THE Syrian government has informed the UN envoy, Kofi Annan, that it will respect the cease fire agreement that it is a party to, and will respect today’s cease-fire deadline.
However, it is not the Syrian regime that is the problem.
The plain facts are that the US and the UK have organised the Saudi, Qatari and Bahraini feudal regimes to supply hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of arms to the Syrian counter-revolutionaries as well as reinforcements – armed gangs from the Lebanon and Libya.
A full-scale operation is now underway to prevent a cease-fire by the simple mechanism of the ‘Free Syrian Army’ carrying on with the war, and attempting to move into any areas from which the Syrian army withdraws its weaponry.
The US-UK object remains to remove the Assad regime, which stands with Iran against imperialism and replace it with a pro-US-UK-Israeli regime, clearing the way for the forthcoming assault on Iran.
For the Saudi and Bahraini monarchies such a regime would be by far preferable to the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athist regimes that were a threat to every monarch in the Middle East and the Gulf.
In fact, the assault on Iran is already being prepared. The Gulf states are being armed to the teeth by the US-UK axis, while the US Fifth Fleet has a massive base in Bahrain itself.
Part of the deal with the Saudi and Bahraini despots is that they are allowed a free hand to kill their own democrats. Democratic propaganda is not being allowed to get in the way of the strategic aims of US-UK diplomacy.
Since the world crisis of capitalism erupted in 2008, along with worldwide revolutionary developments, we have seen imperialism fighting for its life, against the working class of the world and also to re-enslave the former colonial peoples in order to steal their oil wealth.
In this basic struggle, the major imperialist ally has been Arab feudalism and the reactionary anti-Arab nationalism of the Islamists and Al Qaeda
We have already had the NATO-led war in Libya to smash the Gadaffi regime.
Its aftermath has been a massive explosion of different class forces all over north Africa, destabilising all of the North African states and plunging the area into massive upheaval. The imperialist view is that this is just a small price, well worth paying for getting their hands on Libya’s oil, and then continuing to split Sudan and create an oil-rich South Sudan, permanently at war with Sudan to its north, and needing permanent imperialist ‘protection’.
Not satisfied with this the imperialist powers are organising for NATO air power to support Kenyan and other African Union ground forces to take control of a potentially oil-rich Somalia, and to dominate the Red Sea and the Gulf.
Having been originally stymied by the refusal of Russia and China to agree to another Libyan-type intervention into Syria, the imperialist powers have been chipping away at the Russian position to seek to get agreement for an open regional intervention into Syria by Turkey and the Gulf states.
Such an escalation, which is actively being worked for, will almost immediately see a civil war in Iraq and simultaneously such an explosion of oil prices that the western economies will seize up and be brought to a halt.
This struggle that is emerging is the product of the world crisis of the capitalist system. At the same time as the imperialists are seeking to strangle Welfare States at home, they are seeking to put back the handcuffs onto the former colonial peoples.
There can only be one answer to this policy, and it must be the struggle for the victory of the world socialist revolution to smash capitalism and imperialism in alliance with the peoples of Syria, Iraq Palestine, and Iran.
The watchword of the working class in the west must be that the enemy is at home and that every victory of the movement of national liberation is our victory as well.
