Public Opposes Bombing Syria

From this morning's Situation Report, by Paul McCleary and Adam Rawnsley:

And here’s something to chew on. In a new University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, researchers explored Americans’ views on ISIS and Syria. And they found that around 60 percent of those polled — 67 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Democrats, and 67 percent of independents — would like to see the United States work alongside Russia in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, according to FP’s Emily Tamkin.

Obama was prevented from bombing Damascus at the end of summer 2013 because of massive public outcry, which translated into pointed criticism from many members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican. It is good to see that not much has changed in the way of public opinion.

Failed Coup in Turkey: Not the Usual U.S. Color Revolution

As Erdogan rounds up his opponents following the failed coup of Friday night/Saturday morning (for a particularly good synopsis read this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report by Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley), it is worthwhile to question the level of support the putschists received from the United States. According to McLeary and Rawnsley:

How does this end? The Turkish government is lashing out in all directions, with a high-ranking member of the Erdogan government accusing Washington of directly helping to foment the putsch. Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu bluntly claimed over the weekend that “the U.S. is behind this coup attempt.” The comments “come on top of the long-standing U.S. criticism of Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which include opening roughly 2,000 legal cases against political opponents, journalists, comedians, and ordinary Turks accused of insulting the president,”  FP’s Yochi Dreazen writes.

Judging from the reaction to the coup's failure in the U.S. opinion pages, the labor minister appears to be on the money. The Gray Lady's unsigned editorial today calls Erdogan's reaction to the coup attempt a "countercoup" (see "The Countercoup in Turkey").

If the U.S. was involved it must have been in a passive role. The favored U.S. method of regime change after the shelving of "shock and awe" during the Obama administration is the color revolution format witnessed in Kiev's Maidan or the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. In a color revolution there has to be a mass of protesters to act as a foil for the coup plotters. The scheme is to have the protesters elicit a crackdown by security forces. The police overreaction ignites the rebellion. But there was no popular uprising here. There were no Gezi Park protests of three years earlier.

In order for this to work the coup plotters had to take out Erdogan. When they failed to do this the coup could not succeed. Consider this from McLeary and Rawnsley:

Commando raids, F-16s. Some critical details of the scope of the insurrection emerged on Sunday, which included a daring special operations raid on the coastal resort where Erdogan had been staying which just failed to nab the leader, and a harrowing incident where two rebel-flown F-16 fighters followed the president’s plane on its way to Istanbul, locking radars on the jet, but failing to fire.

As the purge of the military continued on Sunday, one of those arrested was Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, the chief of Incirlik Air Base, from which the U.S. military flies missions over Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State. Reports have emerged claiming Van asked U.S. officials at the base for asylum, but was refused. The Greek government also finds itself in a tough spot after eight Turkish officers flew a helicopter to Greece in a bid for asylum. Turkey has demanded their extradition.

An attempt is being made to rewrite the U.S. reaction to the coup as one of immediate and fulsome support for the Turkish government. This is not how it went down in real time. Obama and Kerry were mum until it was clear that Erdogan would survive. Then they expressed their support.

Sanders Must Win Arizona

Before turning to two interesting posts -- Lambert Strether's "The Democrat Establishment Plan for a Three-Front Anti-Trump, Republican-Splitting, Anti-Left Campaign" and this morning's FiveThirtyEight chat "The Most Important States On Trump’s Path To 1,237 Delegates" -- let's get the latest on the terror attack in Brussels from the early morning Foreign Policy "Situation Report" by Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley:

BREAKING: At least 13 people were killed and dozens more wounded at the Brussels international airport on Tuesday after two explosions rocked the departure area,collapsing part of the ceiling and spreading chaos. The attack -- which Belgian authorities said was a suicide strike -- came at the same time as another bomb went off at the city’s Maelbeek subway station. Belgian officials are reporting 15 dead and 55 injured in the subway blast. All flights and train service in and out of the country have been cancelled.

The attacks come just days after the main suspect in the November Paris attacks that killed 130 was arrested in Brussels, FP’s Lara Jakes and Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer write. The arrest on Friday of Salah Abdeslam heightened fears of more terror attacks in the country, as European officials warned that many people who were involved in the Paris attacks people were still at large. No group has claimed responsibility for the Brussels strikes, but the Paris attackers were affiliated with the Islamic State.

Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw called all three explosions “terrorist attacks,” and Prime Minister Charles Michel said, "we were fearing terrorist attacks and that has now happened." Witnesses to the attack at the airport described a bloody scene where water pipes burst, mixing with the blood of the wounded and dead as dazed survivors staggered from the building. Security at airports and train stations around Europe has been heightened in the wake of the attack.

Brussels is a batting-practice fastball right to Trump's wheelhouse. He is the only candidate who viscerally addresses the fear and loathing the masses feel towards the establishment in regards to the perpetual war on terror. Joe the Plumber and Brittany the Burger Flipper are more hip to how the game of global jihad works than the power elite and the mainstream press care to acknowledge. The masses might not be able to describe how Pakistan runs the Taliban with Saudi input or how Islamic State, Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra are main players in Syria thanks to the generous support of the Gulf shiekhdoms, but they know the United States and our European cousins are getting played. Trump, all bluster and braggadocio, says it has to stop, that we need to bar all Muslims from entering the country until we can address the problem, and people listen. People listen because they are tired of the never-ending, ever-expanding war on terror.

So expect Trump to benefit in the near term and every time there is a bombing or gun battle in a Western city.

The FiveThirtyEight chat susses out the real estate mogul's chances of locking up the GOP nomination after the primary season ends June 7. The long and short of it depends on how he does in California. A native of the Golden State myself, I think Trump will do quite well.

An interesting exchange in the FiveThirtyEight chat has to do with Trump's potency among blacks in traditionally Democratic enclaves:

dave: Trump seems to be benefiting a great deal from the fact that there are many places where neither Cruz nor Kasich has much natural appeal. For example, Trump has won a lot of delegates in African-American-majority congressional districts in places like St. Louis and Chicago where there aren’t many evangelicals, wealthy whites — or for that matter, Republicans period. So I see Trump winning a lot of delegates in minority-majority districts in places like California and New York, and that’s a big problem for #NeverTrump right now.

This was brought home to me by a clip on Democracy Now! of a black guy beating the shit out of a Hippie protester at a Trump rally in Tucson.

Hillary's overwhelming support among African Americans is due to her being a known, familiar figure. Well, black people feel like they know Trump too. As long the billionaire can keep the spotlight off the crackers who constitute the base of his support and keep it focused on a cartoon version of a bloodthirsty Muslim, he will win his fair share of African American votes.

What blacks and Bernie supporters need to come to grips with is that we will be consigned to the scrap heap by the end of spring. Lambert Strether lays it all out clearly. There will be no role for Bernie in the Hillary general election campaign and his supporters will not be catered to. The reasoning is well known to progressives and peaceniks. You got no place to go. Team Clinton will happily wave goodbye to all the Hippies and Punks who leave the Dem rez to vote for Jill Stein. The big-game hunt for Hillary is the mythical soccer mom ensconced in her exurb McMansion.

As Strether convincingly argues, Trump v. Clinton is going to be a horrendously negative, epically brutal, low turnout campaign. Hillary will pitch her message to moderate Republicans. By September Bernie Sanders will be a memory as distant as a Nader Super Rally in Y2K.

Bernie is not even mentioning Hillary, choosing instead to inveigh against Trump. He had an opportunity to score points when he was in Seattle over the weekend by mentioning that David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager who is part of Hillary's brain trust, is an Uber executive who spoke out against the company's drivers unionizing with the Teamsters. Top Dems now openly advocate union-busting knowing there will not be a peep from AFL-CIO headquarters. It is truly pathetic.

Bernie shit the bed last Tuesday by losing all five contests -- Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio. He is running significantly behind in Arizona. The way I see it he has to win everything from here to California to prove he is something more than a progressive boutique candidate. Sanders has to beat Hillary in Arizona to take the narrative back.

Afghanistan at a Turning Point

Here is the Afghanistan blurb from this morning's "Situation Report" by Foreign Policy's Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley:

Echoing American generals who have run the war in Afghanistan for the past decade, leader of U.S. and NATO troops there, Gen. John Campbell, told a congressional panel Tuesday that the country “is at an inflection point.” If Washington pulls out too many troops by the end of this year, 2016 “is at risk of being no better, and possibly worse, than 2015,” which was the bloodiest year yet for Afghan security forces. The general -- expected to retire in the coming months once Lt. Gen. John "Mick" Nicholson comes to Kabul to take over -- praised the White House’s decision to keep U.S. troop strength at around 9,800 troops for much of this year, eventually falling to about 5,500 by 2017. "Ultimately, Afghanistan has not achieved an enduring level of security and stability that justifies a reduction in our support in 2016," Campbell said.

Last year the casualty rate sustained by the Afghan security forces was deemed unsustainable. According to Mujib Mashal's "Taliban Bombing Kills at Least 20 at Kabul Police Station":

. . . [C]asualties among Afghan soldiers and police officers had risen by almost a third in 2015, compared with a record casualty rate in 2014 that some officials then considered unsustainable.

***

Intense Taliban offensives this winter, including the string of bombings in Kabul, have Afghan and Western officials increasingly worried about the pressure on the Afghan security forces. 

Col. Michael T. Lawhorn, a spokesman for NATO and United States forces in Afghanistan, said the casualties of Afghan forces through 2015 were 28 percent higher than in the previous year. Colonel Lawhorn, who would not go into details about the new casualty report, said a difficult year for Afghan forces had long been expected because they were carrying responsibility for a “significantly increased operational tempo” last year, after the end of the NATO combat mission. 

An Afghan official briefed on the matter put the number of casualties last year at close to 16,000 soldiers and police officers, with more than 5,000 killed. Even those numbers seemed low, considering that 4,100 were killed in the first six months of 2015, and the fighting greatly intensified in the last six months of the year.

Oruzgan Province north of Kandahar is in trouble, as Mashal goes on to relate:

In the district of Deh Rawood in southern Oruzgan Province, where the police have long complained of a lack of equipment and ammunition while practically under siege, four security checkpoints were abandoned by the police and later burned down by the Taliban, according to Mohammad Karim Khadimzai, head of the Oruzgan provincial council. Around 30 police officers deserted their posts in Deh Rawood and arrived in Tirin Kot, the provincial capital.

In today's paper Mashal and Taimoor Shah report that a hero boy soldier was assassinated by the Taliban in front of his home in Tirin Kot ("Taliban Gun Down 10-Year-Old Militia Hero in Afghanistan").

Gen. Campbell appears to have told Congress the truth when he announced that 2016 is an "inflection point" for Afghanistan. If the Chinese can't put enough pressure on Pakistan to get substantive peace negotiations moving, it is hard to see how the U.S./NATO project in Afghanistan survives.

The "Moderate" Counterfeit: Syria and the U.S.

I have noticed an interesting parallel: The use of the term "moderate" in glaringly different contexts but for the same basic purpose, to mock up support where there really isn't any to speak of. Call it the "moderate" counterfeit.

In the first context, the World War in Syria, the term "moderate" anchors the main fiction of U.S. foreign policy there, that Syria is convulsed by a civil war in which a bloodthirsty dictator, Bashar al-Assad, propped up by authoritarian allies in Iran and Russia, slaughters a "moderate" civil opposition who is looking to a benevolent Uncle Sam for support. That is the cover story. What is really going on is that Syria is being invaded by foreign jihadist mercenaries, bankrolled by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Despite spending half a billion dollars to form a "moderate" fighting force to combat ISIS in northern Syria, the Pentagon came up empty. You would think that this would spur a Congressional investigation or two and possible some heads would roll. But actually nothing of the sort will happen; in fact, the Pentagon is looking for a $100-million increase in the program in next year's budget. According to this morning's "Foreign Policy - Situation Report" by Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley,

Missiles for all my friends. Not all train and equip programs are created equal. While the effort by U.S. Special Forces to train a Syrian force of about 5,000 “moderate” fighters by the end of this year has flamed out, the Washington Post takes a look at the other, more successful U.S. train and equip program in Syria -- the CIA's supply of TOW missiles to rebels.

The missiles have been so successful on the battlefield that the rebels have taken to calling it the “Assad Tamer.” The program has been going on for several years, and during the recent Russian-backed offensive by Syrian forces, rebels have been posting videos of the missiles taking out Syrian tanks and armored vehicles. While a significant capability, the Raytheon-made missiles -- coming mostly from the 13,000 purchased by the Saudi government in 2013 -- have so far been unable to significantly change the situation on the ground, as Syrian forces continue to push rebels out of their positions in Idlib, Hama, and Latakia provinces.

Not dead, just less oversight! The Pentagon’s scuttled training program may be gone, but the effort lives on. Despite insisting for months that every single Syrian fighter needed to be vetted by U.S. forces before being issued weapons, White House and Pentagon officials on Friday said that actually, the opposite is true. On a call with reporters, Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, said only the leaders of various trusted rebel groups will be vetted, and they’ll be trusted to pass out U.S.-supplied weapons and supplies to their troops as they see fit. “We have been working with these groups for months,” she said, and the United States will now “build on that and work with groups on the ground who are already fighting ISIL and provide them some equipment.” She wouldn’t comment on the kinds of equipment specifically, other than to say it will not include “higher-end” weapons like anti-tank rockets and ground-to-air missiles.

The original program may be dead, but like all good Pentagon initiatives, the funding stream lives on. The Pentagon has asked for $600 million to fund it in the 2016 budget, and Capitol Hill appears willing to go along, despite Republican and Democratic lawmakers having recently called the training effort “a joke,” a “total failure,” and “a bigger disaster than I could have ever imagined.”

Hard to believe. But there it is. The fiction of a vibrant "moderate" opposition and the necessity of a well-funded program in the Pentagon to support it is too important for something as disposable as the truth.

Another context where "moderate" is used to anchor an Oz-like fictitious social construct is in the 2016 presidential race. "Moderates" are the wellspring of the "mainstream" candidacies of Jeb Bush and Hillary. ("Moderates" written without the quote marks -- apparently the fiction of moderates on the battlefield in Syria can be designated in quotation as an Obama administration contrivance, but moderates in the U.S. electorate much be vouchsafed as legitimate; hence, no quote marks.)

To get a sense of how the term "moderate" is used in the context of the 2016 presidential primary contest, let us turn to the Gray Lady's principal electoral tea-leaves reader, Nate Cohn ("Why Marco Rubio’s Chances Are Rising"):

A lot has changed since April, when Marco Rubio announced his presidential bid. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was the top candidate of mainstream conservative activists and donors. Jeb Bush seemed like a fund-raising juggernaut with natural appeal to the party’s moderate voters, who play an underrated role in the Republican primary process. Mr. Rubio, a broadly appealing candidate but the top choice of few, looked boxed out.

Today, Mr. Rubio isn’t blocked. Instead, he has a big opening. 

Mr. Walker dropped out of the race, and Mr. Bush does not look nearly as strong as it seemed he might. Mr. Bush hasn’t won many endorsements, he isn’t faring well in the polls, and his impressive fund-raising reflects a narrow base of strong support from wealthy super PAC donors, not wide support by party elites.

As Cohn lines out, Bush's oasis of mass moderate support turned out to be a mirage. This doesn't stop Cohn from pressing on to claim an opportunity for the ridiculous Rubio to tap the same "oasis" of "moderate" support.

The same can be said for Cohn's recent think-piece ("Joe Biden: No Money, Weak Polls, but Still Clinton’s Toughest Rival") where he buttresses Hillary's front-runner status, with, yes, you guessed it, her appeal to "moderate" voters:

Among nonwhite voters, [Hillary] leads Mr. Sanders in a one-on-one contest by a huge margin of 71 percent to 16 percent. 

Similarly, she leads among moderate voters by a margin of 63 to 23 points. The race is closer among whites and liberals, but she still takes a slight lead among both groups in a head-to-head contest with Mr. Sanders.

Mr. Sanders said earlier this year that he thought he had a chance to break into Mrs. Clinton’s coalition by winning support from working-class voters. Perhaps he can. But his opponent is a candidate with universal name recognition, tremendous backing from party elites and considerable financial and organizational resources. These factors make her far less vulnerable than other candidates to perceptions of momentum — in which voters who don’t follow the campaign very closely can flock to someone who seems to be gaining.

At the end of the quote, the underlined portion, you get the real definition of "moderate" in the U.S. electoral system -- someone who is basically ignorant and who will vote for the candidate with the greatest name recognition and the largest number of commercials on television.

While in years past -- when there was at least a modicum of hope in the future -- this would be plenty to win an election, now, things are different. Look at Jeb Bush. There are few "moderates" these days.