For Gaza as an interim measure brought out any which way: Egyptian and Israeli suzerainty until the Hamas civil thug and terrorist culture is no more a burden to the Palestinian population.
For the West Bank, treatment as an in-holding similar to Quebec in Canada with security measures corresponding (as they have for many years) corresponding to threat.
Moscow-Tehran (Red-Green / Old Comrades and Neo-Islamists): that is to be taken care of now, or the “phantoms of the Soviet” will indeed haunt another generation of Israelis and Palestinians.
We know Mr. Khamenei’s cards; Mr. Putin may only hold his close — and sustain his power in potential threat — for so long. He needs to move Russia forward of Imperial and KGB Russian history. I have no idea whether he’s up to doing that or not.
There’s a little craziness in believing — or accepting — that either the PLO or Hamas have been helping the Palestinians as a People (after 70 years of Arab Apartheid in the camps of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria plus the same as a suspended culture in their space and much bedeviled by official corruption and feudal patronage systems, they’re a cohort, but as a people perhaps a little different than presented). For those in the world a little tired of the post-WWII Stalinist project (Hitler’s loss back then: Stalin’s gain), the Palestinians may be thought of as deserving of honest, responsible, and responsive government.
The prompts may be inferred — has Syria signaled the weakening and weakness of the west? And are we so beholden to “Big Money” — the personalities of the powerful and wealthy of the world — that we have abandoned our western political character? — for the following and linked pieces of the BackChannels Soapbox Opera.
Syria has been the demonstration project for a medieval absolutism that intentionally fails to differentiate between the value of property and that of persons. The indiscriminate killing by the Assad regime as flanked by Putin and Khamenei has reinforced that most feudal view of sovereignty — and it should be seen that way. The same “troika” has also extended the tenure of Russian totalitarianism in which centralized power has shown it may arrange all perception for everyone else. There should be no question that Assad incubated ISIS — i.e., allowed the al-Qaeda types to stream into the battlespace and form, and then encouraged their organization by choosing to battle the west first while also bombing neutral noncombatant targets. “Assad v The Terrorists” has been grand and bloody political theater from the start.
If all were so — even though much seems so — we would have disengaged from Syria and nascent “Kurdistan” completely, but I think the spirit of the west still evolving and strong. In Syria, the post-Soviet axis has been effectively destroying itself, especially as may be measured by Syria’s diminished population and controlled land space.
Russia and the “phantoms of the Soviet” in it may be fabulously wealthy, but the state has been deeply damaged financially — and not by sanctions completely but the accumulated effects of capital flight and mafia behavior for decades.
Where Iran has had its hand in driving conflict, it has poisoned land and politics both.
The west has been cautious beneath the now immovable cloud of potential nuclear exchange with its enemies, and it has perhaps (!) suffered from early post-Cold War cooperation that with “Putin’s Pivot” on Syria (2011) has become problematic.
As regards Powerful Big Money, the western investment in its own existence in ideals, principles, and values IS being tested. If the west fails to defend its hard won experience, then welcome to the New Feudalism and wars cooked up endlessly for illicit and licit trade in totalitarian fashion (black market arms –> miscreants; state arms sales –> states). Alternatively, if the west wants to exist as a liberal statement, it will have to stand to defend its integrity.
Possibly: when the Soviet Union dissolved Dec. 25, 1991 and then presumably ended the Cold War, it’s possible (possibly) that American and Russian security elements thought to cooperate on issues confronting both states, Islamic Terrorism high on the list of possibilities conveniently at hand for that.
For the United States, one presumes that cooperation would have been intended to reduce the power and presence of dictatorship in the world and (in domino effect) remove the vestiges of the defunct Soviet Union in global foreign affairs. In the way of political “optics” — how things look — the American and other EU / NATO constituencies would have perceived some great measure of peace and trade taking place between the former superpower antagonists, so when Clinton and others signed off on “Uranium One”, it may have been in that context that the deal went down.
East and West had taken the great leap forward toward peace in 1992 and by 2010 business involving uranium, a strategic asset, appeared to have been conducted in overall calm, bureaucratic, and peaceful conditions.
While other business and political mixers were proceeding, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya were also transformed (in 2003 and 2011, respectively), at least as regards the deposing of each dictator — and let none remember them fondly: they were both monsters in each their own demonic way.
Then in 2011: Syria.
When offered the choice, Putin refused the liberal western path and reverted to the KGB past. At that moment, possibly(!), Team Security USA, in some part, discovered that it had been duped
(Note: intervention in Libya preceded the perceived (Wikipedia) start date of the Syrian Civil War — on BackChannels, the “Syrian Tragedy” — by five days).
Moscow had intended to refuse the adoption of democratic liberalism all along.
What the United States and EU / NATO had done for peace between 1992 and 2011?
I don’t know.
However, one may imagine the possibilities.
However, the old news cross my desktop a few minutes ago, and it seems to add its little bit to the BackChannels perspective on Cold War / post-Cold War / Phantom of the Soviet history.
If you haven’t hit the link, the “old news” was this:
Syria was a key participant in the C.I.A. rendition program at a time when President George W. Bush’s administration labelled Damascus part of the “axis of evil,” according to a report by the Open Society Justice Initiative.
The report – titled “Globalizing Torture” – said President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” indicating an established security relationship between Syrian intelligence and Western agencies.
The story — and not written for conservative Americans — traces its thesis back to at least 2003.
Apparently, Moscow and Washington had been fighting terrorism together in the double-0’s of the new century.
Welcome Moscow’s post-Cold War totalitarian design and the west’s apparent partial cooperation with it, possibly, up to the Syrian gambit of spring 2011 when Obama tested Putin’s navigational tendencies.
In Russia’s persistent feudal mode, states serve power, and power need see no difference between property and persons, sovereignty in the politically absolute mode implying the right — more: even the obligation and demonstration — to destroy either with impunity and without explanation. A little foolery with political perception and CIA “rendition” programs (to fight al-Qaeda and others) would be one thing, but to travel further with Moscow and Damascus in their tyrannous journey appears to have been something Washington could not bring itself to do.
On the gun control issue, you are right: most to all of the mass shooters have been known to the FBI or other civic authorities and officials well in advance of their attacks. Therefore, what is needed are detention and interdiction points backed by new laws involving seditious threats to the community and those presented by the repeated behaviors of seriously troubled persons.
While most of the western public has been focused heavily on violence associated with Islamic extremists and the sense of related threat coming off the brutal depopulating of Syria (in no small part, that’s what the stupid piece of bloody theater has been about), it may have overlooked its own predictable reaction. Where we have been stung by an attack, we naturally respond with cultural pride and state patriotism leaning into nationalism. The result for the dictatorships of the world (different talks — same walk) is the modern renewal of feudalism and related conflict.
The manipulation has been paying off for the world’s political criminals.
In the post-Cold War framework, the “West” has been duped and played into perhaps assisting the enterprises of former and current communist elites in sustaining the feudal worldview needed to maintain for themselves medieval political absolute power.
Now everyone has a problem, not least the state of ______: do the leaders of the world — and the worlds of business, finance, and politics — want the present to recycle into the future using totalitarian techniques — or does it want authentic progress on behalf of our species and the planet that hosts all of us?
I have come to know — no longer just think — the Moscow believes that political issues and perceptions can be invented and controlled from ‘behind the curtains”. Knowing the little I know of wildness in nature and evolutionary unpredictability, I would counsel against that Orwellian ambition.
Place the blame for 9/11 on “east-west competition” for political and resource (“Grand Game”-related) control; post-Cold War realignment, perhaps — the idea that western security services would cooperate with Moscow’s on crime, for example, or on “fighting the terrorists” (after Moscow has positioned them) where it belongs and in proportion to the contribution to design. Of the two, “Moscow” and “Washington”, the data I have dredged from the web points to Moscow’s so-far persistent totalitarian ambition.
There’s much to hash in the above message, but all will distill into the two familiar and very different worldviews so often referenced by BackChannels as “Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Liberal Distribution of Power”.
In which world would you rather live?
Point by point —
First, official Saudi Arabia revoked Osama Bin Laden’s citizenship over the crime visited on the United States of America on September 11, 2001. That leaves unofficial KSA and other actors as possible donors to the Wahhabi al-Qaeda enterprise, but as the sovereign state has maintained its innocence, the potential rogues within have made themselves only potential persons of interest for internal policing. At this time, about 17 years later, a KSA-USA alliance has been established and is being promoted as reliable online.
Regarding reliability, we shall see, as it seems in the nature of history and politics to be full of surprises.
Second and in regard to the news articles cited, BackChannels has noticed from the Cold War Era a kind of symmetrical diplomacy attending “east-west relations”. When, for example, the Soviet Union reclaimed its nuclear missiles from Cuba, the United States moved back its forward-based Jupiter missiles from presence near the Soviet Union’s fringe. Whatever the two states may have been saying to one another, they were saying it at the same time. In popular history, the more dramatic and visible recovery of “nukes” from Cuba was more quietly matched by similar behavior in Europe. It would not be much of a stretch, if any, to suggest that as the Soviet Army retreated from Afghanistan, the American CIA similarly pulled back from its involvement with the Mujaheddin even though that would leave the proxy available to the next Russian state, which was to announce its presence, however pale, with the appearance of the Russian Tricolor raised above the Kremlin on the morning of December 26, 1991.
Finally, BackChannels may wish not to know what took place in 1992 between business interests and multiple state security services with the Cold War presumed over, Communism defeated in Russia, and some new western-leaning and capitalist state about to be born. It would rather — and so will — fast forward to today’s “Phantom of the Soviet” and the destruction brought to Syria and Ukraine (Crimea), the revival of feudal ambitions spurred in EU/NATO targets by the reflexive response to Islamic terror attacks, and in both Turkey and nascent Kurdistan the leverage applied to ego by Putin’s “energy politics” and appeals to narcissistic aggrandizement in leadership in both geopolitical spaces.
Today’s Hamas-produced political theater on Gaza’s border with Israel smacks of Soviet Era spectacle. While nothing would appear to have changed from earlier days, much has changed as regards “state-sponsored terrorism”. The Soviet Union passed into history more than 25 years ago, and the phantoms of it in search of the source of their dark souls must find it absent. In its place now stands the autocratic “Mafia State” fully willing to destroy innocents in its chosen combat arenas, induce greater chaos in the world (seldom more so than in Syria and in Ukraine’s Crimea), bomb hospitals with impunity, and revive the Soviet’s most criminal and pernicious practices and programs.
If Gazans, who in the main have gotten very little out of decades of so-called — and violent — “resistance” only knew for what and for whom they were protesting . . . .
Hmm.
The Internet is fully up: now the Palestinians may know (and know well who has lied to them and how) and — if and when determined to extricate themselves from the powers that have profited off their sustained suffering — make themselves truly free within their own community and more genuinely nascent Palestinian state.
“On the streets of Gaza people have a sense of security – except when Israel attacks” — In defensive modes, preventive, responsive, retributive.
The Palestinians have long surrendered their dreams to propaganda, the PLO/PA, and Hamas as well as the corruption attending such governments that hold themselves beyond criticism.
From what sense of ethics, integrity, or justice were the greenhouses and synagogues of Gaza destroyed after departure in 2005?
Such rage would seem to have been set loose by officially and socially approved, promoted, and popular anti-Semitic incitement, the same that had Hamas in 2006 proclaiming to Palestinians that Hitler admired them as ideal revolutionaries (PMW: “Hamas: Hitler praised the Palestinians as models”).
Perhaps Israel should treat as poison the disinformation fed to the Palestinians and see the same receive an antidote in an honest telling, for Hamas fairy tales have only enslaved the Palestinians and gotten them to get themselves killed for show.
Posted to YouTube March 30, 2018. Ten more Palestinians were to draw fire and die, and the cause should be clear through what the cameras recorded in the way of “peaceful” demonstration.
One may marvel at the power of bad ideas and failed dreams to continue placing the innocent in harm’s way — and for the global press, the more souls corralled and misled into martyrdom, the better for sympathy and “understanding”, never mind the squandering of billions of dollars intended for Palestinian practical betterment going into the pockets of corrupt and venal leaders and their systems of patronage.
The Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy about 26 years, and yet the scenes remain much as Yuri Andropov must have seen them when promoting dictatorship beneath the cover of Popular Liberation Movements.
The peace camps of the west may have to soon decide whether they wish to remain in business by doing their part to sustain the middle east conflict on bogus claims; and Mr. Putin may soon have to decide whether he will take KGB and more general historic Russian barbarism forward with the cynical manipulation and destruction of every space in which Moscow has chosen to play.
I don’t know how far back in modern history the penchant for exploiting or killing journalists go, but as much has been a part of the peril for the intrepid since I signed on here in 2006/7. The evildoers haven’t the innocence required to boast their programs with authentic faith; instead, they manipulate their programs — the Communism, the Islamism, possibly the Capitalism as well, and all other such — to assault their enemies while corralling their believers. Power has become a deeply cynical game beloved of dictators. They will say anything to direct, focus, and incite their mobs. It’s into that environment that it seems modern “war reporters” now walk. They are no longer “telling the other side of the story” — they’re either helping the other side produce their “optics” — or they’re getting whacked.
What the west may do in conflict is adhere convincingly through doctrine to their own arguably superior ethical and moral codes.
Would only that there were that “Hail Dorothy” moment when the Wicked Witch has melted and the army subjected to the poor bitch is found to have no complaints.
There’s much to hash in the above message, but all will distill into the two familiar and very different worldviews so often referenced by BackChannels as “Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Liberal Distribution of Power”.
BackChannels 