The Syria Thread 2011 - Present

[Nordic]

Let me put it this way: Your outrage has no effect on what outrages you; most especially true when you do it here.

It just comes down to whether you can contain yourself and behave like an adult here.

Edit: Just in case this wasn't clear, I'm not talking about Syria. Your behavior has nothing to do with Syria. If you get banned from RI, it will be about your behavior, not the facts on the ground in another country.

Fair enough.

But posting pro-terrorist propaganda is fine here as long as you behave a certain way?

[Wombaticus Rex]

Yeah, obviously, it is. How many flavors of "pro-terrorist propaganda" are archived here?

[American Dream]

Syria: Can Any Capitalist Force Provide a Solution?

Assad Regime
The Assad regime has a long history of using torture against its opponents. So experienced was his regime in those methods, that he allied himself with George Bush as a favored participant in the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program. (So much for Assad’s “anti-imperialist” credentials!) For years, Assad carried out a neoliberal economic program as mandated by the World Bank. In fact, like with the Egyptian and Tunisian regimes, it was exactly his neoliberal economic attacks that led to the revolution against him in the “Arab Spring” of 2011. Assad based himself on religious/ethnic sectarianism, specifically the support of the Alawi minority. One of Assad’s biggest supporters in Aleppo, Fares Shehabi, is a top Syrian capitalist. This basis of Assad’s rule – capitalist neoliberal policies, sectarianism, and torture – mean that he has nothing to offer the great masses of the Syrian people.


Assad’s war against the people of Syria.


Putin
In assessing Assad’s main ally – Putin – we should keep in mind the fact that “foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy”. Putin has pushed the same type of economic policy as is followed by Assad, including privatization of medical insurance, etc. Russian workers’ union rights are extremely limited if they exist at all. In order to maintain a popular base, Putin pushes chauvinism and nationalism. Putin, himself, is close to the founder of the fascist Russian motorcycle gang, the Night Wolves. As “Rolling Stone” magazine explains: “Under Putin’s tenure, the Kremlin has jailed journalists and opposition figures, banned “gay propaganda” and crafted ersatz political parties that provide a veneer of self-governance. It has deployed its vast propaganda apparatus — state-controlled radio and newspapers, but above all, television — to fan patriotic fervor.”


Putin (left) with “The Surgeon”, founder of the Russian fascist
motorcycle gang the Night Wolves

Putin also supports many of the far right chauvinist and racist groups and individuals throughout Europe, including Jobbik, the neo Nazi Hungarian group, Ataka, a similar group in Bulgaria, the Austrian “Freedom(!) Party,” and Le Pen’s National Front in France. (Note: A google search using the words “Putin European right wing groups” will turn up numerous articles documenting this.)

In 1999, the Putin regime invaded Chechnya and carried out a scorched earth policy that reduced Grozny, the principle Chechen city, to rubble, leaving it looking like Gaza after Israel got finished with it.

The interest of the Putin regime in intervening in Syria is to protect its military base in Tartus, and to defend the interests of Russian capitalism in relation to its rivals, the main one being US capitalism. It also has an interest in opposing Islamic fundamentalism, which has arisen in parts of Russia like Chechnya as a result of Russian imperialist slaughter there. It has no interest whatsoever in defending or empowering the Syrian working class. Just the opposite.


The forces opposed to Assad & Co. and the United States
On the one hand, there are the Islamic fundamentalist forces, some of which are outright fascist. None of them advocate US intervention, obviously.

But some of the other forces opposed to Assad & Co. do support the idea of US military intervention in Syria. Some, but not all, of those forces are simply the representatives of US capitalism/imperialism. There are, however, many sincere people who are not such representatives. They see the devastation that the Assad and Putin regimes have wrought, such as on the people of East Aleppo. They see the deadly role of Shia fundamentalists, such as Hezbollah and the Iranian “Revolutionary Guard”. Failing to see any popular force that can stand up to these criminals, they turn to the hope that the US regime will come to their rescue. They should consider:

In 2011, the Syrian masses joined their counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia and rose up against their oppressor, the torturer and World Bank stooge Assad. Unfortunately, the revolution became militarized, and it appears that it got out of control of the masses. One force that intervened was the Saudi and similar capitalists, through their support for the fascist Islamic fundamentalists, including Daesh (or the Islamic State) and al Qaeda (known in Syria as al Nusra). Some claim that the US regime was the one behind the building of the Islamic State. That is ridiculous. The IS arose in opposition to US occupation of Iraq. It is a vicious, bigoted and sectarian force that opposes the role of all non-Sunni Muslims throughout the region. In fact, it’s no accident that at this time, incoming US president Trump is close to Putin and according to the New York Times, he is saying “that the United States should focus on defeating the Islamic State, and find common ground with the Syrians and their Russian backers.”

Even if the US regime were to intervene against Assad, Putin & Co., what would they do? There is not the slightest chance that they would support the opponents of the neoliberal economic attacks on the workers and peasants in Syria. Given that capitalism has proven that it cannot provide any real future in that entire region, there is no chance that US capitalism would support any truly popular mass force. They never have anywhere else and will not in the future. Given the long, long history of US capitalist support for the racist State of Israel, its long history of intervention on the side of capitalist oppressors around the world, its pushing neoliberal economic policies at home, how can US capitalism possibly have anything positive to offer the Syrian masses?

And while the idea that the US intentionally helped the Islamic State to organize is false, there is a certain history here: The US capitalist class did help al Qaeda when they were fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They did that because they saw the greater threat of an anti-capitalist force (even though the Soviet Union was not truly socialist). This stands as a warning: If a mass working class movement were to develop again in Syria and elsewhere in the Muslim world, US capitalism would not hesitate to once again directly back Islamic fundamentalists like the Islamic State in order to counter such a movement.

More at: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2016/12/26 ... asolution/

[American Dream]

Tulsi Gabbard Stands with Assad and Against Syrian Refugees



Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s “fact finding” trip to Syria is guaranteed to find only ‘facts’ that benefit the regime of Bashar al-Assad. As guests of Assad’s regime, foreign dignitaries and politicians enjoy neither freedom of movement nor freedom of speech; all of their activities are tightly controlled by the military-security apparatus and so are their interactions with ordinary Syrians. Even people who travel there for the sole purpose of writing pro-government propaganda for Western consumption describe the intensity of regime control over foreign visitors as “scary.”

Here are some facts Gabbard won’t discover at the dog-and-pony shows engineered by her government minders:

The Assad regime’s security apparatus tortures and kills children and mutilates their bodies. In fact, it was the arrest and torture of teenagers for the crime of spraying graffiti that sparked the 2011 uprising. Not one child-killer or torturer has been dismissed from their post or brought to justice by Syria government for their crimes.

Rape, torture, and murder of civilians by the Assad regime’s security forces is rampant, systematic, and a matter of policy emanating from the top echelons of the regime’s decision-making structures. Even doctors in government custody are routinely tortured and killed.

The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in the conflict are killed by Assad’s forces.

The vast majority of the 697 medical workers killed in the country between April 2011 and November 2015 were killed by Assad’s forces.

Assad and his ally Russia deliberately target hospitals for destruction. Together, they have reduced one of the region’s best health care systems to rubble.

Gabbard says that ousting Assad will strengthen Al-Qaeda (AQ) and Islamic State (ISIS) but she fails to mention that the Assad regime has a long history of aiding Al-Qaeda and ISIS. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Assad’s regime funneled Al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters across the border into Iraq to kill Gabbard’s fellow servicemen and women. After the 2011 uprising turned into a civil war in 2012, the Assad regime’s open borders policy allowed AQ and ISIS to move back and forth freely between Syria and Iraq while Syria’s security services in border areas were ordered to leave suspected militants alone.

Facts like these are why Bernie Sanders s condemned Assad as a “horrendous dictator who has been at war with his own people” and why Gabbard deserves to be condemned for coddling a war criminal and a state sponsor of terrorism — all in the name of being ‘anti-war’! When a 2016 House of Representatives resolution condemning “war crimes and crimes against humanity” by the Syrian regime came up for a vote, she voted against it along with just 2 Republicans. The resolution passed overwhelmingly with 392 yeas, including the yeas of the entire Progressive Caucus.

Gabbard’s anti-progressive positions on Syria-related issues do not stop at Syria’s border. She voted for Republican legislation that would make it nearly impossible for Syrian refugees to resettle in the United States. The bill would have required Syrian refugees to pass background checks conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an impossibility given that most of them fled the war without much (if any) documentation of their identities and the absence of information on Syrians in FBI databases. The few refugees that did manage to get past the FBI’s screening would have to be individually certified by the director of the FBI, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and the director of National Intelligence that they posed no terrorist threat. So the few refugees who miraculously kept all of their paperwork intact with them during their long and arduous exodus and passed FBI screening would be snagged in an endless bureaucratic snafu involving at least one Cabinet-level secretary.

More at: https://pplswar.wordpress.com/2017/01/2 ... -refugees/

[Rory]

How's that yemen thread coming along, AD?

How's the plight of the Yemeni refugees and children these days?

[Nordic]

This just made my day.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... Syria.html

BREAKING NEWS: Russian warplanes 'fly first combat mission in Syria alongside US-led coalition aircraft'

Obama was terrorist scum.

[American Dream]

Syrian Civil War: From Popular Uprising to War by Proxy

by John Reimann

The world powers are playing out a drama in Syria. In this drama, the human beings are but bits of scenery on the stage of history. The young child who has suddenly become an orphan, the widowed mother of three who is forced to flee over the border to Turkey to seek some chance of survival, the young man moaning in pain as he dies a hideous death on the battle field — these are mere numbers. The fact that they add up to an estimated 100,000 deaths by June, 2013 and 28,000 reported missing and as many as 1.5 million forced to flee to neighboring countries — what does this matter to these forces?




Read more: 146 Syria pdf

[seemslikeadream]

Pentagon Denies Russian Claims About Coordinated Strikes In Syria
Last Updated: 1 hour ago
Carl Schreck
Both Russia and the U.S.-led coalition have hit IS targets in Syria, though Washington has accused Moscow of using its operation primarily to prop up Assad.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has denied Russian state-media reports that it provided coordinates for Russian air strikes targeting Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and that the bombing was a joint mission with U.S.-led coalition forces.

Several Russian government media outlets on January 23 quoted a Defense Ministry statement as saying that Washington used a "direct line" to relay coordinates to Russia's Khmeimim air base for strikes the previous day on targets near the town of Al-Bab in the Aleppo region.

"After conducting reconnaissance...two Russian Air Force planes and two planes from the forces of the international coalition delivered air strikes on terrorist targets," the state-run RIA Novosti agency quoted the Defense Ministry as saying.

The ministry did not post the statement on its website or its Facebook page, though state-owned news outlets RT andTASS reported on the statement using identical language in places.

The Pentagon, however, quickly denied the reports.

...
http://www.rferl.org/a/syria-us-denies- ... 53313.html

[American Dream]

A Marxist Analysis of ISIS

Posted by @pplswar on July 17, 2016



The terrifying rise of the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh) has produced perplexity and political paralysis among self-proclaimed Marxists. Perhaps the best example of both is Anne Alexander’s “ISIS and Counter-Revolution: Towards a Marxist Analysis” which failed to investigate a single question of interest to Marxists:

What is the class basis of IS? What class or classes constitute its social roots?
What type of political order does IS fight to establish (monarchist, theocratic, democratic, socialist, communist, fascist)?
Is IS progressive or reactionary, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?
What is to be done about IS?

The inadequacy of Alexander’s analysis became exposed during a subsequent debate with Ghayath Naisse, an exiled Syrian Marxist, who noted that IS displays certain “fascist characteristics.” Alexander rejected the comparison and argued that “the differences between IS and fascist movements are more important than the similarities” on the following grounds:

“First, the context in which ISIS has arisen in Iraq and Syria differs significantly from both the historic context in which European fascist movements arose and the context in which their successor movements operate today. Secondly, the role played by fascist movements in confronting and ultimately defeating the organised working class is absent in ISIS’s case (although this is because the working class is practically absent as an organised actor in Syria and Iraq and not because ISIS is ideologically or practically less hostile to working class self-organisation). Thirdly, ISIS is not organised in a similar social movement form to fascist movements. In its heartlands it operates principally as an army that claims state authority, rather than as a political movement with an armed wing. It is certainly not a mass movement, but rather an elitist vanguard of fighters whose political impact is predicated on their military capabilities, not the other way around.

“ISIS is in essence an armed faction, which has emerged in the context of insurgency and civil war, rather than a social movement. This does not mean it is irrelevant to ask questions about the organisation’s social base—its soldiers and commanders may well be drawn largely from specific social backgrounds. But it is another crucial point of difference with fascist movements, which historically proved able to deploy paramilitaries along with civilian organisers in a single coherent movement.”

Here, Alexander makes the same mistake about IS that Italy’s young Communist Party made about Mussolini’s blackshirts by “regarding [them] as merely a militarist and terrorist movement without any profound social basis,” as veteran communist Clara Zetkin put it. Alexander’s second mistake: IS does use civilian organizers in its heartlands to spread its message among the masses, hold rallies, develop networks of informants and spies, enforce its moral strictures, and recruit fighters. These movement activities are conducted under the guise of Islamic missionary work (Dawah).



But even if Alexander were correct that IS is not a social movement but an armed faction that emerged in a context of insurgency and civil war, that tells us nothing about what distinguishes IS from the plethora of other armed factions that emerged in the same context. Syria and Iraq are full of armed factions (nationalist, Sunni Islamist, Shia Islamist, and even Marxist) but only IS launches terrorist attacks across the globe, only IS sets up markets to buy and sell women and girls as sex slaves, only IS sparked the formation of coalitions of states and proxy armies — one led by the U.S., the other by Russia — to wipe it off the face of the Earth.

Any analysis of IS that cannot account for these differences is worthless.

Understanding Fascism

Before comparing IS to fascism, we must first understand fascism. As George Orwell pointed out in his 1944 essay “What Is Fascism?,” there is no widely accepted, theoretically rigorous definition of fascism and this is true for Marxists as well.

Clara Zetkin argued in 1923 that “fascism is the concentrated expression of the general offensive undertaken by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat” and observed that “fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wide elements of the population.” Building on Zetkin’s ground-breaking analysis, the Communist International’s leading theorist Georgi Dimitroff defined fascism in 1936 as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital” that came to power by “gain[ing] the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat.” Leon Trotsky similarly defined fascist rule in 1933 as “the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital” and fascism as “the mobilization of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat,” as a “means of mobilizing and organizing the petty bourgeoisie in the social interests of finance capital.”

These definitions cannot be treated as gospel since Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes adopted policies opposed by and detrimental to both finance and monopoly capital. Far from being the dictatorship of finance or monopoly capital (or big business generally), fascist regimes subordinate the interests of these classes to fascism’s ideological imperatives or political goals. The class relations this subordination entails are what distinguish fascist regimes from ordinary military dictatorships like Sisi’s Egypt or Pinochet’s Chile. All fascist regimes are dictatorships but not all dictatorships are fascist regimes.

Shortcomings aside, what the Marxist definitions get fundamentally right is that fascist movements are based on de-classed and/or downwardly mobile social strata. The class basis of a specific fascist organization is historically conditioned and depends on concrete political and economic circumstances. For example, the Great Depression swelled the ranks of the Nazis with millions of unemployed, ruined small businessmen, white-collar functionaries, and even housewives whereas Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was staged mainly by ex-soldiers demobilized after World War One. Rejecting comparisons of IS with fascism because conditions in present-day Iraq and Syria are “significantly different” from conditions in early 20th century Europe means a failure to grasp that fascist political trends exist — to one degree or another, in one form or another — in a great variety of social contexts such as 1980s Britain, post-communist Russia, or post-2009 Greece.

Continues at: https://pplswar.wordpress.com/2016/07/1 ... s-of-isis/

[seemslikeadream]

Trump Open to Joint Military Actions With Russia in Syria, Spicer Says
JON REID | JANUARY 23, 2017
In what would constitute a significant shift in U.S. policy, President Donald Trump is open to coordinating with Russia on military operations against the Islamic State terror group in Syria, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Monday.

“If there is a way we can combat ISIS with any country, whether it’s Russia or anyone else, and we have a shared national interest in that — sure, we’ll take it,” Spicer said at the first daily press briefing of the Trump administration.

His remarks follow a Russian claim that the U.S. and its former Cold War adversary conducted a joint military operation in Syria. The Pentagon denied the report.

“The Department of Defense is not coordinating airstrikes with the Russian military in Syria,” Marine Maj. Adrian J. T. Rankine-Galloway, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday in an email statement to Morning Consult. “DoD maintains a channel of communication with the Russian military focused solely on ensuring the safety of aircrews and de-confliction of Coalition and Russian operations in Syria.”

Spicer’s remarks indicate that Trump, on his third full day in office, is committed to overhauling U.S. policy toward Russia. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. supported moderate Syrian rebels against the Russia-backed regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose government has been accused of committing war crimes.

Spicer said Trump would only be open to military partnerships with countries that have “America’s interest.”

Democrats and Republicans alike have accused Russia of committing war crimes in Syria. One skeptical Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, pressed the issue during a confirmation hearing for Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee to lead the State Department. Rubio was unsatisfied with Tillerson’s refusal to call Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal, although Rubio announced Monday that he would nonetheless support the former ExxonMobil chief executive’s nomination for secretary of state.
https://morningconsult.com/2017/01/23/t ... icer-says/

so I am confused....are some people here OK with the U.S. bombing Syria now that the U.S. government might do it with Russia?

[kool maudit]

If the effort is part of the larger goal of restoring the Syrian government's control over the state in its present borders, yes. If it is part of an effort to fragment or dissassemble the state in a pipeline- and terrorist-friendly way, then certainly not.

I don't care what Trump is, but I care what he does. I preferred him to Clinton based on the single issue of his apparent stance on Middle Eastern regime change. As I said a the time, that's a huge gamble. He is surrounded by hawks and the neocons are circling. But she was 100% committed to the doctrine. She was the architect of Libya, wanted an Iraq/Libya-style solution in Syria...

The orange guy was the better choice but we could all still be fucked. Arc of history, innit?

[American Dream]

I'm definitely not a Trump supporter in any way and neither am I a supporter of the Baathist regime in Syria, nor Baathism more generally.

How could anyone here can suggest that Trump was the right choice? It is not a sign of good politics to advocate for him.

[Searcher08]

I'm definitely not a Trump supporter in any way and neither am I a supporter of the Baathist regime in Syria, nor Baathism more generally.

How could anyone here can suggest that Trump was the right choice? It is not a sign of good politics to advocate for him.

You are a consistent advocate for the defacto neoliberal imperialist line in both Syria and Ukraine, while interspersing a large amounts of CP with occasional 'both sides are bad, who would support either', when you do support one side.

It is not 'good politics' to post Trotkyist boilerplate at RI, while claiming to be beyond both sides.

Please dont turn this thread into yet another referendum on Trump.

[kool maudit]

I'm definitely not a Trump supporter in any way and neither am I a supporter of the Baathist regime in Syria, nor Baathism more generally.

How could anyone here can suggest that Trump was the right choice? It is not a sign of good politics to advocate for him.

Your answer was contained in my response. A stated hesitancy to follow the regime change doctrine that has mutilated much of Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

A dubious, unpredictable, and unlikely hesitancy that was only superior by virtue of his main rival's absolute commitment to this hideous, bloody, and imperial bit of policy, the most shameful major-power policy suite of our era.

You had two choices. It sucks, but you did.

[American Dream]

I'm looking forward to seeing if and when others come out of the closet as Trump supporters, too. If Syria/Iran/Russia brought you to this point, then there is something very, very wrong with your politics.