Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Disaster Islamism | Salvage
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Actually, Louis, it is not *exactly* a duplicate posting. The take outs from the article was completely different. The second one is important. I've largely argued this same point...about the only one I've ever commented on regarding Syria at all, that regime change was never really part of the US agenda. It was some, but that was more wishful thinking on part of the U.S. I don't hold the position that the U.S. *supports* Assad, which is I know is popular among some on the left, but at least here, with regards to the actual 'support' the U.S. gave the FSA, it is absolutely correct. Perhaps the only exception was the 2013 or 2014 incident where the Saudis or Qataris supplied TOW II anti-tank missiles. Exactly 18 of them. And took out 18 Russian made T-72 and T-90 tanks. And that was that. Even more directly, and well before the Russians intervened with men and machines, the US could of taken out the Syrian fixed and rotary winged air force in 4 hours flat. Most of it's armor in 4 days. So the idea that the US was interested in regime change my questions is: why didn't they? I was challenged on this several time. Youtube video links were provided by pro-Assadists to me that showed several incidents of MANPADS being used. Since I'm somewhat educated on this from the technology POV, I replied that this was absolutely correct. But they were *Russian* made anti-aircraft missiles that were seized from Syrian troops or brought over by deserters from the army, not US supplied Stingers. David Walters _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Disaster Islamism | Salvage
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Sorry for the duplicate posting. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Disaster Islamism | Salvage
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Contrast this with the supply of anti-aircraft MANPADS. Air power, first his own and then Russian, is the primary reason that Assad has not fallen. If you were intent on toppling a regime and were arming its bloodthirsty sectarian opponents to the teeth, would you not supply them with anti-aircraft weapons as a matter of urgency? Yet these have not been forthcoming, because US policy was, and remains, in the words of Obama’s deputy national security advisor quoted in the New York Times article above, to avoid the ‘transfer of heavier weapons’. The FSA desperately requested anti-aircraft weapons from the US to defend Aleppo in the summer of 2013. None were sent, nor offered. Not only this, but the US actively blocked attempts by Qatar to supply Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft weaponry, as reported in the New York Times article of 13 August 2013, ‘Arms Shipments from Sudan seen to Syria Rebels’. The US administration believed – probably accurately – that such weaponry might be used against American or Israeli interests. If this is an attempt to overthrow the regime, it is a rather poor show. Contrary to fantasy (based on misinterpretations of low-level intelligence revealed by Wikileaks), and allowing that there have been debates within US ruling circles, and that its strategies have been incompetent and/or incoherent, there is not, and never has been, an American imperial policy to overthrow the Ba’athist regime in Damascus. In December of 2011, by which time Assad’s inability to fully rule the country had become clear, the US recognised the Syrian National Council as the ‘leading and legitimate representative of the Syrian people’ for a period of ‘transition’. But the US preference for this ‘transition’ has always been that it be a ‘managed’ one from within the regime. The model for US policy on Syria was the ‘managed’ – now distinctly unmanageable – transition from the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen to his deputy Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. President Obama reiterated the point in his press conference in October 2015, stating that US policy in Syria was for an outcome that ‘keeps the state intact, that keeps the military intact’. The only difference with Russia was the status of Assad himself. David Petraeus, former US viceroy of Iraq and proponent of a more muscular US policy on Syria – and the man responsible for Sycamore Timber – was explicit to the Kurdish news organisation Rudaw in March 2015 that the priority was not Assad but ‘clearly ISIS because that supports the effort in Iraq’. full: http://salvage.zone/in-print/disaster-islamism/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Disaster Islamism | Salvage
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * To begin with, the model Syrian uprising → Islamist militias → ISIS is false. It is true that after five years of unconscionable slaughter and abandonment, Syrian opposition politics has come to be dominated by a form of Sunni Islamo-nationalism. The softer form of this trend is found in parts of the (still extant) Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades, its hard sectarian Jihadi variant in Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (the former Al-Qa’ida affiliate known previously as Jabhat Al-Nusra) with Ahrar al-Sham, the main militia in Northern Syria, occupying a continuum in between. This trend is, to say the least, deeply worrying for the future of any revival of the hopes of the Syrian revolution[*]. Besieged and bombed by not one but two imperial powers; assassinated by militias largely recruited from the non-Sunni minorities; abandoned and slandered by the external Left for their inconvenient uprising against a self-proclaimed ‘resistance’ regime – in this context the turn towards Sunni identity politics amongst the Syrian populace is a tragedy. It is not a surprise. ISIS is not, however, the inevitable outcome of that politics. The organisation’s exterminationist Sunni chauvinism against religious minorities, such as the Alawites from whom the core of the Syrian Ba’athist security apparatus are drawn, is undeniable. But in word, thought and deed ISIS has always considered its foremost enemy ‘apostasy’ (the revolution, the FSA and the anti-Assad opposition more generally) rather than ‘unbelief’ (the Assad regime). full: http://salvage.zone/in-print/disaster-islamism/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
