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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

How Seymour Hersh confuses Syria with Libya

In his most recent essay, The Red-line and the rat line, Seymour Hersh argues that the 21 August sarin attack in Syria was a "false flag" carried out by the opposition in the hopes that it would bring the US into the war. He says Obama had information pointing to this and Hersh uses the yard stick of NATO Libyan intervention to argue that Obama's failure to intervene similarly in Syria indicates that he knew he had no legitimate case for intervention. Hersh writes:
Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.
He makes the same argument a different way in a recent CNN interview:
HERSH: And then the question then is if it's such a wonderful case he has and they're so sure, why so quick to walk away? Why say after a little heat, why say that we're going to go all of a sudden, he's a constitutionalist? The guy who invaded Tripoli without one worry about the War Powers act, all of a sudden he's a constitutionalist and wants to go to Congress?
Because Sy Hersh thinks Obama is as supportive of regime change in Syria as he was in Libya, he concludes Obama's failure to take military action against Bashar al-Assad after the chemical attack can be taken as de-facto proof that the President knew that the Assad regime really wasn't responsible for the sarin attack.

His logic simply makes no sense and shows how far he is willing to stray from rational thought in his effort to prove Obama "knows" Assad didn't do it.

Since Obama intervened in Libya near the very beginning of that conflict and the use of chemical weapons never became an issue, the answer to why he hasn't treated Syria in the same manner cannot possibly be explained by events almost three years after the killing began and after probably twenty times the number of deaths that sparked the Libyan intervention. Since Sy Hersh brings up the yard stick of Libya to measure Obama's Syria response by, he must first explain this almost three year delay in intervention before he can use events around Obama's red-line bluff and the August sarin attack to explain why these might be reasons for further delay. Remember, the kick-off date for the Libya Revolution, was 17 February 2011, and less than 5 weeks later and within a week of the start of the uprising in Syria, French warplanes were stopping Qaddafi's armor from doing to Benghazi what Assad has been able to do to Homs, Idlib and Aleppo. US warplanes were only a few days behind them. So Hersh can't possibly explain why Obama or NATO failed to protect the people of Syria with a similar resolve in 2011, 2012 or two-thirds of 2013 by spinning a tale about administration conflict over the red-line in September 2013. It simply isn't logical.

First you have to understand why Obama failed to intervene militarily even after a hundred thousands deaths, before the August sarin attacks added another thousand or so to the death count. Then you can go into why that attack failed to make him change his tune, in spite of his red-line bluff. Hersh operates under false assumption that Obama has not only been in support of regime change, but actively promoting it. Sy Hersh may believe that because that is the way Obama has always talked about Assad, but actions speak louder than words. When it comes to the Syrian opposition, Obama plays "good cop" to Putin's "bad cop," that's why he talks a different way, but he started working with Bashar al-Assad the same week Obama became President-elect in November 2008 and he would really like to see that regime survive. So would Israel. That is why he has failed to take any military action against Assad, or provide anything more than token support for the opposition, not just after the 21 August 2013 sarin attack, but also for the two and a half years before it.

Obama never planned to carry out a military attack against Assad the way he did against Qaddafi. Obama never expected his bluff to be called. When Obama made his famous "red-line" statement, I said it was a green light to keep killing big time without chemicals. That was the role it played until Assad called Obama's bluff by finally using "a whole bunch of chemical weapons." Then for Obama it became a matter of finding a way to weasel out of his promise. Going to Congress gave him that out. It simply makes no sense to take Obama's failure to change his policy as proof that this continued unwillingness to act against the Syrian regime shows Assad is innocent.

Barack Obama has been in Bashar al-Assad's corner all along:

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya

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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Socialism and the State of Libya

I'm not going to make some elaborate argument that the Libya Revolution is somehow groping towards socialism because Marxists already know that is true of the whole world simply because it is the next historic phase in successful human development. No system is eternal. Just as surely as feudalism had to eventually give way to capitalism, as capitalism ceases to be a benefit to humanity and instead threatens to drag it down with it, it too must give way to a system that is more just, and most importantly, more in tune with humanity's needs at this already post-capitalist stage of our development.

Capitalism gave rise to industrial production and that created vast wealth. This is a good thing, but the control of that wealth, by and for the benefit of an ever shrinking portion of humanity, now increasingly endangers, not only all the people, but the viability of life on Earth. It must be overthrown. This is the most important historic task of humanity in the present era.

Still it must be admitted that the first dozen or so attempts at socialism in a handful of countries makes for a poor showing. It will probably take a lot more attempts and especially in countries with advanced socialized production and the freest forms of capitalist democracy, before really workable models start to take shape.  Good things sometimes take time.

One might wish that the first horse be a thoroughbred, the first car a Mercedes, but that just isn't the way development works. Good things sometimes take time.

A child that has suffered from decades of abuse doesn't recover from the repeated trauma, just because the abuser has been removed. This also takes time.

Because many in the so-called anti-imperialist Left anointed Mummar Qaddafi and his Green Book "socialism" with a kind of sainthood, they opposed the uprising of the Libyan people against his dictatorship from the very beginning. They declared the National Transitional Council and the Revolutionary Brigades creations or tools of US imperialism, and when NATO entered the fray, they expressed little doubt that the whole fiasco would end with NATO boots on the ground and a puppet government in Tripoli.

When Tripoli fell and Qaddafi was killed with no NATO boots on the ground, they robbed the Libyan people of this hard won victory, declared it the first war ever won by air power, and gave all the credit (or blame from their non-Libyan POV) to NATO.

With no puppet government and NATO "boots" to kick around, with the failure of all of their original predictions about the post-Qaddafi outcome for Libya, (no DU to clean up, no bombed out infrastructure, etc.) these "anti-imperialists" resorted to claiming that Libya now had no state at all or was a "failed state" and a "mess" rather than recognizing it for what it is, a country were the state has been destroyed and now has to be rebuilt, a country carrying out the second half of a successful revolution.

They forged a great deal of unity with the sour grapes pro-Qaddafi, pro-Putin camps, and the imperialists, who naturally want to see any revolution declared a failure. They readily parrot every report about Libya in the bourgeois media designed to warn people off of even thinking about revolution, and except for these negative reports, they pay little attention to what is actually happening in Libya and so fail to sympathize the real world lessons of the Libyan experience into revolutionary theory that can help us all move forward.

Two and a half years after the Qaddafi regime was overthrown, Libya is still a mess. It could hardly be otherwise after 40 years of maniacal dictatorship. It is tasked with recreating the state from scratch, and there are many competing interests, so naturally there has been intense political struggle and this struggle has involved the masses in ways they never could have under the "Green" dictatorship, and slowly but surely, the Libyan people are lurching forward and the new Libyan state is taking shape. What follows are three articles published today that address the current state of the Libyan state.

Middle East Institute has just published this assessment of the current state of state building in Libya:
The Political Process in Libya

22 April 2014
By Karim Mezran
Libya’s road to democracy is shaky at best. Security is deteriorating, with targeted killings, criminal attacks, and bombings on the rise and clashes between rival armed groups—some apparently with government legitimacy and others not—growing more frequent. While these negative trends put tremendous pressure on the transition, Libya’s political process, albeit fickle, manages to keep moving. The efforts at institution building in Libya present a nuanced landscape: for every step forward in one aspect, there are steps backward in others.

Two years ago, expectations and hopes were high in Libya regarding the constitutional committee, considered the most important transitional body involved in institution building. Originally, the National Transitional Council (NTC) mandated that the General National Congress (GNC), elected in July 2012, was to serve as the constitutional drafting committee. A few months before the GNC elections, however, in an effort to appease the eastern federalist movement—which is weak but nevertheless vocal—the provision was changed so that the GNC would appoint the 60-member constitutional committee. Just a few days before the elections, the NTC changed its mind again and, in another act of appeasement toward the federalists, decided that the constitutional committee would be elected by the people. The federalists were mistrustful of a nationally elected body and claimed the right for the people of the eastern regions to elect their own representatives to the constitutional committee directly. These decisions created a conflict insofar as they deprived the GNC of its original mandate to draft a constitution and left it as a legislative body with no clear areas or limits of authority and responsibility. More...
Please note that while Libya certainly has its problems, being a client state of the NATO powers isn't one of them. Yet, that is precisely the outcome the so called "anti-imperialists" [Qaddafi lovers] predicted, not that after the revolution there would be a period of disorganization and discomfort. Oh My!

Also today in Libya, from AFP:
Libyan charter panel elects liberal as head

Tue, Apr 22nd 2014, 8:23AM
Ali Tarhuni, a liberal politician and former rebel minister, was elected to head Libya's constituent assembly, a spokesman for the body charged with drawing up a new constitution said Tuesday.

Tarhuni, an exiled opponent of dictator Moamer Kadhafi, returned to Libya to take part in the 2011 revolt which toppled his regime.

He held a ministerial post in a transitional government set up by the rebels, and went on to found the National Centrist Party, part of the liberal National Forces Alliance.

Libya's constituent assembly launched its work Monday in Al-Baida, in the country's east. More...
The Libyans who will draft the new constitution
And from Reuters:
Libya starts voter registration for general elections

22 April 2014
by Ahmed Elumami
(Reuters) - Libya will start registering voters for general elections, officials said on Tuesday, in the first concrete step indicating a vote will take place later this year.

In February, the Libyan parliament, the General National Congress (GNC), agreed to hold early elections, in an apparent effort to assuage Libyans frustrated at political chaos nearly three years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.

Deputies initially agreed to extend their term after their mandate ran out on February 7, to allow a special committee time to draft a new constitution. But that move provoked protests from Libyans angry at the slow pace of political change.

Voter registration will start from Wednesday, Emad al-Shadi al-Saih, head of the elections commission, told reporters. He gave no date for the vote but analysts say it might take place in summer or early autumn.

Saih called on Libyans to avoid "being negative" and participate in the elections in order to rebuild the country. More...

Libya's constitution-drafting body starts work

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya
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Thursday, April 17, 2014

Why does the mass media ignore mass murder in Syria?

I recall when the mantra of the media was "if it bleeds, it leads." That certainly isn't the case with regards to Syria. If more than a hundred people and a dozen children met with a violent end almost anywhere else in the world, it would make the morning news cycle. It happens every day in Syria without so much as a notice.

It can't be for lack of visuals. We all know TV news is a sucker for graphic video. A good video will even make a story where otherwise there wouldn't be one. The Syrian conflict has produced some of the most graphic and tense, or in the case of Syrian refugee children, compelling and heart-rending, videos the world has ever seen, available for free from YouTube, and with today's HD consumer grade cameras, not bad quality. Yet very little of this video ever makes it into the evening news. The true picture of this conflict and the human suffering it is causing is being hidden from us. Even Amy Goodman on Democracy Now fails in her notice of the dead or her concern for the children.

When the media was trying to rally people to fight Saddam Hussein, they made a big deal out of a false story that had Iraq troops throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait, now we have Assad's planes bombing play grounds, schools, breadlines and hospitals, and mums the word. Why are they covering up Assad's crimes when they should be reporting them?

One of the best indications this is the mainstream media's policy came this week when the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition traded accusations over who was using poison gas again in Syria. This should be a big news story for the mainstream media but it has raised hardly a murmur.

The media paid attention to Syria as never before after the 21 August sarin attack because it involved Obama's called bluff and it showed the bodies as never before. As if a hundred thousand people had not been slaughtered already by non-chemical means, the media jumped all over the chemical attack as though it was a fetish. The shameless pro-Assad forces in the blogosphere took up the defense of Assad as if proving he didn't do the sarin attack was the same as exonerating him of mass murder. Even while the media failed to report on Assad's continuing siege of Ghouta, using both bombardment and starvation as weapons, they gave coverage for everybody's opinions and findings on the chemical attack.

There can be little doubt that there have been new chemical attacks in Syria, since both sides agree there have been. While they both predictively point the finger at get other, if the reports that the gas bombs there dropped out of helicopters are accurate, there can be little doubt that those were Assad regime helicopters. Given the history of coverage on the chemical question in Syria, one would expect reports of a new chemical attack to break through this news blackout.

Why hasn't it?







Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria

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Monday, April 14, 2014

Rest In Peace John Johnson of Change-Links


I have two friends that were born on the 4th of July, Ron Kovac, who wrote a book with that title and John Johnson, who passed away, at the age of 69, yesterday . John Johnson had a name like mine where the first name is repeated in the last name with a reference to ones origins, and like me, he was a life long radical, one of the original SDSers.

John Johnson was perhaps best known for publishing the monthly calender of events, Change-Links, that provided much of the glue that held the progressive community in Los Angeles together for the past 20 years. The front page always had topical and insightful articles about the issues of the day, but its heart was the calendar section that covered all the up coming programs, meetings, film showings and scheduled demonstrations. It was like a program for the movement in L.A. Every month you would have to seek out your Change-Links to know what was happening.


I would repair his computers in return for advertising in Change-Links when he was short of cash, or buy ads in Change-Links when I was flush. Once, when he was picking up a fixed computer from my place, he found out that my bike had been stolen. The next day he drove back to Venice from the valley to bring me an "extra" bike he had.
  
In January 2013, John had heart surgery and as a result, there was no paper version of Change-Links for about six months.  I don't think his health ever fully recovered but his spirits and activity did and we all got complaisant  about getting out Change-Links every month as usual again. Then two weeks ago he had a stroke and fell. He also had a very bad MSRA bacterial infection that got into his bloodstream, Last night he died.

Rest in Peace John Johnson. You will be remember wherever people fight for justice,

I believe this is the last blog post John made to the Change-Links website:
The Perils of Progressive Media

31 January 2014
by John Johnson
Last month we got an email from the Getty Foundation. They demanded $350 from Change- Links, claiming that we used one of their photos on a page from our Website from about three months ago. On it, we’d ran an article about a homeless families. To illustrate it I chose a photo I found on the Web of a homeless family.

A number of years ago the Getty empire started buying up all the photos they could, especially ones with news value, then charging for their use. Many artists and others waged a large campaign to stop this monopolization of art but so far it hasn’t stopped them.

Change-Links continues to eke itself out without any corporate or think tank support. We’re one of the few remaining examples of genuine public media. And one of the very few progressive publications still in operation. It’s a lot of work to get out.

It’s also critical at this time for us to build a more organized progressive movement in the US. Occasional progressive and radical outbreaks, like the Occupy movement, infuse us with hope, but they don’t last. We no longer have the base of college movements that were once a vital source of energy and continuity to keep things moving.

During the Seventies we tried to build a working class movement, focusing on both community and the work place. But we couldn’t sustain it after a few years. And by then the student actions were already ebbing.

Today corporations dominate the country and our lives. Wall Street rakes in billions in exchange for ruining the lives of untold poor and working class families. Corporations work hand in glove with government officials to bilk and funnel massive amounts of taxpayer money into their own pockets.

Not that it ever existed, but democracy is next to dead in this country. And it’s pretty much the same throughout the rest of the world, worse in some places, better in others. Dictators have figured out that fraud works better than brute force to keep the population in tow, though they don’t hesitate to use both.

The best news sources on broadcast media are Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now,” and Thom Hartmann. Rachael Madow can be good, but we took a big hit when they got rid of Keith Obermann.

The corporations and the government are not going to establish a fair and balanced public broadcast or print media, much less a progressive one. We’ve got to do it ourselves. Amy Goodman gets a lot of support, and can always use more. But Change-Links is hanging by a thread that gets more frayed with every issue. If you value the news and information we provide, we need your donations and/or volunteer time. Now!
Martin Sheen & John Johnson

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Alternative Left Perspectives on Syria

Linux Beach is honored to find itself on an exclusive list published yesterday by Pulse Media:

Alternative Left Perspectives on Syria

13 April 2014
The responses of most leftists to the Syrian uprising and subsequent war (it’s often forgotten that it started as an uprising — indeed a nonviolent and nonsectarian one) have been deeply disappointing. Disappointing to many Syrian activists, and to many of us on the Left who support the Syrian struggle for dignity and justice, which is now a struggle against both Assad’s killing machine and the jihadi counter-revolutionary forces.

The Left’s responses fall into three main categories:
  1. explicit support for the Assad regime
  2. monochrome opposition to Western intervention, end of discussion (with either implicit or explicit neutrality on the conflict itself)
  3. general silence caused by deep confusion
The first camp, while relatively small, represents a truly hideous, morally obscene and, I would argue, deeply reactionary position – siding with a mass murderer and war criminal who presides over a quasi-fascist police state.

The second camp, which encompasses a majority of peace activists and soi-disant anti-imperialists in the West, represents an (ironically) Eurocentric/US-centric stance (it’s all about the West, not the Syrian people) – a total abandonment of internationalism.

The third camp is at least understandable, given the complexity of the Syrian conflict. The book I co-edited on the subject is titled The Syria Dilemma for a reason. Yet this stance remains disconcerting: silence in the face of what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls “the biggest humanitarian and peace and security crisis facing the world” is a cop-out. Complexity is not a gag order.

There is a fourth camp, however: a small but growing group of progressives who embrace the goals of the Syrian revolution. There are several shades within this camp – it includes Marxists, pacifists, feminists, Third Worldists and leftists of various sorts. Some support the armed struggle in Syria, others do not, standing instead with the nonviolence activists in Syria. But what unites this camp is its solidarity with the Syrian struggle for dignity, justice and self-determination.

The body of writings and arguments this camp has produced directly challenge the dominant narratives on the Left about Syria and offer a critical alternative to it. Here, collected in one place, are some of the key texts of this dissident left camp. Emphasis on some of the key texts – this list is by no means exhaustive. It’s limited to English-language sources. We offer it here as a living resource, one that is expanding on a daily basis. (If you have suggestions for other texts, please post them here.) Here ’tis (in no particular order):

Molly Crabapple
How the Western left ignored Syria’s activists as inconvenient glitches in a story about ourselves

Firas Massouh
Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left

Mohammed Al Attar
What Kind of Support Do Syrians Want?
Solidarity With the Syrian Struggle for Dignity and Freedom
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy Salutes Syria’s Courageous Democratic Movement
A Personal Statement from Campaign for Peace and Democracy Co-Directors Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy

Louis Proyect
A tale of two Syria conferences

Robin Yassin-Kassab
Reporting Syria: How Robert Fisk, Nir Rosen & Joseph Massad have framed Syria all wrong
Blanket Thinkers

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
On Monsterphilia and Assad: The problems with the “anti-imperialist” position on Syria
Why Bosnia is a better analogy than Iraq in the Syria debate

Gilbert Achcar
Syria in the Context of the Arab Uprisings
Welcoming the vote of the British Parliament while supporting the Syrian uprising
Interview with Gilbert Achcar

Afra Jalabi
Streams of Light: The Heroic Struggle of the Syrian People
Anxiously Anticipating a New Dawn: Voices of Syrian Activists, in The Syria Dilemma (not available online, alas — but get the book)

Mohja Kahf
Then and Now: The Syrian Revolution to Date — A young nonviolent resistance and the ensuing armed struggle
Syria: It’s Still a Revolution, My Friends
Lack of U.S. Peace Movement Solidarity with Syrian Uprising and the “No Good Guys” Excuse

Danny Postel
Mission Accomplished? Syria, the Antiwar Movement, and the Spirit of Internationalism

Nader Hashemi
Syria, savagery, and self-determination
International Appeal to Stop the Starvation Sieges/End the Blockades in Syria

Danny Postel & Nader Hashemi
Break Syria’s Starvation Sieges—By Any Means Necessary

Max Blumenthal
The right to resist is universal: A farewell to Al Akhbar and Assad’s apologists
‘We Just Wish for the Hit to Put an End to the Massacres’: a report from the Zaatari refugee camp
Syria and the Left–a conversation between Max Blumenthal & Danny Postel

Talal Alyan
Shell Shocked and Rouged: Syria Is Not a Disposable Bride
While you were neutral about Yarmouk
Yarmouk: an unnerving silence about the ongoing siege of a Palestinian camp in Damascus
An Interview with Syrian Writer and Former Political Prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Yassin Al Haj Saleh
The Syrian Shabiha and Their State
From the Kingdom of Assad to the Third Republic

Yassin Al Haj Saleh & Rime Allaf
Syria dispatches: Robert Fisk’s independence

Rana Issa
The Destruction of Syria: In Memory of Edward Said

Thomas Pierret
No Stability in Syria Without Political Change

Wendy Pearlman
On the Third Anniversary of the Syrian Uprising
Intervening Against Assad: Reflections From Syrian Refugees
Love in the Syrian Revolution


Ian Williams
From the Spanish Civil War to Syria: Parceling Out Truth Subverts Justice

Bill Weinberg
Syria: civil wars in the civil war
Syria: denialism delegitimizes ‘anti-war’ position
‘Anti-war’ movement still betraying Syrian people
Why I am renouncing my Project Censored award

Mary Kaldor
Bordering on a new World War 1
What to do in Syria?

Richard Falk
What Can Be Done About Syria? Tragedy and Impotence
On Syria: What is to be done?

Syrian leftist sends devastating reply to Assad apologist Tariq Ali and ‘Stop The War’

Syrian Anarchist Challenges the Rebel/Regime Binary View of Resistance–an interview with Nader Atassi

Virtually everything Scott Lucas has written for EA WorldView’s outstanding Syria section

Clay Claiborne’s Syria diaries on his Linux Beach blog
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