EAWorldView: EA’s in-depth assessment of the Free Syrian Army, posted last Wednesday, assessed that the regime is now weak enough that it is vulnerable to a sudden takeover of the capital, for example through a series of surprise insurgent attacks. So is this the Battle for Damascus?
Probably not, at least not yet. What we are not seeing is heavy casualties on either side. We are not seeing large swings in control territory. We are not seeing extremely heavy firefights. This does not look like an epic battle to the finish.
What we are seeing are widespread skirmishes that have shut down most of the capital.The Guardian, asking the same question as us, has spoken to two activists. One man, a resident of Barzeh, says:
These clashes in the capital mark a new stage in the Syrian revolution. It is close now.
The regime has tried hard in the last year and half to make Damascus [isolated] from what’s going on outside – to make Damascus quiet. They succeeded in the past, but yesterday there was shelling here, and [today] there was shelling on al-Qaboon and shelling on the south. Suddenly Damascus is in the centre of the action.
Inside Barzeh there is no sign of government presence. I think they don’t dare to fight here. They are stuck in Midan and Qaboon. They are too busy to come here. They used to storm my neighbourhood three times a week
Another man, reportedly the head of the Revolution Leadership Council in Damascus, shares our assessment that, while important, these fights will not likely result in the fall of Damascus. But, he adds, the fighting could spread.
Among those who see the fighting in Syria as the product of an externally controlled covert regime-change project, it is frequently asserted — without much concrete evidence — that the conflict is being fueled by weapons flowing from Qatar and Saudi Arabia and entering Syria through Turkey.
There’s an easy way of testing this theory without attempting to trace weapons back to their source: examine the arms trade on the Turkish border. C.J. Chivers has just been doing this and finds that demand far outstrips supply. There are clearly many more men in Syria seeking weapons and ammunition than there are guns and bullets and the money to buy them.
Rifle rounds cost $2 each or more and Kalashnikovs now cost $1,000 to more than $2,000. American-made M-16s are available and very expensive (from $5,000 to $7,000 per rifle, with scope) but they are also useless — there are virtually no bullets available.
While the most pressing concern of rebel commanders is that they don’t have enough weapons or funds to buy them, there are also looming concerns about what happens after the fall of Assad.
Last year, in Libya, arms researchers watched the swift arc from arms scarcity to oversupply among the opposition forces. From late winter into early summer, weapons were in short enough supply that many Libyan men went to battle without them, ready to pick up the weapon of a fallen fighter, while hoping to capture the weapons of slain Qaddafi troops. At that time, Kalashnikovs could cost $2,000 or more, just as they do for Syrian fighters now. By last fall, after the struggle for the country ebbed, many fighters possessed several rifles, along with machine guns or rocket-propelled grenades. Prices were plummeting, with reports of Kalashnikovs for sale at less than $500. Post-Qaddafi Libya, which for months had inhaled weapons, had become a black-market exporter, with all manner of arms being reported traveling out.
With this in mind, one Syrian rebel commander from Idlib, after the meeting last Friday, drove with journalists from The New York Times to a house he and a commander from Hama share with an ever-changing collection of fighters. His name was Abu Hamza, and he was a former major in the Syrian army. Abu Hamza wanted more weapons. But he said he worried where this was headed – toward the possibility of chaos. “After the war,” he said, “we have to collect these weapons.”
Abu Hamza was confident about the prospects for the uprising; there is no question, he said, that Mr. Assad will fall. But he worried about the effects of these weapons on post-conflict Syria. “We have been watching,” he said, “and we do not want Syria to be like Afghanistan, Somalia or Libya.”
According to a groundbreaking new scientific study released Tuesday by Harvard University, the U.S. population could very well have discovered a new and unprecedented level of not caring about Syria. “Our research indicates that Americans may have stumbled upon an extreme degree of ignorance and disregard for the plight of dying Syrians that we never before thought humanly possible,” said lead researcher Dr. Henry Mason, noting that recent images of the Syrian government openly killing citizens in the nation’s streets appeared to have no measurable effect on American psyches. “At some point—possibly after the mass murder of more than 100 men, women, and children in Houla, or when photos of mass graves began appearing across the Internet—the U.S. citizenry must have found previously untapped reserves of callousness, indifference, and self-absorption that were simply beyond the capacity of our research tools to quantify.” Mason confirmed that scientists expect apathy levels to rise sharply in further trial studies, primarily because 95 percent of Americans still don’t know the president of Syria’s name. (Onion)
In Yarmouk camp in Damascus on Saturday, July 14, Palestinians denounced Bashar al Assad and Kofi Annan.
Robin Yassin-Kassab has written an important piece that deserves to be widely read — especially by those who struggle to understand why anyone who is pro-Palestinian should also be pro-Syrian or for anyone who is confused about what being pro-Syrian actually means. PW
Blanket thinkers
By Robin Yassin-Kassab
One of my infantile leftist ex-friends recently referred to the Free Syrian Army as a ‘sectarian gang’. The phrase may well come from Asa’ad Abu Khalil, who seems to have a depressingly large audience, but it could come from any of a large number of blanket thinkers in the ranks of the Western left. I admit that I sometimes indulged in such blanket thinking in the past. For instance, I used to refer to Qatar and Saudi Arabia as ‘US client states’, as if this was all to be said about them. I did so in angry response to the mainstream Western media which referred to pro-Western Arab tyrannies as ‘moderate’; but of course Qatar and Saudi Arabia have their own, competing agendas, and do not always behave as the Americans want them to. This is more true now, in a multipolar world and in the midst of a crippling economic crisis in the West, than it was ten years ago. Chinese workers undertaking oil and engineering projects in the Gulf are one visible sign of this shifting order.
(My talk of ‘infantile leftists’ does not include the entire left of course. Simon Assaf of the Socialist Workers, for instance, understands what’s happening. So does Max Blumenthal. And many others.)
The problem with blanket thinkers is that they are unable to adapt to a rapidly shifting reality. Instead of evidence, principles and analytical tools, they are armed only with ideological blinkers. Many of the current crop became politicised by Palestine and the invasion of Iraq, two cases in which the imperialist baddy is very obviously American. As a result, they read every other situation through the US-imperialist lens.
Qaddafi had opened up Libyan oilfields to Western exploitation, he bought Western weapons, and he tortured rendered suspects for the CIA. Inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the Libyans rose against the tyranny with incredible courage. When Britain and France, for their own reasons, helped to hasten the end by degrading Qaddafi’s mercenary forces (important but not decisive help – Qaddafi’s fall was effected by a rising in Tripoli and an influx of fighters from the Jebel Nafusa), blanket thinkers very insultingly painted the popular revolution as a foreign plot. Some even retrospectively raised Qaddafi to the rank of anti-imperialist hero. And since the fall of the old regime they’ve done everything they can to paint Libya as a failed state, a site of genocide, a new Iraq. It’s pretty insulting to Iraq as well as to Libya.
The fact that politics and civil society were effectively banned for decades, and the fact that Qaddafi imposed a civil war on his people, traumatising them and causing thousands of young men to take up arms, means that the new Libya faces imense problems. This is not news. Whenever a dictatorship ends violently, all the problems which have been repressed will burst forth. It’s like taking the lid off a steam cooker: all the good and evil in the society, all the intelligence and stupidity that was previously hidden, will spill out. This is not an argument for keeping the dictatorship. Several hundred have been killed in Libya since the fall of Qaddafi, mainly in battles between rival militias. Sometimes this has had a tribal or revenge aspect, but there has been no Iraq-style ethnic cleansing. There is a small separatist movement in the east. Fringe Islamist extremist groups have made a lot of noise. Many of the armed young men are reluctant to give up their arms. But there has been a very successful election. If the new government is able to absorb the militias into a national army and to resolve tribal, regional and other disputes within an accepted political process, Libya can look forward to a much better future. Opinion polls and conversations with Libyans show that an overwhelmingly large majority are happy that Qaddafi has gone and are optimistic about the future. But what does Libyan opinion matter to blanket thinkers?
After 17 months of slaughter in Syria, there is no no-fly zone. The extent of Western and ‘client’ intervention is this: Saudi Arabia and Qatar may be providing a small amount of light weaponry. The Turks may be helping to coordinate the weapons deliveries. The CIA appears to have a few men on the ground watching where the weapons are going and hoping (vainly) to ensure that they’ll never end up in the hands of anti-Zionist militants. On the other side stands a nakedly sectarian regime which considers its people slaves and murders them and destroys their cities with Russian weapons. Imperialist Russia, which has oppressed Muslims in the Caucuses and central Asia, and which bears half the blame for all the Cold War hot wars in Africa, is resupplying the regime with attack helicopters, tank parts and ammunition as the death toll surpasses seventeen thousand. Russia also protects the regime from condemnation at the UN security council. It plays the same role with regards to Syria that the United States plays with Israel. But how do the blanket thinkers see the situation? For them it’s yet another clear cut case of American imperialist aggression against a noble resistance regime, and once again the people are passive tools.
At best they are passive tools. They are also depicted as wild Muslims, bearded and hijabbed, who do not deserve democracy or rights because they are too backward to use them properly. Give them democracy and they’ll vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, and slaughter the Alawis and drive the Christians to Beirut. The blanket thinkers search for evidence of crimes committed by the popular resistance, and when they find them (usually on very flimsy evidence) they use them to smear the entire movement. They demand the resistance negotiate with a regime which has proved again and again that its only strategy is slaughter. They demand that the people remain peaceful as their children are tortured, their women raped, their neighbourhoods levelled. Leftist blanket thinkers do not apply the same criteria to the popular resistance of the Palestinians. It’s Zionists who do that.
To call the Free Syrian Army a sectarian gang is tantamount to calling the Syrian people a sectarian gang. It betrays a willed ignorance of reality. The FSA was formed in response to the sickening violence perpetrated by the Syrian regime, which at this stage is certainly a sectarian gang. Its Alawi military units work with armed Alawi civilians to slaughter Sunnis. This is a disaster for the Alawis and everyone else; it sows the seeds of a potential war which would destroy the country for generations, and it’s one of the first reasons why the regime must go as soon as possible. But the FSA is in reality hundreds of local militias which sometimes cooperate. It consists of defected soldiers (these people are heroes – they fled the army at huge personal risk because they were unable to stomach murdering their people; most soldiers who try to defect are killed before they leave base) and local men who have taken up arms to defend their neighbourhoods. Because the FSA is made of ordinary men, it covers an enormous range of political opinion. Some fighters are disillusioned Baathists, some are secularists, some leftists, some support the Muslim Brotherhood and some are attracted by extremist Wahhabi rhetoric. Some, I’m sure, are criminals, because some of the Syrian people are criminal. Some will be in it in the hopes of financial or sexual profit, because that’s the way people are.
Most are apolitical people, except for the fact that they want to bring down the tyranny. They fight because they have no choice. Of course, there is a huge danger that apolitical people will be easily manipulated by sectarian rhetoric, especially given that their enemy instrumentalises sectarianism. This is certainly a difficult period for revolutions in the Muslim world and internationally. The collapse of leftist thinking and reach, and the shrinking of public debate by dictatorships and consumerism, has left the way open to retrograde forms of religious or nationalist politics. Some of the battle videos labelled ‘Free Syrian Army’ look and sound depressingly similar to jihadist videos from Iraq. But for now it’s mainly a problem of style and ignorance, and it can easily be misinterpreted by an orientalist eye. Most Syrian people are religious, whether we like it or not. But most Syrian people are also aware that a sectarian war would produce no winners. The Allahu Akbar chant expresses a faith which is necessary to overcome the fear of being shot. It doesn’t autmomatically mean ‘Kill the Kuffar’. (But who am I talking to? The Palestinians use religious rhetoric and talk about ‘the Jews’ rather than ‘the Zionists’, and it doesn’t bother the blanket thinkers for a moment).
The longer the necessary fight goes on the more brutalised the people will become, and the more likely that vengeful sectarian voices will dominate. It is the duty of any right-thinking person, leftist or otherwise, to support the oppressed people in their struggle. Anyone who does so, and who respects the Syrians enough to base their comments on knowledge rather than assumption, will have earned the right to offer political advice to the Syrians.
The FSA is inevitably disorganised and outgunned. But it’s a lot more organised than it was a few months ago, and it is liberating territory. It fights with commitment and incredible resilience. Today the battle is in inner Damascus.
And a few days ago it was in the Yarmouk and Palestine refugee camps, which brings me finally to the strange fact that blanket thinkers persist in thinking of the Syrian regime as in some way a threat to Israel. It’s true that Syria helped Hizbullah stand firm, and this is not a small thing. It’s also true that the Syrian regime has massacred Palestinians in Tel Zaatar and other Lebanese camps, that since 1973 the border with the occupied Golan has been quieter than borders with states enjoying peace agreements with Israel, and that Syria has never even tried to shoot at the Israeli planes which have bombed its territory since Bashaar inherited power. But things have become clearer since the uprising began. Rami Makhlouf told the New York Times that Israeli security depended on the Syrian regime’s security.
Paul Woodward at War in Context quotes Reuters on the regime’s recent transportation of chemical weapons: An Israeli official said however the movements reflected an attempt by President Bashar al-Assad to make “arrangements to ensure the weapons do not fall into irresponsible hands”.
“That would support the thinking that this matter has been managed responsibly so far.”
Woodward then comments: So, while the word from Damascus is that “terrorists” armed with “Israeli-made machine guns” conducted the massacre in Tremseh yesterday, the word from Tel Aviv is that Syria’s chemical weapons are nothing to worry about so long as they remain in the responsible hands of the government.
There might be a certain amount of truth in that statement. Still, it’s not exactly the rhetoric one might expect from a representative of an alliance that is supposedly gunning for Assad’s downfall. On the contrary, it reflects the fact that Israel would be much happier to see Assad remain in power.
Here’s a simpler proposition for the blanket thinkers: Hizbullah won victories because it respects its people, because it is of its people. A regime which murders its people and destroys the national infrastructure, which plays with the dynamite of sectarian conflict and puts the whole people’s future in question, would be incapable of winning a victory even if it wanted to.
On Friday tens of thousands protested against regime barbarism in the Palestinian camps of Damascus. Regime forces opened fire, murdering eleven. Many more were dragged from their homes to be tortured in detention. Professional liar and regime spokesman Jihad Maqdisi then described Palestinians as ‘impolite guests,’ outraging Syrians and Palestinians, who are the same people, now more than ever.
BBC News reports: Armoured personnel carriers have been deployed in areas of Damascus, Syrian activists say, with clashes spreading on a second day of fighting.
The activists said troops backed by armoured vehicles had entered the Midan district to try to dislodge rebels.
Witnesses say this appears to be the biggest military deployment in the capital in the 16-month uprising.
Meanwhile, Russia said Western attempts to get Moscow to discuss sanctions contained “elements of blackmail”.
The two days of clashes appeared to be the heaviest fighting in Damascus in the uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, activists said.
The BBC’s Jim Muir says it is not clear whether the battle for Damascus has begun, but the violence seems to be creeping ever closer to the heart of the capital and the centre of the government’s power.
The armoured troop carriers took up positions on the main roads in Midan, which is a mainly Sunni district.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said armour had not previously been deployed in Midan.
Its director, Rami Abdel Rahman, told Agence France-Presse: “Before, the security forces were deployed to suppress protests. Now, we have army troops engaged in combat.”
He added: “[It has] never been this intense.”
One resident, who lives in the south of the city, told the BBC’s Newshour there was a lot of tension, with people scared and nervous, and it was becoming difficult to travel.
He said: “It’s mainly in the southern parts of the city which are effectively besieged at the moment. There were very few people on the streets, just totally different from how the city is normally.
“The feeling, among people around me, is that it’s our turn now. We are really feeling this. That this is the final fight, building up to who wins control of the regime.”
C.J.Chivers reports: To escape the government he served until it gave him an order he could not obey, Capt. Akhmed Trad, a pilot in Syria’s air force, needed a plan: how to spirit himself over a border quickly, and leave no family behind.
In hurried meetings between the pilot and his parents, and indirect conversations over cellphones, evading what they worried were monitored calls, the Trad family set a time and place for everyone to meet, and fled.
Now safely in Turkey, where he is providing information to the rebels and helping them plan attacks, Captain Trad represents one of the great challenges to the government of President Bashar al-Assad and his military.
The Syrian government hails from the Alawite minority. But much of its administration and its military ability depend on Sunni bureaucrats, soldiers and officers like Captain Trad, whose alienation has been growing and whose defections risk increasing as Syria’s internal war takes on deepening sectarian tones.
Defected Sunni army officers have played a large role in the armed opposition since the war began last year, and they lead many of the field units of the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella antigovernment force. While the skills of defected air force pilots have less direct application for the rebels (who have no aircraft), the pilots’ decisions to join the uprising amount to both a moral and public relations victory for the rebels, and undermine the Assad military’s strength.
Captain Trad, interviewed with several family members in a village near this city by the Turkish-Syrian border, said he decided last year to defect, and he waited for his chance. When violence against Sunni citizens escalated this spring, he decided he could serve no more.
Captain Trad is a Mi-17 helicopter pilot; he said his aircraft was equipped to fire rockets. Pro-Assad forces were accused of ethnically motivated killings of Sunni Muslims in Houla, and as the primarily Sunni opposition forces were gaining strength, his commanders ordered his helicopter squadron to attack cities where the resistance was strong, including Idlib. This is where the Trads were born.
“We were told to bomb them, and for us, we did not accept it,” he said. “Bomb what? My town and my friends?” [Continue reading…]
The Daily Beast reports: Guantanamo Bay is still often in the public eye, especially now that a military commission is pursuing the 9/11 case there against alleged terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But there’s a site where the United States is holding detainees overseas in even more restrictive conditions then Guantanamo: a prison in Afghanistan, at the sprawling Bagram Air Base. Recently, the U.S. government agreed to transfer Afghan prisoners into the custody of the Afghan government. But there was a wrinkle: People who aren’t Afghans—who were taken to Bagram by the United States from outside the country—aren’t included in the agreement.
Today, Justice Department lawyers head to federal court to argue that these international detainees should not get the right to see lawyers or challenge the basis for their captivity under the doctrine of habeas corpus. The case concerns three captives at Bagram captured early on in the war on terror. Two are Yemeni and one is Tunisian. One was captured in Thailand; another was captured in Pakistan. (The question of where the third was captured is somewhat unclear: The Pentagon says he was captured in Afghanistan, but lawyers who seek to represent him say he was captured outside the country.)
“The only reason our clients are there,” said Tina Foster, a lawyer in the case and executive director of the International Justice Network, “is that that they were forcibly taken there from third countries by the U.S.” She added, “We would argue that they were brought to Bagram for the purpose of keeping them out of the courts.” [Continue reading…]
Jeremy Peters reports: The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.
They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.
Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review.
The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script — is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.
The push and pull over what is on the record is one of journalism’s perennial battles. But those negotiations typically took place case by case, free from the red pens of press minders. Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.
Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides in Chicago and at the White House — almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.
The Romney campaign insists that journalists interviewing any of Mitt Romney’s five sons agree to use only quotations that are approved by the press office. And Romney advisers almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.
From Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, interviews granted only with quote approval have become the default position. Those officials who dare to speak out of school, but fearful of making the slightest off-message remark, shroud even the most innocuous and anodyne quotations in anonymity by insisting they be referred to as a “top Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.”
It is a double-edged sword for journalists, who are getting the on-the-record quotes they have long asked for, but losing much of the spontaneity and authenticity in their interviews.
Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager, can be foul-mouthed. But readers would not know it because he deletes the curse words before approving his quotes. Brevity is not a strong suit of David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser. So he tightens up his sentences before giving them the O.K.
Stuart Stevens, the senior Romney strategist, is fond of disparaging political opponents by quoting authors like Walt Whitman and referring to historical figures like H. R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. But such clever lines later rarely make it past Mr. Stevens.
Many journalists spoke about the editing only if granted anonymity, an irony that did not escape them. [Continue reading…]
A director of a global internet services company writes: I like the internet. I use it a lot. In fact, I work at a senior level in the industry and from here the internet does not look like a fad that will pass any time soon.
Hundreds of millions think Facebook is fun, that Google is useful, and that iPlayer is essential. Each day people reach for their phones to see if their latest Instagram is a hit, if a new profile pic is liked, or if they have been retweeted.
We do this because it is addictive – literally addictive. Each time there’s a new email, our brains reward us with a hit – a dopamine high – which encourages repeat behaviour. Apparently, it’s one of the ways in which we learn. As one behavioural psychologist put it, the internet creates “a dopamine-induced loop”, giving us “almost instant gratification of our desire to seek“.
Computer game manufacturers have long known this, and so they make products, apps or games that are “sticky”, in the jargon. Society has long known it too: stories of gamers dying of exhaustion at their keyboards are more than five years old now, not to mention “crackberries“. What they want most is for their app to be the first thing to come to your mind when your brain is idle for a second and you think, “What shall I do now?”
But why has the internet industry not asked itself whether it should be taking responsibility for these products, for creating content that is actually designed to be addictive? Does it ask whether building the digital equivalent of a Skinner box or discussing how to manufacture desire is necessarily a good thing?
In other words, are we – the internet industry – the new tobacco? And, if we are, what stage of the marketing of this new industry are we at? Is this the equivalent of the 1930s? Are we at the stage of “More doctors smoke Camels”? [Continue reading…]
Umar Khan writes: The results of the first elections of Libya in over four decades have been emerging gradually and there almost certainly will still be major surprises ahead. There has already been a one big one. Before the poll, it was widely expected that the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Justice and Construction Party (J&C) would emerge as the largest party in the National Congress.
However, it is now clear that Mahmoud Jibril’s National Forces Alliance (NFA) is leading in the party lists and will have the lion’s share of the 80 seats reserved in the congress for political parties. In several constituencies, it took as much as ten times the votes won by J&C which came a poor second.
However, after subsequent predictions that Jibril’s National Forces Alliance (NFA) would therefore gain a majority in the 200-seat congress, the picture that is emerging in regard to the 120 seats reserved for individual candidates is rather different. Candidates linked to other parties and genuine independents appear to have won the majority there.
These 120 seats are likely to determine the fate of the future congress.
The results of the party list seats have clearly surprised the J&C leadership. They say they were unable to effectively counter 42 years of propaganda by Qaddafi that portrayed them as traitors and extremists. They accept the fact that they did not win as many seats on party lists as they expected but also claim they are confident of gaining the same number of seats as the NFA because of the success of their individual candidates.
Libya Herald reports: An estimated 5,000 people are still being held in militia-run detention facilities, two days after the deadline to hand them over to government control expired, Human Rights Watch said today.
Under Law 38, the ministries of interior and defence were required to refer all “supporters of the former regime” currently detained by militias to the competent judicial authorities by 12 July, provided sufficient evidence existed against them to bring a charge.
HRW accused the government of “a lack of political will” in challenging militias over the issue, and said it had “shied away from using force” as a way of compelling them to comply.
“We are not saying they should use force”, insisted Tripoli-based researcher Hanan Salah, when asked if HRW was advocating military action by the government to enforce its mandate, “we are just saying that they haven’t”.
The rights group claimed that some detainees were “subjected to severe torture” and that it receives new allegations of abuse “on a weekly basis”.
In addition, HRW has estimated that 4,000 detainees are now being held in state custody under the authority of the Ministry of Justice across eight regions.
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship write: In all the hullabaloo over the Supreme Court’s decision on health care, another of its rulings quickly fell off the public radar. Before deciding the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the Court announced it would not reconsider Citizens United, the odious 5-4 decision two years ago that opened our elections to unlimited contributions.
Within minutes of that announcement, right-wing partisans were crowing about the advantage they now own, an advantage not due to ideas or personalities but to the sheer force of money. They were remarkably candid and specific.
Here’s what Fred Barnes wrote in The Weekly Standard about the Senate race in Missouri:
For three weeks in May, Republican super-PACs took turns attacking Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in TV ads. Republicans hadn’t held their primary — it’s not until August 7 — but McCaskill wound up trailing all three of the GOP candidates in polls. Now McCaskill, unnerved, is struggling to recover… That’s what super-PACs can do. When they emerged in 2010 and worked in tandem, they were a critical force in the Republican landslide in the congressional elections. This year they’re playing an even bigger role. The size and reach of their efforts dwarf what they did two years ago.
Attaboy, Fred, for telling it like it is, for exposing the hoax that the Court’s original decision was about “free” speech. No, it’s about carpet bombing elections with all the tonnage your rich paymasters want to buy. [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: The head of Egypt’s military took a tough line Sunday on the Muslim Brotherhood, warning that he won’t let the fundamentalist group dominate the country, only hours after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged him to work with Egypt’s elected Islamist leaders.
Clinton’s visit to Egypt underscored the difficulty Washington faces in trying to wield its influence amid the country’s stormy post-Hosni Mubarak power struggles.
Islamist Mohammed Morsi, a longtime Brotherhood figure, was sworn two weeks ago as Egypt’s first democratically elected president. Led by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the military handed over power to him June 30 after ruling Egypt for 16 months. The military, however, dissolved the Brotherhood-led parliament and stripped Morsi of significant authorities in the days before his inauguration, while retaining overwhelming powers for itself, including legislative power and control of the writing of a new constitution.
The United States is in a difficult spot when it comes to dealing with post-Mubarak Egypt — eager to be seen as a champion of democracy and human rights after three decades of close ties with the ousted leader despite his abysmal record in advancing either.
This has involved some uncomfortable changes, including occasional criticism of America’s longtime faithful partners in Egypt’s military as it grabs more power and words of support for Islamist parties far more skeptical of U.S. intentions in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East.
That has fueled accusations among some Egyptians who back the military or oppose Islamists that Washington is promoting the rise of the Brotherhood to power. Protesters chanting against the U.S. — sometimes reaching several hundred — have sprung up at several sites where Clinton visited this weekend. On Sunday, protesters threw tomatoes, water bottles and shoes at her motorcade as she left a ceremony marking the opening of a new U.S. consulate in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.
Reuters reports: Opposition fighters battled Syrian government forces in Damascus into the early hours of Monday in what residents described as the fiercest fighting yet inside the capital.
Activists said the fighting spread from the south of the city to a second area as night fell. At least five people were killed and dozens wounded, locals said.
The spread of fighting came as U.N. peace mediator Kofi Annan was due to fly to Moscow for a two-day visit in which he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin who has resisted Western calls to increase pressure on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Numerous Damascus residents contacted by Reuters said they could hear loud explosions, persistent gunfire and sirens wailing overnight, and described the fighting as the worst so far of the 17-month uprising against Assad.
Thick black smoke was visible above the Damascus skyline in live Internet video links. Government troops closed the airport road, activists said.
“I can’t believe it, it sounds incredibly close. I hear shooting and other stuff, like blasts. I can hear the sounds of ambulances rushing past. I am so afraid. People may die tonight,” said a resident contacted by telephone in a district close to the fighting.
Activist Samir al-Shami, who spoke to Reuters by Skype from Damascus, said the fighting was under way in the al-Tadamon district in the capital’s south, after sustained battles began at nightfall on Saturday in the nearby Hajar al-Aswad district.
“There is the sound of heavy gunfire. And there is smoke rising from the area. There are already some wounded and residents are trying to flee the area,” he said, using Skype to show live video images of smoke visible over the skyline.
“There are also armored vehicles heading towards the southern part of the neighborhood,” he said.
Another activist reached by Skype said the fighting later spread to al-Lawan, a neighborhood on the southwestern outskirts of the capital.
A third activist, who also asked not to be identified, said: “We’ve been expecting things to worsen in Damascus after the army crushed the rebellions in some of the suburbs, like Douma outside the capital. There were thousands of fighters in some of those suburbs. Some of them were killed but a lot of them fled and they’ve been heading to the capital itself.”
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