فوق السلطة - ترمب يفتقد السديس

ما وراء الخبر-كيف ساعدت إسرائيل الإمارات بالتجسس على جيرانها؟

النظام يقصف إدلب بالفوسفور ومطالب بإجلاء المدنيين

COMMENT

This eventual final assault on Idlib was so predictable long time ago. The stupid Syrian "opposition" allowed the regime and Russia to concentrate the fighters from other regions into Idlib. This was done through various "evacuation" agreements.

As a result, all the forces that the regime and Russia want to destroy are where they want them; all that remains is to obliterate  Idlib as Aleppo was obliterated through a scorched earth campaign.

It seems that the Arabs (including the Syrian opposition) are eternally incapable of learning anything. The same story repeats itself, over and over again.

I suggest that the Syrian opposition, if it is truly serious about winning, send a delegation to learn from the North Vietnamese or even the Taliban about the art of guerrilla war.

Link

قصفت قوات النظام السوري ريف إدلب بالفوسفور، وقصفت ريفيْ حماة واللاذقية بالصواريخ، وطالب مبعوثالأمم المتحدة إلى سوريا ستفان دي ميستورا بإجلاء المدنيين من إدلب، بينما تستعد روسيا لمناورات بالساحل السوري.

وقال مراسل الجزيرة مساء اليوم الخميس إن قوات النظام قصفت بالفوسفور محيط بلدة بداما في ريف إدلب الغربي، وذلك بعد أيام من مزاعم روسية بأن المعارضة السورية تعد لهجوم بأسلحة كيميائية في إدلب لاتهام النظام بتنفيذه.

وذكر المراسل أن قوات النظام استهدفت براجمات الصواريخ بلدة السرمانية في سهل الغاب بريف حماة، كما قصفت بصواريخ شديدة الانفجار محاور "كباني" في جبل الأكراد بريف اللاذقية، مشيرا إلى أن المنطقتين تقعان ضمن منطقة خفض التصعيد الرابعة، بينما تشهد أطرافهما عمليات تحشيد عسكرية لقوات النظام.

 دي ميستورا مستعدمن جهة أخرى، قال دي ميستورا من جنيف "أنا مستعد للمساهمة شخصيا وجسديا، في تأمين ممر إنساني يتيح للسكان المدنيين (في إدلب) الخروج إلى منطقة أكثر أمانا".

وقدر المبعوث الأممي وجود حوالي 10 آلاف مقاتل، بالإضافة إلى عائلاتهم، من عناصر جبهة فتح الشام "الذين لا يشكك أحد في أنهم إرهابيون يتعين هزمهم" إلا أنه حذر من "استخدام أسلحة ثقيلة في مناطق مزدحمة بالسكان، حتى لقتال إرهابيين".

وقال ميخائيل بوغدانوف نائب وزير الخارجية الروسي إنه يجب استبدال قوات التحالف الدولي لمحاربة تنظيم الدولةبقوات النظام السوري، موضحا أن هناك اتصالات مستمرة بين القيادات العسكرية الروسية والتركية والإيرانية بشأن إدلب.

واعتبر أنه "لا يمكن السماح للإرهابيين باستخدام المدنيين دروعا بشرية" وقال إن بلاده مستعدة لبحث إنشاء ممر إنساني لإخراج المدنيين من إدلب مع دي ميستورا.

خلوصي يتمنىوبدوره، قال وزير الدفاع التركي خلوصي أكار إنه يتمنى تأمين سلامة نحو أربعة ملايين شخص بإدلب وتوفير المساعدات لهم، دون انتهاك اتفاق وقف إطلاق النار هناك.

وأضاف أن تنفيذ خريطة الطريق الخاصة ببلدة منبج (قرب الحدود التركية) متواصل وبوتيرة بطيئة، وقال إنه يذكّر الأطراف المعنية وبشكل مستمر بخصوص انسحاب وحدات حماية الشعب الكردية من المنطقة.

مفاوضات ومناورات
وبينما تنفي المعارضة المسلحة تواصل الجانب الروسي معها بخصوص إيجاد تسوية تحدد مصير إدلب، قال المرصد السوري لحقوق الإنسان إن مفاوضات جارية الآن "بين المخابرات التركية وهيئة تحرير الشام والفصائل الجهادية" مضيفا أن روسيا تشترط تفكيك الهيئة.

وأعلنت الهيئة في بيان أن موضوع حلها -إن صح- أمر داخلي يناقش داخل مجلس الشورى.. وليس عبر إملاءات" مضيفة أنها تسعى للوصول إلى حل يحمي المدنيين.

روسيا تناور
وقال وزير الخارجية الروسي سيرغي لافروف مؤخرا إن الهجوم على إدلب "ربما أصبح وشيكا" معتبرا أنه يجب الفصل بين "المعارضة المعتدلة والإرهابيين".

وأعلنت وزارة الدفاع أن 25 سفينة حربية وثلاثين طائرة ستشارك في مناورات شرق المتوسط السبت القادم.

وقالت المتحدثة باسم الخارجية ماريا زاخاروفا إن موسكو لا تستبعد قيام الولايات المتحدة بقصف سوريا من جديد، معتبرة أن ذلك سيقوض عملية التسوية "في وقت تمت فيه تهيئة الظروف لتحقيق نقلة نوعية نحو الأفضل، والقضاء على الإرهابيين".

John McCain: The impossible man

John McCain's legacy reflects the internal contradictions of the US imperial experience.

A GOOD PIECE

By Hamid Dabashi

Link

On August 25, senator and former presidential candidate John McCain died aged 81. In the obituaries that poured in, "war hero" and "maverick" were the most frequent epithets used to describe him. Both these terms, however, frame the irreconcilable paradox of the dysfunctional empire McCain called his homeland - its rosy self-perceptions and the truth of its vile militarism.    

"John S McCain," declared the New York Times obituary in august mournful fonts, "the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81."

That pretty much sums up the abiding liberal sentiments at the heart of the empire Senator McCain served valiantly. In the same obituary we read, "a son and grandson of four-star admirals who were his larger-than-life heroes, Mr McCain carried his renowned name into battle and into political fights for more than a half-century."

What did those battles mean for the humanity at large - how many millions have perished around the globe at the receiving end of those waged wars? What did those political fights signify for the poorer and disenfranchised communities at the fractured heart of the empire itself? These are the places where the real obituaries of the senator will be written. 

Upon his passing, we remember McCain for his sustained oppositions to the public spectacle of indecency that Donald Trump commits as US president - and for his agreement with the majority of his policies.  

From Ronald Reagan to John McCain, the quintessence of the Republican Party war against the poor and the weak worldwide breathes fire into the Trump administration. 

A 'common sense' conservative

Senator McCain has left behind a brand of conservatism that his supporters consider "common sense" when compared with the politics of his fellow Republicans Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan - two conservative robots who happily embrace any legislation that favours their enduring power, no matter the human misery it may cause.

McCain may indeed have been different from them, but his presence in the legislative body of the US empire was integral to a deeply reactionary, fanatically militaristic legacy that is wreaking havoc in the US and around the globe.  

Being a military man, McCain was adamantly militaristic in his politics. He was a hardline supporter of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, considering the government of Saddam Hussein "a clear and present danger to the United States of America." He voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002, promising US forces would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqis. 

When the extent of the US atrocities in Iraq became evident in the Abu Ghraib torture chambers, however, he was leading a public outcry against such practices, presumably because he was personally tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was committed to upholding a military code of honour for an army that had done pretty dishonourable acts around the globe. 

McCain never saw the prospect of a war anywhere in the world he did not instantly support - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. He advocated for prolonged wars. He died not seeing his wish to "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" fulfilled. But his legacy is alive and well in Trump's military logic of US domination around the globe. 

McCain staunchly supported Israel, could not care less for the fate of Palestinians, and for a while even considered the arch-Zionist Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2008. Yet he also backed the Arab revolutions, criticising dictators Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Bashar al-Assad. 

But with his hardline support for sending arms to Syria, he played a key role in aggressively militarising the peaceful resistance to the murderous Assad regime. This militarisation, with the help of Damascus, which released from prison hundreds of fighters the regime had been using against the US in Iraq, enabled the creation of various extremist groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

At the same time, McCain's criticism of Sisi and Assad was, of course, seriously compromised by his fanatical commitment to the Saudi ruling clan, even and particularly during their slaughter of Yemenis, when he rejected calls to limit the US sale of weaponry to Riyadh. 

Give a pen and a piece of paper to a Yemeni or Iraqi or Palestinian child and ask him or her what "war hero" and "maverick" mean at the receiving end of US militarism.

In many ways, McCain was a typical US politician, projecting an image that he means well, but in effect being integral to a structural violence definitive to a trigger-happy dysfunctional empire. In his moral confusions, he embodied the impossibilities of the American empire parading its moral cake for the whole world to believe and gobbling it up too. 

The moral confusion of an empire

The moral confusion of John McCain, however, was not personal, it was endemic to the nature of the empire he cherished as his homeland. In the figure of John McCain, as in the moral fabric of the US empire, singing the praise of liberty and freedom, while bombing nations to smithereens, there is no reconciling between its innate militarism and its professed moral high grounds on what it calls "human rights."

McCain and his empire protested too much about liberty and freedom and did too little about it; they did not even know of their guilty conscience. 

As a military man, he served his country with steadfast, unwavering, and straightforward convictions. But as a politician, McCain was caught between the rock of moral opprobrium he had inherited from his military family, and the hard-hitting miseries his militarism had caused at home and abroad. 

He was a contradiction in terms. He was an impossible man. But that contradiction, and that impossibility was the persona US imperialism had solidly, transparently invested in him and he best exemplified it, carried it with convictions and pride. 

We all remember when his infamous singing "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb … Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' classic "Barbara Ann" during a presidential campaign rally delighted the US, Saudi, and Israeli neocons and Zionists to no end.

But in another campaign rally in October 2008, when someone said she did not trust Obama because "he is an Arab", McCain went out of his way defending his rival for being a "decent family man" and "not an Arab". Meaning: No decent family man could possibly be an Arab.

This is not being paradoxical, ironic, or even personally racist. This is being true to the contorted moral imagination of a constitutionally racist imperialism, in which "a decent family man" can only be approximated to John McCain himself.

There was and there will always be a moral conundrum in being a John McCain, a consistent inconsistency, for he embodied and personified an empire that lacks any semblance of normative or moral hegemony, a militarism that murders and mourns at one and the same time.  

Any time a mass murderer went on a rampage slaughtering innocent children and adults, McCain was quick to send his condolences: "Cindy & I are praying for the victims of the terrible #LasVegasShooting & their families", and yet he was the absolute largest recipient of money from the NRA.    

Between Trump and McCain: The future of an empire

The ignominy of Trump in just about anything he says and anything he does, of course, makes McCain look like a towering statue of moral authority - particularly to his liberal admirers.   

"He's not a war hero," Trump once infamously said about McCain, "He's [called] a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured." 

The indecency was repeated later when a White House staffer dismissed McCain's vote because he "was dying anyway".

Spewing such vulgarities about a man who was captured, tortured, and maimed for life while serving in an army Trump's wealthy father had protected his son from being drafted into is positively obscene. 

But Trump and Trumpism could not possibly be the measure of anything. Trump is at once at the rotten roots of American politics and yet an aberration to the liberal veneer McCain best personified in his conservatism.

We may indeed be witness to the end of an era by the passing of John McCain. The rise of Trump and Trumpism has ushered the end of the era of blunt and unbridled racism. The sorts of paradoxical tension McCain personified between highfalutin convictions and dastardly actions, between high-horse morality and cold-blooded murder, between exuding compassion while committing war crimes, may have indeed come to an end. 

If Trump is the future of the American empire, we have a clear consistency between racist convictions and murderous acts. There is no camouflaging here. He kills while he shouts insults.   

With the passing of John McCain, the American empire may have indeed lost an iconic figure definitive to its moral mystification of itself, and thus shed all its false pretences to be a shining city on any hill it has not yet bombed or else turned into a military base.

There is a strong sense of liberal nostalgia in much of the obituaries we read about John McCain these days. There is a strong sense of a desire to put this ugly chapter of Trump behind and move back to a polished imperialism of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama - when Daddy was bombing the world 9 to 5, and then coming home for a civilised dinner with his lovely family. 

The vulgarity of Donald Trump is just too much in the face, too much telling it like it is. In mourning John McCain, US liberalism is also mourning its own refined and cultured costume party that camouflages its murderous militarism in the refined garb of soft-spoken and cultured pride in one's county. 

Read carefully these obituaries - there is a pronounced politics to their mourning. They are positing a "liberal conservatism" (or what they term "common sense" conservatism) to defeat Trump and discredit what passes for the left wing of the Democratic Party at one and the same time. 

Come next presidential election, Americans will have a chance to go one way or the other once again: with the open racism of Donald Trump or the refined militarism of what they call "McCain Democrats". They will make their choice and the rest of the world will have to decide which way to run for cover.

John McCain a war criminal, not a war hero

By Eli Stephens

Link



John McCain is purportedly rescued from Truc Bach Lake by the Vietnamese after his plane was shot down October 26, 1967.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has generated a lot of press, and criticism from other candidates, for his claim that Senator John McCain was not a “war hero.” As it happens, Trump was partially right, but he didn’t go far enough. Not only is John McCain not a war hero, he is in fact a war criminal.

Most people know that McCain was a pilot during the Vietnam War, and that he was shot down over North Vietnam and spent five years as a POW. What is less well known is the story of how he was shot down, a story that has only rarely surfaced in the media. The last time it appeared in the U.S. press, as far as I can tell, was during the 2000 primary campaign. Here’s an excerpt [emphasis added]:

On that gray morning more than 32 years ago, McCain was knocked unconscious briefly when he ejected from his damaged bomber. Both his arms were broken, his right knee was shattered, and when he splashed into the middle of Truc Bach (White Silk) Lake, his 50 pounds of flight gear kept him from reaching the surface.

When Mai Van On finally got to him, about 200 yards out, all the older man could see was a bit of white silk, the top of the American’s parachute.

With U.S. planes still bombing and strafing their target of the day—a nearby light-bulb factory where On worked as a security guard—On used a stout bamboo pole to hoist McCain off the bottom of the lake.

“If I had hesitated even one more minute, I’m sure he would have died,” said On, still vigorous at 83 and still living in the same spot on the southern edge of the lake in the heart of downtown Hanoi.

“John McCain was lucky that morning,” On said. “It was about 11 a.m. I had just come home for lunch and put my bicycle into the house. Then the air-raid siren went off, and 60 or 70 of us ran to a tunnel to avoid the bombs. I was at the entrance to the tunnel when I saw the pilot go into the water.

“The tunnel was still shaking from the bombing when I ran to the lake.”

The only hero that day was Mai Van On, not John McCain.

As I wrote back in 2005:

Bombing a light-bulb factory, a civilian target, is a war crime. McCain, obviously, didn’t select the target, he was just following orders, but that doesn’t exonerate him any more than any other soldier who follows an illegal order. According to Amnesty International this particular violation of the Geneva Convention (bombing civilian targets) is actually official U.S. military doctrine:

“Military advantage may involve a variety of considerations, including the security of the attacking force. … Economic targets of the enemy that indirectly but effectively support and sustain the enemy’s war-fighting capability may also be attacked.”

“War is a clash of opposing wills. … While physical factors are crucial in war, the national will and the leadership’s will are also critical components of war. The will to prosecute or the will to resist can be decisive elements. … Strategic attack objectives often include producing effects to demoralize the enemy’s leadership, military forces, and population, thus affecting the adversary’s capability to continue the conflict.”

Both of these statements, taken from different U.S. military manuals and documents, represent direct violations of the Geneva Convention (and, it should be noted, well before the advent of George W. Bush).

But McCain didn’t just carry out such illegal orders himself, he willingly voiced support for them, specifically during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia when “water systems, power and heating plants, hospitals, universities, schools, apartment complexes, senior citizens’ homes, bridges, factories, trains, buses, radio and TV stations, the telephone system, oil refineries, embassies, marketplaces and more were deliberately destroyed by U.S./NATO planes in a ruthless 10-week bombing campaign.”

For reference, here is Article 54 of the Geneva convention:

“It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.”

McCain, and the entire U.S. political and military establishment, also supported the wholesale bombing of Iraq’s water purification plants during the first Gulf War. And this was no ordinary war crime, it was a planned genocide. Documents released in 2000 revealed that the U.S. had studied in detail all aspects of Iraq’s water system, had planned a strategy for preventing Iraq from reconstructing that system (via sanctions), and knew in advance that “this could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease.” Indeed it did, with more than half a million Iraqi children dead as a result, one of the greatest war crimes in history, carried out by the next generation of U.S. pilots who followed John McCain, and with John McCain’s full-throated support.

John McCain—war criminal then, war criminal now, war criminal forever. To be clear, he is far from the only one currently, or previously, serving in the U.S. government or U.S. military. But, at the moment, he is the only one for whom the entire ruling class, with the lone exception of Donald Trump, is rushing to assure the American public that he was a war hero, before the truth gets more closely examined.