Why is Ghouta so Important to the West?

The Western press has achieved Goebbelsesque levels of distortion in its presentation of  the jihadists' loss of their mortar launch pad of eastern Ghouta. I can think of no better example of this than "‘We Were Dying in There’: Thousands of Syrians Flee Rebel Enclave," by Nada Homsi and Nick Cumming-Bruce. (Cumming-Bruce is The New York Times chief propagandist in Geneva. His job is to filter information that comes out of the United Nations offices there, amplifying the humanitarian crimes of official enemies while air-brushing away any U.S. misdeeds.)

Homsi and Cumming-Bruce ostensibly write about the Syrian government evacuation of civilians  held hostage by the Salafi jihadists in eastern Ghouta. But since this is an unalloyed tale of victory for Syria and its Russian ally, Homsi and Cumming-Bruce execute a switch-up and instead discuss the systematic use of rape by the Syrian Arab Army and its militias. There is no hyperlink to the UN Commission of Inquiry report within the NYT story, but here it is.

Homsi and Cumming-Bruce skew the summary of the report in favor of the Salafi jihadists, making it seem as if they were less criminal than their enemies. Judge for yourself:

United Nations investigators said Thursday that Syrian government troops and affiliated militias had raped and sexually assaulted women and men in a systematic campaign to terrorize, humiliate and punish civilians seen as linked to the opposition — actions that amounted to crimes against humanity.

Opposition armed groups had also committed rapes and sexual violence. Although such acts by rebels were “considerably less common,” the investigators said, extremists had carried out executions and harsh punishments to enforce their rigid social order.

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry monitoring Syria’s conflict said it had documented the rape of women and girls in 20 government detention facilities and military intelligence branches between 2011 and 2016, and the same violence against men and boys in 15 branches.

Such attacks were “not isolated incidents but rather part of a pattern observed countrywide,” the investigators said in a 29-page report, which the panel’s chairman, Paolo Pinheiro, said was “based on 454 powerful, devastating interviews” with victims and witnesses.

The panel’s hope, he added, was that the report would serve as “an equally powerful trigger for accountability,” he told a meeting at the United Nations in Geneva. It was “particularly repulsive” that such violence continued to go unpunished, he said.

During house raids searching for opposition supporters in the early years of the conflict, troops and militias raped women and forced family members to watch the assault, the panel said.

In detention centers, guards subjected women to humiliating invasive searches, gang rapes and torture to force confessions and extract information. Low-ranking officers were often the perpetrators, the panel found, but “numerous cases of rapes by high-level officers have also been documented.”

Male detainees, some as young as 11, also suffered a wide range of sexual abuse, including rape, torture and genital mutilation. Investigators said they had documented such abuse in the political security and military intelligence branches in Aleppo, Hama, Idlib, Tartus and Damascus, including the infamous Sednaya Prison, sometimes “seemingly for amusement.”

Rape and sexual violence by armed opposition groups was not systematic, the panel said, but throughout the conflict it had received regular reports of extremist groups attacking people suspected of being gay, including throwing them off rooftops.

Militant groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State had sentenced women accused of adultery to death by stoning, and subjected women who violated their dress codes to lashings. In areas controlled by Islamic State, women and girls as young as 14 were forced to marry fighters.

When I read this over the weekend two things raked up a stench right away. New York Times readers know that to ISIS "marriage" is a euphemism for rape. If  Homsi and Cumming-Bruce would have scrolled to page 19 of the report they would find: "Many women were passed between multiple ISIL fighters, some as many as six or seven times within two years." Rukmini Callimachi has written about "marriages" that last for 45 minutes.

Then, also on page 19, a direct refutation of the "not systematic" claim:

Until mid-2016, ISIL did not allow their members who “owned” Yazidis to sell the Yazidi children separately. This rule was changed in mid-2016 and resulted in the separation of children from their mothers and subsequent sale of young boys as house servants, and girls as young as nine years as sexual slaves. Such children are often then given Muslim names. Identifying their ancestry remains problematic.

Once again, readers of the "newspaper of record" know that ISIS strictly codified a system of sexual slavery. So why is it undercutting all that reporting now with disingenuous stories out of Geneva, stories that make the jihadists sound better than the Syrian government?

Keeping a foothold in eastern Ghouta must really be important to the United States Government. Elijah Magnier explains why in "Will Syria be the Battleground for All-Out War Between Russia and America?":

The US’s anger at the Syrian-Russian attack on al-Ghouta needs to be made clearer here: the US occupation of al-Tanf Syrian-Iraqi borders aimed to create a launching platform for its military operations towards Deir al-Zour in the north and al-Ghouta in the east. The US plan was to occupy the city of Deir al-Zour and al-Qaim north-east and the capital Damascus. But Iran went around the area where the US forces were positioned, isolating these in the al-Tanf pocket, and made a qualitative leap to liberate Deir al-Zour and al-Qaim by defeating ISIS forces, who withdrew towards the US area of influence east of the Euphrates.

Moreover, Al-Ghouta is a clear demonstration of the US’s failed plan to attack Damascus. The strategic military planning and link between al-Tanf and al-Ghouta was possible had the Syrian Army and Russia not intervened on time to surround it and attack jihadists to force these to surrenderer and pull out to Idlib. The US thought to create a real menace against Damascus and at least prevent the parliamentary and presidential elections due next year. By controlling Ghouta, jihadists were supposed to keep up the pace of bombing to render the Syrian capital “unsafe”.

The US and the International community tried to stop the battles of al-Ghouta to no avail. This prompted Washington to exercise its favourite hobby of imposing sanctions on Russia, without succeeding in stopping the Syrian army (fighting without its allies – except Russia) from recovering its control over Ghouta. The answer came immediately from Moscow by bombing Daraa and hitting al-Qaeda’s area of influence in an indication as to where the future theatre of military operations is expected to be.

Again, events are moving very fast: the US response came quickly through its UK ally when Britain took advantage of the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergey Skripal in London to accuse Moscow of being behind his assassination. The message here is clear: all means are legitimate for the control of the Middle East, specifically Syria.

Israel followed by demanding the return of the UNDOF troops, withdrawn in August 2014 following the abduction of 47 UN peacekeepers by al-Qaeda (the ransom for their liberation was paid by Qatar). The Israeli demand coincided – I have learned from well informed sources – with the gathering of forces of Syria’s allies, including Hezbollah, in Daraa, in preparation for future wide scale military operations. The US considers that the battle of Daraa is directly against itself and its Israeli ally, especially as it is party, along with Russia and Jordan, to the agreement to reduce the escalation there, to serve Israel and secure its security in southern Syria.

In this tense political climate it requires no imagination to link the issue of the Russian former spy to the aggressive statement of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials who threatened to use military force against the US and any other country in Syria if necessary.

The Syrian war is far from being a normal one. It is THE war between two superpowers and their allies, where US and Russian soldiers are directly involved on the ground in a war of domination and power. The lack of victory in the US eyes is worse than losing a battle. Even more, the victory of Russia and its allies on Syrian soil in any battle is therefore a direct blow to the heart of Washington and its allies.

Russia understood the US, UK and NATO’s message, including that of the mainstream media, and had no other choice but to escalate the pace of war in Syria as harshly as possible.

The superpowers are on the verge of the abyss, so the danger of falling into a war of cosmic proposition is no longer confined to the imagination or merely a sensational part of unrealistic calculations.

Will Damascus be the door of a major war that destroys everything? Asking the question is very important : but it is a very difficult question to answer.

Ghouta Redux and the Coming Western Invasion of Libya

There is little reason to expect that the "cessation of hostilities" in Syria, agreed to by the United States and Russia, which is to go into effect on Saturday, will be anymore successful than the Munich agreement of the week before last. The main reason is that both ceasefires are based on the fiction that there is a clear dividing line between the U.S./Saudi-backed forces on the one hand and those of Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra on the other. The U.S.-Russian truce applies to neither Nusra nor ISIS; hence, the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian and Iranian allies can bomb both Salafist groups. And that is where the problem lies: U.S./Saudi forces are largely indistinguishable from Nusra on the battlefield. So while Russia and Syria can interpret bombing Nusra as in compliance with the truce, the Saudis and their neocon backers in the U.S. will cry foul. In other words, nothing will have changed.

There is an interesting story in today's paper by Celestine Bohlen, "A Turning Point for Syrian War, and U.S. Credibility." French foreign minister Laurent Faubius, having recently resigned his post, is blaming Obama for destroying the Pax Americana global order by failing to bomb Damascus to smithereens following the false flag Ghouta sarin attack of August 2013. Fabius blames everything that followed -- Russia's annexation of Crimea, the rise of ISIS, the refugee crisis in Europe -- on Obama's fecklessness.

This keening over the lost opportunity of Ghouta is nothing new. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the national security power elite when Obama decided to go to Congress to get authorization to illegally bomb Syria, a political exigency for the Noble laureate who owed his presidency to not having supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But Ghouta has recently reappeared as the key moment that destroyed the status quo, and it is hardening into settled opinion. As Bohlen explains,

Charges of American “passivity” have been a common theme of late at international conferences, where diplomats, foreign policy analysts and journalists play what the French newspaper Le Monde called the “blame game” for the catastrophic situation in Syria. 

For his part, Mr. Fabius, a former prime minister who left the Foreign Ministry to head the French Constitutional Council, hasn’t hesitated to point the finger at various targets. He has accused Mr. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria of “brutality,” Iran and Russia of “complicity,” and the United States of “ambiguity.” 

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s perceived lack of follow-through in Syria is oft-repeated in Paris; what’s new is that a former foreign minister, among others, is calling the United States’ decision in 2013 a world-changing event. 

François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank based in London, compared the moment to the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, an event seen in hindsight as helping to set the stage for World War I. 

Similarly, Mr. Obama’s reversal in 2013 “is one of those turning points in history where you see the power shift,” Mr. Heisbourg said in an interview. 

By refusing to enforce the red line, Mr. Obama did “enormous, perhaps irretrievable” damage to American credibility, Mr. Heisbourg said. 

“He did it because he didn’t want to do the strikes,” Mr. Heisbourg added. “He was caught in flagrante committing a supreme act of fecklessness.” 

According to both Mr. Heisbourg and, it seems, Mr. Fabius, there were global consequences to Mr. Obama’s inaction, most notably in Russia’s annexation of Crimea the following year, even though Moscow in its public rhetoric continues to accuse Washington of throwing its weight around in an imperial manner. 

Mr. Heisbourg said the “fecklessness” of 2013 had been recognized and interpreted in numerous capitals, not just Paris, as a low point for American power and influence.

“This is not just about the irritated French,” he said. “It goes much deeper.”

“The next U.S. president is going to have to demonstrate early on — in circumstances that he or she would have preferred to avoid — that this was an Obama moment, not an America moment,” he said. 

Although Mr. Fabius expressed regret that “the world didn’t follow France’s position” and punish Mr. Assad for using chemical weapons, others are unconvinced that intervention would have changed the course of the Syrian civil war. In fact, it has been noted in the press that Mr. Fabius’s parting shot at the United States may have been an attempt to deflect criticism of France’s own diplomatic failures in the region. 

Western intervention in Libya, led by France and Britain, has created only greater instability there, while the war in Yemen, waged by Middle Eastern proxies with no overt Western involvement, continues unabated, suggesting no easy answers anywhere in the region.

First, the mainstream press, following the six-month period when the issue of who was actually responsible for the sarin attack was hotly debated, a debate that was won by The London Review of Books when it published Seymour Hersh's "Whose Sarin?" -- evidence points to Nusra not the Syrian government -- blithely went about its business as a broadsheet for Western intelligence services and kept repeating the now-debunked claim that Assad was to blame for the chemical attack.

Next, there is no doubt, as the red-bold quote above makes clear, that the next U.S. president is going to have to atone for Obama's "passivity" by committing to yet another war theater. This will be Libya. Moves are already being made. Read Eric Schmitt's frontpager from yesterday, "U.S. Scrambles to Contain Growing ISIS Threat in Libya." Afghanistan is a lost cause. Russia is in Syria; so the U.S. can't throw down there. Iraq is a charnel house and a massive re-invasion would be politically unpopular in the homeland. Libya is ready-made; plus, it has huge oil reserves. Hillary will take us there for sure, as would Trump, and probably even Sanders. Perpetual war is here to stay. The new dispensation should be called Bellum Americana.

Hippies vs. Punks: Matthew Shipp's Piano Sutras (2013)

About a month ago I read some very positive comments about Matthew Shipp's Piano Sutras (2013) on the digital bulletin board of my public library. So I placed a hold on the record; it arrived at the end of last week; and I've been playing it ever since.

A solo piano recital (for an excellent review, see Will Layman's PopMatters piece) Piano Sutras sounds remarkably fresh, even after listening to the album 15 times in a row. Why is that? My guess is that it is because Piano Sutras manages to aurally picture our present history.

Two-thousand-thirteen in many ways is the jumping off point for our present history, a.k.a., the Zeitgeist. Obama's landslide reelection, rather than heralding a renewed progressive national government, turned out to be nothing more than business as usual.

The year began with the Democratic administration basically throwing in the towel on the fiscal cliff and sequestration negotiations, leaving the GOP to continue to dictate the agenda. Then in May Snowden flew to Hong Kong and revealed that Obama's government was spying on everyone globally. This was followed in July by the Sisi coup in Egypt, rolling back the Arab Spring, and then the Ghouta sarin attack in August, which prompted the Nobel Peace Prize winning president to illegally threaten to bomb a sovereign nation.

In other words. by the end of summer 2013, the idea that Obama represented something other than the maintenance of a rancid, war-based status quo could no longer be maintained rationally. The botched roll out of his signature legislative initiative, Obamacare, in the fall of 2013 reinforced the assessment that, according to Donald Trump's current mantra, "Our politicians are stupid."

Recorded in Brooklyn in February of 2013, Piano Sutras is pregnant with complex dark tones sprinkled with shards of light, the perfect soundtrack for the Zeitgeist of mass opt-out. Our politicians have failed; rather, our politicians are not our own but the employees of the super-rich. Things will continue to grow worse whether we try to catapult backwards to a more honest age (Bernie Sanders) or blow the whole fucking mess apart by launching a Latino pogrom (Donald Trump). Our present history demands enormous, dislocating alterations. Much pain is bubbling down the Zeit-sluice our way.

Bookmakers earn their living by accurately interpreting the Zeitgeist. Matthew Shipp is a master bookie. Do yourself a favor. Prepare yourself for what is coming. Listen to Piano Sutras. You will be stronger for it.

Elites Mewl Diminished Imperial Prerogative

Al Qaeda affiliate Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took control of the Syrian border town of Azaz, routing the Free Syrian Army rebels. This is from a story by Ben Hubbard and Karam Shoumali, "Extremists Take Syrian Town Near Turkey Border":

The takeover also signals a new low in relations between the rebels fighting a civil war against Mr. Assad’s forces and international jihadists who have flocked to rebel-controlled areas to lay the groundwork for an Islamic state. 

For much of the 30-month-old conflict, the rebels welcomed jihadist fighters for the know-how and battlefield prowess they brought to the anti-Assad struggle. In recent months, however, jihadist groups have isolated local populations by imposing strict Islamic codes, carrying out public executions and clashing with rebel groups. 

In the eastern city of Deir al-Zour on Wednesday, extremist fighters took dozens of rebels captive after a gunfight near a rebel base, activists said. 

Reached by telephone, a rebel commander who gave only his first name, Khattab, said that Wednesday’s violence in Azaz began when ISIS fighters stormed the town and tried to detain German doctors who were visiting a hospital.

Turkey responded by closing one of its border crossings.

Elites continue to complain about Obama's decision to go to Congress for authorization to illegally attack Syria; it is considered a significant rollback of the imperial presidency. The story, "Former Defense Secretaries Criticize Obama on Syria," by Thom Shanker and Lauren D'Avolio, about comments by former Obama SecDefs Robert Gates and Leon Panetta regarding the commander-in-chief's handling of Syrian crisis, had the following lines that caught my eye:

Although Mr. Gates said that any unilateral military action against Syria would be a mistake, he also said it was unwise for the president to have sought Congressional authorization to use force, because of the risk to presidential prestige if he was rebuffed. 

If Congress voted no, “it would weaken him,” Mr. Gates said. “It would weaken our country. It would weaken us in the eyes of our allies, as well as our adversaries around the world.”

In other words, it doesn't matter that the most favorable outcome was achieved -- a wider war was avoided, large amounts of chemical weapons will be decommissioned, and the Constitution was honored -- because there was a risk to presidential prestige. This is what qualifies as sagacity in elite circles. Clearly it is insane, the product of a shit-sniffing, addled old courtier; but it is the conventional wisdom of the Washington smart set.

Having been on the losing side of a propaganda war that has raged since Monday when the United Nations released the Sellstrom report on the August 21 Ghouta chemical attack, Russia and Syria finally got off the ropes. For instance, Assad was interviewed on the Fox Network by former presidential aspirant and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, something of a public relations coup since Kucinich still has some chops, albeit waning, among progressives and Fox caters to an audience of hard-shell conservative know-nothing types. This is the type of "unholy alliance" that blocked Obama's AUMF in Congress and has elites like Panetta and Gates mewling about the diminishment of imperial prerogative.

**CORRECTION**C.J. Chivers Not to be Trusted

In the previous post I praised the quality of C.J. Chivers reporting for the New York Times. I'd like to retract that. After reading this morning's Moon of Alabama blog post it is apparent that Chivers frequently engages in tendentious argumentation on behalf of the West.

In the past I suppose I've been swayed by his detached voice-overs describing the technical details of battles captured on videos that have appeared on the New York Times website.

Moon of Alabama offers a counterpoint to the argument that the Syrian government is responsible for the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta based on azimuth data. This is welcome since the West has been winning the propaganda war so far this week.

Chapter VII a Stretch for the West Despite Winning Propaganda War on Ghouta CW Attack

C.J. Chivers, a reporter who does good work, has another story today, "U.N. Data on Gas Attack Points to Assad’s Top Forces," fleshing out the azimuths evidence contained in the recently released United Nations report on the August 21 chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The angle of impact taken from rocket craters point to the Republican Guard 104th Brigade located atop Mount Qasioun. This revelation, mostly unanswered in the last 36 hours, is being countered this morning by the Syrian government. Agence France Presse reports that "Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Wednesday after the first of two days of talks in Damascus that the Syrian regime has handed Russia new materials implicating rebels in the attack that horrified the world." Ake Sellstrom's UN investigators are returning to Syria to continue inspections.

Regardless of the actual truth of who is behind the Ghouta chemical attack, the Syrian government has been losing the rhetorical war with the West since Monday. This has given renewed impetus in the Security Council to include Chapter VII sanctions in the draft resolution governing Syrian compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention. Here's Rick Gladstone's take in "Security Council Returns to Role in Syria Conflict":

[D]iplomats, who declined to be identified, said Russia, Syria’s most important ally, was resisting components of the draft, composed by the three Western permanent members — Britain, France and the United States — that discuss the threat of force to ensure Syrian compliance, whether to condemn the Syrian government for chemical weapons use and whether suspected users should be referred to the International Criminal Court for war crimes prosecutions. 

The discussions are unlikely to produce a quick resolution, the diplomats said, and it is unclear when a draft will be ready for a vote.

Even though Syria and their Russian ally are losing the public relations war on the Ghouta attack, they remain in a strong position vis-a-vis the West. Public opinion is overwhelming against military intervention even though a super-majority already believes the Syrian government to be responsible for the attack; that's what polls published earlier showed. The United States Government is facing the very real threat of a shutdown in the near future. In his negotiations with the House GOP there is no way Obama is going to risk losing public support by launching a unilateral strike. Russia will block any threat of force or official condemnation in the Security Council. It is likely that Sellstrom's inspection team will eventually document evidence of rebel chemical weapons use. The West will do everything it can to prevent this because once it happens any military support for the opposition will be exceedingly difficult to justify to a public bludgeoned about the horrors of using gas on the battlefield.