America, the Friend and the Foe… and the Syrian Solution!

Let’s set aside the “literary” dimension of the saying, and consider the two clear models, or the two clear options, that America presents to all countries of the world, and even to all political forces around the world – friend or foe – and let us look at what it means to be a friend, and what it means to be a foe.

America’s Friends

If a country wants to be America’s friend, then this means that there are a set of conditions that it must fulfill in order to “rise” to the level required by America. These conditions vary, of course, according to the weight of the country, its geographical position, its resources, and so on.

However, in general, for a country to be America’s friend, this means that it must take the same political stances on all major issues in the world. Whether it is about an ongoing political, military, or economic conflict, or even if it is about a set of “ideas” and “values”, America’s friends must conform.

More concretely, to be America’s friend means that your economy must be dollarized, and your state institutions must operate as a branch of international institutions, directly or indirectly, by complying with set laws and conditions.

This includes recipes from the IMF and the World Bank, about lifting subsidies on basic commodities, reducing workers’ wages, reducing social spending, and in many cases raising the retirement age. It also includes, of course, keeping the dollar in particular as the “hard” currency, based on the amount of which that you own the exchange rate of your currency is determined. The recipes also include giving full freedom to foreign capital and hot money in particular, to come in and leave whenever it wants, and even allow it to carry out additional violations of workers’ rights, where the state’s violation of its workers’ rights turns into a threshold that must be achieved, not to prevent it from being exceeded, but rather to make it easy for private companies to exceed it. Taken together, these conditions are conditions for an inevitable implosion, albeit after a while. In essence, they are the conditions for a systematic and long-term plundering of the country’s wealth, its production, its brains, and even its culture.

That is, befriending America means, in concrete terms, that you become subservient, colonized, plundered, and always under the threat of implosion from within.

So, what about enmity of America?

America’s Foes

Adjectives like “dictatorial” and “totalitarian” regimes, etc., are nothing but a pretext by which enmity is justified in the media. Russia itself, which today represents the axis of evil, was a friend of America in the 1990s when it was ruled by mafias and murders took place in its streets on a daily basis. The Arab Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia, which had long been friends of America, even though it does not have a constitution to begin with, and it is a kingdom, and in the legal sense there is no place for talk about democracy, at least in its Western sense. Despite this, it was one of America’s friends for many decades, starting with the Salty Islands meeting after WWII. This same country, in which nothing radically changed in terms of political freedoms, but its international positioning began to change, turned into a symbol of dictatorship overnight.

The same is true of Iran. During the Shah days, when it was allied with the West and with “Israel”, relations with America were among the best, even though the Shah was an absolute symbol in theory and practice of a brutal dictatorship. Iran’s positioning changed after the 1979 revolution, and thus its position relative to America changed.

We could list dozens of other examples, but we will suffice with what we mentioned in addition to a passing reference to Latin America, which provides the clearest example of Americans’ insolence in organizing military coups against elected presidents, elections carried out by American-backed generals, who quickly drown their countries in blood and fill its prisons with political prisoners. This has been repeated in more than 10 countries in Latin America over the past seventy years.

The Dues you Pay in Friendship and in Enmity!

If you are a friend, you must comply with the socioeconomic and cultural model imposed by the US, and you must comply politically with America’s international will. The European example today is more than clear: these ancient countries that seemed independent and tried to pretend to be independent, turned out to be in fact still colonies, starting with Bretton Woods 1944 and the Marshall Plan, which tightened the complete control of the American elite – the Anglo-Saxons in particular – over Western Europe, and turned it into a mere follower of and a backyard for it. This is now clear from the policies adopted by European leaders, all of which are against the interests of their countries and peoples, and in the interest of the American elite.

In the event that you are a foe, America will impose economic sanctions and blockade on you, and perhaps a war if conditions are conducive for that. What is the goal? To become her friend. That is, to comply with the conditions that will lead you towards destruction, ruin, and internal implosions.

On this basis, one of the most important Syrian revolutionaries in the twentieth century was absolutely right when he said that “angering the colonizer is always less costly than appeasing it”.

If this is true in general, it is even more true today in the context of the US’ deep crisis, and its dollar, which is thousands of times more than the size required by the market and the size of the US’ contribution to the production of global wealth. Therefore, the US has absolutely nothing to offer, to any friend or foe, except more plundering and destruction.

What is new in the historical sense, compared perhaps to the past fifty years, is that angering the colonizer in light of the new international balance is not only less costly than appeasing it, but rather is a way to reach a win-win situation as a result. A situation in which effectively not only is military, political, and American intimidation eliminated, but also economic intimidation. Today, peoples and states that have an independent national will can emerge from the cloak of the Americans and their new colonialism, and can play an active role in creating the new world that is based on equal exchange.

As for us in Syria, this means, concretely, that any attempt to search for a solution with the participation or consent of the Americans is almost foolish. Americans do not want a solution and they will do their best to prevent any solution in Syria. Those who rely on and trust the Americans will not be spared, as those who trust them in particular will make themselves the subject of Kissinger’s statement with which we started.

(النسخة العربية)