Stand By Me

 A hundred years ago today, the German Socialist Party fraction in the Reichstag voted in favour of war credits to support the German war effort in the world war just starting. We see a lot on the TV at the moment about how men died doing their duty, not so much on how it was an imperialist slaughter. I think there are parallels in the way much of the Left has betrayed the principle of internationalism in abandoning the Syrian revolution to its fate, and misidentifying the problem there.

 Though we might start with a couple of differences. Firstly, the ideologically committed left has nothing like the influence it did a hundred years ago. Then its actions shaped the world, now it's important to get this right, not for the world's sake, but for the sake of the left. Already you can see the Syria conflict being thrown in the face of those who only choose to demonstrate over Gaza. I saw Abdel Bari Atwan being taunted about this on Dateline a couple of weeks ago, and thought it would be so much easier for him if he'd attended one demonstration in favour of the revolution in Syria. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, not due to the machinations of the Emir of Qatar and John McCain, but because of Assad's army and bands of thugs and Iranians and Hezbollah killing Syrians with Russian munitions from Russian vehicles. If you as an individual didn't protest against these things in the last year, fine, you had other priorities in your politics. But if you are a political tendency that didn't bother to protest against those things, it will be thrown in your face from now until Kingdom Come. And it will only get worse as the horrors of Assad's war to destroy Syria become more public. If you don't know what the Caesar photos are about, find out. If you know what they are, but think their mention moralism or a hoax emanating from the Pentagon, there is a dustbin of history for such conspiracy theorists which can be an interesting place, and I hope you enjoy it. But nobody will take your politics seriously when you can't even acknowledge a tyranny or the revolution against it.

 The second difference is that World War One was an inter-imperialist conflict. Syria is not. The demonstrators of 2011 and the Free Syrian Army are not unconnected groups, the latter funded by the US and Saudi Arabia to spread their influence in the region. The FSA was formed spontaneously to defend the demonstrations for freedom against the snipers of the régime, and grew with the desertions of those soldiers no longer prepared to kill for Assad. To compare it to exile groups trained and implanted by the CIA or the Pentagon is just to slander, and such a lie makes everything else said subject to disbelief.

 The people who say we should ignore the Syrian conflict because our rulers demonise Assad are telling another whopper. I remember when this really did happen. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the papers were full of stories claiming he was a new Hitler, so that a war could be justified the return the region to a Western favoured reactionary monarchy, with a load of Iraqis slaughtered in the process. In 2003 there wasn't quite so much of that, the argument was more about the WMDs that he supposedly had, it being more of an after the event fallback justification that he was a bad man anyway. There has been very little of this with Syria, to put it mildly. Most of the concern has been at the scale of the humanitarian need, not with putting the blame on Assad. Obama proclaimed red lines that Assad couldn't cross, and then Assad kills a whole bunch of people with chemical weapons, and nothing is done. And the now reactionary sections of the left congratulate itself for stopping a war that was never going to happen, while they do nothing to support the victims of the war actually going on in Syria.Because the US is not invested in the Syrian opposition. There is the possibility of the intersection between their professed commitment to freedom, and the Syrian need for weapons to defend themselves. Any more voices in the public sphere ion favour of that would have helped, would help now. But those saying we have to stop Western meddling in Syria let our governments off the hook. You wouldn't have said in Russia in the 70s that the problem in Nicaragua was your government supplying arms to the FSLN. Or that you shouldn't have demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Russia in the 60s because the main enemy is at home. The Syrian conflict is a revolution in a country allied to the US' rivals. Of course they will make some propaganda over it, will provide minimal support to the political opposition, so that they will maximise their influence in a post-revolutionary Syria. But they have stopped heavy weapons going to the rebels rather than sent them. Even the weaponry sent by Saudi Arabia and Qatar has been nothing in comparison to that provided by Russia and Iran to Assad, and it is the lack not the excess that concerns Syrians still fleeing or dying from daily barrel bomb attacks.

 Those who formed the Communist International after World War One also rejected a middle group, those like Kautsky, who had suggested international mediation rather than revolution was the way to stop war. I think that Chomsky somewhere attacks those national security liberals who opposed the Vietnam War because it was bad for the US, rather than because Vietnamese were being killed into the millions. So there is also a comparison with those like the Stop The War Coalition, who desire Russia and China to restrain the US over Syria, and have generally argued against Britain's wars on the patriotic basis of their damage to the country. But I'm thinking there is more of those who equate the fight against Assad with the rejection of foreign intervention on behalf of the revolution. Despite this being the position of some revolutionaries in Syria, I think it has little appeal for most Syrians, as it simply doesn't reflect their experience. And so while it will not be found out as quickly as the outright opposition to the Syrian revolution, it will also be found out as an inadequate response.

 This is not to say that the answer is for the USAF to flatten Damascus, most obviously because that was never going to be the question. I remember someone telling me last year that all bombing is indiscriminate. It's not true. Hannan Ashrawi of the PLO was on the TV the other day, pointing out that the Israeli army cannot be excused for hitting schools in Gaza 'by accident' when it can take out individuals from an F-16. When a government is fighting a war of choice, it tends to achieve military objectives first, and accept collateral damage as a byproduct. It creates the impression of an out-of-control process that can only be stopped by the surrender of the other side. When the US was trying to do as little as possible to fulfil its humanitarian obligations, Obama goes to Congress to ask that it decide, but not spell out what would happen if it went for action, allowing the opponents of action to paint a lurid picture of being dragged into a quagmire on the side of al-Qaida, and the administration was off the hook. So if they had bombed some airfields, there is no mechanism by which that would have translated into a rerun of the Iraq invasion. It might have meant fewer bombs would have been dropped, discriminately, to force the people out of any area that Assad cannot control.

 The revolutionary left is much smaller than it once was, and those getting Syria right seem to be a handful. Which is a shame, as it may be that only a socialist society with its common ownership of the means of production can provide an alternative to a a capitalist world whose daily exploitation constantly intensifies inequality and distress with crisis and wars. Those handful are a motley bunch, and its hard to imagine most of them in the same organisations as any of the others. But for now I see their agreement over Syria as more important than any other differences, as it is only those really focused on solidarity with the Syrian people who are going to be worth a damn in the future.