Syria: More disaster awaits with US foreign policy

Rumsfeld and Saddam. One criminal dead, the other a rich, free man

by Richard Mellor

I have to admit that it's a little difficult trying to figure out the Syrian situation.  When we don't have people on the ground we have to rely on the mass media which means we only get information via the Pentagon and the global media giants that represent the views of global capitalism, particularly the western imperialist kind.

The Internet has opened up a new world for us and while it may be filled with all sorts of junk, porn sites, right wing Nazis and the like, it also offers us an incredible window to the world.  Here in the US, part of the problem is that the media is so controlled and outright censored. In fact, it is the most censored media of all the advanced capitalist economies.

Most Americans would have not a clue that the US overthrew the democratic governments of Iran and Guatemala, was complicit in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Omar Torrijos and possibly JFK and MLK. They know next to nothing about the US involvement in the murder of Salvador Allende and the Chilean constitutionalist general Rene Schneider, a murder that Henry Kissinger still has to answer for.

In Syria, the CIA/Pentagon Washington crowd  is supporting Moaz al_Khatib.  And who the hell is he?  Well, is an engineer and was a manager for several large oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell's Syrian division.  So he is an oil company executive. His father was an Islamic scholar and he taught Sharia law at the at the "Dutch Institute Sheikh Badr al-Din al-Husni in Damascus, and Daawa (Call to Islam) studies at the Tahzib Institute for Sharia Sciences." according to Wikipedia.

I am not singling out Islam here (see my pieces on the Catholic Church for example) but how "Sharia and "Science" can be used in this way is certainly a contradiction in terms.  One is a rational study of the material world based on reason and the other is faith and mythology.

But no matter.  The Royal Dutch Shell group and the folks at the Pentagon have no problem with Sharia law or the ex Nazi at the Vatican and when it suits them.  The US taxpayer funded Islamic fundamentalism in Wall Street's struggle to oust the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan.  The US taxpayer, in league (unknowingly for the most part) funneled more than $3 billion to the Islamic fundamentalists that we are calling terrorists today.  The oil companies were concerned that the Russians would get a pathway to the Indian Ocean and even the Persian Gulf if a government favorable to Moscow.

The fact is that the government of Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai, which was overthrown by the Taliban and unable to get assistance after the fall of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union was a government that workers and our organizations in the west should have  supported although not without criticism.  Ahmadzai was attempting to balance between the backward Islamic feudal warlords and his efforts to introduce a secular, industrial sopciety to Afghanistan.  The story is that he was dragged through the streets of Kabul by a Taliban truck, castrated and hung from a lampost.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the hated Madrases was made possible through US and Saudi money.

Nothing Changes

The imperialist nations do not intervene ion their former colonial possessions with good intentions.  The US called for the  murder of Moamar Gaddafi but British taxpayers and the British secret service trained his ruthless police forces.  All of these ruthless regimes were funded and kept in power by the good grace of their friends in Washington and London. A book worth reading on the subject of US and corporate intervention in Central Asia is Michel Chussodovsky's War and Glabalization.

But as we can see, the US is taxpayer is yet again funding an opposition in Syria that they hope will, advance the interests of Wall Street.  Being a religious zealot, no matter of what faith, doesn't conflict with one's faith in the market and capitalism and that is why the US supported Bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and a Shariah law advocate in Syria. "Politics makes for strange bedfellows" the saying goes, but no so strange when you look more closely at the ties that bind.

There is an alternative for workers. There was in Libya, there is in Syria.  And there is in the entire Middle East and throughout the world. The workers of Bangladesh for example have in India and Pakistan millions of allies in the same situation.  As do the workers of Europe and Latin America and the US. We have to reject supporting the lesser of two evils, a dictator, despot, or the imperialist bourgeois democratic regimes.  We must always appeal to the independent, united movement of workers across racial, nationalist and religious lines.  The folks in Washington and London, Berlin and Beijing, have shown that that their allegiance is to their class allies first of all. They join with the most ruthless individuals and regimes, anything but appeal to the working class.  They know that this can lead to their demise, end it all.

They are forced in times of intense competition to draw us in to the struggle against their rivals which pits worker against worker.  But we must refuse this bond with the devil.

Have I heard this somewhere before or did I just come up with it?  Workers of the world unite.

"Like" the FFWP page on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/FactsForWorkingPeople