In Syria, other people’s history from lands near and far is repeating itself — not as farce but as a parody. Developments in Syria in 2019 are an ironic imitation of Iraq in 2003 and Ukraine in 2014.

Consider US President Donald Trump’s comments that a small number of US troops would remain in Syria to secure “the Oil.”

The 1,000-person US contingent in north-eastern Syria had been suddenly pulled back by Trump, effectively green-lighting the October 9 Turkish invasion of Kurdish-controlled territory. Trump, who had paid no heed to the threatened massacre of the Kurdish fighters, was brazen enough to nominate Syrian oil as worthy of the United States’ tender care.

Accordingly, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper assured that US troops would be stationed around unspecified oil areas in Syria “to deny access, specifically revenue to [the Islamic State] ISIS and any other groups that may want to seek that revenue to enable their own malign activities.”

Then the US president suggested “some of our big oil companies” could move in “and do it properly,” by which he probably meant extracting the black gold and selling it for a handsome profit.

Minus the audacious public acknowledgement that Middle Eastern oil matters more to US politicians than human lives, it might have been Iraq 2003 all over again.

When US forces rolled into central Baghdad in April 2003, they quickly took charge of Iraq’s massive Oil Ministry. Unlike other public buildings, including the National Museum, that were left unguarded and ransacked, the Oil Ministry was guarded by approximately 50 tanks and strategically positioned sharpshooters. It was clearly meant to secure the oil. The only difference is that US President George W. Bush wasn’t indiscreet enough to say as much.

Then there is Turkey’s invasion of Syrian territory. It is reminiscent of Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 but with one crucial difference. When Russia intervened militarily in Crimea, it provoked international outrage. Crippling sanctions were imposed by the United States and the European Union and Russia’s relations with the West were ruptured. Not so with Turkey.

All signs suggest Ankara may just get away with it. On October 23, Trump lifted sanctions against Turkey, commending its promise of a “permanent ceasefire” in north-eastern Syria.

Meanwhile, the Europeans have been crying foul but not with one voice and not as furiously as over Russia’s Crimean adventure.

German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer called out Turkey — “our NATO partner” — for having “annexed territory in violation of international law.” She wants NATO defence ministers to consider a controversial proposal to deploy international troops to establish a security zone in north-eastern Syria but the chances of any of this coming to pass are slim.

Under terms of the deal negotiated in Sochi on October 22 by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkey has de facto control of the area it has taken in Syria.

The focus of the 6-hour Erdogan-Putin talks, the Kremlin said, was about “normalising the situation” in north-eastern Syria. It’s something Putin strived mightily to do in Crimea through a combination of megaprojects and maximum pressure on the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic Muslim community, among others. What will be deemed normal in the Turkish-annexed part of Syria is likely to be just as arbitrary as in Russified Crimea.

However, for all the echoes of the past, events in Syria are playing out in a very different context to what went before. Putin’s Russia, swaggering and newly enshrined as the main non-regional powerbroker, continues in its usual way — unashamedly transactional with short-term friends who serve its long-term interests. Now it is also served by Trump’s America, a risible figure on the world stage, compared to the once sober, if heavy-handed protector of the international order.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2019
Word Count: 630
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Some anniversaries are less about the past than the future. So it should be with November 9, 1989. In case you’ve long forgotten, that was the day when East and West Germans began nonviolently dismantling the Berlin Wall, an entirely unpredicted, almost unimaginable ending to the long-entrenched Cold War. Think of it as the triumph of idealistic hope over everything that then passed for hard-nosed “realism.” After all, Western intelligence services, academic Kremlinologists, and the American national security establishment had always blithely assumed that the Cold War would essentially go on forever — unless the absolute malevolence of Soviet Communism led to the ultimate mayhem of nuclear Armageddon. For almost half a century, only readily dismissed peaceniks insisted that, in the nuclear age, war and endless preparations for more of it were not the answer. When the Berlin Wall came down, such idealists were proven right, even if their triumph was still ignored.

Yet war-as-the-answer reasserted itself with remarkable rapidity. Within weeks of the Wall being breached by hope — in an era that saw savage conflicts in Central America, the Philippines, and South Africa transformed by a global wave of nonviolent resolution — the United States launched Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama by a combat force of more than 27,000 troops. The stated purpose of that act of war was the arrest of Panama’s tinhorn dictator Manuel Noriega, who had initially come to power as a CIA asset. That invasion’s only real importance was as a demonstration that, even with global peace being hailed, the world’s last remaining superpower remained as committed as ever to the hegemony of violent force.

Who ended the Cold War? While President George H.W. Bush rushed to claim credit for ending the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev was the lynchpin of that historic conclusion. It was he who, in the dramatic autumn of 1989, repeatedly ordered Communist forces to remain in their barracks while throngs of freedom-chanters poured into the streets of multiple cities behind the Iron Curtain. Instead of blindly striking out (as the leaders of crumbling empires often had), Gorbachev allowed democratic demands to echo through the Soviet empire — ultimately even in Russia itself.

Yet the American imagination was soon overtaken by the smug fantasy that the U.S. had “won” the Cold War and that it was now a power beyond all imagining. Never mind that, in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan issued his famed demand in then still-divided Berlin, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the Soviet leader was already starting to do precisely that.

As the wall came down, the red-scare horrors that had disturbed American dreams for three generations seemed to dissolve overnight, leaving official Washington basking in triumphalism. The U.S. then wrapped itself in a self-aggrandizing mantle of virtue and power that effectively blinded this country’s political leadership to the ways the Cold War’s end had left them mired in an outmoded, ever more dangerous version of militarism.

After Panama, the self-styled “indispensable nation” would show itself to be hell-bent on unbridled — and profoundly self-destructive — belligerence. Deprived of an existential enemy, Pentagon budgets would decline oh-so-modestly (though without a “peace dividend” in sight) but soon return to Cold War levels. A bristling nuclear arsenal would be maintained as a “hedge” against the comeback of Soviet-style communism. Such thinking would, in the end, only empower Moscow’s hawks, smoothing the way for the future rise of an ex-KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. Such hyper-defensive anticipation would prove to be, as one wag put it, the insurance policy that started the fire.

Even as the disintegration of the once-demonized USSR was firmly underway, culminating in the final lowering of the hammer-and-sickle flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, the United States was launching what would prove to be a never-ending and disastrous sequence of unnecessary Middle Eastern wars. They began with Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990. In American memory, that campaign, which crushed the Iraqi autocrat’s army and forced it out of Kuwait, would be a techno-war made in heaven with fewer than 200 U.S. combat deaths.

That memory, however, fits poorly with what was actually happening that year. An internationally mounted sanctions regime had already been on the verge of thwarting Hussein without the U.S.-led invasion — and, of course, what Bush the father began, Bush the son would, with his 2003 shock-and-awe recapitulation, turn into the permanent bedrock of American politics. 

As the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War approaches, it should be obvious that there’s been a refusal in the United States to reckon with a decades-long set of conflagrations in the Greater Middle East as the inevitable consequence of that first American invasion in 1990. Above all, Desert Storm, with its monumental victory parade in Washington D.C., brought the Pentagon’s Cold War raison d’être back from the brink of obsolescence. That campaign and what followed in its wake guaranteed that violence would continue to occupy the heartlands of the U.S. economy, its politics, and its culture. In the process, the world-historic aspirations kindled by the miracle of the Berlin Wall’s dismantling would be thoroughly dashed. No wonder, so many years later, we hardly remember that November of hope — or the anniversary that goes with it.

Out of the memory hole By revisiting its astonishing promise as the anniversary approaches, however, and by seeing it more fully in light of what made it so surprising, perhaps something of that vanished positive energy can still be retrieved. So let me call to mind the events of various earlier Novembers that make the point. What follows is a decade-by-decade retracing of the way the war machine trundled through recent history — and through the American psyche — until it was finally halted in a battle-scarred, divided city in the middle of Europe, stopped by an urge for peace that refused to be denied.

Let’s start with November 1939, only weeks after the German invasion of Poland that began what would become World War II. A global struggle between good and evil was just then kicking into gear. Unlike the previous Great War of 1914-1918, which was fought for mere empire, Hitler’s war was understood in distinctly Manichaean terms as both apocalyptic and transcendent. After all, the moral depravity of the Nazi project had already been laid bare when Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes everywhere in Germany were subject to the savagery of Kristallnacht, or “the night of broken glass.” That ignition of what became an anti-Jewish genocide took place, as it happened, on November 9, 1938.

The good-versus-evil absolutism of World War II stamped the American imagination so profoundly that a self-righteous moral dualism survived not only into the Cold War but into Washington’s twenty-first-century war on terror. In such contests against enemies defined as devils, Americans could adopt the kinds of ends-justify-the-means strategies called for by “realism.” When you are fighting along what might be thought of as an axis of evil, anything goes — from deceit and torture to the routine sacrifice of civilians, whose deaths in America’s post-9/11 wars have approached a total of half a million. Through it all, we were assured of one certain thing: that God was on our side. (“God is not neutral,” as George W. Bush put it just days after the 9/11 attacks.)

From genocide to omnicide But what if God could not protect us? That was the out-of-the-blue question posed near the start of all this — not in August 1945 when the U.S. dropped its “victory weapon” on two cities in Japan, but in August 1949 when the Soviet Union acquired an atomic bomb, too. By that November, the American people were already in the grip of an unprecedented nuclear paranoia, which prompted President Harry Truman to override leading atomic scientists and order the development of what one called a “genocidal weapon,” the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Then came the manic build-up of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to proportions suitable less for genocide than for “omnicide.” Such weapons mushroomed (if you’ll excuse the word in a potentially mushroom-clouded world) from fewer than 200 in 1950 to nearly 20,000 a decade later. Of course, that escalation, in turn, drove Moscow forward in a desperate effort to keep up, leading to an unhinged arms race that turned the suicide of the human species into a present danger, one measured by the Doomsday Clock, of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was set at two minutes to midnight in 1953 — and then again in 2019, all these Novembers later.

Now, let’s flash forward another decade to November 1959 when the mortal danger of human self-extinction finally became openly understood, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began issuing blatant threats of nuclear war over — you guessed it — Berlin. Because part of that city, far inside Communist East Germany, was still occupied by American, French, and British forces, it amounted to a tear in what was then called the Iron Curtain, separating the Soviet empire from Western Europe. With thousands fleeing through that tear to the so-called Free World, the Soviets became increasingly intent on shutting the escape hatch, threatening to use the Red Army to drive the Allies out of Berlin. That brought the possibility of a nuclear conflict to the fore.

Ultimately, the Communists would adopt a quite different strategy when, in 1961, they built that infamous wall, a concrete curtain across the city. At the time, Berliners sometimes referred to it, with a certain irony, as the “Peace Wall” because, by blocking escape from the East, it made the dreaded war between the two Cold War superpowers unnecessary. Yet within a year the unleashed prospect of such a potentially civilization-ending conflict had hopscotched the globe to Communist Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 caused the world to shudder as incipient nuclear war between Washington and Moscow suddenly loomed. That moment, just before Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy stepped back from doomsday, might have changed something; a relieved world’s shock of recognition, that is, might have thrown the classic wooden shoe of sabotage into the purring engine of “realism.” No such luck, however, as the malevolent power of the war state simply motored on — in the case of the United States directly into Vietnam.

By November 1969, President Richard Nixon’s cynical continuation of the Vietnam War for his own political purposes had already driven the liberal-conservative divide over that misbegotten conflict into the permanent structure of American politics. The ubiquitous “POW/MIA: You Are Not Forgotten” flag survives today as an icon of Nixon’s manipulations. Still waving over ball parks, post offices, town halls, and VFW posts across the nation, that sad black banner now flies as a symbol of red state/blue state antagonism — and as a lasting reminder of how we Americans can make prisoners of ourselves.

By 1979, with the Vietnam War in the past, President Jimmy Carter showed how irresistible November’s tide — the inexorable surge toward war — truly was. It was in November of that year that militant Iranian students overran the American embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage — the event that was credited with stymying the formerly peace-minded president. In reality, though, Carter had already initiated the historic anti-Soviet arms build-up for which President Ronald Reagan would later be credited.

Then, of course, Carter would ominously foreshadow America’s future reversals in the deserts of the Levant with a failed rescue of those hostages. Most momentously, however, he would essentially license future Middle East defeats with what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine — the formally declared principle that the Persian Gulf (and its oil) were “vital interests” of this country, worthy of defense “by any means necessary, including military force.” (And of course, his CIA would lead us into America’s first Afghan War, still in a sense going on some 40 years later.)

Retrieving hope? Decade by decade, the evidence of an unstoppable martial dynamic only seemed to accumulate. In that milestone month of November 1989, Washington’s national security “realists” were still stuck in the groove of such worst-case thinking. That they were wrong, that they would be stunned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union, should mandate thoughtful observance of this coming 30th anniversary.

During the late 1980s, a complex set of antiwar and antinuclear countercurrents seemed to come out of nowhere. Each of them should have been impossible. The ruthlessly totalitarian Soviet system should not have produced in Mikhail Gorbachev a humane statesman who sacrificed empire and his own career for the sake of peace. The most hawkish American president in history, Ronald Reagan, should not have responded to Gorbachev by working to end the arms race with him — but he did.

Pressuring those two leaders to pursue that course — indeed, forcing them to — was an international grassroots movement demanding an end to apocalyptic terror. People wanted peace so much, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower had predicted in 1959, that, miracle of all miracles, governments got out of their way and let them have it. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall that November 9th — a transformation accomplished by ordinary citizens, not soldiers — the political realm of the possible was substantially broadened, not only to include prospective future detente among warring nations, but an eventual elimination of nuclear weapons themselves.

Yet, in November 2019, all of that seems lost. A new Cold War is underway, with East-West hostilities quickening; a new arms race has begun, especially as the United States renounces Reagan-Gorbachev arms-control agreements for the sake of a trillion-plus dollar “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal. Across the globe, democracy is in retreat, driven by pressures from both populist nationalism and predatory capitalism. Even in America, democracy seems imperiled. And all of this naturally prompts the shudder-inducing question: Were the worst-case realists right all along?

This November anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall should offer an occasion to say no to that. The Wall’s demise stopped in its tracks the demonic dynamic set in motion on the very same date in 1938 by that Kristallnacht. If idealistic hope could so triumph once, it can so triumph again, no matter what the die-hard realists of our moment may believe. I’ve referred to that November in Berlin as a miracle, but that is wrong. The most dangerous face-off in history ended not because of the gods or good fortune, but because of the actions and efforts of human beings. Across two generations, countless men and women — from anonymous community activists and union organizers to unsung military officials, scientists, and even world leaders — overcame the seemingly endless escalations of nuclear-armed animus to make brave choices for peace and against a war of annihilation, for life and against death, for the future and against the doom-laden past.

It can happen again. It must.

James Carroll writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article orginated). He is a former Boston Globe columnist, the author of 20 books, most recently the novel The Cloister. His history of the Pentagon, House of War, won the PEN-Galbraith Award. His Vietnam War memoir, An American Requiem, won the National Book Award. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Copyright ©2019 James Carroll — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2019
Word Count: 2,476
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Why are so many Republicans lying so much about the history-making House investigation into impeachable offenses by the president of the United States?

That, to me, is the central question behind yesterday’s publicity stunt by more than 30 House Republicans who broke federal law by barging into a secured room at the Capitol, delaying testimony by a Pentagon official for the coming House inquiry.

These Republicans did not defend Donald Trump on the strength of the evidence for or against the president but instead railed against due process itself. Arizona’s Andy Biggs exemplified their absurd complaint. He said: “This morning, I joined dozens of my colleagues to storm Adam Schiff’s secret, Soviet-style, Stalinist chamber to demand truth, transparency, and due process. We may have received threats for attempting to hear from today’s witness, but we are more resolved than ever to fight.”

That sounds damning — or it would if it were true. It’s a lie, all of it. The truth: every committee involved in the impeachment process — intelligence, oversight, judiciary, and finance — all of them have Republican members sitting on them. Yes, all of them. That’s how Congress works. And everyone knows this. Every Republican knows this. Their media allies know this. Because they do, we know for sure that the Wednesday editorial in New York Post asking what Democrats are hiding is a malicious lie.

The Republicans are indeed in the minority. They don’t control scheduling and other procedural matters in their respective committees. But we’re talking about dozens of GOP members with complete access to all the information the Democrats have access to. They have a say in how things are done. None of this is unfolding in secret. And yet the Republicans are attacking the process itself, claiming it’s rigged against Trump.

What are they hiding? asked House Minority Whip Steve Scalise after they “stormed” a closed-door session in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, where sensitive national security developments are discussed.) “Through those hidden, closed doors over there, Adam Schiff is trying to impeach a president of the United States. Behind closed doors. Literally trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election, a year before Americans get to go to the polls to decide who’s going to be the president.”

Steve Scalise continued: “Maybe in the Soviet Union, this kind of thing is commonplace. This shouldn’t be happening in the United States of America, where they’re trying to impeach a president in secret … The American people deserve better.”

Now that you know the truth — that Republicans have been sitting on impeachment committees from the beginning — you know that these Republicans were in fact protesting other Republicans. In fact, some of these “protesters” actually sit on the committees they were “protesting,” so they were “protesting” themselves! You also know that every single one of Scalise’s words, including “a” and “the,” was a lie, and that every word dripped with contempt for people uninformed about due process.

Moreover, since you now know the truth, you can see that Scalise was projecting. He accused his enemies of behaving exactly the way he and the Republicans are behaving, which is exactly the way totalitarians have behaved in history — they maligned norms and institutions by portraying them as decadent, immoral, corrupt or even criminal.

But again — nothing is being done in secret. The Democrats are following a set of House rules last updated in 2015 and adopted by a majority of House members under then-House Speaker John Boehner. Testimony is happening for now behind closed doors because it involves serious matters of national security. Everyone, though, will hear all the evidence once all the evidence has been collected. But this gang of Republicans objects to evidence-gathering because they know it’s damning. They are throwing fistfuls of lies in our faces in order to distract us from the emerging truth.

Recall the timing of this stunt. The “protest” happened Wednesday. On Tuesday, William Taylor, who was picked by the president to be the US diplomat to Ukraine, confirmed in testimony that Trump did indeed hold up military aid to that country with the explicit demand that Ukraine’s leader announce publicly that he would investigate Trump’s domestic opponents. That, as they say, is the smoking gun. Or as one Democrats put it, there’s a “smoking gun sitting on top of a smoking gun.”

Fortunately, neither the Democrats nor the press corps appears to be taking the bait. The Republicans really did commit a felony by entering the Capitol’s SCIF with smartphones in hand. They should have been arrested (and later prosecuted), but according to Fox News, that’s what they wanted. They wanted to be photographed being frog-walked out of the building, as if they were martyrs to justice. Accomplices to obstruction of justice is more like it. In any case, the press corps is viewing the stunt through the correct lens. NBC News said the Republicans are running out of ways to defend Trump. The Washington Post used the words “frantic” and “disjointed.”

Perhaps the Republicans really were protesting other Republicans. Maybe this spectacle was intended for Senators sitting on the fence more than devotees of Fox News. After all, House Republicans are doomed if Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, decides the Senate’s fate is no longer in line with the president’s. He has already signaled that Trump is toast if he threatens McConnell’s control of that chamber.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 October 2019
Word Count: 898
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When Americans think of militarism, they may imagine jackbooted soldiers goose-stepping through the streets as flag-waving crowds exult; or, like our president, they may think of enormous parades featuring troops and missiles and tanks, with warplanes soaring overhead. Or nationalist dictators wearing military uniforms encrusted with medals, ribbons, and badges like so many barnacles on a sinking ship of state. (Was Donald Trump only joking recently when he said he’d like to award himself a Medal of Honor?) And what they may also think is: that’s not us. That’s not America. After all, Lady Liberty used to welcome newcomers with a torch, not an AR-15. We don’t wall ourselves in while bombing others in distant parts of the world, right?

But militarism is more than thuggish dictators, predatory weaponry, and steely-eyed troops. There are softer forms of it that are no less significant than the “hard” ones. In fact, in a self-avowed democracy like the United States, such softer forms are often more effective because they seem so much less insidious, so much less dangerous. Even in the heartland of Trump’s famed base, most Americans continue to reject nakedly bellicose displays like phalanxes of tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.

But who can object to celebrating “hometown heroes” in uniform, as happens regularly at sports events of every sort in twenty-first-century America? Or polite and smiling military recruiters in schools? Or gung-ho war movies like the latest version of Midway, timed for Veterans Day weekend 2019 and marking America’s 1942 naval victory over Japan, when we were not only the good guys but the underdogs?

What do I mean by softer forms of militarism? I’m a football fan, so one recent Sunday afternoon found me watching an NFL game on CBS. People deplore violence in such games, and rightly so, given the number of injuries among the players, notably concussions that debilitate lives. But what about violent commercials during the game? In that one afternoon, I noted repetitive commercials for SEAL Team, SWAT, and FBI, all CBS shows from this quietly militarized American moment of ours. In other words, I was exposed to lots of guns, explosions, fisticuffs, and the like, but more than anything I was given glimpses of hard men (and a woman or two) in uniform who have the very answers we need and, like the Pentagon-supplied police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, are armed to the teeth. (“Models with guns,” my wife calls them.)

Got a situation in Nowhere-stan? Send in the Navy SEALs. Got a murderer on the loose? Send in the SWAT team. With their superior weaponry and can-do spirit, Special Forces of every sort are sure to win the day (except, of course, when they don’t, as in America’s current series of never-ending wars in distant lands).

And it hardly ends with those three shows. Consider, for example, this century’s update of Magnum P.I., a CBS show featuring a kickass private investigator. In the original Magnum P.I.that I watched as a teenager, Tom Selleck played the character with an easy charm. Magnum’s military background in Vietnam was acknowledged but not hyped. Unsurprisingly, today’s Magnum is proudly billed as an ex-Navy SEAL.

Cop and military shows are nothing new on American TV, but never have I seen so many of them, new and old, and so well-armed. On CBS alone you can add to the mix Hawaii Five-O (yet more models with guns updated and up-armed from my youthful years), the three NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) shows, and Blue Bloods (ironically starring a more grizzled and less charming Tom Selleck) — and who knows what I haven’t noticed? While today’s cop/military shows feature far more diversity with respect to gender, ethnicity, and race compared to hoary classics like Dragnet, they also feature far more gunplay and other forms of bloody violence.

Look, as a veteran, I have nothing against realistic shows on the military. Coming from a family of first responders — I count four firefighters and two police officers in my immediate family — I loved shows like Adam-12 and Emergency! in my youth. What I’m against is the strange militarization of everything, including, for instance, the idea, distinctly of our moment, that first responders need their very own version of the American flag to mark their service. Perhaps you’ve seen those thin blue line flags, sometimes augmented with a red line for firefighters. As a military veteran, my gut tells me that there should only be one American flag and it should be good enough for all Americans. Think of the proliferation of flags as another soft type of up-armoring (this time of patriotism).

Speaking of which, whatever happened to Dragnet’s Sergeant Joe Friday, on the beat, serving his fellow citizens, and pursuing law enforcement as a calling? He didn’t need a thin blue line battle flag. And in the rare times when he wielded a gun, it was a .38 Special. Today’s version of Joe looks a lot more like G.I. Joe, decked out in body armor and carrying an assault rifle as he exits a tank-like vehicle, maybe even a surplus MRAP from America’s failed imperial wars.

Militarism in the USA Besides TV shows, movies, and commercials, there are many signs of the increasing embrace of militarized values and attitudes in this country. The result: the acceptance of a military in places where it shouldn’t be, one that’s over-celebrated, over-hyped, and given far too much money and cultural authority, while becoming virtually immune to serious criticism.

Let me offer just nine signs of this that would have been so much less conceivable when I was a young boy watching reruns of Dragnet:

1. Roughly two-thirds of the federal government’s discretionary budget for 2020 will, unbelievably enough, be devoted to the Pentagon and related military functions, with each year’s “defense” budget coming ever closer to a trillion dollars. Such colossal sums are rarely debated in Congress; indeed, they enjoy wide bipartisan support.

2. The U.S. military remains the most trusted institution in our society, so say 74% of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll. No other institution even comes close, certainly not the presidency (37%) or Congress (which recently rose to a monumental 25% on an impeachment high). Yet that same military has produced disasters or quagmires in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. Various “surges” have repeatedly failed. The Pentagon itself can’t even pass an audit. Why so much trust?

3. A state of permanent war is considered America’s new normal. Wars are now automatically treated as multi-generational with little concern for how permawar might degrade our democracy. Anti-war protesters are rare enough to be lone voices crying in the wilderness.

4. America’s generals continue to be treated, without the slightest irony, as “the adults in the room.” Sages like former Secretary of Defense James Mattis (cited glowingly in the recent debate among 12 Democratic presidential hopefuls) will save America from unskilled and tempestuous politicians like one Donald J. Trump. In the 2016 presidential race, it seemed that neither candidate could run without being endorsed by a screaming general (Michael Flynn for Trump; John Allen for Clinton).

5. The media routinely embraces retired U.S. military officers and uses them as talking heads to explain and promote military action to the American people. Simultaneously, when the military goes to war, civilian journalists are “embedded” within those forces and so are dependent on them in every way. The result tends to be a cheerleading media that supports the military in the name of patriotism — as well as higher ratings and corporate profits.

6. America’s foreign aid is increasingly military aid. Consider, for instance, the current controversy over the aid to Ukraine that President Trump blocked before his infamous phone call, which was, of course, partially about weaponry. This should serve to remind us that the United States has become the world’s foremost merchant of death, selling far more weapons globally than any other country. Again, there is no real debate here about the morality of profiting from such massive sales, whether abroad ($55.4 billion in arms sales for this fiscal year alone, says the Defense Security Cooperation Agency) or at home (a staggering 150 million new guns produced in the USA since 1986, the vast majority remaining in American hands).

7. In that context, consider the militarization of the weaponry in those very hands, from .50 caliber sniper rifles to various military-style assault rifles. Roughly 15 million AR-15s are currently owned by ordinary Americans. We’re talking about a gun designed for battlefield-style rapid shooting and maximum damage against humans. In the 1970s, when I was a teenager, the hunters in my family had bolt-action rifles for deer hunting, shotguns for birds, and pistols for home defense and plinking. No one had a military-style assault rifle because no one needed one or even wanted one. Now, worried suburbanites buy them, thinking they’re getting their “man card” back by toting such a weapon of mass destruction.

8. Paradoxically, even as Americans slaughter each other and themselves in large numbers via mass shootings and suicides (nearly 40,000 gun deaths in 2017 alone), they largely ignore Washington’s overseas wars and the continued bombing of numerous countries. But ignorance is not bliss. By tacitly giving the military a blank check, issued in the name of securing the homeland, Americans embrace that military, however loosely, and its misuse of violence across significant parts of the planet. Should it be any surprise that a country that kills so wantonly overseas over such a prolonged period would also experience mass shootings and other forms of violence at home?

9. Even as Americans “support our troops” and celebrate them as “heroes,” the military itself has taken on a new “warrior ethos” that would once — in the age of a draft army — have been contrary to this country’s citizen-soldier tradition, especially as articulated and exhibited by the “greatest generation” during World War II.

What these nine items add up to is a paradigm shift as well as a change in the zeitgeist. The U.S. military is no longer a tool that a democracy funds and uses reluctantly.  It’s become an alleged force for good, a virtuous entity, a band of brothers (and sisters), America’s foremost missionaries overseas and most lovable and admired heroes at home. This embrace of the military is precisely what I would call soft militarism. Jackbooted troops may not be marching in our streets, but they increasingly seem to be marching unopposed through — and occupying — our minds.

The decay of democracy As Americans embrace the military, less violent policy options are downplayed or disregarded. Consider the State Department, America’s diplomatic corps, now a tiny, increasingly defunded branch of the Pentagon led by Mike Pompeo (celebrated by Donald Trump as a tremendous leader because he did well at West Point). Consider President Trump as well, who’s been labeled an isolationist, and his stunning inability to truly withdraw troops or end wars. In Syria, U.S. troops were recently redeployed, not withdrawn, not from the region anyway, even as more troops are being sent to Saudi Arabia. In Afghanistan, Trump sent a few thousand more troops in 2017, his own modest version of a mini-surge and they’re still there, even as peace negotiations with the Taliban have been abandoned. That decision, in turn, led to a new surge (a “near record high”) in U.S. bombing in that country in September, naturally in the name of advancing peace. The result: yet higher levels of civilian deaths.

How did the U.S. increasingly come to reject diplomacy and democracy for militarism and proto-autocracy? Partly, I think, because of the absence of a military draft. Precisely because military service is voluntary, it can be valorized. It can be elevated as a calling that’s uniquely heroic and sacrificial. Even though most troops are drawn from the working class and volunteer for diverse reasons, their motivations and their imperfections can be ignored as politicians praise them to the rooftops. Related to this is the Rambo-like cult of the warrior and warrior ethos, now celebrated as something desirable in America. Such an ethos fits seamlessly with America’s generational wars. Unlike conflicted draftees, warriors exist solely to wage war. They are less likely to have the questioning attitude of the citizen-soldier.

Don’t get me wrong: reviving the draft isn’t the solution; reviving democracy is. We need the active involvement of informed citizens, especially resistance to endless wars and budget-busting spending on American weapons of mass destruction. The true cost of our previously soft (now possibly hardening) militarism isn’t seen only in this country’s quickening march toward a militarized authoritarianism. It can also be measured in the dead and wounded from our wars, including the dead, wounded, and displaced in distant lands. It can be seen as well in the rise of increasingly well-armed, self-avowed nationalists domestically who promise solutions via walls and weapons and “good guys” with guns. (“Shoot them in the legs,” Trump is alleged to have said about immigrants crossing America’s southern border illegally.)

Democracy shouldn’t be about celebrating overlords in uniform. A now-widely accepted belief is that America is more divided, more partisan than ever, approaching perhaps a new civil war, as echoed in the rhetoric of our current president. Small wonder that inflammatory rhetoric is thriving and the list of this country’s enemies lengthening when Americans themselves have so softly yet fervently embraced militarism.

With apologies to the great Roberta Flack, America is killing itself softly with war songs.

A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, Astore writes regularly for a TomDispatch, where this article originated. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2019 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 October 2019
Word Count: 2,242
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ISTANBUL — The 8-year-old Syrian conflict entered a new phase with a Russian-Turkish accord that fills a power vacuum resulting from the chaotic US withdrawal from the region.

The agreement, reached October 22 at the Russian resort of Sochi, strengthens the positions of Russia, Turkey and the Syrian government in north-eastern Syria at a time when withdrawing US forces were pelted with potatoes and tomatoes by angry locals as they left the region after years of controlling one-third of Syria’s territory.

The dramatic collapse of the US role after US President Donald Trump ordered his troops out of Syria robbed the Syrian-Kurdish militia People’s Protection Units (YPG) of a partner and forced them to pull back from the Turkish border, ending Kurdish self-rule in the area.

Following the Sochi deal, which stopped a 2-week-old Turkish military intervention, the rebel stronghold of Idlib is the only region in Syria where significant fighting continues. A total of 150 representatives of the government, the opposition and civil society in Syria are to start talks about a post-war political order in UN-sponsored negotiations October 30 in Geneva.

“We are entering a new phase but we have to wait and see if this could be the end of the war,” said Huseyin Cicek, a political scientist and expert on religion and politics at the Department of Islamic-Theological Studies at Austria’s Vienna University.

The Sochi accord deepened ties between Russia and NATO member Turkey, a development that is causing concern in the United States, NATO and the European Union. A day after the talks, Moscow said it was in contact with Ankara about extra deliveries of Russia-made S-400 missile defence systems to Turkey.

Russia and Turkey have cooperated closely in Syria despite diverging political interests in the conflict. While Russia wants Syrian President Bashar Assad to remain in power and extend his rule over the whole of Syria, Turkey has been supporting rebel groups fighting the regime and is refusing to deal with Assad.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan worked six hours to hammer out an agreement that was hailed as a triumph by both sides. Erdogan called it “historic.”

Fresh from an agreement with the United States that allowed Turkish troops to occupy a stretch of Syrian territory 100km long and 30km deep previously controlled by Washington’s YPG ally, the Turkish leader went to Sochi seeking an expansion of that zone. However, Putin, while accepting the dimensions of the original Turkish incursion, made sure that Erdogan’s troops would not go further.

After the deal was announced, the Turkish Defence Ministry said the United States had told Turkey the withdrawal of Kurdish militants was complete from the “safe zone” Ankara demands in northern Syria. There was no need to initiate another operation outside the current area of operation at this stage, the ministry said in a statement, effectively ending its military offensive that began October 9.

The Sochi agreement endorsed the return of Assad’s forces to the border alongside Russian troops, replacing the Americans who had patrolled the region for years with their former Kurdish allies. Russian military police took up positions in the border region a day after Erdogan’s visit to Sochi.

The Damascus government is to build 15 posts along the Syrian border with Turkey, the Russian Defence Ministry said. Russian and Turkish forces are to jointly patrol a 10km strip in the “safe zone.”

Under the deal with Moscow, the length of the border that the YPG must vacate is more than triple the size of the territory covered by the US-Turkish accord, covering most of the area Turkey had wanted to include.

Analysts said Ankara did not push through all its goals. As a result of the Sochi pact, Turkey will have full control over about 100km of Syrian lands along the border, much less than the 440km sought by Ankara. It must share control with Russia and Syria in the other sectors.

“The Sochi deal… puts an end to Turkey’s further territorial gains in Syria,” Kerim Has, a Moscow-based expert on Russian-Turkish relations, said in a message in response to questions. Cicek said Erdogan’s plan for the resettlement of up to 3 million in northern Syria was very unlikely to become reality.

Ankara also accepted a new role for the Assad government in northern Syria and could be pushed by Russia to establish direct contact with Damascus, something Erdogan, an outspoken critic of the Syrian president, had been trying to avoid.

“With the Sochi deal, [the] Kremlin received more effective tools to push Ankara to start an open and direct dialogue with Damascus,” Has wrote. “Ankara officially admits Russia’s role of mediator to restart its relations with Damascus and fully implement the 1998 Adana agreement,” a treaty between Turkey and Syria that allows Turkey to fight terrorist threats in a 5km zone inside Syria and calls for close contacts between the two countries’ security services.

“If the Number One enemy of the Syrian authorities, Erdogan’s Turkey, officially readmits Assad’s rule in current conditions, that would be a huge gain for Russia’s settlement policy in Syria,” Has added.

As a consequence, the Sochi agreement could hasten the withdrawal of Turkish forces from Syria, Has said. “For Moscow, in the light of [the] US troop withdrawal, Turkey clearly shows up as the only ‘uninvited guest’ in Syria, which seems more unacceptable with every passing day.”

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 October 2019
Word Count: 896
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Elizabeth Warren is under enormous pressure to say the magic words: I will raise taxes on every American in order to fund universal health care for all. The pressure will continue, and it will surely intensify if she’s dubbed the Democratic nominee.

But the commentators, even the liberal pundits, are wrong. The Massachusetts senator should never say those words. Ever. If she did, she’s be playing by the Washington press corps’ rules, and once she did that, she’d be setting herself up for betrayal. The Washington press corps cannot be trusted to behave honestly, bravely or with integrity, much less with a sense of citizen duty or even patriotism, for God’s sake. (The Washington Post reported Monday that she’s going to explain everything. A bad idea.)

Think about it.

The story about the biggest story of 2016 — “but her emails!” — got none of the attention it deserved over the weekend. A State Department report released Friday said an exhaustive three-year investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state found “no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.” It is now a fact that the biggest story of 2016 was a collective fabrication. Yet the people who turned it into a “controversy” whose consequences have changed the world have said nothing. Only one person, Jeffrey Toobin, has taken responsibility for his role in poisoning public opinion and imperiling the republic.

Instead of soul-searching, what we saw over the weekend, and so far this week, is more of the same. I have seen reams of commentary about how the woman not running for president should not have spoken. She should not have suggested, commentators argued, that the Russians are grooming a Democrat to be a third-party spoiler. She should not have said that someone is probably Tulsi Gabbard, who does enjoy rubbing elbows with ethnic authoritarians. (Clinton did not name Gabbard in her interview.)

Largely missing from this commentary, however, is Clinton’s larger point, which is that the Russians continue to violate our national sovereignty. As if on cue, Facebook reported Monday that it disabled a network of accounts created by Russian operatives to spread propaganda about Joe Biden in key swing states. This news came after Bloomberg reported that a Russian mobster fighting extradition to the US provided dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for legal help from the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the very same guy, the Post reported, whose associates were funneling Russian cash into the campaigns of Republican members of Congress, a pattern the Senate intelligence panel recognized when it said that the NRA was “a foreign asset.”

So here’s Hillary Clinton, who has no skin in the game this time, warning us about something big and important that we all need to pay attention to, not for herself but for the good of our country, and not only is the press corps silent on its role in kneecapping her campaign, all it hears when Clinton speaks is some bitch bitchin’.

Now I ask you, truly: What would you do if you were Elizabeth Warren?

You could say be honest about what Medicare for All requires, and there’s something to be said about that argument. Warren could be upfront with the American people. She could explain that the 1 percent by far will pay the most for universal health care, but that even that won’t be enough. She could say don’t worry about paying more in taxes, because you’re going to pay less in health care. She could explain that it’s going to be no more painful than paying for Social Security. But the problem isn’t Warren’s lack of transparency. The problem in a media environment in which lies become political reality is that honesty can’t solve the problem. Indeed, honesty in a media environment in which lies become political reality can make the problem worse.

If Elizabeth Warren said the magic words — I will raise taxes on every American to fund universal health care for all — that would not prevent Donald Trump and the Republican Party from attacking her in ways that have no basis in reality. If she did say the magic words, she’d end up giving credence to those attacks. By attacking her uniformly and ruthlessly, even if those attacks have no basis in reality, the Republicans in effect bully the press corps into covering how she’s “handling” the politics of universal health care, thus validating the Republican line of attack, even if that line of attack has no basis in reality. Reporters knew all along there was nothing to the Clinton email scandal. But they pretended it mattered anyway because it mattered to the Republicans. When something worked last time, there’s no reason not to try again.

Warren is already getting a taste of what will happen if she says the magic words. The press corps has been framing the issue not as universal health care but eliminating private health insurance, as if that’s Warren’s goal. It isn’t. Getting rid of private health insurance would be the outcome of achieving something bigger, cheaper and better.

But the Republicans don’t want you to pay attention to bigger, cheaper and better. They want you to pay attention to something would be terrible if any real person were trying to do it. The fact that no real person is trying to do it has no relevance to the Republican plan of attack on Warren. They are going to lie until the lies become political reality, and no amount of honesty on Warren’s part is going to change that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 October 2019
Word Count: 930
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On September 26th, President Donald Trump’s White House announced that, in 2020, refugee admissions to the United States will be limited to 18,000, drastically lower than any yearly ceiling over the past 40 years. Along with that announcement, the White House released a separate executive order intended to upend many years of precedent by giving state and local authorities the power to deny refugees resettlement in their jurisdictions.

Nine days later, Trump issued another directive ordering that new immigrant visas be restricted to those who can afford unsubsidized health insurance coverage or are affluent enough to pay for their own health-care costs. Meanwhile, his administration was heading into the final days of a planned timetable to implement new restrictions that would make it harder for needy immigrants to get a green card and work legally to support themselves and their families. That plan has been thwarted, at least temporarily, by orders from judges in three different federal courts.

Those separate but related actions are the latest pages in another dark chapter in the Trump administration’s anti-immigration binge. Together, they steer the U.S. government onto an even more heartless course, setting policies that will not just harm people directly covered by the new provisions but will cause significant collateral damage.

The local option to prevent resettlement will stir up anti-immigrant groups and inflame the national immigration debate, making that issue and the country’s racial divides even more toxic than they already are. In addition to keeping many more desperate people out of this country, the refugee cutback will harm organizations that help refugees already here and destroy Washington’s ability to persuade other countries to deal with the worldwide tidal wave of refugees displaced by wars and other catastrophes.

The new green card rules, if they overcome court challenges and go into effect, will greatly expand the grounds for finding that an applicant might become a “public charge.” That will deny legal employment to many of the most vulnerable immigrants and lead others to forgo badly needed benefits to which they are legally entitled — a trend already evident before those rules even take effect. Similarly, the new requirement that immigrants be capable of paying for health insurance will not just penalize foreign nationals applying for visas, but in many cases keep family members already in the U.S., including children and spouses, from reuniting with loved ones seeking to join them.

These policies have one more thing in common: none of them has anything to do with illegal immigration.

Refugees hoping for resettlement in the United States are not only seeking to enter the country legally but doing so through the most rigorous and time-consuming of all procedures for getting a visa. Those already here who could be excluded from a state or locality under the new regulations are lawfully in the country, not part of an “invasion” (as Trump calls it) of undocumented immigrants who have crossed the border illegally. Immigrants applying for green cards or visa applicants subject to the health insurance requirement are within the law by definition.

The new refugee ban, town by town The “local option” giving state and local governments the right to block the resettlement of newly admitted refugees in their territory has been the least noticed of these new initiatives so far. It has, however, the potential for far-reaching, troubling, even dangerous effects. If the plan survives the expected court challenges and resettlement organizations have to get written approval from state and local authorities before placing new arrivals in specific locations, that could mobilize anti-immigrant activists across the country to put pressure on local officials, intensifying the politicization of refugee issues and galvanizing ugly forces in this society.

The heads of two of the nine national organizations that administer the resettlement program for the State Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement have been blunt in their criticism of the local option policy. It “shocks the conscience,” the Reverend John McCullough, CEO and president of Church World Service, declared in a statement. “This proposal would embolden racist officials to deprive refugees of their rights under U.S. law. This proposal is a slippery slope that takes our country backward. The ugly history of institutionalized segregation comes to mind.”

In a similar vein, Mark Hetfield, president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), described the order as “in effect, a state-by-state, city-by-city refugee ban, and it’s un-American and wrong. Is this the kind of America we want to live in? Where local towns can put up signs that say ‘No Refugees Allowed’ and the federal government will back that?”

Details are still vague on how the local option program would work. Trump’s order calls for the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to develop the lineaments of such a process within 90 days, so details may be forthcoming. On the essential points, though, its wording makes the order’s intent unequivocally clear.

A key passage states that resettlement agencies will have to get written permission from state and local authorities before placing any refugees in their jurisdiction; the burden, that is, will be on the agencies to get approval, not on local or state leaders to initiate an objection. In a curious provision, the document adds that the secretary of state “shall publicly release any written consents of States and localities to resettlement of refugees.” A decision to exclude refugees, however, can remain undisclosed.

Only President Trump and his advisers know whether the primary motive for such requirements was to make resettling refugees more politically fraught and potentially a more visible issue in the coming election season. But that is sure to be the result.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS), is troubled by the prospect that the decisions of local authorities will only be publicized if they accept refugees, not if they refuse them — a twist that may tend to “stoke xenophobia,” she pointed out in an interview, and make it harder for communities to welcome refugees.

Matthew Soerens, who directs World Relief’s efforts to mobilize evangelical churches on refugee and immigration issues, voiced a similar concern. Mandating a public announcement when a jurisdiction decides to accept refugees will draw the attention of “people who maybe don’t want their state or local government receiving them,” Soerens said in an interview. Even if 70% of the people in a community support resettlement and only 30% object, “they can make an ugly political issue,” he added, possibly increasing the difficulty of bringing refugees into a community even when the authorities are in favor of resettling them. “We don’t want refugees to come into a situation where there’s been a big political circus about their arrival,” he added. Most residents may be welcoming, but “it only takes a few to make them feel uncomfortable and unsafe.”

Church World Service, HIAS, LIRS, and World Relief are four of nine national resettlement agencies. Six of them are faith-based. All nine have strongly criticized the new refugee ceiling as cruel, contrary to religious teachings of love and compassion, and against American values. (“Trump Puts Out Lady Liberty’s Torch” was the headline over the Church World Service’s statement.)

Worldwide refugees at a record high, U.S. relief at an unprecedented low The unanimous criticism from those resettlement agencies reflects how deeply Trump’s latest decision will cut into future refugee relief efforts. The new ceiling of 18,000 represents less than one-fifth of the 95,000 yearly cap presidents have set, on average, since the present refugee law was enacted in 1980. Actual admissions, normally somewhat lower than the maximum allowed, are now guaranteed to fall far below the average annual rate over an even longer period dating back to the 1940s.

The number of Muslim refugees, in particular, has dropped in a stunning fashion since Donald Trump entered the White House, even though, as a recent study notes, four of the world’s five largest refugee crises affect Muslim populations. That report, compiled by the Refugee Council USA, highlights how startling the change was for the most deeply troubled countries between the last two fiscal years of Obama’s presidency, 2016 and 2017, and the first two full fiscal years of Trump’s, 2018 and 2019.

The report’s country-by-country figures show that refugee admissions from Iran dropped from 6,327 in 2016 and 2017 to 104 in 2018 and 2019. Admissions from Iraq — where the waiting list still includes thousands of Iraqis who worked for the U.S. government or military after the American invasion and occupation of that country — fell from 16,766 to 308, a 98% drop. For Somalia, the number went from 15,150 to 284; for Sudan, from 2,438 to 201; and for Syria, from 19,473 to 280. Altogether, the Refugee Council found that admissions of Muslim refugees had declined by 90% in the Trump era.

Hurting refugees — and those who help them The cut in admissions doesn’t just harm refugees waiting to come to the United States but hurts those already here and the people who help them. Because the State Department gives the resettlement agencies a fixed amount of money for each individual they resettle, the sharp drop in admissions has meant deep cuts in their budgets. That, in turn, reduces their ability to help new arrivals fit into American society after their initial government-funded 90-day refugee benefits run out.

Since 2017, according to the Refugee Council study, the nine national agencies combined have closed 51 branch offices across the country. That means they can no longer help refugees in those communities find jobs or offer them language training or legal services, or assist them in enrolling children in school or obtaining public benefits they are lawfully entitled to.

If the rollercoaster keeps going downhill, says Krish Vignarajah of LIRS, it could destroy the network her organization has created in its 80-year history: “If we lose that infrastructure built over decades by faith communities, nonprofits, and local communities, that is going to take a very long time to replace.”

World Relief’s Soerens said his agency has closed seven offices since 2017, while halting refugee resettlement in several others, losing “really gifted, committed staff who have years and decades of experience.” When possible, World Relief and similar agencies have tried to close down branches in places where other resettlement agencies are still operating, but, of course, those agencies are now stretched to the limit as well.

Trump’s policies also damage the international response to the growing global refugee crisis. In sharp contradiction to the spirit of the 1980 Refugee Act, which states that “it is the policy of the United States to encourage all nations to provide assistance and resettlement opportunities to refugees to the fullest extent possible,” American influence under Trump has moved in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of providing moral leadership for international efforts to meet the crisis, his example has encouraged governments and political forces across the world that strongly resist more generous efforts. As a result, tens or hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees will be trapped in their suffering for years longer, waiting for relief that may never come.

Raising the “public charge” barrier Another recent Trump initiative will potentially mean new hardships for a different category of immigrants who, like resettled refugees, are in the U.S. legally: non-citizens seeking the right to legal employment who may, in some cases, be subject to deportation if they can’t work.

That group, which includes many who are related to, or share households with, U.S. citizens, will face new barriers under a revised “public charge” rule that was scheduled to take effect this month until it was delayed by judicial rulings in three federal district courts. In those orders, handed down just four days before the October 15th effective date, federal judges in New York and Washington state temporarily blocked the rule nationwide, while a more limited ruling in California stayed its implementation in that state as well as in Maine, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and the District of Columbia, which were plaintiffs in the same lawsuit.

The new rule is aimed at making it tougher for green-card applicants to show that they will not be dependent on public benefits. Its weight would fall entirely on those in the applicant pool who are already the most needy and vulnerable. Women, children, the ill, and the elderly will be disproportionately affected, as will immigrants from poorer countries (who are also more likely to belong to racial minorities). Within those already disadvantaged groups, the poorer and more vulnerable someone is, the more likely she is to suffer adverse consequences.

That non-citizens should be denied permanent residence if they are “deemed likely” to depend on government benefits is a long-standing provision in U.S. immigration law, not a Trump-era invention. For many years, though, the “public charge” label was applied only to those receiving cash assistance through welfare, Social Security disability payments, or government-funded long-term institutional care. Under the new rules, immigrants seeking a green card or temporary employment status would be penalized for using — or just being judged likely to use — a long list of other benefits including food stamps, most Medicaid services, and various housing assistance programs, which were not previously held to define the recipient as a public charge.

Limited use of one of those benefits would not automatically disqualify an applicant, but would count as a “heavily weighted negative factor.” Low income, defined as less than 125% of the federal poverty guideline, would be another “heavily weighted” negative. Health and age could also count against an applicant.

Practically speaking, someone lawfully here could be sent home not only for using public benefits but simply for being more than 61 years old or having “a medical condition that is likely to require extensive medical treatment or institutionalization or that will interfere with the alien’s ability to provide care for himself or herself, to attend school, or to work.” Presumably, this means that someone legally in the U.S. who is blind or has some other physical disability would face a greater risk of deportation. Women would be at a significant disadvantage, an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute showed, because “they are less likely to be employed than men, generally live in larger households, and have lower incomes.”

A side effect of the new rules (noticeable since a draft was released more than a year ago) is that significant numbers of immigrants are now going without assistance to which they are legally entitled. Multiple studies have documented declining enrollments even in programs not covered in the new regulations or when benefits are going to the U.S.-born children of immigrants who are unquestionably eligible for them.

For example, the Agriculture Department’s special nutrition program for women, infants, and children, known as WIC, is explicitly excluded from the list of “benefits designated for consideration in public charge inadmissibility determinations.” But a recent Kaiser Family Foundation fact sheet reports that WIC agencies in a number of states have experienced “enrollment drops that they attribute largely to fears about public charge.” Investigations by the Urban Institute, Children’s Health Watch, and other organizations have found the same pattern in other programs.

A last thought Taken as a whole, the latest Trump administration assaults on refugees and immigrants should shock the conscience — the words the Church World Service’s John McCullough used about the new local-option resettlement policy. Legally, they are not high crimes and misdemeanors as that phrase appears in the Constitution. In moral terms, though, it would not be an exaggeration to call them high crimes and misdemeanors against humanity. By any reasonable standard they are more morally repugnant and bring more suffering to more innocent people than any presidential phone call to Ukraine.

In Trumpian terms, think of it as MACA, or Making America Crueler Again — and again, and again. Closing the country’s doors to more refugees (particularly if they’re Muslim), encouraging bigots and xenophobes to mobilize to keep refugees out of their towns, making it harder for immigrants to stay and build new lives if they are old or poor or sick, raising a barrier of fear that keeps them away from food aid and health care they and their children need and have a right to — none of these are impeachable offenses. In a fairer and more humane country, perhaps they would be.

Journalist Arnold R. Isaacs writes regularly for TomDispatch, where this article originated. Based in Maryland, he has written widely on refugee and immigration issues. He is the author of From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in post-9/11 America and two books relating to the Vietnam War. His website is www.arnoldisaacs.net.

Copyright ©2019 Arnold R. Isaacs — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 October 2019
Word Count: 2,708
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There’s only one thing in my mind that captures the absurdity and exhaustion of our present moment more than the dustup last weekend between Hillary Clinton and Tulsi Gabbard. It’s that the story about the biggest story of 2016 — “but her emails!” — got none of the attention it deserved. The people who are supposed to care about getting the story right don’t care about getting the story right, because if they did care, they’d see that they got it wrong, and that everyone now shoulders the burden of the error.

In an interview Thursday, Clinton said that the Kremlin continues to violate US sovereignty. She said Vladimir Putin likely has kompromat on Donald Trump, and that his operatives are going to elevate the visibility of a third-party candidate in 2020, just as they did in 2016. Last time, it was the Green Party’s Jill Stein who helped Trump take a plurality of votes in three decisive states. Next time around, Clinton implied the Russians are already “grooming” someone like the anti-liberal Tulsi Gabbard.

I’m going to assume you don’t know who Tulsi Gabbard is. That’s how well she’s doing in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination. She’s a zombie candidate. She has been for months. The only way she’ll get considered attention is to do what Clinton said she would do: run as a third-party candidate against the “Democratic establishment” with Putin’s blessing, thus abetting the incumbent by splitting the anti-Trump vote. Gabbard seemed to be preparing for that over the weekend, positioning herself as the anti-war antidote to the “the queen of the warmongers.”

Seriously, Gabbard is not worth taking seriously. The Hawaii Democrat stands with the world’s authoritarians, including India’s Narendra Modi and Syria’s war criminal Bashar al-Assad. But we are forced to pay attention in a media climate in which one remark by a person who isn’t running for president can trigger a pissing match all weekend long between Democratic normies and “the left.” Only it’s not even “a left” in any coherent or honorable sense as much as it is a clot of self-hating anti-American cranks who deny the US is a force of good, much to the liking of our enemies, who amplify this cranky incoherence by orders of magnitude, thus sabotaging our public discourse. There isn’t a circle in Dante’s Inferno in which you are trapped forever in debate with a thousand raging morons — imagine gangs of Glenn Greenwalds and mobs of Matt Taibbis — but there should be. That Fresh Hell is right here on Earth.

While journalists reported the “dustup” (though that gives Gabbard too much credit), while normies and lefties argued over the dustup, and while Russian bots sent the dustup trending all weekend long, nearly everyone ignored the most important story related to Hillary Clinton, the story that can teach us the most about what happened in 2016 and what we the people can do to avoid sending another weak-ass strongman to the White House. More importantly, the story is a lesson to the Washington press corps, which is a class of people reputed to care about getting the story right, but given how much they are paying attention to trivialities, like Gabbard picking a fight with a woman who is not running for president, I fear the lesson isn’t being learned.

The story I’m talking about was about the biggest story of the whole 2016 election being a fiction, a myth, a cipher, a blank space — all of it breathed to life by people who knew better but pretended not to. The story about 2016’s biggest story establishes forever that the Clinton email scandal was based on nothing more than Republican accusations against and conspiracy theories about the Democratic candidate that raised vicious sexist suspicions of a woman seeking power to the level of high treason, an accomplishment so successful that it emblazoned Clinton’s “criminality” on the minds of millions of Americans who to this day chant “Lock her up!” That story about the biggest story of 2016 was buried on A16 of Saturday’s New York Times while the story about Clinton emails a week before the last election earned no fewer than five mentions in the same elite newspaper of record, four on the front page and one in the editorial.

“Quiet Ending for Inquiry into Emails and Server” was the Times print headline. After three years of exhaustive investigation, the US State Department concluded that “there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information” while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. She didn’t do anything criminal, endanger Americans or undermine security. The Washington Post was more accurate about the greater significance, though. “The report appears to represent a final and anticlimactic chapter in a controversy that overshadowed the 2016 presidential campaign and exposed Clinton to fierce criticism that she later cited as a major factor in her loss to President Trump.”

I said the story about the biggest story of 2016 should be a lesson to the Washington press corps, a lesson that isn’t being learned, but I think it’s much more than that. Saturday’s story is an indictment, and one that’s being proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the press corps’ silence. I’ll be happy to be shown wrong when someone like the Times’ Maggie Haberman asks someone like US Senator Chuck Grassley if he and the Republicans regret weaponizing a lie in order to serve the candidacy of a president who has since 2017 lied more than 13,000 times. I won’t, however, hold my breath.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 October 2019
Word Count: 921
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So, it’s a deal. But is it? The ceasefire agreement between US officials and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official speaking anonymously to the Washington Post said, one of the smoothest in Turkish history, so easy that it came as a surprise to Ankara.

It is widely agreed that Erdogan won. He made a political gamble, the type that he has mastered over the years, and the world’s superpower blinked first. Those at home and abroad who had expected a fierce backlash for Erdogan were taken by surprise.

It is time for him to spin and sell his perceived victory at home, to reassert himself as the iron-willed commander-in-chief, to use the domestic tools to tame his opponents even more roughly and repair whatever damage his image received due the defeat in local elections. If not anything else, Erdogan has gained time and manoeuvring room.

But — and it’s a big but — this one may be a pyrrhic victory after all.

Yes, the deal offers openings for some legitimacy for the Turkish incursion, yet another surprise may await at the door, pulling Erdogan into the quagmire of Syria.

The 13-point document, filled with ambiguous phrases and diplomatic pitfalls, leaves a large vacuum regarding the key actors in the war-torn country: Kurds, Syrian regime forces, Russia and, in a shady corner, Iran. Not only that, the deal is certain to stir further storm in Washington as US President Donald Trump seems to be gliding into the vortex of impeachment.

Most of those variables have to do with facts the deal is unable to ignore. First and foremost, the deal falls short of putting strong enough conditionality on a full-scale withdrawal of Turkish armed forces from areas it invaded.

Statements from Ankara immediately after the deal was announced indicate an unchanged position, that it perceives a long-term stay alongside the Turkish-Syrian border from Iraq to Kobane.

Erdogan took a further gamble, saying that if the Americans do not cleanse the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the incursion will accelerate. These signals must be taken as evidence that Ankara will try to maximise the gains of the deal to exert a permanent military presence in the invaded parts of Syria.

If taken together with a total pullout of Syria, the Americans may come to not care whether the Turkish side stays in Syria or leaves. The current Trump stand is to wash his hands of this bloody regional conflict and hope to ignore whatever else Erdogan does.

He has decided to sell out the Kurds, leaving them vulnerable before Ankara and Damascus, as the deal undoubtedly displays. This is what Syrian President Bashar Assad and Erdogan welcome with applause.

Also, Turkey’s secular-nationalist opposition bloc openly supports it, long calling for a dialogue with Assad, discreetly hoping that the Kurdish aspirations for self-rule may far more easily be crushed when the two governments agree.

However, the deal cannot disguise the fact that Turkey is isolated because it has some bizarre plans to initiate resettlement and construction projects on foreign soil, without anyone’s consent.

If, for Syria, the priority is to reassert its control over mainly Kurdish northern parts and force Turkey out of its territory, it will be Russia, the winner in the multidimensional Syria chess game, that will have to manage a solution. Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin know this deal is blurred and short-lived, that, as soon as the SDF agrees to choose their side, the Adana agreement that Erdogan refers to will no longer have validity in terms of deals for a continued presence.

It is clear that Alexander Lavrentiev, who, as Putin’s special envoy for Syria, was in Ankara when US Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cut the deal, returned to Moscow with a relatively placid mind.

When Erdogan next meets his Russian counterpart, whom he must treat with great respect, Putin will only go further, to handle the issue of Idlib and jihadists assembled there, and push Erdogan deeper into the corner by insisting on direct talks with Assad. Slowly but firmly, Putin is getting there.

Anti-US circles who have led Erdogan to alienate everyone in Washington except Trump may have welcomed the deal as a step closer to de-orbit Turkey from the West, but two issues will continue to pose challenges to Ankara, however hard-line its rulers choose to become.

Turkey’s domestic Kurdish issue will not cease to bleed, feeding further an aggressive nationalism at home, and the common denominator of finishing off the Islamic State and other jihadists in Syria, uniting under the umbrella the United States, Russia, the European Union and large parts of Arab League, will never go away.

These two fronts make Erdogan’s Ankara victory a short-lived, pyrrhic one. His hands tied, his mind locked, they will weaken the ground on which he hopes to stand. For the West, Erdogan is a liability; for Russia, he is useful until he is not.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018. 

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 October 2019
Word Count: 827
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We should discuss this week’s heated meeting between Nancy Pelosi and the president. You know the one I mean — the meeting that was the subject of the now famous photograph of the House speaker rising above the table of power, index finger poised like a figure of supreme moral authority, demanding that Donald Trump, who looks like a petulant teen, explain why all roads lead to Russia and Vladimir Putin.

It seems that some Republicans are either discovering for the first time that everything the president’s critics have been saying about him, including that he’s puppet president in league with the enemy, is devastatingly true; or they are developing a narrative by which they can run for the exits while pointing to his worsening mental state as reason why they are fleeing for their lives. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our discussion should begin with reporting from CNN’s Jamie Gangel. At suppertime Thursday, she reported a conversation she had that afternoon with a Republican source in the room when Pelosi allegedly “stormed off.” The GOP source was “alarmed at [Trump’s] demeanor.” “Everyone left completely shaken, shell-shocked,” the source told Gangel. “He is not in control of himself. It is all yelling and screaming.”

Gangel asked the source if the president’s state of mind was getting worse. “100 percent,” the source said. Are you worried about his stability. “Yes.” Gangel said the source had talked to other Republicans who were in the room. According to Gangel’s source, one used the word “sickened” to describe their reaction to the president’s behavior during the meeting. The source added that the “generals were upset.”

Gangel concluded with a chilling implication. Republicans appear increasingly less concerned about Trump’s terrible decision to pull out Syria, betray our allies, and leave the region vulnerable to Russia. Gangel implied that Republicans are growing more worried about Trump’s mental health. “They were concerned about his demeanor.”

What should we make of all this?

First, that Kevin McCarthy is a liar. The House Minority Leader told reporters after the meeting that the president had been calm and reasonable, eager to get work done, while the House speaker had been the one to “storm off.” Pelosi has a reputation for being meticulous about decorum. She’s been on the Hill for decades. She doesn’t even tolerate cussing within earshot. It was never credible to accuse her of “storming off” from any meeting, much less one with the president of the United States. Now we know McCarthy is a sexist liar (who also takes illegal Russian money, but I digress).

Second, that the Republicans are starting to see more clearly that the president’s monumental weakness in foreign affairs has the makings of a nonstop crisis at home. Domestically, the Republican Party can shield Trump from his laziness, incompetence and impotence. Party actors can lie, right-wing media allies can amplify the lie, the president can see the lie on Fox, then repeat it himself — all of which gives the impression to his supporters that all is well. This process, or a rough variation of it, is probably why Trump’s approval rating, though terrible, is nonetheless rock steady.

The Republicans can’t protect Trump from himself as well in international relations. For one thing, he’s the head of state. Today’s Congress is a weak actor in that area. For another, the “adults in the room,” the people the GOP hoped and prayed in 2017 would steer Trump away from disaster, have been purged and replaced by yes-men. Without a superstructure to restrain him, the president has been going with his gut, which is to say, negotiating from a position of abject weakness, as he has throughout his career.

I mean, get this: at the meeting, he actually told Pelosi and the Democrats that the US had to pull out of Syria, because Turkey’s leader said he was going to invade whether he liked it or not. At the same time, Trump presented the Democrats with a letter he wrote to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saying he’d destroy the country’s economy if he crossed the line, whatever that is. The BBC said Erdogan threw the letter in the bin. Mike Pence negotiated a cease-fire. The AP said today that the shelling continued.

Chuck Schumer of all people was so very right. “The president could have said, ‘You go in, and you’re going to have real trouble,’ and 99.9 percent, Erdogan wouldn’t have gone in,” the Senate minority leader told the Post Wednesday. “He’s very tough with the media, with his letters. But when it comes face to face, he’s weak-kneed.”

Weak-kneed, getting weaker, and the Republicans know it.

Which brings me to my final point: Are the Republicans starting to see for the first time that everything Trump’s critics have been saying about him, including that he’s a puppet president in league with the enemy, is devastatingly true — that dude gonna err on Russia’s side every damn time; or are the Republicans crafting a clever story about a president in rapidly declining mental health, so they will have a reason, one beyond their control, for turning against him? After all, all roads do seem to lead to Putin.

I suppose we’ll find out soon.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 October 2019
Word Count: 867
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