22 Wednesday Jun 2016
Suggested: “Interest” x “Values” x “Value” | Rationale.
From a humanist’s standpoint, the Syrian Tragedy hasn’t looked at all rational, but viewed through a lens that takes in “absolute power”, “feudalism”, “malignant narcissism”, and the wholesale producing of a theater of war as a demonstration of power, well then it makes perfect sense, horrific though that may be.
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15 Wednesday Jun 2016
11 Saturday Jun 2016
The Palestinians have been at the mercy of powerful Palestinian families and politicians for decades, and the same have kept refugee generations captive or enthralled or leveraged by brutality , disinformation, and outrageous promises.
Part of the story starts here — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/ — with the foreign policy practices of the Soviet Union and its promotion of anti-Semitic message and conflict. While Putin has worked on “anti- anti-Semitism”, his government has nonetheless met with PFLP in recent years (2014) and has refused to designate Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, which is how they’re officially viewed in the United States.
Districts in poverty are vulnerable to many kinds of exploitation, criminal and political — and sometimes both — through recruitment into programs that are not in their interest.
http://www.tabletmag.com/…/hamas-killed-160-palestinian…
http://www.padico.com/public/English.aspx?Lang=2…
Feudal methods from patronage to brutalization, intimidation, and murder help keep conditions in Yatta exactly as they are. The talk, whether of nationalism or Islam, enrage or mollify the dispossessed to the advantage of those who purport to represent their interests.
I’ve included PADICO, a Gaza-based development corporation, because its board of directors is listed elsewhere on the site, and each name may be researched as regards education and experience. In outline, many are modern — cosmopolitan, well educated — but perhaps no less than Hamas’s tunnel digging children, they too have been hamstrung between the medieval and modern worlds, or that is where they have maintained themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Agatha
One should refuse contextless gambits like the KDH (King David Hotel) bombing but might suggest that in 1946, the greater armies had barely stopped moving, the mess in destroyed and disrupted lives moving on the landscape must have been immense if not easily seen, and military and paramilitary action on the part of the British, whom I am sure wanted to be done with World War II and its aftermath, were still undertaken in the near shadows of other combat theaters.
The simplifications disservice multiple rich histories.
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10 Friday Jun 2016
Tags
Herzl, history, Israel, Judaism, religion, secular humanism, Spirituality and Technology, Wistrich, Zionism
According to the account which he gave to the Hebrew writer, Reuben Brainin, less than a year before his death, Herzl was attracted to the Messiah legends of the Jews from early adolescence. At the age of twelve, he had a “wonderful dream,” which he recounted as follows:
The King-Messiah came, a glorious and majestic old man, took me in his arms and swept off with me on the wings of the wind. On one of the shining clouds we encountered the figure of Moses. The features were familiar to me out of my childhood in the statue by Michelangelo. The Messiah called to Moses: “It is for this child that I have prayed!” And to me he said: “Go and declare to the Jews that I shall come soon and perform great wonders and great deeds for my people and for the whole world!” 19
Shortly after this dream Herzl read a popular science book which presented electricity as the new King-Messiah which would liberate the nations and all mankind from servitude. At first he was indignant but then he began to wonder if electricity might not be the promised redeemer and decided to become an engineer—a childhood ambition which he never fulfilled. What is striking in this dream is the strong identification with Moses, with the Exodus from Egypt and technological advances that could totally transform the lives of humanity. It is precisely such a fusion of tradition and modernity, the idea of a new Jewish exodus and the Promethean redemption of mankind through the Zionist enterprise, that provided the élan vital of Herzl’s project.
Such essays are passed to BackChannels along with the day’s feed in news. Although so much reading online makes for a fragmented educational and informational experience, the fragments, when they are true — valid and reliable — do come together in three-dimensional mosaic. The Torah, commentaries, histories far and near, and current events test each sentence.
Are dreams such as that of the “King-Messiah” poppycock?
Having attained and age in which cynicism and skepticism greet sentimentality too often, the BackChannels editor might say, “Probably so”, but let’s see where it goes. However, the sentence, “It is precisely such a fusion of tradition and modernity, the idea of a new Jewish exodus and the Promethean redemption of mankind through the Zionist enterprise, that provided the élan vital of Herzl’s project” has its weight supported by Israel’s exuberant contributions to the world in the creation and manufacturing of the broadest spectrum of new and continuously improved technologies.
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31 Tuesday May 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Assad, foreign affairs, political theater, Putin, Russia, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Posted to YouTube 2/8/2014
Posted to YouTube 1/1/2015
While Bashar al-Assad in Damascus must take responsibility for the casualties of 2014 and the shaping of the war to that date, it would seem Vladimir Putin in Moscow — or in Sochi — during that same winter has only sustained in that season the legacy of the Soviet alignment.
Posted to YouTube 5/7/2016
Posted to YouTube 5/6/2016
Ellis, Ralph and Holly Yan. “Airstrike at Syrian refugee camp kills at least 28.” CNN, May 6, 2016:
At least 28 people were killed when warplanes struck a refugee camp Thursday in Syria, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported, with many of the dead women and children.
Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the London-based group, told CNN it was not immediately clear whether Syrian or Russian planes conducted the airstrike.
BackChannels — and so BackChannels feels — has been wrong about cozy relationships between dictators, perhaps, but probably right about their colluding in their own practical interests as regards sustaining feudal absolute power.
Kleptocrats, apparently (this inspired by the pieces in the reference section) need not be in love but only realistic about their mutual dependencies.
By incubating the al-Qaeda types in Syria, especially ISIS, by selecting other targets for bombing earlier in the Syrian Tragedy (see in reference BackChannels 2015), Assad and Putin may have developed an unrealistic plan for both blackmailing and goading the west, which appears to be taking refugees, filtering criminals (over time), and fighting ISIS separately. With “Assad vs The Terrorists” backfiring, the two, Assad and Putin, are stuck with one another and Assad needs Putin to get to an endgame that makes sense.
Frederic C. Hof, whose essay for the Atlantic Council has appeared in Newsweek winds through an excellent and most clinical analysis of the options at hand. Here’s a little part of that:
Secretary of State John Kerry nevertheless seeks common ground with Russia on political transition involving a non-Assad, negotiated Syrian consensus.
Is common ground achievable when Moscow sees Assad as personifying a state to save, while Washington sees him as a war criminal and ISIS’s top recruiting asset in the region?
Read Hof — for the boys who made the mess, who produced “Assad vs The Terrorists”, there may be no good exits yet in sight.
The slogan “Assad or We Burn It” has won the day, for now much of Syria has been burned, and Assad has only more to answer for and much, much less to claim.
For Mr. Putin’s part in the Syrian Tragedy, the Russian President may not have been able to direct Assad as regards so many “barrel bombs”, but he has control of Russian air power in the space, and perhaps he should use it to spare noncombatants from assaults, Syrian and Russian, that have built antipathy worldwide for the post-Soviet Moscow-to-Tehran arc of power.
AFP. “Chief Syria opposition negotiator quits over failed peace talks.” ABC News, May 30, 2016.
BackChannels. “Syria — “Assad vs The Terrorists” — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
Hof, Frederic C. “We Must Reject Putin’s Shabby Deal to Work with Assad.” Newsweek, May 30, 2016.
When Pieniążek arrived in Kiev in November 2013 as a young man of twenty-four, he was observing the latest, and perhaps the last, attempt to mobilize the idea of “Europe” in order to reform a state. Ukrainians had been led to expect that their government would sign an association agreement with the European Union. Frustrated by endemic corruption, many Ukrainians saw the accord as an instrument to strengthen the rule of law. Moscow, meanwhile, was demanding that Ukraine not sign the agreement with the EU but instead become a part of its new “Eurasian” trade zone of authoritarian regimes.
At the last moment, Russian President Vladimir Putin dissuaded the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, from signing the EU association agreement.
Tilghman, Andrew. “No U.S. combat advisers for Fallujah invasion.” Military Times, May 23, 2016.
Trofimov, Yaroslav. “Russia’s Long Road to the Middle East.” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2016:
“The Middle East is a way to showcase that the period of Russia’s absence from the international scene as a first-rate state has ended,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, which advises the Kremlin and other government institutions.
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26 Thursday May 2016
Tags
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25 Wednesday May 2016
Tags
foreign affairs, Iraq, ISIS, Islamic Small Wars, Russia, Russian political and military strategy, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Let’s try this model . . . .
We, including Muslims, have before us the archaic manifestation of a legacy in religion owned by about 1.6 billion souls. Some, and for reasons ranging from how they were raised to the possession of the adolescent messianic narcissism known to dictators, would place themselves somewhere beneath the Muslim Botherhood (intentional) umbrella.
Wouldn’t the moderate and peaceful, truly peaceful, want the hotheads and the improvident to get up and go where they might be seen and subjected to the horrors of their own dreams?
As I have argued elsewhere (any may feel welcome to ask), the incubating of the al-Qaeda types, including ISIS, in Syria appears to have been designed as political theater — a theater of the very real — to both blackmail and goad the west into concessions before the Assad regime. It was a good KGB-style plan, and, please note, Russia got to channel the worst of its own Chechnya rebels to the fighting (and it slipped in a few spies as well); however, update: NATO may sting post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia and its alignments (Damascus, Tehran) with its own wasps.
While ISIS has been growing or distilling out of other populations those most prone to join the fight as 7th Century barbarians in Syria, the greater world has been witness to the we’re-not-those-Muslims Muslim repudiation of the al-Qaeda types, the common use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” and such to separate the same from the greater Ummah going forward, and, of late, the appearance reform-minded discussions (e.g., New Age Islam) and organizations (e.g., Muslim Reform Movement). Expect traction to take some time.
There are other facets . . . like that of getting the Iraqi military to hold itself together against not only ISIS, from whom it has been wresting territory this past month, but also from Khamenei’s aggression through Iraq’s more “fiery” Shiite militia, long infested with Revolutionary Guard officers.
Archaic | Feudal-Toward-Modern Main Body | Cultural Avant Garde –>
Quite possibly for the public accustomed to ironic simplifications, what Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have developed in Syria looks a little like the mirror image of CIA’s support for the Taliban in association with Zia Haq’s own conservative Islamism pitched against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In today’s Syrian Tragedy, it’s Moscow, essentially, that appears to manipulate the Sunni-aligned jihadists munching away on the landscape (and enriching itself with oil sales by way of whoever hands over the cash for it).
Be that as it may, it’s looking like the west has been neither blackmailed nor goaded by “Assad vs The Terrorists” has instead absorbed the fallout in finger-wagging (for not intervening) and refugee migration, and may well stick Moscow (Damascus and Tehran) with “The Terrorists”. It may be toward that purpose that the Russian military has strengthened it presence in Syria.
The inspiration for the response: claim that ISIS had been strengthened under the Obama Administration in relation to the Administration weak response to terrorism.
BackChannels counterpoint: the strategy to move the medieval world (and the representatives of political absolute power) toward the modern one (and distributed, checked, and representative power) has a slow track, and in relation to the Islamic Small Wars involves making the feudal world sufficiently visible for fighting. IF that idea works, THEN the post-Soviet axis (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) has done a right thing for the wrong reasons: intending to get at the west, it has helped produce an enemy in space that can be addressed with conventional forces from every side opposed to it.
BackChannels. “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
BCC. “Syria conflict: IS ‘destroyed helicopters’ at Russian base.” May 24, 2016 — (breaking story today, May 25, and still frequently updated).
Fox News. “ISIS claims female Russian spy infiltrated terror network.” May 9, 2016.
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19 Thursday May 2016
Tags
Moscow-Tehran, Russian military presence, Russian Neo-Imperialism, Syrian Civil War, Syrian Tragedy
Beirut- Asaad al-Zoubi, head of the Syrian opposition delegation of High Negotiations Committee (HNC) in Geneva, said that Iranian forces are gradually arriving to battle zones in Syria. Over 11 thousand Iranian fighters had recently, boarding cargo jets, arrived at the Damascus International Airport and to Hama city, located on the banks of the Orontes River in west-central Syria.
Almost 700 Iranian soldiers and militia fighters have been killed in Syria’s civil war, laying bare the scale and cost of Tehran’s intervention to preserve Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power.
Blair pegs the total Iranian commitment of troops, Quds Force and IRGC at 3,000.
For some years now, BackChannels has chained together Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran as equal co-defenders of the “medieval absolute power” on which their respective kleptocracies depend for existence. That balance of nefarious power may be changing:
“Russia has reduced its air strikes Syria, and so all those Iranians are getting killed because of a lack of air cover,” Kamhawi said. “This seems to be part of a Russian strategy to marginalise Iran’s role in Syria and make its influence unparalleled.”
Although RT may deny it, Russia’s military presence in Syria appears in the news alternatives (like AP, Fox News — those “alternatives”) to be expanding.
As “scrape and comment” hasn’t lasting appeal to this blog’s editor — even though at a computer, one naturally looks things up — this post will stop about here and on this note: While Iran has produced a greater fighting presence in the Syrian Tragedy, it may be the Phantom of the Soviet that has irrevocably planted new military assets in the state.
BackChannels. “FTAC — Russia’s Not So Appealing Turn in Syria.” March 6, 2016. The piece contains additional reference to Russia’s expanded military presence in Syria.
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