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Syria, Russia, and Trump
I’m not sure how much news about Aleppo is filtering through the non-stop election coverage. Although my sense was that Gary Johnson did, indeed, know what Aleppo was (and just flubbed the question through some kind of inattention), that kind of inattention is only possible if the subject just isn’t something you think about all that much.
I don’t know whether he’s typical of American voters. It’s not something the next president will be able to ignore, though, that’s for sure. Aleppo’s now a hellscape reminiscent of the Battle of Stalingrad. Even by the horrifying standards of the Syrian war, the past week’s events Aleppo represent a new level of depravity. Russian and Syrian government airstrikes killed more than 300 people, most of them civilians and many of them children; more than 250,000 civilians are trapped. They’re under attack by the Syrian military and by thousands of foreign militiamen commanded by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah fighters, and Russian ground troops; and they’re under bombardment by heavy Russian and Syrian air power — the most sustained and intense bombardment since the beginning of the war. A genuine Axis of Evil, if anything ever was, has emerged from this. Most of the civilians are, according to the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, being killed by Russians. I don’t know how reliable they are, so take this with the usual caveats:
Meanwhile, Putin has formally resurrected the KGB itself:
According to the Russian daily Kommersant, a major new reshuffle of Russia’s security agencies is under way that will unite the FSB (the main successor agency to the KGB) with Russia’s foreign intelligence service into a new super-agency called the Ministry of State Security — a report that, significantly, wasn’t denied by the Kremlin or the FSB itself.
The new agency, which revives the name of Stalin’s secret police between 1943 and 1953, will be as large and powerful as the old Soviet KGB, employing as many as 250,000 people.
The creation of the new Ministry of State Security represents a “victory for the party of the Chekists,” said Moscow security analyst Tatyana Stanovaya, referring to the first Bolshevik secret police. The important difference is that, at its core, the reshuffle marks Putin’s asserting his own personal authority over Russia’s security apparatus. …
“On the night of September 18 to 19 … the country went from authoritarian to totalitarian,” wrote former liberal Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov on his Facebook page.
And the Ukrainian military is reporting the heaviest day of fighting since the latest attempt at a ceasefire came into effect on September 15.
Richard Cohen at the Washington Post, not exactly known as a Trump booster, is absolutely scathing about the Administration’s role in this:
This is not Kerry’s failure. It is Obama’s. He takes overweening pride in being the anti-George W. Bush. Obama is the president who did not get us into any nonessential wars of the Iraq variety. The consequences for Syria have been dire — perhaps 500,000 dead, 7 million internal refugees, with millions more surging toward Europe like a tsunami of the desperate.
European politics has been upended — Germany’s Angela Merkel is in trouble, Britain has bolted from the European Union, and Hungary and Poland are embracing their shameful pasts — but there is yet another casualty of this war, the once-universal perception that the United States would never abide the slaughter of innocents on this scale. Yet, we have. Obama has proclaimed doing nothing as doing something — lives saved, a quagmire avoided. But doing nothing is not nothing. It is a policy of its own, in this case allowing the creation of a true axis of evil: a gleeful, high-kicking chorus line of Russia, Iran and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. They stomp on everything in their path.
Aleppo then is like Guernica, a place of carnage. It’s also a symbol of American weakness. The same Putin who mucks around in Syria has filched U.S. emails and barged into the U.S. election. He has kept Crimea and a hunk of Ukraine and may decide tomorrow that the Baltics, once Soviet, need liberating from liberation. He long ago sized up Obama: all brain, no muscle.
All over the world, U.S. power is dismissed. The Philippine president, a volcanic vulgarian, called the president a “son of a whore” and, instead of doing an update of sending in the fleet, Obama canceled a meeting. China constructs synthetic islands in the Pacific Ocean, claiming shipping lanes that no one should own, and every once in a while a U.S. warship cruises close — but not too close. We pretend to have made a point. The Chinese wave and continue building. The North Koreans are developing a nuclear missile to reach Rodeo Drive, and God only knows what the Iranians are up to deep in their tunnels.
Does all this stem from Uncle Sam’s bended knee in Syria? Who knows? But U.S. reluctance to act has almost certainly given others resolve.
A question for those of you who plan to vote for Donald Trump. Your logic (I assume) is that Hillary Clinton is associated with Obama’s disastrous foreign policy, and should pay the price for this at the ballot box. If this were a normal election, who could disagree? But don’t you think that it isn’t a normal election? Unlike hapless Gary Johnson, Donald Trump almost certainly has no idea what Aleppo is, and he’s shown no desire or ability to learn. You saw it: He arrived at the debate as unprepared to discuss foreign policy as he was at the start of his campaign. And to the extent he has any coherent policy, it’s explicitly to make the Obama Administration’s foreign policy look interventionist by comparison.
Vladimir Putin not only supports Trump, but is almost certainly actively interfering with an American election with the aim of ushering him into office. Trump, as we saw in the debate, either doesn’t know this, or denies it, or doesn’t even understand what the relevant words mean:
As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said. We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t — maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?
You don’t know who broke in to DNC.
But what did we learn with DNC? We learned that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people, by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. That’s what we learned.
Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over.
We came in with the Internet, we came up with the Internet, and I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what [the Islamic State] is doing with the Internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS.
So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is — it is a huge problem. I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable.
Did that garbled speech make Trump-supporters here hesitate at all? “I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers?” We all know elderly, disoriented people who talk like that. In my experience people who talk like that can’t understand these things — it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that they don’t have the cognitive ability. How could Donald Trump possibly understand what people tell him about Russia and Syria, even if he did surround himself with “the best” advisors?
Do you see any sign that “the best” advisors are helping him to understand what he’d confront from his first minute in office? If so, what sign do you see that I don’t?
Published in General
Don’t be too sure. Many Libertarians don’t spend a lot of time thinking about international issues. I stomped out of the Libertarian Party after hearing the phrase “letters of marque and reprisal” once too often.
LOOOOOLLLL
I think you miss the point, we lack leaderahip at the political level not a military level, although I’m not sure about the millitary leadership either. The former chief of our defence force was given the Australian of the year award for talking about sexual harassment in the defence force, our defence force today is far more interested in political correctness than it is about fighting.
I just texted this to my Lib friend, but he may be on a Privateer,
Don’t worry. Everyone gets a lot less picky after the Draft.
Regarding Richard Cohen’s views in the Washington Post, I admit I haven’t the foggiest idea what he means in regard to Hungary and Poland. Besides being dominated by neighboring countries, I don’t know what about the past would be especially shameful for these two countries, and I know of no new trends in these lands returning them to such a past.
Perhaps I’m just ignorant of something that should be obvious, or maybe Mr Cohen wasn’t very disciplined in writing his opinion.
If Bram Stoker were alive now, Vlad Dracula would be the Charlemagne of Eastern Europe.
Dont know where to begin honestly, lets say I largely echo BDB’s emotions on this. The whole middle east outside of Israel is a complete sewer. Want to know why no one discusses it? We’re sick of it, We’re sick of its politics, we’re sick of its ungrateful populace, sick of its psychotic dictators, sick of the Anti-Semitism and Christian persecutions, sick of the medieval clerics and their stupid followers, and sick of the roving packs of gang-rapists and jihadis they export to the western world. And the rotten core, the WORST element of the middle east, is ISIS, its the purest essence of everything wrong with the place and with Islam. That’s who Putin is fighting. That’s who would control Syria now if Putin hadn’t gotten involved. I know the stacks of dead aren’t a good look but Im sorry but we have Putin to thank for stemming the tide and doing what no one else wanted to.
And you know if the US got involved that they’d have just as much a share in the kill count. In a modern war, with a high tech army with aerial capabilities against a guerilla-terrorist death squad who fight and hide among ordinary civilians, that’s how the count would always stack up. It was the same during the Iraq War (and Bush/Cheney got alot of bad PR for it), and its always a constant whenever Israel has to stop the latest Hamas insurgency.
But any leader of a nation with those capabilities to fight with would be stupid not to use them when the only alternative is a ground war with scores of their own dead.
Combat in the Middle-East is a 40 year sentence to very expensive Whack-A-Mole.
Perhaps strange only because we have been sleeping, and waking from our Western dream is difficult, especially as we have been morally and physically weakened, but there is nothing new under the sun. I appreciate your struggles. Carry on!
@dialmformurder except ISIS isn’t who Putin is bombing in Aleppo. It could be argued that rather fairly that letting the Syrian Civil war fester is what created the opening for ISIS which was not around when this war started back in 2011. It isn’t clear what if any plans they have for dealing with ISIS. In fact probably having ISIS there keeps the situation in such a position that Assad and Russia can claim that the choice is them or ISIS. But, as with WWII it doesn’t really matter how tiered and sick we are of these foreigners and their problems. The lesson of history is that their problems invariably become our problems and that solving them latter rather than sooner is always more painful and costly. Then we spend 50 years telling ourselves “never again” we have learner our lesson, and then we forget and start the whole darn thing all over again.
Hungary and Poland are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Both countries have parties and leaders elected by their own populations to have strong law-and-order and border-security positions. Protecting your borders and discriminating about who is allowed to migrate into your country was once an expected norm of every nation-state, but the left have now deemed that to be racist (though only if you’re mainly a white Christian/Jewish country of course, evryone else is still allowed to do it), and a treacherous shrew like Merkel is held up to be a saint.
You can tell that a columnist has gone off the deep-end and is to be disregarded if they trot out the “Hungary/Poland are reverting to their shameful past” line. Wrong and historically quite inaccurate. The mind boggles.
If the “Screw *.*” policy exists because, only through it, do we think that the interests of our own country are going to come first, I believe we’re doomed. To disappointment, if not worse.
Things didn’t get the way they are in *.* in the last ten minutes. For the last seven years, the USA has largely behaved in foreign policy matters like the negligent parents who, to spare themselves the work, left their relatively quiet toddlers to their own devices in the living room, only to finally check on them and find that they’ve broken everything in sight, they’ve taken their diapers off and smeared the contents all over the walls, they’ve hung the cat from the chandelier, and they’ve stuffed the family dog up the chimney.
So now, there’s a huge mess, that will take “someone” a huge effort to clean up.
Who’s at fault, and who should clean it up, or should anyone clean it up? Let the finger pointing begin.
Lucky for US, we have a chief architect of much of this
chaossmart policy running for President. Are you with Her?If not, there’s the other guy. He hires the best people. Then he ignores what they tell him, and does what he wants, because he knows better than anybody what to do. The results of this brilliant strategy were on full display on Monday night.
One, or the other, of them is going to inherit this mess, and is going to have to do something about it. Because, whether we like it or not, sooner or later (perhaps even now) what is happening in the rest of the world will matter here. So he or she will have to act.
And if there is anything more pathetic than the choice between these two, it is the
faint hopeoft-expressed belief that somehow “Congress” will keep one, or the other, of these woeful excuses for Presidential candidates in check when one of them inevitably wins and starts the wheels in motion.That would be the same Congress whose feckless behavior and ‘establishment’ ways caused millions of the electorate to shout “Screw *.*” in regard to over a dozen other “insider” political candidates, and got us to the point we are today. Fat chance Congress is going to save us now.
Wheee. I can’t wait. Heaven help us all.
This is looking too narrowly at a specific circumstance, though I agree that the conditions in the 1930s were peculiar to the 1930s and much, much different in many respects from today. Some arguments made elsewhere about Hitler and Trump are downright silly–and even offensive to me, despite being no fan of the Donald–because the context is so unrelated.
However, the inward turning isolationism of our America First candidate echoes the past, and I would argue it’s harder to ignore the rest of the world today than it was in the 1930s. Since we also don’t have the economic conditions of the Great Depression in our land, it is even more difficult to excuse our leaders when they simply put their heads in the sand about what’s happening abroad.
President Obama has been an ostrich in a way that is impossible to excuse.
But here we are, and where do we go now?
As a mother with a child in uniform, I find the choices deeply, deeply depressing. I find our penchant for electing commanders who have no relation to the military deeply, deeply disturbing. FDR had at least been Secretary of the Navy.
Per the rise of Putin… The collective Republican Party has lost all credibility to confront him because of the decision to make Trump the GOP’s champion.
I’ve never been more anxious.
The choice IS between them and ISIS
And ISIS certainly existed by the time Assad asked Putin for help in 2015, in fact ISIS had all the momentum and looked pretty certain to topple Assad by that point and control the country. As for not being clear, I have no idea how it can’t be clear. They’ve attacked Russia too you know. You’re suggesting that Putin wants ISIS around to destabilise his ally? What do you have to back this up because, to be polite, you’re a very long way from convincing me…
When the coup against Erdogan failed, the Obama administration and many in the US media (including, I believe, Claire Berlinski) said it was a victory for democratically elected governments and the rule of law.
Aren’t both Erdogan and Putin quasi-dictators? But only emphasizing that Putin is a dictator right now will hurt the Trump candidacy. I’m not saying the fear of a Trump/Putin alliance are overblown, by the way.
There is a whole lot’s conflation go’in on. Johnson (he was stoned – look at the video he had no idea what an “Aleppo” was), Trump, Putin, KGB, and Hillary. Hmmm?
When lots and lots of stuff is conflated and charts of dead civilians are tossed in, I am thinking there is not a convincing strategy being put forth.
This is a word salad of emotional inference. I accept it and I accept your sincerity – and you may be right.
What would Trump do? Heck, I don’t know. But my emotional inference is this, he won’t toss American soldiers around like pawns. He will want to work really, really smart and not get caught. He will take his enemies down a peg before the negotiations. He will play the audience, and bide for time.
Hillary will do the same -and claim it is complex, oh so complex.
The case against Trump was not made here, though there are plenty of reasons to oppose him, excerpts from a debate are not clearly one of them. Hillary had her moments of senility or imbecility too.
One other thing, Trump talks a kind of Queen’s mishmash of you-know, really-really bad, sad, yuuuge, and fantastik, that most of us can’t follow. I worked in NYC and have heard this staccato before and it starts to make sense if you are around it a while.
He is play acting like a guy at a bar on the Upper East Side right before last call pretending to be a Presidential candidate. Neither you nor we can say what he will do. That. It is not a reason to vote for Hillary. You can’t tell me what she will do either.
Thank you so much for your family’s sacrifice so we idiots can volley opinions back and forth as if they meant more than a fart. I’m terribly sorry if I was being flip, I work with Vets and reading people’s armchair tactical plans tends to make me impudent. You are apt with your diagnosis. Thank you again for your Family’s service.
First, Trump and Hillary are both dangerously incompetent in skill, intellect and personality to lead a bake sale, let alone a country. However, if you are insinuating that Johnson is better because you think he only flubbed the Aleppo question, I would be skeptical. He has shown himself to be just as un-serious, undisciplined and stupid as the rest. Which brings me to my second point on America’s understanding of Alleppo.
I made the very poorly worded comment on one of your posts a few months back that Syria bored me. More accurately, I think that I and most other Americans just don’t have the stamina for the nearly non-stop barrage of hate, evil, terror and violence that has gnawed at our souls since 911. What I see on a daily basis, is various individuals and groups working through the stages of grief. BLM is at the anger stage, Trump and Hillary fans are at the bargaining stage and so on. It is like going to a mother who lost her son in the Iraq War and is now dealing with a cancer diagnosis and asking her how the tragedy of Syria is affecting her. None of us have an endless reserve of such emotion and frankly, very few see Syrians as innocent hopeless victims.
We are not their parents and they are not toddlers.
Well, I disagree. Excerpts from a debate clearly are “one of them.”
There are plenty of others from Donald “I know more about ISIS than the generals” Trump, though.
And not room enough here to list them all.
As for Hillary’s ‘imbecility,’ I’m afraid I take Marco Rubio’s part, in the disastrous comment he made at one of the primary debates. She “knows exactly what she is doing.”
She’s just not a very good candidate, is all.
Nonsense. That is unadulterated Kremlin propaganda.
Oh goodness. How am I supposed to take you seriously when you make comparisons like this, Claire? Stalingrad involved over 2 million combatants and nearly 2 million dead, wounded and captured (including civilian casualties). If you wanted to say a hellscape reminiscent of Fallujah, or Mogadishu, you’d be closer to the mark. Which brings us to @balldiamondball ‘s point – it gets better if Americans start killing people too?
Oh good she knows what she is doing, thank goodness. She certainly as Sec State helped us with the Syria problem. So the current state of Libya was on purpose?
It is simply a metaphor for what happens when people with limited, or no, or faulty, judgment are left to their own devices. Understand it as literally as you like, or understand it with some latitude, or think of a better one.
The situation is what it is. And like it or not, we need to comprehend its implications and the consequences of action, or inaction, on our part.
Because there will be consequences, for either course. Merely sticking our fingers in our ears and going “LALALALALA! I can’t hear you,” will not avert them.
So far, I am not at all reassured that either Presidential candidate is thinking beyond what he or she needs to say to get elected, consequences be damned.
And they probably will be, no matter which way it goes.
And NYT, vice.com and politco are objective news?
…and yes, he does happen to be fighting Isis and associates on the side of Assad, his ally. I never mentioned motives, obviously he has a strategic interest but so does everyone in war.
But call whatever doesn’t fit your narrative propaganda. You’ve got all the answers obviously.
Let’s say this hyperbole has any validity at all and millions do die. Atlas has to shrug at some point and what better place to side step an atrocity than a crap hole with zero reason for our soldiers to die over.
By all means we should avoid the shrill estrogenless harridan whose foreign influences and unstable temper will decide when and where she will kill our soldiers ….all without a shred of care for those “pigs” in uniform.
Let’s avoid this woman and her serial killer’s soul. I’ll take the buffoon with cajones and his 10 yr old cyber whiz kid over The Blood Countess.
Do you believe that the current President is an incompetent fool, or do you think that he is deliberately engaging in a strategy to diminish and undermine the role and status of the United States and its unique and Western values in the world and at home? (Hint: “Both of these things” is one acceptable answer to this question).
In other words, do you think he “knows what he is doing?”
The answer to your own question may like there.
Of course she “knows what she is doing.” I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, or that, like many, you just think I’m a dunderhead (no need to follow up on this, it doesn’t matter, either way), but I stand by my comment. And I am sorry that Marco Rubio’s insistence that Barack Obama is cognizant of the havoc that he wreaks, and that he intends most of it, went a long way to costing Rubio the nomination. We’re paying for that, and many other things, now.
Unfortunately, not all those who “know what they are doing,” use that knowledge, or their power, for good. History shows us that over and over again.
And merely commenting that someone is self-aware enough to be engaging in deliberately destructive acts does not constitute approbation or endorsement of those acts, or support of that person. Sometimes, quite the reverse.