by Jeff Mackler
“Trump Ends Covert Aid to
Syrian Rebels Trying to Topple Assad,” read a July 19 New York Times headline.
Citing The Washington Post as its source, the article noted that the official
termination of the “secret” U.S. program “was never publicly announced, just as
the beginnings of the program four years ago were officially a secret,
authorized by President Barack Obama through a ‘finding’ that permitted the
C.I.A. to conduct a deniable program.”
“Mr. Trump’s decisions,” said The
Times, “amounted to an acknowledgment that no escalation of the program,
which began in 2013 in concert with the C.I.A.’s counterparts in Saudi Arabia,
Turkey and Jordan, was likely to yield a different result.”
The CIA and its “counterparts”
were intervening in Syria even before 2013, if not congruent with the brief
Arab Spring mobilizations of 2011, when poor peasants, democratically minded
youth, and others protested against the Bashar Assad government’s neo-liberal
and repressive policies. The New York Times revealed on June 21, 2012, that the
CIA had been ferrying arms, recruiting, and training anti-Assad groups based in
Turkey.
The U.S. was simultaneously
the major power behind the Syrian National Council (SNC), which it established
to be the new Syrian “government in waiting.” The SNC consisted of an
exile-based 270-member leadership core that was overseen by the U.S. State
Department and funded by most of the Gulf State monarchies. Within a year the
SNC exploded as it became clear that it was dominated by the Muslim
Brotherhood, whose on-the-ground forces in Syria regularly collaborated with
the al-Qaeda offshoot, the Nusra Front, and related jihadist groups.
This collaboration, together
with the poor coordination and fighting ability of many local Free Syrian Army
units, led the CIA to seek out more “reliable” troops that would fight under
its direct control. Over the past five-plus years the C.I.A. and other U.S.
government agencies have overseen various and re-named reincarnations
of the SNC and FSA, all aimed at publicly presenting these as secular and
democratic forces as opposed to their jihadist
and otherwise reactionary and pro-imperialist nature. (See
Stephen Gowans, “Washington’s Long War on Syria,” Chapter 4, “The
Myth of the Moderate Rebel,” pp. 141-160.)
With Libya’s pulverizing
defeat under their belts, via the U.S. and NATO’s “humanitarian war” in that
country, the original imperialist expectation was that Assad’s army would
crumble and his government would fall in a matter of weeks or months. When this
proved illusory, the now-admitted “covert” operations began in earnest, soon to
include an estimated 50,000 jihadist fighters from 100 countries, but mostly
from the Middle East, supported by untold billions of dollars in U.S., NATO,
and other “coalition” nations’ arms, organized to accomplish in Syria what U.S.
imperialism had facilitated, in one form or another, in Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya,
and Iraq.
Assad’s repression of the
protests in March 2011 provided the required U.S. pretext for his instant
demonization and the subsequent demand of the Obama administration and its
spokespersons, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, that “Assad
must go.”
General Tony Thomas, head of
the military’s Special Operations Command, provided, according to The New York
Times, “the first public confirmation by an American official that the Trump
administration had ended a secret C.I.A. program to arm Syrian rebels.” While
the program remains “classified,” when asked if it was aimed at currying favor
with Russia, Thomas responded, “At least from what I know about that program
and the decision to end it, it was absolutely not a sop to the Russians … it
was a “tough, tough decision.” The CIA, upstaged by Trump, said The Times,
“declined to comment.”
In point of fact, yesterday’s
“covert” operations in Syria have at least in part been replaced by the Trump
administration’s overt “no fly zone” war over Syria today.
Utilizing their massive
air-power superiority in the region, U.S. fighter jets now routinely attack
Syrian government troops and those of its allies from Iran and Hezbollah from
Lebanon whenever they move to challenge U.S.-backed and still existing “rebel”
positions in areas where the U.S. contemplates a long-term, if not permanent
presence. (See “President Trump’s ‘no fly zone’ escalates U.S. war on Syria” by
this writer in the July issue of Socialist Action.)
Having lost most of the
territory that the reactionary U.S.-allied forces had previously occupied,
today’s bipartisan imperialist war strategy revolves around establishing
control over key border areas in the north as well as in southern Syria for
future use, the latter likely as a future pipeline route across the Middle East
to the Mediterranean Sea. U.S. wars there, including in Iraq, buttressed U.S.
corporate control of vast oil and natural gas resources that in time will
require more competitive or advantageous routes than those planned by Russia.
“To the victor, goes the spoils of war!” as President Trump is fond of
proclaiming.
That the U.S. was conducting a
covert war against Syria was no secret. Its basic outlines were frequently
reported by The New York Times, with its Middle East Bureau Chief Anne Barnard
periodically citing the details, albeit usually buried deep in her articles
that aped the imperialist line justifying every U.S. war in the region.
Largely based on Barnard’s
revelations, the bulleted selections below, taken from my Jan. 18, 2016 article
entitled “U.S. imperialism’s Syria strategy,” provided an accurate summary of
at least some of the key U.S. “covert” war efforts.
* “U.S. Major General Michael
Nagata was unceremoniously removed some two months ago after his $500 million
Syrian assignment to train by the end of the year a projected 5400 Syrian
infantrymen to supposedly fight ISIS (Islamic State of Syria and Iraq)
“languished in complications,” according to U.S. News and World Report. This
project ‘ultimately yielded a force of fewer than 60, most of whom were
immediately captured or voluntarily surrendered their U.S.-provided military
equipment to extremist groups. Nagata’s program, aimed at training 15,000
such fighters over the next three years, was similarly abandoned.’”
* “The Oct. 9, 2015, New York
Times article entitled, ‘Obama Administration Ends Effort to Train Syrians to
Combat ISIS,’ states, ‘Obama’s reversal of policy underscored a harsh reality:
tens of billions of dollars spent in recent years to train security forces
across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have rarely succeeded in
transforming local fighters into effective, long-term armies.’”
* “Today, after four and half
years of U.S. ‘training of security forces,’ supposedly to defeat ISIS, some
two-thirds of Syria, mostly thinly-populated areas, is under the control of one
or another jihadist group—either the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front, the
Islamic State (ISIS) itself, or other Islamist groups. Virtually all are
directly, indirectly, or covertly armed and financed by U.S. imperialism, its
NATO allies, the Saudi government (and “private” Saudi billionaires), Qatar,
the United Arab Emirates or other Gulf State monarchies.
* “In place of this failed
program the Obama administration recently announced a ‘new program’ where, ‘for
the first time the Pentagon is providing lethal aid directly to Syrian rebels, though
the C.I.A. has for some time been covertly training and arming groups fighting
Mr. Assad’ (emphasis added). (The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2015).”
In the same article, I wrote,
“The U.S.-allied Saudis and the Turks today account for the lion’s share of
ISIS’s finances and weapons—undoubtedly with the full knowledge of the U.S.
government. The reactionary Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a U.S.
NATO ally, still controls important portions of its southern border with Syria
and utilizes these as central corridors for the entrance of thousands of
international ISIS fighters to Syria to depose the Assad government. In the same
manner over 1000 trucks from ISIS-controlled oil fields in northern Syria serve
as the main conduit for ISIS-smuggled oil into Turkey.”
Today, with the covert cat out
of the bag, The Times asserts that this allegedly now defunct CIA program
“joins similar failed efforts to deliver arms and money to groups seeking to
overthrow governments that Washington found noxious, most famously the Kennedy
administration’s disastrous effort to do away with the government of Fidel
Castro in Cuba.”
Russia’s “targeting and badly
weakening the C.I.A.-backed rebels, who were the most capable of the opposition
fighters [against Assad]” was seen by The Times as decisive to the Assad
government’s winning back Syrian territory. In this regard the Syrian
government’s request for Russian assistance was wholly within its right to
self-determination, that is, to defend itself against U.S. imperialist
intervention, war, and the organization of a “rebel” army aimed at the
removal of the Syrian government itself.
As it turned out, U.S. aid to
these same “rebels” was not enough to allow them to achieve key U.S.
objectives. That is, according to The Times of July 19, it was “not sufficient
to clear the way for their takeover of major cities or [to] approach the
capital, Damascus.” These issues, along with the now undisputed fact that the
vast array of U.S. arms supplied to these same rebels ended up in the hands of
forces that the U.S. deemed terrorist, essentially convinced Trump, if not his
generals, that a total U.S. victory in Syria was not possible—unless, that is,
the U.S. was prepared to engage in yet another land war akin to the present
imperialist catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
After six years of
U.S.-orchestrated war in Syria, at a cost of 500,000 dead and nearly half the
population displaced or in exile, U.S. imperialism continues its effort to
dominate a poor nation in order to advanced the corporate interests of the one
percent, with Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former chief executive
officer of one of the world’s leading fossil fuel multi-national corporations,
Exxon-Mobile, perhaps being the visible symbol of all that is rotten and
corrupt in the imperialist U.S. body politic.
The demand for the immediate
and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria and the Middle East must
stand at the center of the U.S. antiwar movement’s efforts today.
Self-determination for Syria! U.S. Out Now!
The only way to defeat Trump—
and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves
from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left.
Elements of the program for
this new Left are easy to imagine.
Trump promises the
cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the
left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international
agreements.
Such agreements would
establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights,
universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc.
The big lesson of global
capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political
international has a chance of bridling global capital.
Excerpt from:
“We Must Rise from the Ashes
of Liberal Democracy”
BY Slavoj Žižek
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy
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