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Washingtons Long War on Syria

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Syria

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In place of pandering to Wall Street, Syria’s Arab nationalists sought to free Syria—and as an ultimate goal, the entire Arab world—from the political and economic agendas of foreign powers. — location: 99 ^ref-59464

This is not to suggest that a cabal of rich capitalists secretly meets to dictate policy prescriptions to the U.S. government. Instead, the business community takes advantage of a multitude of mechanisms to ensure its policy preferences prevail in competition with other groups. — location: 175 ^ref-37470

the sophistication of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad, — location: 221 ^ref-40574

how much destruction has the US brought upon the latter two - the third remains to be seen

If Marxist socialism was aimed at liberating the working class from its exploitation by capitalists, Arab socialism was aimed at liberating Arabs from their exploitation by imperialists. — location: 240 ^ref-60217

The United States, accordingly, embarked on a decades-long campaign of invasions and economic warfare to drive Iraq’s experiment in Arab nationalism into ruin, and eventually to purge the state of its secular Arab nationalist influence. — location: 246 ^ref-27512

political Islam of revolutionary Iran, to which the Arab nationalists of the Syrian state were allied as a consequence of sharing with Iran’s Islamic Revolution three core values: a commitment to freeing the Middle East from Western domination; an implacable opposition to the colonial settlement of Palestine (a country, which, from the perspective of Syria’s ruling Arab nationalists, was Arab, and from the vantage point of Iran’s Islamists, was Muslim); and a state-directed model of economic development. — location: 308 ^ref-8427

Wahhabism, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood movement and Iranian Islamic Revolution, was not a reaction to Western domination. Wahhabism arose in the eighteenth century as a viciously sectarian, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, unrelated to the Arab and Muslim world’s encounter with European colonialism. — location: 330 ^ref-4241

One way to blunt the appeal of Iran’s Islamic Revolution to Arabs and Muslims, most of whom were Sunni, was to foster anti-Shi’a animosity. Galvanized by animus of Shi’a “apostates,” Islamic State spent a good deal of its energies attacking Shi’a targets. — location: 356 ^ref-5814

Galvanized by animus of Shi’a “apostates,” Islamic State spent a good deal of its energies attacking Shi’a targets. — location: 357 ^ref-15122

in turn, engendered mistrust and animosity on the part of Shi’ites against Sunnis. The outcome was an escalating sectarian conflict, which acted to keep the Arab and Muslim worlds divided, — location: 358 ^ref-58425

With talk of return of Muslim civilization, such disputes ensure it will not occur

Alawites had historically faced discrimination from Syria’s Sunni majority. As a consequence, they were attracted to political parties which were explicitly secular and anti-sectarian and which sought to overcome the Arab world’s religious divisions. — location: 369 ^ref-33517

sounds similar to Jewish involvement in early communist organizations

both the Syrian officer corps and Ba’ath party came to have a disproportionally strong representation of Alawites (along with members of other religious minorities) and a disproportionally weak representation of Sunnis. — location: 375 ^ref-49852

Assad led a second coup, this time against his former comrades, which he styled a “correction.” Assad resolved to take the country in a less hardline leftist direction than his now erstwhile comrades had taken it, largely because he believed the government’s policies had alienated a large part of the population. Conservative Muslims needed to be won over by persuasion, not force, and a go-slow approach was, in his view, called for. — location: 380 ^ref-50439

appointees to top security positions were Alawites. They weren’t Alawite because Assad chose them on the basis of their religious identity, but because he chose them on the basis of their kinship and amity ties. The over-representation of Alawites in key state security positions, then, was a concomitant, or epiphenomenon, of Assad’s decision to surround himself with trusted intimates, — location: 386 ^ref-26324

Accusing the Ba’ath Party of being an instrument of the Alawite community was tantamount to accusing the mid-twentieth century U.S. Communist Party of pursuing a Jewish agenda because Jews were over-represented in the party relative to their numbers in the U.S. population. — location: 392 ^ref-31146

propagation of the myth of sectarian warfare comported with the predilection of Western discourse for Orientalist depictions of the Global South — location: 401 ^ref-7685

the myth of the Assad government as an Alawite instrument of oppression concealed the central role that secular Arab nationalism played in the Middle East and in the politics of the Assad government. This obfuscated the true dimensions of the conflict. — location: 407 ^ref-29378

Acknowledging the ideological framework within which the Syrian government operated, rather than presenting Syrian leaders as motivated by a lust for power to advance a sectarian agenda on behalf of the Alawite minority, would have presented Syria’s Arab nationalists as rational actors pursuing what many may have considered defensible, if not praiseworthy, goals. — location: 411 ^ref-49357

its leadership over a Syria where Arab nationalists pursued an agenda which was antithetical to U.S. imperialist goals. — location: 420 ^ref-18281

Iran’s revolutionaries defined Iran’s private sector as subordinate and subservient to the state sector—an anathema from the perspective of Washington’s Wall Street-defined economic orthodoxy. — location: 427 ^ref-35377

a rocket with a typical payload of nerve gas will kill between 108 and 290 people if delivered under ideal weather conditions — location: 447 ^ref-23014

The sanctions led to the deaths of more Iraqis, observed the Muellers, than all the deaths attributable to the use of weapons of mass destruction throughout history. — location: 454 ^ref-22153

Many peace activists embraced sanctions as an alternative to the soldier’s business, viewing them erroneously, not as a form of warfare, with destructive consequences as great if not greater than pushing or throwing pieces of metal at the enemy, but as peaceful coercion. — location: 459 ^ref-10335

the U.S. war on Syria began long ago, before 2011. It began the moment Arab nationalists came to power in Damascus, proclaiming a motto they were determined would guide their efforts to liberate the Arab world from its centuries of domination by outside powers. — location: 466 ^ref-29710

independent, united Arab state through public ownership and planning—that is, via socialism, a concept which stirred deep antipathy on Wall Street and therefore at the U.S. State Department, where Wall Street’s influence was strong. — location: 480 ^ref-50589

As a collection of individual states, each with its own local concerns and each seeking to safeguard its own autonomy, the countries of the Arab nation would forever work at cross-purposes and would never be able to achieve the coordination and unity necessary to muster a serious challenge to their domination by Europe. — location: 496 ^ref-54861

Why had seven Arab states been unable to defeat Zionist forces in the 1947-1948 war? Answer: Because there were seven Arab states. — location: 500 ^ref-41451

while the Palestinians had begun to think of themselves in national terms, this was only one of several overlapping identities, which included identities related to being members of Greater Syria and beyond that, a greater Arab nation, as well as religious, local and familial identities.” — location: 514 ^ref-41602

Aflaq was a Christian and al-Bitar a Sunni Muslim, both of whom viewed sectarianism as the very antithesis of the party’s raison d’être; — location: 523 ^ref-52329

Arab socialism was defined as state planning, that is, direction and control of the economy in order to overcome the Arab world’s colonial legacy of underdevelopment. — location: 536 ^ref-56886

For Ba’athists, the enemy was Western imperialism and its instruments, including Israel, the Jewish settler state in Palestine, and Washington’s Arab client states, Saudi Arabia among the most important. — location: 540 ^ref-34617

While considering client states as enemies may bring thoughts of open hostility to fellow Muslims, the role those client states play result in just that

Western leaders spoke often of their vision of a political transition in Syria toward a pluralistic, democratic state, obfuscating the reality that pluralism and an elected legislature had been parts of Syrian political life for decades. — location: 594 ^ref-43944

One divide and rule practice was to transmute politically insignificant ethno-sectarian divisions within a community into significant ones by establishing quotas for political office based on ethno-sectarian identity. — location: 607 ^ref-15314

one appointee, Hamid Moussa, was chosen as one of the council’s Shi’a representatives, despite the fact that he self-identified as a communist. — location: 612 ^ref-1740

the conflicts that Bremer wanted Iraqis to focus on were differences within Iraq, and not differences between Iraq and its new imperial overlord. — location: 618 ^ref-45063

A majority of Iraqis were opposed to Bremer’s plan. A September 2003 poll found that only 29 percent of the country’s citizens agreed that it was important that their political leaders represent their sect. — location: 632 ^ref-28894

“This council,” he said, “has divided Iraq along communal and ethnic lines for the first time in history. It is the creation of the occupation forces. It is formed of parties that do not express the will of all Iraqis, whether Sunni or Shi’a.” — location: 636 ^ref-42830

of the “most wanted” members of Saddam’s government, as identified by the deck of fifty-five playing cards issued by the Pentagon on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, two out of every three were Shi’a. — location: 649 ^ref-38842

While different from the Western practice of elections contested by two or more candidates, this was hardly the dictatorship that Western propaganda alleged. — location: 662 ^ref-31780

that for all the surface distinctions between Syrian and U.S. democracy, the two systems were fundamentally alike. — location: 668 ^ref-41864

the difference between presidential elections in Syria, under its 1973 constitution, and the United States today, is that presidential candidates in the former were chosen by Arab nationalists to carry out the country’s Arab nationalist mission, while in the latter, the candidates are chosen by the U.S. capitalist class to carry out the country’s capitalist-based imperialist mission. — location: 679 ^ref-28328

What this criticism ignored was that all religious minority communities in Syria enjoyed improved standards of living under the Ba’athists, because members of these communities belonged to the class of poor, rural, laborers who the Ba’athists’ socialist policies targeted for uplift. — location: 696 ^ref-48001

By exploiting open society guarantees of civil and political liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press, proxies of foreign countries, or indigenous forces which lacked commitment to the national independence project, would be able to organize opposition to the goal of asserting national self-determination. — location: 734 ^ref-2091

The fear of falling into what they call neo-colonialism is always present. Hence, opposition to the dominant party appears to be, and sometimes actually is, destructive of the chances of nationhood. In such circumstances, opposition appears as treason against the nation. — location: 748 ^ref-34733

in a newly-independent underdeveloped country there are strong inherent pressures against a liberal-democratic system. The pressure militates not only against a competitive party system, but also against maintenance of realistic civil liberties. — location: 752 ^ref-19785

It is not unusual to hear of the non-liberal, single-party state of post-colonial societies as a form of government that springs from revolutionary leaders’ lust for power, rather than from the logic of the circumstances in which revolutionaries find themselves. This fits an ubiquitous discourse which holds all revolutionaries to be dictators in embryo. — location: 756 ^ref-8943

totalitarianism is the ideology of total war; in other words, that totalitarianism is not inherent in ideology but political circumstances.21 Governments become totalitarian in times of grave crisis, no matter what their political stripe. — location: 760 ^ref-8056

By 1921, the Bolsheviks had abandoned their initial tolerance of a multi-party arrangement in favor of a one-party state. Why? Ideology was not the reason. The structural logic of the Bolshevik’s situation was. — location: 768 ^ref-41062

What the propagandists failed to mention was that non-liberal one-party states arose as adaptations to enormous political challenges which required strong leadership and unity of purpose; that communist and post-colonial states had to fight for their lives against the fierce opposition of the Great Powers; and that when Washington itself faced even less formidable dangers it regularly shed its liberal and democratic institutions. — location: 786 ^ref-63276

Even in our day, the sequel to the attack of 11 September 2001 was the opening of a concentration camp at Guantanamo, where detainees have been imprisoned without trial, and without even being informed of a specific charge, regardless of age. — location: 794 ^ref-54044

In both world wars the United States faced neither the threat of nuclear annihilation nor a realistic threat of invasion, and certainly did not face the hostility of a country stronger than it militarily by many orders of magnitude. — location: 803 ^ref-45380

the threats faced by the United States in two world wars and after 9/11, no matter how grave they were, were less minatory than the threats which Arab nationalist Syria faced. All the same, U.S. presidents assumed virtual dictatorial powers in both WWI and WWII, and strengthened the United States’ police state powers in response to the 9/11 attacks. — location: 805 ^ref-53585

A single party was able to reach across the divisions of the nation, to bring people together and to fight against their common enemy. — location: 811 ^ref-49204

there are generally two kinds of ways in which democracy has been defined: as a set of procedures for electing candidates to public office, or as a type of society. — location: 815 ^ref-18563

Today, democracy, as a set of procedures for electing people to public office, is lionized by the capitalist elite of the liberal democratic world, though it’s very unlikely that capitalists would welcome democracy as real, genuine rule by the masses, in which decision-making is aimed at promoting and defending the interests of the rabble — location: 822 ^ref-16404

The capitalist elite embraces democracy in the first sense (a set of procedures), and deplores it in the second (a type of society). — location: 825 ^ref-3452

Within a capitalist framework, democracy as a set of procedures for electing representatives does not translate into democracy as a type of society in which average citizens and mass-based interest groups have decisive influence over government policy. — location: 835 ^ref-48631

The rabble achieves full democracy when it rejects the top income stratum-connected decision-makers altogether, and replaces them with its own rule. — location: 851 ^ref-22623

For oppressed people under the yoke of foreign domination, democracy is achieved the moment their oppression ends and they take control of their destiny—that — location: 852 ^ref-42961

The survival of Ba’athism as a movement of Arab national liberation now demanded flexibility. Accordingly, the Ba’athists made a number of concessions that were neither superficial nor partial. — location: 871 ^ref-23407

By making these concessions, the Ba’athist government was delivering the multi-party democracy that Western state officials and media said (erroneously it turned out) protesters had clamored for. — location: 879 ^ref-33295

the insurgency intensified, as outside powers—Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—poured money into it. The insurgents rejected the reforms, explaining that they had arrived too late. Yet the date the reforms were implemented hardly made them less desirable or significant. — location: 882 ^ref-54134

Washington, London and Paris also dismissed the Syrian government’s concessions. The concessions were “meaningless,” they said, but did not explain why. — location: 884 ^ref-48639

The only people who knew what had sparked the demonstrations were the demonstrators themselves. It was the Western media which gave the amorphous phenomenon of violent street demonstrations its form, declaring that protesters were demanding democracy and civil liberties. — location: 889 ^ref-29891

“It was seemingly apparent at the beginning that demands were for reforms. It was utilized to appear as if the crisis was a matter of political reform. Indeed, we pursued a policy of wide scale reforms from changing the constitution — location: 894 ^ref-28987

It was striking that with every step we took in the reform process, the level of terrorism escalated.” — location: 897 ^ref-30333

From Washington’s perspective, the new constitution opened space for alternative political parties. Washington could exploit this new openness to gain leverage in Syria by quietly backing parties that favored pro-U.S. positions—a plus. — location: 898 ^ref-13913

“Syria is an independent state working for the interests of its people, rather than making the Syrian people work for the interests of the West.” — location: 908 ^ref-49455

“Our agenda,” the Obama Administration had declared in 2015, recapitulating U.S. foreign policy strategy since the end of World War II, “is focused on lowering tariffs on American products, breaking down barriers to our goods and services, and setting higher standards to level the playing field for American...firms.” — location: 919 ^ref-64458

Syria had “failed to join an increasingly interconnected global economy,” which is to say, had failed to turn over its state-owned enterprises to private investors, among them Wall Street financial interests. — location: 925 ^ref-65284

nor was the difficulty that the Ba’athists’ reforms weren’t democratic enough. It was that they were too democratic, too focused on safeguarding and promoting the interests of Syrians, rather than making Syrians promote the interests of Wall Street, Washington and Tel Aviv. — location: 943 ^ref-13957

Gaddafi committed Libya to stand with “brothers from all parts of the Arab Nation in the struggle for the restoration of every inch of Arab land desecrated by imperialism and for the elimination of all obstacles which prevent Arab unity from the [Persian] Gulf to the [Atlantic] Ocean,” — location: 954 ^ref-12543

crazy cause he also supported African causes - imagine a linked Pan African Pan Arab entity

NATO forces intervened on the side of Islamist fighters who rejected Gaddafi’s secular Arab nationalism, seeking to found an Islamic state in its place. — location: 979 ^ref-9470

2006 speech in which Gaddafi said: “Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.” — location: 990 ^ref-8894

under Gaddafi’s Arab socialism, Libya had a remarkable record of development. — location: 1000 ^ref-42762

it wasn’t Libya’s development that was handicapped by Arab socialism—it was the profits of Western oil firms. — location: 1001 ^ref-972

the World Bank’s vision for Libya is: “remove restrictions on foreign ownership of land and sectoral restrictions in banking, reform the labor code to provide necessary flexibility to business operations, and replace the progressive corporate tax with a low flat rate” — location: 1002 ^ref-54449

Ba’athist Iraq illustrated an Arab nationalist truth which Washington did not want publicized. The truth was that Arabs could thrive beyond their wildest imaginings if they united to free their homeland from foreign domination, and, by dint of public ownership and planning, used their vast resources, both natural and human, to overcome the colonial legacy of their underdevelopment. — location: 1049 ^ref-55560

Most Arabs are aware that the monarchies were established by imperialists seeking to build fences around oil wells. — location: 1061 ^ref-2837

while tremendous profits are made by U.S.-based petroleum corporations that continue to dominate the petroleum industry in this region, the United States is not in fact especially reliant on petroleum imports from the Gulf.”66 — location: 1085 ^ref-64317

“In 1976…U.S. petroleum companies in the Middle East exported less than 7 percent of their output to the United States while selling 82 percent to third countries.” — location: 1091 ^ref-44937

The problem, from Washington’s perspective, was not that the Arab nationalists would cut the United States off from access to oil from the Middle East, but that they would cut U.S. oil companies off from the immense profits they derived from selling Arab oil to Western Europe and Japan. — location: 1098 ^ref-39794

Washington’s real concern, therefore, was not that Americans would be left to freeze in the dark and wait in queues at the gas pumps, but that U.S. oil firms would lose control of the Middle East’s oil to Arabs who would use these resources for the uplift of the Arab nation, — location: 1105 ^ref-47438

A more convincing explanation of why Bremer ordered the anti-Ba’athist purge was that Washington opposed most aspects of the Ba’ath Party’s ideological orientation: its commitment to freedom from outside domination; its long-term goal of building a pan-Arabic super-state; and its embrace of socialism. — location: 1127 ^ref-3787

If Lenin had decided that opponents of the Bolshevik Revolution would not be allowed to freely organize its demise, the United States decided that opponents of U.S. imperialism would not be allowed to freely organize anti-imperialist opposition within Iraq’s political arena. — location: 1135 ^ref-32194

Over 560 secular nationalist Iraqis were prevented from running as candidates in Iraq’s 2009 elections, under the provisions of the de-Ba’athification articles of Iraq’s Washington-approved constitution. This allowed the election to be monopolized by Shi’a Muslim and Sunni Muslim sectarians. — location: 1137 ^ref-13682

This policy was directed toward not only privatizing state-owned enterprises but also allowing them to be purchased 100 percent by foreign interests. — location: 1146 ^ref-12524

The British response to the revolt was swift and brutal. Villages were razed. Livestock was slaughtered. Everyone, insurgents and non-combatants, was treated as an enemy. — location: 1183 ^ref-40779

British-led forces poisoned wells, torched villages, destroyed crops and shot livestock. During the interrogation of rebels they developed their torture techniques...Areas populated by civilians were turned into free-fire zones.” — location: 1186 ^ref-3596

Contrast the very real democratic outcomes in the Marxist and Arab socialist countries with the non-democratic outcomes in the United States, where, despite the apparatus of voting, health care and education at all levels are not free, and full-employment is not on the agenda. — location: 1214 ^ref-22622

Washington’s assigning Syria to the company of countries in which it sought regime change, a full decade before the Arab Spring uprising, is evidence that the March 2011 disturbances, or more precisely, Damascus’s response to them, did not precipitate Washington’s decision to topple the Syrian government. — location: 1662 ^ref-20022

The first contestable view is that the demonstrations against the Assad government that erupted in the spring of 2011 were disconnected from the main force of opposition within Syria to the secular Arab nationalist state, namely Sunni political Islam. The evidence, however, shows that the demands of the protesters had an Islamist content. It reveals that jihadist groups at the fore of the insurrection had begun operations in early 2011, before the violent protests erupted, — location: 1691 ^ref-4457

The second view, which is clearly untenable, is that the protests were non-violent. They were, on the contrary, violent from the beginning, a reality that was acknowledged by the U.S. government early on, but later obfuscated by U.S. state officials who preferred to speak of the violent eruptions as “largely” peaceful. — location: 1702 ^ref-34218

the reality that a minority that set fire to buildings and cars and clashed with police, eventually killing large numbers of them, were engaged in violence, and that the character of a protest movement containing even a minority of violent participants is still violent. — location: 1705 ^ref-38956

The third contestable view is that the uprising had broad popular support, that the Assad government was widely reviled, and that Assad himself had lost legitimacy among Syrians. — location: 1707 ^ref-23416

reports in the months immediately preceding the mid-March 2011 eruption of anti-government violence said the very opposite. These reports indicated that Assad was widely viewed by Syrians as a legitimate — location: 1709 ^ref-56467

Washington had recycled parts of Kermit Roosevelt’s plan to topple the Ba’athist-Communist triumvirate that ruled in Damascus in 1956; that is, it enlisted the aid of Sunni Islamists to create internal uprisings in Syria, as Roosevelt had planned to do in the mid-1950s. Washington would portray the uprisings as popularly based, and declare that this demonstrated the president had lost legitimacy and must therefore step down. As such, Washington could justify its almost immediate overt support of the armed insurrectionists as an exercise in democracy promotion. — location: 1713 ^ref-486

Rania Abouzeid attributed the failure of the protest organizers to draw significant support to the fact that most Syrians were not opposed to their government. Assad had a favorable reputation, especially among the two-thirds of the population under thirty, and his government’s policies were widely supported. “Even critics concede that Assad is popular and considered close to the country’s huge youth cohort, both emotionally, ideologically and, of course, chronologically,” — location: 1722 ^ref-42701

on the eve of the signal Daraa events Syria was being remarked upon for its quietude. No one “expects mass uprisings in Syria,” — location: 1732 ^ref-48636

Clearly, this wasn’t a peaceful demonstration, as it would be later depicted. Nor was it a mass uprising. Time reported that the demonstrators numbered in the hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands. — location: 1752 ^ref-53539

Why did the government make these concessions? Because that’s what the Daraa protesters demanded. — location: 1758 ^ref-4882

To underscore the point that the protests lacked broad popular support, two weeks later, on April 22, The New York Times’ Anthony Shadid reported that “the protests, so far, seemed to fall short of the popular upheaval of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.” — location: 1782 ^ref-28754

`”there were signs from the very start that armed groups were involved.” — location: 1835 ^ref-38486

By September, Syrian authorities were reporting that they had lost more than 500 police officers and soldiers, killed by guerillas. — location: 1841 ^ref-55126

One reason a violent uprising with a predominantly Islamist content led by armed jihadists against a popular government could be presented as a popular upheaval against an unpopular government was that “the opposition movements during 2011 had well-developed PR operations,” — location: 1850 ^ref-17727

it strains belief that an over- reaction by security forces to a challenge to government authority in the Syrian town of Daraa could spark a major war, involving scores of states, and mobilizing jihadists from scores of countries. — location: 1874 ^ref-7552

we would have to overlook the reality that the Assad government was popular and viewed as legitimate. — location: 1877 ^ref-52942

Third, we would have to close our eyes to the fact that the U.S. government, with its British ally, had drawn up plans in 1957 to provoke a war in Syria by enlisting the Muslim Brotherhood to instigate internal uprisings. The Daraa riot and subsequent armed clashes with police and soldiers resembled the plan which regime change specialist Kermit Roosevelt had prepared. — location: 1889 ^ref-11330

U.S. strategists had planned since 2003, and possibly as early as 2001, to force Assad and his secular Arab nationalist ideology from power, and was funding the Syrian opposition, including Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups, — location: 1893 ^ref-17388

Washington had been driving toward the overthrow of the Assad government with the goal of de-Ba’athifying Syria. — location: 1895 ^ref-34962

To be sure, Syria was, indeed, a police state. But all states are police states to one degree or another, a reality that Western chauvinism elides. Every state has a political policing function. — location: 1900 ^ref-61356

The point of the propaganda is to misattribute the openness of a society to ideology rather that to the comparatively strong security environments these states enjoy, in order to score propaganda points. — location: 1910 ^ref-28087

The United States, for example, is protected from the external threat of military invasion by two vast oceans, and by its formidable military. It is therefore in a position to maintain police state powers at a level far below those of many other countries that exist within very precarious security environments. — location: 1911 ^ref-27286

and yet it still has a massive prison population/police force

There is a rhetoric and a reality of police states. The reality is that every state is a police state; the rhetoric is that we acknowledge only the police states of our enemies, whose strong police state powers are often a reaction to the threats we create. — location: 1938 ^ref-51746

the Syrian government’s use of force “can be explained, if not condoned, by the fact that it” believed it was “fighting for its life—not only against local opponents but also against an external conspiracy led by the United States (egged on by Israel) and including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Britain and France.” — location: 1968 ^ref-52684

How were Washington’s Arab allies reacting to upheavals in their own countries? The question is important for two reasons. First, the answer illuminates whether Damascus’s response to the violent uprising in Syria was excessive by the standards of its neighbors. Second, it indicates whether Washington had established a double standard by which it accepted the use of force by allies to put down violent dissent but established a higher, and impossible, standard, by which Damascus was to be judged. — location: 1976 ^ref-311

Between itself and its allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, Washington had armed and trained 50,000 insurgents. — location: 2009 ^ref-5299

What there was, instead, was an insurrection, with a predominantly Islamist content, led by armed groups, affiliated with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which was colluding with Washington. — location: 2032 ^ref-22951

the Brothers had vowed an unending jihad against the secular government in Damascus and had been supported since 2005 by Washington. — location: 2036 ^ref-61019

in this case, there is no evidence that the uprising was either popular or that the government was unpopular. The evidence, instead, appears to accord more congenially with the following scenario: The U.S. government enlisted the aid of political Islamists to prosecute a guerilla war against a government it was inimical to because it pursued an Arab nationalist agenda which was an ideological threat to U.S. domination of the oil-rich Arab world. Washington chose to ally with Sunni political Islam because it was the major opposition to Syria’s secular Arab nationalist government. Washington had a history of teaming up with mujahedeen to topple secular leftist governments. It had done so in Afghanistan, where it joined with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—and infamously with Osama bin Laden—to fund, arm and organize a jihad against the “atheist” Soviet communists and their ‘infidel’ secular leftist allies who formed the Afghan government. CIA-backed jihadists would do the same in Syria to topple the “infidel” secular Arab nationalists who were led by the Alawite “heretic” Bashar al-Assad. — location: 2041 ^ref-4968

if he regretted U.S. support to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Brzezinski replied, “What is more important in world history?...Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”62 One suspects that Brzezinski’s successors might have had a similar attitude to Washington’s agitating some Muslims in Syria. — location: 2052 ^ref-23019

When she served as U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright thought the U.S.-led sanctions-related deaths of a half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.” It was the price to be paid to eliminate the Arab nationalist threat to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East presented by Iraq’s Ba’athists. — location: 2056 ^ref-6760

Robert Fisk summed up the phony war against Islamic State in Syria with a sarcastic quip: “And so we went to war against Isis in Syria—unless, of course, Isis was attacking Assad’s regime, in which case we did nothing at all.”67 — location: 2253 ^ref-35145

The moderate rebel was a myth. The insurgency was continuous with an Islamist rebellion that had broken out the moment secular Arab nationalists came to power in Damascus in 1963. That rebellion, in turn, was continuous with a war which had raged between the two movements after 1945, when French colonial forces quit the country, and indigenous forces mounted their first bids for control of the state. — location: 2368 ^ref-64395

In point of fact, the insurgency was animated by the goal of reversing Syria’s democracy, and replacing it with an anti-democratic Islamic state. — location: 2384 ^ref-33028

clerical supervision of a representative democracy. — location: 2392 ^ref-38853

The Saudis were vehemently anti-Shi’a and encouraged anti-Shi’a sentiment, — location: 2402 ^ref-9250

Iran’s leadership, predominantly Shi’a, was studiously non-sectarian, aiding both Shi’ite and Sunni groups, and also supporting secular movements within the Arab world which opposed foreign domination, such as Syria’s secular Arab nationalists and the Palestinian Marxist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. — location: 2402 ^ref-49783

While Iran was an Islamic republic, and Arab nationalist Syria, Libya, and Iraq were secular, they were all alike in having constitutions which committed their respective states to act in three broad areas: promoting unity; achieving independence from foreign influence; and using the levers of the state to direct economic development to overcome the colonial legacy of under-development and provide for the common welfare of their citizens. — location: 2416 ^ref-35953

Islamic Iran also emphasized the promotion of unity, but as an Islamic state its focus was on the unity of the Muslim world rather than on the integration of an ethno-linguistic subset of it. — location: 2424 ^ref-26776

the Iranian constitution committed Tehran to “constantly strive to bring about the political, economic and cultural unity of the Islamic world.” — location: 2426 ^ref-10452

Tehran’s focus on pan-Islamism (as against Syria’s pan- Arabism), was accompanied by a universal commitment to struggles against oppression worldwide. — location: 2427 ^ref-32632

Iran’s support for the Ba’athist government in Damascus gave weight to the notion that the Iranian leadership took seriously both its opposition to imperialism and its support for just struggles against the high and mighty. — location: 2437 ^ref-26027

It seems unlikely that Tehran would have provided anywhere near the same level of support for non-Muslims who had been displaced by settlers colonizing territory outside the Islamic world. Tehran generously funded the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas, but not the secular Marxist PFLP, until Hamas sided with Sunni mujahedeen against Tehran’s allies in Damascus. — location: 2443 ^ref-57097

For Hamas, the chances to contribute to the building of a Sunni Islamist state in Syria seemed to have proved more tempting than standing behind a long-time supporter. — location: 2448 ^ref-9422

once Hamas defected from what had been termed the Axis of Resistance, linking Iran, Syria and Hezbollah against U.S. efforts to completely dominate the Middle East, Tehran began to provide “financial and logistical support for the PFLP’s political and military wings.” — location: 2450 ^ref-61676

Domenico Losurdo argues that the string of U.S. aggressions since the first Gulf War of 1990-1991 were but individual campaigns in a single U.S.-led war for re-colonization of the world. — location: 2464 ^ref-9846

Instead, echoes of Hitler were to be found in the arguments the United States and its allies used to undermine Syrian pan-Arabist ideology by representing it as an instrument of Alawite rule. — location: 2900 ^ref-63963

Emblematic of the bearers of this creed was the philo-fascist Winston Churchill. An ardent defender of ruling class privilege and the British Empire’s subjection of the colonies to dictatorship, he sang the praises of Mussolini, and made clear that his sympathies leaned more strongly toward fascism’s defense of the class, racial and gender discrimination from which he and his class, race and sex benefitted, than toward the Bolshevik project of overcoming discrimination along the same lines. — location: 2927 ^ref-19391

Churchill harrumphed. It was just that “a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race” had “come in and taken their place.” — location: 2943 ^ref-31452

Nazism was simply an expression of European colonialism turned inward. — location: 2954 ^ref-7399

In order to attack a doctrine of Marxist internationalism which had found favor among a large body of German proletarians, the future Fuhrer conflated working class ideology with Judaism, — location: 2969 ^ref-40191

The idea was to discredit Marxism by depicting it as an ideology created by a religious minority to dupe the majority and gain ascendancy over it. This was, grosso modo, how the Western establishment defined the Syrian government. Secular Arab nationalism was conflated with the Alawite faith, a faith with which most Syrians could not identify since they did not adhere to it. — location: 2971 ^ref-30530

This was the myth of a minority trying to dominate a majority by propagating an ideology of equality which denied the importance of the cleavage which set the minority apart. — location: 2978 ^ref-50107

The over-representation of Jews in the Bolshevik leadership relative to their numbers in the Russian population did not mean that the first communist government was in reality a Jewish regime which exercised a Jewish tyranny over a Russian Orthodox Christian majority. — location: 2984 ^ref-18298

the over-representation of Alawites in the security apparatus of the state had no immanent connection to religion, but was an imperative of political survival. — location: 2991 ^ref-41429

according to Ba’ath ideology, it was necessary for Arabs to overcome their divisions, including differences of sect. This could hardly be accomplished by establishing a sectarian regime in Damascus guided by an Alawite agenda. — location: 2996 ^ref-59973

imperialists opposed Ba’athist pan-Arabism for the same reason Hitler opposed Marxist internationalism: because its aim was to build a united front of oppressed people against their common enemy. — location: 2998 ^ref-19779

Hitler’s goal in equating Marxism with Judaism was to make Marxism appear to the German worker as something alien, the creation of a tiny minority, not suitable to members of another—and altogether superior—nation. — location: 3017 ^ref-56597

See the same thing w/ how black struggle in US was conflated w/ Marxism (not that it did not have an influence) and more importantly conflated w/ foreign subversion. See it today now w/ everything being "Russian propaganda", even w/ Russia no longer being a Marxist state

both Nazi propaganda and Western propaganda portrayed ideologies of emancipation as ideologies of racial and sectarian domination. — location: 3033 ^ref-14934

There is a wealthy class that dominates the U.S. state and the U.S. government and runs the state in its interest and against the interests of the vast majority of people. — location: 3113 ^ref-42360

There are only eight countries in the world of say 160 capitalist countries that unremittingly had elections and parliamentary forms from about 1940: Britain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Sweden. All others had a dictatorship or military government at some point. — location: 3154 ^ref-21995

the normal state for capitalist economies is to have military rule. — location: 3156 ^ref-30767

If ever there were a deep crisis in the United States that threatened capitalist rule, U.S. generals would act as their counterparts in other capitalist countries have. — location: 3160 ^ref-15449

the Clinton administration’s murder through sanctions-related hunger and disease of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is a crime far in excess of any of which Soviet leader Joseph Stalin can been accused, since the deaths attributed to Stalin were the consequences of decisions he took as defensive responses to a permanent state of emergency the USSR faced during his years in power, including the aggressions of Nazi Germany — location: 3220 ^ref-49070

If Stalin is portrayed as a monster, then by what greater category of monster must we describe George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, — location: 3226 ^ref-7613

It is one thing to take decisions which lead to innumerable deaths in response to significant threats against one’s country (as Stalin did), and quite another to kill numberless people in the absence of a threat in pursuit of foreign policy goals related to the profit-making interests of bankers, investors and oil companies (as the Bushes and Clinton did). — location: 3228 ^ref-22117

U.S. imperialism seeks to offer U.S. corporations, banks and investors untrammeled access to export and investment opportunities anywhere in the world, regardless of the wishes of the people who live in whichever part of the world U.S. capitalists are driven to nestle in, settle in, and establish connections in. — location: 3299 ^ref-46577

corporate America is compelled by the very nature of capitalism to unremittingly seek opportunities for the unceasing accumulation of capital. — location: 3305 ^ref-1835

the profit-making agenda of the highest economic stratum of U.S. society lies at the centre of U.S. global leadership is because economic power is largely coterminous with political power. — location: 3309 ^ref-45967

“policy makers [cater] almost exclusively to the interests of…those who derive lots of income from assets.” — location: 3355 ^ref-51338

citizens are more likely to mount opposition to domestic policy that is hostile to their interests (because they’re more likely to see and feel and understand it) than to foreign policy (whose effects are often distant and indirect and difficult to discern). As a consequence, the corporate community has virtually a clear field to dominate foreign policy with very little, if any, opposition from other sectors of U.S. society. — location: 3364 ^ref-27641

U.S. foreign policy will always be inimical to foreign states which seek to place the interests of local populations above the foreign investment and export interests of U.S. investors, banks and corporations, since the U.S. state is dominated by these capitalist forces. — location: 3434 ^ref-20085

The Soviet Union’s contribution to de-colonization had been incalculable. But now, with the USSR’s demise imminent, the United States was about to become the world’s lone superpower. — location: 3443 ^ref-59145

(Later, in Syria, al-Qaeda would revert to its role as U.S. ally of convenience to counter Damascus’s secular Arab nationalists.) — location: 3475 ^ref-36488

The third force at the center of the U.S. war on Syria was the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist reaction to the Arab world’s encounter with European imperialism. — location: 3525 ^ref-36126

The Arab nationalists proposed to create a secular state, and sought to mobilize Arabs against their domination by the West by building a mass movement on the basis of shared ethnicity. By contrast, the Brothers proposed to restore Islam to the state and sought to mobilize Arabs on the basis of a fundamentalist Sunni interpretation of it. — location: 3533 ^ref-40005

the early days of Islam, when the Islamic world was a force to be reckoned with—militarily, economically, and scientifically. — location: 3539 ^ref-21439

In Syria, the Muslim Brothers were the equivalent, as potential imperialist allies, of subordinated Indian peoples. — location: 3552 ^ref-41780

secret U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks revealed that the Bush administration began working with the Muslim Brothers to topple the Assad government in 2005, if not earlier. — location: 3554 ^ref-49076

the Brothers were at the forefront of the insurrection against the Ba’athists, along with other Salafists and the al-Qaeda aligned AQI, forerunner of Islamic State. — location: 3556 ^ref-36733

Wahhabism encouraged Sunni Muslims to self-identify as Sunnis in opposition to Shi’a “heretics.” — location: 3562 ^ref-15467

Sunnis—who made up the large majority of Syria’s population—were overwhelmingly opposed to the Syrian government. — location: 3601 ^ref-43149

YouGov conducted a poll in late 2011 showing that 55 percent of Syrians wanted Assad to stay. — location: 3611 ^ref-13862

the majority of the Syrian Arab Army’s personnel were Sunni, making the Syrian army the largest Sunni fighting force in the country. — location: 3618 ^ref-17389

Hafez al-Assad’s right hand man, Mustafa Tlass, who served as defense minister for 30 years, was Sunni. — location: 3619 ^ref-53661

there was no evidence that the spring 2011 protests had any democratic content. On the contrary, the protesters’ demands related to the release of political prisoners (mostly Muslim Brothers), the abolition of the wartime emergency law, and an end to corruption. — location: 3623 ^ref-11006

The government almost immediately announced a series of reforms in response to the unrest, including “greater freedom for the news media and political parties, and a reconsideration of the emergency rule.”25 Before the end of April 2011, Damascus had rescinded “the country’s 48-year-old emergency law” and abolished “the Supreme State Security Court.”26 These concessions, however, did not stop the insurrection. — location: 3626 ^ref-52765

in 2011 Syria was closer to the Western model of democracy than virtually all other Arab countries, — location: 3639 ^ref-5395

the insurrectionists weren’t democrats; they were Islamists whose goal was to establish an Islamic state in which the Quran, not democratic decision-making, would be the basis of the country’s jurisprudence. — location: 3642 ^ref-12299

the Free Syrian Army, falsely portrayed as an army of secular democrats, was largely Islamist; it was the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian National Council. This explained why there was not a single reference to democracy in the army’s stated goals. Its only objective, it said, was to overthrow Assad. That goal continued to guide the insurrectionists’ mission, even after Assad made reforms to make Syria more like a Western-style representative democracy. — location: 3644 ^ref-12723

the conflict was misrepresented as a struggle between Alawite minority rulers and an oppressed Sunni majority and also as a dictatorship trying to crush popular aspirations for democracy. — location: 3647 ^ref-52755

terrorism discourse is shaped by taboos which prevent serious analysis of the phenomenon. — location: 3655 ^ref-58126

taboos prevent one from seeing a terrorist as a rational actor with coherent, intelligible, goals. Instead, “terrorist” becomes a term of moral lapidation, and a demand to close off all inquiry into the “terrorist’s” motivations, grievances and goals. — location: 3656 ^ref-17194

political Islam was only occasionally addressed in public discourse as a driving force of the conflict. Instead, the preferred discourse in the West was one of moral approbation where the insurgents were concerned. — location: 3679 ^ref-48883

Wall Street’s war on Syria was also an ideological war on U.S. citizens. By reducing the Syrian government to a single person, Assad, and by repeatedly denouncing him as an Alawite dictator with blood on his hands, a number of ideological tasks were accomplished. — location: 3684 ^ref-47347

All three campaigns represented but individual battles in a greater overall war to effectively re-colonize the planet by integrating the last Arab champions of colonial emancipation into a U.S.-led global order in which Wall Street’s interests would have primacy. — location: 3711 ^ref-43731

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