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	Workers Vanguard No. 1078	13 November 2015

Once Again on ISIS and U.S. Imperialism

(Letter)

14 September 2015

To the editor:

In its reply to Loren S.’s letter of May 29, Workers Vanguard describes Islamic State as anti-imperialist, declaring: “We take a military side with ISIS when it targets the imperialists and forces acting as their proxies.”

This is completely at odds with the facts. Islamic State is a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf states. While it grew out of the communalist slaughters triggered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, this is half the story. As Saudi Arabia has adopted a higher and higher ideological profile in the wake of the U.S.-sponsored jihad against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan, it has increasingly turned its ire against its great rivals, the Shi‘ites of Iran, Iraq, and Hezbollah. The Wahhabists are not the only ones guilty of sectarianism, but there is no question as to who has been the more aggressive. Even prior to 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan told Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia.’ More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.” The genocidal implications of that statement should be clear.

As communalist passions have erupted, the Saudis and their fellow petro-states have thus poured money and weapons into the Sunni side, transforming the mujahideen into a powerful international force. By August 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and similar groups were the driving force behind the anti-Assad revolt, that they were seeking to establish a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria as part of a general anti-Shi‘ite jihad, and that their western backers, the Gulf states, and Turkey were all comfortable with such an outcome. Last October, Vice President Joe Biden told an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School that “the Saudis, the emirates, etc....were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war…[that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into…Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” groups that eventually morphed into ISIS. According to The New York Times, U.S. policy is not to bomb IS when it is battling Syrian government troops, an indication that, despite Obama’s fulminations, it still regards Islamic State as useful proxy against Assad.

The Assad dictatorship has many sins to answer for. But what we are now witnessing in the Middle East is a combined assault by the U.S., Turkey, the Saudis, and other members of the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] on a Third World nationalist state that has long been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism. So unless WV is willing to describe Qatar, the UAE, and other such petro-states as anti-imperialist, it’s hard to see how it can use the same term with regard to IS.

Daniel Lazare

WV replies:

Daniel Lazare engages in more than a little journalistic three-card monte to support his charge that WV describes the quite gruesome forces that constitute ISIS as anti-imperialist. In fact the word “anti-imperialist” was nowhere used in our response to Loren S. to describe the Islamic State. We made our position crystal clear in the very next sentence to the one from which Lazare draws his quote: “At the same time, we are in staunch political opposition to ISIS, whose bloodthirsty methods and retrograde outlook are truly repugnant.”

We do stand with ISIS when it targets the forces of U.S. imperialism and its proxies in the region. (Its military conflicts with the U.S. go unmentioned in Lazare’s letter.) As we have stressed since the U.S. began air strikes against ISIS last year, any setback for the U.S. and its proxies would impede imperialist designs for the region and be in the interests of the exploited and the oppressed. That statement no more means that ISIS is anti-imperialist than President Obama’s now-abandoned promise to withdraw U.S. military forces from the region made him a champion of world peace.

It should be noted that Lazare, a sometimes cogent critic of U.S. foreign policy, has written elsewhere about the conflagration in the Near East and the incoherency of Washington’s policies. Not so in his letter to WV in which ISIS absurdly becomes a part of the imperialist-led crusade against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Lazare only perceives the financing that has been channeled to ISIS from the Arabian Peninsula and the fact that the U.S. does not bomb ISIS forces on the infrequent occasions that they directly engage Syrian government troops. Left unmentioned are the 6,000-plus bombing raids carried out by the U.S. against ISIS, including the months-long bombing of Kobani. During that battle, ISIS was confronted by Kurdish nationalist forces there that signed on as ground troops and spotters for the U.S. imperialists.

The existing coalition against Assad, which Lazare claims is a Saudi-sponsored Sunni alliance, is in fact riddled with contradictions. ISIS forces have launched terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabian cities after its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, denounced the Saudi monarchy as “traitors to Islam.” In response, the regime launched a police roundup of dozens of suspected ISIS supporters. Then there is the not small matter of Turkey’s increasing airstrikes against Kurdish forces, no doubt the most effective anti-ISIS ground troops, after Ankara allowed the U.S. use of its air bases to conduct bombing raids last July.

Lazare’s omissions and obfuscations are clearly not just in the service of propping up his phony charge that WV describes ISIS as “anti-imperialist.” Lazare’s unstated aim becomes clear in his recent articles on the Syrian conflict, in which he complains that the Obama administration has been taken hostage by hawks in Washington. Lazare goes on to offer the following: “Conceivably, Obama could have reversed course and admitted that the Russians are of course right and that supporting Assad is preferable to the nightmare of seeing a black ISIS banner fluttering from the glorious Umayyad Mosque in Damascus” (“On Syria, Incoherence Squared,” consortiumnews.com, 11 September). Alas, he opines, that would be a bridge too far for the president, who is too wedded to the concerns of Washington’s main allies in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Lazare would hope Russian president Putin’s policy carries the day. As Marxists, our main opposition is to the imperialists. We also oppose all the other capitalist powers involved in the squalid civil war in Syria (including Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and call for them to leave.

Lazare’s differences with WV are fundamental. His quest is for a rational U.S. imperialist policy in the Near East. Our understanding is that it is in the nature of imperialism to subjugate, oppress and exploit the world’s toiling masses. Whatever policy differences exist among the imperialist rulers and their servitors, such are all in the service of that fundamental nature. The reality is that, since its development over a century ago, capitalist imperialism has offered a variety of supposedly noble purposes to justify its slaughter of tens of millions of people. Today, U.S. imperialism, the foremost imperialist power, is the greatest enemy of the world’s workers and oppressed.

Our perspective is diametrically opposed to Lazare. In defending ISIS from the blows of the imperialists, we recognize that any setback for Washington could also promote domestic opposition to U.S. imperialism within a war-weary populace that has been ground down by years of economic crisis. As we expressed in our reply to Loren S.’s letter, “We Marxists aim to turn the disillusionment and anger of working people in the U.S. into class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home. It is through such struggle that the proletariat will be won to the program of socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist beast from within.”