SYRIA’S Ba’athist leader Bashar al-Assad has warned that Western action against his country will cause an ‘earthquake’ that will ‘burn the whole region’, and create a number of Afghanistans.
Assad told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The plan is to divide Syria, that is to divide the whole region.’
However, imperialism is not worried about burning the whole region. What it is weighing up is whether it will win or not.
Assad is now pleading in vain that he has started to implement reforms.
Syria was condemned yesterday by Arab League foreign ministers, imperialist stooges. At the same time, various Syrian protest leaders called on the Western powers and/or the UN Security Council to declare a ‘no-fly’ zone over Syria.
It is obvious after the example of Libya, where NATO slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians, that imperialist intervention will have nothing to do with defending civilians.
It also has little to do with Syria’s immediate oil wealth, since Syria is not a major producer.
Syria, however, is Iran’s main ally in the Middle East.
The imperialists are contemplating an attack on Syria, and seeking, under the cover of a NATO mass bombing campaign, to incite the Kurdish and Sunni sections of the Syrian population to overthrow the narrowly-based Assad regime, as part of an attack on Iran, and a preparation for an assault on Iran, again using the Libya tactic to try to overthrow the Islamic republic, but this time reckoning the cost at millions of lives.
A successful assault would immeasurably strengthen the US position in the oil- and gas-rich regions of the Gulf, the Middle East and Central Asia, and of course greatly strengthen Israel, while delivering a final warning to Russia not even to think about standing in the way of imperialism.
The driving force for such an onslaught is coming from the ever deepening world capitalist crisis, and its colossal indebtedness, which is driving imperialism to try to crush its own workers, and destroy the movement of national liberation, grabbing and redividing the resources of the planet.
The Iranian leadership facing this threat may well decide, and it has every right to do so, that the time to fight is now, and not to wait until it is surrounded by baying imperialist forces.
The Russian and Chinese Stalinists – who gave the imperialists the go-ahead to slaughter Libyan civilians and Gadaffi when they refused to use their veto on the UN Security Council to halt the NATO air attack – have now been plunged into a huge crisis.
Even now, the Russian and Chinese Stalinists are arguing that they should receive a greater share of the Libyan spoils than the imperialists are willing to allow them.
However, the Stalinists did not stop the US and its allies from attacking Iraq in 1991, and 2003, they did not stop NATO from bombing Belgrade in 1999, and they will not take action to halt an attack on Syria.
It is the working class of the world that must halt the imperialist conspiracy to destroy the movement of national liberation by taking general strike action to bring down the Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy regimes and replace them with workers’ governments.
There is no doubt that the forces to do this job are emerging rapidly in all of the main imperialist states, because of the massive attacks that are taking place on working people. More and more workers are realising that the enemy is not in some foreign parts but is at home and is the ruling class of capitalists and bankers.
Every victory for the masses of the liberation struggle is a victory for the British workers and vice versa.
In relation to the Syrian regime, the working class of Syria has every right to fight for its rights, but when Syria comes under attack by the imperialists it must oppose Assad and his regime in another way, to show that it is the best defender of the country, and convince the masses that it deserves to rule.
They must form a united front with Assad to fight imperialism and in the course of the struggle change Syria forever, preparing the way for the victory of the Syrian socialist revolution.
