Washington's Long War on Syria by Gowans Stephen

Author:Gowans, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781771861137
Publisher: Baraka Books
Published: 2017-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THE BA’ATHISTS’ ISLAMIC ALLY

There were two officially recognized Islamic states in the Middle East which played key roles in the conflict in Syria. One, Saudi Arabia, an important regional satellite of the United States, was an absolute monarchy. The other, Iran, to which the United States was hostile, was an anti-monarchical state, in which political rule was based on clerical supervision of a representative democracy.

Saudi Arabia, whose royal family was virtually integrated into the U.S. financial elite, cooperated with Washington in defending and promoting the United States’ informal empire. The Islamic Republic of Iran, which was born in opposition to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a U.S.-installed monarch who governed Iran on behalf of U.S. interests, was committed through its constitution to “the complete elimination of imperialism and the prevention of foreign influence.”

The Saudis, who reigned over the holy Muslim sites of Mecca and Medina, had aspirations to lead Sunni Islam, which they pursued in ways that benefited their protector, the United States. In contrast, the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran committed Tehran to “constantly strive to bring about the political, economic and cultural unity of the Islamic world” in order to shed “all forms of domination” by “hegemonist superpowers.”

The Saudis followed a Salafist form of Islam, which prohibited women from driving, sequestered the sexes, and prescribed decapitation, crucifixion, and lapidation as punishment for crime, and recognized such medieval transgressions as sorcery. In Iran, by contrast, women wore chador, but drove and worked with men.

The Saudis were vehemently anti-Shi’a and encouraged anti-Shi’a sentiment, while Iran’s leadership, predominantly Shi’a, was studiously non-sectarian, aiding both Shi’ite and Sunni groups, and also supporting secular movements within the Arab world which opposed foreign domination, such as Syria’s secular Arab nationalists and the Palestinian Marxist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Saudis spent billions of dollars to arm and train Sunni jihadists to overthrow the Ba’athist government in Damascus, while the Iranians provided the Syrian government funds, weapons, military advisors, militia fighters and even some regular army special forces personnel to help repel the U.S.-led war on independent Syria. Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. Special Envoy to Syria, estimated that Iran provided $6 billion per year in military and economic aid to the Syrian republic.1

Among the objectives of the Iranian state, promulgated in its constitution, were “the complete elimination of imperialism and the prevention of foreign influence;” “the attainment of self-sufficiency in scientific, technological, industrial, agricultural and military domains;” and “the planning of a correct and just economic order...in order to create welfare, eliminate poverty, and abolish all forms of deprivation with respect to food, housing, work, health care, and the provision of social insurance for all.” How many constitutions in the world had set the elimination of imperialism as an objective, much less mentioned it? How many committed the state to abolish poverty, food scarcity, inadequate housing, and deprivation in respect of health care? And how many states which officially opposed imperialism and designated the food security, shelter and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.