On 8 December it was announced that President Bashar Al Assad had resigned from the office he had held since the year 2000 and had left the country. A statement released later stated that he was in exile in the Russian Federation and this has been subsequently confirmed by President Putin. Assad’s resignation brought about the end of the Syrian Arab Republic and a terrible defeat for Arab nationalism, Ba’athism and the axis of resistance. The fall of Assad was followed by direct intervention by two regional allies of US imperialism – Turkey in the north and Israel in the south. The Israeli air force has carried out hundreds of bombing runs targeting every Syrian military installation, ammunition dump and intelligence centre they can find. The Syrian navy has been destroyed as has most of its air force. The group credited with the final assault that brought down Assad is known as Hayat Tahir Al Sham (HTS) and their leader Abu Muhammad al-Jolani has been acclaimed as ‘interim’ leader by the US imperialists. But both HTS and their leader are little more than rebranded Al Qaeda men who we are told are now ‘reformed’. The speed of the collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic and the disintegration of the country have left many anti-imperialists surprised and demoralised. In this article we will attempt to provide some answers to the many questions that are swirling around at the moment but we must of course issue the proviso that the full picture of the final days of the Syrian Arab Republic will only come out in due time. When more is known we will revisit this subject as required.
A thirteen-year siege
The war on Syria may have ended quickly but it has been waged for over a decade. Even bourgeois sources such as the arch propagandists at CNN are obliged to admit that the war began in 2011 and that US involvement was clear from very early on. The official reason given by the imperialists for their involvement is the shooting by the Syrian government of demonstrators who rallied following the mass demonstrations that took place in Tunisia and Egypt and saw these two governments fall (both of whom were solidly aligned with imperialism) as well as protests that broke out in a number of other countries in West Asia including Algeria, Morocco and Jordan. It was in Libya and Syria, though, that US imperialism and its allies focused their efforts to make sure that the mass unrest that had broken out across the region was turned to their advantage. It must be mentioned at this stage that the period known as the ‘Arab Spring’ is one that is often mischaracterised and manipulated by imperialism. The grinding poverty of the masses in countries like Tunisia and Egypt produced movements that were strongly backed by the working class of these countries against Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, both of whom were long term stooges of imperialism, the tragedy in both cases being that the workers and peasants of both countries found power snatched away from them after these regimes fell. When power falls into the street the question becomes one of who can pick it up. After the elections in Egypt delivered the Muslim Brotherhood into power and Mohammed Morsi became President, a military coup swiftly followed at the behest of imperialism, and Morsi went from President to prisoner very quickly as the stooge regime of General Sisi was imposed.
The US and its allies, the British foremost amongst them, sought to manipulate the waves of protest that moved around the region. Their focus on Libya and Syria as their targets would be no surprise to anyone familiar with the now notorious list spoken about by former NATO commander General Wesley Clark in 2003 which showed how the Bush administration had a plan to attack seven countries in five years those being Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. Of these countries Libya and Syria have been destroyed by sanctions, invading mercenary armies and bombing campaigns. Somalia remains weakened and divided following decades of civil war, Lebanon is home to the powerful resistance movement of Hezbollah, but the country remains trapped in a sectarian constitution designed by imperialism and suffering from economic weakness which (again) is of deliberate design. Sudan was first split into two following a long campaign of demonisation waged against it by the US imperialists and now both halves of the formerly united Sudan are either in a civil war (the north) or living with the consequences of one (the South). US imperialism might not have gained the kind of tame, stable client regimes it wanted but it has wrecked and looted the majority of the countries on the list mentioned by Clark.
The long war on Syria must be seen in this context. It is a war long planned for by US imperialism and it is one that has been waged by military, political and economic means. The imperialists have spent billions on this war in terms of arming and training various militia organisations with an apparently endless budget for this kind of activity. Owing to the heavy resistance it faced in Iraq and its inability to subjugate that country, the US after the end of the George W Bush era reconsidered its tactics. The war in Iraq had been very unpopular inside the US and had inspired much opposition, so much that the snake Obama was obliged to feign his opposition to it. The resistance of the Iraqi masses and the casualties incurred by the US made them decide to wage their neo-colonial wars in a new way. Direct invasions were proving too risky, so the Obama era saw a rapid increase in the usage of sanctions in order effectively to cut countries off from international trade. These were applied to Syria with devastating effect.
The other factors in these new ‘hybrid’ wars were usage of US air power (including drone strikes) and the employment of mercenary armies to do the fighting. This was the tactic used in Libya and Syria to horrific effect.
As the US journalist Max Blumenthal has noted in his book The Management of Savagery, the Obama administration recruited the very ‘Jihadist’ groups it and its predecessors claimed to have been fighting since September 11th 2001, i.e., Al Qaeda and its various spin offs. As Blumenthal notes, this alliance actually goes back all the way to the Afghan war when Osama Bin Laden himself (child of the Saudi elite that he was) founded the group in the US-organised war against the PDPA government and their Soviet allies. This alliance continued into the 1990s when Al Qaeda were present on the battlefields of Bosnia and Kosovo, again working for the US. The attacks of September 11th 2001, which are attributed to Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, barely interrupted this process. As President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan noted in an email to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February 2012, “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria”. The British imperialists also have a long-term alliance with ultra-reactionary Islamic organisations, as chronicled by the British journalist Mark Curtis in his work Secret affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam, and it was these connections which were fully brought to bear against the Syrian people when the war broke out in 2011. The usage of rabidly sectarian Sunni Muslim organisations by the US and British imperialists is no accident but in fact represents their standard operating procedures. The British ruling class is long practised in the employment of violent, reactionary sectarian groups as a means of dividing colonised peoples, and the US has followed what the old colonial master taught and taken it to new and obscene levels. For countries like Syria, Libya and Iraq, all of which had forms of Arab nationalism as the guiding principles of their governments of decades, there was a need to build a national consciousness and overcome the religious and/or ethnic divisions that had previously been exploited by the European colonisers. When attacking those countries the US sought to reopen those fissures within each of these states. The imperialists would rather deal with many small micro states or with states crippled by various divisions all of which make it less likely that the masses will unite against the imperialists. In this the Saudis, the Turkish regime and the Gulf oligarchies play a particularly repulsive, reactionary role in bankrolling these ultra sectarian Sunni groups including the likes of the Islamic State (ISIS) as outlined by the Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn in his book on the subject from 2015, The rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the new Sunni revolution. The tactics of imperialism thus remain the same: find the most reactionary, violent groups they can and use them to terrorise the population and/or to fracture the unity of states like Syria and to break them down into various fiefdoms that can be more easily controlled.
The point that must be emphasised here is that the war which began officially in 2011 was long planned. General Clark revealed the list of targets in 2003 but the plans date from before that. What we have witnessed is the end of an operation which US and British imperialism have been planning for at least twenty years.
The unforgivable inaction of the British Left
Much of what we have outlined above has become clear only thanks to the work of journalists like Blumenthal, Cockburn, Curtis, Vanessa Beeley and others who have done accurate reporting on the war against Syria. Some of this has only become clear as the war has gone on, but much was known before the war even began.
It was known that the US was using Sunni sectarian groups to fight the war directed against the government of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and that these groups were destroying the unity of that nation. It was known that the US had encouraged religious sectarianism in its brutal occupation of Iraq as a means of breaking up the unified resistance that had emerged to the colonial occupation of that country. The devastation inflicted upon Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya by imperialism was also very clear to all who had eyes to see it. Yet when it came to the war in Syria, from the very beginning the British left and the trade union leadership deliberately undermined any serious work to mobilise against the war. This is despite the very extensive involvement of the British government in the war on Syria. Just as with the invasion of Iraq a decade beforehand, the anti-war movement, dominated by Trotskyites, revisionists and other such treacherous creatures, would not even clearly and plainly denounce the war and the aims of the imperialists. Instead (as with Libya) we got endless agreements with the propaganda of the imperialists directed against the Syrian government.
The leadership of the (so called) anti-war movement in Britain has always shied away from serious action against the wars waged by the British government and will not even clearly explain to workers what the real situation is in Syria. Instead they insist on repeating every slander against Syria and the government that was led by Bashar al-Assad. Again we must ask the question: if those who are supposedly the leaders of the anti-war movement are going to repeat every piece of crude propaganda pumped out by the likes of the BBC, then what are they actually opposing?
The truth is that the (self-appointed) leaders of the ‘anti-war’ movement in Britain do not really oppose British imperialism, given that many of them are either Labour Party people or Trots and revisionists who seek to push people back towards social democracy, who are based within the labour aristocracy and whose mission is to confine anti-war activity to words and peaceful demonstrations, at best, outlawing all anti-imperialist action. For them being against a war is a matter of tokenistic pacifism, not a struggle to build an anti-war movement based on non-cooperation with the war, e.g., preventing the broadcasting of war propaganda and obstructing the production and transportation of ammunition to the theatre of war. Those who only wish to see a revived social democracy do not actually wish to challenge the imperialist system but merely wish to see its spoils divided slightly more equitably. This leads them to a political practice which always seeks to mask the true nature of British imperialism and (naturally) to a long term collaboration with the Labour Party.
Privatisation with Islamic characteristics
Following the resignation of Assad, the new government, headed by the long time Al Qaeda man al-Jolani, committed itself to a ‘free market’ economic policy. Here we are reminded of the fate of many countries that have fallen under the control of imperialism in the 30 years since the fall of the USSR. What this means in practice is that the industrial base of the country will be destroyed while the country will be reduced to a site of resource extraction. Domestic manufacturing will be asset stripped and shut down in order to force Syria to import the great bulk of what its people need. This is a means to prevent any independent development and keep the country dependent upon imperialist countries for these imports just as neighbouring Lebanon is. We are reminded of the miserable fate of Ukraine which was once the most industrialised republic of the USSR. When it fell into the hands of the compradors it had much of this manufacturing base destroyed as imperialism was only interested in stealing Ukrainian farmland and gas deposits. So far the devastating sanctions on Syria have not been lifted and one need not be too much of a mystic to be able to predict what the demands of imperialism will be to the new regime – mass privatisation of state assets, the taking out of giant IMF loans and the turning over of all power related to economic policy to either IMF and World Bank officials or ‘safe’ persons trained in the West who will follow their orders without question. Many years ago, Kwame Nkrumah identified this as one of the key features of neo-colonialism: the nominal independence of a nation compromised by the imperialist powers controlling every aspect of government policy including who gets to be in what role. This is the future that the US and its allies have in store for Syria.
A defeat but not a fatal one
When confronted with a defeat such as what has occurred in Syria many who desperately wish to see the fall of US imperialism and its wretched system will fall into despair. It is the job of communists, though, to remain consistently clear-headed, neither selling false hope nor counsels of despair. The fall of the Syrian Arab Republic is a victory for imperialism but it does not change the overall picture too much. In West Asia the Israeli colonial state, for all the savagery it has engaged in, is still facing determined resistance in Gaza. The Netanyahu gang was forced out of Lebanon by the national liberation forces there headed by Hezbollah. The heroic Yemenis continue to reveal the weaknesses of the US and British naval forces in the Red Sea as they maintain their blockade on Israeli shipping there. More broadly the trajectory of US imperialism is still a downward one as their war on Russia is slowly being lost, the DPRK stands strong against their aggression as the South Korean puppet regime slides in chaos, and the incoming Trump administration faces the reality of their inability to produce military equipment at the rate of both China and Russia. The long decline of imperialism was never going to be a straightforward process and there were always going to be moments such as this when the imperialists score a victory. Part of our task is to understand and to explain to the advanced workers where things truly stand and where we are going.
Resistance will flourish
As the Zionist regime and the reactionary Erdogan clique move into occupy more Syrian territory, resistance to their aggression will emerge. This is inevitable, as these repulsive servants of imperialism will not be able to stop themselves from committing crimes against the Syrian people. There are many Syrians who will be appalled at the attempt to dismember their country, including those units of the Syrian Arab Army who continue to fight. As the full horror of the plans US imperialism has for Syria become clear, more will join the resistance. The victory the US thinks it has won in Syria will turn to ashes just as their ‘victories’ in Afghanistan and Iraq did.
Our tasks now
All communists and sincere anti-imperialists in the imperialist countries must stand with the resistance in Syria as it emerges. As Joseph Stalin pointed out a century ago, the natural allies of the workers in the imperialist countries are the oppressed in the colonised nations. We must use this truth as our guide for action in pushing for an uncompromised anti-imperialist agenda within the trade unions in Britain in order to build a real anti-imperialist base amongst the British working class that is able to point out that the enemy of Syrians, Palestinians, Libyans and other oppressed peoples is the same enemy that seeks to impoverish us at home and in order to mobilise for action to prevent the British government’s war crimes. We must expose the complicity of the trade union leadership and the (so called) leaders of the anti-war movement in helping the British government get away with its crimes against the Syrian people and so many others. Only by doing this can we hope to build a militant anti-imperialist movement not a useless pacifist dead end which is what the revisionists and Trotskyites have built. This is how we can play our part in ensuring that no more nations are placed under siege and invaded by mercenaries in the service of imperialism.
Victory to the Syrian nation!
Victory to the Syrian resistance!
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