Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: “Security” and “Intelligence” Page 1 of 3

David Petraeus’ Disgusting Dialogue With Syria’s al-Julani

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On October 3, 2025

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By Nat Wilson Turner

Last week at the 2025 Concordia Annual Summit in New York City, Ahmed al-Sharaa, President of the Syrian Arab Republic, appeared as one of the speakers.

The summit bills itself as “the largest and most inclusive nonpartisan forum alongside the UN General Assembly” where “top movers and shakers of today’s world to spark dialogue, promote collaboration, and collectively pave the path toward a more equitable, sustainable future.”

Al-Sharaa, is perhaps better known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani (or Al-Jawlani), the al-Qaeda veteran who formed the al-Nusra Front in 2012 to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

Here is what the U.S. State Department had to say about him when they designated him a terrorist in 2013:

Al-Jawlani is considered the leader of al-Nusrah. …

Under al-Jawlani’s leadership, al-Nusrah Front has carried out multiple suicide attacks throughout Syria. These attacks have been primarily in Damascus but the group has targeted other areas of the country as well. Many of these attacks have killed innocent Syrian civilians. Al-Nusrah’s claimed operations since the group’s December 2012 designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization have included a January 26, 2013 suicide attack on a military base in Syria’s Quneitra Province, near the Golan Heights; a February 15, 2013 statement claiming responsibility for early February suicide attacks on regime targets in Damascus and the nearby town of al-Shadadi; and a March 20, 2013 statement claiming responsibility for two separate suicide attacks that targeted a bridge and bunker near the city of Homs on March 6, 2013.

Let’s contrast that with what former U.S. CIA director General David Petraeus had to say to al-Julani in New York. It should be noted that when Petraeus was commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, al-Julani was arrested and jailed for five years for his al-Qaeda activities.

Let’s hear how Petraeus characterized their history on stage last week:

It is obviously my privilege to interview His Excellency Ahmed al-Sharaa, president of the Syrian Arab Republic since January 2025. Born in Riyadh in 1982 and raised in Damascus, President Al-Shar rose to prominence as a rebel commander during the Syrian civil war and ultimately built and then led the force that toppled the Assad government in late 2024. His trajectory from insurgent leader to head of state has been one of the most dramatic political transformations in recent Middle Eastern history. Today he presides over nearly 25 million people in a country at a crossroads, navigating the demands of establishing security and governance and also overseeing reconstruction, the return of displaced Syrians and the challenges of reconciling deeply divided communities.
…
The fact is that we were on different sides when I was commanding the surge in Iraq. You were, of course detained by US forces for some five years including again, when I was the fourstar there.
…
Your skills again in organizing and then leading that force are hugely impressive. But despite all that you have achieved as a military leader, and it is extraordinary and now as a statesman, there are understandably some who are skeptical.
…

Mr. President, I have some sense of how tough your job is right now. How much is riding on you personally and I know you have to be keenly aware of that. The pressure has to be enormous.

When people ask me what was it like to command the surge in Iraq, I would respond by saying it was the most grinding experience of my life, but it was also the most important one. So, this next one is about you personally. How are you holding up under all this pressure? Are you getting time to do some thinking? Are you getting enough sleep at night? Again, I’ve been there and it is so very, very hard. And your many fans, and I am one of them, we do have worries.

I’m ignoring al-Julani’s answers because who cares what that monster has to say?

I’m just here to document Petraeus’ nauseating sycophancy and to provide a little more history on al-Julani and his relationship with the United States government.

It’s Ian’s annual fundraiser. We cover a lot of ground on this blog and those who read it regularly know what is going to happen before most who don’t: the end of American Empire, the end of dollar hegemony, that Russia was going to win the war, the new Hegemon China, and even minor things like Tesla’s oncoming collapse. It’d be great if you can help out (please don’t donate if your financial situation is dire.) You can Subscribe or Donate here or contact me at ian-at-fdl-at-gmail-dot-com if mail or another method would be better. (Most US cash apps do not work in Canada.)

Human Rights Watch chronicled some of al-Julani’s work in 2013 in their report “You Can Still See Their Blood” Executions, Indiscriminate Shootings, and Hostage Taking by Opposition Forces in Latakia Countryside.”

Johannes Stern summed up that report for WSWS thusly, “organised massacres in rural areas of the Syrian governorate of Latakia between 4 and 18 August 2013, killing at least 190 civilians and taking more than 200 hostages. At least 67 were allegedly executed in the operation near villages of the Alawite religious sect.”

Amnesty International took a turn with their 2016 report titled “Syria: Abductions, torture and summary killings at the hands of armed groups.”

I’ll allow Stern to sum that one up, too: “Amnesty International accused al-Nusra of torture, child abduction and summary executions. In December 2014, for example, al-Nusra fighters executed a woman on charges of adultery and stoned to death women accused of extramarital relationships. Overall, they had “strictly interpreted Sharia law and imposed punishments for alleged violations that amount to torture…”

And in case you think al-Julani has changed his stripes since taking power, please see “Syrians describe terror as Alawite families killed in their homes” (BBC) and “Hundreds massacred in Syria, casting doubt on new government’s ability to rule” (France 24).

In 2022, Aaron Mate documented the long relationship between al-Julani and the Obama/Biden regime in the U.S. for Real Clear Investigations. Some highlights:

In waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy…

A concise articulation came from Jake Sullivan to his then-State Department boss Hillary Clinton in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

Sullivan, the current national security adviser, is one of many officials who oversaw the Syria proxy war under Obama to now occupy a senior post under Biden. This group includes Secretary of State Antony Blinken, climate envoy John Kerry, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, NSC Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, and State Department Counselor Derek Chollet.

…
The outbreak of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011, coupled with the fall of Gaddafi, offered the U.S. a historic opportunity to exploit Syria’s vulnerabilities. While the Arab Spring sparked peaceful Syrian protests against the ruling Ba’ath party’s cronyism and repression, it also triggered a largely Sunni, rural-based revolt that took a sectarian and violent turn. The U.S. and its allies, namely Qatar and Turkey, capitalized by tapping the massive arsenal of the newly ousted Libyan government.
…
Although the Obama administration claimed that the weapons funneled to Syria were intended for “moderate rebels,” they ultimately ended up in the hands of a jihadi-dominated insurgency. Just one month after the Benghazi attack, the New York Times reported that “hard-line Islamic jihadists,” including groups “with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda,” have received “the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition.”

….designating al-Nusra as a terror organization allowed the Obama administration to publicly claim that it opposed Al Qaeda’s Syria branch while continuing to covertly arm the insurgency that it dominated. Three months after adding al-Nusra to the terrorism list, the U.S. and its allies “dramatically stepped up weapons supplies to Syrian rebels” to help “rebels to try and seize Damascus,” the Associated Press reported in March 2013.

…
Obama administration officials continued to publicly insist that the U.S. was only supporting Syria’s “moderate opposition,” as then-Deputy National Security Adviser Antony Blinken described it in September 2014. But speaking to a Harvard audience days later, then-Vice President Biden blurted out the concealed reality. In the Syrian insurgency, “there was no moderate middle,” Biden admitted. Instead, U.S. “allies” in Syria “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.” Those weapons were supplied, Biden said, to “al-Nusra, and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” Biden quickly apologized for his comments, which appeared to fit the classic definition of the Kinsley gaffe: a politician inadvertently telling the truth. Biden’s only error was omitting his administration’s critical role in helping its allies arm the jihadis.

PressTV had more on al-Julani’s journey, and how Petraeus, in particular, has played a long-running part in the new President’s journey:

Released in 2009, he became the Emir of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in Mosul, before moving to Syria in 2011 to create the Nusra Front on orders from the ringleader of the Daesh (ISIS) terrorist group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A year later, al-Nusra joined other groups to form Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Although the US State Department listed al-Jolani as a terrorist in 2012 and placed a $10 million bounty on him, the CIA covertly supplied weapons and funds to the HTS.

Journalist Seymour Hersh has reported that Petraeus created a “rat line” from Libya to Syria to move weapons to the HTS and other militants seeking to overthrow the former Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

The CIA program, called Timber Sycamore, had an annual budget of more than $1 billion. It ultimately enabled al-Jolani to oust Assad and set up an extremist regime in Syria in December.

Former French intelligence officer and analyst Thierry Meyssan stated that Petraeus continued supporting Al-Qaeda groups, including the HTS, even after resigning from the CIA in 2012 following a sex scandal.

Petraeus later joined private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), led by billionaire Henry Kravis, which Meyssan said financed HTS for the CIA through unofficial channels.

So I guess it’s fitting that the General and the terrorist turned President are having an on-stage love-in. Al-Julani is a creation of the American state, it’s only right that he should be publicly celebrated by others of his ilk.

Other things I’m reading and watching:

 

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‘Extraordinary’ Corruption at RTX (formerly Raytheon)

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On October 21, 2024

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A few weeks ago a friend of mine from Nicaragua visited. One aspect of American culture he admired was our lack of corruption.

“Oh dear, Marlon,” I replied. “We are a deeply corrupt nation. The difference between our two nations is that in Nicaragua you have both ‘corruption of the poor,’ such as bribes to police officers, bribes to health inspectors, home inspectors, low level bureaucrats and the like and ‘corruption of the rich’ which is usually institutionalized, a part of the legislative process, includes the corrupt purchase of large scale national rents collection, and is unambiguously unethical. Everyone, in Nicaragua, wets their beak, whereas only the rich and powerful in America participate.”

Today Responsible Statecraft offers up the epitome of American corruption:

“RTX (formerly Raytheon) has agreed to pay nearly $1 billion in fines, which is one of the highest figures ever for corruption in the arms sector. To incur these fines, RTX participated in price gouging on Pentagon contracts, bribing officials in Qatar, and sharing sensitive information with China.”

Price gouging? Of course. Bribery in Qatar? No surprise. But sharing sensitive information with China meets my definition of treason. Plus, a billion dollars in fines is much more than the cost of doing business. That’s a penalty that hurts the bottom line.

What makes me sickest is that this is a company that profits off of patriotism, and the demonization of foreign groups, like civilians in Yemen, Gaza and the Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia has rebuilt its defense industry to serve the Russian national interest, not corporate titans. If, heaven forbid, we get into an all out war, and cannot “win” (loosely defined) within six weeks, we’re toast. Our defense industry is simply not tooled up for that kind of capacity and we’ve undergone far too much de-industrialization to keep up with our peer competitors manufacturing capacity. That’s a sobering thought.

Germany Honors Biden For Destroying Nordstream & Their Economy

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On October 19, 2024

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I cannot believe this is happening:

Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

TIME Magazine: Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:

Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.

That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.

Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted

Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.

Never forget Biden threatened Nordstream:

Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.

and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:

“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Blinken celebrated it as an economic opportunity:

“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity.  It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.  That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”

And then there was this from Anne “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory” Applebaum’s husband who’s a Polish official:

Former Polish FM thanks US for damaging Nord Stream pipeline

The consequences of this have been the deindustrialization of Germany:

German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.

It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.

It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.

The above mentioned Anne Applebaum provided the perfect example of their delusion and idiocy with her September, 2022 prediction that Ukrainian victories in Kharkov would bring down Putin.

But that brings me back to Germany’s pathetic ruling coalition. This is how well they’ve done in recent state elections:

In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.

And on the left:

A newly established populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), managed to score votes in the two-digit range in their very first election.

The German people are chomping at the bit to vote out the gang of traitors who have allowed the US to annihilate their economy.

Although in fairness, they also gave the last US President who walloped the Germany economy the same award:

“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”

Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.

 

 

 

The Senders stumble into the Terror Dome

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On October 1, 2024

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Soundtrack for this post.

William S. Burroughs postulated four political parties in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch: Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists.

Per Wiki:

The city is contested by four rival political parties: Liquefactionists, who want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity; Senders, who want to control everyone else through telepathy; Divisionists, who subdivide into replicas of themselves; and Factualists, who oppose the other three.

The Senders are a metaphor for mass media propaganda as practiced by Edward Bernays, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Goebbels, and American political consultants.

The Democrats and their allied Never Trumper Republicans are the heirs to this legacy.

The rise of the Internet, then the World Wide Web, and finally social media initially threw them for a loop and played a role in Trump taking over the G.O.P.

Their reaction was to impose a surveillance and censorship regime using the tech monopolies as bottlenecks:

Essentially the Biden administration’s communications policy has been to relentlessly and flagrantly spin, distort, lie

Unfortunately, combining surveillance and censorship with slick media campaigns using the power of celebrity to encourage supporters to form parasocial bonds with politicians is way too much power for anyone to handle.

Because there’s no way not to get high on your own supply.

As YouTuber History Legends said of the Ukrainian war effort:

The propaganda was too strong and too effective.

We have an entire army of NAFO trolls (on) Reddit and Twitter. People that believed 100% everything that was being said by Ukraine.

The Ukrainians will only show their successes to their population as if the Ukrainians are constantly winning.

At the same time we have a million Ukrainian men abroad. We have countless Ukrainian soldiers and enlisted personnel that are not at the front.

We have people in Kiev partying as if there’s no war happening.

The problem for Ukraine is that they haven’t managed to create (a) national feeling of it’s now or never. They always try to portray the war as ‘oh we’re winning. It’s fine.’

So everybody kind of kept their life going because everything is going well at the front but it’s not true and now it’s too late.

The disorientation goes to the top, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s new piece for Foreign Policy illustrates.

The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago. [Really??] But our work is unfinished. The United States must sustain its fortitude across administrations to shake the revisionists’ assumptions. It must be prepared for the revisionist states to deepen cooperation with one another to try to make up the difference. It must maintain its commitments to and the trust of its friends. And it must continue to earn the American people’s confidence in the power, purpose, and value of disciplined American leadership in the world.

Meanwhile, air alerts over Israel:

All of Israel is covered by air alerts

Eyeless in Gaza, indeed.

Ryan Grim tweets:

This is either a complete and total failure to contain the conflict by the Biden administration -- or this is what the White House wanted and it's the most egregious lie told to the public since WMD. Either incompetence or duplicity--no 3rd option. Malevolent in either case.

Incompetence or duplicity? What do we think?

The Narrative Noise To Signal Ratio Is Deliberately Out Of Control

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On August 16, 2024

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When I saw SPK blogging here, I couldn’t resist the Auld Lang Syne and asked Ian for permission to post sometimes. I wrote for the Agonist in the 2000s.

I’ve followed Whitney Webb since she wrote for MintPress News and find her to be an extremely informative and critical voice, especially about the nexus of tech and finance. Her work frequently frightens me and if I were a Titan of Silicon Valley I would certainly want her silenced.

Her post on Twitter earlier this week caught my eye because it revealed a sort of fuckery that was new to me:

Whitney Webb

Instead of blanket censorship, I am having YouTube bury all my actual interviews/content with videos that use short, out of context clips from interviews to promote things I would never and have never said. Below is what happens when you search my name on YouTube, every single one is a scammy video using my words and likeness to shill everything from shitcoins to insane predictions I’d never make. Collectively, they have gotten millions of views.

YouTube seems to be adopting an AI version of “security through obscurity” to bury the work of Webb and other dissenting voices. This approach won’t work if it’s your only means of concealing valuables or trade secrets.

But if the only goal is to make it harder for Webb’s audience to find her work, it’s a nasty new wrinkle.

Coming in a context of other tweets about Germany’s up is down policies declaring Jews who oppose genocide in Palestine to be anti-semites, a nominally left wing publication disinforming their readers about Brazil’s Lula, relentless economic gaslighting, a seemingly cooked-up online conflict between Black Americans and Palestinians, and the MI6 blaming Russia for the UK’s recent racist pogroms, it was like being the narrator of an H.P. Lovecraft story who’s just discovered some horrible new tentacle of Cthulhu but you know you’ll sound crazy if you try to explain it to your friends or family.

The Espionage Act Is Bad Law Even When It Is Used Against People I Despise Like Trump

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On August 15, 2022

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Back in June 2019, the New Yorker wrote an article lambasting the Espionage Act.

The George W. Bush Administration pursued several government insiders for leaking classified information, but it was the Obama Administration that normalized the use of the Espionage Act against journalists’ sources. Among its targets were Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer, who was sentenced to three and a half years for supplying the Times with classified information about U.S. efforts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program; Donald Sachtleben, a former F.B.I. agent who was sentenced to three and a half years for providing the Associated Press with information about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen; and Chelsea Manning, a former military-intelligence analyst who was sentenced to thirty-five years for providing Assange’s WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of pages of classified government documents…

…(about the Trump admin) Later that year, Sessions told Congress that the Justice Department was engaged in twenty-seven investigations into classified leaks — a dramatic escalation over previous years. In the two and a half years since Trump complained to Comey, the Justice Department has indicted three people under the Espionage Act for providing information of public concern to the press.

Now, the New Yorker is concentrating on people who were prosecuted for supplying information to the press, or in the case of Assange, for publishing information (acting as the press himself.) And one can easily say “This isn’t the same thing — Trump isn’t a whistleblower.”

And I agree. If Trump has taken information and given it to a foreign power, then it’s one of the few semi-legitimate uses of the Espionage Act to go after him.

But if it’s just sat in some boxes, well, the truth is that for senior people, like Clinton (yes, a junior person would have had their career destroyed and likely gone to prison for using their own private server the way she did) and General Petraeus (who avoided indictment under the act), the law is usually an empty letter.

One might then say, well, but these are nuclear secrets and much more serious.

But all of this caviling and caveats brings out the essential point: The Espionage Act is so widely written that it’s a prosecutor’s cudgel, and the choice of whether to use it or not is a political decision, not a matter of whether someone violated the letter of the law. For most of the 20th century, after the original proscriptions (used against communists and people who opposed the draft), it was rarely used, and the choice to use it was clearly a political choice.

It’s a bad law. It shouldn’t be on the books. If it is on the books, it should be applied evenly, and in all cases, for the simple reason that using it against people with power is how it would be repealed and replaced with something much less prone to abuse. If it had actually been used against Clinton, there would have been massive pressure to repeal it.

And that’s the good thing, here. If it’s used against Trump, well, perhaps the Republicans, next time they’re in a position to do so (which could be as early as 2024), will repeal it.

Or, instead, maybe they’ll go tit-for-tat and continue with its weaponization, going after Democrats and left-wingers.

That would be bad, but it would also have the potential for good. You get rules of war and politics when both or all sides have been monsters, and they finally realize that mutual monstrosity is bad.

As for Trump, I have little sympathy. He used the law badly, and for him to be hoist on it amuses. It’s a pity that Obama, who really weaponized it, is smart enough to have not laid himself open. But if I were Clinton, I’d be concerned after 2025.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s Electile Dysfunction

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On March 28, 2017

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(POST BY MANDOS, just in case you didn’t notice)

I have a theory about why Jeremy Corbyn seems so unpopular in the UK, despite the fact that he represents a lot of policy positions that are in themselves popular. My theory is that, deep down, in their collective subconscious (if not their actual consciousness), the British public doesn’t think that Corbyn will send fighter jets to bomb people in foreign countries on under-substantiated suspicions.

Oh, to be sure, there are lots of other problems faced by Corbyn worth discussing, like an extremely disloyal caucus (although disloyalty is probably not the right word as it presumes that they had once been loyal, and they’d made it clear from the beginning how little they thought of him). But the antiwar thing is basically a deep psychological show-stopper in terms of the electability of leader in any medium-to-major military power.  People may not precisely articulate this discomfort with a leader who doesn’t seem like he’d attack small countries on a small suspicion when world politics suggests that said lethal use of military force is a diplomatic, strategic thing to do.

Now there are actually other things you can do to satisfy this urge. For example, Theresa May already proved her willingness to harm innocents with a pathologically, maniacally, cruel immigration policy, for which she was responsible. That policy has made her credible, governmental. You know that May will send fighter jets to foreign countries when the media requires it.

Now, you may ask, why is being bombing-credible, or at least cruelty-capable so important for the election of a leader? The reason why is that the leader is supposed to Protect Our Children. (I’m using “our” figuratively here, since I’m not British.) You’d do anything for your child, right? If you’re an upstanding, caring parent, that is.  So consider the very slim chance that someone in a foreign country may concoct a successful global takeover plot when you’re dead and your children are old people.  Surely avoidance of such demands a low threshold for long-distance war. After all, it’s either your children or theirs, right?

But Corbyn is perceived as a repudiation of Blair. And there’s nothing that defined Tony Blair more as a politician, nothing that placed him more in history than his willingness to go to war on thin evidence. Corbyn and his core support base are visibly angry at that. And that is, at a ground, atavistic level, killing Corbyn’s candidacy. (As I said, among other things.) Blair may be unpopular now, but most people are willing to issue negative judgements after the fact, having voted for the man before the fact. Blair already Protected Our Children, was believed to be credible on this front, and won elections.

You may protest: There are lots of other things that threaten people’s children, like lack of health care, unemployment, impending global enviropocalypse, and other very real but rather imperceptible problems like those. My experience of watching how the European refugee crisis unfolded, particularly in anglophone media and public opinion watching from outside, is that people perceive threats very differently, and react more viscerally to a low-probability threat from other individual humans than they do from higher-probability things like their own potential poverty or workplace safety and suchlike. An incident of lawlessness in Cologne, perpetrated by a tiny fraction of the refugees and not only them, overshadowed in Western media all of the other things that humans, including refugees, face. Because we have to Protect Our Children.

To be sure, lest someone object, a lot of this attitude descends and is transmitted by certain sorts of elite opinion-makers like newspaper columnists and so on. Yes, that is so. But they are working with a public that is highly primed for this visceral syllogism.

Does my theory about Corbyn’s unpopularity demand that this situation remain so forever? No: I don’t counsel despair. My theory is about explaining what has happened so far. People always have the possibility to choose otherwise. Maybe even in time for the next British elections. You never know.

Election Interference

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On February 27, 2017

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So, Obama put sanctions on Russia, ostensibly for interfering in American elections.

The argument has been made that keeping them under these sanctions “disincentivizes” Russia interfering in other countries’ elections.

Okay.

I think this falls to the level of schoolyard ethics.

Russia should stand down when the US stands down. The US has interfered in multiple elections, and recently helped the Maidan overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in a coup.

As for electronic spying, what is known is this: Americans were tapping the German Chancellor’s phone.

There is nothing that Americans want Russians to stop doing that they themselves do not do, with the possible exception of annexation. (And there’s a strong argument that the US still annexes what it wants, de facto, if not de jure.)

The schoolyard bully telling others, “Only I get to hit people” doesn’t go across really well.

It is simply impossible to take the US seriously on any form of “don’t spy,” “don’t fight,” or “enforce human rights.” Just impossible. Of course Russia will try to get friendly governments elected when the West has it under economic sanctions. Of course Russia will try and get friendly governments in power: Just like America does.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but people who unilaterally disarm and refuse to fight get a lot worse done to them than having their faces shoved in the dirt.

America supported a coup that overthrew a democratically elected government. There is no question about this. Then, when the Russians intervened in the Ukraine, they insisted on punishing the Russians.

Think this through a little.

At most, Russian interference in the US election involved the selective release of real, true, information.

The rest of the world wishes American interference stayed at that level.

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