In the unofficial news organ of the German Greens, the taz, columnist Micha Brumlik has written an article urgently calling for war against Syria. Brumlik’s article shows in exemplary fashion the barbaric character of Green Party policy, masked behind talk of humanitarian values and its endorsement of the UN doctrine, the “Responsibility to Protect.”

Under the title “A vision for Syria”, Brumlik outlines a brutal scenario for a rapid strike (the notorious Blitzkrieg) and the subsequent occupation of the country. According to Brumlik’s war plan, Western troops must destroy “Syrian government troop positions with US drones and cruise missiles, “ and then take the capital Damascus in “violent street fighting” to enable “domination over the UN newly established protectorate of Syria.”

The Protectorate should be maintained, he continues, for at least 10 years and be controlled by “German, South African and Brazilian police forces” together with “US troops”. The economy should be rebuilt with the assistance of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and combined with the creation of an “authoritarian participatory democracy”.

Brumlik insists that such a campaign be commenced immediately to restore “some degree of rationality” in the world. This is the only way, he declares, to reduce the number of civilian casualties and ensure peace.

Such war propaganda borders on absurdity. The powers that Brumlik presents as protective in fact triggered and escalated the war in Syria. In collaboration with the Saudi and Qatari monarchies, the Western powers have dispatched right-wing mercenaries into the country, provided them with weapons, and supplied them with intelligence information.

These so-called “rebels” are responsible for numerous massacres and poison gas attacks, notably the religiously motivated mass murder in Houla last year. The Islamist terrorists of the Al-Nusra Front, financed mainly by US ally Saudi Arabia, boast of their vicious killings of defenceless civilians, which they have filmed and posted on the Internet.

The Western forces, and in particular the US army, which Brumlik celebrates as liberators, are responsible for numerous war atrocities and crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. The images of torture from Abu Ghraib, the massacre in Kunduz and the international network of illegal CIA torture chambers are the best-known examples. As for the South African police, they massacred dozens of striking miners in their own country just a year ago.

Based on such preposterous premises, Brumlik demands the right for imperialist powers to occupy any country whose government they have previously destabilised. In the face of “chaos, anarchy and tyranny,” the concept of “inviolable national state sovereignty” is rendered obsolete, he argues.

“A future government” therefore must seek to transform the “Responsibility to Protect” concept into binding international law…. This requires, in return, that such a government is itself prepared to participate in appropriate armed action,” Brumlik declares. He claims that, in particular, there must be immediately military intervention in the Congo.

Brumlik goes so far as to make a biblical comparison. Just as the Old Testament God demands bloody retribution against the people of Syria in Amos 1.3, today the Western powers must ensure order with the use of force led by the United Nations!

Brumlik’s argument is a barely disguised argument that the imperialist countries have to again take up the “white man’s burden”, the justification for colonialist intervention a century ago. In the process of recolonising the Middle East and Africa, thoroughly discredited ideologies are being dug up to once again send soldiers into the field of battle.

The biblical passage Brumlik cites goes far beyond the mere occupation of the country. It calls for the expulsion of all the people of Syria and threatens the neighbours of Israel with “extinction” and “fire” to ensure that all “shall perish”.

This martial language corresponds in many respects to the plans of the Western Powers. The most recent wars against Libya and Mali, which were also justified on the basis of the alleged “responsibility to protect”, have cost thousands of lives and provoked further conflict. The massacres and mass killings in Syria by the rebels demonstrate the barbaric character of the Western intervention.

An open war against Syria could easily trigger a conflagration in the region and a confrontation with Russia and China, with the potential for a third world war. The US, Germany and their allies are willing to ignite a tinderbox in the region to defend their geo-strategic interests.

This is a policy that Brumlik enthusiastically supports. He speaks on behalf of a whole layer of well-heeled petty bourgeois who were radicalised in the 1960s and have since then moved far to the right.

In the 1970s, Brumlik was a member of the trade union think tank, the Socialist Bureau. Later, he switched to the Greens, which he left in 1991 because the party at that time opposed arms exports to Israel. He is a staunch defender of Zionism and has called on a number of occasions for military intervention in the Middle East.

In many respects, Brumlik anticipated the course taken by the Green Party, which in 1998 openly supported the NATO war against Kosovo. Under the pretext of humanitarian considerations, the Greens in government sent German troops into their first war since the Nazis ruled over Germany.

Since then, nothing remains of the Greens’ humanitarian pretensions. Instead, the party now refers to the protection of “interests” and “strategic objectives” and has become one of the main parties of war in Germany.

Brumlik now supplements this course with his invocation of biblical references to “extermination” and fire, thereby articulating the consequences of the Green Party’s policies.