repeats and the predictable

"It is obvious the Syrian army is winning this battle, but we don't tell [the rebels] this. We don't want to destroy their morale. We say we should hold here for as long as Allah will give us strength and maybe he will make one of these foreign powers come to help Syrians."

The irony was not lost on Abu Salam how the jihadis and the Americans – bitter enemies of the past decade – had found themselves fighting on the same side again.

Jake Sullivan: See last item - AQ is on our side in Syria.

The documents show that Israel has been doing more than simply treating wounded Syrian civilians in hospitals. This and a few past reports have described transfer of unspecified supplies from Israel to the Syrian rebels, and sightings of IDF soldiers meeting with the Syrian opposition east of the green zone, as well as incidents when Israeli soldiers opened up the fence to allow Syrians through who did not appear to be injured.

@glcarlstrom why? Hezbollah+Iran are a much bigger threat to Israel than Al-Qaida have ever been.

— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) January 18, 2015

Wow. This is very revealing how friendly Al-Qa`idah is toward the Nazi regime in Tel Aviv. Joulani refers to the Israeli war of genocide as “war of Iran against the region”. https://t.co/oT02qtM8iE

— asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل (@asadabukhalil) December 6, 2024

Syrian President Al-Sharaa (Jolani):

"Syria and Israel, we have common enemies. This is the reality. We will engage [with Israel] if there is honesty and a clear path to peaceful coexistence, nothing less."

Only the wilfully blind cannot see. pic.twitter.com/RpIXmBJWFd

— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) May 31, 2025

October 7th pushed Israel over the edge. It's invaded Syria and the new ruler, Joulani, is talking to Iran, Russia and Turkey. Everyone in the region wants stability, and Israel wants... Lebensraum. 

more comedy

Exclusive: US, UAE discussed lifting Assad sanctions in exchange for break with Iran, sources say https://t.co/qRfT3Z4HuR pic.twitter.com/5vn1P1ChZS

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 2, 2024

BEIRUT/GENEVA/DUBAI, Dec 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. and the United Arab Emirates have discussed with each other the possibility of lifting sanctions on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if he peels himself away from Iran and cuts off weapons routes to Lebanon's Hezbollah, five people familiar with the matter said. The conversations intensified in recent months, the sources said, driven by the possible expiry on Dec. 20 of sweeping U.S. sanctions on Syria and by Israel's campaign against Tehran's regional network, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and Iranian assets in Syria.

--- 

The U.S. Embassy and Department of State are closely tracking President Yoon's recent declaration of martial law. The situation is fluid. Please monitor local news sources for updates as the situation progresses and sign up here to receive direct updates from the Department of…

— Ambassador Philip Goldberg (@USAmbROK) December 3, 2024

"...we are not always consistent" etc.

Mid East Eye. Turkey elections live: Erdogan wins five more years in power 

With 99.43 percent of the votes counted, the board’s chairman Ahmet Yener says we have:

Erdogan: 52.14 percent

Kilicdaroglu:  47.86 percent...

Big drop off in Kurdish vote

...Places that did see a large decrease, however, were Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated areas.

Majority Kurdish areas always tend to have a lower turnout than the rest of the country, with some residents complaining of marginalisation, repression and a lack of representation.

In the first round, Kurdish-dominated areas had 81.70 percent. That dropped to 75.74 percent today.

Mardin’s turnout dropped from 82.76 percent to 78.60; Van went from 78.62 to 72.13; Batman fell from 84.93 to 80.17; and in Agri we saw 72.86 plummet to 65.72, according to Anadolu Agency.

That won’t come as a massive surprise to people following the reluctant way Kurdish parties endorsed Kilicdaroglu again for the runoff.

The opposition candidate made a tacit alliance with the pro-Kurdish HDP before the elections, who supported him from outside his Table of Six coalition. Erdogan used that Kurdish support against him, however, calling the opposition “terrorist” due to the HDP’s ideological links with the PKK armed group.

Ahead of the runoff, Kilicdaroglu won the support of the Turkish ultranationalist Victory Party, who signed an agreement with him that promised to maintain a system of choosing trustees in municipalities that Kurdish parties complain is discriminatory...

Ogan voters appear split two ways 

One of the most anticipated questions ahead of the run-off was how those who voted for third-placed ultranationalist, anti-refugee candidate Sinan Ogan in the first round would vote this time.

Ogan endorsed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan days before the second round. Ogan's ultranationalist, anti-refugee ally Umit Ozdag and his Victory Party, on the other hand, endorsed the opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Ozdag's party got 2.2 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections. 

---

“You brought more than 10 million refugees in,” he shouts, addressing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, over footage of young people climbing through barbed wire and through dusty tracks next to grassland. “I hereby declare that I will send all refugees back as soon as I come to power.”...

When polled, a large majority of voters say the country’s harsh economic crisis is their main concern, but surging far-right elements have scapegoated immigrants, harnessing anti-refugee sentiment across the country and trumpeting racist discourse on immigration in a way that has been taken up by the mainstream and appears set to stay long after the election ends.

Rather than provide alternatives, both presidential candidates have sought to harness support from the ultranationalist right – with both gaining the support of one of the two leading figures in the Victory party. A week after the first-round vote, Oğan said he was backing Erdoğan. Days later, Özdağ declared an alliance with a smiling Kılıçdaroğlu at a press conference. The Victory party leader said he had backed the opposition leader because he believed Kılıçdaroğlu was more likely to enact his policy of immediately deporting refugees. 

 

Venezuelan refugees are a bigger and bigger issue in Colombia and elsewhere. Migrants from Zimbabwe are threatened in South Africa. I've heard nothing, ever, from Bertram and his ilk about the rights of Palestinian refugees, long term residents in Lebanon and Jordan, or about Syrian refugees in those states now. Bangladesh is struggling with the Rohingya. Oxbridge, or European, technocratic universalism is a form of exceptionalism. 

In retrospect Bertram's argument was always a highbrow version of "abolish the police".

update at the top. 

not bad.

If you condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a violation of international law (as I did), and you support the continued presence of US troops in Syria (a violation of international law, since the Syrian government doesn't want them there), you have some explaining to do.

— Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) March 25, 2023

VOA News: US Firm Secures Oil Deal with US-Backed Forces in Syria

A U.S. company has reportedly reached a deal with Kurdish-led authorities in northeast Syria to develop and export crude oil in areas under their control in the war-torn country.

A senior official at the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in Northeast Syria said the deal was approved by the U.S. government.

---

I haven't heard a single US journalist at a major outlet frame the anniversary of the illegal US war with the recent Putin warrant by asking if any US architects of the invasion should also have been prosecuted.

— شنشون (@humanprovince) March 21, 2023

Spent the day stuck watching CNN and now stuck watching American Sniper.  It's tiring.

Ukrainska Pravda English:  Possibility of talks between Zelenskyy and Putin came to a halt after Johnson’s visit - UP sources 

Following the arrival of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Kyiv, a possible meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin has become less likely.

Source: Ukrainska Pravda article "From Zelenskyy's "Surrender" to Putin's Surrender. How Negotiations with Russia Are Going". 

Quote from the article: "The Russian side…was actually ready for the Zelenskyy-Putin meeting.

But two things happened, after which a member of the Ukrainian delegation, Mykhailo Podoliak, had to openly admit that it was "not the time" for the meeting of the presidents. 

The first thing was the revelation of the atrocities, rapes, murders, massacres, looting, indiscriminate bombings and hundreds and thousands of other war crimes committed by Russian troops in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories…

The second "obstacle" to agreements with the Russians arrived in Kyiv on 9 April." 

Details: According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.

Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to "press him."

The Guardian May 2019, Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not 'precision bombing'

From Kosovo to Iraq and Syria, the US and its military allies have for years told a tale of “precision bombing” and “surgical strikes”. It was a lie then and it’s a lie now. When huge numbers of bombs and missiles are unleashed on densely populated cities like Mosul or Raqqa, civilians are killed in their hundreds – possibly thousands. But still, the myth of precision and “meticulous processes” persists. Not least because militaries like our own refuse to even go back to the cities they’ve bombed, and refuse to acknowledge deaths unless presented with irrefutable evidence from the likes of Amnesty.

Last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017.

Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble for bits of steel and plastic they can sell so as to buy food. They risk injury and death from unsafe buildings and uncleared landmines. 

Adults.

Farnaz Fassihi (NYT) on twitter "Tehran billboard replaces Gen. Soleimani's photo with the names of victims perished in airplane tragedy."

Unimaginable in Saudi.

"Unforgivable" "Ashamed"

The New Yorker, 2013,

Before the bombing began, Crocker sensed that the Iranians were growing impatient with the Bush Administration, thinking that it was taking too long to attack the Taliban. At a meeting in early October, 2001, the lead Iranian negotiator stood up and slammed a sheaf of papers on the table. “If you guys don’t stop building these fairy-tale governments in the sky, and actually start doing some shooting on the ground, none of this is ever going to happen!” he shouted. “When you’re ready to talk about serious fighting, you know where to find me.” He stomped out of the room. “It was a great moment,” Crocker said.

The coöperation between the two countries lasted through the initial phase of the war. At one point, the lead negotiator handed Crocker a map detailing the disposition of Taliban forces. “Here’s our advice: hit them here first, and then hit them over here. And here’s the logic.” Stunned, Crocker asked, “Can I take notes?” The negotiator replied, “You can keep the map.” The flow of information went both ways. On one occasion, Crocker said, he gave his counterparts the location of an Al Qaeda facilitator living in the eastern city of Mashhad. The Iranians detained him and brought him to Afghanistan’s new leaders, who, Crocker believes, turned him over to the U.S. The negotiator told Crocker, “Haji Qassem is very pleased with our coöperation.”

The good will didn’t last. In January, 2002, Crocker, who was by then the deputy chief of the American Embassy in Kabul, was awakened one night by aides, who told him that President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union Address, had named Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil.” Like many senior diplomats, Crocker was caught off guard. He saw the negotiator the next day at the U.N. compound in Kabul, and he was furious. “You completely damaged me,” Crocker recalled him saying. “Suleimani is in a tearing rage. He feels compromised.” The negotiator told Crocker that, at great political risk, Suleimani had been contemplating a complete reëvaluation [SIC-pompous/pretension] of the United States, saying, “Maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.” The Axis of Evil speech brought the meetings to an end. Reformers inside the government, who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States, were put on the defensive. Recalling that time, Crocker shook his head. “We were just that close,” he said. “One word in one speech changed history.”

WaPo Nov. 2018

Top Saudi intelligence officials close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked a small group of businessmen last year about using private companies to assassinate Iranian enemies of the kingdom, according to three people familiar with the discussions. 

The Saudis inquired at a time when Prince Mohammed, then the deputy crown prince and defense minister, was consolidating power and directing his advisers to escalate military and intelligence operations outside the kingdom. Their discussions, more than a year before the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, indicate that top Saudi officials have considered assassinations since the beginning of Prince Mohammed’s ascent.
Saudi officials have portrayed Mr. Khashoggi’s death as a rogue killing ordered by an official who has since been fired. But that official, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, was present for a meeting in March 2017 in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where the businessmen pitched a $2 billion plan to use private intelligence operatives to try to sabotage the Iranian economy. 

During the discussion, part of a series of meetings where the men tried to win Saudi funding for their plan, General Assiri’s top aides inquired about killing Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and a man considered a determined enemy of Saudi Arabia. 

The interest in assassinations, covert operations and military campaigns like the war in Yemen — overseen by Prince Mohammed — is a change for the kingdom, which historically has avoided an adventurous foreign policy that could create instability and imperil Saudi Arabia’s comfortable position as one of the world’s largest oil suppliers. 

As for the businessmen, who had intelligence backgrounds, they saw their Iran plan both as a lucrative source of income and as a way to cripple a country that they and the Saudis considered a profound threat. George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, arranged the meeting. He had met previously with Prince Mohammed, and had pitched the Iran plan to Trump White House officials. Another participant in the meetings was Joel Zamel, an Israeli with deep ties to his country’s intelligence and security agencies. 

Both Mr. Nader and Mr. Zamel are witnesses in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, and prosecutors have asked them about their discussions with American and Saudi officials about the Iran proposal. It is unclear how this line of inquiry fits into Mr. Mueller’s broader inquiry. In 2016, a company owned by Mr. Zamel, Psy-Group, had pitched the Trump campaign on a social media manipulation plan. 

A spokesman for the Saudi government declined to comment, as did lawyers for both Mr. Nader and Mr. Zamel. 

Old news. So boring.

Akbar Ganji in Foreign Affairs
Who Is Ali Khamenei?

Ted Koppel in the WSJ, April, 2011

The Arab Spring and U.S. Policy: The View From Jerusalem: Israeli officials want a public commitment from Washington to protect the Saudi regime should it come under threat.

Iran is a democracy compared to the Gulf states. That scares them more than anything else.
MBZ is Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE

Pompeo called Netanyahu, MBS, and MBZ more than once in the past few days to discuss Iran, per State Department.

And today AFTER the assassination of Qassim Soleimani he is calling America’s closest allies in Europe, UK, Germany, ... to explain the attack to them. pic.twitter.com/iPGc3X20Sn

— Negar Mortazavi (@NegarMortazavi) January 3, 2020

repeat from 2012

Guardian

If some of the foreign fighters in Aleppo were callow, others such as Abu Salam al Faluji boasted extraordinary experience. Abu Salam, a rugged Iraqi with a black keffiyeh wrapped around his head, said he had fought the Americans in Falluja when he was a young man. Later he joined al-Qaida in Iraq and spent many years fighting in different cities before moving to Syria to evade arrest. These days he was a commander of the one of the muhajiroun units.

I found him watching a heated debate between the Syrian commanders about how to defend the buckling frontline.

The government attack had begun as predicted and mortars were exploding in the streets nearby, the sound of machine-gun fire ricocheting between the buildings. The mortars were hammering hard against the walls, sending a small shower of shrapnel and cascading glass, but Abu Salam stood unflinching.One Syrian, breathing hard, said that he had fired three times at the tank and the RPG didn't go off.

"Don't say it didn't go off," Abu Salam admonished him. "Say you don't know how to fire it. We used to shoot these same RPGs at the Americans and destroy Abrams tanks. What's a T72 to an Abrams?

"Our work has to focus on IEDs and snipers," he told the gathering. "All these roofs need fighters on top and IEDs on the ground. You hunt them in the alleyways and then use machine-guns and RPGs around corners.

"The problem is not ammunition, it's experience," he told me out of earshot of the rebels. "If we were fighting Americans we would all have been killed by now. They would have killed us with their drone without even needing to send a tank.

"The rebels are brave but they don't even know the difference between a Kalashnikov bullet and a sniper bullet. That weakens the morale of the men.

"They have no leadership and no experience," he said. "Brave people attack, but the men in the lines behind them withdraw, leaving them exposed. It is chaos. This morning the Turkish brothers fought all night and at dawn they went to sleep leaving a line of Syrians behind to protect them. When they woke up the Syrians had left and the army snipers had moved in. Now it's too late. The army has entered the streets and will overrun us."

He seemed nonchalant about the prospect of defeat.

"It is obvious the Syrian army is winning this battle, but we don't tell [the rebels] this. We don't want to destroy their morale. We say we should hold here for as long as Allah will give us strength and maybe he will make one of these foreign powers come to help Syrians."

The irony was not lost on Abu Salam how the jihadis and the Americans – bitter enemies of the past decade – had found themselves fighting on the same side again.

How is it strange?

What’s strange is, I met with the Syrian opposition, and often they would argue that we should work with al-Nusra, who we know is Al Qaeda. And I’m sympathetic if you’re in a neighborhood where al-Nusra is defending you against Assad. You want us to work with them. But let’s say a U.S. president does that, and then al-Nusra is using weapons that we gave them against us. That’s something you never recover from, right?

repeat. Ben Rhodes

repeat "Washington's Sunni Myth"

repeat "The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again"

repeat... repeat...

There are 5 million people in Damascus.

"We, the above mentioned entities and the armed opposition groups operating in Wadi Barada declare that once the ceasefire agreement is respected and all aggression operations among them ground and air operations are on hold against the civilian populated areas in Wadi Barada, we will work immediately on facilitating the entrance of the maintenance teams to the water facility in Fijeh Spring and allowing the accessories to access and we will make all the available efforts to assist the maintenance team for resuming the water supply to our people in Damascus city."

The White Helmets: repeat

partial repeat

Art is intimate empiricism. It's what makes you cry over a picture of a dead baby while another picture would simply make you a sad for a moment. It's the illusion of proximity. Why were people so upset by the pic of the dead kid on the beach? Because he was physically intact. He looked like he was sleeping but he was stiff, like an abandoned doll, a lonely image of death. That's what "aesthetics" means. But the photos themselves are crap illustration, because they aren't made to show you how they work.

Photojournalism is manipulative and voyeuristic. A mature work of art with an image of a dead child teaches you to respect the distance between you and others. You don't believe the fantasy that you're the child's parent; you know you're not and you know you're feeling the wish you were, and that's where it leaves you, in your own world, re-centered of your own world but with a respect for the experience even the tragic experience of others.

Photojournalism is cheap sentiment and cheap politics. It's pity and self-pity, not concern.

From 2004

On the front page of the NY Times this morning, below the fold, is a photograph taken be a camera hovering two feet above the ground, of a naked emaciated child with her head leaning on her mother's thigh.

Get up and walk away from the keyboard, into the middle of whatever room you're in. Bend forward and put your hands in front of your face as if holding a camera; close one eye and look towards the ground with the other and imagine that child at your feet. Move your index finger downwards toward your thumb and make a clicking sound, and see if you can understand what you've become

And as long as we're on the subject, meet the men behind The White Helmets [archive.org]
"Edward", no last name.
The donors page lists the UK, Netherlands, Japan and Norway, but not USAID.
USAID lists them.
https://www.usaid.gov/political-transition-initiatives/syria
"politcal transition initiatives". The words don't appear on the page itself.

Program Highlights
SRP provides assistance to moderate civilian entities at the national, provincial and local levels. All activities include robust outreach components to amplify the efforts of moderate actors and strengthen public support for moderate values. Illustrative examples of SRP programming impacts include the following:

• Increasing popular support for moderate actors and values in Syria. Assistance to provincial and local councils to provide basic municipal services including keeping schools and hospitals open, electricity and water flowing, and trash and rubble off the streets. SRP also assists the councils with records management, repairing small infrastructure and rehabilitating public spaces such as cemeteries and schools.  

• Saving lives through support to emergency responders. More than $23 million in assistance to civil defense teams which act as impartial emergency responders to everything from indiscriminate regime barrel bombings to winter storm relief and firefighting. To date, Syrian emergency responders have saved over 40,000 lives.  

• Preserving moderate space and deterring extremist influence. SRP helps moderate actors remain relevant through community events such as clean-up initiatives, graffiti campaigns, local council outreach events and youth activities. 

"Moderate actors", includes Al Qaeda, and others who behead children and post the video on youtube.
See previous.
Compare Yemen

The June staff withdrawal, which U.S. officials say followed a lull in air strikes in Yemen earlier this year, reduces Washington's day-to-day involvement in advising a campaign that has come under increasing scrutiny for causing civilian casualties. A Pentagon statement issued after Reuters disclosed the withdrawal acknowledged that the JCPC, as originally conceived, had been "largely shelved" and that ongoing support was limited, despite renewed fighting this summer.

"The cooperation that we've extended to Saudi Arabia since the conflict escalated again is modest and it is not a blank check," Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said in a statement.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the reduced staffing was not due to the growing international outcry over civilian casualties in the 16-month civil war that has killed more than 6,500 people in Yemen, about half of them civilians.

Washington’s Sunni Myth  The author is anonymous.  One asshole says it's Nir Rosen. If he's right right it's another reason to trust the argument.

If you read Western media outlets, including War on the Rocks, you might think that most of the problems in the Middle East can be traced to Sunni disenfranchisement, especially in Syria and Iraq. The broader Western debate about the ongoing civil wars in the Middle East is plagued by a false understanding of sectarian identities. Washington elites imagine a broader Sunni sense of identity that does not exist outside the confines of Saudi Arabia and territories held by jihadist groups. This has the malign effect of encouraging polices that add fuel to the fires consuming Syria and parts of Iraq. Alongside this narrative exists another that portrays Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces as bloodthirsty sectarian militias engaged in constant abuses against Iraq’s Sunni Arabs — but this is simply not the case.

Similarly, these same voices describe the Syrian government as an “Alawite regime” that rules and oppresses Sunnis. However, Sunnis are heavily represented at all levels of leadership in Assad’s government. The territory it controls at this point in the war and at all points past is majority Sunni. And the Syrian armed forces are still majority Sunni. Alawites may be overrepresented in the security forces, but all that means is that they get to die more than others. It if it is an “Alawite regime,” isn’t it odd that includes and benefits so many non-Alawites?
Sunnis not only have political power in Syria, but they also have social power, more opportunities, and a greater range of choices in life compared to other states in the region ruled by Sunni heads of state. At the heart of this negligent misapprehension of what is actually happening in the Middle East is an acceptance and mainstreaming of notions of Sunni identity propagated by the most extreme voices in the Sunni world: Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

...There is a cacophony of voices constantly complaining that the U.S. government does not sufficiently support the Sunni sectarian insurgents it backs in Syria. At this point in the conflict, these voices are open about the fact that these Sunni Arab “moderates” cooperate with al Qaeda, but go on to say they still deserve Washington’s support. Sometimes, it seems they argue that we help al Qaeda win in Syria so that its men don’t flee further west to us. Last year Gen. David Petraeus proposed arming al Qaeda in Syria against ISIL. At War on the Rocks, Faysal Itani bemoans the idea that Russia and the United States might cooperate to degrade Jabhat al Nusra, an avowed Salafi jihadist group that until very recently operated as an al Qaeda affiliate.

These advocates too often ignore that the Sunni insurgents have been receiving ample assistance and that Syria’s political and military elite is majority Sunni. Yes, I am talking about the Assad regime. Those who lament the meager assistance provided by the United States to Syrian insurgents overlook the fact that this is one of the best-supported insurgencies in history. Moreover, they discount how successful Syria’s insurgents have been at driving Assad’s forces out of most of the country. Most of the country has fallen into chaos or into the hands of the jihadists who cooperated with U.S.-backed groups. In fact, external aid to Syria’s insurgents was so successful that it forced the Russian military to directly intervene to prevent the total collapse of Syria. Earlier this month Salafi-jihadists led by a Saudi cleric used suicide attackers and foreign fighters to nearly storm into the government-held half of Aleppo. And yet they were lauded as heroic rebels by Western media and applauded by the official Western-backed Syrian opposition leadership. If they succeed, over one and a half million residents of the government-held area of Aleppo will be at great risk.

Here's a good example of how the Atlantic Council gushes over al-Qaida and friends in Syria: https://t.co/d8w9gTxrep.

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) August 2, 2016

A back and forth with Phillip Smyth and others. Abrahms points to the last paragraph specifically. Mehdi Hassan agrees. "the last para is indeed gushing/awful. Al Qaeda's 'local prestige and goodwill'. Ugh."

Ironically, the only parties showing creativity and adaptability in Aleppo are the beleaguered rebels themselves, who are trying to break the siege from inside and outside of the city. The most powerful component of this insurgent alliance is Jaish al-Fateh, a coalition dominated by the hardline Salafist groups Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham—until recently known as the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front. These groups have combined military performance with a grasp of local sentiment, emerging as the insurgency’s vanguard in Aleppo. Should they successfully break the regime’s siege, these hardliners may well be the real winners of the battle for Aleppo. Their victory would boost the depressed position of their Turkish and Arab backers and embarrass the United States. Alternatively, the siege may endure, which would simply highlight US failures in Syria. Regardless, these rebels’ local prestige and goodwill as the main anti-regime force amid Western disengagement will sustain them for now, in Aleppo and beyond.

 It continues until it gets to this

I reply, jumping in, agreeing about the piece, but adding that there is no science of tone. Abrahms responds: "You sure about that?,  linking the below.

Human coding of news media

Human coding of data is much as it sounds: Trained coders read or look through some selected sample of media coverage and systematically note its important traits. The questions (or variables) used differ depending on the goal of the project. Questions range from ‘what is the topic’ to ‘is the treatment of the topic positive or negative.’

As with any type of research, the process of conducting a content analysis project begins with the selection of a main research question or goal. What is it we are trying to answer? All of our subsequent decisions are aimed at best answering that main question.

For all studies, we must select the sample of material to examine, which is often more difficult than it sounds.

Sample design

Choosing a sample involves both a focus on thoroughness, representativeness and the purely practical question of availability. Depending on the scope and goals of a project, we might code every story in a given news outlet, or we might use various search techniques to find specific articles relevant to our analysis.

In recent years, the center has conducted analyses of many types of outlets, including print, online news sites, network TV programs, cable TV programs, radio broadcasts, blogs and tweets.

Sometimes, the research question is focused on understanding the scope of coverage of a particular news outlet. In these cases we generally code every story – or at least a large, representative sample of stories – contained within that outlet during a given time period. Other times, the research question is focused on the way a particular news topic, event or issue is covered. In those cases, we generally use various search techniques to collect the relevant materials.

Within a few minutes he was pulling rank. I asked him to do a "content analysis" of the Constitution, and Shakespeare -later it became more specific: The Second Amendment, and Olivier's Hamlet (the scene with his mother). I said he was sounding like Scalia, and posted a link to Jack Balkin's  "Why are Americans Originalist". He replied, "That paper has 3 citations :)". After then it became whether Jack Balkin or David Lazer is higher on the academic food chain.

Twice this week on twitter I've linked to this.

‘Truly this is the sweetest of theologies’, William said, with perfect humility, and I thought he was using that insidious figure of speech that rhetors call irony, which must always be prefaced by the pronunciato, representing its signal and its justification – something that William never did. For which reason the abbot, more inclined to the use of figures of speech, took William literally …

How do you code for irony?

In one of my first responses to Abrahms I stipulated that journalism was hackwork, so at one level deserved no more than a simplified and therefore vulgar reading: "Now code me Shylock or the Constitution". It went on, and went nowhere.

I can be surprised still how much bureaucratic logic has dumbed down the academy. A few people (from The Atlantic Council!) came to my defense, accusing Abrahms of being a bully. I told them it wasn't an issue.

As always I take comfort in the existence of actors, poets, con-men, comedians, and lawyers. A link from Matthew Scott of Barristerblog.

Casting my mind back 20 odd years to when I started out at the Bar is an uncomfortable experience. On any objective assessment I was a pompous little know-it-all, writes 11KBW’s Sean Jones QC…

I was confident I could succeed because I had never lost an argument. Or so I thought. My armoury of dispute resolution skills included a dogged intransigence, an inexhaustible energy for prolonging the argument and a facility for slyly belittling my opponents and their positions. Arguments always ended the same way: with my opponent calling me a colourful name and refusing to engage with me any further. I was left alone on the battlefield, victorious.

Except, of course, in truth I had lost the battle and the war. What it took me an embarrassingly long time to grasp is that effective advocacy does not depend on having an unshakeable confidence that you are right. It does not even depend on actually being right (though that obviously helps). It depends on being able to persuade someone else that you are right. The unacknowledged truth about advocacy is that it is a sales job. You are trying to persuade the adjudicator to buy the case you are selling. It turns out that requires a completely different skillset to the one I had been developing.

Interesting and amusing update since Abrahms was criticized by an Arabic speaking journalist for not knowing the language. Elijah Magnier responds.

Ask Charles_Lister or Weiss to start with (LOL) @RenaNetjes https://t.co/NVABrh3e4Z

— Elijah J. Magnier (@EjmAlrai) August 6, 2016

In the next tweet Magnier says that Abrahms works with him.
Magnier is fluent, and he's on the ground.

Senior Political Risk Analyst with over 32 years’ experience covering Europe & the Middle East. Acquiring in-depth experience, robust contacts and political knowledge in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Specialized in political assessments, strategic planning and thorough insight in political networks. Created and coordinated network of decision makers to provide key insight into the complex political developments of the Middle Eastern region. Experienced in dealing with intrinsically difficult situations in a broad spectrum of situations when interacting with leaders and fundamentalist movements in war zones and areas of growing instability.

Magier is the tradesman, the connoisseur, the negotiator, the player. He's much more important to Abrahms than David Lazer.

Atrios as troll, a creature of the internet.

March 29

Everybody on the Internet is Wrong 

What I've found frustrating about the internet discourse surrounding the Dem primary is that so little of it has been about anyone actually trying to persuade someone. It's all "I am right, you are wrong." Yes it's the internet. No this should not surprise me. This is how internet discourse usually works. But I've found the level of "my internet-fu has not convinced you because you are stupid" to be weird. Some people like Clinton. Some people like Sanders. Donate money, make calls, knock on doors if you really want to make a difference. Arguing on the internet isn't going to make any difference. As I've said, I'm a Sanders sympathizer. I'm not trying to hide that. But there are good reasons to support Clinton. If I went all in on one side or another I'm sure I'd convince precisely zero people to vote for candidate X. Activism should be productive, not just narcissism.

"Some people like Clinton. Some people like Sanders".  Some people liked Gore and some people liked Bush. Some people liked Palin.
"America's Worst Humans" The World's Worst Humans" "Wanker of the Day"

March 27

Nobody Could Have Predicted
Everybody wins!

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter 5-year-old civil war. 

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

March 24

All The World's A Stage 

Sometimes I think people fail to realize that we all have our roles to play. I don't advocate dishonesty, but it's my role to complain from The Left in hopes that things get pulled a little bit more to the left (recognizing that my superpowers are limited). Other people have their roles. It's how this game is played.

March 20th

My Obsessions 

One thing about having a blog which requires regular posts is that you have to have obsessions. I get that not all readers are interested in my obsessions of the week, but it's really the only way to keep this truck stop running. I gotta pick something and run with it. Otherwise I run out of things to say. I'm basically an introvert, in case that wasn't obvious.

"I like Hillary Clinton. I worried a bit about some of the idiots she has surrounded herself with. But happy for her to run."

Coates in 2008, The Negro Sings Of Zionism

Now, I realize that black nationalism has often been laced with a nice dose of antisemitism. But my point is that philosophically, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann have much more in common with Marcus Garvey and Martin Delaney than with Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King. Black leadership--so influenced by Marin Luther King--would almost naturally be lukewarm to Israel, because Civil Rights philosophy not only explicitly rejects nationalism, it actually rejects violence--even in self-defense. Say what you will about Al Sharpton--his response to Sean Bell is Martin Luther King's not Huey Newton's. Thus when people shuffle out the old "Israel has the right to defend itself" number, I hear echoes of Malcolm X upbraiding MLK for singing "We Shall Overcome" as racial terorists bombed churches and sicced dogs on women. "This is part of what’s wrong with you -- you do too much singing," Malcolm once said. "Today it’s time to stop singing and start swinging."

This isn't a criticism of Zionism. I came up in the orbit of black nationalism, went to a black college, and have made my home mere blocks from where Garvey used to lead his parades. Indeed, as the brothers say, Game respect Game. Plus our histories aren't exact matches. Antisemitism is at once older, and more present. Jew-hating is the western world's oldest ethnic prejudice, nearly four times as old as anti-black racism, plus the Holocaust is much closer to us than the epoch of slavery. But that doesn't stop me from, every so often, throwing in my old Malcolm tapes, or thumbing through David Walker's Appeal and wondering whether we took the right path

As a dude who came up banging Malcolm's "Ballot or The Bullet" like it was the Wu-Tang Forever, who recited Garvey's "Look For Me In The Whirlwind" at the school assembly, Israel is like a parallel universe, what Liberia could have been with the alteration of a few key historical variables. In Israel, cats like me see the shadows of another choice. Then we cut on "Flavor Of Love" and realize that it could not have been any other way.

Rania Khalek, at EI, responding to Coates' recent arguments.

“Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a roadmap for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name,” Coates writes.

There are some gaping holes in this narrative.

First, it relies on a total conflation of Israel and Zionism, on the one hand, with Jews, on the other. And it accepts uncritically the ahistorical claim that Israel and Zionism were the victims of the Nazis, and therefore Israel was the appropriate address for “reparations,” the delivery of which could offer Germans absolution.

The second paragraph made me cringe but I understand the point. The link is to Joseph Massad.

Scientific anti-Semitism insisted that the Jews were different from Christian Europeans. Indeed that the Jews were not European at all and that their very presence in Europe is what causes anti-Semitism.

...Whereas Zionism insists that Jews are a race separate from European Christians, the Palestinians insist that European Jews are nothing if not European and have nothing to do with Palestine, its people, or its culture.

After 1947 European Jews began to call themselves white, to distinguish themselves from Arabs, and also from Mizrahi. For the full absurdity, see Sara Lipton and follow the links.


Did black Americans have a "right" to the new state of Liberia?  Do Syrians now have a "right" to go to Europe?  The desperate go where they need to.

Usually I link to "Jacobin" as "Hamas" (out of no particular antipathy to the latter) but the hipsters have a good one this time: An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him
---

Liberia. The indigenous majority didn't get the vote until the middle of the 20th century. The country was run on Jim Crow.

US backed groups in Syria are are now fighting each other with US supplied materiel.

The US has asked Russia to stop attacks near the Turkish border against al-Nusra because they're mingled with US backed rebels.

Jeffrey Sachs. Why Hillary Clinton is unfit to be President.

In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence - Clinton's intransigence - that led to the failure of Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton's insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.

As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic and misguided for that reason.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria.

This idea is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power for a long time--in fact, for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not going away. There is no way, and no reason, to "defeat" Iran. The regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium that recognizes the mutual and balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naïve, and deeply ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists.

Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran. In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad.

When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change.

In early 2011, Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against Assad to try to foment conditions for his ouster. By the spring of 2011, the CIA and the US allies were organizing an armed insurrection against the regime. On August 18, 2011, the US Government made public its position: "Assad must go."

...The hubris of the United States in this approach seems to know no bounds. The tactic of CIA-led regime change is so deeply enmeshed as a "normal" instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is hardly noticed by the U.S. public or media. Overthrowing another government is against the U.N. charter and international law. But what are such niceties among friends?

This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international law but has also been a massive and repeated failure.

read the rest

One quibble over numbers: Colum Lynch in FP

Assad is routinely accused of murdering 250,000 of his own people. The only problem is that there’s no proof he did.

@Charles_Lister Story wrong. @JohnKerry didn't blame oppo for collapse of talks, doesn't have comms w/regime & hasn't wavered on Asad.

— John Kirby (@statedeptspox) February 7, 2016

You are absolutely right. See the contradiction here https://t.co/OaLWhJ0xNi @SDAllenToronto @MiddleEastEye

— Elijah J. Magnier (@EjmAlrai) February 7, 2016

#SecKerry on bombardment of civilians in #Syria: This has to stop. But it’s not going to stop by walking away from the table or not engaging

— U.S. Embassy Syria (@USEmbassySyria) February 6, 2016

Middle East Eye, Feb 6

US Secretary of State John Kerry told Syrian aid workers, hours after the Geneva peace talks fell apart, that the country should expect another three months of bombing that would “decimate” the opposition.

During a conversation on the sidelines of this week’s Syria donor conference in London, sources say, Kerry blamed the Syrian opposition for leaving the talks and paving the way for a joint offensive by the Syrian government and Russia on Aleppo.

“‘He said, ‘Don’t blame me – go and blame your opposition,’” one of the aid workers, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her organisation, told Middle East Eye.

Kerry told reporters on Friday, as tens of thousands fled the Syrian government and Russian bombardment of Aleppo, that both Russia and Iran, another of Syria's allies, have told him that they are prepared for a ceasefire in Syria.

He said he would know “whether or not these parties are serious” after a meeting of the International Syria Support Group – 17 nations including the US and Russia – scheduled to be held in Munich next week.

But Kerry left the aid workers with the distinct impression that the US is abandoning efforts to support rebel fighters.

Reuters, Feb 3

Syria says Saudi, Qatar, Turkey told opposition to quit Geneva talks.

It was obviously something big: although the explosion had taken place on the other side of Sher Darwaza, a mountain in the center of Kabul, McWilliams had heard it clearly. After negotiating a maze of narrow streets on the south side of the city, he found the site. A massive car bomb, designed to kill as many civilians as possible, had been detonated in a neighborhood full of Hazaras, a much-persecuted minority.

McWilliams took pictures of the devastation, headed back to the embassy, and sent a report to Washington. It was very badly received — not because someone had launched a terrorist attack against Afghan civilians, but because McWilliams had reported it. The bomb, it turned out, had been the work of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen commander who received more CIA money and support than any other leader of the Afghan rebellion. The attack, the first of many, was part of a CIA-blessed scheme to “put pressure” on the Soviet presence in Kabul. Informing the Washington bureaucracy that Hekmatyar’s explosives were being deployed to kill civilians was therefore entirely unwelcome.

“Those were Gulbuddin’s bombs,” McWilliams, a Rhode Islander with a gift for laconic understatement, told me recently. “He was supposed to get the credit for this.” In the meantime, the former diplomat recalled, the CIA pressured him to “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”

I tracked down McWilliams, now retired to the remote mountains of southern New Mexico, because the extremist Islamist groups currently operating in Syria and Iraq called to mind the extremist Islamist groups whom we lavishly supported in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Hekmatyar, with his documented fondness for throwing acid in women’s faces, would have had nothing to learn from Al Qaeda. When a courageous ABC News team led by my wife, Leslie Cockburn, interviewed him in 1993, he had beheaded half a dozen people earlier that day. Later, he killed their translator.

When I hear the name Hekmatyar I think of the stories above, and Cockburn's brother.

Those on the receiving end of Islamic State attacks tend to agree. Asked what could be done to help Iraq following the group’s lightning assaults in the summer of 2014, an Iraqi diplomat replied: “Bomb Saudi Arabia.”

Andrew Cockburn: The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again

Earlier in the Syrian war, U.S. officials had at least maintained the pretense that weapons were being funneled only to so-called moderate opposition groups. But in 2014, in a speech at Harvard, Vice President Joe Biden confirmed that we were arming extremists once again, although he was careful to pin the blame on America’s allies in the region, whom he denounced as “our largest problem in Syria.” In response to a student’s question, he volunteered that our allies

were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

Biden’s explanation was entirely reminiscent of official excuses for the arming of fundamentalists in Afghanistan during the 1980s, which maintained that the Pakistanis had total control of the distribution of U.S.-supplied weapons and that the CIA was incapable of intervening when most of those weapons ended up with the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Asked why the United States of America was supposedly powerless to stop nations like Qatar, population 2.19 million, from pouring arms into the arsenals of Nusra and similar groups, a former adviser to one of the Gulf States replied softly: “They didn’t want to.”

...Two years later, Washington’s capacity for denial in the face of inconvenient facts remains undiminished. Addressing the dominance of extremists in the Syrian opposition, Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, has blamed our earlier failure to arm those elusive moderates. The catastrophic consequences of this very approach in Libya are seldom mentioned. “If we had intervened more swiftly in Syria,” Gartenstein-Ross says, “the best-case scenario probably would have been another Libya. Meaning that we would still be dealing with a collapsed state and spillover into other Middle Eastern states and Europe.”

Even as we have continued our desultory bombing campaign against the Islamic State, Ahrar al-Sham and Nusra are creeping closer and closer to international respectability. A month after the London Eleven meeting, a group of scholars from the Brookings Institution published an op-ed making the case for Ahrar al-Sham: “Designating [the] group as a terrorist organization might backfire by pushing it completely into Al Qaeda’s camp.” (The think tank’s recent receipt of a multiyear, $15 million grant from Qatar was doubtless coincidental.)