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.
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'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."
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 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.
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.
The Saudi crown prince's grand designs are disappearing in the desert and with them the ambitious reform claims By David Hearst Link
The bubble is bursting. One by one, Mohammad bin Salman's grand designs are disappearing in the desert, and with them the ambitious claims he made to reform decades of corruption, diversify an oil dependent economy and emerge as Donald Trump's man in the Middle East.
Strip away the words and the hype, and you are left with a 32-year-old prince, an angry royal family hell-bent on revenge for the humiliations they have suffered at his hands, and a hugely oil-dependent economy which is trying to stem capital flight. That is not a recipe for stability, let alone reform.
The chaos factor
This week, the cornerstone of his designs, plans to list Saudi Aramco on the stock market and raise $100bn by selling off 5 per cent, crumbled. Reuters reported that the financial advisers working on the planned listing had been disbanded, and that the listing had been called off. The report quoted one of four sources saying that even the local float on the Tadawul stock exchange had been shelved.
Saudi Arabia's energy minister denied the report, claiming the government remained committed to the initial public offering (IPO) "in accordance with appropriate circumstances and time," but he is fooling no one. The IPO ran into a headwind of concerns about legal action from the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, an inability to generate a $2tn valuation wanted by bin Salman, and concerns that foreign investors would demand transparency and reveal the extent to which the royal family plundered its funds.
Strip away the words and the hype, and you are left with a 32-year-old prince, an angry royal family hell-bent on revenge for the humiliations they have suffered at his hands
This has left Saudi's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, turning to international banks for an $11bn loan. Western bankers now have to reset their sights on smaller sell-offs like the $70bn stake in Sabic, the chemicals group.
The chaos factor which looms large in anything bin Salman puts his hand to is compounded by capital flight. Even before the prince shook down his cousins by locking them up in the Ritz-Carlton, $64bn in core capital left Saudi Arabia in 2017, up from $55bn the year before, according to the Institute of International Finance.
The corruption crackdown will not have staunched the haemorrhage. It may well have increased it.
Energy and related products account for 87 per cent of the government budget, a figure which shows how reliant government revenues are on the international energy market.
A vulnerable bin Salman
The arrests and the internal repression are continuing. The latest to be locked up is one of the Imams of the Haram, Sheikh Dr Saleh al Taleb. This is the first time an imam, and a judge, of Mecca has been arrested. Taleb's khutbah, or Friday sermon, contained no direct criticism of the Saudi royal family. His speech was deliberately vague. He talked about the duty of Islam to deny evil in public. But his arrest shows how vulnerable bin Salman feels he is.
Another project to portray bin Salman as a defender of women's rights, and the right to drive, is also disappearing. Amnesty launched a full-throated attack on the continued detention without charge of eight women and four men, a crackdown on human rights defenders which started shortly before the ban on women driving was lifted last June.
Michelle Obama (L) and Hillary Clinton (R) pose with Saudi activist Samar Badawi as she receives the 2012 International Women of Courage Award (AFP)
A further grim precedent was set when prosecutors sought the death sentence for Israa al-Ghomgham, the first woman campaigner facing execution, her husband, Moussa al-Hashem, and three other men. Ghomgham’s "crime" was to join mass protests for Shia rights and document them by filming them and publishing them on social media.
Ghomgham's case has now been taken up by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Two weeks ago an official Canadian embassy tweet translated into Arabic, calling for the release of Samar Badawi, the women's right campaigner, sparked a major diplomatic rift with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom froze all trade and investment and issued an instant recall of all its students on medical programmes in Canada. Trudeau's reaction has been to redouble his criticism.
Across the border bin Salman's chief sponsor Donald Trump is also in trouble
The decision to stop the training of Saudi doctors in Canada is another move which hits Saudi hospitals far harder than Canadian ones, although the visa training programme was an important source of foreign revenue. Saudi sent 1,658 visa fellows to Canada to train in medical and surgical specialities, the Lancet reported.
Years of training have been upended at a stroke, and it is far from clear which schools they will be able to move to. Canada was popular because its visa training programmes were generous and did not require doctors to reregister. It's just one part of the overall mosaic, but a telling one.
The big problem
Across the border bin Salman’s chief sponsor, Donald Trump, is also in trouble. This affects the Saudi crown prince in two ways. Firstly, the insiders, through whom he used to get access to Trump, are peeling away.
David Pecker, chairman of American Media Inc, a close former friend of Trump and key witness to the investigation into payments made during the presidency campaign to silence two women who had affairs with Trump, is the latest to reach an immunity deal with prosecutors.
News of the deal was broken by the Hive, a Vanity Fair site that quoted a Trump friend saying: "Holy shit, I thought Pecker would be the last one to turn." Pecker joins Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer, as well as the White House counsel Don McGahn in switching sides and providing federal prosecutors with incriminating information. They have every motive to do so.
Pecker's company published a glossy magazine which appeared mysteriously during Mohammad bin Salman's last trip to the US: "Meet the Next King," it proclaimed, "Our Closest Middle East Ally Destroying Terrorism," "Controlling Staggering $4trillion business fortune," "Building a $640 Billion Sci-Fi City of the Future," "Improving Lives of His People and Hopes for Peace".
Pecker took Kacy Grine, a French businessmen and adviser to bin Salman, to see the Trump in the Oval Office and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and Middle East envoy, the New York Times reported.
But the bigger problem for bin Salman is Trump himself. Bin Salman placed a bet on Trump early on in the presidential campaign and backed it by placing arms contracts which are several multiples of the sum he now needs for his privatisation campaign.
To a prince in the ascendance, this is no problem. This is the way business has always been done in the Gulf. But to a prince whose projects are seen to be failing, who has sent foreign workers home, and who now has to turn the austerity tap back on again at home, Trump's declining fortunes and loss of authority are a big problem.
The truth about bin Salman is beginning to dawn. He is the guy who gambles and loses.
- David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and Ireland Correspondent. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
رغم أن ما أسمي "التدخل الكندي" في السعودية اقتصر على مسألة حقوقية، تتصل باعتقال ناشطي المجتمع المدني والمطالبة بالإفراج عنهم، إلا أن ذلك لم يمنع الرئيس الفلسطيني، محمود عباس، من الانحياز إلى جانب السلطات السعودية تحت يافطة "التدخل السافر في الشؤون الداخلية".
وكان لافتا أن عباس لم يختر الوقوف في هذه المسألة ضد معتقلي الرأي في السعودية فحسب، بل وأيضا ضد من يتضامن معهم، وادعى باسم الشعب الفلسطيني أنه "يقف إلى جانب الأشقاء في السعودية بقيادة سلمان بن عبد العزيز، وولي العهد محمد بن سلمان".
كما اعتبر عباس بدوره أن المطالبة بالإفراج عن معتقلي الرأي في السعودية "مسا بسيادة المملكة على أرضها وشعبها".
وأدان المطالبة الحقوقية، ووصفها بـ"التدخل السافر" في الشؤون الداخلية، بحسب وكالة "وفا".
ولم يتوقف عباس عند حدود الإدانة فحسب، بل دعا الدول العربية إلى الوقوف إلى جانب السعودية وإدانة "التدخل الكندي"، وهو موقف قد يكون له تبعاته على حجم تشجيع الكنديين في اتخاذ موقف متضامن مع حقوق الشعب الفلسطيني نفسه.
يذكر أن السعودية كان قد أعلنت، الليلة الفائتة، تجميد علاقاتها التجارية مع كندا، واستدعاء سفيرها من أوتاوا، والإعلان عن السفير الكندي شخصية غير مرغوب بها، وأملهته مدة 24 ساعة لمغادرة البلاد، كما أعلنت تجميد كافة التعاملات التجارية والاستثمارية الجديدة بين السعودية وكندا، مع الاحتفاظ بحقها في اتخاذ إجراءات أخرى.
وتأتي هذه القرارات في أعقاب مطالبة وزيرة الخارجية الكندية والسفارة الكندية بالإفراج عن نشاطي المجتمع المدني الذين اعتقلتهم السلطات السعودية. واعتبرت الأخيرة ذلك بمثابة "تدخل سافر في شؤونها الداخلية".
يشار إلى أن الإمارات والبحرين قد سارعتا إلى تبني موقف السعودية من باب "مواجهة أي تدخل خارجي في الشؤون الداخلية".
Given its terrible history, the term “fascist” is too often carelessly invoked. But fascism does not presuppose a holocaust. For Americans, the singular presidency of Donald Trump impels a measured consideration of what fascism truly is ― and how it grows. For fascism does not supplant democracy overnight. Rather it advances step-by-step, nourished by denial and disbelief, until it overruns the safeguards protecting decency and freedom.
Is Trump an agent of incipient fascism? Start with its historic cradle ― Europe in the 1920s and ’30s.
True, America’s democratic institutions are deeply rooted. But intelligent Germans and Italians dismissed the bigotry and unreason which overcame them ― their societies were too ancient, too civilized, to yield so easily. Until they did.
How? Both countries nurtured the seeds of democratic decline. Social fissures. Groups that felt beset by inimical forces. Demagogues who promised to subdue those forces in exchange for unquestioning fealty.
Particularly instructive is Benjamin Hett’s The Death of Democracy, a penetrating study of how Nazism overtook the Weimar Republic. Hett never mentions Trump; the societal parallels are, of course, far from exact. But his account carries a troubling ― and clearly intentional ― resonance.
Hitler exuded contempt for reason. He recast globalization as a conspiracy. He identified all-purpose external enemies. He cultivated a sense of victimhood. He insisted that the media serve “the general good,” and promised “legal warfare” against critics. He stoked contempt for pluralism and political institutions.
Particularly insidious, he saw Germans as a racial tribe, intellectually unequipped for critical thinking, who craved a leader with mystical powers. Relentlessly he galvanized their anger and anxieties through rudimentary language that was flagrantly mendacious. The greater the lie, Hitler believed, the easier to popularize: “I reduced [our political problems] to the simplest terms. The masses realize this and follow me.”
But Hitler could not rise on rhetoric alone. The German people were profoundly divided by class, region, religion and income inequality. Many despised the cosmopolites, global elites and politicians they associated with democracy. A conservative political and financial class, dismissing Hitler as a showman, imagined they could control him for their own ends ― a tragic miscalculation that resonates beyond its time.
For while fascism slumbered after World War II, it did not die. A contemporary exemplar is Trump’s patron ― Vladimir Putin.
Putin’s regime checks all of fascism’s historic boxes: a cult of personality; nationalism based in paranoia, xenophobia and ethno-religious identity; a tsunami of lies and distortions. Putin portrays a homeland imperiled by enemies ― entitling him to jail or murder domestic dissidents; invade Russia’s neighbors; and undermine Western democracy.
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Systematically, Putin has interfered in Western elections and financed right-wing foreign nationalists, principal among them Trump. In The Road To Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder quotes a former Russian foreign minister: Putin, the man asserts, “realizes that Trump will trample American democracy and damage if not destroy America as a pillar of stability and major force able to contain him.”
Trump, in turn, serves as Putin’s understudy. By helping Bashar Assad savage Syria, Putin fueled a refugee crisis which destabilized European democracies ― whose response Trump then castigates as weak. Putin boosted the French xenophobe Marine Le Pen; so did Trump. Putin denounced NATO and the EU; Trump disparages them. Putin interfered in the British referendum on EU membership; Trump praises the result. Putin demeans America’s democratic institutions; so does Trump.
Certainly, Trump’s rhetoric mirrors Putin’s animus for essential elements of liberal democracy. The rule of law. A separation of powers. A loyal opposition. An independent media. Vigorous dissent. Limitations on executive authority. The chief difference lies not in attitude, but context. Russia has no democratic tradition or ameliorating institutions – America does. At times Trump’s envy seems palpable.
How to interpret this? In Fascism, A Warning, Madeleine Albright reprises the historic hallmarks of an aspiring authoritarian. These include stoking prejudice against others; igniting anger instead of compassion; inciting disbelief in democratic governance.
The list continues: attacking a free press and an independent judiciary; exploiting the symbols of patriotism to divide and demean; claiming a unique personal power to resolve societal problems; castigating opponents in degrading terms; habituating citizens to blatant lies.
Much of this typifies authoritarians of varied stripes. But fascism feeds on nationalism, nativism and ethnic grievance. As historian Robert Paxton wrote, it is “an affair of the gut more than the brain,” breeding “an obsessive preoccupation with humiliation… and victimhood.” Consider, then, Trump’s methodology and message.
The glue bonding Trump to his base is a suffocating dishonesty which, in Orwell’s words, “demands… the continuous alteration of the past, and… a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Trump’s metronomic repetition of false narratives conjures a mounting dystopia, filled with antagonists he alone can defeat ― eroding fact and reason until his followers accept whatever message, however contradictory, his psyche demands at any given moment.
The fascist sensibility makes the world more dangerous, empowering autocrats to subjugate their citizens, menace their neighbors, vilify “the other.”
In this psychic netherworld, truth is the ultimate enemy. By embracing Trump’s lies, his tribe cements their loyalty, answering his cravings for obeisance. Thus intoxicated, history cautions, instinctive autocrats accelerate their war on institutional constraints, requiring their partisans to follow.
Trump’s message is eerily familiar ― a tribe menaced from without. His most visceral fictions vilify non-whites. An alien black president insinuated in our midst. Apocryphal minorities voting illegally en masse. Undocumented immigrants with fictitious crime rates. A non-existent wave of Syrian refugees bent on terrorism. Imaginary American Muslims celebrating 9/11. And only Trump can “take our country back” from these insidious enemies.
Also menacing are foreigners bent on emasculating true Americans. Job-stealing immigrants. Europeans cheating us in trade deals. Freeloading NATO “allies” sapping our public finances. A malign global order enfeebling America with its siren-song of democracy, human rights and multilateral cooperation. And only Trump will put “America First” ― an isolationist slogan from our nativist past freighted with ethnic animus.
The fascist sensibility makes the world more dangerous, empowering autocrats to subjugate their citizens, menace their neighbors, vilify “the other” and diminish our common humanity ― until, as history demonstrates, their compulsions breed catastrophe.
Perhaps the best synonym for “fascist,” Orwell wrote, was “bully.” In word and deed, Trump licenses mass cruelty. That the lawless sadism of family separation is so widely applauded by Trump’s followers augurs our devolution. Warns Albright, “There is... a tipping point where loyalty to one’s own tribe curdles into resentment and hatred, then aggression toward others. That’s when fascism enters the picture.”
It is tempting to suppose that our Constitution is impervious to corrosion. But already Trump, and his party, are curtailing democracy. Gerrymandering congressional districts. Attacking minority voting rights. Exploiting a campaign finance system which advances plutocracy. Weakening labor unions. Stacking the judiciary with partisan ideologues. Threatening the media and former intelligence officials. Enshrining theocracy. Immunizing kleptocracy. Accelerating inequality.
These harbingers of creeping one-party rule free Republican legislators to subordinate principle to self-perpetuation. In Trump’s thrall, our supposedly independent Congress has become a shell, ceding its constitutional obligations as House Republicans further his attacks on our legal and intelligence institutions.
Trump’s motive is to conceal an authoritarian attack on American democracy: Putin’s efforts to elect Trump president in 2016, and his ongoing attempt to manipulate our elections on Trump’s behalf. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation seeks to determine whether Trump conspired in Russia’s efforts and whether, as president, he attempted to obstruct the investigation itself, thereby sabotaging the rule of law.
Here Trump’s enablers advance a claim of victimization redolent of fascism: that Trump’s ”civil liberties″ are threatened by political partisans bent on thwarting his followers’ will, and that even overt collusion with a foreign power would be a justifiable defense against the threat of his domestic opponents. In this Orwellian construct, Trump has absolute authority to conspire with Russia to subvert American democracy and to obstruct any inquiry into his actions. Such presidential conduct, they argue, is beyond prosecution or impeachment, placing Trump alone above the law.
They deploy baseless McCarthyite attacks on Mueller; portray Trump’s own Justice Department as biased and demand investigation ― and even impeachment ― of those officials striving to maintain their independence. In tribal America, this proto-fascist propaganda is working: a solid majority of Republicans believe that the FBI is framing Trump. The nightmare scenario conjured by Norman Ornstein is not beyond imagining ― Trump fires Mueller, pardons himself and, as chaos ensues, attempts to declare martial law.
More probable is that a supine Republican Congress and judiciary help Trump thwart accountability and, thus unbound, they further erode democratic norms. A Pew Research survey shows that only one in five Americans believe our democracy is working very well, while two-thirds want “significant changes.” As tribalism and income inequality deepen, Trump stands ready to help.
Fascism’s encroachment does not require a president-for-life. Sufficient is a “guided democracy” whose institutions, fatally hollowed out, are occupied by an illiberal cadre that holds increasingly unmediated political and economic power. That, sadly, requires less imagination ― for we have seen it before.
Richard North Patterson is the New York Times best-selling author of 22 novels, a former chairman of Common Cause, and a member of the Council On Foreign Relations.
Michelle Obama (L) and Hillary Clinton (R) pose with Saudi activist Samar Badawi as she receives the 2012 International Women of Courage Award (AFP)
