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Libya – How Moscow Can Influence A Unity Deal
by Richard Galustian
Russia’s growing influence in Libya is reflecting their ever evolving new Middle East and North African policy.
While Libya has been divided between two parliaments and governments since 2014, Russia’s influence has grown with East Libya.
A review of the United Nations resolution on Libya’s arms embargo is likely to be voted upon early next week. However this will only be achieved if Russian concerns can be overcome.
Despite the international efforts a paradox remains. A partial lifting of the UN's arms embargo to one side will greatly increase the danger of swelling the intensity of the civil war and of risking some of those arms reaching the Islamic State in Libya.
The Russians do not understand the West's approach to extremists. Russia's logic is sound as shown in Syria. If it looks like a duck and walks and quacks like a duck; it probably is a duck, to paraphrase Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavarov comment on terrorists.
In Libya the two divided factions, the democratically elected eastern government and parliament, the House of Representatives (HoR), and the 'Libya Dawn' coalition of Islamist militias who created Tripoli's National Salvation Government (NSG), are now challenged by a third 'virtual' faction, the Government of National Accord (GNA) which was selected by the UN as a nine men, now reduced to seven, Presidency Council (PC), which in effect constitutes a GNA quorum.
Let me be clear: The international community supports a non-existent GNA headed by a Western patsy designated prime minister and six other men. To boot, this fledgling Western selected so called government still faces huge unpopularity from the masses who resent Western interference in its internal affairs.
The GNA, having no military forces of their own, have agreed with Dawn Militias that they be re-badged 'the Presidential Guard' and that they be the recipients of new weapons permitted by the UN if the resolution is accepted by the Security Council.
Interestingly Russia's UN Ambassador Churkin said "the highest priority" in Libya should be to encourage the HoR Parliament in the East approval of the new GNA government. A new twist. If anyone can persuade the East and the HoR to 'bless' the GNA, it will be the Russians that will be the broker.
Cont. reading: Libya – How Moscow Can Influence A Unity Deal
U.S. Election Thread 2016-04 – Premature Presumptive
The Associated Press yesterday declared Hillary Clinton to be the "presumptive" Democratic nominee for the presidential election based on alleged pledges of anonymous super-delegates.
This was a quite unprecedented interference in still ongoing and upcoming primaries on a day when no new public vote count was available.
Bernie Sanders said he will continue to campaign up to the convention. His hope is that either the FBI will indict Hillary Clinton for using an unsecured private email server for classified state business, or that some other Clinton scandal will make it most likely that she would lose a vote against Trump. In both cases some super-delegates may change their vote and the convention might vote for Sanders as nominee.
The FBI is under Obama's control and there no doubt that he wants Clinton as candidate to continue his right-leaning policies. But the FBI tends to be leaking quite a bit and someone with access to the case may want to speak to some enterprising reporters.
Sanders requested a meeting with Obama which will happen on Thursday. Obama will offer him a bad deal which would be akin to a total capitulation. Sanders will look for a way to sneak at least some of his preferred policies into the party agenda. He will demand some significant price for endorsing Clinton and will probably wait to do so up to the last minute.
People around the world will wonder what democracy is all about when a race for a presidency ends up as a contest between the two most disliked people in the field who are both proxies for the more or less same small social segment.
The "Not Hillary" voices will not die down. A seemingly racist Trump with otherwise unpredictable policies may be less damaging to the world than an unreconstructed neolibcon Clinton.
The Greatest – RIP
Why should me and other so-called negro go 10,000 miles from home here in America to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who never bothered us? And I will say directly: "No, I will not go."
Muhammad Ali – I Ain't Got No Quarrel With Them Viet Congs (vid)
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"My conscious won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, raped and killed my mother and father. Well, shoot them for what? I am not gonna shoot them. They are little poor black people, little babies and children, women. … Why don't you just take me to jail."
Muhammad Ali on the Vietnam War (vid)
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“[T]he United States is the stronghold of Zionism and imperialism.”
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"In my name and the name of all Muslims in America, I declare support for the Palestinian struggle to liberate their homeland and oust the Zionist invaders."
Ali Belts Zionism
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During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonize them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarizing the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge.
Lenin, State and Revolution, Chap.1. – 1917 via Louis Allday
Confirming Lenin: Bill Clinton among those to give eulogies at service for Muhammad Ali
Syria: The U.S. Is Unwilling To Settle – Russia Returns For Another Round
The Obama administration does not want peace in Syria. The Russians finally have to admit to themselves that the U.S. is no partner for a continuation of a cease fire, a coordinated attack against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and for peace in Syria. Indeed, as Lavrov explains, the U.S. has again asked to spare al-Qaeda from Russian air strikes even as two UN Security Council resolutions demand its eradication. Huge supply convoys (vid) from Turkey are again going to the "rebels" who will, as always, share them with al-Qaeda and other terrorists.
The current renewed Syrian Arab Army attack towards Raqqa is being obstructed not only by sandstorms but also by a timely attack of al-Qaeda, Ahrar al Sham and Turkestan Islamist Party forces against government positions in the south Aleppo countryside.
More than 1,000 militants have begun an offensive against Syrian army positions southwest of Aleppo, the Russian ceasefire monitoring center in Syria said in a statement on Saturday.
The center also reported civilians in Aleppo as saying armed groups partly made up of Turkish soldiers had appeared north of the city.
The exactly same scheme happened in March and April when a move towards eastern Syrian by the Syrian army had to be stopped to prevent further losses against al-Qaeda south of Aleppo. It seems obvious that these moves U.S. supported forces are planned to prevent any gains of the Syrian government in the east.
Today Lavrov again talked to Kerry:
"Lavrov expressed concern about attempts to delay the resumption of political negotiations under various pretexts," the [Russian foreign] ministry said.
As the U.S. is unwilling to settle the Syria conflict Russia will have to retake the initiative.
Is this a trap? Does the U.S. want Russia to sink into a quagmire in Syria? That is certainly a possibility but it is hard to see how this could happen when Russia comes back with a vengeance and strikes hard and fast.
Russian airstrikes against terrorists in Syria have tripled over the last days. Additional resources have been silently dispatched:
Without stirring a buzz similar to that of their first military intervention in Syria, the Russians this week disembarked ground forces and paratroopers in the port of Tartus to support more than 3,000 Russian volunteers dispatched to the region in the past few weeks, in a bid to revive coordination with the Syrian army.
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Syrian sources stated that the Russian joint command staff, which coordinated aerial support operations last fall, had returned to the Hmeimim military base in Latakia province to begin preparations for new operations.
One can only hope that the Russian leadership has learned its lesson. That it will not stop to pursue the enemy for no political gain when it is again, as it likely will soon be, on the run.
Open Thread 2016-20
U.S. Election Thread 2016-03 – Yves Smith On “Not Hillary!”
Not Hillary!
Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism explains why many of her progressive acquaintances will either not vote, or vote for Trump in the upcoming U.S. election. I recommend to read this in full.
For starters two excerpts:
Hillary's experience is one of failure. And she did not learn from it.
Hillary has a résumé of glittering titles with disasters or at best thin accomplishments under each. Her vaunted co-presidency with Bill? After her first major project, health care reform, turned into such a debacle that it was impossible to broach the topic for a generation, she retreated into a more traditional first lady role. As New York senator, she accomplished less with a bigger name and from a more powerful state than Sanders did. As secretary of state, she participated and encouraged strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria. She bureaucratically outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention in Libya, which he has called the worst decision of his administration. And her plan to fob her domestic economic duties off on Bill comes off as an admission that she can’t handle being president on her own.
And the conclusion:
The Sanders voters in Naked Capitalism’s active commentariat also explicitly reject lesser-evilism, the cudgel that has previously kept true lefties somewhat in line. They are willing to gamble, given that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter and celebrity governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura didn’t get much done, that a Trump presidency represents an acceptable cost of inflicting punishment on the Democratic Party for 20 years of selling out ordinary Americans.
The Clintons, like the Bourbons before the French Revolution, have ensconced themselves in such a bubble of operative and media sycophancy that they’ve mistakenly viewed escalating distress and legitimate demands from citizens as mere noise.
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If my readers are representative, Clinton and the Democratic Party are about to have a long-overdue day of reckoning.
To vote for the far right because the former center (left) has lost its bearing is a somewhat dangerous gamble. The U.S. has a relative stable, inertial system with lots of checks and balances that make this move less risky than similar moves underway in Poland, Germany or France. But unless the center left/right politicians recognize that they have lost their former majority there is no chance they will shun the neoliberal globalization nonsense they impose on their constituency.
Voting for a stronger movement towards a genuine left is be a better strategy than voting for the far right. But notorious lack of unity within the left, center-right control over the media and the absence of a successful current archetype will keep a majority away from taking that step.
I agree that the day of reckoning is a long-overdue day. But it may not bring the reckoning we want.
The U.S./UK Financed “White Helmets” Shtick – Fake “Child Rescued” Videos
Below is a incomplete list of "rescue" videos showing "kids being rescued" from "rubble" after "Syrian/Russian bombing" prepared by the U.S./UK financed Syria Civil Defence aka the "White Helmets".
The group was created with the help of Purpose Inc, a U.S. company specialized in regime change NGO operations. Purpose Inc is also behind Avaaz which early on peddled fake war on Syria video propaganda. The White Helmets are financed, like all "Free Syrian Army" media propaganda, by USAID with some $23 million and by the UK Foreign Office with a total of some £23 million. The Netherlands and Japan also donated money to the scheme. The group was build up and trained since mid 2013 by a "former" UK military intelligence operator residing in Abu Dhabi. These are propaganda artists camouflaged as humanitarians.
The "White Helmets" cooperate closely with al-Qaeda. One of its leaders was recently denied an entry visa to the United States. More details about the group researched by Vanessa Beeley can be found here and here.
Back to the "rescue" videos. That shtick started in late 2013.
After that great marketing success the movie script was serialized. Since then a new version of a "child rescued" video appears every other month or so. Here are just a few of these with all of them following the same script.
This May 25 video is typical. Someone fiddles with professional rescue air pressure mats to show off but those mats are never put to use. Someone else digs with his hands under or behind a concrete slab which has a rather large opening on the side. A smiling and laughing child, totally unharmed and its favorite pupped in hand, is pulled from under or behind the concrete slab to lots of Allah Akbar shouting by the (always male) bystanders. Not shown: kid gets the promised candies for such great performance.
Other typical features of these movies, see this one, are smoke (grenades) in the streets, dramatic but small open fires nearby, dust or some red color on the children's face or arms. The camera is often used in a hectic, intentionally amateurish first person view, a style extensively developed in the 1999 horror clip Blair Witch Project. Sometimes sounds of additional "bomb impact" bangs or screaming/wailing women are added.
All the above videos are just as (un-)real as the faked "Hero Boy" video showing a "Syrian boy ducking sniper fire to rescue a trapped girl". Fake "opposition" videos have been a major feature of the media war on Syria. These fakes are often easily recognizable as such. We can be sure that the media professionals at the BBC and other outlets know that these are not real rescue scenes. They distribute them nonetheless.
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