Former DV editor Joshua Frank asks “… are we to ignore the geopolitical situation and just back Russia’s bombings because IS is so damn evil, even if Russia takes out a few innocent Syrian kids along the way?”1
This question is presented as a simple yes-no type and as such is an over-simplification and therefore slanted.
I also wonder what exactly is meant by the suggestion for ignoring a geo-political situation?
It seems prudent to add in much more background to Frank’s article and the article that just appeared at DV by T.P. Wilkinson, critical of Frank’s views.2
1. Syria exists as a state because it was carved out of a pan-Arabia by British-French duplicity, the Sykes-Picot agreement (an agreement reached between European imperialists and not an agreement with the Middle Eastern people who lived in the region).
2. Adding further infamy to the Sykes-Picot agreement, a European influx was was granted territory in the territory of Palestinians without asking the indigenous residents and disregarding their sovereignty, to which the United Nations, to its perfidy, acquiesced in 1947. This was brought about again by imperialist machinations of Europe, the United States, including Canada. The USSR has blame here as well.
3. After WWII, the US embarked on a series of aggressions overseas: Korea, Viet Nam, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and several more.3 The USSR also was involved in aggression outside its territory.
3. Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russia was promised by US administration officials that NATO would not intrude into former Soviet territory.4 The US reneged on its word.
4. The US has a plan to redraw borders.5 Regime change, without an iota of democratic scruples, has long been part and parcel of western imperialist designs for geo-political changes. Thus the US-installed dictators from the homeland; for example, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Viet Nam; Sygnman Rhee in South Korea; Ahmed Chalabi, and when his installation failed, Iyad Allawi in Iraq; and so on.
5. More recently, the US has been behind “successful” regime changes in Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, and Libya. Then the objective grew to Ukraine.
6. Having bitten off Ukraine, the US’s geo-political scheming aggrandized to Russia and China.
7. Syria is a serious geo-political pawn in all this scheming. Syria has relations with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. If Syria were to fall to western imperialism, it is imagined (regardless of IS’s ambitions) that a widening encirclement of Russia would be enabled as well as control of pipelines and fossil fuels. This would all be to Russia’s economic detriment brought about not by open economic competition but militarism.
8. The aggressions are US-manufactured and executed – far beyond US borders. Russia is not aggressing far-flung nations, and where it has been or alleged to have been involved is in states with a substantial Russian citizenry, cajoled by the US to provocative acts; for example, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova.
9. Warring should always be viewed with revulsion, but when one is aggressed, one has the right to resist that aggression militarily. It is clear that Russia did not initiate the foreign aggressions in Syria. Saudi-, Qatari-, US-, Israeli-backed mercenary forces aligned with Syria dissidents have chosen the lethal option to topple the government led by Bashar al Assad.
10. Russia has intervened subsequent to America, Saudi, and Israeli military machinations. An important distinction: Russia was invited by the government of Syria to assist in defeating the mercenary insurrection. The US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia were not invited to assist (which would be ludicrous on its face: a regime asking states seeking its overthrow to assist it).
It is also important to note that if the US and its anti-Assad allies had not participated in an aggression of Syria, then there might well have been no Russian involvement, and Syrians might have been able to settle the matter for themselves. Logically, any blame for casualties resulting from Russian military involvement indirectly belong to the anti-Assad allies. It is here that I diverge with Frank’s analysis in that this important point is lacking: the culpability lies with the primordial violence.
It is also clear that western imperialists have no moral legitimacy to criticize Russia.
All humanity should decry the killing of kids, women, elderly, civilians anywhere. However, our criticisms should primarily focus on our own government’s involvement in imperialism, warring, and killing and work to bring an end to something we, the citizenry, have a chance of stopping: stopping what we are doing.
Frank wraps up his essay:
Those are a few of the questions we should be asking while we oppose all international military involvement in Syria as well as Assad’s murderous human rights violations. It’s time to demand the impossible. It’s time to demand the U.S. and Russia get out of Syria. If the anti-imperialist Left doesn’t do it, who will?
Indeed, I concur for the basic thesis of Frank. We (meaning everyone) should all oppose all international military involvement in Syria. We should oppose any human rights violations anywhere with equal alacrity, whether by regimes in Syria, the US, Israel, the UK, France, Canada, Russia, etc.
But let’s not stop there. We – hopefully everyone but at least everyone in the anti-imperialist Left – should demand an immediate end to resorting to war and violence to solve disagreements.
- Joshua Frank, “The Need to Oppose All Foreign Intervention in Syria,” Counterpunch, 2 October 2015. To be clear, Joshua Frank is a colleague that I have utmost respect for, and he has corrected my wrong outlooks on a few occasions for which I am indebted.
- T.P. Wilkinson, “Saving Private al-Baghdadi,” Dissident Voice, 4 October 2015. While I agree with the brunt of the logic in Wilkinson’s essay, I would submit it was overly critical toward Frank and bordered on ad hominem. Some criticism is weak; e.g., Wilkinson chides Frank: “Needless to say the ‘Free World’ has been extinct since 1989 but Frank hasn’t noticed.” However, the fact that Frank used quotation marks around free world indicates he regards the term scathingly.
- See William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).
- Walter C. Uhler, “The Hypocritical United States of Amnesia and Russia,” Dissident Voice, 15 March 15 2014.
- See Kim Petersen, “A Bloody Border Project,” Dissident Voice, 5 July 2007.