In Response to the Syrian Air Attacks

[Darren redstar]

I have a number of concerns and issues with this article. I think that it falls into the leftist anti imperialism trap of only seeing outside intervention as a problem when it is being done by the USA or Britain ( and occasionally France). The daily bombing of civilians by Russian and Iranian aircraft is ignored and thus it can be inferred is not a problem.i think that the article also repeats the conspiracist slur against the  Syrian opposition; blaming the west for instigating the civil war. The civil war began when Assad’s security forces butchered Syrian people peacefully protesting in favour of democracy and free elections. Are we now to turn back time and withdraw our support for the democratic movements against the Stalinist states in 1989 because they had the support of the ‘western powers’? Foreign intervention has caused untold suffering to the people of Syria, but that intervention has overwhhel   been by Putin’s Russia and the Iranian regimes propping up the Assadist dictatorship.the machinations of the other sub imperialism’s in the region have been minor in comparison 

[PJShannon]

Following is a discussion on the page titled: In Response to the Syrian Air Attacks.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!

[alanjjohnstone]

You make some points i agree with and some i don't.Yes it should have been more balanced, drawing attention to the Russian/Iranian /Hezbollah intervention on behalf of Assad. It is a geo-political war now and therefore there exists ulterior motives of the participants. However your other point i have reservations about.The civil war could not have been sustained nor maintained at the level it reached without the interference of foreign powers financing and facilitating armed opposition and arrival of foreign fighters.Our blog Socialism or Your Money Back has followed the development of the 2011 Arab Spring civil disobedience demonstrations and the consequent  militarisation of those protests into what evolved as the Free Syrian Army which then attracted the support outside forces. Use its search  On this forum there has been an active exchange of opinions and views on this threadhttps://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/syria-will-west-attackIt should be noted, that it was the West who insisted as a precondition of a negotiated settlement,  Assad's removal and encouraged the belief that this was imminent. But this was not so. As indicated by the recent statement of the Labour Party's Shadow Foreign Secretary popular support for Assad was underestimated and as the opposition became more sectarian, many minorities leapt from the fence towards Assad's side….better the devil you know, especially if he is secularWithout outside support i think militarily the war would have ended many years ago as did the earlier Hama uprising of 1982. For sure, that resulted in thousands of deaths but nothing on the scale of today's casualties and miseries. I do not believe that Turkey's involvement or Saudi Arabia's or Qatar's as minor. They were instrumental in escalating the civil war and thwarting any peace talks. I think within the first year or so, hopes of the overthrow of Assad and the growth of a democracy disappeared. I also think personally that the remote chance of victory over Assad would have led to the Muslim Brotherhood taking power, as it did in Egypt. I don't think we have adopted is conspiratorial but stuck to the analysis…the only war worth fighting is the class war…But as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto we should settle our accounts with our own capitalist class first…and that is perhaps why the emphasis has been overly placed upon the UK/US role.

[alanjjohnstone]

I think you might find this of interest, Russian attempts to widen its sphere of influence in the regionPart 1 of 3http://www.dw.com/en/russia-uses-church-far-right-for-foothold-in-lebanon/a-43833438Parts 2 and 3 to come and may well be as equally as intriguing.

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