NZ troops out of the Middle East! End the War of Terror!

Members of the Leon Sedov Brigade in Syria

The Middle-East today is a morass of bloody revolution and counter-revolution. Despite the growing rivalry between the US-led and China-led blocs, they collaborate as a ‘lesser evil’ against the ‘greater-evil’ of the Arab Revolution in the name of the ‘war on terror’. The nominal target is the IS, a creation of the US, but the real target is the Arab Revolution. The NACTs and Labour are both sucked into this. NACTs want to be in the US “Anglo-American Club”, Labour doesn’t want to oppose the war, just NZ sacrificing lives. Only an Arab socialist revolution can end the US led War of Terror. 

On the so-called ‘left’ there is the bullshit that ISIS are Islamic fascists and so NZ should fight that war like NZ workers went to fight the Spanish fascists in the civil war in the 1930s. The irony is that this ‘left’ doesn't see that NZ was part of the British Empire then and Britain did all it could to prevent fighters joining that war. Just as the Key client state of the US does all it can to prevent NZ workers joining the revolutionary side of the Syrian civil war.

In Spain a bourgeois democratic republic was attacked by a fascist army. Volunteers from the Western left of all shades joined the ranks of the republican army to defend it against the fascists. Some mistakenly joined the bourgeois Spanish regimes in Madrid and Barcelona rather than forming a militia independent of these regimes. The Stalinists did so because they feared an independent working class at a time when they were in alliances with the Western democracies against fascism. In Barcelona the anarchist leaders betrayed their rank and file by joining the bourgeois regime also.

The Spanish civil war was lost because the fascists were armed by Italy and Germany while the republic was dis-armed by the ‘democracies’. They did all in their power to prevent the arming of the republic.The only way that this war could have been won, was the formation of popular councils and militias independent of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists, backed by massive workers brigades from all over the world, that would have begun a revolutionary war to smash fascism right across Europe.

In Syria we have a fascist dictator, Bashar Assad, opposed by a popular democratic revolution. Some in the leadership of that revolution, the FSA for example, want to form a bourgeois republic as an alternative to Assad. But many revolutionary fighters reject these bourgeois leaders as aligned to one or other imperialist powers. There are numerous militias that are locally organised and loosely coordinated so effectively that they have resisted Assad despite being ‘dis-armed’ by the ‘democracies’, so that without SAMs Assad’s planes dominate.

Moreover, because most of the Western left has defended Assad and parroted his line that he is being attacked by foreign terrorists (an irony since he has mercenaries from many countries including the Iranian Republican Guards) funded by the Saudis, Turkey, the CIA, you name it. Assad also released from his jails many who went on to form the ISIS in Syria.

Because of this reactionary campaign in the West the revolution and its democratic objectives has been largely ignored, and unlike Spain there has been no massive flood of left wing volunteers to join the militias.

Yet these popular militias that organised Local Coordination Committees that are run on a democratic basis have been able to survive for four years against Assad, and in the last 2 years against the jihadists armed by the West and its local allies. Unlike the Kurd PYG that has fought to defend Rojava from the IS with the benefit of US etc air support, the Syrian revolutionaries have been starved of military support by the US bloc (including NZ) supported by the Western left, except for a few notable exceptions.

One is the Leon Sedov Brigade made up of Trotskyists that still exists as an example how to organise independently of the FSA bourgeoisie, the imperialist powers and their local stooges, and fight on three fronts to link the Syrian revolution to the Palestinian revolution and the wider Arab Revolution. 

Check out the articles on the ongoing popular Syrian revolution here, in particular this recent overview.

The Guardian underscores that the US is now in an informal alliance with Assad to deal with IS. So sending NZ troops to fight IS and jailing (as in Australia) those who want to fight Assad, is siding with the worst enemies of human rights; the US, it’s convenient ally Assad, its military ally Israel, against the target, IS, that originated in the US funding the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the 80s and 90’s. 

Against this coalition of the evil, perpetrators of terror, is the coalition of the masses, popular militias armed and supported by the international working class to defend and extend democracy and socialism.

No Kiwi troops to the US imperialist war of terror!

Build international brigades to fight on the side of the Arab Revolution!

For mass revolutionary parties to lead the fight for socialist revolution!

For a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East and North Africa!