It was not my intention to point a finger, simply to identify the fact that criticism can lead to interference and interference can have negative consequences, not the least of which is moving events that are contained within a country beyond their local boundaries. There are really only two ways to bend peoples to your cultural ideals, by your example or by inducing fear. The difficulties of the first are illustrated by my reference to Kerry's 'embarrassments', and I think few would deny the second is losing traction. I understand those convinced the US holds some kind of global moral high ground feel an imperative to speak up; it is a matter of perspective, freedom of the press is not a moral issue for most of the world, and doesn't become one because the intelligentsia in one group says it is. If, as Kerry does, calling the situation 'worrisome' and expressing 'serious concern' had the potential to reorientate the situation to your perspective, fair enough, but it doesn't. Since, according to Obama, 'universal values and democratic institutions are the core at the NATO alliance' why not instead advocate throwing Turkey out of NATO on the grounds of its non conformity with those values and institutions?
Being bothered how other countries manage their political life is but a short step from trying to make them fall in line with your own. It is a key cause of global unrest and completely ignores the process wherein each stage is simply a link. Evolving processes, like those that take the grub to butterfly, are best left without interference. One of the things Kerry specifically mentioned about the current presidential campaign making his job difficult and embarrassing was the faces of other leaders when he brought up the subject of democracy. Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
There is significant war weariness among people everywhere and it may lead them to feel Trump less obviously likely to maintain US investment in distant military adventures.
I can’t understand why he isn’t mediating this Baghdad-Ankara saber-rattling, which can only benefit the Daesh terrorists. Perhaps because he's too busy gathering up compliments and awards, like the Tipperary International Peace Award, and the Chatham House Prize, to have time for more than the expression of 'serious concern'. Also he has himself confessed that the 'embarrassing' US election has made the job harder, so better perhaps to look for his carpet slippers and leave all that for his successor.
It may not be without some significance that the video of an over excited gentleman promising financial mayhem in the event Trump even gets close to Clinton in the polls is dated May, and here we are six months later continuing our slow stagnation in the same toxic financial morass. There is no earthly reason to assume Trump will actually perform any of the things he promises when even slightly more cerebral politicians rarely if ever do. He will more likely be suborned by the pressure of the financial realities like everyone else. Meanwhile the standard of living of most of the world will continue to decline with attendant environmental, social and infrastructural disintegration.
History does not, of course, repeat itself since it is the study of past events. What such study confirms, however, is that people's needs and reactions are consistent over time, as is the basic pyramidal structure of the groups within which they exist. That is what gives rise to similarities between events and enables those who respect such things to anticipate likely disorders and consider what remedies were employed against their development in the past, or might better have been. The lessons capable of being learned from past events are a cumulative part of our heritage and it is their neglect that results in similar things recurring again and again; the notion of some fateful inevitability called History being responsible is simply a cover for ignorance, or reluctance to learn.
World war means everyone, and these speculations really call for consideration of the role China, and to a somewhat lesser extent Europe, would likely play in any build up to an outright war.
This is only meaningful if one believes he would actually try any of these fantasy solutions to a fantasy problem; or is he just shooting off his mouth? Even if he were to attempt such things the effects would be localised within the US itself and wouldn't blow up the world.
It scarcely matters what contestants say these days but it may matter where they come from, and If one ignores all the blather, it does seem Clinton is for more sabre rattling and military involvement and Trump for less.
This is historically familiar. Basically the interests of leaders have diverted from the people to the point that government is no longer of, by, and for them. Not being a US citizen and having anyway little interest in day to day politics, I can't comment on the 'solutions' explored here except to say that they are all intrinsic while one might perhaps also take into account pressures arising from extrinsic forces. As domestic solutions prove elusive, or too long delayed, extrinsic forces become more of a factor. For instance, it's one thing to advocate reining in US overseas activities, quite another to have no option but to do so, which is what happened to Rome from the early 5th century when instead of tribute flowing into its coffers, it was flowing out to maintain what from our perspective might be called distant 'strategic interests' until under the pressure of necessity those interests began bit by bit to be abandoned.
Les forces de sécurité irakiennes ont lancé lundi une offensive d’ampleur pour reprendre Mossoul, deuxième ville d’Irak aux mains des jihadistes de l’organisation État islamique depuis juin 2014. Les ONG et des acteurs politiques s’inquiètent du sort de quelque 1,5 million de civils coincés dans la ville et estiment que l’Irak n’est pas en mesure de gérer le défi humanitaire de leur exode.
A defeat for those the US is actively supporting is a defeat for the US objective and, although a small guerilla group cannot match great firepower, it can drive the humanitarian situation up to and even beyond what troubles the world in Aleppo. In fact some are already asking what is the difference, a question from Tuesday's DOS briefing. *
Q: He [Josh Earnest – White House spokesman] said this: They, ISIL, are killing civilians all the time, so the idea that somehow the Iraqi Security Forces should delay this operation because of their concern about the humanitarian situation in Mosul, that doesn’t make sense, end quote. The US. view for eastern Aleppo, as I understand it, is that going after terrorists there is not worth the suffering of civilians. Why the difference in U.S. reaction or approach, please?
A: ...the Iraqi Government is coordinating with regional governments on the ground and with police forces and other security forces to ensure that there’s a system in place to deal with those civilians who might be – might have to flee the violence in Mosul.
Precisely because the US has determined to play a background role it would appear to have no ultimate control over the attack, and although the US insists this is an Iraqi Government operation and it is in charge, and by extension in control, many have doubts how realistic that may prove to be at a practical level.
It was indeed the conflict between rich and poor that fractured the Roman republic. For some 600 years the republic had managed these tensions by adapting its structures, mostly internally, like the introduction of tribunes of the people with authority to override the Senate. Machiavelli proposes that constitutional flexibility was the reason the republic lasted so long, flexibility exercised from the strength of the united plebs. While Rome had only a citizen army the Senate could be, and often was, forced to negotiate. Once that was changed to a standing army, however, their leverage disappeared. Ironically it was Gaius Marius, the people's leader, voted by them seven times Consul, whose 'reforms' to the army brought Rome to the slippery slope that led to the end of the republic. It was the legions that raised Caesar and, after Nero, came to appoint his successors. That could not have happened with a citizen army because the citizen army was the people. Parallels can never be exact but the end of conscription can perhaps be seen as such a loss of leverage; remember the social climate and debate at the time of the Vietnam war?
Might this not be a stage in a process of adjustment rather than the edge of a cliff or the end of a cul de sac. Attempts to analyse these things mostly result in contentious descent into non-contextual detail. However, detail aside, US foreign policy has long been guided by the notion of ruling the world, all its actions have been consciously or intuitively geared to that end. Its people have largely been brought up to that view and it's woven into their attitude towards the world from an early age. This I recognise because I attended a notable public school in the early 1950's and, with hindsight, I see the curriculum there was still in large part designed to produce the next generation to administer the Empire that was already unravelled or unravelling. The US does not really have enemies, those it takes to be such are simply resisting the notion of US world dominance. The US is an essential element in the future stability of the world, no one wants it crushed, but it is not the only element and that is what is proving hard to accept. It would be easier if US leaders had the authority Russian and Chinese leaders have, but it hasn't. What it has is a constitution with a whole series of checks and balances on leaders' decisions designed to safeguard the interests of the domestic population but hopelessly inhibiting when it comes to the devious business of global foreign policy. One can see this with the horror Trump evokes; ask the question, What conceivable difference does it make to the pursuit of US foreign policy if the leader has an appetite to grope? Dag Hammarskjöld was said to have had a thing with Nasser's foreign minister!?! Were Trump president and in Moscow, they might even position suitable ladies within arm's length along with his favourite tipple in the mini bar and then get on with the serious business.
They are natural allies. Trade will determine their future relationship as it always does. Trade, and the increasing US/Russia differences, the hotter the latter get the looser Turkish bonds with the US/NATO block are likely to become because if they get to swords drawn Turkey must side with Russia/China; the odds would be too heavily weighed against a US 'win'. The Syrians, alas, are as blades of grass on a battlefield.
Doubtless, but it was the symbol that set European thought afire. Mathematics became a passion. William Oughtred, Vicar of Albury in Surrey (1574-1660), introduced the multiplication sign and trigonometric identities.
But the tendency to separate people into groups and then denigrate, if not actually attack, others than your own is deeply ingrained. Clinton's 'basket of deplorables' is the mirror image of Trump at the same thing. It's not peculiarly American, Israel is addicted to it. It tends to be cyclical and seems to be resurgent in Europe. Of course it's irrational but the irrational is an absence of reason, not its opposite, and reason is individual, not collective. Ignorance fosters it. When the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth the Western world still employed Roman numerals and counters, which obviated any meaningful calculation. It was the Arabs who provided the world with its greatest key to thought by introducing the symbol for zero. Today it is literally unimaginable where we would be without that key.
This phenomenon, though less advanced, is observable in some European areas. The difference being that it is not unfamiliar in Europe. It arises when leaders lose sight altogether of the interests of the people, and it is resolved with a return to the constitutional or founding principles that gave initial impetus to stability and a period of successful development. The resolution can be brought about either by extrinsic happenstance or intrinsic foresight. The extrinsic does the most damage and may be brewing in Syria where, like a piece on a chess board, China appears to be making moves to cover Russia from being taken. This is not because China has any special relationship with Russia, like the US/Israel 'untill death do us part' thing, but simply because if Russia were broken in a confrontation with the US China would be next in line, so the moves are to avoid rather than precipitate such a development. The intrinsic resolution traditionally demands an individual with wide popular appeal and marked qualities of leadership, think Churchill, Kennedy, Mao, that are not apparent in either of the current electoral contenders. Trump is certainly not such a leader but if people feel him less likely to provoke a confrontation with Russia/China then he might be a better choice since he would at least buy time.
Somewhat tangential, but to the extent these manoeuvrings may be the prelude to a more aggressive US military involvement in the conflict, including attacking more Syrian forces, it is worth considering the role China might be provoked to play. Sputnik has a translation of the gist of a piece by Thierry Meyssan which provides interesting details of China's long-term connections with the Syrian regime and military. https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160831/1044813985/syria-china-cooperation-analysis.html . And further, a bunch of Chinese advisers will apparently shortly be joining Russian troops in the Latakia area http://www.alamongordo.com/china-military-arrive-in-syria-to-help-russia/ . Assad has remained clear that in his government's view, any group taking up arms against the state is not opposition, but terrorist. This definition, which he regards as universal, cannot but also be the view of both Russia and China.
This is the agreement that didn't happen. It's purpose was ambiguous which may well be why Russia dragged its heels and the US was so reluctant to publish the details. Teleologically it would seem to have been set up to feed the escalating stand-off between the US and Russia. It was not an agreement for a ceasefire, it was an agreement between the US and Russia to attempt to get those parties over which each was assumed to have influence to down weapons against all but Daesh and other UN designated 'terrorists'. Well, some of the armed militias over whom the US was supposed to exercise influence distanced themselves from the agreement from day one. From that moment on, while both might still attempt to exercise their influence, the expressed hope for a broad humanitarian ceasefire was no longer on the cards; a one sided ceasefire is not a ceasefire, it's capitulation. It has long been a tenet of US policy that a nation has the right to defend itself, vide Israel, Erdogan, etc., so why not Syria? Therefore, if Syrian forces or positions are attacked they, by logical extension, have a right to resist. Now, like a moth emerging from a cocoon, the US morphs the agreement into one where the parties had agreed to a ceasefire and Russia has broken it's part of the agreement. This is logical nonsense and, quite apart from a casual regret for US/allied slaughter of 60 some odd Syrian soldiers, entirely justifies Russian impatience while adding to broad non-US disenchantment with whatever it is the US is doing. It is unbearably unfortunate for the Syrian people, but this could, together with the current electoral fiasco, and a host of other events worldwide, lead the US to take pause and refresh its founding principles.
It is an interesting exercise but does it not simply work backwards, picking circumstances that preceded Trump's present status to identify as causes of it? It is a mechanistic way of looking at things, arising from a belief that there is no higher perspective and what happens has to be the effect of some identifiable preceding cause. However, there are far too many other evidences that suggest something more significant may be underway of which Trump may simply be a symptom. There has been debate around the concept of an 'end of liberalism' to explain many such phenomena including these 7. The unfortunate thing about such a notion is that it too often becomes a simple debate about whether Western liberalism and its global financial model is or isn't coming to an end when we might be looking for some transformative process, a process that may be speeding up but for which there is no individual or collectively contained cause and therefore no 'cure' beyond the fleeting comforts of nostalgia. There has to be transformation, everything is subject to it, and we cannot tell where it will lead but there seems to be a nisus towards a broader humanitarian perspective and growing environmental awareness. If this should be so it might somewhat explain the vicious and aggressive survival responses of those elements standing in its path.
Many do not believe the attack on the Syrian army was an error, and many others are simply not persuaded that it was 'entirely' an error and figure there must be more to it, and what matters is what people believe, belief is a continuing state, Truth is gone before you take another breath. I haven't seen Maria Zakharova's warning but she comes over as entirely rational, highly competent and ultra professional. If her tone appeared undiplomatic there is a limit to the patience even of a saint, and it can still only have been dulcet compared with the vitriolic outbursts of Susan Power. You may have seen/heard in the NYT the exchange between Kerry and a bunch of Syrians the other day http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/30/world/middleeast/john-kerry-syria-audio.html?_r=0 on which the DOS will not, by the way, comment because it was a 'private' conversation. Well, it ain’t private any longer, and it's the kind of thing that must feed into the Russian perspective on the deteriorating situation, leading them perhaps to believe that the US is contemplating pouring more arms into the area, and the better of two evils may be to go all out to gain Aleppo, and then call that a point at which diplomacy should begin since the alternative looks like something that could blow us all sky high.
Yes, he does. He has a serious military background and is not infrequently critical of Russian policy. He also has a command of facts not unlike the good Dr here. He has, of course, his own perspective, but who does not? See my link above.
No one has accomplished anything in Syria if accomplish implies something beneficial to the Syrian people. They were ripe for a period of ideological and political upheaval which should be familiar to anyone looking objectively at the history of any country that has passed through it. Rarely has it ever proceeded without extreme civil disturbance and citizens butchering each other, but that has always, like the French Revolution, been contained and resolved within the nation's own borders. For a wide variety of reasons the nisus for such political upheaval swept across ME nations at more or less the same time. Left to themselves these internal political processes would likely have largely resolved themselves by now. It is the efforts of outside interests, competing ones in the case of Syria, to influence the outcome by supporting one or other elements in what is, however bloody, a not unfamiliar stage in the process of political evolution, that has thrown each in turn into the chaos we see. Of course the Syrian army is inadequate to resist this chaos*, no small nation maintains an army capable to standing up to such foreign funded invaders, why should it? On the other hand what has been accomplished by all the non-Syrians involved is insensibly to turn Syria into a battlefield for a proxy stand-off between conflicting ideological perceptions of how the globe should be run, and it is perhaps at that level that any Russian accomplishment should be judged.
The struggle for women's rights is a an important, but subsidiary, part of the broader process of liberalisation. It will have its opponents in the establishment, and it will take time. It is extremely important that these processes be allowed to evolve internally and at their own pace, that is without interference from places outside where it has already run its course. The lady's incarceration should be a warning; watch but do not interfere; liberalism is evolving in Iran but it's not perhaps yet ready for supra-national feminism.
This is the sort of thing that can happen when you conduct an expansionist foreign policy on the back of what is primarily a domestic constitution. This is particularly true of the US constitution which owes much to the principles of the French Revolution and the Gracchi brothers. The UK Prime Minister has more authority than the US President because it progressively devolved from an absolute monarchy. The same applies to Russia and China since from the point of view of the citizenry there is not that much difference between Putin and a tsar or Xi Jinping and an emperor. The same dichotomy evolved in Rome, and was one of the underlying causes of the end of that Republic since the citizens were increasingly neglected in favour of the defence of the frontiers and exploitation of the provinces, corruption became rife, the rich got richer and deployed multitudes of slaves so there was little work for ordinary folk whose disgruntlement was exploited by a succession of populist leaders, and eventually Caesar. I am not suggesting the US will follow that path but a lot of the ingredients look similar.
I may have misunderstood but I interpreted the analysis to imply the regime is making significant progress towards what Assad has expressed as the first stage of his overall purpose. That is to clear the place of armed groups and establish a degree of order sufficient to permit the country to function thus creating conditions for the start, and, I hope, successful conclusion of the political settlement process and internal determination of the political future by the Syrian people. (Putin's words). One can only speculate what that future might look like and whether or not it will even include Assad, but for this or that group to lay out preconditions for stage two when stage one remains incomplete can hardly be helpful, particularly when Assad has said quite openly that it is up to the Syrians whether he has a place in their future. I most assuredly do not think he can do no wrong if that is what is meant by drinking coolaid.
What appears to be developing is what Assad has said he seeks, to regain sufficient control and calm to pursue a diplomatic resolution to Syria's underlying political problems. This is not the same as restoration of the status quo ante and there seems to me no reason to suppose it could not accommodate Kurdish aspirations to some acceptable degree. Obviously the regime needed and continues to need the support of its allies since a nation of its size cannot be expected to possess military elements adequate to face the kind of foreign backed interference that has been thrown against it. What is distressing Is the opaque and even ambiguous role the US appears to be playing in relation to this purpose, insisting there is no military solution while actively engaged in seeking just that, a role uncomfortably like that voiced against Israeli behaviour in Palestine, the human rights record of Bahrain, etc., and then there's Susan Power hyperventilating like she's just found a parking ticket on her broom. These are embarrassing to outside observers and undermine respect for US involvement. If, as Dr Cole suggests, Assad may be close to achieving his purpose then so much the better since that should bring in sight an end to all this suffering, the restoration of security, and the return of those Syrian refugees whose presence is surely much needed for any lasting diplomatic resolution.
Although each has evolved in its own way, the world is replete with situations where the relics of the colonial era and its residual attitudes leave ordinary people unable to pass their brief lives in security and tranquillity. At an earlier stage, Oslo perhaps, the Palestinian issue might have been addressed in isolation but today it's difficult to view it other than as one among many symptoms of a deeper disorder which needs to be cured before any have a chance of resolution. It's easy to see Israel/Palestine, and Syria, for instance, as aspects of a stand-off between the US and Russia, and that would be valid if Russia had the same global ambitions as the US but I believe we are looking at something quite different and the stand-off is actually between the notion of a single global authority and a completely new reality. The background to Orwell's novel is a tripolar world where the three powers live in fluctuating equilibrium because any two can always combine to outface the third. We may be seeing that emerging, Does it not seem likely that if Clinton were, for instance, to decide to confront Russia in an existential military manner, China would enter the fray on Russia's side? Palestine and other conflict areas may have to wait until the US climbs down from its throne and sits at a round table with Russia and China.
Fear is an advanced response to a sense of insecurity and a basic 'animal' survival instinct that, while it can arise both in isolated individuals and groups, requires the application of individual reason to be allayed. There is therefore such a thing as group fear but not, alas, group reason, and this imbalance is known to be politically exploitable.
Most here are local cultural peculiarities, particularly true of suicide which doesn't harm anyone or cost the State anything, but terrorist attacks are assumed to have distant roots and be more concerning, a bit like a lot of broken legs or a few cases of Zika.
You cannot undertake a major offensive like that without a high degree of planning. My suggestion is this has not (yet) happened and it is as you say a mainly political announcement. When Russia entered the Syrian affray even the US was taken by surprise. Is there not something to be learned from that?
It doesn't sound a coherent, carefully planned undertaking, more like a purpose promulgated for its effect on his immediate audience. Besides, even were it meticulously planned, what conceivable benefit could there be in informing Daesh so far in advance. What is particularly disturbing is this attack on the Red Crescent humanitarian convoy coming so swiftly after the coalition bombing of Syrian forces. Again, the US response is to express 'outrage', a knee-jerk emotional reaction, rather than any serious effort to determine who was responsible and why. It appears to some that the US has found itself insensibly coaxed into an agreement with Russia that it now regrets since if effective it would undermine their policy to remove of the Assad government, a policy which although it has sunk to the bottom of most nations' priorities would be politically inconceivable for the US to swallow. Maybe that's why Clinton's expressed purpose is to bomb Assad infrastructure, perhaps she hopes she can kill him in the process and get off the hook that way.
The scepticism expressed in comments here about the 'accident' is widely echoed in media across the world. The qualifying phrase if it was an accident seems to have become firmly attached to the incident. What is not mentioned is the effect this incident will have on the ordinary Syrian population whose enthusiasm for the rebellion may not be as unequivocal as the West thinks it is or should be.
Data from the World Fertility Survey show Syria's fertility rate to be among the highest in the world. Each of the 80 dead and 100 wounded will be from families with around 7* immediate, and vastly more extended, members and since Syria has a conscript army many of those killed will likely have been Sunni. The ripples extending from this event will travel far and the US response (particularly from Susan Power) has distressed many and disgusted some, just look at this from the impressive Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova: https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160919/1045447909/russia-zakharova-embarrassed-syria-power.html
Mistakes occur but one of this size might have been better handled with a swift call from Obama to Putin. The DOD's attempt to pass some blame to Russia and Syria was absurd, and Samantha Power's histrionic outburst will make it difficult to convince others, not only Syria, that it was a deeply regretted error. Although she is quoted as saying she regretted the loss of life she turned swiftly from the event in question to claim Russia's call for a security council meeting to be a stunt, and then went into a diatribe about Assad's wicked ways. She gives the impression of someone with no grounding in logic unless she studied it to employ rather than abjure its fallacies.
Expect this to unfold as an illustration of yesterday's discussion on facts. The RT report sees this as 'embarrassing' for the US but you can bet the bottom $ that is not the way it will emerge from the DOD or the DOS because the circumstances will not provoke the US to feel 'awkward, self-conscious or ashamed'. At most it will evoke an Olympian 'regrettable' with the non-explicit implication of fault in those on the ground who fail to understand the US purpose to secure humanitarian aid for the starving Syrians and stop Assad from bombing civilians.
Not that he was personally responsible, but ever since Freud there has evolved a grey area between those extremes that had ever satisfied the interpretation of events; either the boy stole the loaf or he didn't; nothing to do with his hunger or the moral condition of his mother. This grey area soon found it's way into literature and other art forms until the earlier extremes more or less disappeared beyond the horizon. Few today are aware of the deep moral attitudes that define classical literature. Later this grey was reinforced by physics with concepts like 'relativity', 'chaos theory' and the 'uncertainty principle'. Today the media and entertainment industry wallow in it, sailing ever closer to what would have been regarded as negative, and the consequence, observed from the outside, can be seen as a morally rootless state, constrained, if at all, by peer pressure only.
Many have been conscious of an evolving disassociation from traditional ideas of reality but it is conceptually elusive and hard to pin down. Spiegel had an interesting reference in a recent article on Merkel:
On the flight back from the G-20 summit, Merkel was asked if she was concerned that politics have reached a post-fact era -- that parties like the AfD or politicians like Donald Trump have found success with slogans that are completely disconnected from reality. With an inquiring gaze, Merkel said that she first had to integrate "post-fact" into her vocabulary. But it was clear that the expression sparked her imagination.
In a speech to parliament two days later, she said: "When we begin participating in a situation where facts can be shoved aside, responsible and constructive answers on the issue are no longer possible. When we begin aligning ourselves, both linguistically and literally, with those who are not interested in a solution, we will ultimately lose our orientation."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/refugee-policy-sees-waning-of-power-for-merkel-a-1111668.html#ref=nl-international
Post fact may more meaningfully be seen as post reason or post rational. Facts are necessary for reason but not of emotion which responds to raw input. What is called the Age of Reason is a relatively recent period, and reason anyway has always been the province of a few. It is also a tool, a problem solving tool, and like any tool has fairly specific functions which make its application cumbersome in other areas, like trying to employ it against the Zionist claim their God gave them Palestine. Wars are indeed a kind of entertainment for those who follow them distantly. That is something reason finds uncomfortable because it doesn't known what to do with it. People long functioned without reason by relying on instinct, intuition and accumulated experience and they can do so again. Facts are useful but they are not Holy Grail.
It seems to me the expressed intention of the congregation to set about rebuilding their mosque is an illuminating illustration of their peaceful nature, and an undertaking which their dedication can achieve with joy. Suing Trump on the other hand would be embarking on a not very Islamic process of spiritually withering escalating ugliness and cost.
Reading the Wednesday DOS briefing, it is tempting to discern a US position that is far from straight forward. The Russians are to 'try' to hold Assad, who has accepted the ceasefire, in check from all but ISIS and Nusrah while the US 'tries' the same with the twenty some odd groups of 'moderate' rebels, some of whom have announced they don't accept the ceasefire. A key phrase being: Ultimately, this is self-selection and we’ve talked about this before as well. If the regime or the – certain groups within the moderate opposition don’t comply with the cessation of hostilities, then they’ve identified themselves as not a part of it. So, if the Russians succeed in restraining the government forces and the US fails with the 'moderates', the 'moderates' gain and that is not the 'fault' of the US which has made every effort to hold them back. Could this not be interpreted as a calculated way to continue regime change efforts while nobbling the government's response. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2016/09/261883.htm
Strange how Russian and US interests, or rather those of Putin and Obama, seem to have converged for the time being like leafs on a stream. Obama would presumably like to achieve something not only for his legacy but to avoid his successor having to deal with 'the mess Obama left behind', while Putin, apart from serious local reasons, must be concerned to contemplate what might happen to the world if Clinton should reach the Oval Office and there be no resolution in sight. Meanwhile, momentarily at any rate, Assad's position appears to be getting a degree safer. The whole thing has a curiously Ukrainian feel to it; I am reminded that Roland Dumas, the former French Foreign Minister, a man with a Trump like tendency to make utterances better unuttered, recounted how Syrian regime change was being hatched back in 2009. NSNBC quoted him:
I met with top British officials, who confessed to me, that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister of Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate. Naturally, I refused, I said I am French, that does not interest me”.
The whole world must welcome it. The situation is deplorable. While everyone concentrates of Aleppo there are other areas where besieged Syrians are dying. To make the ousting of Assad a priority above saving their lives is simply unconscionable. If there really are 'armed moderates' then as human beings and Syrians they might consider joining the Syrian forces and cooperating to get rid Daesh etc. together. Successful cooperation between opponents in a higher cause where their interests unite often serves to take heat out of subsequent dealings.
It has been long perceived that Rome's move from a citizen to a standing army, initiated by Marius at the end of the 2nd century BC, marks the point from which the ancient republican democracy headed towards the empire, and your Founding Fathers were likely well grounded in Roman history and had good reason to seek to avoid that irreversible development.
It's hardly an alliance. The US and Russia are likely to reach fragile accord on specific matters from time to time but deep down they will always remain separate, the same with China. What will be interesting is the European/Russian future. The current stand-off is a US construct with no real roots whereas there have been European/Russian historical and cultural associations since the early 18th century and they are reawakening after the tumults of the 20th century. The last Empress of Russia was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and her remains were reburied in Saint Petersburg in 1998. The Duke of Edinburgh is the grandson of a Russian Grand Duchess married to the King of Greece. The Greeks are shortly to raise a monument to her in Thessaloniki. Russian culture, literature, theatre and ballet, have had great influence in Europe as has European culture in Russia. These reflect roots that survive passing political vicissitudes. A Russian gas pipeline is mooted to pass through Turkey and on to Greece and Italy. The Germans and French have suffered quite enough economically from Russian sanctions as have many other Europeans and they are chafing at the bit. That is the space to watch.
The Russians have previously complained that the rebels used earlier ceasefires to resupply and re-equip their adherents, and it may be significant that during the last week the government regained control from the rebels of various areas including the Ramouseh suburb of Aleppo, which I understand to be a route into the besieged area, and is presumably now in a position to monitor it for such misuse.
I can see how a successful campaign in Mosul might burnish Obama's legacy, but not how it would benefit Clinton in November. The Libertarian candidate didn't apparently know where Aleppo is, and Trump, when asked by Larry King if he thought that might have an impact on his supporters, said he frankly didn't think so.
It seems to me no bad thing to let them rabbit on like that. It exposes the reality of the bleak choice US democracy has before it, and might make a few think seriously about how that has come about and the level of responsibility they might themselves bear for it. Besides, for an anchor like Lauer to pose challenging questions pre-supposes that there exists some more coherent way for the US to pursue the goal of subduing all mankind with its exceptionalism when it is the patent absurdity of persisting in such a purpose that creates the difficulties the ME faces, particularly when the results of the endeavour are of no benefit to ordinary Americans whose security, economic stability, freedom, and confidence have diminished the while; it would be like seeking their policies for swimming up Everest. Dr Cole refers to their Alice in Wonderland statements. Or Alice through the Looking Glass?
The Red Queen shook her head, 'You may call it “nonsense” if you like,' she said, 'but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'
I didn't read Javad Zarif's comment as calling Saudis terror masters. He says 'Saudi terror masters' and, with respect, there are terror masters partout but he is specifically referring to the Saudi ones and including them with the Wahhabi top cleric.
We have perhaps arrived at a stage in the evolution of US foreign policy mapped in Emmanuel Todd's 2003 book 'After the Empire' (Après l'Empire) in which he describes the likely solution for the US' economic dependence as A global theatre of dramatised militarism designed to keep the US, at least symbolically, at the centre of the world. Page 21 of the introduction which can be found on Amazon 'look inside' https://www.amazon.com/After-Empire-Breakdown-Perspectives-Criticism/dp/023113102X. outlines three stages we can recognise. Much has changed since 2003 but Emmanuel Todd's perspective is still instructive.
I wouldn't have much faith in it. The condition of the Syrian victims of this mess is not the top US priority nor the Russian one either for that matter. That is largely window dressing. The same basic positions persist. There is a face off, transparently expressed in Lavrov's statement:
The most important thing, however, is that none of our agreements with the Americans on practical actions and the coordination of operations against terrorists and the coordination of Aerospace Forces operations with the USAF and the US-led coalition will be implemented unless our US partners fulfil the promise they made a long time ago to separate opposition groups working with the United States from terrorists, primarily Jabhat al-Nusra.
Nothing could be more clear. Then again, as the Dr Cole writes ...the Pentagon is grumpy about having to work with Russia at all and doesn’t trust it . Taking that to be so absolutely confirms the importance of priorities other than the condition of the Syrians.
The Pope cries in the wilderness. I have long pondered the decline of morality in the Western world and found no simple answer. In Hellenic days, and in the pre-Christian Roman era, any one of the innumerable 'natural' disasters that have befallen our world would have been attributed to some offence offered the Gods, and oracles, priests, the Sibylline Books, would have been consulted to seek the nature of the offence and the required remedy. Today, with an arrogance not even the most powerful ruler of those eras would have assumed, all is taken to be 'man made' and by extension correctable by man alone. That is what is leading us towards Armageddon, an absence of awareness, of reverence, of respect for anything higher than mankind, and then not even all mankind but just selective members of it. These are the deep rooted attitudes that deter and exclude the wise from seeking office, and they are vividly reflected in the bleak choice facing the US electorate today. Mammon has brought the human race and much else of Earth's life to the edge of extinction. It is already uprooting millions from the Earth's more arid areas and fracturing carefully balanced social systems. I doubt it is reversible.
The basic distinction is not how brutal a regime may be domestically but the extent to which it exports brutality. From this standpoint the activities of the Syrian regime or Mugabe confine such activities within their own borders while the Israelis, for instance, deploy almost all their brutality on their neighbours. Although this may be perceived as an issue of 'morality', it is not itself a moral issue, it is one of simple facts. The US diverges from other nations in considering itself entitled, when so inclined, to play prosecutor and judge, and to administer direct retributive responses through methods such as those outlined in Dr Cole's opening paragraphs. China doesn't do that, Russia doesn't either, in fact no other nation does, and those Europeans and others who tag along with the US wouldn't either were they not variously coerced. The traditional way to deal with behaviour considered unacceptable, ostracisation, can be anything from a personal or group decision to have nothing to do with the offender, all the way through to sanctions, and movements such as BDS. The simple answer to your question, Why is it OUR prerogative to determine who is brutal and has to go and who doesn’t? is that it is not a your prerogative, it is an entirely self-assumed condition that appears to many not only ill-considered but a real threat to vast areas of our world since its effects have a tendency to open Pandora's boxes in a viral manner. This is the reason why many outside the US loop are genuinely concerned about Clinton and regard Trump as the distinct lesser of two evils, concerns that are fertilising right wing movements that are threatening to fracture the integrity of many, particularly European, democracies. http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160901/1044836036/clinton-war-france-national-front.html
This sort of thing often happens, and not only to the US. When I was a young British Army officer in Malaya in the 1950s we were up against 'communist terrorists' we had armed to fight the Japanese. When captured they not infrequently still had their British issued weapons. Traditionally these transformations are sequential in time, the difference here is they have become concurrent. There must be a moral in there somewhere. If you must fight, do it yourself?
Whatever happened on Biden's recent visit to Turkey? Some are speculating he may have had to sacrifice the Kurds to Erdogan for the sake of NATO.
Putin, Erdogan and Assad seem all to have clear cut priorities in Syria which do not actually conflict one with the other while the US appears to be out of that loop, mainly still hankering to eliminate Assad but with so many concerns elsewhere that that purpose is little more than a cloudy dream. Also, all three of them rule in the old fashioned sense of the word and can eliminate opposition, switch allies, and manoeuvre quickly and decisively whereas Obama is constrained by constitutional circumstances better suited perhaps to dealing with domestic rather than shifting global issues.
It does appear that Erdogan, for all the criticism he receives, is plotting a neat course between Russia and the US while remaining popular at home, eliminating opposition, and having a good go at the Kurds. Some of his actions do get 'tut tuts' from the West but I don't imagine that bothers him any more than it does Netanyahu. The media coverage of events get these days gives people the sense that they are living History. It is an illusion, History is the selective interpretation of the past, and closer to acting than being.
They are not mutually exclusive. I suspect Daesh to get a Russian umbrella over the gas pipeline and mollify Washington, and the Kurds to protect the homeland and mollify Assad. Whatever it is one should not look for consistency. By the bye, I suspect that for all his huffing and puffing he is quite happy for the US to prevaricate over extraditing Gulen. That does him no harm in the home market.
The issue surely is not whether he will succeed or not but what he may be trying to do. If he fails he will likely lose his head, but if he prospers...
...and, before I forget it, he appears to be eliminating all serious opposition, a classic procedure when embarked on such a purpose, identified in Herodotus' story of the tyrant of Miletus' advice to Periander of Corinth, and later recommended by none other than Machiavelli himself.
What about the Ottomans and the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent whose tomb they appear to have found in Hungary and which Erdogan dubbed a neo-Ottoman due to his reverence for the nation's imperial past and desire to extend its geopolitical influence* has already visited twice and plans to return for a commemoration next month?
A presidential Turkey seems a perfectly reasonable aspiration, no worse than a democracy with little or no ability to influence or veto the decisions of it's leaders. Turkey is in a situation not altogether dissimilar from England in the early 16th century needing to survive between both Spain and France. Besides, it is more consistent with Turkey's historical past and all nations have a tendency to function better if their roots are respected. The purpose of any foreign policy whether for aggrandizement or survival is the comfort and contentment of its domestic population, and while that is its outcome it all works fine. What it is not supposed to do is cost that population its wealth, tranquillity and security. If that does become the result then it is a failure and only when it fails is it brought into scrutiny and question. Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason and the same can be said of any otherwise 'questionable' pursuits and policies.
These things are always reported from a plateau of high moral principle. Unfortunately that is not the way the world is, and although the reports themselves evoke appalled reactions in many they have no other effect. There are laws but they are little more than guidance as too many nations pay no attention to them, unrepentant individuals too like that arrogant swimmer. Any sane individual knows that pouring billions of classy weapons into an area of contesting nations guarantees they will be used with these results. If there is any sentient matter out there in the cosmos what is happening on Earth must be a developing concern.
As the Asia Times piece (quoted above) says Turkey, Iran, Russia and China – have one thing in common in geopolitical terms – a shared interest or even need to push back at the US, each for its own reasons, though. This can be true however temporary; a guard and his handcuffed prisoner can develop a shared interest on a hijacked plane. Assad anyway wants to clear Syria of all armed groups not actually on his side and the Kurds fall into that category. He is the legitimate ruler of Syria, whether the world likes it or not, just as Caligula was the legitimate Emperor of Rome.
Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s recent visit to St Petersburg to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian jet fighters taking off from an Iranian base for the first time to hit Syrian targets and Erdogan’s proposed visit to Iran probably next week point to a trilateral Turkey-Iran-Russia format emerging on Syria. China seems to be entering the equation laterally as indicated by top military officer Rear Admiral Guan Youfei’s meeting with Syrian Defense Minister Fahad Jassim al-Freij in Damascus. Turkey, Iran, Russia and China have a shared interest or even need to push back at the US, each for its own reasons.
Any large power's foreign policy is like a set of Russian dolls, each nested within another. The background of Orwell's 1984 has the globe controlled by three powers in a state of fluctuating equilibrium with any two always ready to ally to outface the third. Could we be seeing this emerging? http://sputniknews.com/cartoons/20160816/1044331044/russia-china-alliance-us-thaad.html
Not all Russian actions are moves in a game with the US. I would imagine the Russians decided to fly from Iran for purely practical reasons and obviously the new arrangements they are forging with Tehran made this possible, then to avoid prior input from the US they decided to cut notice as short as possible. This suggests two realities. First they are operating to their own plan and want to get on with it, and that they pretty well knew how the US would play it and had no inclination to go down that path, particularly as they are already involved in a protracted back and forth over the ceasefire. On the other hand the US sees everything in terms of their interests and it's clear from the exchanges in the DOS briefing yesterday that they were caught short on this one and are not sure how to respond to a fait accompli that might make any arrangement with Russia look like a US/Russia/Iran partnership. It would not surprise me if Russia's overwhelming priority right now is to get a level of stability in Syria that allows some meaningful political developments to be underway before whichever candidate reaches the Oval Office.
Trump is demagogic and perfectly capable of expressing mutually exclusive views none of which he holds with any meaningful conviction. He is not a strategist so you cannot foretell what he might do or say from one minute to the next, he simply has one objective, to win, a characteristic he might be thought to share with Putin. Politicians wooing the public and then turning away from them in office is as old as society. Cuomo's, You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose, is an echo of an early Roman proverb that men have one mind in the market place, another in the palace. An advantage of history is the way it illuminates the unchanging nature of human behaviour, and the inexorable consequences of certain recognisable processes. The real division in US society may have little to do with Muslims who are simply the focus of a deeper social discontent, founded on grotesque financial inequality and its attendant insecurities, that Trump seems to have found a way to tap, and what we see may be closer to the rise of Peisistratos, the Marius/Sylla conflict, the circumstances that brought Caesar to power, that overthrew the French and Russian monarchies, all based on financial inequality. If that is so, the more Trump is dismissed and vilified, however worthily, may simply serve to harden his support, and poll results showing him losing favour could be misleading since, like the UK Brexit, many who say they oppose him may turn out to be closet supporters.
During the Spanish civil war, which had horrors quite as poignant as Syria, individuals from many countries, including the US, got on their feet and went off to add their efforts to what they perceived as the cause of freedom. Now, when their sensitivities are selectively stirred, they sit at home and expect their leaders, or someone, to do something. It should not be the task of governments to interfere in locations where their own populations are at no risk. If Israelis are challenged about human rights they often point out that there are many worse than them. Although that distressing justification extended logically would lead the human race back to barbarism, it is also true. If there are considered supra-national needs for involvement, they should be taken up by the UN, in a manner similar to a householder calling law enforcement if a neighbour causes unacceptable disturbance. Anything else is like grabbing a weapon and barging over to sort it out. The fact that Clinton believes promising to bomb Assad in his palace will encourage the US electorate to make her Commander in Chief seems...I can't think of a word...'grotesque' seems too mild.
No offence intended, I assure you. I perfectly understand how you might be reluctant to deploy without local juridical immunity for things like murder, manslaughter, theft, drunken behavior, sex crimes and so on, but the article is about Obama's actions.
But it couldn't matter less what happened. No one is being awarded a grade for veracity. What matters is what is happening. and what will happen when the ballot is done.
Fragmenting responsibility doesn't change the fact that US actions created the conditions that fostered ISIS. The buck stops at the White House. Obama may not personally have initiated those conditions but he might have acted to arrest them, and the argument that he was inhibited by international law doesn't alter that because a superpower only respects international law when it suits. After all, US engagement in Syria is not consistent with international law.
I would demur and suggest the problem is that the US electorate, and by extension the rest of us who have no say in the matter, are confronted with an all but impossible choice. The factors that will determine which way the US electorate leans will more likely be determined by gut feelings than any considered analysis of what the contenders promise. Surely most people know, subliminally anyway, that no politician can be trusted to deliver what is espoused campaigning. You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. You have a pretty good idea what you are in for with Clinton and may simply prefer to gamble on Trump. Maybe a business man would be less compulsively destructive. Perhaps he would be more careful with financial resources, more likely to look for a deal than bomb Assad in his Presidential palace. Perhaps this is one case where the devil you don't know could be better than the one you know only too well. What the hell. What can you lose?
It would never have occurred to me that his remark meant such a thing, and I begin to wonder if all these anti-Trump outpourings may backfire. Few in the UK realized how deeply politicians, banks and big business are distrusted disliked and although those feelings may have focused through the lens of immigration it was basically an 'up yours' vote to the establishment. Such feelings are spreading elsewhere in Europe and could well manifest in support for Trump as there is only a choice between Clinton who wears the establishment hat and Trump who seems not to.
Apparently it was delivered in cash on crates to be sure to arrive before an imminent judgement from the arbitration court.
...we felt it was ... in the interest of the American taxpayers, to save them what could have been billions of dollars had this gone to settlement or adjudication. We felt it was prudent to act and to seize the moment.
Clever? Yes. But is it enough to be clever. Better perhaps long-term to have wooed Tehran with generosity than to have enhanced their distrust and driven them further eastwards.
It's not really a question of supporting Palestinians or anyone else but of not inflaming issues by restraining and undermining the institutions and processes that have been put in place to handle such matters. US Exceptionalism is to all intents a religion, and as dangerous as any other in the hands of fanatics. The US has no longer has the national cohesion it had in '56. Historically such a loss occurs when the people lose a sense of security, and the principal cause of a such a loss has usually been excessive fiscal inequality engendering insecurity and the constant attendant concerns which detract people from the proper enjoyment of the 'simple things of life'. Cohesion would mean agreement on the issues, not on how to deal with them. The current dangerous financial inequality is not even on the agenda, let alone top of it where it should be.
Frankly, it strikes me as perfectly sensible to ask such questions of the relevant experts and, if necessary, follow up with further questions until you are absolutely clear. I would, and Trump has no more experience of such a responsibility than I. Clinton, on the other hand, doubtless 'knows it all' but her record with a previous red button inspires somewhat less than overwhelming confidence. The real problem today is gross fiscal inequality which destroys a nation's cohesion, setting parties, groups, and even individuals against each other in a manner that cannot be mended because the institutions which have presided over the development of the inequality remain in place and are incapable of putting it back. This in the end is why the electoral process has produced such a bleak choice. If Trump does pick up the prize but it will be due to having comparatively fewer negatives.
If people believe something then it functions as 'true' in that their attitudes, and often actions, proceed on the basis of the belief. Beliefs can have effects much deeper than most realise, particularly if held in groups because groups are susceptible to emotional stimulation but not to thought or deliberation, they become like vehicles without breaks or ravenous lions, and you cannot expect reason to affect them. In fact any effort to reason, however well intended, is likely to exacerbate them, arousing them to ever more dangerous levels of potential action. Furthermore, extensive support for the Khans, particularly if extended emotionally, heroism and so on, will simply divert the negativity to the supporters. Not here, but in many comment columns you will find contrary beliefs facing off against each other in vitriolic opposition that were it on a street rather than a page might well lead of bloodshed. Much better ignore it and let it simmer down. Truth will outlast erroneous beliefs.
All human behaviour is essentially the same just as is the behaviour of any species. The value of pure religion is that it reflects the existence of an authority higher than the human. This has been so from time immemorial and has traditionally provided the means by which a nation maintained it's cohesion. It is arguable that the success of Rome arose and was maintained while Numa's Gods were taken seriously and only began to crumble when respect, awe, fear, whatever you like to call it, was diminished, the Emperors deified, and the priesthoods become empty political appointments. It is difficult for us today to understand an absolute conviction in the existence of deity, it appears somewhat eccentric to most Westerners. But it is not necessary to entertain anthropomorphic notions of a deity to realise that without some authority higher than temporal law the maintenance of order will demand the exercise of increasingly draconian powers. Further, it is not possible for a state to have a citizen army, even one engaged at a vast distance, with values different from those at home, the two will have an inexorable nisus to merge, that is not politics but physics. Realities above temporal law exist, our changing climate points us to that. Let us hope that one day we learn to hold our environment, that is all that we are not, in the same reverence our ancestors held their deities because that is exactly what it is. Then the Pope be preaching what is rather than what should be.
His bigoted statements and threats to Muslims do not represent America or its values. They certainly appear to represent a fair number of Americans and their values. After all, who has made him the Republican candidate, it's not as if there was no one else. That's where the tarnish comes from.
All the rest of the world can do is marvel at the dysfunction of such a political system. Neither side seems much concerned with Truth; Trump's elephantine habit of stamping on multiple toes does not automatically ignite any corresponding enthusiasm for Clinton although it is arguable that the general appearance of chaos may enhance Putin's global standing, particularly if he and Assad manage to liberate Aleppo while all this is going on. In the end the authority of leadership is probably always safer in the hands of the candidate possessing the least inclination to pervert it, and stripping all else away does not appear to leave Trump at a disadvantage in that respect. By the way, it was Assange who deliberately chose the timing for the release of the DNC emails, not Russia. All nations with the capacity for that kind of thing hack each other round the clock, and Russia probably has the Republican emails lying around somewhere as well.
One needs be careful not to generalise but I would guess that a serious number of these young men whose lives seem to be pretty bleak are attracted by the prospect of their day in the sun, one recently was an admirer of Breivik, someone he can only have encountered in the media. To an extent media coverage does raise their evil to a level one might compare with the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, and the shock and horror backed with poignant interviews functions as a kind of Attic Chorus while the pattern of media coverage follows a recognisable narrative shape. That is what I think is wrong. However, it's much broader than the coverage of these atrocities, it's hard wired into all mass media coverage of almost anything; media has to be readable, not just a bleak list of happenings. Before mass media and the 'popular' novel, stories and theatre had an identifiable purpose to be morally improving , history was written that way, Herodotus and Plutarch were widely read, Elizabeth I translated Plutarch, and Shakespeare lifted passages almost word for word from his Lives. The tradition is still there in the 18th and early 19th centuries, Tolstoy, Dickens etc. In fact it survived into early Westerns; my grandmother took me to the cinema as a child where she would often fall asleep, and waking ask me “Is that the good posse or the bad posse?” Perhaps Freud broke the pattern by introducing a grey space between good and evil which bred the morally ambiguous characters that fill our media and entertainment today. I don't know, but it can't be as simple as censoring media coverage.
This report treats the same visit but from a very different perspective.
A retired Saudi general visiting Israel this week to promote the Arab Peace Initiative said on Sunday that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would eliminate Iran’s excuse for supporting regional terrorist groups.
Cooperation has always been sensible, and seen to be so by all but those American Exceptionalists for whom Russia and it's allies are heretics fit only for the stake and eternal incineration in Hell. My hunch, mainly based on the evasive circumlocutions of DOS spokespersons, is that it has been inching that way for some time but US amour propre is only prepared to see it in terms of Russia joining the US coalition, not anything mutual and certainly not the other way round. In any event, Erdogan's moves towards rapport with Putin and the publication of the hitherto hidden 28 pages on the KSA and 9/11 may have repositioned the goal posts somewhat.
There is also the question of what the word civilisation means to King since it is used as a blanket term which, while it may have broadly accepted parameters, has myriad, often conflicting, meanings within, some of which are mutually incompatible. It is a concept derived from the evolution of natural law into social or civil law. Natural law relates, of course, to those actions that are assumed, with good evidence, to be 'right' in human behaviour and therefore may be seen as the foundation of the concept of morality. Morality is less a question of what people do or don't do than of what they know deep within that they should or should not do. What civilisation certainly is not is simply the latest stage in the historical transformation of human society which is a process without any inherent qualities. In many areas of the Western world today there is no longer any notion of natural law; permissible behaviour has become almost entirely determined by whether or not actions are specifically prohibited. Again and again we hear the justification that this or that egregious action is not breaking any law. As civil law which is fluid is progressively detached from natural law which is unchanging the more manipulable it becomes. That may be what King means by civilisation but it sure as hell isn't moral.
Are drones really that different from the arrows of the Welsh longbow that decimated the French at Agincourt, or the cannon of Napoleon that ploughed into the sabre wielding Russian cavalry at Borodino, or the bombs that reined down on Dresden, Cologne, Coventry and London when I was a child, or the device that exploded over Hiroshima?
The 'coup' appears to have been somewhat hastily organised considering the relative enormity of the purposed undertaking. Then again, is it likely Turkey's Labor and Social Security Minister would accuse the US (presumably the CIA) of complicity without such a claim being countenanced at the highest level? Tangentially, it is interesting that such a claim, even when sincerely doubted, should be widely received without any meaningful degree of incredulity. The timing of this 'coup' is also fairly acute considering Erdogan's recent moves to improve relations with Russia, Syria and Iran. It's ever dangerous to concentrate on trees and miss the wood but there are an awful lot of odd ones in there. I wonder is it true the US has nuclear warheads at incirlik? If so, they are presumably stuck there for the time being.
Kerry has a punishing schedule and must be completely exhausted. Looks like he simply confused what he can say with Lavrov with what he mustn't say at home. Unmistakable facts were ignored in favour of appearances. Tacitus, Annals
Religion renders acceptable actions which might otherwise give the individual pause and challenge the conscience. A well trodden route to religious aggression lies in many Old Testament stories instilled in most of us from an early age.
Elsewhere I mentioned Europe's growing public disenchantment with US foreign policy. Once that gets a grip on European leaders there may start an irreversible drift away which a Clinton presidency would only exacerbate.
Defeating a platform motion opposing Israeli settlements does not of itself guarantee support for them. However, it does cast a light on the much broader issue of US double standards. The greatest problem for the US in the next administration could prove to be Europe drifting away. The signs are not hard to discern and some of the more aggressive support postured by European leaders could be to balance a growing groundswell of public impatience which at its most basic might be summed up by a quote from a disgruntled UK soldier: Why should we fight America's wars for them. It's scarcely possible the US is unaware of this and some consider the moves to build up NATO are the means by which the US seeks to maintain control of the European theatre.
The war may not be going to 'end' but if there arises a degree of calm sufficient to look at the constitution and hold elections then that surely is positive. And it's an objective Assad has reiterated time and time again. As for Assad himself, I suspect he may be more popular than Kerry would like to know. After all he has stood calm and firm against almost impossible odds, and what you acknowledge as the Christian population of West Aleppo will, I imagine, be fairly grateful. To some he may even be a hero. Wouldn't that be a fly in the ointment.
The game analogy is perhaps a shade misleading. Russia has serious practical concerns about which it has been perfectly clear, the resolution of which it pursues with singular consistency. I don't believe Putin thinks of it as a game. There is nothing he can do about the US and it's coterie, euphemistically termed 'the coalition', but tack this way and that trying to work around them. What the whole thing has illustrated beyond doubt is that if peace in Syria were really the US purpose it would be far better. if it couldn't keep out of the fray altogether, to work with Putin and Assad and clear Syria of all foreign combatants and other armed groups, whether for or against the regime, and then back off and let the Syrians decide how they want to proceed in the future. The US, of course, has a different agenda which is very largely responsible for the protracted loss of life, starvation, and despairing migration of the long suffering population. The US constitution displays many of the weaknesses of late republican Rome in that it evolved to serve the domestic population and proved quite unsuited for running an empire, hence grotesque financial inequality, then anarchy leading to a period of what one might term benevolent fascism, etc. etc...
Trump is a rabble rouser; he rouses rabbles and he's good at it. Rabble rousing is done by provoking certain emotions, the process doesn't have to signify anything, it works like certain kinds of music. People who study the human brain can probably even identify the lobes which respond to his kind of thing. Adolph was good at it. The airport attack was a terrorist action of the kind it's easy for Americans to fear. They've been told Muslims are a dangerous lot so put the two together, stir vigorously, and you there you have it; whatever hold reason might exercise is simply overwhelmed. The problem Trump faces is that the rabbles he rouses are regarded with disdain by a sufficient number of more rational beings. At least one hopes so. And the problem they face I serendipitously found perfectly expressed by an 18th century French aristocrat who, alas, quite literally lost his head: Vous avez besoin d'une des mes maximes qui défend d'employer la raison pour combattre l'humeur.
The 'former British colonies' largely make up the Commonwealth which was a ready made template for a future of peace, trade, and relative tranquillity, but alas beyond the comprehension of the post war Labour government. So it was put on the shelf to gather dust. It still exists, 53 countries with 2.2 billion citizens in peaceful and voluntary non-political association http://thecommonwealth.org/ and if there was such a thing as leadership left in the land it could still be infused with new vitality. The EU is a con trick that usurped the immemorial idea of being European and used appeals of Peace and trade to impose its distant, Kafkaesque authority on 500 million innocents. Most Brexit supporters don't think of it that way, but they sensed that it just isn't 'right'. All the motives the media and talking heads propound are simply different illusions seen in the same dark cloud.
Trumpish Islamophobia had very little to do with it. Most European countries have historical experience of being under the thumb of other European entities, England hasn't since the Norman conquest. Somewhere in there lies a deep rooted distrust of the EU, particularly its German flavour. That has been present since the UK joined and has fluctuated ever upwards since. There has never been any affection for the EU, and that slips easily into disaffection; bits of legislation, reported out of context, attracting risible contempt. Overall, the EU is non-democratic and we have seen its vicious treatment of Southern European populations, particularly Greece, the font of democracy and pre-Christian culture. The initial emphasis on trade was sensible and attractive, but the push towards political significance has had the effect of putting it firmly in the US pocket while removing the flexibility England had relied on since the first Elizabeth. The idiotic stand-off with Russia is a prime example. Immigration doubtless played a part but less perhaps for the fact of it than the sense that it was out of UK control. Add to that obscene wealth distribution, the serious unpopularity of Cameron, and the impertinence of Obama threatening to put the UK at the end of any trade queue and you have a fertile bed for Brexit.
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I don't think this is broadly seen outside the US as a laughing matter, more of a tragedy.
It was not my intention to point a finger, simply to identify the fact that criticism can lead to interference and interference can have negative consequences, not the least of which is moving events that are contained within a country beyond their local boundaries. There are really only two ways to bend peoples to your cultural ideals, by your example or by inducing fear. The difficulties of the first are illustrated by my reference to Kerry's 'embarrassments', and I think few would deny the second is losing traction. I understand those convinced the US holds some kind of global moral high ground feel an imperative to speak up; it is a matter of perspective, freedom of the press is not a moral issue for most of the world, and doesn't become one because the intelligentsia in one group says it is. If, as Kerry does, calling the situation 'worrisome' and expressing 'serious concern' had the potential to reorientate the situation to your perspective, fair enough, but it doesn't. Since, according to Obama, 'universal values and democratic institutions are the core at the NATO alliance' why not instead advocate throwing Turkey out of NATO on the grounds of its non conformity with those values and institutions?
Being bothered how other countries manage their political life is but a short step from trying to make them fall in line with your own. It is a key cause of global unrest and completely ignores the process wherein each stage is simply a link. Evolving processes, like those that take the grub to butterfly, are best left without interference. One of the things Kerry specifically mentioned about the current presidential campaign making his job difficult and embarrassing was the faces of other leaders when he brought up the subject of democracy. Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
There is significant war weariness among people everywhere and it may lead them to feel Trump less obviously likely to maintain US investment in distant military adventures.
I can’t understand why he isn’t mediating this Baghdad-Ankara saber-rattling, which can only benefit the Daesh terrorists. Perhaps because he's too busy gathering up compliments and awards, like the Tipperary International Peace Award, and the Chatham House Prize, to have time for more than the expression of 'serious concern'. Also he has himself confessed that the 'embarrassing' US election has made the job harder, so better perhaps to look for his carpet slippers and leave all that for his successor.
It may not be without some significance that the video of an over excited gentleman promising financial mayhem in the event Trump even gets close to Clinton in the polls is dated May, and here we are six months later continuing our slow stagnation in the same toxic financial morass. There is no earthly reason to assume Trump will actually perform any of the things he promises when even slightly more cerebral politicians rarely if ever do. He will more likely be suborned by the pressure of the financial realities like everyone else. Meanwhile the standard of living of most of the world will continue to decline with attendant environmental, social and infrastructural disintegration.
History does not, of course, repeat itself since it is the study of past events. What such study confirms, however, is that people's needs and reactions are consistent over time, as is the basic pyramidal structure of the groups within which they exist. That is what gives rise to similarities between events and enables those who respect such things to anticipate likely disorders and consider what remedies were employed against their development in the past, or might better have been. The lessons capable of being learned from past events are a cumulative part of our heritage and it is their neglect that results in similar things recurring again and again; the notion of some fateful inevitability called History being responsible is simply a cover for ignorance, or reluctance to learn.
World war means everyone, and these speculations really call for consideration of the role China, and to a somewhat lesser extent Europe, would likely play in any build up to an outright war.
Trump's pronouncement may resonate with those who know nothing about Mosul and care less, but simply think: Here they go again and wish they wouldn't.
This is only meaningful if one believes he would actually try any of these fantasy solutions to a fantasy problem; or is he just shooting off his mouth? Even if he were to attempt such things the effects would be localised within the US itself and wouldn't blow up the world.
It scarcely matters what contestants say these days but it may matter where they come from, and If one ignores all the blather, it does seem Clinton is for more sabre rattling and military involvement and Trump for less.
This is historically familiar. Basically the interests of leaders have diverted from the people to the point that government is no longer of, by, and for them. Not being a US citizen and having anyway little interest in day to day politics, I can't comment on the 'solutions' explored here except to say that they are all intrinsic while one might perhaps also take into account pressures arising from extrinsic forces. As domestic solutions prove elusive, or too long delayed, extrinsic forces become more of a factor. For instance, it's one thing to advocate reining in US overseas activities, quite another to have no option but to do so, which is what happened to Rome from the early 5th century when instead of tribute flowing into its coffers, it was flowing out to maintain what from our perspective might be called distant 'strategic interests' until under the pressure of necessity those interests began bit by bit to be abandoned.
Les forces de sécurité irakiennes ont lancé lundi une offensive d’ampleur pour reprendre Mossoul, deuxième ville d’Irak aux mains des jihadistes de l’organisation État islamique depuis juin 2014. Les ONG et des acteurs politiques s’inquiètent du sort de quelque 1,5 million de civils coincés dans la ville et estiment que l’Irak n’est pas en mesure de gérer le défi humanitaire de leur exode.
http://observers.france24.com/fr/20161018-bataille-milices-mossoul-civils-combats
A defeat for those the US is actively supporting is a defeat for the US objective and, although a small guerilla group cannot match great firepower, it can drive the humanitarian situation up to and even beyond what troubles the world in Aleppo. In fact some are already asking what is the difference, a question from Tuesday's DOS briefing. *
Q: He [Josh Earnest – White House spokesman] said this: They, ISIL, are killing civilians all the time, so the idea that somehow the Iraqi Security Forces should delay this operation because of their concern about the humanitarian situation in Mosul, that doesn’t make sense, end quote. The US. view for eastern Aleppo, as I understand it, is that going after terrorists there is not worth the suffering of civilians. Why the difference in U.S. reaction or approach, please?
A: ...the Iraqi Government is coordinating with regional governments on the ground and with police forces and other security forces to ensure that there’s a system in place to deal with those civilians who might be – might have to flee the violence in Mosul.
Precisely because the US has determined to play a background role it would appear to have no ultimate control over the attack, and although the US insists this is an Iraqi Government operation and it is in charge, and by extension in control, many have doubts how realistic that may prove to be at a practical level.
* http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2016/10/263258.htm#IRAQ
let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out
It was indeed the conflict between rich and poor that fractured the Roman republic. For some 600 years the republic had managed these tensions by adapting its structures, mostly internally, like the introduction of tribunes of the people with authority to override the Senate. Machiavelli proposes that constitutional flexibility was the reason the republic lasted so long, flexibility exercised from the strength of the united plebs. While Rome had only a citizen army the Senate could be, and often was, forced to negotiate. Once that was changed to a standing army, however, their leverage disappeared. Ironically it was Gaius Marius, the people's leader, voted by them seven times Consul, whose 'reforms' to the army brought Rome to the slippery slope that led to the end of the republic. It was the legions that raised Caesar and, after Nero, came to appoint his successors. That could not have happened with a citizen army because the citizen army was the people. Parallels can never be exact but the end of conscription can perhaps be seen as such a loss of leverage; remember the social climate and debate at the time of the Vietnam war?
Might this not be a stage in a process of adjustment rather than the edge of a cliff or the end of a cul de sac. Attempts to analyse these things mostly result in contentious descent into non-contextual detail. However, detail aside, US foreign policy has long been guided by the notion of ruling the world, all its actions have been consciously or intuitively geared to that end. Its people have largely been brought up to that view and it's woven into their attitude towards the world from an early age. This I recognise because I attended a notable public school in the early 1950's and, with hindsight, I see the curriculum there was still in large part designed to produce the next generation to administer the Empire that was already unravelled or unravelling. The US does not really have enemies, those it takes to be such are simply resisting the notion of US world dominance. The US is an essential element in the future stability of the world, no one wants it crushed, but it is not the only element and that is what is proving hard to accept. It would be easier if US leaders had the authority Russian and Chinese leaders have, but it hasn't. What it has is a constitution with a whole series of checks and balances on leaders' decisions designed to safeguard the interests of the domestic population but hopelessly inhibiting when it comes to the devious business of global foreign policy. One can see this with the horror Trump evokes; ask the question, What conceivable difference does it make to the pursuit of US foreign policy if the leader has an appetite to grope? Dag Hammarskjöld was said to have had a thing with Nasser's foreign minister!?! Were Trump president and in Moscow, they might even position suitable ladies within arm's length along with his favourite tipple in the mini bar and then get on with the serious business.
They are natural allies. Trade will determine their future relationship as it always does. Trade, and the increasing US/Russia differences, the hotter the latter get the looser Turkish bonds with the US/NATO block are likely to become because if they get to swords drawn Turkey must side with Russia/China; the odds would be too heavily weighed against a US 'win'. The Syrians, alas, are as blades of grass on a battlefield.
Doubtless, but it was the symbol that set European thought afire. Mathematics became a passion. William Oughtred, Vicar of Albury in Surrey (1574-1660), introduced the multiplication sign and trigonometric identities.
But the tendency to separate people into groups and then denigrate, if not actually attack, others than your own is deeply ingrained. Clinton's 'basket of deplorables' is the mirror image of Trump at the same thing. It's not peculiarly American, Israel is addicted to it. It tends to be cyclical and seems to be resurgent in Europe. Of course it's irrational but the irrational is an absence of reason, not its opposite, and reason is individual, not collective. Ignorance fosters it. When the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth the Western world still employed Roman numerals and counters, which obviated any meaningful calculation. It was the Arabs who provided the world with its greatest key to thought by introducing the symbol for zero. Today it is literally unimaginable where we would be without that key.
This phenomenon, though less advanced, is observable in some European areas. The difference being that it is not unfamiliar in Europe. It arises when leaders lose sight altogether of the interests of the people, and it is resolved with a return to the constitutional or founding principles that gave initial impetus to stability and a period of successful development. The resolution can be brought about either by extrinsic happenstance or intrinsic foresight. The extrinsic does the most damage and may be brewing in Syria where, like a piece on a chess board, China appears to be making moves to cover Russia from being taken. This is not because China has any special relationship with Russia, like the US/Israel 'untill death do us part' thing, but simply because if Russia were broken in a confrontation with the US China would be next in line, so the moves are to avoid rather than precipitate such a development. The intrinsic resolution traditionally demands an individual with wide popular appeal and marked qualities of leadership, think Churchill, Kennedy, Mao, that are not apparent in either of the current electoral contenders. Trump is certainly not such a leader but if people feel him less likely to provoke a confrontation with Russia/China then he might be a better choice since he would at least buy time.
the same way they are liberating Kunduz? http://observers.france24.com/en/20161004-taliban-eyewitness-kunduz-afghanistan-attack?ns_campaign=nl_obs_en&ns_mchannel=email_marketing&ns_source=OBS_40_20161005&ns_linkname=20161004_observers_taliban_eyewitness_kunduz_afghanistan_attack&ns_fee=0&f24_member_id=1088486604173&ns_mail_job=1117018026&ns_mail_uid=1088486604173&ns_robot=partner-emailvision&ns_service=mail
Somewhat tangential, but to the extent these manoeuvrings may be the prelude to a more aggressive US military involvement in the conflict, including attacking more Syrian forces, it is worth considering the role China might be provoked to play. Sputnik has a translation of the gist of a piece by Thierry Meyssan which provides interesting details of China's long-term connections with the Syrian regime and military. https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160831/1044813985/syria-china-cooperation-analysis.html . And further, a bunch of Chinese advisers will apparently shortly be joining Russian troops in the Latakia area http://www.alamongordo.com/china-military-arrive-in-syria-to-help-russia/ . Assad has remained clear that in his government's view, any group taking up arms against the state is not opposition, but terrorist. This definition, which he regards as universal, cannot but also be the view of both Russia and China.
This is the agreement that didn't happen. It's purpose was ambiguous which may well be why Russia dragged its heels and the US was so reluctant to publish the details. Teleologically it would seem to have been set up to feed the escalating stand-off between the US and Russia. It was not an agreement for a ceasefire, it was an agreement between the US and Russia to attempt to get those parties over which each was assumed to have influence to down weapons against all but Daesh and other UN designated 'terrorists'. Well, some of the armed militias over whom the US was supposed to exercise influence distanced themselves from the agreement from day one. From that moment on, while both might still attempt to exercise their influence, the expressed hope for a broad humanitarian ceasefire was no longer on the cards; a one sided ceasefire is not a ceasefire, it's capitulation. It has long been a tenet of US policy that a nation has the right to defend itself, vide Israel, Erdogan, etc., so why not Syria? Therefore, if Syrian forces or positions are attacked they, by logical extension, have a right to resist. Now, like a moth emerging from a cocoon, the US morphs the agreement into one where the parties had agreed to a ceasefire and Russia has broken it's part of the agreement. This is logical nonsense and, quite apart from a casual regret for US/allied slaughter of 60 some odd Syrian soldiers, entirely justifies Russian impatience while adding to broad non-US disenchantment with whatever it is the US is doing. It is unbearably unfortunate for the Syrian people, but this could, together with the current electoral fiasco, and a host of other events worldwide, lead the US to take pause and refresh its founding principles.
It is an interesting exercise but does it not simply work backwards, picking circumstances that preceded Trump's present status to identify as causes of it? It is a mechanistic way of looking at things, arising from a belief that there is no higher perspective and what happens has to be the effect of some identifiable preceding cause. However, there are far too many other evidences that suggest something more significant may be underway of which Trump may simply be a symptom. There has been debate around the concept of an 'end of liberalism' to explain many such phenomena including these 7. The unfortunate thing about such a notion is that it too often becomes a simple debate about whether Western liberalism and its global financial model is or isn't coming to an end when we might be looking for some transformative process, a process that may be speeding up but for which there is no individual or collectively contained cause and therefore no 'cure' beyond the fleeting comforts of nostalgia. There has to be transformation, everything is subject to it, and we cannot tell where it will lead but there seems to be a nisus towards a broader humanitarian perspective and growing environmental awareness. If this should be so it might somewhat explain the vicious and aggressive survival responses of those elements standing in its path.
Many do not believe the attack on the Syrian army was an error, and many others are simply not persuaded that it was 'entirely' an error and figure there must be more to it, and what matters is what people believe, belief is a continuing state, Truth is gone before you take another breath. I haven't seen Maria Zakharova's warning but she comes over as entirely rational, highly competent and ultra professional. If her tone appeared undiplomatic there is a limit to the patience even of a saint, and it can still only have been dulcet compared with the vitriolic outbursts of Susan Power. You may have seen/heard in the NYT the exchange between Kerry and a bunch of Syrians the other day http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/30/world/middleeast/john-kerry-syria-audio.html?_r=0 on which the DOS will not, by the way, comment because it was a 'private' conversation. Well, it ain’t private any longer, and it's the kind of thing that must feed into the Russian perspective on the deteriorating situation, leading them perhaps to believe that the US is contemplating pouring more arms into the area, and the better of two evils may be to go all out to gain Aleppo, and then call that a point at which diplomacy should begin since the alternative looks like something that could blow us all sky high.
Yes, he does. He has a serious military background and is not infrequently critical of Russian policy. He also has a command of facts not unlike the good Dr here. He has, of course, his own perspective, but who does not? See my link above.
No one has accomplished anything in Syria if accomplish implies something beneficial to the Syrian people. They were ripe for a period of ideological and political upheaval which should be familiar to anyone looking objectively at the history of any country that has passed through it. Rarely has it ever proceeded without extreme civil disturbance and citizens butchering each other, but that has always, like the French Revolution, been contained and resolved within the nation's own borders. For a wide variety of reasons the nisus for such political upheaval swept across ME nations at more or less the same time. Left to themselves these internal political processes would likely have largely resolved themselves by now. It is the efforts of outside interests, competing ones in the case of Syria, to influence the outcome by supporting one or other elements in what is, however bloody, a not unfamiliar stage in the process of political evolution, that has thrown each in turn into the chaos we see. Of course the Syrian army is inadequate to resist this chaos*, no small nation maintains an army capable to standing up to such foreign funded invaders, why should it? On the other hand what has been accomplished by all the non-Syrians involved is insensibly to turn Syria into a battlefield for a proxy stand-off between conflicting ideological perceptions of how the globe should be run, and it is perhaps at that level that any Russian accomplishment should be judged.
* https://citeam.org/here-s-why-assad-s-army-can-t-win-the-war-in-syria/
The struggle for women's rights is a an important, but subsidiary, part of the broader process of liberalisation. It will have its opponents in the establishment, and it will take time. It is extremely important that these processes be allowed to evolve internally and at their own pace, that is without interference from places outside where it has already run its course. The lady's incarceration should be a warning; watch but do not interfere; liberalism is evolving in Iran but it's not perhaps yet ready for supra-national feminism.
Iraqis Use 9/11 Bill to Demand Compensation from US for 2003 Invasion https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20161002/1045919157/iraqis-compensation-911-iraq-invasion.html Hey ho, here we go.
This is the sort of thing that can happen when you conduct an expansionist foreign policy on the back of what is primarily a domestic constitution. This is particularly true of the US constitution which owes much to the principles of the French Revolution and the Gracchi brothers. The UK Prime Minister has more authority than the US President because it progressively devolved from an absolute monarchy. The same applies to Russia and China since from the point of view of the citizenry there is not that much difference between Putin and a tsar or Xi Jinping and an emperor. The same dichotomy evolved in Rome, and was one of the underlying causes of the end of that Republic since the citizens were increasingly neglected in favour of the defence of the frontiers and exploitation of the provinces, corruption became rife, the rich got richer and deployed multitudes of slaves so there was little work for ordinary folk whose disgruntlement was exploited by a succession of populist leaders, and eventually Caesar. I am not suggesting the US will follow that path but a lot of the ingredients look similar.
I may have misunderstood but I interpreted the analysis to imply the regime is making significant progress towards what Assad has expressed as the first stage of his overall purpose. That is to clear the place of armed groups and establish a degree of order sufficient to permit the country to function thus creating conditions for the start, and, I hope, successful conclusion of the political settlement process and internal determination of the political future by the Syrian people. (Putin's words). One can only speculate what that future might look like and whether or not it will even include Assad, but for this or that group to lay out preconditions for stage two when stage one remains incomplete can hardly be helpful, particularly when Assad has said quite openly that it is up to the Syrians whether he has a place in their future. I most assuredly do not think he can do no wrong if that is what is meant by drinking coolaid.
What appears to be developing is what Assad has said he seeks, to regain sufficient control and calm to pursue a diplomatic resolution to Syria's underlying political problems. This is not the same as restoration of the status quo ante and there seems to me no reason to suppose it could not accommodate Kurdish aspirations to some acceptable degree. Obviously the regime needed and continues to need the support of its allies since a nation of its size cannot be expected to possess military elements adequate to face the kind of foreign backed interference that has been thrown against it. What is distressing Is the opaque and even ambiguous role the US appears to be playing in relation to this purpose, insisting there is no military solution while actively engaged in seeking just that, a role uncomfortably like that voiced against Israeli behaviour in Palestine, the human rights record of Bahrain, etc., and then there's Susan Power hyperventilating like she's just found a parking ticket on her broom. These are embarrassing to outside observers and undermine respect for US involvement. If, as Dr Cole suggests, Assad may be close to achieving his purpose then so much the better since that should bring in sight an end to all this suffering, the restoration of security, and the return of those Syrian refugees whose presence is surely much needed for any lasting diplomatic resolution.
Very impressive history. Thank you.
Although each has evolved in its own way, the world is replete with situations where the relics of the colonial era and its residual attitudes leave ordinary people unable to pass their brief lives in security and tranquillity. At an earlier stage, Oslo perhaps, the Palestinian issue might have been addressed in isolation but today it's difficult to view it other than as one among many symptoms of a deeper disorder which needs to be cured before any have a chance of resolution. It's easy to see Israel/Palestine, and Syria, for instance, as aspects of a stand-off between the US and Russia, and that would be valid if Russia had the same global ambitions as the US but I believe we are looking at something quite different and the stand-off is actually between the notion of a single global authority and a completely new reality. The background to Orwell's novel is a tripolar world where the three powers live in fluctuating equilibrium because any two can always combine to outface the third. We may be seeing that emerging, Does it not seem likely that if Clinton were, for instance, to decide to confront Russia in an existential military manner, China would enter the fray on Russia's side? Palestine and other conflict areas may have to wait until the US climbs down from its throne and sits at a round table with Russia and China.
Fear is an advanced response to a sense of insecurity and a basic 'animal' survival instinct that, while it can arise both in isolated individuals and groups, requires the application of individual reason to be allayed. There is therefore such a thing as group fear but not, alas, group reason, and this imbalance is known to be politically exploitable.
Most here are local cultural peculiarities, particularly true of suicide which doesn't harm anyone or cost the State anything, but terrorist attacks are assumed to have distant roots and be more concerning, a bit like a lot of broken legs or a few cases of Zika.
You cannot undertake a major offensive like that without a high degree of planning. My suggestion is this has not (yet) happened and it is as you say a mainly political announcement. When Russia entered the Syrian affray even the US was taken by surprise. Is there not something to be learned from that?
It doesn't sound a coherent, carefully planned undertaking, more like a purpose promulgated for its effect on his immediate audience. Besides, even were it meticulously planned, what conceivable benefit could there be in informing Daesh so far in advance. What is particularly disturbing is this attack on the Red Crescent humanitarian convoy coming so swiftly after the coalition bombing of Syrian forces. Again, the US response is to express 'outrage', a knee-jerk emotional reaction, rather than any serious effort to determine who was responsible and why. It appears to some that the US has found itself insensibly coaxed into an agreement with Russia that it now regrets since if effective it would undermine their policy to remove of the Assad government, a policy which although it has sunk to the bottom of most nations' priorities would be politically inconceivable for the US to swallow. Maybe that's why Clinton's expressed purpose is to bomb Assad infrastructure, perhaps she hopes she can kill him in the process and get off the hook that way.
The scepticism expressed in comments here about the 'accident' is widely echoed in media across the world. The qualifying phrase if it was an accident seems to have become firmly attached to the incident. What is not mentioned is the effect this incident will have on the ordinary Syrian population whose enthusiasm for the rebellion may not be as unequivocal as the West thinks it is or should be.
Data from the World Fertility Survey show Syria's fertility rate to be among the highest in the world. Each of the 80 dead and 100 wounded will be from families with around 7* immediate, and vastly more extended, members and since Syria has a conscript army many of those killed will likely have been Sunni. The ripples extending from this event will travel far and the US response (particularly from Susan Power) has distressed many and disgusted some, just look at this from the impressive Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova: https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160919/1045447909/russia-zakharova-embarrassed-syria-power.html
* Said to be the average size of Syrian refugee families arriving in Nova Scotia, and presumably fairly characteristic. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrian-refugees-halifax-housing-families-1.3413716
Mistakes occur but one of this size might have been better handled with a swift call from Obama to Putin. The DOD's attempt to pass some blame to Russia and Syria was absurd, and Samantha Power's histrionic outburst will make it difficult to convince others, not only Syria, that it was a deeply regretted error. Although she is quoted as saying she regretted the loss of life she turned swiftly from the event in question to claim Russia's call for a security council meeting to be a stunt, and then went into a diatribe about Assad's wicked ways. She gives the impression of someone with no grounding in logic unless she studied it to employ rather than abjure its fallacies.
Expect this to unfold as an illustration of yesterday's discussion on facts. The RT report sees this as 'embarrassing' for the US but you can bet the bottom $ that is not the way it will emerge from the DOD or the DOS because the circumstances will not provoke the US to feel 'awkward, self-conscious or ashamed'. At most it will evoke an Olympian 'regrettable' with the non-explicit implication of fault in those on the ground who fail to understand the US purpose to secure humanitarian aid for the starving Syrians and stop Assad from bombing civilians.
Not that he was personally responsible, but ever since Freud there has evolved a grey area between those extremes that had ever satisfied the interpretation of events; either the boy stole the loaf or he didn't; nothing to do with his hunger or the moral condition of his mother. This grey area soon found it's way into literature and other art forms until the earlier extremes more or less disappeared beyond the horizon. Few today are aware of the deep moral attitudes that define classical literature. Later this grey was reinforced by physics with concepts like 'relativity', 'chaos theory' and the 'uncertainty principle'. Today the media and entertainment industry wallow in it, sailing ever closer to what would have been regarded as negative, and the consequence, observed from the outside, can be seen as a morally rootless state, constrained, if at all, by peer pressure only.
Many have been conscious of an evolving disassociation from traditional ideas of reality but it is conceptually elusive and hard to pin down. Spiegel had an interesting reference in a recent article on Merkel:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/refugee-policy-sees-waning-of-power-for-merkel-a-1111668.html#ref=nl-international
Post fact may more meaningfully be seen as post reason or post rational. Facts are necessary for reason but not of emotion which responds to raw input. What is called the Age of Reason is a relatively recent period, and reason anyway has always been the province of a few. It is also a tool, a problem solving tool, and like any tool has fairly specific functions which make its application cumbersome in other areas, like trying to employ it against the Zionist claim their God gave them Palestine. Wars are indeed a kind of entertainment for those who follow them distantly. That is something reason finds uncomfortable because it doesn't known what to do with it. People long functioned without reason by relying on instinct, intuition and accumulated experience and they can do so again. Facts are useful but they are not Holy Grail.
It seems to me the expressed intention of the congregation to set about rebuilding their mosque is an illuminating illustration of their peaceful nature, and an undertaking which their dedication can achieve with joy. Suing Trump on the other hand would be embarking on a not very Islamic process of spiritually withering escalating ugliness and cost.
Reading the Wednesday DOS briefing, it is tempting to discern a US position that is far from straight forward. The Russians are to 'try' to hold Assad, who has accepted the ceasefire, in check from all but ISIS and Nusrah while the US 'tries' the same with the twenty some odd groups of 'moderate' rebels, some of whom have announced they don't accept the ceasefire. A key phrase being: Ultimately, this is self-selection and we’ve talked about this before as well. If the regime or the – certain groups within the moderate opposition don’t comply with the cessation of hostilities, then they’ve identified themselves as not a part of it. So, if the Russians succeed in restraining the government forces and the US fails with the 'moderates', the 'moderates' gain and that is not the 'fault' of the US which has made every effort to hold them back. Could this not be interpreted as a calculated way to continue regime change efforts while nobbling the government's response. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2016/09/261883.htm
The cooking method may be OK but the ingredients are wrong.
Strange how Russian and US interests, or rather those of Putin and Obama, seem to have converged for the time being like leafs on a stream. Obama would presumably like to achieve something not only for his legacy but to avoid his successor having to deal with 'the mess Obama left behind', while Putin, apart from serious local reasons, must be concerned to contemplate what might happen to the world if Clinton should reach the Oval Office and there be no resolution in sight. Meanwhile, momentarily at any rate, Assad's position appears to be getting a degree safer. The whole thing has a curiously Ukrainian feel to it; I am reminded that Roland Dumas, the former French Foreign Minister, a man with a Trump like tendency to make utterances better unuttered, recounted how Syrian regime change was being hatched back in 2009. NSNBC quoted him:
http://nsnbc.me/2013/06/16/dumas-top-british-officials-confessed-to-syria-war-plans-two-years-before-arab-spring/
Blair, of course, was UK PM at that time
The whole world must welcome it. The situation is deplorable. While everyone concentrates of Aleppo there are other areas where besieged Syrians are dying. To make the ousting of Assad a priority above saving their lives is simply unconscionable. If there really are 'armed moderates' then as human beings and Syrians they might consider joining the Syrian forces and cooperating to get rid Daesh etc. together. Successful cooperation between opponents in a higher cause where their interests unite often serves to take heat out of subsequent dealings.
Is there something fallen off the end of the last paragraph?
It has been long perceived that Rome's move from a citizen to a standing army, initiated by Marius at the end of the 2nd century BC, marks the point from which the ancient republican democracy headed towards the empire, and your Founding Fathers were likely well grounded in Roman history and had good reason to seek to avoid that irreversible development.
It's hardly an alliance. The US and Russia are likely to reach fragile accord on specific matters from time to time but deep down they will always remain separate, the same with China. What will be interesting is the European/Russian future. The current stand-off is a US construct with no real roots whereas there have been European/Russian historical and cultural associations since the early 18th century and they are reawakening after the tumults of the 20th century. The last Empress of Russia was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and her remains were reburied in Saint Petersburg in 1998. The Duke of Edinburgh is the grandson of a Russian Grand Duchess married to the King of Greece. The Greeks are shortly to raise a monument to her in Thessaloniki. Russian culture, literature, theatre and ballet, have had great influence in Europe as has European culture in Russia. These reflect roots that survive passing political vicissitudes. A Russian gas pipeline is mooted to pass through Turkey and on to Greece and Italy. The Germans and French have suffered quite enough economically from Russian sanctions as have many other Europeans and they are chafing at the bit. That is the space to watch.
The Russians have previously complained that the rebels used earlier ceasefires to resupply and re-equip their adherents, and it may be significant that during the last week the government regained control from the rebels of various areas including the Ramouseh suburb of Aleppo, which I understand to be a route into the besieged area, and is presumably now in a position to monitor it for such misuse.
I can see how a successful campaign in Mosul might burnish Obama's legacy, but not how it would benefit Clinton in November. The Libertarian candidate didn't apparently know where Aleppo is, and Trump, when asked by Larry King if he thought that might have an impact on his supporters, said he frankly didn't think so.
It seems to me no bad thing to let them rabbit on like that. It exposes the reality of the bleak choice US democracy has before it, and might make a few think seriously about how that has come about and the level of responsibility they might themselves bear for it. Besides, for an anchor like Lauer to pose challenging questions pre-supposes that there exists some more coherent way for the US to pursue the goal of subduing all mankind with its exceptionalism when it is the patent absurdity of persisting in such a purpose that creates the difficulties the ME faces, particularly when the results of the endeavour are of no benefit to ordinary Americans whose security, economic stability, freedom, and confidence have diminished the while; it would be like seeking their policies for swimming up Everest. Dr Cole refers to their Alice in Wonderland statements. Or Alice through the Looking Glass?
I didn't read Javad Zarif's comment as calling Saudis terror masters. He says 'Saudi terror masters' and, with respect, there are terror masters partout but he is specifically referring to the Saudi ones and including them with the Wahhabi top cleric.
We have perhaps arrived at a stage in the evolution of US foreign policy mapped in Emmanuel Todd's 2003 book 'After the Empire' (Après l'Empire) in which he describes the likely solution for the US' economic dependence as A global theatre of dramatised militarism designed to keep the US, at least symbolically, at the centre of the world. Page 21 of the introduction which can be found on Amazon 'look inside' https://www.amazon.com/After-Empire-Breakdown-Perspectives-Criticism/dp/023113102X. outlines three stages we can recognise. Much has changed since 2003 but Emmanuel Todd's perspective is still instructive.
I wouldn't have much faith in it. The condition of the Syrian victims of this mess is not the top US priority nor the Russian one either for that matter. That is largely window dressing. The same basic positions persist. There is a face off, transparently expressed in Lavrov's statement:
Nothing could be more clear. Then again, as the Dr Cole writes ...the Pentagon is grumpy about having to work with Russia at all and doesn’t trust it . Taking that to be so absolutely confirms the importance of priorities other than the condition of the Syrians.
The Pope cries in the wilderness. I have long pondered the decline of morality in the Western world and found no simple answer. In Hellenic days, and in the pre-Christian Roman era, any one of the innumerable 'natural' disasters that have befallen our world would have been attributed to some offence offered the Gods, and oracles, priests, the Sibylline Books, would have been consulted to seek the nature of the offence and the required remedy. Today, with an arrogance not even the most powerful ruler of those eras would have assumed, all is taken to be 'man made' and by extension correctable by man alone. That is what is leading us towards Armageddon, an absence of awareness, of reverence, of respect for anything higher than mankind, and then not even all mankind but just selective members of it. These are the deep rooted attitudes that deter and exclude the wise from seeking office, and they are vividly reflected in the bleak choice facing the US electorate today. Mammon has brought the human race and much else of Earth's life to the edge of extinction. It is already uprooting millions from the Earth's more arid areas and fracturing carefully balanced social systems. I doubt it is reversible.
The basic distinction is not how brutal a regime may be domestically but the extent to which it exports brutality. From this standpoint the activities of the Syrian regime or Mugabe confine such activities within their own borders while the Israelis, for instance, deploy almost all their brutality on their neighbours. Although this may be perceived as an issue of 'morality', it is not itself a moral issue, it is one of simple facts. The US diverges from other nations in considering itself entitled, when so inclined, to play prosecutor and judge, and to administer direct retributive responses through methods such as those outlined in Dr Cole's opening paragraphs. China doesn't do that, Russia doesn't either, in fact no other nation does, and those Europeans and others who tag along with the US wouldn't either were they not variously coerced. The traditional way to deal with behaviour considered unacceptable, ostracisation, can be anything from a personal or group decision to have nothing to do with the offender, all the way through to sanctions, and movements such as BDS. The simple answer to your question, Why is it OUR prerogative to determine who is brutal and has to go and who doesn’t? is that it is not a your prerogative, it is an entirely self-assumed condition that appears to many not only ill-considered but a real threat to vast areas of our world since its effects have a tendency to open Pandora's boxes in a viral manner. This is the reason why many outside the US loop are genuinely concerned about Clinton and regard Trump as the distinct lesser of two evils, concerns that are fertilising right wing movements that are threatening to fracture the integrity of many, particularly European, democracies. http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160901/1044836036/clinton-war-france-national-front.html
This sort of thing often happens, and not only to the US. When I was a young British Army officer in Malaya in the 1950s we were up against 'communist terrorists' we had armed to fight the Japanese. When captured they not infrequently still had their British issued weapons. Traditionally these transformations are sequential in time, the difference here is they have become concurrent. There must be a moral in there somewhere. If you must fight, do it yourself?
Whatever happened on Biden's recent visit to Turkey? Some are speculating he may have had to sacrifice the Kurds to Erdogan for the sake of NATO.
Putin, Erdogan and Assad seem all to have clear cut priorities in Syria which do not actually conflict one with the other while the US appears to be out of that loop, mainly still hankering to eliminate Assad but with so many concerns elsewhere that that purpose is little more than a cloudy dream. Also, all three of them rule in the old fashioned sense of the word and can eliminate opposition, switch allies, and manoeuvre quickly and decisively whereas Obama is constrained by constitutional circumstances better suited perhaps to dealing with domestic rather than shifting global issues.
It does appear that Erdogan, for all the criticism he receives, is plotting a neat course between Russia and the US while remaining popular at home, eliminating opposition, and having a good go at the Kurds. Some of his actions do get 'tut tuts' from the West but I don't imagine that bothers him any more than it does Netanyahu. The media coverage of events get these days gives people the sense that they are living History. It is an illusion, History is the selective interpretation of the past, and closer to acting than being.
They are not mutually exclusive. I suspect Daesh to get a Russian umbrella over the gas pipeline and mollify Washington, and the Kurds to protect the homeland and mollify Assad. Whatever it is one should not look for consistency. By the bye, I suspect that for all his huffing and puffing he is quite happy for the US to prevaricate over extraditing Gulen. That does him no harm in the home market.
The issue surely is not whether he will succeed or not but what he may be trying to do. If he fails he will likely lose his head, but if he prospers...
...and, before I forget it, he appears to be eliminating all serious opposition, a classic procedure when embarked on such a purpose, identified in Herodotus' story of the tyrant of Miletus' advice to Periander of Corinth, and later recommended by none other than Machiavelli himself.
What about the Ottomans and the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent whose tomb they appear to have found in Hungary and which Erdogan dubbed a neo-Ottoman due to his reverence for the nation's imperial past and desire to extend its geopolitical influence* has already visited twice and plans to return for a commemoration next month?
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/08/hungary-unearthing-suleiman-magnificent-tomb-160814120849950.html
A presidential Turkey seems a perfectly reasonable aspiration, no worse than a democracy with little or no ability to influence or veto the decisions of it's leaders. Turkey is in a situation not altogether dissimilar from England in the early 16th century needing to survive between both Spain and France. Besides, it is more consistent with Turkey's historical past and all nations have a tendency to function better if their roots are respected. The purpose of any foreign policy whether for aggrandizement or survival is the comfort and contentment of its domestic population, and while that is its outcome it all works fine. What it is not supposed to do is cost that population its wealth, tranquillity and security. If that does become the result then it is a failure and only when it fails is it brought into scrutiny and question. Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason and the same can be said of any otherwise 'questionable' pursuits and policies.
These things are always reported from a plateau of high moral principle. Unfortunately that is not the way the world is, and although the reports themselves evoke appalled reactions in many they have no other effect. There are laws but they are little more than guidance as too many nations pay no attention to them, unrepentant individuals too like that arrogant swimmer. Any sane individual knows that pouring billions of classy weapons into an area of contesting nations guarantees they will be used with these results. If there is any sentient matter out there in the cosmos what is happening on Earth must be a developing concern.
As the Asia Times piece (quoted above) says Turkey, Iran, Russia and China – have one thing in common in geopolitical terms – a shared interest or even need to push back at the US, each for its own reasons, though. This can be true however temporary; a guard and his handcuffed prisoner can develop a shared interest on a hijacked plane. Assad anyway wants to clear Syria of all armed groups not actually on his side and the Kurds fall into that category. He is the legitimate ruler of Syria, whether the world likes it or not, just as Caligula was the legitimate Emperor of Rome.
http://atimes.com/2016/08/hello-want-to-push-back-at-uncle-sam-go-to-syria/
Any large power's foreign policy is like a set of Russian dolls, each nested within another. The background of Orwell's 1984 has the globe controlled by three powers in a state of fluctuating equilibrium with any two always ready to ally to outface the third. Could we be seeing this emerging? http://sputniknews.com/cartoons/20160816/1044331044/russia-china-alliance-us-thaad.html
Not all Russian actions are moves in a game with the US. I would imagine the Russians decided to fly from Iran for purely practical reasons and obviously the new arrangements they are forging with Tehran made this possible, then to avoid prior input from the US they decided to cut notice as short as possible. This suggests two realities. First they are operating to their own plan and want to get on with it, and that they pretty well knew how the US would play it and had no inclination to go down that path, particularly as they are already involved in a protracted back and forth over the ceasefire. On the other hand the US sees everything in terms of their interests and it's clear from the exchanges in the DOS briefing yesterday that they were caught short on this one and are not sure how to respond to a fait accompli that might make any arrangement with Russia look like a US/Russia/Iran partnership. It would not surprise me if Russia's overwhelming priority right now is to get a level of stability in Syria that allows some meaningful political developments to be underway before whichever candidate reaches the Oval Office.
Trump is demagogic and perfectly capable of expressing mutually exclusive views none of which he holds with any meaningful conviction. He is not a strategist so you cannot foretell what he might do or say from one minute to the next, he simply has one objective, to win, a characteristic he might be thought to share with Putin. Politicians wooing the public and then turning away from them in office is as old as society. Cuomo's, You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose, is an echo of an early Roman proverb that men have one mind in the market place, another in the palace. An advantage of history is the way it illuminates the unchanging nature of human behaviour, and the inexorable consequences of certain recognisable processes. The real division in US society may have little to do with Muslims who are simply the focus of a deeper social discontent, founded on grotesque financial inequality and its attendant insecurities, that Trump seems to have found a way to tap, and what we see may be closer to the rise of Peisistratos, the Marius/Sylla conflict, the circumstances that brought Caesar to power, that overthrew the French and Russian monarchies, all based on financial inequality. If that is so, the more Trump is dismissed and vilified, however worthily, may simply serve to harden his support, and poll results showing him losing favour could be misleading since, like the UK Brexit, many who say they oppose him may turn out to be closet supporters.
During the Spanish civil war, which had horrors quite as poignant as Syria, individuals from many countries, including the US, got on their feet and went off to add their efforts to what they perceived as the cause of freedom. Now, when their sensitivities are selectively stirred, they sit at home and expect their leaders, or someone, to do something. It should not be the task of governments to interfere in locations where their own populations are at no risk. If Israelis are challenged about human rights they often point out that there are many worse than them. Although that distressing justification extended logically would lead the human race back to barbarism, it is also true. If there are considered supra-national needs for involvement, they should be taken up by the UN, in a manner similar to a householder calling law enforcement if a neighbour causes unacceptable disturbance. Anything else is like grabbing a weapon and barging over to sort it out. The fact that Clinton believes promising to bomb Assad in his palace will encourage the US electorate to make her Commander in Chief seems...I can't think of a word...'grotesque' seems too mild.
No offence intended, I assure you. I perfectly understand how you might be reluctant to deploy without local juridical immunity for things like murder, manslaughter, theft, drunken behavior, sex crimes and so on, but the article is about Obama's actions.
But it couldn't matter less what happened. No one is being awarded a grade for veracity. What matters is what is happening. and what will happen when the ballot is done.
Fragmenting responsibility doesn't change the fact that US actions created the conditions that fostered ISIS. The buck stops at the White House. Obama may not personally have initiated those conditions but he might have acted to arrest them, and the argument that he was inhibited by international law doesn't alter that because a superpower only respects international law when it suits. After all, US engagement in Syria is not consistent with international law.
I would demur and suggest the problem is that the US electorate, and by extension the rest of us who have no say in the matter, are confronted with an all but impossible choice. The factors that will determine which way the US electorate leans will more likely be determined by gut feelings than any considered analysis of what the contenders promise. Surely most people know, subliminally anyway, that no politician can be trusted to deliver what is espoused campaigning. You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. You have a pretty good idea what you are in for with Clinton and may simply prefer to gamble on Trump. Maybe a business man would be less compulsively destructive. Perhaps he would be more careful with financial resources, more likely to look for a deal than bomb Assad in his Presidential palace. Perhaps this is one case where the devil you don't know could be better than the one you know only too well. What the hell. What can you lose?
It would never have occurred to me that his remark meant such a thing, and I begin to wonder if all these anti-Trump outpourings may backfire. Few in the UK realized how deeply politicians, banks and big business are distrusted disliked and although those feelings may have focused through the lens of immigration it was basically an 'up yours' vote to the establishment. Such feelings are spreading elsewhere in Europe and could well manifest in support for Trump as there is only a choice between Clinton who wears the establishment hat and Trump who seems not to.
Apparently it was delivered in cash on crates to be sure to arrive before an imminent judgement from the arbitration court.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2016/08/260841.htm#IRAN
Clever? Yes. But is it enough to be clever. Better perhaps long-term to have wooed Tehran with generosity than to have enhanced their distrust and driven them further eastwards.
It's not really a question of supporting Palestinians or anyone else but of not inflaming issues by restraining and undermining the institutions and processes that have been put in place to handle such matters. US Exceptionalism is to all intents a religion, and as dangerous as any other in the hands of fanatics. The US has no longer has the national cohesion it had in '56. Historically such a loss occurs when the people lose a sense of security, and the principal cause of a such a loss has usually been excessive fiscal inequality engendering insecurity and the constant attendant concerns which detract people from the proper enjoyment of the 'simple things of life'. Cohesion would mean agreement on the issues, not on how to deal with them. The current dangerous financial inequality is not even on the agenda, let alone top of it where it should be.
Frankly, it strikes me as perfectly sensible to ask such questions of the relevant experts and, if necessary, follow up with further questions until you are absolutely clear. I would, and Trump has no more experience of such a responsibility than I. Clinton, on the other hand, doubtless 'knows it all' but her record with a previous red button inspires somewhat less than overwhelming confidence. The real problem today is gross fiscal inequality which destroys a nation's cohesion, setting parties, groups, and even individuals against each other in a manner that cannot be mended because the institutions which have presided over the development of the inequality remain in place and are incapable of putting it back. This in the end is why the electoral process has produced such a bleak choice. If Trump does pick up the prize but it will be due to having comparatively fewer negatives.
If people believe something then it functions as 'true' in that their attitudes, and often actions, proceed on the basis of the belief. Beliefs can have effects much deeper than most realise, particularly if held in groups because groups are susceptible to emotional stimulation but not to thought or deliberation, they become like vehicles without breaks or ravenous lions, and you cannot expect reason to affect them. In fact any effort to reason, however well intended, is likely to exacerbate them, arousing them to ever more dangerous levels of potential action. Furthermore, extensive support for the Khans, particularly if extended emotionally, heroism and so on, will simply divert the negativity to the supporters. Not here, but in many comment columns you will find contrary beliefs facing off against each other in vitriolic opposition that were it on a street rather than a page might well lead of bloodshed. Much better ignore it and let it simmer down. Truth will outlast erroneous beliefs.
All human behaviour is essentially the same just as is the behaviour of any species. The value of pure religion is that it reflects the existence of an authority higher than the human. This has been so from time immemorial and has traditionally provided the means by which a nation maintained it's cohesion. It is arguable that the success of Rome arose and was maintained while Numa's Gods were taken seriously and only began to crumble when respect, awe, fear, whatever you like to call it, was diminished, the Emperors deified, and the priesthoods become empty political appointments. It is difficult for us today to understand an absolute conviction in the existence of deity, it appears somewhat eccentric to most Westerners. But it is not necessary to entertain anthropomorphic notions of a deity to realise that without some authority higher than temporal law the maintenance of order will demand the exercise of increasingly draconian powers. Further, it is not possible for a state to have a citizen army, even one engaged at a vast distance, with values different from those at home, the two will have an inexorable nisus to merge, that is not politics but physics. Realities above temporal law exist, our changing climate points us to that. Let us hope that one day we learn to hold our environment, that is all that we are not, in the same reverence our ancestors held their deities because that is exactly what it is. Then the Pope be preaching what is rather than what should be.
His bigoted statements and threats to Muslims do not represent America or its values. They certainly appear to represent a fair number of Americans and their values. After all, who has made him the Republican candidate, it's not as if there was no one else. That's where the tarnish comes from.
All the rest of the world can do is marvel at the dysfunction of such a political system. Neither side seems much concerned with Truth; Trump's elephantine habit of stamping on multiple toes does not automatically ignite any corresponding enthusiasm for Clinton although it is arguable that the general appearance of chaos may enhance Putin's global standing, particularly if he and Assad manage to liberate Aleppo while all this is going on. In the end the authority of leadership is probably always safer in the hands of the candidate possessing the least inclination to pervert it, and stripping all else away does not appear to leave Trump at a disadvantage in that respect. By the way, it was Assange who deliberately chose the timing for the release of the DNC emails, not Russia. All nations with the capacity for that kind of thing hack each other round the clock, and Russia probably has the Republican emails lying around somewhere as well.
One needs be careful not to generalise but I would guess that a serious number of these young men whose lives seem to be pretty bleak are attracted by the prospect of their day in the sun, one recently was an admirer of Breivik, someone he can only have encountered in the media. To an extent media coverage does raise their evil to a level one might compare with the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, and the shock and horror backed with poignant interviews functions as a kind of Attic Chorus while the pattern of media coverage follows a recognisable narrative shape. That is what I think is wrong. However, it's much broader than the coverage of these atrocities, it's hard wired into all mass media coverage of almost anything; media has to be readable, not just a bleak list of happenings. Before mass media and the 'popular' novel, stories and theatre had an identifiable purpose to be morally improving , history was written that way, Herodotus and Plutarch were widely read, Elizabeth I translated Plutarch, and Shakespeare lifted passages almost word for word from his Lives. The tradition is still there in the 18th and early 19th centuries, Tolstoy, Dickens etc. In fact it survived into early Westerns; my grandmother took me to the cinema as a child where she would often fall asleep, and waking ask me “Is that the good posse or the bad posse?” Perhaps Freud broke the pattern by introducing a grey space between good and evil which bred the morally ambiguous characters that fill our media and entertainment today. I don't know, but it can't be as simple as censoring media coverage.
This report treats the same visit but from a very different perspective.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-israel-ex-saudi-general-says-palestinian-state-would-curb-iran-aggression/
Cooperation has always been sensible, and seen to be so by all but those American Exceptionalists for whom Russia and it's allies are heretics fit only for the stake and eternal incineration in Hell. My hunch, mainly based on the evasive circumlocutions of DOS spokespersons, is that it has been inching that way for some time but US amour propre is only prepared to see it in terms of Russia joining the US coalition, not anything mutual and certainly not the other way round. In any event, Erdogan's moves towards rapport with Putin and the publication of the hitherto hidden 28 pages on the KSA and 9/11 may have repositioned the goal posts somewhat.
There is also the question of what the word civilisation means to King since it is used as a blanket term which, while it may have broadly accepted parameters, has myriad, often conflicting, meanings within, some of which are mutually incompatible. It is a concept derived from the evolution of natural law into social or civil law. Natural law relates, of course, to those actions that are assumed, with good evidence, to be 'right' in human behaviour and therefore may be seen as the foundation of the concept of morality. Morality is less a question of what people do or don't do than of what they know deep within that they should or should not do. What civilisation certainly is not is simply the latest stage in the historical transformation of human society which is a process without any inherent qualities. In many areas of the Western world today there is no longer any notion of natural law; permissible behaviour has become almost entirely determined by whether or not actions are specifically prohibited. Again and again we hear the justification that this or that egregious action is not breaking any law. As civil law which is fluid is progressively detached from natural law which is unchanging the more manipulable it becomes. That may be what King means by civilisation but it sure as hell isn't moral.
He doesn't strike me as much of a Christian, more like an American Exceptionalist.
Are drones really that different from the arrows of the Welsh longbow that decimated the French at Agincourt, or the cannon of Napoleon that ploughed into the sabre wielding Russian cavalry at Borodino, or the bombs that reined down on Dresden, Cologne, Coventry and London when I was a child, or the device that exploded over Hiroshima?
The 'coup' appears to have been somewhat hastily organised considering the relative enormity of the purposed undertaking. Then again, is it likely Turkey's Labor and Social Security Minister would accuse the US (presumably the CIA) of complicity without such a claim being countenanced at the highest level? Tangentially, it is interesting that such a claim, even when sincerely doubted, should be widely received without any meaningful degree of incredulity. The timing of this 'coup' is also fairly acute considering Erdogan's recent moves to improve relations with Russia, Syria and Iran. It's ever dangerous to concentrate on trees and miss the wood but there are an awful lot of odd ones in there. I wonder is it true the US has nuclear warheads at incirlik? If so, they are presumably stuck there for the time being.
Kerry has a punishing schedule and must be completely exhausted. Looks like he simply confused what he can say with Lavrov with what he mustn't say at home. Unmistakable facts were ignored in favour of appearances. Tacitus, Annals
Religion renders acceptable actions which might otherwise give the individual pause and challenge the conscience. A well trodden route to religious aggression lies in many Old Testament stories instilled in most of us from an early age.
Elsewhere I mentioned Europe's growing public disenchantment with US foreign policy. Once that gets a grip on European leaders there may start an irreversible drift away which a Clinton presidency would only exacerbate.
Defeating a platform motion opposing Israeli settlements does not of itself guarantee support for them. However, it does cast a light on the much broader issue of US double standards. The greatest problem for the US in the next administration could prove to be Europe drifting away. The signs are not hard to discern and some of the more aggressive support postured by European leaders could be to balance a growing groundswell of public impatience which at its most basic might be summed up by a quote from a disgruntled UK soldier: Why should we fight America's wars for them. It's scarcely possible the US is unaware of this and some consider the moves to build up NATO are the means by which the US seeks to maintain control of the European theatre.
The war may not be going to 'end' but if there arises a degree of calm sufficient to look at the constitution and hold elections then that surely is positive. And it's an objective Assad has reiterated time and time again. As for Assad himself, I suspect he may be more popular than Kerry would like to know. After all he has stood calm and firm against almost impossible odds, and what you acknowledge as the Christian population of West Aleppo will, I imagine, be fairly grateful. To some he may even be a hero. Wouldn't that be a fly in the ointment.
The game analogy is perhaps a shade misleading. Russia has serious practical concerns about which it has been perfectly clear, the resolution of which it pursues with singular consistency. I don't believe Putin thinks of it as a game. There is nothing he can do about the US and it's coterie, euphemistically termed 'the coalition', but tack this way and that trying to work around them. What the whole thing has illustrated beyond doubt is that if peace in Syria were really the US purpose it would be far better. if it couldn't keep out of the fray altogether, to work with Putin and Assad and clear Syria of all foreign combatants and other armed groups, whether for or against the regime, and then back off and let the Syrians decide how they want to proceed in the future. The US, of course, has a different agenda which is very largely responsible for the protracted loss of life, starvation, and despairing migration of the long suffering population. The US constitution displays many of the weaknesses of late republican Rome in that it evolved to serve the domestic population and proved quite unsuited for running an empire, hence grotesque financial inequality, then anarchy leading to a period of what one might term benevolent fascism, etc. etc...
Trump is a rabble rouser; he rouses rabbles and he's good at it. Rabble rousing is done by provoking certain emotions, the process doesn't have to signify anything, it works like certain kinds of music. People who study the human brain can probably even identify the lobes which respond to his kind of thing. Adolph was good at it. The airport attack was a terrorist action of the kind it's easy for Americans to fear. They've been told Muslims are a dangerous lot so put the two together, stir vigorously, and you there you have it; whatever hold reason might exercise is simply overwhelmed. The problem Trump faces is that the rabbles he rouses are regarded with disdain by a sufficient number of more rational beings. At least one hopes so. And the problem they face I serendipitously found perfectly expressed by an 18th century French aristocrat who, alas, quite literally lost his head: Vous avez besoin d'une des mes maximes qui défend d'employer la raison pour combattre l'humeur.
The 'former British colonies' largely make up the Commonwealth which was a ready made template for a future of peace, trade, and relative tranquillity, but alas beyond the comprehension of the post war Labour government. So it was put on the shelf to gather dust. It still exists, 53 countries with 2.2 billion citizens in peaceful and voluntary non-political association http://thecommonwealth.org/ and if there was such a thing as leadership left in the land it could still be infused with new vitality. The EU is a con trick that usurped the immemorial idea of being European and used appeals of Peace and trade to impose its distant, Kafkaesque authority on 500 million innocents. Most Brexit supporters don't think of it that way, but they sensed that it just isn't 'right'. All the motives the media and talking heads propound are simply different illusions seen in the same dark cloud.
Trumpish Islamophobia had very little to do with it. Most European countries have historical experience of being under the thumb of other European entities, England hasn't since the Norman conquest. Somewhere in there lies a deep rooted distrust of the EU, particularly its German flavour. That has been present since the UK joined and has fluctuated ever upwards since. There has never been any affection for the EU, and that slips easily into disaffection; bits of legislation, reported out of context, attracting risible contempt. Overall, the EU is non-democratic and we have seen its vicious treatment of Southern European populations, particularly Greece, the font of democracy and pre-Christian culture. The initial emphasis on trade was sensible and attractive, but the push towards political significance has had the effect of putting it firmly in the US pocket while removing the flexibility England had relied on since the first Elizabeth. The idiotic stand-off with Russia is a prime example. Immigration doubtless played a part but less perhaps for the fact of it than the sense that it was out of UK control. Add to that obscene wealth distribution, the serious unpopularity of Cameron, and the impertinence of Obama threatening to put the UK at the end of any trade queue and you have a fertile bed for Brexit.