WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST (1)
After more than a decade of bloody conflict in which more than 600.000 people were killed and more than 14 million were forced to flee their homes, the Syrian ‘civil’ war seemed to have settled in a stalemate and a de facto partition of the country. And yet, only a little push was needed to topple Assad.
The government forces refused to fight. Everywhere the rebels came, there was little or no resistance, everywhere they were greeted by jubilant masses cheering the downfall of the hated regime.
But the rapid collapse of the Assad regime was not the result of a mass strike or popular revolt. The push came from outside, which underscores the interimperialist nature of the current wars in the Middle East. The conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria are all connected. While the trigger was pulled by the weaker side (as it often is), it’s now clear that the string of conflicts has considerably strengthened the grip of the US and its allies on this strategically essential region. Whether that was the US’ plan all along or whether it exploited conflicts that others set in motion, we cannot tell but in essence, it makes no difference. The results are the same.
The war in Ukraine was also a factor. Assad’s ally Russia could have launched an air campaign against the Syrian rebels but that would have diverted military resources from the war in Ukraine at a crucial moment – now that “peace’negociations seem to be approaching – and the results would have been uncertain at best. Putin might have seen it as a trap of the West to weaken the Russian position in Ukraine and choose not to fall in it. He had, in chess terms, to give up a bishop to protect his queen.
Hezbollah, a crucial mainstay of the regime, had to withdrew its troops in Syria to deploy them against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, while its bases in Syria were bombed to smithereens. Iran also had little choice but to withdraw its troops from Syria, once it was clear that Russia wasn’t going to try to save the regime.
So, while the turn of events was surprising, perhaps we should have seen it coming. Every step led to the next one. The brutal destruction of Gaza, the crushing of Hamas, the missile attacks and assassinations in Lebanon and Iran, showing that Israel can strike anyone and anything anywhere in the Middle East while the US and UK assure that any attempt at retaliation remains futile, the invasion and terrorizing of Lebanon, the defeat of Hezbollah and now the toppling of Iran’s ally Assad: it all fits together.
The “axis of resistance” is gone. Iran, the main challenger to American domination of the Middle East, is forced into a defensive position and can do little more than accelerate its nuclear program (even though the chances are high that its installations would be bombed once it would start – or even be able to start- to produce nuclear weapons). For now, it seems unlikely that the other challengers to American hegemony, Russia and China, can do anything about it. US imperialism scored a big win.
The whole set of conflicts was a demonstration of its overwhelming military power and willingness to use it. Israel had its own imperialist interests but it also acted as an agent of the US and its European allies, who kept the flow of arms going which enabled the IDF’s massacres and who protected Israel from retaliatory attacks. Meanwhile, in the diplomatic theater, Israel and the US played the usual good cop – bad cop routine.
The reason why it’s such a big win is fossil fuel. If capitalism would be moving to a clean energy economy, the vast oil and gas reserves of the Middle East would be of diminishing importance but the opposite is true. The world economy needs ever more energy to grow and because it is capitalist, it needs to grow in order not to collapse. In 2004, the world consumed 12.5 billion tons of oil equivalent (TOE), in 2014 13.6 billion TOE and in 2024, global energy consumption is projected to reach 15.3 billion TOE. And of that growing total, the part of fossil fuel keeps rising: In 2014, the world consumed 80.91% of its total energy from fossil fuels and by 2024 this figure has risen to 82.5%. This shows not only that the greening of capitalism is a myth but also that the importance of the Middle East is greater than ever on the inter-imperialist chessboard. Not only the economies but also the war machines consume ever more fossil fuel. If the present tendency towards mounting inter-imperialist confrontation would lead to a global war between opposing blocs, whoever would control the Middle East would have a clear advantage.
The demonstration of US/Israeli military dominance comes right on time for the new (old) US president. It fits his agenda and style, which both on the international and domestic front is based on the projection of power and intimidation.
Of course, the domestic situation played a decisive role in the demise of Assad as well. The vast majority of the population hated his government. But that was nothing new. What was new was a major shift in the balance of forces in the region. Yet the fact that Assad was so easily toppled shows, once again, the vulnerability of governments that rely solely on state violence to cling to power. Assad had no ideological grip on the population and was incapable to halt or even slow the deterioration of its conditions of survival. The Syrian economy was in the doldrums and the part controlled by the government was worst off, in part because of the sanctions imposed by the West. Inflation and unemployment grew rapidly. The regime’s purpose of the murder of the thousands of civilians whose mass graves are now discovered was to sow fear, to cower the population into submission, but it was made possible by the great number of people for whom there was no room in the shrinking economy. They could be killed because they were not needed. Like Gazans and many millions more who have no value for capital.
And now, many Syrians who have fled are returning. They find their land devastated, their cities in ruins, scarce resources and conflicts over them. The country remains a vipers nest. The state is weak and disorganized which leaves room for big and small players to conquer and rule. Israel, which kept bombing Syria even after Assad was gone, has added a swath of land to the part of Syria it annexed in 1967. Turkey also occupies a part of Syria and wants to attack the part controlled by the Kurdish YPG (“Rojava”) but the Kurdish army is an ally of the US which has a military base in the area. Russia still has its naval and air force bases on the Syrian north coast and will not give those up easily. Then there are the remnants of the toppled regime, the remnants of Isis, and all the militias, armies and factions that were formed during the ‘civil’ war, some loosely allied with the new government, some against it, some allied with outside powers like Turkey and Qatar, all using the existing religious differences to stoke division and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. Ahmed al-Sharaa (Muhammad Al-Jawlani), the leader of the new government (ex-Al Qaeda, ex-Isis) received a media make-over from dangerous terrorist with a price on his head to heroic liberator and is now supposed to lead Syria on a path to reconciliation and reconstruction. It doesn’t look good.
Of course we’re glad that the Assad regime has fallen but the joy may not last very long. Peace and prosperity will not return to the region any time soon. For the working class in Syria, the bulk of the population, it is now essential not to be divided by the religious and other sectarian fault lines used to bind them to various factions of capital, and instead to fight autonomously for their class interests, against war and exploitation, for a better life. And why not believe that there may come a day when proletarians in other countries do the same, in the Middle East, in all parts of the world: fight against war and exploitation, for a better life, and refuse to be divided by national, religious, racial and other imposed fault lines. It seems utopian, especially in the Middle East. Yet the need becomes clearer by the day. Capitalism drags the world towards an environmental holocaust, towards impoverishment and global war. But what is missing is confidence in the possibility of a different world, a human community. We feel powerless. By “we” we mean the ordinary people whose labor reproduces society, who make the world go round and who want nothing more than an end to war and exploitation, a better life for all, yes but… we don’t believe yet that it is possible. It is a matter of consciousness: potentially we are so much more powerful than we realize.
December 31
INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE
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Like probably most of those who read this, we in IP have followed these events closely, trying to understand what is happening. We realize it is complicated, many factors intermingle. We have our differences on how to interpret the events and have debated those openly. We want to continue this discussion with a series of articles on the wars in the Middle East, of which the text above is the first installment. The debate we had earlier centered on the question whether capitalism’s need to manage, including liquidate, surplus proletarians, which it increasingly produces as more labor power is being banned from the ever more technological global production process and cannot be profitably exploited, was a driving force of the war. However, both sides agreed that the systemic crisis of capitalism intensifies inter-imperialist conflicts and that this explains the broader “logic” of the war escalation. The next two texts are written by comrades who are not part of the IP group but who share many if not most of its positions. We do however disagree with some of their views, as we will make clear in the introductions, but they both add interesting elements to our understanding of the period. So let the debate continue.
IP