Syria

Most American Presidents during my lifetime would done something militarily similar, on the grounds that something must be done (in response to the use of chemical weapons), and this is something. Maybe I’m still naive, but don’t think any other one would have coupled it with the refusal to admit Syrian refugees.

It is very disheartening to see the heirs of Murrow and Cronkite applauding it as though it suddenly made Trump “presidential”.

And yet the airfield was back in service in 12 hours. As Jim Wright observed over on Facebook:

Wait. 59 Tomahawks? 59? 59 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles is enough firepower to level a city center. And yet, somehow 59 TLAMs didn’t disable a runway? (Syrian jets were launching strikes from Shayrat Airbase today, within hours of the strike. I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but from a weapons standpoint, something doesn’t add up. (paragraph breaks removed to fit with the CT’s blockquote restrictions.)

I guess it all goes back to 1944-5, when huge gouts of American hellfire (including napalm bombing) helped to dislodge the Nazi occupation of France, which hadn’t been ended by the ongoing talks between Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.

That’s the paradigm case used to justify all the others at some point. Once you beat an undisputed baddie, it’s easier to justify beating up guys you merely dislike.

Watching the VSOPs line up is depressing. Also depressing is the general reporting over the course of the conflict, which has at all times been more geared to fitting in with the various party lines in western capitals than at providing a picture of what’s actually going on. It’s narcissist turtles all the way down.

It’s all intensely complicated in Syria. But as with so many complex situations, there is a simple solution!

‘It’s time to end US military engagements in the Middle East. Drones, special operations, CIA arms supplies, military advisers, aerial bombings — the whole nine yards. Over and done with. That might seem impossible in the face of ISIS, terrorism, Iranian ballistic missiles, and other US security interests, but a military withdrawal from the Middle East is by far the safest path for the United States and the region. That approach has instructive historical precedents.

America has been no different from other imperial powers in finding itself ensnared repeatedly in costly, bloody, and eventually futile overseas wars. From the Roman empire till today, the issue is not whether an imperial army can defeat a local one. It usually can, just as the United States did quickly in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The issue is whether it gains anything by doing so. Following such a “victory,” the imperial power faces unending heavy costs in terms of policing, political instability, guerilla war, and terrorist blowback.

Terrorism is a frequent consequence of imperial wars and imperial rule. Local populations are unable to defeat the imperial powers, so they impose high costs through terror instead. Consider the terrorism used by Jewish settlers against the British Empire and local Palestinians in their fight for Israel’s independence and territory; or Serbian terrorism deployed against the Hapsburg Empire; or Vietnamese terrorism used against the French and United States in Vietnam’s long war for independence; or American terrorism, for that matter, that independence fighters used against the British in America’s war of independence.

This is of course not to condone terrorism. Indeed, my point is to condemn imperial rule, and to argue for political solutions rather than imperial oppression, war, and the terror that comes in its wake. Imperial rulers, whether the British in pre-independence America; the Americans in Cuba and the Philippines after 1898; the French and Americans in Vietnam; and the United States in the Middle East in recent decades, foment violent reactions that destroy peace, prosperity, good governance, and hope. The real solutions to these conflicts lie in diplomacy and political justice, not in imperial rule, repression, and terror. ‘

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/04/02/military-should-get-out-middle-east/k0lcRcUl9u9nJkUAkFIh6I/story.html

It continues to be depressing and disheartening that the spectacle of things (and people) being blown up provides satisfaction to many people, but it’s not new and shouldn’t be surprising. Films with lots of explosions are frequently successful. More generally, violence as a form of entertainment has a long history.

Greenwald never demands to be read. He’s been trying to downplay Russian interference in the US election and his unwitting complicity in it for months now. Syria is merely a convenient excuse for him to undermine this narrative. Russian interference in the US election is bad, even if bombing Syria is also bad. He ties them together not because they go together, but it is convenient for him to pretend they go together.

Trumpian logic: Obama was a weak, oh so weak, president. Trump is a strong, very strong, very, very strong president. Obama didn’t attack Syria when Assad did nasty things. Not attacking Syria when Assad does nasty things is weak. Attacking Syria when Assad does nasty things is strong. Trump is strong. Trump will attack Syria.

Although I doubt he put that much thought into it.

Indeed, my point is to condemn imperial rule

Some good points, but doesn’t quite follow its logic to the conclusion it leads to.

Assad’s rule of Syria is 100% imperial by the terms Sach’s defines; a local population who is unable to defeat him turns to ISIS. Assad is a contemporary King Leopold, western educated, recognized by the international community as the legitimate ruler, with that rule secured by purchasing foreign arms with the proceeds of exports of primary commodities. The surplus is used to live like a rich westerner, with a few ethnic notes like you might see in an 3-rd generation emigre businessman. He wears a business suit, his minions wear uniforms with symbols a 19C Frenchman could use to tell their exact rank. He has no tribal or traditional support, no long-standing lineage, no popular mandate, no claim to divine inspiration or religious scholarship. Western support is not a supplement to his rule; it is its sole foundation.

Naturally those fighting him are going to be anti-western. Some of them will take any opportunity to make attacks on their immediate enemy’s strategic partners; al Qaeda’s ‘far enemy’. From a selfish point of view, taking an opportunity to forcibly clarify that in this case ‘Western’ means ‘those Russians over there’, and not ‘us’, is perhaps helpful.

The Tomahawks should have had ‘not in my name’ written on them.

Of course, the fact that a problem exists doesn’t make Trump magically capable of dealing with it.

‘Trumpian logic: Obama was a weak, oh so weak, president. Trump is a strong, very strong, very, very strong president.’

It isn’t ‘logic’ – it’s just a very… ‘Dick-ike’ -(courtesy Bill Maher) – ‘action’ of ‘a Dick’ – who told himself at the correspondence dinner in 2011 – after Obama made hilarious fun of him –
‘If I ever will get my own TeeVee Show playing Precident – I will make fun of this ‘Obama-dude’ by bombing everything he didn’t bomb’!

I have a few things to say.

Impulsive.
Irresponsible.
Ineffective.
Wasteful.
Incoherent.

But these get us nowhere, because we already thought all those things, and thought that they were bad things; whereas Trump’s people also already thought all those things, and thought that they were good things.

So strike all of them, and substitute:

Allegorical.

Can comments be removed because they are incoherent?

“War is the health of the State”

It is interesting to watch reactions: the Bannon/Breitbart alt-right crowd is incensed; Louis Proyect, an “Unrepentant Marxist,” mostly Leninist now I think, has been calling for regime change for years; Demohawks are ecstatic. Reading an older book by Susan Buck-Morss (Dreamworlds), early in, she wrote in Moscow during the fall of the USSR. She seems to be channeling Schmitt maybe Agamben and inspires thoughts on sovereignty, legitimacy, war. She seems to say (apologies if wrong) that war defines the state as a collective in excess and even in opposition to the people/collective/nation or their separate and antagonistic sovereignty. The collective creates its master.

The Breitbart crowd are nationalists, not statists. The Demohawks, and most Republicans, the Deep State, Beltway, mass media are the State defining themselves in opposition to the nation and the people.

The place for the Left is obvious. Internationalist, cosmopolitan, anti-militarist, and consistently, in war or peace, in opposition to the State. Anarchism looking better.

“Why would you be heartened to see someone blowing things up without any plan?”

This would be a perfect subheading in the definitive ethnography of the U.S.

Lately I’m growing more and more convinced that Jeannette Rankin was right. No wars, ever.

I see the ‘Obama did not intervene’ meme is alive and well.

http://fair.org/home/the-return-of-the-dangerous-obama-did-nothing-narrative-on-syria/

Patrick: “It lets you do a morally good thing (accepting refugees) while declining to do a morally compromising thing (literally any military course of action in Syria) but also doesn’t solve very much because there’s no way that accepting refugees will ever be more than a drop in the bucket as compared to the overall rate of killing.”

This is as strong an endorsement for accepting refugees while not attacking as could be written. Attacking Syria won’t end the killing, either; there’s no course of action that will do that. Once ‘end the killing’ is off the table, attacking just kills more people to no clear purpose, while accepting refugees saves more people. That’s true as a general rule, but in this case the distinction is incredibly stark. Trump refuses to accept the refugees, while engaging in an attack which, if anything, is practically designed to be meaningless. He’s doing the least moral thing possible, by your calculus.

There is international law that restricts hate speech? Which Geneva accord is that? (Seriously).

Here in the UK I’m noting a marked split in response along the same lines as Brexit and the EU. So Kate Hoey (Labour MP, pro leave) tweets that there isn’t been proof of Syrian involvement, David Aaronovich (Times journal, leftish, pro EU) complains “she’s at it again”. Nigel Farage is highly disappointed. Tim Farron, proudly christian, Lib Dem leader and very pro EU is now saying he supports Trump’s bombing of Syria (although as a precursor to diplomacy of course). Jeremy Corbyn, a fence-sitter on the EU, is now fence-sitting on bombing Syria.

I’m curious why these apparently unrelated issues show the same clusters of opinion.

“with one party the good guys and the other evil (Okay, sure, if you’re Fox News you can do that. That’s my point.)”

Doesn’t Paul Krugman do that same thing, virtually without fail?

The attack was a $100 million firework display. One could argue over the reasons for this, but it was against a fairly insignificant target, did insignificant damage and the Russians were probably given advance warning. Bill Clinton would have probably hit a pharmaceutical factory, or a water plant. So I guess Trump’s got that going for him.

There is currently no evidence that the Syrian government were responsible for whatever happened. In addition, it’s hard to see what motive they would have had for doing it. It’s possible that evidence will emerge in time, but maybe we should wait?

I keep hoping/thinking that western liberals will wake up to the fact that the rebels are awful, awful human beings. That the media are asking us to cheer for Salafists, many of whom are consider Al-Quaeda dangerously liberal. That the rebels are not popular with Syrians, and that the areas they run are far more repressive and brutal than anything that existed under the old regime. That the rebels are committing war crimes and human rights violations left, right and center – AND NOBODY IN THE WEST CARES. That maybe an armed force that cheerfully uses human shields are not the good guys. Or maybe that a war that increasingly involves foreign fighters as ‘rebels’ is not a war of liberation. But it turns out I was dangerously naive.

At some point I thought at least a few of the smarter liberals would notice that the US is using the same tactics against ISIS in Iraq that the Russians are using in Syria. Or maybe notice that the US is also supporting a totally unnecessary and barbaric Saudi war in Yemen. Or that maybe if the US has become an ally of Al-Quaeda, something has gone horribly wrong. Clearly I’m an idiot for thinking this.

Not all wars can easily be separated into good guys vs bad guys. Syria is certainly not one of those wars.

bob mcmanus: The PYD Kurds are looking pretty good these days. Louis Proyect doesn’t seem to like them much.

@25:

The Breitbart crowd and alt-right are Putin fans. There’s nothing more to their opposition than this. If Trump had bombed any other muslim country, or any faction in Syria not backed by Russia, they’d be cheering now.

There’s no need to drag the despicable Schmitt into this.

@Cian: “There is currently no evidence that the Syrian government were responsible for whatever happened.” ― If you choose to disbelieve the US military who’ve monitored airflights over Syria for some years now, and say the jets that delivered the gas attack came from the specific airfield that just got hit with the retaliatory Tomahawks.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/trump-syria-attack-doctrine-foreign-policy-theory-214999

”

“Our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours,” one former senior official of the Obama administration told me. “It’s a complete indictment of Obama.”

“I feel like finally we have done the right thing,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as Obama’s first-term chief of policy planning at the State Department and long publicly urged a more forceful response to Assad’s horrific attacks on civilians during the six years of war that have wracked Syria, told me. “The years of hypocrisy just hurt us all. It undermined the U.S., it undermined the world order.”

“it was clear that Trump had played the Blob (his many establishment critics) masterfully Friday”

Hope these two comments add some context to the discussion, John. Thanks, again, for the good times and the nudge. After a three month absence, I see a great deal of improvement in the intellectual depth and breadth of the discussions. Bye!

Cian @46: “…any bombing should only occur under UN auspices. That’s hardly fence sitting.” — As long as Russia sides with Assad and holds a veto (i.e. seat on the Security Council) in the UN, waiting for any bombing of the Syrian government to occur under UN auspices is most definitely fence-sitting.

@48+49

‘So, there’s that. Winning!’

“it was clear that Trump had played the Blob (his many establishment critics) masterfully Friday”

‘Hope these two comments add some context to the discussion,’

They did – as for sure Clownstick will keep on doing what Clownstick feels like doing –

‘I see a great deal of improvement in the intellectual depth and breadth of the discussions.’

Thank you!

but at last @49
– and:
‘I see a great deal of improvement in the intellectual depth and breadth of the discussions.’

The major exception was the View and the NYT which very superficially headlined:
‘With Airstrike, Trump Reveals a Doctrine That Improvises’ –
and then they had the nerve to rerun:
‘How a President’s View of Syria Evolved, in 19 Tweets’.

How ‘incoherent’? and bout @35
‘There is international law that restricts hate speech? Which Geneva accord is that? (Seriously).

Seriously –

‘The issue of what speech should or may be prohibited on the basis that it incites others to hatred – so‐called ‘hate speech’ – is a matter of great dispute and argumentation globally, although the standards on this under international law are in fact reasonably developed. International law not only allows, but actually requires, States to ban certain speech on the basis that it undermines the right of others to equality or to freedom from discrimination, and occasionally also on the basis that this is necessary to protect public order.’

and you find more under:
Hate Speech Rules Under International Law, February 2010
http://www.law-democracy.org/…/10.02.hate-speech.Macedonia-book….
Diese Seite übersetzen
T Mendel – ‎2010 – 11.02.2010 – This chapter reviews the international law standards regarding hate … International Provisions Freedom of Expression and Hate Speech.

@47 ‘ If you choose to disbelieve the US military….’

That’s illegal, right?

On the Syria strike. Useless and toothless, but it assuages the emotional types until their next beer or masturbation. Meanwhile Trump (and the indolent knuckleheads in the U.S. media) are now going to revisit all the reasons why Obama forebore from doing this: What’s the strategic policy, here?

Note that Assad himself needn’t have ordered the attack, for it to come from the Syrian forces: it isn’t clear if he’s got all his people under control. Maybe the U.S. announcement — last week!!!! — that Trump would no longer seek Assad’s removal, suddenly emboldened one of Assad’s officers to take the “initiative” and bomb a chlorine gas depot near some people that somebody doesn’t like. Who knows?

Anyway, what’s the policy, what’s next? Lots of bombs, more boots on the ground, or, next week fugeddaboutit?… The U.S. retaliatory strike may bring Russia closer to Iran, and helps Putin wiggle out of a hellish resource drain in Syria, and gets the price of oil up, while finding a renewed enemy in the United States. Play it as it lays! Putin needs enemies, Trump needs enemies, we all need enemies. Golly, “Putin” and “Trump” are almost the same word, like “Prumt” or “Trupin”.

Important to note that Putin did not help Trump win the election because he likes the United States. Far from it! Putin hates the US. Why? Because the US screwed Russia economically after the Iron Curtain fell, by trying to impose the free-market fundamentalist ignorance. Then the US slapped on oil sanctions recently, after Putin annexed Crimea to help shore-up his southern borders (he’s dealing with NATO expansion and Islamic terrorists, while Crimea is 70% ethnic Russian and likes Moscow). In consequence, Russia’s GDP is suffering. Whether you yourself think it’s good or bad to oppose Russia — and whatever you think of Putin’s tactics in response — is not the point here. Fact is, Putin hates the US… Therefore, Putin is not going to help anyone whom he thinks will make the US stronger or more respected in the world. Russian ex-KGB psych profiles may suggest that Trump’s low cognition and high narcissism will result in short-sighted moves and more foreign policy quagmires for the US: “Look at the black eye the US gave itself, with the Bush-Cheney War! — Let’s make America stupid again!”

Donald J. Trump, on Twitter, Oct. 9, 2012:

“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin – watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.”

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/255784560904773633

That Trumpentwitter came one month before the 2012 election.

‘ In fact, American intervention has helped to prop up Assad. In 2012, the Libyan rebels that had just seized power were sending Russian-made MANPAD’s to Syria in an act of solidarity. The CIA intervened to prevent them from reaching the FSA. If the CIA had minded its own business, Assad would have been toppled at least 3 years ago.’

Of all the crazy things that have been stated in this crazy thread, this is by far the craziest. It has much competition.

‘The Russians dumped a huge amount of anti-Hillary propaganda (under “RT, Sputnik”, etc.) onto Facebook and Twitter throughout much of the presidential campaign. This is where most people (except some old-timers) now get their news.’

Actually no maybe this is the craziest thing. Incidentally are there any sane people left in the United States? Looking at it from the outside, it does seem that the entire political class is having a nervous breakdown. Insane (literally insane, I don’t mean that metaphorically) conspiracy theories, hysterical name-calling, political analysis of the ‘black is white, up is down’ variety seem to be ubiquitous…Trump is not an outlier it seems but an entirely representative member of the class. And anyone who doesn’t join in with the circle jerk of hysteria is excoriated as a Russian agent or Arab infiltrator or (on the other side) Obama-ite spy in league with the Deep State, or whatever. It does seem to engage in cod Freudianism for a second that the only time the American political class can achieve some kind of calm is when American imperial troops are killing people outside the American borders. Hence the current love of violence….it’s only by projecting, so to speak, the violence outwards that the American political class can restrain themselves from using violence against each other, it seems.

It does make me thing that the American Republic is more or less doomed. Whether it breaks down in a coup, or civil war, or in some other form of collapse isn’t clear, but it’s difficult to see a system this dysfunctional continuing for much longer.

The Russians dumped a huge amount of anti-Hillary propaganda (under “RT, Sputnik”, etc.) onto Facebook and Twitter throughout much of the presidential campaign. This is where most people (except some old-timers) now get their news. Part of the current investigations by the FBI & the Congressional committees are likely to reveal whether these fake stories were coordinated with people in the Trump campaign.

So you’re saying that RT and Sputnik, two networks that nobody reads/watches, cost Hillary Clinton the election. Does this not strike you as maybe a little paranoid and conspiratorial?

1) Both the Hillary and Trump campaign pumped out propoganda on social media.
2) Both campaigns paid people to troll/pump out favorable stories.
3) 3rd Parties pumped out fake news, because the advertising hits were very profitable (have we already forgotten the Slovenian teens)

Questions:
1) What is the evidence that RT/Sputnik ‘dumped’ propoganda? And how is this any different from what every media organization does to promote/share their content?
2) What is the evidence that this stuff was propoganda, rather than factual stuff that happened to paint Hillary in a bad light?

I’m willing to consider that both of these things happened, but I need evidence. Which is seriously lacking.

Cian @46: “…any bombing should only occur under UN auspices. That’s hardly fence sitting.” — As long as Russia sides with Assad and holds a veto (i.e. seat on the Security Council) in the UN, waiting for any bombing of the Syrian government to occur under UN auspices is most definitely fence-sitting.

I don’t think calling for an investigation by an impartial party is fence sitting. Especially when we are dealing with people known to lie (the US, the rebels, the Syrians and the Russians), in an area where there are no independent observers.

Hidari,

Yes, Trump is indeed the president who exactly matches the times. The US has let its political discourse become so detached from reality, that only someone with dementia can present to the electorate as a rock in the stream, someone who knows what’s going on and isn’t afraid to speak direct truths without all the PC euphemism and dog whistles. Of course he’s actually clueless, and just seems like a rock because he’s so clueless he’s forgotten what conventional politicians know, that the simple bromides they tout to project solidity to the electorate are a fraud needed to get elected and stay in office. In the current state of our politics, only someone who has no idea what the truth is can seem candid and open.

Sure, it could all end in a coup or even civil war. There actually is some truth to the idea that there is in the US a deep state, if only in the sense that there are technocrats in the military and civil service who keep the govt running under all administrations. I would be surprised if there is an actual ongoing cabal or secret committee of these folks, but they do seem to have some sense of common purpose and beneficent ownership of the process that could be provoked to common action if unrealistic Trump decisions threaten what they have built and maintain. This could all end with Trump going the way of Caligula, but he would have to really push things deeply to provoke such a conspiracy among the technocrats, presumably military and security service technocrats.

It seems to me at least as likely that the Trump administration will continue as farce, and never realize its potential to provoke a dramatic end. Maybe the system will end up a bit chastened back from its extreme reality denial by being pushed to the brink. That’s the most hopeful possibility, that we learn from farce, from calamity narrowly averted. But, sure, it is also possible that only some calamity suffered by the US (as opposed to the ongoing calamity we inflict on random victims in the rest of the world) will cause us to learn anything.

Who can tell.

Cian #67: “you’re saying that RT and Sputnik, two networks that nobody reads/watches, cost Hillary Clinton the election.”

Two things are false there:

1. I did not say that they “cost” Hillary Clinton the election, which would imply that they were solely responsible. I reacted to this: You wrote that there is “no evidence” of Russian “interference” in the election, and went on to write, “But even if one accepts that the Russians did this. The idea that this had any affect on the election is laughable.” You are incorrect about the evidence, and your assertion that it had no effect is questionable, to say the least.

2. Links from RT and other sites like it (and worse) inundated my Facebook & Twitter feeds, so I infer that there were a LOT of people reading these things.

Lee:
“You wrote that there is “no evidence” of Russian “interference” in the election.”… You are incorrect about the evidence, and your assertion that it had no effect is questionable, to say the least.”

The evidence claimed by officials is secret, and the evidence cited by journalists is anonymous. Is there any publicly available evidence and any way of assessing the credibility of the secret evidence? Practically speaking, there’s no evidence.

And by interference in the election, do we mean the DNC hack? If so, this is trivial, since better informing the voters, in particular about anti democratic interference by our own keadership, is hardly an obstruction to democratic processes.

And, of course, the evidence for even that is poor: it’s far from certain that the hack was Russian, and there’s zero evidence if Russian that it was state-ordered.

(An excellent, detailed analysis of the evidence here: http://necpluribusimpar.net/trump-russia-media-hacking-democratic-party-private-cybersecurity-companies-part-1/)

There are no good guys in Syria, no “moderate rebels”. Syria is a pawn in a geopolitical game. Few people expect a happy ending at any time in the near future. What people decide to accept as the truth usually depends, consciously or unconsciously, upon what they want the outcome of this game to be. Human suffering by the people of Syria will be played-down if this serves the “greater good” of the desired geopolitical outcome, but weaponised if the “wrong” side looks like winning.

So far as the recent atrocity ins concerned, cui bono?

Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan writes:

“What did happen I do not profess to know. There are at least eleven major identifiable state and non-state forces involved in the fighting around Idlib. In going through them all and considering opportunity and motive for each, I continually find that those whose motive would be false flag stand to benefit a great deal more than those who might have been seeking military advantage.”

As always, if you haven’t decided what you want the truth to be for ulterior reasons, it’s worth reading the whole of his carefully weighed opinion.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/04/the-balance-of-probabilities/

What is the evidence that these networks had any effect on the election?

Asking questions is for people who don’t understand. For people who do understand, the thing to do is to make statements.

Are you a person who understands, or are you a person who doesn’t understand yet? Either is fine, but each means different things for what it means to be polite and considerate.

[asking questions is making a demand of other people, that they do the work required to answer your question. Obvious… but since you don’t actually have any entitlement to the labour of others, a-fortiori you don’t have any right to get your questions answered. Even a refusal is more than you’re entitled to: even having your posts read is more than you’re entitled to. “Asking questions” is a privilege that others have to grant to you: you can trade it for information of your own, or you can ask for it as a favour to an as-yet ignorant person [where the payment is, you become smarter and more-able to usefully contribute], or you can sit there like a particularly selfish six-year-old and express nothing but self-serving demands… only you can’t, not if you’re not an arsehole. You need to make choices.]

I guess we’ll get the evidence of Russian interference once thevgoude committee agrees to interview the witnesses trumps mate indefinitely cancelled – which should be soonish now that nunes is under investigation for revealing classified information. I wonder why he would go to all that trouble to shut down an inquiry into trumps Russia links, if the whole idea has no basis? Perhaps you can ask Michael Flynn at the next RT speaking gig- he’s easy to find, he’ll be the American patriot sitting next to putin.

More for Cian: ABC News, Apr 7, 2017: “Syrian military officials appeared to anticipate Thursday night’s raid on Syria’s Shayrat air base, evacuating personnel and moving equipment ahead of the strike, according to an eyewitness. … U.S. officials believe the plane that dropped chemical weapons on civilians in Idlib Province on Tuesday, which according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights killed 86 people, took off from the same air base. … The airstrike follows confirmation by the Turkish Health Ministry that autopsies on several victims of Tuesday’s attack confirmed the use of the nerve agent sarin in violation of international law and represents an escalation of U.S. involvement in the seven-year conflict.”

Colin,

you are of course right. Nobody who makes wild claims about Russian interference in the election has to prove anything. I have no right to demand that they prove it, anymore than I had the right in 2003 to demand that people show some evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or connections to Al-Quaeda. After all, what is evidence, but something that only a naive six year old could expect. And now I acknowledge that I was wrong to demand evidence of the right for their claims that Obama was Kenyan, or that there was a Behghazi conspiracy. It was my job to find every conspiracy theory, ever scrap of ‘evidence’ and sift through them. And until I had done so, I had to accept that their theories were reasonable.

Out there, in the wacky world of the media so many claims have been made about Russia that it is hard to keep up. Is it one of the claims where Russian names were mangled? Or the strange report about Russian hacking that came out of the intelligence agencies (and which they carefully did not endorse). Maybe it is one of the claims that Naked Capitalism and TruthDig are tools of Moscow (because only a Russkie could criticise fracking). Or it is connected to wild conspiracies about murdered Russian ambassadors. Could it be the article I read that attacked TruthDig as an agent of Russia for daring to publish a story on fracking.

The thing is, Colin, is that I’m dangerously open minded. And while everything I’ve seen so far has been crazed conspiracies of the type I had hitherto associated with the right. It’s possible that there’s something I had missed. That somewhere in the noise, between the MSNBC rants, there was some actual evidence. But in the absence of that I’m going to assume all claims of Russian interference are rubbish. Not because I have warm and fuzzy feelings about Russia. But because so far all the ones I’ve read have been.

Seriously Colin. A couple of links, is that so much to ask?

It does make me thing that the American Republic is more or less doomed.

That is absolutely standard default normal and in no way insightful. Of course the American Republic is more or less doomed. Was anybody expecting it to last forever? Everything is more or less doomed.

(Now, what’s the difference between ‘doomed’ and ‘more or less doomed’?)

– and Cian – did you hear about these 1000 payed internet trolls to do Russian propaganda?

No?

I never believed it either – I thought it was just one – writing a lot about ‘give me proof -man…?
-(and not ‘angry’ – just joking…)

nastywoman @90: What is the evidence that “all kind of silly men on the inter tubes want ‘proof’ for what they can see with their own eyes”?

@Cian, 85
My fave is Louise Mensch’s discovery that Putin financed Black Lives Matter.
Only a traitor or a six-year old would ask for evidence…

– and @91 Correction!

“all kind of silly men on the inter tubes want ‘proof’ for what they can see AND HEAR with their own EAR and eyes”?

and the ‘evidence’ – all these ‘silly men’ who wanted proof that Trump ever did what he said he did.

nastywoman @92: Yes,indeed, I had responded to his post on that very point above. My #91 using his much-repeated refrain “What is the evidence that… [quote referring to his demands for evidence]” was intended as looping i.e. self-referential humor, being another example of demanding evidence of what was right out here openly in front for anyone to clearly and easily see for oneself….

My fave is when fellow Americans ask me -(because I know a little bit about Russia) –‘Do you think Putin really tried to f… with our erection?

Please, tell me that was a typo.

@98
‘The Syrian government’s story in this case is that a conventional air attack on a rebel arms depot released toxic chemicals stored in that depot’ The story is hardly incredible’

How true – as a more ‘incredible’ conspiracy specialists could come up with the story – that the Syrian government knew that the toxic chemicals were stored there – and that’s why they bombed it – to release the chemicals – and see what I mean – when you start inventing your own conspiracy theories – it not only in Greenwalds case – finally might turn on you – just like some crazy Breitbarters – who now believe that Trump always was an agent of ‘teh deep state’ – send to them by… pick anybody you want but not Bannon – in order to establish the US Democrats Dictatorship in the Land of the Free!

@102
‘What other evidence is there at this point that the Russians interfered in the election?’

We have the words from Alex Jones -(one of Americas most experienced conspiracy theory experts) that: ONCE YOU FEED THE PIRATE they want more more, more – and John Oliver adding – I’m against these strikes because what do they say if you want to skin a Ferret you better bring your dancing shoes!’

And Glenn -(or is it Mona?) – do you really have to (still) do this?

Raven wrote,

So you didn’t even watch the scenes of Syrian parents frantically washing chemicals off their small children as those children struggled to breathe?

But those are of very little forensic value:

Do you know the video isn’t faked or borrowed from some other place/time?

Do you know the video wasn’t staged?

Are the people who took the video neutral observers? If not, should they be trusted?

Even if the video is authentic, do you know that the scene is the result of a CW attack? Are the details of the scene consistent with the aftermath of a CW attack?

If it’s indeed a CW attack, what CW agent is it? Are the details of the scene consistent with the effects of that agent?

If it’s indeed a CW attack, how do you know who conducted the attack?

If it’s a CW agent, how do you know it’s an intentional release/attack and not, say, the result of Syrian government bombs hitting a rebel CW depot?

I just noticed that someone had shared my four-part series about Trump/Russia, but since this post is about Syria, I thought I should tell you about the post I wrote about the recent chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun. Indeed, I wrote a very detailed blog post, in which I examine the evidence about the recent chemical attack and compare the situation with what happened after the chemical attack in Ghouta in August 2013. I argue that, in that previous case, the media narrative had rapidly unravelled and that, for that reason, we should be extremely prudent about the recent attack and not jump to conclusions. It’s more than 5,000 words long and I provide a source for every single factual claim I make. I really believe it’s the most thorough discussion of the allegations against Assad with respect to his alleged use of chemical weapons out there. Please share if you thought it was interesting.

Collin Street @79

“Asking questions is for people who don’t understand. For people who do understand, the thing to do is to make statements. ”

A conversation of only assertions is pretty boring. And what do you have against work? Engaging in discussion is work. One must work to understand and then work to make the other participants understand your point of view. Unless you are looking just to lecture, like a hit and run.

Anyway… The airstrike seems to have been a meaningless gesture designed to reach for credibility with the “mainstream” (see, for example, gushing praise from the likes of Fareed Zakaria) as well as create an appearance of distance from the Russians to rebut the charges of coordination with Putin. I don’t know who put him up to it. Or if it is all just a lucky result of an action with no particular result in mind. But considering the word there was some form of warning to Putin pre-strike and the apparent lack of real impact on the Syrian air-force’s capabilities the strike seems to have had some thinking behind it.

The worst bit of this whole incident is seeing the mere act of wasting money and destroying “stuff'” is enough to make a fool “look” presidential in the eyes of the people who have the ability to shape reality with enough repetition.

A stroke of theater, perhaps, but meaningless – not so much. Russia, China, and Iran are not likely to overreact, but they will all be reconsidering their options, and not necessarily in ways that the Trump Administration (part of me still can’t believe there is such a thing) hopes.

I worry particularly that attempts to bully Putin into dropping Assad will backfire. Putin might well be willing to let Assad go, but if Trump tries to bully Putin the way he tried to push around the Freedom Caucus, he will get the same result, only this time weapons will be involved.

@1: Also, neither Obama or Clinton would have announced so publicly and emphatically that removing Assad was no longer a priority. Reluctantly or not, Obama might well have resorted to a show of force here. At the least he would have gone back to Congress and made them say no – or yes.

liberal @ 105: “If it’s indeed a CW attack, what CW agent is it?” — Did you miss reading my #83 (immediately after the #82 you replied to) quoting the ABC News article including word from “the Turkish Health Ministry that autopsies on several victims of Tuesday’s attack confirmed the use of the nerve agent sarin in violation of international law”?

Frankie Boyle on ‘our’ latest imbroglio in Syria.

‘Nothing more perfectly embodies White America than a 70 year old golfer firing missiles at the Middle East from his country club. Some sticks in the mud probably expect a host of formalities to be gone through before attacking another country: a UN investigation, or congressional approval perhaps, but personally I’m just glad to see a guy with the temperament of a mistreated circus animal launching ballistic missiles on a hunch. It seems statesmanlike and decisive. It’s difficult to tell what Syria’s moderate rebels are really like, as journalists can’t really be embedded with them, because they’d be beheaded. But I refuse to be cynical: there’s every chance that Assad’s end will see a peaceful, pastoral period for Syria once groups like Allah’s Flamethrower and Infidel Abattoir get round the table and good-naturedly sort out their deep seated differences on the finer points of Islamic Law. Perhaps this is a period which Syrians will one day look back on and laugh, if laughter is still allowed.
Not only will Democrats support any war Trump chooses to start, they’ll be outraged by any voters who hold it against them at the next election. Hillary Clinton called for the airstrikes immediately before they happened. We’d do well to listen to the woman who is the architect of modern Libya, where her neoliberal intervention introduced the principals of the free market with such clarity that the country now has several different governments competing for the right to kill everybody. Clinton was criticised for running a tone-deaf, aloof campaign but Democrats have rallied, pointing out that many people didn’t vote for Hilary because Trump is a Russian spy, and people who didn’t vote for Hillary are Russian stooges, and people who voted for Hillary but not very enthusiastically are also Russian stooges, and slowly but surely the goodwill has begun to return.
Personally, I think it would be great if Putin was controlling Trump. I’d love to think there was a rational, malevolent actor directing him rather than just a combination of his own blood sugar levels and the concept of vengeance. I honestly think we’d be in less trouble if he was being controlled by the dark wizard Thoth Amon, or if his body had been taken over by a sentient bacterial civilisation that was using him as a kind of Lifeship. I’m not saying it’s impossible that Trump was moved by the plight of Syria’s children, perhaps in the same way that Tony Soprano got really upset when that guy killed his horse, it’s just that the balance of probabilities is that he doesn’t care about them, even enough not to ban them from entering his country.
The Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said that the UK government had close discussions with the US over the few days running up to the attack and had been given “advance notice of the President’s final decision”. Odd then, that immediately after the chemical attack the Guardian cites Downing Street officials (on a tour of despots with the prime minister in the Middle East) who, when asked about military reprisals, said “nobody is talking about that”. Sort of makes you wonder if there’s any contempt that can be shown by the US that will stop us drooling about our “special relationship” like we’re some kind of stalker. I doubt the Americans see us as a valued ally. We’re just somewhere that they stick a few missiles. My best guess is that they think of us in the way that we would think of a shed.
At the prospect of a war, the media reacted with the exuberant joy that I remember fights bringing to a school playground. War copy sells well, and is easier to write. A good way to get a handle on the media’s attitude to conflict is to try to write a thousand words on a United Nations sponsored bilateral negotiation, then the same on a missile cutting a hospital in half. The Guardian exuberantly described the “pinpoint accuracy” of Tomahawks. I’m not sure accuracy is strictly relevant when you’re delivering high explosives, the ultimate variable. In the West, we’ve never needed the military spectaculars favoured by Soviets and dictators; the news has always been our missile parade. On MSNBC the launch of the Tomahawks was repeatedly described as “beautiful”. And there is a certain beauty at that point in their trajectory. Perhaps we should focus on some other point. It would be nice to see a shot of them ten seconds before they drop on their screaming victims. Or two days later when bodies are being pulled from the rubble. Maybe a shot from ten years down the line when the shell casings form part of a makeshift gallows, reflected in the glass eye of an implacable amputee warlord. Perhaps our whole fucked up attitude to war comes from only ever seeing our missiles taking off, only ever seeing our soldiers setting out.
Ignoring international law is bad for all sorts of reasons, not least because it’s the same position as Assad’s. Knowing that our own resolve is only strengthened when people attack us and expecting other people’s to be weakened is suggestive of a kind of racism. Pouring arms and bombs into an intractable conflict means that you are happy for it to be prolonged and worsen. Britain’s activities in the Middle East historically mean we almost can’t imagine what a moral position might look like. We have a huge navy that we could use to pick up the thousands of Syrians, Libyans and others scheduled to drown in the Mediterranean this year, for a fraction of the cost of the bombs we’ve dropped on them. I wonder if those people know, clambering onto boats with their frightened children, many of whom have never seen the sea before and will never see land again, that we aggressively tune out images like this, should they ever reach us at all. That we see all these lives we could save as part of a chaotic, insoluble mess, better not thought about; we who focus so intently on the sleek, clear lines of bombs.’

https://www.facebook.com/FrankieBoyleFans/posts/1476804212360940

‘Frankie Boyle on ‘our’ latest imbroglio in Syria.’

Great insight by one of the UK’s funniest comedian.

@115: I didn’t realize we had already had a second Clinton Administration and HRC made all the (bad) foreign policy decisions while Obama and his inner circle sat around helpless, but it’s interesting information to have, especially since most reports indicated that no president held foreign policy so closely in the White House since Nixon.

Clinton rallied traditional Democrats to her side in 2008 and was criticized for her failure to reach out to Obama’s coalition. She reaches out to Obama’s coalition and is criticized for ignoring traditional Democrats. Oh, well, easy come, easy go. (Which is not to say that a politician with a defter touch might have done better, but 2016 was a very strange year.)

Could you point out some of this “Russian stooges” talk? I’d be interested to read it, and don’t recall seeing any such accusations.

Raven: I’m sorry Raven. I immediately discounted any news story that cited both the Turkish government(!) and the Coventry based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Just as I discount any story that is sourced from RT. The Turkish government have been backing the nastiest jihadists, for a long time were protecting oil smuggling routes through Syria and are doing their best to destroy the YPG and prevent them from setting up an autonomous region. The last has been made harder as since they shot down the Russian plane, the Russians have limited their influence on the peace talks. I’m sure they’d love to change it.

I have seen mixed reports on whether it was Sarin. The early videos (which given the source could have been anything) did not seem to be consistent with a Sarin gas attack – not that it really matters for those that were killed (gas, bombs, bullets, starvation via Saudi blockade – it’s all just death).

I am not disputing that civilians were gassed. However, a chemical weapon would involve firing a chemical weapon. That is a bomb from a plane, a shell or a missile. Bombing a depot that stored chemical weapons would not be a chemical weapon attack. It would be something else. Equally, bombing a depot that contained materials that could be used to make chemical weapons (such as chlorine – also used for other purposes) would not be a chemical weapon attack. The reason I’m not calling it a chemical weapons attack is that I’m suspending judgement until an investigation can be carried out by the UN. Something the Russians have demanded.

Nastywoman: I can’t remember the last time I read something by Greenwald.

Cian @121: Nifty argument to discount ABC News [not mentioning its name] “Just as I discount any story that is sourced from RT.”

“The early videos… did not seem to be consistent with a Sarin gas attack….” — You think not? Those scenes I mentioned, with parents frantically washing off their small children who were struggling to breathe, were typical of trying to remove a nerve agent from the skin, showing the parents knew what they were dealing with (Syrians had become familiar with this kind of attack). However, chlorine gas attacks through the lungs but not the skin, so washing it off the skin would have been pointless to help the children breathe.

“I am not disputing that civilians were gassed. However,…” — Your ‘however’ requires ignoring all those civilians, and all the small children among them. — “… Bombing a depot that stored chemical weapons would not be a chemical weapon attack.” — Such a depot would be surrounded by military guards to protect it, and allow no random insecure civilians nearby, possibly even carrying suicide-bomb vests; so the undisputed fact of those gassed civilians all by itself disposes of this ever-so-convenient “chemical weapons depot” hypothesis.

… @ 122: “I’m saying that there needs to be an independent investigation by the UN….” — (1) If Assad’s government permits it? (2) If Trump’s and Putin’s Security Council vetoes, between them, don’t prevent any clear and truthful finding?

“Russia has invested considerable prestige into destroying Syria’s chemical weapons. If it is shown that Syria has used them behind Russia’s back, Russia will be made to look stupid….” — You’re curiously omitting an option: If it is shown that Syria has used them with Russia’s knowledge, Russia will be made to look complicit. And Russian personnel were at the Syrian airbase from which the jet was observed taking off to deliver the sarin attack.

“You call it defense of Russia – I call it the desire to punish the guilty, whoever they are.” — Unless, of course, anyone were to suggest that’s Assad or Putin (depending on the topic), in which case defense mode engages in full.
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john c. halasz @ 124: “… the Syrian government surrendered its sarin stockpiles….” — On this we have the word of Putin’s Russia, which has taken Assad’s Syria as its favored client; and see lines just above about Russian personnel at the Syrian airbase. At this point you might remember Russian methods in Afghanistan.

“… no forensic investigation has been conducted.” — See the last sentence of #83.

@126
When I studied a few semester anthropology I always dreamed about one time discovering a ‘Regime of Cannibals’ -(with the hope NOT to be eaten by them) – so if I would have survived I would have been ‘The Blond who had discovered ‘the last Regime of Cannibals’!

So I traveled a lot – to all kind of ‘Regimes’ – and I found out – that indeed – there is a difference between the governments I was used to – from my very youth -(even my favorite Italian government) – and so called ‘Regimes’ – and that in no way implies any kind of value judgement or critic of ‘Regimes’ – as anthropological spoken – you need a pretty anthropological attitude if you meet somebody in a ‘Regime’ who tells you that one of the efforts of the Regime is to NOT let women drive a car -(just as a silly example) –

So where was I ?
Oh yes – ‘Regimes’ – and I’m very familiar with the type of… romantic?… language you show in your comment – as when I returned after a half year from Egypt – after leading Americans and all other kind of Tourists into the White and Black Desert and telling them
that the ‘Regime of Mubarak’ was no danger to them personally – I kind of used the same language as you just used?

It made me sooo nostalgic.

Asking what we can do about what is happening in Syria isn’t a bad question, but it requires some careful consideration about what is actually happening in Syria and what is likely to be the effect of any actions to deal with that. I have read a great deal about Syria, and I have gone to talks and seminars, and I have corresponded with academics who study the area; the narrative in most of the mainstream press and politics bears only a tangential relation to what I understand from using these more knowledgeable sources.

One of the themes in “The Battle for Syria” by Christopher Phillips is that many of those involved in fighting in Syria (Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, some of the opposition groups) have been trying to drag the USA into Syria to overthrow Assad for the last five years. The fact that NATO overthrew Gadaffi set a precedent and many of these actors think that the same can be done in Syria. It therefore isn’t inconceivable that there would be a false flag operation to try to bounce the USA into a more direct role in the conflict.

Another issue that isn’t included in many mainstream accounts (but which is apparent if you take the time to listen to people who study the region) is that Syria is part of an area of instability that includes Iraq (and spread out of Iraq and is partly due to the invasion of Iraq). State institutions need to be rebuilt in both Iraq and Syria. There may need to be a military component, and borders may need to be redrawn, but the essential tasks are rebuilding states and their institutions, and rebuilding communities’ trust in those institutions.

There are three letters in today’s Independent from readers making the point that removing Assad may just create a failed state, with even worse consequences than today’s situation. This is a key point that is rarely mentioned in most mainstream comment, though see the second paragraph here:-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/10/not-just-syria-trump-ratcheting-up-wars-world

Most mainstream comment just has a blind spot to this obvious issue, though the public seems to be aware of it.

Dealing with the linked issues of Iraq and Syria will probably take 20 years. It will require rebuilding failed states and determined conflict resolution across the Middle East. Russia would probably cooperate, because one of its concerns in Syria is the collapse of the last vestiges of state institutions. Whether the Gulf States would cooperate, or the arms’ industry would cooperate, is another matter.

Guano, while I doubt we’ll ever know what happened, the most plausible explanation for the 2013 Sarin gas attack was that it was some kind of false flag operation. The gas was fired from way behind enemy lines according to the UN investigation.

I think it’s a real tragedy that the Syrian revolution failed, but it did fail. And if the Syrian government fell it’s hard to see who would stop the Jihadists from taking the country over. The resulting of massacres would probably trouble even the butcher of Hama, Hafez al-Assad.

I should add that if the SAAF knowingly bombed a warehouse containing fertilisers and/or pesticides, that may well also be a war crime.

People should exercise some due diligence, rather than bloviating based on manipulated media images.

tl;dr:

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/04/sentence-first-verdict-afterwards.html

Wow, to read the comments posted here, it would appear that Assad is a veritable humanitarian!

Literally nobody has argued this, or anything close to this. But feel to shred what remaining credibility you have.

And that the government that has been dropping 30 barrel bombs a day on civilians is the nice side of this war

I described them as the ‘Least Evil’. If you want to interpret ‘Least Evil’ as ‘Nice’, I can’t stop you.

and wouldn’t possibly use chemical weapons

The argument was that the Syrians would be unlikely to use them for political reasons. Nobody is defending the Syrian government’s moral character.

I mean really, when was the last time Assad killed even one civilian?!

When was the last time that ISIS killed a civilian? When was the last time that Al-Quaeda killed a civilian? WHen was the last time that a US killed a civilian?

And what has any of this got to do with the use of chemical weapons?

No doubt any such stories are fabrications by the White Helmets or the Syrian Network for Human Rights (who we all know have an office in Corbyn’s front room, the skeezy bastards).

The Syrian Network for Human Rights is one guy in the UK who launders propaganda for the rebels. He’s no more credible than the Syrian, or Russian, propaganda sources. The White Helmets have produced fake footage in the past. Given that there is literally noone independent behind enemy lines who can corroborate any of this (unlike behind government lines, where there are journalists operating), it is impossible to know what is and isn’t true.

Surely the only people in Syria who would use chemical weapons are ISIS, which is why Trump bombed Assad.

Your argment appeared to be that only the government would use chemical weapons. I pointed out that ISIS (who are rather proud of the fact) and Al-Quaeda have both used them. And that in 2013 Sarin was used in what seems to have been a false flag operation by somebody on the rebel side.

Consequently assuming ANYTHING about who is responsible is premature until an investigation can occur.

I am amused by you implying that Trump is infallible, though. Have you met the Faustusnotes on the Trump thread?

Cian @ 130: “I didn’t discount ABC news, I discounted the two sources that their story relied upon.” — This is terminally disingenuous; you had indeed specified only two sources (#121: “both the Turkish government(!) and the Coventry based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights”)… but that article had also relied upon U.S. officials, local residents (as eyewitnesses), and former National Security Adviser Richard Clarke as sources, as well as quoting Trump’s own statement.

“… the first responders were handling the victims without gloves.” — Fathers were desperately washing poison off their young children’s bodies to save their lives, Cian. If you do not understand why they were willing to take a tremendous chance, then I can’t help you.
______________________

Katsue @ 132: See last note above. Look at those videos, and consider also where all that rapidly flowing water was rinsing the sarin… not toward the rescuers’ hands and bodies, but away.

“… it is possible that the toxic gasses in question consisted of chlorine and/or phosphates other than sarin.” — See #83, autopsies showed sarin.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but http://necpluribusimpar.net/chemical-attack-syria/ has a fairly sceptical look at the evidence presented in favour of Assad using chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013. The argument isn’t that Assad couldn’t have done it… merely that the evidence in support of this claim is questionable.

Some takeaways:
Absence of motivation: Assad was already winning the war, Obama had already made use of chemical weapons an issue, a UN team had just arrived to investigate whether chemical weapons had been used prior. This would be a bad time to drop chemical weapons on a population and expect to get away with it.

Absence of means: Missiles that fell on Ghouta had a 2km range at most and couldn’t come from inside Assad-controlled territory. Missiles did not need heavy equipment to create or launch. Presence of Hexamine doesn’t indicate regime involvement, since it too is a an easily-manufactured compound.

Alternate parties: Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic at one point seemed to indicate that earlier chemical attacks in Khan al-Assal were perpetrated by the rebels. Majority of on-the-ground sources pointing to Assad regime are in areas controlled by Salafist and Al-Q forces, rendering them pretty unreliable.

It’s pretty obvious that there are no serious conclusions here, merely questions about the idea that Assad is solely responsible for using nerve agents in 2013 or more recently.

nastywoman @ 142: “that in this case we can’t believe our ‘spies’?” — Recall that our ‘spies’ not only implicate Assad in the recent Syrian gas attack and Putin in our campaign, but also Trump and his staffers as complicit during the campaign. So of course our ‘spies’ must be intensively discredited!

#140 – I’m not on that other thread. I don’t watch RT. I don’t get my talking points from anywhere.

I ask basic questions about the assumptions that people are making when they develop an argument and, in the case of the Syrian civil war, I have taken some time to understand what is going on. Much of what is being said in the mainstream media is based on an inadequate understanding of what is happening in Syria, and what has happened, and makes some rather heroic assumptions.

Assad is evil but he’s not the only evil player in the Syrian civil war. It is a heroic assumption that removing Assad will end the misery, because installing new regimes is a long and arduous process and I see no understanding among those advocating his removal how long and arduous a process it is. In Syria this is even more complicated because of the nature of many of the rebel groups and their inability to work with each other.

The way this story developed over the last week is a frightening example of how mainstream politicians and commentators rush to judgement and automatically make heroic assumptions, and then make ad hominem attacks on those who question them. An unpredictable US president made a knee-jerk reaction and his mainstream critics said how wonderful it is: that is deeply troubling.

@24: Obama might well have launched strikes if he had been able to get British support. Cameron lost that vote, so Obama went to Congress. (I don’t think he felt that he really had to do so, but he was looking for political cover.)

Hindsight is 20/20, but as I think someone pointed out somewhere in this thread, the Syrian revolution began as peaceful and non-sectarian. The “moderate rebels” did exist. Assad responded as Dad would have done, with brute force, and also helpfully released jihadis from prison to add spice to the mixture. IMO there was a window of time between 2011 and 2013 when Obama might have been able to take effective action. That window closed with the collapse of the FSA and then Russia’s entry into the war. The Syrian war spiraling out of control and the ensuing refugee crisis did much to bring us Trump.

Now, of course, things are different. Assad can’t control the entire country no matter how vicious his tactics and there are those who will never stop fighting as long as he’s in power. It’s also not clear who would take his place or what would happen following his ouster. Awful, just awful.

Suzanne,

To get an idea of some of the realities on the ground at the moment the war started, I recommend highly the film “9 days – from my window in aleppo”. It won a price from the European Film Academy (so among other quality features, it includes no gore), is fairly short (13 minutes), and is available on youtube and other sources.

There is really nothing simple about this conflict. And I think it is obvious in hindsight that the best way to avoid the biblical calamity that has been unfolding the last few years would have been to never give any of the rebels any support.

= = = IMO there was a window of time between 2011 and 2013 when Obama might have been able to take effective action. = = =

I’ve read variations on this thought for every US intervention since the Korean War (and some for that one as well). I’d say it is a bit concerning that every single intervention is followed by the lamentation that if only the US had moved at the right time/bombed harder/picked the right side/bombed softer/sent troops/spoken the local language/not sent troops it would have worked out the way we had hoped. Perhaps rethinking of the concept is in order? Just a suggestion.

Cian @ 146: “They’re intelligence agencies. Propaganda and lying are part of the job description. Did you learn nothing from the Iraq war? Are you really this naive?” — Again (as in #82) I remind you the propaganda and lying of the Iraq war came straight from the White House, i.e. the politicians (often voiced by SecState Colin Powell), not from the military or civilian intelligence agencies… in fact, you may recall Cheney and his underlings (Scooter Libby was the only one convicted in the matter, then W commuted his prison sentence) actually outed a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, endangering all her field agents, because her husband, former diplomat Joe Wilson, had publicly contradicted one of those White House lies.

It should be obvious to all that religion is inherent to politics in most of the Middle East in the same way that race is in the US (or class in the UK). So “secular” politics is not going to fly, however much we wish it. Any discussion that ignores this obvious fact is off in cloud cuckoo land (as the Bush neo-cons were with regard to Iraq).

Which is not to say that religious affiliation is all-determining. It has to accommodate patronage ties, ethnicity and, of course, calculations of interest. And the non-Salafist groupings (eg the Shi’a in Iraq, the Kurds and the Damascus regime) are less focused on religion as a test than the Salafists, and so have been able to build much broader coalitions (around 10-20 per cent of the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Units – the anti-ISIS militias are Sunni).

Around half the Sunni population of Syria has stuck with Assad (along with pretty much all the Christians, Druze, Alawi and Shi’a). The rebel side is pretty much all Sunni, and had a strong Salafi component from day one. It could hardly have been otherwise – the Hama revolt brutally suppressed by Assad’s father started with a sectarian massacre of Alawi cadets and also had a strong Salafist component.

So there was probably no point where the US, or any outside force, could have imposed a “secular, moderate” solution, nor was there ever much chance that such a solution could emerge internally. Iraq is instructive – once the Sunni-dominated government was overthrown, the Shi’a were going to insist on the predominance their numbers and new-found political awareness gave them, and those Sunni who found this intolerable were going to resist. A third choice did not exist.

As for attacks on civilians, these have been part of war since forever. The laws of war are very elastic on the issue, and only vaguely applicable in wars where much of the fighting is done by irregulars. As an instance, the civilian population of a Christian town in Hama province recently took up arms en masse to resist a rebel assault (they succeeded). Under the laws of war they could have been shot out of hand. Regime helicopters drop barrel bombs; rebels lob barrels of explosives via rockets into government areas. Both sides try to starve the other out of besieged enclaves.

While there are strong arguments for preventing the use of biological or chemical weapons, the rest is pretty much standard war-fighting, as applied by every belligerent since war began (yes, including the US and every western armed force). If these things are not to happen, prevent wars. If war starts, try to keep it limited in extent and end it asap, as the worst peace is almost always better than any war. This last point seems to be lost on the US (and France and the UK), whose rhetorical indignation never takes account of the actual toll.

The barrel bomb thing was stupid. A barrel bomb is simply an improvised ordinance.

Criticizing the bombing of civilians is one thing (though it would be nice if the media could distinguish between punishment raids, and attacks on opposition controlled urban areas) – but to focus on the type of ordinance is idiotic.

Well ok, cluster bombs are pretty evil. People should definitely criticize the US for those.

Raven, there is currently a fact finding mission by the OPCW that is investigating the incident. If it determines chemical weapons were used (which still hasn’t happened), they will formally investigate.

This resolution was meaningless political theatre designed to either imply Syrian guilt (only the Syrians are deemed worthy of investigation), or to imply that the Russians are trying to hide something. I couldn’t find a copy of the resolution anywhere, but the NYT story would suggest that there were a couple of other poison pills buried in there as well. It was a PR exercise for the rubes, nothing more.

Meanwhile: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to support an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons into the chemical weapons attack in Syria last week, Turkish presidential sources say.

In a Thursday phone call, Erdogan stressed to his Russian counterpart that the use of chemical weapons was a crime against humanity, they said.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/04/14/russia-turkey-back-syria-gas-attack-probe

Cian @ 159: “… there is currently a fact finding mission by the OPCW that is investigating the incident. If it determines chemical weapons were used (which still hasn’t happened)…” — but according to the OPCW press release “their preliminary assessment [is] that this was a credible allegation.”

– and you can have a ‘Russian’ perspective of the whole clusterf… – but as the typical – actually very stereotypical Russian perspective is so widely known – and get’s recycled day in and day out by always the same arguments – the same words and expressions – it actually has become really boring propaganda – and is so easy to identify – that even f… facebook has caught on to it – so I suggest – if one has the desire to recycle some stale stereotypical ‘Russian Propaganda’ – try to mix it with some creative new expressions or ‘greater’ Trumplike words – like ‘beautiful’ – or even try some new -(the latest Beitbart-Approach) that all of it is conspiracy by Americas Blonds to bomb ‘Bigly’ out of the White House…

@156: The Russians violate international law as a matter of routine, targeting civilians and medical and rescue workers alike. Putin is indifferent to the lives of his own servicemen and has no compunction about lying about their deaths. The United States has also been guilty of many war crimes and dishonesties, but it hasn’t descended to that level just yet. (Of course, even as I write that I think of Trump making much of Sisi at the White House….)

The US bombed a hospital in Afghanistan last year and lied about it. While not on the same scale, the US military has lied about the deaths of their troops on many occasions (Pat Tilman anyone?). Part of the reason that the US relies so heavily on special forces is that their deaths can be denied if politically convenient.

How is that different? The US is using exactly the same tactics in Iraq against ISIS that Russia is using in Syria. You can’t fight a war like this in an urban environment without killing civilians. People seem to have accepted this for the US wars in Iraq, I fail to see why Syria is any different. Currently the US is supporting the Saudi’s utterly vicious, completely unnecessary and veering on genocidal Saudi war in Yemen. Where’s the condemnation of the TOTALLY deliberate targetting of civilians in Yemen by Saudi Arabia, the targetting of food production and the illegal blockade of imports (preventing essential medicines and food getting in). Where’s the condemnation by Rachel Maddow of the deliberate starvation of children in Yemen.

Yes Russia is supporting Assad. The US supports the awful Saudi and Egyptian regimes. Again, what is the distinction?

And of course if you want to go back further in time – US war crimes in Korea and Vietnam dwarve anything the Russians have ever done, including the utterly wretched wars in Chechneya. And of course the US would never, ever, meddle in the affairs of neighbouring countries in the Gulf, or S. America.

Condemn Russia all you want (though it would be nice if people bothered to understand it). It’s a corrupt gangster state. But don’t pretend that the US is better when it comes to the international stage.

#156 – There is another possibility, which is that there is an international push for a cease-fire and serious international engagement in peace talks, which leads to serious international engagement in reducing the tensions across the Middle East.

This would be very difficult, and would take a long time, but is the only way of getting to what everyone claims to want – peace and more accountable governments.

Guano @ 166: “… accusations that somebody is repeating Russian talking points.” — Not exactly. An example of an ‘accusation’ would be that somebody was a Russian or alt-right troll. When it is in fact known that Russia has been spreading talking points like #Syriahoax, identifying the repetition of those points here is merely an observation, not a personal accusation.

The repeaters might after all have innocently received their texts through emails from friends or relatives. Though is it quite so likely that they innocently continued to repeat the same material over and over despite having its Russian provenance pointed out to them?

Cian @ 170: “everyone who disagrees with you is a dupe of the Russians” — Wow, what a handwave. I did not refer to ‘every’ or ‘any’ ‘disagreement’, but to “When it is in fact known that Russia has been spreading talking points like #Syriahoax” — that link going to ABC News, ‘Analysts identify #SyriaHoax as Russian-fueled propaganda’, 13 April 2017.

“Incidentally the OPCW and the Security Council are different bodies. If you’re going to be quite so patronizing you should try to get some basic facts right.” — Perhaps you should re-read your own #164 that set the context:

[quoting Raven:] “But wait: the UN investigates many matters; and in #122 you yourself demanded the UN investigate this attack on civilians in Idlib Province, Syria.”
[Cian’s reply:] The OPCW did not request any of these things.

My #168 certainly recognizes that the two are different bodies, as it made the point that the OPCW Executive Council didn’t even meet to discuss the chemical gas attack until the day after Russia vetoed the UN’s condemnation of that attack. Oh, wait — you mean when you were posting #164, you did NOT recognize the difference?

#169

… and I’m pointing out, as politely as possible, that the provenance of my information, and comments, is a selection of very reputable academics who I have heard at meetings of very reputable institutions and who have had books published by very reputable publishers.

If there is some similarity with what Russians are saying, it may be because there is sometimes a grain of truth in Russian propaganda.

Guano @ 173: “Very reputable academics” have been fellow-travelers ere now, even for the old fascist and communist regimes; Julien Benda wrote about it. RT and Sputnik are using an MIT professor as one of their “very reputable” #Syriahoax voices.

Just “a grain of truth”? Need I explain to you the perils of swallowing such admixtures as just a grain of this amid a dollop of that? The grain’s the bait, the dollop’s the poison… or contains the hook.

I just wish our erstwhile interventionists would have the balls to come out with what they mean, and say , loud and proud, ‘Even though 1 week ago I was seriously arguing that there is literally no difference between Donald Trump and Hitler, now that he has started killing Arabs like Obama did, I suddenly realise that he actually has the potential to be a great President, and I now wish to state that I am fully in agreement with the general lineaments of his Syria policy, although I reserve the right to quibble about trivialities in order to convince myself (and gullible others) that I am an independent critical thinker’.

Please, really, have the courage to openly state that. As a position it has incomparably more dignity than hiding your real views behind racist anti-Slavic conspiracy theories and CIA psyops.

Guano @ 173: “Very reputable academics” have been fellow-travelers ere now, even for the old fascist and communist regimes; Julien Benda wrote about it. RT and Sputnik are using an MIT professor as one of their “very reputable” #Syriahoax voices.

At some point, there has to be some determination based in fact regarding what did and did not happen. You can’t just dismiss an argument because it’s advantageous for some other adversarial third party to agree with that argument. I don’t know if I’ve read every single link in this thread, but I’ve read a fair number of them, and it’s hard for me to say, based on the information presented, that the case for “Assad is using chemical weapons” is ironclad. He might or might not be, and the way to establish that is with an open inquiry, with data available for public scrutiny.

nastywoman @178 I skip most of your posts because I do not understand them. (It was my words that attracted my attention to your comment.) But since you wish to stand with Raven and Guano and such, very well. Yes, claiming that the Russian government conspired to conceal Syria’s chemical weapons after Obama threatened general war in the theater, only to openly use them when they are winning the war and there was no great tactical advantage but enormous political disadvantage and that this is so manifestly obvious, is to advocate an ludicrous Russian Conspiracy. Pretending this Russian Conspiracy is sensible while another Russian Conspiracy isn’t, is shameless nonsense that only diverts from the government. To coin a word, stoogery. Petty and unpaid, but stoogery nonetheless.

@Everyone
This thread has a serious problem with degenerating into Whataboutism and Tu Quoque fallacies. The more you accuse others of being a shill, the more you undermine the ability of anyone to have a valid opinion to be criticized. This is actually a powerful strategy for shutting down meaningful conversation on the internet. To support this, I’d like to point you to this article about how the usage of the concept of a “shill” has undermined relevant anti-Putin conversation in Russia: https://nobsrussia.com/2016/12/14/so-you-live-in-a-dictatorship-part-i-you-have-no-beliefs/. A similar concept is currently being perpetrated by the Alt-Right (if everyone is a shill, no one has a monopoly on truth, and in that case appeal to lowest-common-denominator tactics win).

What does this mean to the tone of this and future conversations about Russian and US foreign policy? As @steven t johnson and @Jerry Vinokurov have implied, make a positive case for your position and support it with real evidence (or the best circumstantial evidence that you have). Implying that someone else is parroting certain talking points to undermine the substance of their argument is a Guilt By Association fallacy and engenders fundamental mistrust and chaos. Given the number of different antagonistic groups and positions available, almost anything anyone says is likely to be in line with a certain set of talking points and any such tactics degrade the ability to have a conversation.

@John Holbo
Please, please institute a warning/probation/ban system on accusations such as “shill” or “parroting RT/CIA/Putin/Trump talking points”. Even if the interlocutors in question are in fact shills or parroting talking points, the damage of the accusation (given how easy it is to deploy and how difficult it is to prove/disprove) is greater on the ability to establish meaningful conversation than the damage sustained by curtailment of speech. This kind of thing has very real consequences to the health of online communities and their ability to pick apart and study the veracity of the arguments at hand. If you need moderators, then I’m sure some of us (myself included) would be happy to volunteer to maintain a certain level of argument in good faith.

At some point, there has to be some determination based in fact regarding what did and did not happen.

http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/02_04_44.html

@165: The Pentagon did indeed change its story about the bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz. President Obama was appalled and promptly ordered an investigation. The President apologized, investigations were undertaken, and reparations are being made.

Was that sufficient? No. Were the measures taken by the Pentagon adequate? No. Did the bombing meet the definition of a war crime? Very possibly. Is it the equivalent of Russian (and Syrian government forces) routinely targeting field hospitals and first responders? Not in my view.

@183
@Everyone
”This thread has a serious problem with degenerating into Whataboutism…”

Completly agreed –

‘Whataboutism is a term describing a propaganda technique used by the Soviet Union in its dealings with the Western world during the Cold War. When criticisms were levelled at the Soviet Union, the response would be “What about…” followed by the naming of an event in the Western world.[1][2] It represents a case of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy),[3] a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent’s position by asserting the opponent’s failure to act consistently in accordance with that position, without directly refuting or disproving the opponent’s initial argument.”

And I absolutely agree with @steven t johnson and @Jerry Vinokurov – when they make a positive case for a position and support it with real evidence (or the best circumstantial evidence that you have).

BUT what IF – in a thread commenters make ‘a positive case for a position and support it with real evidence (or the best circumstantial evidence that you have)’ – and then – only then ‘Whataboutism” shows up? –
And then some commenters point to this ”Whataboutism’ – and to the fact that such ”Whataboutism’ – it is widely known ‘Russian Propaganda’.
And there were NO words about ‘shills’ or accusing other commenters to be ‘shills’ – there was just pointing to the fact – that some words and expressions which were used -(‘by accident?) were often recycled words or ‘Russian Propaganda’ – or… ‘Whataboutism’.

So the reminder about ‘Whataboutism’ is very helpful.

Thank you @183

… and the pro-Putin left. Jesus we even have people around here saying they wouldn’t vote if it was Fillion vs. Le Pen.

And proudly so! Before hearing your convincing arguments why I should vote for a candidate you don’t even know how to spell the name, let me check: you do realize that Fillon is Putin’s closest ally among the candidates, right?

Pavel @ 183: “This thread has a serious problem with degenerating into Whataboutism and Tu Quoque fallacies.” — Even Donald Trump, as President, did that defending Putin vs. the US:

O’Reilly: “But [Putin]’s a killer.”Trump: “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?”

Boris Nemtsov and Denis Voronenkov, among other Putin critics, might have explained the difference to Trump… if they’d still been alive.

I do think it is worth noting who engages in these fallacies, and who does not. It is not generally a case of “both sides are equally at fault.”

(Although Faustusnotes @ 188 par#1 is also saying in effect “you too”, it is the satirical rebuttal, reductio ad absurdum.)

“The more you accuse others of being a shill….” — Once again (as in #169) I point out the difference between accusing a person of being a shill, and observing the fact that known Russian-sourced propaganda (e.g. #Syriahoax) is being repeated here. And I note that Suzanne’s #119 and Faustusnotes’s #150 also deny personal accusations.

As for instituting a ban on warnings about incursions of propaganda/”fake-news” talking points, my goodness, won’t that leave us prey for every single scam to come down the pike? Fakers purely love to put out fakery of every possible type (not just pro-Putin and pro-Assad); a bunch of media just got taken on an item about a married couple wanting IVF who upon genetic testing proved to be fraternal twins (they’d both been adopted, so they didn’t know)… utterly false, made up, from a spurious website for a nonexistent newspaper. By such a rule as yours, if the original item was cited, no-one here could even say that it was fake. … Or would it be only fake news in favor of “RT/CIA/Putin/Trump” that would have this special protection? Right now, that’s how you’ve phrased it.

So there would be freedom to repeat lies, but not freedom to call out those lies and tell the truth about them….

@Raven

“That’s an interesting race-based point of view.”

Nothing to do with race:
-Wikipedia

I agree with the rest of your points though.

@nastywoman/@Everyone

Regarding any questions of inadvertent/intended parallels to known sources of propaganda, I would make the argument that any accusation of “parroting RT talking points” and “CIA psyops” is inherently counter-productive to any reasonable form of debate. I figured that on this forum, with it’s fairly high adherence to academic standards (most of you are supposed to be academics, right?), being cautious of or even self-critical about the nature of the sources in question would be the base state. It’s possible to imply that someone’s opinions seem to parallel those of a known propaganda outlet (literally any state agent, media or proxy these days), but I wouldn’t read anything serious into those parallels. So long as people attempt to provide citations for their opinions and acknowledge the basic unreliability of many of these sources, it’s possible to have a functional conversation. Actively avoiding whataboutism and guilt by association fallacies is fundamental to maintaining some form of honesty. Transparency and self-criticism of sources is the only way to tamp down the paranoia.

She advocates forging a privileged partnership with Russia. She has said that a French-Russian partnership is necessitated by “obvious civilization and geostrategic factors” as well as France’s “energy security interests”. In her view, “France’s interests are in Europe, but in Great Europe, especially including its partnership with Russia”.[280] Interviewed by Kommersant, she said “the process of demonization of Russia is taking place at the level of the EU leadership and at the wishes of the US, which is trying to create a unipolar world.” Interviewed about democracy in Russia and Vladimir Putin, she replied: “We also do not have an ideal democracy in France and, therefore, do not have the right to give Russia lessons in democracy. But I openly admit that, to some extent, I admire Vladimir Putin. He makes mistakes, but who doesn’t? The situation in Russia is complicated, and one cannot expect all the problems stemming from the collapse of the Soviet Union to be quickly resolved – they require time. I think that Vladimir Putin has principles and a vision of the future that is necessary to ensure Russia’s prosperity, which it deserves.[74][281]

The National Front considers that Ukraine has been subjugated by the United States, through the Ukrainian Crisis. The National Front denounces anti-Russian sentiment in Eastern Europe and the submission of Western Europe to NATO’s interests in the region.[341] Marine Le Pen is very critical against the threats of sanctions directed by the international community against Russia: “European countries should seek a solution through diplomacy rather than making threats that could lead to an escalation.” She argues that the United States are leading a new Cold War against Russia. She sees no other solution for peace in Ukraine than to organize a kind of federation that would allow each region to have a large degree of autonomy.[342] She thinks Ukraine should be sovereign and free as any other nations.[268] According to Russian media, Le Pen has promised to recognize the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea (from Ukraine) in case she is elected President of France.[343] On 3 January 2017 she told BFM TV “I do not believe that there was an illegal annexation: there was a referendum, the citizens of Crimea wanted to join Russia.”[344]

I note that steven t johnson @ 194 and Pavel @ 196 both “correct” me by offering two different definitions of “white propaganda” — (1) that it uses “genuine facts and objective arguments” [nothing said about its origin]; (2) that it “truthfully states its origin” [nothing said about its facts or arguments]. Apparently the term hasn’t been standardized yet, but “truthfulness” of some sort is implied either way.

As applied to the claim “RT is a white propaganda outlet…”: broadcast screens and webpages are clearly marked with the RT logo and other indicia, so definition (2) “truthfully states its origin” is met.

Regarding (1) “genuine facts and objective arguments” — you are aware, aren’t you, that RT anchors Sara Firth and Liz Wahl both quit RT stating otherwise?

If March 2017’s “How Russia Weaponizes Fake News” from StopFake.org is insufficiently neutral for you, try Wikipedia’s RT (TV network), as neutrality is one of their editing criteria.

I can live with the idea that RT publishes lies, but then, so does the new york times now and then. And CNN, etc. In the end, any media source provides incomplete and noisy information, and that is just the way it is. That’s why you read more than one if you want to have an idea of what is going on. RT at least reports about Yemen and the war against the Kurds inside of Turkey, and at least some of it isn’t all lies. What do you want? Purity and Perfection? Relax, it’s just media.

I can live with the idea that Russia is a corrupt and crazy state but – which state isn’t that? Certainly not the US of A, with Trump in the WH, its Kochs, its bailed out banks and “Home Snatchers” (c.f. Matt Taibbi on foreclosure courts), police impunity, etc. I mean, what’s the problem everybody has with Russia? Is that antipathy anything else than Russophobia?

I can live with the idea that Mr. Assad isn’t Mother Theresa. But did the areas where he lost his iron grip burst out into spontaneous Betty Dodson workshops and Christopher Street Days? Or did something entirely different happen?

Cian @ 198: “HRC was a bad candidate who lost. … I dunno, maybe the white haired guy with zero charisma who draws massive crowds because of his policies is onto something.” — Yet HRC is the candidate who got 60% of the delegates in the primary, and led Trump in the general election’s popular vote by a 2.1% margin, so if “draw” is your criterion….

Oh, but the candidate who won the popular vote also had her voters heavily targeted by the opposition for voter suppression around the country, enough to lose critical Electoral College votes, and her reputation repeatedly targeted for baseless smears by both her primary and general opponents as well as Putin and the well-funded (alt-)right… but then Al Gore and John Kerry had also been heavily targeted for smears, so no doubt any Democratic candidate in the general election would have been (and will be) subjected to the same sort of attack. In short, that’s not due to being a “bad candidate” but due to the sort of campaigns the other side runs now.

‘I can live with the idea that RT publishes lies, but then, so does the new york times now and then.’

Yeah – but even the NYT hasn’t invented ‘Whataboutism’ – that honor entirely goes to our Russian friends.

Clan,
While your general line of argument is thoughtful and appreciated, it is made a bit less strong by your use of the Helms/Limbaugh/Rove attack tactic of misnaming the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party”. The charter and the incorporation documents of that membership organization, available online, clearly list its proper name. Deliberately using a different name than that chosen by a person, membership organization, etc is generally considered insulting.

faustusnotes @ post: “[Trump’s] supposedly left wing apologists” — There may be need for a term like “alt-left”, and increasingly I suspect “alt-” of conveying exactly the same meaning as KellyAnne Conway’s “alternative” in the phrase “alternative facts”… to wit, ‘not really ___ but in the service of something else entirely’.

Cranky Observer @ 207: Good catch. In a different and completely unrelated context, it’s that sort of slip that occasionally betrayed trolls on Democratic-leaning blogs, when they’d say, e.g., “As a lifetime member of the Democrat Party, *I* believe we should do XYZ” — but once called out on that solecism, would softly and silently vanish away under that username, alas only to be replaced by other usernames advocating along the same lines.

Cranky Observer: Oh okay, not sure I understand the insult, but appreciated.

FWIW, a friend of mine who is a big local supporter of Hillary Clinton, and who is very active in local politics (he also donated the maximum allowable) calls them the Democrat party.

Raven, Voronenkov was killed by a Ukranian fascist. And if I was going to highlight victims of Putin I probably wouldn’t choose a corrupt ultra-liberal like Nemtsov. The extraordinary Anna Politkovskaya would be a more obvious choice.

While my strict adherence to the RT line (whatever that is) is apparently obvious to you – you haven’t actually given any examples.

– ‘But, to be candid, I think nastywoman is a devout believer in “Whataboutism,” and is just pretending for tactical reasons.’

To be candid – and I think I truthfully hinted ‘it’ – I was ‘amazed’ about the success of ‘Whataboutism’ -(especially during the US erection) – but as I also hinted – I think IT doesn’t work ‘that well’ anymore – as it had been yugely overdone… and Von Clownstick -(and his fans) have given ‘Whatboutism’ such a bad name – that we should prefer other – not as easily detectable ‘types of Propaganda’.

steven t johnson @ 212: “Raven@199 claims that a propaganda organ of the Russian state was entirely surprised…” — I made no claim about the “surprise” or other ’emotions’ of any organization.

“The NYT publishes lies on a regular basis. Notorious example: Iraqi WMDs.” — Beyond simply reporting as news what was said by the George W. Bush White House (which in the case of WMDs were lies), the NYT’s Judith Miller was specifically complicit:

Long criticised for the strong anti-Islamic bias in her writing, Miller became embroiled in controversy after her coverage of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion was discovered to have been based on the inaccurate information in the intelligence investigations, particularly those stories that were based on sourcing from the now-disgraced Ahmed Chalabi. The New York Times later determined that a number of stories she had written for the paper were inaccurate. According to commentator Ken Silverstein, Miller’s Iraq reporting “effectively ended her career as a respectable journalist.” Miller acknowledged in The Wall Street Journal on April 4, 2015 that some of her Times coverage was inaccurate…. Miller was later involved in the Plame Affair…. Miller later was forced to resign from her job at the New York Times in November 2005. Later, she was a contributor to the Fox News Channel….

Miller being forced to resign gives some hint as to whether this is acceptable behavior. You might as well have cited the made-up and plagiarized articles of Jayson Blair, likewise forced to resign from the NYT, as evidence the NYT had a policy of fabulism and plagiarism. After all, it had published Blair’s articles too….

Cian @ 215: “Voronenkov was killed by a Ukranian fascist.” — Yet others state he “was planted by Russian services as an undercover agent”, that “the murder was likely a contract killing”, making this an act of Russian “state terrorism”.

“I probably wouldn’t choose a corrupt ultra-liberal like Nemtsov.” — Compare the neutrally edited Wiki-bio of Boris Nemtsov, e.g. this excerpt:

[As First Deputy Prime Minister 1977-1998 under Yeltsin] He ended the corrupt act of stashing budget funds in commercial banks. He also managed to introduce an anti-corruption law for all state purchases in the government. He also helped to end the illegal export of raw materials and made oil sales more transparent. … According to The Economist, Nemtsov, unlike many other top government figures, “emerged from the troubled 1990s with his reputation intact.”

[In 2011 Nemtsov said:] “There is a myth spreading about how, in the 1990s, we democrats were pals with oligarchs while Putin was fighting them. It was exactly the other way around. We did not let Berezovsky get a foothold in [the world’s largest natural gas company] Gazprom, we did not allow him to take over the Svyazinvest company [Russia’s largest telecom holding]. Yet Putin used to go to his birthday parties and bring flowers to his wife. It was Berezovsky who lobbied for Putin to become president and then financed his campaign.”

So what a remarkably… inverted… remark it is to call Nemtsov “a corrupt ultra-liberal”.

Cian @ 215: “While my strict adherence to the RT line (whatever that is) is apparently obvious to you – you haven’t actually given any examples.” — Compare your defense of Putin on the grounds that “Voronenkov was killed by a Ukranian fascist” to this RT article from 25 March 2017: “The latest reports from Ukraine identify Parshov as a Ukrainian ‘fascist’….”

Cited as the source “from Ukraine” is another .ru website with the name “ukrainia”, so cute….

Is that black or grey propaganda? In the “origin” sense, that is?

– and @219 and @212 and the NYT –
I love the NYT – absolutely ‘love’ the paper – as it has the best ‘Arts’ section of any newspaper -(I know) – in the world – and for that Art section I even forgave the NYT that they didn’t endorse Bernie in the ‘erection’ – and in this spirit I would like to give a… shoutout to the least ‘artful’ example of Whatouboutism on this whole threat.

THE –
‘I can live with the idea that RT publishes lies, but WHATABOUT the new york times?

And I understand that the commenter who ‘originally’ produced the ‘Whataboutism’ didn’t use the words ‘what about’ at all – as she/he wrote: ‘I can live with the idea that RT publishes lies, ‘but then’, so does the new york times now and then’.

BUT then @212 added on to it by coming to the conclusion that the NYT ‘publishes lies on a regular basis’ – without using the newly – and very un-artfully created example of ‘classical Whataboutism’ – as his example – when he tried to proof that ‘Whataboutism’ was as ‘old’? – as
“The abolition of slavery was a good thing.”
“But, what about the obscene corruption and repression by the scalawags and carpetbaggers?” (AKA the Dunning school.)

But I really would have liked to have these… ‘exhibits’ for may paper about ‘The Language of the Internet’.

Raven@219 misses the absurdity of his claim that RT is a propaganda service that deliberately hires starry eyed idealists for anchors, taking less care for vetting ideological commitment than Fox News does. But then, Raven also claims that Judith Miller was the one who fooled the NYT about WMD, for personal reasons presumably. Like Raven, the NYT would like us all to believe that, and for none of us to have the sense to see Miller as a scapegoat. (Except, technically, scapegoats are actually innocent, unlike Miller and her comrades.)

Faustusnotes’ comment assumes the US government and its allies have the right to openly attack nation after nation for decade upon decade. Those poor souls in Seoul under the threat of Commie artillery can attack the Vietnamese and that’s a justly peaceful nation, but the north just having artillery is insupportable. The real claim here is that some people do not have the right to live. If the people in the south feel threatened they can try to make peace. But, like Faustusnotes, they define peace as victory, which does not admit of human beings outside of American dominion.

nastywoman @ 223: Re #212’s “… conclusion that the NYT ‘publishes lies on a regular basis’….” — I presume that could be justified by pointing to (1) the NYT, as paper of record, is obliged to report statements by the President of the United States, even blatant liars like George W. Bush or Donald J. Trump; the Op-Ed and Letters section, which contains such opposing and contradictory claims they cannot possibly all be true; (3) the advertisements. It will be noted (by others) that none of these are claims by the NYT itself.

steven t johnson @ 225: “Raven@219 misses the absurdity of his claim that RT … deliberately hires starry eyed idealists….” — And last time you said I claimed they were “surprised”. Nothing like either one of these claims did I make, which would be why I missed any such absurdity. Really, Steven, whom do you suppose it persuades when you falsely attribute claims to me? Anyone who has read this thread, or who can scroll back? And of what, other than your tendency to dishonest attribution? (Not, I should think, helpful to you for persuading anyone of anything.)

“But then, Raven also claims that Judith Miller was the one who fooled the NYT about WMD…” — I’ll put that down to mere careless reading on your part, presuming you somehow failed to notice the boldfaced link and subsequent long blockquote of text (not my own) which you are now falsely attributing to me.

Raven, quoting the Economist on Russia is like quoting RT on Chechneya. Actually that rule should probably apply to quoting the Economist on almost any subject.

My favorite of Nemtsov’s reforms was that he decreed that government tenders had to be open, transparent and competitive – except when a closed tender was deemed the best method. An old trick, but still an effective one. He was caught on tape accepting a bribe. There was the rigged sale of Svyazinvest he was responsible for (where the young turks responsible all received very large book advances shortly afterwards). These are just a few that stick out. And honestly, the man was one of Yeltsin’s cronies. That should really be enough to damn anyone. I think he ended up in Kasparov’s and Liminov’s bizarre bunch of far right loons at the end, though I could be misremembering I guess.

And this is Nemtsov on incoming authoritarian Putin:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/05/opinion/russia-s-best-bet.html?pagewanted=print
Some critics have questioned Mr. Putin’s commitment to democracy. True, he is no liberal democrat, domestically or internationally. Under his leadership Russia will not become France. The government will, however, reflect the Russian people’s desire for a strong state, a functioning economy, and an end to tolerance for robber barons — in short, a ”ruble stops here” attitude. Russia could do considerably worse than have a leader with an unwavering commitment to the national interest.

As for the murders of Voronenkov… Unless I’m misremembering, the murderer was a member of the Azov battalion. That Ukranian fascists hate Russians and had a serious problem with Voronenkov is hardly startling news. Or we could choose to believe a complicated conspiracy theory about Russian sleeper agents with no serious facts. But you know, there are some that say the Clintons committed satanic child murders in a Pizza Restaurant. I suppose you think we should take them more seriously as well.

As for Judith Miller. True they fired her when the pressure and embarrassment became too much. Michael R. Gordon is still there and still writing the same kinds of stories 15 years later.

– and for the final my favorite ‘whataboutism’

What about F…face von Clownstick?
Didn’t we talk about him in the first place and then got sidetracked by all kind of other ‘stuff’

And whatabout using a new ‘Whataboutism’ for ‘the Orange Interventionist’?
A self-righteous landfill of angry garbage’ and I know that this ‘synonym’ was created for another ‘self-righteous landfill of angry garbage’ but whatabout using this new and very artful expression for ALL of them?

Cian: “What’s the going rate for Ralph Nader at auto company trade shows?”

You mean this Ralph Nader? The one inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame? The same Automotive Hall of Fame run by executives from Bridgestone, NAPA auto parts, Ford Motor Company, Goodyear, General Motors, Toyota, and the National Automotive Dealer’s Association?

Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

http://www.automotivehalloffame.org/inductee/ralph-nader/848/

Cian, you seem to be saying that Nemtsov had it coming, or we shouldn’t care if Putin killed him.

Steven t johnson, the north doesn’t just “have artillery”. Perhaps you aren’t aware, but North Korea has a large, heavily protected artillery installation within firing range of Seoul, and has also set up the ability to deliver a massive air attack with just a few minutes’ warning (most people say about 6). The general presumption is that if the north decides to strike the south it will cause enormous damage in Seoul that cannot be prevented. This is why not launching preemptive strikes is a good thing. I don’t know what you’re going on about with regards to south Korea attacking Vietnam, but my comment was certainly not presaged on the idea the US can attack whoever they want whenever they want – quite the opposite. For peace in Asia the minimum precondition is that nobody provokes north Korea. Provoking north Korea will lead to a massive conflagration with the potential to kill millions, even if the north doesn’t have functioning nuclear or chemical weapons.

Of course, if your view is that America is always bad and nothing is anyone else’s fault, then I guess it might seem reasonable for Kim Jong-Un to have a bad hair day and decide to obliterate a few million people. Or should I say “people”, since they apparently don’t count enough in your estimation for you to consider what might happen to them when your supposedly non-interventionist cheeto jesus has a bad hair day.

faustusnotes@235 Shrieking about how Kim Jong-un is a maniac who might obliterate millions of people on a whim is not a criticism of US policy, not even Trump’s. It is the south and its master the US which are unstable, unreliable and confused. (This is a charitable interpretation, as by a saint.) The only consistency is murderous hostility to the north. You cannot pretend to be a critic of provocations against the north when you agree with the premise that the existence of a north that can retaliate against attack is an existential terror. If that were true, there is no provoking the north, there is only self-defense. The thing is, it is not true.

The Syria coverage, like the Max Fisher NYT piece on Korea (link above,) is every bit as rotten as RT is alleged to be. There is mews that accepts the US government claims as authoritative and conducts itself at all times as serving the national interest, ultimately as represented by the government. And then there is the coverage by outfits like RT, which don’t, and therefore are wholly unacceptable to CT and the larger part of its commentariat.

Cian @ post: “I’m not sure whether I trust Ukrainian officials less than I trust Russian ones.” — When in #230 I said “Consider the respective sources” it was in reply to your #229‘s “But you know, there are some that say the Clintons committed satanic child murders….” – – – so are you now letting slip Russian officials were your sources, your “some that say”? Or is this merely a bait-and-switch of the topic?

A look at Michael R. Gordon’s Wiki-bio, comparing his professional reputation for accuracy to Judith Miller’s, might explain the difference in their treatment; e.g. his book “Cobra II [on the Iraq War starting 2003], which ‘focuses on the rushed and haphazard preparations for war and the appalling relations between the major players,’ won praise from Lawrence Freedman in Foreign Affairs, who wrote that ‘the research is meticulous and properly sourced, the narrative authoritative, the human aspects of conflict never forgotten.’” (I’ll omit the NYT’s own glowing praise.)

“The Nemtsov quote that I pulled out states explicitly that he was fine with all the things that Putin went on to do (and he knew that Putin was going to do them).” — Written when Putin was still “incoming”, as you said before; yet Nemtsov knew all the things that Putin was going to go on to do; filling his own pockets and locking himself into power and murdering critics… wait, where in that essay are all these things predicted? or praised?

I invite you and everyone else to compare your rendition of Thor Halvorssen with Wikipedia’s neutrally-edited bio.

“There are many heroes and martyrs in Russia, but none of them are politicians.” — Would that be why Russian police had to violently suppress massive protests and arrest hundreds of protestors including their leaders (like Alexei Navalny) just recently?

Mario

“What about X” is, often enough, the only recourse against someone being a hypocrite.

Hypocrisy is common enough in human affairs that most of us have probably been hypocritical at some time, and all of us have probably encountered it in others, but I don’t get why a recourse against it is supposed to be needed. If I were to be hypocritical, why why would you need recourse against that? If you were to be hypocritical, why would I need recourse against that?

‘Corruption’ is one of those things that somehow don’t happen in decent countries. They must be really decent, so that it never happens. Or perhaps, which is my observation, this is so by definition, so that absolutely blatant things never get labelled corruption in those “decent countries”, yet basically anything the Russians do is corrupt. Or the Venezuelans. Or whoever needs to be delegitimized. Which must be a very convenient thing for some people. It is always puzzling and surprising how the decent/indecent split somehow always happens to align with the same petroleum power games.

(And the Halvorsens of this world are an important component of these power games. I’m not impressed by his Wikipedia bio.)

The discussion on North Korea is characteristically inaccurate and uncharitable. Good points have been made here and there, but here’s the basics.

The US and North Korea have not yet signed any peace agreement to a conflict that began more than five decades ago. So, the question of attack, or the right to attack is somewhat inaccurate. What exists is a state of war interrupted by a fifty-plus year period of truce, a truce that could realistically end at any time with the only ‘crime’ being which side broke the truce first and for what reason.

One can assert that sides are keen to destroy the other, but the more likely case is that both North Korea and the US would much prefer a peace treaty signed. North Korea wants to keep a substantial arsenal and retain the right to depose the ‘capitalist’ regime in the south. The US wants peace with Kim either out of power, or unable to menace others in the region. Japanese foreign policy wants no resolution to the conflict and opposes reconciliation between north and south. Why? Because if Koreans are in a permanent state of ‘civil war’ (ideally without bullets flying) then their attentions remain fixed on each other, rather than on the nation that invaded and colonized one hundred years ago. The status quo works just fine for Japan. Missing from the discussion on Korea and the Trump armada is the effect US carrier groups parked off Korea have on the newly-constructed Chinese bases in the Korean/South China/Japan sea. Trump is publicly praising China while at the same time making it perfectly clear who controls this section of north-east Asia. We may yet see some sort of blow and one can’t rule out something really bad. Ideally, we’ll see some sort of Romania style collapse with the criminals hounded from power by oppressed with a minimum of blood-shed. Both China and Russia seem to concerned about a flood of refugees pouring across the border. I’m not convinced China is all that happy propping Kim up and wouldn’t be too greatly vexed were he forced from power. The US already has substantial forces in Korea and Japan. Practically nobody in Korea wants bloodshed from what I can see despite the sabre-rattling. But Kim is the distraction – the real target is the negation of the Chinese bases and a (temporary?) end of Chinese expansionism at the expense of Viet Nam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Japan.

Syria is a very different set of problems.

Mario @ 243: “… absolutely blatant things never get labelled corruption in those ‘decent countries’…” — Somehow you have missed hearing of such industries as Halliburton, Enron, and Arthur Andersen, and people like Bernie Madoff,
Dennis Kozlowski, and Bernard Ebbers. Even recently I’ve noticed the word “corrupt” has been bandied about concerning the current President of the United States; for instance, this little bit hit my Google News front page big-print headlines and stayed up for a week… but then it was in my personalized GN section that searches for items about corruption. I get items there all the time, including on occasion (with great schadenfreude) Republican politicians removed from office and sometimes even sent to prison. If you’re not seeing anything get labelled corruption, maybe you too should go looking for it….

Mario, I worked at the front line of treatment and intervention for drug dependence and street-based youth in the 1990s and I watched as my country changed from a corrupt and evil system in which the police aided criminals while medical and social welfare services turned a blind eye, to a system in which drug dealing was actively targeted by police and children were protected from abuse. It really is the case that we can do better, and corruption is not baked into the system. If we try we can fix these problems. It’s not just rhetoric and useful propaganda tools to talk about this stuff.

Cian @248

Thank you. FWIW – I thought the accusation that you were excusing his murder to be grossly unfair and well over the line, even for an internet comment thread. I disagree with you on the ‘whitewashing’ of the Yeltsin years, and think it’s more that the US media has always been bad at covering for’n parts, and Russia coverage has always suffered from the unwillingness of foreign hacks to travel far beyond St. Petersburg and Moscow.

I’m afraid I do have to take issue with the assumption of a moral equivalence between US and Russian foreign policy and military interventions. Whatever one thinks of recent US/NATO bombing campaigns, they have made genuine attempts to reduce civilian casualties, avoid striking vital facilities like hospitals, admitted when they have failed to do so and placed clear limits on their application of lethal force. This is why Raqqa, and other major population centres held by ISIS are not currently smoldering heaps of rubble and glass devoid of any life more advanced than a cockroach. By contrast, the Russian campaign in Syria has been marked by consistent deliberate targeting of hospitals, bakeries and other facilities without military value but vital for sustaining human life. This is because Moscowhas embraced a strategy of deliberately making it impossible for civilians to survive in rebel controlled areas, forcing them to choose between death or Assad. And when called out, they have lied about their actions, constantly and shamelessly, to the point of claiming their actions have been directed against ISIS when in truth they barely laid a glove on them. No military action can be entirely stripped of barbarity, but the Kremlin has made barbarism central to its methods, and they aren’t even embarrassed about it. This is before we get to Ukraine.

Raven @240

In its heyday the eXile – while scabrous – did some damn fine reporting. I attended the launch of a Very Serious Paper by a Very Serious Person on the 2006 siloviki war a couple of years back. The paper was indeed of very high quality, the result of some very hard work and good research by said Very Serious Person, whose Very Serious status is well deserved (genuinely, lest the caps be mistaken for sarcasm). Doing some additional reading on the topic that night I found an eXile article written just after the war had ended. Its narrative and conclusions were largely identical to the Very Serious Paper. Keep in mind that the subjects are the kind of people who no sane person would want to get on the bad side of, or even be paid attention by.

Taibbi himself has continued to be a fine journalist IMHO. Alas, I don’t think the same can be said of Ames. Leaving aside the personal stuff, ironically he seems to have made the same journey that so many Russians persecuted by the KGB and its successors have, towards a kind of permanent Stockholm syndrome. Hence the parroting of the ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ nonsense, and the ‘Yeltsin was a puppet of American neoliberals who neoliberalled their neoliberalling ways into Russia and got neoliberalism everywhere and generally neoliberalised up the place.’ There are lots of very valid criticisms of economic policy in 90’s Russia to be made, but Ames is of the school that never bothers to consider that maybe – just maybe – that 70-odd years of communist economics administered by mediocrities who spent their time lying to each other about beet production while drinking themselves to death had something to do with it too.

Mario @243

“‘Corruption’ is one of those things that somehow don’t happen in decent countries.”

Actually, it does. The thing is, in functional democratic states it tends to be detected and punished by law enforcement agencies, whereas in highly corrupt states – such as the examples you cite – it isn’t. Nor do westerners generally take a ‘it doesn’t happen here’ approach to corruption. If you look at the Eurobarometer or Transparency International stats versus observed cases you’ll find that in lots of western democracies the citizenry tends to substantially overestimate the prevalence of official corruption (this is especially the case in my own homeland of Ireland, where a number of high profile scandals during the 80’s and early 90’s have cast a very long shadow it does).

Daragh @ 251: “ a kind of permanent Stockholm syndrome” — Hmm, would that (on the having-been-blackmailed/extorted hypothesis) also explain Trump’s actions like his recent near-endorsement of Marine Le Pen, who would at least partially withdraw from NATO… after all Trump’s previous demands for allies to make more contributions to NATO?

steven t johnson

That war has never ended. If the people of the south felt so threatened they would try to make peace. They don’t. This is a concrete proof of the unreality of the supposed threat to us that you pretend to fear.

If this kind of reasoning makes sense, it should surely apply equally in both directions. Do the people of the north feel more or less threatened than the people of the south? Are they making make more or less effort to achieve peace? Is the supposed threat to them more or less unreal?

In the run-up to the French election, around 25% of French social media feeds is fake news linked to Russian sources & supporting the far right:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-voters-deluge-fake-news-stories-facebook-twitter-russian-influence-days-before-election-a7696506.html

steven t johnson @ 256: “There is no moral equivalence between the US and Russia…. The US is much worse.” — Nope, no Russian propaganda is being repeated here….

steven t johnson

There’s a familiar device in comedy which has a number of variants and one general form of which is something like this:

A: ‘Is it X or is it Y?’
B: ‘Yes’
A: ‘Do you mean “Yes, it’s X” or “Yes, it’s Y”?’
B: ‘No’

I posed three questions, each of which was in the form ‘Is it more or is it less?’ and you provided responses which you prefaced, respectively, ‘Yes’, ‘Yes’, and ‘No’. Those are not actual answers to my questions. This suggests that you provided responses without considering the structure of my questions.

What really makes me think that the substantive content of your responses was written without considering the structure of my questions is this. If I ask you ‘Is Pat older than Nat or younger than Nat?’ and you respond ‘Pat is old enough to vote’, then you haven’t answered my question; and what you have written doesn’t answer my questions in essentially the same way.

steven t johnson @ 262: “The contrast between casualties of US invasions and subversions and Soviet invasions and subversions is evidence that can’t be disappeared….” — Indeed. Yet you appear to think it can be. How odd. For instance, you must not be counting the occupation of the Baltic states (with the resulting deportations and deaths), or the Iron Curtain’s casualties, or the Soviet–Afghan War’s casualties, to the Soviet account.

Raven @253

No. Trump is pro Le Pen because they are both racist authoritarians.

Steven T Johnson @ all over the place

“The contrast between casualties of US invasions and subversions and Soviet invasions and subversions is evidence that can’t be disappeared by psychotic ravings about Soviet propaganda.”

So the Holdomor, Katyn Massacre, invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan didn’t happen then? Good to know!

“The US, via the CIA and its subordinates Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have financed and armed IS.”

You do know InfoWars is not a reliable source of information right? Even Alex Jones himself admits he’s doing schtick at this point.

“If so the question of how someone can get smeared with nerve toxin by someone not wearing protective gear that still somehow does not get poisoned would be asked.”

VX is generally stored as a precursor chemical that only becomes lethal when mixed with an additional chemical agent. Entirely coincidentally, two women were involved in the attack on Kim Jong-Nam, where basic intelligence tradecraft would suggest a single assassin would be preferable. Incidentally, one of those women subsequently displayed symptoms of VX poisoning. Of course, the latter report comes from the Malaysian police, who are running dogs and lackeys of the imperialist swine.

“The threat to the north is entirely real, unlike the alleged threat to the south. The threat to the south is the threat of retaliation. The threat to the north is one of massive aggression by the US and its southern puppets. This is particularly true given the dire instability of the southern regime.”

[E-mails CT administrators to see if they’ve noticed any activity from IP addresses in Pyongyang].

faustusnotes@266 Yes, the south’s proportion of arable land would also be perilously low if the south were to endure the economic blockade inflicted on the north. Chinese policy is not the US government’s policy, but you are no doubt gratified by the pro-capitalist, anti-worker policies of the Beijing administration, which is a major reason why the US has gotten so much cooperation from Beijing, over fishing and elsewhere.
As for Soviet aggress, faustusnotes has inexplicably omitted the truly monstrous aggression that so many here at CT have never been able to forgive, being the very souls of virtue, the murderous invasion of Germany.

Daragh@263 fits comfortably into the CT approach, but Agatha Christie would laugh. The link does not even support the claim, as vomiting is one symptom, of very many things, which was not even confirmed to be present on Kim. As to how the woman who allegedly “mixed” the second precursor could escape a lethal dose while guaranteeing a fatal dose to Kim…no doubt the fiendish Commies could solve this little technical difficulty. I suppose Daragh also knows that an Asian like Kim could be relied upon not to wash his face after strange women rubbed stuff all over it.

steven t johnson, the south’s proportion of arable land is lower than the north’s. And both countries have considerably more arable land than Japan, which is strangely not being defended as a victim of US starvation policies.

You’ll also note (and haven’t responded to!) the fact that the supposed aggressive attempts to impede North Korean fishing arise from its own govt selling its fishing rights to its ally China – and then its fishing fleets raiding Chinese boats to steal back fish. But that’s a US plot too amirite?

“steven t johnson”, if that is your real name…

You’ve now moved on to bizarre assertions that ‘so may here at CT’ come down on the side of the Nazis in the question ‘which side would you have preferred won World War II’, and insinuating that I am an anti-Asian racist in place of making an argument. In short, you’ve gone from darkly amusing to genuinely offensive quite rapidly. As others seem content to continue the whack-a-mole task of pointing out the glaring factual errors and logical holes in whatever spaghetti you’ve just thrown against the wall claim you’ve decided to make I’m going to go do something more productive with my day.

“The alleged VX murder plot required Kim… neither of which was a feasible interpretation of the video..”

Nothing about jet fuel and the melting point of steel girders then? No baseless accusations that your opponents are racists and pro-Nazi?