I stand firmly in the latter camp. I'm not going to rehash the case, which I and many others made a number of times over the last five years. I will say that I don't see how any leftist could continue to cling to the dominant Western narrative now that we have the American Secretary of State admitting that: 1) the US poured an "extraordinary amount of arms" into Syria to help the opposition; 2) the US wanted to "manage" ISIS, and watched approvingly as ISIS grew stronger and become threatening to Damascus itself; 3) Russia entered the war in order to prevent an ISIS victory, and did so; and 4) the Russian intervention, which "changed the equation," is legal, because Russia is invited in by the "legitimate regime," and the US has no legal basis for intervention, because the US hasn't gotten the UN to swallow the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine as a substitute for international law.
But there are people still in the first camp, whose sincere commitment to democracy, social justice, and anti-imperialist I do not question. I just disagree with their political judgement. And I vigorously disagree with the rhetorical tactics many of them use to defend it. But that will be the topic of another post.
My position, shared by many people who also hold a sincere commitment to democracy, social justice, and anti-imperialism, requires no denial that that the Syrian Baathist state is a brutish affair. Baathism in Syria, as in Iraq, was the CIA's preferred alternative to communism, and Hafez al-Assad, like Saddam, killed thousands, including leftist dissidents. Both regimes had cozy relationships with American machinations in the region when it was convenient. These are regimes that deserve to be dispatched to the dustbin of history. Nevertheless, there was good reason that I and tens of millions of people around the world objected to the invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003, which, as we foresaw, led to the demise of the country into sectarian chaos. Neither then nor now would calling us "Saddam's apologists" be sign of anything but the weakness of the speaker's political case.
Nor does this position require any love for Putin-era Russia, which is, thanks to American-sponsored shock-and-awe capitalist restoration, a country mired in its own quicksand of conservative nationalism and scheming oligarchy. As it claws its way up the geopolitical food chain, Russia will undoubtedly engage with bad actors, and engage in bad actions. Still, Russia is not (yet) capable, economically or militarily, of being an imperialist power like the United States, and is the target of aggressive maneuvers by the world's most powerful military alliance (NATO). In fact, its very weakness, as a rising capitalist entity, makes it want to insist on the fair rules of the international order, which the stronger capitalist countries proclaim, but have for so long ignored with impunity.
The Syria-Russia alliance is not revolutionary proletarian internationalism. It is an alliance, within the framework of the traditional Westphalian state paradigm, and within the post-WWI framework of international law, that has had a real net positive effect in the context of today's geopolitics. Without Russian military intervention, al-Nusra and allied jihadis would have been rampaging through the streets of Damascus. Saving Syria from that fate is a result I welcome as a leftist.
Again, at the time of the Russian intervention (and still)--especially with the threat of imminent American military attacks on Syrian forces--military action was the only way to stop the jihadi regime-change train, and Russia was the only geopolitical actor capable of intervening with the necessary force. Russia was responding, decisively and legally, to an invitation to defend an independent sovereign state.
"Non-violent" kinda-sorta-pacifist progressives may not like it, but this is a situation that is being determined by armed force. Revolutionary leftists may not like it (I sure don't), but there is no left political force on the scene capable of mounting any serious resistance to either the Syrian state or the foreign-driven jihadi invasion-cum-"rebellion"--itself a foreign intervention.
It's also true, of course, that foreign military intervention, however legitimate its goals, can fail miserably. Having been deliberately provoked into doing so, the Soviets certainly intervened on the right side--Can anyone now doubt it?--in defending the secular Afghan government in 1979 against the proxy jihadi war of the day--which was the seed war of subsequent imperialist-jihadi adventures. Because the "foreignness" of the Soviet soldiers and women's education was more jarring than the "foreignness" of the "Afghan Arabs" and beheading teachers, and/or because the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, et. al., supported the "rebellion" with money. Intelligence, logistics, and sophisticated arms (including anti-aircraft weapons), the result was, and still is, a disaster--for everybody.
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