By Markar Melkonian 

Yerevan’s appeasement of American warmongering in the Middle East is only one of many instances that demonstrate that Armenia’s rulers are incapable of even consistently serving the interests of native Armenian capitalists when they conflict with the demands of the Superpower.

Five years ago, before the violence began to escalate, an estimated 80,000 Armenians called Syria home.  Today, according to published figures, only ten to twelve thousand Armenians are left, mostly in Aleppo and Damascus.  Some 16,000 Armenian Syrians have sought refuge in the Republic of Armenia (the ROA), and thousands of others have escaped to Lebanon, Turkey, and farther afield. These refugees are among the reported four million Syrian refugees who have been forced to flee their country since March 2011.  Millions of others have been displaced within Syria. 

For generations, Muslims and Christians lived in friendship and peace in Syria. Arab people, both Christian and Muslim, extended a hand to Armenians at the time of our direst need.  They gave far more than those who had far more to give.  We have shared dark days with our Arab friends and neighbors, and we have faced the same adversaries, notably Turkish occupiers, British colonialists, and the Zionist oppressors who destroyed our ancient Armenian community in Jerusalem.

But for the past four years, Armenians have watched helplessly, as fighters--many of them non-Arabic-speaking foreigners who crossed into Syria from Turkey--have plunged the country into a bloodbath.  In late January 2013, U.S. Senator John McCain’s “freedom fighters” occupied and depopulated the Armenian village of Yacoubiah (founded in the 8^th century). 

In March 2014, the “freedom fighters” attacked and occupied the Armenian town of Kessab.  In September 2014, they partially destroyed the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church at Deir Zor, and two days after the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide, they bombed the Forty Martyrs Cathedral in Aleppo.  Meanwhile, Armenian communities in Aleppo, Raqqa, and other cities have suffered massive destruction and depopulation.

Thousands of refugees fleeing Syria, including Armenians, are Iraqis who had taken refuge in Syria only several years earlier, when they were forced out of their homes thanks to Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Among George W. Bush’s many other accomplishments, he succeeded in uprooting 30,000 Iraqi Armenians, thus signing the death warrant for the Armenian communities of Iraq. 

Before Operation Iraqi Freedom there was Operation Desert Storm; and between the two American Operations, Washington imposed a deadly military embargo on Iraq, an embargo that, according to Western sources, resulted in the deaths of some 250,000 of the most vulnerable Iraqis, notably women and children.  So far, the death toll in Iraq since 1990 is around one and one-quarter million.  In addition, the American wars in Iraq have created millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of amputees, hundreds of thousands of widows, and hundreds of thousands of orphans. Americaand its regional surrogates in Tel Aviv, Ankara, and Riyadh have fanned flames of fanaticism that will not subside for decades.  They have fomented hatred and division, and turned tens of millions of lives into a living hell.

And for what?  Well, we hear the words “democracy” again and of course “human rights.”  If we are to believe Radio Liberty, America’s wars, embargos, and occupations are noble campaigns undertaken for high-minded reasons.  And needless to say, none of those reasons have anything at all to do with securing corporate America’s global domination, or controlling oil fields, or propping up Uncle Sam’s preferred tyrannies, or promoting the military-industrial complex.

In 2004, an administration in Yerevan saw fit to join George W. Bush’s Coalition of the Willingin Iraq.  Back then, some of us publicly opposed the deployment of Armenia soldiers to Iraq.  By doing so, we were expressing the overwhelming popular sentiment in Armenia.  (For sources, refer to the links below.)  Still, it did not come as a surprise when, at the end of the day, the President of the ROA, as well as the National Assembly and the Constitutional Court all obediently gave the green light to the deployment. Soon, some forty or so Armenian soldiers landed in Iraq, for no other purpose, really, but to help lend an air of international legitimacy to a unilateral war of aggression. 

The reader is invited to review documentation of this writer’s contribution to the campaign to stop the Armenian deployment to Iraq.  Here are some links: 

file:///Users/markarmelkonian/Documents/roadweb/PAGES/iraqdeploy.html

file:///Users/markarmelkonian/Documents/roadweb/PAGES/iraqopenletter.html

file:///Users/markarmelkonian/Documents/roadweb/PAGES/iraqnadistract.html

file:///Users/markarmelkonian/Documents/roadweb/PAGES/iraqplanokd.html

And here is a passage from another document from the campaign to stop the deployment of Armenian soldiers to Iraq:

The Syrian Arab Republic has been a place of refuge for thousands of Christians fleeing Iraq. Will Armenia help set the stage for these refugees to be uprooted yet again? Are leaders in Yerevan prepared to take the next step, to help “stabilize” Syria if the neoconservatives in Washington get their way yet again? It is as true of George W. Bush as it was of Adolph Hitler: To appease an aggressor is to invite further aggression.

(file:///Users/markarmelkonian/Documents/roadweb/PAGES/Iraqnatassem.html)

This open letter was sent out as an email blast on December 14, 2004.  In it, we publicly predicted the consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom for Amenians IN SYRIA, ten years before McCain’s “freedom fighters”blew up the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Deir Zor. 

It is not as if these predictions were the work of genius or mystical insight.  On the contrary, for any moderately informed adult with a healthy skepticism of Radio Liberty propaganda, it was a no-brainer.  In view of the obvious consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom for Syria, it is all the more disgraceful that so few Armenian officials could see the disaster coming. Or that they pretended that they could not see it coming.

Recent revelations, including documents released by Wikileaks, have abundantly confirmed what the most perceptive critics of U.S. foreign policy have long claimed:  the United States has provided training, money, medical aid, and weapons to the “Syrian rebels,” including al-Qaeda-linked fighters of the Nusra Front, as well as future fighters for Daesh (ISIS). U.S. clients in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have provided hundreds of millions of dollars worth of support to jihadi’s during the same time period, and the CIA has provided military training.  All the while, U.S. officials and the corporate-owned media have produced an incessant barrage of inflammatory accusations--many of them outright lies--against the Syrian Army and Bashar Assad.

And now we get to witness the unspeakably humiliating spectacle of leaders of Christian churches in the Middle East dutifully making their pilgrimage to Washington, hat in hand, to beg “favors” from functionaries of the very state that is responsible in the first place for destroying their communities, their lives, and their hopes.  The church leaders mouth the usual platitudes and beg for charity, for the lifting of immigration restrictions, and for the creation of “safe zones” in Syria. Once again, we are required to show gratitude to the architects of our victimhood.

The American wars in Iraq, followed by subversion of Syria, set the stage for the Daesh military advances in Syria.  And this in turn has promoted the long-standing American goal of destroying the Syrian Army—the last remaining Arab army that was willing and able to defend its territory against Zionist attack.  Leaders in Yerevan who railroaded the ROA into the Coalition of the Willing may congratulate themselves that they have brought smiles to the faces of the likes of Richard Perle, Michael Chertoff, Kenneth Adelman, Martin Indyk, Eliot Abrams, and all the rest of the vicious Zionist neocons who have been running American foreign policy for decades.  (Regarding the influence of Friends of Israel on American policy, refer to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2007.)

At the time of the deployment, acquaintances in one or another of the “power ministries” in Yerevan informed us that Armenia simply had no choice in the matter:  it had to join the Coalition of the Willing, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the United States.  The question then arises, how does Armenia find itself in a position where a superpower eight thousand miles away can force it into something as shameful and as harmful as the Coalition of theWilling? Is this the post-Soviet “independence” that the counter-revolutionaries in Opera Square promised twenty-five years ago?

Joining America’s “coalitions” does not even guarantee that the neocons will leave you alone.  Let us recall that the Assad government in Damascus joined the Desert Storm “coalition” back in 1990, and so did the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya. It seems that they, too, were pursuing their own “balanced foreign policies.”  We saw what happened to them. 

There is a lesson here for Armenia: appeasement only encourages further aggression.  Armenia’s participation in the Coalition of the Willing helped to legitimize the decimation of ancient Armenian communities in the Middle East, the destruction of Armenia’s allies in the region, and Turkey’s rise as a regional superpower.  Knowingly or unknowingly, Armenian officials helped the American neocons to achieve their explicit goal of destroying the armies of Iraq and Syria.  Their next target is Armenia’s only helpful neighbor, Iran. 

Yerevan’s appeasement of American warmongering in the Middle East is only one of many instances that demonstrate that Armenia’s rulers are incapable of even consistently serving the interests of native Armenian capitalists when they conflict with the demands of the Superpower. If Armenia’s rulers are incapable of doing this, then what is the likelihood that they will ever pursue the welfare of the country’s impoverished majority?  (Armenians who want to understand what is happening in their country really need to learn the meaning of the term COMPRADOR BOURGEOISIE.) 

If the preferences of the majority are to count for anything, then clear-sighted members of that majority must organize themselves, to articulate their demands through their own independent institutions and advance those demands through the exercise of power at the street level.  This is another lesson—an incalculably costly one--to be learned from the consequences of appeasement in Iraq.

Markar Melkonian is a philosophy instructor and an author.  His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (2005).