It’s a question about how to relate to these “hands off Syria” protests called by Assadist forces because most the speakers will be anti-US bombing but pro-Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. Apologetics & denials about Khan Sheikhoun will be the order of the day from speaker after speaker. Participants will come waving Syrian flags & haloed images of Assad & Putin.

In some places, it may be dangerous to show up with placards denouncing Syrian, Russian, & US bombing. That would be seen as provocation. It wouldn’t be a crowd open to persuasion if their posts on social media are any gauge.

Ironically enough, anti-Assad protests often include support for US bombing. It’s a hell of a mess.

People have to make up their own minds about whether to attend or not with the rule-of-thumb not to go alone & not to invite trouble. People have a right to stand with fascism & Assadism. We have a duty to build a principled antiwar movement opposing all military intervention in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, & elsewhere.

“If Trump loves “beautiful Syrian babies” so much why is he banning them from the United States?”
–Ahmad Shabir

Charles Lister is a research scholar who has written extensively about ISIS & the Free Syrian Army (FSA) for Brookings Institute, a conservative think tank. He tweeted a statement today from the FSA heralding the US bombing of the airbase as a “turning point in the fight against impunity” for Assad & Russia in Syria.

According to Lister’s analysis & “Burning Country” by Leila Al-Shami & Robin Yassin-Kassab, the FSA is not a centralized army of opposition to Assad but a multitude of over a thousand militias without a central command structure. So who actually issued this statement in the name of the FSA is unclear, at least to most of us.
If there are a thousand militias in the FSA who have not cohered as one unit, there are at least a thousand points of view about how to defeat the Assad regime. Looking to the US Pentagon to help defeat Assad is one of those points of view & one of the most misguided & dangerous.

The US military is intervening in Syria as part of the counter-revolutionary forces to defeat the popular revolution against Assad’s dictatorship. The US has conducted nearly 8,000 airstrikes in Syria since 2014. Not a single one of them was to stop Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians or to support the revolution but ostensibly focuses on fighting ISIS.

The US is intervening in Syria for the same reasons it is intervening in Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia. There isn’t a single instance in the past nearly 200 years when the US military has intervened for the purposes of human emancipation from dictatorship.

Many who don’t understand the role of the US in Syria or the general character of the US Pentagon may think the statement from the FSA is a mandate to support US aggression against Assad. Conceding to political delusions & confusions on the part of some Syrians is not a mandate & it would be arrant orientalism to claim that we should. The US is turning the Middle East into a killing field & our mandate is to oppose that with every ounce of our being & to build international solidarity with the peoples of those countries.

The role of the international antiwar movement is to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces, including Russia, the US, Iran, so that the Syrian revolution can proceed to Damascus & take down the Assad regime. That alone is our mandate.

Tariq Ali has roused from his stupor on Assad’s gassing of civilians to deny it happened & to claim “sections of the Western Left,,,are besotted with anti-Assad groupings of various sorts of which the CIA funded groups are the largest.”

Betraying not a hint of that prestigious Oxford education, he continues, “For those who see the Assad regime as the main enemy its obvious that they will be publicly or privately backing Trump’s bombing raid & hoping for more.”

Time to retire the old boy as a political authority when he posts from discredited sources like Off-Guardian, Eva Bartlett, Fares Shehabi, & resorts to political idiocy by claiming opponents of Assad are CIA-funded.

Which sections of the “Western Left” is Ali referring to? Which besotted anti-Assad groupings does he mean? When he can locate them–because they don’t exist, there is no “Western left”–then we can investigate those charges of CIA funding.

Let me just add that this political torpor of Tariq Ali is not new. When I heard him speak ten years ago, most of us needed a cattle prod to keep ourselves awake. There isn’t an original thought or a sign of scholarship in his entire repertoire of banalities.
Let me also add as an antiwar activist of over 50 years of actual organizing, not just speaking like Ali, that I am publicly & privately opposed to Trump’s bombing in Syria as I have been for every war the US has conducted in my lifetime.

Unbelievable to see Trump, CIA officials, & US military guys denouncing Assad for war crimes. It’s just like Netanyahu’s denunciations.

What about Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Central America, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine? What about generations of the most monstrous war crimes in all those countries?

What about Mosul?

Assadists are up in arms against the US bombing of the empty airbase. Are they sure it happened? After all, their memes say the US has lied about Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, & Libya, so why would they tell the truth about that airbase? Maybe evil fairies from outer space did it.

Are Assadists more upset about the bombing of empty airplane hangars than they are about the gassing of civilians? Yes.

No one can seriously believe that Trump gives a rat’s ass about the horrors at Khan Sheikhoun–any more than Assad or Putin do. He is the monster who said he’d bomb the shit out of Muslims because they’re all terrorists & the man trying to ban Muslim refugees. He looked like an ass at his press conference just pretending to care because human empathy is no part of his deranged character.

Many believe the US bombing of the airbase last night was an act of deterrence to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. The US Pentagon has the most sophisticated military surveillance equipment in the world & knows exactly what Assad & Putin have been using against Syrian civilians, including chemicals, gases, barrel, thermobaric, cluster, & bunker buster bombs. They could identify where Syria’s hidden sarin & VX gases are stored.

But the US is not at odds with Assad & Putin in destroying the Syrian popular revolution against dictatorship; the Pentagon functions in Syria as part of the counter-revolution, just as they do in Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Palestine, & elsewhere.

The bombing of that airbase is an assertion of US military power not intended to deter Assad or Putin. Otherwise, why did the US warn Russia of the airstrike who then would have warned Syria? The sole purpose of those airstrikes was to scare the hell out of the Syrian revolution, to show them what they are up against–especially when the international antiwar movement is passive or up the ass of the Syrian regime.

The only response principled antiwar activists can make to this bombing of the airbase is to condemn it–even though Syria & Russia had probably cleared it of personnel & equipment in advance, thanks to the US warning.

But any denunciations of an empty airbase where Assad launches gas attacks cannot overshadow our denunciations of Assad’s gassing of civilians, of Russian, Syrian, & US bombing of civilians in Syria, & of US bombing of civilians in Mosul.

The US just launched 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles ($30 million) from a warship in the Mediterranean at an airbase where they claim the Syrian bombers at Khan Sheikhoun originated. It’s being reported that the airbase is at least partially destroyed. Since there are thousands of Russian ground troops in Syria, striking them is a concern although apparently Russia was warned in advance of the attack.

The White House isn’t talking yet so it’s speculation that the attack is deterrence to Assad for the gas attack. This is however not the first of Assad’s chemical attacks which are frequent. US policy in Syria is intentionally obfuscated. The US has been bombing in Syria for several years.

We don’t have to understand fully what US strategy is; it’s more than Trump grandstanding but it is not decisive action against Assad. It is not regime-change as Assadists will claim. Our sole mandate is to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the US & all foreign military forces. US bombers are no more an emancipatory force in Syria than they are in Mosul, Iraq.

When this crazy Assadist crap first emerged not that many months ago, it was a period of grieving, of loss & separation, of fractured personal & political relationships. It seemed a devastation & political wreckage.

You get a closer look at who they are & what they think, the shabby hatreds lurking in their hearts, it isn’t wreckage any more but a recreation on solid foundations of solidarity. Every time you employ the block button to dispatch another, choruses of angels encircle you singing an up tempo rendition of that old classic tune “What the hell took you so long? Let’s boogie.”

Tariq Ali’s sole contribution to the momentous discussion about the gassing of civilians in Syria is a stupid meme from an Assadist denying Assad gassed civilians. The meme said “The government lied about Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, & Libya. And you think they’re telling the truth about Syria?”

One stands in awe of such irresponsible imbecility. Or is it just indifference?

When I was a young working class socialist, a very privileged older socialist said to me that his indignation had waned with age. It seemed incomprehensible to me at 25. It still does at 72. Maybe that’s what happened to Ali. Maybe his indignation flew the coop. But then he should just stfu rather than post memes from trivial minds apologizing for dictatorship & the bombing of civilians.