Syria: Support for the revolution doesn’t equal support for the revolutionaries

Adnan A. Zulfiqar writes: Sectarian conflict might dominate coverage of Syria today, but internal Sunni dynamics will define its tomorrow. Tensions between Alawis and Sunnis won’t be settled over night, but the demographics in Syria do not suggest a prolonged conflict similar to Iraq or Lebanon.

Unlike those countries, Syria is overwhelmingly Sunni (~75%) and Bashar al-Assad’s fate rests on their support. Over the last two years, the strategic alliance between Assad and the Sunni elite has eroded significantly. Assad’s former Syrian-Sunni allies are now some of his opponent’s most important financial contributors. Russia seemingly hedging its bets on Syria’s future, and the United States attempting to raise its profile on the issue bothindicate that post-Assad preparations are being made.

After almost two years since the rebellion began, over 44,000 have been killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. According to press accounts and my personal observations during a recent trip to the Syrian/Turkey border as part of Truman Project’s Democracy and Human Rights Initiative, the rebels control much of Syria’s north, including most of the border with Turkey, significant portions of Aleppo, and are steadily making a push for Damascus, the final prize. Even Assad’s deputies have cynically taken to the airwaves to advocate for a political resolution, an unlikely proposition at this stage.

An impending power vacuum is inevitable so focus must shift to the competitors aiming to fill that space. The common consensus is that the opposition’s political and military factions are poised to battle for authority. In reality, this competition highlights a more fundamental confrontation: traditionalist Sunnism versus its more puritanical Salafi strain. The Syrian coalition understands this with their perspicacious selection of Mu’az al-Khatib to lead the opposition: the former head imam at Umayyad Masjid, the country’s most important religious site and the fourth holiest site in Islam. Al-Khatib, a Sunni traditionalist, can counter the growing appeal of Salafism. Rebel militias are dominated by an ideological spectrum of Salafi fighters, but are united by both the cause and their interpretive approach to Islam’s foundational texts. Despite Salafism never having mass appeal in Syrian society, there is potential for that to change. [Continue reading…]

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American idolatry — misplaced faith in a piece of paper

Before I came to America in 1988, I’d experienced a lot of cultural diversity. Having grown up in England, traveled through much of Europe, lived in India and France, briefly witnessed the revolution in Iran, explored pre-war Afghanistan, lived in mud huts and slept in caves, I didn’t think I was susceptible to culture shock — until I came here.

This is the paradox the United States presents to so many non-Americans: no other country is so well-known to people from afar, yet upon being confronted with the reality, one discovers that what looks familiar turns out to be foreign.

No other country seems quite as obsessed with a self-defined vision of its uniqueness — an exceptionalism held onto by a population that is largely unfamiliar with other countries. In this glorified isolation the rest of the world is barely visible. At times, America seems less like a country and more like a religion.

From Britain, Jonathan Freedland writes:

We watch their movies, we eat their fast food. Their culture has become global culture. So it always comes as a shock to realise how different Americans are from everyone else. The massacre in Newtown horrified even those who thought themselves inured to horror – I know many who could hardly bear to look at those smiling family photographs of the children – but for non-Americans the subsequent discussion has also been shocking to watch.

To outsiders, the point seems so blindingly obvious: more guns equal more death. In Britain, where gun laws are strict, the annual number of gun-related murders stood, at last count, at 41. In the US the equivalent figure is just short of 10,000.

Whether it’s Britain, Japan or Australia, the evidence is the same: strict gun control means fewer people die. American unwillingness to face this basic arithmetic – preferring to blame the mental health system or videogames or the “feminisation” of the classroom, as one conservative pundit did, or the absence of religious prayer in schools – the explanation of former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee – rather than the most obvious culprit for all this gun violence, namely easy access to military-grade assault weapons, can drive outsiders to distraction. Witness Piers Morgan’s bad-tempered hosting of a CNN debate on guns this week, haranguing his guests for failing to admit what to him was obvious – a performance that few of his American colleagues would match.

What exactly is America’s problem? Why does it stand so far apart, notching up more gun homicides than the rest of the world’s wealthy countries put together? People like to point the finger at the mighty National Rifle Association, which, to be sure, is a well-funded, effective lobby, especially in battleground congressional districts where NRA members can make the difference between victory and defeat. But big tobacco used to be a mighty lobby too; yet when the evidence linked smoking to lung cancer, they were steadily beaten back. Judging by its abysmal performance at a bizarre press conference today, the NRA could ultimately be defeated.

If you really want to know why the US can’t kick its gun habit, take a trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC. You don’t even have to look at the exhibits. Just study the queue. What you’ll see are ordinary Americans lining up, in hushed reverence, to gaze at an original copy of the United States constitution, guarded and under heavily armoured glass. It is no exaggeration to say that for many Americans this is a religious experience. [Continue reading…]

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Did the CIA almost let Osama bin Laden escape?

In late 2010, after the CIA had kept Osama bin Laden’s home under surveillance for several months, the agency was under increasing pressure to come up with conclusive proof that the Abbottabad house was indeed the location of the al Qaeda leader. CIA director Leon Panetta was running out of patience. Peter Bergen writes:

Over the next several months, Panetta became increasingly annoyed — some CIA officials even say “pissed” — about what he perceived as a lack of creativity among the bin Laden hunters.

They were directed to come up with 25 ways of getting inside the compound and encouraged to not be afraid of making some of them “kind of creative.” They came back with 38 proposals including one that sounds more comical than creative: set up loudspeakers outside the house from which could be broadcast the self-declared “voice of Allah” (speaking in Arabic I assume) saying to the inhabitants of the house, “You are commanded to come onto the street!”

One of the plans they decided to put into operation was to set up a phony vaccination program in the area in the hope that they could use this as a pretext for collecting blood samples from the house’s residents, thereby finding markers of bin Laden’s DNA in that of his children.

Matthieu Aikins describes what happened when this plan was put into operation:

[O]n April 21, 2011, a gray jeep pulled into town and parked in front of a property dealer’s shack a short distance from the Big House [where bin Laden and his family lived]. It was an official vehicle, with the logo of the provincial health department painted on the door, and from the passenger side stepped a doctor, here on business from the province’s capital, Peshawar. In his collared shirt and pressed trousers, the doctor stood out among the wheat fields and dirt paths of this semi-rural suburb: a handsome, imposing man with a thick head of black hair, his filled-out frame a point of pride in a country where stunted growth can be a mark of the lower classes. Leaving his driver behind, the doctor set off along a narrow gravel-strewn path, beside fields thick with grass and dusky cauliflower leaves, his gaze focused intently on the house ahead.

Waiting for him outside the compound’s forest-green metal gate were two nurses, Bakhto and Amna, their shawls drawn across their foreheads. All day, as part of a hepatitis B vaccination team that the doctor had assembled, the nurses had been canvassing the area, knocking on doors and looking for women ages 15 to 45 to cajole into taking the needle. First a drop of blood would be drawn from the patient and blotted on a rapid-test strip, which would show, within minutes, whether the patient had been infected with hepatitis. If the patient was negative, the nurses were instructed to administer the vaccination.

Normally a jovial man, the doctor seemed tense at the gate. Amna wondered why he was so interested in this house in particular, the only one whose vaccination he had bothered to personally supervise. She watched as he rapped sharply on the metal door. They waited. Again he knocked, but there seemed to be no one home. Amna shrugged. Did it really matter if they missed this one house? Undeterred, the doctor strode across the street to a low brick compound and roused a neighbor, whose son, as luck would have it, did the occasional odd job for the Big House. The man had the cell number of one of the Khan brothers [Arshad and Tariq, who owned the house]. The doctor dialed it and handed his phone to one of the nurses, but when the brother answered and said the family was away on a trip, the doctor took the phone back from her.

“Hello?” he said. “This is Dr. Shakil Afridi.” The doctor urgently explained the need for the hepatitis test. It was crucial that it happen soon. The vaccine, he said, would be very good for them.

Bergen says Afridi was unsuccessful in collecting DNA samples. No one has described the effect of Afridi’s unsolicited call on the bin Laden household.

We already know that the al Qaeda leader had spared no effort in maintaining a high level of security and it’s reasonable to assume that the doctor’s presence must have aroused considerable suspicion inside the compound.

Afridi’s CIA handlers must have been briefed on the doctor’s over-zealous effort to collect blood samples and thus surely feared their quarry would flee.

Bergen’s account of discussions in Washington at that time paints a picture of somber deliberation. He quotes Panetta saying:

“[W]e’re probably at the point where we have got the best intelligence we can get. It’s now time to make a decision not about whether or not we should do something about it, but what we do about it. We’ve come this far. There’s no turning back. We have enough information such that the American people would want us to act.”

It doesn’t sound like he imagined the next word on bin Laden might be that he had fled — which probably means he didn’t know that Afridi had come close to blowing the whole CIA operation.

Since Afridi’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment (he has been jailed for 33 years convicted of crimes unrelated to his work with the CIA), Washington has portrayed the doctor as a hero, but it’s hard not to wonder whether both the CIA and the White House are content to see him remain behind bars. Afridi may have come dangerously close to turning Abbottabad into Obama’s Tora Bora.

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Dysfunctional citizen-state relations across the Arab world

Rami G Khouri writes: If there is one fundamental relationship that is central to stable statehood and the wellbeing of entire populations in modern states, it is the relationship between the citizen and the state. These highest and the lowest, and biggest and smallest, levels of statehood need to be reasonably in sync with one another for relatively normal life to go on in any country, leading to social calm, economic progress, security for all and opportunities for individual men and women to develop to their full human potential. Not surprisingly, the citizen-state relationship has been widely distorted – in fact never fully established – across much of the modern Arab world, which is one reason why millions of citizens have been in revolt against their governments and ruling elites during the past two years. A good example of the unnatural state of citizen-state relations is the recent string of incidents in which some Arab governments have revoked the citizenships of some of their nationals, usually as punishment for political acts or even just for their political rhetoric.

For example, last month Bahrain revoked the nationality of 31 activists, citing them as a threat to “national security.” This included political leaders, such as Saeed Shehabi who lives in exile in London, and Jalal and Jawad Fairooz, two former MPs from the opposition Al-Wefaq party. As happens in all such cases, the government said its move was perfectly legal, as its citizenship law allows it to reconsider nationality if a Bahraini “damages national security” – a phrase that can be interpreted any way the government wishes.

A year ago, the United Arab Emirates revoked the citizenship of seven citizens who also happened to be members of Al-Islah, an Islamist group that is critical is government human rights policies. Some of them had signed a petition for an elected Parliament with executive powers.

Kuwait took similar measures two years ago when it revoked the citizenship of politician Yasser al-Habeeb, accusing him of abusing religious symbols and attempting to trigger sectarian tensions (he is a Shiite). The Cabinet made the decision at the recommendation of the Interior Minister, using available legal means.

These and other such cases across the region are extreme examples of dysfunctional citizen-state relations, which often reflect mutual contempt for the other by both sides, because they have never negotiated a sensible and equitable relationship that defines the use of state power for the wellbeing of all in society. [Continue reading…]

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Russia says it won’t play role in ousting Assad

The New York Times reports: The foreign minister of Russia, which is among Syria’s most reliable allies, said Saturday that several countries were offering asylum to President Bashar al-Assad to get him to leave Syria, but that Moscow would not mediate on their behalf, according to Russian news services.

“Some countries in the region have turned to us and suggested, ‘Tell Assad we are ready to fix him up,’ ” the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, told reporters who accompanied him on a flight home from the Russia-European Union summit meeting in Brussels, in comments carried by the Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies. “And we answered, ‘What do we have to do with it? If you have such plans, approach him directly.’ ”

“If there are people wishing to give him some kind of guarantees, be our guest,” he said. “We will be the first to cross ourselves and say, ‘Thank God, the carnage is over.’ Whether this will end the carnage — that is far from obvious. It is not obvious at all.”

He also said that Syria’s government had brought together its chemical weapons from a large number of locations throughout the country to one or two central storage places to keep them out of rebel hands.

Mr. Lavrov’s comments follow recent signals from Russia that it sees the military balance shifting, though Moscow has not changed its strong opposition to international intervention in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Al-Nusra not a monolithic group

Reuters reports: The identity of al-Nusra’s leadership is not clear. A shadowy figure known as Abu Muhammad al-Golani – whose nationality is not known – has been named by some as the head.

But an Islamist opposition campaigner who toured northern and central Syria a few days ago and met Nusra commanders said the group operates more like an umbrella organisation with little coordination between units in different regions.

“They are not a monolithic group. The nature of Nusra in Damascus is more tolerant than Idlib. They have a real popular base in Idlib, where most Nusra members are Syrians, as opposed to Aleppo and Damascus.”

He said it did not appear to be seeking to impose Taliban-style control. “Many rebels I have met say they joined al-Nusra because the group has weapons, mostly seized from raids, and that they will go back home after the revolt,” he added.

But many centrist opposition campaigners fear that al-Nusra will turn its guns on any non-Islamist order that could come if Assad was deposed. “The big question is how to contain Nusra in a post-Assad Syria,” said an opposition figure linked to jihadist groups, who did not want to be identified.

“Al-Nusra is the type of group that could declare the most pious cleric a heretic and kill him in the middle of a mosque just because he does not share its view,” he said.

Nusra members are estimated to number in the thousands and are particularly strong in the northern region of Aleppo and Idlib, where they have joined or carried out joint operations with Islamist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and Liwa al-Tawhid unit.

In and around Damascus they are fewer in number but remain potent, and are only 20 kilometers (12 miles) at some points from the Golan Heights front with Israel.

Abu Munther, an engineer turned rebel who operates on the southern edge of Damascus and goes to Jordan to meet other rebels, said in Amman that al-Nusra numbered hundreds of people in Damascus, as opposed to thousands in the north.

But those numbers could grow. Al-Mujahideen brigade in the southern Tadamun neighborhood of Damascus declared its allegiance to al-Nusra after dissatisfaction with Arab-backed military groups headed by defector officers.

Another opposition figure, who did not want to be named, said international intelligence agencies were trying to curb Nusra’s influence in Damascus and the southern Hauran Plain, where they are near Israel and close to the Jordanian border.

“Western intelligence agencies are realising that the Nusra is the biggest threat in a post-Assad Syria and are devoting more resources to deal with the threat,” he said.

“For the first time al Qaeda is within striking distance of Israel,” he said. “Many are realising that the best that could be done for now is to contain them in north Syria – even if the area risks becoming an Islamist emirate of sorts – while trying to build a civic form of government in and around Damascus.”

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Mind control: The CIA’s experiments on involuntary human subjects

On September 16, 2001, Dick Cheney warned that in order to deal with the terrorism threat: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world.” It was as though the CIA was being directed to venture into unfamiliar territory.

An ABC News report broadcast in 1979 detailing secret CIA programs conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects, testing the effects of LSD and other methods of mind control, serves however as a useful reminder that the agency has a long history of working the dark side.

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When the U.S. became a police state

Naomi Wolf writes: People often ask me, in terms of my argument about “ten steps” that mark the descent to a police state or closed society, at what stage we are. I am sorry to say that with the importation of what will be tens of thousands of drones, by both US military and by commercial interests, into US airspace, with a specific mandate to engage in surveillance and with the capacity for weaponization – which is due to begin in earnest at the start of the new year – it means that the police state is now officially here.

In February of this year, Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, with its provision to deploy fleets of drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that this followed a major lobbying effort, “a huge push by […] the defense sector” to promote the use of drones in American skies: 30,000 of them are expected to be in use by 2020, some as small as hummingbirds – meaning that you won’t necessarily see them, tracking your meeting with your fellow-activists, with your accountant or your congressman, or filming your cruising the bars or your assignation with your lover, as its video-gathering whirs.

Others will be as big as passenger planes. Business-friendly media stress their planned abundant use by corporations: police in Seattle have already deployed them.

An unclassified US air force document reported by CBS (pdf) news expands on this unprecedented and unconstitutional step – one that formally brings the military into the role of controlling domestic populations on US soil, which is the bright line that separates a democracy from a military oligarchy. (The US constitution allows for the deployment of National Guard units by governors, who are answerable to the people; but this system is intended, as is posse comitatus, to prevent the military from taking action aimed at US citizens domestically.)

The air force document explains that the air force will be overseeing the deployment of its own military surveillance drones within the borders of the US; that it may keep video and other data it collects with these drones for 90 days without a warrant – and will then, retroactively, determine if the material can be retained – which does away for good with the fourth amendment in these cases. While the drones are not supposed to specifically “conduct non-consensual surveillance on on specifically identified US persons”, according to the document, the wording allows for domestic military surveillance of non-“specifically identified” people (that is, a group of activists or protesters) and it comes with the important caveat, also seemingly wholly unconstitutional, that it may not target individuals “unless expressly approved by the secretary of Defense”.

In other words, the Pentagon can now send a domestic drone to hover outside your apartment window, collecting footage of you and your family, if the secretary of Defense approves it. [Continue reading…]

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Pro-Israel/pro-war lobby’s latest attack on Hagel

The Kristol-Abrams cabal is on the war path again, concerned that the next United States secretary of defense might not be more loyal to Israel than he is to his own country. For the Emergency Committee for Israel, run by William Kristol, Elliot Abrams and their cohorts, placing the interests of Israel first should be the raison d’être of U.S. national security and foreign policy.

This is an ad the committee is now running on cable networks in the hope they can torpedo Chuck Hagel’s nomination for defense secretary — before the nomination has even been made.

President Obama faces a challenge: is he going to capitulate to the Israel lobby as he has so often before, or will he for once show he has a backbone?

If he bows to this pressure, not only will he be confirming that Washington remains Israeli occupied territory, but he will be signalling to all other interest groups, such as the NRA, that in spite of the fact that he never needs to win another election, he remains a pushover.

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A Jewish lobby for a Jewish state

In the bizarro world of political correctness, it’s better to say “Israel lobby” than “Jewish lobby” even though members of the lobby regard the use of either term as anti-Semitic. On the other hand, no one bats an eyelid at the term “Jewish state” even though most Jews choose not to live in Israel.

Marsha B Cohen:

AIPAC comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, and ‘then you’ll get 80 to 90 senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of the letters.’

When someone would accuse him of not being pro-Israel because he didn’t sign the letter, Hagel told me he responds: “‘I didn’t sign the letter because it was a stupid letter.” Few legislators talk this way on the Hill. Hagel is a strong supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values. “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” but as he put it, “I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator.”

— Chuck Hagel to Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land

The kerfuffle over Chuck Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby” — and the implication that some members of Congress are intimidated by it — pervades the right-wing media and its echo chamber in the blogosphere. Since Hagel was floated as a possible Secretary of Defense, some American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) representatives, among them former spokesman Josh Block and former Executive Director Morris Amitay, have denounced Hagel’s characterization. Even progressives are not immune to debating its appropriateness. M. J. Rosenberg, also a veteran of the AIPAC but now one of its fiercest critics, writes:

It is true that it is impolitic to use the term “Jewish lobby” rather than “Israel lobby” although the very same people criticizing Hagel for using the former term objected just as vehemently when Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer used the latter in their book on the subject. In any case, the term Jewish lobby is accurate when one refers to organizations like the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League, etc. They are Jewish organizations and not AIPAC, the registered Israel lobby.

AIPAC’s rebranding of itself as “America’s pro-Israel lobby” instead of the “Jewish lobby” is also relatively recent. The critiques of AIPAC from both the right and left overlook a long paper trail of AIPAC’s self-perception and self-description, which for much of its history — from the 1950s through the 1990s — has reveled in its role as the voice of “the Jewish community.” [Continue reading…]

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Compassion, not anger, is the best response to the Newtown massacre

Izzeldin Abuelaish writes: Like countless other people, I was shocked and mesmerised by the murders at Sandy Hook school. So many innocent souls and committed teachers who risked their lives to protect their six- and seven-year-old pupils. Twenty children shot again and again, an act so sickening that even the chief medical examiner for Connecticut said he had been in his job for a third of a century but that this massacre of innocents was the worst he had ever seen.

Millions of people shared the devastating sadness. For me, there was something else, a shadow I couldn’t turn away from. For the events brought back the deaths by bombs of my own three precious daughters and niece during the attack on Gaza in 2008. Gaza couldn’t be more different from America’s quiet, affluent Newtown. Yet for me, there was a horrendous connection in the violent killing of children. In the murdered child Grace I saw my daughter Aya; in the valiant teacher Victoria, who died protecting her students, I saw my own daughter Bessan, a mother to her sisters. I saw them; I was seized by the images to such an extent that I stopped driving on a green light. “What’s wrong, Dad,” asked my son Abdullah.

“Your sisters are with me,” I answered without a pause to reflect on what I had said.

I, unfortunately, don’t have to guess what the parents of these murdered innocents are going through: the shock, the disbelief, the mourning and the memories that will remain for ever.

And like many of the parents and the community and many of the people of the US, I felt angry: why did these innocents have to die? But then I am led beyond grief and anger, to resolve: this must not happen again. We must do something.

What, we should ask ourselves, would these parents want us to do? Put more guns into households and schools, arm every six-year-old innocent with a weapon whose only purpose is to kill or injure?

That is the path of fear, and the absurd notion that more guns will result in less violence. The path of fear leads to anger, hatred, violence and depression. As a physician I can say it leads to mental and physical illness. It helps neither the parents nor any surviving children in the family.

There is another path, one of human connection and compassion. [Continue reading…]

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How jihadists are winning hearts and minds in Syria

Hassan Hassan writes: The noose is tightening around Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — and he’s beginning to realize it. After a week that saw the opposition’s National Coalition win widespread international recognition and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta sign orders to dispatch Patriot missiles to the Turkey-Syria border, the regime in Damascus gave the first sign that it was looking for a way out.

On Dec. 17, the Lebanese paper al-Akhbar published an interview with Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa, where he said that neither the regime nor the rebels could win militarily and called for a “historic settlement” between the warring parties. Iran, Assad’s staunchest ally, also released a six-point plan that it said would promote national reconciliation.

There is reason to believe that the United States would look sympathetically on a negotiated transition. Washington faces a problem: It is looking to prevent extremists from filling the power vacuum in Syria — it designated the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusrah as a terrorist organization last week — and a political settlement could be a step in that direction. But a deal cut in Damascus is no cure-all for Syria’s ills: Even if an agreement is reached, most rebels groups are not about to let the Syrian army roll back into their towns.

The sprawling eastern province of Deir Ezzor, a larger rural region bordering Iraq, provides a case study in how armed groups — even extremist ones — work to establish a foothold in an area. In the case of jihadists like Jabhat al-Nusra, it also provides some hints for how they could be forced out. Jabhat al-Nusra’s cadres currently coexist with local tribal leaders, who have taken up responsibility for maintaining law and order in the absence of the state. In the long run, however, there is no guarantee that these groups share the same ideology or long-term interests.

Even as fighting rages elsewhere in Syria, the war against Assad has already been won in much of Deir Ezzor, where I grew up. On Nov. 17, the regime’s forces were squeezed out of the district of Abu Kamal, near the Iraqi border, after the rebels successfully attacked Hamdan Air Base, the last bastion of the regime there. Rebels from various villages and towns then joined forces and overran an army base in the city of al-Mayadeen, seizing stockpiles of artillery. People are now going about the hard work of laying the groundwork for future governance.

Jabhat al-Nusra currently controls most of the vital sectors in Deir Ezzor, including oil, gas, sugar, and flour. Its source of funding is unclear, although I was told by residents that Gulf nationals with tribal links to the region support most of the fighting groups in the province. According to residents, the group’s local emirs are typically foreigners, while the majority of the rank-and-file are Syrians from the region. Many people are drawn to the group by virtue of its effectiveness in fighting the regime and delivering public services. [Continue reading…]

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Enough with the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ — it’s time to stop talking and thinking like five-year olds

Adam Serwer writes: At the National Rifle Association’s first press conference since the Newtown massacre that killed 27 people, most of them elementary school children, the gun lobby’s CEO Wayne LaPierre said the solution is more guns.

“There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people,” said LaPierre. He was talking about the entertainment industry, not groups such as the NRA that lobby for laws that allow people to get away with murder. Rolling out a list of 1990s-era conservative cultural shibboleths, LaPierre blamed a coarsening culture, and violence in movies, video games, and music for mass shootings — that is, everything but the deadly weapons the killers have used to slaughter people.

LaPierre’s “solution” is for Americans to arm themselves, and for the government to place armed guards at every public school in the country: “I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.” LaPierre did not note that Columbine High School had an armed guard when two students went on a murderous shooting rampage there in 1999, and that Virginia Tech had an armed police force with its own SWAT team equivalent when one of its students killed 33 people in 2007.

The head of the nation’s most powerful gun rights organization laid out a vision of a paramilitary America, where citizens are protected by armed guards until they are old enough to walk around with their own firearms on the off-chance they might need to pump a few rounds into a fellow citizen. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre.

Even if we don’t make a cognitive leap that few American leaders are willing to make — dispense with the cartoon imagery of a world populated by good guys and bad guys — the question, using LaPierre’s own terms, is: how to stop bad guys from getting guns?

As for LaPierre’s indictment of the American culture of violence, fed by movies and video games, this is a challenge not without merit. Even if effective regulations for gun control were put in place, one can still reasonably ask what kind of influence the media’s portrayals of violence have on the minds of young Americans who enter the military.

The blood shed in American schools is a small fraction of the blood shed overseas and whereas when it happens on this soil we are told that it was a bad guy who had his finger on the trigger, if it happens abroad the supposition is almost always that the bad guys got killed.

Sooner or later we will have to dispense with the good guy/bad guy narrative, and ask why killing people got so easy.

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Mudoch’s plan to steal the presidency and install Petraeus

Carl Bernstein writes: So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch’s ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America’s democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch’s goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.

Thus in the spring of 2011 – less than 10 weeks before Murdoch’s centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed – Fox News’ inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama’s expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign, according to the conversation between Petraeus and the emissary, K T McFarland, a Fox News on-air defense “analyst” and former spear carrier for national security principals in three Republican administrations.

All this was revealed in a tape recording of Petraeus’s meeting with McFarland obtained by Bob Woodward, whose account of their discussion, accompanied online by audio of the tape, was published in the Washington Post – distressingly, in its style section, and not on page one, where it belonged – and, under the style logo, online on December 3.

Indeed, almost as dismaying as Ailes’ and Murdoch’s disdain for an independent and truly free and honest press, and as remarkable as the obsequious eagerness of their messenger to convey their extraordinary presidential draft and promise of on-air Fox support to Petraeus, has been the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country’s political establishment, whether out of fear of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox – or, perhaps, lack of surprise at Murdoch’s, Ailes’ and Fox’s contempt for decent journalistic values or a transparent electoral process.

The tone of the media’s reaction was set from the beginning by the Post’s own tin-eared treatment of this huge story: relegating it, like any other juicy tidbit of inside-the-beltway media gossip, to the section of the newspaper and its website that focuses on entertainment, gossip, cultural and personality-driven news, instead of the front page.

“Bob had a great scoop, a buzzy media story that made it perfect for Style. It didn’t have the broader import that would justify A1,” Liz Spayd, the Post’s managing editor, told Politico when asked why the story appeared in the style section.

Buzzy media story? Lacking the “broader import” of a front-page story? One cannot imagine such a failure of news judgment among any of Spayd’s modern predecessors as managing editors of the Post, especially in the clear light of the next day and with a tape recording – of the highest audio quality – in hand.

“Tell [Ailes] if I ever ran,” Petraeus announces on the crystal-clear digital recording and then laughs, “but I won’t … but if I ever ran, I’d take him up on his offer. … He said he would quit Fox … and bankroll it.”

McFarland clarified the terms: “The big boss is bankrolling it. Roger’s going to run it. And the rest of us are going to be your in-house” – thereby confirming what Fox New critics have consistently maintained about the network’s faux-news agenda and its built-in ideological bias. [Continue reading…]

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The Mayan calendar did not predict the end of the world

A Mayan elder explains in more detail how the Mayan cyclical calendars worked.

It’s always worth being reminded that the real Americans inhabited this continent long before the Europeans arrived.

Tim Padgett writes: I once took a Classics professor friend of mine, a real Hellenophile, to the majestic Maya ruins of Palenque in southern Mexico. I wanted him to see why the Maya, thanks to their advanced astronomy, mathematics and cosmology, are considered the Greeks of the New World. As we entered the Palace there, my friend stopped, surprised, and said, “Corbel arches!” That’s the kind of precocious architecture you find at famous ancient Greek sites like Mycenae — and seeing it at Palenque made him acknowledge that maybe the Greeks could be considered the Maya of the Old World.

Today, Dec. 21, we’re all standing under those Corbel arches, celebrating one of civilization’s more sublime accomplishments, the Maya calendar. The 2012 winter solstice marks the end of a 5,125-year creation cycle and the hopeful start of another — and not the apocalyptic end that so many wing nuts rave about. (That comes next month, when our wing nuts in Washington send us over the fiscal cliff.) Understandably, this Maya milestone is a source of Latin American and especially Mexican pride. As teacher Jaime Escalante tells the Mexican-American kids he turns into calculus wizards in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver: “Did you know that neither the Greeks nor the Romans were capable of using the concept of zero? It was your ancestors, the Mayas, who first contemplated it…True story.”

But, unfortunately, most Americans ignore that record and focus on the doomsday nonsense that a crowd of pseudo-scholars has tied to the Maya calculations. It’s part and parcel of the western world’s condescending approach to pre-Columbian society—typified by the popular canard that if the Maya did rival the Greeks in any arena, then space aliens must have shown them how. It also reflects the maddening American disregard, if not disdain, for Mexico and Latin America, which persists even today as Escalante’s now grown-up Chicano students and the rest of the Latino community prove their political clout. So since today is all about new beginnings — and since Mexico itself is endeavoring a fresh start right now — we also ought to consider an overhaul of the tiresomely arrogant and indifferent way we look at the world south of the border. [Continue reading…]

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