|
Syria,
Interrupted Game Change
By Jim Kavanagh
January 27,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Polemicist" - The
recapture of Aleppo by the Syrian Arab Army and its
allies marks a turning point not only in the conflict in
Syria, but also in the dynamic of international
conflict. For the first time since the dissolution of
the Soviet Union, the rolling imperial engine of regime
change via American-led military intervention has been
stopped in its tracks. To be sure, it’s certainly not
out of service, even in Syria, and it will seek and find
new paths for devastating disobedient countries, but its
assumed endgame for subjugating Syria has been rudely
interrupted. And in our historical context, Syria
interrupted is imperialism interrupted.
Let’s remember
where things stood in Syria seventeen months ago. After
a four-year campaign, directed by the United States,
thousands of jihadis in various groups backed by the
US/NATO, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Israel, were on
the offensive. ISIS occupied Palmyra, Raqqa, and swaths
of territory, and was systematically raping, beheading,
and torturing Syrian citizens and looting and destroying
the country’s cultural treasures. Al-Qeada/al-Nusra had
triumphantly poured into the eastern part of Aleppo,
Syria’s largest city (and one of the oldest inhabited
cities in the world), were beheading and crucifying
their newly-subjugated Syrian captives, and were
beginning their siege of the larger and more populous
part of that city. Turkey had commenced military
operations on Syrian territory against Kurdish forces
(who had won significant victories against ISIS), and
was enabling the transit of foreign jihadis into Syria
and convoys of ISIS oil through its territory. Against
these dispersed offensives, the Syrian Arab Army was
undermanned and overstretched.
As John Kerry
himself later
admitted, in a meeting with Syrian opposition, the
Obama administration saw the ISIS advance as a positive
development: “[W]e know that this was growing, we were
watching, we saw that DAESH [ ISIS] was growing in
strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. [We]
thought, however, we could probably manage that. Assad
might then negotiate.”(By “negotiate,” Kerry meant
“capitulate”—negotiate the terms of his abdication.) For
the Serious People in Washington, this—the impending
takeover of Syria by ISIS and Al-Qaeda jihadis—meant
things were going swimmingly. (Al-Nusra was at the
time—and still is, less officially—the affiliate of
Al-Qaeda in Syria.) As Daniel Lazare
pointed out: “After years of hemming and hawing, the
Obama administration has finally come clean about its
goals in Syria. In the battle to overthrow Bashar
al-Assad, it is siding with Al Qaeda…[R]ather than
protesting what is in fact a joint U.S.-Al Qaeda
assault, the Beltway crowd is either maintaining a
discreet silence or boldy hailing Al Nusra’s impending
victory as ‘the
best thing that could happen in a Middle East in crisis.’”
You read that
right. As one al-Nusra commander
said: “We are one part of al-Qaeda…The Americans are
on our side.”
ISIS?
We can manage that.
But Assad was
still hanging on, maintaining control of Damascus, the
Syrian armed forces, and the vast majority of the Syrian
population. It was time for the big dog to jump in and
make sure the intended, inevitable result was achieved.
Thus, on August 2, 2015, “U.S. officials” told
Reuters that “the United States has decided to allow
air strikes to help defend against any attack on the
U.S.-trained Syrian rebels, even if the attackers come
from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”
Not many
people, and certainly not the mainstream media, took
much notice of that announcement at the time. No thang,
after all, for the U.S. to announce attacks against a
sovereign country. To this day, it’s hardly ever
mentioned in narratives of the conflict.
But with that
announcement—a pledge to use American planes to shoot
down Syrian planes in Syrian airspace and fire
on Syrian troops who might dare to attack US-approved
“rebels” on Syrian territory (something way beyond a
“no-fly zone”)—the United States, under President Obama,
effectively declared war on Syria. Syria was now under
explicit attack by the armed forces of two states—the
U.S. and its NATO ally Turkey—along with a panoply of
jihadi proxy armies supported by at least four other
states – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and
Israel. The newly-promised direct American military
attacks on Syrian forces would be the coup de grâce for
the last secular nationalist government in the Arab
world.
I did notice
that announcement at the time, and wrote about it in the
last of a
series of articles about Syria, where I said: “Those
who wanted a war with Syria in 2013 have finally gotten
what they wanted. It will be a dangerous diversion, at
least, for the United States, and a certain disaster for
the people of the Middle East. And nobody will stop it.”
Because, I assumed (along with virtually everyone else,
I dare say) the inevitability of what we had seen since
the demise of the Soviet Union: that nobody could or
would make a military challenge to an American
military intervention. The world’s only superpower,
and all.
Two Can
Play
I, along with
virtually everyone else, was wrong. There was another
actor in the world who noticed the announcement, took it
as the declaration of war—the intent to finish off the
government of Syria—that it was, and decided not to let
it go unchallenged. Thus, in September, 2016, Russia
accepted the Syrian government’s official request for
military help to resist the multinational
jihadi-cum-Western-air-power-and-special-forces
onslaught. Without saying it this way explicitly,
Vladimir Putin was sending Russian armed forces to
prevent the final offensive against the Syrian state
that the United States had announced it was readying. It
is a flagrant and ubiquitous omission to talk about the
Russian military intervention in Syria without
mentioning the American threat that preceded it.
As Kerry
completed his thoughts cited above, Assad didn’t wait
for ISIS to threaten Damascus, or for the U.S. to start
bombing his army; “instead…he got Putin to support him.”
I was
surprised—amazed, really—that Russia would take such
bold action. Since the disappearance of the Soviet
Union, the U.S. has been geopolitically contemptuous of
Russia, with successive American administrations simply
ignoring Russia in their calculations about how to go
about ruling the world.
Poppy Bush had
promised Mikhail Gorbachev that the US would not expand
NATO to take in the Eastern European and Baltic states,
and he, Bill Clinton, and George W. proceeded to do just
that. They took it for granted that Russia—under the
leadership of their drunken stooge, Yeltsin, and
devastated by the American-induced shock-therapy
restoration of capitalism—could do nothing. With his
war on Russia’s close ally, Serbia, Bill Clinton
(demonstrating that NATO never was a defensive
alliance) announced that, henceforth, NATO’s judgement
trumped all other precepts of international law, and the
alliance was free to attack any country on Earth; he,
too, presumed Russia could do nothing about it. In
Libya, the Obama administration got the Russians (and
Chinese) to vote for a “humanitarian” UN resolution,
which Obama then both used as an excuse and blatantly
flouted to bomb the crap out of Libya for the purpose of
“regime change”—assuming, again, that Russia could do
nothing about it. G. W. Bush abrogated the ABM Treaty,
and he and Obama moved to station “missile defenses” in
Eastern Europe that Russia knows very well are weapons
designed to enable a U.S. first-strike capability; they
assumed, of course, that Russia could do nothing about
it.
The first hint
of a change in Russia’s stance came in 2013, when Putin
adroitly annulled the “chemical weapons” pretext for the
attack on Syria that Obama was itching to launch at the
time. Although the decisive impediment to that planned
aggression was adamant popular resistance, punctuated by
the British parliament just saying No! (another
portentous denial of assumed compliance), Putin earned
the lasting enmity of America’s deep-state neocons.
Still, this Syrian gambit was diplomatic
jiu-jitsu by Russia, turning Kerry’s proclamations about
Syria surrendering chemical weapons against him; there
was no hint that Russia would or could have offered any
military resistance to the attack the United
States would have launched.
That kind of
resistance first peeked out in the context of the
Ukraine upheaval in 2014, where Russia made clear it
would use its military to backstop Crimea’s break from,
and Donbass’s resistance to, the American-instigated,
Nazi-infested coup regime in Kiev. (And I use that
N-word advisedly. See my take on that
here and
here.) Still, this resistance was on Russia’s home
turf, as it were, and Russian armed forces remained in
the background. There was no overt Russian military
action outside of its borderlands, and no hint that
Russia would or could project its own military power,
let alone challenge American military action, in a
distant venue. It was, and still is, true that the U.S.
military is capable of global “power projection” in a
way that Russia’s (or anybody else’s) is
not. So it was possible for American planners to
continue assuming that however the U.S. military
intervened in a far-flung country, there was nothing
Russia could do about it. Nobody really got the point
that Russia was starting to say: There is some borscht
we will not eat.
The rotten soup
that Russia rejected in Syria is the toxic recipe of
regime change via jihadi proxy forces mixed with the
assumption of moral superiority, which allows the U.S.
and its allies to rearrange countries without regard to
the traditional niceties of national sovereignty or
international law.
In that
context, the Russian military intervention not only, as
Kerry said, “changed the equation” in Syria, it was a
game-changing move in world politics. To the great
consternation of the American imperial regime, for the
first time since the Cold War, a country has proclaimed
to the world: When it comes to the proactive use of
military force in critical conjunctures, two can play.
What’s
Left
Whether Russian
intervention to rescue the actually-existing Syrian
Baathist government was a “good” or “bad” thing has been
a contentious issue within the left. The answer to that
depends on whether one sees the conflict that’s been
raging in Syria since 2011 (at least) as: a)
predominantly an indigenous democratic revolt against a
monstrous tyrant, dominated and directed by Syrians in
the nation’s interest, even if also manned by Syrian and
some foreign jihadis and armed, financed, and abetted by
the U.S., Turkey, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel; this
is the dominant Western narrative, ubiquitously promoted
in the media, or b) one of a series of imperialist
jihadi proxy wars that, at best, hijacked whatever
Syrian democratic elements existed at the outset—a war
that is dominated and directed by foreign jihadi and
state actors, and that seeks to destroy the last bastion
of secular Arab nationalism, in order to create a weak,
divided, sectarian non-state that suits those foreign
interests; this is a version of events found only in the
foreign and alternative press.
I stand firmly
in the latter camp. I’m not going to rehash the case,
which I and many others made a number of times over the
last five years. I will say that I don’t see how any
leftist could continue to cling to the dominant Western
narrative now that we have the American Secretary of
State admitting that: 1) the US poured an “extraordinary
amount of arms” into Syria to help the opposition; 2)
the US wanted to “manage” ISIS, and watched approvingly
as ISIS grew stronger and become threatening to Damascus
itself; 3) Russia entered the war in order to prevent an
ISIS victory, and did so; and 4) the Russian
intervention, which “changed the equation,” is legal,
because Russia is invited in by the “legitimate regime,”
and the US has no legal basis for intervention, because
the US hasn’t gotten the UN to swallow the
“Responsibility to Protect” doctrine as a substitute for
international law.
But there are
people still in the first camp, whose sincere commitment
to democracy, social justice, and anti-imperialist I do
not question. I just disagree with their political
judgement. And I vigorously disagree with the rhetorical
tactics many of them use to defend it. But that will be
the topic of another post.
My position,
shared by many people who also hold a sincere commitment
to democracy, social justice, and anti-imperialism,
requires no denial that that the Syrian Baathist state
is a brutish affair. Baathism in Syria, as in Iraq, was
the CIA’s preferred alternative to communism, and Hafez
al-Assad, like Saddam, killed thousands, including
leftist dissidents. Both regimes had cozy relationships
with American machinations in the region when it was
convenient. These are regimes that deserve to be
dispatched to the dustbin of history. Nevertheless,
there was good reason that I and tens of millions of
people around the world objected to the invasion and
conquest of Iraq in 2003, which, as we foresaw, led to
the demise of the country into sectarian chaos. Neither
then nor now would calling us “Saddam’s apologists” be
sign of anything but the weakness of the speaker’s
political case.
Nor does this
position require any love for Putin-era Russia, which
is, thanks to American-sponsored shock-and-awe
capitalist restoration, a country mired in its own
quicksand of conservative nationalism and scheming
oligarchy. As it claws its way up the geopolitical food
chain, Russia will undoubtedly engage with bad actors,
and engage in bad actions. Still, Russia is not (yet)
capable, economically or militarily, of being an
imperialist power like the United States, and is the
target of aggressive maneuvers by the world’s most
powerful military alliance (NATO). In fact, its very
weakness, as a rising capitalist entity, makes it want
to insist on the fair rules of the international order,
which the stronger capitalist countries proclaim, but
have for so long ignored with impunity.
The
Syria-Russia alliance is not revolutionary proletarian
internationalism. It is an alliance, within the
framework of the traditional Westphalian state paradigm,
and within the post-WWI framework of
international law, that has had a real net positive
effect in the context of today’s geopolitics. Without
Russian military intervention, al-Nusra and allied
jihadis would have been rampaging through the streets of
Damascus. Saving Syria from that fate is a result I
welcome as a leftist.
Again, at the
time of the Russian intervention (and still)—especially
with the threat of imminent American military attacks on
Syrian forces—military action was the only way
to stop the jihadi regime-change train, and Russia was
the only geopolitical actor capable of
intervening with the necessary force. Russia was
responding, decisively and legally, to an invitation to
defend an independent sovereign state.
“Non-violent”
kinda-sorta-pacifist progressives may not like it, but
this is a situation that is being determined by armed
force. Revolutionary leftists may not like it (I sure
don’t), but there is no left political force on the
scene capable of mounting any serious resistance to
either the Syrian state or the foreign-driven jihadi
invasion-cum-“rebellion”—itself a foreign intervention.
It’s also true,
of course, that foreign military intervention, however
legitimate its goals, can fail miserably. Having been
deliberately provoked into doing so, the Soviets
certainly intervened on the right side—Can anyone now
doubt it?—in defending the secular Afghan government in
1979 against the proxy jihadi war of the day—which was
the seed war of subsequent imperialist-jihadi
adventures. Because the “foreignness” of the Soviet
soldiers and women’s education was more jarring than the
“foreignness” of the “Afghan Arabs” and
beheading teachers, and/or because the United
States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, et. al.,
supported the “rebellion” with money. Intelligence,
logistics, and sophisticated arms (including
anti-aircraft weapons), the result was, and still is, a
disaster—for everybody.
So it was that
Obama—who entangled the United States in seven wars and
kept sending American soldiers back into wars he
“ended”—predicted that the intervention would trap
Russia in a “quagmire.”
Except it hasn’t. The
relatively small Russian contingent has acted
effectively and with remarkable restraint in the face of
severe
provocation. Things can always go haywire, but so
far, whether anyone likes it or not, the Russian
intervention has been successful. Russia has even turned
Turkey into an ally, for the moment at least.
The fatal flaw
of “the Russians are getting into another quagmire like
Afghanistan” argument is…Afghanistan. And Iraq. And
Libya, etc. The Russians and the rest of the world now
know how foolish and counterproductive it would be to
send tens of thousands of troops to save Syria. The
Russians and the rest of the world also now know how
destructive the American project of regime change via
jihadi proxies is, having seen its results in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Only deluded and
arrogant American exceptionalists—conservative
militarists and liberal humanitarian interventionists
alike—haven’t learned that lesson.
There is no
revolutionary skin in this game, and leftists should be
the last to rationalize away the principles of state
sovereignty and non-intervention, as well as the
prohibition against aggressive and “preventive” war. As
Jean Bricmont has
pointed out, these principles became the bedrock of
international law, and their violation the greatest war
crime, not because of abstract bourgeois theorizing, but
because of the experience of the Second World War (where
Germany claimed to intervene in defense of beleaguered
minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland), and of
colonialism—a system in which stronger states justified
the plunder of weaker ones under the guise of a
civilizing mission. As Bricmont remarks: “The last thing
the newly decolonized countries wanted was intervention
from the old colonial powers.”
As Bricmont
also points out, “just about everything that the United
States is doing everywhere in the world” violates these
principles, and therefore the fundamental structure of
international law. Now, much of that is cheered on by
liberals and some leftists as “humanitarian
intervention” and the “responsibility to protect.” As
used by American liberals, and by “anti-Assadist”
leftists who present Assad as an arch-fiend for whose
elimination the world is responsible, these
concern-saturated phrases are nothing but new-fangled
slogans for missionary imperialism. Within the
“rules-based” world order as conceived by American
politicians and ideologists today, as Bricmont observes:
“It is obvious that such ‘interventions’ are only
possible on the part of strong States against weak
States,” and that “even all strong states are not equal
among each other.”
Really: Can
Russia, China, Iran and their friendly states call
themselves “the international community,” declare that
the undemocratic, misogynist, head-chopping regime of
Saudi Arabia just “has to go,” put their favored armed
factions of Saudi dissidents and international jihadi
brigades on their payroll, set up bases for them in
Yemen where they are supplied with advanced tactical
weapons, and demand that the Saudi government withdraw
itself from, and turn over to these “rebels,” whatever
territory they’d like to occupy? Is that the way the
“rules-based” international order works now? Or is this
prerogative reserved for the US and its favored allies?
It is
amazing how blithely the entire American political and
media elite—with liberals in the lead—have constructed
this alternate-reality version of the rules of
international law, and become legends of righteousness
in their own minds. The American left should have no
truck with this.
Lion
King
A good
historical analogy can clarify a present situation. In
this case, it’s best to avoid the temptation of
associating Syria today with a precedent loaded with
progressive internationalism. I find nothing more
ridiculous than attempts to make the jihadis in Syria
reincarnation of the international brigades in Spain.
And the Russians are not Cuba in Angola. We need a case
that involves nothing more than widely-accepted and
good-enough principles of national sovereignty,
non-interference, and anti-colonialism—in which there is
no good guy for the left.
The best I’ve
come up with is a situation that conventional liberal
history recognizes as one of the more outrageous and
ominous crimes of the twentieth-century. It was an
attack by a country that was the seat of Western
civilization on one of the world’s poorest and most
despotic regimes, ruled by a dictator who styled himself
King of Kings and Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and had
his own self-aggrandizing religious cult: That despot,
Haile Selassie, was nonetheless feted for his resistance
to Italian fascist imperialism.
Is Bashar al-Assad
a worse tyrant than Haile Selassie? Does Syria deserve
less protection from Washington-Riyadh-Tel Aviv’s
twenty-first century imperialism than Ethiopia did from
twentieth-century Rome’s? Who’s afraid of “Selassie
apologist”?
Timeline Review
The jihadi-imperialist
threat to the Syrian state has been interrupted, but it
is decidedly not over. Syria has already been
devastated, and the U.S. and its allies have enough
resources to keep the pot boiling for a long time.
The most
positive recent development has been Turkey’s seeming
turn, propelled by the predictable blowback, away from
the jihadi game. Without Turkey’s help, ISIS and other
jihadi elements will lose important supply lines. But
Erdogan is the epitome of a fickle friend, and can turn
back on an American dime tomorrow.
Any lessening
of regime-change aggression against Syria, as Donald
Trump seemed to favor in his campaign rhetoric, would be
a serious blow to the jihadis, and would probably lead
to Saudi and Qatari support for them drying up. But
anyone who trusts anything that Trump says right now
should wait a few minutes. Even if he backs off on
Syria, Trump’s cabinet choices make clear that he will
likely ratchet up aggression against Iran and the
Palestinians, or maybe go back and take Iraq’s oil.
Besides,
imperialism is a mandatory bi-partisan project. Congress
has already
voted 375-34 in the House, 92-7 margin to continue
the Pentagon training for Syrian insurgents, and, for
the first time, to supply them with anti-aircraft
missiles. Let’s see if Trump and “Mad Dog” Mattis put a
stop to that. My bet: Despite what some wishful-thinking
paleo-conservatives think, Donald Trump is not going to
oversee a less imperialistic American policy in the
world.
What has
happened, and is probably irreversible, and will be
exacerbated by the presence of Trump, is that the
incoherence, failure, and utter ridiculousness (from the
perspective of reasonable standards of global peace and
security) of American policy is now on embarrassing
display.
It’s important
to recognize that the strength of Russia in Syria is
more political than military. The U.S. itself has many
more military assets in the region than Russia, and
there are 16 other countries flying combat
aircraft in Syria. The American-led anti-Syria alliance
draws on forces and facilities in the neighboring
countries of Jordan, Israel, and Turkey. Indeed, the
latter two have the significant armed forces that have
directly attacked Syria, and shot down a Russian plane.
Not to mention the global logistics and arms-supply
network (even
Croatia’s in the act) backed by the enormous
financial resources of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
It was not just
American, but also UK, Danish, and Australian air
forces, that
accidentally-on-purpose bombed Syrian army positions
at the Deir Ezzor airport on September 17th,
killing
about 100 Syrian soldiers and wounding 110 more, in
an operation that was an acknowledged violation of
regulations, and just
happened to
support an ISIS offensive on the airport. There are
more planes and weapons arrayed in the America-led
coalition than in the Russian contingent.
That attack on
Deir Ezzor was, by the way, exactly the kind of attack
Obama had promised a year before. This time it was
destined to be a one-off, because the Russians were
there to prevent it from happening again. It’s thought,
in fact, that it was a Pentagon tantrum designed to
sabotage the Kerry-negotiated cease-fire—which it
did—and, as Gareth Porter
says, meant as “payback” to Russia for its “poke in
the U.S. eye.” That means it was a direct defiance of
civilian command. Let’s see how Donald deals with Mad
Dog when that comes up again.
The fundamental
problem is that there’s an inverse relationship between
America’s military power and its political strength.
That centrifugal tension derives from the increasingly
obvious discrepancy between America’s publicly-declared
motivations and objectives, and the actual motivations
and objectives–which cannot be publicly declared, but
which the results of American actions make harder to
hide.
In the Syrian
case, it plays out like this: Russia supports the Syrian
state against the jihadis. That’s what it says it’s
doing, and that’s what it is doing. You can support that
or oppose it, and it’s clear what you’re supporting or
opposing.
The US, on the
other hand, is supporting: reactionary religious
monarchism, the destruction of secular nationalism,
Zionism, Turkish neo-Ottoman ambitions, capitalism and
neoliberal globalism, oil and gas drilling and pipeline
rights, etc. But the American (and European) people
aren’t going to want to fight, die, or give up their
Social Security and Medicare for any of that. So the
government of the U.S. cannot say what it’s actually
doing, and wraps it up in a bullshit fairy tale about
democracy and humanitarianism, which its client regimes
in Europe and its global media agents promote around the
world incessantly.
This story only
sells as long as people accept the legitimacy of the
source—which means as long as they have enough material
comfort, and as long as they only get the story from
approved sources. But that’s over. All of it. People no
longer have, and will not be getting back, lives of
increasing material comfort, and they are no longer
limited to, and won’t be swallowing whole, the blather
that’s intoned by multi-million-dollar news anchors
(which is why there will be continuing futile attempts
to shut down, or steer people away from, alternative
media).
In Facebook
world, Russia and Syria are in a relationship.
The United
States? Well, it has Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Jordan, al-Nusra (“bad” al-Qaeda), Jabhat Fateh
al-Sham (“good” al-Qaeda), ISIS, the Free Syrian Army,
the Army of Conquest, the Kurds, France, Belgium,
Holland, Germany, the rest of “Combined Joint Task
Force-Operation Inherent Resolve,” Refugee Nation, and
Croatia? It’s complicated.
Whose Timeline
would you want to get involved in?
To be more
“successful,” the U.S. will have to drop all the doo-dads
that are dressing up the imperialism, and be more
explicitly ruthless. It will have to drop the pretension
of fighting for democracy and humanitarianism or
respecting international law, and just be, like: “Let’s
just take the oil.” Precisely what our new president
promises.
We’ve exhausted
the Smooth Operator; time to try the Huckster. Different
salesman, same product.
But that shift
will introduce further political weakness, at home and
in the world, forcing more reliance on dangerous
military aggression, undermining further the “world’s
bestest, diversest, peace-lovingest democracy”
political-ideological foundation that’s absolutely
crucial for stable imperial rule. The United States will
start losing Europe, and from there, even Hamilton
won’t save it. That’s exactly the conundrum you hear
John Kerry struggling with in that remarkable audio
tape.
It’s
increasingly clear that the United States can achieve
nothing but destruction, in Syria or anywhere else.
But it can
achieve that, and as a failing and flailing enterprise,
it may double and triple down on its destructive
impulse. Even if, and precisely because, it has now met
some effective resistance in Syria, it may engage in
dangerous provocations designed to put those
international actors capable of military
resistance—Russia and China—back in their assigned
places.
Sorry, there is
nothing very hopeful in this scenario. It’s nouveau
great-power geopolitics in which there is no left or
progressive force of any significance. We are going to
have to do some unfriending, and make a lot more bad and
unfortunate choices.
Jah rule.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
