This article is posted on The Charlotte Observer
VIEWPOINT about 1 week ago
Last month, 24 Iranian dissidents were killed in a rocket attack
This was the seventh time the group had been bombed by Iran or its allies
If the dissidents are wiped out, so is the dream of a democratic Iran
Sen. John McCain’s proposal of providing U.S. air cover for Camp Liberty would be a step in the right direction. T.J. Kirkpatrick Getty
BY GEN. HUGH SHELTON
Special to the Observer I have long advocated that the United States must uphold its promises to protect the thousands of unarmed Iranian refugees in Iraq as they await final resettlement to third countries through the United Nations. To my regret, warnings of an impending bloodbath perpetrated by Tehran came true last month when 24Iranian dissidents were killed in a horrific rocket attack against their defenseless encampment. Dozens more were…
The United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned four individuals and six entities connected to the regime of Bashar al-Assad on November 25 for helping to transfer Syrian government funds to the Islamic State (IS), and for assisting in Russia-connected schemes to help the Assad regime evade the international sanctions imposed on it. While the sanctions freeze all assets of the individuals and entities that are under U.S. control and ban Americans from transactions with them, the most significant effect of these sanctions is political: the revelation of details about how Assad strengthens the Islamist terrorists he claims to oppose to discredit and destroy the rebellion against his regime.
Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.
I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.
The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.
Trolls online — paid? not paid? who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh. For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.
In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.
Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.
Assad’s central strategy, this with the probable collusion of its partners, has been to produce an interesting piece of post-KGB-style political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists”, which becomes also “Assad OR The Terrorists.” First, however, he needed “The Terrorists”, and he needed bad enough terrorists to confuse the moderate opposition with them. He had a few ways of accomplishing this effect. He could spill Islamists out of his jails (I’ll refer to a piece on that bit of data in a moment) and he could focus his air and ground forces against FSA (the initial revolutionary force while giving the al-Qaeda Typicals (like al-Nusra and ISIS) time to incubate.
Mission accomplished.
With “The Terrorists” fully present, Assad could then make the demand, “help me, or help them.”
The same system makes way also for the Assad-side slogan, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country.”
The western position: help neither, but try to help other forces strong enough in their own moral and fighting fiber to fight both — and the same have been fighting on their two fronts — against Assad’s forces and against Daesh.
Max Fisher’s piece attends to the complicated political nuts and bolts where I have emphasized a larger struggle between the medieval world of political absolutism, of which Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi form a whole: the first three have in the fourth the enemy they need to write the future of the world their way. None appear possessed of any compassion sufficient to forestall their own inability in restraining themselves.
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What has come from this has been a steady stream of “war porn” — indescribable images of death, dismemberment, maiming, and mutilation having for their subject tens of thousands of Syrian noncombatants. All who have watched the “Syrian Tragedy” — that’s my term for it — online have seen this horrific feed.
While we have also seen — and in some ways been made to see — Daesh atrocities conveyed in pictures and text, what we have seen also without end have been the targets and effects of Assad’s barrel bombing of whole areas. A portion of Homs today looks like Nagasaki after the ashes have cooled. Famously, the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp has been devastated between Assad’s forces and those of the Islamic State — http://www.longwarjournal.org/…/islamic-state-releases…
Fundamentally, the struggle between the post-Soviet feudalists (“absolute powers” each of them) and the Islamic feudalists is medieval in a particularly barbaric way: both are using modern weapons absent of any apparent compassion or conscience.
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The medieval screed wants the division of all against all — and those who benefit from it have to promote that division as part of their own archaic, faulted, or otherwise misguided ambition — and for shame or honor, none dare admit fault.
Worse, the medieval of mind align differentially — according to national, religious, or sectarian nominal affiliation. Because you were born . . . Shia . . . because you were born . . . Sunni . . . because you were born Russian Orthodox . . . because you were born Arab . . . . because you were born Turkish . . . . these obligations (to bully, demean, and diminish others, to pick fights with others, the more helpless, the better, etc.) are incumbent upon thee.
The medieval world had been constrained by slow transportation, primitive methods of distant communication (runners with notes or messages) and personal weaponry. These medieval elements in the modern world are not so constrained and are both borrowing and leaking themselves into the platforms, as it were, of the progressive manufacturing of devastating weapons as well as other sectors generating the modern experience of community and technology.
Start with Assad’s planes.
The barrel bombs might be basic in various ways, but the flying machines are not.
Now: Russian cruise missiles launched from air and sea; on the ground, anything that can be gotten and carried.
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Part of the online crowd supports the Russian position coupled with affinity for the Christian Church (which church matters less at the moment: whatever the true political topology may be, Assad’s opposition — “The Terrorists” — are all Islamists in the Baghdaddi tradition. Often reached for in objection to that position are the many images of dead, injured, maimed, and mangled children or their parents. In Assad’s war, the same have not been “collateral” or “in the way” of “The Terrorists”: by all appearances and by way of general barrel bombing most of all, they have been the certain targets of Assad’s so-called “defense”.
This video post on YouTube on May 3, 2011 appears among the earliest statements of the Assad concern for any opposed to its absolute authority in Syria:
Related from 2013:
“It’s more horrific than any other war zone I’ve worked in. Most civilians are caught in crossfire, they are never really caught in direct fire. It is direct fire this time” he told BBC News.
Such state-generated terrorism encourages sympathy for the Syrian opposition, including in the confusion “The Terrorists” that the Assad regime allowed to incubate.
There are many other and similar observations and arguments having to do with “Assad and The Terrorists” and the medieval barbarism put on display before the world. The escalation attending Russia’s entry into the combat area, the side-by-side mix of Russo-NATO (U.S.) cooperation and “proxy war” have no effect on the kind of inhuman consciousness involved in sustaining the conflict.
It has been and remains BackChannel’s thesis that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi and what they represent — on this blog, 21st Century Feudalism — require one another for survival.
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.
Zubatov had long harboured plans for the restructuring and expansion of the political police, envisioning an elite and quasi-independent political police, acting under the direct order of its own Special Section and only indirectly under the orders of Fontanka; a truly secret police expanding and operating at the behest of the MVD‘s edicts, circulars, and regulations and not through the statutes of the Svod Zakonov (Digest of Laws).
Plehve dismissed Lopukhin’s plan and gave Zubatov’s proposals his full support. Zubatov’s ideas on police reform fitted comfortably within Plehve’s view of traditional tsarist bureaucratic behavior, satisfying both his belief in Imperial power politics and his secretive nature. He conceived of political police reform in the only way his experience allowed him to: not through decentralization of authority as Lopukhin believed, but through its deconcentration — the expansion of central authority in the provinces. Indeed, this strategy would permit Plehve to swell the size of the political police to ministerial proportions. As a result Plehve would in fact hold two very powerful ministerial portfolios: minister of internal affairs and the unofficial post of minister of internal security, enhancing his power and prestige within both ministerial circles and the court, making him the most powerful man in Russia next to the tsar.
Zuckerman, Fredric S. The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917. Pp. 92-93. Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1996.
“Fontanka” refers to “Fontanka 16 Quai” (St. Petersburg), the central location, evidently of minimized importance at the above passage, for Tsar Alexander II’s secret police.
According to Wikipedia, “Many authors maintain that it was Rachkovsky’s agent in Paris, Matvei Golovinski, who in the early 1900s authored the first edition.[3] The text presented the impending Russian Revolution of 1905 as a part of a powerful global Jewish conspiracy and fomented anti-Semitism to deflect public attention from Russia’s growing social problems. Another Rachkovsky agent, Yuliana Glinka, is often cited as the person who brought the forgery from France to Russia.”
A rabbi said to me one afternoon in relation to religious zealots, “end times”, and terrorism: “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”
We were then looking forward.
At the moment, BackChannels has been looking backward and would say to the rabbi, “To the contrary, everyone wants to go back to the drawing board!”
For the Islamists, the “drawing board” appears to be 7th Century Medieval Barbarism.
For the Russian President, perhaps, it may be the political police serving Tsar Nicholas II.
Erdogan’s deposing of the Kamalist generals as he took power may have been offset recently by NATO’s relationship with his current generals, NATO has yet sway on that military. Also: Putin’s alignment with Assad in Syria and with the Shiite Assahola bars Erdogan from moving toward Moscow in all but vanity: the Turkish leader has now got his grandiose dream house, the White Palace. While Jihadists have walked from Istanbul’s airport to BadDaddyLand on his watch, and black market oil has reached buyers in Turkey, he’s a bit stuck as regards U.S.-NATO-Kurdish alignment against Daesh.
Putin may be credited with transiting the “Party Privileged” of the Soviet into a “New Nobility” in his 19th Century neo-feudal revanche.
At the moment, that enterprise has not been serving the general Russian population very well, but as he controls Russian media (and only 7 percent of the Federation reads or speaks in English), he may leverage the coming unhappiness against the west and in the cause of Great Russia. In the past year, the Russian economy has contracted by four percent and its best and brightest in entrepreneurs and professionals have fled — are fleeing — for economies in which they may sell their wares. The oil revenues on which the state has been largely dependent have been slashed deeply, so with all of that, my prediction is he will turn to the oligarchs for military funding in the name of Russian patriotism.
The question was, “Why would they attack ISIS? ISIS are now a very convenient foreign policy tool to advance geopolitical agendas in the Middle East for many Muslim countries in the region, mainly Iran, Syria, Russia (non Muslim), Qatar, Turkey and the dreaded fanatics in the glass palaces of Riyadh.”
The medieval world has medieval headaches that it tries to share with the modern and democratic still open societies.
George Haswani (
BackChannels 