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By Afro-Middle East Centre

The Iraqi army’s assault on the city of Fallujah held by the Islamic State group (IS) has ground to a halt in light of fierce house-to-house fighting with IS fighters. The city has been under IS control since January 2014, with 90 000 civilians trapped inside. Some 20 000 civilians fled during the first few weeks of the fighting, which began on 25 May, through IS lines, dodging Iraqi army fire, and even swimming the Euphrates river. In the initial push towards Fallujah, the Popular Mobilisation Forces (Hashd al-Sha’bi) were at the forefront of the battle. These Shi’a militias have been accused of numerous human rights violations against Sunni communities, since their cooption by Baghdad in the fight against IS.

Merely fifty kilometres north of Baghdad, Fallujah is strategically important to the Iraqi capital. IS has used it as a staging ground for infiltrating the capital, and executing attacks that have sapped confidence in the government’s ability to provide security. The manner in which Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi retakes Fallujah and returns it to Baghdad’s authority will serve as the template for the Iraqi army’s impending assault on Mosul, which will be conducted in coordination with Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The battle of Fallujah also represents an internal political issue for Iraq’s Shi’a political class. The successes of the Badr Brigade, a Shi’a militia with strong links to Tehran, in securing Baghdad and beating back IS from Diyala province has provided Badr leader Hadi al-Ameri with significant political capital. Meanwhile the protest movement in Baghdad against corruption and poor service delivery threatens to de-legitimise Abadi’s fledgling government.

The inability of Iraqi forces to coordinate with Sunni tribal leaders – who the government had alienated through heavily sectarian security measures – granted IS the ability to consolidate its control over Fallujah in 2014. In light of the failures leading up to the fall of Fallujah, the government has recently worked to increase coordination with Sunni tribes and militias in battles to retake territory seized by IS since mid-2014. This coordination is a conscious attempt by Abadi to provide a united national front against IS, exemplified through the increasing purchase Sunni tribes and militias have over Baghdad’s approach to retaking Sunni areas. Sunni tribes have called on the government to reign in Popular Mobilisation Forces in the Fallujah assault. Abadi had attempted to hold them on the outskirts of the city. In the days leading up to the current assault, reports of abuses by these forces against Sunni civilians in the liberated areas south of Fallujah prompted Anbar’s Provincial Council to call on ‘sectarian factions [to keep] away from the battle of Fallujah’. In light of these abuses, Abadi also ordered the government to prosecute fighters accused of committing violations.

Within the Shi’a political class, Abadi is on the back foot. The Badr Brigade has become a prominent force within Iraqi politics through its successes against IS. Badr’s political front, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, is poised to become kingmaker in Iraqi elections. This party receives much financial support from Tehran, and uses its control of Diyala province to exhibit its potential as a ruling partner. Meanwhile, the Sadrist camp, led by influential Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, seized upon the May protests in Baghdad’s Green Zone to demand the prime minister changes his cabinet to a technocratic one, eradicates corruption, and enhances service delivery. Sadr and Abadi support the incorporation of the Popular Mobilisation Forces into the Iraqi army, a move opposed by Badr head Ameri. Other militia leaders echo this.

The battle for Fallujah will be a protracted engagement for Iraqi national forces, is becoming increasingly bloody as Iraqi forces get closer to the centre where IS militants are holed up, allegedly using civilians as human shields. Abadi knows that using the militias will grant political points to his rivals. However, these forces have proved effective at clearing and occupying rural zones around contested cities. Abadi thus devised a formula in which Popular Mobilisation Forces are held at the outskirts to prevent IS reinforcements entering the cities, but play no visible role in the liberation of the city. This is a positive development in the battle against IS. The perception of the Iraqi army as liberators in Sunni Fallujah will assist in the pursuit of national unity. Success could guarantee Abadi’s administration the popular support it drastically needs.

16 June 2016

By Thomas Gaist

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is sending 4,000 additional troops to Eastern Europe in the name of reassuring Poland and the Baltic states, the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed on Monday. “We will agree to deploy by rotation four robust multi-national battalions in the Baltic states and Poland,” Stoltenberg told NATO officials.

The US, Germany and Britain will each contribute 1,000 soldiers, with Canada expected to confirm its own contingent of 1,000. The deployments are among the most provocative actions taken by the NATO high command in the course of its anti-Russian buildup, now well into its second year. With ever greater recklessness, the US and European ruling elites are sowing the seeds of war across the width and breadth of the Eurasian landmass.

The announcement of new troop deployments comes in the midst of Operation Anaconda 2016, involving more than 30,000 NATO forces in the biggest war drill held in Poland since the end of the Second World War. Some 12,500 of the 30,000 soldiers are American.

In Eastern Europe, under the guise of “rotational deployments,” NATO has established a permanent military force. Put forth for public consumption as a response to Russian “meddling” in Ukraine and alleged provocations by Russia’s military along the frontiers of NATO’s eastern member states, the real purpose of NATO’s spearhead force is to prepare for a ground invasion across Russia’s western border.

Beginning with the February 2014 coup d’etat in Kiev, the US-dominated imperialist alliance has relentlessly stoked confrontation with Moscow and laid the foundations for a continental-scale war aimed at breaking up and conquering the Russian Federation.

The continued massing of Western troops along Russia’s border makes good on US President Barack Obama’s September 2014 promise that the US and NATO powers would provide “eternal” military assistance to the Baltic states. In effect, Obama committed the most powerful military alliance in the world to waging all-out war against Russia should one of the tiny Baltic states claim to be under attack from Moscow.

Such a war, which would immediately raise the prospect of a showdown between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, would ostensibly be launched to defend some of the smallest and least populated countries in Europe, which are ruled by far-right and rabidly anti-Russian regimes.

The Baltic governments are actively encouraging the deployments and calling for still more NATO military hardware over and above the vast stocks of tanks, artillery and heavy weapons pre-positioned throughout Eastern Europe by NATO since 2014. Backed by the Western alliance, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are placing their societies on a war footing. They are putting their armed forces on high alert and awaiting the call for mobilization against Russia.

On Monday, Lithuanian defense official Juozas Olekas told the UK’s Daily Express that Russia “might exercise on the borders and then switch to invasion in hours.” At stake in Lithuania is “the credibility of the whole alliance,” said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius.

NATO defense of Estonia’s air space must be “first and foremost” on the alliance’s agenda, Estonia’s military chief said, before demanding a permanent presence of NATO troops in Estonia. “These forces are in Estonia to send a clear and unequivocal message to the adversary: do not quarrel with NATO,” he said.

The charge of “Russian aggression” against Europe is among the central lies employed by present-day imperialism. Seizing on the secession of Crimea from post-coup Ukraine and the enclave’s integration into the Russian Federation, the NATO establishment has sought to justify its war preparations as a defensive precaution in the face of a Putin government supposedly primed to invade Central Europe.

While Russia’s military saber-rattling, which alternates with attempts at compromise with the West, only adds to the war danger, it is essentially of a defensive character.

On Monday, citing unnamed NATO sources, British media accused Russia of “circumventing the Vienna accord and building up troop numbers in sensitive locations on Europe’s doorstep.” Announcing plans to boost military expenditures by $3 billion annually, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg declared: “This will send a clear signal that NATO stands ready to defend any ally.”

US and European imperialism are committed to defend the Baltics because it supplies them with a pretext and a staging area for covert and military operations along Russia’s flanks.

In Washington and some European capitals, powerful elements within the imperialist bourgeoisie are actively conspiring to engineer further provocations and destabilization operations against Russia.

The integration of former Soviet republic Georgia into NATO is slated to be a core issue at next month’s NATO summit in Warsaw. Russia and the pro-Western government of Georgia fought a brief war in 2008, and Moscow has vociferously opposed the country’s joining the US-dominated military alliance.

The integration of Georgia would greatly facilitate the projection of US and NATO power against Russia’s southern flank in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea Basin. Last week’s announcement of intensified US military operations in Afghanistan is bound up with preparations to use that country as well to strike against Russia’s “soft underbelly” in Central Asia, in particular against Russian interests in Kazakhstan.

The NATO buildup in Eastern Europe is producing levels of militarist frenzy not seen in Europe since the 1930s. During war drills in Lithuania this week, as the German and Danish militaries rehearsed marching on the Russian border, Danish Colonel Jakob Larsen told the media, “You see it differently when you live here. We need to learn to fight total war again.”

14 June, 2016
WSWS.org

How do we even talk about the horrific killings in Orlando, which left at least 50 LGBTQ revelers dead and more than 50 more injured in the middle of pride month? First we mourn. Then we rage. Then we hug our loved ones, especially our LGBTQ friends, comrades, and family members.

Then we look again, and we see the horror — that this murderer was licensed to carry guns and had no trouble buying incredibly powerful military-style weapons. So casually. So legally. So common, across our country. That’s when we start to rage again.

More troubling still, Omar Mateen worked for a company that was perpetrating systemic violence against vulnerable people long before he took up arms against his LGBTQ neighbors. For nine years Mateen worked for G4S Security, a British-based corporation that contracts with the U.S. and Israeli governments for work that often violates human rights on a massive scale.

G4S, which brags about having 600 staffers on the southern border, has contracts with U.S. immigration authorities to detain and deport people back to Mexico, as well as to run private juvenile detention facilities. In Israel, meanwhile, G4S profits from providing equipment and services in Israeli prisons and interrogation centers where Palestinians are routinely tortured. It’s also involved in running Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Incidentally, G4S is the company that trained Mateen to work as an armed security guard, which licensed him to carry and use weapons. And although his coworkers told supervisors that Mateen “frequently made homophobic and racial comments,” the company did nothing. It kept him on board — and kept him armed.

Should this company continue to profit from multi-million-dollar contracts with the U.S. government?

Since 2012, there’s been a major campaign against G4S, resulting in decisions by major mainstream institutions — like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Methodist Church, numerous European universities, important charities in South Africa and the Netherlands, UN agencies in the Middle East, and more — to divest from G4S holdings, or to cancel or not renew service contracts. G4S is profiting from exactly the kind of anti-Arab and anti-Latino racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that are all on the rise in the U.S. right now.

If the early reports are accurate, G4S’s long-serving employee is responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

And here let’s continue to be careful with our numbers. As my IPS colleague Karen Dolan and others have been pointing out, our nation’s origins are grounded in genocide and slavery. Earlier history has to take into account things like the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, when between 150 and 300 children, women, and men were gunned down. That mass shooting is part of our history, too.

But our nation’s history also includes the great movements that have risen against war, racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. The party at Orlando’s Pulse club was part of a month-long Gay Pride celebration rooted in the extraordinary movement that grew out of the 1969 Stonewall revolt, when bar patrons fought back against police brutality toward gay men and lesbians. June 12 was a special Latino Night at Pulse. And Reverend William Barber, a leader of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, reminded me that June 12, now seared in our memories as the day of the Orlando massacre, is also the anniversary of the 1963 Mississippi assassination of the great civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

One more link between our movements — from Stonewall to Orlando, from Mississippi to Palestine.

Muhammad Ali

And with all the discussion and debate these days about intersectionality and the need to link our movements against racism and against war, the name of Muhammad Ali belongs right up in our pantheon with Dr. King, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Howard Zinn, and so many other women and men who fought and continue to fight those linked battles together.

In the history of our movements for peace and for justice, the most strategic activists, analysts, leaders and cultural workers were always those who understood the centrality of racism at the core of U.S. wars, and who grasped the ways in which U.S. militarism relied on racism at home to recruit its cannon-fodder and build public support for wars against “the other” – be they Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Somalis, Yemenis or …

It was Muhammad Ali who first described the Vietnam-era draft as “White people sending Black people to fight Yellow people to protect the country they stole from the Red people.” He said no to the draft and refused to step forward to accept the legitimacy of the coerced registration. Ali was convicted of felony draft resistance, facing years in prison, while remarking “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong [sic].”

What is perhaps less well known, but absolutely consistent with this man of extraordinary principle, is his 1974 statement in Beirut. After visiting refugee camps filled with Palestinians dispossessed of their homes in the 1947-48 Nakba, or catastrophe, Ali said, “I declare support for the Palestinian struggle to liberate their homeland.”

All of those statements were massively controversial at the time. Ali’s initial resistance to the draft led to his being excluded from professional boxing for years. Yet Ali and the anti-war and anti-racism movements that Ali was part of continued their work. And Ali’s own presence, his principles, his influence was such that in later years the tributes poured in, including his memorable lighting of the Olympic flame at the otherwise corporate-controlled, ultra-establishment 1996 Atlanta games.

Wracked with the tremors of advanced Parkinson’s disease, he held the torch high and stood tall somehow with more grace, dignity, and power than any of that year’s athletes. His incandescent presence that night made undeniably clear, once again, that the movements against war and racism that Ali so eloquently spoke for and that he remained such an elemental and principled part of, had already succeeded in transforming public discourse, if not yet public policy, across the United States.

15 June 2016

EIR’s Jeff Steinberg interviews Virginia State Senator Richard Black on his recent trip to Syria and Lebanon. The two discuss the resilience of the Syrian people, the impact of U.S. sanctions on Syria, and the overall U.S. and Western strategy of “regime change.”

TRANSCRIPT

The following is a transcript of the LaRouche PAC video interview, conducted by EIR Counterintelligence Editor Jeffrey Steinberg with Virginia State Senator Richard Black.

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Senator Black it’s a pleasure to be here. And you’ve just returned from a trip to the Middle East, to Syria and Lebanon, and why don’t you just start by telling us what you saw and your assessments of the situation there?

SEN. RICHARD BLACK: What we did, we spent the better part of a week; we spent our time in Lebanon initially; we met with General [michel] Aoun, who is sort of the presumptive next President of Lebanon. We met with Foreign Minister [gebran] Bassil who is the head of the Christian bloc of the parliament there. And also with the Syrian ambassador to Lebanon; which is a new thing. You know the Syrians have not had an ambassador there until just recently.

From there we flew to Damascus and were then taken out and we visited Palmyra, where the Syrian army conducted an enormously heroic fight to drive out ISIS and assisted by the Russians who did a very good job there. And then we drove from Palmyra to Homs. Homs is the largest province, it’s the size of an American state, but it’s also a very large city.

It was an incredible visit, because, like you, I have studied the Syrian war, the origins of the war for years, since 2011. I know you go back before that, but this is when I got so focused on it. And the best way to explain it, is that through intensive study and what we would call “open source intelligence,” you begin to get a very clear concept of what the war is all about, and the origins of the war. But when you go there and you actually walk the grounds and you shake hands with the soldiers and meet with the refugees and people like that, it turns black and white into Technicolor. And I’m going to tell you: Syria is one of the most incredibly wonderful nations on Earth. And the fact that America set out to topple the government and destroy it, long before there was the faintest hint of civil unrest, it’s really one of the great stains on American honor.

So when I went there, one the one thing that stands out so vividly is this incredible religious tapestry of religious harmony, between the Christians, the Alawites, the Sunnis, the Shi’ites, everyone; and there is such freedom of religion in Syria, and it’s stunning. You know, as an American, here we have the Federal courts being partially repressive to Christianity in particular, and you go over there and I went to the Syrian broadcast system SANA, did an interview. And I came out and in the press room here is the plywood cutout of the Christmas tree and the ornaments are journalists who were martyred covering the war. And you think, “My gosh, if you did this in the United States, the ACLU would be all over you! You’d be in Federal court, and they’d rip down the tree.”

And we went to the theater in Homs province, in Homs city; it’s a large, modern theater, probably seated a thousand people. And they introduced me and they were very polite and receptive. And I sat next to the governor and his wife, and they’re Muslim, and so I’m watching: Here’s this choral presentation, very beautiful, everyone in tuxedos and the orchestra and a very lovely woman, and naturally, the woman very charismatic, you’re focused on her; and then gradually your eyes start to shift gaze. And then, suddenly, I look and I realize that behind them is a theater screen with a projection of Jesus Christ, bloodied, crown of thorns, staggering under the weight of the cross. And I looked at it — and I didn’t even know what they were singing, because they were singing in Arabic, right? And I realized later that they were singing Christian religious songs. And I turned to the wife of the governor, and I said, “Is this a religious theater, a Christian theater?” She said, “No, no, no, this is just a regular theater for entertainment. We put on shows, we put on concerts, everything.” But it happened that on the Julian calendar, we were there for Palm Sunday and we left just prior to Easter.

And so, she said, many of the people here for the presentation are Muslim. She said, the choral group, many of them are Muslim also. And here, they’re participating in the praise of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ! Not that they are not serious Muslims, but it’s also indescribable without seeing it in person. I had heard about it, and from hundreds of Syrians, but to see it and just to encounter it at random, you suddenly were able to “breathe” religious freedom there!

STEINBERG: I think I told you, when I was in Damascus in March of 2010, some of the things that were completely stunning to me, were the Grand Mosque right off of this great market area. You walk in there; it’s a gigantic, beautiful mosque, and right in the middle of it is the tomb of John the Baptist.

BLACK: Yes.

STEINBERG: And we went to parts of the old city, and we visited one of the earliest, the very first of the Christian churches anywhere in the world, and it’s just really stunning. The first event that we went to, was an ecumenical conference. It was at a Sunni religious school; there were Shi’ite, Alawite, Sunni; there were Christians, there were Franciscan monks attending; people from Scandinavian churches. And that night there was a celebration in the old city, and they had these Sunni dervishes.

So it’s what you’re describing: If you’re not there and you don’t see it, it’s almost hard to concede that this is such a natural phenomenon in this country, and you see what the Saudis and the Turks and others are trying to establish, which this hard, sectarian fight within Islam , that has no bearing on the traditional culture of Syria as a country!

BLACK: Yes, and you know, I spoke with Lebanon very senior officials, and of course, discussed this with President Assad and with the top leadership of the Syrian parliament. And one of my questions, is why is there war in Syria? We know, this was not a popular uprising. This was a calculated decision by the CIA, MI6, French intelligence, working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Turks, Saudis — an organized plan to topple the government. And of course we were familiar that there competing plans for oil and gas pipelines. And I come up a divided mind on exactly what’s going on: It is true that the oil and gas pipelines are a major, major incentive for this war.

But the other thing, that both Lebanese and the Syrians were quite insistent on, is that it is Saudi Arabia’s desire to impose Wahhabism. They’re not content that the vast majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims; now, if you listen to the press, they say, “oh, you know, we need a Sunni government.” Well, there are umpteen million Sunnis who are in the government and in high positions, and in the army and everywhere else. What they really mean is that we want Wahhabism, the type of Wahhabism that says that you impose severe, brutal Sharia law, and you begin beheading people, you force conversions and you take the wives of the Christians that you’ve murdered and you sell them at slave markets, which is happening right now in Iraq, perhaps in some parts of Syria also; but their feeling is that the true zeal behind this is this desire to impose the harshest, most extreme and violent, brutal form of Islamic rule.

STEINBERG: What you’re describing is the ISIS and the al-Nusra Front which is simply al-Qaeda, and the Saudis carry out beheadings, cutting off limbs, as their brand of Sharia law justice, exactly as ISIS and Nusra do in the areas they control.

BLACK: That’s exactly correct. And this has gone on through history. When I visited the Church of the Patriarch of Syria and the East, we went to a little adjacent, Christian school, and they had paintings of martyrs, and just as a reminder, that the history of Turkey, the Turks and the Saudis share the same history of violence towards those who do not share this most extreme view. And there was a painting that just stood out in my mind of a martyr, a woman during the Armenian genocide, a Christian, and the extremists had come in and they had amputated her feet and her hands. And she had an infant, and she cradled the infant and breast-fed the infant for the next couple days until she finally died of the torture they’d imposed on her.

So you know, they had suppressed this in Turkey under Ataturk, starting 1925. I read the Turkish Constitution; it’s admirable, it’s a very fine Constitution. But now you have President Erdogan who has said…

STEINBERG: He’s ripping it up.

BLACK: He’s tearing it to shreds, and he says “I want the powers of Adolf Hitler.”

STEINBERG: That’s right.

BLACK: Our ally. Our ally says, “I want the powers of Adolf Hitler!” Imagine that!

STEINBERG: Mm-hmm. And it was brushed off and explained away in the American media as a misquote or something like that, as if he hadn’t said it, and didn’t mean it.

BLACK: And he never retracted a word of it! But a spokesman said, “well, you know, it’s sort of out of context.” Well — gimme a break. How do you put “the powers of Adolf Hitler” out of context! You know?

STEINBERG: Right, exactly.

I wanted to ask you, because I think you made a very important point about the Saudis and what they want, the Turks and what they want, but if the United States and Western European were not in on this for their own reasons, from the very outset, I doubt that the Saudis or the Turks would have been able to create the mess. And I’m reminded that way back in 1991, right at the point that the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were disintegrating, according to Gen. Wesley Clark, he met with Paul Wolfowitz in Dick Cheney’s office — Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr.—and Wolfowitz went through a list of governments targeted for regime change because they had at various points, allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And Syria was right near the top of that list; Syria, Iraq, Libya, others.

And so, I wanted to get your assessment, given the way the situation has played out, the tragedy of the last five years, do you think that this could have actually occurred were it not for the full, witting complicity of the United States, both under President George W. Bush and now, for the last seven years, under President Barack Obama?

BLACK: That’s an excellent question. If one of our assistants could hand me the black and white poster over there, I think this could help to explain it somewhat. [Placard reading “Syrian War Countdown” 16:10]

Let me just run you through this, because the timeline is extremely important: In 2001, Gen. Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe has told us, that the Pentagon was ordered by the Secretary of Defense to make plans to topple seven different countries, neutral, non-belligerent countries, in what was an act of aggression under the law of war, which is a war crime. And so, the Pentagon began war-planning 2001.

Now, President Bashar al-Assad did not take office until I think it was 2000; so he was brand new. He’d come in as a reformer. But reform, good or bad, didn’t matter; we were going to topple seven countries, all of them also enemies of the Saudi Arabians. The United States is pulled around by the nose by Saudi Arabia, and for our senior leaders in this country, they all have a meeting with Mr. Green. And Mr. Green persuades them to do whatever the Saudis tell them.

So, OK, you start with 2001, the Pentagon starts planning. In 2006, WikiLeaks has released a document that came from the Chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy; at the time, we didn’t not have an ambassador, so the Chargé d’affaires was the senior person. That document outlined, in detail, plans to overthrow the government of Syria. And the two things that stand out in my mind is, we have a problem because President Assad came in as a reformer, he’s doing a lot of positive things, and so it is drawing an enormous amount of foreign direct investment and we’ve got to smear the image of Syria so that it will begin cutting off this flow of funds, and will adversely impact the Syrian economy. This is the United States, your country and my country, saying “we’re going to destroy another country by smearing their reputation.

The other thing which I think was equally sinister, is in this country that has this beautiful religious harmony, we said have got to create religious division, religious frictions and hatred among religions, so that we can disassemble this country.

But there were six very specific things outlined. And keep in mind, in 2006, there were no demonstrations, there was no political opposition, there were no uprisings, people were prosperous, they were happy.

So here you go from 2005, we start planning the war; 2006, we come up with explicit plans. You go to 2011 and the CIA works to gain the release of the most deadly al-Qaeda operatives in Libyan prisons and uses those people to spark an uprising in Benghazi, the purpose of which — and I wish, you know, Congress, while they’re always talking about Benghazi, they never talk about before Benghazi. What was the reason we were there in the first place! Why did we attack our
ally, Colonel Qaddafi — now we have had problems with Qaddafi but we had resolved them …

STEINBERG: In 2003, he dismantled his WMD program and became — even John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham, in early 2009, were in Tripoli and said “this guy’s our best friend in our war against — ” it wasn’t ISIS yet, but “the war against al-Qaeda and the other jihadists.”

BLACK: Yes, yes. So, absolutely, he was our best ally. And however, his big mistake was he had a huge arsenal of modern weapons, that we needed, to overthrow Syria. The reason that we went into Libya was, to capture their weapons to feed and fuel the war against Syria. Because we knew, Syria was a powerfully united, cohesive nation of people who — you know, every country has people who are unhappy or who are dissidents; we have ’em in this country — but we knew that we had a tough nut to crack here, because this was a very cohesive country. So we needed a huge amount of armaments. The reason we went into Libya was to capture these. And this is all laid out by Pulitzer Prize winning author Seymour Hersh in his article, “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” something that was censored; almost everything he’s done has been widely printed by major media, and they censored it. But the London Review of Books has it published, and he explains why we went in, how we captured the weapons, and how we started the rat line, flying arms in.

Because the CIA could not go before Congress and say, “Look, we intend to attack a neutral, non-belligerent country, where the people are happy, prosperous, and enjoy greater women’s rights and religious freedom than any other Arab nation; we’re going to rip it to shreds, we’re going to open up a torrent of bloodshed: Please give us an appropriation so we can purchase weapons to do it.”

STEINBERG: Right.

BLACK: That would not have gone over well. So, we went around it, and we captured the weapons in Libya, sent ’em to Syria. Three months after the war in Libya, even before Colonel Qaddafi had fallen, we started the war in Syria. And the technique that we used, — now just watch the timeline: We go from 2001, we decided to bring ’em down then, it was 10 years! An entire decade of planning and plotting and preparing.

STEINBERG: Exactly, exactly.

BLACK: So, you look at this timeline, and then, of course, we’ve employed massive, unrelenting propaganda against President Assad and his government. We call him a “regime,” the “Assad regime.”

STEINBERG: Right, as opposed to “an elected, sovereign government.”

BLACK: Yes. Now, of course, we always ignore the fact that he was popularly elected, in fair and open elections in 2014. Now, on the other hand, we sit at Geneva III at the peace talks, and on one side we have Saudi Arabia, where if you were to suggest the election of the King or dictator of Saudi Arabia, your head would be a spike the next day; and then, on the other hand, you have President Erdogan, the man who would be Adolf Hitler! [laughter]

STEINBERG: Right!

BLACK: It is so bizarre. And the method that we use, the specific method when we triggered this is interesting. The Arab Spring started with a single suicide, and it is very difficult to conceive that it did not spread without very active covert action. Nothing ever happens in politics, nothing just happens without a push.

So there actually began to be legitimate demonstrations in Syria as well as across the Middle East. What I found interesting, I talked to several people — I just bumped into them on my trip, and they said, “Oh, I was anti-Assad then.” Well, one of them turns out to be my interpreter; he’d been with me for the better part of a week! And one day we’re talking, and he said, “You know,” he said, “I was a demonstrator against President Assad.” And I said, “Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me about it?”

He said, “Well, we just started. It was during the Arab Spring, and we started holding demonstrations.” Much like, you and I have both probably been involved in demonstrations! But he said, “first, people started showing up with al-Qaeda flags.”

STEINBERG: Yeah. The black flags.

BLACK: “Then,” he said, “people started showing up with military weapons.” Now, there is no Second Amendment in Syria, so you don’t just grab a Kalashnikov at the corner drug store.

STEINBERG: Right. You don’t go to a gun show on Sunday afternoon.

BLACK: That’s right, you don’t do that. And he said, “The third thing, is they began to preach religious hatred!” And all along the demonstrators would say, “You guys, get out of here, get out of here! This is not what we’re about. We’re just here asking the government for some changes.” And the friction became tougher and tougher, and he said, “My uncle was the head of all the demonstrators” in this large city, and he said, in the seventh month of back and forth with the al-Qaeda people, they murdered him; they killed him.

And so I asked the same question of the several people I encountered, who had been anti-Assad. Well, they weren’t anti-Assad, they were demonstrators; they weren’t demonstrating against him.

STEINBERG: Sure. They wanted reforms.

BLACK: They wanted reforms. You know, I’ve been in demonstrations; I wasn’t demonstrating to bring down the government, I was there for reform.

And this was news to me, because I knew about this transition, but what was stunning that consistently, — two out of the three said that this transition took place over the span of a single month; the second one said it took place over the span of two months. So within one to two months, what started as demonstrations became an al-Qaeda-led violent, jihadist uprising. And of course, you still had demonstrators struggling to make it a demonstration. But that was how it developed.

STEINBERG: You know, it coincided with the period in 2010 going into 2011, when back here in Washington, there was a study ordered by President Obama, of how to relate to the anticipated insurgencies that were going to sweep across the Muslim world, particularly North Africa and the Middle East. The conclusion that was arrived at by people like Dennis Ross, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, was that the horse the United States should ride in on was the Muslim Brotherhood.

BLACK: Yeah.

STEINBERG: And these are still classified, National Security Study and Decision Directives, that are the cornerstone of the U.S. strategy, which was to basically play into the jihadist insurgencies.

BLACK: Yes, and you know, that brings us to a good point: You then come to the point of the uprising itself, how was this carried out? Just prior to the uprisings, Ambassador Ford was sent to Damascus; we had not had an ambassador there for some time. He was put in place by Hillary Clinton. Around that time, of course, you have all of these covert agencies; Western agencies, plus the Saudis and the Turks. And their mechanism was the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood had created a violent uprising under the father, Hafez Assad, and it’s often portrayed some put-down of these poor people. It was not at all that: It was a violent uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood copied, almost with precision, the approach that the Nazis took during Kristallnacht, which triggered the anti-Jewish backlash by the Nazi Party. The Nazis during Kristallnacht and they painted the Jewish star on all Jewish buildings and residences, and then on signal they surged through and they smashed and they beat, they killed 92 people. With identical procedures, the Muslim Brotherhood, first they hired people to stand on the street corners with placards that said, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” Which meant, we’re going to kick out 10% of our population, another 10% we’re going to murder them. In short order, it changed to “Christians to the grave, Alawites to the grave,” which meant, we’re going to kill 1 out of every 5 Syrians.

So they had these people carrying these placards, and then, at a certain point, the Muslim Brotherhood sent people out at night; they marked the residences, and the businesses, with the Nazarene symbol; and then right after mosque, with the most extremist mosques, they surged out and began beating and roughing up and murdering Christians. Within three days from the city of Hama, 70,000 Christians streamed into Damascus; why Damascus? Because they knew that President Assad would protect the Christians. He would protect anyone who was under attack by the Muslim Brotherhood.

And interestingly, then, Ambassador Ford and the French ambassador, get in a car; and the city of Hama had been ringed with security forces so that they could restore order to the town. And violating diplomatic protocol, they bypassed security, they met with the demonstrators, and they promised total American support. And by that action, they converted demonstrations into an armed revolution. And this was done intentionally.

STEINBERG: Right. I was at an event in Washington, in June of 2011, and there was still a Syrian ambassador in Washington at the time. It was Dr. Imad Mustafa. And this was really even before the major eruptions of violence that came a bit later in the year. And he presented a series of videos of sermons that were given by these Wahhabi and other radicalized clerics in these small, rural areas; and it was an absolute call to arms! And this was early on in the process. He said, “this is what we’re dealing with. This is a problem that has existed for a long time, but now, suddenly this problem has mushroomed tremendously, because there’s all of this outside support and encouragement coming from Washington and coming from all of these other places.”

This is what has been described as “regime change.” Using quote “civil society,” as a kind of a human shield, for organized, well-armed, violent elements, that make the claim that they’re part of a public outcry, upsurge; but in fact, it’s an organized, financed, and armed operation.

You mentioned the Sy Hersh article: the United Nations as part of the enforcement of the arms embargo had been monitoring all of those weapons going from Libya into Syria, into the hands of the jihadists. And there were a series of UN reports that tracked out, from Benghazi ships and planes from Qatar and from Turkey, that were overseen by American and British officials on the ground, loading the weapons up; and this is all in official United Nations reports, indicating exactly what you described: the flow of weapons through these channels into the rebels in Syria. Yet, you won’t read a word about that in the American and European media, which is completely on board with this regime change strategy.

BLACK: Well, you know, I’ll tell you what is amazing, Jeff, is that when we started the war on terror, after 9/11, it was essentially a war against al-Qaeda and similar organizations. We have gone full circle from opposing al-Qaeda, which sent 3,000 Americans to a flaming death on 9/11, complete circle to where we now supply them; we arm them; we finance them; and it’s all coming with the approval of the highest authorities in the United States government.

And you know, if you want to consider whether the people of Syria are for or against their government and their President, just consider this: Syria has a population of 23 million people. It is in the sixth year of a war in which it has been opposed by the United States, Great Britain, France, NATO, the European Union, …

STEINBERG: Right. The GCC.

BLACK: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the GCC — this massive force! I mean, basically, all of the great nations of the world, — almost all, not China and Russia, of course — but almost all of the great nations have descended on little Syria, and it’s like “The Little Train That Could,” they just keep chuggin’ and chuggin’ and chuggin’.

And I spoke with the First Lady, who is just utterly charming. She is not — unlike the First Ladies we’re accustomed to who are ostentatious, and pompous and arrogant — she is very down to earth, a very nice person; and she said, “One of the things I’ve done,” she said, unlike worrying about hamburgers and billboards and things like that, she goes out and she meets the families that have lost sons in battle, and she says, “I’ve now met with over 1,000 personally.” She said, “when I first did it, I was naturally apprehensive, and I knew that I would go to some homes and the people would be just so distraught that they’d burst out in anger at anybody who came, and was like me.” But she said, “I was so surprised. I had never encountered that. Every home I go to, they tell me, we are so deeply sad for the loss of our son, but we cannot think of anything for which we would rather have sacrificed our son than for the defense of Syria, for the unity of this nation.”

And I saw that over and over: I went to a hospital for amputees, and I discovered, — just to my personal disgrace as an American — that the sanctions we have imposed on Syria prevent them from receiving prosthetic devices, amputees. They said, not long ago, they had 600 cancer patients, and they said, “look can you make an exception to the exchange provisions,” where we’d blocked all foreign exchange, “so we can get medication for these cancer patients?” And the Treasury Department said, “No. You don’t get prosthetic devices for people who are missing legs and arms; you don’t medication for cancer patients…” There’s such utter cruelty in our government! I mean — our Federal government!

When I was a young Marine, we used to — at the end of the day we’d stand there, the drill instructor would march back and forth, and we’d scream the Marine Corps hymn, and we’d say the words, “we will fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean, we’re proud to claim the title of United States Marine.” If ever our honor has been disgraced, here we are cutting off access to prosthetic limbs for people! Where have we come?! What has come of this country?!

STEINBERG: Exactly. And these are really violations of the Geneva Conventions. There are rules of war, and rules for the kind of medical care that all parties deserve in wartime. And it’s violated.

I wanted to ask you before we finish up: Within the bounds of what you’re comfortable discussing, your impressions and things that came from both your discussion with President Assad and maybe some of the other officials; and similarly, when you were Lebanon, I’m wondering what General Aoun might of shared with you, in terms of his view of what has happened in the region; because is one of the countries that has been greatly affected, and badly, badly damaged by this phenomenon. The Saudis have basically vetoed a President being selected by the parliament because they don’t want anything that would stand in the way of their — as you say — their drive to spread Wahhabism everywhere.

BLACK: Yes. Well, you know, Lebanon has a unique structure, where the President is always a Christian, the Prime Minister is always Sunni, and the Speaker of the Parliament is Shi’a. It’s their way. They don’t quite achieve religious harmony quite as smoothly as Syria does. But interestingly, General Aoun spent a good part of his life fighting against Syria, because Syria occupied a portion of Lebanon; and Syria withdrew under President Assad. When he took over he began the withdrawal and completed the withdrawal of Syrian troops. General Aoun always took the position, he said, “when you’re in my country you are my enemy,” he said, “when you’re out, you are my friend.” And he has been true to that. He’s a delightful man.

And he clearly is supportive of the government of Syria, and I think is very respectful of the President of Syria. And I think he realizes something that I was quoted by ISIS as saying. You know, there were three Americans chosen as enemies as ISIS, but they quoted me, in a way that said, “this man is telling the truth, and listen,” because they said, “in the words of the enemy.” They called me the “American Crusader” — “in the words of the enemy,” and they quoted me accurately and I had said something to the effect that, if Assad falls, then the dread black and white flag of al-Qaeda will fly over Damascus; and within months, Lebanon will fall, and Jordan will fall. And with the consolidation of this very large area under the control of al-Qaeda, we will then face this tremendous extremism that will percolate over into Turkey where it already is taking hold, very rapidly. And that that will begin a drive on Europe, and I believe that this time, Europe will fall.”

And I think that from General Aoun’s perspective, from President Assad’s perspective, from the various officials that I spoke with, I think they share this belief; I think they believe that this is the objective of al-Qaeda.

And you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff became so distraught, so very concerned about the eventual outcome of events in Syria, that they tasked the Defense Intelligence Agency in the summer of 2013 to do complete study and to render findings of fact. The Defense Intelligence Agency, which is not political like the CIA, came up with three findings: They said 1) President Assad must not leave office because if he does, Syria will fall into chaos, just as Libya has done. 2) Turkey is a major problem, because they are the supplier of ISIS, they give them arms, ammunition, everything that ISIS gets comes out of Turkey. And 3) which is the very thing that President Assad has said from the beginning, they said, there are no moderate rebels. The notion is a fantasy, they do not exist! And yet, I think yesterday, Secretary Kerry was out there saying, we’ve got to help the moderate rebels. The “moderate rebels” are al-Qaeda, who flew the jets into the Twin Towers and today these are the “moderates”!

So this is where we have come….

STEINBERG: Right, right. And “Saudi Arabia is our greatest ally in the region.”

BLACK: Yeah. Saudi Arabia, there is increasing evidence pointing to Saudi Arabia as the prime actor in the attacks on 9/11; more and more people are beginning to conclude that as evidence starts emerging.

And so here we are: We are allied with the country most complicit in the 9/11 attacks on us, and we have gone full circle and we are now supplying al-Qaeda with TOW antitank missiles and we’re preparing to give them even more advanced weapons such as antiaircraft missiles; they can be used to shoot down Boeing 747 jets at Dulles Airport, and Heathrow and LaGuardia and across the world.

Extremely reckless, nearly an insane American policy, driven by Saudi wealth that lines the pockets of top people in this country. It’s sad.

STEINBERG: I want to thank you very much. This was really an important visit that you made, a courageous visit. And I think sharing these insights and getting them out as widely as possible is one of the critical steps in getting the United States back on its traditional track which we have veered off of so dangerously that we might not make it as a nation, if we don’t make the corrections in time.

BLACK: We are on a suicidal course, and I really appreciate you, helping to get the word out. We’ve got to change course, or it’s coming here, and it’s coming fast.

STEINBERG: That’s right. Thank you again.

BLACK: Thank you very much.

larouchepac.com

By Laura Vozzella

RICHMOND — After Virginia state Sen. Richard H. Black popped up in Damascus this spring, shaking hands with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the reaction was swift and cutting.

“Dangerously clueless,” Democrats said. “Ignorant” of Assad’s brutality, said the White House. Even fellow Republicans cracked jokes.

In the month since, the Northern Virginia legislator, who regards Assad as a protector of Syrian Christians and a buffer against Islamic extremism, has been on the receiving end of something else: invitations.

Black (R-Loudoun) has been asked to speak, alongside congressmen and a senior State Department official, at a Washington forum on energy and foreign policy. To attend a reception, as the guest of a Jewish constituent, at the Israeli Embassy. To hold Skype sessions with Middle East interest groups. To address a couple of hundred Syrian expats in Boston.

“There’s definitely a lot of interest in hearing what I have to say about Syria,” Black said. “I think it’s pretty clear to people that they’re not getting the straight scoop from their government, and they’re interested in hearing factual information about what’s actually going on.”

Black’s late-April meeting with Assad continues to reverberate, raising and expanding the profile of a man who for years had been known for a single anti-abortion stunt: He was the guy who once mailed tiny plastic fetuses to fellow legislators. Now, he’s the local legislator who had a two-hour sit-down with Assad, a dictator the Obama administration says unleashed chemical weapons on his own people.

Democrats see his trip as a tin-eared political caper, one that reinforces the notion that Black is not just outside the mainstream but also a little nutty.

“If I got on a plane and said to Assad, ‘Attaboy,’ you would absolutely think, ‘Saslaw has lost it,’ ” said state Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax). “And by God, you would be right. . . . I like Dick, but we’re moving into weird.”

Black’s support for Assad has earned him other foes; he now has a spot on the Islamic State’s enemies list. But Black, 72, has also drawn praise from left- and right-leaning skeptics of U.S. foreign policy. The decorated Vietnam veteran figures that about half the people who have phoned to express approval are Democrats from the party’s Bernie Sanders wing.

A global viewpoint
To critics who say Black had no business lending legitimacy to Assad, the senator replies in a way familiar to anyone who has seen him operate in Richmond: with passion and a visceral reference to war. “Show me somebody on the [U.S. Senate] Foreign Relations Committee who has shed more blood for this country, and maybe they can tell me I have no business speaking out,” said Black, who received a Purple Heart for his military service.
Black fought in the jungles of Vietnam, flying helicopters for the Marines, directing the dropping of more than 1,000 bombs and engaging in close ground combat.

A onetime Baptist who converted to Catholicism as an adult, Black feels deeply about war, suffering and life. That drives him whether he is battling abortion or conducting an unlikely tete-a-tete with Assad in the Syrian palace, where the discussion ranged from international politics to chit-chat about family.

Even before Vietnam, Black was drawn to global affairs. He grew up with a father who traveled across Latin America for the IRS and a nanny with a backstory out of an international thriller. After the war, he was stationed in Germany as an Army lawyer. So Black thinks — and acts — globally, sometimes in ways that seem jarring for a state legislator with no role in setting foreign policy.

[Va. senator travels to Syria to shake hands with Bashar al-Assad]

His April visit with Assad was particularly surprising because Black, one of Virginia’s strongest voices for protecting life at every stage, embraced a man the White House blames for a 2013 sarin gas attack that killed more than 1,400 civilians.

Black feels certain that Turkey and al-Qaeda engineered the attack in hopes of triggering a U.S. strike on Syria. The senator says he believes that by drawing attention to the issue with his visit, he can help set U.S. foreign policy straight.

But Black’s intensity and tactics — whether he’s praising Assad or blasting Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” as “moral sewage” — can make him an easy target, even among kindred spirits.

[Why a Va. senator told a teacher, ‘You do not know better than the parents’]

“I can’t comment on this. But I want to. So much,” Del. C. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) tweeted in April along with a photo of Black shaking hands with Assad.

Black drew similar reactions in 2014 when he wrote a letter of praise to Assad. The Syrian president posted it on Facebook, prompting the Islamic State to put Black on its enemies list.

“What’s the matter, Dick?” state Sen. William M. Stanley Jr. (R-Franklin) joked at the time. “Kim Jong Un not returning your text messages?”

‘Would you kill this child?’
Black is used to the jabs. He is still mocked — 13 years later — for enclosing tiny pink, plastic fetuses in letters he sent to senators ahead of an abortion vote. And yet, Black’s bill became law.

As a state delegate in 2003, Black wrote a bill requiring minors to get parental consent for abortions. The measure cleared the House but seemed doomed in a Senate committee controlled by moderates. On the eve of the committee vote, Black’s letter landed.

“You can see that by the 11th week of gestation, a child is well-developed and unmistakably human,” it said. “Would you kill this child?”

The little fetus dolls, bought for 17 cents a pop from an anti-abortion group, caused an uproar.

“People were really appalled by this and talked about nothing else for days afterwards,” said Sen. Janet D. Howell (D-Fairfax). “My receptionist was sobbing. . . . She had had many miscarriages, and she and her husband so much wanted a baby. And here she comes to work, opens my mail — which is her job — and out came a fetus. It just devastated her. And I have never forgiven him for it.”

Black said the outcry helped his cause, drawing attention to the bill and preventing moderates from quashing it in committee. Yet even some pro-life Republicans questioned his strategy.

“You need to shock the conscience, not [cause] the visceral, physical revulsion,” said one Richmond Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending Black.

Bucking conventional political wisdom has often worked for Black, who has beaten better-funded challengers backed by Emily’s List and other abortion rights groups. Black led a revolt against GOP leaders in 2014, when he warned that Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) had a secret plan to circumvent the legislature to pull off his marquee campaign promise: expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
Pure conspiracy theory, GOP leaders said at first. But Black dug in and eventually got changes made to obscure budget language that he said could pave the way for an expansion via executive order.

The McAuliffe administration, which declined to comment for this article, later conceded that the governor was, in fact, pursuing a secret expansion plan — one thwarted by Black.

[Puckett’s Senate exit undid McAuliffe’s secret plan to expand Medicaid]

‘Unnaturally stubborn’
When he was young and his mother ill, Black had a nanny who told stories of international intrigue and injustice. Born in Germany, she was an acrobatic dancer who, while entertaining troops during World War II, was caught behind enemy lines in Poland and gang-raped.

She resumed dancing after the war and was on tour when her troupe went belly-up, stranding her, penniless, in Havana. There she met Black’s father, an IRS agent dispatched to audit island hotels owned by American mobsters. She moved to Miami to care for Black and a younger sister.

As a painfully shy, pimply teenager in Miami, Black was drawn to nerdy-but-daring pursuits. He hunted poisonous snakes. He nearly blew himself up in a home chemistry lab. He was “unnaturally stubborn” by his own account and refused — even as his nanny beat him with a ruler — to put down his chemistry book and go to bed. That was the last straw for the nanny, who quit.

But her stories of brutality, combined with his tour in Vietnam, formed a potent foundation for his later career as a Pentagon lawyer prosecuting rape cases and as a legislator in the General Assembly.

“When I think about abortion,” Black said in the Senate one day in 2013, on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, “my mind returns to battlefields in Vietnam.”

He went on to describe, in cinematic detail, the death of an enemy soldier who had lobbed a grenade at the Americans and got a bayonet slashing in return.

“I remember this enemy soldier, this Viet Cong soldier, screaming, screaming with desperation, screaming like an animal,” said Black, who wanted his enemy’s suffering to end. “And all that I could do as the enemy were surging around us was to yell across the field and say: ‘Shoot him! For God’s sake, just shoot him!’ And they did.”
“As we ran by, I recall looking at him, and he was clearly dead,” he said. “No one would doubt that he was dead. And yet his body shook with the adrenaline that had surged from the horror and the terror that he had gone through. Ladies and gentlemen, the children who die in the womb don’t die easily. People do not die easily. People die in a desperate struggle for life.”

Stanley, the Republican who later teased Black about his fan letter to Assad, took in that speech from a corner of the Senate reserved for GOP cut-ups. All opposed to abortion yet inclined to crack wise, they rolled their eyes as Black launched his Vietnam analogy.

“We’re like, ‘What is he talking about?’ ” Stanley said. “And by the end . . . we were all so moved by it that we were in tears.”

But Democrats were outraged that Black had also invoked the Holocaust, as he suggested that people might look back on abortion someday and wonder why ordinary citizens did not do more to stop it.

For such a polarizing figure, Black has forged some unlikely alliances. He has won praise from some women’s groups for separate laws he wrote that made the state address its backlog of untested rape kits and allowed minors to consent to rape exams, even when their parents object.

“He picked up the torch,” said Kristine Hall, policy director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance.

Sen. Barbara A. Favola (D-Arlington), a vocal abortion rights advocate, worked closely with Black last year to address concerns that colleges were playing down sexual assault. She did not find it easy. Black wanted all campus rapes reported to police. Favola feared that would deter some victims from seeking help. Only after weeks of wrangling did they reach a compromise.

“He’s very well intentioned,” she said. But “he does not see any gray in things.”

Some of Black’s harshest critics suggest something darker. They point to comments he made in 2002, while debating a bill to change Virginia’s definition of spousal rape, which then applied only to cases involving physical injury or couples living apart.

“I do not know how on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape where they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie and so forth, there is no injury, there’s no separation or anything,” he said.

The remark resurfaces every time he runs for office.

“GOP Congressional Candidate: Spousal Rape Shouldn’t Be a Crime,” read a Mother Jones headline in 2014, when Black briefly ran for Congress.

Black said he never doubted the notion of spousal rape; in the 1980s, he prosecuted an Army doctor for raping his estranged wife. He said he only questioned how prosecutors could win convictions without injury or separation. And ultimately, he voted for the bill, which became law.

But to Black’s detractors, such as Progress VA Executive Director Anna Scholl, the “nightie” comment suggested that he blames victims for inviting sexual assault.

“It speaks,” she said, “to a deeper sentiment that men just sometimes can’t help themselves.”

Library board to legislature
His first stint in politics came after Vietnam, when he was back at the University of Miami and elected to the student senate. Black was in his late 20s, married, with two children. In the Age of Aquarius, his idea of a toe-tapper was “Born Free.” He was the odd man out.

“The antiwar movement was roaring, so the senate spent most of its time — when they weren’t talking about rock concerts — talking about the war and trying to pass antiwar resolutions,” he said.

Decades passed before he joined another deliberative body. In 1997, soon after retiring and moving to Loudoun County with his wife, Barbara, to be near their first grandchild, Black was put on the local library board. He greeted the gig like a jury summons.

“I told myself, ‘Boy, this really sounds boring,’ ” he said.

At his first meeting, Black learned of plans to provide Internet access — something he feared could expose young library patrons to pornography. He persuaded the board to require filters, triggering a civil liberties lawsuit and making national news.

“Maybe if I had done this in Nebraska it would have been one thing, but to do it in Loudoun County, home of AOL, was hugely contentious,” Black said.

In the Virginia House and later the Senate, Black continued to champion social issues, along with bills related to autism, Lyme disease and many other topics. He also spent the better part of a decade seeking clemency for a black woman who, under the state’s three-strikes law, got a much harsher sentence for robbing banks with a fake grenade than a more affluent white woman who had robbed a string of pharmacies with a toy gun.

That bit of Black’s biography is all but forgotten in Richmond, though his pro bono effort was the subject of a Washington Post article in 2003. The story made note of something else about Black.

“He’s the guy,” it said, “who sent miniature plastic fetuses to his fellow legislators during a debate over an abortion bill this year.”

Laura Vozzella covers Virginia politics for The Washington Post.

3 June 2016

 

by Shireen T. Hunter

The question of how to help promote human rights globally has always had a political dimension. States often press these issues in the case of those
countries of which they disapprove and ignore or downplay transgressions by friendly countries. In the last decade or so, the use of human rights as a
policy tool, and hence the politicization of the human rights issue, has attained new heights, particularly at the United Nations and its Human
Rights Commission.

Consider, for instance, the cases of Iran and Saudi Arabia. For years, Iran has been under economic sanctions for disregarding human rights. The United
Nations has appointed several special rapporteurs to report on Iran’s transgressions, which in turn has justified the imposition and continuation
of sanctions. Certainly Iran, like any other country that does not respect human rights, should be held accountable, and pressure should be brought to
bear on it. At the same time, incentives should be provided for good behavior.

However, for such measures to be effective, they must apply to all countries in an equal fashion. Yet this has never been the case. Several countries in
the Middle East have contravened international standards of human rights, and yet they have received very different treatment.

A good case is Saudi Arabia. Its human rights record has been dismal. For example, the Saudi government actively discriminates against its large Shia
minority. This discrimination has been repeatedly noted both by human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and by many scholars. Typical
of Saudi policies has been the treatment of Shia cleric, Sheik Nimr Al Nimr. The Saudi government accused him of fomenting disorder, rebellion, and acts
of terror, and executed him at the beginning of 2016. These accusations are the stock-in-trade of nearly all Middle East countries, which interpret any
dissent or even mild criticism as acts of rebellion.

But when these countries violate human rights, the worst they suffer at the hands of outside actors is a slap on the wrist. Iran has been sanctioned
because of its transgressions. But not Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia also has one of worst records regarding women’s rights. And although the United States, other Western countries, and the United Nations
stress the importance of women’s rights, somehow Saudi Arabia pays no price for disregarding them.

The special treatment of Saudi Arabia reached new heights when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was forced to remove Saudi Arabia from a register of
violators of children’s rights, despite the killing of children by the Saudi-sponsored coalition fighting in Yemen. The secretary general said that
the main reason was that Saudi Arabia and a number of its Arab and African allies threatened to cut their financial contributions to the UN, including
its humanitarian activities. He added that, if realized, such cuts would have seriously imperiled UN programs in Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. In
other words, the UN secretary general was blackmailed into removing Saudi Arabia’s name from the register.

That Saudi Arabia would do so is no surprise. What is surprising and depressing is that the secretary general also noted that, in the face of
Saudi threats, he could not expect the support of the permanent members of the Security Council.

Human rights is not the only area where Saudi Arabia gets a free pass for its misdeeds. Support for terrorism is another notable area where different
standards are applied to its actions. The State Department’s report on terrorism cited Iran as the biggest state supporter of terrorism and only
mentioned Saudi Arabia in passing. Would the State Department, by that logic, also consider the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra, and various Sunni
terrorist groups in Iraq benefitting from Saudi help not to be terrorist organizations? The answer is obvious.

This special treatment or Saudi Arabia has served neither that country nor the international community well. It has emboldened Saudi Arabia to continue
its disregard for human rights and support for terrorist groups without fear of any retaliation. Worse, it has given Saudi Arabia license to intervene
militarily in neighboring countries such as Bahrain, undermine the government in Iraq, and engage in the full- scale invasion of Yemen.

These acts have had severely negative consequences for the entire Persian Gulf, much of the rest of the Middle East, and even for Saudi Arabia itself,
as its current domestic troubles indicate. Most regrettably, however, the special treatment of Saudi Arabia has undermined the cause of human rights
throughout the region and has led to growing cynicism regarding the international community’s commitment to upholding human rights. Like peace
and security, human rights are indivisible. Either the same standards and principles are applied to all and transgressors are punished equally or the
defense of human rights will be reduced to mere rhetoric that convinces no one.
Lobelog, June 13, 2016

By Hamid Dabashi

If Hollywood wants to turn to Rumi, may Rumi’s blessings be on Hollywood.

Imagine Leonardo DiCaprio, say as Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Now imagine him as Rumi. Yes, Rumi: the Muslim mystic poet of the 13th century.

Now imagine Robert Downey Jr, say as Tony Stark/Iron Man in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008). Now imagine him as Shams-e Tabrizi. That’s right: the mysterious mystic centre of Rumi’s deepest and most moving affections, the very inspiration behind his monumental collection of lyrical poetry.

Believe it or not, this is not a mere flight of fantasy but the combined intention of a major Hollywood scriptwriter and a producer who have evidently come together to make a biopic on the Muslim mystic, scholar, thinker, and poet Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi: the author of two monumental masterpieces of Persian poetry, the Mathnavi and the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, the founder of the Mevlevi Order, whose Mausoleum in Konya is the pilgrimage destination of millions of his devotees from around the globe.

“An Oscar-winning screenwriter,” we read in the news, “has agreed to work on a biopic about the 13th-century poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi. David Franzoni, who wrote the script for the 2000 blockbuster Gladiator, and Stephen Joel Brown, a producer on the Rumi film, said they wanted to challenge the stereotypical portrayal of Muslim characters in western cinema by charting the life of the great Sufi scholar.”
From Muslim mystic to New Age guru

Why not, was my first reaction to the news. Rumi is so big, so magnificent, so majestic a river that anyone can come closer and fill a bucketful with his grace and go about his business.

Rumi is, of course, no stranger to New Age mysticism and has been quite successfully made available in English by such cavalier “translators” as Coleman Barks and Deepak Chopra.

Though quite distant from their original Persians, these English translations indeed read very well, create an engaging emotive universe, and successfully draw global attention to a poet otherwise entirely alien to them.

When there is no rose, to borrow a metaphor from Rumi himself, what choices do people have but to remember it from a drop of rosewater!

If you read the original Persian or are otherwise familiar with Rumi through the scholarship of the hard-working but quiet Orientalists such as R A Nicholson and A J Arberry, you may roll your eyes at some of these translations.

But given Rumi’s own predilection towards a playful soul he might have smilingly approved of his poetry being taken for a ride into English with such lovely disloyalty.

You cannot really be stubbornly dogmatic about the persona and the poetry of a man who danced with words as he took all dogmas for a lovely bathing under a cascade of forgiving love. Can you?

Imagining Rumi

Be that as it may, the new biopic this report promises is going to venture into a whole different domain: how to imagine and visualise Rumi, the world he lived, the divinity he experienced, the focal points of his love and affection, the universe that he thought engulfed his life and afterlife?

Muslims who know and love Rumi, especially those who are born and raised in his original Persian poetry, will and could never be satisfied with any rendition of him – Hollywood or otherwise.

The reason for that is very simple. They have been imagining him in their own mind for generations and lifetimes, and the slightest variation from that imagining will lead them the wrong way.

The incurable banality of Hollywood for casting famous actors of European descent in leading roles of non-European characters did not of course begin with the idea of having Leonardo DiCaprio play Rumi or Robert Downey Jr Shams-e Tabrizi.

Just take a look at a picture of a blackface Laurence Olivier as Othello or Mahdi of Khartoum, or even more recently of Christian Bale as Moses in Ridley Scott’s Exodus!

The challenge that Hollywood and its scriptwriters and producers face, however, is much more serious than who will portray Rumi.

As a titanic figure in Muslim moral and intellectual history, Rumi was the product of a moment when the Mongol invasion was bringing the Abbasid and Seljuqid empires to a crushing end to build an even more enormous and opulent empire on their ruins.

Rumi was the single most towering moral intellect at the crosscurrent of that world-historic moment. His universe of imagination, the God he praised, the heavens he fathomed, the Persian poetry he perfected to the pitch of that divine presence are all at fundamental odds with the fragmentary attention span of a world in which Hollywood has turned its attention to Rumi.

As a poet, a mystic, and a prophetic soul, Rumi does not belong to anyone, and anyone can enter his presence and hope to receive the gift of his grace.

If Hollywood wants to turn to Rumi, may Rumi’s blessings be on Hollywood. But before Leonardo DiCaprio of Hollywood or Salman Khan of Bollywood is invited to play Rumi, the scriptwriter and producer are well advised quietly to whisper this piece of a ghazal that I as a mere pilgrim to Rumi’s grace translate for them from the original. I promise it will do them good:

Oh Muslims what am I to do

For I no longer know myself?

I am neither a Christian nor a Jew,

Neither a Zoroastrian, nor indeed a Muslim!

I am neither from the East nor from the West,

Neither from the sea nor from the land …

Neither from the dust nor from the wind,

Neither from water nor from fire …

Neither from this nor from the world to come,

Neither from Paradise nor from Hell,

Neither from Adam nor from Eve,

Nor indeed from the Garden of Eden –

I dwell in Noplace, my sign is Signless.

I have neither a soul nor a body,

For I come from the very Soul of all souls.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York

 

By Andre Vltchek

These days you may get hugs from many common people in the Middle East or Latin America when you say that you are Russian, but such emotional outbursts are mainly intuitive. After being bombarded by extremely effective and negative Western propaganda for years and decades, people of the world still know very little, if anything, about two enormous countries that have been proudly resisting the Western imperialism – Russia and China.

I recently spent five weeks in Latin America, where the West openly supports the entire wide spectrum of counter-revolutionary movements, literally overthrowing one progressive government after another. I worked alongside the left-wing intellectuals there, helping to define the way forward, to rescue the Process.

But I was shocked by how little is known there about both Russia and China – for decades two natural allies of the patriotic Latin American Left.

“Are you for Putin or against?” And: “Is China really as capitalist now as we read?”

These were two most commonly asked questions.

Not in Cuba, of course. Cuba, almost free of most of propaganda media outlets of the Empire is actually one of the best-educated and informed societies on Earth. There, people know all about those long decades and centuries of the epic struggle of the Russian people against Western imperialism. There, it is very well known that China is essentially and once again increasingly a Communist (and successful) nation with clear central planning, which uses some controlled capitalist practicesin order tobuilda prosperous society for its people.

But even in such educated countries like Argentina and Chile, even in those centers of progress and revolution like Ecuador and Venezuela, the two world giants are often misunderstood. The majority of people in Latin America may feel sympathy for both Russia and China,but there is no deep knowledge of the realities there.

It is truly discouraging, because the Latin American Left is one of the essential components of the front against Western imperialism, standing shoulder to shoulder with Russia and China, but also South Africa, Iran and other proud nations.

It is easy to understand the reasons behind all this. Even in some of the most revolutionary nations of Latin America, the Western mass media outlets have been managing to retain their presence, often through the right-wing big business cable TV and satellite distributors. Most of the biggest newspapers are still in the hands of local business interests.

And so the negative and misleading messages about Russia and China are spread constantly. People are bombarded with them from the television screens, from the pages of mass-circulation newspapers, and from the imported (Western) films.

Many are resisting. They instinctively want to cling to both Russia and China. But they don’t have enough “ammunition”; not enough positive and inspiring information is available to them. In the meantime the critics are armed tothe teeth with toxic propaganda that is mass-produced in New York, Los Angeles, London and Madrid.

And the situation is much worse in Asia.

There, the Empire has truly and fully mobilized allavailable resources, in order to discredit its two main adversaries.

Speaking to my friends and colleagues in such places like Indonesia and Philippines, I was told that most of the people there know little, even close to nothing about Russia. It is still perceived through the Cold War and post-Cold-War stereotypes. The Western propaganda apparatus has been portraying Russians as cold, aggressive, brainwashed and dangerous.

Great Russian culture, Russian arts and the exceptional warmth of the Russian people, are something almost totally unknown in most of the Asian nations.

Great foreign policy successes of Russia, like those in Syria, are twisted and turned into the crimes, even in Muslim countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where “people should definitely know better”.

In India, which had been for decades very close to the Soviet Union, the situation is somehow brighter, but only among the extremely small and educated group of its citizens. There, like in many other parts of the world, pro-business and pro-Western mass media is skillfully defending the interests of the West, demonizing all that is standing in the way of the Empire.

China is being targeted with an even greater and more malicious force than Russia. Successful and Communist China is the worst nightmare for the West and for the local, Asian ‘elites’.

The entire propaganda apparatus is now in overdrive, spreading ideological attacks and negative messages. The most peaceful major country on Earth is being portrayed as an aggressor and threat to regional and world peace. In the Philippines and elsewhere, the global Western regime is arousing the cheapest and extremely dangerous bellicose forms of nationalism.

The local Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia that consists mainly of the anti-Communist elements, descendants of the people who left China after the revolution, are playing an extremely important and destructive role.

Nobody seems to notice that the United States/NATO is encircling both Russia and China with its military bases, while deploying new offensive missile systems. Nobody talks about those tens of millions of people who were massacred during the Western invasions of Asia during the 20th century.

And the situation is not much different in Africa and elsewhere.

*

True, both Russia and China have invested some substantial resources in order to counter the Western propaganda. The RT, Sputnik and NEO (New Eastern Outlook), have all become extremely effective global information and intellectual detoxification outlets.

But the West is still investing more. The ideological war is even something that is lately being discussed openly in Washington. The more Russia and China resist andthe more they defend themselves; the more Western propaganda steps up its indoctrination campaigns.

Clearly, both Russia and China have to do more, not only for their own interests, but also for the good of the world.

The great achievements of China and Russia have to be explained in detail. Such information should be spread to all corners of the planet.

In this field, China should learn from Russia, as the Chinese media outlets now available abroad are still too ‘timid’ and too reconciliatory. It requires real strength and determination to counter the mighty and centuries-old Western propaganda and brainwashing schemes.It also requires large financial budgets.

But the intellectual ‘resistance’ and the ideological wars should not be fought only in the fields of the politics, news and analyses. The tremendous cultural and intellectual achievements of both China and Russia should be made available to the populations on all continents. China has done so already a lot, mainly through its Confucius Institutes. It should be doing more, and so should Russia.

Both countries are in possession of marvelous cultural wealth, overflowing with wisdom and arts. Their humanism is much deeper than that of the West -the West that has been mainly building its wealth, for centuries, by plundering thePlanet.

For as long as one can remember, both Europe and North America had been committing genocides, while enslaving entire continents. At the same time, they have been engaging in self-glorification, promoting their political, economic and cultural concepts. They claimed cultural superiority. And they have been doing it with such force, such ruthlessness and in the end with such success, that they have managed to fully indoctrinate most of the world into accepting that there is really no alternative, no other way (except the Western way) forward.

There are naturally other ways, and needless to say, much better ones!

In fact, before European colonialism began ruining and enslaving the planet, almost all parts of the world were living in much more developed and gentler societies than those of the West.

Now very little is known about this fact. Alternatives are not discussed in the mainstream, anymore. The search for a better world, for more humanistic concepts, is almost totally abandoned; at least in the West and in its colonies and ‘client” states.

It as if this horrid nightmare, into which the world had been forcedinto by the global Western dictatorship, is the only imaginable future for our human race.

It is not. And there are two great countries on this planet, Russia and China, which can offer many alternatives. They are strong enough to withstand all the pressure from the West. They have hearts, brains; they have the know-how and resources to offer alternatives and to re-start millennia old, essential discussions about the future of our humanity.

But in order for this to happen, the world has to first know about both Russia and China. It has to understand their cultures.

The war against imperialism should be fought not only on the battlefields; it shouldbe fought on the airwaves, at the printing presses, in the concert halls and theatres. Kindness, humanism, internationalism and knowledge can often serve as weapons much more powerful than missiles, strategic bombers and submarines.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.Discussion with Noam Chomsky:On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or hisTwitter.

First published by NEO (New Eastern Outlook)

 

14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Jack A. Smith

From Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, October 2011 as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appeared to be ending:

“There are those on the American political scene who are calling for us not to reposition [to Asia], but to come home. They seek a downsizing of our foreign engagement in favor of our pressing domestic priorities. These impulses are understandable, but they are misguided. Those who say that we can no longer afford to engage with the world have it exactly backward — we cannot afford not to…. Rather than pull back from the world, we need to press forward and renew our leadership. The Asia-Pacific represents such a real 21st-century opportunity for usto secure and sustain our leadership abroad.”

President Obama’s recent journey to Japan and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, beyond visiting Hiroshima and being welcomed by crowds in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, was primarily aimed at strengthening his administration’s most important foreign policy objective — the political, commercial and military encirclement of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Now that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Obama may rest assured that if she defeats Republican Donald Trump in November, as expected, his “rebalance” to Asia will continue apace. Indeed, a Clinton administration may move faster and more decisively.

Clinton was a strong advocate of the rebalance and thoroughly agrees with Obama that Beijing must never be allowed to diminish Washington’s global hegemony, even within China’s ownSouth Asian region, and, like Obama, she always uses the code words “American leadership” in place of “American domination.”

Obama announced what he first termed a “pivot” to Asia in the fall of 2011 just after a 5,500-word article by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton titled “America’s Pacific Century” appeared in Foreign Policy magazine. It began:

“As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise — in the Asia-Pacific region.” The “otherwise” meant military.

While in Japan, Obama told the newspaper Asahi Shimbun May 26:

“Renewing American leadership in the Asia Pacific has been one of my top policy priorities as President, and I’m very proud of the progress that we’ve made. The cornerstone of our rebalance strategy has been bolstering our treaty alliances—including with Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines and Australia—and today each of these alliances is stronger than when I came into office. We’ve forged new partnerships with countries like Vietnam, which I just visited, and with regional institutions like ASEAN and the East Asia Summit. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the highest-standard trade agreement in history, we have the opportunity to write the rules for regional and global trade for decades to come. I believe that America’s position in the region has never been stronger, and I’m confident that the next U.S. President will continue to build on our progress.”

A week later in San Diego Clinton delivered a foreign policy speech. Its purpose was to show that she would be much better than Republican Donald Trump in furthering America’s global interests. Accusing Trump of not understanding that Russia and China “work against us,” she declared:

“If America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum — and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety — and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit. Now Moscow and Beijing are deeply envious of our alliances around the world, because they have nothing to match them. They’d love for us to elect a president who would jeopardize that source of strength. If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.”

Instead of defining the November election as a contest between the right/far right Republicans and the center right Democrats, Clinton depicted it as a choice between “a fearful America that’s less secure and less engaged in the world [under Trump], and a strong, confident America that leads to keep our country safe and our economy growing.”

Clinton has thus committed herself to a continuation of Washington’s decades-longimperial foreign/military policies, replete with cold war rhetoric, the notion of an indispensible America, the commitment to “lead” the world, and targeting China and Russia as virtual enemies. There was no hint of making any efforts to reduce world tensions peacefully. As a result of Obama-Clinton policies the relationship between Beijing and Moscow has become considerably closer in recent years.

Meanwhile the Bush-Obama Middle East wars are expected to continue indefinitely, at least throughout the next administration and maybe much longer. If Clinton gains the White House she is expected to intensify U.S. involvement in these conflicts, particularly in Syria and Libya. Her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is significantly to Clinton’s left in domestic politics but only moderately less hawkish in foreign affairs. Trump is a dangerous enigma, correctly identified by Clinton as “temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.”

U.S. arms for Vietnam

President Obama was warmly received by the Vietnamese Communist Party, the government and it seems by the people as well during his three-day visit starting May 22. A number of U.S. news articles marveled at the fact that Washington appeared to be totally excused for its brutal two-decade intervention to prevent the unification of temporarily divided North and South Vietnam. After all, some to 3.8 million Vietnamese people died from the American air and ground war, as did nearly two million in Cambodia and Laos combined due to U.S. led attacks on suspected North Vietnamese trails and hideouts in these neighboring countries. U.S. war deaths were 58,193 between 1955-1975.

Part of the reason Vietnam doesn’t hate the U.S. is that it won the long war against the world’s most powerful military state following Hanoi’s victory against French colonialism and the earlier Japanese invasion and occupation. Vietnam was exhausted and in economic difficulty after 30 years of continual conflict when the Americans finally fled South Vietnam in April 1975.

Another reason for cautiously partnering with the U.S. is the existence of China on Vietnam’s northern border. Chinese dynasties dominated Vietnam for over 900 years between 111 BCE and 1427 CE. Both Russia and China supported Vietnam in the fight against U.S. aggression but grave tensions and even the possibility of an armed conflict between the two giant nations was an additional worry for Hanoi, which needed their material support to pursue the war. On Dec. 25, 1978,Vietnam invaded and occupied adjacent Cambodia in order to drive out the ultra-left Khmer Rouge government after a number of border clashes between them. In February 1979, China — which had supported the Khmer Rouge — invaded northern Vietnam in a brief but bloody one-month war, with both sides claiming victory. Several short skirmishes took place until 1989 when Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia. Since then relations between the two neighboring countries with governments that seem to share the same socialist ideology have been peaceful but distant.

During his stay in Vietnam, Obama was publicly critical of what he considered Vietnam’s human rights shortcomings, as though killing five million people in Indochina, millions in the contemporary Middle East, and uncritically supporting dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia gave Washington the international standing to wag its finger in Hanoi’s face.

But Obama’scriticisms of the country wereprimarily for show, paving the way for him to announce the ending of he 41-year ban on lethal arms sales to Vietnam. In Hanoi, Obama told a press conference that “we already have U.S. vessels that have come here to port [at Cam Ranh Bay and] we expect that there will be deepening cooperation between our militaries.”

According to The Diplomat May 31: “Uncorroborated Vietnamese sources in Hanoi [state that] prior to Obama’s visit, U.S. officials proposed to their hosts the possibility of raising their comprehensive partnership to a strategic partnership [an important upgrading]. Vietnamese officials reportedly got cold feet at the last minute and politely left this proposal for future consideration.At the same time, although U.S. officials, including the president, described bilateral relations as entering a new phase, no new adjective was placed in front of comprehensive partnership in the official joint statement issued by the two presidents to indicate that relations had advanced significantly since 2013.”

China’s Global Times, a party daily tabloid that tends to speak directly, argued May 26 in reference to the U.S. decision to sell arms to Vietnam: “This is a new move by the U.S. to advance its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy, displaying Washington’s desire to reinforce military cooperation with China’s neighboring countries…. Now, Washington is ironically trying to manipulate Vietnam’s nationalism to counter China. U.S. Senator John McCain, a prisoner in the Vietnam War and now Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, plays a key role in rescinding the ban on the sale of lethal arms to Vietnam, believing it will rope in Hanoi to counter China’s rise.”

In the same issue of Global Times, Nguyen Vu Tung, acting president of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam in Hanoi, wrote an op-ed that expressed his “personal” views, stating: “In July 2013, Vietnam and the U.S. agreed to elevate their relationship to a ‘comprehensive partnership’ designed to further promote bilateral ties in all fields. 

It is noteworthy that the enhancement of Vietnam-U.S. relations ran parallel with Vietnam’s forging its relations with China, a big neighbor that is of increasing importance to Vietnam’s peace, stability and prosperity…. Vietnam-U.S. relations are not developing at the expense of the links between Vietnam and China. Instead of choosing sides, Hanoi tries its best to promote relations with both China and the U.S. and sees its relations with them in positive-sum terms…..

“The independent posture of Vietnam’s foreign policy applies especially to Vietnam’s defense policy where Vietnam strictly follows a ‘three-no principle.’ Vietnam will not enter any military pact and become a military ally of any country, will not allow any country to set up a military base on its soil, and will not rely on any country to oppose any other country. Recently, Hanoi has been under some domestic pressure to review this principle. Yet, adhering to it is still the policy mainstream.”

With the arms sales Vietnam is now considered an allied member of the informal U.S. coterie of East Asian and Southeast Asian nations, six of which are contending with China’s claims to most of the South China Sea, with Washington’s backing. Beijing says it is willing to negotiate with the six on a one to one basis but the U.S insists on multilateral talks. In addition to Vietnam the countries involved in the claims include Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Japan.

China’s claim is based on two points: 1. Implicitly, its long history — about 4,000 years, nearly all of it under Chinese dynastic imperial rule until 104 years ago. 2. Explicitly, the 1947 “nine dash line” map produced by the Chinese Nationalist government in 1947, two years before the success of the Chinese communist revolution replaced the semi-capitalist/semi-feudal Nationalist enterprise called the Republic of China with the People’s Republic of China. The Nationalist government, army and many civilians fled to Taiwan, an offshore province of China that still maintains that the nine dash line is absolutely legitimate, as does the PRC. The U.S. — which supported the Nationalists to the extent of keeping Taiwan in China’s permanent Security Council seat until 1971 — did not question China’s claims until fairly recent years. U.S. support for the six claimants is an important political part of the containment of China by increasing the number of regional allies and dependencies that will support Washington’s political goals.

There are military and commercial aspects of the rebalance to Asia in addition to using allies to strengthen opposition to China.

The U.S. has militarily dominated the East Asia region since the end of World War II in 1945 but it has been significantly increasing its military might since launching the pivot to Asia. More Army and Air force units have been ordered to existing bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and other nearby locations, as well as a new base in Australia. Up to 90,000 U.S. military personnel are in the vicinity. Navy aircraft carriers, other warships and submarines have been shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. An aircraft carrier battle group is patrolling the East China Sea. Some U.S. ships navigate extremely close to small Chinese islets that are being upgraded — a practice that could inadvertently spark an armed confrontation.

The principle commercial element of the effort to contain China is the corporation-dominated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — Washington’s neoliberal free-trade proposal for 12 Pacific Rim countries that is intended to enlarge U.S. economic influence in the region at the expense of China, which has not been invited to join. The 12 signatories to the TPP agreement in 2010 included Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States and Vietnam.

Ratification of the trade pact the may not happen, not least because recent political developments in the U.S. may bury this major Bush-Obama initiative. Hillary Clinton, once a strong advocate as secretary of state, turned against the TPP during the Democratic primary in order to opportunistically convey the impression she was as radical as Sanders in order to attract his constituency. She also wanted to retain the support of the AFL-CIO, which strongly opposes the pact. Trump rejects the TPP because many working class supporters believe that such trade deals take away American jobs, which they do. Some commentators suggest Obama may be able to get it passed after the elections and before the new president assumes office, but it’s a long shot.

Vietnam supports the TTP because its economy stands to gain from increased trade.It is of interest that China is Vietnam’s biggest trading partner and will remain so, as is true of most regional nations aligning with the U.S. superpower. Beijing’s rise over the last 20 years has benefitted all these states, not to mention the transfer of reasonably priced reliable goods throughout area.

U.S. President visits Hiroshima

Obama arrived in Japan May 25 to attend a Group of Seven meeting and to further strengthen Japan’s commitment to help in the effort to surround China, but the international media focused entirely on the first American presidential visit to Hiroshima in the 71 years since the United States obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.

He didn’t apologize to Japan because that would be unpopular with many Americans and alsowith Korea and China, countries that suffered woefully from the vicious and racist Japanese invasion and occupation. They believe Japan hasn’t sufficiently atoned for its numerous wartime atrocities.

Instead Obama delivered a quite moving speech: “We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are….”

His address was hypocritical, particularly when he declared: “We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil. So nations and the alliances that we formed must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics. And yet, that is not enough, for we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mindset about war itself.”

In reality Obama is not only slower than his three predecessors in reducing nuclear weapons but he has initiated a trillion dollar effort to upgrade America’s entire nuclear arsenal and delivery systems.

In his Asahi Shimbun interview Obama also said: “I believe that we’ve substantially enhanced America’s credibility in the Asia Pacific, which is rooted in our unwavering commitment to the security of our allies. We continue to modernize our defense posture in the region, including positioning more of our most advanced military capabilities in Japan. As I’ve said before, our treaty commitment to Japan’s security is absolute. With our new defense guidelines, American and Japanese forces will become more flexible and better prepared to cooperate on a range of challenges, from maritime security to disaster response, and our forces will be able to plan, train and operate even more closely. I’m very grateful for Prime Minister Abe’s strong support of our alliance.”

Abe is a hawk about China. “No one country is more enthusiastic than Japan to advocate containing China,” according to a May 19 commentary by Zhang Zhixin, the head of American Political Studies at China’s Institute of American Studies. He continued:

“The strategic competition between the [U.S. and China] is becoming more apparent. In economic and trade areas, the EU and U.S. denied granting market economy status to China. In the South China Sea, where China is trying to secure its maritime sovereignty and rights, the U.S. believes China is challenging its regional hegemony and military dominance in the area. As deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said, the U.S. is intensely focused on China’s ‘assertive and provocative behavior.’ Therefore, the U.S. Navy is pushing for a more aggressive policy of patrolling close to Chinese-fortified islands and caused more dangerous encounters between the U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and Chinese jet planes.

“What makes the situation more complicated is that Japan, as an outsider in the South China Sea issue, is trying to insert itself into the conflict. At the end of last year, the Japanese Foreign Minister talked about the possibility of joint patrol with the U.S. Navy in the [South China Sea] area. This year, Japan is becoming increasingly aggressive in charging that China’s a threat in the Asia Pacific region. It is understandable for the Prime Minister Abe to do so to the domestic audience to sell his proposal of revising the pacifist Constitution, but when he was selling his viewpoint to the EU countries, that’s too much. Japan is allied with the U.S., but the latter never restrained Japan’s anti-China rhetoric. Furthermore, Japan actively sold advanced weapons to countries around the South China Sea, participated in more multilateral military exercises, and conducted more port calls in the area, which just made the regional situation more tense.”

Another area of sharp Chinese-Japanese contention is in the East China Sea. Both countries claim rocky, uninhabited protuberances known as Senkaku by Tokyo and Diaoyu by Beijing. China scrambled jets to meet Japanese military aircraft in disputed airspace May 21. Japanese officials said it was the closest Chinese jets had flown to their planes. It came as China was holding air-sea naval exercises with Russia in the region. Tokyo officially protested to Chinese ambassador Cheng Yonghua June 9 about a “Chinese and three Russian warships” that entered what Japan called the “contiguous zones” near the disputed Islands. The Chinese Defense ministry responded June 9 calling the navigation legal and reasonable, insisting “China’s naval ships have every right to navigate in waters under its jurisdiction.” The reply came a day a before the beginning of a large-scale eight-day joint military drill in the western Pacific involving the U.S., Japan and India.

According to Stratfor in a June 10 analysis: “Japan under Abe has upset Beijing by broadening the geographic and functional scope of the operations of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, which Japan’s postwar pacifism long limited. Perceptions of Chinese expansionism have prompted Japan to prioritize responding in the South China Sea. In 2015, Japan announced the start of talks with the Philippines on a Visiting Forces Agreement that would permit Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel to rotate through Philippine bases. Later that year, Japan secured an agreement with Vietnam to allow Japanese warships to make port calls at Cam Ranh Bay, which they did in April of this year. Even more ambitiously, Japan has responded that it might be amenable to U.S. calls for regional powers to join freedom of navigation operations in waters far beyond the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s traditional domain in Japan’s near seas. Though these steps are incremental, they represent slow and steady progress toward a clear endpoint most unwelcome in Beijing —the routine presence of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operations in the South China Sea.”

The 42ndG7 summit meeting in Japan May 26–27 accomplished little. It was “an opportunity lost” according to Montreal Star columnist Thomas Walkom, who wrote June 1: The leaders of seven important countries had a chance to do something that would rekindle the sputtering global economy.Some, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Canada’s Justin Trudeauurged their fellow leaders to foreswear austerity and, among other growth-inducing measures, spend money to stimulate the world economy.

“They failed. Italy’s Matteo Renzi was on side with Canada and Japan, as were France’s François Hollande and U.S. President Barack Obama. But Germany’s Angela Merkel and Britain’s David Cameron insisted that debt and deficit control were more important than fiscal stimulus.The final communiqué from the session said essentially that each nation would continue to do what it thought best.So what do we make of the G7? In some ways, its time has passed. It no longer represents the world’s major economies. China is conspicuously absent. Russia, briefly a member of what was then called the G8, was summarily expelled in 2014 for annexing Crimea.”

The importance of India

As soon as President Obama returned home he put aside time to work out plans for ensnaring rising India more deeply into Washington’s informal anti-China coalition. He met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the White House June 7. This was their seventh meeting in the two years since the Indian leader was elected in May 2014, which must be some kind of record. Modi addressed Congress the next day and his speech was received with great applause. Earlier Indian governments, while friendly to the U.S. were closer to Russia (and the USSR in earlier days) and nonaligned countries than to America. Modi is campaigning for a much closer relationship with Washington, which is exactly what the Obama administration wants.

The Economist noted June 11: “China worries about signs that Western countries are cozying up to its giant neighbor. It fears that Modi will exploit better ties with America as a source of advantage. For years the Pentagon has pursued India as part of an effort to counterbalance growing Chinese strength, but only in recent months have Indian military officials begun to show eagerness for co-operation. This month the two countries will hold their annual naval exercises not in Indian waters, but in the Sea of Japan, with the Japanese navy, near islands claimed by both Japan and China. In a wide-ranging speech before a joint session of Congress on June 8 Modi said that America was India’s “indispensable partner.” An outright military alliance between India and America remains unlikely, but even the remote prospect of one will concentrate Chinese minds.

In her pivot to Asia article referred to earlier, Clinton foresaw intense U.S. involvement in the region “stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas…. Among key emerging powers with which we will work closely are India and Indonesia, two of the most dynamic and significant democratic powers of Asia, and both countries with which the Obama administration has pursued broader, deeper, and more purposeful relationships.” India and Indonesia are second and fourth ranking countries in population. (China is first, U.S. third.)

According to the Center for International Studies “Washington has made it clear that Jakarta is central to the U.S. rebalance, toward the Asia Pacific, both in its own right and as a leader in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN.)”It is also the largest Muslim country by far.

India, however, is the big prize.As a result of U.S.-Indian talks after the Modi government took power India has been designated a “Major Defense Partner” by Washington, although it is not entirely understood what this unusual title obligates India to do. For its part the U.S. is supplying India with technology, loans,equipment,and other means of enhancing India’s economy and military.

Commenting on the Obama-Modi meeting June 7 the Associated Press reported “The two governments said they had finalized the text of a defense logistics agreement to make it easier for their militaries to operate together. The U.S. and India share concern about the rise of China, although New Delhi steers clear of a formal alliance with Washington.

In an article published by the Cato Institute April 29 and titled Persistent Suitor: Washington Wants India as an Ally to Contain China, Ted Galen Carpenter wrote:

“A growing number of policymakers and pundits see India not only as an increasingly important economic and military player generally, but as a crucial potential strategic counterweight to a rising China…. Strategic ties have gradually and substantially deepened. President Barack Obama has characterized the relationship between the United States and India as ‘a defining partnership of the 21st century,’ and Indian Prime Minister Modi has termed it ‘a natural alliance.’” Perhaps more significant, India has contracted to receive some $14 billion in supposedly defensive military items from the United States in less than a decade. Washington has now edged out Moscow as India’s principal arms supplier.

“Bilateral strategic ties received an additional boost in mid-April 2016 with the visit of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to Delhi. That trip generated considerable uneasiness in China, where opinion leaders noted not only was it Carter’s second trip to India during his relatively brief tenure as Pentagon chief, but that he cancelled a previously scheduled trip to Beijing so that he could make this latest journey. That move, they feared, suggested a rather unsubtle tilt against China in favor of one of its potential regional geostrategic competitors. The agreement that came from Carter’s visit would do nothing to reassure the Chinese….

“Moreover, India maintains an important economic relationship of its own with China. Indeed, according to most calculations, China has now emerged as India’s largest trading partner. Trade between the two Asian giants topped $80 billion in 2015. In addition to the economic stakes, there are bilateral security issues, primarily unresolved border disputes, as well as security issues throughout Central Asia of concern to Delhi that could be exacerbated if relations with Beijing deteriorated.Shrewd Indian policymakers may well conclude that the best position for their country is one of prudent neutrality (perhaps with a slight pro-American tilt) in the growing tensions between the United States and China.”

U.S.-China Relations

The contradiction between Washington’s words and deeds is no better exemplified than in its relations with China. U.S. rhetoric rarely includes threats, except occasionally regarding the South China Sea. Most though not all its multitude of discussions with Chinese leaders are soft spoken and civil. From time to time the U.S. speaks of China as a “partner.” Never stated openly is the fact that Washington will continue pressuring Beijing until it learns how to behave in a fashion acceptable to the world’s only military and economic superpower. Part of that pressure consists of continual exaggerations of China’s military power, which is far behind that U.S.

The Beijing government never threatens the U.S. It is well aware of the meaning behind Washington’s friendly words because it is surrounded by U.S. military power and Washington’s obedient allies in the region, by exclusionary trade deals, the rejection of its claims in the South China Sea and innumerable efforts by the White House to undermine China in all the political and economic associations and coalitions in the East Asia region.

Beijing rarely mentions this publicly and works to develop a cooperative “win-win” relationship with Washington. China clearly recognizes the U.S. as the world’s great power and occasionally appears slightly deferential.

The following June 6 report from Xinhua news agency about the annual China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Beijing that day is typical example of the Chinese approach:

“President Xi Jinping urged China and the United States to properly manage differences and sensitive issues and deepen strategic mutual trust and cooperation at a high-level bilateral dialogue. The differences between China and the United States are normal, Xi said.

“As long as the two sides tackle differences and sensitive issues in the principle of mutual respect and equality, major disturbances in bilateral relations can be avoided, Xi said, adding that China and the United States should strengthen communication and cooperation on Asia-Pacific affairs.

“The broad Pacific Ocean, Xi said, ‘should not become an arena for rivalry, but a big platform for inclusive cooperation. China and the United States have extensive common interests in the region and should maintain frequent dialogues, cooperate more, tackle challenges, jointly maintain prosperity and stability in the region, and “cultivate common circles of friends’ rather than ‘cultivate exclusive circles of friends.’

“The Chinese president also called on the two sides to expand mutually beneficial cooperation, uphold the win-win principle, and raise the level of bilateral cooperation…. [He] stressed that China will unswervingly pursue the path of peaceful development and promote the building of a new model of international relations with win-win cooperation at its core.”

At the same time, as we have written at length [1], China openly rejects in principle the existence of a unilateral global hegemon — a position the U.S. has occupied for the last quarter century since the implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Beijing advocates a form of shared global leadership. Washington is convinced that it deserves the right to in effect rule the world and has no intention of dismantling its shadow empire. This is the principal contradiction between the U.S. and China.

Beijing is doing what it can to avoid a major clash with the United States, short of appearing to kowtow to Washington. The U.S. does not want a clash as well. Both sides fear the possibility of war and each is aware that one may eventually take place. That is certainly one of the reasons the Obama administration has launched its decades-long program costing a trillion dollars to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal.

China, for all its progress since the 1980s, is still a developing country and behind the U.S. in many ways, but is destined to become a major power in a few decades at most. The U.S. cannot but accept China’s inevitable growth. At issue is whether Beijing will eventually subordinate itself to the U.S. as have other powers, such as Germany, UK, France and Japan, have done, or in any other acceptable fashion.

There are current and historical reasons why China will not do so. At this point the U.S. is drawing upon all its resources to contain and surround the growing giant. This can only lead to big trouble in time, for both countries and the world.

Unfortunately, both U.S. neoliberal capitalist political parties are absolutely dedicated to world domination and ultimately to the use of terrible violence to defend American “leadership.” Unless this changes substantially imperialism eventually will lead to global calamity. This is a matter that goes far beyond the Hillary, Donald, and Bernie political preoccupation of the moment. None of them would substantially transform the existing foreign/military policy. Only a genuinely left wing mass movement in the U.S. has a chance of changing direction.

— [1] For article “The Hegemony Games — USA v. PRC,” click on 5-31-15 Newsletter Hegemony Games

Jack A. Smith, editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter at http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/, who may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net.
14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dan Glazebrook

Over the past three weeks, it has emerged that British special forces are now in direct combat roles in Libya and Syria. Ostensibly there to fight ISIS, the real goal is to prevent the Syrian and Libyan armies defeating ISIS themselves.

The Normandy landings, launched 72 years ago this week, saw the opening of a second front against the Nazis in Europe by the US and the UK after years of procrastination. Despite the signing of a ‘mutual assistance’ agreement with Britain in 1941, and the Anglo-Soviet alliance in 1942, for years very little was done by the US or Britain to actually fight the Nazi menace. In a joint communique issued in 1942, they agreed to open a second front in Europe that same year, an agreement they broke and then postponed repeatedly, leaving the Soviets to fight the strongest industrial power in Western Europe alone for three years – at an eventual cost of 27 million lives. The US and Britain, it seemed, were following what International Relations theorist John Mearsheimer has termed a ‘bait and bleed’ policy, allowing Germany and the Soviet Union to “bleed each other white” whilst they themselves stood on the sidelines. “If we see Germany winning, we ought to help Russia,” declared US Senator (and later President) Harry Truman in June 1941, “and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” The British Minister for Aircraft Production Colonel Moore-Brabazon echoed his views the following month, telling a lunch party of government officials that the best outcome on the Eastern front would have been the mutual exhaustion of Germany and the USSR in order that Britain could then move in to dominate Europe. He was eventually forced to resign following uproar from a public determined to see their government do more to help the embattled Soviets.

In the end, it was not until well after the Nazis’ fortunes had been decisively reversed at Stalingrad that the long promised ‘second front’ actually materialized. Indeed, by this point the outcome of the war had effectively already been determined. D Day, then, was waged not to defeat the Nazis but to ensure the Soviet Union, who had borne almost all of the sacrifice, would not reap the fruits of their victory. As Soviet Admiral Kharlamov, head of the Soviet Military Mission in Britain during the Second World War, wrote, “Certain circles, both in the United States and Britain, feared that should the Red Army defeat Germany single-handed, the Soviet Union would have enormous influence on the post-war development of and social progress in the European countries. The Allies could not allow that to happen. This is why they considered the opening of a second front in Europe not so much a military action but as a political measure aimed at preventing the progressive political forces from coming to power in European countries.” Documents declassified in 1998 revealed that Churchill had even ordered the drawing up of a plan that would see British and US troops push on beyond Berlin alongside a rearmed German army in a nuclear war against the Soviets.

History is now repeating itself, this time as farce. From 2014 until September 2015, ISIS appeared to sweep all before them, achieving hugely symbolic victories in Iraq’s Mosul and Fallujah, Syria’s Raqqa and Palmyra, and Libya’s Derna and Sirte. At the same time, under Saudi and Turkish tutelage, Al Qaeda’s ‘Al Nusra front’ was making gains in Syria, and the Ansar Sharia faction in Libya took Benghazi, paving the way for a major ISIS infiltration. The West did little to help. In Syria, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) had been left to fight such groups not only bereft of support from the West, but facing a West apparently determined to destroy them. Similarly, the Libyan National Army – representing the elected Libyan parliament – was hamstrung by an arms embargo scrupulously observed in relation to them, but regularly violated by the West’s gulf allies when it came to the ‘Libya Dawn’ sectarian militias who were attacking them. And even the US’ supposedly closest allies in the Iraqi army, the elite ‘Golden Division’, had trouble getting effective US support when they needed it.

Despite this, starting with last September’s Russian intervention in Syria, the tide has begun to turn against ISIS and Al Qaeda, paving the way for a string of victories by the Syrian Arab Army and the Libyan National Army in particular, and pointing, potentially, towards the full restoration of governmental authority in both countries.

In Libya, the key moment was in February 2016, when the Libyan National Army finally regained control of Benghazi from ISIS and Ansar Sharia after 18 months of intense fighting. Both the ISIS presence in Benghazi and the city’s liberation were predictably downplayed in Western media, despite the city’s fate having been apparently so important to British and US leaders back in 2011. On May 3rd, the Libyan National Army began its march West from Benghazi towards ISIS’ last Libyan holdout in Sirte.

In February, too, a massive Syrian army offensive towards Aleppo began to make serious gains, taking territory from Al Qaeda, ISIS and Ahrar Al Sham. On February 3rd, the supply route to Aleppo was severed, breaking a rebel siege of two government-held towns south of Azaz. Mass surrenders to the SAA followed, including 1200 in Hama. Then, exactly one month later, the world-historic city of Palmyra was liberated from ISIS by Syrian government forces backed with Russian air support. In what was presumably an attempt to appear relevant, the US had also launched two token airstrikes on the city, illustrating, said journalist Robert Fisk, that the US “want to destroy iSIS – but not that much”.

Today, ISIS’ original stronghold, the capital of its self-declared caliphate, is itself under threat. The Times reported earlier this week that a massively re-moralised Syrian army, is “storming towards the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa” and that “the Syrian regime’s elite Desert Hawks unit, backed by the Russian airstrikes, crossed the southern border of Raqqa province at the weekend – the first time that any of Assad’s forces have set foot there since being driven out by isis nearly two years ago.” They have been making swift advances.

Throughout 2016, then, the national armed forces of Libya and Syria, representing the elected governments of both countries, have been on a roll; and the days of ISIS and their sectarian bedfellows may well be numbered. So it is interesting that it is precisely this moment – not when ISIS were making gains, but now that they are facing defeat – that British troops have deigned to openly enter the fray.

The same edition of the Times that reported that the SAA were “storming towards …Raqqa” also carried, as its front page story, the news that “British special forces are on the frontline in Syria defending a rebel unit”, noting that “the operation marks the first evidence of the troops’ direct involvement in the war-torn country rather than just training rebels in Jordan.” And the same newspaper had reported the previous week that British special forces undertook their first known combat mission in Libya on May 12th, in support of the ‘Libya Dawn’ faction of the Libyan civil war. Libya Dawn is an umbrella group of mainly Misrata-based militias that emerged following the elections of June 2014 under Qatari patronage to fight against the newly elected secular parliament, and its armed forces, the Libyan National Army (LNA). The Times tacitly acknowledged that, up until now, the LNA has been fighting ISIS alone, noting that “MIsrata had largely ignored the metastasis of ISIS in Sirte, 170 miles away, since the first terrorist cells embedded themselves there in 2013”. Now, however, alongside the British ‘boots on the ground’ that Cameron vowed would never step foot in Libya, they have suddenly found themselves the ‘chosen force’ to liberate the country.

As in 1945, having sat back whilst a vicious and genocidal group laid waste to thousands upon thousands of soldiers fighting alone against them, the Cameron regime now wants to deny those armies the fruits of their heroic sacrifices. Cameron would rather see Raqqa and Sirte liberated by a ragtag of militias with little to unite them other than their sectarianism, than to see the authority of the elected governments restored. With British troops now in combat roles alongside the insurgents in Syria, however, this raises the prospect of a direct confrontation with Russian forces. Just like Churchill in 1945, it appears he is quite prepared to risk this. Back then, saner heads prevailed. The question is – where are those heads now?

Dan Glazebrook is author of Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis

This article originally appeared at: Rt.com

14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org