STRANGE TIMES

No choice but to run for their lives.

Artillery is for destroying a military opponent or any ‘legitimate target of war’ and I’m always glad to hear of any people running away from artillery directed at military forces operating near them. Naturally directing such fire at civilians is a war crime and so is systematically bombing hospitals from the air. When that bombing is the reality, plausible denial is sought. Putin is a criminal perpetrator and is bombing hospitals as policy. This has been a continuation of Assad’s policies. Yet even reckless aerial bombing really is the same as directing artillery fire at civilians. The HIRISE coalition doesn’t have any credibility remaining over refugee-making issues like hospital bombing. Quite simply Putin is a war criminal assisting Assad who is another war criminal and Steve obviously knows this just as well as I do. So my question is; what is the plan to stop these criminals from committing their ongoing crimes? It can’t possibly be to declare that the criminally conducted war is over and that these criminals won! Any declaration that the war is over just permits a return to their smaller scale, day by day normal crimes. It’s no plan to stop the war criminals.

So what is or ought to be the ‘western’ plan to stop them committing crimes? After all, even people like Steve are not opposed to revolution or so he proudly says; and we are to understand by that, not opposed to a revolution for democracy, meaning very broadly, almost across the political and cultural swamp of the middle east. So we are to understand that Steve is all for the draining of that swamp, that is to say, the changing of the politics and culture from brute tyranny to liberal democracy at some stage 1 level. (whatever that exactly means for their region). The west had to start somewhere and so will they. It won’t look like the current west anymore than a trip back in time would take us to some good old days.

What such ‘support’ for revolution means (at a minimum) is acceptance of democratic elections under a constitution that protects the minority from the oppression of a majority in the manner of the Iraqi constitution, and then the ongoing struggle to make those words a living functioning reality. All pretty basic stuff for people who say ‘And this doesn’t mean I’m against communism or against revolution it just means I’m against stupid.’ sic We all remember that Jefferson owned slaves, and there are demonstrations, riots, and killing in Iraq right now!

Now I have often objected to actions from people who while nominally on my side do things that are ‘stupid’, one only has to go back a couple of days and see how deadly and obviously harmful such rotten actions can be. I called it out straight away but that didn’t stop Steve from making use of the same crime to attack the whole war. Democrats are opposed to all such crimes but we can’t forget those bigger crimes that set the stage for these other crimes. Those bigger crimes have driven ½ the population of Syria out of their homes and they haven’t stopped yet! Ultimately 500,000 deaths stem from the crime of a tyranny holding on to power when the peaceful revolution made its clear demands. And what have NATO leaders been doing to end the big HIRISE crimes? Other than killing ISIS not much!

Now having killed enough ISIS thugs Trump would like to take his troops and go home but his military advisors have told him that he actually has to go back in and so now the whole world hasn’t got a clue what will happen next. This is a very confusing period for anyone.

But the PKK ought to know that their old strategy is now in tatters, even if their western cheer squad has (as usual) no clue what is happening and wait to be told what to think. ISIS has worked out the same thing for its strategy, and Al Qaeda, who told them from the start that they would fail with their adventurous land grab strategy, can now shake their heads as they themselves go deeper underground to continue to hide among the good Muslims! That has always been their method for Syria and it is very sound. What the pseudo-left can’t deny is that there is such a thing as good Muslims and that they constitute the current majority in all the countries of the Middle East that is going to go through any democratic revolution. These good Muslims must come to power from any such democratic process. So consequently there will be deep Islamofascist sleepers within these political formations. That really can’t be stopped and must be constantly countered. That is just how the world works. People very often pretend one thing and work towards another just look at al Sisi saluting his political leader not long before he staged a coup and arrested him!

The enemy fights back and that is why such a democratic revolution is protracted despite any wish that it was not so. They have often won in the past and will always have a fightback of some sort.

Now, what of the Turkish, Erdogan-style Islamists? These people have waged a struggle for democracy against exactly the enemy coup type militarists etc., for decades. Just what are these Islamists up to?

They have to work to keep the good Muslims from further radicalizing, while fully understanding that they are committed to Islamic norms; and that includes some notion of Jihad because that is the culture that they are in.

Now this is when it gets complicated and westerners have to look to what Erdogan has done at home as an indication of what his intentions are next door. He ordered the Army in for this 4th occasion and so that is now both a very big footprint of territory and a large army. The Turks have on every occasion they deployed made a great show of the number of troops being sent in! The great size of these deployments is almost right out there on full display. A bit like Mao along the lines of if you need 10 send 20 or 30 and quite unlike the Rumsfeld method. Not quite as plain, but for a keen observer like me something like the demonstrations breaking out in Lebanon that are now on show. Don’t go asking for proof that they are the biggest army, because it is just an assertion that I make with no intention of proving.

Rather than Erdogan, it is Putin who is the well-known liar that once even ½ fooled the ½ theorists that used to post their thinking about Syria at this site. They gave up posting about Syria and I gave up annoying them about their foolishness. But now Steve is making the assertion that the very big military forces commanded by Erdogan are in a coalition with Islamofascists. He wants me to ‘…recognise that Turkey and IS were in an informal alliance.’ He is asserting that perhaps the vilest style of Islamofascist that we have seen since well…ever really, and that is up against some stiff competition – and Erdogan are mates! This accusation is commonly made by ‘the usual suspects and to be expected even from the MSM and I have an answer.

We, that is everyone that has ever been positively contributing to this site have opposed such vile creatures that we term Islamofascists since well before 9/11. We have ALSO always stood up in opposition to all those pseudo-leftist ‘stop the war coalitions’ and all their ‘hands off’ and never unite lines. The track record is now over a very long time. All of us have supported armed revolution to overthrow oppressors.

I have always had consistent ‘rotten’ Maoist politics that are founded on support for the underlying democratic revolution. We have often argued that one can’t be a communist without first being a revolutionary democrat and I have never stopped learning about and thinking about Syria even though I haven’t posted much recently. From my studies, it is apparent that HIRISE is the issue the western world has to overcome in order to stop the crimes that Steve ought to call first-line ‘stupid’, rather than focus on the second tier crimes that will eventuate even as we try our best to ensure they do not.

The second tier will nevertheless happen because there are weak link allies on the democrat side and also enemies concealed within. That is the nature of not just our war but all revolutionary war. What the Assad-HIRISE has been up to for all these years is not an accident and near-miss collateral damage but targeted terror bombing.  HIRISE is waging a terror war and driving off the Syrian people who wanted to live free of the current undemocratic tyranny. Refugees and Rubblestan were both obviously created as policy! The second-tier crimes that happen from the democrat’s side are not in the interests of the Islamist democrat types that Erdogan has shown himself to be over decades of struggle. That is the answer.

Back in 2011 Syrian soldiers who would not fire on their own people formed the FSA and ran for their lives for the protection of the Turkish border and the other borders as well. But Turkey is where they are principally based. Then they started to fight back and that is why the animation looks as it does. The first green territory was very often right on the border. It was the ‘green team’ because it was never just soldiers that ran for their lives who formed the FSA and then fought back. It was the masses that came out from Friday prayers who were subsequently shot down in their peaceful demonstrations who formed the majority of those that fought back. They didn’t just accept orders from any FSA, composed as it was of former regime soldiers anyway! They stood up separately and made their own revolution. They have negotiated from their own POV and relative strength and not just accepted orders. Civil war complications from the very start were the reality for Syria and understood to be so from the very start of the resistance by any experienced western observer.

By 2019 however; through a protracted and massive struggle, Turkey has helped build (shelter, equip and train) a force with sufficient discipline that now has the ‘mass’ to pull into its orbit many other smaller rebel groups as it goes forward under that Turkish protection with Turkish supplied arms, etc.  This force is now called the Syrian National Army and that name spells out what it is designed to do in the future rather than what it is doing now.

What the SNA is doing now is taking shelter from HIRISE bombing under the protection of a massive mechanized army that is very capable of defeating the HIRISE professionals it faces off against. In reality, HIRISE is most assuredly battle-hardened but still not comparable to the fully integrated Turkish armed forces it faces. Turkey is a better fighting force in all respects in my opinion and no one ought to doubt, up to whatever task might come its way and also is strategically placed to quickly throw the Assad backing Syrian Arab Army (SAA) out of Aleppo for just one example of what it could do if all this goes pear-shaped.

Arthur has long held the Russian deployment in contempt and I have always agreed with that view in the strategic sense. A paper tiger that Mao depicts. Tactically though it is still a real tiger. But I don’t doubt this puffed-up bunch of terror bombers will become that paper tiger and in the not too distant future.

The Syrian rebels that are going to defeat Putin were once mostly reluctant freedom fighters; they were mostly everyday Islamic believers who had no choice but to organize with the only people they could trust, and just as often could not trust – because Syria was a terror police state with spies and informants everywhere! As often as not trust could only be established when under fire when your real comrades are fighting for their lives with you. That is the reality of civil war generally. It is a universal truism that applies from Ireland to China and everywhere in between.

The conclusion is that people have to learn how to make a revolution on the job and with the raw materials that they have to hand and in Syria they have and are, learning the most with the Turkish government!

Erdogan knows he faces a fascist warmongering coalition led not by Assad who he holds in obvious utter contempt, but now by Putin who is a puffed-up fascist and not much more than a strategic incompetent destroying relations with all his neighbors in a vain attempt to turn back the clock to the old era of Russian superpower status. He is well overstretched and Turkey is just stepping up to its task and that task is to help the Syrian peoples make their revolution against the Putin-led HIRISE troops.

Over the last couple of weeks, this running away from artillery has been happening in an enclave in the Nth East of what used to be Syria. The media has presented this advance as an attack on the Kurds, but Erdogan has explained for years that this territory is run by the PKK, and the western world has long designated them as a terrorist organization – which the Turks have every right to protect themselves from and continue their war against.

The history of the PKK is not now at issue, nor the former practices of the Turkish terror regimes of the past.

Today the issues and solutions are not what they were when the PKK formed up to fight all those decades ago. The new reality must be correctly identified or the whole war will be misunderstood and progressive westerners will not know what is going to happen next.

For several years now this enclave has been colored yellow on maps and has been expanding. It is essentially controlled by the PKK, with only an SDF fig leaf for plausible denial. The Turkish government and Syrian National Army they back are not buying this cover story. This ‘Rojava’ had also contained 3 smaller Assad enclaves colored pink. The pink is now spreading and butting up against SNA green and there is shooting between them. So now, with the Turkish-led action the whole enclave is ‘in play’, and there are currently reports of at least one small Russian force coming under direct fire, from which they withdrew and then told the world it never happened, but it was caught on film!

So what is likely to happen? Will Assad get back control of all this Yellow territory (including the oil) or will the Syrian National Army under the protective wing of the Turkish military steadily take over at least most of it and then another period of regrouping drag on?

These are fundamental questions. How will the democratic revolution make progress in Syria if Assad makes the gains that the HIRISE forces are currently enabling?

Turkey is a democracy and so is led by a reasonably conservative Islamist party. Almost every county in this region would be if the democratic revolution is underway to that stage 1 level, and that, Steve, is what I am advocating as a supporter of democratic revolution.

Fascists are making war and I want to know how they are to be defeated by democrats.

1    I would fully endorse the statements that ‘A GLOBALIZED WORLD WITH OPEN BORDERS CANNOT PEACEFULLY COEXIST WITH FASCISM!’ and that ’FASCISM MEANS WAR’.  So, as there are fascists like Putin all over the world currently in charge of large military formations and busy making war, the question arises; how do anti-fascists unite to fight back?  How do we intend to defeat the fascists? To the extent that western governments are still sitting on the fence; then like Libya the situation will get worse till they get off the fence and in this case end the Assad tyranny as they simultaneously deal with Daesh types.  It is a war of two fronts.

2    IMV ‘a devastating regional war spreading from Syria throughout the region with profound implications for Europe and the rest of the world’ is already underway and thus can’t be avoided. Diplomacy and military actions must now proceed together, but what are the diplomats tasks now?  What are the military tasks?  Who has real skin in the game?

3    I think the evidence is overwhelming that Obama and Putin really are strategic imbeciles but Putin is the fascist not Obama. Obama is just a treacherous liberal that could care less even about ruling class national interests when there is a big price to pay.  Dithering is as dithering does.

4    Turkey, Britain and France cannot directly act against Russian meddling in Syria. It is now quite apparent that the era of imperialism is so long gone for these powers that they are in essence reliant on the U.S. in leading them as a united COW, or better still as a part of a united NATO action. Even though ‘they have no real rapid deployment capability, and no strategic airlift or sealift capability capable of moving any militarily relevant force within any reasonable time frame’ they don’t really require it.  Turkey has the capacity to drive heavy columns straight down the roads to the sound of the guns. Britain and France could deploy strategically useful elements to Cyprus, and Turkey, and even Jordan. They could with a few days notice for some and weeks to months notice for others. The planners ought to have been planning on contingent intervention for some years then refined and adjusted several times over by now. This issue had already long ago got to the point of a vote in the British parliament over bombing in Syria. Now we have had reports of the British using killer drones recently despite the vote.  The vote would I think be different now.

5     It is perfectly true but irrelevant that ‘by simply closing the Mediterranean and hence Syria to hostile shipping, which they can still do quickly, they can remind Russia’s military that Russia is not, never has been and never will be a mediterranean power’  but they will not push against Putin in this manner and he is well aware that they would not because it would mean war if they did. Yet Putin really is an imbecile! Unfortunately so were the likes of Hitler; Tojo; and Mussolini; and there were people like Yamamoto telling them so, but they could not stop the madness unfolding. They will all stand back and shrug that it is NOT ‘their duty to dispose of him quickly’, but only to increase in measured ways what they are doing now, and what they have been doing is so far been little and late. They are useless!

6     Obama really is a strategic imbecile who has been up in Alaska preparing for the Global warming Paris event!  This refugee ‘flood’ is unfolding in the media every day and he is MIA. In 15 months he will been gone! And when it comes to war making he wants to be gone! So, it will be a year or more for everyone, most probably including the U.S. to mobilize a force capable of serious intervention in Syria.

7     Turkey has long advocated removing the Assad regime and has all along pointed out ‘that there is no other way to avoid millions of refugees continuing to pour out of Syria.’  Yet the ‘stable’ democratic Turkish government have got nowhere with Obama and the situation has got worse and themselves much less stable.  A war is resuming again in Turkey with not just the worst of the Kurdish nationalists but with all manner of anti- Turkish forces having an interest in seeing that it break out and bog the Turkish military down. Even the threat of it is beneficial to Assad and Putin.

8     The executive in both Britain and France is terribly conservative and are still only managing the refugees rather than dealing with the source of those refugees.  They are not even raising the alarm about Putin’s ridiculous intervention to establish and preserve in Syria something that resembles Israel. They can’t do that.

9     There could not be any Anglo ­French expeditionary force in 2015 or 16.  The ruling elites of both countries will manage the Syrian casualties but not take any of their own.  There is no effective system that exists after the Europeans deserted Bush and Obama deserted U.S. leadership. There is nothing other than ineffective thrashing about while the war goes on with those that are prepared to put boots on the ground. Enter the fascists led by Putin.

10     In the midst of all this the West’s own little fascist – Netanyahu – is provoking the Palestinians of East Jerusalem and is thus preparing public opinion to make more war on the Palestinians; even no doubt as he prepares to pull out of more of the West Bank and create yet another vast open air prison.

11     Putin has made it impossible to simply declare war on Assad. No one can now announce ‘a no fly zone and an intention to start enforcing it’ without dealing with Russian air assets. It is now a hot war where Russian helicopter gun ships must be shot down in numbers over an extended period. Russians fighting as Martians might have to be copied as tit for tat.  There was ‘European public opinion that would certainly swing behind a no fly zone and accelerate a rapid shift in US public opinion’ but they were not banking on war with Putin’s troops.

12     The ruling elites won’t act quickly enough so the war ‘will take much longer and will be a much bigger and bloodier regional war than if they act immediately while Obama still dithers.’

13     But just because FASCISM MEANS WAR progressives have to propose a fighting response to tyranny. So… All air defences close to the borders of Turkey and Jordan must be extended deeper into Syria. That is to say that what is sauce for Putin in Martian activity is sauce for everyone else in enforcing the shooting down of anything that is dropping barrel bombs on the Syrian people.  Trouble is that really does require boots on the ground and until they are put in Putin will continue to implement real war for the establishment of the fascist enclave.  Russians flying helicopters are going to be the direct enemy of anyone wanting the revolutionary transformation of the now contested part of Syria that Putin has determined to preserve as a predominantly Alawite and Baathist led enclave.

14     As for Germany; Merkel is not any sort of leader worth a cracker like say Mao and he most certainly did not permit uncontrolled sloshing about of peoples’.  The refugee issue is not resolved by open borders! It is childish to think that devil take the hindmost people are even 1st priority in a war where the people under attack are being barrel bombed for wanting to vote. Any form of NO FLY WAR NOW is the priority to stop the – Putin, Assad, Netanyahu style policies of driving refugees off their land!

15     Country shopping for economic benefit is all well and good for the lucky ones but it will not solve anything for the proletarian classes who will lose their doctors; engineers; and so forth with the get up and go initiative who do go off to the ‘good life’ in the developed West.  The West just can’t rob the undeveloped world of their best and brightest and then all the terribly progressive people feel so good about it!

16     No one can, for example, pretend that Abbott did not stop people drowning!  People were drowning. People are now drowning in the Mediterranean sea and no policy that yabbers on about open borders will be acceptable currently to the masses. That desirable distant policy relies on what Europe had to do to get its borders lifted.  The U.S. in the 19thC taking the huddled masses did not prevent the mass slaughter of the 20thC world wars.  When people are being driven in their millions out of THEIR land and cities THAT is the issue.

17     No rubble producing fascist enclave that generates mass deaths and refugees as policy can be permitted to keep going on with their policies!

18     Obama and Putin are engaged in what appears to me as complete imbecility because of their own logic that includes in Obama’s case outright ruthless neglect.  No ‘well executed misinformation campaign’ here just exactly the sort of disaster that we ought to expect from a collapsing international system.  The revanchist sees an opportunity and as his only tool is a hammer then it must be a nail.

19     The ‘US and Russia are NOT cooperating to assist the Assad regime to move out of Damascus and retreat to a coastal enclave’, and so ‘that could NOT still count as America still exhausting every other alternative before eventually doing the right thing.’, but Obama might grasp at this stupid straw.  It may look good to him now that [something like] it is happening anyway. Whatever he thinks I am sure Damascus can not be lost by Assad and any enclave held in the long term. So, I do not think that Putin and Assad have conceded Damascus in any sense at all, and I am sure Obama knows jack shit about what to be getting on with other than some climate change clap trap for Paris.  The f..ing ‘leader of the free world’ is MIA over the refugee flow.

20     Putin does not intend to ‘escort the Assad clan out of Syria’. He is joining the Iranians and making war. Of course if he was ‘providing temporary protection for the Alawi and other minority communities until international peacekeepers can arrive’, then of course ‘nothing should be said or done to prejudice that operation.’  But that is not what is happening because if it was he would not have sprung it on all of them.  He is putting the enemies of Assad between a Western anvil and his hammer and also bringing in his own anvil to smash Western supported FSA types on as and when he chooses.  He is fighting the Western supported FSA types from the start.

21     Without very big U.S. backing Europe and Turkey simply do not have the stomach to stop the war in Syria that is however now a “clear and certain danger” to their vital national interests.  They will continue to try and bumble along managing refugees and being humiliated by Putin bumbling around like a crazed loon with a hammer.  The only international system that was operating was one of U.S. superpower leadership and with Obama at the helm it is currently not functioning as well as on the way out strategically.  So the situation will get even worse!

22     Perhaps as Iyad El-Baghdadi @iyad_elbaghdadi says ‘The Syrian catastrophe was very preventable, if the world’s red line was “killing protesters” rather than “drowned refugee toddlers”.’,  but that is the past and the question for all now is what is to be done to stop Assad and his great and powerful gangster friend killing democratic revolutionaries into the future.