The militarization of the conflict tended to create dependence by rebel groups on outside forces that supplied weapons as well as money to pay the rebel fighters.
This aid was nowhere near enough to make a military victory over Assad possible, but it did have an influence on the politics of the rebel movement. Aid came from a number of sources, including Turkey and various governments and private sources in the Gulf. While there was some rivalry amongst the various donors, the overall impact was to strengthen the more reactionary sections of the rebel movement at the expense of the more democratic and progressive sections. Turkey favoured groups hostile to the Kurdish-led Rojava revolution, thereby alienating Kurds from the rebellion. Gulf donors generally favoured groups that identified with Sunni Islam, thereby alienating non-Sunni minorities, such as Alawis, Christians and Druze. The result was that Assad retained the support of the religious minorities, if only as the supposedly lesser evil than the Islamist groups. This, combined with support from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, was sufficient to ensure his survival. Chris Slee ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of mkaradjis . <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, 27 November 2020 12:08 AM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [marxmail] Why the Arab Spring Failed I think Anand Gopal, John Reimann, Joseph Green and Louis Proyect are all making excellent points, whatever the differences. The fact that we are analysing a genuine mass revolutionary movement, even if from different perspectives, is a cut above much of the left. Even here on marxmail the other day we had someone use the neo-con/war on terror term “jihadis” to describe the entire Syrian struggle for freedom. Yes, even here on a Marxism list, let alone out there. I think we need to calmly analyse the factors leading to defeat of the Syrian revolution, and there’s no point talking past each other as we all better admit that we don’t know all the answers. While I have little time at the moment to say much, just on the specific point being raised, I’d like to point to this amazing LCC document that was signed by countless FSA units and officers in 2012: “LCC initiates FSA Code of Conduct<https://web.archive.org/web/20200224161514/https:/www.facebook.com/notes/%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%8A%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%AD%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7/new-battalions-sign-the-code-of-conduct/508232342537240>, which many great battalions signed in the past few days: “In light of recent events in Syria. FSA commanders got together and signed the new FSA code of conduct. “The document was initially published by the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs) and underlines the requirement to respect human rights and international humanitarian law including laws pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war.” Full: https://web.archive.org/web/20200224161514/https://razanghazzawi.org/2012/08/15/lcc-new-fsa-battalions-sign-the-code-of-conduct/<https://web.archive.org/web/20200224161514/https:/razanghazzawi.org/2012/08/15/lcc-new-fsa-battalions-sign-the-code-of-conduct/> This shows there certainly were attempts to do what we are suggesting wasn’t done. Was it done to the degree of success we all would like? Almost certainly not. But I’m not sure that is because of either a lack of will by the LCCs, or for that matter by the FSA brigades themselves. Even if they’d all signed on, and effectively came under the theoretical political control of the LCCs, would that have worked in practice? And for how long? Given the conditions of genocidal slaughter within which they were all operating, conditions which none of us can imagine. Of course, these objective conditions were created by the regime’s response to the uprising; scorched earth did not aim only to slaughter and militarily defeat, but above all to make life, and therefore any attempt to build an alternative one, impossible in regions outside regime control. Louis is right that the military angle of the revolution was above all a defensive war; there was never a possibility, in my view, even in 2012, of an outright military victory over the regime. But not having the *defensive* weapons – above all anti-aircraft weapons in a war of aerial slaughter – meant that even the defence of the civilian populations, the children, the schools, the hospitals, the markets, was impossible. Simply to survive, many FSA units whose job it was to protect the liberated regions from the genocidal regime, were forced into corrupt and/or criminal practices to survive. This of course was another, probably intended, result of Assad’s massacre society. Louis says that the defeat of the revolution “was a result of the massive military offensive that could only triumph by outside assistance from Hizbollah, Iranian, Russia intervention, supplemented by Afghan and Iraqi mercenaries. Sometimes you lose not because of bad politics but because you are outgunned.” It is true that you can be simply outgunned; there isn’t always a “crisis of leadership” at fault when the enemy is equipped with warplanes and endless massive weaponry continually supplied and with no-one in the world interested in challenging it. However, the two things are not so separate. By forcing an inherently outgunned population into a military conflict just for survival, the regime not only ensured things like corrupt practices etc, but also ensured that to the extent some coherent politics did enter the fray (within an otherwise politically heterogenious movement for democracy and military survival), it was probably not going to be based on lofty ideals of proletarian solidarity. Not that “jihadis” ever had the kind of weight that our leftist “war on terror” folk imagine out of ignorance, but their mere presence – together with the less political nature of most of purely military struggle for survival – meant that the non-Sunni parts of the Syrian population, along with the more comfortable middle class elements of the big cities – were just not going to join. They may hate Assad, but the revolution did not offer them hope because in these conditions it couldn’t. They rose up for democracy, but ended up defending the ruins of towns and cities being daily bombed, besieged, starved and destroyed. On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 11:27 PM Louis Proyect <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 11/26/20 7:21 AM, John Reimann wrote: The fact is that as Leila al Shami agreed (in a personal communication with me), there was no systematic attempt to integrate the rebelling troops into the LCC's, meaning into the revolution itself. Failing that, it would have been inevitable that the officers who came over would have maintained control over their troops. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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