Peti oktobar na bliskom istoku i arapskom svetu

[Prospero]

Evo malo američkog autošovinizma™ na temu:
 

A Refugee Crisis Made in America

Will the U.S. accept responsibility for the humanitarian consequences of Washington-manufactured wars?
By Philip Giraldi • September 9, 2015
 


Procyk Radek / Shutterstock.com


 
On April 29th, 2008 I had a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment. I had flipped open the Washington Post and there, on the front page, was a color photo of a two year old Iraqi boy named Ali Hussein being pulled from the rubble of a house that had been destroyed by American missiles. The little boy was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and had on his feet flip-flops. His head was hanging back at an angle that told the viewer immediately that he was dead.
 
Four days later on May 3rd a letter by a Dunn Loring Virginia woman named Valerie Murphy was printed by the Post. Murphy complained that the Iraqi child victim photo should not have been run in the paper because it would “stir up opposition to the war and feed anti-US sentiment.” I suppose the newspaper thought it was being impartial in printing the woman’s letter, though I couldn’t help but remember that the neocon-dominated Post had generally been unwilling to cover anything antiwar, even ignoring a gathering of 300,000 protesters in Washington in 2005. Rereading the woman’s complaint and also a comment on a website suggesting that the photo of the dead little boy had been staged, I thought to myself, “What kind of monsters have we become.” And in truth we had become monsters. Bipartisan monsters wrapped in the American flag. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions was “worth it.” She is now a respected elder statesman close to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
 
I had another epiphany last week when I saw the photo of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach like a bit of flotsam. He was wearing a red t-shirt and black sneakers. I thought to myself that many Americans will shake their heads when looking at the photo before moving on, more concerned about Stephen Colbert’s debut on the Late Show and the start of the NFL season.
 

The little boy is one of hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to get to Europe. The world media is following the crisis by focusing primarily on the inability of unprepared local governments to deal with the numbers of migrants, asking why someone somewhere can’t just “do something.” This means that somehow, as a result, the vast human tragedy has been reduced to a statistic and, inevitably, a political football.

 

Overwhelmed by thousands of would-be travelers, Hungary suspended train service heading towards Western Europe while countries like Serbia and Macedonia deployed their military and police along their borders in a failed attempt to completely block refugees. Italy and Greece have been overwhelmed by migrants arriving by sea. Germany, to its credit, is intending to process up to 800,000 refugee and asylum applications, mostly from Syria, while Austria and Sweden have also indicated their willingness to accept many more. Immediate neighbors of the zone of conflict, notably Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are hosting more than three million of those who are displaced, but the wealthy Arab Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia have done little or nothing to help.

 

Demands for a European unified strategy to deal with the problem are growing, to include sealing borders and declaring the seas off of preferred departure points in North Africa and Asia to be military zones where undocumented ships and travelers will be intercepted and turned back. One also has to suspect that the refugee crisis might be exploited by some European politicians to justify NATO “humanitarian” intervention of some sort in Syria, a move that would have to be supported by Washington. But while the bickering and maneuvering goes on, the death toll mounts. The recent discovery of 71 dead would-be migrants who suffocated in the back of a locked truck found in Austria, to include five children and a toddler, horrified the world. And that was before the dead three year old on the Turkish beach.

 

Many of the would-be migrants are young men looking for work in Europe, a traditional enterprise, but most of the new arrivals are families escaping the horrors of war in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Their plight has been described in the media in graphic terms, families arriving with nothing and expecting nothing, fleeing even worse conditions back at home.
The United States has taken in only a small number of the refugees and a usually voluble White House has been uncharacteristically quiet about the problem, possibly realizing that allowing in a lot of displaced foreigners at a time when there is an increasingly heated debate over immigration policy in general just might not be a good move, politically speaking. But it should perhaps be paying some attention to what caused the problem in the first place, a bit of introspection that is largely lacking both from the mainstream media and from politicians.

 

Indeed, I would assign to Washington most of the blame for what is happening right now. Since folks inside the beltway are particularly given to making judgements based on numerical data they might be interested in the toll exacted through America’s global war on terror. By one not unreasonable estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.

 

There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.
The number of internally displaced within each country is roughly double the number of those who have actually fled and are seeking to resettle outside their homelands. Many of the latter have wound up in temporary camps run by the United Nations while others are paying criminals to transport them into Europe.

 

Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war. The invasion of Iraq created a power vacuum that has empowered terrorism in the Arab heartland. Supporting rebels in Syria has piled Pelion on Ossa. Afghanistan continues to bleed 14 years after the United States arrived and decided to create a democracy. Libya, which was relatively stable when the U.S. and its allies intervened, is now in chaos, with its disorder spilling over into sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Everywhere people are fleeing the violence, which, among other benefits, has virtually obliterated the ancient Christian presence in the Middle East. Though I recognize that the refugee problem cannot be completely blamed on only one party, many of those millions would be alive and the refugees would for the most part be in their homes if it had not been for the catastrophic interventionist policies pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States.

 

It is perhaps past time for Washington to begin to become accountable for what it does. The millions of people living rough or in tents, if they are lucky, need help and it is not satisfactory for the White House to continue with its silence, a posture that suggests that the refugees are somehow somebody else’s problem. They are, in fact, our problem. A modicum of honesty from President Barack Obama would be appreciated, perhaps an admission that things have not exactly worked out as planned by his administration and that of his predecessor. And money is needed. Washington throws billions of dollars to fight wars it doesn’t have to fight and to prop up feckless allies worldwide. For a change it might be refreshing to see tax money doing some good, working with the most affected states in the Middle East and Europe to resettle the homeless and making an honest effort to come to negotiated settlements to end the fighting in Syria and Yemen, both of which can only have unspeakably bad outcomes if they continue on their current trajectories.

 

Ironically, American hawks are exploiting the photo of the dead Syrian boy to blame the Europeans for the humanitarian crisis while also demanding an all-out effort to depose Bashar al-Assad. Last Friday’s Washington Post had a lead editorial headlined “Europe’s Abdication,” and also featured a Michael Gerson op-ed urging immediate regime change in Syria, blaming the crisis solely on Damascus. The editorial railed against European “racists” regarding the refugee plight. And it is not clear how Gerson, an evangelical neoconservative former speech writer for George W. Bush, can possibly believe that permitting Syria to fall to ISIS would benefit anyone.

 

We Americans are in something approaching complete denial about how truly horrible our nation’s recent impact on the rest of the world has been. We are universally hated, even by those who have their hands out to receive their Danegeld, and the world is undoubtedly shaking its head as it listens to the bile coming out of the mouths of our presidential candidates. Shakespeare observed that the “evil that men do lives after them,” but he had no experience of the United States. We choose to dissimulate regarding the bad choices we make followed up with lies to justify and mitigate our crimes. And still later the evil we do disappears down the memory hole. Literally.

 

In writing this piece I looked up Ali Hussein, the little Iraqi boy who was killed by the American bomb. He has been “disappeared” from Google, as well has the photo, presumably because his death did not meet community standards. He has likewise been eliminated from the Washington Post archive. The experience of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984 immediately came to mind.
 
 
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

​

[Budja]

Hoces da kazes da stopiranje pomoci ili uvodjenje sankcija rezultira blazim diktatorima u odnosu na svoje potcinjene? A sta ako se oglusi na upozorenja (kao sto se njih 95% oglusava)?

 

A sta ce da radi kada mu se izmaknu pare ispod nogu? Da napadne Izrael?

[Anduril]

Naravno da je teško i preteško predvideti. Međutim, ne treba biti Aristotel pa skontati da "tko ne riskira, taj ne profitira" nije univerzalno primenjiva krilatica i da se te plemenite namere jako često pretvaraju u onu čuvenu relativizaciju o omletu i jajima.

 

Irak, na primer. Trebalo je stvarno biti kompletno lud pa pomisliti da onakva akcija neće proizvesti neverovatne potrese u celom regionu, koje će biti potpuno nemoguće kontrolisati. Takve stvari se jednostavno ne rade, pa ne znam kakav ludak da drži vlast tamo. Ne mogu slobodna društva da pomognu celom svetu da se oslobodi, to je opasna iluzija.

 

Slična stvar važi i za Libiju. Da su pre dve godine prelomili i krenuli da iz vazduha ruše Asada to bi verovatno i uradili a onda bi Sirija postala jedno tri puta veći pakao nego što već jeste. Možda bi i Liban goreo zajedno sa njom, Irak da ne pominjem.

 

Ruanda i SFRJ nisu isto što i Bliski Istok.

 

Pa cemu nas uci istorija? Ako recimo vojna akcija zaista nema alternativu (jer se recimo sprovodi neki genocid), da li su dovoljni samo vazdusni udari i 100K vojnika? Ili su mozda siroke koalicije sa velikim brojem vojnika i sa jasnim planom obnove i podele delotvornije?

 

A sta ce da radi kada mu se izmaknu pare ispod nogu? Da napadne Izrael?

 

Pa sta rade dikatori kad im se izmaknu pare? Sta je uradio Milosevic? Sta radi Kim? 

[Prospero]

Milošević i Iran su ispregovarali, doduše sa prvim je bio lingering aftertaste do 99.

 

Nema univerzalnog recepta nego slučaj po slučaj.

 

via TT

[Gandalf]

Pre svega, mislim da mi previše gledamo stvari iz evropske perspektive, odnosno razmišljamo u kategorijama evropskih političkih sistema - imaš zlog diktatora i ugnjeten narod, pa se onda narod digne da zbaci zlog diktatora, kao za vreme francuske revolucije.

jedan od problema u sagledavanju ovih dogadjaja je prilicno romanticno tumacenje evropske istorije. ovo je primer: Luj XVI nije bio zao, nije bio klasican apsolutni monarh, a i ovaj deo o narodu koji se digao da ga zbaci je nategnut.

Edited September 9, 2015 by Gandalf

[Prospero]

Imao je Tokvil klasičnu opasku na temu, da se narod ne buni kad je diktatura najbrutalnija nego kad oseti slabost diktature, ergo se Francuzi nisu bunili pod Lujem XIV nego pod Lujem XVI koji je bio light verzija apsolutizma. Ima tu još sastojaka, svakako, ali i ovaj momenat je donekle bitan.

[frn1782]

Umesto sushe i bune Sirijskih hipstera zbog zelje za demokratijom nekako logicniji sled dogadjaja je obrazac koji postoji vec 25g a vodi se geopolitickim motivima.

Skidanje diktatora desavanjem naroda pa ako ne uspe gradjanski rat pa ako ne uspe bombardovanje pa ako i to ne uspe uletanje licno.

ID mu dodje samo posredni produkt takve politike a ta susa faza 1 posle koje je trebao sistem da se urusi i zavlada demokratija Libijskog tipa.

[Gandalf]

ID mu dodje samo posredni produkt takve politike a ta susa faza 1 posle koje je trebao sistem da se urusi i zavlada demokratija Libijskog tipa.

mislim da su Ameri i susu isplanirali, kako bi stvorili uslove za obaranje rezima. CIA je cudo.

[Ariel]

ma haarp bre, šta misliš, gde su ga prvi put testirali i što je sad onolika pustinja od damaska do rijada.

[Bane5]

Umesto sushe i bune Sirijskih hipstera zbog zelje za demokratijom nekako logicniji sled dogadjaja je obrazac koji postoji vec 25g a vodi se geopolitickim motivima.

Skidanje diktatora desavanjem naroda pa ako ne uspe gradjanski rat pa ako ne uspe bombardovanje pa ako i to ne uspe uletanje licno.

ID mu dodje samo posredni produkt takve politike a ta susa faza 1 posle koje je trebao sistem da se urusi i zavlada demokratija Libijskog tipa.

 

nema tamo nikakve pobune, sve se snima u skupim katarskim filmskim studijama.

[Anduril]

Milošević i Iran su ispregovarali, doduše sa prvim je bio lingering aftertaste do 99.

 

Nema univerzalnog recepta nego slučaj po slučaj.

 

via TT

 

Ispregovarali da ali pitanje je bilo sta je sa unutrasnjom represijom, tj. da li diktatori mogu sebi ikad dopustiti slabost.

Edited September 9, 2015 by Anduril

[Anduril]

Hm, pitanje je koliko ovi savetnici za bezbednost u SAD razmisljaju u okviru nekog jasnog plana.

Konstantno menjanje strana u zavisnosti od interesa...

 

 

Joseph S. Nye

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a former US assistant secretary of defense and chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, is University Professor at Harvard University and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. 

How to Fight the Islamic State

CAMBRIDGE – The Islamic State has captured the world’s attention with gruesome videos of beheadings, wanton destruction of antiquities, and skilled use of social media. It has also captured a large part of eastern Syria and western Iraq, proclaimed a caliphate based in Raqqa, Syria, and attracted foreign jihadists from around the world.

US President Barack Obama says that the Islamic State must be degraded and ultimately defeated. He has appointed General John Allen to lead a coalition of some 60 countries in the task, relying on air strikes, special forces, and training missions. Some critics want him to send more American troops; others say that the United States should settle for a doctrine of containment.

 

In the current US presidential campaign, some candidates are calling for “boots on the ground.” They are right: boots are needed. But the soldiers who wear them should be Sunni Arabs and Turks, not Americans. And that says a lot about the nature of the triple threat that the US and its allies now face.

The Islamic State is three things: a transnational terrorist group, a proto-state, and a political ideology with religious roots. It grew out of al-Qaeda after the misguided US-led invasion of Iraq; and, like al-Qaeda, it appeals to extremist Sunni Islamists. But it has gone further, by establishing a caliphate, and is now a rival to al-Qaeda. Its possession of territory creates the legitimacy and capacity for offensive jihad, which it wages not only against infidels but also Shia and Sufi Muslims, whom it considers “takfir,” or not true Islamic monotheists.

The Islamic State extols the purity of seventh-century Islam, but it is extremely adept at using twenty-first-century media. Its videos and social-media channels are effective tools for attracting a minority of Muslims – primarily young people from Europe, America, Africa, and Asia – who are struggling with their identity. Disgruntled, many are drawn to “Sheikh Google,” where Islamic State recruiters wait to prey upon them.

By some estimates, there are more than 25,000 foreign fighters serving in the Islamic State today. Those who are killed are quickly replaced.

The tripartite nature of the Islamic State creates a policy dilemma. On the one hand, it is important to use hard military power to deprive the caliphate of the territory that provides it both sanctuary and legitimacy. But if the American military footprint is too heavy, the Islamic State’s soft power will be strengthened, thus aiding its global recruiting efforts.

That is why the boots on the ground must be Sunni. The presence of foreign or Shia troops reinforces the Islamic State’s claim of being surrounded and challenged by infidels. So far, thanks largely to effective Kurdish forces, who are overwhelmingly Sunni, the Islamic State has lost some 30% of the territory it held a year ago. But deploying additional Sunni infantry requires training, support, and time, as well as pressure on Iraq’s Shia-dominated central government to temper its sectarian approach.

After the debacle in Libya (where the Islamic State supports jihadist militias and has announced the creation of three “distant provinces”), Obama is understandably reluctant to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, only to see the Islamic State take control of more territory, accompanied by genocidal atrocities against Syria’s many non-Sunnis. But Assad is one of the Islamic State’s most effective recruiting tools. Many foreign jihadists respond to the prospect of helping to overthrow a tyrannical Alawite ruler who is killing Sunnis.

The US diplomatic task is to persuade Assad’s supporters, Russia and Iran, to remove him without dismantling the remains of the Syrian state structure. A no-fly zone and a safe zone in northern Syria for the millions of displaced people could reinforce American diplomacy. And providing massive humanitarian assistance to the refugees (at which the American military is very effective) would increase US soft power enormously.

As it stands, the funding and coordination of America’s soft-power strategy is inadequate. But we know that hard power is not enough, particularly to contest the cyber territory that the Islamic State occupies – for example, by developing a capacity to take down botnets and counter hostile social-media accounts.

Even if the US and its allies defeat the Islamic State over the coming decade, we should be prepared for a similar Sunni extremist group to rise from the ashes. Revolutions of the type the Middle East is experiencing take a long time to resolve. The sources of revolutionary instability include tenuous post-colonial boundaries; arrested modernization; the failed “Arab Spring”; and religious sectarianism, exacerbated by the interstate rivalry between Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shia-ruled Iran.

In Europe, wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants lasted for nearly a century and a half. The fighting ended (with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) only after Germany lost a quarter of its population in the Thirty Years’ War.

But it is also worth remembering that the coalitions of that time were complex, with Catholic France aiding Dutch Protestants against Catholic Habsburgs for dynastic rather than religious reasons. We should expect similar complexity in today’s Middle East.

Looking ahead in a region where the US has interests as varied as energy, Israel’s security, nuclear non-proliferation, and human rights, American policymakers will need to follow a flexible strategy of “containment plus nudging,” which implies siding with different states and groups in different circumstances.

For example, whether or not Iranian policy becomes more moderate, sometimes Iran will share US interests, and sometimes it will oppose them. In fact, the recent nuclear agreement may open opportunities for greater flexibility. To seize them, however, US foreign policy toward the Middle East will have to develop a higher level of sophistication than the current debate reveals.

Joseph S. Nye recently co-chaired an Aspen Strategy Group discussion on the Islamic State and radicalism in the Middle East.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-to-fight-the-islamic-state-by-joseph-s--nye-2015-09#lmzBA6Xc0v5HlUZC.99

[gone fishing]

"SAD još 2006. planirale rušenje Sirije"

Osnivač Vikiliksa Džulijan Asanž u novoj knjizi "Fajlovi Vikiliksa" navodi da su SAD planirale da svrgnu vladu Sirije mnogo pre početka pobune 2011. godine.

Izvor: Tanjug

sreda, 9.09.2015. | 21:45

 

Foto: Beta, AP

U intervjuu za “Raša tudej” Asanž je predstavio poglavlje o Siriji, koje se bavi događajima iz 2006. godine i telegramom koji je poslao američki ambasador u Damasku Vilijam Robak, a odnosi se na plan za svrgavanje režima predsednika Bašara el Asada u Siriji.

"Plan je bio da se koristi veliki broj različitih faktora za stvaranje paranoje unutar sirijske vlade, putem preterivanja i straha od državnog udara", kaže Asanž.

 

Asanž je dodao da je naozbiljniji deo plana bio da se podstaknu tenzije između šiita i sunita.

 

Konkretno, to je značilo da se šire lažne glasine da Iran pokušava da preobrati sunite, kao i da se radi sa Saudijskom Arabijom i Egiptom kako bi se stvorila perceprcija koja će otežati uticaj Irana, kao i uticaj sirijske vlade na stanovništvo.

 

Asanž je naglasio da je telegram američkog ambasadora Robaka zabrinjavajući i da se takvi telegrami često moraju čitati između redova.

 

"Da bi shvatli šta se događa u Siriji, moramo sagledati regionalne saveze. Deo problema u Siriji je što ima veliki broj američkih saveznika koji je okružuju, prvenstveno Saudijsku Arabiju i Katar, koji uzimaju novac i oružje, a Turska je, takođe, ozbiljan igrač", kaže osnivač Vikiliksa.

 

Prema njegovim rečima, svako od njih ima svoje hegemonističke ambicije u regionu.

 

Kako dodaje, nema sumnje da je u toj grupi i Izrael, i ako bi se Sirija destabilizovala, on bi bio u poziciji da zauvek zadrži Golansku visoravan i čak da pridoda još teritorije.

 

"Tako dakle imate brojne igrače oko Sirije, koji traže način da odgrizu neki komad...", predočio je Asanž.

[Gandalf]

"SAD još 2006. planirale rušenje Sirije"

 

susa je pocela 2006-e.

 

nije to slucajno.

[Budja]

Pa cemu nas uci istorija? Ako recimo vojna akcija zaista nema alternativu (jer se recimo sprovodi neki genocid), da li su dovoljni samo vazdusni udari i 100K vojnika? Ili su mozda siroke koalicije sa velikim brojem vojnika i sa jasnim planom obnove i podele delotvornije?

 

 

Pa sta rade dikatori kad im se izmaknu pare? Sta je uradio Milosevic? Sta radi Kim? 

 

Jasno, Kimovi su jos od pedesetih zavisili od americke vojne pomoci, na koju se naslanja doktrina armije, a armija drzi celu ekonomiju.