U.S. imperialism’s Syria strategy & the right of oppressed nations to self-determination

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SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2016 5 U.S. Major General Michael Nagata was unceremoniously removed some two months ago after his $500 million Syrian assignment to train by the end of the year a projected 5400 Syrian infan­ trymen to supposedly fight ISIS (Islamic State of Syria and Iraq) “languished in complications,” according to U.S. News and World Report. This project “ulti­ mately yielded a force of fewer than 60, most of whom were immediately cap­ tured or voluntarily surrendered their U.S.-provided military equipment to ex­ tremist groups.”

Nagata’s program, aimed at training 15,000 such fighters over the next three years, was similarly abandoned.

The Oct. 9 New York Times article en­ titled, “Obama Administration Ends Ef­ fort to Train Syrians to Combat ISIS,” states, “Obama’s reversal of policy un­ derscored a harsh reality: tens of bil­ lions of dollars spent in recent years to train security forces across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have rarely succeeded in transforming lo­ cal fighters into effective, long-term armies.”

Today, after four and half years of U.S. “training of security forces,” supposedly to defeat ISIS, some two-thirds of Syria, mostly thinly-populated areas, is under the control of one or another jihadist group—either the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front, the Islamic State (ISIS) itself, or other Islamist groups. Virtually all are directly, indirectly or covertly armed and financed by U.S. imperial­ ism, its NATO allies, the Saudi govern­ ment (and “private” Saudi billionaires), Qatar, the United Arab Emirates or oth­ er Gulf State monarchies.

In place of this failed program the Obama administration recently an­ nounced a “new program” where, “for the first time the Pentagon is provid­ ing lethal aid directly to Syrian rebels, though the C.I.A. has for some time been covertly training and arming groups fighting Mr. Assad” [emphasis added]. Disappearance of “moderate rebels”

U.S. officials have also been compelled to admit, according to the British-based Independent journalist Robert Fisk, that Syria’s so-called “moderate” anti-Assad forces do not exist. “Ameri­ can officials,” Fisk writes, “… claim that the Syrian Army does not fight ISIS. If true, who on earth killed the 56,000 Syrian [Army] soldiers—the statistic an official secret, but nonetheless true— who have so far died in the Syrian war? The preposterous Free Syrian Army (FSA)?”

Fisk continues: “This rubbish has reached its crescendo in the on-again off-again saga of the Syrian ‘moderates’ who were originally military defectors to the FSA, which America and Euro­ pean countries regarded as a possible pro-Western force to be used against the Syrian government army. But the FSA fell to pieces, corrupted, and the ‘moderates’ defected all over again, this time to the Islamist Nusra Front or to ISIS, selling their American-supplied weapons to the highest bidder or mere­ ly retiring quietly.”

Fisk, cites a recent public meeting where “[General] David Petraeus, for­ mer No 2 in Baghdad—announced re­ cently that the [Syrian]‘moderates’ had collapsed long ago.”

“But within hours of Russia’s air as­ saults,” says Fisk, “… the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, the poor old BBC and just about every newspaper in the Western world resur­ rected these ghosts and told us that the Russkies were bombing the brave ‘mod­ erates’ fighting Assad’s army in Syria— the very ‘moderates’ who, according to the same storyline from the very same sources a few weeks earlier, no longer existed.”

Background to the Syrian war Four and half years ago, in 2011, dur­ ing the various uprisings that constitut­ ed the Arab Spring, which began with mass popular rebellions that toppled the U.S.-backed Tunisian dictatorship of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and then the U.S.-backed 30-year Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, the U.S. government embarked on its own “re­ gime change” efforts in Libya and Syria.

We have carefully documented in the pages of this newspaper the horrors attendant to these U.S. imperialist in­ terventions in the Middle East and be­ yond, beginning with the still ongoing U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter now the longest war in U.S. his­ tory. Without exception, all have been the product of a U.S. imperialist system in its deepest crisis in the modern era with no resolution in sight other than at the expense of the world’s oppressed peoples and nations and the working class masses in the U.S. itself.

It is in the above context of virtually endless U.S. wars and interventions that have taken the lives of literally millions in the Middle East that any serious as­ sessment of the present situation in Syria can best be understood.

With U.S. imperialism’s assisted roll­ back of the Arab Spring revolutionary tide in Egypt and with the Gadhafi “re­ gime change” in Libya via a U.S./NATO “humanitarian war” that slaughtered thousands under its belt, the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad was placed dead center in the U.S. impe­ rial gun sights.

When Assad ordered his army to fire on a series of peaceful mass mobiliza­ tions in 2011 aimed at challenging his government’s imposition of severe neoliberal austerity measures that espe­ cially offended Syria’s poor peasantry and layers of the middle class as well as leading bourgeois opposition figures, a dynamic was set in motion for yet an­ other U.S. intervention—the sixth such war initiated, supported, or continued under the auspices of the Obama ad­ ministration.

As in Libya, the U.S. moved to estab­ lish a Syrian government-in-exile while arming and financing the short-lived and largely exile-based “Free Syrian Army” headed by a handful of defect­ ing Syrian Army officers. In conjunc­ tion with the deep popular outrage at Assad’s repression and austerity measures, top U.S. planners expected a quick rout of Assad’s armed forces and the establishment of a new regime to the liking of both U.S. imperialism and its anticipated bourgeois allies inside Syria. The ever-present threat of yet another U.S. intervention to back such a “regime change” scenario was also an important factor in imperialist expecta­ tions that Assad would be forced to exit post-haste.

The absence of any significant orga­ nized socialist forces on the ground to pose a coherent working class-based strategy for the Syrian masses to defend and advance their own interests as op­ posed to Assad’s or those of a would-be U.S.-sponsored and imposed capital­ ist order weighed heavily against any positive outcome for the Syria’s work­ ing masses. Given the historic failure of past bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist parties to effectively challenge imperi­ alist prerogatives in Syria and far be­ yond, history has exacted a terrible toll on Syria’s initially hopeful and promis­ ing Arab Spring.

But in the absence of anything resem­ bling a revolutionary leadership, the democratic and popular thrust of the anti-Assad mobilizations rapidly dis­ sipated. This tragic void was inevitably filled by an assortment of reactionary, mostly religious-fundamentalist, forces backed by U.S. imperialism and/or its reactionary regional allies, especially in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

ISIS’s main pillars of support in Syria The U.S.-allied Saudis and the Turks today account for the lion’s share of ISIS’s finances and weapons—undoubt­ edly with the full knowledge of the U.S. government. The reactionary Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a U.S. NATO ally, still controls important portions of its southern border with Syria and utilizes these as central cor­ ridors for the entrance of thousands of international ISIS fighters to Syria to depose the Assad government. In the same manner over 1000 trucks from ISIS-controlled oil fields in northern Syria serve as the main conduit for ISIS-smuggled oil into Turkey. In those Turkish-Syrian border areas under the control of the oppressed Kurdish peo­ ple the flow of ISIS fighters has been significantly thwarted.

An Oct. 10 New York Times editorial provides a glimpse of how ISIS oper­ ates. In the article, entitled, “Why Is Money Still Flowing to ISIS?,” The Times estimates ISIS revenues from the sale of oil at $40 million monthly. “The Islamic State is also looting banks; demanding ransom from kidnap victims; engag­ ing in human trafficking; selling off plundered antiquities; and leaning on private donors, mainly in Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia” (emphasis added). That these “private donors” include Saudi billionaires and members of the ruling Saudi government is not a fact that Times reporters bother to mention, although The Times does estimate ISIS annual revenues at $1 billion.

While the United Nations formally maintains lists of scores of people and organizations designated as financial supporters of terrorist groups, includ­ ing the Islamic State, U.S. officials have noted that “enforcement has been in­ consistent in some cases.” More to the point, the Dec. 4 New York Times notes, “There is already extensive evidence of transfers from wealthy donors in the Persian Gulf in particular, but few con­ crete penalties.”

In the same article, David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foun­ dation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington advocacy group, states, “There is still so much reticence to ac­ tually engage in that naming and sham­ ing [of groups that fund terrorists] that this [new UN resolution] has limited impact.”

Similarly, a UN resolution that bans any nation from assisting in the smug­ gling of ISIS-controlled oil is ignored with impunity. Thus, the evidence that key U.S. allies are active accomplices in funding or otherwise supporting ISIS and/or organizing troops to directly (continued on page 8, in “L.A. methane leak”)