for
this war, from combating terrorism by bombing the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria (ISIS), to supporting “human rights” by financing and arming similar
Salafist jihadi militias in a war for regime-change, there remains the
well-founded popular suspicion that the real aims have to do with the drive by
US imperialism and its allies to secure hegemony over the Middle East and its
vast oil reserves.
It is under these conditions that a collection of
pseudo-left organizations from Europe, the US and beyond have joined in issuing
a statement that serves as propaganda for a dramatic widening of the
imperialist campaign.
The signatories of the statement include the French
New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), the British Socialist Workers Party, Socialist
Alternative of Australia, the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) of Sri Lanka, and
the International Socialist Organization (ISO) of the US. All of them have long
and shameful records of providing “left” justifications for imperialist interventions
and dressing up US-orchestrated wars for regime-change as “revolutions.”
The French NPA was at the forefront of those
supposedly “left” organizations that cheered on the imperialist war for
regime-change in Libya. Its leading spokesman on the Middle East and North
Africa, Gilbert Achcar, hailed the US-NATO intervention that toppled and
murdered Muammar Gaddafi, while killing at least 30,000 Libyans and leaving the
country in a state of permanent civil war.
At the outset of the war, Achcar penned the infamous
lines: “Every general rule admits of exceptions. This includes the general rule
that UN-authorized military interventions by imperialist powers are purely
reactionary ones, and can never achieve a humanitarian or positive purpose.”
He and the NPA went on to lend support to the
US-orchestrated war to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, going so far as
to meet with the collection of Western intelligence assets who formed the
Syrian National Council to advise them on how best to bring about direct
imperialist intervention.
Similarly, Australia’s Socialist Alternative denounced
any warnings about Western intervention in Syria, declaring that the “left” had
to reject “knee-jerk anti-imperialism.”
For its part, the International Socialist Organization
defended the “right” of “Syrian revolutionaries” to receive arms and aid from
the CIA as well as to seek direct US military intervention.
The transformation of these organizations, all of
which came out of the predominantly middle class protest movements against war
in the 1960s and early 1970s, into open supporters of imperialist war is part
of a protracted process. Its material roots are to be found in the increasing
affluence of sections of the middle class that have become a new constituency for
imperialism.
After enthusiastically supporting the “Syrian
revolution” in 2012 and 2013, most of these organizations fell largely silent
as it became increasingly obvious that the so-called “revolutionaries”
consisted of sectarian Sunni Islamist militias funded and armed by the
reactionary Arab regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, along with
the Islamist government in Turkey—all of them working with the CIA.
They have now re-launched their campaign in tandem
with the imperialist drive for escalation begun under the pretext of responding
to the apparently ISIS-inspired attacks in Paris and California.
The thrust of their intervention is made clear in the
second paragraph of the statement:
“In Syria, the first form taken by the
counterrevolution is support for the Assad regime. Russia’s deadly raids and
the intervention of Iran, Hezbollah and sectarian Iraqi militias champion this
profoundly reactionary, anti-democratic project. Assad is fuelled, too, by the
mistrust Western powers routinely demonstrate toward democratic and
revolutionary forces in Syria…”
There is not a word in the statement about the decades
of US imperialist war that have shattered the entire region, leading to over a
million deaths and the destruction of entire societies. The problem, from the
standpoint of these organizations, is Russian aggression, Iranian intervention
and “sectarian Iraqi militias”—that and the failure of the US and its allies to
provide sufficient “trust” and support to the so-called “democratic and
revolutionary forces in Syria.”
This last phrase is employed in much the same way as
Western governments use the term “moderate rebels.” In both cases, the
democrats, revolutionaries and moderates go unnamed. That is because the real
forces fighting the Assad regime consist of Al Qaeda-linked Sunni sectarian
militias, including ISIS, the Al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham.
The position of these organizations is made even more
explicit by the International Socialist Organization of the US in an article
posted on its web site December 9 denouncing Russia—much in the same manner as
the US State Department—for bombing not ISIS, but “non-ISIS opposition groups,”
which again, for obvious reasons, are left unnamed.
The article states:
“Even though official US policy calls for the removal
of Assad, Russia’s intervention bolstered the regime’s position, creating a new
set of calculations about Syria’s future that was almost immediately embraced
by a significant current of the US foreign policy establishment.
It continues:
“In practical terms, the US military has already made
its peace with Assad. Its opposition to Russian air strikes on ground forces
backed by the US has been rhetorical at most…”
The thrust of the ISO’s argument is directed at the
ongoing debate within the US political establishment and the military and
intelligence complex over policy toward Syria. This supposedly left
organization is weighing in to support the most bellicose factions within the
ruling elite and the Pentagon, demanding that Washington continue to prosecute
the war for regime-change by confronting Russia.
Turning the world inside out, all of these
organizations present Russia as an imperialist power and the principal
aggressor in the Middle East, while portraying US imperialism as a hapless and
increasingly spent force.
The peculiar fixation of the pseudo-left on the
fiction of “Russian imperialism” has ominous significance. Having promoted and
defended imperialist interventions in Libya and Syria under the false flag of
“human rights,” they are now lending their efforts to promoting far bloodier
conflicts, including a potential war between the US and Russia, the world’s two
largest nuclear powers.
The forging of a genuine mass antiwar movement can
take place only through an unrelenting struggle to unmask these pseudo-left
organizations and root out their political influence, as part of the fight to
mobilize the international working class in the struggle to put an end to
militarism and its source, the capitalist system.
The original source of this article is World Socialist Web Site
No comments:
Post a Comment