Prabash
The International Herald Tribune
reported on 9 October that ‘a House of Representatives committee voted
overwhelmingly Wednesday (on 8 October) to impose economic and diplomatic
sanctions on Syria after the White House, deeply frustrated in its diplomatic
contacts with Damascus, dropped its opposition to such punitive steps’. However
this is not unexpected, but still a dangerous game the US has been playing with
the people of the Middle East. “Sanctions,” "economic
embargo" “diplomatic and trade isolation,” are types of
inhuman punitive actions against the masses and have been the instruments of war
for US
imperialism in the past several decades. According to the character of the
American way of war, the economic sanction is but one step towards actual
violent war against a country and its people. Now Syria has been imposed economic and diplomatic sanctions that
clearly shows that Bush administration is embarking on the same pattern of
approach and behavior with Syria that it took with Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
The American move has come following
the Israeli attack on Syria last week. Bush had responded to the attack in
a tricky way, admitting that attack on Syria may destabilize the region but also
saying that Israel has a right to defend itself. Bush has always been dismissing
the suggestion that the Israeli hoodlums have no right to attack any people or
nation.
The House International Relations Committee of the US voted demanding that
‘Damascus halt support for terrorism, end any program to develop weapons of
mass destruction and withdraw its troops from Lebanon’. While this so-called House of International Relations
Committee demands withdrawal of troops from others,
it has its own quarter of a million troops in Iraq, and a huge number of troops in
South Korea, Okinawa in Japan and the Philippines, Turkey, Germany and
many other countries. It is always silent on the question of the
withdrawal of its imperialist troops from any of these countries.
The American method of imposing war and suffering
on the peoples of the world has always been the method of Total War, sometimes waging
different means of warfare, such as trade and diplomatic, simultaneously, and
sometimes step by steps heightening pressure and tension, leading to all-out
military aggression, inflicting death and destruction on massive scale. This
total war includes not only military strikes and economic sanctions but also
media war involving slanders, lies and character-assassination as well as political isolation,
perpetration coups and physical elimination or assassination of leaders of other
countries. The propagation of lies and slanders, threats of war and intimidation,
attempts at cowing people, and at their weakest moment and attacking them
with the 'most advanced' and 'awesome' high-tech US military might should be all
too familiar to the people of the world by now. This procedure implies that militarily
powerful countries need not wait for the playing out of other options such as
diplomacy when dealing with weaker countries. The main objectives of the imperialist, in taking
measures
before imposing war militarily are to weaken the country and the people.
Weakening the masses of the country is very important before going to war
because, the US aggressors through its history had received humiliating blows and
severe defeats in the civil-war China, in the Korean War against North Korea and
China, and against the Cuban, Vietnamese and other Indo-chinese peoples. Imposition
of economic sanctions, leading a psychological and propaganda war not only impoverish the
masses of the people in the countries victimized by imperialism and greatly weaken them
but also gives rise to apathy towards the regime at home and hence prepares
conditions favorable for military actions insuring victory for the
aggressors. That
has been the experience in Iraq, and being applied against Iran, North
Korea (the so-called Axis of Evil according to US imperialist chieftain, George
W. Bush), and presently against Syria.
The Iraq war has manifested that the
reactionary Ba’th Socialist Party (Ba’th means resurgence in Arabic) but the
Iraqi and
Syrian regimes have been 'socialist' only in name and indeed very reaction in
essence. They have no way of defending the interests of
the great majority of the people. They are not only representatives of
exploiting classes, but also oppressors of national minorities.. Because of these
characteristics they
have been relatively isolated from the masses, especially from Shia'a
majority. Nevertheless, even while the US aggressors, puffed up with arrogance, is
bulldozing its way around the region, they are met with fierce resistance daily,
sustaining dozens of casualties in an average of twenty guerilla attacks against
their military
personnel a day, even according to the US and other occupation forces.
US imperialism has been roaming
like a rabid dog in the Middle East; it has been biting anyone in its way. Right
after the US claimed victory over Iraq, it began to bully Syria claiming that it had
harbored Iraqi resistance fighters. Instead of taking a firm
stand to defend the sovereign right and to stop the US from committing
aggression against Syria and trampling on its national sovereignty the Assad
regime was so much intimidated that it gave the US intelligence detailed
information. Yet the US aggressors declared that the Syrian regime had not
gone far enough in obeying its dictates. Not only that, some of the
commentators have commented that Syria had facilitated the CIA with information
about al Qaeda and other militants. Subsequently the US forces hit a
Syrian convoy within Syrian territory, killing several people and violating the
sovereign right of Syria. But Syria remained silent, thoroughly humiliated and
weak even in protesting the US aggression.
Now, the US aggressors are
considering to impose economic sanctions on Syria claiming that it has been
supporting and harboring terrorism. Despite Syria’s role in aiding the CIA against so-called terrorism, the US
is clamoring that “the Syrians have
done so little with regard to terrorism that we don’t have a lot to work with.”
Richard Boucher, the US State Department spokesman, further said, Syria continues to have “terrorist groups operating with offices and activities
there, some training facilities, transhipments” of weapons and money, and that
when asked to halt these Syria had taken only “very, very, very small steps”
(International Herald Tribune, 9 Oct 2003).
Now the question is what is
terrorism and who is supporting, nurturing and harbouring them? This question
is debated heatedly the world over. The veteran Maoist revolutionary,
the Chairman of the Communist Party of the United States of America, Bob
Avakian has precisely pointed out that by far the US imperialist regime
itself is the biggest terrorist in the world. Pointing to the numerous wars of
aggression throughout the history of the United States Bob Avakian has
laid bare its terrorist history; the
US bombed Japan with atom bombs and killed several hundreds of thousands of civilians, invaded several countries,
was and continues to be involved in
coups, assassinations, and
toppling of legitimate governments and replacing them with its puppet regimes. Moreover
US agents have provoked such regimes to massacre the people in their millions in
some of those countries. The power structure in the US is the most hated
of the imperialists as its hands are always soaked with the the blood of the millions
upon
millions of innocent people. Resistance to US bloodletting has invariably
been labeled 'terrorism' by the US and its allies. In the Middle East and
the Arab world, America has been lording over the regimes there through its
network of espionage agents, the notorious CIA, by war threats, intimidation and
also by economic and diplomatic blackmail. For the people in the
Middle East a sorry state of affairs prevails today: either most of the regimes
serve as abettors of the CIA or be openly guided by its agents. Such is the case with the
rulers of the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirate, Abu Dhabi and Oman as with
Jordan, Egypt and Syria.
The duty assigned to these regimes by
US and other great powers is to
exploit, plunder and repress the people - and suppress and kill any would-be
resisters in their countries who hinder or threaten the flow of profits to
imperialist homelands. The whole history of their development and approach
towards the people have proven these to be the case. While the
regimes submit themselves to imperialist overlordship, the people often find
themselves with no alternative but to take revenge by attacking the possible targets
connected to the US-Israeli authorities or business interests. Nobody but the US
imperialism is responsible for these attacks which are often atrocities
against innocent civilians. For
instance, the US power-holders themselves have been claiming that the fighters 'causing trouble' in Iraq
come from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and
even Chechnya. Whether it is true or false, such claims are not verified by
independent and reliable
sources, but the US power-holders speculate on such possibilities because they
are deeply hostile towards the people of these countries most; because they
themselves have
been killing their brothers and sisters in those countries everyday or thorough their puppets regimes.
Broadly speaking, the uprisings of
militant Islamic movements in the
Middle East are themselves creatures of US imperialism, just as the Palestinian
uprising was created by Zionist Israel.. Where there is oppression, there
is resistance. Certainly, everywhere the resistance is against those forces that
oppress them. For instance, the British and French imperialists have met
stiffer resistance in their African colonies than in the Middle East. The Zionists and the US
are hit hard in the Middle East, and the US is resisted the world over.
The Syrian people need to unite.
The people of the Middle East and the Arab world need to unite ever closer. And the
people of the world need to unite with the. Syrian people who are now facing the same challenge
that the Iraqi people are facing today. This terrible
future cannot be wished away by relying on submissive regimes of these
countries. The only way the people can meet these challenges is by
building revolutionary communist parties, guided by a revolutionary ideology and
politics and through developing the people’s army through armed resistance
against imperialist-imposed war and military occupation, through revolutionary
people's war, through establishing lively
fraternal relations with the proletariat in other parts of the world and fighting imperialist
terrorism on every front.. Today, the imperialists powers have not only retained
their monopolistic economic and political control and domination but
have degenerated into global terrorism. This terrorism deserves to be defeated on
a global scale. This
global terrorism is but an aspect of global system of imperialism in the 21st
century. Because this moribund system is lashing out wildly
everywhere, the demise of imperialism too is certain.
Clearly, Syria now has to be on war
footing, just as Iran and North Korea are. This tense situation might continue for sometimes
or might lessen through bargaining, compromises and even capitulation by the regime. But adoption of such
a cowardly policy by the regime will only mean more
repression, exploitation and suppression against the people. In this regard, the
people in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other countries in the Middle East must
learn from the great wars fought by nations and peoples under conditions of real
socialism in the Soviet Union and China
against German and Japanese fascism respectively. These wars were fought under the leadership of
great leaders like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tsetung. The the special
characteristics of the great resistance war of the
Vietnamese people against US imperialism and the people's war - and the laws
governing these revolutionary wars - that are being waged in Nepal, Peru, India,
the Philippines and Turkey at present must be grasped by the peoples of the
Middle East. The defeat of German fascism by the USSR, Japanese fascism by China
and the US imperialism by the Korean and Vietnamese peoples would not be possible
under conditions where religious fanatics, bourgeois chauvinists or extremely
narrow-nationalists hold sway. Defeating all kind of oppressors and reactionaries had
been possible only because the peoples of these lands were led by great
revolutionary leaders, guided by scientific world outlook.
Another important factor in winning
the war against imperialism is unity of revolutionary people at the international level. The
global terrorism under US imperialism, the real axis of evil (the US, Britain
and Israel) has for too long hovered over the masses of the people like vultures hovering over carcasses. Unless the revolutionary people
everywhere blast their way out these bloody talons, imperialism will continue
not only to hover but also feast on the flesh of the prey, the people of the
planet. Hence unity and struggle must be the watch words for oppressed nations
and peoples. The evil system of imperialism can only be destroyed by the growing
unity of the people, only through the coordinated actions against the imperialists and their
running dogs. Imperialist plunder can only be stopped by the power of the people
worldwide including within the United States and by nothing else. The
war can only be eliminated with the elimination of the imperialism and by
establishing socialism and communism throughout the world.
9 October 2003