US, UK and France threaten military intervention against Syria

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Wednesday August 29, 2012 12:24 by pat c

Its not just the WMD excuse that the Imperialists are using to advance their cause of War on Syria and the threat of war against Iran: the US et al are using the reactionary Sunni regimes and their co-thinkers throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Full text at link.

In citing “weapons of mass destruction” as a pretext for waging war against Syria, the Obama administration is treading a well-worn path. When President Barack Obama threatened August 21 that the movement of chemical weapons inside Syria was a “red line” that could trigger US military intervention, he did nothing that was not pioneered by George W. Bush before the 2003 war against Iraq. Obama now has the backing of British Prime Minister David Cameron and, this week, France’s François Hollande. The French president said his government was already working with Turkey to establish no-fly zones “in co-ordination with our closest partners.”

The connection between Iraq and Syria is more than a repetition of Washington’s hyping of an alleged WMD threat and invocations of democracy and human rights

Confronted with the explosion of working class opposition to its client regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and more broadly throughout the region in 2011, Washington is seeking to mobilize reactionary forces to suppress the working class while implementing plans for regional hegemony laid out after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That invasion ended up strengthening Iran’s position by eliminating its main regional rival. Washington responded by seeking to undermine what it dubbed the “Shia arc of extremism”—which included the Alawite-dominated Baathist regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran itself.

The US responded to last year’s revolutionary working class struggles by deepening its reliance on Sunni Islamist forces tied to the Persian Gulf monarchies. Exploiting the political bankruptcy of the petty-bourgeois “left” forces, which opposed a struggle for power by the working class, Islamist parties have come to power in Tunisia and Egypt.