Patrick Higgins: On June 12, the Washington Post published a story about “budget cuts” facing the CIA program for Syria. Shoehorned into the story was the disclosure that the initiative “has become one of the agency’s largest covert operations” to the tune of nearly $1 billion dollars a year, with “Syria-related operations [accounting] for about $1 for every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget” and the CIA having “trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.” In other words, the United States launched a full-scale war against Syria, and few Americans actually noticed.
Another major assumption driving calls for interventions is a belief that interventionist action and local Syrian revolutionary action are complementary. In order to stage this argument, commentators tend towards assuming rather than demonstrating that a revolution has been underway in Syria since 2011. Perhaps the core of this incoherence lies in the dedication of Hashemi’s and Postel’s book: “To the Syrian People.”
The abstract embrace of this people, in itself belying the concrete conditions of a four-year war, is connected to another leitmotif of Syria discussions: any refusal to replace analysis of the situation within the country and its relationship with broader international politics with a neat, generalized “will” of the people narrative is to deny Syrian “agency.”
Hashemi’s and Postel’s project stands with the Syrian people. But with which Syrian people exactly? Syria is gripped by war, and it is clear that large sectors of the lower classes, particularly those among the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, are still with the government.
The popular narrative of the People versus the Dictator — one piece in Hashemi’s and Postel’s book describes it as a conflict between “a dictatorship” and “a democratic opposition” — elides the reality of varying classes and sects with various social roles and politics.
This narrative is, in other words, a cartoon. More than that, it is a cartoon that overshadows the central contradiction currently at play in the Syrian situation: one between imperialists and various resistance movements, as well as the states supporting them. More here.