[IAC] NATO moves closer to war on Syria

[ckaihatsu]

NATO MOVES CLOSER TO WAR ON SYRIA - IAC Statement


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INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER STATEMENT – IACenter.org

ON TURKEY'S GROUNDING OF SYRIAN AIRLINER



NATO MOVES CLOSER TO WAR ON SYRIA



Turkey’s war-jets forced down a civilian airliner, flying from Moscow to Damascus. Thirty-five Russians and Syrians were passengers. This aggressive act brings NATO another step closer to open war against Syria as part of an imperialist plan to take over the country.



U.S. spokesperson Victoria Nuland immediately supported Turkey's Oct. 10 act of air piracy. Some 150 U.S. special troops had moved into Syria's southern neighbor, Jordan. On Oct. 9 NATO Secretary Gen. Anders Fogh Rasmussen said NATO would back up Turkey. The British, French and German governments also backed up Turkey and blamed Syria for the crisis.



Turkey had continued shelling Syria, using as a pretext the charge that Syrian forces had launched mortars into Turkey a week earlier. To this day it is unclear who launched the mortars. It might well have been the counterrevolutionary rebels that the NATO countries and the Gulf oil monarchies have been arming all along.



Turkey claimed there were weapons aboard the airliner, along with 17 Russian and 18 Syrian passengers, whose lives were endangered by the grounding. As of now Turkey has shown no evidence that weapons were aboard, nor did it in any case have the right to ground an airliner flying on a regular air lane. It underlines the seriousness of the war threat that Turkey risked its important trade and diplomatic relationships with Russia to make this aggressive move.



It is important to look at who are the forces now threatening to intervene in Syria. The NATO powers are the former colonialist powers that carved up Africa and Asia, and dominated Latin America. Even the Netherlands -- where Rasmussen is from -- held Indonesia as a colony until after World War II. They still monopolize military and economic power in the world, they completely dominate the media and their 1% superrich are the exploiters of humanity. And they are making war to make new colonies out of sovereign states, with the U.S. leading the pack in the new colonial wars.



While they pretend to be promoting "democracies," NATO's main allies in the Middle East are monarchies Jordanian monarchy. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been financing the Syrian counterrevolution with their ruling family's oil billions. NATO's front line is militarist Turkey, whose troops will supply the main cannon fodder for the war against Syria.



Each week the civil war in Syria grows closer to a regional war into which all the NATO powers will jump.



Those anti-war forces that exist in the United States and the other NATO powers have the following responsibilities: to refuse to be swept up in the war propaganda that demonizes Syria and its leader; to argue and educate others to understand that people in their countries can only lose from an intervention against Syria; and to mobilize to stop the aggression from NATO by whatever steps are possible.



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[erupt]

to refuse to be swept up in the war propaganda that demonizes Syria and its leader;

Fuck Assad, I'll demonize him as I please. In no way is it because the U.S., the U.K., or any other country with any agenda in the Middle East claim, but because he's a war pig who has no problem killing hundreds of innocents at a time.

[ckaihatsu]

Fuck Assad, I'll demonize him as I please. In no way is it because the U.S., the U.K., or any other country with any agenda in the Middle East claim, but because he's a war pig who has no problem killing hundreds of innocents at a time.


Yeah, sure, but as soon as you start to demonize him you'll start getting smiles from the Western imperialists.

[Red Banana]

Who cares? What sense does that make "you can't dislike him because they don't like him either"? Assad is a common enemy, it happens. He's an enemy to the Syrian people and their allies for social justice reasons and an enemy to western imperialists for geopolitical reasons. I don't really see a socialist revolution coming out of Syria at the moment, so the choice is bourgeois democracy or bourgeois dictatorship. That doesn't mean supporting western imperialism but it sure as he'll doesn't mean defending a tyrant. No to imperialist military intervention, No to Assad.

[Let's Get Free]

Yeah, sure, but as soon as you start to demonize him you'll start getting smiles from the Western imperialists.

That's the problem with people like you. It is purely because it is Assad and you believe that there is something inherently progressive and justified about the existence of Assad's regime, because of it's antagonism with Washington, that you are descending to this level of utterly rotten casuistry.

[ckaihatsu]

Who cares? What sense does that make "you can't dislike him because they don't like him either"? Assad is a common enemy, it happens. He's an enemy to the Syrian people and their allies for social justice reasons and an enemy to western imperialists for geopolitical reasons. I don't really see a socialist revolution coming out of Syria at the moment, so the choice is bourgeois democracy or bourgeois dictatorship. That doesn't mean supporting western imperialism but it sure as he'll doesn't mean defending a tyrant. No to imperialist military intervention, No to Assad.





That's the problem with people like you. It is purely because it is Assad and you believe that there is something inherently progressive and justified about the existence of Assad's regime, because of it's antagonism with Washington, that you are descending to this level of utterly rotten casuistry.


Notice I didn't say anything like "Up with Assad", etc....

To put it understandably, it's just *bad timing* -- while the initial popular movement was for the removal of Assad, the NATO counter-revolution had momentum at the time, coming off of its tacit public backing for intervention into Libya. NATO co-opted the groundswell in Syria, changing the impetus into its own, for the sake of nation-building (as in Iraq, etc.)

I don't like the situation any more than you do, but at this point it would be *worse* to tolerate or allow external imperialist meddling when the autonomy of an entire country -- and even the whole region -- is in the balance.





For the trillionth time here on this forum, there is a difference between a *country* -- in the sense of a location of denizens -- and the person who has assumed control of its matters of business and state.

Maybe a rough comparison here would be the outpouring of world sympathy shown to the people of the U.S. after the events of 9/11 -- this wasn't an *endorsement* of President Bush at the time from the world's population. There's a difference.

[Fruit of Ulysses]

The whole "Arab Spring" is by and large a NATO backed scheme that does not reflect the aspirations of the overwhelming majority of working and oppressed among the Arab people. The "rebels" receiving CIA backing are just as if not more so reactionary than those who have been deposed and are actively working for the perpetuation of imperialism; the movement is organized and lead by male sunni arab chauvenists whose program seeks to impose a far right interpretaion of fundamentalist salafi/wahabi Islam.

Hosni Mubarak was certainly a Western stooge but like em or not, despite his regimes reactionary stance on homosexuality, Assad is popular among women, national and religeous minorities, as well as the lower classes and has helped serve firmly the anti-zionist and anti-imperialist cause. Having said that, I'm not the biggest fan of Syrian Ba'athism, but US military intervention would be disasterous for world progress.

[Kassad]

Does this mean that WWP will be moving closer to having dinner with Assad like they do with Ahmadinejad every year in New York?

[Os Cangaceiros]

I don't like the situation any more than you do, but at this point it would be *worse* to tolerate or allow external imperialist meddling when the autonomy of an entire country -- and even the whole region -- is in the balance.

What about Russia's "imperialist meddling"? Russia has been clearly backing up Assad, and Russia is clearly an imperialist power. To cite just one small example, in Cambodia (http://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/162082950/critics-cambodian-court-s-secession-ruling-political).


Critics of Hun Sen say that Mam Sonando, who runs the activist group Association of Democrats, came into the government's cross hairs for trying to help farmers in the village of Pro Ma in Kratie province organize to protect their land. The land was granted to a Russian-owned agribusiness, and some villagers refused to leave.

So seeing as how Russia's foreign economic interests are insured through the might of Russia's buddies and through Russia itself, it's hard for me to see this as anything other than an inter-imperialist proxy war, not something akin to "defend Syria from imperialism".

[DasFapital]

If there's any American military action it won't be until after the election season is over.

[l'Enfermé]

What about Russia's "imperialist meddling"? Russia has been clearly backing up Assad, and Russia is clearly an imperialist power. To cite just one small example, in Cambodia (http://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/162082950/critics-cambodian-court-s-secession-ruling-political).



So seeing as how Russia's foreign economic interests are insured through the might of Russia's buddies and through Russia itself, it's hard for me to see this as anything other than an inter-imperialist proxy war, not something akin to "defend Syria from imperialism".
What's Russia got to do with it? Before the war began, Syria's largest export partners were, in order: Iraq, Lebanon, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Italy. Main import partners: China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, South Korea, Germany, Russia, Lebanon, Egypt.

Russia has no "foreign economic interests" in Syria. Neither does China really, Syria is completely expendable. The only reason they oppose NATO and Arab League intervention in Syria is because a NATO intervention in Syria would strengthen America's role as the world's hegemon. Russia and China couldn't give less of a shit about Assad. Calling the war in Syria an inter-imperialist proxy war is like saying that America's invasion of Iraq was a proxy-war between NATO and the Non-Aligned Movement, because NAM was very critical of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the "War on Terror" in general.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I actually agree with you. I don't think there's anything in Syria that Russia particularly wants, Syria just serves the geopolitical interests of an imperialist state.