This is Part 2 of a longer series on the modern role of revolution.
1. The international destruction and re-creation of Syria
The Syrian war seems to be shuddering to some sort of end, with the Assad regime still in place. Among the West's traditional liberals and among some of the remains of the Syrian 'democratic' forces, the dismal result of the seven years of brutal fighting has happened because the West did not support their natural allies from the outset. This version of history correctly implies a continuing (albeit slow) decline in Western power in the world, but it is blinkered by the reality of the West's (read the USA's) shift in policy, since their slow-motion defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with their savagely corporate version of democracy in those countries.
But the US has not ignored Syria. Right now the US controls and defends most of Syria's oil wealth - as a result of its occupation of Raqqa and it shows its immediate intention to 'monitor' and 'keep the peace' in most of the other north-eastern towns and cities. It is one of the four military powers that now actually run Syria. The US have taken their slice of Syria as a matter of their direct interest - which does not include in any way 'mending' the Syrian nation. That is the great lesson that a cautious Obama and then an 'America First Trump' have learnt from the Iraqi (and the Afghan) farragoes.
The US also intend to limit Turkey, the second military force dividing up Syria. They do not care about the Kurds' future but are happy to use them as cannon fodder if necessary. This is required while Erdogan's Ottoman madness inflates the external threat of a new Kurdistan as a means of holding back his own country's internal decay. Theoretically Turkey now controls an area of over 900 square miles of Syria, including parts of Aleppo and Idlib - where the anti-Assad forces are sent.
Both Hezbollah (funded and armed by Iran) and Putin, the other two foreign powers, are already sending their bills to Assad. Assad is calling the next period of Syria, the policy of reconstruction. One of Assad's new 'reconstruction' laws, law 10, sent out in May, states that Syrians that wish to reclaim their homes and buildings have to show themselves in weeks, with papers proving ownership etc. It is an 'ownership' that frequently means holes in the ground - courtesy of Putin's generals and their military tactics borrowed from the 'Battle' of Grozny in their 10 year war in Chechnya. Otherwise these buildings/spaces and places (covering whole cities and part cities, like Eastern Aleppo) become state property and are to be sold and 'developed' by Russian and Iranian money and companies. Assad has to pay his bills.
The contradiction at the heart of a future Syria is that Assad's state cannot rule without the deadly weakness of direct foreign domination. Osama Kadi, founder and president of the Syrian Economic Task Force states;
'Syria as a centrally managed state no longer exists.'
2. Nation states and the Middle East
The three 'great' nations of Egypt, Turkey and Iran (who between them account for half of the population of the Middle East) have now switched 2 to 3 against US and general western leadership. The intermediate nations (Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, just over a collective quarter of the Middle East's population) are either fighting surrogate wars for regional hegemony (see Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the new paradigm) or, as in the case of Iraq, crawling out of a western military disaster. Finally the smaller group of nations, led by Syria with a nominal population of 18.4 million people, are being progressively sucked into the vacuum created by the impact of western imperialism's 'withdrawal' from its previous whole scale interventions.
This leaves the horrific effects of the crazy, early 20th Century and the 1948 national boundaries, now literally shaking into pieces. It expands the stateless millions who now only have borders, and are without nations, and who are still at war for survival. (Of the 4.3 million refugees registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 33% live in UNRWA's 59 refugee camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In 2016, from an estimated pre-war population of 22 million, the UN identified 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance, of which more than 6 million are internally displaced within Syria, and around 5 million are refugees outside of Syria.) It also draws the Israeli nuclear threat to Iran into the frame.
Today Trump and his State Department provide Israel (the 10th in population terms of the 11 ME countries) with $3.1billion per year. Iraq gets $5.3 billion. Egypt gets $1.3 billion-straight to its vast, property-owning military. (Iran has gone into the same game with its military - without the US subsidies.) There are secret bonuses to both Israel's security forces and to Egypt's government. But this is not enough. It is certainly not anything like the West's previous weight. The Middle East rulers have learnt that Syria, a medium sized nation, with an internationally loathed dictator, even one that hates Israel, cannot be toppled (as Iran's leadership was toppled, as Libya's leadership was toppled, as even Iraq's leadership was toppled) by US power. This changes everything.
3. How can the Middle East's people win substantial change?
The key to understanding the dreadful and apparently unresolvable Syrian war is the structural character of the struggle of millions of people in the Middle East. Imperialism from the West has created a jumble of political entities defined by their historical western masters which destroyed any coherence and unity between the Middle East people themselves. Cockpits have periodically emerged and become focused by their artificial sets of country boundaries, recently over-laid by religious definitions, that rarely actually apply to the whole populations in the invented nations. Naturally, under these conditions, it is impossible to establish anything other than savage, dictatorial regimes and repression and impoverishment for the many. The basic needs of the population cannot be resolved in these contexts.
The closest to a 'solution' most recently, was the ISIS claim to establish a Middle East (and then a world) Caliphate. Taking one of the more obnoxious religious strands available, ISIS demanded that everybody adopt its unifying principle. At the same time it proposed a definitive end to Western domination. Its success among Arab youth in the region (and beyond) speaks for itself. ISIS gained their purchase because they were both 'universal' in the Arab cause - a desperate necessity in the crazy jigsaw of the Middle East - and because the West was the 'Great Satan'.
The Arab Spring was another attempt to 'go beyond' the crushing burden of underdevelopment and the seemingly irrepressible logic of dictatorship. It had its greatest advance in Egypt, the most historically coherent and settled 'nation' in the Middle East. But, in part as a result of its westernised social base, it was unable to face the two 'hidden' roadblocks to revolution. ISIS did not analyse the deep anger of the most impoverished and disrespected population of the Arab East, but they mobilised it among the youth. And its lances thrown at the West were publicly popular. What ISIS touched was the need to overthrow the domination of the West, not only in the here and now, in this city or in the Parliament in that country, but in the history, the borders, the use of resources, that the imperialists had set up. The Arab Spring was unable to grasp that reality and could not therefore link itself to the layers in society that felt its historical burden.
Equally the Arab Spring did not address itself to the borders in the Middle East world, of which the 'border' between Israel and a non-existing Palestine is the core.
4. Revolution in the Middle East?
This summary essay, which began with reflections on the French May '68 events (see 15 June), started with the revolution for change being centred around the question of power. The Syrian war and the Arab Spring throw up another key to revolutionary success. And that is the need to define the essential purposes of revolution. To change society by taking power away from the classes that rule to empower the classes that are exploited is essential but abstract. Russian revolutionaries resolved their vision to 'Land, Peace and Bread' - to be gained by 'All Power to the Soviets.' In the case of the modern Middle East three great fissures in society need to be bridged for any revolution to be successful from whatever geographical point in the region that it first arises.
The modern relationship to imperialism has to be defined at once and all, and it is at the heart of any revolutionary attempt. Revolution will be led in the Middle East by those who seek to unify all the oppressed social layers that have born the burden of relentless poverty, their endless labour for survival - seen as at the margins of society and that is able to throw down the shame created for them by distant centres of power and wealth - as they will need to rise to the future and organise to create the great new changes.
There are already mass organisations across the Middle East that fight imperialist power beyond national boundaries, albeit be it most with deeply reactionary purposes, as in the case of ISIS. This too is a critical matter in the development of the Middle east revolution. There has to be an understanding and a meaningful approach to the fractured and incoherent national structures of the Middle East that are the presiding legacy of imperialism - but the new structure has to welcome all who identify with the need for change - regardless of place, or religion.
From that point of view Hezbollah has gone through some significant developments as its internal contradictions grow. Starting as an international defence force for Shi-ite Iran, Hezbollah, in public statements, has widened its view, making allies beyond the Iranian sectarian approach to the different wings of Islam. It has also reversed the Iranian model in respect to women's rights and even to Marxism! Its signal success against the Israeli intervention in Southern Lebanon makes it the only Middle East force since 1948 to defeat Israeli fire power. At the same time its centre of power remains with the Iranian regime, and Hezbollah is increasing its self-corrupting hooks into ruling circles in Lebanon and now Syria.
The Kurdish battle for a homeland, denied by the imperialist settlement at the beginning of the 20th Century and, latterly, by its 1948 extension in the seizure of Palestine, has remained a radical movement. Its inevitably cross-region perspective and its implementation of highly developed self-organised communities, with consistent efforts to promote women's place at the centre of leadership, remains a guiding star. But the Kurd's struggle for nationhood, in Iraq, in northern Syria and in Turkey cannot, solely, lead the region. It is nevertheless part of the jigsaw that has to be put together to make the Middle East revolution.
At the core of the understanding of 'national liberation' in the Middle East, lies the issue of Israel and Palestine. It will be the key resolution of the first of the many fractures of Middle East life. Indeed millions of Arabs, and others, will not believe in real change without it. The latest (and last) 'solution' proposed and promoted by the West has been 'The Two State Solution.' It is a rank and increasingly desperate failure. Even the US has currently abandoned it. While hundreds of Palestinians are dying for it.
At the heart then of the revolution in the Middle East has to be the recognition of one, combined, Jewish and Palestinian state - recognising both sets of peoples as citizens of a secular nation. New settlements in Palestine, for Arab and Jew. End the old imperial borders; build the new peoples' nations.
These are some of the key elements of the Middle East revolution.
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