Syria and Iran resist imperialist aggression
SYRIA
From “peaceful protesters”
to “freedom fighters”
Ever since Syria’s first
stirrings of unrest began in the spring, the imperialist media bust a gut
trying to convince us all that what was at issue was a spontaneous popular
democratic revolt on Cairo lines, pitting unarmed peaceful protestors against a
homicidal response from the state’s armed forces. All the information to the
contrary that leaked in round the edge via PressTV, Russia Today and elsewhere was studiously ignored. No matter what such sources
revealed about the smuggling of weapons into rebel hands, the manipulation of
protest marches by armed fundamentalist gangs or the sighting of terrorist
snipers on the rooftops, none of this sufficed to shake the media hounds from
their dogged allegiance to the imperialist mantra: the opposition was peaceful,
the government alone employed force.
However, when in October the US and Europe tried to
push through a UN Security Council resolution of the type so recently employed
as a pretext for massacring Libya, China and Russia vetoed the proposal. Thus
deprived of a diplomatic pretext for direct intervention, and with the fiction
about universal peaceful protest versus armed tyranny wearing ever thinner, the
propaganda line abruptly changed gear. Instead of persisting with denials about
the violent character of the “democratic opposition”, a new spate of
attacks on the security forces was now admitted, celebrated and given out as
supposed evidence of imminent mass defections from the army.
So it was that we came to be told that on 16
November the Air Force Intelligence HQ in a suburb of Damascus had been
bombed. The self-styled “Syrian National Council” (SNC), from its haven
in Turkey, claimed this terror attack on behalf of the “Free Syrian Army”
(FSA). Then on 20 November the same terrorists were “credited” with
having launched an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) attack on the Ba’ath
Socialist Party’s offices in the centre of Damascus.
The day after this act of terror, the British
Foreign Secretary William Hague met opposition leaders in London and declared
that regime change would be “the best thing for the future of Syria”. Meanwhile the economic blackmail went up another notch, as on 27 November the
reactionaries controlling the Arab League imposed a new swathe of sanctions
intended to starve Syria of trade and investment and a few days later Turkey
froze (i.e. stole) the financial assets held by the Damascus government and
blocked all transactions with the country’s central bank.
On 2 December terrorist gangs attacked a military
intelligence base in Idlib, in the north west of the country, reportedly
slaughtering at least eight soldiers. The London-based Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights also claimed and that thirteen people had suffered injuries in the
course of an attack on an air force intelligence centre in the port city of Latakia. Then, suitably geed up by talks between the opposition and Hillary Clinton in Geneva on 6 December, two days later armed gangs blew up a pipeline bearing oil from the
east of the country to a Homs refinery in the west.
As this article is written, the rebels continue to
feed the media with new tales of murderous derring-do, here gloating over the
claimed slaughter of at least eight soldiers in the ambush of an army convoy on
the outskirts of Hama, there exulting over another 7 soldiers slain by
so-called “defectors”. Whatever the truth of these bloodcurdling
assertions, it is true indeed that over 2,000 members of the security forces
have already sacrificed their lives for the cause of Syria’s unity and
independence. 13 December alone saw another 17 military funerals, and
doubtless there will be more such victims of western backed terror by the time
this goes to press.
Lacking support in Syria, the rebellion is weak and divided
However, the problem for the SNC
quislings-in-waiting and their snipers and bombers in the supposed “Free
Syria Army” is that, when they step out of the shadows, they cut a less
than convincing figure. They clamour for the UN to impose a “no fly zone”,
conspire with France and Turkey to establish “buffer zones” and “humanitarian
corridors”, all transparently aimed at securing the kind of “humanitarian
intervention” which resulted in Libya getting bombed for eight months and
seeing her people delivered into the hands of western-backed lynch mobs and
terror gangs. But the harder they clamour for assistance from the West (and
from reactionaries in the Arab League, Turkey and Israel), the clearer it
becomes just how minimal is the support which these RPG-toting “democrats”
actually enjoy in the country to which
they lay claim.
Contrary to the media pretence that the root of the
troubles is sectarian antagonism between a minority Shi’ite Alawite government
and a majority Sunni population, the Ba’athist-led National Progressive Front
coalition governs the country on a secular basis. It is precisely this secular
policy which broadens Assad’s appeal across confessional boundaries, in a
country which includes Sunni, Alawite, Christian and Druze citizens. It is a
telling feature of Syria’s progressive character that the majority of her
people identify themselves first of all as Syrians, and only secondarily by
considerations of religious background. Conversely, it is those who seek to
undermine Syria’s anti-imperialist tradition, promoting the most obscurantist
and reactionary religious forms as a cloak for imperialist meddling, who seek
to undermine national unity and stir up sectarianism – just as in Iraq and Libya.
Happily, the rebels themselves, just like the
Libyan rebels before them, are disunited to a degree which severely embarrasses
their benefactors in the West. Foreign Secretary Hague, meeting with SNC
contras in November, begged his protégés to botch together at least an
appearance of unity, piously intoning that, “At an extreme moment in their
nation’s history, it is important for opposition groups to be able to put aside
their own differences and come to a united view of the way forward.” To
assist in this exercise in stitching together damp blotting paper, Hague has
reportedly appointed an “ambassador-designate” to lead liaison efforts.
Claims that the FSA are composed primarily of
Syrian army defectors (as opposed to mercenaries released by the US from jails in Iraq and armed by the West) seem dubious, even judging from some capitalist press
reports. In a story published on the Guardian website on 11 December
(‘Inside Syria: the rebel calls for arms and ammunition’), Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
reports on his encounters with rebel fighters in the mountainous north of the
country. What they have to tell him is revealing. The people outside Syria (i.e. the Turkish-based SNC) “have no weight on the ground”, whilst those fighting
inside Syria “don’t have a Benghazi” (i.e. a solid base of support for
counterrevolution). The fighter gestures to his fellows, telling the
journalist, “Look at all these men in this room. I didn’t know any of them
before March and they didn’t know me. I don’t trust them and they don’t trust
me.” As for defections, he tells Abdul-Ahad, “I don’t count on major
defections in the army” – the only way you’d get that, he says, would be to
have a no fly zone where people could hide from the security forces. Another
fighter tells him that “There is no such thing as a Free Syria Army. It’s a joke. The real revolutionaries are here in Syria in the mountains.” However
this “real revolutionary” confesses that his own morale is below zero,
claiming “people are getting killed – yet still there are no defections in
the army”. Interestingly, he ascribes this state of affairs to the “ideological”
cohesion of the army, controlled by the political officers of the Ba’ath. He
concludes despairingly that “Even if a general did defect, he wouldn’t
defect with his tanks and soldiers, he would defect on his own.” The
message is clear: these “patriots” would sell their country to the West
in exchange for assistance in overthrowing Assad. Without such assistance,
they would stand as little a chance of success as their toy soldier
counterparts in Libya had stood – before NATO was transformed into their own
private Luftwaffe.
Assad stands firm
Meanwhile, beyond all the media ballyhoo about the
rebels, ordinary Syrians have been getting on with business as usual. The four-yearly
local government elections kicked off in mid-December, with 42,000 candidates
standing for 17,000 seats. The successful candidates will be responsible for
implementing the reforms which the government has announced over recent months
in response to legitimate public criticism. Just how little the West-backed
opposition really cares about such reforms, other than as an arbitrary pretext
for undermining the stability of the anti-imperialist state, is shown by the
fact that they have chosen to boycott these elections. Damascus has long since
committed to these reforms, and from the outset has welcomed even the Arab
League proposal to send observers into Syria – so long as this is not
accompanied by the enforcement of sanctions against the Syrian people. The
League’s stubborn refusal to take yes for an answer shows how dishonestly
intended was the original proposal.
No less an authority than the Jewish Chronicle
gives a flavour of just how dismal would be the prospects of the much-vaunted
rebellion were it obliged to rely upon support from the broad masses of Syrian
society, rather than hiding behind the skirts of imperialist backers. In an
article penned by John R. Bradley (‘Syrian revolt faces secular opposition’, 1
December 2011), the author notes that “when it comes to the Assad regime,
greatly exaggerated reports of its imminent demise have been a steady staple of
the Western media for nine months and counting”, whereas the “truth is
that, in and of themselves, economic sanctions by the Arab League will make no
difference to Assad’s chances of survival in the medium term, which are far
higher than most Western commentators believe…”
Bradley continues, “If a popular uprising
against Assad had ever been on the cards, it would have already happened. In
fact, all the evidence suggests that he still enjoys massive support among the
mostly secular Syrian population, who rightly fear that the only alternative to
their long-faced president is an extraordinarily vicious and prolonged civil
war… the West and its regional allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey appear determined
to orchestrate an armed revolutionary uprising, with the Arab League sanctions
aimed at deepening the divide between Assad and his people. If that comes to
pass, Assad and his military backers will fight to the death, and the resulting
civil war in religiously and ethnically complex Syria would make the Libyan
revolution look like a high-school prom. But with the same eventual outcome:
the triumph of Wahhabi-funded and controlled Islamist militias.”
UPDATE: 30 December:
When the Arab League finally
sent its monitors, those who had clamoured hardest for the observer mission to
be sent then promptly began to rubbish the mission’s findings – because the
monitors took one look at Homs and reported that, contrary to the horror
stories retailed by anonymous “activists”, the overall situation was “reassuring”,
with a few armoured cars on the street but none of the myriad tanks alleged by
the rebels! This was not at all what the rebels and their puppet-masters had
expected. In an attempt at damage-limitation they claimed that (a) all the
tanks must have been cunningly withdrawn, and that in any case (b) the leader
of the mission was connected with the Sudanese government so was bound to be
lying. As we go to press, the rebels are doing their best to turn the
mission’s visits back into the pro-Western propaganda opportunity that was
intended. It will take an awful lot of manufactured photo opportunities to undo
the damage, however.
___________________________________________
IRAN
IAEA: from
watchdog to lapdog
Meanwhile the same toxic mix
of black propaganda, diplomatic arm-twisting, economic blackmail, covert war
and threat of direct attack being brought to bear upon Syria is likewise being endured by Iran. A fresh round in the diplomatic harassment of Iran was
signalled by the publication on 8 November of a new report from the
Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), the UN body
responsible for ensuring that countries signed up to the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) comply with treaty requirements. Iran is a willing signatory; Israel has consistently refused to sign. Yet the Zionists have “proliferated”
without let or hindrance from the “international community”, and have long
since been in possession of the nuclear bomb – an estimated 200 fully
operational bombs to be precise. When one of its own scientists, Mordecai
Vanunu, had the courage to blow the whistle on Israel’s WMD, he was kidnapped
abroad and slammed into solitary for years whilst that same “international
community” sat on its hands. By contrast Iran, a willing signatory to the
NPT, has been hounded for years by imperialist powers hell-bent on abusing the
IAEA’s compliance procedures as a means of violating Iran’s sovereignty and
impeding her work in the fields of nuclear energy and medical science.
For years, attempts to force the IAEA to lend its
authority to Washington’s unproven allegations about Tehran’s supposed pursuit
of a Persian nuclear bomb were frustrated by an IAEA which was not disposed to
be so entirely under the US thumb as the White House desired. Whilst IAEA
investigations on Iranian soil were no less intrusive than those to which Iraq
was subjected in the farcical quest for non-existent WMD, that body’s former
chief, Mohammed ElBaradei, steadfastly drew the line at lending credence to
Washington’s baseless claims against Iran.
Over a lengthy period, Washington left no stone
unturned in its single-minded quest for non-existent evidence. Veteran
journalist Seymour Hersh details this frantic search in Democracy Now! “Cheney
kept on having the Joint Special Operations Force Command, JSOC — they would
send teams inside Iran. They would work with various dissident groups – the
Azeris, the Kurds, even Jundallah, which is a very fanatic Sunni opposition
group – and they would do everything they could to try and find evidence of an
undeclared underground facility. We monitored everything. We have incredible
surveillance. In those days, what we did then, we can even do better now. And
some of the stuff is very technical, very classified, but I can tell you,
there’s not much you can do in Iran right now without us finding out something
about it. They found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization. In
other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities
to enrich, but not separate facilities for building a bomb. This is simply a
fact. We haven’t found it, if it does exist. It’s still a fantasy.” (cited
by Media Lens, 24 November)
In the absence of evidence, Washington desperately
needed the second-best outcome: a lying testimonial from the IAEA carrying the
cachet of UN legitimacy. When ElBaradei ended his stint at the IAEA in 2009, Washington saw its chance. The US went into overdrive to get somebody more pliable into
place, lobbying frantically to shoehorn a rank outsider, Yukiya Amano, into the
top post. Amano’s chief qualification for the job is simple to spot: an
overweening eagerness to please his masters in Washington. A secret cable from
the US Embassy in Vienna, released by WikiLeaks, gloated that Amano accounted
himself “solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from
high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear
weapons program.” Another US cable speaks of a revealing encounter with the
new boy. “This meeting, Amano’s first bilateral review since his election,
illustrates the very high degree of convergence between his priorities and our
own agenda at the IAEA. The coming transition period provides a further window
for us to shape Amano’s thinking before his agenda collides with the IAEA
Secretariat bureaucracy.” (For “bureaucracy”, read, anyone at IAEA
still possessed of a shred of integrity.)
Hersh cites the views of Robert Kelley, a retired
IAEA director, on the supposed “credible” evidence referenced in the 8
November report. Kelley “noted that hundreds of pages of material appear to
come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the IAEA by
a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those
materials, and others, ‘were old news,’ Kelley said, and known to many
journalists. ‘I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’
by the same reporters.’” No such obvious questions troubled the authors of
the IAEA report, who claimed that it now had “credible” evidence that “indicates
that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear
explosive device.”
With the 8 November IAEA report, Washington won at
best a Pyrrhic victory, having effectively destroyed the credibility of the
very body whose endorsement it so relied upon. Pocketing the IAEA report, on 18
November Washington managed to steam-roller through the IAEA’s Board of
Governors a resolution expressing “deep and increasing concern about the
unresolved issues regarding the Iranian nuclear program, including those which
need to be clarified to exclude the existence of possible military dimensions.”
However, Washington had failed to get Iran reported to the Security Council or to impose a deadline for Tehran to comply with the latest
hectoring demands. Clearly the need was felt to ratchet up the campaign of
intimidation another notch. To this end, on 21 November, the US, Britain and Canada announced unilateral sanctions against Iran’s banking and energy sectors. France put in a sly kick too, urging world powers to boycott Iranian oil and freeze (i.e.
steal) her financial assets. China and Russia have joined Iran in denouncing these new sanctions.
The Dirty War
Meanwhile, behind all this fabrication of evidence
and diplomatic bullying, imperialism has long been engaging in a brutal
campaign of espionage, terrorism, assassination and sabotage against Iran, culminating most recently in mysterious explosions at a key defence installation and
a uranium reprocessing facility.
Leading Iranian scientists have long been targeted
for assassination. Recent examples include the car bombs that claimed the lives
of two university professors, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi, and the
booby-trapped motorcycle that slew another professor, Masoud Ali-Mohammadi.
Now, with rival Republican contenders for the US presidency striving to outdo
each other in fascist zeal, the “secret” war against Iran is the best advertised in history. According to AFP (8 December 2011), Newt Gingrich “proposed
at a November 12 debate that Washington kill Iranian scientists and disrupt Tehran’s suspect nuclear program – ‘all of it covertly, all of it deniable’. In that same forum,
Santorum said the United States must do ‘whatever it takes to make sure’ Iran
does not develop a nuclear program — then wondered whether Washington may
already be heavily involved in doing just that. ‘There have been scientists
turning up dead in Russia and in Iran. There have been computer viruses. There
have been problems at their facility. I hope that the United States has been involved with that,’ he said. ‘I hope that we have been doing
everything we can, covertly, to make sure that that program doesn’t proceed.’”
There can be no doubt that Washington, London and Tel Aviv are already up to the neck in dirty tricks without the need for
further prompting from the Tea Baggers. The “computer viruses” to which
Santorum referred clearly has in mind the Stuxnet cyber assault on Iran’s nuclear programme launched last year. Nor are the attacks confined to cyberspace.
In mid November a missile testing base near Tehran suffered a blast which
reportedly killed over 30 members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps,
including a leader of Iran’s missile programme, Major General Hassan Moqqadam. Time
Magazine, on 13 November 2011, said this was the work of Mossad.
Then at the end of November there was a further blast, this time at a uranium
processing plant in Isfahan. Israel’s former director of national security,
Major-General Giora Eiland, bragged that the explosion was no accident, adding
that “There aren’t many coincidences, and when there are so many events
there is probably some sort of guiding hand, though perhaps it’s the hand of
God.” (cited in ‘Shadow War Heating Up. War with Iran: A Provocation Away?’
by Tom Burghardt, 7 December: www. projectworldawareness.com) Curiously, none
of the dirty tricks practiced by Washington and Tel Aviv excites anything like
the manufactured outrage which greeted the B-movie fiction spun around a
non-existent Iranian government plot to bump off the Saudi ambassador to the US.
29 November demonstration
against British Embassy
The self-appointed guardians of democratic western
values send saboteurs and death squads into other people’s countries at will,
safe in the knowledge that the “international community” will not raise
a finger to stop them. But just let some enraged Iranian students lob a few
bricks at the British Embassy and pitch a portrait of the Queen out of the
window and the UN Security Council cannot restrain its righteous indignation,
condemning the demo “in the strongest terms”. William Hague whinged that
Iran had “committed a grave breach” of the Vienna convention.
Obama declared himself “deeply disturbed” by
what had happened, the German foreign minister fulminated against this “violation
of international law”, whilst his French counterpart agreed that “the
Iranian regime has shown what little consideration it has for international
law”.
When we consider the continuous and flagrant
breaches of international law being committed by imperialism in relation to Iran, with or without the cloak of UN “legitimacy”, it is not hard to comprehend the
rage which this arouses in the patriotic youth. So far from acting as the
simple agents of the government, as the western media pretend, the
demonstrators in the end could only be restrained by the government’s own
security forces using teargas to clear the embassy compound, such is the depth
of popular revulsion at what is being attempted against the country’s
sovereignty. (Need we add that, had the demonstrators instead got themselves
tear-gassed protesting against Ahmadi-Nejad,
they would at once have been hailed by the bourgeois media as peaceful
democrats cruelly repressed by a tyrannical regime.)
Iran stands firm
Imperialist aggression against both Syria and Iran
is driven not only by the desire to humble an anti-imperialist force and
strengthen and extend the stranglehold on resources and markets in the middle
east, but also by the strategic goal of containing Russia and China. China in
particular, whose socialist foundations have permitted a rapid return to steady
growth after an initial blip occasioned by a degree of exposure to the
crisis-ridden world market, is well placed to engage in mutually beneficial
trade relations with third world countries anxious to escape domination by
crisis-stricken imperialism. China champions Iran’s right to develop its civil
nuclear industry, and neither China nor Russia has any interest in
collaborating with the West’s sanctions campaign. These realities constitute
an unwelcome stumbling block for the warmongers.
Such considerations, taken together with the
courageous anti-colonial resistance being mounted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia, all add to the perils awaiting the warmongers should they persist. Nor
would it be wise for imperialism to dismiss lightly Iran’s own ability to
defend herself, even without the bomb she is accused of coveting. The recent
successful downing of an advanced US RQ-170 drone over the eastern part of the
country, one of many drones in routine violation of Iranian airspace, not only
exposes US covert operations and demonstrates Tehran’s vigilance but also
delivers sensitive military intelligence into anti-imperialist hands. Already
back in the summer the Iranians not only showed visiting Russian experts a
number of other drones which had previously been shot down, but also displayed
some model drones which they had contrived to design through reverse
engineering! Obama’s risible plea for the return of his spy plane deserves, and
has been accorded, nothing but contempt.
SOLIDARITY
The struggle of the Syrian and the Iranian people
to defend themselves, by contrast, deserves the warmest support from all those
in the anti-imperialist movement, not least those resisting imperialism within
the belly of the beast itself. After all, who better upholds the
anti-capitalist aims of the Occupy Movement than those brave students who dared
to occupy the British Embassy in Tehran? Their own letter to the press, relayed
by the Fars news agency, makes the case admirably.
“‘We have occupied the British embassy to voice
support for the 99 percenters of the world and in opposition to the policies of
the world arrogance,’ the letter said on Saturday. ‘We as the students who have
occupied the British embassy in Tehran announce explicitly that we are standing
for our historical decision and will humiliate Britain and make it regret,’ it
added. The Iranian students called on … people across the world to attack the
interests of Britain in their region and stop London from looting their
countries and nations any further.” (Fars, 3 December, ‘British
Embassy Occupation Meant to Voice Support for World 99 Percenters’)
By giving active solidarity to those who stand in
defence of Iran, Syria and other anti-imperialist countries under attack, we
will strengthen our hand against the same imperialist enemy which is currently
demolishing welfare, looting jobs and driving us into poverty and war. The
national democratic struggle against imperialist oppression that is being waged
by these nations enormously strengthens the world struggle for proletarian
revolution.
Victory to anti-imperialist Syria!
Victory to anti-imperialist Iran!
Death to imperialism!