Boardman writes: "None of the Democratic candidates in the October 13 debate
had anything very useful to say about ending the carnage in Syria and the
rest of the Middle East."
A child plays near damaged buildings in the besieged part of Homs City,
western Syria. (photo: Yazan Homsy)
Syrian Sideshow Baffles Democrats, Who See No Way to the Egress
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
17 October 15
Democrats have no new ideas for peace other than more war
None of the Democratic candidates in the October 13 debate had anything very
useful to say about ending the carnage in Syria and the rest of the Middle
East. The most belligerent was Hillary Clinton, wanting to stand up to
Vladimir Putin's "bullying" and establish a no-fly zone over Syria. The rest
wanted more restraint on continued military action, and everyone vaguely
supported "diplomacy," with no suggestion how to get there. Additionally,
Jim Webb called for confronting China over the South China Sea (the
suggestion was ignored).
Bernie Sanders called the Syrian situation a "quagmire in a quagmire" and
left it at that. Unfortunately, that was the most detailed analysis from any
of the candidates, none of whom demonstrated any willingness to think
outside the box, or even to admit they were all thinking within a very old
box that had served no one well. After decades of disastrous American
bloodletting in the Middle East, the best the Democrats can offer is to
maybe slow it down a little.
Certainly that's better than Republicans, who are all gung-ho to watch the
arms and legs fly and figure out whose body parts are whose later. The
expansion of Russian military action in northwestern Syria has pushed
Republican jingoism to the frothing stage, as if another war to end war is a
mistake we need to make again.
Republican senators don't quite have the honesty to say they're calling for
war with Russia over Syria, they just complain that President Obama isn't
doing anything to stop President Putin, as if there were some way to
accomplish that short of military confrontation up to and including all-out
war. John McCain may be a former presidential nominee and Bob Corker may be
the current chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, but by berating
the president for not leading the US into war against the Russians in Syria,
they demonstrate once again, if demonstration were needed, that they are not
serious people with the best interests of the country or the world among
their priorities.
What use is a debate that avoids details and consequences?
Cautious only by comparison, Clinton's call for a no-fly zone is just a
euphemistic way of calling for going head-to-head with the Russians. Unless
Clinton somehow imagines the Russians will stop flying, and will also
persuade their Syrian ally to stop flying, how does Clinton expect to
enforce a no-fly zone without US planes and missiles shooting down Russian
and Syrian warplanes? A no-fly zone sounds bland enough, but on reflection
it is clearly a stupid, ill-defined, unachievable tactic designed to give
the impression of sophisticated toughness where there is none. It is a sad
measure of the quality of American presidential debates that there was no
follow-up question from the moderator or any candidate as to how a
no-fly-zone could be achieved, how long it would take to put in place, how
long it would last, how much it would cost, or what risks it entailed.
Publicly at least, the leadership consensus in the US these days among
Republicans, Democrats, Congress and the White House is that the US "has to
do something" about Syria and the Middle East. What with overthrowing
governments and supporting dictatorships from Iran to Libya, what with
nurturing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to bait the Russians, has the US not
already done enough? Or way, way too much?
When people insist that the US "has to do something," the first question
from others, from the media, from the self-replicating governing
intelligentsia, from almost everyone - the first question is the wrong
question, because the first question is usually, "What?" "What," they ask,
reflexively, without stopping to reflect: "What should we do?"
"What should we do now in the Middle East?" is the wrong question
The right question is "Why?" Why should we do anything? What is there about
the past 65 years to persuade anyone that the US has played a positive,
peaceful role in any of the countries we have devastated? The time is long
past when we might have first done no harm. Not that widespread destruction
of ancient cultures is all our fault. It's not. The US was a late arrival to
supporting carnage and corruption in the Middle East, but the US has done
more than its share to destroy the possibility of human happiness in too
many places to be held blameless ever. We know what doesn't work, measured
clearly by the millions of people displaced, disabled, or dead.
And then there's Tunisia.
Tunisia, despite having many of the same handicaps as other Middle East
countries, has somehow managed to survive its inherent cultural and
political tensions with a collaborative effort that won the Nobel Prize for
Peace this year. Suffice it to say that the Nobel Committee's award to the
Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet honors a phenomenon unlike any in the US
for decades. The Arab Spring that started in Tunisia in 2010 spread to many
other countries, as the Nobel Committee noted, but:
"In many of these countries, the struggle for democracy and fundamental
rights has come to a standstill or suffered setbacks. Tunisia, however, has
seen a democratic transition based on a vibrant civil society with demands
for respect for basic human rights.
"An essential factor for the culmination of the revolution in Tunisia in
peaceful, democratic elections last autumn was the effort made by the
Quartet to support the work of the constituent assembly and to secure
approval of the constitutional process among the Tunisian population at
large.. The broad-based national dialogue that the Quartet succeeded in
establishing countered the spread of violence in Tunisia and its function is
therefore comparable to that of the peace congresses to which Alfred Nobel
refers in his will."
Tunisians achieved this without significant help or interference from the
US. The single national success story in the region came about without
meaningful involvement by the so-called (by itself) "essential, exceptional,
indispensible" nation. Everywhere else that the US has engaged in the Middle
East mayhem is the norm. Where the US was absent, in Tunisia, there is, for
the present, a maturing, peaceful democracy.
Can you say it's an option to do nothing? Always! First, do no harm.
Here's the thing about US policy in Syria: having failed to find the
imaginary "moderate opposition" to support, now the US is metaphorically
reduced to choosing between supporting either the Kurds or the tooth fairy.
Neither option promises any better results than previous efforts since 2011.
And supporting the tooth fairy would at least allow the US to avoid the
contradictions inherent in supporting the Kurds, who are the enemy of US
NATO ally Turkey, which has once again been bombing Kurds in Turkey, Syria,
and maybe Iraq and Iran for months now.
When bombs went off in Ankara October 10, killing and wounding hundreds of
people, the victims were mostly Kurdish peace activists. Who carried out the
bombings? Not yet known. Who benefitted from the bombings? The Turkish
government benefitted from blowing up political opponents. The Islamic State
(ISIS) benefitted from blowing up military enemies who are the most
effective fighters against ISIS. The Kurds, who control a large swath of
northwestern Syria along the southern Turkish border, have been driving ISIS
slowly southward.
ISIS and other jihadi groups benefit from years of support from other
supposed US allies like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. These Sunni states
find it in their interest to maintain a steady flow of money and arms to
jihadi elements of all sorts in a proxy struggle against the Shiite elements
associated with Iran as well as the Alawites who make up the core of support
for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
For no apparent rational reason, US policy in the region in the past few
years has come down to a single, largely unexamined goal: Assad must go.
That's it. The US doesn't even have the remotest idea of any kind of
successor government, or even if any would be possible, short of a US
occupation, which no one in the governing consensus is calling for. For a
president who once wisely articulated a foreign policy principle of "don't
do stupid things," it's hard to imagine the US finding itself in a more
stupid position than having a non-negotiable goal that it knows is
unachievable by any means it is willing to employ.
What harm would come from US military de-escalation?
Militarily the US has been in a quagmire in Afghanistan since 2001, a
quagmire in Iraq since 2003, and a quagmire in Syria since 2011. The
conventional wisdom articulated by President Obama and others on down is
that there is no military solution to Syria or anywhere else. That said, no
one in authority proposes anything but more military measures.
Bernie Sanders doesn't recommend any policy that follows the logic of his
own observation that Syria in the Middle East is a "quagmire in a quagmire."
Why? No one disputed this characterization. And no one embraced it. The five
Democrats gave the impression other leaders give, that they really don't
want to think about a problem to which there may be no active solution. Why
take a stand when there's no place to put your feet? When you have no good
alternatives, why choose any of them?
Sanders called, as he has before, for an Arab coalition to take the lead in
Syria and the Middle East generally. An American president can't make that
happen, an American president can only wait for that to happen. Meanwhile
the US can stop bombing people, the US can disengage from the Saudis'
criminal war in Yemen, and the US can focus on the multilateral negotiations
all the Democratic candidates said they support.
The best thing to do when you're in a quagmire is to get out of the
quagmire. Leave it to the Turks, the Saudis, the Russians, the Israelis, and
all the other people who lack the courage and the wisdom to act like
Tunisians.
________________________________________
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
A child plays near damaged buildings in the besieged part of Homs City,
western Syria. (photo: Yazan Homsy)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
Syrian Sideshow Baffles Democrats, Who See No Way to the Egress
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
17 October 15
Democrats have no new ideas for peace other than more war
one of the Democratic candidates in the October 13 debate had anything very
useful to say about ending the carnage in Syria and the rest of the Middle
East. The most belligerent was Hillary Clinton, wanting to stand up to
Vladimir Putin's "bullying" and establish a no-fly zone over Syria. The rest
wanted more restraint on continued military action, and everyone vaguely
supported "diplomacy," with no suggestion how to get there. Additionally,
Jim Webb called for confronting China over the South China Sea (the
suggestion was ignored).
Bernie Sanders called the Syrian situation a "quagmire in a quagmire" and
left it at that. Unfortunately, that was the most detailed analysis from any
of the candidates, none of whom demonstrated any willingness to think
outside the box, or even to admit they were all thinking within a very old
box that had served no one well. After decades of disastrous American
bloodletting in the Middle East, the best the Democrats can offer is to
maybe slow it down a little.
Certainly that's better than Republicans, who are all gung-ho to watch the
arms and legs fly and figure out whose body parts are whose later. The
expansion of Russian military action in northwestern Syria has pushed
Republican jingoism to the frothing stage, as if another war to end war is a
mistake we need to make again.
Republican senators don't quite have the honesty to say they're calling for
war with Russia over Syria, they just complain that President Obama isn't
doing anything to stop President Putin, as if there were some way to
accomplish that short of military confrontation up to and including all-out
war. John McCain may be a former presidential nominee and Bob Corker may be
the current chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, but by berating
the president for not leading the US into war against the Russians in Syria,
they demonstrate once again, if demonstration were needed, that they are not
serious people with the best interests of the country or the world among
their priorities.
What use is a debate that avoids details and consequences?
Cautious only by comparison, Clinton's call for a no-fly zone is just a
euphemistic way of calling for going head-to-head with the Russians. Unless
Clinton somehow imagines the Russians will stop flying, and will also
persuade their Syrian ally to stop flying, how does Clinton expect to
enforce a no-fly zone without US planes and missiles shooting down Russian
and Syrian warplanes? A no-fly zone sounds bland enough, but on reflection
it is clearly a stupid, ill-defined, unachievable tactic designed to give
the impression of sophisticated toughness where there is none. It is a sad
measure of the quality of American presidential debates that there was no
follow-up question from the moderator or any candidate as to how a
no-fly-zone could be achieved, how long it would take to put in place, how
long it would last, how much it would cost, or what risks it entailed.
Publicly at least, the leadership consensus in the US these days among
Republicans, Democrats, Congress and the White House is that the US "has to
do something" about Syria and the Middle East. What with overthrowing
governments and supporting dictatorships from Iran to Libya, what with
nurturing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to bait the Russians, has the US not
already done enough? Or way, way too much?
When people insist that the US "has to do something," the first question
from others, from the media, from the self-replicating governing
intelligentsia, from almost everyone - the first question is the wrong
question, because the first question is usually, "What?" "What," they ask,
reflexively, without stopping to reflect: "What should we do?"
"What should we do now in the Middle East?" is the wrong question
The right question is "Why?" Why should we do anything? What is there about
the past 65 years to persuade anyone that the US has played a positive,
peaceful role in any of the countries we have devastated? The time is long
past when we might have first done no harm. Not that widespread destruction
of ancient cultures is all our fault. It's not. The US was a late arrival to
supporting carnage and corruption in the Middle East, but the US has done
more than its share to destroy the possibility of human happiness in too
many places to be held blameless ever. We know what doesn't work, measured
clearly by the millions of people displaced, disabled, or dead.
And then there's Tunisia.
Tunisia, despite having many of the same handicaps as other Middle East
countries, has somehow managed to survive its inherent cultural and
political tensions with a collaborative effort that won the Nobel Prize for
Peace this year. Suffice it to say that the Nobel Committee's award to the
Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet honors a phenomenon unlike any in the US
for decades. The Arab Spring that started in Tunisia in 2010 spread to many
other countries, as the Nobel Committee noted, but:
"In many of these countries, the struggle for democracy and fundamental
rights has come to a standstill or suffered setbacks. Tunisia, however, has
seen a democratic transition based on a vibrant civil society with demands
for respect for basic human rights.
"An essential factor for the culmination of the revolution in Tunisia in
peaceful, democratic elections last autumn was the effort made by the
Quartet to support the work of the constituent assembly and to secure
approval of the constitutional process among the Tunisian population at
large.. The broad-based national dialogue that the Quartet succeeded in
establishing countered the spread of violence in Tunisia and its function is
therefore comparable to that of the peace congresses to which Alfred Nobel
refers in his will."
Tunisians achieved this without significant help or interference from the
US. The single national success story in the region came about without
meaningful involvement by the so-called (by itself) "essential, exceptional,
indispensible" nation. Everywhere else that the US has engaged in the Middle
East mayhem is the norm. Where the US was absent, in Tunisia, there is, for
the present, a maturing, peaceful democracy.
Can you say it's an option to do nothing? Always! First, do no harm.
Here's the thing about US policy in Syria: having failed to find the
imaginary "moderate opposition" to support, now the US is metaphorically
reduced to choosing between supporting either the Kurds or the tooth fairy.
Neither option promises any better results than previous efforts since 2011.
And supporting the tooth fairy would at least allow the US to avoid the
contradictions inherent in supporting the Kurds, who are the enemy of US
NATO ally Turkey, which has once again been bombing Kurds in Turkey, Syria,
and maybe Iraq and Iran for months now.
When bombs went off in Ankara October 10, killing and wounding hundreds of
people, the victims were mostly Kurdish peace activists. Who carried out the
bombings? Not yet known. Who benefitted from the bombings? The Turkish
government benefitted from blowing up political opponents. The Islamic State
(ISIS) benefitted from blowing up military enemies who are the most
effective fighters against ISIS. The Kurds, who control a large swath of
northwestern Syria along the southern Turkish border, have been driving ISIS
slowly southward.
ISIS and other jihadi groups benefit from years of support from other
supposed US allies like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. These Sunni states
find it in their interest to maintain a steady flow of money and arms to
jihadi elements of all sorts in a proxy struggle against the Shiite elements
associated with Iran as well as the Alawites who make up the core of support
for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
For no apparent rational reason, US policy in the region in the past few
years has come down to a single, largely unexamined goal: Assad must go.
That's it. The US doesn't even have the remotest idea of any kind of
successor government, or even if any would be possible, short of a US
occupation, which no one in the governing consensus is calling for. For a
president who once wisely articulated a foreign policy principle of "don't
do stupid things," it's hard to imagine the US finding itself in a more
stupid position than having a non-negotiable goal that it knows is
unachievable by any means it is willing to employ.
What harm would come from US military de-escalation?
Militarily the US has been in a quagmire in Afghanistan since 2001, a
quagmire in Iraq since 2003, and a quagmire in Syria since 2011. The
conventional wisdom articulated by President Obama and others on down is
that there is no military solution to Syria or anywhere else. That said, no
one in authority proposes anything but more military measures.
Bernie Sanders doesn't recommend any policy that follows the logic of his
own observation that Syria in the Middle East is a "quagmire in a quagmire."
Why? No one disputed this characterization. And no one embraced it. The five
Democrats gave the impression other leaders give, that they really don't
want to think about a problem to which there may be no active solution. Why
take a stand when there's no place to put your feet? When you have no good
alternatives, why choose any of them?
Sanders called, as he has before, for an Arab coalition to take the lead in
Syria and the Middle East generally. An American president can't make that
happen, an American president can only wait for that to happen. Meanwhile
the US can stop bombing people, the US can disengage from the Saudis'
criminal war in Yemen, and the US can focus on the multilateral negotiations
all the Democratic candidates said they support.
The best thing to do when you're in a quagmire is to get out of the
quagmire. Leave it to the Turks, the Saudis, the Russians, the Israelis, and
all the other people who lack the courage and the wisdom to act like
Tunisians.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
