On Syria: Where the Left is right and the Right is wrong When the Green Movement started in Iran in June 2009, there was a recalcitrant fraction of the Left (taken in a very generic sense) that went on a rampage against it and denounced the civil rights uprising as a Saudi-US plot to dismantle the Islamic Republic and appease Israel and pave the way for neoliberal imperialism. “I am only for revolutions that make Israel angry,” one such sophomoric detractor of the Green Movement famously said at the time. “If Israel is happy with an uprising I am not happy.”  More than two years after the Green Movement and a year into the Arab Spring, the selfsame segment of the Left faces an even more crippling dilemma trying to formulate a sensible position vis-à-vis the bloody drama in Syria.  The dilemma that this component of the Left faces in Syria is rooted in a more fundamental failure to read the Arab Spring in general - for if they denounced the Green Movement because the US had allocated some millions of dollars for “regime change” in Iran, that sum was peanuts compared with the money that the US had invested in the Egyptian army, and that the Saudis had in ensuring the Islamists had the upper hand in post-Mubarak Egyptian elections. So what to do with the Egyptian revolution? Dismiss the whole thing just because the US and the Saudis were trying to control its outcome?   Read more

On Syria: Where the Left is right and the Right is wrong

When the Green Movement started in Iran in June 2009, there was a recalcitrant fraction of the Left (taken in a very generic sense) that went on a rampage against it and denounced the civil rights uprising as a Saudi-US plot to dismantle the Islamic Republic and appease Israel and pave the way for neoliberal imperialism. “I am only for revolutions that make Israel angry,” one such sophomoric detractor of the Green Movement famously said at the time. “If Israel is happy with an uprising I am not happy.” 

More than two years after the Green Movement and a year into the Arab Spring, the selfsame segment of the Left faces an even more crippling dilemma trying to formulate a sensible position vis-à-vis the bloody drama in Syria. 

The dilemma that this component of the Left faces in Syria is rooted in a more fundamental failure to read the Arab Spring in general - for if they denounced the Green Movement because the US had allocated some millions of dollars for “regime change” in Iran, that sum was peanuts compared with the money that the US had invested in the Egyptian army, and that the Saudis had in ensuring the Islamists had the upper hand in post-Mubarak Egyptian elections. So what to do with the Egyptian revolution? Dismiss the whole thing just because the US and the Saudis were trying to control its outcome?  

Read more

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