Category Archives: Middle East

Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, History, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism

“Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi” is the current column, now on WND. A excerpt:

“Us against al Qaeda”: This has been—still is—the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that played out in the Benghazi affair, in which the American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed). …

… Uncovered by The Times’ investigation, however, was a very different reality in Benghazi—”murkier than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi,” contends Kirkpatrick, “was not infiltrated by al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”

In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the findings that “turned up no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” and that “the attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Col. Gadhafi.”

How can that be? Easily: The history of Libya is festooned with similar ransacking and burning of consulates by angry local mobs. Alas, in the ignorance it cultivates about the past, America is Cicero’s perpetual child. By the definition of the great Roman statesman, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.” …

… The facts in the Benghazi affair have likewise been unwoven and retied into two contradictory narratives to suit the respective sides.

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, as you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel “dialogue” conducted on the teli. Hosts Stephanie Cutter (left-wing, social-democratic rat) and S. E. Cupp (right-wing, social-democratic rat): Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a “maze-bright” rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth. …

Read the complete column. “Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi” is on WND.

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Decentralized ‘Al Qaeda’ Represents Ordinary Invaded Muslims

Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Terrorism

“Us against Al Qaeda” is the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that allegedly played out in Benghazi.

Understandably, Fox News is fuming over “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” David D. Kirkpatrick’s expose in the New York Times. For these Republicans hold that:

Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The investigation by The Times, however, shows:

…that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.

In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the NYT findings that “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” “The attack,” it was revealed, “was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”

I have no doubt, simply based on the history and policies of the US in the Middle-East, that to the extent the “American-made video denigrating Islam” is a symbolic proxy for the hatred harbored by the invaded Muslims for the invading Americans-–to that extent it is probably correct to say that the video, more so than the mythical Al Qaeda, was a catalyst for the attack on our embassy in Benghazi.

However, the NYT is hardly unsparingly honest; it is, in fact, as dishonest and politically provincial as the neocons of Fox News.

Predictably ignored in the Kirkpatrick article is that Al Qaeda has morphed into many decentralized operations that mirror the aspirations of the invaded Muslims to be free of invading Westerners—unless of course they can get us to bankroll their Baksheesh economy.

There is cross-pollination between these double-crossing entities. So wrong was the Gray Eminence on Iraq that the NYT reporter who piped lies straight form Bush’s White House to her Times readers was recruited to Fox News: She is Judith Chalabi Miller.

‘Assad’s Pro-Zionist Grandfather and the Betrayal of the Alawites’

History, Islam, Israel, John McCain, Lebanon, Middle East, The West

Writing at Chronicles magazine, Eugene Girin offers a slice of Syrian history you won’t get from that moron McCain and his media acolytes:

“From 1920 to 1936, Syria’s Alawites enjoyed their own separate autonomous state in French-ruled Syria. First, it was known explicitly as the Alawite State and from 1930 to 1936, as Latakia Governorate. In response to pressure from the Sunni majority, France dissolved the Alawites’ state and forcibly incorporated it into the Sunni-dominated areas.”

“Needless to say, the Alawites (as well as the Christians and Druze) were appalled by France’s surrender to the Muslims and pleaded with the mandate authorities to protect them. In an eerie echo of today’s situation in Syria, 450,000 Alawites, Druze, and Christians signed a letter to the French authorities, part of which stated”:

“The ‘Alawis believe that they are humans, not beasts ready for slaughter. No power in the world can force them to accept the yoke of their traditional and hereditary enemies to be slaves forever….”

“Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper recently quoted part of another letter, sent by Alawite leaders to French Prime Minister Leon Blum in 1936. The French surrender to Arab Muslim demands was influenced by the bloody uprising of Muslims in British-ruled Palestine, led by the future ally of Hitler Haj Amin Al-Husseini. The Alawites alluded to the bloody revolt in their plea to the Jewish Blum”:

The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria.
Therefore we ask you to consider the dreadful and terrible fate that awaits the Alawites if they are forced to be annexed to Syria, when it will be free from the oversight of the Mandate, and it will be in their power to implement the laws that stem from its religion.”

One of the six signatories of that letter was Sulayman Assad, the father of Hafez and the grandfather of Bashar. …”

Read “Assad’s Pro-Zionist Grandfather and the Betrayal of the Alawites.”

UPDATE II: The Proof Is In the Putin

Media, Middle East, Military, Propaganda, Republicans, Russia, The State, War

The punditocracy is shouting almost in unison that Russia and Syria have pulled one over us. The US, they say, has been weakened because someone halted the momentum of the American war juggernaut.

You see, the pundits and the pols cannot perceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus; and depend on it for status and income.

Individual Americas who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from a war are somehow mistakenly identifying with the state and its emissaries—politicians and pundits—who have everything to gain from the great theatre that is war. “In Syria (and all else), it’s ‘Us’ against ‘Them.'”

Think about it. Who benefits when America goes to war? Not you. Not ordinary Americans. Those who benefit “function within the nimbus of great power” in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.

What happens to the bluster of Bill O’Reilly, his sidekick Dennis the Menace or Charles Krauthammer if the US is no longer dictating the terms of war (lots of it) and peace (too little of it) in the world? Their immense egos suffer. Maybe even their incomes, eventually. But not you, the ordinary American. Krauthammer, ridiculously, equates the failure to go to war against Syria with “Russia supplanting America as regional hegemon.”

But the proof is in the Putin, who stopped a war. Why is stopping a war tantamount to supplanting US power?

Rather, the Russians are replacing bully power with a balance of power. And this is good for Americans (if not for their overlords who art in D.C.)

He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.

UPDATE I: Gerson, another neocon:

“This allows Moscow to supply proxies such as Syria and Iran with weapons while positioning itself as the defender of international law and peace.”

UPDATE II (9/15): Yet another Republican pundit (albeit one of the few talented ones) who depends on The Party for status and income. Here Ann Coulter praises Republican wars.

She promotes and profits from ’em; YOU fight ’em.