This is a brilliant post, which means I agree with it. It won't seem new to thorough readers of MNE.
What is generally left out this conversation for the most part is China's interest in it. China is a target, too, and it knows it. This means Russia and China have a shared geopolitical and geostrategic interest in allying against the US. Since the US is backing Sunni Islam, Shiite Iran also has a vital national interest in it. A Russian-Chinese-Iranian axis is in the making, and the US realizes this.
The world is fast splitting into the emerging world versus the neoliberal Western "democracies." India, which seeks to sit on the fence and play both sides, will have to choose eventually.
For Russ
Why Syria is Russia's Stalingrad
For Russ
Why Syria is Russia's Stalingrad
Parmen Posokhov, Trymava
Translated by Kristina Rus
Translated by Kristina Rus
India's decision may prove to be vital. The future of the world may well be in its hands.
ReplyDeleteIf India, notwithstanding all the previous hostility with China and the trinkets offered by Washington, nevertheless decides the future is multipolar, Washington will have no hands left to play, other than war or a proxy war to dismember Russia and China.
It's surprising how many Leftists refuse to accept this grand chessboard vision of international politics. They seem to think in very localised terms. Many on the Right have no such illusions: they view almost everything through the prisms of China and Russia, or a single China-Russia prism. If you read closely, and between the lines, realist centrist theorists like Mearsheimer don't hide how the international system in fact works (domination), and find quaintly amusing all the flag waving nonsense about the purity of each country's intentions. We accept reflexively the nefarious nature of all other countries foreign policy, but are incapable of accepting the same about our own country. In the UK, for example, it is accepted that France and Germany, almost mirror images in many respects to the UK, have a Machiavellian foreign policy (true), but cannot possibly accept that we too are as Machiavellian. Fascinating psychology!
Well maybe the US side just doesnt think Assad is up to the task (and now proven not as we see Russian military having to come in there to do the heavy lifting for Syria) so they wanted him out of the way and better leadership installed in Syria before US got further engaged...
ReplyDeleteUkraine is probably being driven by Soros/Democrats and is all screwed up and unrelated... iow Ukraine was just incompetent Democrats trying to do what their sponsor Soros wanted.... f-ed it all up...
There is no link between US policy in Ukraine and Syria...
And from talking to a US MI person, they dont want a conflict to ever occur directly between Russia and the Islamic terror states... so I'd imagine they are pretty uneasy watching this Russian build up in Syria ... which I assume means that Russia will soon attempt go Roman on ISIS...
btw Where is NATO in this current refugee crisis? Where is the UN? AWOL as Barry golfs...
To replace something you need a replacement. You can't just go around making failed states and expecting 'better leadership' (whatever that may be) to steep in. Instead what you got is a feudal status quo raising with warlords and terrorists everywhere abusing the population.
ReplyDeleteI agree though that there doesn't seem to be a real connection between Ukraine and Syria. But in the case of MENA is either stubborn stupidity or pure evil (pursuing a 'chaos strategy'). It has been several countries now where the West has directly or indirectly instigated this. It cannot be explained any other way.
I'm still undecided on what is it.
"Well maybe the US side just doesn't think Assad is up to the task..."
ReplyDeleteBut ISIS and the rest of the Saudi-financed and trained apocalyptic maniacs are?
In any case, you put it correctly. What exactly is the task? The task is to do what Washington tells you to do. The Saudis do as they're told, so their anti-human jihad on the rest of the Islamic world is irrelevant, even useful. Assad, a paragon of liberal and progressive ideals when compared with the Saudis, has to go - and a mindbogglingly barbaric jihadi army has been created to dislodge him, with Washington essentially subcontracting the operation to the Saudis. It is a reprise of the subcontracting to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the jihadi proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the eighties.
Syria is an extremely diverse country. Anything other than a secular government is going to lead to genocide or something very much like it. ISIS and the rest of the Saudi- and Gulf-backed jihadis are genocidal maniacs par excellence. So why are we backing them, or at the very least inhibiting the Syrian army from destroying them? Just from the perspective of self-preservation, and leaving aside any higher ethical reasons, I want ISIS obliterated from the face of the planet.
The connection between Ukraine and Syria through ISIS is quite clear in my view and I have pointed it out in the past. Put in the simplest terms, the US pinning the Russian military down on two fronts, East and West-Southwest.
ReplyDeleteUkraine is a piece in creating a cordon sanitaire on Russia's Western border from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The US has been using Islamist proxies on the Eastern front beginning with the war in the Caucasus, which the head of Russian intelligence make public fairly recently in an unprecedented move. The US has also been stirring up regime change in Central Asia for some time.
The Russian military sees itself under attack by the US using proxies on both eastern and western fronts. Russia is accordingly ramping up its defense industry to Soviet levels and doing its best to counter US technology.
China's situation is similar, with Islamic militants on the eastern front and the Seventh Fleet on the western littoral, Japan rearming, and US bases surrounding.
Chinese strategy is a bit different from the Russian, since the Chinese lag technologically at this point. Swarming is the primary strategy since they have the number and the tech is go enough to confront US technology given that numerical advantage.
Whatever, there is a whole lot of military spending going on, and the arms race is amping up again.
As ever, Tom's analysis is excellent. If the State Department had any sense they'd add him to their policy planning staff!
ReplyDeleteIn twenty years or so, courtesy of freedom of information, we'll find out that what Tom spelt out above is indeed the case. As so with so much other foreign policy, read the declassified documents and compare it to what was being said at the time.
One of my favourite cases is the absurd propaganda directed at Nicaragua in the eighties. When the internal White House documents were declassified, Reagan admitted to his staff that if the American public ever found out what the government was doing, they'd be lynched: "If such a story gets out, we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we find out who did it." State terrorism has to be hidden from the public. They just don't like it. Instead they have to be drip fed patriotic homilies about freedom and "standing tall".
I was in Nicaragua in 1978 and got a chance to see the dictator, I mean, president Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the bunker in which he lived in the center of the capital city Managua. The US was clearly backing the wrong side, just as I had conclude while serving in the military (1964-1967) during the Vietnam War.
ReplyDeleteTom,
ReplyDeleteNo idea you were in Vietnam. My deepest sympathies. How long before you were aware of the wrongheadedness of Washington policy? Early on or much later? How about the other poor bastards who were there with you? Was there as much antiwar sentiment within the ranks as they say, precipitating the move to a professional army, or was that an excuse to hide the real reasons?
The morons in Ukraine, now a failed state, cannot defeat a bunch of reveals, European countries won't follow up the warmongering for very long before starving of oil and gas, etc.
ReplyDeleteIf that's the strategy is a joke, and the idiots in the State Department need to wake up. I don't think there is any connection.
I was an officer in the US Naval Reserve on active duty from June 1964 to June 1967, just when the "conflict" (in was never officially a war) was heating up. I was gung ho at the outset, but came to realize that the facts were not as represented and eventually become radicalized, but that was largely after I had been discharged from active duty and was a grad student participating in the anti-war movement.
ReplyDeleteThe closest I ever got to shore was about a mile, but I was there on the scent at the time of the battle of Chu Lai and was glad I was not on the ground.
There was no dissent in the ranks or among the officer corps at the time and no one shared my perspective on it.
This was before the move to a professional army, which was likely a reaction to the anti-war movement, which was really an ant-draft movement for many. TPTB decided that conscription needed to be ended in order to preclude anti-draft resistance in future conflicts of opportunity.
Few mind a draft when there is an actual threat, but no one believed that Vietnam was a threat, let alone vital to US national interests. Strategically, it wasn't even about China as much as Russia, as well as securing natural resources of Southeast Asia. Democracy, not so much.
The South Vietnamese government was notoriously corrupt and the Viet Cong were just a national liberation army rather than a threat to the US.
Vietnam has never really been analyzed dispassionately in the US. The right considered that the left "stabbed the country in the back by breading its will to continue the war through the anti-war movement. The right has never forgotten that. It's a big reason for going to the all professional services to avoid the issues that conscription raise, especially when the rich and powerful and their relations got deferments pretty much automatically if they wanted. The attitude of the right was pretty much in evidence in the swift-boating of John Kerry.