NFL Week 5: Let's Get Caught Up

The National Football League season is already in its fifth week. The season, entering its second quarter, has been a strange one, particularly if you are Seahawks fan. At this point last year, the hard times were ahead for Seattle; now, Seahawks fans have essentially dodged a season-ending bullet with Kam Chancellor's ball punch of a paydirt-bound Megatron on Monday night.

At 2-2, things could be worse, though it is a long shot to think that the situation will improve going into Cincinnati this Sunday. Marshawn Lynch is out again with a strained hamstring. Seattle is going to have to find a way to run the ball; otherwise, Russell Wilson will be eaten alive by the Bengals front seven. It will be a good test of the Seahawks defense. I can't think of a more complete offense right now than Andy Dalton's. A.J. Green is awesome, and the Cinci running-back combo of Jeremy Hill and Giovani Bernard is potent.

Let's get caught up on the season so far. First, two general comments. A guy, a labor politico of sorts, who survives by peddling seminars to unions, came into the office recently. He sat in the little reception area in front of my work station and waited for the head of the labor council to get off the phone and come out of her office and greet him. While he was waiting I took the opportunity to ask him, "Are you a Seahawks fan?"

This is my litmus test, a type of loyalty oath. Most people, believe it or not, say yes and then proceed to break down with acuity recent action. There are a few who beg off and say, "Well, yeah, but I don't really watch the games." This labor politico, which was surprising to me, admitted up front that he didn't follow the Seahawks, quite a liability for someone whose business is telling labor leaders how to connect with their membership.

I said to the guy, "Imagine if there was just one-quarter the interest in our political process as there was in the National Football League."

He stared back at me in a perturbed, confused manner. He didn't get it. The fact is that right now the athletes of the National Football League -- Kam Chancellor, Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, A.J. Green, et al. -- are in the cultural vanguard. When I wore my Beast Mode hoodie on Friday, young people turned their heads as I passed by.

The music industry has been debased along with film. Neither can lead the masses as they used to. It is a dystopian world in which we live. But the gridiron is an idealized space where the heroes are untarnished (except for the New England Patriots). I can't remember a time -- and I've been following the NFL since 1975, when I was in sixth grade -- when the cultural cache of professional football athletes was this full.

Prior to last Monday night's Detroit-vs.-Seattle match-up I was in the grocery store. I live close to downtown in what many would describe as a hipster neighborhood. Never before have I seen so many young hipsters decked out in NFL jerseys. In the past, allegiance to the NFL home team was the provenance of the white, suburban working class. No longer. After Seattle's overtime Week 1 loss to St. Louis I went out for a run and was surprised to see the number of young people in Seahawks regalia glumly streaming out of house parties. Something different is happening here.

That's the first point. The National Football League is of enormous cultural importance now in the United States. I take it as proof that our political system is almost entirely bankrupt; the rapturous allegiance to the NFL is the observe of this bankruptcy, a hunger to believe in something that is authentic. And what is more real than a physical contest? Until our political system becomes more democratic and begins to address the many concerns of working people, I'm sure the NFL will continue its meteoric rise.

If the first point is that the NFL represents the cutting edge culturally in this country, then the second point is that it is simultaneously able to tap into an amazingly nourishing pool of nostalgia for a time when things were stable and prosperous, when every man was safely ensconced in his castle (and securely positioned in front of his television, usually in the fortress of the suburbs). I speak here of Thursday Night Football, at least the first nine weeks that are televised on CBS before retreating behind the paywall of NFL Network.

There is something about being a bachelor alone in his apartment at the end of the work week watching a primetime professional football game as the sun goes down and the room goes dark, particularly when the contests are close, as they have been the last two Thursdays -- Ravens vs. Steelers; Colts vs. Texans; it is a feeling of contentment, order, and tranquility, a lifeline back to previous generations of bachelors alone in t-shirts bathed in the phosphorescent glow from the TV screen, like a fictional Paul Drake watching a nighttime telecast of Norm Van Brocklin's Los Angeles Rams. One sleeps well after a night like that.

But this Sunday the story is about the unbeaten teams that remain. Let's hope the Seahawks knock off the Bengals; the loathsome Cowboys wallop the villainous Patriots; the Falcons keep rolling; the Raiders whip the Broncos; and the Packers best the Rams. This would leave three teams undefeated: Green Bay, Atlanta and Carolina (because of a bye).

Oh, and I wouldn't mind seeing the Lions give the Cardinals another loss.

Turkish Support for ISIS Makes the Front Page + NFL Weeks Four & Five: Cowboys Riding High

It is all out in the open now. The only thing that prevents an interpretation of events in Iraq and Syria along the lines of the left-of-center perspective -- that Islamic State is a creation and ally of Gulf Arab Sheikhdoms and Turkey (with an assist from U.S. intelligence agencies) designed to fracture the Shiite axis of Syria-Iran-Hezbollah -- from cohering into the settled, dominant narrative is willful ignorance.

A boundary has been crossed, I believe, with today's story by Mark Landler, Anne Barnard and Eric Schmitt about the imminent fall of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, "Turkish Inaction on ISIS Advance Dismays the U.S." The reporters come right out and say what has been said for a long time in the Left media (and was said just yesterday on Counterpunch by Patrick Cockburn): Turkey prefers a Kurdish and Assad defeat to the defeat of Islamic State.

While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares. 

But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.

Mr. Erdogan has also resisted pleas to send his troops across the border in the absence of a no-fly zone to ward off the Syrian Air Force.

Even as it stepped up airstrikes against the militants Tuesday, the Obama administration was frustrated by what it regards as Turkey’s excuses for not doing more militarily. Officials note, for example, that the American-led coalition, with its heavy rotation of flights and airstrikes, has effectively imposed a no-fly zone over northern Syria already, so Mr. Erdogan’s demand for such a zone rings hollow. 

“There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” a senior administration official said. “After all the fulminating about Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe, they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe. 

“This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border,” said the official, who spoke anonymously to avoid publicly criticizing an ally.
Secretary of State John Kerry has had multiple phone calls in the last 72 hours with Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, to try to resolve the border crisis, American officials said. 

For Mr. Obama, a split with Turkey would jeopardize his efforts to hold together a coalition of Sunni Muslim countries to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. While Turkey is not the only country that might put the ouster of Mr. Assad ahead of defeating the radical Sunnis of the Islamic State, the White House has strongly argued that the immediate threat is from the militants. 

But if Turkey remains a holdout, it could cause other fissures in the coalition. It is not only a NATO ally but the main transit route for foreigners seeking to enlist in the ranks of the Islamic State.

So everything is pretty much out in the open. Turkey, a country that for years has been the gateway for jihadis on their way to battlefronts in Syria, has blocked Kurds from rushing to defend Kobani. The Turkish military sits by and watches ISIS shell the city. This led to an outbreak of protests by Kurds in Turkey yesterday. Erdogan, according to Landler et al. is trying to exact concessions from both the U.S. and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party,

Analysts say the Kurds of Kobani are being held hostage as Mr. Erdogan seeks to wrest concessions not only from Washington but also from Kurdish leaders, his longtime domestic foes. 

The aim, said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is to weaken Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in peace talks with the Turkish government. 

Turkey also wants the Kurdish fighters to denounce Mr. Assad and openly join the Syrian insurgents fighting him. But the fighters and local political leaders accepted control of Kurdish areas when Mr. Assad’s forces withdrew earlier in the Syrian war, and have focused more on self-rule and protecting their territory than on fighting the government. In some places they have fought alongside government troops. 

The impasse leaves Kobani isolated. Some refugees are literally pressed against the fence, unwilling to cross because they cannot take their livestock, and sometimes blocked by the Turkish authorities, who have also stopped Syrian and Turkish Kurds from crossing into Syria to fight the Islamic State. 

Tear gas wafted near the border on Tuesday, as Kurdish men packed the streets of the town of Suruc to protest Turkish policy; demonstrations broke out in several cities across Turkey. In Diyarbakir, at least 10 people were killed and more than 20 were injured in clashes between sympathizers of a pro-Kurdish party and a group known for its Islamic affiliations, while the authorities ordered schools to close in several southeastern cities, the Haberturk news channel reported. 

On one small stretch of the border near Kobani, a fleeing Syrian Kurd, Omar Alloush, said a Turkish soldier had looked on as an Islamic State fighter addressed Syrian Kurds across the border fence, telling them they were welcome to return as long as they abided by the group’s extreme interpretation of Islam. 

“We will never trust those people,” Mr. Alloush, a member of a Kurdish political party in Kobani, said by telephone. 

Yet another hillside spectator, Avni Altindag, a Kurd from Suruc, said the Islamic State was stronger than a few air raids. 

He pointed to the men watching the smoke rising over Kobani, who were chanting for the People’s Protection Committees, a Kurdish group known as Y.P.G. that is battling the Islamic State in the town’s streets. “They used to come with high expectations of strikes against ISIS, but all are disappointed,” he said. 

Mr. Altindag blamed Turkey. “They don’t want to help what they say is their enemy,” he said. “This is why it is in Turkey’s favor that Kobani falls to ISIS.”

One would think that now that the ISIS ruse has been exposed -- that it is clear that U.S. allies are actually allies first of ISIS (see Biden's Harvard Kennedy School speech) -- that Obama would drop his efforts to placate the Saudis and Turks by toppling Assad's government. But indications are that he is sticking to the disastrous policy that brought us to the chaos we are experiencing today. Yesterday, at the end of a story by Karam Shoumali and Anne Barnard, "Slaughter Is Feared as ISIS Nears Turkish Border," there were four paragraphs that support the notion that sporadic U.S. airstrikes of ISIS positions in northern and eastern Syria are a smokescreen for its regime change operations in Syria:

Elsewhere across Syria, insurgents struck on two fronts against government forces. 

North of Aleppo, insurgent groups including the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and the American-backed Harakat Hazm fought government forces that recently seized the town of Handarat. Fighters from Hazm, which has been supplied with American-made TOW antitank weapons, have destroyed government tanks in recent days, rebels say. Rebel spokesmen on Monday said they were pushing hard to take back the town of Handarat and had captured foreigners, including Afghans and Lebanese, fighting on the government side. 

In an unusual battle near the border with the Golan Heights in southern Syria, another United States-backed group, the Omari Brigades of the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, took a government air defense base on the hilltop of Tel al-Harrah and posted a video of several fighters with what they said was Russian-made government air defense equipment. 

A covert United States effort to equip and train relatively moderate insurgents there has had few major successes. More aid has been promised to groups deemed moderate by American officials as part of the campaign against the Islamic State. But it was unclear whether the recent victory was because of new equipment or organization, or if it benefited from recent victories in the area by the Nusra Front.

Islamic State's siege of Kobani began in earnest the middle of last month, about the time I put up the flyer (below) in my cubicle at work:

I went online this morning to see if I could find any news about yesterday's march. It turns out that the flyer must have been changed once it had been sent out -- I received it in the mail from Workers World -- because it is actually today. The destination of the march is a World Business Forum event at Radio City Music Hall.

A powerful capitalist distraction for the working masses in the United States is the National Football League. The story of the last two weeks -- NFL Week Four and Week Five -- has been the rise of the perennially hapless Cowboys of Dallas. Week Four the Cowboys destroyed the Saints on Sunday night; Week Five, they held on in OT to beat their Lone Star rivals, the visiting Texans. Though they had the better of Houston most of the game, the Texans came back on the legs of Arian Foster. In the overtime period, Romo threw up a blind Hail Mary that Dez Bryant somehow came up with. The completion set up the game-winning field goal.

So Dallas is not only playing well, but the Cowboys are also lucky. You don't want to rely on luck to win games, but I find luck is a good indicator of a team's potency. To make a Super Bowl run, a team not only has to be dominant but lucky. The Seahawks were excellent last year, but they were also lucky.

The strengths of Dallas -- I got to see both the Week Four and Week Five Games -- are in its big, young offensive line and its DeMarco Murray powered ground game. Romo has been bridled and lucky so far. He is coming off back surgery, and he's not playing as petulantly as he has in the past; he is not constantly dropping back to pass and throwing picks.

Another bright spot has been the play of the Dallas defense, which strikes me as more consistent this season and less prone to giving up the big play.

We'll find out what Dallas is made of when they come into town to play Seattle on Sunday. The Seahawks enjoy a great homefield advantage. And while their pass rush has not been as successful as last year, the run defense has been stellar.

My sense is that the Cowboys will find a way to self-destruct. Murray is injury prone, and so too is Romo of late. The Seahawks will come into Sunday's game more focused after being penalized more than a dozen times (erasing three touchdowns by Harvin!) on a spotty Monday night victory over the free-falling Redskins.