The Iraq War Disastrous Surge

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A note from Tom Engelhardt, the editor of Tikkun’s  media ally TomDispatch.com where this article appeared orignally. Every now and then, I think back to the millions of people who turned out in this country and across the globe in early 2003 to protest the coming invasion of Iraq.  Until the recentWomen’s March against Donald Trump, that may have been the largest set of demonstrations in American history or, at the very least, the largest against a war that had yet to be launched.  Those who participated will remember that the protests were also a sea of homemade signs, some sardonic (“Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”), some blunt (“Contain Saddam — and Bush”), some pointed indeed (“Pre-emptive war is terrorism”).

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The New Balance of Terror in Syria

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 Interview with Joseph Daher: The new balance of terror in Syria

https://socialistworker.org/2017/02/07/the-new-balance-of-terror-in-syria

The new balance of terror in Syria

February 7, 2017

The scorched-earth war of the Assad dictatorship, backed by allies Russia and Iran, against the Syrian Revolution has attained a critical victory with the conquest of the rebellion stronghold of Eastern Aleppo. Now the left must place a premium on understanding the lessons of what happened–and what it will mean for the region. Joseph Daher is a Swiss-Syrian socialist activist, a member of the Revolutionary Left Current in Syria and founder of the Syria Freedom Forever blog. He will be touring the U.S. and Canada February 9-17 to speak about his recent book Hezbollah: Political Economy of the Party of God. Ashley Smithinterviewed Daher about conditions in Syria and the situation for the remnants of revolutionaries after Aleppo, as well as the role that Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shia fundamentalist party, has played. Syrian soldiers march into a conquered city

AFTER THE conquest of Aleppo, Assad’s counterrevolution seems to have decisively set back the Syrian Revolution.

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Against Amnesia: the American Empire Under Obama

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Against amnesia: The empire under Obama

There is already nostalgia for the Obama years among people who care about justice and peace. But we should question the rosy picture, writes Khury Petersen-Smith. President Barack Obama speaks to U.S. soldiers

EVEN BEFORE Barack Obama left office, an effort was underway to secure his legacy as a progressive and an idealist. And now that Trump has taken the throne of American power, the mythology surrounding the Obama years will only grow. The myth presents Obama as a tragic figure: committed to a progressive agenda, but more committed to national unity.

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Obama’s last killings in Iraq and Syria: 450 civilians

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Former U.S. President Barack Obama spent the last months of his term leading a coalition in Syria and Iraq that killed hundreds of civilians. As liberals mourn the end of the Barack Obama administration, a monitoring group reported that the U.S.-led coalition killed 450 or more civilians in Syria and Iraq since October. 70% Spike in Civilian Deaths by US-Led Coalition in Syria, Iraq
“With reported fatalities from coalition strikes at record levels we would have expected significant media engagement,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars, a London-based monitoring group that has been tallying the death toll of coalition strikes by compiling official and local reports. “Instead, anything beyond local reporting has been almost non-existent.”
The count begins from and largely includes casualties from the intense operation in Mosul, which the U.N. says is the largest such offensive since World War II. Most of the rest of the remaining deaths are from the Raqqa governorate but do not include fatalities from the Iraqi Security Forces or Air Force.

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2/3 of Israelis support Two States

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Last week, J Street commissioned a new poll of Israeli public opinion, conducted by a respected Israeli pollster. The poll posed a series of questions about Israelis’ views on the Obama administration and US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. We wanted to explain for you why we felt it was important for us to launch this poll right now, and to lift up some of its topline findings. Following the flurry of hotly debated activity by the US and the UN in the past month, we wanted to take the political temperature of Israelis on key questions related to the conflict and the peace process. Secretary Kerry’s speech, which laid down an important marker for the Obama administration’s eight years of work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, followed close on the heels of the administration’s abstention on UNSC Resolution 2334.

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Russia’s Legitimate Fears

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Editor’s Note: Russia’s dictatorship is a far cry from the hopes that the Russian people had when they overthrew their communist regime and bought into the neo-liberal fantasies sold to them by global capitalism. The subsequent history has led many Russians to regret that they didn’t try to replace an oppressive oligarchy claiming to be communist with a democratic socialism instead of a new capitalist dictatorship. Yet none of that is reason to dismiss Russia’s legitimate fears about NATO encirclement and the neo-con thirst for yet more wars to advance an imperialist agenda to serve global capitalist economic expansionism. Russia’s disgraceful and murderous policies in Syria are good reason to hope that Putin, Assad and their allies should be brought to justice for crimes against humanity, but that is not a good reason for the US and Nato to take steps which might accidentally lead the U.S. into a nuclear war with Russia–a point that led some otherwise decent people to not want to support Hillary Clinton who represented the side of the Democratic Party more aligned with those imperial interests than with the aspiration of many Americans to not be involved in more wars. But those forces are just as strong in the Republican Party, so there are many who fear the worst as Obama leaves office by further stroking tensions with Russia (if he was so concerned about the “integrity” of our democratic voting system he should have begun a campaign as soon as he was elected in 2008 for a constitutional amendment that would have replaced the electoral system with a direct vote for Congress and that would have incorporated the ESRA’s plan to ban all money from elections except public funding, and he should have insisted that the 2016 election was not valid until all those who had been prevented from voting in the racist states had been allowed to vote–and certainly should have made known to the American people what the Russians were suspected of doing in September when he learned about it, rather than let their alleged manipulation of the elections stand).

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Cops of the Pacific? The U.S. Military’s Role in Asia in the Age of Trump

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An interesting speculative piece from our media all TomDispatch.com

Cops of the Pacific? 
The U.S. Military’s Role in Asia in the Age of Trump 
By Tim Shorrock

Despite the attention being given to America’s roiling wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, crucial decisions about the global role of U.S. military power may be made in a region where, as yet, there are no hot wars: Asia.  Donald Trump will arrive in the Oval Office in January at a moment when Pentagon preparations for a future U.S.-Japan-South Korean triangular military alliance, long in the planning stages, may have reached a crucial make-or-break moment. Whether those plans go forward and how the president-elect responds to them could help shape our world in crucial ways into the distant future. On November 18th, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s most conservative prime minister since the Cold War, became the first foreign head of state to meet with Donald Trump after his surprise election victory. The stakes for Abe were high. His rightist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has run Japan for much of the last 70 years, has been one of America’s most reliable, consistent, and subservient allies.

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Election 2016 and the Growing Global Nuclear Threat

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Playing a Game of Chicken with Nuclear Strategy 
By Michael T. Klare

Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” Of all the responsibilities of America’s top executive, none may be more momentous than deciding whether, and under what circumstances, to activate the “nuclear codes” — the secret alphanumeric messages that would inform missile officers in silos and submarines that the fearful moment had finally arrived to launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) toward a foreign adversary, igniting a thermonuclear war. Until recently in the post-Cold War world, however, nuclear weapons seemed to drop from sight, and that question along with it. Not any longer. In 2016, the nuclear issue is back big time, thanks both to the rise of Donald Trump (including various unsettling comments he’s made about nuclear weapons) and actual changes in the global nuclear landscape. With passions running high on both sides in this year’s election and rising fears about Donald Trump’s impulsive nature and Hillary Clinton’s hawkish one, it’s hardly surprising that the “nuclear button” question has surfaced repeatedly throughout the campaign.

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American Power at the Crossroads: a Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action

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American Power at the Crossroads
A Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action
By Dilip Hiro   and sent to us by our ally TomDispatch.com

In the strangest election year in recent American history — one in which the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson couldn’t even conjure up the name of a foreign leader he “admired” while Donald Trump remained intent on building his “fat, beautiful wall” and “taking” Iraq oil — the world may be out of focus for many Americans right now.  So a little introduction to the planet we actually inhabit is in order.  Welcome to a multipolar world.  One fact stands out: Earth is no longer the property of the globe’s “sole superpower.”

If you want proof, you can start by checking out Moscow’s recent role in reshaping the civil war in Syria and frustrating Washington’s agenda to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.  And that’s just one of a number of developments that highlight America’s diminishing power globally in both the military and the diplomatic arenas.  On a peaceable note, consider the way China has successfully launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a rival to the World Bank, not to speak of its implementation of a plan to link numerous countries in Asia and Europe to China in a vast multinational transportation and pipeline network it grandly calls the One Belt and One Road system, or the New Silk Road project.  In such developments, one can see ways in which the previously overwhelming economic power of the U.S. is gradually being challenged and curtailed internationally. Moscow Calling the Shots in Syria

The Moscow-Washington agreement of September 10th on Syria, reached after 10 months of hard bargaining and now in shambles after another broken truce, had one crucial if little noted aspect. For the first time since the Soviet Union imploded, Russia managed to put itself on the same diplomatic footing as the U.S. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented, “This is not the end of the road… just the beginning of our new relations” with Washington. Even though those relations are now in a state of suspension and exacerbation, it’s indisputable that the Kremlin’s limited military intervention in Syria was tailored to achieve a multiplier effect, yielding returns both in that war-ravaged, devastated land and in international diplomacy.

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Henry Giroux on the Pathology of Politics in our Warfare State

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Editor’s note: Living as we do in the 15th year of the war that began with Afghanistan and Iraq and has now spread to Syria, Yemen, Libya, etc. it is sometimes possible for many of us to accept the militarization of our society as just normal. When I first read Henry Giroux’s article sent to Tikkun this morning I thought, “wow, he is over the top this time.” Then I realized that the problem was how much I myself have gotten used to the bizarre develpments that have happened in American politics. In an article I sent out earlier this morning from Tom Engelhardt I read and shook my head at the ways that the Obama administration has moved from its original promise to seek a world without nukes to planning a trillion dollar modernizaiton of our nuclear arsenal and just thought, “oh well, that’s just another part of Obama’s consistent abandonment of the ideals he promised, so why should I be shocked?”

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Bombs Åway: The Continuing Impact of 9/11

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Bombs Away! 
Their Precision Weaponry and Ours 
By Tom Engelhardt    Thanks to TomDispatch.com our ally

On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda launched its four-plane air force against the United States. On board were its precision weapons: 19 suicidal hijackers. One of those planes, thanks to the resistance of its passengers, crashed in a Pennsylvania field.  The other three hit their targets — the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — with the kind of “precision” we now associate with the laser-guided weaponry of the U.S. Air Force. From its opening salvo, in other words, this conflict has been an air war. With its 75% success rate, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mission was a historic triumph, accurately striking three out of what assumedly were its four chosen targets.  (Though no one knows just where that plane in Pennsylvania was heading, undoubtedly it was either the Capitol or the White House to complete the taking out of the icons of American financial, military, and political power.)  In the process, almost 3,000 people who had no idea they were in the bombsights of an obscure movement on the other side of the planet were slaughtered.

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Democrats’ Platform Hawkish on Foreign Policy by Stephen Zunes

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“Most Progressive Dem Platform in History” Hawkish on Foreign Policy

Posted: July 27, 2016

Stephen Zunes

Image by Joeff Davis

The Democratic Party platform may indeed be, as some have proclaimed, the “most progressive” in the history of the party—at least on various important domestic issues. But some of its foreign policy planks reflect a disturbingly hawkish worldview consistent with those of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Declaring that “we must defeat ISIS, al-Qaeda and their affiliates,” the platform calls for the United States and its allies to “destroy ISIS” strongholds in Iraq and Syria. There is no acknowledgement that these strongholds are in heavily populated urban areas, thereby risking large-scale civilian casualties, and no mention that the rise of these extremist organizations are a direct consequence of previous U.S. military interventions in the region. Regarding Iran, while there are many legitimate criticisms of that country’s reactionary regime, the platform appears to go overboard with its accusations, such as the claim that “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” Many analysts would give that designation to Saudi Arabia, with whom the platform says the U.S. should “strengthen its security cooperation.”

It also says the party will “push back” against Iran’s “support for terrorist groups like Hamas.” While there was a brief period of some limited past Iranian support of that Palestinian Islamist organization, there is no apparent evidence that it continues.

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What Are We Doing in Syria by Jeffrey Sachs

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America’s True Role in Syria
by Jeffrey D. Sachs

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Ankara with Turkish President Erdogan last month. (Photo: Turkish Govt/via Twitter)

 

Syria’s civil war is the most dangerous and destructive crisis on the planet. Since early 2011, hundreds of thousands have died; around ten million Syrians have been displaced; Europe has been convulsed with Islamic State (ISIS) terror and the political fallout of refugees; and the United States and its NATO allies have more than once come perilously close to direct confrontation with Russia. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama has greatly compounded the dangers by hiding the US role in Syria from the American people and from world opinion. An end to the Syrian war requires an honest accounting by the US of its ongoing, often secretive role in the Syrian conflict since 2011, including who is funding, arming, training, and abetting the various sides. Such exposure would help bring to an end many countries’ reckless actions.

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War or Peace: The Essential Question Before Voters on November 8th

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In the 1992 presidential election, the campaign team of Bill Clinton had the remarkable insight to simplify the choice before the American electorate in November, encapsulating the whole thought process in the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid.” Following this advice, voters ignored the foreign policy triumphs of President George H. W. Bush’s administration, including the recently won war against Iraq to liberate occupied Kuwait, and the slightly more remote “victory” in the Cold War, which Bush recalled to the nation in the forlorn hope of eliciting gratitude. Indeed, going into the elections, the economy was anemic, for cyclical reasons, and it was not to the incumbent’s advantage that this fact be highlighted.

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The Mess in Syria by Robert F. Kennedy , Jr. & response by Stephen Zunes

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Ediotr’s Note;  We found this analysis of why Western powers got involved in the Syrian war in EcoWatch.  We then asked  Tikkun contributing editor Stephen Zunes for his response. Both are printed below. One thing stands out for us: though Obama assured me when he met with me in 2006 that he would support Tikkun’s proposed Global Marshall Plan (www.tikkun.org/gmp), once elected he allowed the militarists to frame the alternatives in foreign policy in ways that ignored the impact a Strategy of Generosity could have had in preventing the emergence of ISIS (ISIL or The Islamic State) and hence the muddying of the lines between a popular democratic opposition to the Assad regime and a Sunni struggle to achieve dominance through meeting the brutality of Syrian Prime President Assad’s regime with even greater brutality. The nonviolent generosity approach to the region, had it been a central part of Obama’s agenda in his first two years in office when he had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, could have precluded the rise of ISIS and other Sunni extremist groups and made it easier for the democractic opposition in Syria to rally the majority of their own country against the human rights violating regime of Assad in Syria.