Syria massacre heightens danger of imperialist intervention

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4 Socialist Action june 2012 On May 25, 108 Syrian civilians were murdered in the Houla area of towns and villages, including 34 women and 49 children. Some were killed by artillery shells, some at close hand by guns or knives.

Not surprisingly, the regime and the opposition blamed each other. It’s most likely that responsibility for the carnage lies with President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces and his sectarian Shabiha armed gangs. True, it is certainly not beyond the power or immorality of imperialism to have orchestrated the massacre through local agents. But no one except the most benighted sycophants of the pseudo-anti-imperialist Assad can deny the thousands of murders that had already been committed by the regime before the Houla massacre.

Naturally, imperialist governments, institutions, and media used the massacre to demand tougher sanctions and greater arming of the opposition, and to step up threats of direct military intervention. On May 29, new French President François Hollande said on France 2 television, “I want what happened in Libya to be perceived as proof that foreign intervention is possible in Syria. Homs today is Benghazi yesterday.” Several Western countries expelled Syrian diplomats in the following days.

It is still not clear if Houla will be the turning point for what has been up to now a Western approach longer on rhetoric than action against Assad. After all, Assad, for all his crimes, was a useful tool for Washington, from its acquiescence to Israel’s conquests (even of Syria’s own territory), to its collaboration in war against Saddam Hussein, as well as cooperation in the “rendition” and torture policies of the “war on terror.”

What’s more, the geography, demo(Left) Syrian opposition photo shows May 23 funeral of Samir Abu Nabbut, allegedly killed by government forces.

graphics, and infrastructure of the country would make direct intervention far more difficult than the relative walkover in Libya. As a result, to this point the U.S. has relied primarily on arms and soldiers funneled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar into the country, and on special operations forces of as yet unconfirmed Western origin.

Even after Houla, The New York Times on May 30 reported that “Obama now shows no signs of intervening with force, an option his White House sees leading only to ‘greater chaos, greater carnage.’… If the president considered Libya a model of humanitarian intervention, Syria increasingly looks like Mr. Obama’s Bosnia.’

But that is hardly a reassuring parallel if one remembers how in the end his fellow Democrat Bill Clinton was more than happy to launch a murderous bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia, using a similarly fraudulent (continued on page 5)

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(continued from page 1: “Europe’s rulers press demands on workers as debt crisis deepens”) tions and throwing open further the doors to foreign investors. When a Greek official leaked word of the plan, Germany denied it, but no one took the denial seriously.

Greek Prime Minister Panagiotis Pikramenos said Merkel had suggested in a phone call to Greek President Karolos Papoulias that Greece hold a referendum on its continued membership of the single currency alongside next month’s elections, in an apparent attempt to encourage voters to back mainstream parties who support austerity. The German government said that no suggestion of the kind had been made. But the Greeks insisted that it had.

Germany itself leaked news that its central bank had called for an end to financial support for Greece, and that eurozone finance ministers were preparing contingency plans for a Greek exit from the euro.

The Guardian’s Seamus Milne quoted EU commission president José Manuel Barroso as saying that “‘to remain in the euro, Greece must respect its commitments.’ By commitments, he meant the package of pulverising privatisations, tax rises and cuts in jobs, pay and services demanded by the EU and IMF in exchange for loans which cannot be repaid and are reducing the country to beggary.”

Milne noted that “the Irish are getting similar treatment, as the country’s elites try to scare voters into backing the EU’s permanent austerity treaty in a referendum later this month. Crucial to the campaign has been the threat that Ireland will be denied future emergency bailout funds for its own shrinking economy if the treaty is rejected.”

Milne predicted that “a disorderly Greek default— which could still take place inside the euro—has the potential to trigger a cascade of bank runs and knock-on crises across the eurozone whose impact could dwarf the Lehman crash of 2008. … Greece is, after all, only the state furthest down the road of collapse. The threat to crippled Spain could already be on a much larger scale. Across the eurozone, the banking system is once again tipping towards breakdown, as self-defeating austerity deepens the crisis.

“As one EU commissioner told me yesterday, ‘this austerity union is simply not sustainable.’ Eurozone leaders’ attempt to solve the crisis by ‘internal devaluation’—cutting wages and services across the southern periphery to restore competitiveness—was a ‘complete disaster,’ he said, that would deliver mass poverty and migration to the north.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman reported: “Greece is experiencing what’s being called a ‘bank jog’—a somewhat slow-motion bank run, as more and more depositors pull out their cash in anticipation of a possible Greek exit from the euro. … This demonstration that the euro is, in fact, reversible would lead, in turn, to runs on Spanish and Italian banks.”

Such predictions of financial collapse were replicat... Syria (continued from page 4) humanitarian rationale.

Despite their armed intervention into the former Yugoslavia, Clinton and U.S. imperialism never intended to give real support to the struggle of the Bosnians, Kosovars, and other oppressed nationalities for self-determination. In Yugoslavia and in Syria today—indeed, throughout U.S. imperialism’s history— the right of oppressed people for freedom and self-determination has never been on the agenda.

In any case, Washington will no doubt find more ways, however indirect, to intervene in what U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice declared after Houla would most likely “develop into a regional sectarian war … a proxy conflict with arms flowing in from all sides.”

Some progressive supporters of the uprising against Assad latched on to Houla to call for direct imperialist military intervention now. Such action, however, will do nothing to free the Syrian people from tyranny. It could in fact bolster Assad’s hold on power as he rallies disaffected elites back to his side. And on the other hand, if Western intervention pushes Assad out, it could lead to a puppet regime even more beholden to the neoliberal economic policies begun by Assad, and to a switch from silent acquiescence in Zionist crimes to outright support for them.

If Assad goes, of course, we can be sure that a regime as repressive as his will be needed eventually to crush Syrian worker, peasant, and youth dissent against these policies.

In the last few months, the mass movement against Assad—which originally mobilized constant and often huge demonstrations, spreading ever further across the country—has been subverted by the pro-imperialist leaderships of the Syrian National Council and Free Syrian Army. The latter group’s military activities, divorced from a mass base, have been neither effective in military terms nor a rallying point for the mass movement. To the contrary, they have Carl Court / AFP / Getty Images ed in the paper’s business pages. The Times reported May 16 that “German officials have been boasting recently about the ability of the eurozone to handle a Greek exit. Though aimed at reining in Greece’s left-wing parties and their goal of renegotiating the bailout deal, the talk also unsettled markets and had the potential of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The perils of brinkmanship in an unstable environment were on full display on Wednesday as the news emerged that Greeks had pulled nearly $900 million in savings from banks in the days after the May 6 elections, prompting fears of an uncontrollable bank run.”

The U.S. Labor Department reported at the end 69,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the fewest in a year. The news, coupled with unsettling reports from Europe, sent the stock market diving and capitalist politicians scrambling to come up with job-creating “solutions.”

The report showed that the official unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent.

Government data said that 12.7 million Americans were unemployed, with four out of 10 unable to find work for 27 weeks or more. A major explanation for the rise in official unemployment rates was that many workers who had previously given up looking for a job, had sensed some growth in the increasingly pushed aside that movement, and left less and less room for the neighborhood and town/city-based committees to organize ordinary Syrians. The militarization of the conflict has also opened space for more sectarian reactionary forces.

This militarization of the opposition and the growing dependence of its self-appointed “leaders” on imperialism is orchestrated by a segment of Syria’s ruling class that supports Assad’s neoliberal economic policies but wants to be the ones to implement them “efficiently” and “democratically” (and in the process to enjoy a greater share of the profits).

And not coincidentally, the SNC and FSA’s policies have actually hindered the one military policy that could defeat Assad—a major split in his army’s ranks. The last thing the bourgeois leadership of the SNC/FSA wants is a successful revolution against Assad carried out by armed workers, peasants, and youth. But it is only a grassroots-based mass movement that could achieve such a split by organizing the families, Andrea Pattaro / AFP / Getty Images (Above) Italian demonstrators protest in front of Greek pavilion at Venice Biennale art show, in November 2011, to protest austerity.

(Left) Striking public workers protesting British government’s cutback policies, May 12, express solidarity with struggle of Greek working class.

As always in the midst of such crises and upheaval, the most parasitic find new opportunities to profit from despair. The New York Times reported on May 15 of a “Vulture Fund,” which got almost 90% of the profits from the Greek government’s payment of hundreds of millions of euros to investors who had rejected the terms of the country’s debt renegotiation and held out for full payment. The firm, Dart Management, is a secretive investment fund based for tax purposes in the Cayman Islands, built on a fortune made originally in Styrofoam cups. Dart had in years past made huge profits twisting the screws on debt-burdened Latin American countries.

Throughout the tumult of May, stock markets throughout Europe reeled like drunken sailors. But workers in Greece—and increasingly, elsewhere on the continent—have shown their resolve to resist capitalism’s menu of cutbacks and unemployment. It is the duty of workers everywhere to show solidarity with them, including by increasing the resistance to their own banks, corporations, and governments. n economy and once again entered the job market.

That was virtually an admission that the actual number of long-term unemployed workers is much higher than the government cares to admit. Only about half of the non-governmental jobs lost during the recession, which began in 2008, have yet to be recovered.

According to Al-Jazzera, the government report hinted at a fundamental weakness: “Some had believed that we had decoupled from China slowing and all the problems in Europe, but that seems to be short-sighted,” said Malcolm Polley, president of Stewart Capital Advisors in Indiana, Pa. “We’re slowing alongside the rest of the world.” Chinese factory output barely rose in May, and manufacturing activity in Britain shrank at its fastest pace in three years. Earlier data had shown manufacturing activity also declined in Germany and France. n coworkers, and neighbors of the military to appeal to rank-and-file soldiers and junior officers to come over to the revolution arms in hand.

Imperialist intervention in Syria has nothing to do with saving the rights or even the lives of Syrians, but is solely designed to maintain Western dominance of the Middle East and Northern Africa. It aims to shore up the Gulf Cooperation Council-led counterrevolution, intended to derail the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions and turn back the growing movements in Bahrain, Yemen, Morocco, and elsewhere in the region.

Those misguided progressive activists who cry out that only imperialist arms can stop civilian massacres forget the lessons learned from past interventions in Libya, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, etc.—which only increased the civilian death toll and the destruction of the infrastructure of those countries.

No imperialist intervention! Victory for the workers, peasants and youth of Syria against Assad’s dictatorship! n Socialist Action june 2012 5

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Which way for Greece?

Andreas Kloke is a member of the leadership of OKDESpartakos, Greek section of the Fourth International T quake-like change in the political landscape and to he Greek parliamentary elections led to an earththe end of the two-party domination by the conservative New Democracy (ND) and the social democratic PASOK. Compared to the 2009 elections, the ruling PASOK party fell from 43.9% to 13.2%, ND, which is now the strongest party, won 18.9% (2009: 33.5%). On the other hand, SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) rose from 4.6 to 16.8% and has thus become the second largest party.

The Independent Greeks, led by P. Kammenos, a right-wing nationalist split from ND and founded in February 2012, a party that refuses to support the memoranda policies, are in fourth place with 10.6%. The Communist Party (KKE), up to now the strongest left party, received 8.5% (2009: 7.5%).

Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn), a gang of neo-Nazi Hitler-nostalgia addicts, gained 7.0% (441,000 votes, 2009: 0.3%), certainly the real “scoop” of these elections.

The Democratic Left (DIMAR) is in the seventh place with 6.1%. DIMAR was founded in 2010 and is a rightwing split from SYN, the left-reformist party with origins in euro-communism and the main component of SYRIZA. The far-right LAOS failed with 2.9% (2009: 5.6%) due to the 3% threshold. The same happened to the Green Ecologists, with 2.9% (2009: 2.5%) and three right-neoliberal formations , namely Democratic Alliance (DISI), with 2.6%, Dimourgia xana, with 2.2% and Action (Drasi), with 1.8%.

ANTARSYA (Anti-Capitalist Left Alliance for the Overthrow ), essentially a coalition of some 10 anticapitalist revolutionary organizations, received 1.2% (over 75,000 votes; 2009: 0.36%); the alliance of two ML organizations 0.3 %; and EEK, an organization that calls itself Trotskyist, 0.1%.

The percentage of valid votes cast was 62.7% (2009: 68.9% and 2007: 72.1%), again significantly lower Simon Dawson / Bloomberg (Left) Syriza supporters celebrate in Athens following the May 6 election.

than ever before, which also provides an indication of the falling acceptance of the parliamentary democracy, established in 1974 after the fall of the military junta, in the Greek population.

There is no question that the election results express the complete rejection of the memoranda policies by the clear majority of the electorate. On the one hand, the share of leftists in the broad sense has increased to 34% (and if you count the ecologists, to 37%). On the other hand, the “anti-memorandum” camp gained a total of around 60%. The very good results of the left must certainly be attributed to the general strikes of the last two years, and particularly to the large mobilizations and square occupations, particularly Syntagma Square, from May 2010 to July last year, the great general strike of Oct. 12 and 13, and the mass protests of well over half a million demonstrators on Feb. 12 at Athens alone—that is, to the powerful movement directed against the memoranda policies, especially from May 2010 to February 2012.

The “ungovernableness” of the country A crucial problem connected with the election result is known as the “ungovernableness” of the country, i.e., the great difficulties to continue the memoranda policies under the guise of “democratic” government coalitions. The leaders, but also the system-compliant media in Greece and Europe (as usual, especially in Germany), have launched a wild propaganda campaign to keep Greece on track and to secure the continuation of memorandaslavery, the ruin and plunder of Greek society in favor of unbridled domination of domestic and foreign capital. The calls for the eviction of Greece from the euro-zone are getting louder.

Because of its good election result, the SYRIZA leadership under A. Tsipras is playing a key role. The ideas of the left parties as a whole had been characterized during the election campaign as “unrealistic,” “highly dangerous,” and “catastrophic.” But after the elections the tables have been turned, and SYRIZA was asked to “take its responsibility” and to participate in a “government of national unity” with ND, PASOK and DIMAR. The DIMAR leadership, which would like to serve in such a government, played a particularly bad role, but finally did not dare to do so without the consent of SYRIZA in the face of the election results.

A day-long wrangling over the formation of a new government began, but ended without result. Therefore, the second round of the elections has been sched-

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U.S. jobless rate rises T of May that employers had added a paltry

European leaders, and the media, have launched a wild propaganda campaign to secure the plunder of Greek society, in favor of the domination of capital.