Real Clear Politics / Real Clear World
October 17, 2012
Why Is the Anti-war Left Silent
on Assad's Killing?
By Vicken
Cheterian
Why are there no demonstrations in Paris against
the violence in Syria?
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.
The same can be said about the anti-war movements in
Britain or Australia
(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)
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,
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
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 guerrillas 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.
