Above photo: A defaced portrait of Bashar al-Assad on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria. Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images.
Similar to a predator realizing it is losing a fight and is reaching its end, the U.S. is lashing out and attempting to deepen its claws into subjugated nations like Syria, which just experienced a coup.
The fall of Syria was a serious strike against the Axis of Resistance, but all is not lost. There are lessons to take away from these events in the fight against imperialism.
The fast-paced unfolding of events that took place in Syria shook everyone, including the regime change and color revolution enthusiasts who hoped to destroy Syria only to deliver it on a golden plate to the Zionist entity to annex massive swaths of lands. The forceful overthrow of the government in Syria represents a colossal defeat to the Pan-Arabists in the region and those who center the Palestinian national liberation cause. This is not a rhetorical exaggeration; the demise of Syria will have direct consequences on the Axis of Resistance — given that the land bridge (Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon) has been undermined — and the interconnected struggle against imperialist zionism. While the fog of the color revolution has not settled, there are plenty of lessons to learn from the destruction of Syria and how imperialism is still capable of launching deadly blows as we witness the demise of its hegemony.
Syria and the Imperialist Cordon Sanitaire
Any reader of non-mainstream media that is not kowtowing to imperialism and Zionism will know that anyone who questions the usual narratives about Syria will be framed as an Assad apologist. This framing dilutes any contestation of what western media and liberal mouthpieces have produced in terms of defamation and lies about Syria’s government as merely bloodthirsty, dictator-loving, and campist. These mouthpieces of liberal imperialism never look at how those critical of imperialism center the notion of contradiction in the materialist dialectic tradition, especially espoused in anti-western Marxism. Leftists and western Marxists alike, alongside the liberal imperialists, have been constantly referring to Syria as a dictatorship that needs a regime change. Meanwhile, those critical of imperialism understand the notion of contradiction that situates people into a system mired with imperfections. The Syrian government has historically oppressed, imprisoned, and prosecuted dissidents — both right and left-wing. Further, as a state, it promoted neoliberalism since Bashar Al-Assad took over in 2000. Denying these facts would be an injustice to the history and analysis of this conjuncture and would not provide sufficient grounding to understand how western imperialism aided in the mobilization of the many Syrians for a regime change since 2011. While most of the mainstream news and literature will focus on how much blood has been spilled by the war on Syria since 2011, pinning the blame solely on the government, the people who challenge such narrative have been constantly sidelined and the critical literature they produce is being equated as regime propagandists.
The work of Ali Kadri, particularly Imperialism with Reference to Syria and The Cordon Sanitaire: A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World, are arguably the best suited books to understand imperialism and how it operates globally with cases of Eastern Asia and Western Asia — the very places Mao had warned the Arabs about half a century ago when he orated : “Imperialism is afraid of China and of the Arabs. Israel and Formosa [Taiwan] are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front gate of the great continent, and we are the rear. Their goal is the same. . . Asia is the biggest continent in the world, and the West wants to continue exploiting it. The West does not like us, and we must understand this fact. The Arab battle against the West is the battle against Israel. So boycott Europe and America, O’ Arabs!”.
Now, we are constantly hearing the Zionist entity as expanding and forming buffer zones to supplant any actors from launching attacks against the entity, a cordon sanitaire. Kadri situates this term within the imperialist system to understand imperialism and anti-imperialism, development and de-development of the regions. He essentially notes that imperialism implants allied regimes and transfers industrial technology to them so that they develop but within subservient status to the US-led imperialism while remaining as a military outpost that protects US hegemony: “There is also a remarkable similarity between these regions [Eastern and Western Asia]. Rich countries in both regions are closely allied with US-led imperialism. In particular, the developed Asian countries serve as part of a Cordon Sanitaire hedging the advance of China … Accordingly, one may deduce that to develop as such or to grow wealthy and sustain a pro-imperialist working-class consciousness, a given country has to supplement US-led imperialist hegemony.” Liberals will often bring the example of the economic development of the Zionist entity and the so-called ‘Asian tigers’ without a reference to US-led imperialism and how it enabled such economic transformation of those gates to Asia. In their advocacy for such developmental models, they forgo imperialism as a world system and how much geopolitical autonomy these countries have (i.e. just a fortnight ago, South Korea declared martial law, fearing parliamentary budget disputes and sending alarming message to the more than 28,000 American soldiers housed in that satellite state). These satellite regimes, whether in Western Asia or Eastern Asia, have a strategic role in defending US hegemony, and in return, the US protects the regimes sitting there from actual revolutionary change, like what we saw in Bahrain in 2011 and the Zionist entity when Iran retaliated against it in October and April of this year. The enabling of subservient development of those entities serves the interest of the US to create its own imperialist buffer zone.
Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran have been countries that hampered the hegemony of this ever-expanding buffer zone by training, housing, funding and arming the Palestinian resistance, and for that reason, color revolutions have been instigated to allow for the Zionist entity to enjoy its expansionist project unabashedly with the help of the Zionist Arabs and the NATO proxies in the region. In recent days, people have been resharing the video of the war hawk, retired U.S. general Wesley Clark , where he spoke about performing a regime change in seven countries, particularly the aforementioned ones to protect US strategic interests in the region. But it is not about just regime change. It is about dependent development and how to transform the economies of these countries into consumer hubs as opposed to sovereign production localities outside of the orbit of imperialism, so they purchase the excess productions of the imperialist core. Clark, who was spearheading the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, has infamously said “demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure of [Yugoslavia],” where it is clearly to demobilize the infrastructural development of the country to make it docile and economically subservient to the imperialist system — nothing about democracy and popular rule by the masses. While Iraq and Libya have been destroyed, de-developed and deindustrialized alongside the introduction of a market-oriented economy, Syria is awaiting the same fate as its ‘moderate rebels’ want to transform the economy into free-market .
Anti-imperialist Lessons Following a Devastating Defeat Worse than ’67
The loss of Syria is a grand defeat for the Axis because Lebanon’s land bridge has been cut off by these Zionist ‘moderate’ rebels who took power in Syria and vowed to stifle the presence of Shia in the country, namely Iran, Iraq and Lebanon — the very powers that are actually sacrificing their limbs and livelihood for Palestine’s liberation and the resistance in Gaza. The end of Syria is a loss for the Arabs that the region has not experienced anything like it since 1967 when the Zionist entity took over the Golan Heights and swiftly annexed the Sinai Peninsula. In my view, it is even worse because not only is Syria being destroyed here, but people are celebrating it as a revolution and liberation of Syria, and it is done by mostly indigenous hands as opposed to foreign entities inflicting this loss upon us, like what the region witnessed in 1967.
The demise of Syria is a major blow to those who know the weight of Syria in Arab history and civilization. It is a hub of knowledge production and ancient civilization, with rich cultural production and art history. Just like many of Iraq and Libya’s artifacts and heritage are being destroyed and/or sold to western museums to satiate the gaze of museum goers and milking profits from entrance fees and orientalized exhibitions, while we (the people of Libya and Iraq) are left with hollow libraries and museums, Syria will experience the same. There will be a loss of individual freedoms, forced assimilation to an Islamist status quo, discrimination based on sects, and silencing of ideologically anti-imperialist knowledge production. Surely, Syria’s education textbooks that have promoted progressive and peaceful coexistence between the various sects and ethnicities within the Syrian society will be undermined by the anti-Kurd, anti-Shia and anti-religious pluralism spearheaded by the ‘reformed’ jihadists running the country. These are not mere speculations but lessons learned from the destruction of Libya and how Islamist takeover has reduced the country to being run by reactionary and conservative forces that furtively seek to normalize relations with Zionism while the country continues to be under sanctions despite the overthrow of the Libyan government since 2011.
Since 2022, many have been cheering the dwindling US hegemony given the proliferating de-dollarization, the formation and consolidation of BRICS as an alternative, and the rise of China that presents an alternative development model outside of the imperialist orbit. But the imperialist enemy has been detecting its diminishing hegemony and hence, it has passed in its congress the so-called Global Fragility Act — an act that views the world as changing too fast and too far from the imperialist orbit, making it a fragile globe, and hence the need to promote stability. This act was passed in 2019 and is tied to a number of other acts that attempt to stifle the burgeoning popularity of China and Russia as strategic partners for sovereign development for much of the global south.
To claim that imperialism is in decay and incapable of inflicting damage on the Axis forces would only unjustly serve imperialist goals. Imperialism as a system that has withered multiple crises is led by smart billionaires who bankroll numerous functionaries that enable the reproduction of the system and supplant anti-imperialism through various weapons — media propaganda, financial sanctions, and militarism. All three were employed in Syria, such that the mainstream media and the functionaries of imperialism performed the most bizarre mental gymnastics that involved celebrating jihadists rolling into Syria’s capital, overthrowing the government, and claiming liberation while almost half of the country getting annexed by the Zionist entity (and not forgetting that Turkey occupies part of Syria and the US has troops stationed in the country’s fertile lands and oil-abundant region). The inability to question Zionist expansion by the new rulers of Syria – who promised not to make Syria a launchpad for attacks against the Zionist entity – tells us how blinded by imperialist logic these decadent regime change enthusiasts are.
While surely the Axis of Resistance has received a major blow and needs to reorganize and restrategize vis-á-vis the proliferation of imperialism in Syria given the victory of the Zionist Islamists (they literally thanked the Zionist entity for supporting them in overthrowing the Syrian government), the compass remains Palestine. The ongoing genocide in Gaza ought to be our compass and standing with — ideologically and materially — the anti-imperialist forces should be the prime focus. The enemy is no longer on the other side of the border; the enemy of Palestinian liberation is within us, and it starts with educating and mobilizing against the local functionaries of imperialism.