U.S. hands off Syria!
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In early June, the United National Anti war Coalition (UNAC) initiated discussions among all major U.S. antiwar coalitions re garding the critical need for united local and regional antiwar protests to counter the es calating U.S. and U.S.-backed attacks on Syr ia. The result was an agreement with UNAC, ANSWER, United for Peace and Justice, the International Action Center, Veterans for Peace, World Can’t Wait, and now hundreds of other groups for June 28-July 17, 2013 ac tions in cites across the country.
The central demands of the protest are:
• Stop the U.S./NATO/Israeli war and all forms of intervention against Syria!
• Self-determination free from outside in tervention for the Syrian people!
The joint statement (see text on page 11) recognized that there has been a “conflict that has been raging [in Syria] for more than two years.” Indeed, the signers have evidenced a variety of often counterposed positions on the Syrian civil war, with some forces, including Socialist Action, seeing its origins in the fully justified massive uprising of the Syrian people against the repressive and reactionary Assad dictatorship.
Others partaking in this worthy united effort to stop U.S. intervention in all of its forms and support the right of the Syrian people to self-determination, have declined to take any position on the matter. This includes UNAC, which aspires to unite all activists against the policies of U.S. imperialism. And finally, there are those in the movement who support the Assad regime in one form or another.
All of the endorsers agree, however, that the steady and now rapidly increasing U.S.—as well as Israeli— political, economic, and military intervention has no objective other than “regime change,” that is, the re placement of the Assad regime with one more ame nable to advancing the interests of U.S. imperialism to dominate the region and its people and resources in neo-colonial fashion. None of the signers harbor any illusions that the U.S. aim is to provide “humanitarian” aid to the oppressed Syrian people or to help establish any form of democracy in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East; hence the unity statement includes the demand, “U.S. Out of the Middle East!”
The essential facts of the varying forms of U.S. inter vention in Syria have been known from the beginning. Today, fewer people than ever believe that the military support from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Libya to the Islamic fundamentalist components of the opposi tion, often allied with al-Qaida, represented the inde pendent decisions of these repressive and reactionary governments.
These facts were dramatically shown by The New York Times in late June with a detailed account of Lib yan military forces of the fundamentalist variety regu larly sending massive quantities of heavy weapons from the former Gadhafi army to its Islamic co-think ers in Syria. This alone demonstrated in bold relief that the U.S. has been willing to allow aid to go even to its professed radical Islamist enemies, provided only that they momentarily advanced U.S. political and eco nomic interests in the Middle East.
These interests also dictated a two-year diplomatic and military effort to patch together a new regime in Syria that would maintain that nation’s essential mili tary, political, and economic structures—and prefer ably without having to include Assad. To date every U.S. effort to achieve this goal, from the international conferences overseen by U.S. Secretaries of State Hill ary Clinton and John Kerry to the more recent shift to some form of Geneva conference, have come to naught.
The massive U.S. diplomatic and military pressures on the broad array of opposition forces have proven incapable of uniting them in a common effort to re place Assad with a credible alternative acceptable to imperialism.
Until recently, a major obstacle to this U.S. effort was 12 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2013 (Above) A Free Syrian Army fighter fires at government troops near Idlib, June 15, 2012 of his departure for the G-8 conference in Northern Ireland, at which the major imperialist countries were planning to discuss the Syrian issue.
For public consumption, President Obama justified the increased U.S. intervention with the claim that the White House now had “high confidence” that the Assad regime had employed the chemical poison sarin on two occasions during combat in Aleppo. (To date, however, no reliable evidence of the use of sarin has been released.)
In preparing its deeper involvement in the Syrian conflict, the White House also evidently sensed that the time was right to leak to the press some infor mation concerning its earlier covert military aid to the anti-Assad opposition. This echoed reports from sources in the Jordanian government and elsewhere. Thus, the Chicago Tribune and other media outlets re ported in late June that since late 2012, if not earlier, CIA and U.S. special operations troops have trained several hundred Free Syrian Army troops with mate riel including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.
The training has been conducted both in northern Jordan—using the ruse of U.S. “war games” with the Jordanian army—and in southern Turkey. But accord ing the British Guardian (March 8, 2013), Jordan now seems to be the preferred scene for U.S. training ef forts, since Turkey has allowed radical groups like the al-Nusra Front to become dominant on the northern front, while focusing its own efforts on combating the national struggle of the Kurds.
Socialist Action fully supports the June/July actions jointly called for by the major portion of the U.S. anti war movement and its allies among oppressed people. These protests express our common opposition to all imperialist interventions and afford the peoples of these nations the best opportunity for determining their own futures. Were it not for imperialist interven tion over the past century and more, the world would indeed be a qualitatively different place.
While it is undeniable that the very forces that initi ated the just struggle against the Assad dictatorship have been seriously weakened, if not marginalized, their ongoing efforts to coalesce the broadest forces possible, today and in the future, regardless of the out come of the present civil war, will prove decisive.
The fight for freedom and democracy in Syria is in our view inseparable from the fight for socialism— (continued on page 11, in “Greeks mobilize against public TV shutdown”)