Dominoes

 Cameron touches down in St. Petersburg. Is nobody worried that the Russians will blow him out of the sky? Or Obama, or Hollande? No, because it is never going to happen. They aren't going to let a faraway country about which they care little disrupt their trading relationship, let alone kick off a world war.

 We are sometimes invited to believe a much more convoluted version of this fancy, that there will be an inexorable sequence of events that reach the same result. Russia and America, we are told, have been fighting a proxy war in Syria. If the Americans bomb Syria, they will incur the Russians ire, who will give bigger and bigger guns to Assad. This in turn will provoke the Israelis, who again we are told are behind the movement to remove Assad, and their attack on Russian emplacements or deliveries will get them into a war with Russia, and then the US will come in on Israel's side.

 This is never going to happen.

 At the outset of the war with Saddam Hussein over Kuwait, the US was still suffering very much from what was called the Vietnam Syndrome, an inability to project its military power overseas, and I think that's a good thing, especially for the Central American countries frequently suffering US intervention in the 50s any time their leaders got at all leftist.

 As the name suggests, it was the impact of the Vietnam War in ripping apart American society, that made this change. There are two parts to this, the real direct impact, the 58,000 Americans sent home by the Vietnamese in body bags (by contrast the British deaths in Afghanistan stood at 444 this May), and to a lesser extent for many, the couple of million Vietnamese killed and the countries destroyed). Secondly there are the lies and stratagems used to get the public to go along with such slaughter.
Chief among these when it came to Vietnam was the Domino Theory, that if one country was allowed to fall to communism, then one by one all the others in the region would do so. It was untrue in Vietnam for a number of reasons. There was no domino effect, except insofar as the US went on to mess up other neighbouring countries like Laos and Cambodia in their efforts to stop change in Vietnam. There was no Communist conspiracy to subvert Vietnam, a liberation movement that had based itself on the principles of the American revolution turned to Moscow, because it was the French and the Americans who were destroying their country, not Communists.

 And so for years when the Americans wanted to mess with a country, they had to do so indirectly, funding the Contras and mining Nicaragua's harbours when they took a dislike to the Sandinistas. But as Karl Marx wrote in the German Ideology:

 "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it."

 And so the ideology of imperial control gets every opportunity to re-assert itself. Reagan started small, with invasions like Grenada, where a motley bunch who’d killed the Marxist leader Maurice Bishop were in charge. That the US had been implacably opposed to Bishop, invented the pretext of some supposedly threatened American medical students and invaded a Commonwealth country without even bothering to inform the Queen’s representatives, all that didn’t matter, what mattered was US force could be justified enough to secure public acquiescence

 And so back to Kuwait. We were taken into that war with a mixture of truth and lies. Kuwait really had been invaded, but it was an artificial statelet, designed to keep the oil wealth of the Gulf in the hands of a few Emirs, which the mostly rightless immigrant population had no interest in defending. But because this was a war that most of British capitalism wanted to fight, we heard the first, and not the second. Sometimes the Kuwaitis would spread some outright lies, such as the Iraqi army plucking babies from incubators. But by and large some of the basic facts, that Saddam was a nasty dictator who had invaded another country, could be fitted into a narrative that demanded action, and most people in Britain were prepared to go along with it.

 On the other side, some of the arguments against the war, such as over the nature of Kuwait, didn't really get a hearing. Some of those, such that there would be the Mother of All Battles and Saddam would destroy the world's oil supply proved not to come to pass or be counter-productive; if he's such a madman, then he needs to be dealt with.

 In fact, there was a massacre of Iraqi troops fleeing on the road to Basra, but that didn't affect the general perception that the war was a good thing. In fact as Saddam threatened to massacre opponents in the North and South of Iraq, it became a springboard for the establishment of the Responsibility To Protect doctrine, along with the genocide in Rwanda three years later.

 Now I know there are Syrians who think that R2P is the right model to apply to Syria, and that’s more understandable to me than Westerners who think they are protecting Syrians and the world by playing up the threat of US air strikes. But I think it will always be an opportunity for the US to pick and choose when to care, and in Syria it has been doing its damndest not to care. And that will always be the tendency with the Great Powers while they are exploitative capitalist states, because their foreign policy will always tend towards their own sectional interests. It is not inevitable, popular pressure and political change can work wonders sometimes. But it will never help the party of peace if their arguments aren’t in correspondence with reality, and so will by default encourage the victims of oppression to think that R2P might be their only alternative.

 For two weeks now we’ve had a media circus about what the West might do in the response to the latest chemical attack by Assad’s forces. Syrians have seen this sound and fury signify little a few times already, though the more desperate you get, the more you cling on to any hope. But any discussion of action that might arm Syrians is put on the sidelines, or bundled together with other forms of intervention. And with the media narrative following the general interest of the Western powers in staying out, the ideas that we don’t know who the rebels are, that they are all jihadis, that the Syrian uprising is a sectarian proxy war run from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel; all achieve prominence as descriptions of the situation, and they are all untrue. But that narrative isn’t going to go away and be replaced by an enthusiasm for boots on the ground, the slippery slope hypothesis, because there is a huge majority of opinion, both in the public and the establishment, against it. That isn’t suddenly going to turn around when limited strikes fail to achieve much.

 So there is no dynamic, no secret plot for regime change in Syria, which will magically take us from some token air strikes to a full-blown invasion. I defy anyone to show that there is. If we are told that there are always unforeseen consequences to military intervention, I’d say first that I don’t think air strikes are any more than a diversion, so I’d like a little more precision about what we are being asked to consider the consequences. But that given that Assad’s war on Syrians has caused 100,000+ dead, and 2 million+ refugees, and the killing and the exodus has jumped a level each time the regime has got desperate, the real killing rape and torture seems much more important than a bunch of hypotheticals, especially when those hypotheticals are based on a lazy assumption that the Iraq War is bound to be replicated. I think that because it can be shown that the American interest has been to stay out of Syria (government and business interest), that the pressure can be deduced to be in the direction of keeping them out, not pulling them in.

 And so we come to the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, which if anybody doesn’t know it, spoiler alert, when the wolf finally does come nobody believes the boy. If the Left claims that thousands will die in carpet bombing, that depleted uranium will be scattered across Syria, that American soldiers will be dying to help al-Qaida, and none of these things turn out to be true, it will discredit the Left, and because the Left does not control the media, that impression will stay for a long time, and when the US does want to intervene, the pendulum will have swung back to it being easy again for the US to do what it wants. And if the situation in Syria takes another step towards Hell, then there is a greater likelihood that American, French or British power will be brought to bear on Syria, rather than the empowerment of those rebels that we just don’t know about from what we’ve read in the press.

 It is a bit like the debate on the EU. In Greece at the moment, where the EU imposed bailout conditions are wrecking the economy and Greek lives, saying Stuff The EU may be a political necessity. But in the UK it is an irrelevant distraction to say stuff Europe, a slogan only suitable for those who want to keep immigrants out or restrict human rights. Often it is important to oppose American missile strikes, but right now it is Russian weapons, Iranian and Lebanese troops,that are killing Syrians. Why don’t the Americans threaten sanctions on Russia if they don’t stop supplying Assad with weapons? Why don’t the Americans drop the sanctions on Iran if they pull out of Syria? Those might be progressive demands. 

 So hopefully this hoopla will be out of the way soon. The Americans will have restored the credibility of the international system by flattening a bit of metal with along with as few people as they can, most people can go back to what they’re doing, and Syrians can get on with trying to turn the tide in their favour. If the Americans were to accidentally kill Assad, something I am sure they are going to do their level best to avoid, then the personalised nature of the Assad monarchy might mean the revolution is successful in weeks rather than months. Which would mean a lot of happy and considerably more pro-American Syrians. But it would also mean the legitimation of the American killing of leaders it doesn’t like, and Kim Jong-Un might seriously finger his nuclear button (as it is , the lack of military response has meant that North Korea quiets down again each time there is an incident, because they are not really interested in fighting a war they would lose unless there is no alternative). Which is one reason I expect the Americans to stay to precision guidance, and probably stay away from central Damascus (the régime’s parade of kids on the hillside on last night’s TV are pretty safe too. I would have thought their PR might have advised against the Nazi-style salutes). But if Assad finds he still can’t take all of Homs in a month’s time and still falling apart on other fronts, and decides to kill 50,000 people with gas there; the pressure for Western invasion will go critical. If the Left commentary on air strikes has been to see them as the main problem, it will be a bystander to the debate. If it correctly identifies the regime as the problem, and arming the FSA as the solution, it has a better chance at being part of the answer to the Syrian crisis and the instability that comes with it, posing a better solution than imperial imposition (which both a hawks’ invasion and the peaceniks deal with the Russians would be), and not just part of the furniture.

 On the bright side, we were told that there was no way Assad could be overthrown, and no way he would use chemical weapons because he wasn’t close to being overthrown. Clearly part of the latter assertion is false. Maybe he knows that the end is close.