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On 9/16/14 9:01 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:
Thanks. I wasn’t familiar with Y-K’s criticism and will keep his
“health warning” in mind when reading Landis’ material. But I didn’t
see anything in his Al Jazeera piece yesterday which seemed to
warrant your description of it as a “joke”. What statement(s) did you
regard as over the top?
I thought it might have been obvious from what I excerpted in my initial
reply:
> Administration efforts over the past three years to cobble together
> an effective pro-Western fighting force from fragments of the Syrian
> opposition and their rival regional sponsors have been spectacular
> failures.
I didn't say much more about these "efforts" because I thought comrades
were familiar with my analysis. Here's a bit of it:
http://louisproyect.org/2014/04/08/seymour-hersh-as-dorian-gray/
To start with, he [Seymour Hersh] likens Barack Obama to George W. Bush
as if the rhetoric about “red lines” were to be taken seriously. Hersh
believes that he was held back by “military leaders who thought that
going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.” I often
wonder if people like Hersh bother to read the NY Times or—worse—read it
and choose to ignore it.
In fact there was zero interest in a large-scale intervention in Syria
in either civilian or military quarters. All this is documented in a NY
Times article from October 22nd 2013, written when the alarums over a
looming war with Syria were at their loudest, that stated “from the
beginning, Mr. Obama made it clear to his aides that he did not envision
an American military intervention, even as public calls mounted that
year for a no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians from bombings.” The
article stressed the role of White House Chief of Staff Dennis
McDonough, who had frequently clashed with the hawkish Samantha Power.
In contrast to Power and others with a more overtly “humanitarian
intervention” perspective, McDonough “who had perhaps the closest ties
to Mr. Obama, remained skeptical. He questioned how much it was in
America’s interest to tamp down the violence in Syria.” In other words,
the White House policy was and is allowing the Baathists and the rebels
to exhaust each other in an endless war, just as was White House policy
during the Iran-Iraq conflict.
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