The Russian leader has drawn open the curtain on a new era of global competition among a handful of nations that presume to act as heaven’s surrogates on Earth.America’s sense of its own exceptionalism — its “City Upon a Hill” complex — is disdained even by some Americans, who think it leads the nation into trouble. But America isn’t the only society with a mystical sense of mission. In fact, the rest of the 21st century may be the story of America’s confrontation with three rival powers that directly challenge our claim to moral superiority.
BackChannels is not certain that nations, no less than persons, have much choice about the development or embrace of a national self-concept and its promises for the future. Whether accepted as legacy or reinvented in revolution, a “nation” would seem a concept deriving meaning from shared ethnolinguistic or political experiences, principles, and values.
Here is a video by the author of the above noted essay, and its concern appears to be American domestic cohesion.
Posted to YouTube by CauxRoundtable1 on December 20, 2016.
If true, I don’t think it’s nonsense. The Kingdom has to assert itself against the revised Moscow-Damascus-Tehran alignment. Everyone knows that the PLO was a KGB project from the git-go and that similar politics (as with a Moscow meeting with the PFLP at this time last year) have been sustained by Putin. The Kingdom — and Kingdom Holdings — Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal have become stakeholders in the west.
The Soviet dissolved in session almost 24 years ago.
For people who think with calendars, this next year could be a doozy.
Cute, But Slow Down That Trolley!
What was reading before reading that headline:
Saudi multibillionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal has said that he would stand with Israel against the Palestinians if a new uprising was ignited, Kuwaiti media reported on Tuesday.
According to the AWD news website, bin Talal told the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas: “I will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada.”
An article from an obscure website falsely claiming that Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal had said that he would side with the Israelis against the Palestinians, went viral on social media before the prince released a statement on Thursday roundly denying the story.
Uh oh.
And Now the Rest of the Message from “Behind the News” (Israel)
The Saudi Arabian Football Federation has announced its refusal to play a World Cup preliminary match against the Palestinian national soccer team in a stadium near Ramallah, Samaria.
In its official announcement Tuesday to FIFA, Saudi Arabia expressed concern for the safety of its players in the sensitive area of Judea-Samaria, but reports say the real reason behind the refusal is fear that playing in the area would be a recognition of the “Israeli occupation.”
Of course, BackChannels prefers the allegation of Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal’s gentle swing west to the strident reportage and commentary produced by east and west partisan press.
To test public attitude and sentiment on any given but not yet presented policy, one may “float a trial balloon” — put it Out There: “swings west” vs “refuses play on Israeli occupied territory!” — and ascertain the public response to each possibility.
Happens every day.
What is the distance between the private convictions of the powerful and the public perception of the same?
The Prince Online
One of the largest shareholders in Citigroup, the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after the Murdoch family, and with major stakes in dozens of other Western companies, he travels the globe often wearing bespoke suits instead of the traditional Saudi thawb. Based in a country where women can’t drive or vote, he champions women’s rights and discourages his female employees, who make up 65 percent of his workforce, from wearing the veil in his offices.
Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Co. agreed to sell its almost 30 percent stake in Saudi Research and Marketing Group at nearly double the market value.
“Not in London, not in New York, not in Dubai, right here in Saudi Arabia,” he said eagerly. “Kingdom Hotels, that will go public in Dubai and London. But Kingdom Holdings, that must go public here, that’s for sure. Because half of my investments are in Saudi Arabia.”
Farther down the column of the same piece:
Many of Prince Alwaleed’s most visible investments have been in the West, especially in hotel properties–most recently Fairmont Hotels & Resorts , which he purchased with Colony Capital for some $3.5 billion. Kingdom Hotel Investments, which Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley will take public, raising at least $300 million, holds stakes in 26 hotels including such landmarks as London’s Savoy, the George V in Paris and a number of Four Seasons properties.
The world online, probably much like the one represented virtually, appears to have arrived freighted with classes and masses. The wealthy, the few breathtakingly so, appear to battle for share of control of the world’s productive businesses and resources, and two of the qualities of high honor, dignity and integrity, attend their achievements. The much, much, and far less wealthy may both bask in that glory as well as swim in its patronage and its “sweet words”, at times, perhaps, pandering.
Where is the Prince going?
The reader’s guess may be as good as BackChannels’ — although a writer blessed with look-up time and cursed with imagination may have a small edge in the collection of tea leaves for floating above the dark waters of an abyss of possibilities.
Back rooms and boardrooms, closed curtains and curtains lifted on theaters, few in the world, much less meandering around the web, may ever ascertain a true state of affairs in the region of the practical interests and strategies of the world’s chief controlling agents of privately-held capital or privately-controlled state capital. Whether watching Kingdom or Kremlin — how different those two! — the (public access) watching needs must take place from somewhere far on the sidelines — down the columns and between the lines of common publications — and however magnificent the parade, one may see only one’s own small and shades-of-gray portion of the passing show.
The Prophet of Islam has said, “Whoever has not fought for his Imam or does not wish for Jihad, he will die a hypocrite.”
Now in compliance with the Great Prophet of Islam and to show his obedience to his Imam, the Chief Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, has recently stated that “we are ready for the big fight with the United States”. Although the General comes from a generation that has already passed a practical test of Jihad with much honor and glory, his wish for Jihad is actually a statement on behalf of the younger generation who has not tasted the sweet flavor of Jihad and wish for this holy war in order not to die a hypocrite.
Assad is a man who has proven himself utterly incapable of formulating any sort of vision to move the country beyond its current troubles. His approach to every problem has been to resort to increasingly horrendous levels of violence.
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I may one day write an article titled, “The Six Hundred Very Cool People You Meet on Facebook”, but not today.
You have been spared, possibly less so, however, than the author of the following opinion piece: Aboud Dandachi, who writes from Istanbul, escaped Homs, Syria just this past September.
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The Huffington Post recently published an article by Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University calling for the United States and the international community to drop its demand that Assad relinquish power, viewing it as the main reason the conflict has dragged on for so long. On Twitter, Sachs has elaborated on his viewpoint, claiming that all Bashar Assad wants is to preserve his rule, and that if the Syrian people just surrendered and acquiesced to living under thirty more years of his family’s tyranny, then the terrible bloodshed in Syria would stop overnight.
On a practical level, there are two main problems with Sachs’s suggestion that the Syrian people surrender to Assad so as to spare themselves anymore of his bloody repression. First, Sachs commits the cardinal sin that so many other “anti-establishment” Lefists have committed when talking about Syria; ridiculously exaggerating and inflating the USA’s role and influence on events in Syria.
Second, Sachs seems to be oblivious to the fact that some towns and villages in the country did indeed try exactly what he is suggesting, the foremost being my own hometown of Telkelakh. Today, ninety percent of its inhabitants have been made refugees, scattered all over the region, the fallout from a truce the regime blatantly broke in the summer of 2013.
In his article, Sachs makes the astonishing assumption that if only the United States publicly and clearly dropped its demand that Assad step down, that policy change would somehow have any sort of effect on the ground inside Syria. Sachs seems to believe that the opposition, made up of numerous disparate groups, is somehow waiting upon Washington for guidance on when to start and stop their rebellion against the Assad tyranny.
In reality, the United States has not contributed a single bullet to the rebels’ war effort. Indeed, Barack Obama has even gone so far as to prevent America’s regional allies from providing the rebels with the kind of anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry that would have neutralized Assad’s air superiority and advantage in armor. Today, the United States could cut off what trickle of monetary aid it does provide to a limited selection of rebel brigades, and it would have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the fighting capabilities of the opposition groups in general, the vast majority of whom receive nothing from the USA.
Contrary to the Left’s frenzied assertions of an American policy hell bent on regime change at any cost, America’s approach has been very inconsistent and haphazard when it came to Syria. Far from being at the forefront of the efforts to depose Assad, Barack Obama has been exactly the kind of weak, timid, indecisive American president that Assad could not possibly have hoped for in his wildest dreams.
Assuming that lives in a conflict will be spared if one party just surrendered to the other, is to depend on the good intentions and humanity of the conflict’s victor. Germany and Japan could surrender to the Allies in World War Two safe in the knowledge that there would be no mass reprisals in the aftermath of their defeat. What happened, however, to the communities of the countries that surrendered to Germany and Japan? Two words; concentration camps.
Sachs’ second major mistake was to assume that in three years of brutal war, some city or town in opposition to the regime did not at some point try exactly what he is suggesting. We have adequate precedents that illustrate exactly how the regime treats the areas it has reconquered, and they amply demonstrate the sheer absurdity of Sachs’ view that acquiescence to the Assad regime’s tyranny would stop the killing.
I have written before at length on what happened when my home town of Telkelakh attempted a truce with the regime in early 2013. It was a truce that was set up exactly along the lines that Sachs suggests. CNN even visited the town and loudly trumpeted it as a possible template for similar truces throughout the country.
And yet as a means to save lives, it failed miserably. From February to June, dozens of people in the town died from regime sniping and shelling. Relatives of fighters were arrested at the checkpoints surrounding the town. Finally, when the regime felt strong enough to retake Telkelakh in the wake of its conquest of Qusair, the army and Hizbollah invaded the town. Thirty rebel fighters who had surrendered on promises from regime representatives that their lives would be spared were never heard from again.
The regime’s behavior in other areas it has reconquered has been no less atrocious. Human Rights Watch has extensively documented the regime’s demolition of entire neighborhoods in Hama and Damascus that were in opposition to it. Thousands of homes were razed by the regime in areas it reconquered, in a horrendous display of mass punishment. Such punitive actions on the part of the regime on areas it had reconquered, and where all opposition to it had been extinguished, pretty much makes a complete mockery of Sachs’ assertions that the Syrian people have nothing to worry about if they only just surrendered themselves to Assad’s rule.
Sachs goes on to make another outlandish assertion, that political change from within Syria will more likely to lead to regime change than an armed conflict would. Sachs cites two examples; Myanmar, and Poland in 1989.
Oh dear, where do I begin. Sachs seems to deem the ongoing genocide in Myanmar against the minority Muslim Rohingya community to be irrelevant to the point he is trying to make. Poland in 1989 benefited from the reformist tendencies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who by that time wasn’t prepared to keep propping Eastern European client dictatorships with the USSR’s military might. If the Poles had tried in 1979 what they did in 1989, their political awakening would have been crushed under the tracks of Soviet tanks. In three years of the worst conflict in the country’s history, the regime of Bashar Assad has not once displayed the slightest capacity or capability for reforming itself.
There is no Gorbachev to be found within Assad. The post-war occupations of Japan and Germany transformed those societies because there was a vision in place for their reformation. Assad is a man who has proven himself utterly incapable of formulating any sort of vision to move the country beyond its current troubles. His approach to every problem has been to resort to increasingly horrendous levels of violence. Sachs actually thinks Assad is capable of allowing the sort of political awakening that happened in Poland? This is a man who today flings barrel bombs on Syrian cities like a monkey would throw feces around its cage. No, for the foreseeable future, in Syria, the only way to remove a bloody dictator is to kill him or have him die of old age.
In proposing ways of ending the conflict, Sachs puts the onus on the USA to change its policy towards the Assad regime, making only passing reference to Iran and Hizbollah’s massive aid to the Assad tyranny. Sachs, like so many Lefists, has got it so very backwards. If America cut off what little aid it sends to rebel groups, it would have no affect whatsoever on the conflict. And yet if Iran and Hizbollah withdrew their support for Assad, the regime would collapse within a matter of months.
What Jeffrey Sachs is calling for is appeasement, and it is the habit of appeasers to sanitize and whitewash the true intentions of those they hope to appease. Why fight Assad, the argument goes, all he wants is to preserve his rule.
Yes, why fight Hitler? All he wants is the Sudetenland. If Jeffrey Sachs had been around in 1938, Munich would have been exactly the kind of deal he would have written in favor of.
“By using composite or archetypal characters modeled on real CIA officers, by placing them in scenarios based on actual historical events, and by careful attention to sets, costumes, and other details, The Good Shepherd has a degree of authenticity, a documentary feel, reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Intelligence officers should know about the many liberties the film takes with history, but those new to the profession or hoping to learn something about its history may not readily recognize the distortions.”
Trust me to find the Jewish Israeli Zionist Mossad angle!
“Under the heading of foreign intelligence, there was the Israeli desk, the Lovestone Empire, and a variety of smaller operations. The Israeli connection was of interest to Angleton for the information that could be obtained about the Soviet Union and aligned countries from émigrés to Israel from those countries and for the utility of the Israeli foreign intelligence units for operations in third countries. Angleton’s connections with the Israeli secret intelligence services were useful in obtaining from the Israeli Shin Bet a transcript of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Congress denouncing Joseph Stalin.”
One could not ask for more openness from an “open society”.
Our commanders show their faces.
Our secret agencies turn up their histories — and if I (or anyone else) want to travel down to M Street, Foggy Bottom, Georgetown, all of that, whether for romance or inspiration, insight or, it’s always possible, the “skinny”, one may do as much.
From the cookie jar to the nuclear arsenal, people lie only . . . to hide something or to get something.
It’s not a good thing even if in a good cause or a snooty one, perhaps.
It gets messy.
The film takes the viewer through the messiness, the spider’s web, the snake pit, the scorpion’s den. In that, it may be much, much less about history and much, much more about diplomacy.
In today’s America, personnel in government, every corner of it, in general — the exceptions will wind up in court, I’m certain — is the world’s “rainbow coalition”.
* * *
I’ve a new page started on “Associated Articles of Governance – United States of America“. The centuries-young mission has changed the character of the realpolitik, and for all the grousing and polarization, God knows it’s a great place for the portion of humanity inhabiting it and, despite the criticism and the bloody messaging, still a beacon to those suffering in the shadows of political tyranny.
Perhaps that’s because, and this for all the blood and treasure spent since then, it is still yesterday and yesterday remains captive to yesterday’s drives, experiences, and transmitted inter-generational cultural programming.
One of the most complicated and intrigue-filled scandals in recent decades, the Iran-contra affair dominated the news for many months. It consisted of three interconnected parts: The Reagan administration sold arms to Iran, a country desperate for materiel during its lengthy war with Iraq; in exchange for the arms, Iran was to use its influence to help gain the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon; and the arms were purchased at high prices, with the excess profits diverted to fund the Reagan-favored “contras” fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Strangely, the page on my Chrome browser looks like garbage until copied down (fair use – one paragraph) to ASCII text.
* * *
The event in the year 1358 was a counterattack. Our courageous and religious youth attacked the U.S. embassy and discovered the truth and identity of this embassy, which was the Den of Espionage, and presented this fact to people throughout the world.
In those days, our youth called the U.S. embassy the “Den of Espionage”. Today, after the passage of 30-plus years since that day, the name of U.S. embassies in countries which have the closest relationship with America – that is to say, European countries – has become the den of espionage. This means that our youth are 30 years ahead of the rest of the world. This event was related to America as well. These three events were related, in different ways, to the government of the United States of America and its relations with Iran. Therefore, the 13th of Aban – which is tomorrow – was named “Day of Fighting Against Arrogance”.
He believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory. He used hissimple lifestyle and behaviour to criticise the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt society. He declared himself a cosmopolitan. There are many tales about him doggingAntisthenes‘ footsteps and becoming his faithful hound.[3] Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and slept in a large ceramic jar[4] in the marketplace. He became notorious for his philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He embarrassed Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaged his lectures. Diogenes was also responsible for publicly mocking Alexander the Great.
The investigations were effectively halted when President George H. W. Bush (Reagan’s vice president) pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger before his trial began.[2]
The scandal began as an operation to free the seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by a group with Iranian ties connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the U.S. hostages. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.[2][3] Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[4][5]
While President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause,[6] the evidence is disputed as to whether he authorized the diversion of the money raised by the Iranian arms sales to the Contras.
Certainly from journalism’s second row seat to history, I ask what can be known or with confidence inferred by sifting and revisiting news — and what may be imagined in the widening gaps between surface coverage of many elements and their untapped depths.
In Pakistan, which information environment practically guarantees no one can know much of anything with confidence, one expects the floating of wild conspiracy theories, the kind that turn events upside-down and deliver them on a plate labeled “CIA-Mossad”.
In the open societies, Great Britain and the United States foremost, one expects such behavior to be minimized rather than encouraged, and yet we’re scratching our heads over growing “black budgets” and many things happening seemingly off the page as well as “off the hook”.
Of course, I’m reading spy novels, so perhaps that enthusiasm has begun to contaminate my appreciation of RT, CNN, Al Jazeera, Time . . . .
I ask questions about many things that can’t be seen.
One cannot “see” psychology and political psychology — no sign ever hangs over a politician announcing that he may be “DICTATORIAL”, “DISINGENUOUS”, or “DISSIMULATING”, and yet memory serves for recalling milestones and other moments, puzzling moments, sometimes, and fitting them back together.
Then such signs start to emerge from out of the fog, we start to test them again.
How could Ronald Reagan, for example, a show business alumnus, fumble so badly on the Lebanese hostage crisis as to not be aware of Oliver North’s behind-the-scenes machinations to cut a deal somewhere inside the Iran-Soviet-South American political line?
The fair good Republican story begs credibility.
The Lebanese hostage drama was not third-page lead and flip to the back of the “A section” stuff: it was front page all the way, and the President, the Republicans’ most beloved, seems nonetheless to have dropped the reins.
* * *
At ABC News, where I worked at the time, one of our camera crews had been granted access to the Oval Office the previous night. We had video of Carter, looking grim and exhausted in a cardigan, consulting with his aides until, quite literally, it was time to dress for the inauguration of his successor. Those images and live shots of desperate diplomacy, followed by the stately run-up to the transfer of power in Washington, played on one side of the screen. The preparations for departure from Mehrabad played on the other.
The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians’ message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America’s sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.
“The Iranians” are still stage-managing “down to the last minute” the dramas in which they star themselves. That is part of the “malignant narcissism”, a part of control, a part of the guaranty of continuing “narcissistic supply” from one’s ever awed (and battered and intimidated) subjugated others.
* * *
The original reason for the hostage-taking seems to have been “as insurance against retaliation by the U.S., Syria, or any other force” against Hezbollah, which is thought responsible for the killing of 241 Americans and 58 Frenchmen[7] in the Marine barracks and embassy bombings in Beirut.[8] Other reasons for the kidnappings or the prolonged holding of hostages are thought to be “primarily based on Iranian foreign policy calculations and interests” particularly the extraction of “political, military and financial concessions from the Western world”,[9] the hostage takers being strong allies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Reagan’s [STET] made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. Obama’s arrogance by appointing 32 leftist czars and constantly bypassing congress is impeachable. Eric Holder is probably the MOST incompetent and arrogant DOJ head to ever hold the job. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?
Presidents are politicians and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie, but even using that low standard, the Obama’s have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry, and they display an animus for civility.
The divide between what an American President may know and what the American public may be allowed to know in the way of day-to-day foreign relations and states of affairs seems to widen with the growth and the heightened presence of the “Islamic Small Wars” and the concomitant development of an immense intelligence bureaucracy laden with missions the public doesn’t need to know about – or shouldn’t — until afterward, perhaps, and denoted affirming as regards American patriotism.
The acknowledged and most galling of the world’s dictatorships and still feudal societies don’t have this issue: they know what they’re about, and their subjects do as well, and that’s a sad state wherever it’s found; the states navigating between open democracy and paternalist nationalism or resurgent absolutism do have this issue, for certainly Moscow’s internal opposition has been tracking what has been and continues to be taken from them since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Long opposite in stance, the United States may no longer be immune itself to cultivating suspicion throughout its constituency.
I neither condemn, demonize, nor patronize President Obama and have long noted, not alone, the need in even informal open source research to separate surface from what may be gathered and sifted as regards separate items of interest and their management.
Lo and behold, for example, where Obama has been roundly accused of abandoning Israel, throwing it “under the bus” (so I read too often), Israel holds sway over the critical cockpit avionics of the F-35 program, has developed with U.S. support long-distance refueling capability, and has access to “bunker busting” (tunneling-exploding) bombs. Even though it appears contentious and stressed, I believe the American-Israeli relationship close, rather than not, and laudable given the general stakes involved for democracy, the fruits of The Enlightenment, and the general well being — measurable by indicators of improved qualities in living — of others worldwide.
Nonetheless, the American body politic may be slipping collectively into the land of innuendo, far right and left, and have less and less insight — or energy for developing insight — into the White House’s essential American rationality (or rejection of it).
Cock-a-doodle-do about Reagan or Obama, align with the Tea Party or the New Old Now Old, Lost, and Far Out Left, the policy axis may not align with either filter.
On the surface, for example, the Obama Administration has decried the “military coup” in Egypt (that would be Obama, the secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ever clever “Manchurian Candidate” out to get “America, the Prise”) but the Egyptian military, Israel, and the United States would seem on some same kind of page as regards Iran, Hamas, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
While the political cant went that-a-way –> . . . the politicians, their armed forces, their wealthy benefactors and partners — do add “large swaths of their constituencies” — hold some central constructs together out of the light.
One might say of highest-level privileged conversations, whether taking place in “open societies” or decidedly closed or closing ones, that they are all taking place somewhere “in the shadows”.
* * *
WASHINGTON — When Shiite Muslim terrorists hijacked a TWA jet and took 39 Americans hostage in Beirut four years ago, then-President Ronald Reagan’s public stance was clear: There would be no negotiations with terrorists.
But in private, the U.S. position was quite different. Reagan quietly encouraged Israel to make a deal with the terrorists, to exchange Israeli-held detainees for American hostages–and that is how the TWA captives were released, as the first step in a massive swap of prisoners across Israel’s northern border.
BackChannels 