Islamic State
The drums of perpetual war are beating again on the banks of the Potomac. Without a Congressional vote or debate, American military might is being thrown at Islamic State (aka ISIS) in the midst of the sectarian war that has been gripping the Middle East. On September 9, Sarah Lazare at Commondreams.org reported on a recently released study on the strange parallel between the arming of Islamic State and al Qaeda. The Islamic State (IS) is now in possession of lethal weapons formerly owned by so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels, as well as large quantities of arms produced in the United States, a new report reveals. The study — conducted by Conflict Armament Research, a research organization that tracks weapons proliferation in war zones — documents arms and ammunition captured by Kurdish People's Protection Units and Peshmerga forces from IS in Iraq and Syria from from mid-June to early August 2014...."This is one more piece of evidence of why military solutions have devastating consequences in the immediate and long terms," said Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at Institute for Policy Studies, in an interview with Common Dreams. "We see an example of the consequences of the over-arming of the region if we look back at Afghanistan in the 1980s during the anti-Soviet War when the U.S. provided stinger missiles that can bring down aircraft to mujahedin guerrillas who morphed into al Qaeda." We have 13 years of experience in knowing what doesn't work in these conflicts and here we are doing it again.
There are other options short of war to weaken ISIS. The above-quoted Phyllis Bennis wrote in The Progressive on September 10: We have to recognize that military attacks are not only wrong in a host of ways (illegal in international law, immoral because of civilian casualties, a distraction from vitally needed diplomacy) but also that those strikes are making real solutions impossible....weakening ISIS requires ending the support it relies on from tribal leaders, military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis. Bennis then presents six steps short of war to accomplish this:
- Stop the airstrikes.
- Make real the commitment for “No boots on the ground.”
- Organize a real diplomatic partnership to deal with ISIS. Even though the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes and deploying new troops in Iraq, everyone agrees there is no military solution.
- Initiate a new search for broader diplomatic solutions in the United Nations. That means working to build a real coalition aimed at using diplomatic and financial pressures, not military strikes, at the international level in both Iraq and Syria.
- Push the UN...to restart real negotiations on ending the civil war in Syria. That means everyone involved needs to be at the table.
- Massively increase US humanitarian contributions to U.N. agencies for the now millions of refugees and IDPs in and from both Syria and Iraq.
Related
As usual in these poorly thought-out rushes to military action, some of the best analysis comes from The Nation. Here are links to a trio of relevant articles.
Gaza
As Egypt gets ready to host a donor conference for the devastated enclave of Gaza on October 12, Noam Chomsky's September 9 article for TomDispatch.com "Ceasefires in Which Violations Never Cease - What’s Next for Israel, Hamas, and Gaza?" should be required reading for every pundit on the planet and for anyone wanting to understand the situation in Gaza. Tom Englehardt's introduction makes clear that if what Israel wanted to accomplish in Operation Protective Edge was to destroy support for Hamas, they failed miserably. Englehardt quotes a Palestinian poll taken just before the current ceasefire went into effect: If new presidential elections are held today and only two [candidates] were nominated, [the Hamas candidate] Haniyeh, for the first time since we have started asking about his popularity about eight years ago, would receive a majority of 61% and Abbas would receive 32%. Chomsky notes the history of these ceasefires whose terms have basically remained the same since Hamas came to power in the 2006 elections. The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it -- as Israel has officially recognized -- until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality. These escalations, which amount to shooting fish in a pond, are called "mowing the lawn" in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as "removing the topsoil" by a senior U.S. military officer, appalled by the practices of the self-described "most moral army in the world." Chomsky has much to say about Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the world reaction to the internationally monitored 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power in Gaza and the West Bank, Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense, the recently concluded Operation Protective Edge, and the latest Israeli land grab in the West Bank. On the land grab: As Operation Protective Edge ended, Israel announced its largest appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years, almost 1,000 acres. Israel Radio reported that the takeover was in response to the killing of the three Jewish teenagers by "Hamas militants." A Palestinian boy was burned to death in retaliation for the murder, but no Israeli land was handed to Palestinians, nor was there any reaction when an Israeli soldier murdered 10-year-old Khalil Anati on a quiet street in a refugee camp near Hebron on August 10th, while the most moral army in the world was smashing Gaza to bits, and then drove away in his jeep as the child bled to death.
Quoting Israeli scholars, journalists, military and political leaders, Chomsky concludes that a viable two-state solution is not a strong consideration in Israeli political circles: The realistic alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will continue to carry forward the plans it has been implementing for years, taking over whatever is of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian population concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas it is integrating into Israel...Gaza will likely remain under its usual harsh siege, separated from the West Bank. And the Syrian Golan Heights -- like Jerusalem, annexed in violation of Security Council orders -- will quietly become part of Greater Israel. In the meantime, West Bank Palestinians will be contained in unviable cantons, with special accommodation for elites in standard neocolonial style.....For a century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily on the pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground, which the world was to ultimately come to accept. It has been a highly successful policy. There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support. For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change U.S. policies, not an idle dream by any means.
Related
For a discussion of what has happened to Palestinians politically and territorially, see "The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted & Speaking Truth to Power" - Informed Comment (reprinted July 13, 2014)
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| Map is from Friends of Sabeel - North America website and Informed Comment |
Lone Star Politics
Over the past year or so, there have been various surges of optimism over the possibility of Democrats picking up a governorship or a US Senate seat now held by a Republican in a red state. The latest bit of unfounded optimism is the Kansas Senate race. The Democrat is dropping out of the race and Democrats are supporting the independent. Whether this last bit of optimism pans out or not, we'll have to see. Earlier would-be upsets are now long forgotten and Democrats are trying desperately to hold onto Senate seats in swing states. One of the early examples of this unfounded optimism was in the Texas governor's race. As Rolling Stone journalist Mark Binelli noted in a July article: This was supposed to be the year Texas turned blue, or at least purple, the year female and Hispanic voters turned out in droves and carried Democrat state Sen. Wendy Davis to the governor's mansion. Battleground Texas, a group founded last year with the bold goal of transforming Texas into a swing state, targeted the swelling Latino population, which by 2020 is projected to overtake the white population of Texas....By Memorial Day, however, the Battleground Texas narrative, at least in this election cycle, had begun to look like Daily Kos fan fiction. Davis was trailing Abbott by 14 points. Meanwhile, back in her old Fort Worth Senate district, a Tea Party Republican named Konni Burton seems well-placed to win Davis' old seat in the fall. The Abbott lead over Davis is still hovering in low to mid double digits and our second most populous state looks like it will remain "red. The article "Lone Star Crazy: How Right-Wing Extremists Took Over Texas" explains how Texas fell "into the hands of gun nuts, border-sealers and talk-radio charlatans": After nearly six years of pumping out cynical horror stories involving our nefarious president and a Washington bureaucracy run amok, the right-wing fear machine has managed to reduce its target audience to a quivering state of waking nightmare, jumping at shadows. Binelli sees a parallel with the 1960's. In the years after JFK's murder, Dallas was known as the City of Hate, an image which the city struggled for years to erase. Nowadays, the City of Hate era has grown so distant that hate has been allowed to return as a winning campaign slogan in Texas. ...Then as now, the pot was stirred by reactionary preachers..., wealthy string-pullers.., political opportunists...and organized interest groups.
Links/In Brief
Scotland
With less than a week until Scotland votes on independence from the UK on September 18, the most recent polls are saying that it is too close to call. [The Guardian, Sep 12]
If the vote is for independence, a whole slew of constitutional questions arise. And the exit of the overwhelmingly Labour Scottish MP's from Westminster has led to a (perhaps ill-founded) hope among Tories that Scottish independence will consign the rest of the UK to permanent Conservative government. [The New Statesman, Feb 20]
Greenhouse Gases
Surging carbon dioxide levels have pushed greenhouse gases to record highs in the atmosphere, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has said. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major cause of global warming, increased at their fastest rate for 30 years in 2013, despite warnings from the world’s scientists of the need to cut emissions to halt temperature rises. [The Guardian, Sep 9]
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