THE TORIES plan to call a snap vote in parliament to authorise British airstrikes against the legitimate Syrian government forces of President Assad should they win a large majority in the general election according to authoritative sources close to the Tory party.
While no official announcement of intention has been made by Tory leader Theresa May, she has made no secret of her support for the statement made by her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who last month said that Britain would launch bombing raids if asked by the US even without the approval of parliament.
Johnson said it would be ‘very difficult to say no’ if Donald Trump told the British to join in bombing Syrian troops, adding that whether or not this would require a vote in parliament ‘needs to be tested’. Johnson’s statement came after the US launched a deadly cruise missile attack on a Syrian airbase on 6 April under the pretext of carrying out retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack.
Previously Johnson had described President Assad as ‘a monster who needs decapitating’. At the time, May refused to distance herself from Johnson and was deliberately evasive about whether this was official Tory policy. Now it transpires that plans are advanced for any future Tory government with a sufficient majority to immediately seek to overturn the Commons vote in 2013, when MPs, including 30 Tory rebels, voted against military action against Assad following an earlier trumped-up charge that Syrian forces had used chemical weapons.
Yesterday, a senior Whitehall source told the press that they are ‘99.9 per cent’ certain that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack and that: ‘After the election we will have a clear majority and we will push it through.’
Two things are very clear, the first being that for all their claims of being 99.9% certain, neither the Tories nor the US government nor any of the cheerleaders for imperialist war to overthrow the Assad regime have produced the slightest shred of evidence to substantiate their claims.
The second is that the only beneficiaries from this attack were the jihadist al-Nusra Front, ISIS or Al-Qaeda terrorist groups and, of course, the imperialists who immediately jumped on this tragedy as an excuse to launch an all-out war on Syria.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, warned at the time that this would not be the last provocation by Western imperialism to frame Assad saying: ‘We have information from various sources that such provocations – I cannot call them otherwise – are being prepared in other regions of Syria, including in the southern outskirts of Damascus, where they are again planning to throw some kind of substance and accuse Syrian official authorities of using it.’
He added that this whole attack was reminiscent of the pack of lies and ‘dodgy dossiers’ used by Blair and Bush to justify their illegal war and invasion of Iraq. That war killed millions of people, destroyed a previously advanced state and spawned terrorism throughout the region.
This is precisely what imperialism would like to do to Syria to secure its strategic position for the West.
The second indisputable fact is that a section of the British capitalist class and their Tory representatives is so desperate to cling to the coat-tails of US imperialism that it will commit the UK to blindly following every instruction from Trump. So weak is British capitalism that they are prepared to risk a military confrontation with Russia and even nuclear war in order to seek crumbs from the US table by proving they are a reliable poodle.
The Tories are determined to push for war in the event of a victory on June 8 – the issue for workers and youth is to make sure that they are thrown out. Workers must demand that an incoming Labour government carry out socialist policies. This means breaking with US imperialism, the complete withdrawal of all British forces from the region and full support to the Syrian people in their fight against regime change and for the right to determine their own leadership.
