I Yearn for the Fall of Assad as Well as That of His Enemy

On 15th August 2021, when the Kabul US-puppet regime fell, I expressed relief that US imperialism was defeated and, simultaneously, horror at what the women of Afghanistan were about to suffer in the hands of the jihadist Taliban.

Immediately, the US liberal-imperialist lobby attacked me for… celebrating the Taliban victory. You see, for imperialism’s stooges, if you do not support US imperialism you must be a supporter of jihadists who opposed US imperialism. The imperialist mindset refuses to see the obvious: we had a duty to oppose, with equal fervour, both US imperialism and the jihadists that US imperialism strengthened through its brutality. They could not see that a US imperialist invasion only strengthened the jihadists who wanted to place the women of Afghanistan under gender apartheid.

Last Sunday, Assad’s regime collapsed and the jihadists stormed Damascus. Again, I expressed relief that a tyrnannical regime had fallen, adding:  “Syrians have suffered enough. The task now is to ensure they do not suffer more, as the Iraqis and the Libyans did after the fall of their dictators. To that end, foreign powers, Western and non-Western, must also be kept at bay.”

Immediately, I was (as in the case of the fall of Kabul) attacked for celebrating the… jihadist victory – this time by opponents of US-imperialism. For them, if you did not support Assad you must have been a supporter of the jihadists who opposed Assad. Same logic as that of US imperialism’s cheerleaders: “If you are not with us you are against us”. My anti-imperialist detractors could not see that the Assad regime, because of its tyrannical ways, only strengthened the jihadists who overthrew Assad.

My message to anti-imperialists who think that supporting tyrannical figures like Assad (or, before him, Saddam) because he is the enemy of our imperialist enemy is: Think again! To fight imperialism and win in the long run, we must win the hearts and minds of people. And we cannot do this by supporting tyrants, whom the people loathe, just because they are enemies of our enemies.

But was Iraq not better off, some ask, before Saddam was overthrown by the US army? Of course it was. Was Libya not better off before the West took out Qaddafi? Of course it was. Is Syria not running the risk of becoming an even worse bloodbath after Assad’s fall, just as Iraq and Libya were? Of course it does. But, this is no reason to treat Saddam, Qaddafi or Assad as the ‘solution’, as the antidote to imperialism. Their tyrannical regimes alienate their own people and, in the end, crumble – thus proving incapable of resisting imperialism. That they may be, for a while, the enemy of the chief imperialist, the US, does not make them a friend of anti-imperialists.

In short, anti-imperialism will only succeed if anti-imperialists maintain some minimum ethical standards. That’s our greatest weapon, not AK47s or anti-aircraft missiles.

A bullet-riddled portrait of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad adorns Hama’s municipality following the city’s capture by rebel forces on December 6, 2024

For if we stick to minimum ethical standards we can win over the masses worldwide who appreciate a principled humanist stance. We can also expose more readily the duplicity of the Western media who went, without blushing, from (a) justifying the two-decade-long occupation of Afghanistan as essential in the fight to prevent the jihadists from taking Kabul to (b) celebrating the take over of Damascus by the… jihadists!

Alas, if we don’t maintain minimum ethical standards, and instead support tyrants who are opposed to our enemies, our opposition to the enemy’s favourite tyrants will sound as hypocritical as the Western press. And that, believe me, would be the greatest gift to the Western press, to imperialism, to tynanny. For, at that point, it would be reduced simply to a contest between their “tyrants” and our “tyrants”.

To conclude, there is nothing confusing about condemning both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq. Both Milosevic and NATO’s bombing of Serb civilians. Both the Taliban and the US invasion of Afghanistan. Both Assad’s regime and the US-backed jihadists that overthrew him. Not only is there no contradiction but it is the only right and effective way to be anti-imperialist.

Turning to what really matters today, what we now have after the fall of Assad is a Western press waxing lyrical about the new Syria being born without saying a word about the US and Israeli bombs falling from the sky all over the new Syria.

Also, have you noticed that no one is talking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza? This is the greatest gift to Netanyahu, his US minders and their EU genocide cheerleaders.

So, comrades, let us maintain minimum ethical standards in combating imperialism. And let’s keep talking Palestine!