THE Syrian war has reached a ‘stalemate’ and President Bashar al-Assad’s government will call for a ceasefire at the Geneva conference on the state’s future, the country’s deputy prime minister has told the Guardian newspaper.
Syria’s Deputy Prime Minister, Qadri Jamil, a former Communist Party member, has said that neither side is strong enough to win the conflict.
He continued that a ceasefire would have to be kept ‘under international observation’, which could be provided by monitors or UN peacekeepers.
Jamil is one of two cabinet ministers from small secular parties who, he said, ‘wanted to give a lesson to both sides to prepare for a government of national unity and break the unilateral aspect of the regime – and break the fear in opposition circles about sitting in front of the regime’.
Meanwhile, the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Tehran is ready to help broker peace in Syria.
In an article in the Washington Post newspaper, Rouhani wrote: ‘We must join hands to constructively work toward national dialogue, whether in Syria or Bahrain.’
This development represents a triumph for the Stalinist diplomacy of President Putin, whose drive to show just how useful the Stalinist bureaucracy can be in getting the imperialists out of a huge crisis of their own making, is now bearing its rotten fruit.
First of all, with President Obama facing defeat at the hands of the US Houses of Congress – who were on the point of refusing to back his proposed strike against Syria – Putin volunteered that Syria did have chemical weapons and was prepared to reveal them and agree to their destruction.
This allowed Obama to turn a huge defeat for himself into a limited victory. One – he lived to fight another day after indefinitely postponing a Syria strike vote in Congress. Two – there was the added bonus of Syria agreeing to the destruction of its wmds, and a weakening of its defences, while Israel continued to keep its chemical warfare assets and its nuclear bombs, and the Saudis also kept their chemical arsenal.
Now this process has been extended after the Syrian Deputy Premier’s statement that this is a war that ‘neither side can win’. It is now to be forward to the Geneva Conference to lay the basis for a transitional government with an open pro-imperialist wing, and without Assad. He will be retired to await his summons from the Hague!
The talk of a war that nobody can win takes us back to Vietnam, where this was the credo of Stalinist governments and revisionist protest movements everywhere. They insisted that a compromise regime had to emerge out of peace talks because the US was just too powerful to lose.
The Vietnamese people never listened to this defeatist tripe and delivered an historic defeat to US imperialism and its South Vietnamese allies, who were both run out of the re-unified country.
Putin’s policy is today doubly treacherous since US imperialism has already been defeated in Afghanistan, and has been told by the US people that it must not intervene in Syria!
The so-called Syrian opposition and its tens of thousands of imported Islamist and Al-Qaeda allies are not only being defeated, they are killing each other!
The struggle of the Syrian people and army, supported by the masses and the workers of the world, has already imposed a defeat on the US as far as intervention is concerned. This same alliance has to be developed to win this war and put an end to the imperialist war drive in the Middle East.
The Moscow-Beijing Stalinist politicians and some Iranian leaders who are supporting ‘reconciliation’ in Syria, think that by helping imperialism they are safeguarding Russia and Iran from attack.
The lesson of history is that appeasement of imperialism leads to disaster. The Stalin-Hitler pact brought no peace to Russia and in fact prepared the way for a Nazi invasion that cost tens of millions their lives.
UK, EU, US and Russian workers must call and fight for victory to Syria and take revolutionary action to put an end to capitalism, imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy through the victory of the world socialist revolution.