In my long piece on Syria, I refer to a New Yorker magazine article that details the willingness of revolutionary-minded Syrians, including a geezer my age who used to smuggle ammunition to the FSA, to stand up to Islamist authoritarianism. This Youtube clip (hat tip to Pham Binh) shows them in action:

From last night’s Chris Hayes show on MSNBC

Just the other day I got email from two old friends who were troubled by my position on Syria that obviously went against the grain of Monthly Review, ZNET, Counterpunch, the British and American antiwar coalitions, and thousands—perhaps millions—of bloggers and leftist websites. Why wasn’t I demanding no American war with Syria? Since I get these sorts of questions all the time, I thought it would be good to answer them publicly.

One of the lessons I learned from my eleven years in the SWP was not to be worried about being in a minority. If only I had the guts to tell the party leadership that they were all wrong in 1977 about a massive working-class radicalization that existed only in their imagination, I probably would have been much happier with myself in the long run even if I had been shunned by fellow members. If you don’t have the courage of your convictions, you should find some other movement besides Marxism.

I may be in a minority on the American left, but am buoyed by the knowledge that most Arabs and Muslims are sickened by Bashar al-Assad and would like to see him overthrown by any means necessary, even with weapons procured from Satan’s grandmother. Except for the “Angry Arab”, there is not a single Arab or Muslim commentator I have run into who has adopted the outlook of the “anti-imperialist” left. I should add that the scare quotes are meant to indicate that Russia is not considered an imperialist power in such quarters.

Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk have at least adopted a “plague on both your houses” position on Syria but then there are those like Saul Landau who wrote that Syrian “restaurants and markets once offered abundant food” without acknowledging that 60 percent of the population makes less than $2 per day or that Syria ranked four places beneath Egypt in the 2010 United Nations Human Development Indicators index. One supposes that a shop window filled with bread and cake might not mollify a street vendor who hasn’t had a square meal in two days. It might even piss them off.

I take my stand with people like Hatem Bazian, who was the first Palestinian to be elected to the Student Union at San Francisco State in the late 80s as a leader of the Progressive Coalition. He was the keynote speaker at last September’s rally for the Syrian revolution in Washington. As a student activist, he took the lead on affirmative action, access to education, anti-apartheid efforts on college campuses, and the Central American Solidarity Movement. He authored resolutions, which were adopted by the USSA national conference in 1991 calling for cutting US aid to Israel and imposing sanctions for its sales of military equipment to apartheid South Africa. After becoming a professor at Berkeley, he drew the ire of Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch, especially for his support for BDS.

Then there is Robin Yassin-Kassab, the Syrian author of the novel “The Road from Damascus”, and the co-editor of the quarterly journal “Critical Muslim” that will be running my article on the Jews of the Maghreb in the next issue. He blogs at
http://qunfuz.com/
. I particularly urge people to look at his article titled “Blanket Thinkers” that states:

But how do the blanket thinkers see the situation? For them it’s yet another clear cut case of American imperialist aggression against a noble resistance regime, and once again the people are passive tools.

At best they are passive tools. They are also depicted as wild Muslims, bearded and hijabbed, who do not deserve democracy or rights because they are too backward to use them properly. Give them democracy and they’ll vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, and slaughter the Alawis and drive the Christians to Beirut. The blanket thinkers search for evidence of crimes committed by the popular resistance, and when they find them (usually on very flimsy evidence) they use them to smear the entire movement.

On the very same day I received the email, I noticed a Facebook status update from Richard Drayton, the young academic who wrote “Nature’s Government”, a very fine study of how Britain used scientific research in the 18^th and 19^th century to advance its imperial interests. He wrote what amounted to a formula. Imperialism foments rebellions in distant lands using the real or imagined discontent of a group of people to find an opening for military intervention. The outcome is always greater suffering and setbacks to the anti-imperialist cause. When I began to post material that questioned some of his assumptions, he took great umbrage and told me that if I wanted to support imperialism, I should do it on my own blog.

To some extent, Drayton was probably upset that he had no answers to some of the points I was making about the character of the non-jihadist Syrian movement. Who would want to waste their time reading the statements of their leaders, like Ahmed Mouaz al-Khatib who is on record as stating “Iran’s possession of nuclear capabilities poses no threat to any Sunni but it will be a formidable deterrent to the evil powers that are rushing madly upon the Muslim World”? It was so much easier to view them as indistinguishable from Jonas Savimbi or Adolfo Calero—pliant tools of American imperialism.

I decided to leave Drayton in peace but remained troubled by his utter lack of curiosity about the people who had decided to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Did he have two standards for understanding politics: a rigorous one for his scholarly books and another one much more relaxed for his FB musings? How depressing. Also, his reference to the USA “fomenting” a rebellion in Syria had an odd ring. Where did that term come from I asked myself, stroking my chin. Within a minute or two, I realized that this was exactly how American presidents referred to revolutionary movements in places like Cuba, Vietnam or Nicaragua. The Kremlin was “fomenting” violence in an otherwise abundant, happy and peaceful land.

Strange bedfellows

On my return from Mexico City, I discovered that M.N. Roy lived there during WWI. Furthermore, like Irish freedom fighter Roger Casement, he tried to strike deals with Kaiser Wilhelm to get weapons to liberate his people. During a period of inter-imperialist rivalries, it was not considered a betrayal of socialist principles to look for such opportunities. In Roy’s case, there was the added dimension of his writing the theses on national liberation adopted by the Comintern. How could you cozy up with imperialists and then write such classic statements of Marxist policy?

This is not to speak of V.I. Lenin’s stance with respect to the same bogeymen. In “To the Finland Station”, Edmund Wilson describes the uneasy feelings that some of his comrades had that remind me a bit of what I hear all the time (I should go on record that I am no Lenin, only a Louis Proyect.)

In the train that left the morning of April 8 there were thirty Russian exiles, including not a single Menshevik. They were accompanied by the Swiss socialist Platten, who made himself responsible for the trip, and the Polish socialist Radek. Some of the best of the comrades had been horrified by the indiscretion of Lenin in resorting to the aid of the Germans and making the trip through an enemy country. They came to the station and besieged the travelers, begging them not to go. Lenin got into the train without replying a word.

Even after Hitler took power, some nationalists continued in the same vein, the most notable among them Subhas Chandra Bose who relied on both German and Japanese support for an army that could liberate India. Despite this marriage of convenience, Bose was politically on the left and an admirer of the USSR. Indeed, Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler served his policy aims well as indicated by his 1941 Kabul Thesis written just before he travelled to Germany to consult with the Nazis:

Thus we see pseudo-Leftists who through sheer cowardice avoid a conflict with Imperialism and argue in self-defence that Mr. Winston Churchill (whom we know to be the arch-Imperialist) is the greatest revolutionary going. It has become a fashion with these pseudo-Leftists to call the British Government a revolutionary force because it is fighting the Nazis and Fascists. But they conveniently forget the imperialist character of Britain’s war and also the fact that the greatest revolutionary force in the world, the Soviet Union, has entered into a solemn pact with the Nazi Government.

While some sought advantage by aligning with the axis, others found the allies more amenable to their broader goals. While he would eventually find himself locked in a deadly struggle with American imperialism, Ho Chi Minh had no problem connecting with the OSS during WWII as recounted by William Duiker in his 2000 biography “Ho Chi Minh: a Life”:

While Ho Chi Minh was in Paise attempting to revitalize the Dong Minh Hoi, a U.S. military intelligence officer arrived in Kunming to join the OSS unit there. Captain Archimedes “Al” Patti had served in the European Theater until January 1944, when he was transferred to Washington, D.C., and appointed to the Indochina desk at OSS headquarters. A man of considerable swagger and self-confidence, Patti brought to his task a strong sense of history and an abiding distrust of the French and their legacy in colonial areas. It was from the files in Washington, D.C. that he first became aware of the activities of the Vietminh Front and its mysterious leader, Ho Chi Minh.

The next day, Patti arrived at Debao airport, just north of Jingxi, and after consultation with local AGAS representatives, drove into Jingxi, where he met a Vietminh contact at a local restaurant and was driven to see Ho Chi Minh in a small village about six miles out of town. After delicately feeling out his visitor about his identity and political views, Ho described conditions inside Indochina and pointed out that his movement could provide much useful assistance and information to the Allies if it were in possession of modern weapons, ammunition, and means of communication. At the moment, Ho conceded that the movement was dependent upon a limited amount of equipment captured from the enemy. Patti avoided any commitment, but promised to explore the matter. By his own account, Patti was elated.

Geopolitical players

Within a couple of years, everything changed. Inter-imperialist rivalries were now a thing of the past. The US ruled as the sole dominant superpower with lesser nations serving as vassals that faced a bloc of nations aligned with the USSR. The cold war had begun and the Soviet Union was the unquestioned protector of the colonial revolution even when it was cutting deals with imperialism that, for instance, left Vietnam under French control.

For the most part, the least troubled ties were with the local “progressive” bourgeoisie that was not trying to destroy capitalism but find ways of fostering its development in a postcolonial environment. Among these partnerships, the ones with Nasser’s Egypt, Baathist Syria, Qaddafi’s Libya, and Sukarno’s Indonesia stand out. The Soviet Union was also willing to provide material and diplomatic aid to revolutionary societies like Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua. It also aided liberation movements in Africa—most notably the ANC. While the USSR was undemocratic and hardly anybody’s ideal of socialism, its vast resource base and commitment to national liberation, even if half-hearted, meant that the left (except for the state capitalists) would have to consider it as an asset.

Throughout my career as an activist from 1967 to 1990, the USSR was a kind of beacon in the night sky that could be relied upon for pointing in the right direction even if it was off by a few degrees or so. It supplied the heroic Vietnamese with anti-aircraft weapons even if they were a bit dated and incapable of bringing down a B-52, kept the Cuban economy afloat, provided the Sandinistas with tractors and cars, and trained the ANC cadres in guerrilla warfare as described eloquently in Ronnie Kasril’s memoir.

In 1990 all that came to an end, signaled by the deal between the USA and the USSR that left Nicaragua high and dry. After a brief period of perestroika and glasnost, Yeltsin’s vicious neoliberal/gangster regime set in, marking the end of an era.

After the contradictions of Yeltsin’s rule became too acute, a new team replaced him headed by Putin. I noticed at the time that many people on the left were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because he not only signaled a retreat from the free market excesses of the past but also for his identification with Milosevic. NATO’s war in Yugoslavia had made Slavophilia fashionable, with Putin seen as the best hope for reversing NATO and Western banking’s incursions into the East.

That would obviously explain the willingness of many on the left to give critical support for Putin’s war in Chechnya. It was fairly easy to link the Chechen rebels to Islamist tendencies funded by the West that constituted a threat to democracy and secularism, such as in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, Russia began to be linked with other rising “counterhegemonic” powers that could serve as a counterweight to US imperialism. They may have not been revolutionary societies but at least they were less willing to take their marching orders from the State Department and the Pentagon. In addition to Russia, you had Brazil, India, China, and South Africa—all benign by comparison to Blair’s Britain, a Germany that made war on Yugoslavia, and Berlusconi’s Italy.

In 2007 Immanuel Wallerstein wrote an article titled “The Putin Charisma” that pretty much encapsulated this new-found enthusiasm for counterhegemonic tendencies in Russia:

Even more important however are Putin’s political accomplishments on the world scene. He has resisted, so far successfully, any and all attempts by the United States to obtain United Nations authorization of real punitive action against Iran, North Korea, and Sudan. He has held up any moving forward to independence for Kosovo. To be sure, Russia’s positions have been China’s positions on these questions, so Russia is not alone. But in the 1990s, such strong and so far effective Russian political stands were not thinkable.

Then there are Russia’s dealings with Europe. He has opposed United States plans to install antimissile structures in Poland and the Czech Republic, and has gotten support for his stand (if quiet support) from Western Europe. He has used control of gas and oil exports from Russia itself and from both Central Asian and Caucasian countries not only to obtain greater rent for Russia (and thereby greater world power), but more or less to impose his terms on energy issues on Western Europe.

If a neutral referee were to assign points for Putin’s actions on some scale of positive/negative consequences for Russia, I think a fair observer would have to say that Putin has done well as a geopolitical player.

The key term here is “geopolitical player”. As a grand master of world systems theory, Wallerstein has hardly ever concerned himself with the class struggle and the fight for socialism in a particular country. His main interest is the global chess game with the bad guys playing Black and the good guys White. As such, Syria is only a pawn.

As someone who was fairly vociferous about the role of NATO and Western banks in destroying Yugoslavia, I might have been expected to back Putin. Perhaps my original sin was questioning the right of Putin to turn Grozny into a graveyard. All the elements were in place. I was hostile to the KLA in Kosovo. Why wouldn’t I be just as hostile to the Chechen rebels?

On the Marxmail archives I checked what I was saying back then and was not disappointed to discover that I had that bastard Putin figured out as far back as September 2004. In a thread dealing with the horrible terrorist attack by Chechen rebels that left many schoolchildren dead in Beslan, I had this exchange with a character named David Quarter who epitomized the leftist infatuation with Putin:

David Quarter wrote:
>
> So because Yelsin and his successor, Putin, are “committed to
> capitalism”, we should side with the U.S. in its drive to control the region,
> and inevitably occupy Russia? (Or are they in the Caucasus simply for the
> vodka?) I was under the impression that Marxists takes sides in conflicts?

Yes, we take sides with the Chechen people against the Putin gang. If
the USA decides to invade Russia in order to liberate the Chechens in
the same fashion that Iraq was invaded in the first Gulf War to
“liberate” the Kuwaitis, we should oppose US war aims which have nothing
to do with liberation. Right now, US opposition to the war against
Chechnya is purely verbal.

Boy, did I get that right: US opposition to the war against Chechnya is purely verbal. At the time, Clinton was reconciled to seeing Chechnya suffer the same scorched earth fate as Syria. In fact, Republicans oppose Obama’s policies in the same way that they opposed Clinton’s back then. They complained about “inaction” but mostly to score points.

Was Putin’s victory over a jihadist movement in Chechnya supposed to be some kind of victory over medieval backwardness and a repudiation of “humanitarian intervention”? One imagines that the same people calling out for “no war in Syria” would have clapped their hands over Putin’s crushing of a similarly inspired rebellion of bearded jihadists seeking to impose Sharia law and the hijab.

Over the past five years or so I have paid much closer attention to developments in Russia, mostly through my affinities with Chto Delat (What is to be Done), a collective of artists who consider Putin a dictatorial brute with loyalties to the country’s billionaires despite his occasional populist demagoguery.

I have come to the conclusion that Putin used the war in Chechnya to consolidate his rule and gradually turn Russia into a police state with a veneer of bourgeois democracy. The refusal of the West to get involved with the war by supplying arms or logistics was obviously the sort of thing that would cheer the “no war with Russia crowd” but in reality the real obligation of ordinary people—as opposed to the Washington establishment—was to offer solidarity with the Chechen people. I am afraid that the same Islamophobia that made solidarity so weak back then is the same problem we are dealing with today. It is tempting for many on the left to write off such movements as “Islamist” when in reality they are revolutionary movements based on class inequality that rally around religious themes. Engels was probably the first Marxist to understand how such plebian religious-based movements operate:

In the so-called religious wars of the Sixteenth Century, very positive material class-interests were at play, and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. If the class struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual situation, and is to be explained by conditions of the time.

–Peasant Wars in Germany

One of the commentators who has zeroed in on such a dynamic today is Aron Lund, the Swedish author of “Syrian Jihadism” who wrote:

The Syrian civil war is a sectarian conflict – among other things. It is also a conflict along socio-economic and urban-rural lines, a classic countryside jacquerie against an exploitative central government, albeit internally divided by the country’s religious divisions, which cut across other patterns of identity and loyalty. Then there is a political dimension to the struggle, with Bashar el-Assad’s loyalists battling to preserve the current power structure against demands for democratization and economic redistribution.

The growing prominence of Islamist imagery is perhaps more due to its usefulness in Sunni identity politics, than to the ideology itself. Religion is not the driving force of the rebellion, but it is the insurgent movement’s most important common denominator. For Syria’s revolutionaries, Islam functions both as a ready-to-use ideological prism, a sectarian identity marker, and an effective mobilization tool in Sunni Muslim areas – and, of course, as a source of spiritual comfort in wartime. Nir Rosen, an American journalist who has travelled extensively among the Syrian rebels, points out that many insurgents ”were not religious before the uprising, but now pray and are inspired by Islam, which gives them a creed and a discourse.”

The brutal realities of asymmetric warfare

At last count Bashar al-Assad had 900 jet fighters, 135 armored attack helicopters, and 5000 tanks at his disposal. It might be useful to take a close look at the armaments of a MIG-23 fighter, the most prevalent in his air force. Each MIG-23 has two pods of sixteen S-5 rockets. This youtube clip demonstrates the impact of firing just two of these rockets on the town of Rastan:

As it turns out, Rastan is the third largest town in Homs, the region in Syria that has been suffering such air attacks for well over a year. On February 12, 2012 the Guardian reported from the Baba Amr district of Homs, the capital city :

Abu Suleiman was working methodically to wrap the body of a seven-year-old girl in a white shroud. He didn’t flinch as a volley of mortar bombs crashed down only a street away. He has been preparing the dead for burial since the start of the uprising. Last week he had his busiest day.

Carefully, he folded over the white cloth to cover the girl’s curly chestnut hair, matted with blood. He did not clean it off. “If they are killed by a bomb or a bullet, we don’t wash their martyrs’ blood,” he said. He wrote the girl’s name on the shroud, Nuha al-Manal.

“Of course, it a very difficult job,” he added. “Among those I prepared for burial were my son, my son-in-law, my nephew, my neighbour, my friend. But it has to be done. I feel I owe these people something. The least I can do is to wrap them in their shrouds.”

Such long lists of the dead were common in the Baba Amr quarter of Homs. Abu Sufyan had lost a brother, a nephew, an uncle, and, most recently, his mother. A warm and generous man – we had stayed in his house last November – he had become prone to explosions of rage.

He shouted at a hysterical woman in the makeshift hospital. Her son’s foot had been neatly severed by a mortar. Someone was holding it, wrapped in a bloody keffiyeh. She was ululating, clutching her face. “Give us guns so we can defend ourselves,” she wailed, piercingly. Abu Sufyan had no patience with this. “We’ve had a hundred martyrs already today,” he bellowed. “Get out so the doctors can work.”

That’s obviously how most of the 93,000 reported dead in Syria met their fate, from rockets launched by jets or helicopters or long-distance artillery. As Abu Sufyan said, guns were needed to defend people under such an attack. More specifically, MANPAD’s were the only weapon that could turn such a city into a “no fly” zone. One would think that given the White House’s determination to foment a war against the Baathist dictatorship, it would have been doling them out like candy.

On August 22, 2012 the NY Times reported that the USA would not supply them in light of the Afghanistan experience when Stinger missiles went unaccounted for in Afghanistan.  Milton A. Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.’s support for Afghan fighters in the 1980s told the Times: ”The complexity of Syria today makes Afghanistan in 1985 look very simple. Who is the Syrian opposition? Who would these weapons go to?”

As it turns out, the USA and the supposed enemies of the Baathist dictatorship have worked together to block the shipments of such weapons to the rebels as the Wall Street Journal reported on October 17, 2012:

U.S. officials say they are most worried about Russian-designed Manpads provided to Libya making their way to Syria. The U.S. intensified efforts to track and collect man-portable missiles after the 2011 fall of the country’s longtime strongman leader, Moammar Gadhafi.

To keep control of the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar formed a joint operations room early this year in a covert project U.S. officials watched from afar.

The U.S. has limited its support of the rebels to communications equipment, logistics and intelligence. But U.S. officials have coordinated with the trio of countries sending arms and munitions to the rebels. The Pentagon and CIA ramped up their presence on Turkey’s southern border as the weapons began to flow to the rebels in two to three shipments every week.

In July, the U.S. effectively halted the delivery of at least 18 Manpads sourced from Libya, even as the rebels pleaded for more effective antiaircraft missiles to counter regime airstrikes in Aleppo, people familiar with that delivery said [emphasis added].

“We were told that we need to get our house in order on the ground, and that it wasn’t time yet,” said a rebel representative involved in the delivery.

This does not register on the “no war with Syria” left that would have you believe that the USA had been supplying MANPAD’s all along. I try to imagine what it would mean for a leftist to apply this line if they were a Syrian living in Homs. Here is the scenario. Saeed, a 20 year old graduate student from the Baba Amr district, has just returned home after a year of studying political science in London where he came in contact with members of John Rees’s Counterfire group that recruited him to their particular brand of Marxism, one in which the highest duty of revolutionaries is to prevent imperialism intervening in Syria. Saeed runs into the aforementioned Abu Sufyan on a shelled out street where this conversation ensues:

Abu: Hello, Saeed, how was London?

Saeed: Okay, but I am glad to be home.

Abu: Did you hear that Hassan from down the block was killed last night by a mortar shell?

Saeed: I am sorry to hear that.

Abu: But help might be on the way. The CIA has shown up in Jordan with ten trucks filled with Stinger missiles and other powerful weapons. Allah only knows why the Americans have gotten involved this late in the game but we will now be able to protect our people.

Saeed: But, Abu, we cannot accept those weapons. They are from the American bourgeoisie and will lead to imperialist domination of the Middle East. We need to organize the working class into soviets and fight for socialism and put an end to sectarian warfare against our Shia, Christian and Allawite brothers and sisters.

Of course such a dialog would never take place in the real world. To start with, Obama has only agreed to send small arms to the rebels, which are utterly useless against MIG’s and attack helicopters. But more importantly for the debate on the left, I doubt that anybody in their right mind would tell someone from Homs not to use such weapons no matter who supplied them. It is instead a talking point mostly of currency in the West where it is supposed to serve as some kind of “anti-imperialist” litmus test. With American imperialism showing absolutely no interest in supplying weaponry that can make a real difference in Syria, the agitation of groups like Counterfire amounts to trying to break down an open door.

The Character of the Syrian Revolutionary Movement

To some extent, the “plague on both your houses” stance relies on evidence carefully sifted so as to put the rebels in the worst possible light. The most recent instance was the case of a fifteen-year-old boy being executed by jihadists for blasphemy. Before that there was Abu Sakkar, the fighter who took a bite out of a dead Baathist soldier’s heart. Whenever such violations of human rights take place, the entire revolutionary movement suffers collective punishment. By the same token, MIG or Scud missile attacks on working-class tenements in Aleppo or Damascus are considered normal activities for a government under attack.

Since Syria is such a dangerous place for foreign journalists and since the Baathists either tightly control or outright ban outsiders from reporting, it is not easy to get a handle on what life is like under rebel control.

One of the few detailed reports was filed by Anand Gopal in the August 2012 Harpers, which thankfully is not behind their paywall. While by no stretch of the imagination can it be described as a soviet, this extract from the article should convince you that something was happening there that deserved our support:

Ibrahim Matar served in the army unit that put down the early protests in Daraa. He didn’t believe the government’s assertions that the protests were organized by Al Qaeda, but he felt it was too dangerous to desert. When he finished his service, in November 2011, he came home to a transformed Taftanaz: ordinary people were running the town. “It was like a renaissance,” he said, “a new look at life.”

During the massacre, he fought alongside the rebels and then abandoned the town at night. When he returned to his scorched home, he headed straight for his prized library. “I saw the burned paper,” he told me, “and tears came to my eyes.” He had been studying for a master’s degree in English translation and had maintained the library for years, collecting books by Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett. “Some say Godot is God,” he said, “but I say he is hope. Our revolution is now waiting for Godot.”

Matar brought me to a mosque that sits next to one of the mass graves. Inside, there were heaps of clothes, boxes of Turkish biscuits, and crates of bottled water. An old bald man with a walrus mustache studied a ledger with intensity while a group of old men around him argued about how much charity they could demand from Taftanaz’s rich to rebuild the town. This was the public-affairs committee, one of the village’s revolutionary councils. The mustached man slammed his hands on the floor and shouted, “This is a revolution of the poor! The rich will have to accept that.” He turned to me and explained, “We’ve gone to every house in town and determined what they need”—he pointed at the ledger—“and compared it with what donations come in. Everything gets recorded and can be seen by the public.”

All around Taftanaz, amid the destruction, rebel councils like this were meeting—twenty-seven in all, and each of them had elected a delegate to sit on the citywide council. They were a sign of a deeper transformation that the revolution had wrought in Syria: Bashar al-Assad once subdued small towns like these with an impressive apparatus of secret police, party hacks, and yes-men; now such control was impossible without an occupation. The Syrian army, however, lacked the numbers to control the hinterlands—it entered, fought, and moved on to the next target. There could be no return to the status quo, it seemed, even if the way forward was unclear.

In the neighboring town of Binnish, I visited the farmers’ council, a body of about a thousand members that set grain prices and adjudicated land disputes. Its leader, an old man I’ll call Abdul Hakim, explained to me that before the revolution, farmers were forced to sell grain to the government at a price that barely covered the cost of production. Following the uprising, the farmers tried to sell directly to the town at almost double the former rates. But locals balked and complained to the citywide council, which then mandated a return to the old prices—which has the farmers disgruntled, but Hakim acknowledged that in this revolution, “we have to give to each as he needs.”

And even as the power of Islamists has escalated, there are still signs that such people committed to democracy and a relative degree of secularism continue to fight for a Syria that reflects their values. In the April 3, 2013 issue of the New Yorker magazine, there’s a report from Raqqa, the first provincial capital to fall to rebel control, in this instance largely due to jihadist weaponry. Despite being nominally in control of the city, the Islamists face defiance from the city’s democratic-minded citizenry as Rania Abouzeid reports on an argument that took place over the hoisting of a black Islamist flag over the city:

A few days earlier, a massive black flag bearing the shahada had been hoisted atop a flagpole in Raqqa city’s main square, in front of the elegant, multi-arched governorate building. “We will become a target for American drone attacks because of the flag—it’s huge,” said Abu Noor, a wiry young man who worked in a pharmacy by day and at night volunteered to guard the post office near his home against looters. “They’ll think we’re extremist Muslims!” (There haven’t been such strikes in Syria yet, though the possibility is much discussed here.)

“There is no moderate Islam or extremist Islam,” the Jabhat [an Islamist militia] member said calmly. “There is only Islam, and Islam is under attack in the West regardless of whether or not we hoist the banner. Do you think they’re waiting for that banner to hit us?” he said.

Abu Mohammad, an older man in a tan leather jacket and a white galabia (a loose, floor-length robe), interjected: “What we’re saying is, put the flag above your outposts, not in the main square of the city. We all pray, we all say, ‘There is no god but God,’ but I will not raise this flag.”

“This is an insult to people who died for the revolutionary flag,” said Abu Abdullah, a former English major at the university.

“We are not forcing anything on anyone,” the Jabhat member said. “We offered it as a choice. We did not take down the revolutionary flags in the city—even though we could have.”

Outside, the night air was cool. Warplanes that had been continuously rumbling over the city during the day had retreated, prompting bakeries, shuttered because of the threat of air strikes, to open. Long queues, segregated by gender, quickly formed as night fell, just as they did every night, guarded by armed men with black scarves covering their heads and faces.

“With this banner you have cleaved us from our country Syria,” Abu Moayad said. “Why is it here? We are not an Islamic emirate; we are part of Syria. This is a religious banner, not a country’s flag.”

The Jabhat member leaned forward and looked the older man in the eyes. “This is a lack of self-esteem, something we were conditioned to feel toward our religion by a regime that didn’t let us practice it,” he said. “Do you know how many people a day come to offer loyalty to us, to try and join us?”

At that, Abu Moayad lost his temper. He stood up, moved a few steps across the room toward the young masked man, and wagged a finger in his face: “The Syrian revolution rose up to step on Bashar’s neck, but I swear I am with Bashar against this flag!” he yelled. “That is how strongly I feel about it! You are causing fitna [internal divisions]!”

The young man remained seated. “What did you do for the revolution?” he asked.

“I used to transport ammunition smuggled from Iraq to towns in Raqqa province.”

Returning to the original question raised at the beginning of this article, I am totally opposed to the USA making war with Syria. But if that means organizing a protest against shipments of powerful weapons to the sort of democratic-minded activists described in the Harpers and New Yorker, count me out.

I agree that American imperialism only acts in its own interests. I also remain deeply proud oft my activism against funding of the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s. But in this particular instance the idea of organizing protests in the Ramsey Clark ANSWER coalition fashion against sending weapons to the FSA goes against my socialist principles. The fight against Baathist tyranny is one of the most important taking place in the world today and the left has a stake in the revolutionary struggle against a torturing, murdering, and corrupt dictatorship even if it is not being led by the Rosa Luxemburg brigades.

It is almost completely ruled out that the White House is ready to supply the sorts of weapons that could turn Syria into a graveyard for MIG’s. But if I were a socialist member of Congress (obviously speaking hypothetically), I doubt that I would vote against the shipment of such weapons. Long ago I read a 1938 article by Leon Trotsky called “Learn to Think” that provides a framework for understanding these issues. Trotsky might have had some confused ideas about how to organize a revolutionary party but when it came to dialectical contradictions such as the ones under consideration, he could rise to the occasion.

Trotsky was addressing an ultraleft (as he put it) “principle” that workers must always oppose its own imperialist government’s decision to arm rebels in another country. He offered this as a possible exception to the rule:

Let us assume that rebellion breaks out tomorrow in the French colony of Algeria under the banner of national independence and that the Italian government, motivated by its own imperialist interests, prepares to send weapons to the rebels. What should the attitude of the Italian workers be in this case? I have purposely taken an example of rebellion against a democratic imperialism with intervention on the side of the rebels from a fascist imperialism. Should the Italian workers prevent the shipping of arms to the Algerians? Let any ultra-leftists dare answer this question in the affirmative. Every revolutionist, together with the Italian workers and the rebellious Algerians, would spurn such an answer with indignation. Even if a general maritime strike broke out in fascist Italy at the same time, even in this case the strikers should make an exception in favor of those ships carrying aid to the colonial slaves in revolt; otherwise they would be no more than wretched trade unionists – not proletarian revolutionists.

In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat. This rule applies just as much to the war period as to the period of peace.

Of course, this article might have seemed a lot less controversial in 1938 when inter-imperialist rivalry was the environment that Marxists operated within. But as I pointed out earlier, those conditions no longer obtain. Instead, we are dealing with American imperialism and its close allies like Britain and Israel facing off against the BRICS and their partners.

What is to be Done

While I can understand why some on the left might quibble over whether Russia is “imperialist” or not, there is a more fundamental way of approaching these problems that cuts across the nation versus nation framework. While these contradictions exist, there is a more fundamental contradiction based on class that demands our attention.

Despite all the sectarian distortions and the departures from civilized norms in Syria over two years of brutal warfare, there is still a revolution taking place there. It might not pose socialist demands but the yearning to live in freedom is one that Marxists should identify with.

If Bashar al-Assad is able to suppress the mass movement, and there is every indication that he will, the net result will be to encourage other powers in the Middle East to drown revolutions in blood. Despite the “support” that Sunni regimes have given to the rebels, there is little doubt that a Morsi or an Erdogan would calculate that a military solution would work for them as well, given a deep-going and irreconcilable crisis.

Finally, I will recount the exchange I had with Anand Gopal at the last Left Forum that might help to shift the discussion away from one centered on the procurement of arms. When I posed the question to him during the discussion period whether the slogan of “no arms to Syria” was one for the left to organize around, his first reaction was to defend the slogan on the basis that further militarization of the conflict would lead only to it looking much more like Afghanistan.

A few minutes later, however, he took a somewhat different tack while not disavowing his earlier statement. He said that the emphasis should be on solidarity with the Syrian revolution. Looking back in retrospect, I am convinced that this is the best position for the left to take.

In order for the left to get up to speed on why this revolution deserves to be supported, I will conclude with a list of websites that I consult on a regular basis in order to make sense of what is happening there and to help us make the case for our Syrian brothers and sisters who are our natural allies in a fight for a more just world.

EA WorldView | A Window On The World:
http://eaworldview.com/

Brown Moses Blog:
http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/

Syria News | Covering the Crisis:
http://beta.syriadeeply.org/

Syrian Freedom:
http://syrianfreedomls.tumblr.com/

Syria Freedom Forever:
http://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com

The Revolting Syrian:
http://www.therevoltingsyrian.com/

Robin Yassin-Kassab’s Blog:
http://qunfuz.com/

Finally, despite my disgust with the British SWP’s handling of the rape case that has thrown into a deep and possible terminal crisis, I have to recommend the reporting of Simon Assaf who is one of the most reliable commentators on the Arab Spring I have encountered on the far left.

Tomorrow or the next day I will be posting a journal of the panels I attended at last weekend’s Left Forum in NY, including an audio archive (with mixed success since about half of the panels involved Powerpoint slides or other visual material). But today I want to single out a particularly interesting panel discussion that did not allow recordings for security reasons. “Prospects for Syria’s Revolution” was held yesterday morning at ten under the auspices of Haymarket Books, the imprint of the ISO. The first speaker was from the
http://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com/
blog, an indispensable resource for understanding Syria from a Marxist standpoint. Even though he is presently not based in Syria, the blogger had to have his identity concealed during a Skype video call since it is entirely conceivable that the Baathist goons might want to track him down. The second speaker was Anand Gopal, who quite simply is the most informed person on the American left about Syria, both theoretically and as a journalist who has taken great risks to tell the true story of the revolutionary struggle

To give you an idea of what the “Syrian Freedom Forever” blogger stands for, here’s an excerpt from his latest blog entry “Syria or elsewhere, there are no pure revolutions, just revolutions…”:

The role of the revolutionary is to be on the side and struggle with these popular organizations struggling for freedom and dignity and to radicalize as much as possible the popular movement towards progressive objectives, while fighting against opportunists and reactionary forces opposing popular class interests.

A banner in Homs expressed very well this feeling: The revolution is permanent against the regime and the cheap lackey opposition.

My feeling is that as long as there is one Syrian expressing such a view and arrayed against him are revolutionary governments in Venezuela and Cuba, as well as dozens of leftist websites, and groups like the Stop the War Coalition in Britain, I will stand with him or her against al-Assad.

His talk took the bull by the horns and challenged some of the myths about Baathism that are circulated on the left.

Baathism as a secular movement:

Hafez al-Assad, the current dictator’s father, was responsible for a constitution that stated that only a Muslim could be president doing so in order to placate the Muslim Brotherhood. Under his reign, there were more mosques built in Syria than in Saudi Arabia. When he organized a coup against the leftist military officer Salah Jadid in 1970, he did so on the basis of orienting Syria to conservative Arab states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. And most importantly, in the early period of the Syrian revolution, his son Bashar al-Assad released Islamist hardliners from prison knowing full well that they would constitute a challenge to the more secular ranks of the democratic opposition. The Daily Star of Lebanon reported on March 19, 2013 that al-Assad ”ordered the release of the Islamist prisoners some two years ago”, dovetailing with the Washington Post report of March 27, 2011 that 246 Islamist prisoners had been released from the Sednaya military prison in Damascus.

Baathism as a socialist movement

In Syria Bashar al-Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf controls 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. 30 percent of the population lives under $1 per day, and 60 percent under two dollars. The IMF has supported every single one of al-Assad’s economic policies and Saudi Arabia is Syria’s primary investor. Under Bashar al-Assad, the economy has evolved away from agriculture into banking and insurance.

You can also consult my own article on “The Economic Contradictions of Syrian Baathism” (
http://louisproyect.org/2012/07/19/the-economic-contradictions-of-syrian-baathism/
) for more information.

Baathism as an anti-imperialist movement

Besides reminding us of Baathist support for Lebanese fascists against the Palestinians, “Syrian Freedom Forever” made a point that I had been completely unaware of. Hafez al-Assad supported George Bush the senior’s first gulf war on Saddam Hussein. Bashar al-Assad also had summit meetings with Sarkozy in 2008, with his adviser arch-imperialist Bernard Kouchner in tow. El-Marad, a Lebanese newspaper, reported at the time:

Both leaders held a joint press conference in Damascus following their first session of talks.

President Assad said that his earlier visit to France and President Sarkozy’s visit to Syria had both strengthened relations between their countries. Noting that France currently holds the presidency of the European Union, Assad said he supported Sarkozy’s efforts to play a more active role in the Arab world, and said he was happy with “a new dynamic” form of European involvement in the region “after many years of absence.”

Meanwhile let’s not forget how Hillary Clinton viewed Bashar al-Assad until facts on the ground made such a statement untenable:

“There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

–Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on “Face the Nation,” March 27, 2011

* * * * *

For people unfamiliar with Anand Gopal’s reporting, the best thing I can do is refer you to his August 2012 Harper’s article titled “Welcome to Free Syria” that convinced me early on that there was a revolution occurring there that the left should get behind, especially this passage (fortunately the article can be read in its entirety online at
http://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/welcome-to-free-syria/
):

All around Taftanaz, amid the destruction, rebel councils like this were meeting—twenty-seven in all, and each of them had elected a delegate to sit on the citywide council. They were a sign of a deeper transformation that the revolution had wrought in Syria: Bashar al-Assad once subdued small towns like these with an impressive apparatus of secret police, party hacks, and yes-men; now such control was impossible without an occupation. The Syrian army, however, lacked the numbers to control the hinterlands—it entered, fought, and moved on to the next target. There could be no return to the status quo, it seemed, even if the way forward was unclear.

In the neighboring town of Binnish, I visited the farmers’ council, a body of about a thousand members that set grain prices and adjudicated land disputes. Its leader, an old man I’ll call Abdul Hakim, explained to me that before the revolution, farmers were forced to sell grain to the government at a price that barely covered the cost of production. Following the uprising, the farmers tried to sell directly to the town at almost double the former rates. But locals balked and complained to the citywide council, which then mandated a return to the old prices—which has the farmers disgruntled, but Hakim acknowledged that in this revolution, “we have to give to each as he needs.”

It was a phrase I heard many times, even from landowners and merchants who might otherwise bristle at the revolution’s egalitarian rhetoric—they cannot ignore that many on the front lines come from society’s bottom rungs. At one point in March, the citywide council enforced price controls on rice and heating oil, undoing, locally, the most unpopular economic reforms of the previous decade.

“We have to take from the rich in our village and give to the poor,” Matar told me. He had joined the Taftanaz student committee, the council that plans protests and distributes propaganda, and before April 3 he had helped produce the town’s newspaper, Revolutionary Words. Each week, council members laid out the text and photos on old laptops, sneaked the files into Turkey for printing, and smuggled the finished bundles back into Syria. The newspaper featured everything from frontline reporting to disquisitions on revolutionary morality to histories of the French Revolution. (“This is not an intellectual’s revolution,” Matar said. “This is a popular revolution. We need to give people ideas, theory.”)

The one thing struck me in Anand’s presentation was how the situation had become so militarized in Syria so suddenly. He gave the best analysis I have heard.

To start with, this revolution was rooted in the countryside where the regime’s abandonment of support for the peasantry created mass hatred for the system. But unlike the cities, where an organized working class could mount mass protests even up to and including a general strike in order to put pressure on the regime, the relatively atomized peasantry had to resort to arms almost immediately since this was the only tenable defense.

Very rapidly, those who had access to guns and the money necessary to defend the masses were propelled into the leadership. This meant for the FSA that the owner of a cement factory became a top commander. In a very real sense, Syria was experiencing a kind of bourgeois-democratic revolution. His access to funds was critical. It also explains the rise of the Islamist militias. With money pouring in from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, it gave the jihadists clout.

Even though the Islamists have become a major factor in the Syrian struggle, Anand pointed to the more secular and more democratic-minded mass movement’s willingness to take them on. He referred to the conflicts taking place in Raqqa, the first provincial capital under rebel rule. Even though the Islamists are trying to impose Sharia law, and codes that make women second-class citizens, the secular and democratic minded residents are not intimidated. This passage from a recent New Yorker article (
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/04/the-black-flag-of-raqqa.html
) shows the give-and-take of the unfolding drama:

Two men in their twenties, called Abu Noor and Abu Abdullah, answered, then called me to the door to greet the man from Jabhat. They were both civilians, but supported the uprising. We stood in the stairwell of the apartment building chatting for a few minutes, and then Abu Abdullah went inside and came back with a flyer bearing Jabhat’s name. It called for replacing the tri-starred flag used by Assad’s opponents since the uprising’s earliest days with a black one bearing the words of the Muslim shahada (“There is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger”).

“What is this?” Abu Abdullah asked the young Jabhat member. “We were just talking about it, we don’t like it.”

The Jabhat member, who was unarmed, smiled through his face covering. “And what don’t you like about it?” he said. “We are all Muslims, so what is the problem with a flag that bears the shahada?”

“We are not all Muslims,” Abu Noor said. “You and I are but there are Christians here, too. You have insulted them. And besides, what gives you the right to change the symbol of the revolution?”

“We protected the churches,” the Jabhat member said, referring to the city’s two churches, which were left unscathed in the Islamist rebel takeover of the capital. “Let’s not talk out here,” he added. “The neighbors will hear us. Do you have coffee?”

The men walked into the formal living room of the modest five-room apartment. Two older gray-haired men, Abu Moayad and Abu Mohammad, rose from sky-blue couches to greet their guest.

For the next few hours, the men engaged in a combative and highly charged discussion. It was about the black banner, but more than that about the direction the Syrian uprising has taken. The men of the house feared that it had been hijacked by Islamists, led by Jabhat al-Nusra, who saw the fall of the regime as the first step in transforming Syria’s once-cosmopolitan society into a conservative Islamic state. All four men said they wanted an Islamic state, but a moderate one.

A few days earlier, a massive black flag bearing the shahada had been hoisted atop a flagpole in Raqqa city’s main square, in front of the elegant, multi-arched governorate building. “We will become a target for American drone attacks because of the flag—it’s huge,” said Abu Noor, a wiry young man who worked in a pharmacy by day and at night volunteered to guard the post office near his home against looters. “They’ll think we’re extremist Muslims!” (There haven’t been such strikes in Syria yet, though the possibility is much discussed here.)

“There is no moderate Islam or extremist Islam,” the Jabhat member said calmly. “There is only Islam, and Islam is under attack in the West regardless of whether or not we hoist the banner. Do you think they’re waiting for that banner to hit us?” he said.

Abu Mohammad, an older man in a tan leather jacket and a white galabia (a loose, floor-length robe), interjected: “What we’re saying is, put the flag above your outposts, not in the main square of the city. We all pray, we all say, ‘There is no god but God,’ but I will not raise this flag.”

“This is an insult to people who died for the revolutionary flag,” said Abu Abdullah, a former English major at the university.

“We are not forcing anything on anyone,” the Jabhat member said. “We offered it as a choice. We did not take down the revolutionary flags in the city—even though we could have.”

David Bromwich, a Yale literature professor, is one of my favorite political commentators, with an especially keen eye on Barack Obama’s cynically plutocratic policies.

That being said, I do have a bit of a bone to pick with him over an article of his on the New York Review website titled Stay out of Syria. Since the magazine has been a champion of “humanitarian interventions” in the past (Michael Ignatieff pushed for making war on Iraq early on there, and before that the magazine was Serbophobia, Inc.), it is of some note that they are publishing such an article. It goes hand in hand, I supposed, with Dissent Magazine’s laptop bombardier Michael Walzer urging the president to continue with a “dithering” approach.

Of course, if the intention is to avoid an Iraq-style invasion, nobody can question the wisdom of staying out—even though there are no signs that after two years American imperialism has any interest in supporting the “moderate” rebels whose leader has said: “Iran’s possession of nuclear capabilities poses no threat to any Sunni but it will be a formidable deterrent to the evil powers that are rushing madly upon the Muslim World.”

To some extent, the analytical errors in David’s article are probably a function of relying on the bourgeois press, which reflecting the “dithering” approach of the president is keen to find any excuse to allow the status quo to continue.

For example, David echoes the al-Nusra Front = al-Qaeda line that is dominant in the US press. I would recommend that he pay closer attention to alternative journalism that incorporates a far more sophisticated understanding of the “jihadist” problem, Scott Lucas’s Enduring America Worldview in particular.

Scott’s treatment of the al-Qaeda linkage is indispensable.

For weeks, we have noted how the media and “experts” have used one paragraph from the statement of a leader of the Islamist faction Jabhat al-Nusra — ripping it out of context of the rest of the statement, let alone developments on the ground or an understanding of the Syria conflict — reducing the group to the simplistic tags of “Al Qa’eda-linked” or “Al Qa’eda affiliate”.

For the full story, go here.

David’s warnings about the jihadist threat in Syria are based on a McClatchy’s article by Nancy Youssef titled “Middle East in turmoil 10 years after Iraq invasion that officials said would bring peace” that calls attention to a leaflet distributed by al-Nusra Front rebels that urged the residents of Raqqa, the first provincial capital to fall to anti-Baathist rebels, to “beware of democracy”, giving one the impression that the city had become some kind of menacing lair of bearded fanatic, Sharia-ruled dictatorship.

In fact the city belies this image, if you read a recent article in the New Yorker Magazine by Rania Abouzeid reporting from Raqqa. Despite Jon Lee Anderson, the magazine does let a useful item slip by from time to time. Despite the Islamist warnings about democracy, the city appeared to be far freer than those under Baathist rule, as this debate over the Islamist black flag would indicate:

“With this banner you have cleaved us from our country Syria,” Abu Moayad said. “Why is it here? We are not an Islamic emirate; we are part of Syria. This is a religious banner, not a country’s flag.”

The Jabhat member leaned forward and looked the older man in the eyes. “This is a lack of self-esteem, something we were conditioned to feel toward our religion by a regime that didn’t let us practice it,” he said. “Do you know how many people a day come to offer loyalty to us, to try and join us?”

At that, Abu Moayad lost his temper. He stood up, moved a few steps across the room toward the young masked man, and wagged a finger in his face: “The Syrian revolution rose up to step on Bashar’s neck, but I swear I am with Bashar against this flag!” he yelled. “That is how strongly I feel about it! You are causing fitna [internal divisions]!”

The young man remained seated. “What did you do for the revolution?” he asked.

“I used to transport ammunition smuggled from Iraq to towns in Raqqa province.”

“That’s great, thank you,” said the Jabhat member. He seemed slightly taken aback by an answer he didn’t appear to have expected. “But why do you say that this flag will cause fitna and all of the problems of the Free Army—the thieving and the looting—aren’t fitna?”

The comment only enraged Abu Moayad. “Whoever wrote this is a Zionist!” he said, grabbing the black-banner leaflet out of Abu Noor’s hands.

David also ensures us that the talk about Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons amounts to Judith Miller type reporting in the build-up to the war in Iraq.

On April 26, for example, a story by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt was entitled “White House Says Syria Has Used Chemical Arms.” The factual substance of the article was ambiguous, and its headline might more accurately have read: “Chemical Weapons Used in Syria. US Uncertain of Source.”

Well, in just over a month we are a lot more certain about the source. A long and very detailed article in Le Monde makes the case that al-Assad has been using chemical weapons even if earlier reports of Sarin gas were unfounded.

In the northern part of Jobar, which was struck by a similar attack, General Abu Mohammad Al-Kurdi, commander of the Free Syrian Army’s first division (which groups five brigades), said that his men saw government soldiers leave their positions just before other men ‘wearing chemical protection suits’ surged forward and set ‘little bombs, like mines’ on the ground that began giving off a chemical product.

The blogger Brown Moses, whose articles on weaponry in the Syrian civil war are highly regarded, provided even more confirmation.

Now of course the fact that the Baathist dictatorship is using illegal weapons is no excuse for an Iraq-style invasion of Syria but it behooves those writing about Syria to avoid making facile comparisons with Bush’s war. The simple fact is that the opposition to al-Assad is not the kind that American imperialism trusts, no matter if John McCain sits down with it. To get a real idea of what policy-makers have in mind, it’s worth taking a look at a recent article in the LA Times. This appears to be the form that “humanitarian intervention” will take, using the same kind of excuses about Sharia law, oppression of women, etc. that were made for going into Afghanistan. It is of some interest that the LA Times cites Amnesty International, an outfit that spread the Hill and Knowlton “throwing the babies out of the incubators” hoax that led to the first Gulf War. Amnesty, of course, is one of the NY Review’s favorite human rights authorities.

CIA begins sizing up Islamic extremists in Syria for drone strikes

The strategy is part of the agency’s secret contingency planning to protect the U.S. and its allies as the violence there grows. Some militants in Syria are seen as closely linked to Al Qaeda.

March 15, 2013|By Ken Dilanian and Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — The CIA has stepped up secret contingency planning to protect the United States and its allies as the turmoil expands in Syria, including collecting intelligence on Islamic extremists for the first time for possible lethal drone strikes, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The increased U.S. effort comes as radicalized Islamic fighters have won a growing share of rebel victories. The State Department says one of the strongest militias, Al Nusra Front, is a terrorist organization that is indistinguishable from the group Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Amnesty International reported Thursday that some Syrian opposition fighters routinely executed captives and suspected informants, although the group said Assad’s security forces were even more brutal.

A Youtube video has gone viral. You can find 754,000 references to it on Google and it is displayed prominently on MRZine (where else?) It shows a commander of the Farouq Brigades cutting out the heart of a dead Syrian soldier and taking a bite out of it. While such depravity is not to be condoned, how does it compare to these reports in today’s NY Times that mentions this incident but has much more to say about the real atrocities:

The recent executions, reconstructed by speaking with residents and human rights monitors, unfolded over three days in two Sunni enclaves in the largely Alawite and Christian province, first in the village of Bayda and then in the Ras al-Nabeh district of the nearby city of Baniyas.

Government troops and supporting militias went house to house, killing entire families and smashing men’s heads with concrete blocks.

Antigovernment activists provided lists of 322 victims they said had been identified. Videos showed at least a dozen dead children. Hundreds more people are reported missing.

“How can we reach a point of national forgiveness?” said Ahmad Abu al-Khair, a well-known blogger from Bayda. He said that the attacks had begun there, and that 800 of about 6,000 residents were missing.

Multiple video images that residents said they had recorded in Bayda and Ras al-Nabeh — of small children lying where they died, some embracing one another or their parents — were so searing that even some government supporters rejected Syrian television’s official version of events, that the army had “crushed a number of terrorists.”

One prominent pro-government writer, Bassam al-Qadi, took the unusual, risky step of publicly blaming loyalist gunmen for the killings and accusing the government of “turning a blind eye to criminals and murderers in the name of ‘defending the homeland.’ “

Images of the killings in and around Baniyas have transfixed Syrians. In one video that residents say shows victims in Ras al-Nabeh, the bodies of at least seven children and several adults lie tangled and bloody on a rain-soaked street. A baby girl, naked from the waist down, stares skyward, tiny hands balled into fists. Her round face is unblemished, but her belly is darkened and her legs and feet are charred into black cinders.

Opposition leaders called the Baniyas killings sectarian “cleansing” aimed at pushing Sunnis out of territory that may form part of an Alawite rump state if Syria ultimately fractures. Mr. Houry said the killings inevitably raised such fears, though there was no evidence of such a broad policy. Tens of thousands of displaced Sunnis are staying in the province, largely safe.

Not all reactions followed sectarian lines. Survivors said Christian neighbors had helped survivors escape, and on Tuesday, Alawite and Christian residents of the province said they were starting an aid campaign for victims to “defy the sectarian wind.”

Mr. Qadi, the pro-government writer, labeled the killers “criminals who do not represent the Alawites” and called on the government to immediately “acknowledge what happened” and arrest “those hyenas.”

He added: “This has happened in a lot of places. Baniyas is only the most recent one.”

When the uprising began in March 2011 as a peaceful movement, Sunnis in Bayda raised banners denouncing Sunni extremists, seeking to reassure Alawites that they opposed Mr. Assad, not his sect, said Mr. Abu al-Khair, the blogger.

In May 2011, security forces stormed the village, killing demonstrators, including women.

After that, Bayda remained largely quiet. Most activists and would-be fighters left. But residents said they often helped defecting soldiers escape, a pattern they believe set off the violence.

Activists said that on May 2, around 4 a.m., security forces came to detain defectors, and were ambushed in a fight that killed several government fighters — the first known armed clash in Baniyas. The government called in reinforcements and, by 7 a.m., began shelling the village.

A pro-government television channel showed a reporter on a hill above Bayda. Smoke rose from green slopes and houses below, where, the reporter said, “terrorists” were hiding. A group of men the reporter described as government fighters walked unhurriedly through a square.

“God willing, Bayda will be finished today,” a uniformed man said on camera.

What happened next was described in Skype interviews with four survivors who for their safety gave only nicknames, an activist in Baniyas, and Mr. Abu al-Khair, who said he had spoken from Damascus with more than 30 witnesses.

Men in partial or full military dress went door to door, separating men — and boys 10 and older — from women and younger children.

Residents said some gunmen were from the National Defense Forces, the new framework for pro-government militias, mainly Alawites in the Baniyas area. They bludgeoned and shot men, shot or stabbed families to death and burned houses and bodies.

The activist in Baniyas, Abu Obada, said security forces had told people to gather in the square, and some Bayda villagers, fearing a massacre, attacked them with weapons abandoned by defectors. Other residents disputed that or were unsure because they had been hiding.

A cousin of Mr. Abu al-Khair’s, who gave her name as Warda al-Hurra, or the Free Rose, said her female relatives had described being herded to a bedroom with children, and heard male relatives crying out in pain nearby. At one point, her cousin Ahmed, 10, and brother Othman, 16, were brought in, injured and “limp as a towel,” she said.

Her aunt begged a guard to let them stay, but he said, “They’ll kill me if I make one single mistake.”

Soon another gunman shouted at him and took the boys away. They are still missing.

The gunmen brought more women, until there were 100 in the room. He ordered the guard to kill them. The guard said: “Don’t be rash! Take a breath.”

The man relented. The women heard gunmen celebrating in the square; later they were released. When they ventured out, there were “bodies on every corner,” Ms. Hurra said.

Another resident, Abu Abdullah, said he had fled his house and returned after dark to find stabbed, charred bodies of women and children dumped in the square, and 30 of his relatives dead.

Omar, of nearby Ras al-Nabeh, the man who had dragged dozens of bodies from the streets, said he had helped Bayda residents pick up bodies, placing 46 in two houses and the rest in a mosque, then had run away, fearing the return of the killers. He said he had recognized some bodies, including the village sheik, Omar al-Bayassi, whom some considered pro-government.

One video said to be from Bayda showed eight dead children on a bed. Two toddlers cuddled face to face; a baby rested on a dead woman’s shoulder.

On May 4, shelling and gunfire began to hit Ras al-Nabeh. Abu Yehya, a resident, hid in his house with his wife and two children, who stayed quiet: “Their instincts took over.” Two days later, he said, he emerged to find his neighbors, a family of 13, shot dead against a wall.

On May 6, security forces allowed in Red Crescent workers. Bodies were tossed and bulldozed into trucks and dumped in a mass grave, Mr. Abu al-Khair said.

Residents posted smiling pictures of children they said had been killed: Moaz al-Biassi, 1 year old, and his sister Afnan, 3. Three sisters, Halima, Sara, and Aisha. Curly-haired Noor, and Fatima, too little to have much hair but already sporting earrings.

Mr. Obada said residents on Tuesday were indignant when a government delegation offered compensation for damaged houses, saying, “What do you get if you rebuild the house and the whole family is dead?”

Displaced Sunnis who had sheltered there are fleeing, and some say Alawites are no longer welcome.

“It’s now impossible for them to stay in Syria,” Omar said.

Socialists and War: Two Opposing Trends published by Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is as thin politically as it page-wise. Clocking in at 46 pages, most of the book consists of freely available published material: a reprint from PSL’s newspaper, a Dissident Voice interview with Brian Becker who is the national director of PSL’s front group ANSWER Coalition, and a historical document, the Basel Manifesto. The only original work is Becker’s essay, “Socialists and War: Two Opposing Trends,” which claims that socialist debates over imperialist intervention into the Arab Spring are the modern analog to the split within the socialist movement over World War One with myself as Plekhanov and PSL as – who else? – the Bolsheviks. (Whether Becker gets to play Lenin and Mazda Majidi Trotsky or vice versa in their 1914-1917 reenactment is unclear.)

The book is a reminder that seven dollars doesn’t buy much of anything these days.

full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8293

The Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) is not alone in trading its support for the revolution for “a plague on both your houses” neutrality. The Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) made an almost identical shift, albeit theirs seems to be based on smears and falsehoods about the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rather than an all-sided assessment of the contradictions of the Syrian opposition. Although neither group is terribly influential, the essentials of the narrative both have adopted about Syria is the predominant one among progressives in the West thanks to outlets like The Nation, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, MRZine Online, Mondoweiss, Global Research, Black Agenda Report, Jacobin, among many others.

From Self-Defense to Jihad?

The shift to the right among Marxists parallels the evolution of petty-bourgeois Arab intellectuals such as Jadiliya who supported Syria’s peaceful demonstrators but recoiled in fear when these same demonstrators grew tired of being cut down by machine gun fire and took up arms to defend themselves. If the revolution’s unavoidable militarization repelled these intellectuals, the militarized revolution’s “Islamization” repelled Marxists like AWL, CWI, and As’ad AbuKhalil, the Angry (but not intelligent) Arab.

Underlying these shifts is the question of method.

full article:
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8118

http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=7963

Please go to
http://www.syrianassistance.com/our-activities.html
to help.