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Posted to YouTube 5/9/2016.
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Ukraine – About That Russian ‘Hybrid’ Vehicle
04 Saturday Jun 2016
Category Archives: Regions
All For Show – Russia’s Comeback – High Culture and Lowest Barbarism
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
Related
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.
Additional, Cited, and Related Reference
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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FTAC – A Response to Advocacy for Putin’s Russia
27 Friday May 2016
Tags
anti-Semitism, dictatorship, Judaism, liberation teleology, liberation theology, political corruption, political criminality, political psychology
Re. democracies and monarchies: a dozen European states remain monarchies but tempered by their democratic complements in power (parliamentary systems).
Re. bigotry in the west — the point is the people fight it in concert with their governments. The real tension is between ethnolinguistic cultural majorities and their interest in preserving themselves and evolving as they themselves determine. As much has given rise to what I call the “New Nationalism” and, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, “New Nationalists”. Those on the Far Right in relation to those movements are often anti-Semitic, which goes with the defensiveness and, probably, patronage. Even in Hungary, however, such as Jobbik may become prominent but make the final climb into political leadership.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/a-note-on-hungarys…/
With Jobbik in Hungary, the revision is just weird, but explained some by the persistence of Soviet politics in the post-Soviet Era.
Regarding Ukraine, Alexander J. Motyl has been arguing for the ceding of Donbas, but it’s not about being Russian in any case. The truth is ordinary people resent state-enabled criminality and related criminal aggrandizement. Yanukovych worked to get himself shoved out of office, and some of Russian heritage with whom I’ve spoken — and some I have read about in Grigas’s book, resent being used by Moscow as “compatriots”. The claim of protection is seen as a pretext for aggression that either expands or strengthens Russia’s area of control and influence or that results in a “frozen conflict” lending itself to criminal enterprise (where there is no effective and functioning sovereign, there’s a lot of space available for mischief).
Even while posting about Nadiya Savchenko’s liberation, I have wondered about both inherent and legacy politics plus what the effect of fame and public interest may have on her political vision as she necessarily updates herself.
In the British sphere, I’ve unconditionally accepted Naz Shaw’s “turnaround” or present stance and, with either, her repudiation of the anti-Semitic facet of the Labour Party.
Finally, regarding criminality, we have all got some vanity, and our personal mixes of “reparative” and “malignant” narcissism generally fill out a moderate life. With the criminal class, immoderation becomes either desirable or habitual, partly because of what we think of as criminal has lost its brakes in conscience, busted through normative boundaries, and, here invoking the Islamic concept, “exceeded limits.” When these people are small and surrounded by a lawful society, the wind up in jail; when they’re large, they may go a long time in business before hitting any walls; and in politics, they can ruin states — and they do that in profound ways.
The want of the power to impose suffering on innocent others with impunity becomes, I believe, a facet of that political criminality we call “dictatorship”. It’s not just the firm hand that one may dislike to the point of loathing: it’s the dispensing of sadism that comes through those that the good find aberrant and abhorrent.
Welcome to Virtually New World.
Now that we’re all here and furiously chatyping, what are we (and leaders old and new) going to do with it?
We may try to recognize some things we don’t like about our Newest Age.
Also deeply related on this blog: “Why the Jews?”, a piece that is at bedrock about one human response to “absolute power” — within which concept BackChannels would include the power to make others suffer with impunity — that has worked its way around the world.
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Putin – Yanukovych – Manafort – Trump
27 Friday May 2016
The hint came through a review in the New York Review of Books:
On February 22, Yanukovych fled to Russia. (Two years later, his political strategist, Paul Manafort, would resurface in the US, playing the same role for Donald Trump.)
Why lookee here at this beautiful lede:
Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s palace, is impressive by the standards of Palm Beach—less so when judged against the abodes of the world’s autocrats. It doesn’t, for instance, quite compare with Mezhyhirya, the gilded estate of deposed Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Trump may have 33 bathrooms and three bomb shelters, but his mansion lacks a herd of ostrich, a galleon parked in a pond, and a set of golden golf clubs. Yet the two properties are linked, not just in ostentatious spirit, but by the presence of one man. Trump and Yanukovych have shared the same political brain, an operative named Paul Manafort.
And here at this disclosure:
Manafort was a principal at the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly (along with another top Trump ally, Nixon alum Roger Stone), a K Street powerhouse with close ties to the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, as well as top Republicans on Capitol Hill.
But over the years, they made millions by representing a rogue’s gallery of clients far away from D.C.’s genteel corridors of power: dictators, guerilla groups, and despots with no regard for human rights—including one man responsible for mass amputations, and another who oversaw state-sanctioned rape.
Welcome to the Age of Image.
Who is that precious vote going to — the candidate or the candidate’s handler and stage manager?
The Woodruff and Mak piece rolls around to this from Yanukovych’s election in Ukraine:
At the time of the election, Manafort had spun that Yanukovych was merely misunderstood, and that “the West has not been willing to move beyond the cold war mentality and to see this man and the outreach that he has extended.”
Recall the web site Yanukovych Leaks.
Ukrainians had developed cause for pique at the potential for the endless validation of corruption had they not risen to revolution for the rule of law.
Another gem —
That Trump would choose the Center for the National Interest as the place to premier his new seriousness on foreign policy has Manafort’s fingerprints all over it. For Manafort and the Center have something very important in common: both have ties to the Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin, (whose ambassador to the United States sat in the front row for Trump’s address).
BackChannels had gotten the sense that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump appreciated one another as strong men but had no idea how close that molecular bond might be through the agency of a quiet but major political operator in the figure of Paul J. Manafort.
Addendum – October 24, 2016
According to The New York Post, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and ex-”core” aide Rick Gates have financial ties to a biometric security company that lobbied the Putin administration on behalf of technology that would help it spy on its own citizens.
Manafort was a major early investor for EyeLock — and owned up to 10 percent in the company, the Post reported — while Gates was an independent contractor hired to build business for them in Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Additional Reference
Burns, Alexander, Maggie Haberman. “Mystery Man: Ukraine’s U.S. fixer.” Politico, March 5, 2014.
Gingerich, Jon. “Trump Hires Manafort for Delegate Push.” O’Dwyer’s, March 29, 2016.
Lake, Eli. “Trump Just Hired His Next Scandal.” Bloomberg View, April 13, 2016.
Sourcewatch. “Davis, Manafort & Freedman, Inc.”
Wikipedia. “Paul Manafort” (as viewed August 14, 2016):
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BackChannels Pass Along — “The Wars of Vladimir Putin” by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books
27 Friday May 2016
But was the West coming to the East, or the East to the West? By 2014, a quarter-century after the revolutions of 1989, Russia proposed a coherent alternative: faked elections, institutionalized oligarchy, national populism, and European disintegration. When Ukrainians that year made a revolution in the name of Europe, Russian media proclaimed the “decadence” of the EU, and Russian forces invaded Ukraine in the name of a “Eurasian” alternative.
Source: The Wars of Vladimir Putin by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2016.
Two Videos Juxtaposed – Son of Hamas on Islam; Jacob Olidort on Variance in Salafism
26 Thursday May 2016
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Savchenko Freed!
25 Wednesday May 2016
Fast Reference
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/ukraine-russia-savchenko-freed/484277/ – 5/25/2016/0800 ET – “Russia and Ukraine Swap Prisoners” by Krishnadev Calamur.
http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-savchenko-russia-consul/25460100.html – “Ukrainian Officer Detained in Russia Details Her Capture to Consul.” – 7/17/2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11772178/Nadia-Savchenko-All-you-need-to-know.html – “Nadia Savchenko: All you need to know” – by Roland Oliphant – 9/29/2015
Other Related Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Sentsov – “After the November 2013 breakout of the Euromaidan protests Sentsov became an activist of “AutoMaidan” and during the 2014 Crimean crisis he helped deliver food and supplies to Ukrainian servicemen trapped in their Crimean bases.[1] Sentsov stated that he did not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and the “Russian Federation military seizure of the Crimea”.[5][nb 1]”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/europe/russian-court-sentences-ukrainian-filmmaker-to-20-years-in-prison.html – “Russia Gives Ukrainian Filmmaker Oleg Sentsov a 20-Year Sentence” by Sophia Kishkovsky – 8/25/2015.
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FTAC – A Comment on Obama, The Islamic Small Wars, and the Syrian Tragedy
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.
Reference
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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BackChannels 