The bombing raids, unprovoked and illegal, were of course immediately supported by the US and British governments. Since Israel has illegally occupied Syria’s Golan Heights for 46 years, perhaps the legitimacy of a few more air raids hardly merited serious consideration.

But it’s only necessary to consider what the western reaction would have been if Syria, let alone Iran, had launched such an attack on Israel — or one of the Arab regimes currently arming the Syrian rebels — to realise how little these positions have to do with international legality, equity or rights of self-defence.

Israeli officials have let it be known that the attacks, launched from Lebanese airspace, were aimed at stockpiles of Iranian missiles bound for Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance movement and governing party. They were not, it was said, intended as an intervention in Syria’s civil war — but as a warning to Iran and protection against Hezbollah attacks in a future conflict.

That’s not how it seemed to the Syrian rebel fighters on the ground, filmed greeting the attacks with cries of “Allahu akbar”, unaware of who had actually carried them out. By bombing the Syrian army, which has recently made advances in some rebel-held areas, Israel is clearly intervening in the war.

The raids follow the public declaration by Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah last week that his fighters are supporting government forces inside Syria — which are also backed by Iran, Russia and China. It is Syria’s role as the pivot of Iranian influence across the Middle East that has turned the Syrian war into a potential regional conflagration.

Having hedged its bets, Israel has now started to make clear it regards the prospect of Islamist and jihadist groups taking over from the Assad regime as less threatening than the existing “Syria-Iran-Hezbollah axis”, as the Israeli defence ministry official Amos Gilad put it recently.

That has coincided with talk of creating an Israeli buffer zone inside Syria, while Israeli officials have been pushing claims that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons. Since Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line”, allegations of their use have become a crucial weapon for those demanding increased western intervention, in a bizarre echo of the discredited orchestration of the invasion of Iraq a decade ago.

That effort came unstuck this week when the UN investigator Carla Del Ponte reported that there were “strong concrete suspicions” that Syrian rebels had themselves used the nerve gas sarin. The claim was hurriedly downplayed by the US, though the rebel camp clearly has an interest in drawing in greater western intervention, in a way the regime does not.

The fact is intervention has long been a central dimension of the war. The regime forces are backed by Syria’s old allies in Russia and Iran. Funding and military support for the rebels come from the US, Britain, France and their regional allies: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Jordan.

Airlifts of arms to the Syrian rebels, co-ordinated by the CIA, have increased sharply in recent months to become what one former US official calls a “cataract of weaponry”. British and American forces are training rebel fighters in Jordan. The worth of US aid to the Syrian opposition has doubled to $250m, while the EU has now lifted its oil embargo to allow exports from rebel-held areas.

The result of foreign intervention has of course been to escalate the conflict. Now pressure is building on the Obama administration to go further and supply weapons directly. Among those pushing for more intervention is David Cameron – anxious to ingratiate himself with the Gulf dictators — who has been pressing for the EU arms embargo to be lifted.

The intention is to build up the west’s favoured groups and weaken the role of jihadists who have taken centre stage as the war has gone on. They include Jabhat al-Nusra, which now controls swaths of rebel-held territory and has declared allegiance to Al Qaeda.

The irony of the US and other western governments — let alone Israel — once again making common cause with Al Qaeda, after a decade of a “war on terror” aimed at destroying it, is one factor holding Obama back. So is the risk of being drawn into all-out war (publicly raised by Britain’s chief of the defence staff); the hostility of American public opinion (mirrored in Britain and the Arab world); and the aftermath of intervention in Libya, where militias have been besieging government offices demanding the ousting of western-backed Qadhafi-era leaders.

The reality is that what began in Syria more than two years ago as a brutally repressed popular uprising has long since morphed into a vicious sectarian war, manipulated by outside forces to change the regional balance of power and already dangerously spilling over into neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq.

The consequences for Syria have been multiple massacres, ethnic cleansing, torture, a humanitarian crisis and the risk of the country’s breakup. The longer the war, the greater the danger of a Yugoslavian-style fragmentation into sectarian and ethnic enclaves.

The Assad regime bears responsibility for that, of course. But so do those who have funded and fuelled the war, bleeding Syria and weakening the Arab world in the process. The demand by Cameron and other western politicians to increase the flow of arms is reckless and cynical.

The result will certainly be to ratchet up the death toll and spread the war. If they were genuinely interested in saving lives- instead of neutralising Syria to undermine Iran – western leaders would be using their leverage with the rebels’ regional sponsors to negotiate a political settlement that would allow Syrians to determine their own future.

That would be difficult enough to achieve and enforce on the ground. But an internationally and regionally backed deal now looks the only way to bring the war to an end. In which case, increased intervention is really about improving the west’s bargaining hand, at a cost of yet more Syrian suffering — and yet another blowback to come.

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Set up on US-occupied Cuban territory, it was filled with supposed “enemy combatants” seized in post-invasion Afghanistan, the vast majority held without charge or trial, brutalised and tortured. That was all supposed to have come to an end after Obama’s election.

But instead of shutting this monstrosity, the camp is being rebuilt. Congress has played a central role in keeping Guantanamo open. But the president only tried to move it to Illinois, not end the scandal of indefinite detention without trial. And he’s personally blocked the release of dozens of prisoners, even when they’ve been cleared.

That’s at the heart of why the detainees are striking. Among them is Shaker Aamer, a Saudi-born British resident held without charge for 11 years, much of it in solitary confinement. As with half of the rest of the prisoners, the US authorities now accept that there is no case against him, and he was cleared for release six years ago.

Aamer hasn’t seen his family since 2001, and has never met his 11-year-old son, Faris. He has refused food for 71 days, and his case is due to be debated in the British parliament in response to a petition of over 100,000 names. It now turns out that, uniquely among the prisoners, Aamer has been cleared for release to only one country: Saudi Arabia.

Despite British claims to be lobbying for his return to London, the evidence suggests neither London nor Washington wants anything of the kind. As Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, puts it:

“The sole reason to send Shaker to Saudi Arabia is to have him silenced, most likely by sentencing him to a long imprisonment after a sham trial.”

The reason is not hard to find. Soon after he was seized, Aamer says he was assaulted and tortured (into falsely confessing links to Al Qaeda) by US officials at Bagram air base in Afghanistan in the presence of MI6 (the UK’s secret-intelligence agency) officers — abuse that continued at Guantanamo. Even more dangerously, he was also present, along with British intelligence agents, when Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was tortured at Bagram into alleging that Saddam Hussein was training Al Qaeda terrorists — bogus claims Bush and Colin Powell used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Metropolitan police (the Greater London police force) has now opened three new investigations into UK intelligence collusion with torture and “rendition”, including Aamer’s case.

That’s on top of MI6’s role in the kidnapping of Libyan dissidents and their families in 2004, for which the British government has already paid out over GBP2m in compensation.

Earlier this month detectives interviewed Aamer in Guantanamo. No wonder the British government is so keen to force through secret court hearings in “national security” cases through its justice and security bill – or that it has struggled to convince the courts that the Salafist cleric Abu Qatada, regularly detained without charge for years, would not be at risk of torture if packed off to a police state such as Jordan.

The scale of torture, kidnapping and detention without trial unleashed by the US government after 9/11 is, as the US Constitution Project report found last week, “indisputable”. And at every stage it’s been backed and emulated by its closest allies. At least 54 states, including Britain and 24 others in Europe, took part in the CIA’s secret “extraordinary rendition” programme, it’s now emerged.
And British forces have carried out plenty of beatings and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, either on their own or in cahoots with US and local forces, as multiple reports and inquiries have now made clear.

It’s hardly surprising in the wake of such a saga that western claims to be the champions of human rights and humanitarian intervention are treated with derision across much of the world. But as the west’s dirty secrets are seeping out, the war on terror itself has already mutated.

Obama hasn’t closed Guantanamo or held those who authorised these barbarities to account. But US torture camps and boots on the ground are on the way out. Their place has been taken by air and proxy campaigns, such as in Libya and Syria, and drone wars that have already killed thousands in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — but are more popular at home.

We don’t yet know the motivations of the two men accused of carrying out last week’s atrocity in Boston, which killed three people and seriously injured many more.

But we do know that 61 were killed the same day in bomb attacks in Iraq that were blamed on Al Qaeda, brought to the country by the US-British invasion. And 16 were killed in Pakistan the following day in a suicide attack claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, which mushroomed as a result of the invasion of Afghanistan.

What is certain is that so long as the US and its allies intervene, occupy and wage war across the Arab and Muslim world — whether directly or by proxy, with daisy cutters or drones — such outrages will continue. It’s the logic of a war of terror without end.

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As the bishop of Grantham, Thatcher’s home town, put it, spending GBP10m of public money to “glorify” her legacy in the month benefits are slashed and tax cuts handed to the rich is “asking for trouble”. What’s planned today isn’t a national commemoration, but a military-backed party spectacle.

It’s a state funeral in all but name, laid on for none of the last seven prime ministers. Nothing of the kind has been seen since the death of Winston Churchill, who really did unite the country for a time against the mortal threat from Nazi Germany. Thatcher did the opposite, of course, though every effort will be made today to milk her short but bloody colonial conflict in the south Atlantic for all its jingoistic worth.

It’s hardly a surprise that 60 per cent of the population oppose the public subsidy, or that Buckingham Palace is alarmed at the funeral’s regal dimensions. Now the decision to silence Big Ben has tipped the whole saga into the realm of offensive absurdity.

There’s been much talk about a need for dignity and respect. But the prospect of the leader of a class war government being treated like a respected head of state is itself an insult to the half of Britain that recoils from her memory and the millions of people whose communities were devastated by her policies. From the moment the former prime minister died there has been a determined drive by the Tories and their media allies to rewrite history and rehabilitate a deeply damaged brand. For a few days of fawning wall-to-wall coverage it seemed like that might be working, as happened in the US after Reagan’s death in 2004.

But a week on, it’s clear the revisionists have overplayed their hand. Anger and revulsion keep bursting into the open. Simply raising her record reminds people of the price paid for unrelenting deregulation, privatisation and tax handouts to the rich; why she was so unpopular across Britain when she was in power; and the striking similarity with what’s being done by today’s Tory-led coalition.

So there’s been no polling bounce for Cameron, even as he claimed that Thatcher “saved our country”. And while people recognise her strength, polls show clear opposition to many of her flagship policies, including privatisation (only a quarter think it’s delivered a better service). Most don’t believe she “put the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain” at all, her economic policies are seen to have done “more harm than good”, and her legacy is regarded as one of division and inequality.

Which is what the facts show. Far from saving Britain, Thatcher’s government delivered rampant inequality, social breakdown, disastrous financial deregulation, pulverising deindustrialisation and mass unemployment. A North Sea oil bonanza was frittered away on tax cuts for the wealthy and a swollen benefits bill as public services were run down, child poverty escalated and social mobility ground to a halt.

But for all that, her apologists insist, Thatcher did what was necessary to turn Britain’s economy round. But she didn’t. Growth during the 1980s, at 2.4 per cent, was exactly the same as during the turbulent 1970s and lower again in the post-Thatcher 1990s, at 2.2pc — while in the corporatist 1960s it averaged over 3pc.

And despite claims of a Thatcher “productivity miracle”, productivity growth was also higher in the 60s (and it’s gone into reverse under Cameron). What her government did do was redistribute growth from the poor to the rich, driving up profits and slashing employees’ share of national income through her assault on trade unions. That’s why it felt like a boom in better-off Britain, as the top rate of tax was more than halved, while real incomes fell by 40pc for the poorest in her first decade in power.

You only have to rehearse what Thatcher’s government unleashed a generation ago to recognise the continuity with what’s been happening ever since: first under John Major, then under New Labour, and now under Cameron: privatisation, liberalisation, low taxes for the wealthy and rising inequality. Thatcher was Britain’s first woman prime minister, but her policies hit women hardest, just as Cameron’s are today, while Tony Blair says he saw his job as “to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them”.

But Thatcherism was only an early variant (following her friend General Pinochet, the Chilean dictator) of what became the neoliberal capitalism adopted or imposed across the world for the next generation. And it’s that model which imploded in the crash of 2008. As even the free-market Economist conceded last week, while demanding “more Thatcherism, not less”, her reforms could be said to have “sowed the seeds” of the current crisis.

Like other true believers, the magazine’s editors fret that the pendulum is now swinging away from the neoliberal model. So does Blair, who remains locked in the politics of the boom years and whose comfort zone remains attacking his own party. So he’s launched a coded assault on Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, for supposedly thinking a crisis caused by under-
regulated markets will lead to a shift to the left. There’s certainly no automatic basis for such a shift. As history shows, the right can also take advantage of economic breakdowns — and often has. But more than 20 years after Thatcher was forced out of office, the evidence is that most people remain stubbornly resistant to her individualistic small-state philosophy, believing for example that it’s the government’s job to redistribute income across the spectrum and guarantee a decent minimum income for all.

And crucially, the economic model that underpinned the policies of Thatcher and her successors is broken. As the Labour frontbencher Jon Trickett argued this week, we need a “rupture” with the “existing economic settlement” — the Thatcher settlement. That’s the challenge of the politics of our time, not only in Britain. As we remember blighted lives and communities today, it’s time not just to bury Thatcher, but Thatcherism itself.

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Civilians are still being killed at a rate of at least 4,000 a year, and police at about 1,000. As in the days when US and British forces directly ran the country, torture is rampant, thousands are imprisoned without trial, and disappearances and state killings are routine.

Meanwhile power and sewage systems barely function, more than a third of adults are unemployed, state corruption has become an institutionalised kleptocracy and trade unionists are tried for calling strikes and demonstrations (the oil workers’ leader is in court in Basra on that charge tomorrow). In recent months, mass protests in Sunni areas have threatened to tip over into violence, or even renewed civil war.

The dwindling band of Iraq war enthusiasts are trying to put their best face on a gruesome record. Some have drifted off into la-la land: Labour MP Tom Harris claims Iraq is now a “relatively stable and relatively inclusive democracy”, which is more or less the direct opposite of reality.

Tony Blair – treated with media reverence but regarded by between 22 per cent and 37 per cent of Britons as a war criminal — accepts the cost of invasion was “very high”. But the former prime minister claims justification in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, while insisting that a popular uprising against his regime would have triggered a worse death toll than in Syria. That avoids the fact that the US and Britain controlled Iraq’s airspace from 1991 and could have prevented aerial attacks on rebels. It also blithely ignores the scale of the bloodbath for which George Bush and he are directly responsible.

Whether either is ever held to account for it, global opinion against the Iraq war is long settled — including in Britain, the US and Iraq. The invasion was a flagrant act of aggression against a broken-backed state, regarded as illegal by the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion.

The onslaught triggered a death toll which certainly runs into hundreds, rather than tens, of thousands: estimates range from the Iraq Body Count’s minimum of 173,271 up to 2012 (acknowledged to be an underestimate) through the Iraqi government and World Health Organisation’s 223,000 and Lancet survey’s 654,965 “excess deaths” in the first three years, to the ORB polling organisation’s estimate of more than a million.

The occupation was a catastrophe for Iraqis. It destroyed the country’s infrastructure, created four million refugees, reduced cities like Falluja to ruins — littered with depleted uranium and white phosphorus as cancer rates and birth defects multiplied, and brought Al Qaeda and its sectarian terror into the country.

That wasn’t the result of mistakes and lack of planning, as the US and British elites like to tell themselves. But as with the armed resistance that mushroomed in the aftermath of the invasion, they were foreseeable and foreseen outcomes of what by any sober reckoning has been a reckless crime.

Saddam Hussein “created enormous carnage”, Blair said yesdterday — which was certainly true in the years when his regime was backed by Britain and the US. But that is exactly what Bush and he did in their war to overthrow him. The biggest improvement in Iraqis’ lives thereafter came as a result of the lifting of US and British-enforced sanctions, estimated by Unicef to have killed half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s.

Ten years on, the US still has a powerful presence in Iraq — now starting to resemble a sort of American-Iranian condominium — with thousands of military contractors, security and intelligence leverage and long-term oil contracts. But it’s a long way from the archipelago of bases and control its leaders had in mind.

Iraqi success in preventing a permanent occupation is down to resistance, armed and civil, Sunni and Shia. But that achievement was undermined by the eruption of sectarianism in the aftermath of the invasion, fostered by the occupying forces in the classic imperial divide and rule mould.

The evidence is now indisputable that this went far beyond the promotion of a sectarian political carve-up. As the Guardian reported this month, US forces led by General Petraeus himself were directly involved not only in overseeing torture centres, but also in sponsoring an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads (known as “police commando units”) to
undermine the resistance.

One outcome is the authoritarian Shia elite-dominated state run by Nouri al-Maliki today. His Sunni vice-president until last year, Tariq al-Hashimi — forced to leave the country and sentenced to death in absentia for allegedly ordering killings — was one of those who in his own words “collaborated” with the occupation, encouraging former resistance leaders to join Petraeus’s “awakening councils”, and now bitterly regrets it. “If I knew the result would be like this, I would never have done it,” he told
me at the weekend. “I made a grave mistake.”

The sectarian virus incubated in the occupation has now spread beyond Iraq’s borders and threatens the future of states across the eastern Arab world. But the war hasn’t only been a disaster for Iraq and the region. By demonstrating the limits of US power and its inability to impose its will on peoples prepared to fight back, Iraq proved a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies. For the British state, the retreat of its armed forces from Basra under cover of darkness, with their own record of torture and killings, was a humiliation.

There’s little prospect, given the balance of power, of those most responsible for torture and atrocities in Iraq – let alone ordering the original aggression — of facing justice, or of the reparations Iraqis deserve. But there should be a greater chance of preventing more western military intervention in the Middle East, as Blair and his friends are now pressing for in Syria and Iran.
“Damn us for what we did,” a British Iraq veteran wrote yesterday. Far better would be to make it impossible for the politicians who sent them there to unleash such barbarism again.

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Then the US authorised the stationing of Patriot missile batteries along the Turkish-Syrian border. Ostensibly intended to protect Turkey from stray Syrian artillery fire, they could rather more plausibly be used to help enforce a Libya-style no-fly zone. There has since been a flurry of media briefings about increased covert US arms supplies and rebel training, along with plans for intensified intelligence and special forces deployment, or even all-out air and naval power support. Direct intervention, US and British officials are reported to insist, is “now inevitable”.

Next Britain followed France in recognising the new opposition Syrian National Coalition, stitched together under Nato and Gulf tutelage, as the “sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people”. Since the coalition clearly isn’t the sole representative of Syrians, the declaration (which goes beyond even what was said during the Libyan war) sets a precedent that is likely to come back to haunt them. But it was followed by only a slightly less sweeping statement from the US and about 100 allies.

What such support can mean on the ground is demonstrated in the latest real-life horror video circulating among Syrians. It shows two captured officers from President Assad’s Alawite sect being beheaded with a machete in the street, apparently by western-backed Free Syrian Army rebels, one of them a child.

Of the tens of thousands who have died since last year’s uprising morphed into armed revolt, the majority have been killed by regime forces. But there’s also no doubt that atrocities have been committed on a large scale by both sides. And they have mushroomed as jihadist groups have grown in importance and Iraq-style ethnic cleansing, kidnapping, revenge killings and sectarian attacks spread.

Rampant torture and summary executions by opposition as well as regime forces have been condemned by human rights organisations, along with widespread rebel conscription of child soldiers. Last week Channel 4 News in the UK uncovered evidence that more than 100 Alawite civilians killed in the Syrian town of Aqrab may have been massacred by rebel forces rather than, as initially reported, by government troops.

You might imagine the multiplication of such incidents and the advance of fundamentalist groups in Syria would give western governments reason to pause before bolstering their support for the rebels. But in fact that’s exactly why they insist they need to step up their involvement.

David Cameron told parliament this week that there was now a “strategic imperative” to act because the Syrian war (which the west and its Gulf allies have been fuelling) is “empowering al-Qaida-linked extremists”. There is an “opportunity”, he says, for Britain, the US and autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan to “shape” the Syrian opposition.

Of course, both the US and Britain have been funding, training and attempting to funnel Gulf arms through Turkey and Jordan to their favoured factions for some time. Now the Obama administration has branded a leading Syrian jihadist group a terrorist organisation, to Syrian opposition fury. The aim is intervention for influence, both before and after the expected fall of the Assad regime – dressed up, as in Libya, in the language of “protecting civilians”.

It’s all of a piece with the rebranded war on terror. In the wake of the disaster of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, there were to be no more boots on the ground. Western intervention would again take the form of humanitarian air campaigns, targeted drone attacks and a return to the proxy and covert wars of the past.

But as demonstrated by Nato’s campaign in Libya — which helped boost the death toll at least 10 times and gave air cover to ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate killing — wars to “protect civilians” do nothing of the kind. Deeper western intervention in Syria will certainly escalate, not end, the killing, as well as taking Syria’s future out of the hands of its own people.

What began in Syria nearly two years ago as a popular uprising, brutally repressed by the Assad regime, has since increasingly taken on the character of a sectarian conflict and regional proxy war, as Saudi Arabia and its western backers have seen the chance to sink Iran and Russia’s main long-term Middle Eastern ally.

But the expectation that the government is about to fall is almost certainly premature. With neither side strong enough to prevail, the likelihood instead is that the country will go on bleeding, as external intervention deepens the conflict. Even if the regime were to implode or retreat to its strongholds, the civil war would very likely continue.

Which is why the only way out of an increasingly grim conflict is a negotiated settlement, with regional and international backing. This week, Syria’s semi-detached vice-president, Farouk al-Sharaa (mooted as a possible transitional president), acknowledged that the army could not win the war, and called for a “historic settlement” and national unity government.

The western powers and Gulf regimes have so far underwritten the opposition resistance to negotiation. An attempt to sponsor a regional settlement by Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, in conjunction with Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia was scuppered by the Saudis. But in one form or another, negotiation will eventually have to take place. Meanwhile, not only will more intervention by the western powers increase the killing. It may not give them the control they crave either. Already the mainly Islamist rebel fighters are becoming more mistrustful of their foreign backers. Just as likely is that it will lay the ground for the kind of blowback that created Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the first place — and risk engulfing the region in a still more devastating conflict.

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Nato is, after all, supposed to be training up Afghan troops to take control in time for the withdrawal of combat forces in 2014.
Instead, those client regime troops are routinely turning their guns on a long-reviled foreign occupation force. No wonder support for a continued military presence is falling rapidly in the main British political parties — long after it has among the populations of all the occupying states.

The US-British invasion of Afghanistan was of course launched in response to the 9/11 attacks: the poison fruit of US-led support for the Afghan mujahideen war against the Soviet Union. Why do they hate us, many Americans asked at the time, oblivious to their country’s role in decades of coups, tyranny, sanctions regimes and occupations across the Middle East.

In the aftermath of the killing of the US ambassador to Libya and assault on the consulate in Benghazi, as protests against a virulently Islamophobic US-made video spread across the Muslim world, Hillary Clinton echoed the same sentiments. “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate?” she asked, “in a city we helped save from destruction?”

She was referring to Nato’s decisive role in winning power for the Libyan rebels who first took up arms in Benghazi last year. But just as the mujahideen the US backed in Afghanistan later turned their guns on their imperial sponsor in the form of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, so many of the Islamists and jihadists who fought against Qadhafi with Nato air cover have their own ideas for the future of their country.

This is the start of the blowback from US and western attempts to commandeer the Arab uprisings. Something similar is likely to happen in Syria. The invasion of Afghanistan more than a decade ago didn’t destroy Al Qaeda, instead it spread it into Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and north Africa, and today the flags of its offshoots are flying across the Arab world.

In Libya, Nato’s intervention sharply escalated the death toll, triggered large-scale ethnic cleansing, spread war to Mali, and left thousands in jail without trial and the country in the control of multiple armed militias. Western governments hailed July’s elections, in which most seats were not open to political parties, as bucking the Islamist trend across the region.

But their man, a former Qadhafi minister, has now been defeated for the job of prime minister by an independent Islamist, while the British ambassador’s convoy, the Red Cross and UN have been attacked and Sufi shrines destroyed. Meanwhile, the Nato-backed authorities are threatening military action against jihadists in Benghazi, as American warships and drones patrol Libya’s coast and skies.

The fact that the attack on the US consulate, along with often violent protests that have spread across 20 countries, was apparently triggered by an obscure online video trailer concocted by US-based Christian fundamentalists and émigré Copts seems bafflingly disproportionate to outsiders.

But in the wake of the Rushdie affair and Danish cartoons controversy, it should be clear that insults to Islam are widely seen by Muslims as an attack on their collective identity.

Those feelings can obviously be exploited, as they have been in recent days in a battle for political influence between fundamentalist Salafists, mainstream Islamists and the Shia Hezbollah. But it would be absurd not to recognise that the scale of the response isn’t just about a repulsive video. As is obvious from the slogans and targets, what set these protests alight is the fact that the injury to Muslims is seen once again to come from an arrogant hyperpower that has invaded, subjugated and humiliated the Arab and Muslim world for decades.

Since launching the war on terror, the US and its allies have attacked and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq; bombed Libya; killed thousands in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; imposed devastating sanctions; backed Israel’s occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians to the hilt; carried out large-scale torture, kidnapping and internment without trial; maintained multiple bases to protect client dictatorships throughout the region; and now threaten Iran with another act of illegal war.

The video is manifestly only the latest trigger for a deep popular anger in a region where opposition to imperial domination is now channelled mainly through the politics of Islam rather than nationalism. The idea that Arab and Muslim hostility to the US would have been assuaged because it intervened to commandeer Libya’s uprising (an intervention most Arabs reject) is absurd.

About two-thirds of people in the Middle East and North Africa say they distrust the US, polling shows, rising to more than three-quarters in Pakistan. After 11 years of the war on terror, following decades of baleful intervention, the only surprise is that there are more violent anti-US and anti-western protests in the region.

Western war in the Muslim world has also fed a toxic tide of Islamophobia in Europe and the US. What is it about Muslims that makes them so easily offended, Europeans and Americans commonly demand to know — while Muslims point to cases such as the British 19-year-old who was convicted in Yorkshire, north England, last week of posting a “grossly offensive” Facebook message that British soldiers in Afghanistan “should die and go to hell”, and ask why they’re not afforded that protection.

The events of the last week are a reminder that an Arab world which has thrown off dictatorship will be more difficult for the western powers to hold in thrall. The Economist called the deadly assault on the US consulate in Libya an example of “Arab dysfunction” and urged the US not to retreat from the Middle East but go in deeper, including in Syria. As Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Libya have already shown, that would only bring disaster.

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The defection by Syria’s prime minister is the most high-profile coup yet in a well-funded programme, though unlikely to signal any imminent regime collapse. But the capture of 48 Iranian pilgrims — or undercover Revolutionary Guards, depending who you believe — along with the increasing risk of a Turkish attack on Kurdish areas in Syria and an influx of jihadist fighters gives a taste of what is now at stake.

Driving the escalation of the conflict has been western and regional intervention. This isn’t Iraq, of course, with hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, or Libya, with a devastating bombardment from the air. But the sharp increase in arms supplies, funding and technical support from the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others in recent months has dramatically boosted the rebels’ fortunes, as well as the death toll.

Barack Obama has so far resisted the demands of liberal hawks and neoconservatives for a direct military assault. Instead he’s authorised more traditional forms of CIA covert military backing, Nicaragua-style, for the Syrian rebels.

The US, which backed its first Syrian coup in 1949, has long funded opposition groups. But earlier this year Obama gave a secret order authorising covert (as well as overt financial and diplomatic) support to the armed opposition. That includes CIA paramilitaries on the ground, “command and control” and communications assistance, and the funnelling of Gulf arms supplies to favoured Syrian groups across the Turkish border. After Russia and China blocked its last attempt to win UN backing for
forced regime change last month, the US administration let it be known it would now step up support for the rebels and co-ordinate “transition” plans for Syria with Israel and Turkey.

“You’ll notice in the last couple of months, the opposition has been strengthened,” a senior US official told the New York Times last Friday. “Now we’re ready to accelerate that.” Not to be outdone, the UK’s foreign secretary, William Hague, boasted that Britain was also increasing “non-lethal” support for the rebels. Autocratic Saudi Arabia and Qatar are providing the cash and weapons, as the western-backed Syrian National Council acknowledged this week, while Nato member Turkey has set up a
logistics and training base for the Free Syrian Army in or near the Incirlik US air base.

For Syrians who want dignity and democracy in a free country, the rapidly mushrooming dependence of their uprising on foreign support is a disaster — even more than was the case in Libya. After all, it is now officials of the dictatorial and sectarian Saudi regime who choose which armed groups get funding, not Syrians. And it is intelligence officials from the US, which sponsors the Israeli occupation of Syrian territory and dictatorships across the region, who decide which rebel units get weapons.

Opposition activists insist they will maintain their autonomy, based on deep-rooted popular support. But the dynamic of external backing clearly risks turning groups dependent on it into instruments of their sponsors, rather than the people they seek to represent. Gulf funding has already sharpened religious sectarianism in the rebel camp, while reports of public alienation from rebel fighters in Aleppo this week testifies to the dangers of armed groups relying on outsiders instead of their
own communities.

The Syrian regime is of course backed by Iran and Russia, as it has been for decades. But a better analogy for western and Gulf involvement in the Syrian insurrection would be Iranian and Russian sponsorship of an armed revolt in, say, Saudi Arabia. For the western media, which has largely reported the Syrian uprising as a one-dimensional fight for freedom, the now unavoidable evidence of rebel torture and prisoner executions — along with kidnappings by Al Qaeda-style groups, who once again find
themselves in alliance with the US — seems to have come as a bit of a shock.

In reality, the Syrian crisis always had multiple dimensions that crossed the region’s most sensitive fault lines. It was from the start a genuine uprising against an authoritarian regime. But it has also increasingly morphed into a sectarian conflict, in which the Alawite-dominated Assad government has been able to portray itself as the protector of minorities — Alawite, Christian and Kurdish — against a Sunni-dominated opposition tide.

The intervention of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf autocracies, which have tried to protect themselves from the wider Arab upheaval by playing the anti-Shia card, is transparently aimed at a sectarian, not a democratic, outcome. But it is the third dimension — Syria’s alliance with Tehran and Lebanon’s Shia resistance movement, Hezbollah — that has turned the Syrian struggle into a proxy war against Iran and a global conflict.

Many in the Syrian opposition would counter that they had no choice but to accept foreign support if they were to defend themselves against the regime’s brutality. But as the independent opposition leader Haytham Manna argues, the militarisation of the uprising weakened its popular and democratic base — while also dramatically increasing the death toll.

There is every chance the war could now spread outside Syria. Turkey, with a large Alawite population of its own as well as a long repressed Kurdish minority, claimed the right to intervene against Kurdish rebels in Syria after Damascus pulled its troops out of Kurdish towns. Clashes triggered by the Syrian war have intensified in Lebanon. If Syria were to fragment, the entire system of post-Ottoman Middle East states and borders could be thrown into question with it.

That could now happen regardless of how long Assad and his regime survive. But intervention in Syria is prolonging the conflict, rather than delivering a knockout blow. Only pressure for a negotiated settlement, which the west and its friends have so strenuously blocked, can now give Syrians the chance to determine their own future — and halt the country’s descent into darkness.

By arrangement with the Guardian

On Tuesday, Russian and Chinese leaders reaffirmed their opposition to forced regime change and support for UN envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan. But Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, has made clear western powers might act alone and take action “outside the authority” of the UN. Even the new French president Francois Hollande has said military intervention in his country’s former colonial territory was “not to be ruled out”.

The latest calls for action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime follow the slaughter of 108 people, including 49 children, in Houla less than a fortnight ago. Opposition activists have blamed pro-regime “shabiha” sectarian militias for the massacre; the government Al Qaeda terrorists. But there’s no doubt that atrocities such as Houla — let alone killings on a larger scale — have the potential to turn intervention grandstanding into the real thing.

That’s what happened in Kosovo 13 years ago, when contested killings in Racak led to Nato’s bombing campaign outside the authority of the UN. The US administration continues to resist demands for open intervention in Syria. But Hillary Clinton says the case for intervention is getting stronger “every day”, while the opposition Free Syria Army has now declared itself “free of any commitment” to the UN peace plan.

The reality is that intervention in Syria by the US and its allies has already begun. The western powers have backed the fractious opposition Syrian National Council since the early days of last year’s uprising. So have the Gulf autocracies led by Saudi Arabia, who have stepped up the flow of weapons and cash to favoured Syrian rebel groups in recent months, while Turkey has provided a cross-border base. That is co-ordinated with the US, which supplies the same groups with “non-lethal assistance” and “communications equipment”.

In other words, the US and its allies are sponsoring regime change through civil war. And while paying lip service to the Annan plan for demilitarisation and negotiation, they are making sure it won’t succeed. The results can be seen on the ground. Overall, lethal violence is estimated by human rights groups to have dropped by 36 per cent since the plan was supposed to come into effect, but government casualties have increased sharply over the same period (953 reported killed since mid-March). Rebel fighters claimed to have killed 80 government troops last weekend alone.

Syria is reported by the western and Gulf-controlled Arab media through the prism of a popular uprising against an authoritarian regime. But that is only one vital dimension of the conflict. And as brutal repression by a government which retains significant support has been met with a growing armed campaign, grassroots opposition has been displaced by foreign-backed groups whose strategy to win power is based on engineering outside intervention.

It has also increasingly morphed into a sectarian conflict, as the Alawite-dominated regime has used minorities’ fears of a Sunni-dominated opposition to bolster support. The latest phase of Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East owes its virulence to the occupation of Iraq, where the US ruthlessly played the sectarian card to prevent the emergence of a genuinely national resistance. It has also been a knife at the heart of the Arab revolution and the linchpin of the Saudi-led strategy to prevent uprisings engulfing the conservative Gulf regimes.

Anti-Shia incitement has been central to Saudi propaganda against reform in the kingdom itself, the crushing of democratic protest in Bahrain and the drive to focus opposition across the region against Damascus (Alawites being a quasi-Shia sect), rather than Amman or Riyadh. It’s also what has attracted Al Qaeda and other Sunni volunteers to join the fight against the Assad regime, as tit-for-tat confessional killings multiply. For Syria and Lebanon, with their precarious ethnic and religious makeups, that is a disaster.

But it is the third dimension of the crisis — Syria’s role as Iran’s principal ally — that gives it the potential to set the region on fire and draw the outside world into a devastating conflict. The internal struggle in Syria, whose territory has been occupied by Israel for the last 45 years, has already become part of a western and Saudi proxy war against Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah. As James Rubin, US assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton, claimed this week, US intervention in Syria would be a “risk worth taking” because Iran “would no longer have a Mediterranean foothold from which to threaten Israel and destabilise the region”.

In fact, Iran’s alliance with Syria is one more reason why increasing western and Gulf dictators’ intervention in Syria would escalate the conflict, not end it. Last year’s Nato intervention in Libya increased the death toll by a factor of 10 to 15 and left a country of lawless warlords, torture and ethnic cleansing. Intervention in Syria, whether by fully arming the opposition or using air power to create “humanitarian corridors”, would have a far more devastating impact.

That’s partly because the Syrian regime has significant air defences and large-scale armed forces and the conflict is being fought out in heavily populated areas. But it’s also because of the sectarian schisms and the risk of spreading the conflict further into countries such as Iraq and Lebanon. Why the states that brought blood and destruction to Iraq and Afghanistan should be thought suitable vehicles of humanitarian deliverance to Syria is a mystery. But full-scale foreign intervention would certainly lead to a far greater civilian death toll and many more Houlas.

Right now, lower-level intervention is bleeding Syria in a war of attrition. Short of an internal coup, the only way out of a deepening sectarian and regional conflict is an internationally guaranteed negotiated settlement that allows Syrians the chance to determine their own future. That means the US and its allies giving the Annan plan a chance, as much as Iranian and Russian pressure on Damascus. The consequences of the alternative — full-scale military intervention — would be incalculable.

By arrangement with the Guardian

From Pakistan to Somalia, CIA-controlled pilotless aircraft rain down Hellfire missiles on an ever-expanding hit list of terrorist suspects — they have already killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians in the process.

At least 15 drone strikes have been launched in Yemen this month, as many as in the whole of the past decade, killing dozens; while in Pakistan, a string of US attacks has been launched against supposed “militant” targets in the past week,
incinerating up to 35 people and hitting a mosque and a bakery.

The US decision to step up the drone war again in Pakistan, opposed by both government and parliament in Islamabad as illegal and a violation of sovereignty, reflects its fury at the jailing of a doctor who reportedly helped CIA in finding whereabouts of Bin Laden and Pakistan’s refusal to reopen supply routes for Nato forces in Afghanistan. Those routes were closed in protest at the US killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers last November, for which Washington still refuses to apologise.

Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan’s high commissioner in London, on Tuesday described the latest US escalation as “punitive”. But then Predators and Reapers are Barack Obama’s weapons of choice and coercion, deployed only on the territory of troublesome US allies, such as Pakistan and Yemen — and the drone war is Obama’s war.

In his first two years in office, the US president more than tripled the number of attacks in Pakistan alone. For their US champions, drones have the advantage of involving no American casualties, while targeting the “bad guys” Bush lost sight of in his enthusiasm to subjugate Iraq. Enthusiasts boast of their surgical accuracy and exhaustive surveillance, operated by all-seeing technicians from thousands of miles away in Nevada.

But that’s a computer-game fantasy of clinical war. Since 2004, between 2,464 and 3,145 people are reported to have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan, of whom up to 828 were civilians (535 under Obama) and 175 children. Some
Pakistani estimates put the civilian death toll much higher — plausibly, given the tendency to claim as “militants” victims later demonstrated to be nothing of the sort.

The US president insisted recently that the civilian death toll was not a “huge number”. Not on the scale of Iraq, perhaps, where hundreds of thousands were killed; or Afghanistan, where tens of thousands have died. But they gruesomely include dozens killed in follow-up attacks after they had gone to help victims of earlier strikes — as well as teenagers like Tariq Khan, a 16-year-old Pakistani boy decapitated in a strike last October after he had travelled to Islamabad to protest against drones.These killings are, in reality, summary executions and widely regarded as potential war crimes by international
lawyers — including the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Philip Alston. The CIA’s now retired counsel, John Rizzo, who authorised drone attacks, himself talked about having been involved in “murder”.

A decade ago, the US criticised Israel for such “extrajudicial killings” but now claims self-defence in the war against Al Qaeda. These are attacks, however, routinely carried out on the basis of false intelligence, in countries such as Pakistan
where no war has been declared and without the consent of the elected government.

Lawyers representing victims’ families are now preparing legal action against the British government — which carries out its own drone attacks in Afghanistan — for taking part in war crimes by passing GCHQ intelligence to the CIA for its “targeted
killings”. Parallel cases are also being brought against the Pakistani government and the drone manufacturer General Electric — whose slogan is “we bring good things to life”.

Of course, drone attacks are only one method by which the US and its allies deliver death and destruction in Afghanistan and the wider Middle East, from night raids and air attacks to killing sprees on the ground. The day after last Friday’s Houla
massacre in Syria, eight members of one family were killed at home by a Nato air attack in eastern Afghanistan — one of many such atrocities barely registered in the western media.

But while support for the war in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low in all Nato states, the drone war is popular in the US. That’s hardly surprising, as it offers no danger to American forces — the ultimate asymmetric warfare — while
supposedly “taking out” terrorists. But these hi-tech death squads are creating a dangerous global precedent, which will do nothing for US security.

A decade ago, critics warned that the “war on terror” would spread terrorism rather than stamp it out. That is exactly what
happened. Obama has now renamed the campaign “overseas contingency operations” and is switching the emphasis from
boots on the ground to robots.

But, as the destabilisation of Pakistan and growth of Al Qaeda in Yemen shows, the impact remains the same. The drone war
is a predatory war on the Muslim world, which is feeding hatred of the US — and fuelling terror, not fighting it.

By arrangement with the Guardian

The entire European establishment has now lined up to scare Greeks off giving another majority to anti-austerity parties, as they did in explosive elections earlier this month. Europe’s revolt against austerity has to be contained. Democratic niceties about not interfering in other countries’ elections have been ditched. If Greeks vote for parties such as the radical left Syriza
— now leading in most opinion polls — they will be voting to leave the euro, Europe’s political elite has warned.

“To remain in the euro,” the unelected EU commission president Jose Manuel Barroso declared, “Greece must respect its
commitments”. By commitments, he meant the package of pulverising privatisations, tax rises and cuts in jobs, pay and services demanded by the EU and IMF in exchange for loans which cannot be repaid and are reducing the country to beggary. Knowing most Greeks both reject death-spiral austerity and want to stay in the euro, Europe’s political class is ratcheting up the fear of forced exit meltdown.

Most preposterous has been the British prime minister David Cameron lecturing Greeks on their responsibilities from outside the eurozone. “You can either vote to stay in the euro, with all the commitments you’ve made,” he declared, “or you’re effectively voting to leave”. Fellow Tory minister Ken Clarke warned the Greeks of “serious consequences” if they voted for “cranky extremists”. This from a government that demands growth from Europe while driving its own economy into a double-dip recession with homegrown austerity.

Meanwhile, the Irish are getting similar treatment, as the country’s elites try to scare voters into backing the EU’s permanent austerity treaty in a referendum later this month. Crucial to the campaign has been the threat that Ireland will be denied future emergency bailout funds for its own shrinking economy if the treaty is rejected. So far, that has kept the yes campaign ahead, even though Sinn Fein has mirrored the European trend by doubling its support to more than 20 per cent on the back of opposition to the country’s failed austerity programme.

But in both cases, the threats are phoney. The legal basis of the treaty clause the Irish government is claiming would cut off future bailout funds is strongly contested and the prospect unrealistic. And Greeks are not voting on whether to stay in or leave the euro next month. They are voting on whether to continue to reject a shock therapy programme that even those demanding its implementation know can only drive Greece deeper into debt and destitution.

There is now a strong likelihood that the country will end up leaving the euro, whichever way it turns — and that may well offer Greece the most realistic chance of eventual recovery. But it’s not what parties such as Syriza are demanding. Instead, its leader Alexis Tsipras has been in Paris and Berlin this week calling for a halt to Greece’s debt repayments, and negotiations with Europe’s leaders on a new deal.

The stronger the vote for anti-austerity parties, the better the chance that those negotiations could produce more than cosmetic results. That’s because the threat of a disorderly Greek default — which could still take place inside the euro — has the potential to trigger a cascade of bank runs and knock-on crises across the eurozone whose impact could dwarf the Lehmans crash of 2008.

Greece is, after all, only the eurozone state furthest down the road of collapse. The threat to crippled Spain is already potentially on a much larger scale. Across the eurozone, the banking system is once again tipping towards breakdown, as self-defeating austerity deepens the crisis.

As one EU commissioner told me on Tuesday, “this austerity union is simply not sustainable”. Eurozone leaders’ attempt to solve the crisis by “internal devaluation” — cutting wages and services across the southern periphery to restore competitiveness — was a “complete disaster” that would deliver mass poverty and migration to the north.

But despite hopes that France’s new president Francois Hollande, now backed by Barack Obama, could shift Europe towards jobs and growth, the concessions on offer from Germany’s Angela Merkel are so far not remotely on the scale necessary to overcome the growing crisis. That would need a commitment to fullblown eurobond lending to underpin state debts, a Marshall plan-style programme of fiscal transfers and investment in weaker eurozone states, along with recapitalisation and public takeover of European banks.

But Germany’s leaders show no sign of being prepared to foot the bill for the costs of a currency union that has benefited German capital above all but now threatens, like the gold standard in the early 20th century, to bring Europe’s economy to its knees.

But the eurozone’s implosion isn’t only the result of a cockeyed, one-size-fits-all currency structure that was always going to buckle and fracture under pressure. It’s also the product of the wider crisis of neoliberal capitalism that first erupted in the banking system five years ago and has since wreaked havoc on public finances, jobs, services and living standards throughout the western world.

Asked who they held responsible for the Greek crisis at the weekend, 50 per cent of Britons polled rightly blamed the banks, 22 per cent Brussels — and only 4 per cent the Greek people. But the eurozone breakdown is also the product of a generation of EU treaty-enforced privatisation, market deregulation and corporate liberalisation that paved the way for the crisis across Europe, including in Britain.

It’s that inbuilt neoliberal structure of the EU, central to debates in mainland Europe, that has been missing from the growing political pressure for a referendum on EU membership in Britain — but has played a central role in this crisis.

Across the continent, whether in or out of the eurozone, the need for a break with a failed economic model could not be more pressing.

By arrangement with the Guardian