The anti-war left's concerns over Syria are understandable, but ill-founded

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/26/antiwar-left-syria-uprising

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The lesson of the miraculous Arab spring is that people in the Middle East are capable of liberating themselves sans bombardment. Who fondly remembers Firdos Square today? And how does that compare to the crowds in Tahrir Square last January?

But things are never that simple. The US found a way to intervene in the revolution in Libya by forging an alliance with former regime elements to hijack the uprising, and piloting its allies to power. The racist violence that followed, with the ethnic cleansing of black Libyans and migrants, was a terrible conclusion to a promising uprising.

Anti-war activists are justly suspicious of any trace of US involvement in the region's uprisings. Sami Ramadani rightly pointed out that US military intervention would be disastrous for the country.

However, there is a more ambiguous situation in Syria, which is posing a real dilemma for the anti-war movement. Syria has long been a target of US aggression, and reports have indicated attempts by the CIA and the Gulf states to co-opt the leadership of the opposition. The fear is that, as in Libya, the US and its allies will find a way to convert the uprising into a proxy war and will win by promoting civil war. This should be opposed. This is the dilemma: how to support a democratic resistance movement without giving a carte blanche to those who want to hijack it?

Ramadani's argument is a case in point. As an ally of the democratic and left forces in Syria, he argues that the dominant groups – the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian National Council (SNC) – are effectively "pro-intervention factions … founded in and logistically backed by Nato member Turkey". In an article for the Labour Left Briefing, he added that "the sacrifices of the Syrian people have been hijacked by Nato and the Saudi-Qatari dictators". Thus, he and many others look to a negotiated settlement to avoid civil war driven by external forces.

The caution is thoroughly understandable, but the analysis is mistaken. There is a tendency which Robin Yassin-Kassab has identified as "blanket-thinking", which is to take a quality of an element within a given organisation and treat it as characteristic of the situation as a whole. Thus, it is true that the leadership of the SNC is largely composed of exiles and has been pro-intervention, but the SNC is a very loose umbrella organisation and its relationship to the grassroots Local Co-ordination Committees (LCCs) is often strained. The LCCs have opposed intervention. Likewise, it is true that the leadership of the FSA is based in Turkey, but the militias loosely linked to this leadership developed organically within Syria in response to the regime's aggression, and are too diverse and decentralised to be a proxy army.

Nor is it clear that other forces, such as the National Co-ordinating Committee (NCC), a left-nationalist coalition with a strongly anti-imperialist position, have been marginalised. There has certainly been a great deal of difficulty in reconciling the SNC and NCC leaderships. In January, they attempted to coalesce around an agreement that opposed external intervention, but the agreement could not be ratified. However, the NCC remains better rooted in Syrian society and is an important force in the struggle. And the SNC is rapidly losing credibility on the ground due to its reliance on external backers.

One of the major sources of hesitation over the revolt has been its militarisation. The co-ordinating committees have tended to argue against this trend, as it is the ground on which Assad is decidedly stronger. Assad's military crackdowns were, however, inevitably going to produce an armed response. Even if politics, rather than military might, is the deciding factor here, it seems implausible that people can defeat such a regime without being armed.

The outstanding worry is that sectarian forces will come to the fore, and attack minorities. When Islamists bombed Damascus last year, they issued a sectarian statement against the Alawi minority from which the ruling Ba'ath elite hails. But there is no evidence that such forces are dominant: the sectarian Wahabis are a small minority within the struggle. In reality, the regime, by using Alawite militias to attack unarmed groups, is the major sectarian force. The regime has reportedly paid agents provocateurs to shout sectarian slogans at opposition rallies. It has never respected the rights of minorities, least of all Kurds, who are participating in the revolt.

The evidence is that despite attempts at co-optation, this is still very much a popular revolution, and the initiative lies with the citizens organized in the committees and militias. And their victory would be a defeat for everyone who thinks Arabs are incapable of freeing themselves from oppression.