Spreading war: Kerry's gift to Syria

The United States fancies itself as the shining light for freedom, as the power on Earth for good, spreading democracy. How does this factcheck?

We spent much of the 19th century spreading US hegemony in several directions, starting with owning slaves and stealing both native lands and Mexican lands, and, toward the end, invading and overthrowing governments in Central America. We only invaded Canada once.

We spent much of the 20th century making the world safe for democracy  whoops US corporations. Mostly, we won--got rid of some threats to US interests who happened to be elected by their people but who were unfriendly to predatory capitalism. Mohammed Mossaddegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Salvador Allende in Chile come to mind. These are the sorts of cases that make the world somewhat suspicious and of course the illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq based on two Big Lies feed into that mistrust.

Why, then, would the Obama administration, in the person of John Kerry, offer to assist the Free Syrian Army? It looks like it fits the pattern, the Yes-he's-a-son-of-a-bitch-but-he's-our-son-of-a-bitch routine, where we pick an armed thug or a bunch of them, give them weapons and training, and expect them to be US-corporate-friendly at the end of the day, plus providing war profiteers upfront profits immediately by grabbing US taxpayer money, shoveling it into the accounts of corporations. Which corporations? All corporations. Seriously. (pictured: John's buddies)

Just a tiny example, only a couple of brief notes from just one day of Pentagon contracts, from Friday, March 1, only a select few:

• Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals, Wayne, N.J., was issued a modification exercising the first option year on contract SPM2D0-12-D-0002/P00006.  The modification is a fixed-price with economic-price-adjustment, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum $49,401,788 for various pharmaceutical products.
• Tennier Industries*, Boca Raton, Fla., was awarded contract SPM1C1-13-D-1028.  The award is a fixed-price with economic price adjustment contract with a maximum $15,551,438 for universal camouflage patterned jackets. 
• Exide Technologies, Milton, Ga., was awarded contract SPM7LX-13-D-0029.  The award is a fixed-price with economic price adjustment contract with a maximum $6,754,515 for procurement of storage batteries.
• DLT Solutions, Herndon, Va., is being awarded a $23,212,706 firm-fixed-price contract (FA8771-13-F-8100) for procurement of software maintenance and support for perpetual enterprise Oracle software licenses. 
• L-3 Communications Vertex Aerospace L.L.C., Madison, Miss., is being awarded a $8,076.281 contract modification (FA3002-09-C-0006, P00022) for aircraft flightline maintenance for the F-16 aircraft in support of Taiwan's F-16 program.

There were more, of course. I mean, when you are tasked with spending a half a $trillion each year, you need to keep it flowing out and flowing heavy in many directions. You'll hear nothing but dire threat complaining from the military about their budget, of course--if a general fails to kvetch they can find another who will.  Really, however, when will it finally become poor form to talk poor mouth with their mouths full?

Creating conflict, nurturing threat, all requires violence capacity-building, and John Kerry is fitting right into that groove right away. The results will be fabulous, no doubt. The contracts for more non lethal military aid to the Free Syrian Army will begin to appear in the DOD daily contract listings and already, just on the great news of Kerry's support, the FSA is promising to widen the war into Lebanon and, while they are at it, Iraq! Nice going, John! We've done so so much to help inflame hatred and violence between Shia and Sunni in Iraq and now you've helped spread that more assuredly and now violently into Syria and Lebanon--and doubling back on Iraq yet again. What a Secretary of State.

President Obama, are you paying any attention to John? There are Syrians who still believe in nonviolence, know how to wage a nonviolent campaign, and every time we pay attention and pay money to the violent rebels we make it all worse. You thought it couldn't get worse? It's about to, thanks to US help. State Department should be about spreading real democracy, about enlightenment, about reason and rational discourse and indigenous decision, not about military aid to the least worst armed bunch.

Sequester US military

The US media has been especially emetic recently in their coverage of the sequester. While cuts to human services, education, health care, and environmental protection are huge, most of the stories are all about how this will hurt the military, will threaten our national security, will ripple out into the civilian world, and woe woe woe. Really?

How is it, then, that John Kerry has just promised $60 million in starter funds plus more "non lethal" aid to the Free Syrian Army, the irregulars in Syria who are mirroring some of the worst of the Assad regime? The FSA has tortured, killed civilians, and shut down all current hope of a nonviolent solution to this civil war. John! Where is that $60 million coming from? Do they let you just walk into the printing room at the US Dept of Treasury and grab a suitcase full? Who do you think is going to pay for it, now that the budget is sequestered and all we hear is whining from the military and their media buds? At least Fox News is your new BFF, eh?

Kerry is talking about sending military vehicles to the FSA while NPR reports from Pentagon spokespeople that the US military--thanks to the sequester--will be short on military vehicles. John! Are you paying attention or are you just paying thugs to continue a violent revolution they hijacked from a very promising nonviolent civil society Arab Spring uprising two years ago?

Syrian and Iranian officials responded predictably, asserting that this aid will only prolong the war, which is almost certainly true. When dictators face elections--as Assad will next year--they usually run out of excuses and lose when they face organized nonviolent civil society opposition, even when they brutally suppress it. This happened to Pinochet, Milosevic, and to hand-picked successors to crime bosses like Kuchma in Ukraine, and yet now we see Bashar al-Assad given the perfect excuse to postpone elections indefinitely and the US is contributing to that.

Yes, the Iranian and Syrian officials are cynical. Syria's Walid al-Moallem and his Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi claim that Syria's regime is legitimate and that Syria is a sovereign nation and everyone should shut up about whatever Bashar al-Assad wants to do to his lowly subjects. This is quite 19th-century of them, at best, but when Kerry arranges support for the armed revolution, he is Just So 20th Century. Yes, Assad's sovereignty stops at violations of human rights, but now we know that nonviolent interventions, coupled with support for nonviolent indigenous civil society opposition, work best, and incur lower costs for all parties.

Back when Assad was being terribly brutal toward a mostly nonviolent opposition, Iran criticized him. The foreign minister of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi told Assad to recognize the legitimate voices of Syrians and even Ahmadinijad said the crackdown should stop (Anderson, 2011). Thanks to the justification provided first by the FSA and now by the USA, Iran has closed ranks and is attacking the US. This is so unnecessary and so very unhelpful to Syrians (remember them, John?).

If we could apply the sequester double-time to the US military and use a small part of that instead to support nonviolent civilian movements we would repair much of the damage to the US image worldwide even as we would be far far more effective at spreading sustainable democracy.

References

Anderson, J. H. (2011). After the fall. World Affairs, 174(4), 16-22.

AP (2 March 2013). Syria, Iran accuse U.S. of double standard. USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/03/02/syria-double-standards/1958487/

 

Kerry! We Just Say No!

We now see John Kerry peddling the old brand, War-Lovers Kool-Aid, in his pronouncements that he is going to provide the violent insurgents in Syria with body armor, armored vehicles, military training and other aid. This is how the US operates against the interests of the US voters, citizens, and taxpayers while operating in the interests of the Pentagon private contractors, also known as war profiteers.

This aid will be paid for by the US taxpayers. This aid will come despite bellows from the violent rebels that they are being harmed by a USA which will not give them air support and heavy weapons--guaranteeing that US aid will be scorned and nobody in Syria will be grateful to the US. The body armor may well be worn by insurgents who attack Americans in the future and the armored vehicles may well be driven by those attackers. John Kerry is arranging for the next chapter in Blowback, Chalmer Johnson's exegesis of our tendency to give the guns to those who point them at us later.

Research in my field of Peace and Conflict Studies features some of the complex examinations of the regional conflict formations (RCF) that connect politics, military, religion, economics, and other facets of regional groupings of nations that are often even more connected than, for example, the nations of North America (Leenders, 2007). Do we actually think that military vehicles given to "moderate" violent insurgents in Syria will be received by Arabs unaffected by the hatred we've engendered in Iraq, in Palestine, in the Arab street across the entire region? Are we that naive? Seriously?

Is this actually the time to tell starving children of the world that we are going to spend our money to distribute military goods, not food? If we really fed children and stopped military aid, would we have more friends and fewer terrorists?

Most of all, the idea that democracy comes at the barrel of a gun is outdated and proven ineffective, if not simply diametrically opposed to real outcomes measured and analyzed over time. This is shown, known and promptly ignored by those far more protective of contractor profits than they are of democracy. We gave support to our favorite violent actors in Libya and we earned the murder of our ambassador as blowback. How long will US citizens, voters and taxpayers go along with this? Perhaps it's time for peace people to join in temporary coalition with the Tea Party who oppose foreign military bases and aid. We can always go back later to insulting each other, but it seems that we have some overlapping goals that could form a basis for success.

Please tell John Kerry and our elected officials that war profiteering is unpatriotic.

References

Gearan, Anne (27 Feb 2013). Kerry: U.S. must help counter aid to Syria opposition from extremists. Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kerry-us-must-help-counter-aid-to-syria-opposition-from-extremists/2013/02/27/08a740b2-8111-11e2-b99e-6baf4ebe42df_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines

Leenders, R. (2007). 'Regional conflict formations': Is the Middle East next?. Third World Quarterly, 28(5), 959-982. doi:10.1080/01436590701371660

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

In the early days of Arab Spring the struggles in Tunisia, Egypt, and then Yemen, Bahrain and Syria were all essentially nonviolent. They were also characterized as such by mainstream media worldwide and by observing academic specialists. Indeed, Dr. Chibli Mallet, Visiting Professor in Islamic Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, wrote then, in early 2011, in the journal Middle Eastern Law and Governance:

In Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, the refusal to resort to violence is a conscious choice of hundreds of thousands of people. (p. 136)

It is left to us, some 70,000-75,000 war dead later, to wonder what happened, what bloody happened, to poor poor Syria? Whose bright idea was it to take up arms? Why did that model produce enough of a violent insurgency to overshadow, overwhelm, and occlude the nonviolent launch of the Syrian Arab Spring? The results have been a mortal failure, and are about to become rancidly worse as the US contemplates taking the path demanded by John McCain and his death-specializing friends who own arms manufacturing corporations. We may have the liberal Obama in his lame duck impervious years and his new Secretary of State John Kerry with an ancient history of a few antiwar statements, but McCain is carrying the day, and may as well be boss of Kerry, who is now making all the arrangements, according to the Times of London.

Syrians will suffer more as the US pours arms into the conflagration, but for a US with a profits-before-people culture, we will see the US taxpayer fleeced again and dead Syrians as a direct result. Then we will have heavily armed Islamists in control. Great. I'm sure they will love us, John.

I don't have John's cell phone, nor even his new email. Please consider going to the State Dept website and submit a question. Mine:

How can I convince Sec Kerry to NOT send arms to Syria? The Free Syria Army commits human rights violations almost as often as does the regime. Support nonviolent civil society, not an armed insurgency.

References

Mallat, C. (2011). The philosophy of the Middle East Revolution, take one: nonviolence. Middle Eastern Law & Governance, 3(1/2), 136-147. doi:10.1163/187633711X591495

Ending Syria's violence

As John Kerry prepares to start arming violent insurgents trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, we on the nonviolent side wonder if this is just one of those wars with no chance for nonviolent solutions. Isn't it a bit like the communists shooting at dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in the 1970s and 80s? Isn't it something along the lines of the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic slaughtering civilians as the armed Kosovo Liberation Army fought back hopelessly? Couldn't we say that this is just one of those times that is similar to the civil war in Liberia, with "Christian" dictator Charles Taylor in a death match with the violent warlords in a coalition charmingly calling themselves the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD)?

Oh, that's right. All these wars were stopped and resolved by nonviolent people power. 

In 1989 a civil war began in Liberia, led by Charles Taylor, who had strong relationships to both Moammer Qaddafi and evangelist Pat Robertson. Can you say, "Odd bedfellows?" Both helped fund Taylor's war, Qaddafi by diverting oil funds from Libya and Robertson by purchasing rights to diamond mines in Liberia. Taylor and Samuel Doe and Prince Johnson were among the squabbling leadership and eventually Taylor came out on top, only to find his presidency attacked by a new crop of warlords.

Finally, in 2003, after suffering massacres, rapes, abductions, child soldiering, and the impoverishment of war long enough, the women of Liberia united and stopped that war. They were the ones. They not only brought all parties to the table in Accra, Ghana, they forced them to stop dallying and then they made sure the warlords in the transitional post-Taylor government gave way to the first African woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Leymah Gbowee (pictured, from Nobel site) and Johnson Sirleaf  received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize (along with amazing Yemeni Arab Spring organizer Tawakkol Karman) for this remarkable achievement.

Syrian women could end their civil war and topple the Assad regime. Syrian civil society could use nonviolence in a number of ways to finish this horrific war and overthrow this bloody murderous ruling party. Learning from others in similar situations, we can devise our own ways to win without war, to stop wars in their blood-soaked tracks, and to bring peace and justice to our world.

John Kerry should return to his antiwar years and start a new US era of helping nonviolent civil society, not arming those who commit mirror atrocities to the dictators they fight and then establish new dictatorships once they take power.