Benghazi

 'How easy it is for some to cackle now about what a "mess" Libya is today, post Qaddafi, which saw 643 people killed in 2013, and forget about the horror it was under Qaddafi, or the bloody course he was undertaking, and that is the right word, before the UN and NATO intervened to put an end to his air assaults and curtail his artillery bombardments. To see a full exposition of what Qaddafi had in mind for Libya we need look no further than Syria, where Assad and his friends have enjoyed a free hand to suppress the rebellion by any means available. Assad is reported to have used poison gas to kill some 30 times since the August sarin attack with no new international sanctions. Syrians haven't enjoyed the protection of an internationally imposed "no-fly" zone and they haven't been allowed access to modern anti-aircraft weapons, so Assad has been able to use his air force with impunity. The estimated 30,000 lives lost in the war to rid Libya of Qaddafi now recedes into the shadows of the rising toll of the murderous Assad's attempt to cling to power.'

 Many liberals who remember the war in Iraq claim that Syria is just confusing, and the only sensible course of action is to stay well out. Such inaction has just meant that the cancer of an inoperative dictatorship has spread its infection throughout Syria and beyond. Some of those liberals who style themselves as anti-imperialists go further and need to lie grievously about what is going on there. Along with Seymour Hersh's offensive claim that Turkey was responsible for the gas attack in August and not the actual culprit Assad, he also says that the Americans set up a 'rat line' from Benghazi to supply weapons to the Syrian rebels. Clay Claiborne shows here that the opposite is the case, that the US has been collecting anti-aircraft weapons (manpads), and stopping them getting to Syria.

 We're frequently told by the media that Assad is immovable, and that military support to the opposition will only serve to rile the Russians. This leads to a fantasy that things could settle down with Assad in power. It is a fantasy because he ignores the millions who won't consent to live under Assad's rule again, who Assad would not allow to live if his rule goes on. While he remains the flow of refugees, the breaking down of Syrian society, and the sense of betrayal that Syrians feel for a West which could have provided the means for them to free themselves but did not, will only increase.

 If the rebels get manpads, the régime's airforce will not be able to bomb civilians. It will be Assad who has no strategy and demonstrably no future. That is the demand that left-wing people and anyone else of good will should be placing on our governments, not whining about how Western interference never solved anything, and conflating support for the Syrian rebels with a re-enactment of the Iraq invasion. It is possible to do some politics without addressing the most important international issues of the day, but when I see people talk about regrouping the left in this country, and they don't think Syria even matters, they will find that their omission shows for others their irrelevance to a politics that matters.