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For days now, the US military has been launching air strikes against the
reactionary Sunni-fascist group Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS, or
just IS now) in Iraq. Yet, strangely, not only have I not seen any
evidence of anti-war demonstrations, or organising for them, I have also
not seen the entire faux-left cybersphere full of fulminating attacks
on US imperialist intervention, with everyone repeating and slightly
re-wording the same half-baked, evidence-free article, like we saw last
August during the alleged build-up to an entirely imaginary US attack on
the reactionary, secular-fascist regime of Bashar Assad in Syria.
The geopolitics is of course interesting. While the Syrian regime of
Assad barely fired a shot at ISIS for an entire year (and vice versa),
and instead both focused on crushing the Free Syrian Army (FSA, and its
more moderate Islamist allies, and also Jabhat al-Nusra), often even
directly and blatantly collaborating against the FSA, and in oil deals,
and the West, forever refusing to send even a bullet to the FSA under
the bullshit rubric that such arms might get into the hands of
extremists, even though for the whole year, the only force in the
entire region (apart from the Kurds) that were actually fighting ISIS
(the worst extremists) were the FSA and its allies (and indeed are still
furiously resisting ISIS in Syria right now); well now that the US is
bombing ISIS, and bolstering and arming Assad's ally, the sectarian-Shia
regime of Maliki, so now the Assad regime and ISIS have also FINALLY
come to blows! What an amazing coincidence!
Anyway, let's try to figure out some differences for anti-war western
leftists.
Perhaps we should only oppose US interventions when they are just a
figment of our imaginations, as opposed to ones that are actually
happening in our face.
Perhaps we should only oppose imaginary US interventions when the US
shows that it is impossible to intervene without going around in a whole
lot of circles like countless committee meetings, taking a war proposal
to Congress for the first time in half a century etc, whereas when the
US shows that you can order air strikes without all that pretense, then
it is OK.
Perhaps it should depend on the degree of imaginary anti-imperialism
of the reactionary tyrants under real or imaginary US attack. So
apparently, since the Syrian Baath regime has collaborated with US
imperialism for decades, right up to the rendition and torture program
of terror suspects on behalf of the US in very recent times, and
slaughtered Palestinians and their camps and organisations and militants
with a passion rivalling the Zionist regime, we should defend such a
well-intentioned regime, whereas a regime like ISIS which is totally,
fundamentally anti-imperialist to the core (I don't use that as a
compliment, rather it is a neutral statement), then we should not oppose
a US attack.
Perhaps we should look at who has done the most slaughtering. Both of
course are monstrous tyrants to the core and neither has any redeeming
feature whatsoever. But since ISIS has probably killed several thousand,
and Assad has pretty much levelled every city in Syria, turned the whole
country to rubble, killed over 100,000 people to be generous, tortured
tens of thousands to death in medieval dungeons, bombed hospitals and
schools with a fury rivalling Israel in Gaza, and at that very time,
last August, had bombed hundreds of children in their sleep with
chemical weapons, of course we should defend only Assad, not ISIS.
Perhaps someone could offer some other suggestions.
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