On Syria, chess, and Nat King Cole

When I say I was wrong about Syria, I don’t mean I’ve at last acknowledged Bashar al-Assad to be the monster depicted by an empire-serving propaganda blitz for which ‘universalists’ Owen Jones and George Monbiot gave left-liberal cover. While I’ve learned many things since writing it, and changed my views on matters far from trivial, I stand by my 2017 post, Monbiot, Syria & Universalism, on that pair’s blindness to the reality, restated two months ago in US Neocons & Israel’s far-Right: Part 2, of:

an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington

I stand too by my 2019 critique, Syria: how Trotskyists got it so wrong, of a revolutionary Left which, with honourable exceptions, cried “a plague on Washington and Damascus both”. For a people starved by lethal sanctions and oil theft, and subjected to living Hell by Western-armed jihadists, the far-Left remedy was a call for the workers of the world to rise up and replace the “Arab socialism” of a beleaguered Ba’athism with their 24 carat real McCoy brand. But as I said at the time, in a tetchy exchange with the now deceased Louis “Unrepentant Marxist” Proyect: ¹

There’s no third game in town, Louis. It’s the last Ba’athism in the Middle East – with all its very real flaws – or it’s the US Empire unbridled. You and so much of the so-called far Left appear to have made your choice but don’t insult everyone’s intelligence by pretending there’s some third possibility here. ²

And the Syrian leader? I agree with Simplicius the Thinker – cited in Bashar al-Assad was no Michael Corleone – on Assad the Younger being:

… a tragic figure [in that] while he was a good man and kind leader, he may not have been an effective leader. He was never meant to be ruler. He was a simple doctor-in-training while his older, firmer brother Bassel al-Assad, elder son of Hafez, was to inherit the throne [but] died in a car accident …

Still less am I wrong on the US, with its slash-and-burn plans for the Middle East and reckless determination to shore up by All Means Necessary a unipolar world run from Washington and Wall Street. Asleep in a media induced amnesia, our emotions instruments to be manipulated by selective if not flat-out mendacious depictions of nations targeted for regime change, few of us join the dots to see a bigger picture plain as daylight if we would but look.

Where I was wrong was in overstating what the axis of resistance could do. I was so sure Russia and Iran, with China in the wings, would step in to save Syria and thwart US, Israeli and Turkish designs. Why? Because for reasons given elsewhere – US Neocons & Israel’s far-Right: Part 4 – I thought they’d have to. Instead the axis states made hard choices which precluded saving a nation state with deliberately inbuilt division ³ and no longer able or willing to fight. I was guilty – as were Mohammad Marandi, Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter and a good few others – of wishful thinking.

And wishful thinking has a way, when reality intrudes, of begetting its mirror opposite: a tailspin of despair equally wide of the mark. For which Nat King Cole and George Shearing prescribe the only antidote worthy of the name:

Will you remember the famous men
Who had to fall to rise again?

So take a deep breath
Pick yourself up
Dust yourself off
And start all over again.

With this in mind I offer Brian Berletic, speaking not from his New Atlas channel but as a guest of Danny Haiphong. It’s long but, if pushed for time, the first twenty-five minutes will do.

It’s a shame to miss the rest though. While exploring themes wider than Syria, the conversation keeps returning to it. It also has Brian – always magisterially well informed and tightly argued – showing a homely side I’d not seen before. He doesn’t literally invoke Nat King Cole but comes close. And as he so often does, he urges us not to let emotion cloud our judgment:

… the Syrian government for so many years stood valiantly up to the Empire and did all it could but it’s clear that in the last few years, whether through internal pressures or attempts at a coup – perhaps successful; we have so many unanswered questions – something was going wrong and externally there was a lot of pressure. So Russia and China are going to look at that and say well, we need to continue on the path we have set out, whether Syria has Assad or whether it does not.

In chess you’re not going to finish the game with all your pieces. You have to sacrifice some; it’s just the the reality of the game and in geopolitics that is also a reality. If you are losing these pieces after careful consideration of how to win the overall game, that makes sense and is not in vain …

… when I was a small kid playing with my father I’d lose a piece and be so upset I‘d seek immediate revenge by taking another piece. Usually that led me into a trap, and that’s what people mean when they say don’t become emotional, don’t react emotionally. Think logically, rationally; think strategically. Look at the big picture and what you’re trying to do. That’s how we have to approach this.

Later he returns to this theme from a different angle while:

… thinking of China’s responsibilities and its need to prioritize. Not as they want to but as they absolutely have to. As the West repeatedly provokes Russia, Iran and China, many who support the latter demand instant revenge …

… what Israel has done to Gaza placed upward pressure on Iran and Hezbollah to Do Something.  This was designed to have them overextend, then collapse themselves and in a way it did work because Iranian people don’t really support Hamas, not on the scale they support Hezbollah. Hamas is cut from the same cloth as the forces that just took over Syria – at one point they were literally shoulder-to-shoulder with those forces in Syria fighting its government. ⁴

People didn’t get that. They wanted revenge for Gaza, and it’s understandable – it’s a tragedy, a catastrophe and crime against humanity – but that’s the point. A lot of what Israel does is very deliberate to provoke emotions that override reason and strategy. To a certain extent it has worked in the Middle East but with China and Russia it doesn’t.

They are patient; China above all since the US has troops on Taiwan, internationally recognized as Chinese, yet China has done nothing. By right it could, but hasn’t because it’s thinking long-term. It has removed any desire for revenge or emotional satisfaction from the equation, to focus on what makes the most sense: suffer short-term political humiliation for long-term Victory, or satisfy yourself now and collapse later?

For the second time this week Michael Corleone springs to mind. In Godfather III he counsels:

Don’t hate your enemies. It clouds your judgment.

Over to Brian and Danny.

* * *

1. Louis Proyect had an execrable debating style exemplified by his describing one female defender of Assad as “too ugly to fuck” and, on a different matter, by his Photoshopping the head of an adversary to the image of a cockroach. I don’t say such things excuse my “tetchiness” – and it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead – but they do add context.
2. Let me return briefly to Owen Jones, who to give him his due has put his colleagues to shame on Palestine. I find him somewhat fluid. While his ‘universalism’ puts him on the liberal left, I noticed one of his videos this week – I’ve yet to view it – echoing a trope more common to some strands of Marxism in its heaping of scorn on the idea of Assad as anti-imperialist.

   I address that red herring in the 2019 post already cited:

   Here’s Fred Weston, writing for In Defence of Marxism:

   … [the idea of] the Assad regime as anti-imperialist … can only be sustained if one suffers selective historical amnesia and ignores what the regime has actually done to collaborate with imperialism. In 1976, Hafez Assad invaded refugee camps in Lebanon to suppress Palestinian resistance, coordinating its operations with Israel, and with the full backing of US imperialism. Syria had in fact been called on to intervene by the west (including Kissinger) to prevent the defeat of the right-wing Maronite Christian militias in the civil war that had started in 1975 between progressive secularists, Muslim militias and the PLO. Later, in 1990-91 the regime cooperated in the US attack on Iraq; in 2003 the regime did not lift a finger to defend Iraq against imperialist attack. It withdrew from Lebanon under US pressure.

   All true, more or less. And all perfectly irrelevant. What’s wrong here (on top of slyly conflating Hafez and Bashar into a single Assad) is the tacit demand that an imperialised state behave with anti imperialist consistency to ‘earn’ the support of the left in imperialist states. But unless he thinks the west attacks Syria because of the sins he lists, and I’m sure he thinks no such thing, Weston makes the very confusion [Trotsky’s] critical but unconditional defence disentangles.

   Internationalism begins at home. A key tenet is that imperialised states be defended from our own imperialism, regardless of Stalinist, nationalist, theocratic or other defects in their worldviews, or failings real or cynically concocted in their leaders. Such defects and failings must be condemned where proven, but always in the context of – yet meticulously decoupled from – unwavering insistence that the prime villain is ‘our’ imperialism.

   Why does this matter? Because the left in the global north has a sorry record of capitulation to ferocious dominant narratives. That’s why defence of the Provisional IRA was tougher for British socialists than defence of an ANC whose program and leaders were equally flawed. Conversely, it’s why white South Africans in the ANC were truly heroic – likewise Israeli Jews fighting their own apartheid state – and why it was easier to defend the IRA if you were French or American than British.

3. Under Sykes-Picot, 1916, the British and French carved up a dying Ottoman Empire in ways calculated to perpetuate – with the rising importance of oil, and age old colonial fears of Eurasia – divide and rule. Look at a map of Syria, with its oddly straight line – like those which divvied up 19th century Africa at Potsdam – running southwest to northeast to give that harp shape. One reason Bashar Had To Go was that, even at its most brutal as Hafez fought the Muslim Brotherhood no holds barred, Syria was a successful secular state wherein Christian, Alawite Shia, Druze, Jew and Sunni coexisted in peace.
4. What many never knew and some of us forgot, or chose to overlook and/or recast in the heat of our outrage at the genocidal state, is that Hamas was (a) an Israeli creation to weaken the PLO, (b) fighting alongside the jihadists and against Hezbollah in the dirty war on Syria. Where pundits like Scott Ritter were insistent that Hamas had set a trap for Israel, Brian was equally insistent from the get-go that Hamas was used, wittingly or not, to spring a trap for Iran.