THE US and UK are stuck deep into the Syrian quagmire – a quagmire of their own making.
They have achieved a situation where millions of refugees are flooding westwards bringing the EU to near breaking point; with IS getting stronger not weaker in the vacuum that has been created. The active US trained military forces inside Syria have been reduced to nine men – the rest have deserted to IS – while the secular nationalist Syrian state and its army led by President Assad is proving to be unbreakable. This is why the imperialist double act of Kerry and Hammond are appealing to Russia for rescue.
In London on Saturday the duo spelled out that they wanted Russia to organise not only talks, but the removal of President Assad, not immediately and not even in a month! – but soon! They are on their knees! Kerry has set Cameron and Hammond standing on their heads – they want to bomb Syria, now they want to talk to Assad, provided Russia guarantees that he will go in the very near future.
They are looking to make a deal with Russia on this issue when Putin addresses the UN General Assembly on September 28th. However, this manoeuvre is not unexpected. On Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said: ‘Russia supports the statehood of Syria, not President Bashar Assad himself.’
Last Tuesday, Assad warned a party of Russian journalists that the West was waging a war against him just like it was against Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said: ‘Ever since the coup in Ukraine President Putin has been viewed by western media as an enemy, a czar, a dictator clamping down on the opposition, someone who came to power in an undemocratic way even though he was elected as a result a popular vote recognized by the West. No longer. This is what the western propaganda campaign is all about.’
He concluded that the western powers were working hard to bring about regime changes in Syria, Russia and other countries. He was saying that if Assad goes then Putin could be next!
In fact President Assad is the choice of the Syrian people. On June 5 2014 he won a landslide victory in a presidential poll securing 88.7 per cent of the vote, parliament speaker Mohammad al-Laham has said.
The two other candidates, Hassan al-Nouri and Maher Hajjar, won 4.3 per cent and 3.2 per cent respectively. The victory gave Assad a third seven-year term in office. The head of the Supreme Constitutional Court said that the turnout in the country’s presidential election was 73.42 per cent.
Assad has got six years of his term to go and Kerry and Hammond should be informed of this fact. The fact is that only the Syrian people, and certainly not the western powers or even Russia has the right to decide who rules Syria. This is the role of the Syrian people, who have stood up bravely to a US-UK-Saudi-Qatari backed Islamist insurrection that has already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The imperialists thought that they would take Damascus as easily as it proved to take Tripoli. They have been proved to be wrong, and now it is they who live in fear of the impact that the failure their war is having on the EU and the US, and the rest of the capitalist world. However, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin may well welcome Kerry’s proposals in return for some concessions perhaps over the Ukraine.
Any deal to get rid of Assad will constitute a chronic interference in Syria’s internal affairs, to rescue imperialism from the disaster that it has created, and strengthen it in its drive to undo not just Syria, but Iran and then Russia itself. The working people of the world must support the right of the Syrian people to decide on its own government. Russian workers must make it perfectly clear to Putin and the Stalinist bureaucracy that it is not in the interests of the Russian workers, the Syrian workers or the workers of the world to rescue imperialism from its Syrian quagmire so that it can all the better tackle Iran, fight its working class at home, and plan a new war on Russia.
