QUINN ON SYRIA, PRAYER AT PUBLIC MEETINGS, AND EMANUEL’S DISPENSING HIS WISDOM ON WABASH

5/9/14

Time is tight, as it has been for the last several months, but a man’s gotta write what a man’s gotta write…

WHY DO SO MANY IN WASHINGTON WANT TO HELP AL QAEDA IN SYRIA?

http://www.rantlifestyle.com/2014/05/09/why-do-so-many-people-in-washington-want-to-help-al-qaeda-in-syria/

Contrary to what the likes of John McCain would have you believe, militarism and meddling does not equate to patriotism.

CAPTAIN OBVIOUS STRIKES AGAIN:  SUPREME COURT SAYS IT’S OKAY TO PRAY

http://www.rantlifestyle.com/2014/05/06/captain-obvious-strikes-supreme-court-says-okay-pray/

Maybe this is the beginning of the end of all the silliness inflicted on us by the freedom from religion crowd…but probably not.

RAHM EMANUEL TO DOWNTOWN BUSINESSPEOPLE:  JUST SHUT UP AND PAY

http://www.rantlifestyle.com/2014/05/03/rahm-emanuel-downtown-business-people-shut-pay/

And have you noticed how the local media, or at least elements of the Chicago Tribune, seem to have turned on their consanguineous champion?  Still…bet heavily on the wise and mighty Rahm’s reelection.  In the screwed up politics of enlightened, modern day America, it’s all about money, and Mr. Emanuel has boatloads of it.

Have a great weekend, everybody, and God bless and thank all of you out there who are mothers.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics. 

RUSSIAN ARMS TO SYRIA: THANK YOU, COMRADE?

5/29/13

U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague, commenting on the EU decision effectively clearing the way to ship arms to the Syrian rebels (but probably not before August 31), stated

“We would only send arms to anybody in carefully controlled circumstances…with other countries and in accordance with international law.”

The French, meanwhile, are considering Gen. Salim Idris, leader of the Supreme Military Council, the latest Middle Eastern potentate disguising himself as a “moderate” in order to get on the receiving end of the Western aid sluice (perhaps Mr. Idris is  a distant cousin of Hamid Karzai, but I digress.), as a possible channel for western arms shipments.

The Western urge to help the citizenry of Syria is understandable; no one wants to stand by while the citizenry is being slaughtered by its own government.   The Western search for a “moderates” to arm to fight the Assad regime is also understandable; no one wants to arm Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda wannabes and have doing so come back to bite the benefactor; think the United States, which virtually created Al Qaeda to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.  

While these impulses are understandable, they are as silly as U.S. guarantees to Russia of their naval base in Tartus in a post-Assad Syria.  See my 5/17/13 post, AMERICAN ASSURANCES IN SYRIA:  A RUSSIAN GUANTANAMO IN AL QAEDA’S COURT?   The West cannot control events in Syria and there are no “moderates,” whatever that means in this context, to arm.  We have three choices in Syria:   support the thuggish, or worse, Assad regime, support the radicals who compose virtually all of the Syrian resistance, or stay the hell out of the whole conflict.   The third is the only logical course of action.  See, inter alia, THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR:  A FRIGHTENING HISTORICAL ANALOGY, 5/24/13 and WHAT IF BASHAR ASSAD WINS IN SYRIA?, 5/21/13.

Ironically, but not for the first time in history, the Russians may be doing us a favor by intervening actively in Syria.  They may not be doing the right thing for themselves;  they, too, should probably stay out, though their interests in Syria are more vital than outs.  Again, see my 5/17/13 post.   In the wake of the EU talk of arming the rebels, the Russians have reaffirmed their determination to send, among other things, the S-300 air defense system to Syria, which is sufficiently sophisticated to quash any Western ideas of air raids or no-fly zones in Syria.   As Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov put it,

“Such steps in many ways restrain some hotheads.” 

And we know who Mr. Ryabkov has in mind when he speaks of  “hotheads.”

Going further, the Russians may be doing us a larger favor by keeping the Assad dynasty in power.   Beyond Syria’s being the Russians’ only friend in the Arab world and containing the only Russian base outside the former Soviet Union, the Russians have a third great interest in Syria, i.e., containing the spread of radical Islamism that is causing the Russians fits in its southern Republics of Chechnya and Dagestan and which we got a taste of in Boston earlier this Spring.   If Assad is overthrown, it isn’t going to be done by the “moderates” we in the West fantasize about.  Syria will become either a radical Islamic republic or, more likely, a lawless no-man’s land, like Afghanistan, a veritable agar dish for radical groups.  

Given Syria’s physical proximity to the southern reaches of Russia, the Russians are understandably very concerned about Syria’s becoming a breeding ground for terrorist troublemakers.   And even though we have the luxury of distance, we should be equally concerned.  Again, the Russians may very well be doing us several favors in Syria.

WHAT IF BASHAR ASSAD WINS IN SYRIA?

5/21/13

News of Syrian government forces’ making major strides in the civil war in that troubled “nation” afforded Senator John McCain the opportunity to (what else?) call for deeper military involvement in the latest quagmire that has drawn his attention.

“This is a significant and dramatic indicator of the Obama administration’s passivity.  For this administration to sit idly by and watch these events unfold, (sic) is writing a shameful chapter in American history.”

After further ripping the Obama Administration for not racing headlong over this cliff without taking a nanosecond to consider the consequences “optimistic to the point of fantasy,” Mr. McCain then fell back on his standard Cold War rhetoric, pointing out that Russia sees and raises us each time we increase our assistance to the rebels.   What Mr. McCain’s point is in this instance is difficult to fathom, perhaps as much for him as for his listeners, but I digress.

We know what Mr. McCain’s motivation is in urging that American blood and treasure be fulsomely expended in this latest Middle Eastern rabbit hole; he has to look for every opportunity he can to pay back, with your money, the “defense” contractors who have so generously bankrolled the lifelong ego trip he calls a career.   We, as citizens, however, have no debt to repay to the contractors.  Unlike Mr. McCain and his colleagues whose “jobs” consist of having their hindquarters smooched by obsequiants who want a piece of your wallet, we work for our livings, and a good portion of what we make goes to support the likes of Mr. McCain and his fellow barnacles on the ship of state. Before we follow Mr. McCain’s advice to repeat what he considers the stunning successes of Iraq and Afghanistan, we are duty bound to examine the three major assumptions behind the argument that we should get more involved in Syria.

The first assumption is that we can influence the outcome in Syria.  Take a look at Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam before you accept the idea that we can guide outcomes of civil wars born of centuries of antagonism halfway around the world.  (See my 5/17/13 piece AMERICAN ASSURANCES IN SYRIA:  A RUSSIAN GUANTANAMO IN AL QAEDA’S COURT?)  At least in the case of Vietnam, the civil war was brewing before we got there.   We rekindled a largely dormant civil war in Afghanistan and started the now rampaging civil war in Iraq.  In none of those cases was the outcome good for America.  Well, ultimately things may have worked out for us in Vietnam, but only because our side lost.

The second assumption behind Mr. McCain’s and his bipartisan War Party’s enthusiasm for intervention in Syria is that it would be a good thing if the Assad dynasty was overthrown. 

There is not doubt that Bashar Assad is a thug, as was his father before him.  Neither shows, or showed, any compunction about slaughtering his own people to keep himself in power.   But what is the alternative?  Thugs were overthrown in Libya and, to a lesser extent, in Egypt.  They were replaced with a brutal stew of chaos and dueling thugs striving for power, only the new thugs like us even less, or hate us even more, than the old thugs. 

Furthermore, in Libya and Egypt, Mr. McCain (and Mr. Obama and the entire Western media and foreign policy establishments) seemed to have been surprised that the revolutionaries they backed did not turn out to be the Jeffersonian democrats they had supposed them to be.   In Syria, the War Party can’t even pretend that it is on the side of the angels; there is no doubt (except perhaps in Mr. McCain’s febrile brain) that the Syrian opposition is dominated by Al Qaeda and others who us ill.  As I said in my 4/28/13 piece OBAMA AND SYRIA:  “…AND A MAN IN MY POSITION CANNOT AFFORD TO LOOK RIDICULOUS!”

We have little to no influence on the parties fighting in Syria and, despite elements of our foreign policy apparatus again having fallen for the usual song and dance about “moderate, pro-Western elements,” we have no friends on either side of the Syrian conflict.   We have plenty of people who will flit around Washington professing friendship with America in order to line their own pockets, but we have no genuine friends in Syria.

The third assumption behind Mr. McCain’s war whoop-whoop is that Al Qaeda and its allies in Syria will win, that Mr. Assad will give up and leave the country.   But given the advances Mr. Assad and his Hezbollah allies have made of late, his defeat is far from a foregone conclusion.  As I said to a friend of mine in the Fall of 2011 (in a White Castle on Cicero Avenue in Alsip), when this conflict was just getting started, Assad could very well win this thing because he is at least as brutal as his father, who killed 30,000, many with chemical weapons, of his own people to maintain power.  

So suppose that Mr. Assad does wipe out the rebellion and emerges victorious, a very realistic possibility.  Not only will that expose us to the charges of flaccidity that Mr. McCain, Lindsey Graham, and other bi-partisan War Party members are always hyper-ventilating about, but we would then have to deal with a Syria that owes us nothing but owes the Russians, the Iranians, and, most dangerous of all, Hezbollah big time.   How receptive will a newly entrenched Mr. Assad feel about peace overtures then?  How will he regard Israel, one of our greatest allies whom he regards as little more than a surrogate for Western domination of an area he feels is rightly his?   Yes, Mr. Assad and his father have always despised Israel, but the Assads have kept an uneasy peace, albeit largely out of necessity, with their far more powerful neighbor for the last forty years.   Would that change if Mr. Assad were to defeat the rebels, and their Western backers, with help from Hezbollah and Iran?   Would you like to take the chance that it wouldn’t?

Of course, Mr. McCain and his fellow messenger boys for the “defense” industry will use the growing chance that Assad can win to argue for further U.S. military involvement in Syria; they will use anything to argue for more U.S. military involvement in Syria.  But wouldn’t a saner, and more enlightened, self-interested policy be to stay completely out of this latest Middle Eastern civil war and try to maintain the uneasy peace with the winner?

But who gets rich, or gets his campaign fund generously stocked, with a policy of enlightened non-intervention?

OBAMA AND SYRIA: “…AND A MAN IN MY POSITION CANNOT AFFORD TO LOOK RIDICULOUS!”

4/28/13

Much criticism is being directed toward President Obama due to his clumsy handling of the Syrian situation.   The President had previously said that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would be a “red line,” presumably tripping more vigorous U.S. action on behalf of the amorphous bands of rebels seeking to seize power in Syria.  (See my 4/11/13 piece, SYRIA:  GROUNDHOG DAY FOR AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY.)   When both the Israelis and our own intelligence sources confirmed that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons against its own population, the President hemmed and hawed, talking about wanting to be very careful before taking further steps toward active military involvement in Syria.   It’s easy to understand, and encourage, the President’s caution; there are those of us who have not forgotten the eagerness of the Bush crowd to get us into the huge military mistakes known as Iraq and Afghanistan.  But the President’s caution looks like pusillanimousness to his enemies and even to objective observers.  What once looked was a red line is starting to fade to a pink line, as some of his critics are fond of saying.

Mr. Obama is indeed looking quite ridiculous at this juncture, but not for the reasons the likes of Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham would have you believe.  The President does not look silly and indecisive because he is not reacting to Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons, but because Mr. Obama drew a red line in the first place.   Rather than saying that use of chemical weapons would be the tripwire for further U.S. involvement in Syria, the President should have stated unequivocally that the conflict in Syria is none of our business, that we have no dog in that fight, and that we are not going to get involved in that conflict.   Period.

Why is yours truly so adamant about keeping us out of Syria?   Again, see my 4/11 piece, but also note the arguments of Senator Lindsey Graham, John McCain’s mini-me, on Face the Nation this (Sunday, 4/28) morning.   Mr. Graham is, of course, urging greater involvement in Syria but not “boots on the ground,” no sir.  He instead favors such restrained measure as enforcing no-fly zones, using “cruise missiles” to destroy Syrian airfields, and vague measures to “secure Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles.”  Mr. Graham argues that if we do nothing, some combination of four things is going to happen.

1. Syria will become a failed state.
2. Syria’s chemical weapons will fall into the “wrong hands.”
3. Jordan will be overrun with refugees, threatening the regime of King Abdullah, whom Mr. Graham cites as a “loyal ally.”
4. The Iranians, emboldened by our lack of action, will move more quickly to develop nuclear weapons and foment trouble in the Middle East and beyond.

Well, guess what, Senator?   All those things, with the possible exception of the fourth, either have taken place or are going to take place regardless of what we do in Syria.   We have little to no influence on the parties fighting in Syria and, despite elements of our foreign policy apparatus again having fallen for the usual song and dance about “moderate, pro-Western elements,” we have no friends on either side of the Syrian conflict.   We have plenty of people who will flit around Washington professing friendship with America in order to line their own pockets, but we have no genuine friends in Syria.   We can’t influence the outcome of the war and, even if we could, no outcome will be favorable to us or to broad swaths of the Syrian people.   Syria is a mess and has become a hellhole.  Nothing we do can change that; the only impact of American involvement will be further shedding of American blood and expenditure of American money.   Funny how all this concern about the precarious state of federal finances goes out the window when the War Party sees a conflict in which it can get us involved, but I digress.

One would have thought that intelligent, or even sentient, people would have learned something about the limits of American power and influence from the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which are failed states, bristling with weapons and breeding legions of terrorists and one of which may very well become an Iranian satellite.  Both of have cost us plenty of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we don’t have… and to no good end.

But we don’t learn.   Or, more properly, in a society that seems to equate militarism with patriotism and in which politicians need money from “defense” contractors to sustain their fantasy lives they call careers, we decide not to learn and rush to the next opportunity to prolong conflict, destroy lives, and create enemies.

JOHN McCAIN, CHUCK HAGEL, AND DEFERRING TO HISTORY

2/1/13

As anyone, and certainly anyone who reads my blogs, could have predicted, the War Party and its majordomo John McCain, are giving former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel one heck of a hard time in Mr. Hagel’s hearings for his confirmation as Secretary of Defense.   It seems that Mr. Hagel has the preposterous notion that we ought to be circumspect in military affairs and think long and hard before we send young men and women into combat for questionable goals.  Mr. Hagel apparently believes that further enriching the “defense” contractors who subsidize the lifelong sinecures War Party members occupy in the city they vociferously claim to detest is not sufficient justification for sending kids to their deaths.  Such apostasy is clearly anathema to Mr. McCain and his colleagues.

Fortunately for Mr. Hagel and for those of us who favor a defense that defends, Mr. McCain is not the brightest bulb in the Congressional chandelier.   Note the following exchange between Mr. McCain and Mr. Hagel on the “surge” in Iraq, of which Mr. McCain was the most salient and ardent champion:

McCain:

“Were you correct or incorrect when you said that the surge would be the most dangerous foreign policy blunder…since Vietnam?”

Hagel:

“It’s far more complicated than that…My answer is ‘I’ll defer that judgment to history.’”

McCain:

“I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it.”

John McCain is, as is his usual custom, clearly wrong on at least one issue here.  History does not make judgments in the space of 5, 10, 20, or even 30 years.  History, unlike current events, takes a long time go play out.   So history has yet to make a judgment on the surge.

Mr. McCain’s narrative is that the “surge” led to pacification in Iraq that gave the United States the opportunity to leave, more or less, Iraq without the guilt of leaving behind a failed state in which anarchy and violence ruled the day.   This former may or may not be true and the latter seems to be turning out to be wishful thinking.

We do know that the “surge” cost 1,200 American lives and, less importantly, billions of dollars.  We don’t know if the “surge” led to pacification, even temporarily, of Iraq.   At the same time we were “surging,” we were stepping up a program of payouts (bribes, really) to various warring factions in Iraq to come over to our side, or at least to behave themselves for awhile.   Whether the surge or the payoffs led to Iraq’s temporary pacification we don’t know.  And we also don’t know whether we would have left regardless of conditions in Iraq; the American people were, even long before we left, sick and tired of George Bush’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq, an Adventure that John McCain was critical of only in the sense that it was not pursued aggressively enough for his tastes.

We also know that the pacification, whether the result of the surge or the expenditures of plenty of spondulicks, was temporary.   Just about every day, we hear of car bombings, kidnappings, or other such goings-on in Iraq.   The minority Sunnis, who used to run the country, are disdainful, or worse, of the now ruling majority Shiites, who are very cozy with their Shiite brethren in Iran.  The Kurds in the north have more or less seceded from Iraq, and neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites are happy about what that means for their access to Iraq’s oil wealth, much of which is located in the Kurdish north, which is now openly called Kurdistan.

It looks like Iraq will wind up being a failed state and will descend into anarchy and civil war.  It may become, or at least parts of it will become, an Iranian satellite.   Thus we will have left either another breeding ground for terrorism or have handed the Iranians a client state at the expense of American blood and treasure.   And John McCain accuses Chuck Hagel of not being sufficiently tough on Iran!

Iraq’s either descending into a hellish dystopia, becoming an Iranian satellite, or both seems to have been inevitable from the moment George Bush decided, for reasons no one has yet been able to discern, that it would be a good idea to invade Iraq.    The only difference the “surge” has made it is to delay this outcome for perhaps a few years.   Was that delay worth 1,200 human lives?

One more thought…

If Iraq keeps heading in the direction it seems to be going, it, too, will become a breeding ground for terrorism, if it has not already become one, as seems likely given the hatred the Iraqi people have developed for Americans after George Bush, er, had his way, with their country.  Note that the justification for our going into Afghanistan was that it had become a breeding ground for terrorism.  So perhaps Mr. McCain and his henchmen are brighter than I think and are simply laying the groundwork for more military adventures in Iraq, which would make the “defense” contractors even richer…and more grateful to the likes of Mr. McCain, his mini-me from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of those who find Mr. Hagel’s talk of prudent exercise of military power so reprehensible.

History, a subject that Mr. McCain clearly does not understand, will have to tell us.