Arab Dictatorships Want To Kill Syrian Revolution

The first thing that has to be said is that the Syrian people are bravely resisting and suffering under - first and foremost - the brutal Syrian regime. But the second thing that must be added is that they are suffering a second misery, which is to be the pawns of a cynical maneuvering by rival empires and Arab dictatorships.

On the looming anniversary of the Bahraini democratic uprising, which was crushed by Saudi tanks, it is more than a little rich for the Saudi foreign minister at the United Nations to be bemoaning the lack of support for the Syrian people to resist the government.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal conveyed the 22-nation league's deep frustration with Syria, telling delegates that it was no longer appropriate to stand by and watch the bloodshed.
"Until when will we remain spectators?" he said. The bloodshed in Syria "is a disgrace for us as Muslims and Arabs to accept."

In fact, as these miserable dictators are shedding crocodile tears for the Syrians they are cheering on the repression that continues apace in Bahrain with life sentences for activists, blacklists and purges of people from their jobs. And today as Bahrainis attempt to mark the anniversary of the start of the pro-democracy movement are they faced with Saudi flowers? Not likely:

Monday's march by thousands of opposition supporters to Manama's Pearl Square is the largest attempt in months to retake the central roundabout that served as the epicenter of weeks of protests last year by Bahrain's Shiite majority against the ruling Sunni dynasty.
The government has deployed thousands of security forces to prevent the opposition from staging a mass rally to mark Tuesday's one-year of the revolt.
Bahrain imposed martial law in March to quell the protests. Emergency rule was lifted in June, but clashes still occur on an almost daily basis.

No, this proposal for a UN-backed, Arab League peacekeeping force is nothing more than the most cynical maneuverings to remove a regime that has not only been a thorn in the side of the Saudis and the lunatic sectarian dictatorships that dominate the Gulf. It is also about the rabid sectarianism of the Saudi (and Bahraini) regimes, who are Sunni Muslim and not only oppress their indigenous Shi'ite populations (in Bahrain's case, they are the majority of the population in a Sunni kingdom), but see Shi'ite Iran as the enemy. Allowing the troops of Gulf dictatorships to intervene in the Syrian revolution would be a disaster and a death blow for the revolution as surely as inviting Russia to send peacekeeping troops.

Of course the United States says nothing about the repression in Bahrain for the exact same reason that Russia continues to back the Syrian regime. In neither case does it have anything to do with fears of civil war, human rights, sovereignty or any of the other flowery language they employ to dress up their evil intentions. It is quite simple. The United States fifth fleet is stationed in Bahrain and Russia's only Mediterranean naval base is located in Syria. It is entirely about imperial jockeying for position in a strategically important region.

In the end, this jockeying is hurting the Syrian people (and the Bahraini people). Russia continues to back a bloody Syrian dictatorship as it bombs its own people. America, Europe and the Saudis look for the most retrograde sections of the movement, preferably Sunni regime defectors, the Muslim Brotherhood - who are proving reliably moderate in Egypt - or even Salafists, to back or to intervene directly to shape any new regime. This is the Libyan model mark 2: intervene in a popular revolt to steer it in the direction of benefiting American imperialism. The result, if they are successful is a lost revolution and dashed aspirations for true democracy and social justice, just as in Libya. In that country it has led to growing anger and protests against the west's favourite neo-liberal revolutionaries, including the storming and destruction of NTC offices last month.

Behind these protests, and mounting discontent, is growing disillusion with the NTC and its attempts to limit and stunt expectations that emerged during last year's uprising. The NTC is seen as corrupt and riddled with nepotism, and is widely perceived as trying to create a new patronage system based on regional and tribal interests.

The only hope that exists for the Syrian revolt is the continued disintegration of the Syrian regime under pressure of the movement, the army defections, etc. That process seems to be continuing apace - though it is difficult to tell outside of the country with the clampdown on media and the conditions of near civil war. In this sense the division and lack of consensus between the imperial powers - divided as they are between mutually conflicting strategic interests - may serve not only to give the Syrian regime time to crush the revolt (something that Russia would like to see and may yet offer peacekeepers to aid) but also to buy time for the movement to deepen and degrade the ability of the state to implement its murderous policies.

Russia 'to consider' Syria peacekeeping plan - Middle East - Al Jazeera English:

'via Blog this'

Syrian Revolution: Caught Between Repression & Imperialism

The first and foremost thing that must be said is that the people of Syria, who have resisted an utterly vicious military repression of their aspirations for nearly a year, are some of the bravest people on the planet. Day after day the government of the Assad dynasty find new levels of depravity in their attempt to brutalize and torture the democratic aspirations of their population into submission. We are witnessing both the heights and the depths to which human nature can sink.

For that reason I have absolutely no sympathy with those who attempt to excuse the actions of the regime on the grounds of supposed anti-imperialism. This is a vicious and bloody police state that is fighting for its life, not some progressive bastion - any more than was Libya - it deserves to have no tears shed for it.

That doesn't imply, however, that it isn't a complex situation. Sadly, the Syrian regime is not the only vicious and anti-democratic regime in the world. The United States comes to mind. After all, they arm the thoroughly backward, religiously justified police state of the Saudi  monarchy. They benefit from the sectarian and repressive Bahraini monarchy next door. They have financed the Egyptian military's repressive apparatus since the 1970s. And that doesn't even include the millions of people whose deaths can be directly and indirectly laid at the feet of the US government (that's right, I wrote millions - Iraq, Indonesia in 1965, El Salvador, Chile, the Philippines, et al). And a number of equally (or more) vicious, anti-democratic regimes have their fingers in the Syrian pie in a way that is no so very different from Libya.

As I've noted more than once, the Arab revolutions in the first instance threw the USA and its allies in Europe and the Middle East, on the back foot. Their core clients were thrown onto the backfoot and for a moment it looked like the USA would even lose Bahrain, home to the extremely strategic 5th Fleet. But counter-revolution, like rust, never sleeps and, as Mao said, in crisis there is opportunity. With the uprising in Libya, the Americans, Europeans and the Gulf Cooperation Council - which composes Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait and was fresh from crushing the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain - moved to intervene in the Arab revolution. The idea was clearly two or threefold. 1) Steer the revolution in a "moderate", pro-capitalist and pro-western (cough, cough, Israel) direction. 2) Eliminate regimes that were not fully in the pocket of the Americans and the Saudis/GCC. And 3) do some damage to the ambitions and strategic interests of other imperialist powers, in particular China and Russia.

Libya may have been the first stop on this traveling road show but it most certainly isn't the last. And now Syria is becoming the next target and battleground for inter-imperialist rivalry. This is, of course, very dangerous for the region and the Syrian people. None of the big players give a damn about democracy or self-determination. The Russians spent more than a decade slaughtering Chechens who were foolish enough to think that they deserved independence because it's a democratic right - not to mention the Russian government's penchant for internal repression and fixing elections. The Chinese? Tiananmen Square, anyone? Actually, China makes no pretence about having any support for democratic rights - the Chinese people "aren't ready" for democracy. Turkey has, of course, also made noises of support for the anti-Assad movement in Syria but their concerns for democracy can't be taken seriously either, with their continued denial of the rights of their Kurdish population, including a recent deadly bombing raid on Kurd civilians - and a counter-insurgency in the 90s that destroyed something like 40,000 villages.

The involvement of these opposing players with their regional ambitions - I haven't even discussed Iran, which remains in the crosshairs of the west - is making the struggle for democracy more difficult. It is making it more, not less, likely that Syria will descend into civil war. For those of us who live in the Europe and North America, our first responsibility is to oppose all attempts by our governments to intervene in the Syrian conflict. They are not here or anywhere interested in the human and democratic rights of the population.

Within Syria itself the scene on the ground is very complicated. There is much talk in the press about divisions within the opposition but how much that is reflected on the ground inside Syria is unclear and how much of it is a cynical attempt to get the more radical and grassroots Local Coordination Committees to line-up with the pro-imperialist, emigre-based Syrian National Council (SNC) is unclear. The existence of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) also further complicates matters. On the one hand its existence is a positive sign of the disintegration of the Syrian state's repressive apparatus. On the other it risks becoming a substitute for a mass movement and causing a descent into civil war, which will be much more convenient for the imperialists of each side to back. It doesn't help that the FSA leadership has itself lined up with the SNC. Like in Libya, the FSA could easily end up acting as the foot soldiers for a NATO military operation.

At present the movement seems to have, against tremendous odds, retained its mass, popular character with strikes, sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience and popular mobilization. It is, in many ways, now a game of wills - who can withstand the pressure exerted by the other longer. The Syrian state is a "deep state", which, like many other dictatorships in the region, has utilized clientelism, sectarianism, tribal and ethnic rivalries to sustain its power base. Undermining those deeply embedded relations of clientelism and fear was never going to happen overnight and was unlikely to ever happen without bloodshed, given the vicious nature of the regime. But the momentum seems to be in the direction of the disintegration of the Syrian regime, as the movement has now firmly taken hold in the capital, Damascus. What the movement needs most at the moment, it seems, is time to finish the job free of the meddling of outside interlocutors whose interests are anything but democracy and justice.

Libyan Rebels Are NATO Patsies For A New Great Game In Africa

Today: UK PM Cameron with Mustafa Abdul Jalil,
head of rebel TNC & former Gaddafi Justice Minister

In the first days following the pro-democracy demonstrations and then uprising in Libya, it would have taken a hard heart indeed to not support the revolt. While Muammar Gaddafi might once, in distant memory, have been able to claim some sort of fidelity to anti-imperialism and to the social development of Libya, those days were long gone. His regime was now taking money from Europe to act as its southern gendarme against illegal African immigration to Europe and was an enthusiastic partner in the War on Terror. It's no accident that arch-war monger, former British PM Tony Blair, was announced by Gaddafi's son to be a $1 million+ per year consultant to the regime. The domestic economic policies of the regime were increasingly neo-liberal and his son - and likely heir to the leadership of Libya - Saif al-Islam was the Libyan version of Gamal Mubarak - a designer suit wearing playboy and enthusiastic privatizer. The Libya regime was now just one more western supported petro-dictatorship in the Arab world.

What's more, that revolt was obviously part of the wave of revolts sweeping the Arab world and that had already toppled Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt. In Bahrain it looked like the pro-democracy movement was on the verge of victory. In Yemen it was well on its way. There were even stirrings in Syria and large protests in Iraq.

But things have changed a lot in the last four months.

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia continue to deepen, with strike waves and the explosive growth of independent unions in Egypt. In Syria, the revolt against Assad continues unabated and, impossibly, grows even in the face of terrible repression. In Yemen, President Salah clings to power - though for what reason is unclear since all but his family have abandoned him - driving the country to the brink of civil war. In Bahrain, with US blessing, the Saudi military helped to crush the pro-democracy movement in a wave of repression and purges that continues.

And in Libya we've passed the 100 day mark since NATO started it's "humanitarian bombing" mission to "protect civilians." What has become clear is that while the revolt was rooted in the real and legitimate discontent of the Libyan people, that movement was quickly corralled and contained by forces with another agenda. Opportunists from the Libyan regime, senior figures who had happily gone along with the torture and repression of dissidents, suddenly "joined" the movement, forming the Transitional National Council. The popular elements, including the local committees that sprang up in the heat of the revolt were pushed aside. The struggle against the Gaddafi regime was transformed from a social struggle against a repressive neo-liberal dictatorship, to a military struggle between two factions of the regime.

Yesterday: Former UK PM Tony Blair with Gaddafi

No longer was it about an uprising and about winning rank and file soldiers to support the revolt and break with Gaddafi - a pattern that marked the early stages of the revolt. It now became about defeating Gaddafi-controlled troops in a military contest in order to elevate the former regime figures to the leadership - with policies that differed little from Saif the "reformer". But Gaddafi and his allies still controlled two-thirds of the country geographically, a significant amount of popular support and two-thirds of the state infrastructure, meaning that the former regime figures were outgunned and outmanned. With no apparent political strategy to deepen the revolt, they ended up in the arms of NATO, begging for the alliance's military support.

But the support of NATO, Europe and the USA comes at a heavy price. That price is clear - the first thing that was demanded of the TNC was that they agree to respect the oil contracts signed by the Gaddafi regime, including its terms. It is also likely that it will mean accepting a US base on Libyan soil - the US African Command (Africom) has been refused by every African country and so is stationed in Germany. This is a strategically important beach-head for the Americans, who feel increasingly squeezed by the Chinese, who are making substantial inroads into Africa - ironically, by spending money on infrastructure that was accumulated by selling Chinese goods to America and Europe (paid for with debt that is held by the Chinese). Prior to the revolt against Gaddafi, there were more than 30,000 Chinese workers and specialists in Libya attached to the sizeable Chinese oil investments. An article in The Globe & Mail last November gives a flavour of China's push into Africa:

On Monday, Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping finished a two-day visit to Botswana in which he signed financing deals worth millions in infrastructure and energy development. Two days earlier, he’d made major deals in oil-rich Angola. On Wednesday in Ethiopia, Chinese private and state investors opened a $27-million leather-goods factory that will employ 500 Ethiopians; the same investment fund is also building cement plants and an airport hotel nearby. On Thursday, Sudan, which imports 80 per cent of its food, announced plans to quintuple its current wheat cultivation with backing from Chinese and Persian Gulf investors, increasing its acres under cultivation by 25 per cent a year for a decade.

And this is not an atypical week. The Chinese claim to have more than $1.5-billion invested in Africa now, up from $210-million; they employ at least 300,000 Africans in their own countries (and, increasingly, import African workers to the cities of the Pearl River Delta) and have built 60,000 kilometres of roads and 3.5 million kilowatts worth of power stations there – far more than any other country. Last year, China replaced the United States as the largest trading partner of South Africa, the continent’s biggest economy, and annual China-Africa trade topped $100-billion for the first time this year.

Russian interests are also under threat in the region as the US, UK and the EU jockey to make the maximum gains from the upheaval of the Arab Spring. It's no surprise that Russia has opposed intervention, not from any principled anti-imperialism - as the Chechnyans and Georgians could attest - but rather out of the fear of losing their toehold in the region, mediated through America's enemies (i.e. those countries whose policies aren't subordinate to America's interests) like Syria and Iran.

What is going on in Libya now must be seen in this light - as a hijacked revolution that now plays its part in a new Great Game between imperial powers jockeying for position in Africa and the Middle East, primarily China and Russia vs NATO & the USA. Not only is this game a dangerous one that could exacerbate tensions between the imperial powers, none of whom is likely to look kindly on the loss of infrastructure and capital investments, strategic relationships, etc. It is also a threat to the whole process of democratic revolution throughout the Arab world.

On the other hand, if NATO loses in Libya, it will be a massive blow to the ability of the alliance to project power beyond Europe's borders. The recent criticisms by outgoing US Defence Chief Gates makes clear that there are already tensions and frustrations within the alliance as a result of the unwinnable NATO war in Afghanistan. Defeat in Libya will be another nail in the coffin of one of the pre-eminent tools of the United States to spread its empire, alongside its junior European partner. It will also be a defeat for the Gulf Cooperation Council, led by the repressive Saudi regime, who have thrown in their lot with the emerging project to use the upheaval to reconfigure relations in the region - defeating thorns in the side like Syria's Assad (who is a Shi'ite and who supports Hezbollah, a Shi'ite movement) and the bombastic Gaddafi, who has offended the Gulf emirs more than once with his anti-colonial rhetoric.

Chances are there will be no "good" solution forthcoming in the short-term. Probably NATO will attempt to save face by declaring a limited victory via establishing the partition of Libya between Cyrenaica in the east and Tripolitania in the west. Cyrenaica will, of course, be a NATO client regime "protected" by the permanent presence of NATO/US troops and military forces. A victory by Gaddafi is also unlikely to bring democracy to the Libyan people. The real hope lies with the further deepening of the Tunisian revolution on Libya's western border and the Egyptian revolution on the eastern border.

In the meantime, the best bad outcome is for a defeat for NATO, which is a much bigger threat to world peace and democracy than Gaddafi has ever been. NATO is waging war in Afghanistan, to guarantee a strategic advantage against China on its western border and to encircle Iran to the west of Afghanistan. NATO countries led the war against Iraq - predominantly the US and UK, of course. The UK was the first country to rush into the Middle East after the Egyptian revolution to hawk more weapons to frightened dictatorships. The US, of course, is deployed in more than 150 countries around the world. The Libyans, at present, are not deployed anywhere outside of Libya and under Gaddafi were involved in or initiated three wars since 1977 - two of those were ostensibly anti-colonial: against a French neo-colonial regime in Chad and the other a protest against the Egyptian dictatorship's peace treaty with Israel. This is not at all to justify Libyan military interventions - let alone its corrupt and oppressive social and economic policies - but to make clear that Gaddafi's regime are not even in the same league as the US/NATO and, with a population of 6 million, can't even be described as a regional imperialist country.

France confirms arming Libyan rebels - Africa - Al Jazeera English

Russian Spies, American Spies. We All Got Spies - Why the Hoopla?

I've mostly been not reading about the Russian spy scandal. I just don't care that much. But I browsed this article in the Globe & Mail this evening to catch up on what's going on. Apparently a bunch of people were spying for Russia and they were arrested in the US with some of them charged and convicted. But now some of those people are going to be sent back to Russia in exchange for some people in Russia who were caught spying, were charged and sent to jail. Huh?

Wait a minute. If our side is spying - I'm assuming CSIS is doing more than telling tales about our foreign agent MPs, they're actually doing some spying of their own - and their side is spying, then everyone is spying and why is it a crime? I mean, I can see why governments and corporations don't want spies stealing the secret to how they get the Caramilk inside the Caramilk bar (I know how by the way and will sell it to the highest bidder) but why the jail term? Isn't that, you know, hypocritical? And why the big stink about it?

"Holy shit there were people spying on our country just like we were doing to them!"

Part of the hoopla, I suspect, has to do with the fact that there is increased imperial friction going on in the world these days. No, Imperial Friction is not the name of the well-known penguin's mating activity. What I mean is that while the USA is still the world's pre-eminent power, with an enormous military capacity, it is no longer unassailable and other pretenders and regional powers are beginning to challenge the Americans.

Afghanistan, for instance, is not just about those Kazakh gas deposits and possible lithium supplies inside Afghanistan itself. It is about containing China on its western borders and pushing up against Russia on its southern borders. And Russia and China are pushing back, though in different ways. The clash in Georgia is another reflection of this friction. At one level it does look utterly silly, this tit-for-tat spy swap with lots of huffing and puffing and hand-wringing by the American and Canadian media about Russia doing the same thing here that we're doing over there. But on another level it is quite frightening because we can see in miniature how such conflicts can escalate and become much more dangerous. This is primarily expressed through proxy fights - Russia crushes Georgia, America's Newest caucasian sweetheart; America sells weapons and performs joint military maneuvers with Taiwan, infuriating China. But sometimes secondary conflicts can spiral out of control. Imperialism plays a very high stakes game of chicken and people's lives, including our own, are the ante.

CIA Aren't Just Thugs - They're Funny Too

So, I came across this article in the New York Post about the CIA's purchase of a couple of Russian helicopters in the weeks following 9/11, as the USA prepared to invade Afghanistan. What's interesting about this story is just how incompetent and corrupt are all the people who were involved. It is a story reminiscent of some of the other CIA torture stories coming out at the moment - the European supply station chief who gave contracts to his friend's company to soak up all those counter-insurgency dollars (and who is now in jail for doing so - like two of the key men behind this fiasco).

Awash in dollars and itching for a fight with big, bad Afghanistan (with a GDP less than a box store mall in suburban Ohio) these mooks - most of whom had never left Texas, let alone been to Russia (including the translator) - found themselves in a remote Siberian city, surrounded by volcanoes, 30 degree below zero temperatures and suspicious officials ("oh, these military helicopters are just for tourist reasons and fishing. Honest."). They're hotel rooms were cold and bugged. The Army guys along for the ride spent their time drunk. When members of the civilian air crew who flew them there expressed concern about their behaviour, the Army man in charge threatened to shoot their airplane out of the sky (they subsequently slipped out in the middle of the night and flew to Japan to get away). The CIA goes got sick of the Army guys' drunken antics and sent them home and then somebody else outbid the CIA for the helicopters.

They did eventually get the copters but there was a trail of fraud, mayhem and stupidity longer than a Russian novel.

It all just goes to show you that whether they know what they're doing or not, whether they do their job well or poorly, the CIA are always a danger to humanity.