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Imperialism, Russia and Syria

John Molyneux & Memet Uludag

Syria: the debate on the left

(July 2018)

From Irish Marxist Review, Vol. 7 No. 21, July 2018, p. 40.
Copyright © Irish Marxist Review.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

Debate on the left about Syria, in Ireland and internationally, has centred on whether or not it is possible to combine opposition to all US and Western intervention in Syria with opposition to Russian intervention and to the Assad regime’s war on his own people.

On one hand there are some supporters of the Syrian people and even of the Syrian revolution who are so bitter against the Assad regime and its Russian backers and so desperate at the ongoing plight of the Syrian people that they end up calling for some kind of Western intervention. Sometimes this takes the form of outright calls for bombing but often it consists of vaguer calls for ‘the international community’ to ‘do something’, or to implement sanctions or to ‘establish a no-fly zone’.

We understand that these calls are often well intentioned, motivated by a desire to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people, but we disagree completely with this approach. We believe it loses sight of the fact that US imperialism, as argued above, is the main imperial force in the world and encourages the illusion that it undertakes ‘humanitarian’ interventions when it doesn’t. If the US intervenes in Syria it will not be to help the Syrian people but to advance its own imperial interests and it won’t make the situation better, it will make it even worse and could easily escalate into wider Middle Eastern War.

The concept of ‘the international community’ is also an illusion. It suggests that the various imperialist and capitalist powers whose domestic role is to administer and maintain the exploitation of their respective working classes somehow, when they get together, become benevolent humanitarians acting in the best interests of oppressed peoples. They do not. The ‘international community’ is a euphemism that all too often actually means US imperialism and its many allies.

The imposition of a ‘no-fly zone’ sounds like a ‘peaceful’ solution but is not thought through. A no-fly zone is meaningless unless it is enforced and it could only be enforced by the US military or its allies. It would simply serve as a stepping stone to war and invasion. Sanctions, in this case, would legitimise the idea of US and the Western powers as the world’s police and hit the ordinary people of Syria. There is a fundamental difference between imperialist imposed sanctions on Syria and BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) on Zionist Israel which is a popular movement from below in solidarity with, and called for by, the Palestinian people. Thus, we should oppose all Western intervention in Syria, other than provision of humanitarian aid which should be massively expanded. If our governments and rulers really care about the Syrian people, there is something very simple they can do: welcome the refugees!

But if opposition to Western intervention is our first priority this should be accompanied by opposition to Russian intervention, to the appalling Assad regime and to the interventions by other regional powers – Iran, Turkey, Israel etc.

The tyrannical Assad regime, as described above, deserves only to be overthrown but this is a task for the Syrian people themselves.

There are some, particularly from a Stalinist background or influenced by the same, who argue that any criticism of Russia or Assad ‘objectively’ supports either US imperialism or ISIS and other reactionary jihadist forces. We reject this for the following reasons:

It is perfectly possible to criticise Russia and its imperialism without supporting the US. Socialists have been doing this for many decades and it has not prevented us from opposing and mobilising massively against the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghan War, the Iraq War and the bombing of Syria. Russia is not as big a power as the US, but it is no less imperialist, as its record shows.
It is perfectly possible to condemn Assad’s war on his own people without supporting any foreign intervention. Not to do so is to defend the indefensible. It is a matter of indisputable fact that by far the biggest killer of Syrian civilians has been the Assad regime.
The idea that opposing Assad means supporting ISIS and other counter-revolutionary jihadists denies to the Syrian people the possibility of progressive and revolutionary action and consciousness. Indeed, it says to them you have no right to rebel against the tyrannical regime by whom you are oppressed. Intentionally or not it is a concession to Islamophobia. It was clear that attitudes of this sort influenced some leftist responses to the whole phenomenon of the Arab Spring, with the half-stated belief that a genuine popular democratic revolution could not be produced by Arabs/Muslims; it had to be orchestrated behind the scenes by either the Americans or the Islamists or both.
We stand in solidarity with the Syrian people and with the Syrian Revolution of 2011 and with the Arab Spring as a whole. We believe that, sooner or later, the peoples of the Middle East will rise again.

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