I don’t think any observer of last year’s election thought otherwise no matter what few lefties were dissuaded from voting by Clinton’s campaign of “There is no alternative”. It was Clinton’s failure to change or offer change more than Trump’s attraction that cause their sitting out.
Read this carefully. It foretells where the extra $54 billion for defense is going. And the consequences will cause the defense budget to only go up.
Trump’s reckless killing of civilians in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen is many things: barbaric, amoral, and criminal. It is also, ironically, likely to strengthen support for the very groups — ISIS and al Qaeda — that he claims he wants to defeat, given that nothing drives support for those groups like U.S. slaughter of civilians (perhaps the only competitor in helping these groups is another Trump specialty: driving a wedge between Muslims and the West).
But what Trump’s actions are not is a departure from what he said he would do, nor are they inconsistent with the predictions of those who described his foreign policy approach as non-interventionist. To the contrary, the dark savagery guiding U.S. military conduct in that region is precisely what Trump expressly promised his supporters he would usher in.
One of the things blocking unity in opposition to Trump is the fact that too many of his opponents have halo effects and horns effects relative to the Democratic Party and critics of the Democratic Party. We have forgotten that word that was so current about Bush in the 2003-2006 era — “nuance” — in the rush to imitate the hardball tactics of Republicans. I once thought that imitation would strengthen Democrat’s position; I now see that the long-ago stated values of the Democratic Party get undermined by such chicanery. Stop writing off people.
What a joke this article is. This is Greenwald saying “sorry not sorry, I’ll redefine ‘interventionism’ so it fits what I perceive to be Trump’s nationalistic barbarity, all of which was foreseeable but we had to focus on Killary.”
When is his credibility going to be shot to shit hat he just goes away and stops commenting? Like the rest of the chatter class who get it wrong without any accountability, he keeps avoiding his own.
Signs of the Times’s headline “Killary, Trump, and the lesson the Democrats didn’t learn from Brexit” tells me that this must be the Greenwald opinion you are referencing:
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept: Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
A lot of secondary sources associate Greenwald with the “Killary” label that nowhere appears in his writings. The most incendiary comments he makes are reports of interviews. And from that SOTT, Mediaite, and others make clickbait for outrage.
When it is no longer possible to make an argument within the Democratic Party against neoconservative foreign policy, a lot of longtime Democrats will leave. The end of yellow-dog tolerance every election will have ended. I don’t think the Congressional Democrats as individual candidates have reached that point, but the spokespeople for Democratic positions are rapidly moving in that direction. IMO, that is a profound mistake politically and for the future of the country and the world. I think this reflexive hunkering down into a warmongering position is the sort of fear that rushed Democrats into McCarthyism and into support of the Iraq War. With Trump’s search for an enemy, any enemy to be a war President, the lack of Democratic pushback could solidify the Trump administration the way that collaboration solidified the W administration for 4 years and led to a surveillance state we have yet to shake.
Unbelievable. i am tempted to give this post a “1” simply on the grounds that it is incomprehensible.
That article is quite clear and very accurate. It is exactly what Trump said that he would do…use U.S. military might to attack its enemies rather than to support its (supposed) friends.
And that is exactly what he is doing.
Is what he is doing “good?”
Define the term, if you can. I cannot, anymore. In the absence of identifiable truth…living deep within the maelstrom of lies that this country has become…the concept of “good” becomes relative. If you do not really know what is happening, how can you put a moral label on anything?
All I can say is that it is what it is, on all available evidence.
Civilians dying?
Yup.
Just like WWII.
Dresden
Hiroshima
Nagasaki
Only of course not so many.
Yet.
Would HRC have done any worse?
Any better?
Who the fuck knows?
She might have chosen other groups of civilians to be put at risk if her main goal was to help our so-called allies rather than our throroughly-proven-to-be enemies, but other than that?
Business as usual.
American business.
Killing business.
Here is some “truth” for you.
What goes around comes around.
The only U.S. politician to quite clearly state that he would end this whole murderous downward karmic cycle as quickly as he possibly could was Ron Paul.
Look what it got him.
The enmity of almost the entire media and resultant total non-personing.
They tried the same thing on Trump…with much better reasons to do so on any moral levels…and failed miserably for the simple reason that Donald Trump is a by far stronger media personality than is Ron Paul.
And here we are on a supposedly “progressive” website, listening to nattering about someone who has been nonpersoned by that same media on (totally unproven) speculations that he is in the pay of Russia along with Donald Snowden, Julian Assange and every other attempted truth-teller whistle blowing on this this rotted-out system.
And you, seabe?
You are marching right along with the killers.
Clomp clomp clomp.
Congrats.
AG
IMO, you misread Ron Paul and Trump in the same way that Greenwald suggests that “non-intervention” is always misread for pacifism.
I have seen no politician since Dennis Kucinich make a case of ending the madness and in his case he could not articulate what exactly he would do differently.
Politically, opposition to perpetual warfare is playing into the “there is no alternative” framing of national security. That is, the US is obligated to play the “Great Game” forever.
Merits a 4++++++++.
How anyone can’t see that Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are cut from the same cloth has long amazed me. Maybe paleoconservatism sounds better to some when it comes out of the mouth of a Southern Baptist instead of a Catholic.
Ron Paul is decidedly anti-Trump.
Pat Buchanan is not.
Lumping them together under some sort of faux meme-ish rubric like “paleoconservatism” is ridiculous.
And…they both have their points.
Would I vote for either?
I’ll never get a chance to choose, will I.
i certainly would not have voted for either Trump or HRC. And I didn’t.
I believe that militarily-enforced economic imperialism is the single most destructive force driving the U.S. down, and no matter how much I may agree or disagree with some of their other positions, the first serious candidate for the presidency that promises to end the Permanent War State will get my vote and my work as a supporter.
End of story.
Make up whatever names you wish for my own position.
There it is and there it stands.
Walk softly within our own borders and carry a big stick.
We have the big stick.
Now it’s time to come home and learn how to be a peaceful nation for all of our own citizens.
Would that entail some hardships?
You bet it would.
Right off the bat, our “favored nation” situation in terms of oil prices…favored because of fear…would disappear.
Could we survive that eventuality?
I don’t know, but it’s getting about time to find out.
This “World Cop” thing sure isn’t working.
AG
Well, Trump did put a major dent in the Paul dynasty. The Bushes don’t like Trump either, and some Democrats are heralding that now to whitewash GWB.
At the end of the day, Buchanan jettisons his disagreements and opposition to GOP winners. That’s how he makes his living. The Pauls have always relied on being mostly Republican (anti-abortion, etc.) along with anti-social libertarians (dismantle the federal government except for the military and courts) to keep them in office in districts/states that are +10 GOP. What either of them would do in a situation where he had to cast the deciding vote hasn’t been tested.
A Sanders-Paul coalition to advance or defeat an act is fine, but as their positions and reasoning to reach the same conclusion have nothing in common, I sure as hell won’t be sticking Paul on some pedestal for once getting it right but not for the right reasons.
Basically, this.
I’m not a fan of RonRand Inc., and Buchanan is a scumbag, but until we end Empire, everything else is, at best, window dressing and bandaids.
We fly Death Robots over sovereign countries. If that isn’t terrorism d/b/a “National Security”, I don’t know what is.
Don’t blame Greenwald for your poor reading comprehension skills.
A stronger excerpt from Greenwald’s article is:
He never conflated the two orientations. He critiqued both choices — lion or tiger — with equal intellectual rigor. That you preferred one of the choices and couldn’t/can’t tolerate a valid critique of that candidate, says nothing about Greenwald.
Ahem…
<quote>with equal intellectual rigor</quote>
what BS.
Using military force in another country is by definition interventionism. ISIS is a political and military enemy of Syria. Attacking ISIS in Syria is interventionism. It doesn’t matter if you are doing it with the express permission or approval of the Syrian government.
Worse, the US’s botched and dumb efforts to get the “Terrorists” are why Greenwald is critical of the US’s efforts in Yemen and elsewhere. Greenwald specifically critiques those as ‘interventionism’ even though we were invited to do so in Yemen and most of the other places. But you’ll never hear a word about Russia being an interventionist for it’s part in Syria because it was invited!
So when the US does the same thing Russia does, the US is wrong and Russia is okay, if not straight up righteous. Reverse it and when Russia does the same thing the US had previously done, and the US was and is still wrong, but Russia is still okay if not righteous in it’s actions.
You don’t get to crow about non-interventionism while completely trying to redefine the word so that it only means what you want it to mean.
His intellectual rigor isn’t worth the money to create the electrons to publish his BS.
Le Sigh…
I’m going to have to find the time to actually write these things properly. This is the second time in as many days I’ve tried to write a quick response and messed up my HTML tags because I was in too much of a hurry to get it right the first time or preview them and catch the mistakes there.
US intervention in Syria is also one of those gray areas if you want to go by the “invited” standard. Notice for example the US apologized when it accidentally hit Assad’s troops, but not when it hits civilian areas where they’re lobbing drone strikes in ISIS held territory.
○ Kerry audio leak: secretary of state ‘lost argument’ over use of force in Syria | The Guardian – Oct. 2016 |
Small problem of International Law disregarded by Bill Clinton with Serbia and Kosovo, same with Hillary Clinton and Libya intervention extended to regime change.
○ Americans Living In a Parallel Reality on Iraq and Syria
Don’t confuse them with International Law and statements in accordance with law by fmr SOS Kerry. They prefer to cherry pick info and apply their only layperson’s definition of intervention. (And downrate comments they don’t like.)
When you can tell me who enforces, how they enforce, and provide examples of consistent rational enforcement of “International Law”, I will concede that “International Law” is really more than “International Suggestions.”
Until then, “International Law” is about as meaningful a concept as “Compassionate Conservatism” is, that is to say it’s not at all.
You can’t have law without enforcement. The enforcement part is what makes it ‘law’ and not just a suggestion. (Setting aside other things like consent of the govern, collective creation, etc.)
There is nothing bigger than a Nation State at the present time here on planet Earth. That means there is no ‘law’ governing Nation States unless other Nation States are enforcing it. And just like the days of old, when you are more powerful than another Nation State, the only thing that can stop you (externally) from doing what ever you want, is a bigger more powerful Nation State.
The only ‘Law’ Nation States have to obey right now and for the foreseeable future is the Law(s) of Physics.
It works the way commercial law works in the US. It’s for the little guys. The powers that run the system are exempt.
It lowers chaos; it does not dispense justice.
Appealing to it, if you have a large enough military, is a diplomatic tool.
Btw, perhaps you could provide the ‘appropriate’ definition for interventionism for the realm of discourse that this resides in, or at least provide the discipline that has a different definition of interventionism and the methods by which one can become credentialed in the aforementioned discipline such that there actually are laypersons with relation to that discipline and field.
You seem to be under the impression that I have defended or advocated for our intervention in Syria, as opposed to showing that we are in fact defacto allied with Assad given our targets and our actions. Whereas you’re stuck defending Russian intervention and war crimes, which are the same as what we are doing in Yemen when it comes to the definition of “sovereignty”.
Once you see DAESH/ISIS/ISIL as a threat to US national security, your choices are to de facto ally with Russia and Syria or to fight two enemies at once. Or to do nothing at all and have to deal with those consequences. Congressional warhawks were OK with subverting Assad with arms shipments. But they required fighting DAESH/ISIS/ISIL with one hand tied behind the back–no coordination that could put Assad back in power even termporarily. BooMan wrote early on about the tricky balancing act that Obama was having to carry out because of the lack of Congressional support for a better policy. And because of the deep and contradictory lobbying ties with Israel, Jordan, Saudis, and Turkey.
I’m aware of the situation and the respective balancing act. But that doesn’t mean Obama’s policy in Syria hasn’t been a failure, or that we should be “teaming up with Russia”. Im arguing an actual anti-imperialist point of view here. Not ass covering for Putin’s war crimes.
President Obama in 2011: “Assad must go, it’s a matter of weeks.”
○ Secretary Clinton Says Syrian President Assad ‘Must Go’ | ABC News – April 1, 2012 |
○ Kerry says Syrian people will determine fate of Assad | AP – Dec. 2015 |
However in Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News, no mention of Tillerson’s statement for Assad to stay …
○ Turkey: New energy is needed in US ties
Really? If I think really long and hard over the past fifty years, I might be able to come up with one time, and then only in an extremely narrow sense, when imitating a tactic or a strategy of the GOP could possibly benefit Democrats. As has been said many times, if given a choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, voters go with the real thing.
Tactics, not policy.
When did Democrats think they needed to fuzz and spin what they said to be like Reagan Republicans? That one I disagreed with.
When did Democrats think they needed a hard-hitting media personality on radio to create a bunch of Democratic equivalent of “ditto-heads”? Where was the popularity of Air America and Ed Schultz if not in a partial hope for their seizure of their audience? And how quickly we lined up behind Dan Rather when he got played and saw when Rachel Madddow was walking into the same trap?
I now want Democrats to hold together in absolute opposition to force Republicans to own their budget and appropriations. I initially thought a touch of bipartisan aisle-crossing might leaven their position; I dropped that position in 2007.
Unlike the assertions of many, I do not have perfect foresight.
And I have said loud and often that given the choice between a real Republican with those set of policies and a fake Republican. I suspect that is one of Greenwald’s frustrations with the Democratic Party, that it will not move in a democratic socialist direction. And those Democrats who are hide-bound and determined not to move leftward find him a convenient punching bag.
Air America, Olbermann, Maddow, and lefty blogs came along at a time when Republicans so dominated the air and print media that getting anything different out there couldn’t hurt. But soon enough it became apparent that dittohead-land, rightwing or leftwing, only preached to a choir that couldn’t carry a tune on its own. It didn’t change the fact that media access and time was given to those that brought in the most stable and loyal ears and eyes and those folks don’t get bored watching/hearing the exact same thing day in and day out.
Okay, I’ve thought of a few, but it’s not just imitation but also elevating to higher principles. Progressivism, racial equality, and environmentalism. Pro-peace/anti-war also shifted from Republicans to Democrats, but that has been a stickier wicket because GOP anti-war was packaged with isolationism but corporate globalism was fine.
The sad truth is that you can’t have an aggressive corporate globalism without an aggressive military posture. The troops are there to further the merchants, For thousands of years.
The vikings neatly encapsulated the two. The same band were sometimes merchants, sometimes hostile raiders, but always with an eye to the loot.
Well, that was always the Achilles heel of the GOP running with with isolationism and corporate globalism. But seriously, until the Bushes they managed to keep their military interventions to support corporations brief, small, and/or covert or at worst minimally covered by the press. (GHWB’s Panama invasion was SOP, but Iraq was too large and public and too costly with no spoils for the corporations for them to make a clean getaway on that.) Proxy wars for corporations were the preferred MO.
Not surprising that as Democrats have become more allayed with business that they have ramped up their use of proxy wars.
apropos — Foreign Policy — Happy Anniversary to America’s Shameful Travesty of a War in Yemen
Note this:
Bomb today and leave the questions for tomorrow or never.
The data cited by Glenn Greewald are contested and his conclusion troublesome once you look beneath the graphs on the website of Airwars. It even stated on that webpage:
At Airwars we’ve been modelling Coalition airstrike data since the start of operations in August 2014, enabling us to comprehensively model over time the war against Daesh. All of our graphs and tables are based on official data releases from the Coalition, and from individual member nations.
…
The term airstrike is imprecise. According to AFCENT, [webpages deleted – Oui] an average of 3.65 weapons were released by allied airstrike to October 2015, with allies admitting that multiple targets, aircraft actions and even locations might be labelled under any one `strike’ report.
…
The US, France, Canada and UK prefer to report the number of strikes their aircraft carry out. In contrast the Netherlands, Denmark and Australia all report the number of weapons released.
…
CJTF-OIR intermittently issues overall figures for US and for allied strikes, for both Iraq and Syria.
The situation in Mosul-East is much more difficult than the earlier conquest of Mosul-West due to high density of population and the citizens used by IS as human shields against allied airstrikes. Can only be compared to the Fallujah raid in 2004 or the final month of Russian/Syrian bombing of East-Aleppo before the liberation from rebels and jihadists. In Mosul the attacking Iraq Army is made up of a substantial number of Shia, the inhabitants of large swaths if the Islamic State are made up of Sunni population, many who at first collaborated with the forces called ISIL and originated in the Sunni triangle of Baghdad-Ramadi-Tikrit.
Thank you for addressing the content of Greenwald’s article.
The point is the apparent loosening of the rules of engagement. Counterintuitively more bombing and looser controls on bomb targeting do not necessarily end wars sooner. Those measures subtly change the strategy from counter-force (military capability) to counter-value (things the supposed enemy values) targeting while projecting the illusion of strength and determination. In this case, DAESH/ISIS/ISIL likely appreciates the US own-goal of killing Iraqis opposed to DAESH/ISIS/ISIL. It has succeeded in halting the momentum towards their elimination.
The moral equivalency with Russian civilian casualties is sorta neither here nor there. The audience for English language news and opinion for the most part has little means of control of Russian policy and military doctrine. Increasingly that might also be true of US policy and military doctrine, but there is the narrative that Congress can be pressured on these issues. There is little expectation that that is true of the Duma.
What caught me was the practical argument, not the moral comparison. The practical argument is, “Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.”
What data and contested by whom? And what makes his conclusion troublesome? Seriously, not good enough to merely cite from Airways webpage (the source of Greenwald’s data) and a two year old report as if it’s obvious evidence to support your statement/allegation/conclusion.
Were there decent reasons to suspect that Airwars was getting and/or cherry picking data as its reports were hyperbolic about Syrian-Russian air strike casualties? Sure, but working out from the number of sorties launched by each of the entities conducting air strikes at that time, the civilian casualties from Syrian-Russian bombs wasn’t completely unrealistic. What was off were the estimates of minimal civilian casualties from the bombings by other (often unidentified) participants (US, France, Iraq, Israel, Turkey), in part because Airwars didn’t have good enough information on even the number of bombing runs being conducted. Should Airwars have revealed that serious shortcoming? Yes and in bold type.
It didn’t. As Russia significantly reduced its air strikes, an irrefutable fact regardless of the fuzziness of the number of its earlier and current strikes, Airwars couldn’t plausibly continue to report large civilian casualties from Russian air strikes. The US reported increases in its air strikes as Russia reduced its. Was there an increase in November? We will never know, but reporting more in the “fair” to “weak” evidence classification for Nov-Dec is a baseline regardless if it was the same or more than what was perpetrated earlier. “Fair” and “weak” have continued to increase this year. So, that’s where Greenwald is on firm ground.
Looking back to September ’15, we can see a sizable “contested” that didn’t subsequently move into the “disproved,” “weak,” or “fair” categories. Note the significant 12/16 increase in “disproved.” Not odd that “contested” would increase along with increased in “fair” and “weak” — fog of war and all that in the initial reporting. It’s the size of the “contested” that is disproportionate to what Airwars has reported in the past (including during their possibly inflated numbers for Russia-Syria bombing).
The Independent, 3/25/17:
Airwars just focusing on where the action is?
Coincidental that the focus was on Russia-Syria until this year and now the USG? Assessing that with any confidence would require more solid information on Russia-Syria and USG air strikes through 2016. Were the USG numbers under-counted/reported before 2017? Are the 2017 USG numbers inflated? With dRump claiming to have removed the kid-gloves from the US military, the current numbers appear plausible. The one USG institution that has been most aligned with dRump is the military. Thus, it isn’t without an incentive to inflate its reports above the actual increases, most of which aren’t in dispute. That, however, begs the question as to whether or not Airwars has been and is now putting a thumb on the scale, consciously or unconsciously.
Does a funding source for Airwars matter? Ah, there’s the rub.
○ Procedural change in rules of engagement … battlefield commanders given more authority [minutes ago via Airwars.org]
Earlier from president Trump:
○ Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) – Chris Woods drone war
My question was more rhetorical than asking for an answer.
Exactly what question are the the excerpts you’ve selected supposed to answer? That Chris Woods is above reproach? And therefore, Airwars data can be accepted as fact? (I don’t question the factual basis of those reports; only the completeness and biases of the reports the purport to be about Syria and Iraq.) If so, just state that and provide a link to whatever source you’ve used to reach your conclusion. Although that still doesn’t address my rhetorical question.
In real time, the best outsiders can do is pose questions, keep and open mind, and wait until such time as more relevant information becomes available that may help answer the questions. In the meantime remain cognizant of funding sources — it can have an insidious effect on even the best.
(Without researching, I don’t know if I’d view the Rowntree trust as okay and not inclined to take anybody else’s word on that. Open Society Foundation is tainted in too many ways for me to believe that it’s ever strictly eleemosynary. In addition to that the 2016 election led to a reduction of my list of reliable and credible individual and organizational/institutional voices/source, and I’m not about to fill those now empty slots with long-established unreliable sources as many Democrats and self-styled lefties at MOA have done.)
Quote from The Sage of Rio de Janeiro:
“Trump’s reckless killing of civilians in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen is many things: barbaric, amoral, and criminal. It is also, ironically, likely to strengthen support for the very groups — ISIS and al Qaeda — that he claims he wants to defeat, given that nothing drives support for those groups like U.S. slaughter of civilians….”
Just curious, suppose one changed a few words to get this:
“Putin’s and Assad’s reckless killing of civilians in Syria is many things: barbaric, amoral, and criminal. It is also, ironically, likely to strengthen support for the very groups — ISIS and al Qaeda — that they claims they want to defeat, given that nothing drives support for those groups like Russian or Syrian government slaughter of civilians.”
Would The Sage of Rio de Janeiro write such a passage? And if he did, would it be re-posted here?
There is one practical difference. Assad is politically willing to take the risk of blowback from his opposition, including ISIS. Haider al-Abani is not, especially considering the fact that the dead are likely to be Sunni, with whom Abadi must make his political peace for stability.
The endless search for moral equivalency does not in the end change the practical realities on the ground. Russia and Syria’s actions were restoring stability by suppressing the rebellion and ISIS. Obama’s US and Iraqi actions were restoring stability by suppressing ISIS. Trump’s loosening of the rules of engagement creates blowback that halts that move to stability.
The US and Russia’s bridge-playing offensive against ISIS has made a difference. Trump has reversed that with on change in policy that ostensibly is being “tougher”.
Greenwald is reporting the consequences of Trump’s shortsightedness. And you want to quibble about what he might write or not write.
A hypothetical argument tells one nothing without the experiment to test it. Moreover, in principle, Americans in a democratic society have more power to change bad policies than Russians under Putin’s authoritarian nationalist oligarchy. Therefore Americans should be very interested in American policy and its consequences, and Russians should be very much interestested in Putin’s policy and its consequences.
In my opinion, which of course no one listens to or acts upon, the smartest move in Syria would have been a more open coalition between the US, Russia, Tukey, and Iran to restabilize Syria and eliminate DAESH/ISIS/ISIL. And more openness to Iranian participation and more caution with Saudi participation in Middle East policy. But there is apparent opposition to stabilization from the US military that will not allow rapprochement with Russia enough to eliminate ISIS. And that opposition just got from Trump what they wanted. Strangely enough, that does not make life easier for Russia and their client Assad.
>>the smartest move in Syria would have been a more open coalition between the US, Russia, Tukey, and Iran to restabilize Syria and eliminate DAESH/ISIS/ISIL.
i won’t claim to have a better idea, but how do you convince Russia and Turkey to agree on whether Assad stays or goes? that may not be the only big problem but i see it as the biggest.
That’s what negotiations are for–to figure that out. While they’re negotiating, you stabilize the country enough that the Syrian people and not Putin or Erdogan (or Trump) might have a means of having a little weight in that decision.
Being best buddies with the Saudis, Jordan, and Israel likely is not the key to that diplomacy.
Greenwald has exiled himself from the US. He could choose to be concerned about abuses by both US forces and Russian ones. He does not choose to do that.
Reuters, 12//6/16 — Trump lays out non-interventionist U.S. military policy
Might be easier to read from a presumed neutral source for those that want to smash something whenever they see Greenwald’s name.
“George Bush resisted impulses to intervene in Iran. Non-interventionist!”
This is ridiculous. He just can’t admit “I was wrong”, and yet people continue covering for this egoist.
Not just The Sage of Rio de Janeiro who cannot admit a mistake.