The Friends and Enemies of the Syrian People
In bourgeois politics and war, truth is the first victim of the conflict.
In these days, after spending two and a half years courting mayhem and chaos, the gentlemen and gentlewomen of the White House, those in the U.S. Congress, the senior and junior "researchers" security agents, "embedded" reporters, all and all tucked behind the walls in such licentious news headquarters of CNN, FOX, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and even NPR, the so-called non-profit, public broadcasting company are gathering momentum to push, as they did in the cases of Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, the body and honor of the Syrian nation off the cliff before gnawing and tormenting a nation that should be left to itself – to its own people – to heal instead of this slow process of death – Syrians as the prey and Americans with Saudi and Qatari proxies – as the beasts.
During the past 100 years, since the 1917 October Revolution which almost coincided with WWI, the decimation of millions of people and the widening gap between a minority of rich and a great majority of poor, coupled with a high rate of unemployment and unprecedented labor organizing and increasing challenges to capitalism, the ideologues of the system launched a process of mis-education, misrepresentation of facts and dissemination of unscientific notions. The key instruments in the possession of the bourgeois rulers were the ideas of democracy and capitalism. The ideologues at the service of capital equalized private ownership of capital, financial goods, and market as an embodiment of democracy, freedom, equality and even justice before the law.
U.S. Attacks on Revolution and Socialism
These historians change the place of the aggressors with those who are aggressed upon. There are ample examples that could be brought to bear. From day one, the Bolshevik Revolution was met with overt hostility from Pres. Wilson's administration. After withdrawing funding for Russia and opposing to include the Bolsheviks as allies against Germany in 1918, the US extended its maritime blockade of Germany to include Soviet Russia and began overtly supporting Russian opposition factions.
In 1918 the Allied Powers, including the US, began a military intervention in the Russian Civil War. President Wilson appointed General William S. Graves to lead thousands of American troops at Vladivostok.
For protecting the system of capitalist relations and exploitation for private gain in the hands of a tiny few, from then on the capitalist statesmen and their media labeled the leaders of the socialist state and communist parties as dictators and anti-democratic. Hatefully, the pro-capitalist authors and politicians equated Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and Che Guevara with Adolf Hitler of Germany, Benito Mussolini of Italy and Francisco Franco of Spain.
No wonder that today not only communist leaders but anyone who is perceived to be a foe of the imperialist interests and against the plunder of their natural resources could be branded as dictator and the enemy of "his own people". For example, on September 8, 2013, the U.S. establishment branded leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico as "a dictator" for opposing privatizing the Mexican oil industry, which was nationalized as an act of national sovereignty in 1938.
On September 4, 2013, John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, in his pompous oration during the U.S. Senate, called the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "a thug and a murderer." Yet, it is not hard to show that the U.S. leaders from Wilson, Kennedy, Johnson, Kissinger, Clinton, Bush the father and Bush the son and today President Hussein Barack Obama, have dragged this nation to war across the world. The people of the world sitting in judgment – who do they name as Hitlerite and War Criminals?
Mr. John Kerry, the then richest senator in the U.S. Congress (Roll Call, 2011), may deceptively assume that Americans in general and full-time workers in particular don't have the time and appetite to read the objective history and hence would not be able to find out the truth about how many wars the U.S. has initiated, overtly and covertly, and how many precious lives the U.S. ruling class has sacrificed on the altar of the U.S. weapons industry and financial capital.
John Kerry copies Colin Powell
A simple comparison between the vocabulary used by John Kerry to prove and condemn Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons against the opposition with those used by Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, G.W. Bush, and infamous Dick Cheney in passing judgment against Saddam Hussein of Iraq shows that President Obama's verdict is a copy of the U.S. State Department 12 years ago! Both letters of indictment began with saying that "there is clear and compelling evidence" that Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons "against his own people".
To show to the satisfaction of a class of deeply conservative officials that the U.S. is the main source of world insecurity, poverty, lawlessness, separatism, and extremism, we intend to attract the attention of the readers to the terrorist methods (drones and war are terrorism) used by the U.S. administrations with the help of the media in settling differences with other nations. To be as brief as possible and avoid extensive recitations of historical episodes, we suffice in depicting some few and far between examples of heinous crimes committed against not only individuals but humanity in general.
Following the 1917 October Revolution, a great number of imperialist countries rushed huge armies to support the ancien regime (Czar) with the aim of toppling the young socialist state. It was with the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, headed by Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky and many others that the Soviets defeated the occupation armies. It should not surprise anyone when American academics joined the U.S. warmongers in their ceaseless attacks against the leaders of Russia.
Demonizing Non-Capitalist States
Likewise, the sordid attack against Kim Il Sung is understandable. It was the U.S. that invaded Korea in 1951 and it was Kim Il Sung that organized the Korean Workers party and mobilized the people of Korea to stop the U.S. invading army. It was the common valiant effort of China's Peoples' Army and the Korean revolutionary forces that beat the U.S. troops back and conditionally halted the war in July 1953. Today it should not surprise anyone that the CNN mouthpieces, Andrew Cooper and Christiane Amanpour, inject their poisonous rhetoric into the politics of Korea. Once again the hatred of U.S. bourgeois writers against Kim Il Sung, Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) and the peoples of Korea is understandable, though repugnant. Today's generation of Americans are a bit more familiar with the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The current work force, aging between 30 and 40 years have learned either through their families or friends or by reading history books that the U.S. in addition to dropping tens of thousands of missiles on the children, women, men, schools, hospitals and workplaces, intending to force the population to submit, it dropped all kinds of chemical weapons, most notably Agent Orange, with the aim of corrupting the soil and killing the population of Vietnam resisting this onslaught. In that U.S. war, the U.S. did not 'save the lives' of the peoples of Laos and Cambodia. The U.S. government saw the shadows of U.S. enemies in the sub-continent of Southeast Asia. No wonder that Senator John McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry hate the leaders of Korea and Vietnam!
U.S. Imperialism Breeds War
But the war engagement of the U.S. corporations and government is non-stop. The injuries of the war in Southeast Asia (56,000 U.S. troops perished about one-half million disabled and decapacitated) had not yet healed that the U.S. led by the so-called "liberal democrat" Bill Clinton invaded Yugoslavia and tore apart that country into four small and weak city-states that could only act as subservient U.S. colonies in the heart of Europe. The taste of victory over the people of Yugoslavia and the downfall of the Soviet socialist state set the stage for the war against Afghanistan and two and a half years later ruining Iraq and destroying the lives of over 3 million people of that country. Overall, the U.S. in 50 years of continuous wars has created at least 50 million refugees in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now in Syria!
Trying not to fall far behind President Barack Hussein Obama in his passion for war but simultaneously placing the blame of mass murder and total destruction of the livelihood of the people of Syria on the government of that country. Just like his predecessors, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, William Joseph Burns, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the current U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry likened Syrian President Bashar al Assad to Hitler and blamed the government for the use of chemical weapons on a neighborhood in Syria, with no solid proof. John Kerry that stepped into office of Secretary of State under the aura of following peaceful diplomacy suddenly exalting the fire of war by calling the President of Syria a murderer and killer is shocking. It is astonishing that the leaders of the U.S., well-known for their jingoistic and warmongering appetite call the leaders of seven countries they plan to overthrow as the ones "who killed their own people".
Just like in the case of Iraq in 2003 that General Colin Powell, at the behest of George W. Bush, a pathological liar, claimed that Saddam Hussein was in possession of "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)", now John Kerry has been on a fast course of preparing the other countries and the U.S. Congress to drop the U.S. irresistible bombs on the heads of the Syrian people to "save them". Over time the world learned that U.S. officials lied through their teeth and took no responsibility in the world court of law for the crimes they committed. It is still incumbent on the American people to admit the guilt by bringing George Bush, Dick Cheney and Company to the International Court of Justice for war crimes and violations of international covenants. And until then, the people of the United States carry the guilt of the war crimes of their leaders.
One thing that is becoming increasingly clear and visibly obvious is that the governments, but especially the people, outside of the United States do not trust the claims and the blames of the U.S. Even the British government led by the right-wing strata of reactionary ruling class was forced by Parliament to refuse the U.S. invitation to join in another "coalition of the willing" war at the cost of British youth and a shabby economy. To exit from the back door, the French government conditioned its partnership to that of London. In turn, the British Parliament so fond of claiming a "special relation" with Washington, this time preferred to abandon the old partnership to save its own skin. Overwhelmingly the British workers halted the participation of the government in the American criminal enterprise. Here went the old alliance down the sewer.
The outcome of the war drums played days and nights into the ears of the American people was greatly under the influence of objective conditions and not the sweet and kind heart of Hussein Obama, Secretary of Defense (WAR) Chuck Hagel, another so-called liberal or the womanly heart of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power.
Real Friends of the Syrian People
In the international arena, President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation, Iranian newly-elected President Hassan Rouhani and President Xi Jinping of the Peoples Republic of China who holds the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him China's paramount leader all rebuffed the claims of Obama that the U.S. government is in the possession of evidence showing that the Damascus government is the source of using chemical weapons against "its own people".
President Vladimir Putin demanded on Saturday, Sept. 1, 2013 and on several occasions later that the U.S. provide the 'indisputable' proof the Syrian government employed the use of chemical weapons in an attack in one of the Damascus suburbs earlier this month, adding that such a claim is an "utter nonsense". It is telling that the U.S., which is pushing for airstrikes and war, has not provided verifiable evidence. Furthermore, initially the U.S. government insisted that it is not going to wait for the results of the UN weapons experts inspection report that took five days to put together. This is exactly a page from the result of the U.N. inspection team ten years ago, when Scott Ritter and U.N. inspectors were ready to deliver a report that no WMDs had been found in Iraq, only to be pushed aside in the Bush-Cheney rush to war. Clearly, the United States purposefully discredited the U.N. inspector's work to remove any obstacles in the way of their war plans, causing Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission team in Iraq to state in an interview with London's The Guardian, "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media".
Concurrently, U.S. officials under the supervision of Jay Carney, a team that has been in charge of tracing the movement of the Syrian chemical stockpile has said, "none appeared to be deployed for immanent use". According to the media outlet The Blaze (www.theblaze.com) a U.S. official went further and said, "there was no evidence either side (the Syrian government or the pro-U.S. opposition) had used such weapons in an attack in northern Syria, disputing a competing claim by rebels that "regime forces fired the chemical weapons." There isn't the slightest doubt that the White House with no credibility left to lose, has resorted to a broad campaign of fabrications that even its own European allies do not believe and are distancing themselves from this charade to lower the cost of U.S. loss of reliability as a partner to protect the puppets in charge of the gas stations in the Persian Gulf.
After all, Russia is an atomic power and to that effect has over 5000 nuclear warheads, along with the delivery systems. Given the balance of forces, no matter how crazy the Democrats and the Republican Congresspersons are, they have to include the military power of Russia in the equation, or inequality for that matter.
Iran didn't wait to watch all the machinations of turns and twists of the muscles shown by Hussein Obama, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, John McCain and Bill Clinton. Very early the high-ranking officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran warned that foreign military intervention in Syria will result in a conflict that would engulf the entire region, pointing at Israel as an opportunity target for Iranian missiles. The logical warning from Tehran came in response to a series of threats by John Kerry and Hussein Obama on Monday that the U.S. is ready to "punish" the team of leadership in Syria and Lebanon – referring to Hezbollah. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Araqchi, clearly expressed that Iran was equally ready to defend the people and the government of Bashar al-Assad.
This infuriated Washington that felt at its lowest level of credibility, strength and confidence. White House had placed itself in a bind: on one hand it lacked the economic, military and moral strength needed to remain militarily engaged for more than a year and on the other the loss of face carries much greater future misfortune for the Empire. The governments that depend on the U.S. to hold onto their right-wing class interests have to give concessions to the working class at home and be accommodating to the more progressive states in the Mideast region. Such a trend also accompanies great economic and military contradictions around the world.
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About the Author: Ardeshir Ommani, president of the American Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC) is an Iranian-born writer and an activist in the U.S. anti-war and anti-imperialist struggle for over 50 years. He holds two Masters Degrees: Political Economy and Mathematics Education, and attained the status of Doctoral Candidate in Political Economy. He can be reached at [email protected].
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