ON Tuesday evening there was dancing in the streets of Aleppo as residents celebrated the defeat of the Islamist factions that had been armed, supplied and financed by the Western powers and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain to overthrow the Assad government, and to make up a puppet regime that would run Syria for them.
The Syrian people have been shot, blown up, gassed and starved for five years, but they have emerged the victor. The great losers are the US and the UK, the major imperialist powers who want to run the Middle East and take over its vast oil resources, starting with the right to select who should govern Syria.
After destroying Iraq in 2003, murdering the Libyan leader Gadaffi in 2012 and destroying Libya with him, they were unable to do the same in Syria. They have been stopped and defeated in Syria, while at home the masses of the working class and the middle class are turning against them as the Brexit revolt in the UK, and the dumping of the Clinton gang in the US vividly illustrate.
Their allies in the region, the feudal gangsters who rule in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar, who put hundreds of billions of dollars into the war chest of the US and the UK to assemble the forces to get rid of Assad, have had their fingers very badly burnt indeed.
The Saudis are now involved in a war in the Yemen, where the Houthi ‘rebels’ have also refused to give way to the tactics of mass murder and are fighting back against the murderous weaponry supplied to the Saudi ruling class by the US and the UK with the greatest possible bravery. For all the members of the US-mustered alliance, winning the war in Syria was vital.
The US and the UK wanted to sweep away the last Arab nationalist state so as to impose an Israeli peace on the Palestinians and completely dominate the region with its huge oil reserves, before taking on Iran.
The Gulf feudalists hate the Syrian Baathists and want to be able to dump the Palestinians and have an open alliance with Israel to make war on Iran. This is why they want to smash all pro-Iranian forces whether they be in the Yemen or in the Bahrain democratic movement.
All these plans have now been dealt a huge blow by the Syrian people. PM May will live to regret her trip to the Gulf, where she pledged the closest possible alliance with the Saudi and Bahraini brigands.
Even more will she regret her open adulation of the Balfour Declaration in its centenary year. In 1917, the UK pledged to hand Palestine over to the Zionists, a handing over that has cost the lives of millions of Palestinians, Egyptians and Syrians, in the various Israeli wars, and in the decades of the occupation of Palestine.
Boris Johnson will regret his recent statements that the UK is returning to its old imperialist policy of permanent intervention east of Suez. The UK is already being accused of ‘war crimes’ against the Yemeni people!
He paraded his ‘Return to East of Suez’ position to the Gulf feudalists who are welcoming the building of a giant UK naval base in Bahrain to help them oppress their own people and attack Iran. However, the defeat in Syria, after a colossal expenditure of cash and lives will be nothing to what the UK will experience in the Gulf – it will be its graveyard.
The main enemy is however not in the Gulf – it is at home. British workers have had more than enough of imperialist interventions abroad, and of permanent austerity at home. Billions are being spent on a Bahrain base while the NHS is being allowed to sink!
There is a massive movement of millions of people in both the US and the UK against the ruling class establishment. The defeat of the imperialist powers in Syria opens up the prospect for them to be defeated at home by socialist revolutions that will make PM May regret her open adulation for the notorious Balfour Declaration.
The message from the victory of the Syrian army at Aleppo is to go forward to the state of Palestine and forward to the British and US socialist revolutions that will lay the basis for an anti-imperialist socialist world!
