by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
15 February 2012
All quotes from, ‘‘Assad must go to save Syria from intervention’, RT 15 February 2012.
Today, I see that the well known ‘revolutionary’ Tariq Ali is telling that,
“He [Assad] has to be pushed out,” Tariq Ali insists, for which “the Syrian people are doing their best”.
Given that all reports indicate that the country is seriously divided over the Assad regime, perhaps without foreign interference the Syrian people could decide for themselves without professional revolutionaries doing it for them. Frankly I’m outraged more than depressed by this.
The entire piece is filled with suppositions and wishful thinking about the nature of the ‘uprising’. So for example Ali tells us that.
“He [Ali] believes that once Assad falls, the new government will keep good relations with Iran, because this will be in the interest of the new democratic government.”
What ‘new democratic government’?
In a classic case of backing a self-fulfilling prophecy, Ali says
“If the Assad clan refuses to relinquish their stronghold on the country, sooner or later something disastrous will happen,” Tariq Ali predicts, threatening a foreign intervention and recalling the inglorious deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi lynched by mobs inspired by the west.”
Sooner or later? So what’s happening now is not a disaster?
“That is the future that stares them in the face, there is no other future,” Tariq Ali said.”
Talk about throwing in the towel. So why don’t we all roll over and play dead before we actually are?
“He expressed hope that all the most influential parties, like Russia, China, Iran and even Hezbollah must realize that it is time for President Assad to go and to do so, no peacekeeping force is needed.”
So Tariq Ali thinks it’s time for Assad to go. Once more the Western ‘left’ reveals its true colours. Who needs enemies with a friend like this?
As with Libya this not about defending Assad’s regime but about Imperial strategy. It’s about getting rid of the last obstacle to NATO’s expansion eastward and crushing resistance in the Arab world. If Tariq Ali can’t see this, then what has he been doing for the last forty years (except that is, making a living out of being a professional lefty)? As ever it’s the Western intelligentsia telling the rest of the world what to do and how to do it. Shame on you Ali.
see
Syria: CIA-MI6 Intel Ops and Sabotage by Felicity Arbuthnot
Rick Rozoff: Syria Crisis: UN Hijacked By U.S. And NATO
Rick Rozoff: Obama’s attitude main threat to world peace
Sibel Edmonds and Pepe Escobar: Back Story on Syria, interviewed by Peter B. Collins
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It is good that someone has exposed the darling of Counterpunch and many other Western “leftist” web sites and publications, for what he really is and has been all along. However, there should be no surprise in Tariq Ali’s position on Syria.
He is a thoroughly Westernized British citizen of Pakistani origin, has been a Trotskyite, and, like most Trotskyites, anarchists, and ultra-leftists, was attacking the former USSR with ignorant, slanderous, empty, and subjective generalities and accusations, without showing any knowledge of the concrete political economy of the former USSR. Obviously these qualities put him on the same wave lengths with a large number of Western “leftists”. In general, his writings lack depth and objectivity, and tend to be superficial, demagogic, and parasitic. However, a large part of the Western “leftist” media seems to prefer such writers and speakers.
Another darling of the Znet and other “leftist” media has been Pervez Hoodbhoy, another Pakistani “leftist intellectual”, who has been vilifying the anti-imperialist resistance forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and pleading for their defeat by the US, NATO, and Pakistani militaries.
Both of these “leftist intellectuals” had completely underestimated the determination, strength, resilience, anti-imperialist and anti-occupation spirit, and guerrilla warfare competence and efficiency of the resistance forces, and were ridiculing, slandering, and mocking them for thinking and acting as if they could confront and take on such incomparably superior and high-tech military forces, as those of the US and NATO. Initially, when the Afghan resistance forces made a strategic retreat, in face of the overwhelming conventional forces of US and Western imperialism, they, like so many others, thought that Afghan resistance was crushed and finished. Obviously they neither knew the Afghan character nor the nature of guerrilla warfare and Afghans’ long historical experience in its strategy and tactics. On the other hand, the great and unmatchable Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, who had lead the Vietnamese resistance forces to victory, against the incomparably superior forces of French and American imperialisms, had predicted that US invaders will lose both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghan resistance forces came roaring back and are now much more powerful, successful, and popular than before their strategic retreat.
Now that the whole world can see the strength, resilience, and successes of the efficient applications of guerrilla warfare strategy and tactics of the Afghan and Pakistan anti-imperialist and anti-occupation resistance forces, Tariq Ali has started to parasitize and latch on to those, without explaining such a drastic trapeze.
Like so many other Western “leftists”, his positions are the result of a cunning and clever mind, attempting to maintain a balance between respectability, acceptability, and selling himself and his writings, on the one hand, and a subjective, manipulative, and parasitic “leftism”, on the other. It is a refection of the quality of mass psychology of the left and leftist media in the West that only such Westernized Third World people are allowed publicity.
Articles in support of the Afghan and Pakistan anti-imperialist resistance are almost non-existent in the “leftist” literature of the West. This author’s article, with the following web link, seems to be an exception in this regard.
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