Meredith Tax: Supporting Dictators is Not Anti-imperialism
Meredith Tax reviews Rohini Hensman's recent book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism
"Hensman begins her discussion of the Syrian civil war with this summary: “The peaceful democratic revolution of 2011 sparked off by the Arab uprisings later became militarised in response to the brutal repression carried out by the state. Syria typifies the moral and political degeneration of pseudo-anti-imperialists who support, or fail to oppose, the genocidal crushing of a democratic uprising by a totalitarian state allied with Iranian and Russian imperialism.
While true as far as it goes, this framing downplays the role of jihadis and omits the key role played by Turkey, which not only financed factions of the Free Syrian Army, but directly supported both al Qaeda and ISIS in order to destabilize Syria. Erdoğan, who sees himself as the once and future Sultan, has made no secret of his desire to annex parts of northern Syria and has invaded it three times. In fact, the Syrian civil war is in part a regional conflict in which the four big powers in the area — Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey — are engaged in a struggle for dominance.
But Hensman sees the struggle largely in terms of good guys and bad guys. She takes her entire narrative from Syrian opposition sources and, because the Syrian opposition is supported by Turkey, glosses over the more unsavory aspects of Turkish intervention, villainizes the Kurds, and reduces an extremely complex situation to a simple conflict pitting the Syrian opposition against Assad and his allies, among which she includes both ISIS and the Kurds."