Editorial — by Noaman G. Ali

War drums are beating in Western countries, sizing up Syria for some kind of military intervention. In Britain, parliament has voted against any military intervention – embarrassing the ruling Conservative party’s leader David Cameron – but that hasn’t stopped the US and French governments from carrying on with plans to strike.

The immediate justification for the pending intervention is the use of chemical weapons on the outskirts of Syrian capital Damascus that have killed perhaps over 1,400 people in a most brutal way. In two years of civil war between the dictatorship headed by Bashar al-Assad and an assortment of opposition groups, over 100,000 people are alleged to have died and several millions have become refugees.

Western governments claim that the Assad regime carried out the chemical attacks. But even if it didn’t, the Assad regime has shown incredible brutality against its population through conventional weapons, funded and backed by Russia and Iran. Long before the anti-regime movement was militarized, peaceful protesters were being massacred with impunity.

In such times, well-meaning people often wonder why it is that we – our governments – don’t do anything to intervene and stop the killing. When Western governments start talking about using military intervention, many folks think it’s for the best. But this approach forgets that Western ruling classes have already been intervening, both in Syria and in the region at large. That’s partly why the mess is such a mess to begin with.

The Syrian regime itself came to power in the 1960s through a popular revolution led by military officers against pro-Western elites. The new regime tried to build an economy independent of negative Western influence by investing in industry and agriculture and raising the living standards of significant sections of the population, especially in rural areas. This degree of economic and political independence has never gone over well with Western ruling classes.

Over time, the expansion of the government and especially the armed forces and secret police developed into one of the more frightening and restrictive regimes that dot the region, often putting down even minor signs of opposition. The regime moved away from its radicalism, and based its repressive aspects on the bargain that it would provide for relatively decent living standards and defense from warmongers like the US and Israel and their allies, the Gulf states.

But more recently the secret police and army apparatus have been used to line the pockets of newer and newer sections of the Syrian elite, while impoverishing the masses and fueling greater inequality. The Israeli state has become ever more unaccountable, continuing to occupy Syrian territory and carrying out strikes inside the country, with no check from the Syrian military – except through roundabout support for the resistance movements Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. The Syrian ruling classes had simply become satisfied with their status quo, sometimes even happily aligning with Western imperialism, such as during the invasion of Iraq in 1990.

The fear and paralysis in Syria ruptured in 2011 when, along with massive eruptions in Tunisia and Egypt, the Syrian masses took to the streets month after month, unarmed, protesting against the Assad regime, saying, “ Yalla, irhal, ya Bashar! ”—“Go on, leave, Bashar.” The regime responded with incredible brutality – including massacres, disappearances, torture and assassinations – falsely claiming that the protesters were armed terrorists.

Many groups did eventually take up arms and many Syrian soldiers defected from the armed forces in order to defend the masses, forming several commands under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. These groups bravely improvised tactics, strategies and even weapons in their rebellion against the regime. Rather than realizing the historic opportunity for a political settlement, the Assad regime simply continued its brutality. Yet, rebels managed to hang on to and then even take over territory as the war proceeded. The historically oppressed Kurdish people in northern Syria also formed self-defense units, and soon formed an autonomous political unit of Western Kurdistan.

But Syria’s geopolitical enemies, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar – all of which are allies of Western imperialists such as the US, Britain, France and Israel – have taken advantage of the disorder to fund and arm some of the groups that are aligned with their interests. Many of these groups are hardline Islamists who seek to make sectarianism worse by targeting religious minorities, including Christians and Alawites. These reactionary groups have engaged in seriously brutal massacres and disappearances of civilians, and have increasingly sidelined the popular and democratic opposition – especially because they have received the bulk of funds and arms from international sponsors.

Islamist armed groups have also attacked the autonomous political unit in Western Kurdistan. Most likely, the Islamists are acting in support of their sponsors in Turkey, who are opposed to any sort of self-determination for the Kurdish people. The largest population of Kurds is currently in Turkey, and they have been fighting for self-determination for over three decades. The Syrian Kurds, in turn, have attempted to prevent Turkey from intervening against the Assad regime – despite opposing it themselves. In Lebanon, Assad regime forces have sought to pressure any anti-regime activity, including through bomb attacks. The Lebanese group Hezbollah, which defeated Israel in 2006, has intervened in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime.

All this goes to show that the conflict is not simply about the Assad regime fighting a domestic opposition. The civil war is also part of a larger attempt to change the balance of forces in the Middle East, especially attempts by the Gulf states (particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar) to weaken the influence of Iran. But what’s more important is that the rulers of Gulf states and Turkey have also tried to weaken the power of the popular masses rising up in their own countries and in others such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya – the Syrian popular masses are also their targets.

These objectives line up with those of the US, Israel and European powers. As the Assad regime appears to have gained the upper hand in the conflict, the chemical attack took place at the outskirts of Damascus and all of these states started rattling their war sabres at a feverish pitch. But Western military intervention is not selfless, nor done with the best of intentions.

As the experience of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya shows, new regimes that come to power at the hands of Western imperialists are not any less corrupt, unequal, or repressive than the ones they replace. Relative economic independence is transformed into total subordination to the world market under Western imperialism. Elements of the former regime as well as new groups form insurgent forces that keep destabilizing the new regimes backed by occupying powers. In Syria, it’s not even clear that military intervention seeks to end the war, it might just be intended to prolong it.

For all these reasons, it’s important for well-meaning people in the West to oppose foreign military intervention in Syria – the only decent solution in this mess is a political settlement. Any bombing will hurt even more civilians, not make things better for them. We should make no mistake here: One major reason that the idea of Western military intervention is facing so much difficulty is that many Syrians on the ground and in the diaspora, representing the popular democratic forces, have strongly resisted such intervention. We should stand with them morally in opposing the Assad regime, and concretely oppose the imperialism of our own ruling classes.

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