It has been a point made by the anti-Zionist movement for the last 60 years, that the Palestinians should not be made to suffer because of the Holocaust Jews suffered in Europe. I don't think the Syrians now rising against Bashar al-Assad are responsible for us being dragged into a war in Iraq.
It wasn't obvious from the beginning that the WMD stories in Iraq were a complete pack of lies. For me it came at Colin Powell's UN presentation, where I had a hard time believing that he would bother to put forward such an obviously rubbish case.
What was obvious from the beginning was that it was all about régime change, that Bush was determined to invade Iraq. So however long it took to take off, especially when what was putting it off was the assembling of hundreds of thousands of troops in the Gulf, it was going to be a massive military intervention, which even if it had had any justification, was going to have horrendous consequences.
Ann Leslie was just saying on Sunday Morning Live (she's a Daily Mail journalist opposed to intervention in Syria) that she thought that WWII was a just war, but with WWI she is not so sure. I think that both might be best described as imperialist wars, but that while there was no real difference between the King of England and the German Kaiser, it is to retreat from reality to say that Hitler and the Nazis were no different from any other politicians.
So I think we should take a very different attitude to Syria than we did to Iraq. Then the entire reality was about large imperial states using military force, whether that was a bad thing, which I think it was, and how they could be stopped. What has been going on in Syria is a revolution, and if you want a positive outcome, empowering the revolutionaries is the way to go.
The policy of the "international community" (a phrase Noam Chomsky points out somewhere usually means the US and its allies, sometimes just means the Pentagon) for the last two years has been to Do Nothing, and it has been a disaster. The weakness of the FSA has encouraged the growth of radical Islamism (which to the extent they fight against Assad isn't the worst thing), has enabled Assad to carry out massacre after massacre. The torturing of Sunni opponents to make them cry out "There is no God but Bashar" has been just one way that the régime has encouraged a sectarian divide in Syria and throughout the region, and each time Assad gets a bit more desperate, as he will inevitably in a country that will never let him govern again, the massacres get worse. "Those who make a revolution half-way dig their own graves" said St.Just during the French revolution, those who insist that what is needed is a political solution through the UN with the Russians on board dig the graves of others.
The proposal to drop a few bombs to indicate that you are a very naughty boy if you use chemical weapons are largely just a distraction from any rational debate about what can be done to help Syria. To focus on stopping it, to say it is far worse than the policy of Doing Nothing that has left Assad in charge, has strengthened the Islamists, has increased sectarian divisions, and made Syria more and more something something will have to have something done about, to the point where if no intervention is done that empowers the Syrian people, eventually one will take place that looks a lot more like Iraq.
When the question of EU sanctions came up, probably some time last year, I remember asking Robin Yassin-Kassab if he thought they were a good idea, as there was a long record of the misuse of sanctions, such as at the moment against Iran. He replied something like that the state officials need to be stopped, and there didn't seem any other way of doing it. In the absence of any prospect that the labour movement in Europe would propose to bring about such sanctions, I thought fair enough, I don't think this is necessarily the way to go, but as it turned out, it didn't seem to be the worst thing.
For a long time I held the position that much of the far left has finally got around to adopting, that I was against Western intervention, but for the victory of the rebels over Assad. Though even then I understood that you have to make the latter clear before it is worth saying the former. A lesson I think much of the far left has failed to learn. Have they talked to a single Syrian? The Syrian revolutionary left also says Neither Riyadh Nor Tehran, but they really don't have anything to prove.
What is intervention? That is one of the problems with the debate. With the simplification that inevitably comes with public debate, the question is often posed as a straight yes/no. But my point is two-fold, intervention that aids the rebels is the only way to stop the spiral into a sectarian proxy war which is more likely to drag in an unwanted boots on the ground imperial intervention the longer it is allowed to fester (because that's the way the Do Nothing policy of the last two years has altered the picture). And the current 'threat' of limited bombing to deter chemical weapons use is largely a distraction, it isn't going to kill civilians the way Assad does, it isn't going to involve dropping chemical weapons the way Assad has multiple times, and so to protest about the former while ignoring the latter is utterly disproportionate. The message to Syrians is that they don't matter.
When Obama was announcing that he will take some action on Syria, I saw someone making fun of the fact that he was flanked by the leaders of Latvia and Estonia. Nobody in the West gave much of a shit about the oppression of the Baltic states by the Russians, and so it is no surprise that they have been bastions of pro-US support ever since they achieved national independence. The situation of Syria is a little more complicated, as it is hard to reconcile the position on Israel of the US and the majority of Syrians, but I think the abandonment by the left of the principle of internationalism when it comes to Syrians means that however late US support comes, it would earn them gratitude in Syria for a generation, because others turned their backs.
A Syrian has just told the BBC in Beirut, "I'm a Syrian revolutionary, what we need is arms not bombs." Many on the left will see that and think that's exactly what they are saying. But if you don't make it clear about the arms, many Syrians would be as happy to see the bombs drop on you. Think about it.
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