I've never been hair-on-fire alarmed over the existence of RT, which is now conventionally described in the US as "the Russian propaganda channel." Which in great part it is. There are some shows that RT has run that can't be shoe-horned into that mode. And with the start of Putin's second Presidency, RT did take a turn toward more consistently promoting Russian government positions.
I'm all for critical reading and paying attention to the quality of sources. FOX News is Republican Party propaganda, and I always take that into account when using them as a source of information. Because of their status promoting Republican partisan ideology, they are a good bellwether for the direction the Republican Party is going on particular issues. But they also do report real news. If someone is being interviewed on FOX News, the interview itself and the content of it are news. For factual description of events, i.e., a big part of what we call news, I generally don't rely on solely a FOX News report. But even there, news reporting by FOX local affiliates is more straightforward reporting, not necessarily subject to the same intensity of an ideological agenda sa the FOX national news.
All this is by way of introduction to a quote from the Moscow Times. As of today, Wikipedia's entry on the Moscow Times says:
The Moscow Times is an English-language weekly newspaper published in Moscow, with a circulation of 55,000 copies. It is distributed free of charge at places frequented by English-speaking tourists and expatriates such as hotels, cafés, embassies, and airlines and is also available by subscription. The newspaper is popular among foreign citizens residing in Moscow and English-speaking Russians. In November 2015 the newspaper changed its design and type from daily to weekly (released every Thursday) and increased the number of pages to 24.
The newspaper regularly publishes articles by prominent Russian journalists such as Yulia Latynina and Ivan Nechepurenko. It has served as a 'training ground' for foreign correspondents, including Ellen Barry, who later became New York Times Moscow bureau chief and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Last week there was a lot of talk in Russia of a new “Cuban crisis,” evoking the breathtaking showdown between the U.S.S.R and the United States in 1962 over Moscow’s installation of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. In response to Russian bravado, President Donald Trump tweeted about America’s “nice, new and “smart”!” missiles.
But behind the smokescreen of the American president’s flamboyance and Moscow’s World-War-III innuendo, both sides have shown cool-headed restraint. The United States and Russia quickly moved to de-escalate as soon as the operation was over. Military and diplomatic contacts continued.
Given the circumstances, it is a good outcome. But for the Kremlin, it is bad television. Moscow wanted an engrossing new story about an evil aggressor deterred by a righteous Russia.
Commentators on Russia’s state-run television had few comforting stories to tell apart from praising Syrian air defenses, all Soviet designs from the 1970s, doing a superb job shooting down Western missiles. Syria intercepted 71 out of 103 cruise missiles fired by the U.S. and its allies, the Russian Ministry of Defense said on Saturday.
The U.S. military denied the claim. A military representative stated that the Syrians launched around 40 surface to air missiles after the last U.S. missile hit its target. At no time, he added, were Russian air defense systems engaged. The U.S. did acknowledge that they did not strike all the sites believed to be involved in Syria’s chemical weapons program.
I found the op-ed helpful in providing some insight into what Russia's official narrative on Syria might imply.
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.
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 GazeHaaretz 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.
I began this post before the news a few minutes ago that the US, Britain, and France are making some kind of military strike on Syria. My Congresswoman's initial reaction:
By illegally bombing Syria, President Trump has once again denied the American people any oversight or accountability in this endless war. Congress, not the president, has the power to authorize military action. https://t.co/9P25HQ8zq6
My preferred Democratic California Senator candidate reacted:
No, it's less than zero. The American treasury will be robbed billions, U.S. lives will be at risk, Syrian people will be massacred, untold terrorists bred, & the world will be an even more dangerous place. #SyriaStrikes
So there we are. [British Prime Minister Teresa] May holds a “war cabinet”, for heaven’s sakes, as if our losses were mounting on the Somme in 1916, or Dorniers were flying out of occupied France to blitz London in 1940.
What is this childish prime minister doing? Older, wiser Conservatives will have spotted the juvenile quality of this nonsense, and want a debate in Parliament. How could May follow an American president who the world knows is crackers, insane, chronically unstable, but whose childish messages – about missiles that are “nice and new and ‘smart’” – are even taken seriously by many of my colleagues in the US? We should perhaps be even more worried about what happens if he does turn away from the Iran nuclear deal.
It continues to surprise me that European political discussions of the refugee crisis refer so little to the role of NATO wars in the Greater Middle East. And that European discussions of military strikes, interventions, and regime change refer so infrequently to the significant effects on the refugee crisis that those wars have.
But in reality, when Britain and France talk about military intervention in the Middle East or Northern Africa, they are talking about something like to significantly increase the number of refugees trying to come to Europe. And not just to Europe.
The UN Refugees website as of this date provides the following graphics on refugees:
The graph on the right apparently applies only to the three countries show in the middle graphic.
The website also provides this information:
The conflict in Syria, now in its seventh year, was the world’s biggest producer of refugees (5.5 million). Humanitarian needs in Syria have increased significantly since the beginning of the crisis, with 13.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, including more than 6 million children. Over 400,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million injured since 2010.
Many Syrians have been forced to leave their homes, often multiple times, making Syria the largest displacement crisis in the world with 6.3 million people internally displaced and almost 4 million people registered as refugees in neighboring countries. An estimated 4.53 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in hard-to-reach areas and besieged locations.
Turkey hosts over 2.9 million registered Syrians. The majority of them live in urban areas, with around 260,000 accommodated in the 21 government-run refugee camps. There are more than a million registered Syrians in Lebanon and 660,000 in Jordan. Iraq has also seen a growing number of Syrians arriving, hosting more than 241,000, while in Egypt UNHCR provides protection and assistance to more than 122,000. [my emphasis]
South Sudan is also a significant source of regugees: "In 2016, the disastrous break-off of peace efforts in July in South Sudan contributed to an outflow of 737,400 people by the end of the year. That number has continued to rise during the first half of 2017."
The relentless suffering of Syrian civilians marks a shameful failure of political will and a new low in Syria’s long-running conflict, which this month reaches a depressing seventh anniversary, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said on Friday.
“This seven-year war has left a colossal human tragedy in its wake. For the sake of the living, it is high time to end this devastating conflict. There are no clear winners in this senseless pursuit of a military solution. But the losers are plain to see – they are the people of Syria,” he added.
Seven years of fighting have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, driven 6.1 million people from their homes inside Syria, and forced 5.6 million refugees to seek safety in neighbouring countries in the region.
The conditions faced by civilians inside Syria are worse than ever, with 69 per cent languishing in extreme poverty. The share of families spending more than half of their annual income on food has risen to 90 per cent, while food prices are on average eight times higher than pre-crisis levels. Some 5.6 million people endure life-threatening conditions in terms of their security, basic rights or living standards, and require urgent humanitarian assistance. [my emphasis]
In the last years of the Obama administration, the US resettled tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. When Trump took office, that number plummeted — partly because of the 120-day “refugee ban” that prevented nearly any refugees from being brought into the US over the summer of 2017, and partly because of specific scrutiny facing refugees from several countries, including Syria.
The result is that the US is on pace to resettle fewer than 100 Syrian refugees in the fiscal year that ends September 30. And it might not even be that many.
Rather than bombing Syria, the US should be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees. https://t.co/9S2mxVlqnJ
The US was taking only a trickle of Syrian refugees under the Obama Administration. But, "almost as soon as Trump took the oath of office, his administration slammed the door shut" on them.
The German statistical office reports that at the end of 2017, Germany had a total of 10.6 million people in Germany with only a non-German citizenship. (Ausländische Bevölkerung wächst im Jahr 2017 um 5,8 % 12.04.2018) Most of them come out of other EU countries, especially Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. They show the foreign population of the country growing from 8.2 million to 10.0 million from 2014 to 2016. 2015 was the acute phase of the chronic refugee crisis that generated political unrest in Europe, although about 500,000 of that growth was from the EU-28 states.
Spiegel Online reports (Zahl der Ausländer auf 10,6 Millionen gestiegen 12.04.2018 ) that the number of Syrian refugees coming into Germany dropeed from 260 thousand in 2016 to 61 thousand in 2017. the number from Afghanistan dropeed from 119 thousand in 2016 to five thousand in 2017. The national statistics office indicates that some of the refugees coming in 2015 appear in the figures as though they arrived in 2016. The real drop in Syrian and Afghan refugees was from 2015 to 2017.
Der Standard reports that an EU payment payment due under the EU's 2015 agreement with Turkey, which is a very large part of the solution to the refugee problem. A classic Angela Merkel extend-and-pretend "solution." Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and Sweden are all pushing to have it come out of the EU budget. With some grumbling to be heard about how Merkel crammed the thing down everyone's else's throats. (Adelheid Wölfl, Flüchtlingsabkommen mit Türkei: Merkel soll an EU vorbeiverhandelt haben 12.04.2018)
Trump is a spaz. So it's hard to know which of his tweets to take seriously. Although since he is President of the United States, people do take them seriously, and for good reason.
Still, this is reckless and stupid for the President to be tweeting like this:
Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!
And it makes even more of a muddle when he tweets immediately afterward:
Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!
A new major bombing strike or other kinds of US military escalation in Syria has a real risk of winding up in a direct confrontation of some kind or other between American and Russia military forces. Peter Beaumont warns:
... in diplomacy – especially the diplomacy of war – the niceties of language are employed in defence of the legal status of armed conflict between states. What is said – and how it is said – matters when justifying the use of force. In Trump’s remarks, the appeal to international law and ethics emerges as nothing more than an expression of his personal outrage, and the dangerous diplomacy of “ya, boo, sucks”. Perhaps we should not be surprised by such comments from a political leader who has long ignored the counsel of his own lawyers, and for whom the world appears as a binary struggle, with those challenging him portrayed with nicknames and in the crudest terms of otherness. ...
If a sense of escalation has been palpable in the past few days, first in the0 Russian threat to shoot down US missiles, then Trump’s knee-jerk response, what is clear is that in his tweet, Trump has dangerously widened the scope of the crisis, from frustration among the international community at Moscow’s shielding of Assad, to hinting at the possibility of a clash with Russia.
That plays into deeper and darker themes of a competition between Putin and Trump – both thin-skinned populist nationalists who have vowed to make their countries “great again”. Two men with fragile egos who have each yoked to their national ambitions.
And too many Democrats have preemptively restricted their ability to criticize Trump's recklessness in the Middle East by carrying on like it was 1959 about how Trump is way too soft on The Russians.
I was suggesting on Facebook to someone writing about Trump's announced Syria withdrawal that speculating on Trump's motives for a particular foreign policy decision like the Syria pullout announcement is very tricky, since he likely doesn't know the motive of some of them himself. Given what we know about him, it's entirely believable that his buddy Vlad called him up and told him to pull the troops. It's also easy to imagine it's because he met with one of his FOX News kitchen cabinet who told him, "Bashar Assad is a big ole poopy-head."
It turns out that the pullout wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.
Donald Trump has decided to keep US forces in Syria for a limited period, ending speculation about an immediate pull-out fuelled by the president himself. He agreed at a National Security Council meeting that the 2,000 US troops backed by massive airpower should stay in Syria where they support the Kurds in the east of the country. ...
The one big aim uniting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in their approach to the Syrian conflict is that they all want US forces out of Syria, though their motives differ. Mr Putin and Mr Rouhani want Mr Assad’s forces to extend their control to the east and north of the country, while Turkey wants to destroy the Kurdish quasi-state, which the Syrian Kurds call Rojava, which has grown up east of the Euphrates during the war against Isis.
US Middle East policy has been such a disaster, especially since the Iraq War, that it's hard to imagine that anyone looking at foreign policy pragmatically would advocate sustained US military involvement in Syria, much less an Iraq War.
Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center writes about why it's Time to Get Out of SyriaDefenseOne 04/05/2018. Speaking of the widespread pushback from Republicans, Democrats, and the media to the kinda-sorta pullout announcement, Admas observes:
This criticism perpetuates a long tradition of American hubris about our ability to make things happen in the Middle East, especially using military force. But those days are long, long gone, if they ever existed. A stake went through the heart of American Middle East hubris the day President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Whatever the invented justification – a nuclear program, terrorism support, revenge for the Bush 41 assassination attempt, moral judgement against a nasty regime – the 2003 invasion and the eight years of conflict and nation-building failure that followed undermined what little was left of our capacity to influence events in the region.
The invasion also set in motion a regional security landslide that had been waiting to happen and has been rumbling downhill ever since. Along with the ill-advised effort to expand democracy in the region, under Presidents Bush and Obama, the underlying entropy that infects Middle East politics — inter-state tensions, conflict of Islamic sects, Arab-Persian tensions, the unresolvable Kurdish problem — simply spun out of control, never to return.
I think pulling US troops out of Syria would be a good decision. I was ready to credit Trump's pullout comment as an instance of the Rick Perry Principle, that even a stopped clock is right once a day.
But managing subtlety really doesn't seem to be Trump's forté.
Backing Kurdish separatists is consistent with the policy we followed in Iraq. But there are a lot of ways that can go wrong. Among other things, they are the enemy of Turkey, which is one of our NATO allies. Putin and Turkey's Erdoğan are courting each other pretty heavily right now, so pushing Turkey more in that direction has real risks for the US.
Turkey is also a huge part of the EU's current solution to the refugee crisis. If Turkey decided to send the refugees in their camps to Europe, that would cause some problems, to put it mildly, and likely benefit the populist right parties in the short run.
But that saying about "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" is inoperative in media mainstream and in much of the foreign policy establishment. The bold Maverick McCain is back doing what he does best, mongering war:
Über-realist Stephen Walt gives us some things to watch for in How to Start a War in 5 Easy Steps Foreign Policy 04/02/2018 (the mainstream media is half way there already when it comes to war on Syrian and Iran):
The danger is grave and growing.
War will be easy and cheap (but only if we act now).
War will solve all (or at least most) of our problems.
The enemy is evil. Or crazy. Maybe both.
Peace is unpatriotic.
Not so long ago, we used to hear some cliches about war all the time that we don't hear much these days. Like, "War is always a failure of foreign policy." And, "The only justification for going to war is to produce a better peace."
The American discussions of military involvement these days often seems stuck at, "Who do we bomb next?" And for the news media, "If we have a war, our ratings will go up."
Patrick Cockburn was one of the best reporters on the Iraq War. If we can legitimately speak of it in the past tense. The trusty but staid Encyclopaedia Britannica's gives this definition (internal links omitted):
Iraq War, also called Second Persian Gulf War, (2003–11), conflict in Iraq that consisted of two phases. The first of these was a brief, conventionally fought war in March–April 2003, in which a combined force of troops from the United States and Great Britain (with smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. It was followed by a longer second phase in which a U.S.-led occupation of Iraq was opposed by an insurgency. After violence began to decline in 2007, the United States gradually reduced its military presence in Iraq, formally completing its withdrawal in December 2011.
We must speak of multiple armed conflicts in Syria rather than a single war so that when one military confrontation gets close to its final chapter, it is swiftly replaced by another. Isis, the greatest threat of 2014 to 2017, is largely eliminated, but the new focus of violence is the escalating struggle between Turkey and the two or three million Syrian Kurds.
The Syrian Army is advancing into Eastern Ghouta and the likelihood is that President Bashar al-Assad will soon have almost complete control of the capital for the first time since 2012. One outcome could be for the rebel fighters to leave with light weapons for opposition or Turkish-held territory in southern and northern Syria, while the bulk of the civilian population would be amnestied and stay where they are. But the Syrian war is littered with compromise solutions which never quite came about because there were too many players to agree on a common course of action. [my emphasis]
Cockburn argues that a deal between the US and Russia is the best hope of putting the armed conflict to an end sooner rather than later. He describes the enhanced influence of Russia in Syria this way:
The Russians, for their part, know that it was their military intervention in Syria which in a single stroke restored their status as a superpower or something like it, a position they had lost when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. When the Syrian crisis first exploded in 2011, a senior Iraqi official asked an American general what was so different between the situation in Libya, where Gaddafi had just been ousted and killed, and that in Syria. The general replied in a short succinct sentence, saying that in Syria “Russia is back”. [my emphasis]
It's worth noting here that the US' enhanced influence in the US that has grown over the decades since the Carter Administration, and especially since the Persian Gulf War of 1991 has been anything but an unmixed blessing. To put it mildly. Anyone who wishes Russia ill might be celebrating their current role in the Middle East.
Cockburn's article is worth noting in connection with these reflections from Lawrence Wilkerson, The Most Important Hearings Of The Young CenturyLobeLog 03/16/2018. He reminds us that starting a war is a way for Trump to rally public support around him in the face of the staggering scandals now being investigated in relation to Trump, his businesses, and his 2016 campaign:
But the Syria conflict will most likely be the conduit through which this presidential team, linked at the hip with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s team, pursues its first new and immediately most likely use of military power. However, even the unending war thus produced — for that is precisely what it will be — will not sufficiently satisfy the appetites of this team. Moreover, taking on Syria and Iran might well lead to Russia. Putin has said as much publicly.
Imagine this scenario for a frightening moment. While embroiled in Syria with Israel at our side, Russia and Iran confront the U.S. and no one backs down. Turkey leaps into the mix to finish off as many Kurds as possible as the inevitable major regional war begins. Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, China delivers and immediately acts upon an ultimatum to Taipei. This bellicose White House team led by Donald Trump challenges China and, in the process, immediately loses USS Carl Vinson, sunk in minutes by a combination of missiles, torpedoes, and precision-guided bombs, an aircraft carrier worth $14 billion with about 5,000 souls on board.
Mr. President, what do you and your team do now?
Frankly, I believe this bone-spur-afflicted warrior will run upstairs in the White House, close the door firmly, pick up his smart device, and commence tweeting that, among other things, it was not his fault.
One of the implications of Wilkerson's comment is that, even if the Trump Administration is trying to be friendly to Russia, bad decisions in the context of unpredictable day-to-day events in the Syrian context could escalate to a much more consequential clash for the United States.
Paul Pillar, among other experienced analysts, is wondering what if any strategic goals may have been behind Trump's apparently impulsive missile strike on Syria last week (Syria and the Call of the QuagmireThe National Interest 04/06/2017):
... there has been a surge of cries to “do something” in response to a reported chemical weapons attack in Syria, which the Trump administration has answered with a cruise missile strike against a Syrian airbase. The secretary of state is talking about regime change in Syria just a week after he had appeared to rule out such change as an objective. We have heard this sort of belligerent uproar after previous battlefield developments in the Syrian war that have elicited outrage. There was an earlier reported use of chemical weapons, and several months ago there was a similar popular reaction to the situation in Aleppo in the final days before the regime recaptured the remainder of that city. These reactions are essentially expressions of mass emotion rather than a reflection of any careful consideration about what actions would or would not be in U.S. interests.
Pillar's commentary is worth reading in full. Especially worth noting is his judgment, "the make-up of whatever regime rules in Damascus is not an important U.S. interest, and certainly not important enough to warrant the costs and risks of immersion in someone else’s civil war." And he reminds us that "direct U.S. military intervention in this war carries a significant risk of escalation into a much wider war, especially when facing the large military requirements of establishing something like the much-talked-about safe zones."
In a segment titled, How will Trump foreign policy evolve after U.S. strike on Syria? 04/07/2017, the PBS Newshour featured historian Andrew Bacevich, former Under Secretary of State Sarah Sewall, and retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, former chief commander in Afghanistan of the joint International Security Assistance Force.
Allen is happy to see the escalation of the US role in Syria. And he repeated some of the worst inclinations of the current militarized policy atmosphere, in which "doing something" is always considered advisable, and "doing something" is assumed to be the use of military force:
What we have got to be very careful about is looking for all the reasons why the United States shouldn’t act. And there are plenty. We have heard them tonight. But, at some point, the United States, I believe, has a moral obligation to act.
And selling short the decision to make this attack, I think, in some respects, doesn’t take into account some very, very serious strategic minds that are at work right now. We have a secretary of defense, we have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and we have a national security adviser and a secretary of state who are very serious thinkers and strategic leaders. [my emphasis]
Bacevich points out that problem in Allen's approach:
We have not heard anything that remotely resembles a strategy from this president or from this administration. We now have the president’s response to the first crisis that he has faced. And the response is one to opt for military force, which, of course, has become exceedingly routine in the way we approach the world.
But this conversation, I think, reveals the difficulty. We don’t know what is the context in which this decision was made. And I think we desperately need to hear that context, to hear some vision, to get a sense of strategy.
I’m not particularly encouraged by the fact that three out of the four people that General Allen just ticked off are generals. It strikes me that that is suggestive of a mind-set that is likely to opt for force as the preferred response to almost any situation. [my emphasis]
Andrew Bacevich raised some appropriate questions:
If indeed, as some people suggest, this is a one-off event, then my guess is, a week from now, we won’t even be talking abut it, and it will quickly be forgotten.
If, as some people suggest, this shows a more assertive Trump administration, that somehow we’re going to ratchet up the pressure on the Assad regime, trying to produce regime change, then I would be very much interested in hearing more about how that is going to occur and, beyond that, if and when it occurs, if Assad is forced out, then what?
What do we think the United States will inherit, and what will the United States do with that inheritance? Recalling the situation after regime change in Iraq and Libya, you know, those seem to be the reasonable questions.
And he addresses the dangers of a foreign policy driven by unstable Presidential impulses:
A week ago, the president was largely indifferent to events in Syria. It appears that, when he saw the videotapes of the aftermath of the Syrian chemical weapons attack, he was outraged, and then basically, in about a 48-hour period, he went from being indifferent to deciding we had to attack Syria.
And I have to say that strikes me as not so much a change in policy, but really a change in impulses. We have an impulsive president. We see little in our president that suggests that he acts after serious reflection.
And so, yes, indeed, if somebody like Kim Jong-un in North Korea is reflecting on the implications of the Syrian attack, are the implications one that would cause Kim Jong-un to be more prudent, or does he say, holy cow, holy cow, we got a crazy guy on the other end of this relationship?
Sarah Sewell brings up the thorny question of how to distinguish the types of outrages that will call for which kind of American response:
First of all, if all we’re doing is a red line on chemical weapons, that’s not immaterial, but it’s really not the point. The point is that Assad is a butcher.
And so the question becomes for the civilians, do I care if I’m being gassed or I’m being hit by barrel bombs? The problem is still there.
Second, look at the Russian issue. Now we have got a much more commingled battlefield with higher risk of actual escalation. Do we really want that? Is that a smart move? What happens if something does escalate?
Third, look at the order of battle on the ground. We talk about whether or not you can use force to get a political settlement. Who are the biggest, most powerful actors among the rebels? They’re al-Qaida and ISIS.
So, even if we’re willing to commit to try to use enough force to get a negotiated settlement, we’re actually at risk of strengthening the hand of the rebels that we have nominally vowed to fight in the war on terror. [my emphasis]
That's what makes it so disturbing that the American TV coverage has so heavily focused on the show-business aspects of the "beautiful" air strikes, as Brian Williams infamously described them.
The Young Turks this year addressed Williams' war-porn attitude as well as the continuing warmongering of the mainstreame media in Corporate Media Pounding The War Drums 04/07/2017:
Fred Kaplan reminds us about how misguided the PR rah-rah approach the corporate media takes to war is (The Morning After in SyriaSlate 04/07/2017):
At the start of every war that the United States has entered in the last quarter-century, much has been made—by officials, officers, and pundits—of the number of missiles fired, the brightness of the blasts, and the firm “message” that the president was sending to whatever international outlaw needed punishing.
But the real issues, which can’t be assessed at the start and usually wind up with a less burnished glow, are these: how much damage the strikes actually wreaked, how the object of the attack responds, what the president does as a follow-on, and—ultimately—how this whole sequence of events affects the rest of the war and the political struggles underlying it.
Hillary Clinton and other corporate Democrats generally approved of the Syria attack, as well. So far, they haven't managed much more in the way of criticism that saying that Congress should pass a new authorization for military action so they can vote for it, and urging Trump to escalate more.
He discusses how just a few months ago, the Syrian Army "was being written off, the Bashar al-Assad government said to be reaching its final days."
But now their reputation is changing, with a little help from their Russia friends:
Then along came Vladimir Putin with his air and missile fleets and suddenly the whole place is transformed. While we huffed and puffed that the Russians were bombing the “moderate” rebels – moderates who had earlier ceased to exist according to America’s top generals – we’ve been paying no attention to the military offensive which the Syrians themselves are now staging against the Nusra Front fighters around Aleppo and in the valley of the Orontes.
The Nusra Front is the group that identifies with Al Qaeda, although Bin Laden's original core group hardly seems to exist any more.
Nothing that the armies of other Arab states are either inexperienced or weakened ' Libya's own army is in bits," he writes - he notes that Syria could come out of the current situation with more prominent clout in the Middle East: "If it wins – and if it holds together and if its manpower, which is admittedly at a low level, can be maintained – then the Syrian military is going to come out of this current war as the most ruthless, battle-trained and battle-hardened Arab army in the entire region. Woe betide any of its neighbours who forget this."
Fisk also writes of the current state of the Russian intervention:
... the Russians are now telling the Turks – and by logical extension, this information must go to the Americans – their flight coordinates. Even more remarkable, they have set up a hotline communications system between their base on the Syrian Mediterranean coast and the Israeli ministry of defence in Tel Aviv. More incredible still is that the Israelis – who have a habit of targeting Syrian and Iranian personnel near the Golan Heights – have suddenly disappeared from the skies. In other words, the Russians are involved in a big operation, not a one-month wonder that is going on in Syria. And it is likely to continue for quite a time.
Fisk also refers to the verbal analogies/metaphors/similes that observers were making not long ago about the sad state of the Syrian Army: "We employed our own army of clichés to make the case for regime change. The Syrian army was losing ground – at Jisr al-Shugour and at Palmyra – and so we predicted that the whole Assad state had reached a 'tipping point'."
The most recent popular physical metaphor applied to foreign relations—so popular that its usage has become almost a fad—concerns a “vacuum” in the Middle East. A search on Google News (which covers only articles that have been “crawled” in the last 30 days) for items with both vacuum and Middle East yields 68,900 hits. The imagery has become a major part of criticism of President Obama from those who believe the United States ought to be intervening militarily in the Middle East more often and more deeply than it has been lately. The escalation of Russian military involvement in Syria has stimulated a chorus of commentary about how Russia is moving into a “vacuum” created by insufficient U.S. intervention in the region (and how this is bad).
The application of the “vacuum” imagery to Middle Eastern affairs is seriously misleading on several counts, beginning with the central fact that metaphor is not reality. Even the more physical aspects of foreign policy do not exhibit characteristics similar to true vacuums and how matter responds to them. Moreover, the Middle East is not a vacuum not only in the sense that it has an atmosphere with not much less than sea level pressure but also that it is filled with people, governments, armies, militias and much else that collectively make it what it is. The vacuum imagery implicitly assumes that there are important attributes of the region that don't really count unless they involve intervention by an external power, and especially by the United States. It is insufficient attention to the heat and pressure involving what already is in a particular country, and too much emphasis on what external intervention ought to be able to accomplish, that often has spelled trouble, for the external intervenor as well as for people inside the country.
The metaphor further assumes a sort of zero-sum quality to events in the region, comparable to how two bodies of gas cannot move into the same space without increasing heat and pressure, and to how if one body moves out that can create a vacuum that sucks the other body of gas in. International relations do not work that way. U.S. and Russian international activity are not really like two blobs of gas. The imagery takes no account, for example, of how external forces can work together and not just work to push each other out of the same space—and in Syria, external forces working together offer the only hope for de-escalating the civil war there.
Juan Cole makes an important point which will tend to be drowned out by anti-Russian revisionism (How Putin Adopted Obama’s Way of WarThe Nation 10/13/2015):
President Obama did not invent the war from above, using drones and warplanes against a guerrilla force, but he has a clear preference for airborne counterinsurgency. He has loosed drones or airstrikes in some seven countries, regardless of whether the United States was on a war footing with them, and his use of drones dwarfs that of George W. Bush. Obama deployed the US Air Force extensively against the Taliban in Afghanistan, even while trying to build up the Afghanistan National Army. After the fall of Mosul in the summer of 2014, he went back into Iraq with drones, fighter jets, and a plan to rebuild the Iraqi Army. Other great powers have clearly been watching and learning, and Vladimir Putin’s Syria intervention is arguably a Russian adaptation of the Obama Doctrine of counterinsurgency.
Putin’s Syria campaign has exactly the same shape as Obama’s preferred methods. The Russians have expanded a military airbase near Latakia to allow provision of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army with more tanks and heavy artillery, brought in by huge military transport planes. Russian trainers and advisers are attempting to up the game of the SAA, now shrunk by defections and fatigue to only 90,000 troops from its former strength of some 300,000. The Russian air force is hitting arms depots and armed convoys of Syrian insurgents. It is giving close air support to the troops of the SAA and its Hezbollah allies in the region just north of the provincial Sunni city of Hama and in Idlib Province. [my emphasis]
Cole contrasts this approach with the counterinsurgency strategy of The Surge in Iraq, which was really just a rehash of that applied in Vietnam under Gen. Creighton Abrams.
Cole supported the NATO intervention in Libya. But he acknowledges here that the result was obviously less than optimum:
One difficulty with the Obama Doctrine can clearly be seen in Libya, which is that mere air support to one side in a revolution or civil war does nothing to build institutions in the aftermath. The very militias supported by NATO from the air declined to disarm after the war and then went to war with one another, leaving roughly 3,000 dead last year and the country in disarray.
Cole's view of the prospects for the Syrian Army even with the new Russian assistance is less optimistic (from Syria's viewpoint). And for the prospects for Assad's government: "In the end, though, Russia’s hope of restoring the authority of the Assad regime, which is guilty of mass torture and mass murder, seems forlorn."
Robert Fisk takes a no-nonsense look at the Syrian situation in Syria’s ‘moderates’ have disappeared... and there are no good guysThe Independent 10/04/2015: "The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – 'moderates' whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed."
Those Syrian Moderates have proven to be remarkably hard to locate!
Fisk gives us a bit of history:
“American officials” – those creatures beloved of The New York Times – claim that the Syrian army does not fight Isis. If true, who on earth killed the 56,000 Syrian soldiers – the statistic an official secret, but nonetheless true – who have so far died in the Syrian war? The preposterous Free Syrian Army (FSA)?
This rubbish has reached its crescendo in the on-again off-again saga of the Syrian “moderates”. These men were originally military defectors to the FSA, which America and European countries regarded as a possible pro-Western force to be used against the Syrian government army. But the FSA fell to pieces, corrupted, and the “moderates” defected all over again, this time to the Islamist Nusrah Front or to Isis, selling their American-supplied weapons to the highest bidder or merely retiring quietly – and wisely – to the countryside where they maintained a few scattered checkpoints.
He doesn't have a very high opinion of the Russian role there: "The Russian military are killers who go for the jugular. They slaughtered the innocent of Chechnya to crush the Islamist uprising there, and they will cut down the innocent of Syria as they try to crush a new army of Islamists and save the ruthless regime of Bashar al-Assad."
Fisk also claims that the Chechnyan issue has a direct connection to Russia's Syrian intervention:
The first [Russian] strikes – far from being aimed at the “moderates” whom the US had long ago dismissed – were directed at the large number of Turkmen villages in the far north-west of Syria which have for many months been occupied by hundreds of Chechen fighters – the very same Chechens whom Putin had been trying to liquidate in Chechnya itself. These Chechen forces assaulted and destroyed Syria’s strategic hilltop military Position 451 north of Latakia last year. No wonder Bashar’s army put them on the target list.
The single most constructive thing that the United States, the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and even France and Britain could do to ease the refugee crisis in Europe would be to stop promoting wars and "regime change" operations in the Middle East.
Wofgang Münchau (The deadly disunity of the EuropeansFinancial Times 09/06/2015) writes on the EU and the European refugee crisis: "Angela Merkel is, for once, on the right side of the argument." (my emphasis) That is truly an historic moment!
He also says:
The EU has 500m inhabitants. Setting aside refugees, net immigration — the difference between those coming into and those leaving the EU — was 539,000 in 2013, about 0.1 per cent of the total population. Net immigration was higher in 2010, when it stood at 750,000. ...
Net immigration including refugees is clearly rising. Still, this is not an immigration crisis. It is a collective action crisis.
Its solution would be straightforward in the presence of a central authority empowered to take decisions. But this is not how the EU works. It works through co-ordination and harmonisation — through fiscal rules, banking regulation and neighbourhood policies. But none of them prevented the crisis, and none of them helps solve it.
As Yanis Varoufakis recently called attention to the way in which the dysfunctional response to the financial/debt crisis in the eurozone has compounded the problems the EU has in developed common policies and implementing them effectively, now particularly in the refugee crisis (On CNBC discussing Greece and Europe – full transcript, 4th September 2015 09/04/2015):
You’re quite right; in the end we created a common currency which divided us. And the deeper those divisions grew, the greater the failure to be united when it came to other matters. For instance, the refugee crisis. For instance, ways of dealing with the dearth of investment throughout Europe. Instead of getting closer together we were torn apart. In the United States, in the 19th Century, there was one financial crisis after another. Even at the beginning of the 20th century – and especially after 1929. Every time, the United States faced a major financial crisis it managed to consolidate. To get closer together. To create institutions that were common and which created shock absorbers for the system. In Europe, the idea was that we must bind ourselves together by means of the same currency in order to create this process. But, the first time a crisis tested us, following the financial that began in Wall Street, the City of London, and so on – we failed. Instead of consolidating, we are dividing and multiplying. And failing at other realms. So Europe’s monetary failure is spreading to other realms. [my emphasis]
The military conflicts and political instability driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe were triggered largely by U.S. and Western military interventions for regime change – specifically in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria (a regime change in-the-making).
The United States was provided with strong military support by countries such as Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, while the no-fly zone to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was led by France and the UK in 2011 and aided by Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Canada, among others.
And the article highlights the concept of "regime change refugees":
The United States was directly involved in regime change in Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003) – and has been providing support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battling a civil war now in its fifth year.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who says he is “horrified and heartbroken” at the loss of lives of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean and Europe, points out that a large majority of people “undertaking these arduous and dangerous journeys are refugees fleeing from places such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS the term “regime change refugees” is an excellent way to change the empty conversation about the refugee crisis.
Obviously, there are many causes, but “regime change” helps focus on a crucial part of the picture, he added.
And the use of that term is a reminder that the anodyne phrase "regime change" describes a reality that can and sometimes does produce conditions that are catastrophically bad. Syrian and Ukraine are two current examples of that.
The left-Peronist site La Batalla Cultural raises an important point about regime-change operations in Los idiotas funcionales al imperialismo (Sept 2015; accessed 09/07/2015). The title, "The Useful Idiots of Imperialism," has a definite Leninist ring to it. But the point made by the article is a fairly basic one. Powerful countries like the US for Britain or France are happy to use democratic- and humanitarian-sounding claims and slogans to promote interventions whose aims are primarily narrow power-political ones. The difference in the US between "humanitarian hawks" and neoconservatives when it comes to advocating war is getting harder and harder to discern. Even the rhetoric is similar. Neocons are more likely to use cynically pragmatic arguments, but they have always used humanitarian claims to promote war as well.
The fact that a regime is bad in some way, even seriously bad, does not in itself justify military action against it. All the considerations of classic Just War theory still apply, including considering realistically whether the military action has a reasonable prospect of success. Any military action like the Iraq War of 2003 that produces more than a decade of civil war, massive population displacement and intensified international conflict is hard to see as one that ended up in a success in anything much more than killing a lot of Arabs and Kurds. Those who pointed the small chances of a good outcome prior to the invasion were not sympathizers of Saddam Hussein, as the Republicans inevitably called us. Actual sympathy for Saddam Hussein's general form of governance in the US was effectively nonexistent.
But it is possible to distinguish between the particular regime and the nature of a particular war. The Malvinas/Falklands War of 1982 is an excellent example. It pitted a cruel and unpopular dictatorship in Argentina against democratic Britain.
But Argentina had by far the better claim on the territorial question of to which country the islands belong. As the UN webpage on decolonization says as of this writing, " At present, 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories (NSGTs) across the globe remain to be decolonized, home to nearly 2 million people." The NSGT designation is a euphemism for "illegal colony." The Malvinas Islands are one of those cases. Ten of the 17, including the Malvinas and Gibraltar, are controlled by Great Britain.
In 1982, the Argentine military dictatorship landed its armed forces on the Malvinas. Britain retook the islands. But despite the unpopularity of the dictatorship, the war was tremendously popular among Argentines. That, of course, was part of the dictatorship's calculation. They hoped for a patriotic rallying to the government. Instead, the defeat of Argentina in that popular military cause was the nail in the coffin of the dictatorship. Losing wars is always unpopular. Losing wars that the public considers genuinely patriotic and justified is especially unpopular.
The current Argentine government headed by Cristina Fernández and the previous one held by her late husband Néstor Kirchner both strongly emphasized human rights and insisted on a thorough legal and educational reckoning with the crimes of the dictatorship.
But they also have pressed the claims of Argentina to the Malvinas - including the rights to major oil reserves to be controlled by the country that controls the islands - and have made a big deal out of honoring the veterans of the Malvinas War of 1982. Their recognition of the justness of Argentina's claim to the Malvinas in the 1982 war does not mean that they or their supporters admire the government that conducted the war. They don't even recognize the legal or moral legitimacy of that extra-constitutional and criminal dictatorship.
The Argentine Pope also supports the nation's legitimate claim to the Malvinas, as illustrated by this photo from August of this year, with him holding a sign saying, "It's time for dialogue between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Malvinas":
Francisco es, fue y será muy malvinero. Todos los años, el 2 de abril, celebraba misa en la Catedral metropolitana junto a todos los familiares y ex combatientes de Malvinas. Los alentó y abrazó siempre. A las seis de la tarde las puertas del templo se abrían de par en par para ellos. Recordaba con emoción a los 649 caídos en combate. En ese día glorioso y doloroso para la memoria de los argentinos, de la misa salían con una sonrisa. Esperanzados para seguir luchando un año más. Antes era un ruego desde el país, ahora es desde el Vaticano para el mundo. Al Papa no lo tomó de sorpresa la presencia de Gustavo Hoyo, director de Diálogo Malvinas. Se acercó. Tomó la pancarta en sus manos y les dijo: “Sigan adelante”. Posó para la foto. Nunca dudó, sus homilías así lo demuestran, que las Malvinas son argentinas. Él sabe mejor que nadie, que decir la verdad no conforma a todos.
[Francisco is, was and will be a malvinero [i.e., supporter of Argentina's claim to the Malvinas]. Every year on April 2, he celebrated Mass in the Catedral metropolitana together with all the relative and ex-combatants of the Malvinas [from the 1982 war]. He always encouraged and embraced them. At 6:00 in the evening, the doors of the temple opened wide for them. He recalled with emotion the 649 fallen in combat. On this glorious and mournful day for the memory of Argentines, the left the Mass with a smile. We hoped to keep to keep fighting another year. Then it was a prayer from the country, today it is from the Vatican for the world. The Pope was not surprised by the presence of Gustavo Hoyo, director of Diálogo Malvinas [Diálogo por Malvinas, a campaign promoting Argentina's claims to the Malvinas]. He took the poster in his hands and told them, "Keep going forward." He posed for the photo. He never doubted, as demonstrated by his homilies, that the Malvinas are Argentine. He knows better than anyone to state the truth not accepted by everyone.]
For whatever reason, the Vatican decided they needed a little diplomatic dissimulation on that particular event, presumably to avoid the impression that the Pontiff was directly endorsing a particular political campaign, in this case on an issue rather than a candidate. (Nadia Khomami, Pope Francis 'tricked' into calling for Falklands talksThe Guardian 08/20/2015)
Getting back to the polemical article in La Batalla Cultural, they are taking an anti-imperialist position informed by a Latin American view not so familiar to most Americans, and not always a comfortable one for people in the US and Europe. One widely-held perspective on the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-83 is known as the Two Devils theory, a kind of Both Sides Do It approach in which the crimes of the dictatorship are considered together with violent actions by the leftwing guerrillas in Argentina before and during the dictatorship. The latter are certainly a major part of the historical story. The now-annual journal La Lucha Armada en la Argentina, for instance, is a journal devoted primarily to a serious historical study of the leftwing guerrilla movements of that period.
But the crimes committed by the military government not only were far more massive in number. They also were done in the name of the Argentine nation and under general cover of law. And of the Christian religion, as the dictatorship endorsed a strong reactionary/national brand of Christianity that was deeply rooted in part of the Argentine Catholic Church. (Pope Francis has no justification for being proud of the general role he played during the dictatorship. But it's clear that he now identifies more with the liberation theology that was violently and murderously persecuted by the dictatorship.)
Americans can understand how the Two Devils theory can be misused as a defense of the dictatorship by reference to the current political movement in the US known as Black Lives Matter. White racists who want to see the widespread practice of (mostly white) police killing unarmed African-Americans (mostly men) continue, are eager to make a both-sides-do-it argument, arguing that the advocates against criminal violence by police practiced on young black men is somehow an incitement to active violence and murder against police. It is a bad-faith argument that really is directed only at providing phony justification for police murdering African-Americans at will and with impunity. (See Charlie Pierce, who addresses this issue though not exactly like I'm going here in Texas Cop Killing Could Spark National Backlash Against #BlackLivesMatterEsquire Politics Blog 08/31/2015)
Sometimes "both sides do it" is really an attempt to validate the actions of one side.
La Batalla Cultural (LBC) argues that not only is the Two Devils framing dominant in the way Argentines think about the dictatorship and the guerrillas. It also argues that this attitude carries over into views of foreign policy, and specifically to the Syrian conflict. LBC makes the point that a Two Devils approach to a situation like Syria, in which the Assad regime in Syria is equated with ISIS/Daesh and its Sunni backers can make an effective cover for regime-change intervention by countries like the US, France and Britain for whom alleged humanitarian concerns are entirely subordinate to other power-political consideration. LBC puts it this way:
Tenemos ahora en Medio Oriente un clásico escenario de invasión imperialista. Los Estados Unidos y sus amigos de la OTAN (en una palabra, el Occidente capitalista y cristiano) están poniendo la mesa para entrar con todo en Siria y hacer allí un nuevo Irak o Afganistán, para luego apropiarse de los recursos naturales y disponer de la suerte de los pueblos. ¿Cómo? Con estas sencillas jugadas, que son de manual:
Financiando y armando a los grupos llamados “rebeldes” sirios, que son lo equivalente a la oposición cipaya de Venezuela o Argentina (o de cualquier otra semicolonia) hasta fogonear bien la guerra civil
Con la guerra civil en marcha, poniendo en el territorio al “Estado Islámico” o ISIS, un tercer actor para complicar y desestabilizar aún más.
[Today we have in the Middle East a classic scenario of imperialist invasion. The United States and its friends in NATO (in a word, the capitalist West) are setting the table to enter Syria in full force and make a new Iraq or Afghanistan there, in order to later appropriate their natural resources and control the fortune of the peoples. How? With these open plays that are right out of the book:
Financing and arming groups called Syrian "rebels," that are the equivalent of the opposition loyal to foreigners of Venezuela or Argentina (or of any other semi-colony) to the point of fomenting civil war
With the civil war in progress, set up a third actor in the territory of the "Islamic States" or ISIS to further complicate and destabilize {the situation}.]
LBC particularly calls attention to the way that the ugly consequences of these policies, like today's refugee crisis between the Middle East and Europe, can be used by warmongers as excuses to continue and intensify the very policies that generate the problem in the first place.
This is why, despite the record of some its major figures like Henry Kissinger, I can't give up my fondness for the "realist" school of foreign policy theory. At its best - as in Stephen Walt's work - it emphasizes careful evaluation of the potential negative consequences of foreign policy decisions and the dangers to clear thinking that comes from taking one's side's own propaganda too seriously.
And LBC is also reminding its presumably mainly Argentine readers that a regime-change approach used in one part of the world without effective international criticism and resistance can be used in other parts, as well.
It was against The Terrorists, of course. ISIS in this case. Whose side we were supporting in doing that is less than clear.
Henningan reports, "The military's intent was to capture Sayyaf, but he was killed when he 'engaged' U.S. forces, Carter said. The commandos captured Umm Sayyaf, his wife, who the Pentagon suspects is also a member of the Sunni militant group and 'may have been complicit in what appears to have been the enslavement of a young Yezidi woman rescued last night.'"
So it wasn't an assassination mission. And it was helping women's rights. Good to know.
This is the PBS Newshour report on the resignation, Why is Chuck Hagel stepping down? 11/24/2014. One of the two guests interviewed is neoconservative Thomas Donnelly from AEI, aka, Neocon Central. The other is P.J. Crowley, a former Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama Administration.
Robert Reich posted on Facebook today that he thinks Hagel was dumped from being Defense Secretary because Obama and his advisers think Hagel's not enthusiastic enough for more wars:
Why is Chuck Hagel being canned after having been Defense chief for less than two years? Competence aside, part of the answer is the White House has moved from seeing events in Iraq and Syria through the Vietnam lens to the Nazi Germany lens, and Hagel is still seeing them as Vietnam.
For the last fifty years, American foreign policy has swung between two polar-opposite views: Through the Vietnam lens, we don’t want to be dragged into foreign civil wars that can end up costing tens of thousands of American lives. But through the Nazi Germany lens, we must stop barbarous and aggressive fascist movements before they overwhelm civilization. Obama himself began with Vietnam lenses but he and his advisers view the Islamic State as more like Nazi Germany.
I hope Reich is wrong about the Obama team seeing Middle East crises through a "Nazi Germany" lens. One of the biggest problems in US foreign policy since the Second World War is that policymakers inflate opponents in "Hitler." It gets particularly dysfunctional in a situation like Syria where no one can really decide whether the New Hitler is the Islamic State group or their mortal enemy the Assad regime.
One of the most useful books I've ever read on US foreign policy - one we're unlikely to see Little Tommy Friedman ever quoting - is The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2006) by Jeffrey Record of the Army Air War College; a version of it is available via that link. He thinks the "Munich analogy" has been so overused that it not only ignores the real history of "Munich" in 1938 and why it was a bad policy for the West but also leads to wildly inflating threats and over-reacting in self-destructive ways. As he puts it, the real Hitler and Nazi Germany were not only enormously powerful militarily (and got a huge boost from the Skoda arms factories they got in Czechoslovakia from the Munich Agreement) but were also "unappeasable *and* undeterrable." And, "No post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship."
When Chicken Littles like Sen. Lindsay Graham squawk that the Islamic State is going to come "kill us all" in the United States, that's just crackpot warmongering. Only bad policy comes out of that.
Historian Andrew Bacevich has been one of the best analysts of US military affairs for the last decade plus. He has basically a conservative-realist framework for looking about foreign and military policy, based on the thinking of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He has meaningful criticisms of both Democratic and Republican thinking on foreign policy without falling into the vapid Both Sides Do It cliches our star pundits so often use. This piece of his at TomDispatch addresses the current poor state of US foreign policy, Malarkey on the Potomac: Five Bedrock Washington Assumptions That Are Hot Air (with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt) 11/23/2014.
But as The Young Turks discuss in the clip above, it's not entirely clear that Hagel is being pushed out because of his caution and restraint.
Hagel was brought in to withdraw American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan at a time of severe budgetary cuts, but reality in the Middle East and elsewhere had other plans. Rightly or wrongly, through its own fault or that of others, the Pentagon has been perceived in recent months as being caught flat-footed by the rampage of Islamic State in Iraq, the survival of Bashar Assad in Syria, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the belligerency of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and more. Under these circumstances, the credibility of America’s veiled threat that “all options are on the table” against Iran also took a serious hit.
But rather than displaying the kind of resolute confidence and leadership needed in such dangerous times, Hagel often sounded like Chicken Little shouting “the sky is falling.” He told Charlie Rose only last week that ISIS is “an incredibly powerful new threat” to every interest we have, the likes of which have never been seen before. Hagel’s panicky overkill, which already rankled Obama back when he still referred to ISIS as “junior varsity” may have been the final nail in his coffin: better the momentary embarrassment of an appointment gone wrong, Obama’s advisers reasoned, than the long term damage incurred by a defense secretary who sometimes sounds as if he hasn't convinced even himself that he can get the job done. [my emphasis]
For the next Secretary of Defense, I hope he Obama at least finds a Democrat to nominate this time.
"America’s war against ISIS is quickly turning into a quagmire," writes Fred Kaplan. (Obama’s QuagmireSlate 10/31/2014)
Knock me over with a feather! Who could have foreseen such a thing? I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you!
Kaplan explains:
The most promising allies in a fight against the Sunni jihadists of ISIS would be the Shiite regimes of Iran and Syria. But Obama can’t join forces with them, at least not openly: First, he’s called for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with good reason, and allying with Iran’s mullahs wouldn’t go over well politically; second, if he did ally with them, the region’s anti-ISIS Sunni governments would back away. And Sunnis are vital to this coalition, in order to discredit the notion that ISIS is a legitimate Muslim power. As for those Sunni governments, Turkey—which could be the most potent force against ISIS — doesn’t want to help the Kurds, lest they push their long-standing desire to secede; the Saudis are providing a base to train “moderate” Syrian rebels, and the United Arab Emirates is providing some air power, but otherwise, they don’t have much to give.
Awesome. And he sums up:
So here we are, back in the Middle East again, shoring up a dysfunctional regime, caught in the middle of a sectarian conflict, saddled with allies who aren’t doing much and whose interests conflict with ours, roped off from potential allies who could do much more but whose interests conflict with ours more deeply, and facing a bunch of millenarian savages whose appeal grows as our involvement deepens.
A recurring problem in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has been the insistence that no problem can be solved if Uncle Sam isn't leading the charge. ...
The final error -- sadly, one all too typical of recent U.S. foreign policy -- is that we are promising the moon and delivering moon pies. The Bush administration promised that the invasion of Iraq would be short, easy, and would pay for itself. Bush also told us the United States would eliminate all "terrorists of global reach." Trying to eliminate a particular tactic used by many diverse groups was a fool's errand, especially when U.S. military intervention tends to reinforce the extremists' narrative and helps them replenish their ranks with new recruits. The United States is still in Afghanistan today -- and so are the Taliban -- and it is congratulating itself on convincing the Afghan government to let us stay for a few more years. And now we are headed back into Iraq. Osama bin Laden may be dead and gone, but the endless war that he foresaw would sap U.S. strength and weaken existing Arab governments is still underway. [my emphasis]
He also recalls important aspects of the Cheney-Bush Iraq War, which I've come to think of as Phase 3 in the Thirty Years War in Iraq.
Walt:
Ever since the first Gulf War, U.S. leaders have routinely exaggerated the threat that the United States faced in Iraq and/or Syria. Even though much of Iraq's military power was destroyed in 1990 to 1991 and was never rebuilt, the Clinton administration continued to portray that country as a dangerous threat to vital U.S. interests. Hence the continuation of sanctions that may have killed as many as 500,000 Iraqis and the misguided strategy of "dual containment," which forced the United States to keep thousands of troops in Saudi Arabia and helped convince Osama bin Laden to order the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, of course, the Bush administration ratcheted up the threat even more in order to justify a preventive war. Aided by mendacious or gullible journalists, they convinced the American people that Saddam had active WMD programs and was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, even though neither claim was true. [my emphasis]
Aaaa-aand in today's news, we're dumping the "moderate" Syrian fighting force we have and building a whole new one.
Well, at least we had the old one, the Free Syrian Army, on the paper and digital pixils of press releases.
Hanna Allam reports for McClatchy Newspapers, "John Allen, the retired Marine general in charge of coordinating the U.S.-led coalition’s response to the Islamic State ... said the United States’ intent is to start from scratch in creating a home-grown, moderate counterweight to the Islamic State." (It’s official: U.S. will build new Syrian rebel force to battle Islamic State)
I think they should call themselves the "Army of Revolution, Victory and Nation" so they could have the English initials ARVN.
Because we're not just repeating the stock exercise of training the South Vietnamese Army, as we did in Iraq. This time we're recruiting all the soldiers, too!
I mean, it's like the Very Serious Person David Ignatius said back in August 2003 during that phase of the Thirty Years War in Iraq, "America's job is to give Iraqis the tools to create a modern, secure country -- and then get out." (Think Strategy, Not NumbersWashington Post 08/26/2003)
And that's what we did. Except, you know, the getting out part proved to be harder than expected.
Allen's comments are really striking:
For most of the three years of the Syrian conflict, the U.S. ground game hinged on rebel militias that are loosely affiliated under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, or FSA. Their problems were no secret: a lack of cohesion, uneven fighting skills and frequent battlefield coordination with the al Qaida loyalists of the Nusra Front.
This time, Allen said, the United States and its allies will work to strengthen the political opposition and make sure it’s tied to "a credible field force" that will have undergone an intense vetting process. ...
The Syrian arena is important, Allen said, but to the U.S., "the emergency in Iraq right now is foremost in our thinking." There will be a simultaneous training-and-equipping campaign for Iraq, where the U.S.-trained military collapsed during the Islamic State’s summer offensive.
Allen said the new training program is “for those elements of the Iraqi national security forces that will have to be refurbished and then put back into the field,” with the ultimate goal of reclaiming Iraqi territories seized by the Islamic State.
Allen sounded confident that the United States and its allies could juggle two massive training efforts even as the Islamic State has shown itself to be resilient under weeks of coalition airstrikes.
“We have the capacity to do both, and there is significant coalition interest in participating in both,” Allen said of the twin force-building efforts in Iraq and Syria.
The plain meaning of what the article reports him saying is, the effort to train the Iraqi Army has failed badly, and we're having to redo it. And redoing in Iraq what we failed to do in years of direct US occupation is going to be given priority over creating a pro-American, American-directed Sunni Syrian guerrilla group to replace the Free Syrian Army (FSA) whose main accomplishment seems to have been to train a few Sunni guerrillas who took their weapons and training and joined Islamic State.
And that's just the level of failure we know about from the public record.
Given these failures, it's worth paying attention to this more recent piece by VSP Ignatius, which reads like a White House press release repurposed as a Washington Post column, Obama faces growing pressure to escalate in Iraq and Syria 10/14/2014. It reads as like a list of pending escalation actions:
Using Apache helicopters, presumably flown by Americans, in direct combat to assist Iraqi forces to counter IS troops in Anbar province.
"Stepping up airstrikes over Iraq and Syria" by up to ten times the previous level.
"Accelerate the training of the Iraqi army and a new Sunni national guard." Because our extensive training program in Iraq for years was so very successful, one must suppose. "Hundreds of foreign trainers, drawn from the special forces of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Australia and other nations, will be working with the Iraqi military. A similar effort is needed for the Sunni guard." Traning the Sunni "guard" sounds suspiciously like the support for Sunni militias and death squads that was the centerpiece of The Surge. Which also produced so obvious long-term benefits.
"Create a border strip in northern Syria that’s safe from air attacks by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad," which has been a key goal of Turkey, which would serve their priorities of, in order, keep Kurds (allies of the Syrian regime) out of Turkey, help overthrown the Assad regime, and provide a base of operations against IS.
"Speed the training of the moderate Free Syrian Army so it can battle the Islamic State’s militants." I guess that one's out now! "Some officials argue for doubling the planned force to 10,000 and speeding completion of training camps in Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia." Training sounds so benign in this context, doesn't it?
"Warn the Assad government that the U.S.-led coalition won’t permit attacks on the moderate opposition. Given the reluctance of the United States, Turkey and other nations to send ground troops into Syria, and the popular hatred of Assad’s army, the FSA represents what generals call the “defeat mechanism” against the extremists. Assad must stop assaulting these forces that can liberate Sunni areas from the Islamic State." What? Two days ago the FSA was the "'defeat mechanism' against the extremists"? And today they're out of the picture. (Also, Also, if the Sunni ARVN is going to be the new "'defeat mechanism' against the extremists," which presumably means IS - doesn't that mean the new moderate Sunni ARVN is going to be effectively fighting for New Hitler Assad if they're going to prioritize the war against New Hitler IS? We're on so many sides in this Non-War War, it's really hard to keep up!
The last option he describes:
Finally and most painfully, authorize U.S. advisers to join the “assault echelon” when Iraqis go into battle against the extremists. This will be the hardest recommendation for Obama to accept, because it fuzzes his pledge not to use combat troops in Iraq. But one official says putting U.S. advisers “in harm’s way” will be crucial in stiffening Iraqi resolve. Dempsey said Sunday that the “decisive” battles for Mosul and other extremist strongholds “will require a different kind of advising and assisting” from what Obama initially advocated.
Back to direct combat on a larger scale that spotters on the ground to help target airstrikes or Apache flights in support of Iraqi forces. And if "putting U.S. advisers 'in harm’s way' will be crucial in stiffening Iraqi resolve," doesn't that mean its an American war?
