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    Gowans: The United States has produced very few anti-imperialists. Noam Chomsky is not among them. Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on November 6, 2019, 2:46 pm, in reply to "Stephen Gowans: Chomsky and Achcar provide a service to the US"

    (quote)
    The high-profile anarchist, former champion of international law, and
    one-time outspoken critic of wars of aggression, supports the
    uninterrupted invasion of Syria by US forces, despite the fact that
    the invasion is illegal and contravenes the international law to which
    he had so frequently sung paeans.

    But the principles he once upheld appear to have been sacrificed to
    the higher goal of defending the anarchist-inspired YPG, the Kurdish
    group which had sought and received support from Washington to
    establish a Kurdish mini-state in Syria in return for acting as a
    Pentagon asset in the US war on the Arab nationalist government in
    Damascus. In this, the YPG recapitulated the practice of political
    Zionism, offering to act as muscle in the Levant in exchange for
    imperialist sponsorship of its own political aspirations. For Chomsky,
    the desired end-state - what he would like the political Left to rally
    in support of - is the restoration of the status-quo ante, namely,
    robust US support for a Kurd mini-state in Syria.

    Washington's illegal military intervention has been the guarantor of
    the YPG's aspirations to create a state on approximately one-third of
    Syrian territory. A YPG state east of the Euphrates would be an asset
    to the US imperialist project of expanding Washington's already
    considerable influence in the Middle East. A Kurd-dominated state
    under the leadership of the YPG would function as what some have
    called a second Israel. As Domenico Losurdo put it in a 2018
    interview,
    "In the Middle East, we have the attempted creation of a new
    Israel. Israel was an enclave against the Arab World, and now the US
    and Israel are trying to realize something similar with the
    Kurds. That doesn't mean to say that the Kurds don't have rights and
    that they haven't been oppressed for a long time, but now there's the
    danger of them becoming the instruments of American imperialism and
    Zionism. This is the danger - this the situation, unfortunately.
    " [3]

    To make the US invasion palatable to the political Left, Chomsky
    misrepresents the US aggression as small-scale and guided by lofty
    motives. "A small US contingent with the sole mission of deterring a
    planned Turkish invasion," he says, 'is not imperialism." But the
    occupation is neither small, nor guided by a mission limited to
    deterring a planned Turkish invasion. Either Chomsky's grasp of the
    file is weak, or he's not above engaging in a spot of sophistry.

    Last year, the Pentagon officially admitted to having 2,000 troops in
    Syria [4] but a top US general put the number higher, 4,000. [5] But
    even that figure was, according to the Pentagon, an "artificial
    construct," [6] that is, a deliberate undercount. On top of the
    infantry, artillery, and forward air controllers the Pentagon
    officially acknowledges as deployed to Syria, there is an additional
    number of uncounted Special Operations personnel, as well as untallied
    troops assigned to classified missions and "an unspecified number of
    contractors" i.e., mercenaries. Additionally, combat aircrews are not
    included, even though US airpower is critical to the occupation. [7]
    There are, therefore, many more times the officially acknowledged
    number of US troops enforcing an occupation of parts of Syria. Last
    year, US invasion forces in Syria (minus aircrew located nearby)
    operated out of 10 bases in the country, including "a sprawling
    facility with a long runway, hangars, barracks and fuel depots." [8]

    In addition to US military advisers, Army Rangers, artillery, Special
    Operations forces, satellite-guided rockets and Apache attack
    helicopters [9], the United States deployed US diplomats to create
    government and administrative structures to supersede the legitimate
    government of the Syrian Arab Republic. [10]

    "The idea in US policy circles" was to create "a soft partition" of
    Syria between the United States and Russia along the Euphrates, "as it
    was among the Elbe [in Germany] at the end of the Second World War."
    [11]

    During the war on ISIS, US military planning called for YPG fighters
    under US supervision to push south along the Euphrates River to seize
    Syria's oil-and gas-rich territory, [12] located within traditionally
    Arab territory. While the Syrian Arab Army and its allies focused on
    liberating cities from Islamic State, the YPG, under US direction,
    went "after the strategic oil and gas fields," [13] holding these on
    behalf of the US government. The US president's recent boast that "we
    have secured the oil" [14] was an announcement of a longstanding fait
    accompli.

    The United States has robbed Syria of "two of the largest oil and gas
    fields in Deir Ezzour", including the al-Omar oil field, Syria's
    largest. [15] In 2017, the United States plundered Syria of "a gas
    field and plant known in Syria as the Conoco gas plant" (though its
    affiliation with Conoco is historical; the plant was acquired by the
    Syrian Gas Company in 2005.) [16] Russia observed that "the real aim"
    of the US forces' (incontestably denominated) "illegal" presence in
    Syria has been "the seizure and retention of economic assets that only
    belong to the Syrian Arab Republic." [17] The point is beyond dispute:
    The United States has stolen resources vital to the republic's
    reconstruction, using the YPG to carry out the crime (this from a
    country which proclaims property rights to be humanity's highest
    value.)

    Joshua Landis, a University of Oklahoma professor who specializes in
    Syria, has argued that by "controlling half of Syria's energy
    resources...the US [is] able to keep Syria poor and under-resourced."
    [18] Bereft of its petroleum resources, and deprived of its best
    farmland, Syria is hard-pressed to recover from a war that has left it
    in ruins.

    To sum up, the notion that the US occupation is small-scale is
    misleading. The Pentagon acknowledges that it deliberately undercounts
    the size of its contingent in Syria. But even if there are as few US
    boots on the ground in Syria as the US military is prepared to
    acknowledge, that still wouldn't make the US intervention trivial.

    US boots on the ground are only one part of the occupation. Not
    counted are the tens of thousands of YPG fighters who operate under
    the supervision of US ground forces, acting as the tip of the US
    spear. These troops, it should be recalled, acted as muscle for hire
    to seize and secure farmland and oil wells in a campaign that even US
    officials acknowledge is illegal. [19]

    Another part of the occupation - completely ignored by Chomsky - is US
    airpower, without which US troops and their YPG-force-multiplier would
    be unable to carry out their crimes of occupation and theft. US
    fighter jets and drones dominate the airspace over the US occupation
    zone. Ignoring the significant role played by the US Air Force grossly
    distorts the scale of the US operation.

    What's more, Chomsky's reference to the scale of the intervention as
    anodyne is misdirection. It is not the size of an intervention that
    makes it imperialist, but its motivations and consequences.

    Additionally, Chomsky completely misrepresents the aim of the US
    occupation. It's mission, amply documented, is to: sabotage Damascus's
    reconstruction efforts by denying access to revenue-generating
    territory; to provide Washington with leverage to influence the
    outcome of any future political settlement; and to block a land route
    over which military assets can easily flow from Tehran to its allies
    Syria and Hezbollah. [20] In other words, the goal of the occupation
    is to impose the US will on Syria - a textbook definition of
    imperialism.

    The idea that it is within the realm of possibility for Washington to
    deploy forces to Syria with the sole mission of deterring aggression
    is naïveté on a grand scale, and entirely at odds with the history and
    mechanisms of US foreign policy. Moreover, it ignores the reality that
    the armed US invasion and occupation of Syrian territory is an
    aggression itself. If a man who has been called the principal critic
    of US foreign policy can genuinely hold these views, then Martin
    Green's contention that "Imperialism has penetrated the fabric of our
    culture, and infected our imagination, more deeply than we usually
    think," is surely beyond dispute.

    The US occupation, then, is more substantial than Chomsky alleges; it
    is an aggression under international law, not to say under any
    reasonable definition; the claim is untenable that the sole motivation
    is to deter Turkish aggression; and the US project in Syria is
    imperialist. All the same, one could still argue that US troops should
    not be withdrawn because their presence protects the YPG and the
    foundations of the mini-state is has built. If so, one has accepted
    the YPG's and political Zionism's argument that it is legitimate to
    rent oneself out as the tool of an empire in order to achieve one's
    own narrow aims, even if it is at the expense of the right of others
    to be free from domination and exploitation.
    (/quote)
    -- https://gowans.blog/2019/11/03/the-united-states-has-produced-very-few-anti-imperialists-noam-chomsky-isnt-among-them/

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