Syria’s downfall

Baath power began with the Syrian revolution in 1963. It ended this month. For most of that time the Party that led the Syrian Arab Republic was led by members of the Assad family.
Now Bashar al Assad is in Moscow. The Syrian Arab Republic is no more. The Baath Party has been dissolved. The old pan-Arab flag has gone and a new one flies over Damascus – the flag of the bogus “Syrian republic” during French colonial rule. 
Though a pan-Arab movement Syria was always at the heart of the Baath (Renaissance) Party. Born is the 1940s in the struggle to break the chains of colonialism it evolved into a mass movement when it merged with the Arab Socialist Party in 1952 to become the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party under its famous slogan “Unity, Freedom, Socialism – One Arab Nation! One Glorious Destiny!” that would soon be adopted by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union in Egypt. 
Baathist Syria took the road of socialist advance sweeping away the old guard and the feudal order in the countryside to build a better life for the Syrian people with national health and education services funded by a public sector that also had to support the armed forces needed to confront the Zionist enemy. 
From the start Baathist Syria supported the just struggle of the Palestinian Arabs in confronting Israel as well as fighting side by side with Egypt, which was then the United Arab Republic, in two major wars with the Zionist entity. In the 1970s Syria intervened in the Lebanese civil war under an Arab League mandate through a peace-keeping force that remained in the Lebanon until 2005.
Communists and Nasserists had long worked with the Baath as “independents” in the Syrian parliament but in 1972 this was formalised with the establishment of a popular front, the National Progressive Front, that brought communists, Nasserists and social-democrats into government as junior partners of the Baath.
Baathist Syria was always to the fore in the struggle against imperialism. A pillar of the non-aligned movement the Syrian Arab Republic stood with the militant Palestinian resistance movements and other progressive Arab republics in the Rejection Front to oppose any surrender peace with Israel. It joined the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front that included the PLO, Algeria, Libya and People’s Yemen to oppose Egypt’s acceptance of the American and Zionist demands that led to the Camp David surrender peace with Israel.
Baathist Syria was a friend of the Soviet Union and the DPR Korea. Syrian trade with People’s China had soared in recent years and only a few months ago Syria applied to join BRICS, the independent economic bloc of the Global South.
This is why the imperialists, working hand in glove with Turkey, Israel and the feudal Arab oil princes worked to bring down the Assad government. They imposed sanctions and blockades on Syria to force it to end its alliance with the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran. They fomented the sectarian strife that triggered the civil war that began in 2011 and ended in the collapse of the Syrian government last week.   
The imperialists and their Zionist and feudal Arab lackeys cannot bring peace to the Middle East. Nor is that their intention. They believe that the best way to maintain imperialist hegemony and preserve the super-profits of the big oil corporations is by keeping the Arab masses weak and divided. It’s worked so far. But this is by no means the end of the story.