A decade ago after the imperialist “Arab Spring”, Iran, Russia and Syria were strengthened. USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia despair. To reverse the crisis of hegemony, Biden starts a new offensive.
Extracted from the Blog of the Grupo Emancipação do Trabalho
On the first day of the Biden government, a new operation was launched to invade Syria, with 200 soldiers and a convoy of 40 trucks loaded with weapons and logistics materials from the so-called US-led international coalition entered the interior of Hasaka via al-Walid crossing the northern border from Iraq into Syria. Trump had initiated a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Biden is trying to replace them. The Democrat named old foreign policy hawks, many of those responsible for Obama’s open and secretive interventions in Libya and Syria at the beginning of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.
Since 2011, the Syrian government, with the support of Russia, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah, has bravely resisted imperialist military offensives. That is why imperialism has been trying to overthrow the Lebanese government, by all possible means. Despite being hegemonized by neoliberals, the government is also composed of Hezbollah, Israel’s arch-enemy who heroically was at the forefront of the wars that defeated the Nazi-Zionist state, in 2006, in Lebanon itself, and in 2016, in Syria.
In Libya, more recently the hybrid war it counted on the explosion of the Port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, a sabotage, played in the lap of the Lebanese government and the journeys against corruption, led by agents of imperialism in the country. The purpose of the operation is to change the Lebanese regime. Now, during the Biden government, these demonstrations were augmented by protests against inflation, the economic crisis, which despite being just, are manipulated externally, following the same script of the so-called Arab Spring, triggered by popular dissatisfaction with the effects of the global economic crisis of 2008.
The new planetary emperor tries to reissue in an accelerated way, seeming to want to make up for lost time, the coup politics that he, as vice president, Obama and Hillary started almost a decade ago and that led to bloody massacres in Egypt, Libya and the endless war in Syria.
Pyrotechnics of Israel and real growing power of the heirs of the first superpower in history
Synchronized and at the forefront of the new offensive is the State of Israel. On January 13, 2021, the Zionist state propagated with great fanfare that it had carried out the biggest and deadliest air strike against Syria since the beginning of the war in 2011, murdering 57 people, explicitly claiming that its target was the militants of Iranian revolutionary guard in Syria.
It is worth remembering that the assassination of Soleimani, the main Iranian military leader, was the biggest military operation of the Trump administration.
But there is more to aerial pyrotechnics and marketing than concrete advances in the new coalition offensive that has been defeated inch by inch within Syria in the last decade, while the unity of the oppressed peoples of the region is consolidating. The US crisis strengthens its biggest enemy in the region. The decline of current imperialism supported by Nazi-Zionist policies, sponsorship of mercenary and bloodthirsty groups such as ISIS, and the cruel and growing siege against Iran since the 1979 revolution, contradictorily, has been catapulting Iranian regional leadership. It is worth remembering that Persia, now Iran, defeated the all-powerful Mesopotamia, liberated the Hebrews from the Babylonian Captivity and revolutionized politics, building the first superpower in world history.
As Magnier portrays:
“In Syria, a military source with decision-making power tells us that ‘Israel was able to target many military equipment and destroyed many hangars’. However, there are about half a million hangars in Syria that do not necessarily contain Iranian weapons and missiles. Is Israel planning to destroy them all? Is Israel able to eradicate Iranian forces and their allies? Is it a propaganda bombardment, serving (Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin) Netanyahu? Is Israel trying to attract sympathy from Western countries to collect financial assistance? Is the goal to have unconditional Western support for all Israel’s actions? Israel is undoubtedly trying to demonize Iran, although Iran’s presence in Syria is at the official request of the government. Israel has failed to expel Iran from Syria despite all its shouts and bombings. Today Iran has established a massive presence in Syria that before the Syrian war had been denied to both Iran and its allies, in Al-Mayadeen, Albu Kamal, Deir Ezzor, T3, Al-Sukhnah, Kajab and Palmyra, reaching Homs. Likewise, centers were established in Handarat, north of Aleppo.”
“Israel began to carry out defensive manoeuvres for fear that its enemy could move forward and take a position in the territories it is occupying, mainly in northern Israel that borders southern Lebanon. Israeli strategic efforts have failed to stop Hezbollah from stockpiling its Iranian precision missiles. It also failed to push Iran out of Syria even when it enjoyed four years of unlimited support from the Trump administration and a friendly Russian presence. Netanyahu hid under Putin’s cloak to bomb Syria. Even so, Iran is in Syria to stay. Israel lost both the battle and the war. ‘You can continue performing your air show as long as Russia does not stop you’, concluded the source.
Elijah J. Magnier, Does Russia turn a blind eye to Israeli bombings in Syria?
In fact, considering that the geopolitical result of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was not the strengthening of the USA or Israel but of Iran over the whole of Iraq; whereas the result of the “Arab Spring” in the Arabian peninsula was not the stabilization of the dominance of the Saudi Arabian dictatorship over the region, but its defeat by an infinitely weaker military force, the Yemeni guerrillas, supported by Iran; whereas Lebanese Hezbollah, driven by Iran’s revolutionary guard were, alongside Russia and Assad’s own forces, this imposed the most humiliating defeat of the Zionist-American front in Syria,
At the base of this expansion of its geopolitical power is the expansion of its economic and cultural power, despite all the sanctions and sabotages imposed by the USA and Israel on the Persian nation. The integration of the peoples of the region against imperialism takes place concretely through the Iran-Iraq-Syria Plan to advance the historic Transnational Railroad ‘Land-Bridge’ (in literal translation, Earth Bridge), as the arm of the Chinese mega project of the new silk road (Belt and Road Initiative) in the region, bridging the gap between China and the Mediterranean via a land route through the Middle East.
At the same time, Russia is increasing its forces in Syria. The Moscow Armed Forces have sent more reinforcements and heavy military equipment to Al-Qamishli airport as they reinforce their presence east of the Euphrates River. The Russian Armed Forces have sent more troops to the front line with the Turkish military near the key city of Tal Tamr. Between Russia and Turkey there is a permanent relationship of tension and association. Russia has also recently sent more ships to patrol Syria’s Mediterranean coast from the naval base at Tartus.
Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia
Turkey seeks to crush any Kurdish organization within Syrian territory. Kurds are an oppressed nationality with no state or territory of their own, inhabiting Turkey (15 million), Syria and Iraq and 23 other countries. During the Syrian civil war that started in 2011, President Bashar al-Ássad issued a decree granting citizenship to inhabitants of Kurdish origin, which they have been deprived of since 1962. However, a fraction of the Kurds who present themselves as “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) was created, sponsored and armed by the United States, which also supported Islamic State, Al Qaeda and every mercenary band imaginable to overthrow the Assad government. In order not to allow Syria to become a strong military base for the Kurdish opposition, Turkey made several military incursions into Syrian territory. Imperialism then sponsors a war of chaos whose main victim is the Syrian population. The SDF is fighting the government of Syria and Turkey, which is also fighting the government of Syria to control the region occupied by the SDF.
“A siege was imposed by the SDF in the cities of Al-Hasakah and Qamishli, closing the entrances and exits of neighbourhoods controlled by the Syrian army and preventing food supplies from reaching them.”
US-sponsored Kurdish separatists besiege Syrian cities in Hasakah https://www.syrianews.cc/us-sponsored-kurdish-sdf-separatists-besiege-syrian-cities-in-hasakah
A few months ago, the Nagorno-Karabakh war broke out between Turkey-backed Azerbaijan and Armenia, which wanted but did not obtain military support from Russia. Faced with the crisis of imperialism’s hegemony, Turkey tries to expand its influence in the transcontinental region where it is located, participating in disputes in Syria, Iraq, the Mediterranean and the Caucasus. It seeks to expand its domains in regions where NATO control has been weakened. Without Putin’s support for Armenia, Azerbaijan won the war. The Armenian government, of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, a liberal very close to European capital who came to power through a “velvet revolution”. The Armenian defeat sparked strong street protests in the country calling for Pashinyan’s resignation to the cry of “Nikol traitor” “Armenia without Nikol”.
Rome does not pay traitors. This is the fate of Putin’s faltering allies, of the rulers of countries that were former workers’ states when they flirt with the Atlanticist West. They are hit or almost by the West itself. So it was with the governments of Ukraine (Yanukóvytch), Bieolorussia (Lukashenko) and now with Armenia (Pashinyan). In the latter case of the Azerbaijan-Armenian war, a Turkish victory may not be a Russian defeat, but a defeat for imperialism.
Everything indicates that the next period will be one of more desperate actions by imperialism and Zionism in the region. The more they lose ground, the greater their savagery. As the Bolshevik revolutionary taught us “In the period of the crisis, the hegemony of the United States will be more complete, more open and unforgiving than in the period of prosperity.” Leon Trotsky, Critique of the Programme of the Communist International, 1928.
However, while we unconditionally defend Iran against the US and Israel, we warn that the current Iranian president is sowing confusion. Sheikh Hassan Rohani, both for being a friendly interlocutor of imperialism within the Iranian state bureaucracy and for representing the interests of the Persian bourgeoisie, does not deserve any confidence from the workers in the anti-imperialist struggle.
In this dispute, workers around the world have a side. They are on the opposite side from imperialism, Israel, Saudi Arabia and all their political and military agents, responsible for the coups, hunger, misery and for making the pandemic more deadly against the majority of the world’s population. Therefore, what benefits the oppressed and exploited in the world is the defeat of this imperialist offensive and its hybrid war. Marxists fight with their working-class brothers and oppressed peoples anywhere on the planet against big world capital, pointing out that no victory is enough for us in the capitalist frameworks and defend a program and strategy independent of the governments facing imperialism.
