Erdogan Drops a Nuke

Turkey is not a nuclear state, though it does participate in a nuclear-weapon sharing program with the United States as a NATO member. Turkey does have a weapon in its arsenal that is capable of delivering a blow as devastating as a nuke; it is one that Turkish president Erdogan, in the wake of Syrian/Russian airstrikes yesterday that killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Syria's contested Idlib Province, has now deployed:

“We have decided, effectively immediately, not to stop Syrian refugees from reaching Europe by land or sea,” a senior Turkish official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

“All refugees, including Syrians, are now welcome to cross into the European Union,” the official said, adding that police and border guards had been stood down.

Within hours, a column of dozens of migrants was heading on foot towards the European frontier in the early morning light. A man carried a small child in his arms. Others rode in taxis.

Four years ago, Erdogan, after much haggling with German chancellor Angela Merkel, agreed to block the flow of refugees from the Syrian war zone and warehouse them in Turkey. The flows of refugees destabilized Europe, led to Brexit and the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) ultra-nationalist party. Erdogan, whenever he feels like he is not getting what he wants from European leaders, threatens to turn on the refugee spigot; that he has finally done so means that he must be desperate for assistance. What he wants is NATO support for Turkey's offensive operation in Idlib Province, the rump caliphate Erdogan controls along with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), previously known as the Nusra Front, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate.

The problem for Erdogan is that there is no deal-maker among the Europeans who can deliver what he wants. Merkel is a lamb duck with a greatly diminished base of support. Rank'n'file Christian Democrats are moving to embrace AfD. Macron is despised by the French. Boris Johnson has problems of his own. Across the Atlantic, Trump is in the middle of an election year that is taking place during the global coronavirus pandemic. To commit U.S. forces to a war with Russia would be political suicide.

It's not clear that NATO military aid to Turkey would do anything more than expand the refugee crisis during a plague year. The deal-maker Erdogan needs more than anyone is Vladimir Putin.

Erdogan's ask seems to be a return to the original Sochi boundaries minus the agreement's commitment to demilitarization; in other words, a complete absurdity. If Russia and Syria are going to move in a direction that Erdogan wants, a completely new agreement will have to be drawn, which will take time.

But the floodgates have opened. Refugees are crossing borders while the coronavirus continues to spread. We'll know that Erdogan is on his way to getting what he wants if a ceasefire is called in the next 48-72 hours. If not, 2020 is looking downright biblical -- locusts, plague, war.

U.S. Duplicity and World War in Syria

Duplicity and publicity are all the United States is capable of, so much so that one dismisses the top-of-the-fold story yesterday by Eric Schmitt and Michael Gordon ("U.S. Aims to Put More Pressure on ISIS in Syria"), two reporters who are usually tasked with the big propaganda roll-outs, as more of the same and awaits a quote from either Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov or some Iranian official to at least get a semblance of the truth.

Those quotes arrive today in "Russian Soldiers Join Syria Fight" by Andrew Kramer and Anne Barnard:

Russian officials say they are targeting the Islamic State, though their bombs have mainly hit territories held by other insurgents who oppose Mr. Assad, Russia’s ally. The strikes have hit the Army of Conquest, an Islamist faction that includes the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, as well as more-secular groups that often fight alongside it, including some that have received covert American aid. 

The Obama administration, by contrast, says its own airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria can succeed only with a political transition that ends with Mr. Assad’s removal. 

The administration’s position was ridiculed Monday by Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who said the American airstrikes, which began more than a year ago, had done little militarily. In comments carried by Russia’s official Tass news agency, Mr. Lavrov said that even the Americans had acknowledged their faltering efforts to create a force of so-called moderate insurgents in Syria.

“Nobody knows about these people,” he said. “Nobody’s really heard about the moderate opposition.”

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran, Mr. Assad’s regional ally, was also dismissive of the American efforts in Syria, both to unseat Mr. Assad and to combat the Islamic State. Sounding emboldened by the Russian airstrikes, Mr. Zarif said at a talk in New York that there was a difference between Russia — which was invited by Mr. Assad to help — and the American-led coalition that has been bombing Syria. “Why are you there?” he said. “Who gave you the right to be there?”

The lies and the omissions of the official U.S. position are too layered and numerous to conveniently recite. But let's give it a shot. First, the big one that is being leaned on heavily by the press, which should and no doubt does know better, that Russian airstrikes are targeting the "moderate" Syrian opposition and driving otherwise secular fighters into the arms of the jihadists of Al Qaeda and ISIS. This is a lie, plain and simple, the main fabrication the U.S. relies on to justify its actions in Syria. The actuality is that the U.S. is working with the Salafis to destroy Syria and Iraq and pressure Iran, as the U.S. worked with the mujahideen to destroy Afghanistan.

The big omission in this context is the revolt of the Centcom analysts, a story which confirms the Russian and Iranian positions that the U.S. is engaged in a phony war against ISIS while the jihadists of the Army of Conquest (the Pepsi to Islamic State's Coke) roll along destroying the Syrian state.

Now with Turkey's keening over a Russian incursion into its air space, followed by a NATO reprimand, we're getting closer to World War III or World War IV, whichever one it is by now. According to Kramer and Bernard,

The potential combination of Russian ground forces and aerial attacks particularly threatens to undermine Turkey’s Syria policy, which aims for the establishment of a “safe zone” along the Turkish border where some Syrian refugees could return in the future. 

The Russian air incursion happened on Saturday, when Turkish fighter jets scrambled to intercept a warplane that trespassed into Turkish airspace. On Monday, NATO issued a warning to Russia, as the United States began urgent consultations with Turkey over what they called “next steps.” 

Russia’s actions were “an unacceptable violation” of Turkish airspace, NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said after meeting with the Turkish foreign minister, Feridun Sinirlioglu. Mr. Stoltenberg added, “Russia’s actions are not contributing to the security and stability of the region.”

The United States is completely out of whack with the will of its people, passing trade deals, which are  overwhelming rejected by voters on both the left and the right, with the goal of a future conlict with China. It is a vision of the future which offers nothing but poverty and war. No wonder most works of popular fiction seem to be dystopian. This system of war and poverty calls for a rebellion. We need to be thinking about wise, efficient ways this rebellion can be brought about.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Nuns

World War III, usually associated with the Cold War and its many crises -- Suez, Berlin, Cuban Missile -- and proxy military conflicts -- Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua -- is back with a vengeance. The United States is banging its war drum. China is reportedly sending a warship to the Mediterranean. Russia, with an anti-submarine ship and a missile cruiser already there, is sending additional ships. They will be monitoring -- and who knows what else -- a U.S. submarine and the five U.S. destroyers loaded with cruise missiles meant for Syria. One mistake, a faulty guidance system on one of the Tomahawks, and a regional crisis becomes a global conflagration.

For the last several weeks I've been meaning to take a stab at a Hippies vs. Punks post devoted to The Nuns, a first wave Punk group from San Francisco. Along with Crime and Avengers they dominated the San Francisco Punk scene in the early years, 1976 through 1978. 

What captivated me at first about The Nuns was the realization that they are the band that kicked off the famous last show of the Sex Pistols, the moment when Punk died and Post-Punk began. The venue was Bill Graham's Winterland Ballroom where The Last Waltz had been filmed a little over a year earlier. The line-up that January night in 1978 was The Nuns, Avengers, Sex Pistols, followed by Negative Trend.

None of The Nuns' recordings really jump out at you. The eponymous The Nuns, released in 1980, was minus guitarist, co-founder, song writer and present-day star Alejandro Escovedo. The band broke up in 1979 and reformed, except for Escovedo, for a single week in the spring of 1980 to quickly record the self-titled album. To hear the band in its prime with Escovedo on guitar you have to track down singles.

What does exist is video of The Nuns' performance at the Sex Pistols' Winterland show, January 14, 1978. (The web sites where one can find it, sadly, require membership.)

But what has stuck with me the past few weeks is not the music as much as the story of their keyboard player, Jennifer Miro, who, along with Jeff Olener and Richie Detrick, was a vocalist. (For Jennifer Miro's story check out the excellent SF Weekly piece by Jack Boulware.)

Miro died of breast and liver cancer in December of the year before last alone in hospice care at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center. Up until then she had been employed as a receptionist for celebrity divorce attorney Raoul Felder. Obits can be found at the SF Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Nuns put out five more albums after The Nuns (1980), all built around Jennifer Miro and her embrace of a cold, drum-track driven, synthesizer-based sound and a sexual fetishist persona. Not my cup of tea. But I am drawn to a woman, a fellow office worker, who, present at the creation of our current exhausted Zeitgeist, chose to die alone as quietly as possible. There is something to be learned here. 

Let's end with the last lines from Jack Boulware's appreciation:

On January 14, 1978, at the Winterland in San Francisco, what would be the final show ever for the Sex Pistols, the most talked-about punk show in history, before the mob of 5,000 roared to life and pelted the stage with spit and D-sized batteries, before anyone knew what to expect, before rock media anointed this night as the death of punk rock, before the voiceover introduction, "We're The Nuns, and we ain't from New York, and we ain't from England, we're from San Francisco!", the very first person to take the stage was Jennifer, walking out by herself in a single spotlight, scared to death and emotionally fragile from just having broken up with Crime drummer Brittley Black. She sat at her piano, began a closing-time saloon melody, leaned into the mic and sang, "I'm so lazy, so lazy...I'm too lazy to fall in love...It's such a bother, I'd much rather stay home and watch TV..." 

Jennifer remembered the moment clearly. "After that," she said, "you can't go back to a normal life."