Real Clear Politics / Real Clear World
October 17, 2012
Why Is the Anti-war Left Silent on Assad's Killing?
By _Vicken Cheterian_
(http://www.realclearworld.com/authors/?author=Vicken+Cheterian&id=12719)
Why are there no demonstrations in Paris against the violence in _Syria_
(http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/syria/?utm_source=rcw&utm_med
ium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautolink) ? A friend who knows the French
anti-war movement went on to supply an answer: because the French left is
deeply
divided between those who support the popular revolt and many others who see
in the Syrian regime the last anti-imperialist Arab regime.
This confusion is not limited to _France_
(http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/france/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautol
ink) . The same can be said about the anti-war movements in Britain or
_Australia_
(http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/australia/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautolink)
(where in Sydney, as
Syria's air-force and artillery was pounding the poor neighbourhoods of
Aleppo, demonstrators demanded: "hands off Syria!"). This internal divide has
little to do with what is happening in Syria or the region itself, and more
to do with the left's own deep crisis of vision and theoretical clarity.
When the "Arab spring" gained momentum in early 2011, there was rejoicing
among leftist intellectuals, third-worldists, and self-declared
anti-imperialists of various shades. A popular movement had overthrown two
dictatorships (in Tunisia and _Egypt_
(http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/egypt/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautolink)
) which
for decades - in the name of fighting against Islamist extremism -
collaborated with western states and repressed their own populations. Over
Bahrain,
it now became easy to condemn a western-blessed Saudi intervention that
helped suppress a popular movement calling for equal rights and democratic
freedoms. But things got complicated in _Libya_
(http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/libya/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautol
ink) , when the threatening approach towards and into Benghazi by Muammar
Gaddafi's military forces led to urgent calls for protection of civilians;
this opened the way to Nato's aerial power, with the Arab League and the
United Nations providing the necessary justification.
The Nato campaign in Libya provoked a deep debate within the left. For a
decade and more, the left had focused its efforts on opposing successive
United States military interventions in the middle east. The protests against
the Iraq war in 2003 were especially huge, with broad public opinion as well
as the left disbelieving the official version that Saddam Hussein's
"weapons of mass destruction" and alleged links with al-Qaida posed a danger,
and
(when these two arguments were discredited) that the war was all about
bringing democracy to Iraq. For a large part of the western public, and even
more beyond, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were triggered by efforts to
maintain global domination, and in the case of Iraq to plunder the rich
(oil) resources of the Arab and Muslim world.
In Libya, much of the left (if no longer of the western public) had the
same attitude: this was an imperialist intervention that sought to control the
country's oil. Even those leftists (like Gilbert Achcar) who defended the
right of Libyans to ask for outside protection in the face of the danger of
immediate massacre, while remaining critical of Nato action beyond this
criteria, were strongly attacked.
War vs. revolution
Syria deepened the divisions of an already divided left. There is little
agreement on how to describe events there "in the final analysis". Perhaps it
is a revolution already stolen by imperialist forces and their local
agents (as Tariq Ali suggests), or could it still be a popular revolution by
those demanding political freedoms who are being heavily repressed by a
dictatorial regime?
The more sceptical attitudes towards the uprising in Syria are informed by
a deep suspicion towards the west's official policies in the middle east
that draws on the experience of the last decade. This suspicion informs the
reporting of some leading western journalists. Rainer Hermann, the
correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote two articles on the
Houla
massacre of 108 civilians in May 2012, half of them women and children,
that not only questioned the dominant narration but actually suggested that
the killings were perpetrated by rebel fighters themselves.
Hermann relied on interviews with one or two "witnesses" in Damascus, and
quotes the infamous Sister Agnes to support his argument about rebel
violence, rather than doing any in-depth research himself; even the detailed
United Nations investigation, based on dozens of interviews with
eye-witnesses,
was not enough to convince him to revise his exculpation of the Syrian
authorities.
Such reporting leads Tariq Ali to accuse the rebels of committing massacres
in order to provoke Nato intervention. Ali later qualified this, saying
now there was now more doubt about which side caused the Houla bloodbath,
without abandoning his overall analytical framework. Robert Fisk, the
well-known Independent writer, similarly suggested after visiting the town of
Daraya in late August 2012 that the massacre there (where some 500 people,
mostly civilians or unarmed militants, were killed) was the responsibility of
opposition fighters (see Yassin Al Haj Saleh & Rime Allaf, "_Syria_
(http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/syria/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=lin
k&utm_campaign=rcwautolink) dispatches: Robert Fisk's independence", 14
September 2012).
Rebels vs. Islamists-jihadis
A United Nations commission presented its findings on human-rights
violations inside Syria in September 2012. More than twenty journalists
attended a
press conference in Geneva to discuss the report. But the discussion did
not focus on the over 100 pages that charted abuses, violations, torture and
summary killings; nor was a single question was asked about the Daraya
massacre. More than half the questions asked were about a few paragraph in the
report about the presence of foreign "jihadi" fighters in Syria. How many,
where were they from, and were there a record of their human-rights abuses?
(The answer to the last question was no, but questions about jihadis
continued nevertheless). I was reminded of George Bernard Shaw's remark that
"a
journalist is somebody who can't distinguish between a bicycle accident and
the collapse of civilisation".
It may be time to read, even re-read, Edward Said's Covering Islam.
Critical intellectuals did not believe US propaganda about al-Qaida's links to
the
Iraqi regime prior to the 2003 invasion. Shouldn't the same criteria be
used in the case of Syria? The regime there has also justified its repression
of the popular movement from spring 2011 by depicting it as the work
of"Salafis" and "foreign agents" funded by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey,
France,
Britain and America. A similar scepticism about the Syrian authorities and
their claims would be welcome.
Neo-anti-imperialism
The classical leftist thinkers were always conscious of the interrelation
between local struggles and the international balance of forces. Their
modern successors tend to separate the two levels. So the Arab revolutions are
read in isolation from what is going on the global level, as if the enduring
crisis of capitalism that erupted in 2008 (or even globally-relevant
factors such as food and water crises) has no connection to events. The result
is to neglect the possibility of seeing the Arab revolutions as representing
a new "weakest chain" in a fracturing system. Today, there is an urgent
need for critical views that link local struggles to global politics and aid
understanding of the dialectical relations between them.
Tho left-leaning intellectuals who see the problem in Syria in terms of
US-supported "Islamists", or through categories of inter-confessional regional
struggle between Sunnis and Shi'a - but not the regime of Bashar al-Assad
- have abandoned analysis of the local dimension of the events to keep only
its international one. They lack any understanding of the Syrian events in
terms of class or as a revolt against injustice, repression, and
censorship. Instead, their self-satisfying geopolitical reading sees only a
struggle
between a US-led effort to impose imperialistic order and a last-ditch
Arab resistance supported by Russia and China.
An illustration of this attitude is the French Communist Party newspaper
L'Humanité's interview with the Lebanese scholar George Corm, where his
response to a question on the Arab spring is socio-economic (referring to
youth
unemployment and demands for political opening) but to one on Syria is
concerned only with regional and global power struggles.
This "anti-imperialist" reading of Syrian developments has clear
limitations. It finds hard to explain why after eighteen months, Nato
airplanes have
not intervened, even after Syrian air-defences shot down a Turkish F-4
fighter-bomber on 22 June 2012 (which might be thought a perfect pretext for
direct action); why, if there is a "universal conspiracy" to overthrow
al-Assad's regime, this would be deterred by a Russian veto; or why the
conspirators don't supply opposition fighters with missiles such as portable
anti-aircraft Stingers (as the then US administration gave to the Afghan
mujahideen in the 1980s).
Gilbert Achcar's criticism of the Syrian National Council and its hopes for
Nato aerial support is more to the point than simplistic views that see
intervention as the essence of the conflict. The details of the struggle
inside Syria are the best antidote to such views, which can only be sustained
by adopting rhetoric that abstracts from the reality on the ground - and
thus makes it easy to attribute massacres like those at Houla or Daraya to
opposition forces without close inquiry.
Class vs. anti-imperialism
The gradual abandoning of analysis of internal social developments as the
engine of major political events such as revolutions has deeper roots. For
most of the past century the Soviet experience, and Marxist perspectives on
class, was dominant among leftist intellectuals. The collapse of the Soviet
Union shattered their certainties and undermined the analytical
foundations of their alternative world-vision. But even more fatal was their
failure
to engage with the consequences of the Soviet collapse, and to ask
pertinent questions. How to explain the collapse of such a state without
apparent
internal or external pressure; what does its end reveal about the past
Soviet experience; why didn't the Soviet working class mobilise itself to
defend
its social rights when a political opening permitted this; why didn't the
Russian working class resist on more than individual factory levels against
the massive privatisation under Boris Yeltsin?
The collapse of the Soviet Union should also have led to a questioning of
the model of progress that the Soviets established, with its basis in the
capture of the state by a small vanguard as the foundation of socio-economic
development; and of "progressive" regimes in the "third-world", including
those such as in Libya and Syria that would inflict a bloodbath rather than
leave.
The legacy of the silent rusting of older instruments of analysis
(including class struggle, and workers as a revolutionary class) is to leave
the
geopolitical dimension as the sole usable framework. The world is again
imagined in quasi-cold-war terms, with a mindset that echoes the outlook of
some
of Washington's hawks. The US invasion of Iraq and US policy in Syria seen
in the same indiscriminate terms. This anti-imperialist view also has the
problem of being unable to find a worthy opponent to western imperialism:
Vladimir Putin's Russia can be considered "progressive" as little as Syria or
Iran (the grisly record of Syrian Ba'athism includes invading Lebanon in
1976 to support the right-wing Phalangists and repress Palestinian guerri
llas and the Lebanese left, one example among so many others).
The Syrian conflict is evolving in an international context, understanding
of which requires going beyond a dogmatic, simplistic geopolitical reading
by those whose Godot-like "waiting for the imperialist invasion" would be
black comedy were it so tragic. Meanwhile, the massacres continue.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
