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The American Public Understands Obama’s Position on Syria. They Just Disagree With It.

by nowabazaBS1 Posted on September 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent notes today the results of a new CNN poll: 82 percent of Americans believe that Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical weapons attack against his own people. Nonetheless, 59 percent are opposed to U.S. military action against Syria:

What this underscores, again, is that the case against Assad has already been made successfully, and that it isn’t enough. The White House has yet to persuade Americans to accept the underlying rationale behind strikes — that they would deter further attacks, or that the potential upsides of intervening, whatever they are, outweigh the potential risks.

I think that’s right. It’s not that Obama’s case is “muddled” or “weak,” or that people aren’t paying attention. They know what Assad has done, and they know why Obama wants to launch air strikes against him. They just don’t agree. This means that if Obama wants to win over public opinion, a more robust version of his current argument probably will move the needle only a little bit. He needs something different.

However, I’d also draw your attention to this:

The American public may be against air strikes, but generally speaking, they don’t really seem to care much. This is both good news and bad for Obama. The good news is that this means most Democrats won’t punish their representatives for voting for the war. The bad news is that most Republicans won’t punish them for voting against it. The other 42 percent say they might, though frankly I kind of doubt it. Still, I’d sure like to see some crosstabs that tell us the partisan makeup of the 31 percent who are more likely to vote for their representative if they’re against a military strike.

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The American Public Understands Obama’s Position on Syria. They Just Disagree With It.

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Obama’s Mixed Message on Syria

by Gerald234 Posted on September 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama has a tough task this week, as he seeks to win congressional support—particularly among his skeptical Democratic comrades—for a limited military strike on Syria in retaliation for the regime’s presumed use of chemical weapons. But as the White House tries to whip up support on Capitol Hill and within the public at large, it is conveying something of a mixed message.

On Monday morning, UN ambassador Samantha Power was on NPR, as part of the administration’s full-court press. A onetime journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for a gripping book on modern genocides, Power is a particularly effective spokesperson for Obama on an issue concerning mass murder and humanitarian imperatives. She was asked about GOP Rep. Tom Cole’s opposition to the resolution authorizing the president to strike Syria. Cole has argued that the Syria conflict is “particularly intractable and particularly nasty. It’s a war on many levels. A civil war, a religious war, a proxy war between the Iranians and the Saudis.” He contends that there is “no direct security threat to the United States” or its allies and that limited strikes “are not likely to work.” Power replied:

President Obama does not want to get involved in this conflict. He wants to degrade Assad’s capability of using his chemical weapons and affect his cost-benefit calculus because he will use again and again and again. And it’s only a matter time before these weapons will fall into the hands of nonstate actors, again imperiling some of our closest allies in the region, but also in the long term hurting the United States.

The key part of that answer was her assertion that the president seeks to stay out of the conflict in Syria. But that’s not what the resolution passed last week by the Senate foreign relations committee says. Section 5 of the resolution presents a “statement of policy”:

(a) CHANGING OF MOMENTUM ON BATTLEFIELD.—It is the policy of the United States to change the momentum on the battlefield in Syria so as to create favorable conditions for a negotiated settlement that ends the conflict and leads to a democratic government in Syria.

(b) DEGRADATION OF ABILITY OF REGIME TO USE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.—A comprehensive United States strategy in Syria should aim, as part of a coordinated international effort, to degrade the capabilities of the Assad regime to use weapons of mass destruction while upgrading the lethal and non-lethal military capabilities of vetted elements of Syrian opposition forces, including the Free Syrian Army.

And Section 6 of the resolution calls for the United States to work for a negotiated political settlement in Syria by providing “all forms of assistance to the Syrian Supreme Military Council and other Syrian entities opposed to the government of Bashar Al-Assad that have been properly and fully vetted and share common values and interests with the United States.”

Though these parts of the resolution are closer to recommendations than authorizations of specific actions, they do put the Obama administration on record as being involved in the conflict, if only by assisting one or more of the warring factions. And, of course, Obama in June authorized the CIA to covertly train and arm supposedly moderate rebel forces in Syria—though the CIA has reportedly not yet begun handing out weapons to opposition forces. (The program may soon be turned over to US special forces.)

So the United States is already involved in the conflict. When Power insists that the president does not want to get involved, what she really means is deeply involved (as in, with combat troops). This parsing shows how complicated the situation is, and how difficult it is for the White House to present a clear message. Obama wants to launch a military assault to deter Assad from the use of chemical weapons, but he doesn’t want to defeat Assad; he wants to steer clear of participation in the wider conflict, though he is providing support to players in that ongoing civil war. The White House can certainly defend such a policy, given the complexities of the situation, but it does contain a fair bit of yin and yang. No wonder many of his own Democrats have yet to rally to Obama’s call.

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Obama’s Mixed Message on Syria

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Meet the Man Confronting Iran’s "Chain Murders"

by Olesiacei Posted on September 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Among artists who defy totalitarian regimes, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is both magnificently and horrifically situated to convey how art can be used to confront oppression.

Since serving a one-year prison sentence in 2010 for attempting to make a film in support of the pro-reform Green movement, the 40-year-old has lived a paradoxical existence. On the one hand, he is a renowned director, the recipient of two top prizes from the Cannes Film Festival and a Hamburg fellowship that allowed him and his family to escape the country. On the other hand, he is “a man whose head is chopped off from his body,” as he put it recently at the 40th Telluride Film Festival in Colorado.

“My body may have been in Hamburg for the last few years,” said Rasoulof, “but my mind and heart—everything I think and want to feel—are in Iran. One thing I’m really afraid of is to be disconnected in that way for a long time. It’s the most fearful prospect I can think of.”

Rasoulof was in Telluride for the US premiere of his clandestinely made “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” his fifth feature. It could easily land him back Tehran’s notorious Evin prison if he were to return home. The film is based on the 1988-1998 Chain Murders, when a series (or chain) of more than 80 writers, translators, poets, political activists, and ordinary citizens were killed by government operatives for criticizing the Islamic Republic.

Mohammad Rasoulof

“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” is Rasoulof’s most realistic and directly political film so far, a significant departure from more allegorical and metaphorical movies like “Iron Island” (2005) and “The White Meadows” (2009). The story centers on a poet and novelist in Tehran who, in their quest to publish a book about one grizzly incident of the Chain Murders, are terrorized by a fellow intellectual turned state security henchman. The story is also about the working class purveyors of government terror, particularly a blank-faced man named Khosrow, whose day job as a murderer of dissident artists allows him to pay his ailing son’s hospital bills.

Rasoulof explains that the character of Khosrow was inspired by an experience in prison. Rasoulof’s habit is to get up every morning and drink a cool glass of water. That ritual ceased in prison. But one day, he woke and found his burning hot cell intolerable. Rasoulof rang the bell for the guard, asked for water, and was rebuked. When the next guard came on shift, he tried again. Not only did the second guard bring him a glass of water, he did so every time he arrived for work at the prison.

“I came to see that those working as the prison guards and executioners in this system are human, too,” Rasoulof said. “They don’t have horns. They aren’t animals. There must be some reason why they do what they do.”

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Meet the Man Confronting Iran’s "Chain Murders"

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Mitch McConnell: Want My Syria Position? Wait Till Next Week

by David Green Posted on September 6, 2013

Mother Jones

At an appearance Friday at the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spoke about the Syrian civil war and the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons on the Syrian people.

McConnell did not take a position on whether the US military should bomb Syria in response to the chemical weapons attacks. “This is a tough call. I think there are good arguments on both sides,” he said. The Kentucky senator told the audience he would announce his position on whether to bomb Syria next week.

McConnell did, however, delve a bit deeper into his views on the chemical weapons attack. “Use of chemical weapons against anybody, particularly against your own people, has been viewed for decades as simply unacceptable,” he said. That view is awfully close to President Obama’s position that the use of chemical weapons crosses a “red line” widely acknowledged by the international community.

In 2012, Obama said that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.” Earlier this week, Obama hedged that by saying, “I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line. The world set a red line when governments representing 98 percent of the world’s population said the use of chemical weapons are abhorrent and passed a treaty forbidding their use even when countries are engaged in war.”

What McConnell said at the Northern Kentucky Chamber is a boiled-down version of that statement. It remains a mystery whether McConnell will back strikes in Syria—and risk further inflaming his already hostile conservative base—or cast his lot with fellow Kentucky senator Rand Paul and oppose the strikes. We’ll have to wait until next week to find out.

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Mitch McConnell: Want My Syria Position? Wait Till Next Week

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Der Spiegel: Gas Attack Was a Gigantic Screw-Up

by Larry Daichea Posted on September 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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So why did Bashar al-Assad launch a chemical weapon attack in the first place? It’s a bit of mystery. McClatchy rounds up the evidence, including a new report from Der Spiegel about a phone call intercepted by German intelligence:

According to Der Spiegel, one of the parties in the intercepted phone call was a “high-ranking member of Hezbollah,” the militant Lebanese movement that’s sent fighters to support the Assad government. That Hezbollah member told the Iranian that “Assad had lost his temper and committed a huge mistake by giving the order for the poison gas use,” according to the magazine’s account.

The U.S. intelligence assessment reached a similar conclusion, finding that the alleged use of chemical weapons may have been in part because of “the regime’s frustration with its inability to secure large portions of Damascus.”

….The German account goes further than others that have been released recently in providing details of Assad’s state of mind that might have played a role in the motivation for launching a chemical attack, noting that Assad sees himself embroiled “in a crucial battle for Damascus.”

It also said Assad’s forces had used a highly diluted chemical agent in previous attacks on rebels and that the high death count Aug. 21 might have been the result of “errors made in the mixing of the gas” that made it “much more potent than anticipated.” That would be consistent with a suggestion from an Israeli official, cited by The New York Times, that the attack was “an operational mistake.”

So it was all one big FUBAR, launched by a sociopath who lost control of himself and then bungled by a military unit that was incompetent. And now we’re deciding what we ought to do about it.

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Der Spiegel: Gas Attack Was a Gigantic Screw-Up

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Would Bombing Syria Deter the Use of Chemical Weapons?

by Vladyslava7u1 Posted on September 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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The putative reason for air strikes on Syria is that we need to enforce international treaty norms against the use of chemical weapons. This is a fine justification, and I wish that Team Obama would stick to it instead of veering off into the kind of absurd fearmongering we’ve heard over the past few days. More and more, they sound like every two-bit political hack of the past century who’s whipped up war fever among the locals by haranguing them with sordid accounts of foreign barbarity, appealing relentlessly to national chauvinism, and scaring everyone with tales of atrocities that will surely visit the homeland if we don’t retaliate now now now. It’s sort of nauseating seeing the Obama administration haul out this age-old playbook.

But no matter how you feel about that, there’s still the argument that autocratic thugs need to be deterred from using chemical weapons. And it’s a good argument: autocratic thugs should be deterred from using chemical weapons. But even though I’d very much like to believe a strike on Syria would accomplish that, I’m having a pretty hard time convincing myself that it really would. The problem is that no matter how virtuously we view our own motives, and no matter how clear we think our message is, the rest of the world views things differently. They are much more cynical, and the message they’ll take away from air strikes is that the U.S. will punish the use of chemical weapons if:

  1. You are a small country that poses no real threat of retaliation;
  2. And we didn’t like you very much to begin with;
  3. And the current U.S. president happens to want to do it;
  4. And America’s current strategic alliances permit it.

Would American air strikes on Syria give the world’s tinpot thugs something to think about? Sure. And maybe you can say that every little nudge helps. But if we end up bombing Syria, I don’t think anyone would take away from it a belief that America will always and forever retaliate against any country that uses chemical weapons. That’s a pleasant fiction we might enjoy telling ourselves, but history doesn’t back it up and the rest of the world knows it.

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Would Bombing Syria Deter the Use of Chemical Weapons?

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Sheldon Adelson: I Stand With President Obama on Bombing Syria

by Benny Roye Posted on September 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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The debate over whether to bomb Syrian military facilities and weapons installations is creating some strange bedfellows. Among them: President Obama and Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

On Tuesday, the Republican Jewish Coalition, which counts Adelson as a donor and a board member, told its members to urge Congress to authorize a strike in Syria. A spokesman for Adelson, a top backer of pro-Israel causes, told Bloomberg News that the gambling mogul supported the coalition’s position—and thus Obama’s—on Syria.

Obama and Adelson are far from ideological allies. Adelson reportedly spent upwards of $150 million, in disclosed and dark money, to defeat Obama in last year’s presidential election. He and his wife, Miriam, almost single-handedly kept Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich in the running during the GOP primary season, giving $20.5 million to the pro-Gingrich super-PAC, Winning Our Future. Once Romney won the party’s nomination, Adelson and his wife poured $30 million more into Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney super-PAC. On election night, Adelson attended the Romney campaign’s party at the Westin hotel in Boston.

During the campaign, Adelson questioned Obama’s commitment to protecting Israel. “Time and again, President Obama has signaled a lack of sympathy—or even outright hostility—toward Israel,” Adelson wrote in an op-ed for JNS News Service. These days, Adelson seems to be feeling better about Obama’s foreign policy stance.

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Sheldon Adelson: I Stand With President Obama on Bombing Syria

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Kanye West Performs for a Dictator’s Family, and Human Rights Activists Are Livid

by Abe Johnson Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Trying to steal Taylor Swift’s thunder is no longer the most cringeworthy thing Kanye West has ever done.

Over the weekend, the hip-hop artist performed for a dictator’s kin. On Saturday, West was in Almaty (Kazakhstan’s largest city) performing at the wedding reception of Aisultan Nazarbayev, the 23-year-old grandson of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Nazarbayev has ruled the central Asian country for 23 years since its independence from the dissolved Soviet Union, and has come under fire by human rights organizations for his authoritarian tactics, including attacks on a free press, torture, torpedoing workers’ rights, and jailing the political opposition. (In 2011, Sting canceled a gig in Kazakhstan after Amnesty International got in touch with him about the human rights abuses.)

For his performance (which included a rendition of “Can’t Tell Me Nothing“), West reportedly received $3 million. Here’s a brief clip from the event:

A news agency in Kazakhstan reported that West was a personal guest of the controversial strongman. As you can imagine, human rights advocates aren’t thrilled about any of this.

“Kazakhstan is a human rights wasteland,” Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), said in a statement sent to Mother Jones. “The regime crushes freedom of speech and association; someone like Kanye, who makes a living expressing his views, would find himself in a prison under Nazarbayev’s rule.”

“The millions of dollars paid to West came from the loot stolen from the Kazakhstan treasury,” said Garry Kasparov, a noted critic of Vladimir Putin and chairman of HRF. “West has supported numerous charities throughout his career, including a few specifically focused on international human rights work. Kanye has entertained a brutal killer and his entourage…It’s up to the public to hold him accountable.”

West is now in the growing club of celebrities caught getting chummy with despots. In 2012, Kim Kardashian, the reality-TV socialite and mother of West’s child, is in it, too. In 2012, she traveled to Bahrain and generated positive press for a regime that was still taking heat for its bloody crackdown on political dissidents. (Following her arrival, Bahrain police were deployed to control “hard-line” Islamic protesters enraged at her presence.)

Earlier this summer, Jennifer Lopez was slammed by human rights groups for her paid performance at the lavish birthday bash of 56-year-old Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the human-rights-quashing dictator of Turkmenistan. Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Lionel Richie, and Usher had all danced and sung for relatives of the deceased Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi. Godfather of Soul James Brown and blues guitar legend B.B. King performed for Zaire president Mobutu Sese Seko, a vicious anti-communist tyrant. British supermodel Naomi Campbell was caught hanging out with Charles Taylor, a convicted war criminal and ex-president of Liberia. And the list goes on.

The human rights violations and internationally denounced actions of all the above can be found in five seconds on Google. Maybe famous people who don’t need the money—and the people they hire to vet their appearances—should use it more.

West’s publicist did not respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment.

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Kanye West Performs for a Dictator’s Family, and Human Rights Activists Are Livid

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Americans Are Really, Really Not Excited About Air Strikes on Syria

by agerere567 Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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The latest polls are pretty damn negative about air strikes on Syria. According to ABC News, only 36 percent support a strike. According to Pew, the number is even lower: only 29 percent of Americans support military action. And take a look at this question from the Pew poll:

Ouch. Big majorities think an air strike will lead to further escalation and create a backlash against the United States. And only a third think it will discourage the future use of chemical weapons. No wonder so few people support the air strikes. President Obama has a helluva sales job ahead of him.

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Americans Are Really, Really Not Excited About Air Strikes on Syria

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From the Fever Swamps: Obama Planned the Syrian Gas Attacks

by Myrna Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Are you ready for the next big right-wing conspiracy theory? Sure you are! Naturally it’s about Syria.

There have long been mutterings that the chemical attack in Ghouta was a false-flag operation. That is, the Syrian opposition actually carried out the attack, hoping that Bashar al-Assad would get blamed and President Obama would retaliate with a huge bombing campaign. But it’s just been mutterings. Today, though, Rush Limbaugh upped the ante, jabbering on air about an article by Yossef Bodansky titled “Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?”

Got that? Not just a false flag operation that snookered the idiot-in-chief, but an operation actually put in motion by the White House. Bodansky, an Assad sympathizer who has previously suggested that the 1995 Oklahoma bombing was orchestrated by Iran and that Saddam’s WMDs all ended up in Syria, tells a simple story. Starting on August 13, at a meeting between Syrian opposition leaders and representatives of Qatari, Turkish, and US intelligence, senior opposition commanders told everyone to expect “a war-changing development” which would soon lead to a U.S. bombing campaign in Syria. Shortly afterward, a huge cache of weapons was released to the rebels under the supervision of US intelligence, and they were told to get ready to use them. Sure enough, a few days later a major chemical attack took place and Assad got the blame:

The latest strategy formulation and coordination meetings took place on August 26, 2013. The political coordination meeting took place in Istanbul and was attended by US Amb. Robert Ford. More important were the military and operational coordination meetings at the Antakya garrison. Senior Turkish, Qatari, and US Intelligence officials attended in addition to the Syrian senior (opposition) commanders.

….The descriptions of these meetings raise the question of the extent of foreknowledge of US Intelligence, and therefore, the Obama White House….At the very least, they should have known that the opposition leaders were anticipating “a war-changing development”: that is, a dramatic event which would provoke a US-led military intervention.

Evidence is then laid out that Syrian rebels really did launch the chemical attack and Assad had nothing to do with it.

….How is that US Intelligence did not know in advance about the opposition’s planned use of chemical weapons in Damascus? It is a colossal failure. And if they did know and warned the Obama White House, why then the sanctimonious rush to blame the Assad Administration?

In summary: the Syrian opposition carried out the chemical attack, and they did it with the foreknowledge of the United States. Or maybe even worse: perhaps the United States actively coordinated the whole thing. As one eager Dittohead put it, “RUSH LIMBAUGH SAYS ADOLF OBAMA BEHIND NERVE GASSING OF SYRIANS!!!” That’s an exaggeration, of course. Rush is just saying it’s “a very possible scenario.” Like Hillary Clinton’s murder of Vince Foster.

This story hasn’t produced a flashing red siren from Drudge yet, so I suppose it doesn’t quite count as the fever swamp’s latest pet theory. But I imagine that’s coming soon.

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From the Fever Swamps: Obama Planned the Syrian Gas Attacks

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