US ADMINISTRATION:
“REBELS FIGHTING THE ASSAD REGIME WOULDN'T SUPPORT AMERICAN INTERESTS IF THEY
WERE TO SEIZE POWER”
By Michael Pröbsting,
Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT),
22.8.2013,www.thecommunists.net
The renowned news
agency The Associated Press reports about a document of the Obama
administration which it has obtained. One of the highest U.S. officials,
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in a
letter to a congressman the refusal of the US government to lent support to the
Syrian rebels.
This is how The
Associated Press summarizes the position of the U.S. government:
“The Obama
administration is opposed to even limited U.S. military intervention in Syria
because it believes rebels fighting the Assad regime wouldn't support American
interests if they were to seize power right now, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to a congressman in a letter obtained by
The Associated Press.
Effectively ruling
out U.S. cruise missile attacks and other options that wouldn't require U.S.
troops on the ground, Dempsey said the military is clearly capable of taking
out Syrian President Bashar Assad's air force and shifting the balance of the
Arab country's 2½-year war back toward the armed opposition. But he said such
an approach would plunge the United States deep into another war in the Arab
world and offer no strategy for peace in a nation plagued by ethnic rivalries.
"Syria today is
not about choosing between two sides but rather about choosing one among many
sides," Dempsey said in the letter Aug. 19 to Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.
"It is my belief that the side we choose must be ready to promote their
interests and ours when the balance shifts in their favor. Today, they are
not." (…) Despite calling for Assad to leave power in 2011, President
Barack Obama has steadfastly refused to allow the U.S. to be drawn directly
into the conflict.“ (1)
The Syrian Revolution
as part of the Arab Revolution
For revolutionaries
this statement of a leading representative of US imperialism is hardly
surprising. The RCIT has explained from the beginning that the Arab Revolution
– which started in January 2011 in Tunisia and reached Syria in March of that
year – is a historic event which shattered the political order that US
imperialism and its allies imposed in North Africa and the Middle East in the
past decades. Millions of workers, peasants and poor have entered the political
arena and fight for bread and freedom. They have overthrown arch-reactionary
bourgeois dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. They are fighting a
bloody civil war in Syria with more than 100.000 people dead.
But given the lack of
revolutionary parties they have suffered and still suffer setbacks. They face
enemies in form of either by bourgeois semi-democratic governments which came
out of parliamentary elections and who bloc the unfinished democratic
revolution (Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen). Or they face open dictatorships which
are determined to fully crush the revolutionary process as we see it in Syria,
Egypt and Bahrain.
The imperialist
powers were all shattered by the Arab Revolution. Since then they either try to
crush it via allies or to contain it by trying to buy-off and succumb the
forces that have come to power.
The RCIT supported
the Syrian Revolution from the beginning, called for the formation of workers
and peasants councils and militias to bring down the Assad dictatorship and
form a workers’ and peasants’ government. We called for the support of the
rebel movement despite its Islamist and secular petty-bourgeois and bourgeois
leaderships without giving them any political support. (2)
It has been a slander
of the mass rebellion in Syria to denounce it as an imperialist-inspired
conspiracy. It started as peaceful mass mobilizations for democratic rights and
– after the brutal suppression of Assad’s guards – turned into a civil war. Various
leftists have terribly erred in supporting the Assad regime and claiming that
US imperialism uses the Syrian rebels as tools.
They justified their
support for Assad by referring to the verbal denunciations of the regime in
Damascus by the Western imperialist powers and its collaboration with parts of
the Syrian rebel’s leadership. Such collaborations certainly did and still do
take place. But this is only a subordinated element in the Syrian rebels
struggle. The last two and a half years proved that US imperialism has no
interest to intervene seriously in Syria at all. Quite the opposite, it is
blacklisting the Syrian Islamists forces and warns of the dangers of them
coming to power. The document of US General Dempsey emphasizes this explicitly.
The rebels have not
even received any significant modern weapons from the Western Powers until now.
The situation is very different on the other side of the civil war: Russian
imperialism fully supports the Assad regime and sends it huge amount of modern
weapons.
Of course
circumstances can change and this or that imperialist power might also want to
intervene. But programs and tactics have to be based on the reality and not
speculations about future possible events. Anything else is day-dreaming and
phrase-mongering.
It is only natural
for imperialist powers to try to utilize civil wars for their interests. In the
case of Syria it is obviously that it is part of the sphere of influence of
Russian imperialism (and China to a certain degree). Moscow wants to keep its
hegemony in Syria and Washington would like to get a foothold there.
As we elaborated in
another document, such imperialist interference has happened hundreds of times
in the history of liberation wars in colonial and semi-colonial countries. German
imperialism for example lent material and military support for the Irish
national revolutionaries during the First World War. Similar things happened
during the Second World War where for example Japanese imperialism supported
the Indian bourgeois independence fighter Bose. And the US and UK imperialists
on the other hand supported the Tito partisans in Yugoslavia. Only political
analphabets could conclude from this that these liberation struggles were
reactionary and only imperialist tools. (3)
Lenin on liberation
wars and imperialist interference
For Marxists such
contradictory struggles are nothing new. Already one hundred years ago the
great Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin explained that in the epoch
of imperialism the big powers will always try to interfere and utilize national
and democratic conflicts. He insisted that this must not lead Marxists to
automatically take a defeatist position in these conflicts. It depends on which
factor becomes the dominant aspect – the national, democratic liberation
struggle or the imperialist war of conquest.
„Britain and France
fought the Seven Years’ War for the possession of colonies. In other words,
they waged an imperialist war (which is possible on the basis of slavery and
primitive capitalism as well as on the basis of modern highly developed
capitalism). France suffered defeat and lost some of her colonies. Several
years later there began the national liberation war of the North American
States against Britain alone. France and Spain, then in possession of some
parts of the present United States, concluded a friendship treaty with the
States in rebellion against Britain. This they did out of hostility to Britain,
i.e., in their own imperialist interests. French troops fought the British on
the side of the American forces. What we have here is a national liberation war
in which imperialist rivalry is an auxiliary element, one that has no serious
importance. This is the very opposite to what we see in the war of 1914-16 (the
national element in the Austro-Serbian War is of no serious importance compared
with the all-determining element of imperialist rivalry). It would be absurd,
therefore, to apply the concept imperialism indiscriminately and conclude that
national wars are “impossible”. A national liberation war, waged, for example,
by an alliance of Persia, India and China against one or more of the
imperialist powers, is both possible and probable, for it would follow from the
national liberation movements in these countries. The transformation of such a
war into an imperialist war between the present-day imperialist powers would
depend upon very many concrete factors, the emergence of which it would be
ridiculous to guarantee.“ (4)
In another article
Lenin compared the possibility of imperialist interference in national
liberation struggles for their aims with the possible interference of sections
of monopoly capital in democratic struggles in imperialist countries. In both
cases, Lenin argued, it would be wrong to refuse support for theses struggles
because of this interference:
„On the other hand,
the socialists of the oppressed nations must, in particular, defend and
implement the full and unconditional unity, including organisational unity, of
the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without
this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and
their class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in face of all
manner of intrigues, treachery and trickery on the part of the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations persistently utilise the slogans of
national liberation to deceive the workers; in their internal policy they use
these slogans for reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the dominant
nation (for example, the Poles in Austria and Russia who come to terms with
reactionaries for the oppression of the Jews and Ukrainians); in their foreign
policy they strive to come to terms with one of the rival imperialist powers
for the sake of implementing their predatory plans (the policy of the small
Balkan states, etc.). The fact that the struggle for national liberation
against one imperialist power may, under certain conditions, be utilised by
another “great” power for its own, equally imperialist, aims, is just as
unlikely to make the Social-Democrats refuse to recognise the right of nations
to self-determination as the numerous cases of bourgeois utilisation of
republican slogans for the purpose of political deception and financial plunder
(as in the Romance countries, for example) are unlikely to make the
Social-Democrats reject their republicanism.” (5)
Taking a
revolutionary path today in Egypt and Syria
It is important that
revolutionaries today who adhere to the tradition of Lenin and the Communist
International apply such a concrete and dialectical approach to liberation
struggles and refuse a mechanistic and economist approach which can only lead
into the counterrevolutionary camp.
It is no accident
that the Syrian regime immediately cheered the military coup d’état in Egypt.
It understood much better than many so-called Marxists that the coup was a
heavy blow against the Arab Revolution and therefore also against the Syrian
Revolution.
It is a primary
obligation of revolutionaries to support the popular masses’ struggle both
against the military dictatorship in Egypt and against the Assad
dictatorship-in Syria. The RCIT is dedicated to this task.
Footnote
(1) Bradley Klapper:
Dempsey: Syrian rebels wouldn't back US interests, Associated Press, August 21,
2013,
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/dempsey-syrian-rebels-wouldnt-back-us-interests
(2) See Yossi
Schwartz: Class struggle and religious sectarianism in Syria, 12.6.2013,
http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/class-struggle-and-religious-sectarianism-in-syria/;
Yossi Schwartz: Syria: After the defeat in Qusayr and ahead of the Battle for
Aleppo, 11.6.2013, http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/syria-after-defeat-in-qusayr;
ISL-Leaflet: Victory to the Revolution in Syria!
http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/victory-to-revolution-in-syria.
see also Michael Pröbsting: The Coup d'État in Egypt and the Bankruptcy of the
Left’s “Army Socialism”. A Balance Sheet of the coup and another Reply to our
Critics (LCC, WIVP, SF/LCFI), Revolutionary Communist International Tendency
(RCIT), 8.8.2013, www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/egypt-and-left-army-socialism.
(3) Michael
Pröbsting: The Coup d'État in Egypt and the Bankruptcy of the Left’s “Army
Socialism”. A Balance Sheet of the coup and another Reply to our Critics (LCC,
WIVP, SF/LCFI), Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT),
8.8.2013,
www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/egypt-and-left-army-socialism
(4) V. I. Lenin: The
Junius Pamphlet (1916); in: LCW 22, pp. 310-11
(5) V. I. Lenin: The
Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1916); in:
LCW 22, p. 148