On 11/25/20 9:43 AM, John Reimann wrote:
There were the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC's), which were in effect revolutionary councils, but except for in a few scattered instances there was not a move to get the soldiers to send their representatives into the LCC's. So, when the rank and file soldiers revolted, a whole layer of Assadist officers went over with them. These were officers not only at the lowest levels but up to mid level also. This ensured that the soldiers did not come under the control of the more radical forces of the revolution.
What the hell? You are writing about things you have no direct knowledge of. I've written over 300 articles on Syria since March 2011 and I've never come across anything in my research about defecting Syrian officers exercising this kind of control over the ranks. The FSA was a militia that offered very little in the way of a political program one way or another, in contradistinction to the guerrilla movements in Latin America. It was mostly meant to defend liberated territories from Assad's military, which in the long run was an exercise in futility given the asymmetric warfare. Anand, who is a friend of mine that I've had long discussions with, is someone with a deep knowledge of the Syrian revolution. His analysis seems irreproachable. My only quibble is that he might have overestimated the possibility of independent working-class action. I see the revolution in many ways as a jacquerie, the term for a peasant revolt. In addition to the peasantry, you get people in places like Homs, Daraa and East Aleppo coming out of the informal economy like street peddlers--analogous to Mohamed Bouazizi, who self-immolated in Tunisia. Add to that the young and educated middle-class and you get a majority of the population in motion against an unpopular dictator. Why did the revolution collapse? I'd say that it was a result of the massive military offensive that could only triumph by outside assistance from Hizbollah, Iranian, Russia intervention, supplemented by Afghan and Iraqi mercenaries. Sometimes you lose not because of bad politics but because you are outgunned.
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