Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Syria and the left - or should I say "the left of uncertain identity"?

Just to start: there are good reasons for the United States to stop escalating its military actions in Syria. Very convincing ones, in my eyes.

Or, to put it more appropriately, people who advocate escalation of war and US military strikes in other countries have the moral burden of providing convincing reasons. Military contractors will always make money on them, and so will various other companies that provides various kinds of support to the war effort. Those are not legitimate reasons for going to war and killing people.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy explains his concerns in this Morning Joe segment, Senator Chris Murphy: Military Strike In Syria Not The Way To Go 04/18/2018:



Syria is a complicated and risky situation in which one-off bombing campaigns are questionable at best. They are a flat-out bad idea unless they are part of a meaningful political and diplomatic strategy for ending the conflict in Syria and resolving the genuinely messy issues involved without allowing the situation to expand into a wider war involving Iran, the US, Israel, Russia, and Turkey. Or some combination thereof. The Trump Administration has no such strategy. And even if it did, successfully implementing it is unlikely to happen with a moody orange man-child as President.

The US, British, and French governments claim that their intelligence indicates that there was a chemical weapons use by the government of Syria. Whether there was a legitimate practical reason for the US to make the strike the Trump Administration made last weekend, the US and its NATO allies had no authorization in international law for doing that. And that matters.

The US Constitution matters, too, Including the war powers provision. The Congress and both parties have been complicit in neglecting their duty to enforce it. The Supreme Court had long since refused to step in to enforce Congressional war powers, judging that to be the duty of Congress and not the courts. There was no Congressional autorization for this intervention, nor for the more-or-less covert operations there, though some of them are well know. Even though the news reports have to be scrutinized rather closely to tell that.

Syria doesn't take place in a historical, political, moral, or practice vacuum. We've had the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, and the Libyan intervention in the last twenty years. (We'll leave the smaller military interventions to the side for now.) Part of the official purpose of all those included fighting terrorism, improving stability, protecting human rights, preventing the spread and use of "weapons of mass destruction," and supporting international law. Oh, and defending the United States itself.

If any of those four clearly achieved any one of those goals, it would require more imagination than I possess to say how. The best I can say is that the Kosovo War seems to have had the least calamitous results.For what it's worth, I personally favored the Kosovo War and the Afghanistan War, the latter at least in its initial stages. But I also try to pay attention to what actually happens in US wars, whether I support them or not. Maybe especially if I support them.

Also, "you're on Russia's side if you don't support {fill in your favorite bad foreign policy idea}" just doesn't cut it as an argument for going to war.

The Democrats' lazy and defensive approach to the Trump-Russia scandal hasn't helped, because too many of them are over-eager to paint anything they can as evidence of Trump's sympathy or collusion with Russia. There's plenty of evidence for that without cramming anything and everything into that box.

There's always strife in the Democratic Party over war and peace issues. There has also been around of finger-pointing, trolling, shaming, and general quibbling between people who consider themselves on the left (not center-left) that I've been hearing about. Alexander Reid Ross writes about it, from his own polemical point of view, in How Assad's War Crimes Bring Far Left and Right Together - Under Putin's Benevolent Gaze Haaretz 04/17/2018. I don't want to oversimplify his argument. But in this article, he does come across as though he considers anyone opposed escalating US military intervention in Syria as a Soviet Russian dupe. (Yes, putting "Soviet" there was intentional.) It's a variation on stock war propaganda. And anyone serious about opposing a war has to be prepared to let a lot of criticism slide off their backs, including that kind.

Because most people, most of the time, aren't cheering for war with any country. That doesn't make them fans of human rights abuses in every country against which they are not advocating war.

Foreign policy is all about picking sides. Picking a position that matches more closely with that of Country X than with Country Y, or even with that of Home Country A-Number-One, doesn't mean that the person picking sides has any particular love or admiration for Country X or its governing system. So what I've encountered of the more sectarian left factions slagging each other has mainly made me puzzle over what they are trying to say rather shedding much light on the Syrian civil war and other countries' reactions to it.

A case in point would be The ‘anti-imperialism’ of idiots (Leila's Blog 04/14/2018), which Reid Ross links at the end of his Haaretz article.

This article was my first exposure to Leila Al Shami that I recall. And on this first encounter, It's not clear to me what she's supporting. She seems to be in favor of Trump's retaliatory strike, or something like it, against Syria over chemical weapons use. Or maybe not. I think she's saying that Assad's war has been reprehensible. She may or may not be supporting US troops being stationed in Syria, it's really not clear. It's also not clear whether she's saying that that it was wrong for Syria to try to retake territory held by IS/Daesh, or whether the US was right or wrong to provide some aid to jihadist groups fighting Assad's government. Although she does seem to like it that some Syrian democratic groups protested against the jihadists.

She uses using terms like "the western ‘anti-war’ movement' and the "authoritarian left", but who she puts in that category is mostly unclear. She mentions several rightwing figures in the US and Europe, and the ANSWER coalition and Stop the War UK on the left. Would she put left/center-left figures like Barbara Lee in that category? Part of how she avoids naming her targets is by using the passive voice that so annoyed Geeorge Orwell: "support is extended," "Everything that happens is viewed ...," "Syrians are not seen as possessing ...", etc.

I don't know what "pro-fascist left" is even supposed to mean. Fascism is hard enough to define outside of Mussolini's regime that called itself fascist. Terms like "left fascist" just add to the muddle, as did the famous Comintern "social fascist" label eight decades ago.

I'm also puzzled at her obviously disapproving comment that it's an authoritarian tendency to put "states themselves at the centre of political analysis." It's pretty hard to talk about foreign policy in any meaningful sense without realizing that the international system is a system of states. Much (though not all) of international law is focused on the behavior of national states.

Her approach, unfortunately, strikes me as kind of scattershot.

Part of the reality of antiwar politics in the US is that the groups that have experience organizing antiwar marches and rallies tend to be smaller left groups. Maybe in some parallel universe, the Democratic National Committee has a well-organized national Resistance to War Division with well-staffed state-level chapters that have deep expertise in doing that. But not in this one.

I recall attending one of the large marches against the Iraq War in early 2003 and being struck by the fact that the first speakers before the main event tended to walk through laundry lists of all the various causes they found worthy of support int he US and around the world which I'm sure most attendees found to be so much background noise. But that kind of group is likely to be very visible in antiwar protests. And they often find themselves squabbling with similar but competing groups over differences in position that may be unintelligible to people not immersed in those particular faction fights.

This Struggle Session podcast (Episode 60, Episode 60 - Do Something About Syria w/ Rania Khalek 04/17/2018) features a group of people who understand themselves as being on the left and who are unapologetically against escalating NATO intervention ins Syria. They engage the debate from their viewpoint.

The topic also comes up on Sam Seder's Majority Report (04/17/2018 edition) for a few minutes, starting around 2:11:00:



Sam suggests that the discussion on the left over intervening in Syria or not has become a kind of signifying issue in which other views and positions have become wrapped up. Which would explain why some of the discussion that I've encountered seems a bit long on polemical insults and baiting the other side without being all that focused on the actual issues around intervention.

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