Message from reader Justin Davis:
I never know what to make of these articles [‘Massacre in Syria promoted as reason for intervention’]. A lot of it reads like a Loose Change-style apologetics for the current administration in Syria. A well grounded theoretical understanding of the socialist critique isn’t going to point one toward a cabal of bogeymen hiring black-ops mercenaries from the safety of their smokey backrooms to disrupt dictatorships in oil-rich companies.
Don’t get me wrong. Certainly, I am as critical of post-industrial Western capitalist democracies as anyone, but I don’t think that the conflict in Syria is the proper forum for flexing our ideological muscles. At some point we have to face the fact that—regardless of who’s doing it, who it’s happening to and why—people are dying.
I can’t get behind any socialism that doesn’t prioritize saving lives. Maybe in my old age (it’s my 24th birthday) I’m getting sentimental, but I don’t see how there could be anything bigger for any politics to concern itself with than human life. That is, after all, the point.
There are no good wars and no one walks away from a conflict, especially one like this, without getting blood on their hands. Will the FSA and the SNC be that much better than Assad, if at all? I’m not sure. Is the Syrian government responsible for the bulk of these attacks or is it the ‘terrorists’? I can’t say. Was the Arab spring engineered by greedy Western capitalists? I don’t know.
What I do know is that I find this non-interventionist stance to be highly antithetical to the spirit of internationalism that is integral to the successful reproduction of socialism. It is, to me, a question of ethics. It would be wrong to throw the Syrian uprising under the bus just because the bourgeoisie might capitalize off of the conflict and I am honestly appalled that the PSL is supporting this opinion.
Response from Taylor Goel
Dear Justin,
Thank you for your letter. Because your view undoubtedly is shared by many others who consider themselves anti-war and progressive, even socialist, I have written a brief response below.
You write, “regardless of who’s doing it…people are dying. I can’t get behind any socialism that doesn’t prioritize saving lives.” You continue, “I find this non-interventionist stance to be highly antithetical to the spirit of internationalism.”
People are indeed dying in the Syria conflict, which has turned into a full-scale civil war with international armed forces involved.
In civil wars, as in most wars, both sides use terror, violence and intimidation. In the U.S. Civil War, for instance, General Sherman was seen as a war “hero” because of the terror he inflicted in his march to the sea which crushed the resistance of the slave-owning Confederacy. The issue about which side to support cannot be determined by an estimate of violence but by assessing the political and social character of the contending forces.
On one side of the conflict, the Syrian revolt is dominated by an array of armed opposition groups, reactionary in character, and funded from abroad.
The main armed group, the Free Syrian Army, has been operating as a proxy force of NATO on the ground in Syria from the very beginning of the uprising in 2011. Saudi Arabia and Qatar—client states of imperialism—along with Turkey, a NATO member, have funded the FSA and provided it with arms, while Western special operation forces have assisted it on the ground. The FSA is made up both of local and foreign militias, mostly Sunni extremists. Al-Qaeda has also been linked to numerous terrorist attacks.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which maintains the allegiance of a section of the Sunni population, has long opposed the secular orientation of the Assad government. It pursues a reactionary social program, and has played a leading role in the main political face of the opposition, the Syrian National Council. The SNC is likewise filled with pro-Western figures living abroad with no base of legitimacy inside Syria. The SNC has repeatedly called for foreign intervention and clearly would like to follow the same script of imperialist regime change carried out last year in Libya with disastrous results. Even the name of Syria’s SNC was taken after Libya’s National Transitional Council, which has been operating as the political representatives of NATO.
By provoking a response from government forces, the main objective of these imperialist-backed groups is to create the pretext for an eventual NATO intervention. Their conquest of power would undoubtedly unleash, as it has in Libya, a reign of terror against those sectors of the population, including minorities, that opposed their revolt and foreign intervention. These groups are firmly in the leadership of the Syrian revolt, having pushed aside those like the National Coordination Committee, which at one point campaigned on the basis of opposition to foreign intervention, sectarianism and violence.
On the other side, the Syrian government maintains varying levels of support among significant sectors of the population, despite the intense international campaign of isolation and demonization. While there have been large protests against the government, the biggest in Syria so far have been in defense of it. The Syrian government reported that 57 percent of the electorate turned out for a recent constitutional referendum.
The Syrian government is bourgeois nationalist, and in recent years in particular has adopted social and economic policies that have increased the hardship on poor and working people, especially young workers. As in all capitalist societies, it deploys forces of repression like the police to protect this unequal order. Syria carries out a contradictory, but independent, foreign policy, assisting resistance movements on the one hand, but at other times aligning with the imperialists based on its own narrow interests.
What should be the position of people of conscience and anti-imperialists inside the United States? First, despite the fake rhetoric of “freedom, democracy and human rights,” the only objective of NATO interventions is to secure for international capitalists the domination of this strategically decisive and oil-rich region. They are seizing upon the opportunity of the “Arab Spring” to intervene in Syria, create a new government beholden to their interests, deliver a blow to the resistance movements of the region, and escalate the conflict against Iran.
Second, were it not for the imperialist support of the forces leading the opposition in Syria, they would have been defeated long ago by a government that maintains a mass base and military superiority. The violence and blood-letting has been drawn out by the imperialist governments and its regional reactionary client regimes. They are now stoking a destructive sectarian civil war that would spill over into neighboring countries. For those that care about saving human lives, this is no path to peace.
The former colonizers of the Middle East, while maintaining “kill lists” and torture centers and carrying out drone attacks and military occupations, have no right to speak of “humanitarian intervention.” This is an updated version of the White Man’s Burden, and we must stand against it.
