Author Archives: News Sources

The new ideology of the new Cold War

Jochen Bittner, describing the political formula mastered by Vladimir Putin as “orderism,” writes: Orderism prioritizes stability over democracy and offers an alternative to the moral abyss of laissez-faire societies. Russia stands as a model for this new social contract. This contract is built on patriotism, traditional gender roles, Orthodox Christianity, military strength and, at the top, a benevolent czar who will promise only as much as he can deliver (provided the public gives him sufficient support, he can deliver a lot). Orderism may not yet boast the same economic performance as liberalism, but its adherents insist that the cohesion and the common spirit of an orderly nation will allow it to outlive the inevitable downturn of the disorderly West.

It’s easy to see why, especially for those who have suffered dislocation and anomie under liberal democracy, orderism is appealing. But just as the utopian promises of Communism were merely a fig leaf for tyranny, the official face of orderism hides something much darker. Order is attractive only until it stifles, and then represses. Unchecked autocrats turn on the weakest and most vulnerable as scapegoats, and lash out in foreign misadventures to divert attention from problems at home. Society breaks down; fear reigns. Orderism ultimately fails to deliver on its own promises.

What is striking, though, is how compatible orderism is with the attitudes of many voters in the United States and Europe. Donald J. Trump’s campaign boils down to a promise of tough order. And the decision of British voters to leave the European Union, catalyzed by the promise of the U.K. Independence Party and others of an orderly, independent England, was nothing but an attempt to stop the frightening and discomfiting effects of globalization. Part of the difficulty in dealing with orderism is that it is ideological without being an ideology. It is mercurial, pragmatic and cynical; its meaning and values change to fit the circumstances. [Continue reading…]

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Aleppo conditions worsen under siege

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Syrian regime and its Russian allies are heavily bombarding hospitals, markets, utilities and aid warehouses in the besieged, rebel-controlled half of Aleppo, according to opposition officials and aid workers who said it was a concerted effort to force rebels and residents to surrender quickly.

The regime succeeded last month in encircling and cutting off the rebel-held eastern side of Aleppo after more than two years of attempts. The bombardment of infrastructure since has led to deteriorating humanitarian conditions for an estimated 300,000 people under siege, the officials and aid workers said.

Food supplies in the city are expected to last for only a few more weeks, according to the United Nations and aid agencies.

“What is happening is to break the will of the opposition,” said Muhammad al-Zein, an administrator with the medical council overseeing hospitals in the rebel-held part of Aleppo. “The warplanes are not striking the headquarters of [rebel] factions. They are targeting the infrastructure in order to create a feeling of defeat and surrender.”

Russian warplanes don’t strike civilian targets, said Lt. Gen. Sergei Rutskoi, a top general overseeing Russian operations in Syria. He said seven channels had been opened up around Aleppo to allow people to flee, and added that Russian soldiers have delivered food products and medical supplies.

Opposition officials and local aid workers said no humanitarian corridors have been opened to allow civilians to leave the rebel-held portion of Aleppo. On Sunday, in an attempt to break the siege, rebel factions launched an offensive against regime forces along the southern edge of the city, and some people burned tires that filled the sky with black smoke in an attempt to prevent regime and Russian aircraft from bombing the rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Libyan forces push into Sirte after U.S. air attacks

Middle East Eye reports: Forces loyal to Libya’s unity government have advanced inside the Islamic State group’s stronghold of Sirte following the first US air attacks on positions in the city.

Fighters seized the central district of al-Dollar after clashes that killed five of their members and wounded 17, they said on social media on Tuesday.

The Tripoli-based unity government launched an operation in May to retake Sirte, which the militants have controlled since June 2015.

The fall of the coastal city, 450km east of Tripoli, would be a major blow to IS, which has also faced a series of setbacks in Syria and Iraq.

The US air raids would continue as long as the unity government continued to request them, the US defence department said on Monday. [Continue reading…]

TSG IntelBrief says: The metastasizing nature of the so-called Islamic State has required the military effort to combat the group to grow alongside it. Though the U.S. has struck high-value targets in Libya before — most recently in February — it has not engaged in a sustained air campaign against the Islamic State in Libya. However, the announcement on August 1 of two airstrikes against Islamic State fighters in the coastal city of Sirte may be an indication that the operational tempo against the group in Libya is about to increase. The strikes came at the request of Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA), which has been trying to battle the Islamic State while simultaneously attempting to navigate the numerous militias and armed rivals that make foreign intervention highly problematic.

For a time in late 2015, it appeared that the Islamic State was on the verge of making Sirte its de facto third capital after Mosul and Raqqa. Unlike Iraq and Syria, the environment in Libya has posed unique challenges for the Islamic State’s ‘fight everyone everywhere’ strategy; the lack of a sectarian wedge in Libya blunts the group’s appeal. Still, the Islamic State managed to take control of the important coastal city of Sirte in May 2015, and estimates of the group’s total strength in Libya ballooned to 4,000-6,000 fighters in April 2016.

To prevent another Raqqa or Mosul, the U.S., as well as France, the UK, and others, have spent months building liaison relationships with various militia and GNA forces. These relationships take time to build, as do intelligence gathering networks that can generate information accurate enough for targeting purposes. The August 1 strikes in Sirte indicate that cooperation and coordination has progressed to a level in which all parties are comfortable moving ahead. The scale and pace of any U.S. air campaign in Libya will not compare to those in Iraq or Syria, but comments made by U.S. officials indicate airstrikes will continue as the GNA seeks to gain footing in the fractured country. [Continue reading…]

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France’s emergency powers — the new normal

Letta Tayler writes: France’s latest renewal of its emergency law has made few headlines abroad—except perhaps in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, fresh from passing his own sweeping state of emergency, may have relished watching the champion of liberté, égalité, and fraternité once again suspend rights in the name of security.

But European countries, rattled by a new spate of deadly attacks in France and Germany, may yet be tempted to turn to the new French law as a model. This would be a serious misstep on both legal and strategic grounds.

France’s parliament on July 22 did not simply extend the state of emergency that President Francois Hollande declared in the wake of the horrific Paris attacks last November. Propelled by the despicable Bastille Day attack a week earlier in Nice, lawmakers significantly expanded emergency powers of police search, seizure and detention. They also used the emergency powers act to slip more than a dozen new draconian counterterrorism provisions into French criminal law. In contrast to the emergency measures, which lapse in six months, these changes to France’s criminal codes are permanent.

There is no justification, ever, for attacks such as those in Nice and Paris, which together killed 214 people and wounded hundreds, or for tragic, smaller attacks that followed in Normandy and southern Germany. Whether the attackers are members of organizations like the Islamic State, lone wolves who heed such groups’ murderous calls, armed neo-fascists, or violent extremists of any other ilk, the authorities have a duty to protect people from such atrocities.

But governments must also take care not to overreact. Taken together, France’s rolling state of emergency and the amendments to criminal codes mark a perilous shift away from judicial safeguards against security force abuses. While every new attack increases the allure of tough responses, the new measures represent a serious step backward for human rights and the rule of law, playing directly to armed Islamist groups’ desires to divide the world along the stark lines of Western oppressors vs. Muslim oppressed. They also set a dangerous precedent for other governments, whether closer to home in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Turkey, or farther afield in Brazil, Malaysia, Australia and elsewhere. [Continue reading…]

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British diplomat set to take on EU security portfolio

The Associated Press reports: Britain’s ambassador to France is set to take up a newly created European Union security portfolio, the EU’s executive arm announced Tuesday.

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker wants Julian King to lead the institution’s fight against terrorism, organized crime and radicalization.

The post shares some tasks held by the commissioner for home affairs and migration issues but avoids any major activities that could be linked to Britain’s negotiations on leaving the EU in coming years.

King is a career diplomat who has spent several years working at EU headquarters in Brussels. [Continue reading…]

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Joe McCarthy was brought down by attacks on his decency. Trump will lose the same way

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Harold Pollack writes: Sixty-five years ago, America faced the challenge of a snarling demagogue, who captured the imagination of millions by fusing legitimate fears of an external enemy with the cultural, regional and demographic resentments of people who disliked the changing nature of our postwar country. Then, as now, a demagogue could draw upon widespread weariness with imperfect and occasionally complacent liberal leaders, important or petty security scandals, the grind of military stalemate in an inconclusive long war.

Then, as now, the demagogue benefited from apologists and enablers who privately wanted him defeated, but who would not take risks or bear political costs to openly confront him. Then, as now, his political adversaries were divided and hesitant in their efforts to formulate an effective response. Then, as now, parts of the Republican Party gave a vicious demagogue a congenial political home.

Of course, history doesn’t repeat itself. Donald Trump is no Joe McCarthy. For one thing, President Eisenhower and other Republican gatekeepers never allowed McCarthy near their party’s nomination for president. For another, America is a far more cosmopolitan and diverse nation today than it was at the close of the Korean War. [Continue reading…]

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How Paul Manafort wielded power in Ukraine before advising Donald Trump

The New York Times reports: Few political consultants have had a client fail quite as spectacularly as Paul Manafort’s did in Ukraine in the winter of 2014.

President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who owed his election to, as an American diplomat put it, an “extreme makeover” Mr. Manafort oversaw, bolted the country in the face of violent street protests. He found sanctuary in Russia and never returned, as his patron, President Vladimir V. Putin, proceeded to dismember Ukraine, annexing Crimea and fomenting a war in two other provinces that continues.

Mr. Manafort was undaunted.

Within months of his client’s political demise, he went to work seeking to bring his disgraced party back to power, much as he had Mr. Yanukovych himself nearly a decade earlier. Mr. Manafort has already had some success, with former Yanukovych loyalists — and some Communists — forming a new bloc opposing Ukraine’s struggling pro-Western government.

And now Mr. Manafort has taken on a much larger campaign, seeking to turn Donald J. Trump into a winning presidential candidate.

With Mr. Putin’s Russia, and its interference in Ukraine, becoming a focus of the United States presidential campaign, Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine has come under scrutiny — along with his business dealings with prominent Ukrainian and Russian tycoons.

After disclosures of a breach of the Democratic National Committee’s emails — which American intelligence officials have linked to Russian spies — both men are facing sharp criticism over what is seen as an unusually sympathetic view of Mr. Putin and his policies toward Ukraine. That view has upended decades of party orthodoxy toward Russia, a country that the previous Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, called “our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump even echoed Mr. Putin’s justification of the annexation of Crimea, saying the majority of people in the region wanted to be part of Russia, remarks that were prominently featured on state news channels in Moscow. [Continue reading…]

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A record 65.3 million people were displaced last year: What does that number actually mean?

By Jeffrey H. Cohen, The Ohio State University and Ibrahim Sirkeci, Regent’s University London

We continue to witness violent attacks – bombings and murders in France, Germany, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq; fighting in South Sudan and the continued civil war in Syria. These conflicts have renewed interest in the global refugee crisis and the movements of displaced persons around the globe.

The United Nations Human Rights Council announced in June that 65.3 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes in 2015. This is a record number and is equal in population to the U.K. or France.

People who have been forced to leave their homes, their nations and occupation against their will are often referred to as “displaced.” And 65.3 million is a lot of displaced people. They are found across the globe in response to crises that range from the social to the environmental, and include Syrian refugees fleeing civil war, Central American children crossing international borders to reach family and security in the U.S., Colombians moving internally to avoid warfare and violence and Filipinos who are forced to relocate in response to changing climates and environmental disasters.

The UNHRC’s report identifies important global patterns that we must acknowledge. But, the overwhelming size of the displaced population reported confounds a complex issue and creates new fears. The numbers overwhelm and make it difficult to define potential solutions.

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Pope Francis: Valuing money more than people ‘is a basic terrorism against all humanity’

Reuters reports: Pope Francis has said it was wrong to identify Islam with violence and that social injustice and idolatry of money were among the prime causes of terrorism.

“I think it is not right to identity Islam with violence,” he told reporters aboard the plane taking him back to Rome after a five-day trip to Poland. “This is not right and this is not true.”

The pope was responding to a question about the killing on 26 July of an 85-year-old Roman Catholic priest during a church service in western France. The attackers forced the priest to his knees and slit his throat. The killing was claimed by Islamic State.

“I think that in nearly all religions there is a always a small fundamentalist group,” he said, adding “We have them,” referring to Catholicism.

“I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I look at the papers I see violence here in Italy – someone killing his girlfriend, someone killing his mother-in-law. These are baptised Catholics,” he said.

“If I speak of Islamic violence, I have to speak of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent,” he said.

He said there were various causes of terrorism.

“I know it dangerous to say this but terrorism grows when there is no other option and when money is made a god and it, instead of the person, is put at the centre of the world economy,” he said.

“That is the first form of terrorism. That is a basic terrorism against all humanity. Let’s talk about that,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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As Obama dithers, Syrian rebels in Aleppo brace for Putin’s onslaught

Roy Gutman reports: When Russia dropped its bombshell announcement of a plan to bring “stabilization” and “assistance” to rebel-held Aleppo by emptying it of its inhabitants and its defenders, the U.S., the UN, and any number of countries working to end the war in Syria were taken aback.

Gen. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, announced that President Vladimir Putin had issued a decree ordering a “large scale humanitarian operation” in Aleppo, which has been under siege for three weeks.

But there was no advance consultation on the decision to set up four corridors — three for civilians and one for armed combatants — to leave the city. Western diplomats said it amounted to imposing a military solution on Syria’s biggest metropolis as well as a violation of international law.

A top official of the Syrian opposition said he’s convinced Russia’s intent is use the methods it deployed to destroy Grozny. The capital of the Chechen Republic was the scene of bloody combat in 1994-95, and then again in 1999-2000, early in Putin’s first presidency. At that point leaflets were dropped offering people safe passage out of the city, and after a brief pause the real devastation began. In 2003, the United Nations reportedly called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth.” The war was over, and on Putin’s terms. [Continue reading…]

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The forces besieging Aleppo are counting on our indifference

Natalie Nougayrède writes: As Europe reels from terrorist attacks, Aleppo, once Syria’s second city, is suffering its own nightmare. The connection between these two developments is more than coincidence. As bombs, guns and knives were being wielded in France and Germany, a massive military operation was under way to besiege, and perhaps empty or starve, the eastern districts of Aleppo that since 2012 have been controlled by the anti-Assad rebellion.

When responding to the latest terror in Europe, few if any western officials draw parallels with the plight of Aleppo. That is understandable. Public opinion is naturally more focused on the domestic fallout from traumatic events. When security fears take over and political passions are aroused, it is hard to look beyond what lies in your immediate vicinity. Yet Aleppo will have consequences for Europe and for its citizens, and there is little cause to think they will be positive.

This is why: Islamic State cannot be defeated just through military action in Iraq and Syria, or police operations in Europe. It can be defeated only if the attraction that the militant group exerts on young, confused Sunni Muslims, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is somehow neutralised. The massacres carried out by the Assad regime in Syria over the past five years, and the failure of the international community to put an end to them – or even to hold his power accountable – have provided no small reason for the radicalisation now making Europe bleed.

The summer of 2015 went down in history as a time when the chaos of the Middle East suddenly became a vivid reality for Europeans because of the refugee crisis. The summer of 2016 may go down as the tipping point when all hope of a negotiated settlement in Syria’s civil war, one that would deprive Isis of much of its ability to recruit and sow terror, entirely faded. [Continue reading…]

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Doctors tell of ‘horrifying’ conditions in Aleppo as medical supplies run out

ITV News reports: American doctor Dr Samer Attar, who is now back in Chicago, worked in an underground field hospital in Aleppo.

He said the conditions he witnessed there were “brutal and horrifying” and that they would only worsen with the closure of Castello Road – now the only aid route into Aleppo.

“Right now that road has been cut off by the Syrian government, that was the last remaining humanitarian supply route into eastern Aleppo.

“The doctors I’ve been speaking to says they have no food, no fuel, no medicines to last them the next month.

“A neurosurgeon I know texted me to he hasn’t eaten anything for the past few days other than dried dates whilst working around the clock.

“He has to perform massive brain operations on patients and he is trapped. No one is coming to relieve him.” [Continue reading…]

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French politicians are using terrorism to score points ahead of election

By Jocelyn Evans, University of Leeds and Gilles Ivaldi, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis

Until recently, France’s politicians had largely presented a united front against terrorist attacks. Rarely did they use tragedy to score points off each other. But that has started to change over the past year. Now a political controversy has erupted in the wake of the massacre in Nice on Bastille Day 2016. It will no doubt be further fuelled by the killing of a Catholic priest near Rouen.

Within hours of the incident at a fireworks display in Nice, opposition politicians were rounding on the government. How was it that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was able to kill 84 people and wound hundreds by driving a truck into a festive crowd, even as the country lived under a state of emergency?

One was Christian Estrosi, the former mayor of Nice and a Republican right winger who supports former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Estrosi is currently leading the offensive against the government. “Lies are fuelling the controversy,” he said, referencing the contested number of national police and soldiers in Nice on the night of the attack. “If the state stops lying, there will no longer be a controversy.”

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Muslims mourn in solidarity with Catholics across France after priest’s murder

BBC News reports: Muslims across France have attended Catholic Mass in a gesture of solidarity after the murder of a priest on Tuesday.

Fr Jacques Hamel was killed in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen by two men who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

France’s Muslim council, the CFCM, urged Muslims to show “solidarity and compassion” over the murder.

“We are all Catholics of France,” said Anouar Kbibech, the head of the CFCM. [Continue reading…]

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National security leaders talk about ISIS like a chronic illness in the global body politic

The Daily Beast reports: Officially, the Obama administration is still committed to defeating ISIS. But at the annual gathering of national security chiefs in Aspen, no one was talking about beating the terror army and its adherents. Instead, grim resignation and dark warnings of a long hard fight to come dominated the discussion, with every official predicting a global rise in terror attacks, including in the United States.

“Do we expect more attacks? Regrettably we do, both in Europe and the U.S.,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.

While some here held out hope for a military triumph over ISIS in Iraq and Syria, they acknowledged that any such advances would represent the first stage in a years-long battle against a group that’s already spread to unstable parts of the Mideast, Africa, and Southeast Asia—and already inspired attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, Orlando to Istanbul.

“If we destroy [ISIS] in Syria and Iraq so they don’t have a territory anymore, of course that reduces their influence. But the virtual caliphate has not been destroyed,” said European Union Counterterrorist Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove in an interview, referring to ISIS’s prodigious online presence. “The capacity to inspire in the west will remain for some time.”

It was a far cry from earlier gatherings of the Aspen Security Forum, where officials and experts hailed the killing of al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden as a death blow to Islamic extremism. And it was a markedly different tone from President Obama’s statements of just a few months ago, when he redoubled his commitment to “defeat [ISIS] and to eliminate the scourge of this barbaric terrorism that’s been taking place around the world.”

In contrast, national security officials at Aspen didn’t really speak of ISIS as an enemy that could be taken out. They talked about the terror group like a long-term problem to be managed—a chronic illness in the global body politic. [Continue reading…]

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Khizr Khan’s loss: A grieving father of a soldier struggles to understand

On March 22, 2005, the Washington Post reported: Khizr Khan is a lawyer by training and demeanor, an articulate man, a careful and methodical thinker who is trying at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday to make sense of the fact that his 27-year-old son is gone forever.

It’s a workday, so he finds someplace quiet, an empty conference room on the 13th floor of the office building where he works near the White House. He shuts the door, sits at a big empty table, picks up a pen.

He and his wife would talk often to their three boys about why they decided to come to the United States, he began. It was the 1970s, and Pakistan was under military rule. They came to Silver Spring to have more freedom and opportunity.

“It sounds cliche,” said Khan, 54, “but that is the story.”

His son was always reading books about Thomas Jefferson; that part of his passion was certainly his father’s doing. When the boys were small, Khan would take them to the Jefferson Memorial. He’d have them stand there and read the chiseled, curving words about swearing hostility against tyrannies over the minds of men.

But Humayun had a serious-minded disposition all his own, even as a little boy. He was the middle one, the comforter, the one the cousins would run to when they were being picked on. He gave swimming lessons to disabled children in high school. He had a sense of responsibility that his father cannot quite account for, other than to say that’s just the way he was.

“We always depended on his balanced approach to things,” Khan said, fidgeting with the pen.

It was not exactly surprising, he continued, that Humayun quoted Jefferson in his admissions essay for the University of Virginia, a line about freedom requiring vigilance. It was a bit surprising, though, when he signed up for ROTC and told his dad that after graduation in 2000, he wanted to join the Army. [Continue reading…]

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Trump gets rescued by firefighters — then insults firefighters

On Friday night, Donald Trump along with nine other people got trapped in an elevator at The Mining Exchange Hotel in Colorado Springs. It wasn’t long before firefighters came to the rescue. The Washington Post reports:

“The firefighters were able to secure the elevator, open the top elevator hatch, lower a ladder into the elevator, which allowed all individuals to self-evacuate, including Mr. Trump, onto the second-floor lobby area,” fire department spokesman Steven Wilch told Colorado station KRDO in a Saturday report. Trump was over an hour late to his event at the University of Colorado campus located in solidly conservative Colorado Springs — but he made it.

If you think that’s the sort of thing that might prompt him to mention the fire department in his remarks at that event, as you may have heard Friday, you’re right! “We have a fire marshal that said we can’t allow more people,” Trump said, as the crowd booed. “….The reason they can’t let them in is because they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Fire Marshal Brett Lacey, the candidate said, was “probably a Democrat, probably a guy that doesn’t get it.”

Trump went on. “Hey, maybe they’re a Hillary person. Could that be possible? Probably,” he said, calling the restriction a “disgraceful situation.”

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Russia’s development as a proto-fascist state

Vladislav Inozemtsev writes: Western policymakers in recent years have struggled to categorize the Russian political system, often resorting to vague phrases such as “illiberal democracy” or “authoritarianism.”

If anything, the Russian system should be characterized as proto-fascist – tamer than European fascist states during the 1920s and 1930s, but still featuring key elements of those regimes. These include the structure of Russia’s political economy; the idealization of the state as a source of moral authority; and Russia’s particular brand of international relations.

In The Anatomy of Fascism, Columbia University historian Robert O. Paxton writes that:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In a 1995 essay for The New York Review of Books, the novelist Umberto Eco, who was born during Italian fascism in 1932, defines fascism expansively as a “cult of tradition” based in “selective populism.” And as early as 1939, Peter Drucker claimed in The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, that “fascism is the stage reached after communism has proven an illusion.”
Judging by these definitions, it would be difficult today to find any trend in Russian political society that could not be labeled fascist. [Continue reading…]

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