I am happy to state with confidence that this election will backfire on the Tories. The strong evidence from both the 2017 election and the Scottish referendum campaign, is that once broadcasting rules on equal time come into play, the impact on voters is profound of hearing direct from normally derided people and their normally ridiculed arguments.
The Johnson/Cummings electoral strategy is catastrophically bad. First past the post rewards regional voter concentration. Cummings plan is to sacrifice votes in traditional Tory areas in order to pile them up in traditionally hostile areas. The result will be to even out their vote, lose regional concentration and lose the election. They can pile on two million racist votes in traditional Labour constituencies without gaining more than a dozen seats. That will merely cancel out losses in Scotland. That people en masse are going to forget the devastation of their communities by Thatcher or the generations of fight for a decent living is far from probable. The antipathy to the Tories in parts of the UK is not “tribal”, it is the result of generations of hard experience.
The Brexit Party may have more appeal than the Tories in traditional Labour consituencies, but neither they nor the Tories will win any significant number of them. It is in the marginals of the Midlands and Lancashire where the Brexit Party may damage the Tories’ chances, not in Sunderland and Hartlepool which will stay Labour. The SNP is going to sweep Scotland, the Liberal Democrats make substantive gains in London and the South West and the Labour Party will do much better in London and the North than anybody now expects. The Midlands, both East and West, are hard to predict and the key battleground, but the number of possible Tory gains is not enough to compensate for their losses elsewhere. The Tories could end up with the largest share of the vote, perhaps 36%, but less seats than the Labour Party. That is what I expect to happen.
Yesterday in the House of Commons a general election was approved for December 12; following its approval today in the House of Lords, parliament will be suspended for a six-week election campaign.
The common prediction is that no one knows how the election will turn out. Boris Johnson, Tory prime minister, has been consistently polling ahead of Labour -- "more than 10 percentage points in some" -- but I'd take that with a grain of salt. The overwhelming opinion going into the last general election, June 2017, was that the Tories under Theresa May would pad their majority, yet they ended up losing seats and had to cobble together a minority government with the help of Ulster unionists.
In 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn proved to be a formidable campaigner, putting Tories on the defense for their commitment to austerity and militarism. Those themes will resonate once again with the electorate.
Johnson calculates that he can win by campaigning on a message that only he will complete the Brexit agenda and fulfil the “will of the people” who voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. He is emboldened by the stance of the Brexit Party, who have indicated that they will not stand against Tory candidates in marginal seats but will stand against Labour candidates in seats in the north of England that voted heavily in 2016 to leave.
The Liberal Democrats are seeking to increase their 19 MPs in Westminster by hoovering up the Remain vote. Johnson’s other main calculation, therefore, is that the Liberal Democrats will win votes at Labour’s expense in Remain voting areas.
Much has changed in the last four years. Brexit prefigured Trump. Voters were in the mood to "fuck shit up" in 2016, and in this they succeeded, but not in a way that they would like to see continued. Austerity, market orthodoxy, militarism -- none of it stopped or even decreased in intensity. The neoliberal paradigm didn't cease to function with Trump and Brexit; the chairs on the observation deck were slightly rearranged.
My guess is that the Tories will not perform too well. Labour will do better than expected but not by a huge margin. The Scots and Liberal Democrats will pick up seats too. Then there will be a big Blairite row over who gets to lead a coalition government because Jeremy Corbyn is unacceptable to neoliberals.
On Monday, the street running into Tahrir Square, Baghdad’s main gathering place and the entryway to a bridge leading to the Green Zone, was packed with people, food carts and trucks blasting music, as well as protesters beating a traditional drum.
Much of the protest had a festive air: People danced, some men took their shirts off, others wore hats made of the Iraqi flag, and at tea carts vendors handed out cups of sweet tea and sandwiches. Closer to the Green Zone, the demonstration was more of a battle, as security forces fired tear gas and clashed with protesters.
[snip]
The government’s response in recent days has been more moderate than when the protests began in the first week of October. At that time, the security forces used live fire to drive back those who tried to enter Baghdad’s heavily guarded Green Zone. Nationwide, over the first five days, 157 people were killed, including eight members of the security forces, according to a government report.
A two-week hiatus in protests followed those clashes, and the demonstrators appeared to organize in the calm. The protests resumed on Oct. 25.
Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, a nationalist Shiite cleric, has been stoking the antigovernment sentiment of the protesters, calling for new elections and for Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to step down.
Mr. al-Sadr is the only leader of a Shiite political party urging his followers to protest; most of the others, some of whom have ties to Iran, are firmly in the government camp. But Mr. al-Sadr, who has pushed to rid Iraq of both American and Iranian influence, has repeatedly spoken out against corruption, garnering him greater credibility with the demonstrators than some of his peers.
It's when an uprising becomes Mardi Gras that authorities need to worry. A Mardi Gras draws in the broad public, unlike a purely political march or police street fight. The government is obviously scared, agreeing to toss a few gumdrops in the form of dissolving provincial councils and reducing salaries of top officials.
Neither the United States nor Iran want to see this uprising continue. One doesn't want to see more bloodshed, but at the same time it would be wonderful to see a reboot of the Arab Spring. That Muqtada al-Sadr is playing a leadership role is encouraging. It means that there is a formidable combatant in the arena; a champion, not a cutout.
I happened to be up early and online when Trump made his announcement that the U.S. had terminated a “whimpering and crying and screaming" ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Watching it, what struck me was how much of the question-and-answer period that followed Trump's statement dealt with Syria's oil. (Below are the key passages from the NPR readout.) One could be forgiven if you were to draw the conclusion that al-Baghdadi's death and control of Syria's oil were connected.
Which, of course, they are. The U.S. goal, from the days of the Arab Spring up until now, is regime change in Syria. Control of Syria's oil allows the U.S. to maintain its fantasy that it can force Assad to negotiate away his presidency.
What struck me even more than Trump's lubricious display over Syria's oil was that there was not one peep from the assembled press corp regarding the legality of such a move. It is as if the law of jungle and mafia don behavior have become totally normalized for a head of state in the age of peak neoliberalism.
THE PRESIDENT: No, I think it's great. Look, we don't want to keep soldiers between Syria and Turkey for the next 200 years. They've been fighting for hundreds of years. We're out. But we are leaving soldiers to secure the oil. And we may have to fight for the oil. It's okay. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there's massive amounts of oil.
And we're securing it for a couple of reasons. Number one, it stops ISIS, because ISIS got tremendous wealth from that oil. We have taken it. It's secured.
Number two — and again, somebody else may claim it, but either we'll negotiate a deal with whoever is claiming it, if we think it's fair, or we will militarily stop them very quickly. We have tremendous power in that part of the world. We have — you know, the airport is right nearby. A very big, very monstrous, very powerful airport, and very expensive airport that was built years ago. We were in there — we're in that Middle East now for $8 trillion.
So we don't want to be keeping Syria and Turkey. They're going to have to make their own decision. The Kurds have worked along incredibly with us, but in all fairness, it was much easier dealing with the Kurds after they went through three days of fighting, because that was a brutal three days. And if I — we would have said to the Kurds, "Hey, do you mind moving over seven miles?" Because, you know, they were in the middle, mostly. So you have seven or eight miles. "Could you mind moving over?"
Because, I have to say, Turkey has taken tremendous deaths from that part of the world. You know, we call it a safe zone. But it was anything but a safe zone. Turkey has lost thousands and thousands people from that safe zone. So they've always wanted that safe zone, for many years. I'm glad I was able to help them get it. But we don't want to be there; we want to be home. I want our soldiers home or fighting something that's meaningful.
I'll tell you who loves us being there: Russia and China. Because while they build their military, we're depleting our military there. So, Russia loves us being there. Now, Russia likes us being there for two reasons: because we kill ISIS, we kill terrorists, and they're very close to Russia. We're 8,000 miles away. Now, maybe they can get here, but we've done very well with Homeland Security and the ban, which, by the way, is approved by the United States Supreme Court, as you know. You know, there was a reporter that said we lost the case. And he was right, in the early court. He refu- — he didn't want to say; just refused to say that we won the case in the Supreme Court. So, you know.
But we have a very effective ban, and it's very hard for people to come to our country. But it's many thousands of miles away, whereas Russia is right there, Turkey is right there. Syria is there. They're all right there. Excuse me, Iran is right there. Iraq is right there. They all hate ISIS. So, we don't — you know, in theory, they should do something.
And I'll give you something else: The European nations have been a tremendous disappointment because I personally called, but my people called a lot. "Take your ISIS fighters." And they didn't want them. They said, "We don't want them." They came from France, they came from Germany, they came from the UK. They came from a lot of countries. And I actually said to them, "If you don't take them, I'm going to drop them right on your border. And you can have fun capturing them again."
But the United States taxpayer is not going to pay for the next 50 years. You see what Guantanamo costs. We're not going to pay tens of billions of dollars because we were good enough to capture people that want to go back to Germany, France, UK, and other parts of Europe. And they can walk back. They can't walk to our country. We have lots of water in between our country and them.
So, yeah. Go.
[snip]
I spoke with Lindsey Graham just a little while ago. In fact, Lindsey Graham is right over here. And he's been very much involved in this subject. And he's — he's a very strong hawk. But I think Lindsey agrees with what we're doing now.
And, again, there are plenty of other countries that can help them patrol. I don't want to leave 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 soldiers on the border.
But where Lindsey and I totally agree is the oil. The oil is, you know, so valuable for many reasons. It fueled ISIS, number one. Number two, it helps the Kurds, because it's basically been taken away from the Kurds. They were able to live with that oil. And number three, it can help us because we should be able to take some also. And what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly. Right now, it's not big. It's big oil underground, but it's not big oil up top, and much of the machinery has been shot and dead. It's been through wars. But — and — and spread out the wealth.
But, no, we're protecting the oil. We're securing the oil. Now, that doesn't mean we don't make a deal at some point. But I don't want to be — they're fighting for 1,000 years, they're fighting for centuries. I want to bring our soldiers back home. But I do want to secure the oil.
If you read about the history of Donald Trump — I was a civilian. I had absolutely nothing to do with going into Iraq, and I was totally against it. But I always used to say, "If they're going to go in..." — nobody cared that much, but it got written about. "If they're going to go in..." — I'm sure you've heard the statement, because I made it more than any human being alive. "If they're going into Iraq, keep the oil." They never did. They never did. I know Lindsey Graham had a bill where basically we would have been paid back for all of the billions of dollars that we've spent — many, many billions of dollars. I mean, I hate to say it, it's actually trillions of dollars, but many, many billions of dollars. And, by one vote, they were unable to get that approved in the Senate. They had some pretty big opposition from people that shouldn't have opposed, like a president. And they weren't able. If you did that, Iraq would be a much different story today because they would be owing us a lot of money. They would be treating us much differently.
[snip]
Now, I will secure the oil that happens to be in a certain part. But that's tremendous money involved. I would love to — you know, the oil in — I mean, I'll tell you a story. In Iraq — so they spent — President Bush went in. I strongly disagreed with it, even though it wasn't my expertise at the time, but I had a — I have a very good instinct about things. They went in and I said, "That's a tremendous mistake." And there were no weapons of mass destruction. It turned out I was right. I was right for other reasons, but it turned out, on top of everything else, they had no weapons of mass destruction, because that would be a reason to go in. But they had none.
But I heard recently that Iraq, over the last number of years, actually discriminates against America in oil leases. In other words, some oil companies from other countries, after all we've done, have an advantage Iraq for the oil. I said, "Keep the oil. Give them what they need. Keep the oil." Why should we — we go in, we lose thousands of lives, spend trillions of dollars, and our companies don't even have an advantage in getting the oil leases. So I just tell you that story. That's what I heard.
The popular uprising in Iraq is heating up again, competing for headline space with Lebanon and Chile. The periphery of global neoliberal rule is in rebellion. Meanwhile, the United States has declared its intention to garrison the Syrian oil fields of Deir ez-Zor with additional troops and tanks. Germany wants to send tens of thousands of NATO troops to occupy Rojava. And The New York Times correspondent Ben Hubbard has penned a lachrymose article from an undisclosed location in "Northeastern Syria" about the ongoing detention of ISIS combatants and their kin, yet the "newspaper of record" has not a word about Julian Assange.
Closer to home, Amazon is attempting to buy the Seattle City Council, having recently dumped $1 million in a chamber of commerce PAC. Amazon's principal target is socialist Kshama Sawant. If Amazon can buy an election in my neighborhood, it can buy an election anywhere. If Kshama Sawant can't swim above the tsunami of mega-corp cash, we're all in trouble -- from Santiago to Baghdad; from Beirut to Seattle; from Kobani to Sinaloa, and everywhere else.
Chanting “Let us in! Let us in!” about two dozen Republican members of the House pushed past Capitol Police officers to enter the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee, where impeachment investigators have been conducting private interviews that have painted a damaging picture of the president’s behavior.
The government official being interviewed was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, Laura Cooper, who was providing the "smoking gun" in the form of testimony regarding Trump's hold on the hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance for the U.S. banana republic on the Dnieper.
It's going to be hard, following the Taylor testimony, for the GOP to deny that Trump was involved in an illegal shakedown of the government of incoming Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. So they're resorting to circus theater, the next installment of which is going to feature a call to reveal the whistle-blower's identity, as if that matters at this point. Stolberg and Fandos note that
Indeed, some Republicans are growing increasingly uneasy about the inquiry, and fretting that it could get much, much worse for them. Publicly, they are taking their cues from the president, and Wednesday’s performance appeared intended to please Mr. Trump. The president has fumed publicly and privately that Republicans have not been tough enough in defending him, and has recently tried to undercut the inquiry by suggesting that the whistle-blower whose allegations touched it off is not credible or does not exist.
“Where’s the Whistleblower?” the president tweeted on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, the senior Republicans on the three investigative panels involved in the inquiry formally requested that Mr. Schiff arrange for public testimony by the whistle-blower, and all government officials the whistle-blower relied on to compile that account.
The Republicans will continue to spotlight MacGuffins as the impeachment inquiry rolls along. In a way it is a spectacular moment. We are living through counterfactual history. What would have happened if Nixon hadn't resigned in August 1974?
Nixon's resignation is a important moment in time because it kicked off the gestation period for our current zombie neoliberal paradigm.
So we're back to the future. It rarely happens in such a focused way.
A joint Turkish-Russian statement issued after six hours of talks between Putin and Erdogan said they would establish a “joint monitoring and verification mechanism” to oversee implementation of the agreement.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was more blunt. If Kurdish forces did not retreat, Syrian border guards and Russian military police would have to fall back. “And remaining Kurdish formations would then fall under the weight of the Turkish army,” he said.
[snip]
Ankara may also have to moderate its own military ambitions in the region. Turkish security sources said Ankara was re-evaluating a plan to set up 12 observation posts in northeastern Syria in the wake of the deal.
That change reflects the fact that Turkey, which had aimed to be the dominant force in the “safe zone” area, will now have to share that territory with Assad and Putin, who have both said that Turkish forces cannot remain in Syria in the long term.
“The most significant part of the Russian-Turkish agreement is the arrival of the Syrian border guard to the northeast, something both Damascus and Russia sought for a long time,” said Yury Barmin, a Middle East specialist at Moscow Policy Group.
“This also means de facto recognition of Assad by Erdogan.”
The Putin-Erdogan powwow yesterday in Sochi puts a spotlight on a major U.S. foreign policy failure.
As Peskov said, “The United States was the closest ally of the Kurds during the last few years, and in the end the U.S. ditched the Kurds and effectively betrayed them.”
ISIS detention centers and U.S. military bases were abandoned. The plan to station exiting U.S. troops across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan has been vetoed by the Iraqi government. Now, Putin has blessed Erdogan's "safe zone."
No word yet if the Kurdish YPG plan to fight back. If they do it will be absent any backer other than the CIA. The Kurds have until Tuesday to clear out of the border.
German defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is calling for a massive NATO occupation force to patrol the Syrian border along with Turkey and Russia, which is an obvious non-starter.
Moon of Alabama points out the logistical difficulties the U.S. faces in supporting its remaining operations in Syria. (This assumes that U.S. statements it will leave only a couple hundred troops in country are truthful. More likely a couple thousand.)
The entire U.S. occupation of northeast Syria, a.k.a., Rojava, has been shrouded in mystery from the get-go. Reporting has been atrocious. Has the U.S. really abandoned its airbase outside Kobani? Does the U.S. really only have a couple hundred soldiers in Deir ez-Zor? We don't know.
Nonetheless, it is a significant victory for Syria. Its troops are once again patrolling the northern border and no Turkish military bases are being erected.
The Democratic Party elite are unhappy. Their frontrunner, Joe Biden, who was never really their frontrunner since they prefer a Pete Buttigieg or a Kamala Harris, is flagging badly, and the only viable options remaining, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are considered beyond the pale because of their anti-plutocratic rhetoric and their "tax and spend" policies.
So what is a Democratic Party elite to do? Jonathan Martin explores the question this morning in "Anxious Democratic Establishment Asks, ‘Is There Anybody Else?’" The answer appears to be a hope that a late entrant to the primary appears. With the exception of Sherrod Brown, the elite saviors mentioned -- Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama -- are all ridiculous.
At this point in the national polls, there are three top candidates -- Biden, Warren and Sanders -- and a slew of also-ran contenders -- Harris, Buttigieg, O'Rourke, Booker, Klobuchar, et al. -- who all practice a neoliberal orthodoxy that a majority of the Democratic Party electorate has given up on.
Right now in the national polls the combined totals of Warren and Sanders surpass that of Joe Biden, something even more pronounced in polls from early primary states. And what's particularly worrisome for Democratic Party elites is that voters appear to be migrating from Biden to Warren.
The firewall for the elites will be the same one as last go-round -- South Carolina. But what is different this time is that California has moved its primary up to Super Tuesday, March 3. So, if Biden loses California, it's going to be hard for him to bury the Warren/Sanders challenge in the same way that Hillary did to Bernie in 2016.
A fail safe is likely being designed to deal with this outcome. But when you tick through the options the only one that makes sense is insane -- a kamikaze attack in the form of a third-party campaign a la Ross Perot by billionaire Mike Bloomberg.
Over the weekend the Pence-Pompeo ceasefire appeared to hold. As Reuters reports, "On Sunday, the SDF said they had withdrawn from the border town of Ras al Ain under the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal, but a spokesman for Turkish-backed Syrian rebels said the withdrawal was not yet complete." Turkey has promised to resume its offensive tomorrow unless all Kurdish forces are gone.
Which raises the question, Gone from where?Presumably from "[A] rectangular piece of territory that is bounded by the towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain on Syria’s border with Turkey, and runs south to a main highway in territory Mr. Kobani’s forces control, by Tuesday night." Mazlum Kobani, leader of the Syrian Kurdish forces, says they're already gone, but he promises trouble if Turkey plans to cleanse the area of Kurds and repopulate it with Syrian Arab refugees. At the same time, Iran is on record opposing the establishment of a dozen Turkish observation posts (a.k.a., military bases) in the cleansed area.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper went on record today saying that U.S. troops would stay in northeast Syria to "protect" the oil fields from a defeated Islamic State, laying to rest any notion that a U.S. withdrawal would be complete. A U.S. convoy of 30 Humvees was observed exiting Syria and entering Iraq at the Sumel crossing. What's that, maybe 150 troops?
The question here is has the Trump administration convinced the Kurds to give up on that rectangular piece of territory bounded by Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain. For now, it appears so. Erdogan meets with Putin tomorrow. We should know more in the next 36 hours.
Though the announcement halts fighting for five days, and gave Mr. Pence an agreement to return home with, it was in practice less of a cease-fire deal than an acknowledgment of the United States’ rapid loss of influence in Syria since the Turkish invasion began last Wednesday.
In less than two weeks, the United States’ official position has reversed from one of tacit support for Syrian Kurdish control of northern Syria — to one of total deferral to Turkish territorial ambitions in the same area.
A spokesman for the Kurdish forces, Mustafa Bali, said on Twitter that Turkey continued to pound civilian areas and a hospital, despite the announcement on Thursday night by Mr. Pence that there would be a five-day pause in the fighting.
Syria and Russia were not included in ceasefire discussions. Since the Kurdish YPG are now allied with Syria and Russia in the contested borderlands, the Pence-Pompeo ceasefire is essentially meaningless, a ham-handed club-footed sideshow meant to draw the attention of Trump's domestic critics.
The real reason for the five-day pause is likely that the Turks faced difficulty in clearing and holding Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, the nexus of the Turkish invasion. The five-day pause will allow the Turks to position more firepower and possibly work out an agreement with the Russians to use the kind of air power that was critical in conquering Afrin last year.
In public appearances, Trump said he was fulfilling a campaign promise to bring U.S. troops home from “endless wars” in the Middle East — casting aside criticism that a sudden U.S. withdrawal from Syria betrays the Kurdish fighters, stains U.S. credibility around the world and opens an important region to Russia.
“We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria. Syria’s not happy about it. Let them work it out,” Trump said. “They have a problem at a border. It’s not our border. We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”
As the troops withdraw, they first will collapse inward by abandoning the outposts closest to the line of advancing foreign troops, in this case the Turkish military and its ill-disciplined Syrian militia proxies, along with Russian and Syrian government forces.
U.S. troops are leaving the Turkish border but there is no reporting saying that they are exiting Syria.
Moon of Alabama continues its "best of all possible worlds" interpretation of ongoing events, providing the first reference to Syria recovering some of its oil fields in Deir ez-Zor:
Russian troops prevented attempts by Turkish supported Jihadis to attack Manbij. Russian and Syrian units have now also entered Ayn al-Arab/Kobani. Syrian government troops took control of the electricity producing dam in Tabqah and some units set up posts in Raqqa. Other units entered the Conoco and Al-Umar oil fields north of Abu Kahmal and east of Deir Ezzor. Some local tribe which profited from the oil explorations there held a small protest against the return of government control.
I remain skeptical. The official U.S. position, which presumably vice president Pence and secretary of state Pompeo are in Ankara today to convey, is a demand for a ceasefire. Trump has already undercut this position with his comments that what happens in northeast Syria is not a U.S. concern. And the House of Representatives has undercut Trump by voting a 354-60 rebuke of his troop pullout.
But so far the pullout seems limited to some bases in Kobani, Manbij, the hot zone between Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, and Raqqa. The U.S. controls a substantial airbase near Kobani, as well as an Advanced Operational Base West and an Advanced Operational Base East; also, we need some confirmation that the U.S. has actually relinquished control of the oil fields in Deir ez-Zor.
A Manchurian candidate stab-in-the-back narrative is beginning to take shape, the broad outlines of which are that Trump conspired with Putin and Erdogan to carve up Syria. Russian-backed Syrian troops now occupy positions abandoned by U.S. troops in Manbij. We should know soon enough if there is any substance to this new elite narrative because Turkish troops and their Syrian proxies are bearing down on Manbij. There should be a battle. If not, it would be a marvel of Russian de-confliction, and plenty of grist for Russiagaters.
Trump has pivoted to confront Turkey, offering up sanctions targeting Turkish steel that the market has laughed off. Pelosi is working with Lindsey Graham to concoct something more stringent.
Russia is skeptical that all U.S. troops are in fact exiting northeast Syria. So am I. There is no news of Deir ez-Zor (a.k.a. Deir al-Zour). Deir ez-Zor is where the Kurdish-led SDF and the U.S. fought with the Syrian Arab Army and Russian mercenaries in 2018. It is where Syria's oil fields are. Let's keep an eye Deir ez-Zor in order to understand how serious the United States is about vacating Syria.
This is how contradictions work themselves out. Chaos. Now that the Syrian Arab Army has deployed to Rojava and is moving to reassert control of the M4 highway, it is hard to imagine everything get buttoned up as neatly as Moon of Alabama outlines this morning. First, we must haver some reliable reports of the Syrian Arab Army taking control of the oil fields of Deir ez-Zor and occupying the many U.S. bases and secret airfields sprinkled throughout Rojava. There hasn't been anything like that so far.
Right now the narrative is topsy turvy. The long-demonized Assad government is virtuous for doing something the United States was unwilling to do -- defend the Kurds from Turkish attacks. While the former U.S. ally Free Syrian Army is being branded a vicious mercenary jihadist invader.
Also, much is in play on the diplomatic front. The European Union has passed a ban of weapon exports to Turkey, while the Trump administration scrambles to get out in front of congressional sanctions on Turkey. Erdogan might decide it is time to open up the refugee floodgates and swamp Greece like it was 2015.
Then there is the status of the 11,000 ISIS foot soldiers imprisoned in Rojava, not to mention the thousands of Western soldiers and contractors.
To sort all this out, a reliable hegemonic force is required. The only one that currently fits the bill is Russia.
At news conference today Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan confirmed that his goal is the total control of the Turkish-Syrian border:
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey’s incursion into Syria will stretch from Kobani in the west to Hasaka in the east, going some 30 km (19 miles) into Syrian territory, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday, and the town of Ras al Ain was already under Turkish control.
Addressing a news conference in Istanbul, Erdogan said the Turkish-led forces had also besieged the Syrian border town of Tel Abyad, west of Ras al Ain, in its fight against the YPG Kurdish militia, which Ankara says is a terrorist organization.
“We focused first on the 120-km (75-mile) area between Ras al Ain and Tel Abyad. Thus we will divide the 480-km terrorist corridor down the middle,” Erdogan said.
“Then we will take control of Hasaka on the one side and Ain al Arab (Kobani) on the other and complete the operation,” he said, referring to towns either side of the current focus of operations. “We will go down to a depth of around 30-35 km, in line with the safe zone map which we declared previously."
[snip]
The Turkey-led forces have so far seized control of 109 square km (42 square miles), territory including 17 villages around Tel Abyad and four villages around Ras Al Ain, Erdogan said.
Every indication is that things are going to get increasingly ugly because at this point no power is stepping in to curb the Turkey's campaign against the Kurds. Germany's making pro forma demands that Turkey halt its invasion, while the U.S. abandons more bases to remove its forces from the line of fire. Unless the YPG is capable of more fight-back than it has shown to date, its looks like it is going to unfold exactly as Erdogan outlines.
In the left critique of impeachment one can detect an implicit assumption that Trump standing in the crosshairs of the deep state is somehow an anti-imperialist. The header of yesterday's Moon of Alabama post, "Trump Brings Troops Back Home To Saudi Arabia," perfectly encapsulates this fallacy, as does the conclusion to Bill Van Aucken's "US sends 3,000 more troops to defend Saudi monarchy":
While the Democrats’ exclusive focus on Trump’s failure to pursue a sufficiently bellicose policy against Russia and prosecute the war for regime change in Syria has allowed the US president to absurdly posture as an opponent of war, the reality is that he has overseen a staggering increase in military spending designed to prepare for “great power” confrontations, particularly with China.
Meanwhile, whatever his political pretense, Trump has done nothing to end any of the wars in the Middle East. While he has ordered US troops to pull back, allowing the Turkish invasion, none of them have been withdrawn from Syria.
With the latest buildup of US forces in Saudi Arabia, Washington is preparing, behind the backs of the working class, to launch a catastrophic military conflict with Iran. The most urgent task posed by these developments is the building of a global antiwar movement led by the working class. This movement must be armed with a socialist and internationalist program to unify working people in the United States, Europe and the Middle East in a common struggle against imperialist war and its source, the capitalist system.
Turkey's goal in its four-day offensive appears to be the control of the entire border of Rojava. For a cogent assessment of what's in store for Rojava read "The Annihilation of Rojava," which appeared Tuesday on Jacobin.
It's been over a year since I posted something under the "Hippies vs. Punks" header. It's not for a lack of thought on the topic, which, to refresh you, is the hypothesis that popular music as a unifying, generally progressive social force splintered and shifted in the years from 1975 to 1979, kind of a "last hurrah" for the great "massification of bohemia" (Robert Christgau's term vis-a-vis The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album) brought on by the 1960s rock'n'roll revolution.
It's no coincidence that this period of time is also the same period where postwar social democracy is exchanged for the market orthodoxy of neoliberalism; in many ways we've been living within a monoculture every since. We are now at a point where maintaining this static horizon of neoliberalism has become increasingly problematic to the point of absurdity. Contradictions are piled upon contradictions. City of London bankers find a return to social democracy, something neoliberalism was enshrined to shatter, preferable to following the increasingly insane logic of no-horizon neoliberalism.
In my young-man youth there was an attempt to bridge the Hippies vs. Punks war. That, for lack of a better descriptor, was Grunge, which was really a mainstreaming of underground rock'n'roll that had flourished on the margins of mainstream major label corporate arena rock and pop. So I have been exploring 1987 to 1994. My last Hippies vs. Punks post on The Leaving Trains dealt with this.
Mostly over the last year I have pivoted back and forth between listening to music that influenced me during the time 1987-1994, like Sonic Youth, and using Robert Christgau's Pazz & Jop 1979 Dean's List as a treasure map to guide me in a reconstruction of 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher and the Iranian Revolution.
The great failing of Christgau's 1979 Dean's List is that besides Pere Ubu's Dub Housing it contains no Post-Punk albums. Where's Entertainment! and Metal Box?
It's other major failing, something which struck me when I went to my normal lunch spot the other day and the classic rock streaming on the PA was Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" off their seminal Double Vision (1978) album, is the absence of classic cock rock. Look at the bands that appeared at Bill Graham's Day on the Green concerts in the 1978 and 1979 and you get an idea what teenagers were listening to. It wasn't Pere Ubu and it wasn't Tom Verlaine.
Classic rock as practiced by Aerosmith and Foreigner is and was a celebration of the "bottom of the sack," which actually sounds good in our no-horizon zombieland of today.
Reporting on Turkey's invasion of Rojava, now in its second day, is generally poor. The invasion appears to be larger than originally advertised. The New York Times features a map of Turkish strikes from Kobani all the way to Qamishli, basically the entire northern border of Rojava with the exception of the eastern tip. The Turkish Defense Ministry boasts of tangible progress; the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, the opposite. One thing seems certain, the United States did not restrict the use of Turkish air power.
NATO-ally Turkey has said it intends to create a “safe zone” for the return of millions of refugees to Syria. But world powers fear Turkey’s action could deepen the conflict, and runs the risk of Islamic State prisoners escaping from camps amid the chaos.
[snip]
In the Turkish border town of Akcakale, around 30 vehicles carrying Syrian rebels, many pick-up trucks mounted with anti-aircraft machines drove along the main along the Turkish side of the border from Syria’s Tel Abyad, a Reuters journalist said.
The double-cross of the Kurds comes at an inconvenient time for Trump. He needs his troops in congress loyal. But as the extent of the Turkish invasion comes to light, there will be great pressure on congress to act.
With the Turkish invasion of northeast Syria about to begin, Kurdish forces are vowing to resist. One can understand why. The Syrian towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al Ain, where Turkish forces are massing and where U.S. forces recently pulled back, lie at the center of Rojava.
Trump has threatened Turkey with devastating reprisals if its invasion is bloody and destabilizing, at the same time he gave it the green light to go ahead. Congress could punish Turkey if Trump fails to:
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, addressed Turkey on his own Twitter account on Tuesday, warning the country not to go ahead with the operation.
“To the Turkish Government: You do NOT have a green light to enter into northern Syria,” Mr. Graham wrote. “There is massive bipartisan opposition in Congress, which you should see as a red line you should not cross.”
Trump has an equally big mess on his hands at home. White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter yesterday to the U.S. House of Representatives declaring that the White House will not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Nancy Pelosi now needs to schedule a full vote of the House on impeachment. She wins that vote, Trump will likely tack back and provide some sort of limited cooperation.
The left case against impeachment, articulated by Taibbi and Urie, is that the whistleblower who got the ball rolling is not a real whistleblower but a spook and impeachment is a CIA-instigated coup. To which I say, okay, yes, you are right. But this doesn't mean that impeachment should be blocked or Trump defended. The underlying facts of Russiagate were never proven. The underlying facts of Ukrainegate are not even in dispute.
Taibbi says
The argument that’s supposed to be galvanizing everyone right now is the idea that we need to “stand up and be counted,” because failing to rally to the cause is effectively advocacy for Trump. This line of thinking is based on the presumption that Trump is clearly worse than the people opposing him.
That might prove to be true, but if we’re talking about the treatment of whistleblowers, Trump has a long way to go before he approaches the brutal record of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, as well as the cheerleading Washington political establishment. Forgetting this is likely just the first in what will prove to be many deceptions about a hardcore insider political battle whose subtext is a lot more shadowy and ambiguous than news audiences are being led to believe.
My point is that impeachment is a galvanizing and informative exercise. Already the quality reporting that has been done on Ukrainian politics in the last week is much better than what has been delivered in the last three years.
Judging from the hue and cry brought on by Trump's announcement of a troop pullout in northeast Syria, one would think that it was 1948 and the United States had just abandoned West Berlin to Soviet tanks. Rojava must indeed be vitally important to U.S. strategic interests in the middle east: a quasi-state chock full of secret airfields to bomb any foe anytime -- exactly what the "deep state" wants.
But Trump is angling after a two-fer here: one, he gets to pose as a peacenik -- a little appreciated aspect of his successful presidential campaign -- in the run up to 2020; and, two, he gets to implement a strategic goal long sought by Western powers in Syria, the fabled "no-fly/safe zone" occupied by Syrian rebels.
Mr. Trump’s decision, announced late Sunday, has been sharply criticized by politicians of both political parties in the United States as a desertion of the Kurdish-led forces — the most reliable American partners in fighting Islamic State militants in Syria. But fighters and veterans of the Free Syrian Army point out that they were also abandoned by Mr. Trump when he cut support to their force in 2017.
Now, the Free Syrian Army, which has largely been marginalized in the conflict, sees a chance to regain lost territory in its struggle against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
[snip]
Hisham al-Skeif, a former civilian leader of the anti-Assad uprising and a spokesman for a faction of the rebel army, said the creation of the safe zone had been negotiated to avoid clashes. Free Syrian Army soldiers would be on the ground, backed by Turkish forces, but would avoid areas where United States forces and their Kurdish-led allies were based, he said.
“We are allied with the Turks, and we are convinced this is for peace and not war,” he said. “We always say we never want to fight.”
Mr. al-Skeif said Free Syrian Army soldiers and Turkish troops were expected to occupy a strip of territory between the two border towns of Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, where most residents are Arabs. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which have been allied with the United States, were reported to have withdrawn from the towns on Monday.
The operation to create a safe zone, if successful, would be a boost for Mr. Erdogan, who is under political pressure at home from splinter groups in his own party and growing public resentment against Syrian refugees.
Seen in this light, there is no U.S. double-cross of its Kurdish allies. The principal actors sat around a map and made a decision together. The U.S. has been talking to Turkey for months if not years about just this moment. What's happening now as Turkey prepares to invade is everyone is playing to their domestic audience.
On Monday, witnesses in Syria saw United States forces withdrawing from two positions in northeastern Syria: observation posts in Tel Abyad and Ein Eissa.
“Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria,” the White House said in a statement released just before 11 p.m. [Sunday] in Washington. “The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial ‘Caliphate,’ will no longer be in the immediate area.”
It's not clear how significant a military campaign Turkey is launching here. Erdogan's "safe zones" are supposed to span 300 miles along the Turkey-Syria northeast border while penetrating 20 miles inside Syria, all territory presently claimed by the Kurdish state of Rojava. Anthropologist and left intellectual David Graeber sees a genocide in the making, one with NATO fingerprints.
Rojava and the Kurdish-led SDF are a contradiction that Trump inherited from the Obama administration. The existence of Rojava is considered by Turkey, a NATO ally, an unacceptable threat. But Rojava provides the U.S. a substantial footprint to wage ghost wars in the middle east. Trump, in a show of hollow bombast last year, called for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, only to capitulate ultimately. Now, though, it does seem as if the Kurds have been double-crossed:
Last December, Mr. Trump called for a complete United States withdrawal from Syria, but ultimately reversed himself after a backlash from Pentagon, diplomatic and intelligence officials, as well as important allies in Europe and the Middle East.
Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and author of “Erdogan’s Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East,” said in a telephone interview that a Turkish incursion uncontested by the United States would allow Turkey to cut another swath into Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria. That would give Mr. Erdogan a ready place to send hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and prove yet again his influence with Mr. Trump on Syria policy.
“It’s quite a significant development,” Mr. Cagaptay said.
Many Syria experts criticized the White House decision and cautioned that American abandonment of its Kurdish allies could widen the eight-year Syrian conflict and prompt the Kurds to ally with the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad to combat the much larger and more technologically advanced Turkish army.
“Allowing Turkey to move into northern Syria is one of the most destabilizing moves we can do in the Middle East,” Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and former Marine who served in the Iraq war, said on Twitter on Sunday night. “The Kurds will never trust America again. They will look for new alliances or independence to protect themselves.”
The announcement by the White House came as a shock to the S.D.F., Kurdish officials said on Monday. In a statement, the S.D.F. said that it had fulfilled its obligations in the efforts to reduce tensions with the Turks but that the United States had not.
The statement warned that a Turkish incursion could endanger the progress made to establish security in the wake of the battle against the Islamic State. It also called on Kurdish forces to “defend our homeland from the Turkish aggression.”
Mr. Erdogan has demanded a “safe zone” for his nation to run 20 miles deep and 300 miles along the Turkish-Syrian border east of the Euphrates. That area, he has said, would be reserved for the return of at least a million Syrian refugees now inside Turkey. Mr. Erdogan has threatened to send a wave of Syrian migrants to Europe instead if the international community does not support the initiative to send them back to Syria.
Since early August, the American and Turkish militaries have been working together on a series of confidence-building measures — including joint reconnaissance flights and ground patrols — in a 75-mile-long strip of that 300-mile border area.
American-backed Kurdish forces have pulled back several miles and destroyed fortifications in that area.
Civil unrest in Iraq, predominantly in Baghdad and the southern provinces, has roiled the country all week. The death toll is at 33 with over 1500 wounded. Security forces have resorted to live fire.
Protesters are demanding government action on unemployment, income inequality, corruption and the delivery of basic services -- fundamental demands of a democratic electorate.
No discernible political or sectarian orientation can be ascribed to this uprising, though it seems to be centered in Shiite areas of the country. One needs to be cautious given the West's penchant for color revolutions and the recent importance of Iraq in the U.S.-Iran quasi-war, but this seems to be another expression of Tahrir Square spirit (something returned to Egypt recently).
As the NYT reports, Ayatollah Sistani has sided with the protesters, calling for a formation of anti-corruption committee and protester-government dialogue:
“It is sorrowful that there have been so many deaths, casualties and destruction,” [Ayatollah Sistani] wrote in a letter read out by his representative, Ahmed al-Safi, at a sermon in Kerbala, Reuters reported. “The government and political sides have not answered the demands of the people to fight corruption or achieved anything on the ground.”
Ayatollah Sistani urged both side to step back “before it is too late,” The Associated Press reported, and he repeated his call for the formation of a committee of technocrats to address corruption.
In an effort to prove his seriousness, [prime minister Adil Abdul] Mahdi invited representatives of several political factions, including opposition parties, to meet with him and discuss how to be reduce tensions.
Mr. Mahdi’s efforts seemed aimed at dividing the protesters between those who had resorted to violence and those who insisted their goal was to protest peacefully.
“Today we are pulled between two options: having a state or having no state,” he said.
What a wonderful thing if the Middle East could get another shot at the Arab Spring. The Gulf monarchies are much more fractured today than eight years ago, as are the old colonial powers of the West. It will be difficult to play the jihadist card again with the same bravado. Maybe people power will not be so grossly subverted this go-round.
“To impose an anti-mask law in the current social condition is to further infuriate the people and will definitely be met with escalating violence,” lawmaker Fernando Cheung told Reuters. “This is no different than adding fuel to fire. The result will be riots.”
Goldman Sachs estimated this week that the city might have lost as much as $4 billion in deposits to rival financial hub Singapore between June and August.
On Thursday, Lam Chi-wai, chairman of Junior Police Officers Association, urged the city’s leader to impose a curfew to maintain public order.
“We cannot work alone - clapping only with one hand - without appropriate measures and support from top level,” Lam said.
I'm not disputing the legitimacy of the Hong Kong protests. What I am saying is that gigantic media outlets like Reuters and The New York Times lavish significant daily attention on the civil unrest in Hong Kong while feeding their readers scraps about the far more lethal ongoing uprisings in Haiti and Iraq.
Clearly there is a double standard at work here. What is it?
China is an official enemy. A primary purpose of mainstream media is to articulate official enemies, to foment hatred. Any opportunity to mobilize popular opposition to Beijing will be fully exploited by Western media. We're back to the cold war. Russia and China are to be seen as implacable foes with whom the West is locked in a death match.
That's why the coverage of Hong Kong 2019 reminds me of Kiev 2014.
We'll find out soon enough how close the comparison is. My experience of the 1999 Seattle WTO is that the overwhelming majority of protesters, like 95%, are peaceful and that the number of people who come to an action armed with projectiles, let alone firearms, is tiny. So once the Hong Kong government begins its crackdown in earnest, which appears likely now that the parade for 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party has concluded, we'll be able to judge the extent of foreign penetration and support for the protesters by the armed response to the Hong Kong police.
The left critique of impeachment has largely gone silent over the last few days. It's pretty much up to Aaron Mate to articulate it. His argument is somewhat sophistical -- but similar to the rhetorical sleight of hand that RT has been performing recently -- in that it reduces impeachment to a trial based on the edited and abridged telephone transcript produced by the White House of the July 25 Trump-Zelensky chat. But impeachment is an investigation launched by the House which produces articles to be judged in a trial conducted in the Senate. Impeachment is a process, and we are at the very beginning of that process.
Chris Hedges made a hash of his case against impeachment when he "debated" John Boniface on Democracy Now! There was really no debate because Hedges, looking uncomfortable in his role of impeachment skeptic, immediately capitulated and acknowledged that he was not opposed to impeachment; he was opposed to a narrow impeachment inquiry based solely on Ukraine. John Bonifaz agreed, reminding Hedges that impeachment is a broad and popular movement that has been focused on the emoluments clause of the Constitution and Trump's treatment of refugees and migrants.
Thomas Edsall has a worthwhile "It Can't Happen Here" article about the chances that Trump won't vacate the White House if he is convicted in impeachment trial or he loses the 2020 election.
The latest breaking news is the growing realization that the State Department will probably ignore some of the subpoenas from the House.
Finally, let's not forget that impeachment is not just a crisis in U.S. politics; it's a crisis in Ukraine's politics as well. This morning WSWS provides this helpful thumbnail sketch of Ukraine:
Imperialist war planners have historically considered the resource-rich Ukraine, which is geographically located at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and the strategically important Black Sea, as key to a domination of the Eurasian landmass. Control over Ukraine was central to the efforts of German imperialism to control Europe in both World War I and World War II, when the Nazis systematically worked with local bourgeois fascist forces to murder the country’s Jewish population and wage war against the Soviet Union.
Since the days of the Cold War, the US has been heavily involved in fostering right-wing political forces in the country to help bring it under its control. Following the dissolution of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Ukrainian oligarchy, while maintaining extensive ties to Germany and to some extent France, has been heavily dependent on and influenced by US imperialism. As a central component of the efforts of US imperialism to encircle and isolate Russia, both Republican and Democratic administrations have staged two “color revolutions,” in 2004 and in 2014, to bring to power pro-US presidents in Kiev.
Following the 2014 US- and EU-backed toppling of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych with the heavy involvement of far-right forces, then US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland stated that the US had pumped some $5 billion into Ukrainian “civil society.” Since 2014, the US has stationed military advisers throughout the country, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) alone spent another $2 billion in Ukraine.
There are good impeachment round-ups in both The New York Times and the Associated Press. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney who was tasked to ferret out juicy Russiagate tidbits and Biden dross in Kiev, was subpoenaed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Giuliani was given until October 15 to produce records showing that other Trump administration officials were working to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden. Giuliani made a statement on CNN in September to this effect.
It was reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was listening in on the July 25 call to Ukrainian president Zelensky. Pompeo will likely be subpoenaed soon.
The Times also has a story on the super-secret White House computer network, NICE, where the July 25 Trump-Zelensky chat was archived. There are ellipses in the phone transcript which happen to occur in places where Trump is asking Zelensky for an investigation:
Is the White House account of Trump’s Ukraine call accurate and complete?
Beyond the fact that the memo is not a verbatim transcript, it contains three ellipses where Mr. Trump was speaking — and each in a place where he was asking the Ukrainian president for investigations.
It is not clear if this indicates that Mr. Trump trailed off or that something was cut out of the reconstruction. It is also not clear whether any notes exist by American officials that would indicate whether he said anything more in those spots.
But one official said that any notes or draft documents discussed by two or more National Security Council officials counts as a “record” that may not lawfully be destroyed under the Presidential Records Act. However, the initial file produced by the voice-to-text software would not count as a record and could be lawfully deleted, the official said.
It's not looking good for Trump. I can't understand why guys like Ray McGovern are rushing to his defense.
