not at all, just sometimes what is the point - I agree 100% with what I have posted below,
Ukraine
When its competitors cannot be stifled by intimidation, threats, tricks or bribery, imperialism resorts to war. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and others are suffering tremendously for having dared to demand that their resources should be used to benefit their own people. However, the obstacles to imperialist domination presented by these countries is as nothing compared to those presented by Russia and China.
This is why for years the imperialist powers, led by the US, have been encircling China and Russia with military bases and missile shields. At the same time, they have been drawing countries that were formerly part of the USSR and the eastern bloc into the imperialist sphere of influence (and exploitation) by creating and financing ‘colour revolutions’ that hold out false hopes of a life of ease and plenty (‘freedom’), when what actually awaits most people is unending drudgery and humiliation.
Ukrainians were seduced by a ‘colour revolution’ in 2004, but found that instead of a glittering future they got nothing but economic chaos and disaster. That is why Yanukovych, the ‘evil dictator’ who had been ousted in 2004, was re-elected as president in 2010.
Yanukovych had planned to sign a bilateral trade agreement with the EU in 2014 in the hope of ‘solving’ the country’s economic problems, but in return for the promise of a €610m ‘aid package’ from the IMF, the EU imperialists kept demanding ever-more onerous ‘restructuring’ terms (social-spending cuts and privatisations).
The terms were so suicidal for Ukraine that in the end Yanukovych refused to sign. And so imperialism let loose its ‘democracy movement’ – ie, the treacherous elements in Ukrainian society, for the most part an unconscionable fascist, anti-semitic and violent rabble, financed by the US to the tune of $6bn because they were happy to sell out their country’s interests.
These vile elements, who had never succeeded in winning more than a tiny minority of votes in any Ukrainian election, managed, with the full backing of imperialism, to seize power, despite considerable internal opposition.
This opposition especially but not exclusively came from those whose mother tongue was Russian rather than Ukrainian. In fact, the areas where Russian-speakers were in the majority, like Crimea and eastern Ukraine, immediately chose to secede rather than submit to the fascist ‘government’ that had been imposed by imperialism. Whereas Crimea managed to leave peacefully, the fascists have been waging genocidal warfare on eastern Ukraine to try to force its surrender.
The people of the Donbass have been fighting not because they are Russian nationalists but because they know that what the EU has in mind for their region – once the proud heartland of Soviet industry – is nothing but mothballing and mass unemployment of industrial workers.
Syria, Isis, Iraq
Frustrated in its efforts to overthrow the constitutional government in independent Syria after three years of proxy war, and fearing that the sectarianism with which its divide-and-rule policy has contaminated Iraqi society will not forever serve to smother the resurgent voice of national resistance within that country either, it seems that imperialism now prays that the development into a major force in Iraq of its own unacknowledged offspring – the well-equipped and trained islamist forces of Isis – may one way or another help to tip things back in the West’s favour.
It has long been plain that the most ruthless and the best organised of the counter-revolutionary forces fighting to subvert the sovereignty of Syria have been those of Isis (the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, now grandiloquently rebranded, with delusions of establishing a global ‘caliphate’, simply as the Islamic State). Whilst it seems that this organisation, incubated by the West and the Gulf states, has by its extreme violence and obscurantism in fact made it harder than ever to unite the ragbag of anti-Assad forces, it remains the most potent continued military threat to the Syrian people.
Now with Isis rampant across the border into Iraq, capturing Mosul in a lightning strike and threatening to push south toward Baghdad, and with the feeble Iraqi army, hand-reared by the imperialist occupation, initially mounting poor resistance, the rapidly developing facts on the ground are throwing much received wisdom into question and opening the flood gates to speculative analysis and prognostication, of varying levels of usefulness.
How far US imperialism is successfully stage-managing events and how far it is itself being overtaken by those events is a moot point. Where it is capable of steering events to coincide with its interests, it will do so. However, it is even able to benefit from instability, chaos and bloodshed to the extent that it weakens imperialism’s opponents, and is prepared to wait for an opportunity to pounce again on its weakened enemy.
So in Syria it has been clear to all observers for many months now that imperialism has failed to unseat the country’s lawful president by means of a proxy war. The dream of a scrubbed-up secular united-front government of comprador stooges capable of overthrowing the constitution, supplanting the elected government and acting as a stable cipher for imperialist interests has totally failed.
Their pet ‘Syrian National Coalition’ (SNC) has completely fallen apart and the fight against Assad has morphed into a vicious internecine scrap between rival mercenaries and jihadists. Meanwhile, the patriotic forces of Syria are getting on with mopping up the pockets of rebellion and the president has been overwhelmingly re-elected for a further term of office.
However, the fact that imperialism has not won this proxy war does not mean that it will accept defeat. If it cannot impose its ‘New Order’, then, for the moment, it will set its sights on stoking up yet more chaos in the region, in the hope that out of all this witches’ brew something may turn up to imperialist advantage. Imperialism has a long history of backing more than one side in a conflict, the better to exercise command.
In this light, it is possible to start making some sense of the yawning contradictions raised by the Isis invasion from Syria into Iraq. Least significant in this respect are the barmy subjective notions entertained by the fighters themselves, with their pipe dreams of establishing a caliphate embracing Syria, Iraq and beyond.
Such pipe dreams are no threat to imperialist interests. Indeed, they usefully blow smoke in people’s eyes and make it harder to discern what is really going on. The more imperialism can bamboozle us all into falsely blaming ancient tribal, ethnic or confessional enmities for the horrors unleashed by its own actions, the happier it will be.
The counter-revolutionary role of Isis in Syria is only too obvious, and the additional nuisance value of having a permanent Isis occupation of the north of Iraq, with the Iraqi border serving as a home territory for the proxy war, will not be taken lightly by Damascus.
Indeed, since its rapid advance in Iraq, Isis has also stepped up its activities in Syria – both against the legitimate government of President Assad and the patriotic people, and against various other stripes of counter-revolutionaries, as well as the Kurds.
In late July, Isis managed to seize control of the major Shaar oil field, east of the city of Homs, and, using its international connections, has even pressed it into commercial service, further filling its counter-revolutionary war coffers as a result. Further, with its military capacity much augmented by the weaponry seized from a demoralised Iraqi army, Isis has also temporarily captured Deor-al-Zor, the largest city in eastern Syria.
A Ba’athist revolt?
What the Isis incursion really means for the people of Iraq itself is less obvious. Some commentators have suggested that the invasion, billed in the media as a sunni islamist takeover, is in fact primarily the work of the Ba’athist resistance, with former Ba’athist generals in the van.
While it is clear that the rapid advance of Isis in sunni areas of Iraq has only been possible because of support from Ba’athist elements resentful of the Iraqi government’s marginalisation of Iraq’s sunni population, it is far from clear that the Ba’athists, who are secular, will be any better off under a sunni religious fundamentalist regime than they were under the Maliki government. One can surmise that the Isis headbangers are counting on being able to eliminate the Ba’athists as soon as this becomes tactically feasible (assuming they have much of a clue about tactics), and the Ba’athists are waiting for their moment to eliminate the fundamentalists.
In the meantime, however, the southern sweep has closed the frontier of Syria to the passage of material support from Iran to the Assad government and represents something of a setback to the anti-imperialist cause, although it would seem unlikely to prove fatal.
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=leaflets&subName=display&leafletId=102
http://www.shoah.org.uk/2014/08/24/hands-off-ukraine-hands-off-russia/
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