I took the three-day holiday weekend as an opportunity to catch up on sleep. That's why this page has had only two short posts since Saturday. I slept. I exercised. I watched the conference championships on Sunday. Yesterday, rather than participating in the annual Martin Luther King Day rally and march, I stayed home and cleaned. I find that since my place of employment moved out of the city, lengthening my daily commute from 35-minute walk each way to a 90-minute walk-train-&-bus-ride both to and from the office, that I need a holiday just to scrub my stove top, dust and whatnot. Pretty pathetic.
The holiday weekend turned out to be a good one to hibernate. Anne Barnard did report a lethal Israeli strike on Hezbollah forces in southern Syria, which also managed to kill an Iranian general. Interpreted as part of the March 17 Knesset election campaign, a way for Netanyahu to look tough, Iran and Hezbollah will not overtly respond.
"U.S. Signals Shift on How to End Syrian Civil War," by Anne Barnard and Somini Sengupta, prominently featured on the Gray Lady's web site for the better part of a day, is obviously intended to announce USG's retreat from its Geneva II diktat that "Assad Must Go." It strikes me as nothing more than rhetoric though, an adjustment in State Department public diplomacy in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. People are once again awake to the role of key U.S. ally Saudi Arabia in exporting Wahhabism. It is difficult for the Unites States to be seen as on the side of jihadis now when the United Nations is working on an Aleppo ceasefire and Russia is holding peace talks on Syria. As Barnard and Sengupta write,
Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Mistura [Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for the crisis in Syria], said that his plan would not resemble the past cease-fires, and that the United Nations, not the Syrian government, would be the guarantor. Yet even the modest Aleppo proposal is on shaky ground. While Mr. Assad has said he will consider it, his government has not signed off on the plan; Mr. de Mistura’s deputy arrived Sunday in Damascus for consultations.
The Moscow talks are arguably in worse shape. While Mr. Kerry said he hoped the talks “could be helpful,” several crucial opposition groups have refused to attend and say the United States has not pressured them to go.
That leaves American policy ambiguous, offering only modest verbal support to the new mediation efforts while continuing to finance some Syrian insurgents, yet not enough to seriously threaten Mr. Assad. Even a new program to train them to fight ISIS will not field fighters until May.
Critics argue that Washington is simply trying to disengage and offload the Syria problem to Mr. Assad’s allies, Russia and Iran, even at the cost of empowering them.
Still, any attempt to bring the parties to the table should be considered constructive, another Western diplomat said. “You can’t say to the Russians, ‘Go to hell.’ ”Also in the news this weekend is increased fighting for the airport in Donetsk. Reports have gone back and forth. First, that DPR forces had finally gained control from the Ukrainian junta; then the junta counterattacked with tanks. An indication that the September Minsk ceasefire agreement is now largely worthless is that the Gray Lady is starting to report on the armed conflict in the Donbass again and doing so in terms found in Andrew Kramer's latest, "Ukraine Accuses Russia of Sending More Troops and Artillery to Aid Rebels":
MOSCOW — In as clear a sign as any of the unraveling peace process in eastern Ukraine, the authorities in Kiev accused Russia on Monday of again sending regular army soldiers into Ukraine to prop up pro-Russian separatists who were losing a battle.
About 700 soldiers crossed Russia’s western border into the snowy war zone in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council said in a statement that was not possible to verify independently.
They came armed with a wide array of heavy weapons, Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk told journalists in Kiev, the capital. The country’s intelligence agencies “confirm that men and equipment entered from Russia,” he said. Howitzers and other artillery and antiaircraft systems were said to have crossed the border.This repeats a well-worn pattern from last summer's fighting: the junta suffers a setback, a military defeat, and immediately a keening that "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" commences in Kiev, in this case from the chief putschist and U.S. lackey, "Yats." I interpret this to mean that things are not going well for the Kiev junta.
Finally, a word about present-history and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. Tanzina Vega had a faintly praising, mostly critical assessment of the Mike Brown/Eric Garner police accountability/racial justice protests. One quote from her "Protesters Out to Reclaim King’s Legacy, but in Era That Defies Comparison" caught my eye; it was from David Garrow, establishment academic and Pulitzer-winning biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
What is far less clear is whether today’s protesters have the ability, or even the intention, to build an organized movement capable of creating social change.
David J. Garrow, a historian and the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said the impromptu protests that had erupted in recent months were not comparable to the strategies used by civil rights groups of the 1960s, which had clear goals such as winning the right to vote or the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter.
“You could call it rebellious, or you could call it irrational,” Mr. Garrow said of the new waves of protests. “There has not been a rational analysis in how does A and B advance your policy change X and Y?”
Mr. Garrow compared the protesters to those of Occupy Wall Street. “Occupy had a staying power of, what, six months?” Mr. Garrow said. “Three years later, is there any remaining footprint from Occupy? Not that I’m aware of.”Remaining "footprint from Occupy?" What about Obama's second term? During my hibernating weekend I watched a couple Frontline documentaries from a few years back. One was "Cliffhanger," about how Obama's failed "Grand Bargain" negotiations with Boehner ended up creating the "fiscal cliff" trade-off that was supposed to be resolved by whomever won the 2012 presidential election. What the Frontline documentary skipped was how Occupy Wall Street sprang to life after the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff that created the "fiscal cliff," and how Occupy Wall Street completely changed the frame of reference from a preoccupation with "crippling debt" to income inequality and how the system is rigged by the 1% against the 99%. Obama appropriated the Occupy Wall Street message for his general election campaign, siphoned off some of its activist energy, and went on to win his second landslide.
So don't accept elite dismissals of Occupy or Black Lives Matter. They are movements that are here to stay and will continue to have an impact.
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