Tag Archives: Syria

Political Rants

Bus hat.

It’s probably best for me to start by saying that I was always against U.S. military involvement in the Syrian civil war – this was the case during the Obama administration and it remains the case now. But because our troops have been there in numbers exceeding 1,000 for years now, and that we have worked them into Syria’s complex web of security guarantees, alliances, and bitter enmities, it seems only right that we should consider the consequences of whatever decisions we make, whether it means pulling troops out or putting more in. This is a situation in which every power is in it for its own gain, and that includes the United States. That’s why the goddam war is still going on … and thanks to Trump this week, it’s likely to move into a new and more deadly phase.

The Syrian Kurds, who made the mistake of fighting for us as part of the conflict in their country, are now in the crosshairs of a massive military operation by Turkey – an incursion into northern Syria with the aim of establishing a buffer zone between the Turkish frontier and the Kurdish population, which Erdogan considers an enemy. Trump has chosen to throw the Kurds under the bus, so he has proven that he is, after all, an American foreign policy traditionalist. Our foreign policy establishment has been arranging bus hats for that dispossessed people since the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. (See Jon Schwarz’s article in the Intercept for a thumbnail history of our various betrayals of the Kurdish people.) It’s a little mystifying as to why mainstream foreign affairs talking heads are so unhappy with Trump right now. He just pulled a Kissinger.

Trump's expandables

The only fortunate thing for the Kurds of Syria is that a broad swath of American articulate opinion supports them. The trouble is, Trump doesn’t, and apparently Erdogan has something the fat boy wants, hence the policy about-face. Or maybe it’s because, as Trump incoherently said, they didn’t help us during World War II. In any case, Americans tend to love Kurds when they are useful, like they’ve been in Syria, like they were in Iraq in 1991 and after. They also hate and undermine them when they stand in opposition to friendly countries, like the Turkish Kurds in the 1990s. But that’s half a loaf, at least – other stateless peoples, like the Palestinians, don’t even get that.

Like so many others we have on our heads, this bloodbath could have been avoided.

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Political Rants

Do no harm?

Former secretary of defense under Donald Trump James Mattis has a book out, so he’s making the rounds of all the talk shows, talking about leadership, acting as though his reluctance to criticize the president is somehow rooted in personal integrity. What he won’t talk about on the book tour is how his “leadership” responded to policies that any person of average integrity would take issue with. Mattis sat still when Trump started banning Muslims from entering the country. He said nothing when Trump began separating children from their parents at our southern border and putting them in cages. He was silent as Trump praised white supremacists as “good people” in the wake of Charlottesville. When did he finally throw in the towel? When Trump decided to remove troops from Syria. That tells you much of what you need to know about Mattis.

Steve Inskeep’s fawning interview on NPR had few high points. Somehow Mattis saw fit to claim:

“From a Roman general, I used no better friend, no worse enemy. We were going in to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam. We were not going in to dominate them. I didn’t want triumphalism. I wanted to go in with a sense of first do no harm.”

First do no harm? Seriously? He has a funny way of showing it. One of Mattis’s bragging points was always his pivotal role in the various battles of Fallujah, a bloody massacre in which the U.S. military’s first act was to commandeer the city hospital. It’s kind of ridiculous to refer to such operations as “battles”, when the enemy they are fighting are so outgunned. In any case, the Iraqi casualties in Fallujah were so high that the city was left out of the Johns Hopkins study of Iraqi deaths caused by the 2003 invasion because they felt it would skew the numbers. That study, first published in 2005 I believe, numbered Iraqi deaths at more than 500,000 as a result of the war. It was revised later to something like 650,000. Do no harm?

Mr. Kindness himself.

The example he gives of a young officer choosing not to shoot up a building in Baghdad in order to spare civilians sounds apocryphal in light of the stories that have come out of that war. Robert Fisk described the U.S. tank shell that destroyed the building that housed Reuters journalists, among others. That was more along the lines of common practice, frankly. The U.S. military doesn’t exactly walk around on tip-toe. How any senior commanding officer attached to this atrocity can have the gall to speak proudly about his humanity in the context of imperial war is beyond me.

Save your leadership lessons, mad dog. You lost all credibility the moment you signed on to the criminal enterprise that was the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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Political Rants

Who would you sanction?

We have had Cuba, Iran, and North Korea under sanction for decades; Venezuela under sanction for a number of years now.  These examples are all for political reasons, of course. In the cases of Cuba and Iran, we dole out punishment for the unforgivable crime of “stealing” something quite valuable from us … specifically, Cuba and Iran. With North Korea, it’s basically get-back for their not having lost the Korean war after we reduced their country to rubble in the early 1950s. It was the same situation with Vietnam for a couple of decades, before we half-forgave them for what we did to them. (Not a typo.)

If, of course, we didn’t have a craven foreign policy, who would we call out? I have a few candidates.

Balsonaro’s Brazil. Make no mistake – the reason why there have been more than 70,000 fires in the Amazon this year is because this clown fascist has been encouraging ranchers, miners, loggers, and soybean farmers to clear this irreplaceable resource for further exploitation. Balsonaro is similar to Trump in as much as he represents all of the worst tendencies of his nation, rolled up into one big greasy ball. A sane U.S. foreign policy would oppose this mad regime with every tool in the toolbox, support the freeing of Lula and the aspirations of Brazil’s workers and landless peasants.

Great candidates (for sanctions)

Modi’s India. The BJP Hindu nationalists are flexing their muscles after their electoral win, with Modi at the helm. In the Indian administered sector of Kashmir,  they are engaged in a massive shutdown of free speech and free expression. Modi has cut the region off from the rest of the world and is arresting dissidents, harassing Muslims, and basically encouraging his Hindu nationalist followers to reek havoc on the majority Muslim community. A sane U.S. foreign policy would take issue with this in a big way. It just astounds me the degree to which this story is being ignored in America. If India were an official enemy, you would hear no end of this.

Netanyahu’s Israel. The Israelis are, once again, dropping bombs on people they don’t like, attacking targets in two locations in Lebanon – Beiruit area and the Bekaa Valley (see Rami Khouri’s article in The New Arab). They also bombed a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq and a purported Iranian position in Syria. They are throwing gasoline on a burning fire and getting away with it. I am convinced that they do not want to fight a conventional war with either Hezbollah or Iran. They want us to fight it.  This, and countless offenses against Palestinians, should carry a substantial cost in terms of U.S. aid … if we had a sane foreign policy.

That’s a big if, regardless of who wins the presidency next year. But I would sooner go with a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the driver’s seat than the current ass-clown.

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