Syria’s Uprising in Context

Since the beginning of the unrest in Syria, “the government has said that while some protesters have legitimate grievances, the uprising is driven by militant Islamists with foreign backing.” [1] This hardly squares with the view of Western state officials and media commentators who say that an authoritarian regime is killing its people and violently suppressing a largely peaceful movement for democracy.

Who’s right?

There’s no question that there has been a longstanding Islamist opposition in Syria to Ba’athist rule. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party has been in power since 1963. The party’s roots are in Pan-Arabism, non-Marxist socialism, and liberation from colonialism, imperialism and religious sectarianism. Being secular, socialist (though diminishingly so) and dominated by a heterodox Shiite sect, the Alawi, Syria’s lead party has held no appeal for the Sunni majority, which has leaned toward the Muslim Brotherhood.

Neither is there any question that Islamist uprisings have become a habitual occurrence in Syria. Condemning the Alawi as heretics and resentful of the Ba’athists’ separation of Islam from the state, the Muslim Brotherhood organized riots against the government in 1964, 1965, 1967 and 1969.

On coming to power in 1970, Afiz Assad—the current president’s father– tried to overcome the Sunni opposition by encouraging private enterprise and weakening the party’s commitment to socialism, and by opening space for Islam. This, however, did little to mollify the Muslim Brothers, who organized new riots and called for a Jihad against Assad, denigrating him as “the enemy of Allah.” His “atheist” government was to be brought down and Alawi domination of the state ended. By 1977, the Mujahedeen were engaged in a guerrilla struggle against the Syrian army and its Soviet advisers, culminating in the 1982 occupation of the city of Hama. The Syrian army quelled the occupation, killing 20,000 to 30,000.

In an effort to win the Islamists’ acquiescence, Assad built new mosques, opened Koranic schools, and relaxed restrictions on Islamic dress and publications. At the same time, he forged alliances with pro-Islamic countries and organizations, including Sunni Sudan, Shia Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. While these measures secured some degree of calm, Islamists remained a perennial source of instability and the government was on continual guard against “a resurgence of Sunni Islamic fundamentalists.” [2]

The United States hasn’t created an opposition, but it has acted to strengthen it. US funding to the Syrian opposition began flowing under the Bush administration in 2005 [3] if not earlier. The Bush administration had dubbed Syria a member of a “junior varsity axis of evil,” along with Libya and Cuba, and toyed with the idea of making Syria the next target of its regime change agenda after Iraq. [4]

Around the same time, Syrian exiles in Europe founded the Movement for Justice and Development, openly calling for the overthrow of the Ba’athist government. The Movement was one of the key recipients of US lucre. The leader of the organization, Anas Al-Abdah, is a member of the Syrian National Council, the main exile opposition group, which French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé and UK Foreign Secretary William Hague have designated a legitimate representative of the Syrian people [5] –a matter one would think should be decided by Syrians, not outsiders, and least of all not former colonial powers. The group “has a significant contingent of Islamists.” [6]

The Syrian National Council’s foil is the National Coordinating Body for Democratic Change in Syria, led by opposition figures who live inside the country. The body, left-wing and secular, is open to dialogue with the Assad government and subscribes to the three no’s: no to foreign intervention, no to sectarianism, and no to violence. [7]

The Islamist-heavy Syrian National Council, by contrast, follows the three yeses: Yes to foreign intervention, yes to sectarianism, and yes to violence. It has “called on the international community to take aggressive …steps, including the possible establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria” [8] and appears to be tied up with the Free Syrian Army, a largely Sunni formation which operates out of Turkey and has, it says, about 10,000 fighters. [9] “The Saudis and Qataris are reported to be funding and arming the opposition” while “Western special forces are said to be giving military support on the ground.” [10]

SNC leaders say that if they succeed in achieving their goal of replacing Assad they’ll cut Damascus’s alliance with Iran and end arms shipments to Hezbollah and Hamas [11]—a policy that would be welcome in Washington and Israel.

In September, The New York Times reported that the Obama administration was discussing how to bring about Assad’s ouster but that “the administration does not want to look as if the United States is trying to orchestrate the outcome in Syria.” [12] It is no longer necessary for Washington to conceal its regime change ambitions. Its description of the unrest as violent dictatorship against a peaceful demand for democracy, rather than the alternative and more descriptive narrative of secular government against an armed Islamist rebellion, has become hegemonic. Who’s going to blame Washington for intervening on the side of, what’s understood to be, a popular rebellion for democracy? Accordingly, the State Department now openly acknowledges that it “will continue working with Syria’s political opposition to ensure an eventual political transition” [13], which is to say it will continue to pursue its longstanding policy of working with the opposition to bring about the Ba’athists’ overthrow.

Washington’s motivation for ousting Assad has nothing whatever to do with his handling of the rebellion. Assad’s reaction to the uprising is only relevant as raw material to be shaped, twisted and manipulated into a pretext for overt intervention. Washington’s concerns lie elsewhere, unrelated to the welfare of Syrians or attachment to spreading democracy. Indeed, were Washington impelled by humanitarian concerns and a desire to overturn tyranny, it would be difficult to explain its foreign policy record.

When democracy-hating Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet and paradise for foreign investors, violently put down a popular uprising last year, Washington sat on its hands. Sometimes raw interest trumps principle, explained the United States’ newspaper of record, The New York Times, as if US foreign policy is normally governed by principle, and departures from it in favor of interests are aberrations, rather than the opposite.

The cracking of Shiite skulls in Bahrain was ably assisted by the Sunni petro-monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which dispatched tanks and troops—the same democracy-abominating countries which have taken a lead role in demanding that Assad undertake democratic reforms. Every one of them absolutist states, they have joined the United States, Britain and France in a preposterously named “friends of Syrian democracy” group. Qatar, one of its members, was instrumental in providing material and propaganda support to the Libyan rebels—many of whom, like their Syrian counterparts, were militant Islamists. The spectacle of the Gulf Cooperation Council aligning itself with what is called a pro-democracy rebellion is a bit like the Wall Street Journal backing the communist-era Solidarity trade union as the true face of socialism in Poland. Whatever Solidarity was, it was not the true face of socialism, which is why the Wall Street Journal backed it.

Neither has Washington taken effective, concrete measures to prevent Israel from cracking down violently on Palestinians who rise up against Israeli oppression, let alone recognize Israeli oppression as illegitimate. Washington’s violent intervention in Iraq on entirely baseless grounds, and its authoring of a colossal humanitarian tragedy there, hardly recommends the United States as a country whose foreign policy is governed by a commitment to peace and democracy, though its commitment to war and the plundering of countries unable to defend themselves is undoubted.

No, Washington’s ambition to overthrow Syria’s Ba’athist state is a longstanding one which pre-dates the current uprising. The US state has been keen to install a pro-imperialist government in Damascus since at least 1957, when it tried unsuccessfully to engineer a coup there. In 2003, the United States initiated a program of economic warfare against Syria, and in 2005, if not earlier, started to funnel money to opposition elements to mobilize energy for regime change.

Apart from Syria’s irritating Washington by allying with Iran, backing Hezbollah, and providing material assistance to Palestinian national liberation movements, the country exhibits a tendency shared by all US regime change targets: a predilection for independent, self-directed, economic development. This is expressed in state-ownership of important industries, subsidies to domestic firms, controls on foreign investment, and subsidization of basic commodities. These measures restrict the profit-making opportunities of US corporations, banks and investors, and since it is their principals who hold sway in Washington, US foreign policy is accordingly shaped to serve their interests.

The US State Department complains that Syria has “failed to join an increasingly interconnected global economy,” which is to say, has failed to turn over its state-owned enterprises to private investors, among them Wall Street financial interests. The State Department is aggrieved that “ideological reasons” continue to prevent the Assad government from liberalizing Syria’s economy. As a result of the Ba’athists’ ideological fixation on socialism, “privatization of government enterprises is still not widespread.” The economy “remains highly controlled by the government.” [14]

The Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation are equally displeased. “Hafez al-Assad’s son Bashar, who succeeded him in 2000, has failed to deliver on promises to reform Syria’s socialist economy.”

Moreover,

The state dominates many areas of economic activity, and a generally repressive environment marginalizes the private sector and prevents the sustainable development of new enterprises or industries. Monetary freedom has been gravely marred by state price controls and interference.
[...]

The repressive business environment, burdened by heavy state intervention, continues to retard entrepreneurial activity and prolong economic stagnation. Labor regulations are rigid, and the labor market suffers from state interference and control.

…systemic non-tariff barriers severely constrain freedom to trade. Private investment is deterred by heavy bureaucracy, direct state interference, and political instability. Although the number of private banks has increased steadily since they were first permitted in 2004, government influence in the financial sector remains extensive. [15]

The US Library of Congress country study on Syria refers to “the socialist structure of the government and economy,” points out that “the government continues to control strategic industries,” mentions that “many citizens have access to subsidized public housing and many basic commodities are heavily subsidized,” and that “senior regime members” have “hampered” the liberalization of the economy. [16]

All in all, Syria remains too much like the socialist state the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party founders envisaged for it, and too little like a platform for increasing the profits of overseas banks, investors and corporations. Accordingly, its regime of self-directed, independent, economic development must be changed. The militant Islamist uprising, helped along by US money, propaganda and diplomatic support, has set the stage for Washington to realize its regime-change ambitions. Washington has framed the conflict as one between peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators and a murderous tyrant whose thirst for power has driven him to the extremes of killing his own people. Assad has, by this reckoning, “lost legitimacy” and must step aside.

Of course, the idea that the conflict is the latest in a long line of militant Islamic eruptions against a secular Syrian state is never to be entertained. Neither is the notion to be contemplated that the insurgency has evolved into a civil war. There were more casualties in the US Civil War than in all other US wars combined, yet complaints about Abraham Lincoln killing his own people–and on a grandiose scale–are never heard. The Spanish Republic was never abominated, except by rightists, for killing the Spaniards who rose up against it. In these conflicts, there were material and class interests at stake—and the clash of them led to the killing of rebel forces by the government and of government forces by the rebels. And so too in Syria. Yes, in civil wars, governments do kill their own people.

I’m on the side of the Syrian government. The Assads backed away from the Ba’athist commitment to socialism further than I would have liked, but I recognize that the possibilities for achieving socialism in a small Third World country have become vanishingly small since the demise of the Soviet Union (and were not without formidable challenges before then.) All the same, the Ba’athists continue to obstinately hold on to elements of the party’s socialist program; hence, the US State Department’s complaint about “ideological reasons” getting in the way of privatization.

Moreover, Ba’athist Syria remains an organized force against Zionism and for Palestinian national liberation, and it’s not clear that a successor government would follow the same path. Importantly, what would likely follow Assad’s ouster is hardly to be embraced: A country thrown into chaos by competing militias and warlords, where torture and the systematic extermination of the old regime’s supporters run rampant, as has characterized post-Gaddafi Libya, or the installation of a US puppet regime to facilitate the exploitation of Syria’s land, labor and resources by Western captains of industry and titans of finance. A third choice of more space for other political parties and the parliament being given new powers is academic. The hard-core of the rebellion won’t be satisfied with anything less than the complete extirpation of the Ba’athists and what they stand for: some measure of socialism and the secular state. Neither will the United States, Britain, and France settle for the continuation in Damascus of a state committed to independent, self-directed economic development and alliance with Iran.

The choice, then, is between, on the one hand, the triumph of yet another eruption of imperialism under the guise of humanitarian intervention, and on the other, the preservation of the Ba’athist state, and Syria’s self-determination. If the Ba’athists are overthrown, a blow will be struck for imperialism. Their survival will preserve the life of an organized force against Zionism, imperialism and for some measure of self-directed development toward socialism.

1. Anthony Shadid, “Assad says he rejects West’s call to resign”, The New York Times, August 21, 2011.
2. US Library of Congress. A Country Study: Syria. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sytoc.html
3. Craig Whitlock, “U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by Wikileaks show”, The Washington Post, April 17, 2011.
4. Moshe Ma’oz, “Damscus vs. Washington: Between the ‘Axis of Evil’ and ‘Pax Americana’”, in Bruce Cumings, Evarand Abrahamian and Moshi Ma’oz. Investing the Axis of Evil: The Truth about North Korea, Iran and Syria. The New Press. 2004.
5. Jay Solomon, “Clinton Meets With Syrian Opposition,” The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2011.
6. Charles Levinson, “As Syria strikes kill scores, opposition seeks backing”, The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2012.
7. Mazda Majidi, “Will Syria be another Libya?” Liberation, November 29, 2011.
8. Jay Solomon and Nour Malas, “Syria would cut Iran military tie, opposition head says”, The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2011
9. Dan Bileksky, “Factional splits hinder drive to topple Syria leader”, The New York Times, December 8, 2011.
10. Seumas Milne, “Intervention in Syria will escalate not stop the killing”, The Guardian (UK), February 7, 2012.
11. Jay Solomon and Nour Malas, “Syria would cut Iran military tie, opposition head says”, The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2011
12. Helene Cooper, “U.S. is quietly getting ready for Syria without Assad”, The New York Times, September 19, 2011.
13. Charles Levinson and Gregory L. White, “America Exits Syria as Russia Makes Push”, The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2012.
14. US State Department website. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3580.htm#econ. Accessed February 8, 2012.
15. Index of Economic Freedom 2012. http://www.heritage.org/index/country/syria. Accessed February 8, 2012.
16. US Library of Congress. A Country Study: Syria. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sytoc.html

Kindergarten Threats

By Stephen Gowans

New York Times reporter William J. Broad wrote today about the apocalyptic vision of fiction-writer and Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich. [1] Gingrich warns that U.S. bêtes noire Iran or North Korea could send the United States back to the Middle Ages, detonating a nuclear missile high above the United States, which would create an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out anything that runs on electricity.

“Millions would die in the first week alone,” Gingrich cautions in the foreword to “One Second After,” a novel written by William R. Forstchen, a Gingrich friend and co-writer with Gingrich of historical novels. The novel describes a calamitous scenario in which an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack cripples the United States.

Gingrich announced before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference in May 2009 that he favored “taking out Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites” to prevent either country from delivering an EMP Armageddon to the United States.

Gingrich is not alone in calling for strikes on Iran and North Korea.

In a March 30, 2010 piece, Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus wrote that the then head of the US strategic nuclear command, former astronaut General Kevin P. Chilton, had told US senators that “no nuclear power has been conquered or even put at risk of conquest.” Chillingly, Pincus added that Chilton’s observation is something that “others in government ought to ponder as they watch Iran and North Korea seek to develop nuclear capability”…a not so veiled call for wars to prevent North Korea and Iran from eliminating the risk of their being conquered. [2]

Equally chillingly, in a July 18, 2008 New York Times op-ed, Israeli historian Benny Morris urged the United States “to use bombs to stave off war”…that is, for “the US to use its formidable military to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities”. (Using bombs to stave off war is like using famine to stave off hunger.) To make his case, Morris constructed a fantasy about Israel being “threatened almost daily with destruction by Iran’s leaders,” adding bizarrely that they “are likely to use any bomb they build…because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption.” [3] In other words, because Israel threatens to pre-empt Iran, Iran must be pre-empted, otherwise it might pre-empt Israel’s pre-emption.

Creating Fictions

As the Cold War drew to a close, Colin Powell, at the time the top US solider, warned: “I’m running out of demons, I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and (then North Korean leader) Kim Il Sung.” [4] On the eve of the Soviet Union’s demise, cold warriors Robert McNamara, Carl Kaysen and George W. Rathjens echoed Powell’s warning in an autumn 1991 Foreign Policy piece: “With the end of the Cold War,” they wrote, “it is hard to construct even a semi-plausible military threat to the United States.” [5]

Keen to keep US taxes flowing to the Pentagon and straight to the bottom lines of Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and other profit-soaked US defense contractors, US officials took on what the cold warriors envisaged as a difficult task. They puffed up military midgets into military Gargantua, and found dire threats—an alleged genocide in Kosovo and WMDs in Iraq—where none existed. 9/11 sealed the deal.

Today Pentagon chief Leon Panetta can cite “North Korea and Iran as persistent threats” which the US military must remain bulked up to “to deter and defeat,” [6] with few people batting an eye. At $700 billion per year [7], US military spending is greater than that of the next 19 biggest spending countries combined, [8] many of which are US allies, and none of which are North Korea or Iran. And the New York Times turn over its pages to the Benny Morrises of the world as a platform to urge the United States to prevent wars by waging more of them. It turns out that Powell’s and McNamara’s fears that the United States had run out of demons to justify the pumping of billions in profits into defense contractors were based on a misjudgment of the prowess of the propaganda system to crank out compelling fiction.

Getting Gingrich

Maybe it was a desire to discredit Gingrich, a Republican whose hand on the tiller of the ship of state may be too frightening for the liberal New York Times to contemplate that led Broad to puncture some of the myths that have been carefully constructed about Iran and North Korea as nuclear menaces–myths the Times itself has been no stranger to lending credence to. Whatever the case, the Broad article ran against form, challenging Gingrich’s fear-mongering.

Broad cited Philip E. Coyle III, a former head of Pentagon arms testing, who has complained that Gingrich and his fellow fear-mongers are puffing up Iran and North Korea “with the capabilities of giants.” Broad then pointed to other military experts who say that North Korea and Iran “are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.” To this might be added that it’s far from certain that Iran is even at the kindergarten stage, while North Korea, the most sanctioned country on earth [9], will find its US-imposed poverty keeps it at the kindergarten stage well into the future.

“To even begin to attempt to do what Mr. Gingrich fears,” Broad writes, Iran and North Korea “would have to perfect big rockets, powerful bombs and surreptitious ways to loft them high above America.” Yet “Iran is having trouble keeping its missile bases from blowing up and North Korea cannot seem to get a big rocket off the ground without it tumbling out of control.”

Broad’s reporting deflates myths about an EMP attack, but it is just as damning to the more widely-circulated myths about North Korea and Iran threatening the United States and its allies with a garden variety nuclear strike.

The Real Threat

Still, it’s true that both countries pose a threat—though not a military one and not to the bulk of US citizens. Iran and North Korea, like Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, defy a US-favored regime of free-trade, free-markets and free-enterprise–one that opens doors to US enterprises and keeps foreign profits pouring into Wall Street.

According to the US Congressional Research Service, numerous US sanctions have been imposed on North Korea for reasons listed as either “communism”, “non-market economy” or “communism and market disruption.” [10] Iran, as the US Congress of Library’s country study documents [11], favors a host of state-led economic development measures that, like North Korea’s publically-owned and planned economy, walls off large parts of the country’s markets, resources and labor from foreign corporations, banks and investors.

It is the limitations on US elite economic interests, and the threat of their becoming a model for other developing countries, that drives Gingrich, Pincus and others to puff up military pipsqueaks into giants and to elevate kindergarten students into MIT graduates. Transformed into threats, they become seemingly legitimate targets for all manner of aggressions—sabotage, economic warfare, funding of overthrow movements, military harassment, and, at times, overt war. The aim is replace leaders who favor independent, self-directed economic development, with puppets who will throw open the country’s doors to US exports and investment and co-operate with the United States militarily.

Marionettes

Burhan Ghalioun is a fine example of an aspiring puppet. He is the president of the Syrian National Council, an exile group linked to the Movement for Justice and Development [12]. The latter has received $6 million in US government funding to organize opposition to the Assad government, according to a WikiLeaks cable [13]. The supplicant marionette, who has met with Hilary Clinton and has already persuaded French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and British Foreign Secretary William Hague to declare his organization “a legitimate representative of the Syrian people” [14] is promising US officials that if they bring him to power he will “cut Damascus’s military relationship to Iran and end arms supplies to Middle East militant groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas” while integrating Syria with “the region’s major Arab powers”, [15] a reference to the Gulf Cooperation Council, the club of US-allied oil tyrannies which recently used military force to crack down on a democratic uprising in Bahrain, a member country, and home to the US 5th Fleet, the main military threat against Iran. (Bahrain, for the record, is a foreign investor’s paradise, ranking number 10 on the Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom). Ghalioun’s eagerness to become entangled with a conspiracy of democracy-abominating absolute monarchies speaks volumes about his commitment to democracy and the direction of a possible Syrian National Council-led revolution in Syria.

1. William J. Broad, “Among Gingrich’s passions, a doomsday vision”, The New York Times, December 11, 2011.
2. Walter Pincus, “As missions are added, Stratcom commander keeps focus on deterrence”, The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
3. Benny Morris, “Using Bombs to Stave Off War,” New York Times, July 18, 2008.
4. Carl Kaysen, Robert S. McNamara and George W. Rathjens, “Nuclear Weapons After the Cold War”, Foreign Affairs, Fall 1991.
5. Ibid.
6. Thom Shanker and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Weighing Pentagon cuts, Panetta faces deep pressures”, The New York Times, November 6, 2011.
7. Ibid.
8. “Defence spending: The world’s biggest armies in stats,” The Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8002911/Defence-spending-the-worlds-biggest-armies-in-stats.html
9. Then US President George W. Bush had called North Korea “the most sanctioned nation in the world”. U.S. News & World Report, June 26, 2008; The New York Times, July 6, 2008.
10. Dianne E. Rennack, “North Korea: Economic sanctions”, Congressional Research Service, October 17, 2006. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl31696.pdf
11. The Library of Congress. Iran: A Country Study. 2008. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/irtoc.html
12. The leader of the Movement for Justice and Democracy is Anas Al-Abdah. He is a member of the SNC.
13. James Rosen, “U.S. Fears Syrian Reprisals After WikiLeaks Disclosure,” FoxNew.com, April 18, 2011.
14. Jay Solomon, “Clinton Meets With Syrian Opposition”, The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2011.
15. Jay Solomon and Nour Malas, “Syria would cut Iran military tie, opposition head says”, The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2011

Seeing the US Everywhere

By Stephen Gowans

The New York Times ran an article today about Washington’s plans to strengthen its military presence in Australia. Australia is to be used by the US military “as a new center of operations in Asia” from which the United States will seek “to reassert itself in the region and grapple with China’s rise.”

The problem for policy planners in Washington is that “China has become the largest trading partner with most of the countries in the region, undercutting American economic influence.” And so the United States will beef up its presence in the Pacific to prove that “it intends to remain a crucial military and economic power” in Asia.

In simple language this means that China has secured export and investment opportunities in its own backyard and that US corporations, banks and investors want them for themselves. So Washington will use its military to take them away from the Chinese.

For obvious reasons, China thinks this smacks of old-fashioned gun-boat imperialism.

Not so curiously, the headline of the Ian Johnson and Jackie Calmes article announcing Washington’s plan to muscle China out of economic primacy in the region put a chauvinistic spin on the story: “As US looks to Asia, it sees China everywhere.”

Imagine China setting up military bases in Venezuela and sending aircraft carriers to the Gulf of Mexico in order to “assert itself in the region.” How strange would seem a newspaper headline that read: “As China looks to the Gulf of Mexico, it sees the United States everywhere,” as if this were an unexpected discovery.

The New York Times’ headline could have been more aptly written this way: As China looks around its neighborhood, it sees the US military everywhere. But then this would have made US imperialism uncomfortably obvious.

An article by Johnson and Calmes’ New York Times’ colleagues Nada Bakri and Rick Gladstone, also in today’s edition of the newspaper (“Syria faces new threats as opposition seeks allies”) is equally worthy of comment. Their article used “one human rights group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” as a source for the number of people killed in recent clashes with Syrian government forces.

One might get the impression that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is a neutral human rights monitor without a political agenda. After all, Bakri and Gladstone refer to it as “one human rights group”, and nothing more.

Were it an opposition group seeking to overthrow the Syrian government we might think twice about trusting it as a source of unbiased information.

Well, think twice.

A statement posted to the group’s website on November 15, 2011, makes clear that it is more than just “one human rights group.” In the statement, the group calls for a no-fly zone over Syria “in accordance with its duty and commitment to echo the voice of Syrian Popular Revolution.”

The Observatory makes no secret of the reason it wants “the international community” (which is to say, Nato) dropping bombs on Syrian military installations and Assad supporters: “the acceleration of overthrowing Syrian brutal regime.”

Meanwhile, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the group of US-allied oil autocracies that had been acting as arms and propaganda suppliers to Libyan rebels, played a key role in pushing through the recent Arab League suspension of Syria.

The Council has also become a key to Washington’s plans to continue to dominate the Persian Gulf, even as—or rather, precisely because–US troops are being withdrawn from Iraq.

Both US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have said that the United States will “maintain a large military presence in the region, in part as a counterweight to Iran.” The US military will rely on “the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new ‘security architecture’ for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.”

It’s not only China that is hemmed in by the US military. As Iran looks around its neighborhood, it too sees the US everywhere.

In Libya, the end of 42 years of….

…self-directed economic development aimed at giving Libyans a stake in their economy.

I’m not saying Gaddafi’s Libya was a model society, but it did offer its own citizens advantages that are conspicuously missing in Washington’s Third World satellites.

Margaret Coker, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Libya speeds oil output but sees hurdles ahead”) serves up an example of Gaddafi’s friendly-to-Libyans, not-so-friendly-to-overseas-investor policies. Among “many of (Gadaffi’s) heavy-handed state policies” were “foreign-currency exchange limits and a law that forced private enterprises to make Libyan employees shareholders of the business.” These policies “crimped corporate work during the Gadhafi regime,” writes Coker, by which she means encroached on the profits of Western banks, corporations and investors. Bad man.

In the same issue of the WSJ we learn that Washington is quietly funnelling bunker buster bombs and other ammunition to the group of anti-democratic oil monarchies that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council. The aim is to build up these despotic regimes as “a unified counter-weight to Iran” (“U.S. plans bomb sales in Gulf to counter Iran.”)

The GCC, it will be recalled, dispatched tanks and troops to crush a popular uprising in one of its member states, Bahrain, while it was also helping rebels oust the Gaddafi government in Libya. GCC member, Qatar, an absolutist state, was particularly helpful to the Libyan rebels, dispatching hundreds of ground troops to aid the cause of…

• (A) Building democracy in Libya?
• (B) Ending Gaddafi policies that crimped corporate work?

You decide.

Finally, yesterday’s WSJ ( “U.S. to build up military in Australia”) points to plans for “a new and permanent U.S. military presence in Australia…a step aimed at countering China’s influence and reasserting U.S. interests in the region.” Notes WSJ reporter Laura Meckler, the “South China Sea, which China considers as its sovereign territory…is important economically.”

Indeed it is.

Fortunately, the combined forces of the US Army, US Navy, US Marine Corps, US Air Force and the CIA exist to make sure the South China Sea—and every other economically important region of the globe—is available to Wall Street for its aggrandizement…and free from anyone who might exercise their sovereignty to impose policies that crimp corporate work.