RUSSIAN Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is in Syria for talks with President Bashar al-Assad. He was cheered by tens of thousands of pro-Assad crowds who lined the streets as he arrived in Damascus.
The visit comes after Russia and China vetoed a Western-backed UN resolution designed to repeat the Libyan regime change operation, with its massive slaughter and destruction of infrastructure, on Syrian soil.
US State Department spokespersons have also condemned Russia and China, and the US has ominously closed its Syrian embassy. The State Department chief Hillary Clinton is deservedly infamous after greeting the news that Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi had been murdered by her ‘Libyan Freedom Fighter’ allies with uncontrollable laughter. Now she wants to repeat the Libyan treatment on Assad and Syria.
The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Ankara will start a new diplomatic initiative with countries opposed to Syria, following the ‘UN fiasco’. Turkey is already supplying the Syrian opposition with arms and has transported hundreds of Libyan counter-revolutionaries to Syria to bolster the ‘Free Syrian Army’.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague has however surpassed all of his imperialist friends with the fury of his response to the Russian-Chinese veto.
In a statement to MPs, Hague said the resolution was ‘reasonable and necessary’ – stressing that it had been backed by the Arab League.
He told MPs: ‘There is no need to mince words about this. Such vetoes are a betrayal of the Syrian people.
‘In deploying them, they have let down the Arab League, they have increased the likelihood of what they wish to avoid in Syria – civil war – and placed themselves on the wrong side of Arab and international opinion.’
Mr Hague warned the UK was determined to ratchet up the pressure on the Assad regime. ‘This is a doomed regime as well as murdering regime. There is no way it can regain international credibility as well as credibility with its own people.’
He said he did not ‘rule out’ recognising opposition forces as the legitimate government of Syria – but that this would only be done ‘in concert’ with allies (the Qatari, Saudi and Bahrain feudalists) in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Hague is furious that Russia and China did not nod through the UN resolution, as they had done in the case of Libya, allowing the UK and French governments to organise the slaughter of large numbers of Libyan civilians in support of Libyan counter-revolutionaries who cannot cope with running the country, but have already set up hundreds of torture centres for their opponents.
Hague can stomach all these atrocities because they allow him and other imperialist leaders to grab Libyan oil wealth.
He is now cursing the Russian and Chinese Stalinists because they have blocked his drive to repeat this Libyan experience in Syria.
However the issue does not end there.
The Hague-Clinton assault on Syria is in reality the beginning of the war against Iran. The immediate aim is to remove the pro-Iranian Assad regime, and then, alongside Israel and the Lebanese Falangists, to take action to try and crush Hezbollah in the Lebanon.
This would involve the deaths of hundreds of thousands, but as a former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, remarked about the number of Iraqi children killed by the UN blockade, this would be ‘a price worth paying’ to secure their rear before they launch their attack on Iran.
Since such an operation would put the imperialist forces at the gates of the oil and gas-rich Caucasus, and pose a massive threat to Russia, as well as cutting the Chinese oil supply, the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing and Moscow could not allow the UN resolution, since they are the ultimate target of imperialism.
The workers of the world and all those who want peace instead of a new world war must support the Assad regime against imperialism.
They must call for the defeat of the imperialist forces and embrace Lenin’s slogan that the enemy is at home.
The imperialist ruling class, who will not stop its struggle to shatter the Welfare State in the UK, are straining every nerve and muscle to destroy Syria, the Lebanon and Iran.
Imperialism is the enemy of humanity and must be destroyed by the victory of the world socialist revolution.
