[Peace-discuss] JONES INTRODUCES RESOLUTION TO DECLARE THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE IN SYRIA WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL AN IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE; Four U.S. senators seek to bar military aid to Syrian rebels; Syria, The View from the Other Side

Mon Jun 24 17:23:38 UTC 2013

(from the UFPJ-activist list -- twitches in Congress against making war 
in Syria!)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[ufpj-activist] JONES INTRODUCES RESOLUTION TO DECLARE THE USE 
OF MILITARY FORCE IN SYRIA WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL AN IMPEACHABLE 
OFFENSE; Four U.S. senators seek to bar military aid to Syrian rebels; 
Syria, The View from the Other Side
Date: 	Sun, 23 Jun 2013 18:39:28 -0500
From: 	m_eisenscher at uslaboragainstwar.org 
<m_eisenscher at uslaboragainstwar.org>
To: 	ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>

JONES INTRODUCES RESOLUTION TO DECLARE THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE IN 
SYRIA WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL AN IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE

Jun 21, 2013 Issues: Budget Spending and Taxes 
<http://jones.house.gov/issue/budget-spending-taxes>, Values 
<http://jones.house.gov/issue/values>, Armed Services 
<http://jones.house.gov/issue/armed-services>

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, Congressman Walter B. Jones (NC-3) 
introduced a resolution to prohibit the use of war power against Syria 
without congressional authorization.  H. Con. Res 40 emphasizes that 
declaring and appropriating funds for war is a power of the legislative 
– not executive – branch.  Should the president choose to implement 
military force against Syria without congressional approval, that 
decision would constitute an impeachable offense under Article 2, 
Section 4 of the Constitution.

“We cannot continue to spend American money and risk American lives 
overseas without a vote of approval from Congress,” said Jones.  “For 
too long, the legislature’s responsibility to authorize military force 
has been overlooked.  It is time that we uphold the Constitution, which 
makes it clear in Article 1, Section 8 that Congress alone holds the 
power to declare war.  A breach of that principle by the president would 
unquestionably be considered an impeachable offense.”

See the full text of the resolution at the link below.

        *Downloads*

H. Con. Res. 40.pdf 
<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjones.house.gov%2Fsites%2Fjones.house.gov%2Ffiles%2FH.%2520Con.%2520Res.%252040.pdf> 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Four U.S. senators seek to bar military aid to Syrian rebels

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/uk-syria-crisis-usa-congress-idUKBRE95J1B120130621 

Fri, Jun 21 2013
A member of the Free Syrian Army aims his RPG through a hole as

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON | Fri Jun 21, 2013 1:07am BST

(Reuters) - Four senators introduced legislation on Thursday that would 
bar President Barack Obama from providing military aid to Syria 
<http://uk.reuters.com/places/syria>'s rebels, saying the administration 
has provided too little information about what they see as a risky 
intervention.

The bill would prevent the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence 
agencies from using any funds to support military, paramilitary or 
covert operations in Syria, directly or indirectly.

The bill's sponsors - Democrats Tom Udall of New Mexico and Chris Murphy 
of Connecticut and Republicans Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of 
Kentucky - expressed doubts about Washington's ability to ensure weapons 
will not fall into the wrong hands, and called for debate in Congress 
before the United States becomes more involved in Syria's civil war.

"The president's unilateral decision to arm Syrian rebels is incredibly 
disturbing, considering what little we know about whom we are arming," 
Paul said in a statement.

Other lawmakers argued it was in the U.S. national security interest to 
get more involved in Syria.

"This is about looking at the possibility of a failed state in which 
terrorist actors already present within Syria in this fight can launch 
attacks against our allies, and potentially against the United States," 
Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign 
Relations Committee, told reporters.

After months of equivocating, Obama decided a week ago to provide 
military aid to rebels trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar 
al-Assad, citing Assad's government's use chemical weapons in the 
two-year-long conflict.

The administration has since been working to win more support in 
Congress for the plan. Secretary of State John Kerry, a former senator, 
has been on Capitol Hill at least twice this week to make the 
administration's case to lawmakers.

On Tuesday he had a classified briefing for House of Representatives 
leaders from both parties and committee chairmen.

On Thursday Kerry conducted at least three briefings: one for the House 
Intelligence Committee, a second for the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee and a third for other senators.

Many members of Congress, particularly in the Republican-controlled 
House, remain deeply sceptical about plans to arm the rebels, 
questioning the cost when other programs are being cut and worrying that 
U.S. weapons could fall into the wrong hands.

Others have been pushing for military aid for months, with some senators 
in particular denouncing Obama for his failure to intervene in a 
conflict in which more than 90,000 people have been killed.

Last month the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 15-3 in favour 
of a bill to provide lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. That measure 
has not yet gone to the full Senate for a vote.

Paul, Murphy and Udall were the three members of the foreign relations 
panel who voted against that bill.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Stacey Joyce and Xavier Briand)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

    *Syria, The View From The Other Side*

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/syria-the-view-from-the-other-side/
Posted in Syria <http://gowans.wordpress.com/category/syria/> by what's 
left on June 22, 2013

By Stephen Gowans

His security forces used live ammunition to mow down peaceful 
pro-democracy protesters, forcing them to take up arms to try to topple 
his brutal dictatorship. He has killed tens of thousands of his own 
people, using tanks, heavy artillery and even chemical weapons. He’s a 
blood-thirsty tyrant whose rule has lost its legitimacy and must step 
down to make way for a peaceful democratic transition.

That’s the view of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, cultivated by 
Western politicians and their media stenographers. If there’s another 
side to the story, you’re unlikely to hear it. Western mass media are 
not keen on presenting the world from the point of view of governments 
that find themselves the target of Western regime change operations. On 
the contrary, their concern is to present the point of view of the big 
business interests that own them and the Western imperialism that 
defends and promotes big business interests. They accept as beyond 
dispute all pronouncements by Western leaders on matters of foreign 
affairs, and accept without qualification that the official enemies of 
US imperialism are as nasty as the US president and secretary of state 
say they are.

What follows is the largely hidden story from the other side, based on 
two interviews with Assad, the first conducted by Clarin newspaper and 
Telam news agency on May 19, 2013, and the second carried out on June 
17, 2013 by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Both were translated into 
English by the Syrian Arab News Agency.

*Peaceful protests?

*Ba’athist Syria is no stranger to civil unrest, having experienced wave 
after wave of uprisings by Sunni religious fanatics embittered by their 
country being ruled by a secular state whose highest offices are 
occupied by Alawite ‘heretics’. [1] The latest round of uprisings, the 
opening salvos in another chapter of what Glen E. Robinson calls 
“Syria’s Long Civil War,” began in March, 2011. The first press reports 
were of a few small protests, dwarfed by the far more numerous and 
substantial protests that erupt every day in the United States, Britain 
and France. A March 16, 2011 New York Times report noted that “In Syria, 
demonstrations are few and brief.” These early demonstrationsa few 
quixotic young men declaring that “the revolution has started!”, 
relatives of prisoners protesting outside the Interior Ministryseem 
disconnected from the radical Islamist rebellion that would soon develop.

Within days, larger demonstrations were underway in Dara, where citizens 
were said to have been “outraged by the arrest of more than a dozen 
schoolchildren.” Contrary to a myth that has since taken hold, these 
demonstrations were hardly peaceful. Protesters set fire to the local 
Ba’ath Party headquarters, as well as to the town’s main courthouse and 
a branch of SyriaTel. Some protesters shot at the police, who returned 
fire. [2] One can imagine the reaction of the New York City Police to 
protesters in Manhattan setting fire to the federal court building, 
firebombing the Verizon 
<http://www.surfcanyon.com/search?f=sls&q=Verizon&p=wtigck> building and 
opening fire on police. A foreign broadcaster with an agenda to depict 
the United States in the worst possible light might describe the protest 
as peaceful, and the police response as brutal, but it’s doubtful anyone 
in the United States would see it that way.

 From “the first weeks of the protests we had policemen killed, so how 
could such protests have been peaceful?” asks Assad. “How could those 
who claim that the protests were peaceful explain the death of these 
policemen in the first week?” Assad doesn’t deny that most protesters 
demonstrated peacefully, but notes that “there were armed militants 
infiltrating protesters and shooting at the police.”

Was the reaction of Syrian security forces to the unrest heavy-handed? 
Syria has a long history of Islamist uprisings against its secular 
state. With anti-government revolts erupting in surrounding countries, 
there was an acute danger that Syria’s Muslim Brotherslong at war with 
the Syrian statewould be inspired to return to jihad. What’s more, 
Syria is technically at war with Israel. As other countries in similar 
circumstances, Syria had an emergency law in place, restricting certain 
civil liberties in the interest of defending national security. Among 
the restrictions was a ban on unauthorized public assembly. The 
demonstrations were a flagrant challenge to the law, at a time of 
growing instability and danger to the survival of the Syrian secular 
project. Moreover, to expect Syrian authorities to react with restraint 
to gunfire from protesters is to hold Syria to a higher standard than 
any other country.

Meanwhile, as protesters in Syria were shooting at police and setting 
fire to buildings, Bahrain’s royal dictatorship was crushing a popular 
uprising with the assistance of Saudi tanks and US equipment. New York 
Times’ columnist Nicholas D. Kristof lamented that “America’s ally, 
Bahrain” was using “American tanks, guns and tear gas as well as foreign 
mercenaries to crush a pro-democracy movement” as Washington remained 
“mostly silent.” [3] Kristof said he had “seen corpses of protesters who 
were shot at close range, seen a teenage girl writhing in pain after 
being clubbed, seen ambulance workers beaten for trying to rescue 
protesters.” He didn’t explain why the United States would have a 
dictator as an ally, much less one who crushed a pro-democracy movement. 
All he could offer was the weak excuse that the United States was “in a 
vicecaught between its allies and its values,” as if Washington didn’t 
chose its allies, and that they were a force of nature, like an 
earthquake or a hurricane, that you had to live with and endure. The 
United States was indeed in a vicethough not of the sort Kristof 
described. It was caught between Washington’s empty rhetoric on 
democracy and the profit-making interests of the country’s weighty 
citizens, the true engine of US foreign policy. The dilemma was readily 
resolved. Profits prevailed, as they always do.

Bahrain’s accommodating attitude to US imperialismit is home to the US 
Fifth Fleetand its emphasis on indulging owners and investors at the 
expense of wage- and salary-earners, are unimpeachably friendly to US 
corporate and financial interests. Practically the entire stable of US 
allies in the Middle East is comprised of royal dictators whose attitude 
to democracy is unremittingly hostile, but whose attitude to helping US 
oil companies and titans of finance rake in fabulous profits is 
tremendously accommodating. And so the United States is on good terms 
with them, despite their violent allergic reaction to democracy. Aware 
of whose interests really matter in US foreign policy, Kristof wrote of 
Bahrain, “We’re not going to pull out our naval base.” Democracy is one 
thing, but a military base half way around the world (i.e., imperialism) 
is quite another.

That Bahrain’s version of the Arab Spring failed to grow into a civil 
war has much to do with US tanks, guns and tear gas, foreign 
mercenaries, and the silence of the US government. The Bahraini 
authorities used the repressive apparatus of the state more vigorously 
than Syrian authorities did, and yet virtually escaped the negative 
attention of responsibility-to-protect advocates, the US State 
Department, “serious” political commentators, and anarchists and many 
(though not all) Trots who, in line with their savaging of Gadhafi, 
preferred to vent their spleen on another official enemy of Western 
imperialism, rather than waste their bile execrating a US ally. What’s 
more, the ‘international community’ did much to fan the flames of the 
Syrian rebellion, linking up once again with their old friends Al-Qaeda 
and the Muslim Brothers to destabilize yet another left nationalist 
secular regime, whose devotion to sovereignty and self-management was an 
affront to Wall Street. [4] Without naming him specifically, Assad says 
Khalifa is among the leaders who stand in relation to the United States, 
France and Britain as “puppets and dummies [who] do their bidding and 
serve their interests without question.”

*Anti-imperialism

*If Khalifa is the model of the Arab dictator Washington embraces, Assad 
fits the matrix of the Arab leader whose insistence on independence rubs 
the US State Department the wrong way. “The primary aim of the West,” 
Assad says, “is to ensure that they have ‘loyal’ governments at their 
disposal…which facilitate the exploitation and consumption of a 
country’s national resources.” Khalifa comes to mind.

In contrast, Assad insists that a “country like Syria is not by any 
means a satellite state to the West.” It hasn’t turned over its 
territory to US military bases, nor made over its economy to accommodate 
Western investors, banks and corporations. “Syria,” he says, “is an 
independent state working for the interests of its people, rather than 
making the Syrian people work for the interests of the West.”

It’s not his attitude to multi-party democracy or the actions of Syria’s 
security forces that have aroused Western enmity, asserts Assad, but his 
insistence on steering an independent course for Syria. “It is only 
normal that they would not want us to play a role (in managing our own 
affairs), preferring instead a puppet government serving their interests 
and creating projects that would benefit their peoples and economies.” 
Normal or not, the Syrian president says, “We have consistently rejected 
this. We will always be independent and free,” adding that the United 
States and its satellites are using the conflict in Syria “to get rid of 
Syriathis insubordinate state, and replace the president with a ‘yes’ man.”

*Foreign agenda

*Assad challenges the characterization of the conflict as a civil war. 
The rebel side, he points out, is overwhelmingly dominated by foreign 
jihadists and foreign-based opposition elements (heavily dominated by 
the Muslim Brothers) backed by hostile imperialist powers. Some of 
Assad’s opponents, he observes, “are far from autonomous independent 
decision makers,” receiving money, weapons, logistical support and 
intelligence from foreign powers. “Their decisions,” he says, “are not 
self-governing.”

The conflict is more aptly characterized as a predatory war on Syrian 
sovereignty carried out by Western powers and their reactionary Arab 
satellite states using radical Islamists to topple Assad’s government 
(but who will not be allowed to take power) “to impose a puppet 
government loyal to them which (will) ardently implement their 
policies.” These policies would almost certainly involve Damascus 
endorsing the Zionist conquest of Palestine as legitimate (i.e., 
recognizing Israel), as well as opening the country to the US military 
and turning over Syrian markets, labor and resources to exploitation by 
Western investors, banks and corporations on terms favourable to Western 
capital and unfavourable to Syrians.

*Russia and Iran

*Criticism of the intervention of a number of reactionary Arab states in 
the conflict, and the participation of Western imperialist powers, is 
often countered by pointing to Russia’s and Iran’s role in furnishing 
Syria with weapons. Assad argues that intervention of the side of the 
jihadists (‘terrorists’ in his vocabulary) is unlawful and illegitimate. 
By furnishing rebels with arms, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the 
United States “meddle in Syria’s internal affairs” Assad says, “which is 
a flagrant violation of international law and our national sovereignty.” 
On the other hand, Russia and Iran, which have supplied Syria with arms, 
have engaged in lawful trade with Syria, and have not infringed its 
independence.

*Hezbollah

*According to Assad, Hezbollah has been active in towns on the border 
with Lebanon, but its involvement in the Syrian conflict has, otherwise, 
been limited. “There are no brigades (of Hezbollah fighters in Syria.) 
They have sent fighters who have aided the Syrian army 
<http://www.surfcanyon.com/search?f=sls&q=army&p=wtigck> in cleaning 
areas on the Lebanese borders that were infiltrated with terrorists.”

Assad points out that if Hezbollah’s assistance was needed, he would 
have asked for deployment of the resistance organization’s fighters to 
Damascus and Aleppo which are “more important than al-Quseir,” the 
border town that was cleared of rebel fighters with Hezbollah’s help.

Stories about Hezbollah fighters pouring over the border to prop up the 
Syrian government are a “frenzy…to reflect an image of Hezbollah as the 
main fighting force” in order “to provoke Western and international 
public opinion,” Assad says. The aim, he continues, is to create “this 
notion that Hezbollah and Iran are also fighting in Syria as a 
counterweight” to the “presence of foreign jihadists” in Syria.

*Democracy?

*The Assad government has implemented a number of reforms in response to 
the uprising.

First, it cancelled the long-standing abridgment of civil liberties that 
had been authorized by the emergency law. This law, invoked because 
Syria is in a technical state of war with Israel, gave Damascus powers 
it needed to safeguard the security of the state in wartime. Many 
Syrians, however, chaffed at the law, and regarded it as unduly 
restrictive. Bowing to popular pressure, the security measures were 
suspended.

Second, the government proposed a new constitution to accommodate 
protesters’ demands to strip the Ba’ath Party of its lead role in Syrian 
society. The constitution was put to a referendum and ratified. 
Additionally, the presidency would be open to anyone meeting basic 
residency, age and citizenship requirements. Presidential elections 
would be held by secret vote every seven years under a system of 
universal suffrage, with the next election scheduled for 2014. “I don’t 
know if (US secretary of state) Kerry or others like him have a mandate 
from the Syrian people to speak on their behalf as to who stays and who 
leaves,” Assad observes, noting that Syrians themselves can decide 
whether he stays or leaves when they go to the polls next year.

Despite Assad’s lifting the emergency law and amending the constitution 
to accommodate demands for a multi-party electoral democracy, the 
conflict continues. Instead of accepting these changes, the rebels 
summarily rejected them. Washington, London and Paris also dismissed 
Assad’s concessions, denigrating them as “meaningless,” without 
explanation. [5] Given the immediate and total rejection of the reforms, 
Assad can hardly be blamed for concluding that “democracy was not the 
driving force of the revolt.”

Elaborating, he notes:

    It was seemingly apparent at the beginning that demands were for
    reforms. It was utilized to appear as if the crisis was a matter of
    political reform. Indeed, we pursued a policy of wide scale reforms
    from changing the constitution to many of the legislations and laws,
    including lifting the state of emergency law, and embarking on a
    national dialogue with all political opposition groups. It was
    striking that with every step we took in the reform process, the
    level of terrorism escalated.

The reality that the armed rebellion is dominated by Islamists [6] also 
militates against the conclusion that thirst for democracy lies at its 
core. Many radical Islamists reject democracy because they see it as a 
system for creating man-made laws and, as a corollary, for rejecting 
God’s law. Reportedly hundreds of jihadists [7]members of a sort of 
Islamist Internationalhave travelled from abroad to fight for a 
Levantine society in which God’s law, and not that of men and women, 
rules. Assad asks, “What interest does an internationally listed 
terrorist from Chechnya or Afghanistan have with the internal political 
reform process in Syria?” Or in democracy?

Good terrorists and bad terrorists

Syria’s jihadists have resorted to terrorist tactics, and appear to have 
little fear that they will ever be held to account for these or other 
war crimes. They are not mistaken. Their summary executions of 
prisoners, indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, terrorist car 
bombings, rapes, torture, hostage taking and pillagedocumented by the 
UN human rights commission [8]will very likely be swept into a dark, 
murky corner, to be forgotten and never acted upon, while imperialist 
powers use their sway over international courts to shine a bright line 
upon war crimes committed by Syrian forces. While their ranks include 
the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra front, the jihadists have been depicted as 
heroes by Western governments and their media stenographers, a “good 
Al-Qaeda,” says Assad. Cat’s paws of the West, radical Islamists are 
good terrorists when they fight to bring down independent governments, 
like the leftist pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, and the 
anti-imperialist governments in Libya and Syria, but are bad terrorists 
when they attack the US homeland and threaten to take power in Mali.

Chemical weapons

Ben Rhodes, the US deputy national security advisor, announced that 
Syrian forces have “used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent 
sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the 
last year” killing “100 to 150 people.” [9]

Assad says the White House’s claim doesn’t add 
<http://www.surfcanyon.com/search?f=sls&q=add&p=wtigck> up. The point of 
using nerve gas, a weapon of mass destruction, is to kill “thousands of 
people at one given time.” The 150 people Washington says Syrian forces 
took 365 days to kill with chemical weapons could have been easily 
killed in one day using conventional weapons.

Why, then, wonders Assad, would the Syrian army use a weapon of mass 
destruction sub-optimally to kill a limited number of rebels when in a 
year it could kill hundreds of times more with rifles, tanks and 
artillery? “It is counterintuitive,” says the Syrian president, “to use 
chemical weapons to create a death toll that you could potentially reach 
by using conventional weapons.”

There is some evidence pointing to the use of chemical weapons by the 
rebels. Carla Del Ponte, a member of the United Nations Independent 
Commission of Inquiry on Syriaa body created by the UN Human Rights 
Council to investigate alleged violations of human rights law in 
Syriasays that the commission has “concrete suspicions” of the use of 
sarin gas by the rebels” but no evidence government forces have used 
them. [10]

Assad says he asked the United Nations to launch a formal investigation 
into suspected use of chemical weapons by rebel forces in Aleppo, but 
that the UN demanded unconditional access to the country. If Assad 
acceded to the demand, the inspection regime could be used as a cover to 
gather military intelligence for use against Syrian forces. “We are a 
sovereign state; we have an army and all matters considered classified 
will never be accessible neither to the UN, nor Britain, nor France,” 
says Assad. If he rejected the demand, it could be saidas it indeed it 
was by the White House [11]that the ‘international community’ had been 
prevented by Damascus from undertaking a comprehensive investigation, 
thereby releasing the UN from any obligation to investigate the use of 
chemical weapons by the jihadists. At the same time, by rejecting the 
UN’s demand, the Syrian government would create the impression it had 
something to hide. This could be countered by Damascus explaining its 
reasons for turning down the UN conditions, but the Western media give 
little time to the Syrian perspective, preferring saturation coverage of 
the pronouncements of Western officials. In terms of Western public 
opinion, whatever US officials say about Syria is decisive. Whatever 
Syrian officials say is drowned out, if presented at all.

It should be noted that no permanent member of the UN Security Council, 
including the United States and Britainindeed, no country of any 
standingwould willingly grant an outside organization or country 
unrestricted access to its military and government facilities. The 
reasons for denying UN inspectors untrammelled access to Syria are all 
the stronger in Syria’s case, given that major players on the Security 
Council are overtly backing the rebels, and could be expected to try to 
use UN inspectorsas indeed the US did in Iraqto gather military 
intelligence to be used against the host country.

It would also do well to remember that the United States evinced no 
interest in investigating the use of chemical weapons by the rebels, 
immediately dismissing the allegations as unfounded. Following up on the 
allegations wasn’t an option.

Finally, Assad points out that the chemical weapons charges call to mind 
the ‘sexed up’ WMD evidence used by the United States and Britain as a 
pretext to invade and conquer Iraq: “It is common knowledge” he says, 
“that Western administrations lie continuously and manufacture stories 
as a pretext for war.”

Conclusion

The purpose of the foregoing is to offer a glimpse into the conflict in 
Syria from the other side, a side which the Western media are 
institutionally incapable of presenting, except in passing, and only if 
overwhelmed by the competing imperialist narrative.

Assad’s analysis and values are very much in the anti-imperialist vein. 
He speaks of Western powers seeking “dummies” and “yes men” who will 
pursue policies that are favourable to the West. The United States does 
indeed maintain a collection of “yes men” in the Middle East. Khalifa, 
the royal dictator of Bahrain, who used US tanks, guns, tear gas and 
Saudi mercenaries to crush a popular rebellion, is a model Arab “yes 
man” and a dictator, as many of Washington’s “yes men” are, and have 
always been.

Assad, in contrast, has none of Khalifa’s readiness to kowtow to an 
imperialist master. Instead, his government’s insistence on working for 
the interests of Syrians, rather than making Syrians work for the 
interests of the West, has provoked the hostility of the United States, 
France and Britain, and their determination to overthrow his government. 
That Assad’s commitment to local interests goes beyond rhetoric is clear 
in the character of Syria’s economic policy. It features the state-owned 
enterprises 
<http://www.surfcanyon.com/search?f=sls&q=enterprises&p=wtigck>, 
tariffs, subsidies to domestic firms, and restrictions on foreign 
investment that Wall Street and its State Department handmaiden 
vehemently oppose for restricting the profit-making opportunities of 
wealthy US investors, bankers and corporations [12]. On foreign policy, 
Syria has steered a course sensitive to local interests, refusing to 
abandon the Arab national project, whose success would threaten US 
domination of the Middle East, while allying with Iran and Hezbollah in 
a resistance (to US imperialism) front.

For his refusal to become their “puppet,” the United States and its 
imperialist allies intend to topple Assad through accustomed means: an 
opportunistic alliance with radical Islamists who hate Assad as much as 
Washington does, though for reasons of religion rather than economics 
and imperialism.

1. Syria’s post-colonial history is punctuated by Islamist uprisings. 
The Muslim Brotherhood organized riots against the government in 1964, 
1965, 1967 and 1969. It called for a Jihad against then president Hafiz 
al-Assad, the current president’s father, denigrating him as “the enemy 
of Allah.” 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. Islamists have since remained a perennial 
source of instability in Syria and the government has been on continual 
guard against “a resurgence of Sunni Islamic fundamentalists,” according 
to the US Library of Congress Country Study of 
Syria.http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sytoc.html 
<http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sytoc.html>
2. “Officers fire on crowd as Syria protests grow,” The New York Times, 
March 20, 2011.
3. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Bahrain pulls a Qaddafi”, The New York Times, 
March 16, 2011.
4. For the West’s opportunistic alliances with political Islam see Mark 
Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, 
Serpent’s Tail, 2011.
5. David M. Herszenhorn, “For Syria, Reliant on Russia for weapons and 
food, old bonds run deep”, The New York Times, February 18, 2012.
6. Adam Entous, “White House readies new aid for Syrian rebels”, The 
Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2013; Anne Barnard, “Syria campaigns to 
persuade U.S. to change sides”, The New York Times, April 24, 2013; 3. 
Gerald F. Seib, “The risks holding back Obama on Syria”, The Wall Street 
journal, May 6, 2013.
7. According to Russian president Vladimir Putin “at least 600 Russians 
and Europeans are fighting alongside the opposition.” “Putin: President 
al-Assad confronts foreign gunmen, not Syrian people,” Syrian Arab News 
Agency, June 22, 2013.
8. Damien Mcelroy, “Syrian rebels face war crime accusation”, The Ottawa 
Citizen, August 11, 2012; Sam Dagher and Nour Malas, “Lebanon militia 
kidnaps Syrians”, The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2012; Hwaida Saad 
and Nick Cumming-Bruce, “Civilian attacks rise in Syria, U.N. says”, The 
New York Times, September 17, 2012; Stacy Meichtry, “Sarin detected in 
samples from Syria, France says”, The Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2013; 
Sam Dagher, “Violence spirals as Assad gains”, The Wall Street Journal, 
June 10, 2013.
9. Statement by Ben Rhodes, the US deputy national security advisor for 
strategic communications, on chemical weapons. The Guardian (UK), June 
13, 2013.
10. “UN: ‘Strong suspicions’ that Syrian rebels have used sarin nerve 
gas,” Euronews, May 6, 2013; “UN’s Del Ponte says evidence Syria rebels 
‘used sarin’”, BBC 
<http://www.surfcanyon.com/search?f=sls&q=BBC&p=wtigck> News, May 6, 2013.
11. Rhodes.
12. For Syria’s economic policies and the US ruling class reaction to 
them see the Syria sections of the Heritage Foundation’s Index of 
Economic Freedom http://www.heritage.org/index/country/syria and the CIA 
Factbookhttps 
<https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sy.html> 
://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sy.html 
<https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sy.html> .

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