NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?-No U.S. Troops To Syria!

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

There is no simple answer to the question of what to do against the terrorist violence perpetrated by supporters if the Islamic State.  But an indispensable step is to understand where the threat originated and to stop inflating it by our own actions.  First do no harm.

 

Last week there was a small standout in Harvard Square to protest the US alliance with Saudi Arabia.  I was holding a sign which said “No More Arms Sales to Terrorist Supporters.” A small elderly woman came up to me and said “God bless you for what you are doing,” in heavily-accented English.  I asked her where she was from, and she wouldn’t answer.  Then I asked her (in my halting, Levantine-inflected Arabic), “Do you speak Arabic?” “Yes,” she replied.  Where was she from, I asked in Arabic. “Syria,” she said. “They are destroying my country.”

 

The thousands of foreign fighters unleashed on Syria – and much of their armaments --  have reached the battlefields through the complicity of NATO member Turkey and its open borders to the south.  The financing comes from supposed US allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Petro-monarchies. Those oil tanker trucks in ISIS-controlled eastern Syria, which we only recently began to target, have been smuggling oil mainly through Turkey as a means of financing the IS Caliphate and paying its fighters.  It is absurd to argue that the US is somehow unable to restrain its allies.  Saudi Arabia was made to shut up about the impending nuclear agreement with Iran, which their ruling family opposed (though not Israel, the other US “ally” which wields too much political power in our country to be intimidated).

 

HOW SAUDI/GULF MONEY FUELS TERROR

In the wake of the latest terrorist outrage in Paris, the big question is not which specific group is responsible for the attack, but who’s responsible for the Islamic State and Al Qaeda in the first place. The answer that has grown increasingly clear in recent years is that it’s Western leaders who have used growing portions of the Muslim world as a playground for their military games and are now crying crocodile tears over the consequences.  This pattern had its beginnings in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency and the Saudi royal family virtually invented modern jihadism in an effort to subject the Soviets to a Vietnam-style war in their own backyard. It was the case, too, in Iraq, which the United States and Great Britain invaded in 2003, triggering a vicious civil warfare between Shi‘ites and Sunnis… Faced with a choice between Assad on one hand and ISIS and Al Qaeda on the other, Obama has dithered and delayed, refusing to commit himself wholeheartedly to the rebel cause but failing to object when his closest friends channel funds to groups that the U.S. officially regards as anathema.    More

 

US-Saudi Relationship Discredits US Fight Against ISIS

On Monday, the Obama Administration announced it had approved a $1.3 billion arms sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The White House claimed the weapons package, which included laser-guided bombs, was needed because the Saudis’ inventory had been depleted due to “counterterrorism operations.”  But as anyone following events in the Middle East knows, the last thing the regime in Saudi Arabia is interested in doing is combating terrorism… By the U.S. metric, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world. Not only were Saudi citizens and Saudi money instrumental in the creation of al-Qaida and the perpetration of the 9/11 attacks, ISIS is a thoroughly Saudi-backed operation.  The Saudis helped bring ISIS to power in Iraq in hopes of thwarting Iranian influence and even now, after all the killings and cruelty, Saudi money flows to ISIS in hopes of undermining Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria.   More

 

Outside Powers Must End Their Syria Proxy Wars

Warplanes drop bombs, meaning they function as airborne artillery. No military doctrine holds that artillery alone can conquer territory. That takes forces on the ground. The ground forces exist in both Syria and Iraq, and they are not from the Western world. The Syrian Army, though odious to many Syrians and to the Western powers, is the strongest of these and has weathered four-and-a-half years of war without breaking up… One step would not involve any combat at all: Close the open supply line between ISIS and the outside world through Turkey. Turkey is an ally, but no friend. Its open border with Syria is the jihadis’ lifeline. Without it, the weapons and ammunition the jihadis seized from the Iraqi Army last year would not be enough for them to defend all their territory. Without it, jihadis trained in Syria would not pass easily into Europe to murder civilians. Without the Turkish supply line, the local forces whose shared hatred of the jihadis — who include the Syrian Army, the Kurds and all of Syria’s and Iraq’s other minorities, Iraq’s majority Shiite population, secular Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — would stand a better chance of defeating them.   More

 

Can European Union, Russia & US team up to defeat ISIL?

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has teamed up with French President François Hollande in seeking a ‘rapprochement’ with Russia to fight [the so-called] Islamic State [group], described by both as the biggest threat to the EU.  Juncker spoke on Wednesday (18 November) at a public debate in the Bozar concert hall in Brussels, organised by the French weekly l’OBS, and the Belgian dailies De Standaart and Le Soir. Answering questions by the audience, and by the editors of the three periodicals, Juncker made no secret of his personal views.  “Like François Hollande, who is European, I consider Islamic State Europe’s enemy number one. Therefore we should use all means to put an end to this galloping barbarity,” Juncker said.   More

 

Clinton Promises a More Hawkish Approach to Islamic State Than Obama

In her remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Clinton reiterated her support for a no-fly zone in Syria and called for creating humanitarian corridors in the war-torn country to shelter displaced Syrians who would otherwise seek refuge in Europe. She also signaled an openness to sending more U.S. special forces to Syria than the 50 troops President Barack Obama has already authorized, and advocated for intensifying America’s air campaign against ISIS… Clinton’s speech comes as her Republican rivals propose a series of increasingly hawkish measures to defeat the Islamic State and deal with the second-order effects of the 4 ½-year civil war in Syria.   More

 

HILLARY CLINTON'S LIBYA

Some of the better-informed commentators on the recent terrorist attacks by ISIS have noticed the reassertion of the 2002-2003 understanding of the Middle East: that all-out war is the only sensible policy and Israel is our most faithful ally in the region. It is an opportunist line, and it is being pushed hardest by opportunists on the far right. But a proper tally of the ideological culprits who have never been held to account should make special reference to Hillary Clinton's actions in Libya… The fact that neither candidate opposing Clinton in the primaries had a word to say about any of this -- that they were comprehensively uninformed about the NATO action in Libya and its aftermath -- points to an enduring weakness in the disposition and political temper of almost all Democratic politicians of any note.   More

 

Why a Climate Deal Is the Best Hope for Peace

The connection between warming temperatures and the cycle of Syrian violence is, by now, uncontroversial… The implications of a failure to bring carbon down to safer levels go well beyond amplifying catastrophes like Syria’s historic drought. The last time atmospheric CO₂ was this high, global sea levels were at least six metres higher. We find ourselves confronted with ice-sheet disintegration that, in some susceptible areas, already appears unstoppable. In the currently overloaded CO₂ climate, it’s just a matter of time until hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from coastal regions, their agricultural lands and groundwater destroyed by saltwater intrusion from sea rise… as the author and energy expert Michael T. Klare argued weeks before the attacks, Paris “should be considered not just a climate summit but a peace conference—perhaps the most significant peace convocation in history.”   More