21. Dec 2024.

The Roads to Damascus

"None but a few corrupt cronies will be shedding tears at the tyrant’s departure. But there should be no doubt that what we are witnessing in Syria today is a huge defeat, a mini 1967 for the Arab world..."

Tariq Ali | NLR
Put za Damask (Biblijski motiv)

"... As I write, Israeli land forces have entered this battered country. There is not yet a definitive settlement, but a few things are clear. Assad is a refugee in Moscow. His Baathist apparatus did a deal with the Eastern NATO leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (whose brutalities in Idlib are legion), and offered up the country on a platter. The rebels have agreed that Assad’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, should continue to oversee the state for the time being. Will this be a form of Assadism without Assad, even if the country is about to pivot geopolitically away from Russia and what remains of the ‘Resistance Axis’?

Like Iraq and Libya, where the US has a lock on the oil, Syria will now become a shared American–Turkish colony. US imperial policy, globally, is to break up countries that cannot be swallowed whole and remove all meaningful sovereignty in order to assert economic and political hegemony. This may have started ‘accidentally’ in the former Yugoslavia but it has since become a pattern. EU satellites use similar methods to ensure that smaller nations (Georgia, Romania) are kept under control. Democracy and human rights have little to do with any of this. It’s a global gamble.

In 2003, after Baghdad fell to the US, the exultant Israeli Ambassador in Washington congratulated George W. Bush and advised him not to stop now, but to move on to Damascus and Tehran. Yet the US victory had an unintended but predictable side-effect: Iraq became a rump Shia state, enormously strengthening Iran’s position in the region. The debacle there, and subsequently in Libya, meant that Damascus had to wait for more than a decade before receiving proper imperial attention. Meanwhile, Iranian and Russian support for Assad upped the stakes of routine regime change.

Now, Assad’s ousting has created a different type of vacuum – likely to be filled by NATO’s Turkey and the US via the ‘ex-al-Qaida’ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the rebranding of its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani as a freedom fighter after his stint in a US prison in Iraq is par for the course), as well as Israel. The latter’s contribution was enormous, having disabled Hezbollah and wrecked Beirut with yet another round of massive bombing raids. In the wake of this victory, it is difficult to imagine that Iran will be left alone. Though the ultimate aim for both the US and Israel is regime change there, degrading and disarming the country is the first priority. This wider plan for reshaping the region helps to explain the unstinting support given by Washington and its European proxies to the continuing Israeli genocide in Palestine. After more than a year of slaughter, the Kantian principle that state actions must be such that they can become a universally respected law looks like a sick joke.

Who will replace Assad? Before his flight, some reports suggested that if the dictator made a 180-degree turn – breaking with Iran and Russia and restoring good relations with the US and Israel, as he and his father had done before – then the Americans might be inclined to keep him on. Now it is too late, but the state apparatus that abandoned him has declared its readiness to collaborate with whomever. Will Erdoğan do the same? The Sultan of Donkeys will surely want his own people, nurtured in Idlib since they were child soldiers, in charge and under Ankara’s control. If he succeeds in imposing a Turkish puppet regime, it will be another version of what happened in Libya. But he is unlikely to have it all his own way. Erdoğan is strong on demagogy but weak on actions, and the US and Israel might veto a cleansed al-Qaida government for their own reasons, despite having used the jihadis to fight Assad. Regardless, it is unlikely that the replacement regime will abolish the Mukhābarāt (secret police), illegalize torture or offer accountable government.

Prior to the Six Day War, one of the central components of Arab nationalism and unity was the Baath Party that ruled Syria and had a strong base in Iraq; the other, more powerful one was Nasser’s government in Egypt. Syrian Baathism during the pre-Assad period was relatively enlightened and radical. When I met Prime Minister Yusuf Zuayyin in Damascus in 1967, he explained that the only way forward was to outflank conservative nationalism by making Syria ‘the Cuba of the Middle East’. Yet Israel’s assault that year led to the speedy destruction of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, which paved the way for the death of Nasserite Arab nationalism. Zuayyin was toppled and Hafez-al Assad was propelled to power with tacit US support – much like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, whom the CIA supplied with a list of the top cadres of the Iraqi Communist Party. The Baathist radicals in both countries were discarded, and the party’s founder Michel Aflaq resigned in disgust when he saw where it was headed. 

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Entire text is available at: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-roads-to-damascus

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