Turkey claims it was in Turkish airspace, Russia claims it was in Syrian airspace.
Remember, ISIS gets a lot of its supplies and recruits through the Turkish border, which the Turks have kept open for them. Remember also that Turkish air strikes in Syria have primarily hit Kurds fighting ISIS.
Turkey is not “anti-ISIS,” quite the contrary.
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—you should ban French and Belgian visitors.
Because, as Marcy points out, all the Paris attackers were Europeans. None of them were Syrian refugees.
Sigh.
Let us speak today of what should be done if someone wanted to actually bring peace to Syria.
First: Airpower not in support of ground troops is largely, though not entirely, worthless. This has been demonstrated over and over again since, and including during, World War II. It does not significantly degrade the your opponent’s fighting ability, and disproportionately harms civilians.
So, if you want to do something even remotely productive or effective in Syria, you need ground troops.
However, foreign ground troops have not been able to bring peace to Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s safe to say that Western ground troops, while good at open field battle, are terrible at creating peace. The reason for that is too long to go into, but let’s not pretend otherwise; there is an extensive track record.
Right now, the French are bombing abandoned buildings in Raqqa (doing nothing of significance). If they actually tried to bomb ISIS they would kill civilians, a non-productive response to ISIS killing French civilians.
So, air power must be used in support of ground troops. The other consideration, if you want to defeat ISIS, is that you have to support its enemies. This means supporting the Syrian army, Hezbollah, the Kurds, Iran, and Iraqi troops.
Notice that this is essentially the strategy Russia is pursuing.
You also can’t play both, or all sides. Being against Assad and against ISIS, and allied with Turkey, who hates the Kurds and bombs them (when the Kurds are some of the most effective people fighting ISIS) is crazy.
Make an alliance and stick with it.
The West is caught between multiple allies with different interests. The Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel all want Assad gone, for different reasons.
But Assad wasn’t executing terrorist attacks in France, was he? Nor was he bombing those nations who have supported ISIS and various al-Qaeda affiliates, the people who are sponsoring attacks in the West.
Strategic confusion is the core problem. The West wants to eat its cake and have it too. The people who are fighting ISIS are people the West mostly doesn’t want to support, the people supplying ISIS are mostly people the West regards as allies.
The West is confused. Does it want ISIS (and al-Qaeda) defeated more than it wants to be rid of Assad or not?
This is a choice which must be made. The West can’t have both.
(Nov 18: Article corrected to indicate French bombing empty facilities.)
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Why are people calling for Western leaders to “fight terrorism”?
2002: 725
2010: 13,186
2014: 32,727
Those attacks mostly weren’t hitting the West. Now, a tiny fraction are.
Next.
Without the US arming and organizing the Afghani Mujahideen in the eighties there is no Al-Qaeda.
Without the US and British invasion of Iraq, there is no ISIS.
Understand this: Widespread global terrorism exists because of the US’s actions specifically and the West’s generally.
Let us turn now to economics. Inequality has been increasing since the 1970s. It has become worse every decade, with only minor reversals. After the financial crisis, it became so bad that more than all the productivity gains in the environment went to the top three percent.
This happened in large part due to various financial, economic, and legislative “reforms.” It was deliberate, in other words. Inequality is a result of deliberate action by US leadership.
Austerity is, likewise, the result of deliberate action by Western elites, generally. They decided to deliberately impoverish their citizens and have done so.
This is not unique to the West. India claims much economic progress, but the average number of calories eaten per capita has gone down over the last thirty years. The average Indian is worse off than they were when India was run on frankly socialist principles.
The leadership classes are chosen for their ability and desire to become leaders. If that overlaps with an ability and desire to make their society good for the majority of the population, that’s great, but in most countries right now, that’s not how or why they are selected.
These people are selected by oligarchs, for oligarchs, and their skillset is pleasing oligarchs. This is done through a system that selects candidates before they get to voters, even primary voters or the equivalent. In most cases, you do not get a choice of a leader who will put ordinary people’s interests first.
To see what happens when someone does slip through, take a look at how UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been treated by the Press. I have never seen such libelous coverage of a political leader. One UK headline yesterday read “Corbyn and his friends must choose what side they are on” with respect to the Paris attacks.
Here is what Corbyn said, by the way:
“Today, all our thoughts and sympathy are with the people of Paris.
“What took place in the French capital yesterday was horrific and immoral.
“We stand in solidarity with the people of France – as with all victims of terror and violence.
“I have cancelled my engagements today to hold discussions on events in France with shadow cabinet colleagues and be briefed by Downing Street security officials.
“It’s vital at a time of such tragedy and outrage not to be drawn into responses which feed a cycle of violence and hatred.
“We are proud to live in a multicultural and multi-faith society, and we stand for the unity of all communities.”
This is an eminently sane, statesmanlike statement that simply says our response should not make the situation worse, but Corbyn is being vilified for it.
This sort of propaganda works, Corbyn took over the Labour leadership with negative favorability ratings, virtually unheard of. He did so because he had been endlessly smeared by the Press.
Let me blunt. Anyone who wants our leadership to “fix” terrorism has either not been paying attention, is a fool, or is a tool who knows they’ll make it worse but expects to personally benefit in some way.
This situation is similar to the Iraq war in the sense that anyone stupid and immoral enough to invade Iraq could not be expected to run the war in a way which would lead to good results. One can make a theoretical case that an invasion of Iraq could have worked out well, but that can’t happen in the real world because no one who would invade Iraq in the first place would be competent or just enough to actually implement improvements.
Note, however, that the Iraq war was an immense profit opportunity and that a great deal of money was funneled to the right people. Again, this is one of our leaders’ core competencies, this is what they do well.
Years ago, Stirling Newberry told me that the job of modern politicians was to wrangle the masses for oligarchs. He was right. That is what they do. They are good at manipulating enough of the population, and they are good at giving money and power to those who already have both.
They are not good at anything else, and expecting them to do anything else is insane.
You do not want Hollande, Obama, and Cameron (let alone Erdogan) trying to fix the Middle East. You do not want the people who report to them trying to do so. You do not want western militaries trying to do so.
At least not if you want a reduction, rather than an increase, in terrorism.
The first rule of holes applies. The first thing you want the leadership to do is stop digging. Other than criminal investigations, you should want them to do nothing. No military action, no legislative changes. Military action hasn’t worked, legislative changes will just be more gutting of civil liberties, and that hasn’t worked either.
This is true of virtually everything. They cannot and will not fix inequality, because their raison d’etre is to create inquality. They cannot fix the financial system or the economy because it exists as it is to increase inequality. They cannot run a war because they were not chosen for that sort of competence.
If you want to fix any problem in the West, or have the West be helpful for fixing any global problem, you need to fix the Western leadership class. That means fixing Western media, education, corporations, etc, etc. The list is long, because they have deliberately broken virtually everything to turn it into an opportunity for a very few people to become richer.
If you are British, you have a decent, honorable man who actually wants to do almost all the right things: Corbyn. Get to work supporting him, however you can. If he goes down, the political class will take it as a lesson that trying to help ordinary people is a really bad idea. (Well, they have already decided this, so work to prove them wrong.)
But, in general, you need to retake control of the system which creates leaders, you need to restructure, bypass, or break the media conglomerates (or all three), and you will need to restructure society from the ground up so that it does not produce either such corrupt leaders or the people who enable them.
This is a goddamn big job. It is far harder than dropping some bombs on the Middle East, or sending in the troops again. But it is an actual solution to a whole series of problems.
In the meantime, don’t ask your leadership to “fix” anything. That’s not what they are there for. Whenever they want to do anything, your default position should be to oppose it–unless you are 100 percent certain it’s in your interest and have done the hard, cold research and thinking to support that conclusion. Sure, sometimes you’ll be wrong, but most of the time you’ll be right, because they are not in power to make your lives better, but to enrich a small class of people and impoverish the majority.
Any knock-on effects, like terrorism, are secondary to them, and even if they had the desire to fix such problems, they cannot–they do not have the ability. They will simply make them worse, even if it was possible they were sincerely trying to do good.
If you live in the West, the great danger to your life, health, and prosperity is your leadership. It is how your society is run. This is cold, hard, and true.
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Look, this is not a mistake by Obama. This is how Obamacare was designed:
for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.
“The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor,” said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a former hardware salesman with chronic knee pain. “We have insurance, but can’t afford to use it.”
Obamacare was a way of bailing out insurance companies and for providing catastrophic insurance coverage, which is meant to protect hospitals. If someone requires many thousands of dollars of care in one go, the hospital doesn’t have to eat it.
Meanwhile the high deductible, plus the relatively low percentage of premiums which the plan should be designed to pay out, are intended to keep insurance companies in business, as they were becoming less and less profitable.
In-network vs. out-of-network rules and deductibles also make the insurance hard to use in many parts of the country, and, again, this was by design.
Obamacare was never designed to make sure everyone had health care, it was designed to help insurance companies and hospitals—to get money to people who matter.
I strongly suspect it was also intended to preempt the logical plan of simply extending Medicare to everyone. Obama went out of his way to make sure there would be no public option, as well, trading it away right at the beginning.
Obamacare is a corporate subsidy. Some ordinary people get helped, but that is a side-effect.
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To say that the Paris attacks are terrible is easy. To follow the consequences of that statement is hard.
First, let us start with responsibility. Those most responsible are those who commanded the attacks take place, and those who carried them out.
This seems evident.
Let us make another statement: Absent the Iraq war, there would be no ISIS. If ISIS is responsible, then no Iraq war means no Paris attacks.
The Iraq war was an attack on a country which had not attacked the US, Britain, or any other coalition member. It did not threaten any coalition member. It did not have “WMD” in any meaningful sense of the words.
No Iraq war, no Paris attacks.
If you want to punish those responsible for the Paris attacks, on that list are George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair, among others.
Nor can a case be made that they did something defensible which had unfortunate consequences. The crime they committed was the same one for which the Allies hung most Nazis: starting a war without caususbelli. At Nuremburg, that was held worthy of death because of all of the crimes that follow logically from war.
It’s hard to tell how many deaths the Iraq war has caused, but put it from hundreds of thousands to well over a million.
Those people are just as dead as the Parisians. Most of them were civilians.
It should be, but isn’t, an unexceptionable statement to say that the people most responsible for their deaths are the people who ordered those deaths, and the people who killed them.
“Just following orders” should be out of style as an excuse, but it isn’t.
Legitimate violence, to many, is violence sanctioned by a state. Since Bush and Blair were heads of state, their violence is legitimate.
Yet the International Criminal Court regularly tries and imprisons Africans for killing people with the power of the State.
This ethical spiral goes nowhere good. It is impossible not to conclude that what matters in violence is only who commits it. We kill civilians in large numbers. We say that our soldiers are only following orders. We are still killing large numbers of civilians in foreign countries.
We would never accept this excuse of someone who carried out the attacks in Paris, that they “were only following orders.”
There is no way to cut through this knot that does not involve an appeal to authority, that does not come down to: “We’re okay with killing people with whom we don’t identify.”
ISIS claims to be a state, and claims the right to order violence. It claims the right to kill innocents. So does the West. The history of medical sanctions or of direct attacks on civilian infrastructure like sewage does not allow the argument for “collateral” casualties to be taken seriously.
I am unable to see, on the basis of any ethics that isn’t tribal, particular, or supine to authority that the Parisian attacks are more worthy of condemnation than either similar attacks that occur regularly in the Middle East. I am also unable to see what difference it makes to the dead if they are killed by a “terrorist’s” bomb or bullet, or a bomb or bullet used by a “soldier.”
Either civilians are off limits, or civilians aren’t. Either war crimes that got Nazis hung are war crimes for everyone, including Americans and British (or French, in Libya) or the Nuremburg trials were simply victor’s “justice”; simple vengeance.
We should expect propaganda from the state. We should expect hysteria. But we should not allow our own thinking or sympathy to fall subject to it.
The Paris attacks are terrible. They are not more terrible, or less terrible than other attacks of similar sort, no matter who carries them out.
I will accord “the West” the ethical upper-hand when I see Bush, Blair, and their cronies on the dock for their crimes.
Because I will tell you this: While every life has value, and every murder is a tragedy, more murders are worse than less murders.
If we want to avoid the next Paris attack, we will try our own criminals and cease our violent meddling in the affairs of other countries. Because, for the time being, we will not, the regularly scheduled tragedies, here and abroad, will continue.
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So, 128 dead so far, and over 200 injured in multiple attacks across Paris. ISIS has claimed responsibility, though nothing in their communique shows any knowledge not in the news, so it may or may not be them.
In a sense it doesn’t matter who it is. The task of any group which seeks minority support is to “heighten contradictions,” as the old Marxists used to say. You commit atrocities precisely because you want backlash against an identifiable minority. The more they are oppressed, the more they will turn to you, the less they will inform, and so on.
“Terrorists” and western Governments have become co-dependent. Many in the West want further excuses for internal repression (which is usually justified as just being against a despised minority, then spreads), and for more war.
Hollande has used language which indicates he may be about to invoke NATO Article 5. If so, he would presumably want significant Western military action where ISIS is—Iraq and Syria.
This is a potential disaster, given the Russian presence, and given that the Russian presence, in part, was to forestall a NATO “no fly zone.” With public opinion inflamed, the West may tell Russia to “step aside, or else.” What if Russia doesn’t?
Even if Russia does withdraw, welcome to another quagmire, ending in a failed state. (Yes, Syria is a failed state now, mostly, but if you think Western intervention will fix that you haven’t been paying attention.)
Let us hope sanity reigns. And let us remember that attacks of this magnitude are reasonably common in Iraq, Syria, and other failed states. To be sure, it is a tragedy. It is no more of a tragedy, nor less a tragedy, than a similar attack in Baghdad.
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Apparently Putin is difficult to understand:
Vladimir Putin
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, created in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union, said it’s not sure what Putin is trying to achieve with either his actions in Ukraine or his weapons program.
“We cannot fully grasp Putin’s intent,” the alliance’s top military commander, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, told Congress in April, according to the Defense Department’s website. “What we can do is learn from his actions, and what we see suggests growing Russian capabilities, significant military modernization and an ambitious strategic intent.”
I first studied economics back in the early eighties. The discussion of trade was perfunctory; trade was not considered particularly important to the US economy because, with the exception of oil, the US could produce pretty much everything it needed, and–just as importantly–most of what it wanted.
Modern orthodoxy maintains that trade makes one strong. This is fundamentally incorrect. Trade is necessary at times as a bootstrap up for industry, or to get things you truly cannot make yourself, but it can make you weak. The more you trade, the more vulnerable you are.
Russia is vulnerable. Putin turned Russia around by concentrating on hydrocarbon production and selling it to foreigners.
Commodity production is always a bad deal. No matter how rich it makes you, commodity prices are always boom or bust, and are always subject to technological obsolesence.
So, Russian defense spending:
Defense and the related category of national security and law enforcement now eat up 34 percent of the budget, more than double the ratio in 2010.
…
Putin signed documents creating what he called the “industrial battalions” program, which will give thousands of draftees the option of working in defense enterprises instead of joining the regular military.
After years of chronic funding problems for weapons makers, Russia has started to prepay for the goods and services it buys from the more than 1,300 organizations and 2.5 million people that make up the defense industry.
This is not hard to understand.
What part of Russian industry is most technologically advanced and does the world demand the most?
Weapons.
Russia needs to diversify what it exports. Military goods are the obvious market for which to do so. Really, there are only three sources for military goods: the West, China, and Russia.
Russia appears to have begun this strategy about 2012, before the oil price crash, the Ukraine, and so forth, but their vulnerability to oil price crashes was obvious. That the US was continuing to try to destabilize Russia’s near abroad and draw it into NATO was obvious as well.
Now, Syria.
What’s the problem with buying your weapons from the US?
Unless you’re a core US ally, the US is unreliable. If your government changes in ways the US doesn’t like, or if you are an enemy of US core partners (Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.), they will cut you off from parts and ammunition at the drop of a hat, as well as canceling pre-paid orders.
But: The US was able to say that they had the best equipment. No one could compete.
What is happening in Syria is a demonstration that Russia can be counted on to help its allies—meaning its customers. It is a demonstration that Russia’s new weapons, and particularly its cruise missiles and airpower, are comparable to US product, and maybe, even in the case of its most advanced fighter/bomber, better.
It is a demonstration that if you buy Russian you aren’t buying crap that US-supplied forces can roll right over any more.
The Syria issue is a trade policy issue.
That is not to deny the geopolitical element to it, there certainly is one. But most analysts are not catching that this is also economic policy in action.
Shove Russia against a wall, impose sanctions, drive down the price of oil, and of course they will reach for what else they do well, and can sell.
The failure to anticipate this, the failure to understand this at the highest possible levels of NATO, when Putin had been telegraphing his strategy for years, is a terrible indictment of our “leadership”‘s competence.
Now, add to first class armaments and reliable supplies, a proper payments and banking system with China’s aid. Add China’s industrial goods and willingness to build infrastructure, and you have a second vertical capable of supplying virtually everything the West can do, and one which doesn’t care about the internal politics outside its near-abroad.
That new world isn’t quite here yet, but it’s almost.
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My parents were rich, then poor, then middle class during my life. My father both made and lost a fortune in his thirties and forties. I went to an elite private school, paid for partially by the UN. Then, I spent my twenties poor, often ill, and, on occasion, was only saved from the street by the kindness of friends.
When I think of class issues, I think of them in terms of corridors. In every gleaming office tower, they are there, in every upscale marble, glass, and steel mall—they are there. They are dark concrete, engrimed, lit by harsh fluorescent lights behind steel cages, streaked with the residue of years of waste. They are the corridors that the service staff use: the maintenance staff, the cleaners, the truck drivers, the blue collar guys who cart the heavy boxes and fixtures around. They are ugly, and often they stink.
The most disgusting set of corridors I ever encountered was in the Chateau Laurier. For those who don’t know, the Chateau Laurier is an old hotel connected by tunnels to Parliament Hill in Ottawa itself. It is one of the hearts of power in Canada. And the sub-basement has a smell that is something between rotten meat and acrid cheese with something acid and chemical cutting through it. I quite literally gagged the day I delivered food meant for the gullets of the rich to the old majestic Chateau, that magnificent palace whose opulent restaurants are but feet from a stench laid down for decades.
It’s that squalor that underlies the worlds of both opulence and sterility–the opulence of the upper class, the sterility of the middle classes’ office buildings. It’s those corridors in which those who earn little more, and sometimes less, than minimum wage work. For Lord save the clean, little people–in their white shirts and ties, their buffed oxfords, and their clean fingernails–save them from seeing the people who do the work that keeps their white walled world clean and running, the people who keep the air conditioning and the heat on, the carpets clean, and the light fixtures working.
The trolls come out at night as the offices empty. Once the daytime denizens are gone, they come scurrying out from their tunnels and are allowed to move through the offices; so as not to offend the others with the sight of their sweating for a living or dealing with dirt and garbage. And when the daytime denizens do see you, if you are one of those night-time trolls, they don’t see you. Their eyes don’t track you, they move right over you as if you were a piece of moving furniture—an appliance. They will only approach reluctantly if they need something. After they’ve gotten what they wanted, whacked the machinery, as it were, you usually find you’ve gone back to being an invisible appliance with whom eye contact is to be avoided at all costs. And you are paid in scraps. For your labor, you receive a pittance compared to those whose fingernails are clean, whose work involves the strain of typing on a keyboard, attending meetings, and picking up the phone.
That’s my second world, that world of tunnels. It’s a world I inhabit no longer, but it’s a world that haunts me, that I know exists alongside the antiseptic office world. Those corridor dwellers are the ones whose labor makes that new, office world possible—they are the trolls of the modern world, who come out at night, or who scurry through tunnels in the day, never to be seen by those whom their work supports. If seen, they must be ignored.
And they are.
And so I listen to John Edwards and I marvel that he dares speak of the unspeakable, of the great fear—not just of the middle class, but of all Americans. For we choose not to look at that which we fear. It’s not that we fear the working poor, or their humbler cousins, the broken, those who don’t even have job, much less a bad job. What we fear in them is that we might see people like ourselves.
For, to feel secure, in our beautiful world, we must believe that there is something fundamental that makes us different from the poor and the broken. We must think, “Ah, but I’m smarter,” or “I work much harder,” or, less gratifying but still good, “I have a better eduation than they do.”
We must think, then, “I am more valuable than them, I am different, what happened to them could never happen to me! I’m different! I am!”
We cannot see them as humans like us. That many of them work hard, or worked hard when they were allowed to. That most are not stupid, and that many are no worse educated than we. (And isn’t that the easiest thing to fix anyway? As though if everyone had a high school diploma, or a B.A., or a Ph.D., there would be jobs for them all.)
But I worked among them, lived among them, was one of them, and I know they work as hard, indeed harder, than most of the soft office workers whose lives they make easy. And I remember the screams from the soft, pampered bewildered sots when something went wrong in their pristine worlds and their inability to pick up a heavy box, or use a plunger on a toilet, or confront someone violent. Oh, yes, they disdained the goblins, but they’d coming running for our help fast rather than soil those soft hands.
And yes, this sounds bitter. And yes, it is. And yet, I’ve long moved on from that world. My hands are the soft ones now, I’ve not picked up a shovel in over a decade.
But I don’t think that what I do is somehow innately more deserving than someone who cleans toilets for a living, or who sits at a security desk and patrols to make people safe, or who digs ditches, or who… but why go on, make your own list of the underpaid and under-appreciated.
And so I listen to John Edwards and I know why he lost twice. People don’t like you when you make them look at the other side, at the dark fate that may await them one day if they’re a little unlucky; if their company downsizes, if they’re 45 and the company wants a youngster, or if some guy in China is willing to do their job for one-tenth the wage.
Like the way the middle class says about death “she passed away,” we don’t want to look firmly in the face of poverty and see that the face is our face, that its fate echoes ours. If seen, it must be ignored.
Mustn’t it?
(A Reprint, and now kicked back to the top from 2010 re-publication.)
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I’m glad Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new Prime Minister, has made half his ministers women. Good for him.
But…
let us take a single example. The new Finance Minister.
A man. Bill Morneau, who used to be in charge of the C.D. Howe institute. For non-Canadians, that’s a think tank that is very right-wing.
As I noted about Trudeau throughout the election, he’ll be good on some things, but he’s still a neo-liberal. There will be various good news around taxes and pensions, then they will pass the Trans Pacific Partnership, which will do more harm than every bit of economic good they do.
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