• Syria conflict: US diplomats press for strikes against Assad

    
    By Barbara Plett Usher and Suzanne Kianpour  BBC News, Washington 
     
   
   
  • 8 hours ago

• Dozens of US State Department officials have signed an internal memo protesting against US policy in Syria and calling for targeted military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad's government.

  They argue the current approach is working against the Syrian opposition and helping Mr Assad to stay in power.

• It was signed by 51 mid-to-high level officials who've been involved in implementing the administration's Syria strategy.

  It is not unusual for internal "dissent cables" to be filed through State Department channels.

• However, it is extremely rare to have this number of diplomats voice opposition to a White House position.

   

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  A State Department spokesman acknowledged receipt of the memo but declined to comment on its contents.

  But an official familiar with the letter told the BBC that it was sent "because the status quo is not sustainable".

• The document urges a credible threat of military action against the Assad government. Otherwise, it says, Damascus will feel no pressure to negotiate with the rebels and continue violating the ceasefire.

  The large number of signatories is a real "indictment of the policy from the people who are trying to implement it," says Robert Ford, a former ambassador to Syria who resigned in 2014 out of frustration with the administration's hands-off approach to the conflict.

• "What they're saying is we cannot achieve our objectives" for a sustainable ceasefire or a negotiated peace deal, he told the BBC.

  "People are very frustrated with the barrel bombs in Aleppo, the targeting of hospitals, the flow of refugees."

  The Obama administration is pushing for a political solution to the civil war but has mostly steered clear of military involvement, focusing instead on the fight against the Islamic State group in Syria.

• The letter follows the apparent collapse of the joint US-Russian peace process.

  There have been violations of the ceasefire by both the opposition and the government.

  But President Assad has openly defied the truce, and his forces, backed militarily by Iran and Russia, seem intent on regaining strategic territory such as the crucial city of Aleppo.

• Moscow argues that it is supporting strikes against jihadist insurgents not covered by the ceasefire.

  But Secretary of State John Kerry, who has pushed opposition groups to lay down their arms, is growing increasingly frustrated as the Syrian regime continues to change facts on the ground while he calls for diplomacy.

• "The United States is not going to sit there and be used as an instrument that permits a so-called ceasefire to be in place while one principal party is trying to take advantage of it to the detriment of the entire process," he said recently.

  Mr Kerry has pressed the Obama administration for tougher action against the Assad government in order to force it to the negotiating table, and signatories to the dissent letter believe he'll be sympathetic to their suggestions, according to sources involved in the process.

• But that's unlikely to sway President Obama, who is wary of being drawn into another Mideast conflict after the messy results of US intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. He's also reluctant to risk further tensions and possible military confrontation with Russia.

  However, his possible successor, presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, has argued for a more assertive policy in Syria, including stronger support for non-Islamist rebels.

  Perhaps the letter is aimed as much at her as it is at Mr Kerry.

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• Judicial Watch: Defense, State Department Documents Reveal Obama Administration Knew that al Qaeda Terrorists Had Planned Benghazi Attack 10 Days in Advance

   

  MAY 18, 2015

• Administration knew three months before the November 2012 presidential election of ISIS plans to establish a caliphate in Iraq 

   

  Administration knew of arms being shipped from Benghazi to Syria
• (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense (DOD)and the Department of State revealing that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was committed by the al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-linked “Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman” (BCOAR), and had been planned at least 10 days in advance. Rahman is known as the Blind Sheikh, and is serving life in prison for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts.  The new documents also provide the first official confirmation that shows the U.S. government was aware of arms shipments from Benghazi to Syria.  The documents also include an August 2012 analysis warning of the rise of ISIS and the predicted failure of the Obama policy of regime change in Syria.

• The documents were released in response to a court order in accordance with a May 15, 2014, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against both the DOD and State Department seeking communications between the two agencies and congressional leaders “on matters related to the activities of any agency or department of the U.S. government at the Special Mission Compound and/or classified annex in Benghazi.”

   

  Spelling and punctuation is duplicated in this release without corrections.

• A Defense Department document from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), dated September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, details that the attack on the compound had been carefully planned by the BOCAR terrorist group “to kill as many Americans as possible.”  The document was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Obama White House National Security Council.  The heavily redacted Defense Department “information report” says that the attack on the Benghazi facility “was planned and executed by The Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman (BCOAR).”  The group subscribes to “AQ ideologies:”

   

  The attack was planned ten or more days prior on approximately 01 September 2012. The intention was to attack the consulate and to kill as many Americans as possible to seek revenge for U.S. killing of Aboyahiye ((ALALIBY)) in Pakistan and in memorial of the 11 September 2001 atacks on the World Trade Center buildings.

• “A violent radical,” the DIA report says, is “the leader of BCOAR is Abdul Baset ((AZUZ)), AZUZ was sent by ((ZAWARI)) to set up Al Qaeda (AQ) bases in Libya.”  The group’s headquarters was set up with the approval of a “member of the Muslim brother hood movement…where they have large caches of weapons.  Some of these caches are disguised by feeding troughs for livestock.  They have SA-7 and SA-23/4 MANPADS…they train almost every day focusing on religious lessons and scriptures including three lessons a day of jihadist ideology.”

   

  The Defense Department reported the group maintained written documents, in “a small rectangular room, approximately 12 meters by 6 meters…that contain information on all of the AQ activity in Libya.”

• (Azuz is again blamed for the Benghazi attack in an October 2012 DIA document.)

   

  The DOD documents also contain the first official documentation that the Obama administration knew that weapons were being shipped from the Port of Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria. An October 2012 report confirms:

   

  Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.

   

  During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the ((Qaddafi)) regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The Syrian ports were chosen due to the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo.

• The DIA document further details:

   

  The weapons shipped from Syria during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.  The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.]

   

  The heavily redacted document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons.

• Another DIA report, written in August 2012 (the same time period the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria), said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups: “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The growing sectarian direction of the war was predicted to have dire consequences for Iraq, which included the “grave danger” of the rise of ISIS:

   

  The deterioration of the situation has dire consequences on the Iraqi situation and are as follows:

   

  This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters. ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.

• Some of the “dire consequences” are blacked out but the DIA presciently warned one such consequence would be the “renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena.”

   

  From a separate lawsuit, the State Department produced a document created the morning after the Benghazi attack by Hillary Clinton’s offices, and the Operations Center in the Office of the Executive Secretariat that was sent widely through the agency, including to Joseph McManus (then-Hillary Clinton’s executive assistant).  At 6:00 am, a few hours after the attack, the top office of the State Department sent a “spot report” on the “Attack on U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi” that makes no mention of videos or demonstrations:

   

  Four COM personnel were killed and three were wounded in an attack by dozens of fighters on the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi beginning approximately 1550 Eastern Time….

• The State Department has yet to turn over any documents from the secret email accounts of Hillary Clinton and other top State Department officials.

   

  “These documents are jaw-dropping. No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them.  If the American people had known the truth – that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack from the get-go – and yet lied and covered this fact up – Mitt Romney might very well be president. And why would the Obama administration continue to support the Muslim Brotherhood even after it knew it was tied to the Benghazi terrorist attack and to al Qaeda? These documents also point to connection between the collapse in Libya and the ISIS war – and confirm that the U.S. knew remarkable details about the transfer of arms from Benghazi to Syrian jihadists,” stated Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president.  “These documents show that the Benghazi cover-up has continued for years and is only unraveling through our independent lawsuits. The Benghazi scandal just got a whole lot worse for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.”

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• How the US Helped ISIS 

   

   

  A recently declassified document again shows the United States’ complicity in the rise of ISIS.

   

   

  by David Mizner
• In October 2014, Vice President Joe Biden publicly criticized US allies for backing ISIS. The previous month, General Dempsey had told the Senate Armed Services Committee that America’s “Arab allies” were funding the group.
• US officials were trying to distance themselves from the ISIS-supporting actions of their allies without harshly condemning them. Biden suggested that their arming of ISIS was unintentional and quickly apologized to them. (Responding to Dempsey, Senator Lindsey Graham actually defended them: “They were trying to beat Assad. I believe they realize the folly of their ways.”)
• This mild criticism of allies came amid the effort of American officials to sell the decision to start bombing ISIS. By this time, the group was already entrenched in eastern Syria and western Iraq. But there’s no evidence that in the months and years prior, the Obama administration had made any attempt to prevent its client states from helping ISIS become a regional power.
• The United States itself continued to send arms into Syria despite the certainty that some would end up in the hands of ISIS. “We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA,” said ISIS leader Abu Atheer in 2013, referring to the US-backed Free Syrian Army. He said ISIS bought anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank weapons from the FSA.

• A recently declassified US military intelligence document is further evidence of US complicity. Formerly classified as “secret,” an August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report was among a batch of documents obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch.

   

  The mainstream press and Republican politicians have focused on other documents in the collection: those related to the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Largely overlooked is this document, which contradicts the official narrative not just about the rise of ISIS but also the makeup of the opposition in Syria and its relationship with foreign backers.
• “The August 5, 2012 DIA report confirms much of what Assad has been saying all along about his opponents both inside and outside Syria,” says “terrorism analyst” Max Abrams.
• The report concerns a period in time when the escalating violence in Iraq had ceased to be a prominent topic in the US press and when its coverage of the war in Syria — mirroring the discussion in Washington — focused on the Assad government, not the forces aligned against it. This may be hard to imagine now that ISIS has become the US government’s favorite monster, but during these months President Obama and his team gave major speeches on Syria that didn’t even mention the group.

• Even after ISIS took Fallujah in January 2014, discussion of the group in establishment outlets was scarce. It wasn’t until later in 2014 — after continued battlefield victories and heavily publicized beheadings of westerners — that Islamic State became Public Enemy Number 1.

   

  American officials claimed the ascendancy of ISIS had caught American intelligence by surprise. Yet in the 2012 report — which was circulated widely through the US government — the DIA foresaw the creation of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria. It also said that Islamic State of Iraq could “return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi” and declare an “Islamic state” in western Iraq and eastern Syria.

• More than that, the report says the creation of an Islamic state was precisely the goal of the foreign governments that support the opposition:

   

  If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).
• The document previously identifies, in a slightly different context, “supporting powers” as “Western countries, the Gulf States, and Turkey.” Even if one interprets the document to exclude the United States from the “supporting powers” — indeed, why would its intelligence agency tell the US government what its policy was? — it reveals that at least as early as 2012, the United States knew that its client states sought the creation of an “Islamic state.” Two years would pass before the United States offered its peep of performance protest.

• More broadly, the United States participated in a war against the Syrian government that turned Islamic State of Iraq into a regional power encompassing — and devastating — large parts of two countries. Such an outcome was predictable — and indeed predicted by the US government itself.

   

  While American politicians and pundits have blamed the ascendance of ISIS on former Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki and Assad — or on the removal of American troops from Iraq — the DIA report reminds us that the key event in the rise of ISIS was the corresponding rise of the insurgency in Syria. Brad Hoff of the Levant Report, the first journalist to analyze the DIA report, says it shows that “A nascent Islamic State became a reality only with the rise of the Syrian insurgency . . . there is no mention of U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq as a catalyst.”

• Maliki warned that the war in Syria could engulf Iraq, yet the United States and its allies kept supporting the insurgency. The American bombing of ISIS, relatively light and sporadic, has only intensified the belief of many Iraqis that the United States doesn’t want to defeat the group.

   

  According to the official storyline, the US has sought to weaken ISIS in Syria by supporting “moderate” rebels. (President Obama has faced constant criticism for not arming opposition groups in Syria despite constantly arming opposition groups.)
• The decision of the US to train its own force was an acknowledgement that it’d been unable to find moderate groups to support. Former US Ambassador Robert Ford has admitted as much, saying that “for a long time, we have looked the other way” as US-backed groups worked with al-Qaeda’s affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq spinoff al-Nusra Front. Many “moderate” rebels — “entire CIA-backed rebel units” — have joined al-Nusra Front and ISIS. Earlier this year, the main US-backed group, Harakat al-Hazm, couldn’t beat al-Nusra Front — so it joined them.

• The 2012 DIA document confirms that reactionaries dominated the opposition from early on. “The Salafist, The Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” it says. It also notes that “AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning.”

   

  This is the long-obscured truth that the DIA report underscores: that after the initial stage of the war in Syria, simply to support the war on the Syrian government was to help ISIS.
• American complicity in the rise of ISIS would hardly be an anomaly. At various times since World War II—most infamously in Afghanistan in the ’70s and ’80s — the United States has armed, allied with, or otherwise strengthened jihadists (and their precursors) for the purpose of undermining its more immediate and authentic adversaries.

• And one need not consult history for an antecedent. Right now, as its effort to build a force from scratch founders, the United States is encouraging its proxies in Syria to work with al-Nusra Front and has green-lighted a new coordinated effort of Gulf countries and Turkey to arm an opposition coalition that includes al-Nusra Front and other reactionary groups.

   

  If the United States really wanted to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, it would stop empowering them.

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• US ex-intelligence chief on ISIS rise: It was 'a willful Washington decision'     

  Published time: 10 Aug, 2015
• The US didn’t interfere with the rise of anti-government jihadist groups in Syria that finally degenerated into Islamic State, claims the former head of America’s Defense Intelligence Agency, backing a secret 2012 memo predicting their rise.
• An interview with retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), given to Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan, confirms earlier suspicions that Washington was monitoring jihadist groups emerging as opposition in Syria.

• General Flynn dismissed Al Jazeera’s supposition that the US administration “turned a blind eye” to the DIA’s analysis.

  Flynn believes the US government didn’t listen to his agency on purpose.

  “I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision,” the former DIA chief said.
• The classified DIA report presented in August 2012, stated that “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al- Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” being supported by “the West, Gulf countries and Turkey.”
• The document recently declassified through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), analyses the situation in Syria in the summer of 2012 and predicts: “If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria… and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
• The report warns of “dire consequences” of this scenario, because it would allow Al-Qaeda to regain its positions in Iraq and unify the jihadist Sunni forces in Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against all other Muslim minorities they consider dissenters.
• “ISI (the Islamic State of Iraq) could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards of unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory,” the DIA report correctly predicted at the time.
  Those groups eventually emerged as Islamic State (IS formerly ISIS/ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front, an Islamic group loyal to Al-Qaeda.
• Unlike the US State Department, which rushed to label the declassified DIA memo as unimportant soon after its declassification, the DIA’s former head expressed full trust in the 2012 report, stressing he “paid very close attention” to this document, adding “the intelligence was very clear.”

• Al Jazeera notes that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn became “the highest ranking intelligence official to go on record,” saying the US and other states, notably Turkey and the Gulf Arab states, were sponsoring Al-Qaeda-led rebels in Syria with political support and weapons in an attempt to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

  When Al Jazeera’s Hasan asked Flynn why he didn’t attempt to stop the US coordinating arms transfers to Islamic extremists, the retired general said: “I hate to say it’s not my job, but my job was to ensure the accuracy of our intelligence,” said Flynn, who also served as director of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during the US hunt for Bin Laden.

• With the Al-Qaeda’s notorious founder killed in Pakistan in 2011, the former DIA head admitting the US sponsored Al-Qaeda-associated groups a year later in Syria should come as a shock to American media outlets, such as the Daily Beast, which criticized the DIA memo as unworthy.

  Author for the Levant Report, Brad Hoff says hours after he published a rebuttal to the Daily Beast article, he was contacted by a personal friend, a high level official with CIA Public Affairs, who urged Hoff to drop his comments regarding the IS issue, insisting the Daily Beast article had been “written insightfully.”

• Assad blame game ‘encourages more groups like ISIS’

  RT’s Gayane Chichakyan asked US State Department spokesperson John Kirby to comment on the DIA memo and Flynn’s assessment of it. In response, Kirby ignored the claims, solely blaming Assad for the rise of Islamic State forces.  

  “I am certainly not going to talk about the intelligence report that I haven’t seen … The rise of ISIL inside Syria was, in fact, helped by Assad regime’s lack of legitimacy to govern effectively its own people and its own territory,” Kirby said. 

  Washington’s approach to Syria only helps to further destabilize the situation by exclusively presenting the Syrian president as a leader who has ‘lost’ legitimacy, Washington Bureau Chief for Al-Quds, Said Arikat, told RT. 

• “It is very difficult to contain the situation in Syria or Iraq. It is very difficult to put that genie back in the bottle. If the United States was really intent on defeating ISIS, it has to create or facilitate conditions by which or through which you can have a political resolution,” Arikat said. 

  “And you begin by saying we want all Syrian representatives, including those who look at Assad as a representative. That is the only way. To continue to adhere to the stubborn line that Assad has lost his legitimacy is basically agitating for more of these groups to emerge. Today we have ISIS, tomorrow we might have something else,” he added.

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• Unlikely partners? How Western media largely ignored State Dept-Google-Al Jazeera plot against Assad     

  Published time: 26 Mar, 2016 04:46Edited time: 26 Mar, 2016
• The Western media has quietly ignored an unexpected collaboration between Washington, Google, and “independent” Al Jazeera aimed at helping to overthrow Syria’s Bashar Assad. Would they be as oblivious to a similar cozy “partnership” involving Russia?  

  Last Monday, WikiLeaks lifted the lid on a correspondence between Jared Cohen, the President of ‘Google Ideas,’ and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff in the summer of 2012. In his July 25, 2012 email to top State Department’s officials, Cohen pitched his about-to-be-launched “tool” to Clinton’s inner circle, asking it to “keep close hold” of it.

  The leak revealing the project, which would seem to be an outrageous scandal to some, has actually been quite difficult to spot in the news. Since WikiLeaks released the latest batch of Clinton’s emails on March 21, a Google news search spits back about 30 web sources related to the story.

• Of those, only two – The Independent and Daily Mail – could arguably be considered major mainstream media outlets. That means there were slim chances that the eye of an average newsreader would catch wind of the State Department’s teamwork with the US’ biggest tech giant, Google, and Arab media outlet Al Jazeera.

  According to what Cohen wrote, it appears that Google’s innovative visualizer worked to “publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”

  “Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” he said.

• Google also collaborated with Al Jazeera, which took primary ownership over the tool, because of “how hard” it was to get information out of Syria.

  At the State Department, the idea was lauded and passed on to Clinton via her private email by deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan as “a pretty cool idea.”

  RT asked media expert Lionel why the revelations failed to receive much attention in the Western media.

  “I don’t expect a reaction from Western media because Western media hasn’t even read this, has no idea about this,” Lionel told RT. “But can you imagine if the same set of facts were involved with the different countries, different corporations around the world depending upon your frame of reference. This would either be an outrage or ‘well, maybe this is a delightful and benign cooperation, an independent tech giant…and all for the common good of liberty’ and whatever. It depends upon your perspective.”

• Another curious aspect is the fact that the WikiLeaks release directly involved Clinton’s email, which has been a hot topic tainting her presidential campaign for a year now. Clinton’s opponents as well as the US media have been taking nearly every opportunity to poke her for her “careless” misdeed – with the notable exception of this story.   

  The three parties in this collaboration did not end up together by chance, either.

  Funded by the Qatari government, Al Jazeera portrays itself as “the first independent news channel in the Arab world” and “one of the world’s most influential news networks,” whose main goal is it to give “a global audience an alternative voice.”

  Qatar has been largely supporting the rebels in the Syrian conflict, along with Washington and other anti-Assad powers that even mulled launching a direct military intervention on Syrian soil last October.
• It turned out that Google’s Syrian Defector Tracking was a good fit for Al Jazeera. It even ended up winning the channel a prestigious Online Media Award for “Best technical innovation.”

• “This is going to show you very fascinating aspects of the new warfare – how media, and corporations and various platforms are merging together. We are not sure who the military is, who is the government,” Lionel said.

  He suggested that the State Department’s reluctance to release Clinton’s emails could be explained by the intention to hide “the conflation of allegedly private industry with the government.”

• “We have this new world here. We have the government and we have the Pentagon, DAPRA and defense advanced research program agency, we have private industry, we have these various platforms. We have this new introduction of mercenary groups and private contacting teams. [But] our country [the US] has had a very strict barrier, Posse Comitatus, that separates private law enforcement from military," Lionel said. "There have always been distinctions and barriers and jurisdiction alliance. In this new world, these barriers are being eliminated, dissolved.”

  As Lionel says, the collaboration between Google and the US government only seems to be “innocent” if there is a bias towards “who you like… and the information that’s being propagated.”

• When contacted by RT, Google declined to comment on the situation, yet did not hesitate to proudly stress Al Jazeera’s achievement.

  “No comment, but pointing out that this data visualization project was very public, Al Jazeera won a journalism award for it,” the tech giant said in an email.

  Given these circumstances, it would not hurt to wonder what the Western media’s reaction might have been if the same collaboration had occurred across the ocean and involved, let’s say, the Russian government, a well-known media outlet, and a Russian internet giant.

• Since its inception in 2005, RT has often been labeled as anything ranging from a “Russian propaganda machine” to a “propaganda bullhorn” by high-profile Western officials and politicians.

  “If RT wanted PR in American media, this is exactly the move it should make. You would never hear the end of that on American media,” Ted Rall, a political cartoonist and author, told RT. “You really don’t have a right to call anyone a propaganda if you yourself is doing the same thing.”

  As for Al Jazeera’s prize winning tool, it appears to be currently defunct for unspecified reasons.

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• They Made Him a Moron

    

  The strange career of Alec Ross

      Evgeny Morozov
• One day in October 2009, I received an email from the office of Alec Ross, then the innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton. Informing me that my writing on technology and global affairs had attracted considerable interest at the State Department, the email mentioned that Ross would like to meet and chat about my work. A subsequent email, from Ross himself, asked me for advice on what the State Department should do. “What I’d really like to know,” wrote Ross, “is what are those things we can do, either materially or symbolically, to help ensure and extend Internet Freedom across the globe.”
• Ross seemed like an intriguing type: he was the first such innovation adviser, one of the whiz kids brought in from the outside to help disrupt the stale world of U.S. diplomacy. He was a political appointee, with little experience in foreign policy. During the 2008 election campaign, Ross advised Obama’s team on technology policy; prior to that, he cofounded a nonprofit dedicated to bridging the digital divide. Here was someone young and ambitious, a poster child for Obama’s infatuation with digital technologies—after all, they had just got him elected.
• Curiosity got the better of me. I went to see Ross at the State Department, just a few blocks from the flat that I was renting in Washington. I was, to put it mildly, underwhelmed. Mr. Senior Adviser for Innovation, I quickly discovered, didn’t have much advice to dispatch and was himself busy recruiting informal advisers to generate talking points for Clinton. That wouldn’t have been so bad if, at the same time, Ross weren’t so keen on namedropping and signaling his status. It took him just a few minutes to mention that he was supposed to have a call with “Samantha Power at the White House” and that, despite his senior position, he had seen poverty up close in West Virginia (where he grew up) and in Baltimore (where he was living). A six-week-old copy of The Economist, featuring an African woman holding a mobile phone on its cover, occupied a strategic spot on his desk. Here was an important man reading important things and talking to important people.
• Out of courtesy, I did share some thoughts with Ross, but it wasn’t long before our paths diverged.[*] I soon became a critic of the U.S. government’s “Internet freedom agenda,” while Ross and his colleague and friend Jared Cohen (then on the policy planning staff of the State Department and now the head of Google Ideas) embarked on adventures so reckless and ridiculous, so obsequious to the interests of Silicon Valley and offensive to anyone well-versed in the diplomatic trade, that some career staffers at the State Department began to ridicule, anonymously, of course, their cluelessness on social media.
• Ross’s tenure at the State Department was, by and large, a failure. His efforts to promote “twenty-first-century statecraft”—Clinton’s lofty vision for American power that would put “Internet freedom” and digital technologies at its core—floundered after the State Department was confronted by Cablegate, the release of a massive library of leaked diplomatic cables that began in late 2010 and was coordinated by WikiLeaks. Ross, who claimed the twenty-first-century-statecraft concept as his own and hoped that it would become “a major part of [Clinton’s] legacy,” was suddenly forced into damage control. Few would find his pronouncements on “Internet freedom” credible after the State Department’s reaction to WikiLeaks. An even more unglamorous picture of his activities emerges from Clinton’s email trove. The good news is that Ross did innovate on at least one front—spin. In 2012, Ross wrote to Cheryl D. Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff: “‘Hillary Clinton is the most innovation-friendly American diplomat since Benjamin Franklin.’ Thought you’d enjoy that line. It appears in minute 10 of show I did on CSPAN. I’m going to continue to use it.”
• summer 2010, Ross and Cohen took a delegation of American technology executives from the likes of Cisco and Microsoft to Damascus to meet with Bashar al-Assad—strange are the twists of twenty-first-century statecraft. Never missing an opportunity to show off, the pair tweeted all the fun they were having in Syria. (Cohen: “I’m not kidding when I say I just had the greatest frappuccino ever at Kalamoun University north of Damascus”; Ross: “Creative Diplomacy: @jaredcohen challenged Minister of Telecom to cake-eating contest.”) By Ross’s account, though, the trip pursued the much nobler objective of fomenting regime change via social media. As he wrote in another email to Mills, “When Jared and I went to Syria, it was because we knew that Syrian society was growing increasingly young (population will double in 17 years) and digital and that this was going to create disruptions in society that we could potential [sic] harness for our purposes.”
• Anyone familiar with Ross’s style won’t be surprised to discover that his first book, The Industries of the Future (Simon and Schuster, 2016), has all the usual ingredients: West Virginia or Baltimore gets a mention in almost every chapter; the few interesting speculations in the book come from somebody else; and there is an abundance of praise lavished on CEOs, venture capitalists, and other very important men, all of them Ross’s buddies. As Ross put it in one of the emails written during his government tenure, “We should cultivate ‘social media influencers’ for the purpose of validation and amplification of our message”—and he follows that advice to the letter.
• Apparently, Ross has never met an “influencer” he didn’t want to quote or praise. We learn that Larry Summers has “one of the sharpest minds in the world”; that LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman is “one of Silicon Valley’s top minds (and nicest people)”; that investor Charlie Songhurst is “one of the most creative thinkers at the intersection of technology, society, and the global economy”; and so on. The influencers are happy to return the favor. “Anyone who wants to understand the key forces that are shaping our economic, political, and social futures will benefit hugely from Ross’s insights,” reads a blurb for the book from Hoffman—one of Silicon Valley’s nicest people, indeed. This network, it turns out, is quite incestuous. First, Ross quotes the famous venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Then, he quotes Larry Summers—only to tell us that Summers is also an adviser to Andreessen’s firm and sits on the board of several other Silicon Valley startups. An app for disrupting the elites? Alas, nobody is building it.
• At times, the book reads like an extended college admissions essay, with the student, prompted to reflect on his most memorable experience, desperately trying to relate something very trivial he did last summer to lofty questions of globalization and democracy. Ross reflects, for example, on his time working as a janitor after his freshman year in college, linking it to his experiences as an innovation adviser to the Secretary of State. On another level, The Industries of the Future can be read as an extended effort to prove to the world that Ross does belong in the very center of that bizarre Venn diagram—right at the intersection of technology, foreign policy, and the Democratic Party—that had secured him his original job at the State Department.
• Such books are normally written before a person is appointed to a high-level advisory position within the government; they are meant to attest to one’s intellectual credentials and articulate a grand strategic vision of the future, which can then guide the person’s advisory work. Ross, however, got his career backwards: he got his advisory position based on his campaign work for Obama, though he had few academic or intellectual credentials to his name. Then, after he left the State Department in 2013, he pursued the well-trodden path of aspiring pundits-cum-lobbyists: a fellowship at an Ivy League school (Columbia), seats on half a dozen corporate boards (FiscalNote, Kudelski Group, Leeds Equity Partners, Telerivet, AnchorFree, 2U), and now, finally, a book.
• Given Ross’s career trajectory—from a supposed “big thinker” without any big thoughts to a power broker between industry and government—this book appears eight years too late. While his publisher blurbs him as a “leading innovation expert” whose book “belongs on the shelf alongside works by Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria” (pretty faint praise, this), The Industries of the Future reads more like a love letter to a few more unexplored corporate boards, preferably in industries that will last longer than Alec Ross’s career as the next Tom Friedman.
• This turn to futurism and technology is not new for Washington insiders. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski once penned a tome on the “technetronic era.” Ever since the heyday of modernization theory, with its belief in the civilizing power of radio, television, and satellites, anyone with even rudimentary expertise in the latest technologies has been in high demand in Washington; a lucrative career spanning academia, the lecture circuit, and the private sector was guaranteed. From Ithiel de Sola Pool to George Gilder, Ross is in good—or, rather, awful—company.

• The Jargon That Ate the World

   

  The Industries of the Future has a relatively straightforward structure. Ross dedicates each chapter to an emerging industry, from biotech to fintech to cybersecurity, all while peppering the reader with so much data and so many examples that one can only hope that no interns were hurt in collecting them. He interviews his favorite experts—most of them Silicon Valley royalty—and extracts long quotes from each, periodically pausing his courageous reportage from the digital frontlines to proclaim, in a crushingly banal editorial voice, what he himself thinks about the future.
• Whatever industry he examines, Ross inevitably comes up with the same finding: any industry of the future will be just like one industry of the past—the Internet. His mindset is the best example of what I call Internet-centrism: using the Internet as the basic analytical category for making sense of the world and urging everyone to heed its lessons. Thus, when Ross thinks about the future of robotics, he thinks about “the Internet in the 1990s.” Likewise, “where we are today with genomics is the equivalent of where we were in 1994 at the advent of the commercial Internet.” Bitcoin’s blockchain will be “to banking, law, and accountancy as the Internet was to media, commerce and advertising.” (Here, Ross is quoting the director of the MIT Media Lab.)
• This is futurism at its laziest: it’s enough to simply take an industry and search for its equivalent of eBay, Google, and Uber, or search for some well-known phenomenon from the 1990s and argue that it will repeat itself, albeit in a different sector. (“I anticipate that the same kind of protest and labor movements that advocated against free trade agreements in the 1990s will form in the 2020s once robots begin to really make their presence known in the workplace”; the Luddites will finally arrive, says our futurist.) The rest of the book is filled with banalities unworthy of even Thomas Friedman. “Data: the raw material of the information age”; “The world has left the Cold War behind only to enter into a Code War”; “Multicultural fluency is increasingly important in a business world that is growing more global”—this stuff would be embarrassing enough to read coming from the futurists of the 1950s.

• The paucity of big ideas in this book can easily be explained by the material it draws on. Mostly, Ross cites articles from newspapers and magazines rather than actual books on these subjects. He ignores anything of analytical substance that has been written on the industries he’s examining and prefers to “waterboard” the reader with factoids and trivia about hair-washing robots in Japan or the consultant dispatched by the State Department to the Colombian jungle (“the last stronghold of the FARC guerillas”), where he was “educating local stakeholders.”

   

  There are occasional wild predictions, which are either irrelevant or impossible to substantiate. What good is it to say that in the future you will be able to host a dinner party with eight people at the table, all speaking different languages, while the voice in your ear will be whispering the language of your choice? Moreover, do you know anybody with a burning need to organize such a dinner party?

• This book by the State Department’s former innovation adviser merely attests to the intellectual bankruptcy of the term “innovation,” which in the hands of people like Ross has ceased to have any substantive meaning. For Ross, “innovation” is an activity that will prepare you for the future—which can, of course, be foreseen if you surround yourself with enough “innovators.” But what exactly makes Ross an innovator? Tweeting about Cohen’s cake-eating contest in Syria? That may very well be: mastery of social media is what passes for savvy technology strategy these days.

   

  The Alec Ross success story is a fine illustration of how somebody with virtually zero foreign policy experience can rise to the upper echelons of the foreign policy establishment by becoming a go-to authority on all things technology—and now, apparently, on all things future. Technology experts have joined economists as America’s most useful idiots. There is always demand for their expertise, there is no risk in saying stupid things about complex matters (the majority won’t understand them anyway), and there are plenty of corporations willing to foot the bill for this intellectual circus.
• In his supposed pragmatism, Ross combines the worst of Clinton and Obama, making it impossible for him to come up with any mildly defensible, let alone exciting, thesis. Yes, technology is disrupting many industries; yes, some jobs will be lost and some will be created; yes, we need to distribute the gains of the digital revolution more evenly. Ross doesn’t say how all this will be done, and instead stops short at a level of generality that should endear him to the Davos elites. Here is someone talking technology policy without hurting any corporate interests in the process!
• While Ross does pinpoint the dire consequences of automation for the job market, he shies away from more radical proposals—like a universal basic income—for tackling it. Rather, he believes that government will somehow be able to pull it all together with the same old tools of taxation, regulation, and retraining. Perhaps the rise of Bitcoin will give Silicon Valley an innovative method of paying taxes? Or perhaps, Ross writes, “as the sharing economy grows as a share of the total economy, the safety net needs to grow with it.” There are, however, no details whatsoever on how that net is to be designed, let alone implemented.

• This might seem boring—and it is. The only redeeming feature of this book is that Ross, in the course of defending the empire-building efforts of both Silicon Valley and Washington, reveals the geopolitical and technological unconscious of American elites. The Industries of the Future is interesting not for what it says about technology—you could have read it all in The Economist, years earlier—but for what it leaves unsaid. Ross makes implicit, and occasionally explicit, assumptions about Silicon Valley’s increasingly prominent role in global affairs that deserve far more scrutiny than what he has to say about robotics, agriculture, or the sharp mind of Larry Summers.

   

  Ross uses terms like “globalization” and “innovation” as harmless euphemisms for “capitalism.” Globalization, for him, is something for which the United States government has no responsibility—it’s just happening on its own, autonomously and anonymously, as if trade treaties, military bases, and offshoring zones were all springing up without anyone consciously creating the policies that enable them. Ross’s book is a good example of how this discourse of globalization has been adopted by American policymakers as a way of blaming the effects and consequences of their own policies—aimed primarily at making the whole globe a safe playground for American capital—on historical inevitability.

• Magic Mountains

   

  Like many in Silicon Valley, Ross believes in what has become known as the Varian Rule—named after Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian—which states that the kinds of luxuries enjoyed by billionaires today will eventually be provided, albeit in a somewhat modified, heavily technologized form, to the poor and middle classes. You won’t get a chauffeur, but you will get a self-driving car; you won’t get a secretary, but you’ll get Siri or Google Now. The only benchmark of success is access to goods and services, while the actual terms on which this access is provided—for Google Now to work, for example, you need to let Google monitor you pervasively—are never discussed. Here is a capitalism-friendly version of social mobility, whereby consumption, rather than the dissolution of existing power relationships, becomes the sole goal of emancipatory struggles.

• Ross also subscribes to the view, quite popular in both Washington and Silicon Valley, that thanks to the digital revolution and proliferation of cellphones and social media, the powerful (corporations, governments, traditional media) have lost their clout and newly empowered citizens find ways to outsmart their oppressors. It’s not for nothing that Mark Zuckerberg chose The End of Power, by the quintessential Washington insider Moisés Naím, as the first selection of his book club. (The book’s not-so-subtle subtitle is this: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be.)

   

  Ross tells us that “everywhere, newly empowered citizens . . . are challenging the established order in ways never before imaginable—from building new business models to challenging old autocracies.” To see just how ridiculous this idea is, it’s enough to look at what happened in Greece last summer. The angry Greeks and their supporters abroad had a fancy hashtag (#thisisacoup), while their opponents in the European governments, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund—well, they had just about everything else. Guess who won. Perhaps the Greeks should have heeded Ross’s advice and attempted to disrupt the Troika with a “new business model.”
• Despite incessant proclamations to the contrary, the purse still wields more power than the cellphone. And given the growing indebtedness of the population and the financializaton of everything under the sun, citizens stand to be further disempowered for the benefit of elites, banks, and transnational institutions. (The latter barely get a mention in Ross’s book.) Populism is on the rise across the globe not because citizens feel empowered by new technologies, but because they feel disempowered by everything else. These populist movements might even be putting technologies to good use. But as the Greek experience shows us, while a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin might offer some hypothetical lifeline to a government that subscribes to an alternative political and economic agenda, other mechanisms of power—mostly the old-fashioned banking system—preclude its actual deployment.
• What is most interesting about Ross’s geopolitical unconscious is his treatment of the future itself. Apparently, there’s just one future, with America and Silicon Valley at the helm. All that other countries can do is either adapt to it by reshaping their industries and expectations to favor more “openness,” or risk being labeled “control freaks” and “closed societies” by the likes of Ross and his army of think tanks, NGOs, and fake grassroots activists. It’s pointless to imitate Silicon Valley, Ross warns. Instead, other countries should accept that American companies will operate the network and communications infrastructure on which the global economy functions. These countries, Ross tells us, should find ways to foster industries of the future and make money with additional services—like, say, data analytics—built on top of that infrastructure.
• This is, of course, very bad advice for any country that would like to preserve strong domestic industry and maintain a modicum of sovereignty. Not everybody can be an authoritarian city-state like Singapore or a tax haven like Ireland. Ross does his best not to acknowledge a basic fact—that the profitability of future industries is inherently tied to the data-intensive platforms from which they emerge. A company like Google wants to be in every industry, from life extension, to home automation, to insurance, to energy—and it runs the infrastructure on which all these industries will operate in the future. How is it possible for any country to build a sustainable, long-term business strategy around data analytics when Google owns their data? Ross pays some lip service to the importance of people owning their own data but dances around the fact that, on this very issue, corporations enjoy far more rights than citizens—and the U.S. government is clear about whose side it is on.
• Ross’s world is not just flat—it’s plastic. Any country, he suggests, can simply abandon an industry that feeds it and move to embrace “the future.” But German car companies are afraid of Google not because they can’t develop an analytics business on top of self-driving cars and operating systems supplied by Google, but because they’ll make far less money from the analytics business than they currently make selling Mercedes and BMWs (while probably having to fire most of their heavily unionized workforce). This is a painful political and economic conflict, but for Ross, it’s simple: all these foreign countries and companies are refusing to look toward the “future,” adjust to the inevitable disruption that it will unleash, and acquire the expertise required to survive.

• The Fool’s Errand

   

  Ross’s only big idea in this book is that, thanks to the rise of new technologies, we are entering a new era, one in which countries will need to decide just where to be ideologically. “The principal political binary of the last half of the twentieth century,” he writes, “was communism versus capitalism. In the twenty-first century, it is open versus closed.” It doesn’t take long to understand that “open” can mean only one thing—“open for business,” and particularly for business involving American capital. Ross’s “open” vs. “closed” dichotomy does not transcend capitalism—it simply rebrands it.
• Consequently, any country that would like to limit, or at least slow down, the pillaging of its economy and resources by global corporations will be classified as “closed,” its leaders immediately labeled “control freaks” or “neo-Luddites.” The doublespeak of American diplomacy—the phony enthusiasm for “freedom” and “human rights”—was bad enough, but merged with the doublespeak of Silicon Valley (“open source,” “Internet freedom,” “transparency”), the hypocrisy becomes absolute.
• Ross’s reframing of “capitalism vs. communism” as a contest between open and closed reveals that, on issues of foreign policy, there’s barely any difference between America’s two major parties. In the domestic context, any policy demanding the removal of barriers to the free circulation of capital would traditionally be associated with the neoliberal right, who believe that the government should not limit the further intrusion of market logic into all domains. But while Ross insists that the U.S. government has a role to play in opposing the tide of “neoliberalism”—which he defines as an ideology “encouraging the free flow of goods and services in a market without government regulation”—he opposes all such efforts by foreign governments. Here is the duplicity of the Democrats in a nutshell: neoliberalism is bad when practiced in America, but when imposed on other countries, it’s “globalization.”
• Ross’s views are consistent with Washington’s long-standing opposition to efforts such as the New World Information and Communication Order, a now mostly forgotten attempt by developing countries, many of them from the Non-Aligned Movement, to assert the right to shape their own technological and media destinies. Not only did the United States fight such efforts tooth and nail, but Washington also articulated its vision for a world in which no such rights would exist, giving us the doctrine of the “free flow of information,” which has now been reincarnated as the “free flow of data.” Thus, we get the curious paradox of somebody like Alec Ross: as a Democrat, he timidly opposes neoliberalism at home, but he is more than happy to export it globally.
• To substantiate his thesis about the importance of “openness,” Ross embarks on a brief discussion of geopolitics—clearly not his area of expertise, despite his years at the State Department. His treatment of Estonia and Belarus—his best examples of “open” and “closed”—is a case in point. The two countries, we are told, faced a clear choice about what route to pursue after the fall of the Soviet Union. Estonia, he concludes, chose Skype, while Belarus chose to be ruled by the same mustachioed man for more than twenty years now.
• This is, of course, a caricature of history, with Ross substituting his fictitious future—the one in which we are all wearing multilingual earpieces—for the actual past. Never mind the questions of Russian language, national minorities, the power (or lack thereof) of the diasporas, the different structures of national economies—for Ross, all post-1990 decision-making in the former Soviet Union pursued just one objective: innovation. This is history as seen by the likes of George W. Bush, with his predilection for viewing everything through the single lens of freedom vs. terror. But it’s a bit of an embarrassment for Alec Ross, who likes to boast that he was a history major in college.

• Ross sees the same civilizational conflict between “open” and “closed” in today’s Ukraine, again with little understanding of history, language, culture, or even the future, on which he is supposed to be an expert. The wild enthusiasm of Ukrainians who want to join the European Union is not at all reciprocated, with many Europeans already thinking about life after the collapse of the union rather than the admission of new members.

   

  Ross’s reading of technological developments in Russia—which he calls a good example of how not to build industries of the future—is equally flawed. For one thing, Russia was much closer to following the “open” Estonian path than the “closed” Belarusian one, with shock therapy and radical neoliberal reforms almost running the country into the ground in the early 1990s. If only the sharp mind of Larry Summers had been there to guide them! All Russia got was his Harvard buddy Andrei Shleifer.

• Even looking at the last decade alone, one can see that Russia has pursued a pro-American technology policy, inviting many Silicon Valley giants to set up shop in its own equivalent of Silicon Valley, Skolkovo. The war in Ukraine changed all that, with Russians reversing their efforts to integrate themselves into Western networks and institutions and instead rushing to lessen their dependence on American and European partners and reclaim their sovereignty—in finance and food, but also technology.

   

  In technology policy, it has meant efforts on the part of the BRICS states to coordinate an alternative to the dominance of Silicon Valley, with the Russian government investing in mobile operating systems and mobile phone companies, taking aggressive positions on Internet governance, and pushing for data localization laws that would force American firms to store data locally. Likewise, other countries that Ross disparages—Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina—pursued smart, hands-on technology policies that aimed to boost domestic industries, create new talent, and reassert control over their own technology and monetary policy. (Ecuador, for example, attempted to roll out its own digital currency.) For Ross, though, anything that aims to limit the reach of U.S. capital is immediately labeled closed, technophobic, and neo-Luddite.
• One might disagree with the political ideologies of those governments, but one would be hard-pressed to call them technophobic. It’s true that they see America’s technology firms as an extension of America’s economic and foreign power—not an unreasonable assumption given the revolving door between Washington and Silicon Valley (a trend exemplified by people like Jared Cohen and Alec Ross). And the U.S. government itself does not conceal its agenda. A close look at new trade treaties like TTIP, TPP, and TiSA reveals that they advocate the “free flow of data” (now a euphemism for the free flow of capital) and that any effort to stem it would surely be considered contrary to American interests.
• What Ross doesn’t want to say is that there’s another possible future, a highly technological one that would deploy algorithms, big data, sensors, and all the rest to accomplish a very different political and economic program than the one he endorses. In fact, we have already caught glimpses of such a future. The experiments with cybernetics in Allende’s Chile come to mind, though they were crushed by none other than that evangelist of openness, the United States. Some governments have grasped that, in order to develop the industries of their own future, they need to maintain some technological sovereignty—much to the chagrin of Silicon Valley and Washington, who were planning to continue their joint project of spreading markets, information, democracy, and American investment everywhere.
• Ross implies that only benighted adversaries like North Korea, with its rudimentary technological capabilities, could resist the American gospel. But in the face of efforts to develop a very different version of the sharing economy—as the new radical mayor of Barcelona, for example, is now trying to do—Ross has little to say. The fact that much of the rest of the world has been working on an alternative to neoliberal globalization—what the French call altermondialisme—has either never registered with Alec Ross or is just not something that the corporate boards he is auditioning for want to know.
• Ross’s argument, or rather its style, leads to the eventual depoliticization of extremely political and contentious issues by wrapping them up in the empty, futuristic language of technology and innovation. Technology talk furnishes the seemingly innocent vocabulary that allows the U.S. government to bypass any organized resistance to the sort of neoliberal measures—more privatization, more austerity, no controls on movements of capital—that used to constitute the agenda behind the so-called Washington Consensus. All these measures, from privatization of industry to the radical reform of labor markets, are now presented as the reasonable and future-oriented option that would allow developing countries to leapfrog right into advanced, knowledge-based capitalism.

• And while previous efforts to market such policies generated a lot of pushback and even rioting from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, none of that struggle is visible now that Silicon Valley has taken over the job from the World Bank and the IMF. Who could argue that a country shouldn’t adapt itself to the future and build fancy apps? Why would any country want to resist the natural pull of technology?

   

  Of course, there is nothing natural in that pull. For every deep thinker like Alec Ross, there are a dozen American technocrats working to ensure that such boring (but vital and controversial) issues as international technology standards are resolved in the interests of Washington and Silicon Valley. All this talk of the future, with its air of inevitability and progress, gives them impeccable cover. Alec Ross has seen the future and heeded its advice: the only industry safe from disruption is cheerleading for American capital.
• [*] That much can be gleaned from a bizarre and random attack that Ross launches on me in his book, calling me “a social media-savvy graduate student in Massachusetts . . . who writes neo-Luddite screeds against American technology companies, advancing the official views of Russia and Belarus”—arguably, just the kind of person that Hillary Clinton’s innovation adviser should have sought advice from! Ironically, the only memo of advice I’ve ever written for a government was for the American one—at Ross’s own prompting.

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• John Cusack and an Ex-Clinton Aide Wage a War of Tweets Over Internet Freedom

         

  Posted on Mar 23, 2016

• An unlikely pair exchanged harsh words on Twitter on Saturday: former Hillary Clinton staffer Alec Ross and longtime actor John Cusack. The cause of their online brawl? A WikiLeaks tweet highlighting one of Clinton’s emails, in which Ross—her senior adviser for innovation when he wrote the message—stated:

    

  When Jared and I went to Syria, it was because we knew that Syrian society was growing increasingly young (population will double in 17 years) and digital and that this was going to create disruptions in society that we could potential[ly] harness for our purposes.

• Cusack retweeted this and added: “Well that’s not very nice. ...” Ross quickly fired back: “What’s your point?” And then the war of words ensued, with both parties spending much of the day attacking each other via the social media platform.

    

  Ross, now an author and “advisor to investors, corporations and government leaders,” worked for Clinton from 2009 to 2013 in the State Department. During his time in the Obama administration, Ross said that defending Internet freedom was a “pillar of America’s foreign policy priorities.”

• This isn’t his first brush with controversy on Twitter. In October, for example, he shared his support of Clinton’s condemnatory opinion of Edward Snowden.

    

  Cusack, meanwhile, has a history of being vocal about privacy rights. He’s a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—as is Snowden—and has called the Obama administration “similar to Bush” in regard to drones, national security and privacy rights.

    

  Although both Ross and Cusack claim to be advocates for Internet freedom, it’s clear why Cusack would take issue with Ross. Julian Assange, founder of the very WikiLeaks that published the above email, has called Ross a “foreign-policy tech vulture” and has said Ross gives the “veneer of authenticity” to the government’s disingenuous stance that Internet freedom is crucial to democracy.

• For all his preaching about Internet freedom, Ross has made his views on WikiLeaks clear: “WikiLeaks set the open government backward. … It wasn’t whistle-blowing because whistle-blowing reveals acts of official government wrongdoing …. [The] view that there should not be secret information of any sort is beyond naive.”

    

  On Saturday, what seemed like a modest political statement on Cusack’s part (he previously said he doesn’t care what people think of his views) turned into all-out Twitter warfare.

    

  There were cheap shots from both sides. But it quickly became more serious when Cusack accused Ross of being a “pro-corporate hustler.”

• Ross called the accusations “complete crap,” to which Cusack responded by linking to an old tweet in which Ross states that “Snowden is no hero” and “[s]hould be prosecuted.” Cusack continued to throw tweets at Ross, and eventually the WikiLeaks account jumped into the fray, accusing Ross of sexism and sharing a negative article about him. Most of Ross’ tweets have since been deleted, but WikiLeaks held on to them, an ironic display of the Internet freedom being contested.

    

  Cusack retweeted the words of his supporters and continued to criticize Ross, who seemed to ignore the swell of negativity. Although many parts of their squabble were rather immature—Cusack telling Ross to “take his best shot,” for example—their exchange highlighted serious issues that have been in the spotlight since 2011. Privacy rights and technological freedom have played a minor role thus far in the presidential campaign, but Apple’s conflict with the FBI proves that these questions still need to be addressed.

    

  —Posted by Emma Niles

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• The Disease is the Cure: Michael Walzer’s Solution to the Refugee Crisis
• Greg Shupak       December 2, 2015
• In a recent essay for Dissent entitled “The European Crisis,” Michael Walzer offers a case study in liberal imperialist ideology. The article ostensibly offers a discussion of the challenge posed to Europe by the mass influx of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. He urges European states to accept greater numbers of refugees than they have, albeit for a rather dubious reason:  failing to do so, he writes, will be bad for Europe. Furthermore, Walzer contends that it’s necessary to address the wars in the Middle East that have precipitated the refugees’ exodus by reinstituting a form of the inter-war colonial Mandate System. He writes that “There are countries in the world today that ought to be, for a time, not-independent and not-sovereign” and subject to an arrangement that is “like occupation.”
• He nominates Libya and Syria for “a new trusteeship system for countries that are temporarily unable to govern themselves.” In what respect this is “like occupation” and not simply “occupation” is rather unclear. Understanding why his proposal is both unjust in its implications, and fallacious in its reasoning, allows us to see why his argument is so insidiously dangerous. Developing and disseminating a critique of this form of imperialism is particularly urgent following the recent attacks in Paris, which are sure to occasion all-manner of rationalizations for further interventions in the Middle East and North Africa.
• Walzer’s arguments are characterized by subtle and not-so-subtle racism. His title foregrounds the European experience of the violent dispersal of millions of Libyans and Syrians rather than that of the people actually being dispersed. Throughout the essay the residents of both countries are treated as little more than problems to be managed. That most familiar Orientalist motif is present as well: the possibilities for the people of the East, in Walzer’s view, are limited to foreign stewardship, “a tyrant, like Qaddafi, say,” or “a chaos of thugs and zealots—and then thousands of people fleeing.” In this respect, the social democratic Walzer is every bit as reactionary as the arch-conservative Robert Kaplan, who has frequently put forth arguments that are virtually identical to Walzer’s.
• Walzer laments that, if Europeans fail to meet the needs of refugees “the idea of Europe will die.” Europe endangered: here is the distress-call of the empire apologist. He goes on to say that if European states don’t adequately respond to the refugee issue: “The dream of a new kind of commonwealth, a commonwealth of mutual responsibility and liberal values, will be over; we will wake up to a grim day.” As is typical of ideological utterances, the statement is partially true and partially untrue. The claim that “the idea of Europe” is one of “mutual responsibility” is ambiguous. Who is mutually responsible to whom? If this is to be something other than utterly vapid idealism, then what are the material dimensions of this “mutual responsibility”? Evidence of “mutual responsibility” exists in much of the conduct of the European bourgeoisie’s disparate national factions toward one another but Walzer’s formulation occludes the uneven, violent relationships that the European ruling classes maintain within and beyond their borders.
• Similarly, while it is accurate to say that “liberal values” are hegemonic in Europe, Walzer is dead wrong when he claims that it’s the absence of liberalism that produces “grim day[s].” European liberalism has shown itself perfectly amenable to many “grim day[s]” characterised by colonialism, neo-colonialism, genocide, patriarchal oppression, and centuries of ruthless exploitation of the working classes outside and inside of Europe: these are not liberalism’s “Other,” but constitutive elements of the liberalism that is hegemonic in Europe and that Walzer defends. By papering over these aspects of liberalism with rhetoric about the “mutual responsibility” to ward off a “grim day,” Walzer lays the conceptual groundwork necessary for his brand of imperialism.
• Walzer says that he is reluctant “to suggest the countries that might serve as trustees, since I wouldn’t want to vouch for any country’s trustworthiness.” This is a flimsy subterfuge: who, other than the United States, and the European powers, could play the leading role in Walzer’s “trusteeship” system, given the current global order? Practically, “trusteeship” entails greater control over Libya and Syria principally by the traditional “great powers” of Europe and North America. Walzer must know this--his repeated use of “we” indicates that he does, as does the invocation of the Mandate System.
• “The old mandate system of the League of Nations,” he begrudgingly acknowledges, “was not a great success”.  But, he says, “it did not produce, and perhaps it prevented, disasters like the ones we are helplessly watching today.” This is the Mandate System that includes, for example, Britain’s vicious suppression of the Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920, and of the 1936 Uprising in Palestine, or the French suppression of the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925-27. It should be noted that such episodes rarely put a dent in the colonial zeal of Walzer’s liberal and even leftist forbearers. Arguably, moreover, the Middle East states system which arose as a direct outcome of that brutal period is a precondition for today’s tragedies. Perhaps the closest contemporary analogue to Walzer's proposal, however, is the brutal UN-endorsed occupation of Haiti, wherein the massacre of pro-Aristide forces and the empowerment of sweatshop owners was a routine facet of “stability” and even “democratization.”
• Control of Libya and Syria by the United States and its allies must be opposed. To be sure, the Syrian government has tortured and killed large numbers of its population with Russian help. It so happens that in many cases where the United States claims to intervene for humanitarian reasons, or is called upon to do so by loyal intellectuals, the government against which the intervention is poised is similarly culpable. But Walzer’s cure is not only not an improvement on the disease but one of its causes. Walzer says that “we” should partake in the “use of force” to solve the problems of Syria and Libya. Therefore, we must look at what  “we” habitually do with such a license and what the effects are. 
• Even in the recent history of Libya and Syria, there is little to commend the would-be “trustees.”  The Libyan intervention contributed to a body count of some 50,000 people and empowered the more conservative and sometimes racist tendencies in the opposition.  In Syria, the pattern of US conduct ranges from efforts to leverage an exile-based opposition movement, to subsequent CIA financing and training of fighters, to support for Wahhabists by close US allies, to current bombing raids against daesh and other jihadi forces. In neither Libya nor Syria did the supposed beneficiaries gain. This is to say nothing of the wider US record with respect to the Arab Spring: the war on Yemen, the US-supported Saudi invasion of Bahrain, and the welcoming of the restorationist dictatorship of General Sisi in Egypt.
• This reality is precisely what disappears behind Walzer’s calculatedly imprecise formulations. He asserts, for example, that “wars, warlords, and tyrants require a more forceful intervention.” Therefore, for a state to undertake trusteeship “great virtue isn’t necessary, only a readiness to stop the killing, get rid of the killers, and provide enough stability for the citizens of the war-ravaged countries to begin rebuilding.” Wars and warlords, in short, require wars and warlords. Predictably overlooked is the problem with his recommending that “we” get rid of “the killers” when “we” are chief among “the killers.” Such hand-waving in the guise of moral pragmatism is, of course, a precondition for the coherence of the ‘humanitarian’ rationale for empire.
• Revealingly Walzer argues that “politics is probably a more common cause of disasters than economics.” Here he assumes, quite unjustifiably, that economics and politics can be disentangled--a necessary element of the mystifying discourse in which politics is all about nebulous “values,” rather than hard currency. What might we discern about international politics if we factor in the economic?
• It is unambiguously the case that elites in the United States have pursued wealth in the Middle East through war, occupation, and the support of countless dictators. To take only one of many possible examples, the US launched the 1991 Gulf War to, as Bashir Abu-Manneh argues, “safeguard the preeminence of US political and economic interests in the region. Arab oil regimes were protected, and Israeli military supremacy was assured: Iraq would never be able to pose any sort of threat to either Saudi Arabia or Israel….Only war, thus, could have satisfied the material and ideological requirements of U.S. imperialism.”

• Moreover, Adam Hanieh of the University of London shows that:

   

  US military intervention in the region must be understood as a necessary complement to neoliberal ‘peace.’  With the American occupation in Iraq, and the threats and attempts to destabilize and attack Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the US supports and cultivates those social forces that it hopes will act as subserviently towards its interests in the region, and pursue normalization with Israel, as have the Jordanian and Egyptian governments.  The most important factor in US policy is to limit capacities for countries in the region to exert independent control over economic or foreign policy.  
• These are key objectives of US regional policy and they are highly significant because, whatever Walzer’s protestations, he is recommending the rule of the American state and its junior partners over Libya and Syria. In the face of centuries of evidence of western states’ recourse to devastating violence around the world in pursuit of capitalist imperatives, effectively erasing economics from the discussion is Walzer’s approach to explaining how the current US-dominated international state system can produce a set of actors willing and able to run Syria and Libya in a manner that will benefit the people living in these countries.
• Yet Walzer’s proposed solution, in addition to being ferociously racist, is historically passé. The system of colonial Mandates was certainly a key moment in the development of this international system, but in a world system structured by the legal form of sovereignty, can be counted rather a blunt, ineffectual mechanism.

• And this is crucial to understanding the task that Walzer’s article performs. It is highly unlikely that his blue-sky-thinking for empire would directly affect policy.  However, the role of intellectuals of Walzer's type is to shape the moral and intellectual ground on which policy discussions and justifications can take place.  For the sake of future US interventions, it is of inestimable service that ideologues work at persuading influential audiences that the problems of Libyans and Syrians are really about “the idea of Europe” and that these problems can and should be solved by the US ruling class and its proxies. This intellectual work offers, as a form of narcissistic “sympathy,” a racist paternalism which denies the right of Syrians and Libyans to self-determination.  Despite Walzer's attempt to pretend otherwise, this is the precise opposite of solidarity.

   

  Dr. Greg Shupak is an author and activist who teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Canada.

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• Obama urges Russia to stop bombing 'moderate' rebels in Syria

   

   

  Russian airstrikes help push Syrian army toward major victory at Aleppo

   

      Thomson Reuters  <script>  if(!CBC) { var CBC = {}; }  if(!CBC.APP) { CBC.APP = {}; }  if(!CBC.APP.SC) { CBC.APP.SC = {}; }  CBC.APP.SC.authors = "Reuters";  </script>    Posted: Feb 14, 2016

• U.S. President Barack Obama urged Russia on Sunday to stop bombing "moderate" rebels in Syria in support of its ally Bashar al-Assad, a campaign seen in the West as a major obstacle to latest efforts to end the war.

   

  Major powers agreed on Friday to a limited cessation of hostilities in Syria but the deal does not take effect until the end of this week and was not signed by any warring parties — the Damascus government and numerous rebel factions fighting it.

• Russian bombing raids directed at rebel groups are meanwhile helping the Syrian army to achieve what could be its biggest victory of the war in the battle for Aleppo, the country's largest city and commercial hub before the conflict.

   

  There is little optimism that the deal reached in Munich will do much to end a war that has lasted five years and cost 250,000 lives.

   

  Complicated co-operation

   

  The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin and Obama had spoken by telephone and agreed to intensify cooperation to implement the Munich agreement. But a Kremlin statement made clear Russia was committed to its campaign against Islamic State and "other terrorist organisations," an indication that it would also target groups in western Syria where jihadists such as al Qaeda are fighting Assad in close proximity to rebels deemed moderate by the West.

   

  Russia says the "cessation" does not apply to its air strikes, which have shifted the balance of power towards Assad. It says Islamic State and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front are the main targets of its air campaign.

• But Western countries say Russia has in fact been mostly targeting other insurgent groups, including some they support.

   

  The White House said Obama's discussion with Putin stressed the need to rush humanitarian aid to Syria and contain air strikes.

   

  "In particular, President Obama emphasized the importance now of Russia playing a constructive role by ceasing its air campaign against moderate opposition forces in Syria," the White House said in a statement.

• Aid threatened

   

  Relief workers said efforts to deliver humanitarian aid were being threatened by the latest escalation of violence.

   

  "We must ask again, why wait a week for this urgently needed cessation of hostilities?" said Dalia al-Awqati, Mercy Corps Director of Programs for North Syria.

   

  The situation in Syria has been complicated by the involvement of Kurdish-backed combatants in the area north of Aleppo near the Turkish border, which has drawn a swift military response from artillery in Turkey.

   

  The Kurdish YPG militia, helped by Russian air raids, seized an ex-military air base at Menagh last week, angering Turkey, which sees the YPG as an extension of the PKK, a Kurdish group that waged a bloody insurgent campaign on Turkish soil over most of the past three decades.

• Turkey began shelling while demanding that the YPG militia withdraw from areas it has captured from Syrian rebels in the northern Aleppo region in recent days, including the Menagh air base.

   

  The bombardment killed two YPG fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Syrian Kurdish PYD party rejected Turkish demands for withdrawal, while the Syrian government said Turkish shelling of northern Syria amounted to direct support for insurgent groups.

   

  France called on Turkey to stop the shelling, but Turkey said it would continue to respond to Kurdish militia attacks in Syria.

   

  Syria also said Turkish forces were believed to be among 100 gunmen that entered Syria on Saturday with a dozen pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns in an operation to supply rebel fighters.

   

  Other fronts were also active on Sunday. Kurdish-backed forces were fighting with insurgent groups near Tel Rifaat in the northern Aleppo countryside, while further south, government forces renewed their shelling of rebel positions to the northwest of Aleppo city. The Observatory also reported air strikes by jets believed to be Russian in areas east of Damascus, north of Homs, and in the southern province of Deraa.

• 'Putin is not interested in being our partner'

   

  Reaction from politicians in the West to the Munich deal was sceptical. U.S. Senator John McCain said he did not view the deal as a breakthrough.

   

  "Let's be clear about what this agreement does. It allows Russia's assault on Aleppo to continue for another week," he said at security conference in Munich.

   

  "Mr Putin is not interested in being our partner. He wants to shore up the Assad regime," McCain said.

   

  A senior ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Russia had gained the upper hand in Syria through armed force. Norbert Roettgen, head of the foreign affairs committee in the German parliament, said Russia was determined to create "facts on the ground", to bolster its negotiating position.

   

   

  'Reconciliation'

   

  As the fighting continued, the Syrian army urged citizens in Deraa province, the Ghouta area east of Damascus, and in rural districts east of Aleppo to quickly seek "reconciliation" with the government.

   

  So-called local reconciliation agreements are often seen as a means for the government to force surrender on insurgents, and have typically followed lengthy blockades of rebel areas and the civilians living there.

   

  Saudi Arabia confirmed it had sent aircraft to Turkey's Incirlik air base to join the fight against Islamic State, but said any move to deploy Saudi special forces into Syria must await a decision by the U.S.-led coalition combating the militants.

   

  Any ground operations in Syria will lead to "a full-fledged, long war", Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned.

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• Hillary Clinton and the Syrian Bloodbath

   

     

   02/14/2016
• Jeffrey Sachs Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University

• In the Milwaukee debate, Hillary Clinton took pride in her role in a recent UN Security Council resolution on a Syrian ceasefire:

     

   

  But I would add this. You know, the Security Council finally got around to adopting a resolution. At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva, which set forth a cease-fire and moving toward a political resolution, trying to bring the parties at stake in Syria together.

   

       

  This is the kind of compulsive misrepresentation that makes Clinton unfit to be President. Clinton's role in Syria has been to help instigate and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not to bring it to a close.
• In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence - Clinton's intransigence - that led to the failure of Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton's insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.

• As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic and misguided for that reason.

   

  Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria.

• This idea is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power for a long time--in fact, for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not going away. There is no way, and no reason, to "defeat" Iran. The regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium that recognizes the mutual and balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naïve, and deeply ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists.

   

  Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran. In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad.

• When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change.

   

  In early 2011, Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against Assad to try to foment conditions for his ouster. By the spring of 2011, the CIA and the US allies were organizing an armed insurrection against the regime. On August 18, 2011, the US Government made public its position: "Assad must go."

• Since then and until the recent fragile UN Security Council accord, the US has refused to agree to any ceasefire unless Assad is first deposed. The US policy--under Clinton and until recently--has been: regime change first, ceasefire after. After all, it's only Syrians who are dying. Annan's peace efforts were sunk by the United States' unbending insistence that U.S.-led regime change must precede or at least accompany a ceasefire. As the Nation editors put it in August 2012:

   

   

  The US demand that Assad be removed and sanctions be imposed before negotiations could seriously begin, along with the refusal to include Iran in the process, doomed [Annan's] mission.

• Clinton has been much more than a bit player in the Syrian crisis. Her diplomat Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi was killed as he was running a CIA operation to ship Libyan heavy weapons to Syria. Clinton herself took the lead role in organizing the so-called "Friends of Syria" to back the CIA-led insurgency.

   

  The U.S. policy was a massive, horrific failure. Assad did not go, and was not defeated. Russia came to his support. Iran came to his support. The mercenaries sent in to overthrow him were themselves radical jihadists with their own agendas. The chaos opened the way for the Islamic State, building on disaffected Iraqi Army leaders (deposed by the US in 2003), on captured U.S. weaponry, and on the considerable backing by Saudi funds. If the truth were fully known, the multiple scandals involved would surely rival Watergate in shaking the foundations of the US establishment.
• The hubris of the United States in this approach seems to know no bounds. The tactic of CIA-led regime change is so deeply enmeshed as a "normal" instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is hardly noticed by the U.S. public or media. Overthrowing another government is against the U.N. charter and international law. But what are such niceties among friends?
• This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international law but has also been a massive and repeated failure. Rather than a single, quick, and decisive coup d'état resolving a US foreign policy problem, each CIA-led regime change has been, almost inevitably, a prelude to a bloodbath. How could it be otherwise? Other societies don't like their countries to be manipulated by U.S. covert operations.
• Removing a leader, even if done "successfully," doesn't solve any underlying geopolitical problems, much less ecological, social, or economic ones. A coup d'etat invites a civil war, the kind that now wracks Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It invites a hostile international response, such as Russia's backing of its Syrian ally in the face of the CIA-led operations. The record of misery caused by covert CIA operations literally fills volumes at this point. What surprise, then, the Clinton acknowledges Henry Kissinger as a mentor and guide?
• And where is the establishment media in this debacle? The New York Times finally covered a bit of this story last month in describing the CIA-Saudi connection, in which Saudi funds are used to pay for CIA operations in order to make an end-run around Congress and the American people. The story ran once and was dropped. Yet the Saudi funding of CIA operations is the same basic tactic used by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s (with Iranian arms sales used to fund CIA-led covert operations in Central America without consent or oversight by the American people).
• Clinton herself has never shown the least reservation or scruples in deploying this instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Her record of avid support for US-led regime change includes (but is not limited to) the US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Iraq War in 2003, the Honduran coup in 2009, the killing of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, and the CIA-coordinated insurrection against Assad from 2011 until today.

• It takes great presidential leadership to resist CIA misadventures. Presidents get along by going along with arms contractors, generals, and CIA operatives. They thereby also protect themselves from political attack by hardline right-wingers. They succeed by exulting in U.S. military might, not restraining it. Many historians believe that JFK was assassinated as a result of his peace overtures to the Soviet Union, overture he made against the objections of hardline rightwing opposition in the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government.

   

  Hillary Clinton has never shown an iota of bravery, or even of comprehension, in facing down the CIA. She has been the CIA's relentless supporter, and has exulted in showing her toughness by supporting every one of its misguided operations. The failures, of course, are relentlessly hidden from view. Clinton is a danger to global peace. She has much to answer for regarding the disaster in Syria.

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• Western warmongers have all the answers, and they're all wrong

  #IslamicState

  

  Nafeez Ahmed

  Friday 29 January 2016
• The wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan failed not because of noble errors, but because short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of the people. And this is why the creeping return to war will fail again

• Despite an almost total lack of public debate, Western military escalation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is on the rise.

  Renewed military interventionism has been largely justified as a response to the meteoric rise of Islamic State networks, spreading across parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

  Missing from government pronouncements, though, is any acknowledgement that the proliferation of Islamist terrorism is a direct consequence of the knee-jerk response of military escalation.

  Discarded to the memory hole is the fact that before each of the major interventions in these three countries, our political leaders promised they would bring security, freedom and prosperity.

  Instead, they have done precisely the opposite.

• White man’s burden for Afghan freedom

  In October 2001, as US special forces were roaming Afghanistan in the search for Osama bin Laden, Max Boot – a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations - wrote a gushing article in the Weekly Standard titled, The Case for American Empire.

  “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” he said.

  “Occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over… Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”

• Fifteen years into the war in Afghanistan, it is patently clear that this imperial dream is nothing more than a self-soothing fantasy. President Barack Obama has reneged on a promise to withdraw US troops, and will instead keep 9,800 there in 2016 – and has said that at least 5,500 will remain in the country indefinitely.

  The Taliban, far from being destroyed, is resurgent like never before. IS is now active in Afghanistan, and its reach is growing.

  Billions have been invested in this failed long-haul military effort – while the economy, infrastructure and basic public services remain underdeveloped, broken and ineffective.

  Instead, in the name of promoting democracy, the West has cynically supported fraudulent elections, endemic corruption, and warlord cronyism.

• According to the new Human Rights Watch World Report 2016, under the US-backed "democracy" in Afghanistan: “Little progress was made in reining in abusive militias, reducing corruption, promoting women’s rights, and reforming the courts.”

  The West’s response to this has been to turn a blind eye, because the corrupt regime we’re backing there by definition constitutes "the good guys".

  “Donors have been all too willing to ignore abuses taking place rather than using their influence with the government to end them,” said HRW’s senior Afghanistan researcher, Patricia Grossman.

  This hasn’t stopped Boot from touting himself as an expert on what the US should do next in Afghanistan.

• Blaming the troop withdrawal itself for the failure of US counterinsurgency operations, earlier this month Boot proclaimed: “Afghanistan is not lost even now. A greater US commitment can still save the democratic government in Kabul and stop a Taliban takeover.”

  What democratic government in Kabul?

  Boot conveniently ignores that the acceleration of the Taliban’s insurgency did not begin under Obama, but intensified under the Bush Doctrine.

  Between 2002 and 2006, the number of insurgent attacks increased by 400 percent, and the number of deaths from these attacks increased by more than 800 percent. Between 2005 and 2006, IED attacks more than doubled from 783 to 1,677, and armed attacks near tripled from 1,558 to 4,542.

• From 2006 to 2007, insurgent attacks increased by a further 27 percent.

  Neither Bush nor Obama have shown much interest in addressing one of the key material causes behind the Taliban insurgency.

  According to Richard Armitage, a former deputy US secretary of state under Bush from 2000 to 2005: “We had substantial information that there was direct assistance from the Pakistan government to the Taliban between 2002 and 2004.”

  In fact, intelligence of this nature has continued to pour in seamlessly since then until today. But Pakistan is still the West's "ally" in the "war on terror".

• Civilising missions in Iraq and Syria

  Similarly, Washington Post veteran David Ignatius was one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the 2003 Iraq invasion, which he described as “the most idealistic war fought in modern times – a war whose only coherent rationale, for all the misleading hype about weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda terrorists, is that it toppled a tyrant and created the possibility of a democratic future. It was a war of choice, not necessity, and one driven by ideas, not merely interests.”

  Ignatius also criticised commentators who wrote “darkly about America's designs on Iraqi oil, or a conspiracy to enrich Vice President Cheney's old friends at Halliburton… It would be nice, in a weird way, if the Iraq war were anchored to such worldly interests. But it isn't.”

• He went on to write an astonishingly glowing portrait of one of the war’s chief architects, then Pentagon war-planner Paul Wolfowitz, praising his deference to Arab intellectuals – like the late Ahmed Chalabi, who we now know fabricated the threat of Saddam’s WMD in cahoots with his Bush administration backers.

  Never mind that State Department and UK Foreign Office files prove unequivocally that opening up Iraq’s considerable oil resources to global markets was a major strategic goal of the 2003 invasion. Or that Cheney’s Halliburton made $39.5bn from the war, largely from no-bid contracts.

• No, despite that, Ignatius claims he admits his support for the war was a “mistake”, because the war itself was just a “mistake” – but he remains strangely unable to this day to acknowledge the neoconservative’s “worldly interests” behind the war.

  Despite that, Ignatius still thinks himself qualified to advocate solutions to the rise of IS across Iraq and Syria.

  In Iraq, he thinks, the solution is obvious: more military intervention to empower Sunni insurgents to fight IS – a prescription that ignores how al-Qaeda in Iraq arose directly in response to the US surge which empowered Sunni tribes, many of whom had previously fought alongside al-Qaeda in the first place.

• Meanwhile, the US has built up 3,700 "boots on the ground" in Iraq, and the Pentagon is complaining that more are needed.

  At least Ignatius has Max Boot to back him up. He recently recommended that the “necessary troop size” in Iraq ranges “from 10,000 personnel (according to General Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command) to 25,000 (according to military analysts Kim and Fred Kagan)”.

  He even threw in the idea of breaking up Iraq, a process he euphemistically calls “nation building”, without the slightest sense of irony about the failure of such hubris in creating the current crisis:

• “The United States should lay the groundwork for a post-conflict settlement in both Iraq and Syria that does not necessarily require keeping both political entities intact.”

  On Syria, Ignatius suggests in The Atlantic that the US should consider working with al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, to undermine IS.

  "Some Qatari officials have told me they think Nusra can be split into several factions, and that many of its fighters can be co-opted by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey into less menacing groups that reject foreign terror operations.

  "This may be wishful thinking, but it’s worth exploring. The message to Nusra should be that attempts to spread terror outside Syria will provoke devastating US and allied attacks.”

  He says this might help the US build a “strong” ‘moderate’ opposition, paving the way for violent regime change. 

• “The shattered nation can gradually be stabilised if the United States and its allies seriously commit to building a new Syrian force that can help fill the vacuum, post-Assad.”

  He adds that the US will need to work with people from the incumbent Baathist establishment, fostering an opposition that “can merge with ‘acceptable’ elements of the Syrian army to manage a transition from Assad”.

  Conveniently absent from his tragic tale of America’s “feeble”, “weak” and “feckless” approach is the US role in deliberately fostering the militants – a process that Ignatius blames solely on US allies, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states and Turkey.

• Never mind that Obama’s former Pentagon intelligence chief Michael Flynn has confirmed that the Pentagon anticipated the rise of an IS-type entity in Iraq and Syria as a direct consequence of US support for Syrian jihadist groups. This support, he said, was funnelled through our allies, the Gulf states and Turkey.

  And unsurprisingly, Ignatius seems oblivious to the inherent contradiction in calling for “a political solution – jointly brokered by the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia” while demanding that the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey accelerate their war drive to topple Assad, backed by Iran and Russia.

• Cheerleading for ‘democracy’ in Libya

  Sadly, this sort of nonsense is routinely regurgitated by defence think-tanks and policy groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Consider the abysmal track record of Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

  “What will Free Libya look like?” he asked in a Telegraph comment in 2011. Celebrating Libya’s rebel forces as “one of the more cohesive and forward-thinking armed opposition movements to have emerged out of civil conflict in recent years,” he downplayed the danger from “Islamist factions”.

• He claimed they were “an entirely different flavour to those that percolated for decades in Afghanistan – less steeped in prolonged guerrilla warfare, without major state sponsors like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and in the shadow of an internationally recognised rebel committee”.

  In a jubilant op-ed for the Conservative Party’s Middle East Council, Joshi continued this thread: “Libya’s new rulers can now legitimately claim to have crossed the line from wartime to the democratic transition… The war in Libya has been an unqualified military success.”

  But Joshi’s unashamed propaganda published on the website of the incumbent War Party overlooked key facts.

• In March 2011, Nato-backed Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi openly admitted that al-Qaeda jihadists who had fought Western troops in Iraq were fighting on the frontlines to topple Gadhafi. “Members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting the invader,” he said.

  According to former CIA officer Bruce Reidel at the time, “There is no question that al-Qaeda’s Libyan franchise, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, is a part of the opposition. It has always been [Muammar] Gaddafi’s biggest enemy and its stronghold is Benghazi.”

• Canadian intelligence files show that senior Nato leaders knew military action would likely lead to “a long-term tribal/civil war” in Libya, especially if “opposition forces receive military assistance from foreign militaries”.

  The opposition, intelligence agencies confirmed, were strongly tied to al-Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups.

  The same batch of declassified Pentagon intelligence reports that former Pentagon intelligence chief Flynn acknowledged as accurate, documented close ties and weapons transfers between the US-backed operation in Benghazi and al-Qaeda affiliated rebels in Syria.

• In 2014, Flynn told the Armed Services Committee that the very “militias that won the revolution against the Gaddafi regime are now also threatening both the transition process and overall security.”

  The presence of IS fighters in Libya is thus a direct consequence of the Nato strategy that pundits like Joshi championed. Not that he can bring himself to acknowledge this while trying to distance the Nato intervention from those predicted consequences.

  Now the British prime minister, David Cameron, plans to dispatch 1,000 British troops to lead a US and EU 6,000 strong coalition to stop religious fighters from consolidating their control of a dozen of Libya’s major oil fields.
• The sad truth is that a significant portion of the pundit class that keeps trying to tell the public and government what to do, are clueless – and their ludicrous track records prove it.

• In Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, religious-fuelled insurgencies has been a direct product of a toxic combination: US and UK led military interventions, occupations, withdrawals, re-calibrations, and on and on and on; the ongoing billion dollars of support for the very groups that Western forces are fighting, by US and UK allies like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, among many others; and the installation and protection of corrupt, fraudulent, illegitimate regimes dressed up under the guise of "democracy promotion", all the while securing access to lucrative regional oil and gas resources.

  The fundamental reason the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya failed is not because of noble errors, but because in all three cases, short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of long-oppressed local populations.

  And this is why the creeping return to war will fail again.

• - Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the 'crisis of civilization.' He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

  The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

  Image: An Islamic State fighter watches as a missile launches into the air (AFP)

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• Syrian War Could Turn on the Battle for Aleppo

   

      

  By KAREN ZRAICK and ANNE BARNARDFEB. 12, 2016 

   

    Inside 

   

   

• Russia is bombing rebel-held areas in Syria at a furious pace. That is giving the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, the upper hand. Meanwhile, critics accuse the United States of dithering.

  The war, approaching its sixth year, may be reaching a turning point in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and once its commercial capital. Government-aligned forces are trying to encircle its eastern half, controlled by rebels since 2012. If the government succeeds, it would be the greatest blow to the opposition in years.

  But the battlefield is unpredictable. If the government regains full control of Aleppo, will the war begin to wind down, or will it escalate?

• What Is Assad Doing?

  Backed by the Russian airstrikes, Syrian government forces and Iran-backed militias are trying to besiege the rebel-held section of Aleppo to starve the rebels into submission — the same method government forces used to recapture another major city, Homs. Using starvation as a weapon is a war crime, but it has been widely used in the Syrian war.

  Government-aligned forces have also severed the main supply route to Turkey that delivered food, weapons and aid to rebel-held areas, leaving one remaining route.

  The United Nations is warning that about 300,000 people in the rebel-held part of Aleppo could be at risk of starvation.

  The Syrian government has also succeeded in turning humanitarian aid — food — into a negotiating chit. In talks to end the fighting among world powers on Thursday, allowing food deliveries was offered as a government concession.

• Who Controls What?

  According to an analysis by the Carter Center of the population centers each faction controls, the government has about 40 percent of the country, while the Kurdish groups, the Islamic State and other insurgent groups each hold about 20 percent.

  The rebel groups that the West considers relatively moderate are strongest around Aleppo. But they are intertwined in places with the Nusra Front, which is linked to Al Qaeda and which the United States and Russia both consider a terrorist group. The deal reached in Munich, for a “cessation of hostilities,” leading to a cease-fire, excludes the Nusra Front and Islamic State.

  The rest of Aleppo Province is a patchwork of zones of control. Kurds have the area around Afrin in the northwest, Islamic State holds the east, the government and its allies have advanced in the south, and other insurgent groups hold the west.

• Why Is Aleppo So Crucial?

  Mr. Assad may never be able to stitch Syria back together. But he and his allies now believe they can add Aleppo to a core area they control that includes the capital, Damascus, and Homs. That would give the government control of the cities that were the main population, cultural and economic centers of Syria — though insurgents still hold Idlib, which lies between them.

  Still, it could take a long time for the government to re-establish full control of Aleppo. And even if it does succeed, it is possible the rebels and their backers will retreat and change tactics, as the insurgents in Iraq did. That could mean that even a nominally government-controlled Aleppo could still suffer sporadic attacks and instability, as Homs and Damascus do now.

   

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  What Is the Situation in Aleppo?

  More than 300,000 people live in the insurgent-held side of Aleppo, and at least twice as many in the government-held west. Government troops occupy the historic citadel, while the Old City is contested. Both sides of the city have suffered indiscriminate shelling and water and electricity cuts. The rebel-held side is being pounded by government and Russian airstrikes and barrel bombs that have hit markets, schools and homes.
• In the countryside, foreign Shiite fighters, trained and sometimes led by Iranian commanders, are fighting on behalf of the government alongside the Syrian Army. Coming from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran itself, those forces recently broke an insurgent blockade around two isolated, pro-government towns, Zahra and Nubol.

• Rebel-held rural areas in Aleppo Province are boxed in between government and its allied forces, Kurdish militias, Islamic State and the Turkish border, which is closed to most refugees. The Kurdish militias, with some Arab allies, have advanced into territory ceded by Arab and Turkmen rebels under Russian attack.

  What Is the U.S. Doing on Syria?

  There is a lot of confusion over the United States’ aims in Syria. American policy has been to give insurgents enough support to keep them going — not enough to help them actually win. The question the rebels are now asking is, will the United States let them lose outright?

• The United States still insists on trying to separate the civil war from the fight against the Islamic State. That is a distinction the rebels largely reject, insisting that Mr. Assad must go.

  But Russia’s airpower has changed the calculus so that there is little the United States can do militarily without risking a direct clash with Russia.

  The United States has insisted for months that there is no military solution to the Syrian war, only a political one. On Wednesday, one senior American official conceded, there may in fact be one — “just not our solution,” but that of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

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• 'No Bashar al-Assad in the future', says Saudi foreign minister: report

   

  Fri Feb 12, 2016

• BERLIN (Reuters) - Bashar al-Assad will not be ruling Syria in the future and Russia's military interventions will not help him stay in power, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told a German newspaper in an interview published on Saturday.

        

  "There will be no Bashar al-Assad in the future," al-Jubeir told newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

• "It might take three months, it might take six months or three years - but he will no longer carry responsibility for Syria. Period."

        

  Saying that the Syrian people's determination to topple al-Assad was unbroken despite heavy Russian air strikes and persecution within the country, al-Jubeir criticized Russia's involvement in the five-year-long war.

        

  He said that Assad's previous calls for help to his own military, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite militia forces from Iraq and Pakistan were all in vain.

• "Now he called the Russians, but they won't be able to help him either," al-Jubeir said.

        

  Russia entered the war on Sept. 30 2015 in support of the Syrian president. At least 250,000 people have been killed, 11 million made homeless and hundreds of thousands have fled to Europe since the conflict began in 2011.

        

  Moscow has said its air strikes are against the extremist militant groups Islamic State and the Nusra Front, but other countries and rebel groups say the attacks target civilians.

• Asked about a more direct military involvement with 'boots on the ground', al-Jubeir said such discussions were currently underway among the member states of a U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State.

        

  "If the coalition should decide to deploy special forces in the fight against IS in Syria, Saudi-Arabia will be ready to participate," he said, using the initials IS to refer to Islamic State.

        

  At a peace and security conference currently underway in Munich, major powers said a peace deal could only be reached if Moscow stops bombing insurgents other than Islamic State.

        

  But Russia pressed on with its air strikes in support of al-Assad, who vowed to fight until he regained full control of the country.

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• 08 February 2016 - 20H45 

  Russian air strikes in Syria 'good thing': Del Ponte
• GENEVA (AFP) - 

  Former war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who is currently probing rights abuses in Syria, on Monday backed Russia's air strikes on "terrorist groups" in the war-torn country.

  "Overall, I think the Russian intervention is a good thing, because finally someone is attacking these terrorist groups," Del Ponte told Swiss public broadcaster RTS, listing the Islamic State group and Al-Nusra among the groups targeted.

  But Del Ponte, a member of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, quickly added that the Russians apparently "are not distinguishing enough between the terrorists and others, and that is not as good."

  Her comments came amid international bickering over the Russian air strikes and what role they played in undermining last week's peace talks to end the country's five-year war.

• Moscow launched a bombing campaign in Syria last year at the request of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying it was targeting the Islamic State group and other jihadist organisations.

  The West has accused Russia of targeting more moderate factions that oppose Assad's regime, and Syrian activists say the strikes have killed civilians, allegations Moscow dismisses as "absurd".

  UN envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura last week suspended attempts to begin a dialogue between al-Assad's regime and the opposition, as Russia pressed on with its bombing campaign on the ground.

• One day after the talks broke down, Russia's defence ministry said that air strikes had hit 875 "terrorist targets" in Syria since the start of the month.

  Del Ponte, a 68-year-old Swiss national who came to prominence investigating war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, also touched on another sensitive subject Monday, saying she thought Assad should be included in peace negotiations.

  "If you want a ceasefire, if you want peace, you first have to negotiate with the government," she said, pointing out that the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was already under investigation when the US negotiated the 1995 Dayton accord with him that ended Yugoslavia's bloody war.

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• After   Entering Aleppo With Russia's Help, The Syrian Army   May Set Its Sights On Raqqa
• By Robert Fisk

    February 08,   2016 "Information   Clearing House"   -   "The   Independent" -   After   losing up to 60,000 soldiers in five years of   fighting, the Syrian army has suddenly scored its   greatest victory of the war – smashing its way   through Jabhat al-Nusra and the other rebel forces   around Aleppo and effectively sealing its fate as   Russia provided air strike operations outside the   city.

   

  The rebel   supply lines from Turkey to Aleppo have been cut,   but this does not mean the end of the story. For   many months, the regime’s own military authorities –   along with tens of thousands of civilians, including   many Christians – were trapped inside Aleppo and at   the mercy of shelling and mortar fire by the Nusra   fighters, who surrounded them until the army opened   the main highway south.
•  During   this period, the only way to Aleppo was by plane   because the army held a tiny peninsula of   territory going to the airport – I flew out one   night on a military aircraft crowded with   wounded Syrian troops.

   

    But the   tables have turned. It is the rebels themselves   who are now surrounded, along with the tens of   thousands of civilians in their sector of the   city – but they have no airport to sustain them.   On the basis of so many other battles in this   appalling war, there is unlikely to be any   offensive for the centre of this greatest of   Syrian cities; rather it will be a slow and   grinding siege to force the insurgents to   surrender.

    In an   ironic twisting of recent history, the two Shia   villages of Nubl and Zahra – whose people had   been surrounded by rebels and starved for three   years, fed only by Syrian military airdrops –   have now been retaken by the Syrian military.

• The   Shia, co-religionists of the Alawite people from   which President Bashar al-Assad comes, have been   cornered in several villages in the region,   although their plight has gone largely   unreported.

   

  Now the   people in the rebel-held part of Aleppo are   going to feel the same sense of isolation – and,   no doubt, the shellfire of their besiegers.   There has always been a movement of people   between the two sectors of the city – will these   passages now be closed? And what of the tens of   thousands of civilians streaming north towards   Turkey?

   

  Aleppo   itself was late to join the war. By some kind of   historical miracle, it remained disentangled   from the conflict until 2012 when rebels –   thinking they were en route to Damascus –   managed to infiltrate into the ancient city. Its   streets were then burned out in months of   fighting. Now it appears to be the first of   Syria’s large cities to be effectively back in   the hands of the regime. What comes next? The   retaking of the Roman city of Palmyra? The   clearing of the lands around Deraa (of Lawrence   of Arabia fame)?

• And,   much more dramatically, how soon will the Syrian   army, its Hezbollah allies and the Russian air   force set their course for the Isis “capital” of   Raqqa?

   

  Isis,   which holds Palmyra, must be learning of the   extraordinary developments of the past few hours   with deep concern. The everlasting Sunni   “Islamic Caliphate” in Syria doesn’t look so   everlasting any more. Is this why the Sunni   Saudis have suddenly offered to send ground   troops to Syria? And why the Turks are so   flustered? I doubt if anyone is weeping in Shia   Iran.

   

  Anyway,   the Saudi military is already having its feet   chewed off in the disgraceful Yemen war. As for   the Turks sending their own Nato soldiers across   the Syrian border – presumably at risk of being   attacked by the Russians – that is a nightmare   which both Washington and Moscow must avoid.   Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves in another   Gavrilo Princip moment – and we all know what   happened in 1914.

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• Gulf countries played a role in the Syrian uprising’ India's former ambassador to Syria on how the country has changed since 2009

• BY ALIA ALLANA

   

  V. P. Haran served as India’s Ambassador to Syria from 2009 until 2012. He speaks to Fountain Ink on how sections of the media exaggerated the uprising as well as signs that al-Qaeda was a game player since the early days of the conflict.

• What was Syria like when you arrived in January 2009?

   

  Syria was a peaceful country and there was no undercurrent of tension. The Syrian economy was doing well, there was over five per cent growth rate on average. Unemployment was at about eight per cent but Syrians who were unemployed could find work in the Gulf. There was, however, a high percentage of educated unemployed. Syria also had a comfortable foreign debt position at 12.5 per cent of the GDP. Much of the debt owed was to Russia which wrote off much of the debt. The real problem was the drought in the north-east that had led to massive relocation to the south and south–west.

• What was life like in Damascus?

   

  As a diplomat you tend to live a secluded life but I’d go to the downtown area, sometimes in a cab, and have tea in a cafe and chat to the people. Those were wonderful moments and wonderful days. Law and order was never a problem. My female colleagues used to tell me they could wear jewellery and walk home alone at 2 in the morning and they would feel safe. In certain areas restaurants would stay open until 5 a.m. One never felt there would be trouble on the streets.

• Some say it was because of the mukhabarat (military intelligence directorate) but I sensed that people felt as though they were responsible for their collective security.

   

  When I reached Damascus, I was told every other person is the mukhabarat. This is a gross over-estimation. There is an intelligence unit and they function very efficiently internally but I never had a direct encounter. In my four years I was followed once in Media in Idlib Province. A jeep tailed us but they weren’t intimidating.

• Did you anticipate an “Arab Spring” in Syria? 

   

  When the situation got tense in Tunisia and Egypt, President Bashar al-Assad appeared on TV and stated that the political and economic conditions were different in Syria. He said he was confident Syria would not go down the same path. This was also the general assessment of the diplomatic community.

   

  Bashar al-Assad was a popular leader and this is partly why he is still in power. There is no adequate internal opposition and a lot of the problems in Syria have been created by foreign sources that are trying to get rid of an inconvenient regime. Sixty-seven percent of the entire Arab world had voted him the most popular Arab person in a poll in 2009. Even the diplomatic community was in agreement that he had the support of about 80 per cent of Syria. Western diplomats said so as well. He had begun reforms in 2000 but didn’t carry through because of opposition from the Baath party.
• Also this is not just a Sunni-Shia fight. Look at the numbers. There are over 50 per cent Sunni Muslims in Syria and there are Kurds, Druze, Maronites, Assyrians, Alawites and others who make the remainder. Bashar al-Assad has the full support of the minorities and even a large percentage of the Sunni Muslims support him. But by the time I left, in 2012, Syria had changed a lot. While the first couple of years were like heaven, things started deteriorating by early 2011.

• Do you recall the first protests in 2011?  

   

  By February, when Bahrain experienced protests, there were attempts by some NGOs to organise protests in Damascus. Two had been organised over two weekends but hardly 20-30 people turned up. The number of journalists and members from the diplomatic community was far greater than the demonstrators. Then March 18, 2011 happened when the children wrote on the walls of the school and then there was a big protest. The following week there was a protest in Latakia and then with each passing Friday something happened.
• Soon parts of Latakia, Homs and Hama were chaotic but Aleppo remained calm and this troubled the opposition greatly. The opposition couldn’t get the people in Aleppo to rise up against the regime so they sent bus loads of people to Aleppo. These people would burn something on the streets and leave. Journalists would then broadcast this saying Aleppo had risen.
• The opposition couldn’t get the people in Aleppo to rise up against the regime so they sent bus loads of people to Aleppo. These people would burn something on the streets and leave. Journalists would then broadcast this saying Aleppo had risen.
• A few things need to be said about this: some parts of the media went overboard in projecting Syria negatively. At times things that didn’t happen were reported. For instance I was talking to a prominent sheikh when my colleagues started calling me frantically saying that the sheikh would play a role in protests planned for that afternoon. But no such thing was happening. In fact I was sitting with him then having lunch.

• There was a lot of exaggeration by the media.

   

  There is one instance that stands out. In Idlib, hardcore Sunnis had gone to Aleppo and told the people to join the opposition. People in Aleppo started beating them and ordered them to leave. The crowd had been unruly and the police had to come in and control it. The hardcore Sunnis from Idlib had to be taken to a house and the police had to give them their uniforms so that they could leave without being lynched.

• Did Damascus change much during this period?

   

  I recall one incident on the April 14, 2011 when I went for my daily walk to the stadium which was about two kilometres away. On the way I passed the bakery I used to pass every day but there was a long queue at this usually quiet bakery. On the way back the queue remained and I enquired. People were stocking up on bread because they had heard that something would happen. The next day nothing happened despite it being a Friday.

• As the situation worsened my walk to the stadium was replaced by a walk around the park in the Mezze area by the second half of 2012. One day a motor bike came at very high speed and turned a corner from where it revved its engine. Soon after, a security jeep followed but missed the turn taken by the bike. When they couldn’t find the bike they came to the park to see if people had seen what was going on. Then we were told that the people on the bike were planning attacks.

   

  In Mezze, not far from the district where diplomats live, is a cactus field and rebels had gotten into it by a tunnel arrangement. They had established a camp there from where they threw fire rockets aimed at the PM’s office. After that the security forces went in and blasted the camp. This was a targeted operation and I spoke to a person who lived in a flat with clear view and he said they had targeted one building and destroyed it completely.  A huge cache of arms and ammunition was recovered from the building.

• But parts of the country remained calm.

   

  The external backers of the opposition could not digest this. They sent a group of people to the Syrian-Jordanian border and they overran two security posts. They killed all the people there. Some were killed in the most brutal manner in al-Qaeda style. The government didn’t report this immediately but a member of the diplomatic community confirmed it was al-Qaeda in Iraq who had done it. It was evident that al-Qaeda in Iraq were in Syria since April 2011.

   

  Al-Qaeda was there from the very first week, and if not the first week then from late 2011 when al-Qaeda banners appeared. It was these groups that provided the opposition with support from across the border. In Raqqa the fighters came from the north and it was clear that it was al-Qaeda.

• Assad has been saying that it was terrorists from the beginning. Why did no one believe him?

   

  People’s minds were not open. Why would al-Qaeda in Iraq take interest in creating chaos in Syria? A lot of it was being directed by outsiders, namely the Gulf countries. Al Jazeera played a role, too. In April I had taken a guest to the amphitheatre in Bosra and then to Sweida for which I had to take the highway to the Jordanian border. We were in the car at about 9:30-10:30 am. That day an Al Jazeera correspondent was asked to leave Syria and was travelling along the same road. The correspondent reported check points every few seconds. My embassy called me in a panic because of what they saw on TV. I told them I had encountered just one check point.

• Why did the Syrian government not present a better case about the present of terrorists?

   

  We asked them about the lack of engagement with the media and they said that nobody believed them. They had very bad PR and handling of the media. Having said that, there were also excesses by the government. Syria has a very inadequate police force so when the problems started the government was forced to deploy security forces to handle problems that are managed by the police. Some of the army committed excesses and the government put a few under house arrest or into prison but they didn’t go public with this.

   

  Bashar al-Assad was not just slow on enacting reforms but also slow on announcing changes that had been undertaken. For instance when they enacted a reform reducing the primacy of the Baath Party, the reform wasn’t reported until three months later. Their PR wasn’t wise. They didn’t handle the crisis well.

   

  (Title image :“Al-Hamidiyah Souq” by Bernard Gagnon)

   

  (This is Part II of the Fountain Ink series on the crisis in Syria. Read Part I here.)

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• Macmillan backed Syria assassination plot 

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

    Documents show White House and No 10 conspired over oil-fuelled invasion plan 

• Ben Fenton

   

    Saturday 27 September 2003
• Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive "regime change" in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west's oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures. 

  Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria's pro-western neighbours, and then to "eliminate" the most influential triumvirate in Damascus.

   

  The plans, frighteningly frank in their discussion, were discovered in the private papers of Duncan Sandys, Mr Macmillan's defence secretary, by Matthew Jones, a reader in international history at Royal Holloway, University of London.
• Although historians know that intelligence services had sought to topple the Syrian regime in the autumn of 1957, this is the first time any document has been found showing that the assassination of three leading figures was at the heart of the scheme. In the document drawn up by a top secret and high-level working group that met in Washington in September 1957, Mr Macmillan and President Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus.

• Part of the "preferred plan" reads: "In order to facilitate the action of liberative forces, reduce the capabilities of the Syrian regime to organise and direct its military actions, to hold losses and destruction to a minimum, and to bring about desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals. Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention and in the light of circumstances existing at the time."

   

  The document, approved by London and Washington, named three men: Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, head of Syrian military intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, chief of the Syrian general staff; and Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Communist party.

• For a prime minister who had largely come to power on the back of Anthony Eden's disastrous antics in Suez just a year before, Mr Macmillan was remarkably bellicose. He described it in his diary as "a most formidable report". Secrecy was so great, Mr Macmillan ordered the plan withheld even from British chiefs of staff, because of their tendency "to chatter".

   

  Concern about the increasingly anti-western and pro-Soviet sympathies of Syria had been growing in Downing Street and the White House since the overthrow of the conservative military regime of Colonel Adib Shishakli by an alliance of Ba'ath party and Communist party politicians and their allies in the Syrian army, in 1954.

• Driving the call for action was the CIA's Middle East chief Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt. He identified Colonel Sarraj, General al-Bizri and Mr Bakdash as the real power behind a figurehead president. The triumvirate had moved even closer to Nikita Khrushchev's orbit after the previous year's disastrous attempt by Britain and France, in collusion with Israel, to reverse the nationalisation of the Suez canal.

   

  By 1957, despite America's opposition to the Suez move, President Eisenhower felt he could no longer ignore the danger of Syria becoming a centre for Moscow to spread communism throughout the Middle East. He and Mr Macmillan feared Syria would destabilise pro-western neighbours by exporting terrorism and encouraging internal dissent. More importantly, Syria also had control of one of the main oil arteries of the Middle East, the pipeline which connected pro-western Iraq's oilfields to Turkey.

• The "preferred plan"adds: "Once a political decision is reached to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria, CIA is prepared, and SIS [MI6] will attempt, to mount minor sabotage and coup de main incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals.

   

  "The two services should consult, as appropriate, to avoid any overlapping or interference with each other's activities... Incidents should not be concentrated in Damascus; the operation should not be overdone; and to the extent possible care should be taken to avoid causing key leaders of the Syrian regime to take additional personal protection measures."

• Sabotage

   

  The report said that once the necessary degree of fear had been created, frontier incidents and border clashes would be staged to provide a pretext for Iraqi and Jordanian military intervention. Syria had to be "made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments," the report says. "CIA and SIS should use their capabilities in both the psychological and action fields to augment tension." That meant operations in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, taking the form of "sabotage, national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities" to be blamed on Damascus.
• The plan called for funding of a "Free Syria Committee", and the arming of "political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities" within Syria. The CIA and MI6 would instigate internal uprisings, for instance by the Druze in the south, help to free political prisoners held in the Mezze prison, and stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus.

• The planners envisaged replacing the Ba'ath/Communist regime with one that was firmly anti-Soviet, but they conceded that this would not be popular and "would probably need to rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power".

   

  The plan was never used, chiefly because Syria's Arab neighbours could not be persuaded to take action and an attack from Turkey alone was thought to be unacceptable. The following year, the Ba'athists moved against their Communist former allies and took Syria into a federation with Gen Nasser's Egypt, which lasted until 1963.

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• As Syria Rebels Face Rout, Allies Saudi, Turkey May Send Troops: Experts
• ated: February 06, 2016 15:42 IST

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  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the claims 'laughable'.

  Riyadh:  With rebel forces facing the prospect of a crushing defeat by Syria's Russian-backed regime, their allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey may send in limited numbers of ground troops, analysts say.
  
   Riyadh on Thursday left open the possibility of deploying soldiers, saying it would "contribute positively" if the US-led coalition against the ISIS terror group in Syria decides on ground action.
  
   The fate of Saudi-backed Syrian armed opposition groups fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad is also a major concern for the kingdom.
  
  

  "I think Saudi Arabia is desperate to do something in Syria," said Andreas Krieg, of the Department of Defence Studies at King's College London.
  
   Krieg said the "moderate" opposition is in danger of being routed if Aleppo falls to the regime, whose forces have closed in on Syria's second city, backed by intense Russian air strikes.
  
   "This is a problem for Saudi and Qatar as they have massively invested into Syria via the moderate opposition as their surrogate on the ground," said Krieg, who also serves as a consultant to the Qatari armed forces.
  
   Russia, which along with Saudi Arabia's regional rival Iran is a major ally of Assad, meanwhile has accused Turkey of "preparations for an armed invasion" of Syria.
  
   Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the claims "laughable".
  
   But Krieg said Erdogan's policy in Syria has achieved nothing so far.
  
  Peace Efforts Stalled
  
   "Turkey and Saudi need to turn this war around. So any Saudi engagement would be in cooperation with Doha and Ankara," he added.
  
   Aleppo province is among the main strongholds of Syria's armed opposition, which is facing possibly its worst moment since the beginning of the nearly five-year war, at a time when peace efforts have stalled.
  
   The Saudi-backed opposition umbrella group, the High Negotiations Committee, says it will not return to peace talks which recently collapsed in Geneva unless its humanitarian demands are met.
  
   "The Saudis believe that the chance of a peaceful solution for the Syrian crisis is very limited," said Mustafa Alani, of the independent Gulf Research Centre.
  
   "They don't see that there is a real pressure on the regime to give major concessions... They think eventually it will have to end in the battlefield," Alani said.
  
   "Turkey is enthusiastic about this option (of sending ground troops) since the Russians started their air operation and tried to push Turkey outside the equation," he added.
  
   Alani said the Saudis are serious about committing troops "as part of a coalition, especially if the Turkish forces are going to be involved".
  
   But he and other analysts said Saudi involvement would be limited, given its leadership of a separate Arab coalition fighting in Yemen for almost a year and guarding the kingdom's southern border from attacks by Iran-backed Yemeni rebels.
  
  Saudi Special Forces
  
   "They are overstretched. But in principle I think they will not hesitate to send a certain number of their fighters to fight in Syria," Alani said, adding that this would probably include Saudi special forces.
  
   Turkey and Saudi already belong to a US-led coalition which officially has 65 members. It has been bombing ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, as well as training local forces to fight the extremists.
  
   Krieg said that with Saudi and other Gulf kingdoms "bogged down" in Yemen, he could only foresee a possible expansion of "train and equip" missions involving Gulf special forces to help rebels in Syria.
  
   "Saudi and Qatar have already networks on the ground," he said, viewing Doha as a link between Riyadh and Ankara as relations improve.
  
   On Friday, US Central Command spokesman Pat Ryder welcomed Saudi Arabia's willingness to send soldiers against ISIS.
  
   The United States has been calling on coalition members to do more.
• World | Agence France-Presse |
• In November, the United Arab Emirates said it was also ready to commit ground troops against jihadists in Syria.
  
   Jane Kinninmont, senior research fellow at London's Chatham House, said Saudi Arabia is more interested in the war in Yemen than the struggle against ISIS.
  
   "But what you might see is small numbers of ground troops and perhaps also special forces which would be there partly to make a symbolic point that Saudi Arabia is supporting the fight against ISIS," she said, using another acronym for the Sunni extremists.
  
   She declared herself "a bit sceptical" about potential Turkish army involvement in Syria, "but we might see them having some kind of interest in containing Kurdish influence".

  Story First Published: February 06, 2016 15:42 IST

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• Syrian Forces Press Aleppo, Sending Thousands Fleeing

   

      

  By ANNE BARNARDFEB. 5, 2016 

   

    Inside 

   

   
• Mr. Assad’s forces also broke the insurgents’ siege of two towns near Aleppo, Nubol and Zahra, which had survived on government airdrops of food. People there were celebrating on Friday and thanking the troops in videos posted on social media.

• The Dirty War on Syria

   

   

   

  By Prof. Tim Anderson

   

  Global Research, November 27, 2015
• The following text is the introductory chapter of  Professor Tim Anderson’s forthcoming book entitled The Dirty War on Syria
• Although every war makes ample use of lies and deception, the dirty war on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. The British-Australian journalist Philip Knightley pointed out that war propaganda typically involves ‘a depressingly predictable pattern’ of demonising the enemy leader, then demonising the enemy people through atrocity stories, real or imagined (Knightley 2001). Accordingly, a mild-mannered eye doctor called Bashar al Assad became the new evil in the world and, according to consistent western media reports, the Syrian Army did nothing but kill civilians for more than four years. To this day, many imagine the Syrian conflict is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or some sort of internal sectarian conflict. These myths are, in many respects, a substantial achievement for the big powers which have driven a series of ‘regime change’ operations in the Middle East region, all on false pretexts, over the past 15 years.
• This book is a careful academic work, but also a strong defence of the right of the Syrian people to determine their own society and political system. That position is consistent with international law and human rights principles, but may irritate western sensibilities, accustomed as we are to an assumed prerogative to intervene. At times I have to be blunt, to cut through the double-speak. In Syria the big powers have sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies while demonising the Syrian Government and Army, accusing them of constant atrocities; then pretending to rescue the Syrian people from their own government. Far fewer western people opposed the war on Syria than opposed the invasion of Iraq, because they were deceived about its true nature.
• In 2011 I had only a basic understanding of Syria and its history. However I was deeply suspicious when reading of the violence that erupted in the southern border town of Daraa. I knew that such violence (sniping at police and civilians, the use of semi-automatic weapons) does not spring spontaneously from street demonstrations. And I was deeply suspicious of the big powers. All my life I had been told lies about the pretexts for war. I decided to research the Syrian conflict, reading hundreds of books and articles, watching many videos and speaking to as many Syrians as I could. I wrote dozens of articles and visited Syria twice, during the conflict. This book is a result of that research.
• Dirty wars are not new. Cuban national hero Jose Martí predicted to a friend that Washington would try to intervene in Cuba’s independence struggle against the Spanish. ‘They want to provoke a war’, he wrote in 1889 ‘to have a pretext to intervene and, with the authority of being mediator and guarantor, to seize the country … There is no more cowardly thing in the annals of free people; nor such cold blooded evil’ (Martí 1975: 53). Nine years later, during the third independence war, an explosion in Havana Harbour destroyed the USS Maine, killing 258 US sailors and serving as a pretext for a US invasion.
• The subsequent ‘Spanish-American’ war snatched victory from the Cubans and allowed the US to take control of the remaining Spanish colonial territories. Cuba had territory annexed and a deeply compromised constitution was imposed. No evidence ever proved the Spanish were responsible for the bombing of the Maine and many Cubans believe the North Americans bombed their own ship. The monument in Havana, in memory of those sailors, still bears this inscription: ‘To the victims of the Maine who were sacrificed to imperialist voracity and the desire to gain control of the island of Cuba’ (Richter 1998).
• The US launched dozens of interventions in Latin America over the subsequent century. A notable dirty war was led by CIA-backed, ‘freedom fighter’ mercenaries based in Honduras, who attacked the Sandinista Government and the people of Nicaragua in the 1980s. That conflict, in its modus operandi, was not so different to the war on Syria. In Nicaragua more than 30,000 people were killed. The International Court of Justice found the US guilty of a range of terrorist-style attacks on the little Central American country, and found that the US owed Nicaragua compensation (ICJ 1986). Washington ignored these rulings.
• With the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 the big powers took advantage of a political foment by seizing the initiative to impose an ‘Islamist winter’, attacking the few remaining independent states of the region. Very quickly we saw the destruction of Libya, a small country with the highest standard of living in Africa. NATO bombing and a Special Forces campaign helped the al Qaeda groups on the ground. The basis for NATO’s intervention was lies told about actual and impending massacres, supposedly carried out or planned by the government of President Muammar Gaddafi. These claims led rapidly to a UN Security Council resolution said to protect civilians through a ‘no fly zone’. We know now that trust was betrayed, and that the NATO powers abused the limited UN authorisation to overthrow the Libyan Government (McKinney 2012).
• Subsequently, no evidence emerged to prove that Gaddafi intended, carried out or threatened wholesale massacres, as was widely suggested (Forte 2012). Genevieve Garrigos of Amnesty International (France) admitted there was ‘no evidence’ to back her group’s earlier claims that Gaddafi had used ‘black mercenaries’ to commit massacres (Forte 2012; Edwards 2013).
• Alan Kuperman, drawing mainly on North American sources, demonstrates the following points. First, Gaddafi’s crackdown on the mostly Islamist insurrection in eastern Libya was ‘much less lethal’ than had been suggested. Indeed there was evidence that he had had ‘refrained from indiscriminate violence’. The Islamists were themselves armed from the beginning. From later US estimates, of the almost one thousand casualties in the first seven weeks, about three percent were women and children (Kuperman 2015). Second, when government forces were about to regain the east of the country, NATO intervened, claiming this was to avert an impending massacre. Ten thousand people died after the NATO intervention, compared to one thousand before. Gaddafi had pledged no reprisals in Benghazi and ‘no evidence or reason’ came out to support the claim that he planned mass killings (Kuperman 2015). The damage was done. NATO handed over the country to squabbling groups of Islamists and western aligned ‘liberals’. A relatively independent state was overthrown, but Libya was destroyed. Four years on there is no functioning government and violence persists; and that war of aggression against Libya went unpunished.
• Two days before NATO bombed Libya another armed Islamist insurrection broke out in Daraa, Syria’s southernmost city. Yet because this insurrection was linked to the demonstrations of a political reform movement, its nature was disguised. Many did not see that those who were providing the guns – Qatar and Saudi Arabia – were also running fake news stories in their respective media channels, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. There were other reasons for the durable myths of this war. Many western audiences, liberals and leftists as well as the more conservative, seemed to like the idea of their own role as the saviours of a foreign people, speaking out strongly about a country of which they knew little, but joining what seemed to be a ‘good fight’ against this new ‘dictator’. With a mission and their proud self-image western audiences apparently forgot the lies of previous wars, and of their own colonial legacies.
• I would go so far as to say that, in the Dirty War on Syria, western culture in general abandoned its better traditions: of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence at times of conflict; in favour of its worst traditions: the ‘imperial prerogative’ for intervention, backed by deep racial prejudice and poor reflection on the histories of their own cultures. That weakness was reinforced by a ferocious campaign of war propaganda. After the demonisation of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad began, a virtual information blockade was constructed against anything which might undermine the wartime storyline. Very few sensible western perspectives on Syria emerged after 2011, as critical voices were effectively blacklisted.
• In that context I came to write this book. It is a defence of Syria, not primarily addressed to those who are immersed the western myths but to others who engage with them. This is therefore a resource book and a contribution to the history of the Syrian conflict. The western stories have become self-indulgent and I believe it is wasteful to indulge them too much. Best, I think, to speak of current events as they are, then address the smokescreens later. I do not ignore the western myths, in fact this book documents many of them. But I lead with the reality of the war.
• Western mythology relies on the idea of imperial prerogatives, asking what must ‘we’ do about the problems of another people; an approach which has no basis in international law or human rights. The next steps involve a series of fabrications about the pretexts, character and events of the war. The first pretext over Syria was that the NATO states and the Gulf monarchies were supporting a secular and democratic revolution. When that seemed implausible the second story was that they were saving the oppressed majority ‘Sunni Muslim’ population from a sectarian ‘Alawite regime’. Then, when sectarian atrocities by anti-government forces attracted greater public attention, the pretext became a claim that there was a shadow war: ‘moderate rebels’ were said to be actually fighting the extremist groups. Western intervention was therefore needed to bolster these ‘moderate rebels’ against the ‘new’ extremist group that had mysteriously arisen and posed a threat to the world.
• That was the ‘B’ story. No doubt Hollywood will make movies based on this meta-script, for years to come. However this book leads with the ‘A’ story. Proxy armies of Islamists, armed by US regional allies (mainly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey), infiltrate a political reform movement and snipe at police and civilians. They blame this on the government and spark an insurrection, seeking the overthrow of the Syrian government and its secular-pluralist state. This follows the openly declared ambition of the US to create a ‘New Middle East’, subordinating every country of the region, by reform, unilateral disarmament or direct overthrow. Syria was next in line, after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In Syria, the proxy armies would come from the combined forces of the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fanatics. Despite occasional power struggles between these groups and their sponsors, they share much the same Salafist ideology, opposing secular or nationalist regimes and seeking the establishment of a religious state.
• However in Syria Washington’s Islamists confronted a disciplined national army which did not disintegrate along religious lines, despite many provocations. The Syrian state also had strong allies in Russia and Iran. Syria was not to be Libya Take Two. In this prolonged war the violence, from the western side, was said to consist of the Syrian Army targeting and killing civilians. From the Syrian side people saw daily terrorist attacks on towns and cities, schools and hospitals and massacres of ordinary people by NATO’s ‘freedom fighters’, then the counter attacks by the Army. Foreign terrorists were recruited in dozens of countries by the Saudis and Qatar, bolstering the local mercenaries.

• Though the terrorist groups were often called ‘opposition, ‘militants’ and ‘Sunni groups’ outside Syria, inside the country the actual political opposition abandoned the Islamists back in early 2011. Protest was driven off the streets by the violence, and most of the opposition (minus the Muslim Brotherhood and some exiles) sided with the state and the Army, if not with the ruling Ba’ath Party. The Syrian Army has been brutal with terrorists but, contrary to western propaganda, protective of civilians. The Islamists have been brutal with all, and openly so. Millions of internally displaced people have sought refuge with the Government and Army, while others fled the country.

   

  In a hoped-for ‘end game’ the big powers sought overthrow of the Syrian state or, failing that, the creation of a dysfunctional state or dismembering into sectarian statelets, thus breaking the axis of independent regional states. That axis comprises Hezbollah in south Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance, alongside Syria and Iran, the only states in the region without US military bases. More recently Iraq – still traumatised from western invasion, massacres and occupation – has begun to align itself with this axis. Russia too has begun to play an important counter-weight role. Recent history and conduct demonstrate that neither Russia nor Iran harbour any imperial ambitions remotely approaching those of Washington and its allies, several of which (Britain, France and Turkey) were former colonial warlords in the region. From the point of view of the ‘Axis of Resistance’, defeat of the dirty war on Syria means that the region can begin closing ranks against the big powers. Syria’s successful resistance would mean the beginning of the end for Washington’s ‘New Middle East’.

• That is basically the big picture. This book sets out to document the A story and expose the B story. It does so by rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence in case of conflict. I hope it might prove a useful resource. Here is a brief overview of the chapters.

   

  Chapter 2, ‘Syria and Washington’s ‘New Middle East’’ puts Syria in context of the US plans for a ‘New Middle East’, the latest chapter in a longer history of US attempts to dominate the region.

   

  Chapter 3, ‘Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda’ addresses the problem of reporting and reading the Syrian crisis. Media channels have shown a hyper-reliance on partisan sources, committed to the war and denigrating the Syrian Army. This is the key barrier to understanding the controversies around chemical weapons, civilian massacres and the levels of support for or opposition to President Assad.

• Chapter 4, ‘Daraa 2011: Another Islamist Insurrection’ reconstructs, from a range of sources, the Saudi-backed Islamist insurrection in Daraa in March 2011. Those armed attacks were quite distinct from the political reform rallies, which the Islamists soon drove off the streets.

   

  Chapter 5, ‘Bashar al Assad and Political Reform’ explains the political reform movement from the time Bashar assumed the presidency in the year 2000 to the beginning of the crisis in 2011. From this we can see that most opposition groups were committed to reform within a Syrian context, with virtually all opposing attacks on the Syrian state. The chapter then reviews the role of Bashar as a reformer, and the evidence on his popularity.

• Chapter 6, ‘The Empire’s Jihadis’ looks at the collaboration between Salafist political Islam and the imperial powers in the Middle East. Distinct from the anti-imperial Islamic currents in Iran and south Lebanon, Salafist political Islam has become a sectarian force competing with Arab nationalism across Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and drawing on long standing collaborative relations with the big powers. This history provides important background to the character of Syria’s Islamist ‘revolution’, and its various slogans.

   

  Chapter 7, ‘Embedded Media, Embedded Watchdogs’ identifies the propaganda techniques of media channels and the network of ‘human rights’ bodies (Human Rights Watch, Avaaz, etc) which function as megaphones and ‘moderators’ for the Washington agenda. Many have become fierce advocates for ‘humanitarian war’. A number of newer western NGOs (e.g. The Syria Campaign, The White Helmets) have been created by Wall Street agencies specifically for the dirty war on Syria. A number of their fabrications are documented here.

• Chapter 8, ‘The Houla Massacre Revisited’ considers in detail the evidence from the first major massacre designed (following success of the technique over Libya) to influence UN Security Council consideration of military intervention. While the first UN inquiry group, actually in Syria, found contradictory evidence on this massacre, a second UN group outside Syria and co-chaired by a US diplomat, tried to blame the Syrian Government. Yet more than a dozen witnesses blamed Farouq FSA Islamists, who killed pro-government villagers and took over the area, holding it for some months. Several other ‘false flag’ massacres are noted.

   

  Chapter 9, ‘Chemical Fabrications: the East Ghouta Incident’ details the second major ‘false flag’ incident of international significance. This incident in August 2013, which nearly sparked a major escalation involving US missile attacks on Syria, was used to accuse the Syrian Government of killing hundreds of civilians, including children, with chemical weapons. Within a fairly short time multiple sources of independent evidence (including North American evidence) disproved these accusations. Nevertheless, Syria’s opponents have repeated the false accusations, to this day, as though they were fact.

• Chapter 10, ‘A Responsibility to Protect and the Double Game’ addresses a recent political doctrine, a subset of ‘humanitarian intervention’ popularised to add to the imperial toolkit. The application of this doctrine in Libya was disastrous for that little country. Fortunately the attempts to use it in Syria failed.

   

  Chapter 11, ‘Health and Sanctions’ documents the NATO-backed Islamist attacks on Syria’s health system, linked to the impact of western economic sanctions. These twin currents have caused great damage to Syrian public health. Such attacks carry no plausible motive of seeking local popular support, so we must interpret them as part of an overall strategy to degrade the Syrian state, rendering it more vulnerable to outside intervention.

   

  Chapter 12 ‘Washington, Terrorism and ISIS: the evidence’, documents the links between the big powers and the latest peak terrorist group they claim to be fighting. Only evidence can help develop informed opinion on this contentious matter, but the evidence is overwhelming. There is little ideological difference between the various Salafi-Islamist groups, and Washington and its allies have financed and armed every one of them.

• Chapter 13, ‘Western Intervention and the Colonial Mind’ discusses the western cultural mindset that underlies persistent violations of the rights of other peoples.

   

  Chapter 14 ‘Towards an Independent Middle East’, considers the end-game in the Syrian crisis, and its implications for the Middle East region. At tremendous cost the Syrian Arab Republic, its army and its people, have successfully resisted aggression from a variety of powerful enemies. Syria’s survival is due to its resilience and internal unity, bolstered by support from some strong allies. The introduction of Russian air power in late September 2015 was important. So too were the coordinated ground forces from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, in support of an independent Syria.

   

  When the attacks on Syria abate the Middle East seems set to be transformed, with greater political will and military preparedness on the part of an expanded Axis of Resistance. That will signal the beginning of the end for Washington’s 15 year spree of bloodshed and ‘regime change’ across the entire region.

• Notes:

   

  Edwards, Dave (2013) ‘Limited But Persuasive’ Evidence – Syria, Sarin, Libya, Lies’, Media Lens, 13 June, online: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/735-limited-but-persuasive-evidence-syria-sarin-libya-lies.html

   

  Forte, Maximilian (2012) Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Baraka Books, Quebec

   

  ICJ (1986) Case concerning the military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America) Merits’, International Court of Justice, Judgement of 27 June 1986, online: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/?sum=367&p1=3&p2=3&case=70&p3=5

   

  Knightley, Phillip (2001) ‘The disinformation campaign’, The Guardian, 4 October, online: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/oct/04/socialsciences.highereducation

   

  Kuperman, Alan J. (2015) Obama’s Libya Debacle’, Foreign Affairs, 16 April, online: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2015-02-16/obamas-libya-debacle

   

  Martí, Jose (1975) Obras Completas, Vol. 6, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana

   

  McKinney, Cynthia (Ed) (2012) The Illegal War on Libya, Clarity Press, Atlanta

   

  Putin, Vladimir (2015) ‘Violence instead of democracy: Putin slams ‘policies of exceptionalism and impunity’ in UN speech’, RT, 28 September, online: https://www.rt.com/news/316804-putin-russia-unga-speech/

   

  Richter, Larry (1998) ‘Havana Journal; Remember the Maine? Cubans See an American Plot Continuing to This Day’, New York Times, 14 February, online: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/14/world/havana-journal-remember-maine-cubans-see-american-plot-continuing-this-day.html
• Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2015).

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