It was miraculous and it was the first time the western proxies were defeated in the field in quite a long time, since at least the Vietnam War. It was the turning point where things stopped getting worse and started getting better.

Yeah seeing Putin announce that he would being bombing ISIS oil trucks after Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 was a big turning point geopolitically. It was a signal that Russia was not taking this lightly, that they were going to bomb the western proxies' source of funding directly. No more tip toeing around the issue.

We are getting not just 1 more Libya, the whole fucking shia and non-sunni/jewish middle east is going to become Libya-fied. It's unbelievable and terrible.

I really think that a lot of USA citizens and/or westerners struggle to grasp how bad this is and can get in terms of ethnic divide, and it comes down to the way race, along with ethno cultural groups, are seen in mainstream society there. I know you've gotten into extensive arguments over that very topic in the past on this website. I wrote a comment on it in this thread somewhere. For all the faults of the Assad government, he at least tried to create a secular state and mitigate this issue. That is something that is incredibly difficult to do (even in a country that is considered "racially homogeneous" by USA/western definitions) and can easily fall apart into indescribable barbarism.

you've linked to one person with a poor take. largepenis correctly describes the situation as a disaster. and yeah no shit the 'western left more generally' sucks. you're correct to disagree with parzivus in that one take (obviously the HTS are US aligned) but it's ridiculous to take literally one person's bad post and extrapolate it to make it so that you are the one true newsmega poster. don't conflate what you're reading on the internet at large with what is going on here in this thread and in this community. be constructive instead of wildly hyperbolizing in a self serving way.

Isn't the inaction of Russia and Iran precisely proof that these bourgeois governments are more driven by their own interests than by principled anti-imperialism? This seems deeper to me than a strategic mistake. They are not stupid and they have powerful capabilities. What they also have are their own bourgeois and national interests.

I think there is a persistent false dichotomy among communists between the "Western left" position that all these powers are imperialist and so equally bad and undeserving of support, and the self-styled anti-imperialist position that only the Western bloc is imperialist and so its opponents are necessarily anti-imperialist. These opponents are playing a counterhegemomic role and still they aspire to imperialism or at the very least to their own capitalist development (IMO the latter necessarily implies the former, that's Marxism). It's not an either/or.

Russia and Iran simply will not self-sacrifice to the extent of the DPRK, Cuba, or currently the Yemenis. Why would these powers be consistent anti-imperialists when their system is built to sell out? Following bourgeois interests is the same reason Russia began to fight NATO in Ukraine in 2022 instead of 2014. Back then it was preferable to sell oil to Westerners than to fight imperialism.

It is true that Russia, Iran, & Syria under Assad are better than the alternative. I agree that it has been right to critically support them. This situation is an absolute disaster; Syria is on track for an Afghanistan/Libya style nightmare, and this is the clearest victory for Israel and its backers in over a year. But they are not communists and that is a clear reason why they act the way they do.

In my view, Russia intervened in Syria in 2015 because they wanted to maintain a partner in an increasingly Western-dominated Southwest Asia, they wanted the use of their ports, and they wanted the Syrian market to be more amenable to Russian than Western capital and weapons exports. They perceived the benefits as worth the costs. Now supporting Assad and the like would be good money following bad, so they won't do it. It is self-serving in the same way their betrayal of Armenia was. Let's not forget their historically close relationship with Israel either.

Bourgeois powers can be worthy of support over other bourgeois powers in a particular context, but that should not cloud our judgment to the point we are surprised when they do not give up capitalist development for the cause. In the case of Assad, part of the reason the war began in the first place was his government's neoliberal privatizations leading to mass popular discontent, which, as you know very well, the West promptly took advantage of to further destabilize and to promote Salafist insanity. (That is not incompatible with the Syrian government having no good options after the imperialist war began. I agree there's little they could have done past that pivot point; that should not be the focus of criticism.)

As an aside, this false dichotomy plays into the ridiculous turf war on this site between "doomers"/"bloomers". We need to break out of black and white thinking in general.

I know that many of your allies being defeated and destroyed by ISIS and Israel is fucking bad and such a crisis that you must intervene. I know that genocide is nearly being completed, in open sight. I know that the imperialists will never back down without being defeated in the field. I know the recent Iranian government turned much more pacifist and reactive after the elections of the neoliberal leader obsessed with making deals with the west. These are things that are not in dispute, criticism is warranted and guess what - if you go onto Iranian social media right now the people of Iran are going ballistic criticizing their government for being fucking cowards and clowns.