Dispatches from Deena Stryker

Dear Mr. Secretary:

As a former State Department political appointee who drew President Jimmy Carter’s attention to important aspects of the Cuban Revolution, I hope you will share with National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and the other members of the Trump cabinet the fact that Russia has long enjoyed close relations with Iran, and that there are important reasons for this.

Understanding these reasons starts with knowing the difference between Sunnis, who seek to impose a medieval, top-down version of Islam through jihad, and Shia, who are historical defenders of the dispossessed and favor peace. The Shia revere Ali, the prophet’s designated successor, because he defended the poor, while his opponent, who had him killed, represented the merchant class which still today is mostly Sunni. Since the seventh century, Shiism has been more popular among the lower Arab classes, culminating in the 1979 Iranian revolution. The revolution’s principal ideologue was Ali Shariati, a friend of left-wing writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who is reported to have said that had he believed in God, he would be a Muslim.

Shariati argued that a good society would conform to Islamic values, and that the role of government was to guide society in the best possible manner rather than to manage it. Ignorant of these facts, American political actors and journalists claim that Shia Iran supports terrorism, when in fact, Islamic terrorism seeks to advance a rigid Sunni tradition. Politicians and journalists who use Iran’s backing of Hezbollah to claim that it supports terrorism ignore that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the military arm of Lebanon’s left, is a political and religious theoretician who endeavors to implement Shariati’s vision. Lebanon’s Hezbollah supports the Palestinian cause, as does Shiite Bashar al-Assad, whose country is known as the ‘frontline state’ because it borders on Israel.

While India, Pakistan and Israel have nuclear capabilities, Iran is denied that right — whether because it had a revolution or because its system of government operates under religious law is never made clear. Although it has respected the strict limitations on its nuclear research set out by the Western P + 5 and Russia, minutes after being sworn in to office, US President Donald Trump announced that his administration would develop a “state of the art” missile defense system to protect Americans against attacks from North Korea and Iran. Reports of the launch of a test missile by Iran a few days later made no mention of that provocation.

The new US president needs to understand that it cannot have better relations with Russia while threatening Iran. Slapping sanctions on Iran for testing a missile, as Trump did without missing a beat, may be a gesture toward Israel in order to be able to lean on Netanyahu over new settlement construction; but Iran has never waged war on its neighbors except when provoked (as in the eight year conflict initiated by Iraq in the nineteen-eighties and supported by a US eager to defeat the Revolutionary regime). Iran’s efforts to overcome the historical enmity between Islam’s Shia and Sunni regimes that roils the Middle East, are far from being reciprocated by the most powerful Sunni government and US ally, Saudi Arabia. With US support, it is waging a devastating air campaign against its tiny neighbor, Yemen, one of the poorest countries on the planet, because Shia Houthis vying for power there could supposedly pose a threat to the Sunni monarchy.

Cooperation between Russia and the US to defeat ISIS, the Sunni so-called Caliphate, cannot flourish if the US fails to welcome the Shiites in that struggle. To do that, it could be helpful for Americans to know how Vladimir Putin interacts with Russia’s Muslim neighbors. As I wrote in ISIS in US-Russia crosshairswww.greanvillepost.com/?s=Deena+Stryker “Not only did Putin win the peace with the Chechens, he has adopted policies vis-a-vis his country’s Islamic neighbors which are very different from those the US implemented in its attempt to dominate the Middle East — or those implemented by the United States after the Civil War, when ‘reconstruction’ was a myth that led to officially sanctioned segregation and a struggle for equality that is yet to be won. Russia contributed generously to Chechen reconstruction, favoring a modernization that supports tradition, refusing to throw the historical, as well as the socialist baby, out with the bathwater.”

Beyond theology, the crux of the Sunni-Shia divide is whether Iran or Saudi Arabia will be the preeminent power in the Middle East. Russian-Iranian relations have varied over time, but Western economic sanctions on Iran led to Russia becoming a key trading partner and made Iran the only country in Western Asia invited to join the Collective Security Treaty Organization, President Putin’s response to NATO’s encroachment.

As perhaps the world’s foremost petroleum executive, you know that relations between Russia and Iran go beyond their shared existence as oil producers. With so many urgent tasks ahead, I hope you can prevail upon the Trump Administration to pursue a seamless shift away from Saudi Arabia, that supports its number one enemy, ISIS, and recognize Iran as the leading Middle East power, whose efforts will be directed toward a vital process of healing.

—Deena Stryker
Senior Contributing Editor
The Greanville Post

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ABOVE IMAGE: THE OBAMAS BURNISHING THEIR CREDENTIALS AS UNCONDITIONAL ALLIES OF THE MEDIEVAL SAUDIS. ⁽¹⁾ 

By  Gilbert Mercier

Syria: Fog of proxy war and conflicting agendas

As furious fighting rages in Syria for control of Qusair, a border town of critical strategic importance, the dense and toxic fog of that country’s proxy war is spreading to Lebanon and Iraq. With Hezbollah becoming directly involved in the conflict to back Assad, the patchwork coalition of Syrian rebel groups and Jihadist foreign fighters, with al-Nusra in the lead, is losing ground and on the defensive. Bashar al-Assad has three main objectives, which could now be obtained with the substantial and full commitment from Hezbollah. First, taking back Qusair would reopen a critical channel between Damascus and pro-Assad Alawite militias on the Mediterranean coast. Second, this would cut off the rebel-held areas between the north and south. Third, and perhaps most importantly, this would give Assad a stronger hand before the peace conference organized by Russia and the United States, to take place in June. Meanwhile, Arabs and Muslims in general are killing each other and doing the bidding of Israel and the West in what could become a full-blown regional sectarian war between Sunnis on one side, and Shiites and Alawites on the other. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West are certainly strange bedfellows, and this is reflected by the state of the Syrian opposition “coalition.”

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Syrian opposition: no clear agenda or coherent leadership

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] meeting of the Syrian opposition in Turkey last week was a complete fiasco. The coalition’s Western supporters, with the US, the UK and France in the lead, wanted more seats for liberals, but this attempt was blocked by a Muslim-Brotherhood influenced bloc supported by Qatar. In this regard, reflecting a change of course, the Western-backed part of the coalition was supported by the Saudis, as they became concerned about Qatar’s rising influence on Syrian opposition groups.

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The sectarian war in Syria spreads to Lebanon and Iraq

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]lawites are now also fighting against Sunnis in Tripoli, Lebanon. According to Qatari as well as Israeli sources, 5,000 Hezbollah troops have joined Assad’s forces in Syria, and another 5,000 have been called to be deployed in the coming days. On May 27, rockets fired by Sunnis targeted and hit Hezbollah-held areas of Beirut. Meanwhile, in a speech on May 26, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah said that his organization will stand firmly with Assad. “We will continue to the end of the road. We accept this responsibility and will accept all sacrifices and expected consequences for this position,” said Nasrallah.

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In Iraq, sectarian violence has become a daily event. According to the United Nations, more than 700 people were killed in April, and already 350 in May in sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. Sunni Iraqi Jihadists are reported to be fighting against Assad in Syria. The expansion of the fight to Lebanon and Iraq demonstrates, once again, that inflaming sectarian conflicts in the Arab world is a deadly strategy concocted by the West and Israel to divide and rule the Middle East. These geopolitics of chaos have wrecked Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The West and Israel would like an encore in Syria by toppling Assad.

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Will today’s allies against Syria, Hezbollah and Iran become foes tomorrow?

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen one considers this strange Qatar-Saudi Arabia-Israel alliance built on the principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” it is hard not to recall the pact of non-aggression signed in 1939 between Hitler and Stalin. On one hand, not having a  front with the Soviet Union made wrecking Poland, Belgium and France easier for Nazi Germany. On the other hand, this gave Stalin the time he needed to build up the Red Army, knowing perfectly well that the pact with the Nazis would be extremely temporary. Providing that Assad is toppled and that Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West “take care” of Hezbollah and Iran, the aftermath in the region and beyond would be extremely messy.

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“Inflaming sectarian conflicts in the Arab world is a deadly strategy concocted by the West and Israel to divide and rule the Middle East. These geopolitics of chaos have wrecked Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The West and Israel would like an encore in Syria by toppling Assad…”

[dropcap]Q[/dropcap]atar and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia are working to establish an Islamist state in Syria. Using their money, they are exploiting the Syrian opposition against Assad as well as recruiting and arming some 50,000 Jihadist foreign fighters. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have done this before. Qatar was among the few Arab states that offered active military assistance to NATO during the toppling of Gaddafi in Libya, and Qataris were key suppliers of money and weapons to Libyan rebels. Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s vision is that of a Middle East that becomes Sunni dominated, under their influence, using the Muslim Brotherhood as a political instrument. Qatar wants a Muslim-Brotherhood controlled Syria, just like Egypt. But what will Israel do if it becomes surrounded by Muslim-Brotherhood controlled states sponsored by Qatar and Saudi Arabia? And what will happen to Israel’s vision of territorial expansion to a Greater Israel?

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Can Russia and China impose a political solution for the Syrian crisis?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he only hope for avoiding an escalation that would put us on course to World War III is for Russia and China to make a stand on Syria, as opposed to their inaction on both Iraq and Libya. Syria should be defined as a red line not to be crossed by the West, Israel, and their temporary allies from the Gulf. If Russia dumps Syria, Hezbollah and, down the line, Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin would lose all geopolitical credibility.

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Nobel-peace-prize laureate Mairead Maguire, who just headed a peace delegation to Syria and Lebanon that pushed for a Syrian National Reconciliation, wrote in a report: “The Syrian state and its population are under a proxy war led by foreign countries and directly financed and backed by Qatar.”  According to Maguire, 50,000 foreign Jihadist fighters have come to Syria through Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. The Jihadists originate from many different countries: there are Libyans, Saudis, Tunisians, Chechens, Afghans, Pakistanis, Emiratis, Lebanese, Jordanians, Europeans, and even Australians.

Saudi King Salman-bin-Abdulaziz-Al-Saud (above and below), one of the main figures behind the Middle East mess. (Bing/(cc))

Qatar’s strongman Emir Tamim-bin-Hamad-Al-Thani. The Gulf potentates—with their allies in the West— are a case study in how to squander enormous fortunes on criminal and stupid pursuits. (Bing-(cc))

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Maguire urged the international community to “support a process of dialogue and reconciliation in Syria between its people and the Syrian government and reject outside intervention and war.” While Russia’s aim is merely to push for a ceasefire, Maguire’s ultimate goal is peace in Syria, although, with so much animosity between Sunnis and Alawites, a partition of Syria along sectarian lines (see map) might be a more realistic solution to avoid further bloodshed in a conflict that has already killed more than 80,000 and displaced 3.5 million people.

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Editor’s Note: Photographs one, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten by Freedom House.

 

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP. JUST CLICK HERE.

Gilbert Mercier is a French author of "The Orwellian Empire", a journalist, on air geopolitical analyst, a photojournalist and filmmaker based in the US since 1983. He is the founder and  co-editor-in-chief of News Junkie Post"   

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[Photo: US missiles found in ISIS stronghold in Mosul, Iraq.]

=By= Kurt Nimmo

The Iraqis found missiles at an Islamic State base in Mosul stamped with USA and DOD.

The discovery did not warrant a headline on CNN or The New York Times.

“Several US-made missiles were found in al-Shoura region to the South of Mosul,” reports Iran’s al-Alam News Network, citing a local source.

“The ISIL terrorists have sent US-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Tal Afar and it is quite evident that they are preparing for a long-term war,” an Iraqi security official told an Arabic-language media outlet.

In early 2015 Qasim al-Araji, the head of the Badr Organization in Iraq, told parliament he had evidence the US armed the Islamic State, according to a report carried by the Arabic language Almasalah.

Iranian media and other sources claim US military aircraft dropped weapons in areas held by the Islamic State.

“The Iraqi intelligence sources reiterated that the US military planes have airdropped several aid cargoes for ISIL terrorists to help them resist the siege laid by the Iraqi army, security and popular forces,” Iraqi intelligence claimed in December, 2014.

“What is important is that the US sends these weapons to only those that cooperate with the Pentagon and this indicates that the US plays a role in arming the ISIL.”

In January 2015 Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui said American aircraft delivered weapons and equipment to ISIS southeast of Tikrit, located in Salahuddin province.

“The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” the leader of the committee Hakem al-Zameli said, according to the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Last February Iran’s FAR News Agency reported the Iraq Army shot down two British planes delivering weapons to the Islamic State.

Both the Islamic State and al-Nusra are in possession of US-made BGM 71E TOW anti-tank missiles.

The London-based organization Conflict Armament Research (CAR) previously reported that ISIS fighters are using “significant quantities” of arms including M16 assault rifles marked “property of the US government.”

CAR has documented a CIA-Saudi program begun in 2012 that has provided thousands of tons of weaponry to “insurgents” (jihadi mercenaries) in Syria. The weapons are shared with the Islamic State.

“Conflict Armament Research was able to trace the serial numbers of weapons recovered by Kurds battling ISIS in Eastern Syria back directly to the CIA-Saudi weapons airlift program,” notes Brad Hoff for Levant Report.

If Hillary Clinton is elected next week the restocking of the Islamic State’s arsenal and the war in Syria will continue.

“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states that had donated to the Clinton Foundation. Saudi Arabia had chipped in at least $10 million, and Boeing added another $900,000 as Secretary Clinton made it her mission to get Saudi Arabia the planes with which it would attack Yemen,” writes David Swanson.

Clinton is well aware the Gulf Emirates arm and provide logistical assistance to the Islamic State.

“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” Clinton wrote in an email to John Podesta.

Clinton did not mention Obama’s secret authorization in 2013 that armed jihadis fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The deal allowed the Saudis to arm jihadis with US weapons. It also permitted the CIA to train the mercenaries on how to use the weapons, including anti-tank missiles, The New York Times reported.

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=By= Patrick Cockburn

It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furore over the sexual antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating of these is what reads like a US State Department memo, dated 17 August 2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces, which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

At the time, the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies were supporting Isis and al-Qaeda-type movements. But in the leaked memo, which says that it draws on “western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region” there is no ambivalence about who is backing Isis, which at the time of writing was butchering and raping Yazidi villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.

The memo says: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region.” This was evidently received wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and South Asia.

For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront these traditional Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the “War on Terror” would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda in its different guises is much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.

It is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the US foreign policy establishment in general did not know what was happening. An earlier WikiLeaks release of a State Department cable sent under her name in December 2009 states that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan].” But Saudi complicity with these movements never became a central political issue in the US. Why not?

The answer is that the US did not think it was in its interests to cut its traditional Sunni allies loose and put a great deal of resources into making sure that this did not happen. They brought on side compliant journalists, academics and politicians willing to give overt or covert support to Saudi positions.

The real views of senior officials in the White House and the State Department were only periodically visible and, even when their frankness made news, what they said was swiftly forgotten. Earlier this year, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg inThe Atlantic wrote a piece based on numerous interviews with Barack Obama in which Obama “questioned, often harshly, the role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally”.

It is worth recalling White House cynicism about how that foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington was produced and how easily its influence could be bought. Goldberg reported that “a widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as ‘Arab-occupied territory’.”

Despite this, television and newspaper interview self-declared academic experts from these same think tanks on Isis, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are wilfully ignoring or happily disregarding their partisan sympathies.

The Hillary Clinton email of August 2014 takes for granted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding Isis – but this was not the journalistic or academic conventional wisdom of the day. Instead, there was much assertion that the newly declared caliphate was self-supporting through the sale of oil, taxes and antiquities; it therefore followed that Isis did not need money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The same argument could not be made to explain the funding of Jabhat al-Nusra, which controlled no oilfields, but even in the case of Isis the belief in its self-sufficiency was always shaky.

Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did not believe a word of it, claiming privately that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states by threatening violence on their territory unless they paid up. The Iraqi and Kurdish officials never produced proof of this, but it seemed unlikely that men as tough and ruthless as the Isis leaders would have satisfied themselves with taxing truck traffic and shopkeepers in the extensive but poor lands they ruled and not extracted far larger sums from fabulously wealthy private and state donors in the oil producers of the Gulf.

Going by the latest leaked email, the State Department and US intelligence clearly had no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis. But there has always been bizarre discontinuity between what the Obama administration knew about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and what they would say in public. Occasionally the truth would spill out, as when Vice-President Joe Biden told students at Harvard in October 2014 that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates “were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world”. Biden poured scorn on the idea that there were Syrian “moderates” capable of fighting Isis and Assad at the same time.

Hillary Clinton should be very vulnerable over the failings of US foreign policy during the years she was Secretary of State. But, such is the crudity of Trump’s demagoguery, she has never had to answer for it. Republican challenges have focussed on issues – the death of the US ambassador in Benghazi in 2012 and the final US military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 – for which she was not responsible.

A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean closer amity with Saudi Arabia, but American attitudes towards the Saudi regime are becoming soured, as was shown recently when Congress overwhelmingly overturned a presidential veto of a bill allowing the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government.

Another development is weakening Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies. The leaked memo speaks of the rival ambitions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar “to dominate the Sunni world”. But this has not turned out well, with east Aleppo and Mosul, two great Sunni cities, coming under attack and likely to fall. Whatever Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the others thought they were doing it has not happened and the Sunni of Syria and Iraq are paying a heavy price. It is this failure which will shape the future relations of the Sunni states with the new US administration.

Source: The Independent via Znet.

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CARRYING OUT THE CRIMINAL AGENDA OF THE 0.00001% ACROSS THE GLOBE

ALEX LANTIER, SENIOR ANALYST, WSWS.ORG

Dateline: 27 September 2016, first iteration

This week, as criticism of the US-Russian cease-fire in Syria mounted within the Pentagon brass, a prominent foreign policy analyst issued a statement denouncing the truce. He reiterated US calls for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, and he advocated a major escalation of the US-NATO intervention in Syria—arming the Islamist opposition with anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons.

Gilbert Achcar

“As almost everybody can now tell,” this critic wrote, “the new cease-fire agreement on Syria is doomed to break down, as would any such agreement that does not settle the core political problem of the crisis. Of course, even a respite that doesn’t last is better than nothing at all (although the truce has so far been very disappointing with regard to humanitarian relief). But short of an agenda that includes a comprehensive agreement for Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance in that war-torn country.”

He added, “Without a balance of military forces on the ground in Syria which would compel the Assad regime and its Iranian backers to seek real compromise, a genuine political settlement is not possible. … [T]he issue of creating such a balance of forces—especially by providing the Syrian opposition with anti-aircraft missiles capable of limiting the Syrian regime’s use of air power, its main weapon of large-scale destruction—has been the principal bone of contention on Syria within the Obama administration since 2012.”

One might assume that this essay had been prepared by a CIA operative, or, perhaps, a columnist for either the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. In fact, the author is Gilbert Achcar, the prominent associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA). Achcar left that movement to take a professorship at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London and join the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain. His latest article was written for the Nation and republished on the Pabloite’s International Viewpoint web site, affiliated with the NPA.

As Achcar was drafting his essay, Ashley Smith of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States published a similar warmongering appeal on the Socialist Worker web site. For Smith, the truce should be used to re-arm US-backed “revolutionary” militias fighting alongside the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. He wrote that the truce “at best, might allow breathing space for revolutionaries to regroup for a future uprising against the regime.”

Smith attacked the Obama administration for lacking the appetite for a major confrontation with Russia. Smith criticizes Obama for having failed to militarily exploit the concocted “poison gas” episode of 2013 to overthrow Assad and bring the opposition to power.

Achcar using his professorial status to pollute the minds of the unwary or simply ignorant.

This was because Obama, Smith wrote, has been “hesitant to press this policy out of fear of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East.” He continued: “Thus, whenever the Assad regime crossed supposed ‘red lines,’ like its continuing use of chemical weapons, the US preferred to cut deals with Russia rather than take any action that might topple Assad, but also threaten a wider upheaval. The US has also refused to supply the FSA [Free Syrian Army militia] with weapons it pleaded for to defend itself against regime air strikes.”

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]mith’s denunciations of the Assad regime’s “relentless bombing of civilian targets” are utterly hypocritical and tailored to the specific needs of American imperialism. His selective outrage overlooks the US-backed Saudi bombing and blockade in Yemen, which has killed thousands and threatens hundreds of thousands of children with starvation. Smith has written nothing on Yemen, which has been ignored by Socialist Worker and the entire pseudo-left press.

Nor is Smith concerned about the sectarian massacres carried out by the US-backed Islamist opposition in Syria, and the bloody record of US imperialism itself, whose wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have still claimed a far greater toll than the Kremlin’s Syrian intervention.

The writings of Achcar and Smith obliterate any significant distinction between the positions of leading pseudo-left political tendencies and the most ruthless representatives of American and European imperialism. Indeed, in an extraordinary passage, Achcar closes his essay with a friendly quotation from Anthony Cordesman, the head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.

“If anyone in the region had any illusion about the democratic and humanitarian pretexts invoked by Washington in previous wars, they have lost them completely by now,” he writes. “As Anthony Cordesman, one of the most astute observers of the military-political situation in the Middle East, recently observed, the US president is now entirely focused on an ‘exit strategy’—not an exit from the Syrian crisis, though, but his own exit from office.”

Achcar’s “astute observer” is in fact one of American militarism’s most important strategists. He is the author of innumerable reports calling for the escalation of US wars in the Middle East and aggression against China and Russia. He is also the author of a CSIS report on nuclear war that dismissed the destruction of India and Pakistan—that is, the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people—as economically unimportant. “The loss of India and Pakistan might create some short term economic issues for importers of goods and services,” he wrote. “However, the net effect would shift benefits to other suppliers without any clear problems in substitutions or costs.”

From Achcar’s standpoint, however, Cordesman is a colleague with whom he can work on the friendliest basis. They share the same objectives, as well as the same enemies—that is, anyone who opposes their war policies.

The articles by Achcar and Smith express not just the positions of these two individuals, but the evolution of social forces and their reflection in political tendencies.

In 1999 David North, international editorial board chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, wrote:

The objective modus operandi and social implications of the protracted stock market boom have enabled imperialism to recruit from among sections of the upper-middle class a new and devoted constituency. The reactionary, conformist and cynical intellectual climate that prevails in the United States and Europe—promoted by the media and adapted to by a largely servile and corrupted academic community—reflects the social outlook of a highly privileged stratum of the population that is not in the least interested in encouraging a critical examination of the economic and political bases of its newly-acquired riches. [A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016]

This social stratum and the political tendencies that reflect their interests have moved sharply to the right. The writings of Achcar and Smith show how, amid growing anger and mass disaffection with war in the working class, pseudo-left organizations are being integrated and recruited to play major roles in imperialist politics. The organizations and tendencies that were in the leadership of anti-war protests in the late 1960s and 1970s are now shamelessly pro-war. Workers, students and youth must understand this fact, and the social processes that underlie it, in order to build a new movement against the immense dangers that confront mankind.

The fight against imperialist war requires the systematic political exposure of the pro-imperialist pseudo-left. But this theoretical-political work is inseparably linked to the political organization and education of the working class and the broad mass of youth. It is within this powerful social force that the mass constituency for revolutionary opposition to imperialist war will be found. The Detroit conference called by the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality—Socialism vs. Capitalism and War—will mark an important advance in the fight to build a new movement against war. We urge readers and supporters of the World Socialist Web Site to come to Detroit on November 5 to participate in this critically important conference.

Alex Lantier

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

But be sure to support YOUR media.
If you don’t, who will?

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