Western powers openly attack Assad gov’t

The assassination of four of Syria’s top government officials, including the deputy head of Syria’s armed forces and the defense minister, has hiked the level of the civil war in that country. The lethal explosion on July 18 preceded a weekend exchange of heavy weapons fire between the Syrian army and opposition units in neighborhoods of Damascus, and also in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. A major battle for the fate of Syria has begun.

That the European Union and the United States openly side with the opposition “Free Syrian Army” has made it crystal clear that world imperialism has thrown its weight behind those forces that want to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The Western powers, with the aid of the most reactionary regional states, are arming, funding, training and giving propaganda and diplomatic aid to the most reactionary of the many elements in the Syrian uprising.

“World imperialism” means essentially Japan and the West European and North American NATO countries. U.S. imperialism is its center, with the Pentagon holding a near monopoly on military power and Wall Street still dominant in finance. These countries colonized the world until the mid-20th century and still control finance, high-technology, information and advanced weapons.

What the NATO powers have aimed at since the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1991 is to reconquer the former colonial territories and peoples. This means that — despite all the lip service imperialist spokespeople pay to “democracy” and “human rights” — they are really aiming at intervention to seize resources and strategic bases and to remove governments that show any independence, of which Syria’s is one.

U.S. government spokespeople and the dominant corporate media have both waged a campaign over the past 15 months to misrepresent the Syrian opposition as a popular, pro-democracy uprising. Anyone deceived by these lies should ask why the NATO exploiters would support any kind of really democratic and popular uprising. They didn’t do it in Tunisia or Egypt; they still don’t in Bahrain or Jordan or Morocco or Yemen or Saudi Arabia.

Why imperialists back ‘revolution’

On July 23, less than a week after the terrorist attack in Damascus that killed four leading security officials in Syria’s government, the European Union increased sanctions against Assad’s supporters. The FSA publicly took credit for the attack, although who was really behind it is still unclear.

Nevertheless, the EU froze the assets of 26 more people connected not with the FSA but with Syria’s government and took steps to stop European companies from doing business with three more entities in Syria. “It brings the total number of people subject to E.U. measures to 155, with 52 entities now affected by an asset freeze.” (New York Times, July 23)

The support is not limited to economic pressure. A British newspaper on July 22 reported the following: “The Daily Mail can reveal some rebels inside Damascus have been trained by former SAS [Special Air Service, a corps of the British army] soldiers working for teams of private security contractors from two companies based in the Middle East.”

The heavy fighting in Aleppo and Damascus has caused the exodus of at least 30,000 Syrians, mainly to Lebanon. The Iraqi government has even invited the million-plus Iraqis who were given shelter in Syria to return — something that is dangerous for those who opposed the government and the U.S. occupation there.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking in Tokyo on July 8, already threatened the Assad government: “There is no doubt that the opposition is getting more effective in their defence of themselves and in going on the offence against the Syrian military and the Syrian government’s militias. So, the future … should be abundantly clear to those who support the Assad regime. The sand is running out of the hour glass.”(Reuters, July 8)

An article in the Guardian on July 12 by Charlie Skelton showed how many of the leaders of the main opposition Syrian National Council located outside Syria have been groomed, trained and built up by U.S. government agencies or imperialist think tanks. That means that even if the SNC or any parts of the Syrian uprising had legitimate roots in the population, its leadership is completely captive of the imperialists.

It is instructive that the British-Pakistani anti-imperialist, Tariq Ali, who is himself an opponent of the Assad government and wants to see it replaced, now says, according to an introduction to his comments on video, that we are witnessing in Syria a new form of recolonization by the West, like we have already seen in Iraq and in Libya, and that the opposition leadership is now “composed of sundry Syrians who work for the Western intelligence agencies.”

UNAC opposes imperialism in Syria

The most important of anti-war umbrella groups in the U.S., the United National Antiwar Coalition, has taken a position opposing “any military, economic, diplomatic, or covert intervention aimed at controlling the internal affairs of Syria or any other country.”

In an emailed statement on July 9, UNAC wrote: “The U.S. government’s goals in Syria are to gain dominance in a part of the world that holds the vast majority of the known oil reserves and to gain strategic advantage as it seeks to isolate and contain competitors like Russia and China. The U.S. has no interest in democracy or the humanitarian well-being of a country’s peoples anywhere in the world, especially in areas where the U.S. has economic or strategic interests.”