Imperialist Strikes and Anti-Russia Provocations

U.S. Out of Syria Now!

APRIL 16—Having bled Syria for years, stoking the fires of a civil war that has claimed the lives of half a million people and devastated much of the country, the U.S., with the support of the British and French imperialists, launched more than 100 missiles at Syrian government installations on the night of April 13. The targets included a scientific research facility in Damascus, one of the few Syrian cities with a semblance of normalcy. The pretext for the strikes was an alleged April 7 chemical weapons attack in Douma by the Bashar al-Assad regime. The imperialists claim that the Syrian military killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds with chlorine or sarin gas (or a combination of both). The Syrian government and Russia, its main ally, deny the accusation.

While the imperialists have avoided directly hitting Russian military targets (so far), the missile strikes represent a naked act of aggression aimed at asserting Washington’s power in the Near East, most centrally against Moscow. And it is the Democratic Party that has been spearheading the crazed anti-Russia drive in the U.S.

Following the alleged chemical weapons attack, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi declared that Russian president Vladimir Putin “must be held accountable.” In an April 10 editorial, the New York Times complained that a statement by Trump indicating that he wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria reinforced “Russia’s reprehensible behavior.” The bluster from Democrats and the Times for a “coherent strategy” in Syria is aimed at goading the scandal-prone Trump administration into a more aggressive posture against Putin’s Russia, a nuclear-armed regional power. Indeed, the White House recently expelled 60 Russian diplomats and imposed sanctions on seven of Putin’s associates, a dozen of their companies and 17 Russian officials.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is also gearing up to impose harsh new sanctions on Iran, the Assad regime’s other key ally. John Bolton, the hawkish new national security adviser, has called for bombing Iran and has declared that the U.S. will bring about “regime change” before the Islamic Republic’s 40th anniversary next February. For its part, the Israeli military has stepped up its attacks in Syria—including by targeting Iranian bases in the country—having launched over 100 airstrikes since 2012.

When it comes to slaughtering civilians, the U.S. imperialists are second to none. According to the Airwars website, the U.S.-led coalition has butchered nearly 10,000 civilians in Syria and Iraq since 2014, having carried out some 30,000 airstrikes. From the 1991 Gulf War and the United Nations-imposed sanctions to the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, the U.S. and its “democratic” allies are responsible for snuffing out nearly three million lives in Iraq alone.

It takes some chutzpah for the U.S. to shed tears over the supposed use of chemical weapons. Napalm was unleashed on the masses of Korea and those of Vietnam, where millions were also exposed to Agent Orange, during U.S. imperialism’s counterrevolutionary wars in those countries. More recently, the U.S. used white phosphorus in Iraq during the 2004 assault on Falluja and the 2016 attack on Mosul. It has acknowledged using depleted uranium in Syria in 2015 in the war against the Islamic State. And, of course, no howls of outrage are heard from America’s politicians and media when U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia employ these weapons against defenseless populations in Gaza and Yemen.

As Marxists, we have no side in the Syrian civil war, which is reactionary and communal on all sides. But we do have a side against the U.S. and other imperialists. It is in the vital interest of the international proletariat, not least in the U.S., to oppose the depredations of U.S. imperialism and demand: All imperialist forces out of Syria and the Near East now! We also oppose the regional powers that have become involved in the Syrian conflict—including Russia, Iran, Israel and Turkey—and demand that they also get out.

On Saturday, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, threatened that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” for further attacks. In the event of a full-on war against the Assad regime, Marxists would have a military side with Assad’s forces while maintaining our political opposition to his brutal capitalist government.

Imperialist Deceptions

We do not know what happened in Douma on April 7, although there is every reason to suspect that the imperialists’ account is “fake news.” In an article in the London Independent (16 April), Robert Fisk, one of the few Western journalists in Douma, quotes a local doctor who told him that the video of panicked residents “is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia [oxygen starvation amid the suffocating rubble]—not gas poisoning.” The U.S. imperialists have a long track record of fabricating evidence to justify war: from the lies about the sinking of the USS Maine, which paved the way for the 1898 Spanish-American War; to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a pretext to escalate U.S. forces in Vietnam; to the claims that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and was complicit in the September 11 attacks, which served to beat the drums of war against Iraq.

Last year’s alleged chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhoun, which was also blamed on the Syrian government, took place days after Trump announced that his administration accepted that Assad would remain in power. It was followed by the U.S. bombing of a Syrian air base. This year’s attack took place shortly after Trump stated his intention to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and cut off funding to opposition rebels. In both cases, the main source of information regarding the purported chemical attacks was the “White Helmets.” The media presents this group as being made up of dedicated, impartial rescue volunteers. In fact, this outfit was set up and financed by, among others, the U.S. and Britain, and is allied with the Islamist rebels (see “Syrian ‘White Helmets’: Tools of U.S. Imperialism,” WV No. 1103, 13 January 2017).

As demonstrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the imperialists’ stories around the Khan Sheikhoun attack are highly dubious. After the New Yorker and London Review of Books (which commissioned his investigation) refused to publish his account, the German newspaper Die Welt (25 June 2017) printed a report by Hersh revealing that U.S. intelligence services knew that the Khan Sheikhoun site was hit by a conventional bomb. Russia had told the U.S. in advance of the attack, which targeted a meeting of high-level jihadists. According to Hersh’s sources, the conventional bomb triggered secondary explosions from the weapons cache in the building that could have generated a toxic cloud. Even Secretary of Defense James Mattis acknowledged this February that there was “no evidence” that Assad had used sarin gas in Khan Sheikhoun.

The struggle against imperialist militarism and war must be linked to a program for the overthrow of the world imperialist order by the working class. The same ruling class that rains down bombs on the masses of the Near East also wages class war on the working people at home. When the U.S. feigns outrage over Assad killing his “own people,” remember that cops in this country gun down over 1,000 people every year, many of them black and Latino. As we wrote after last year’s missile strikes on Syrian forces (“Defend North Korea! U.S. Out of Syria!” WV No. 1110, 21 April 2017):

“What is desperately needed is class struggle against the capitalist rulers, both to defend the interests of workers and the oppressed at home and to oppose U.S. imperialism abroad. The Spartacist League and our comrades in the International Communist League aim to win the most conscious layers of the working class to the understanding that what is necessary to put an end to exploitation, racial oppression and imperialist slaughter is the overturn of the capitalist order in the U.S. and internationally through socialist revolution.”