“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” The famous phrase in the romance The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, exposes the dominant classes’ policy of illusory change to keep the situation as it is.
By Fabio Bosco.
This might be one of the best phrases to define the stand of the US governments on the use of massive destruction chemical weapons by the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. International rules ban the use of these weapons, but the dictator has used them regularly over the seven years of uprising against his regime.
In 2013, after an attack on Ghouta, with more than one thousand deaths, President Barack Obama made an agreement, mediated by the Russian government, to take all chemical weapons from the Syrian regime in exchange of no military retaliation. In 2014, the Secretary of State, John Kerry, announced that the recall was successful. Nothing more untruth.
In 2017, president Donald Trump launched missiles against the aerial base in Khairat, in Syria. From this base departed the plane the threw chemical weapons on the Syrian population in Idlib. Before attacking, Trump informed the Russian government so Assad could evacuate the base first, and reconstruct it quickly after the attack.
Before this new attack on Douma, the Trump government and its allies, the British Theresa May and the French Macron, launched over one hundred ground and aerial missiles on the “fundamental components of the regime’s chemical weapons warfare infrastructure”, according to the Lt. General Kenneth F. McKenzie, from the Pentagon. Despite the destruction caused, the Syrian regime had taken prevention measures, as there is no info on deaths or injured, so far – not even of an occasional leak of chemicals.
Also, the chemical weapons used by the Syrian dictator are based on chlorine and sarin gas, both of easy access and preparation.
These facts prove that Trump and his allies’ missiles did not reduce the Syrian government’s capability of carrying out attacks with chemical weapons. And they also confirm that the US government’s goal is not to ban chemical weapons neither to defeat the Syrian government. Their fear is that the working population overthrows the regime through a social revolution. A revolutionary victory would have a major impact on the Arab world and would put imperialist domination in the region in danger.
The only possibility of ending this catastrophe, imposed to the Syrian population by the dictator Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies, is to defeat the regime and change it for a new government, composed by revolutionary forces: local coordination committees and rebel militias.
The only contribution by Trump, Theresa May and Macron that could put an end to chemical weapons in the region is to withdraw their troops from Syria and stop impeding the rebels’ access to heavy weaponry, needed to avoid the fatal aerial attacks by the Syrian and Russian aviation.
