Syria: In imperialist sights

James Turley writes about the Imperialist campaign against Syria and asks where the Left and the Anti-War Movement are. Full text at link.

It is clear at this point that the Syrian uprising - met with such ruthless brutality by the Ba’athist regime - is in the process of being transformed into some kind of civil war. It is equally clear that imperialism has taken sides against the government of Bashar al-Assad. What is less clear is who exactly is fighting the Ba’athists....

All this raises the question: where is the workers’ movement and the left? In Syria, alas, it is hardly in a position to challenge the Islamists for dominance of the uprising. Its largest sections, especially the Syrian Communist Party, are hopelessly compromised by the regime. To the left of the ‘official communists’, there are only small, nascent organisations, which as yet lack visible penetration into society at large. The uprising has involved political strikes, but not on any large scale....

As for our own comrades on the British far left, the story is also somewhat dispiriting. Socialist Worker (February 25) is very keen to accentuate the positive in the rebellion, reporting demonstrations in that tone of forced breathless excitement we all know so well. The Socialist Workers Party still seems to be in ‘Tahrir Square mode’, unable to see that the forces contesting the legacy of the Arab awakening are more fragmental and, in places, more dubious than ever; realism, as ever, loses out to that starry-eyed optimism that no scale of disappointment seems to dissipate.

In any case, our first duty in Britain is to disrupt the game our imperialist rulers are playing with Syria - and what a dangerous game it is, involving not just the fates of Syrian protestors, but also the possibility of a truly horrific war on Iran. A pity, then, that political opportunism and cynical factional manoeuvres have left the anti-war movement in this country reduced to a desiccated, demoralised rump.