Imperialism in the dock: why the West is not bombing Syria

The American Zionist scholar Daniel Pipes recently wrote an article in The Washington Times, with the title “Stay out of Syria: Intervention is a trap”. Arguing that “Bashar al-Assad’s wretched presence” in power may “do more good than harm”, he added that Assad’s “non-ideological and relatively secular” regime is at least staving off “anarchy, Islamist rule, genocide, and rogue control of Syria’s chemical weapons”. Marcus Halaby writes
Better the devil they know?
In a previous article on the same theme, he argued that “protracted conflict in Syria offers some geopolitical advantages”, amongst which it prevents Syria from threatening Israel, and that it “foments Middle Eastern rage at Moscow and Beijing for supporting the Assad regime”.
Another US Middle East pundit, Gary Gambill, has also argued for “a strategic non-intervention” in Syria, asking: “What’s wrong with the status quo of an Iran chained to a Syrian corpse?”
War as social work
Pipes meant his words as a criticism of what he sees as “a sentimental U.S. foreign policy of ‘war as social work’”, which places the welfare of peoples with a “wretched record as American allies” above “national interests”. But anyone who has watched the Obama administration’s behaviour on Syria – its actions, and not US State Secretary Hillary Clinton’s hypocritical words about peace, democracy and human rights – might be forgiven for thinking it had taken his and Gambill’s advice.
The fact is that Pipes – a racist who has made a living from cheering on US imperialism’s military adventures – is probably right to think that it is not in the Western ruling classes’ interests to intervene in Syria. That is why it has not happened yet, and probably isn’t going to.
For those on the anti-war left who patiently await a Western military intervention to justify their equivocations or lack of support for the Syrian revolution, this might come as a surprise. But the Syrian regime – the Arab dictatorship that US and Israeli politicians once loved to hate – at least understood the rules of the global game and played by them. The same cannot necessarily be said of anything that might replace it.
Israel in particular prefers a weakened Assad regime over what Israeli defence official Amos Gilad called the “devastating crisis for Israel” of an “Islamic empire” controlling the whole region.
A system of global rule
Why the reticence to intervene? One answer is that the neo-conservative faction of the US ruling class that pushed for war in Iraq and Afghanistan is now out of power, discredited by its failure to prevent a post-Saddam Iraq from becoming an Iranian satellite.
And Obama’s hasty and improvised intervention in Libya – intended to undo the damage done by US support for Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Ben Ali – is unlikely to be repeated in Syria, even if it has strengthened the ideology of “humanitarian war” previously used by Bill Clinton’s administration to justify bombing Serbia in 1999.
But also, it is wrong to regard imperialism as simply being a policy of governments – of wars, invasions, aerial bombing and “regime change” promotion. Imperialism is primarily a system of global rule, one in which rival imperialisms compete and sometimes fight each other (directly or through proxies), and sometimes co-operate.
Decline and cooperation
And of course, the United States is not the world’s only imperialist power. It has had to recognise that Syria sits in the sphere of influence of its Russian and Chinese rivals, who feel sorely cheated by the overthrow of Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The West has common interests with Russia and China in Syria – even if Hillary Clinton and William Hague host and give publicity to a few media-friendly Syrian bourgeois exiles to discredit Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao; and even if they let their Saudi and Qatari allies provide their favoured Syrian rebels with a drip-feed of black market semi-automatics smuggled through Turkey and Lebanon.
What they all fear above anything else is the collapse of Syria’s repressive state apparatus and the self-arming of the Syrian masses, in a way that prevents them trying to control the outcome of the regime’s downfall, the way that they have tried to in Egypt and Tunisia.