Vol. 79/No. 39 November 2, 2015
The war, which began with Assad’s brutal repression of popular protests for political rights in 2011, has so far left 250,000 dead and displaced more than 11 million — half the population. Many of those with the means have fled for Europe.
U.S. imperialism remains the dominant world power, but is far weaker than when its World War II victory allowed Washington to impose a Mideast order in its interests. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist regimes across Eastern Europe more than two decades ago, Washington lost Moscow’s help in curbing and corrupting revolutionary movements in the Middle East and elsewhere.
As the old imperialist world order unravels, the U.S. rulers have sought new alliances to maintain stability and a measure of dominance, through the recent nuclear accord with Iran and “reset” with Russia.
The speed and forcefulness of Russia’s move into Syria took the Barack Obama administration aback. Russian President Vladimir Putin is shoring up Russian access to Mediterranean ports and strengthening Moscow’s hand in politics in the region, in collaboration with Tehran and Baghdad. Moscow claims it is joining in efforts to stop the terrorist Islamic State, but in fact it’s focused on efforts to reinforce the Assad regime.
For the first time since the civil war began, Assad traveled outside Syria to meet with Putin in Moscow Oct. 20.
While the U.S. government carries out aerial attacks on Islamic State, Kurdish forces have sustained the most effective and successful fight on the ground. In Syria, Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) regained 17 villages in the Mt. Abdulaziz area of Hasakah province, reporting more than 100 Islamic State soldiers killed in an early October offensive.
The U.S. rulers — like the capitalist governments of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran — oppose the ambitions of some 30 million Kurds for a homeland, but they benefit from Kurdish advances on the ground.
Washington recently ended a $500 million program to train fighters against Islamic State who had to agree not to use their weapons against Assad. The Pentagon said it was able to field less than a dozen such troops.
Instead, they have begun to pass more weapons along to already existing groups on the ground. Some forces resisting the regime’s new Moscow-backed offensive say they have gotten their hands on U.S.-made TOW anti-tank weapons.
No alternative for Washington
Some U.S. politicians and pundits — from Republican Sen. John McCain to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — have assailed Obama’s “inaction” in Syria and called for stepped-up direct U.S. intervention. Clinton and others have called for Washington to impose a “no-fly zone” over parts of Syria, enforcement of which would pose confrontations with Russian planes.Bernie Sanders, vying with Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, opposes that proposal and backs Obama.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump has expressed support for Russian airstrikes against Islamic State and reluctance about U.S. intervention. During a Sept. 20 interview with Trump, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly said, “Once Putin gets in and fights ISIS on behalf of Assad, Putin runs Syria. He owns it. He’ll never get out, never.”
“Do you want to run Syria? Do you want to own Syria?” Trump replied. “I want to rebuild our country.”
“I’m looking at Assad and saying, ‘Maybe he’s better than the kind of people that we’re supposed to be backing,’” Trump added.
In a similar vein, ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan in an op-ed column titled “The Antiwar Insurgency,” argued that the U.S. invasion of Iraq led to the rise of Islamic State. “For anti-interventionists, Trump vs. Sanders is the ideal race,” Buchanan wrote, saying Sanders and Trump were gaining support because they opposed the Iraq war and today’s U.S. intervention in Syria.
Political figures from differing backgrounds have argued there is little basis for any course counter to the one being pursued by the Obama administration. “Republican bloviating about ‘weakling’ Obama notwithstanding, any future president will face this foreign-policy dilemma: The distance between America’s idea of itself and what it can plausibly achieve is widening,” wrote New York Times columnist Roger Cohen Oct. 15.
“The destruction of ISIS is more urgent than the overthrow of Bashar Assad,” Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state under the Nixon and Ford administrations, said in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal the next day. Washington’s acquiescence to a Russian military role in Syria made sense, he said, because the two countries share “compatible objectives” in the fight against Islamic State.
He wrote that in a possible future federated Syria “a context will exist for the role of Mr. Assad, which reduces the risks of genocide or chaos leading to terrorist triumph.”
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