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Corbyn Wins In Stunning Defeat Of Blairite Establishment
In a stupendous defeat of establishment and pseudo-left media like The Guardian, as well as Blairite interventionists, Jeremy Corbyn again won the Labour leadership elections.
Corbyn received more votes than the last time he was elected.
A massive campaign against Corbyn had been driven by nearly all British media and nearly all established Labour MP's. It prevented Labour attacks on the Tories when those were in deep trouble over the Brexit vote. Those MPS must shut up – or leave.
It is now up to Corbyn to develop a new political Labour platform that offers a real alternative to the destructive rerun of Thatcher policies by Prime Minister Theresa May. It could be the start of a dawn of the left in all of Europe.
Congratulations to him and good luck!
OT
WAPO
© Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images Destruction after an airstrike in the rebel-held Ansari district in Aleppo, Syria, on Friday. “It is a horrific situation,” said Ammar al-Selmo, head of the city’s branch of the White Helmets civil defense group.
BEIRUT — Syrian and Russian warplanes launched a ferocious assault against rebel-held Aleppo on Friday, burying any hopes that a U.S.-backed cease-fire could be salvaged and calling into question whether the deal would ever have worked.
Waves upon waves of planes relentlessly struck neighborhoods in the rebel-held east of the city on the first day of a new offensive announced by the government. Residents described the most intense airstrikes they had yet witnessed in a five-year-old war that has already claimed in excess of 300,000 lives.
By nightfall, more than 100 bombs had landed, and more than 80 people were dead, said Ammar al-Selmo, head of the Aleppo branch of the White Helmets civil defense group.
Rescuers don’t have the capacity to reach all the places that were hit because there are too many, he said. Three White Helmets bases were among the locations targeted, and two were destroyed, along with their equipment and fuel supplies, further diminishing the group’s ability to respond.
“It is a horrific situation now in Aleppo,” Selmo said. “There are dead people in the streets, and fires are burning without control.
“People don’t know what to do or where to go. There is no escape. It is like the end of the world.”
If there had been any doubt before that the cease-fire deal co-sponsored with Russia is dead, at least for the foreseeable future, the violence Friday put it to rest. A meeting in New York between Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov ended swiftly, without statements or discernible progress toward Kerry’s stated goal of reviving last week’s cease-fire.
Instead, the launch of the offensive called into question the entire premise of the agreement painstakingly negotiated by Kerry and Lavrov over the past eight months: that Russia shares the Obama administration’s view that there is no military solution to the conflict. On that basis, U.S. officials have explained, Moscow would be willing to pursue a negotiated settlement in return for a cease-fire and the prestige of eventually conducting joint military operations in Syria alongside the United States against terrorist groups.
At a news conference in New York, Lavrov offered a starkly different point of view. He said it is the United States that needs to come around to the idea that President Bashar al-Assad is the only viable partner in the fight against terrorism, calling his army “the single most efficient force fighting terror in Syria.”
“Little by little, life will make everyone understand that it’s only together that you can fight terrorism,” Lavrov said.
His comments, alongside the events of the past week, suggest that Russia and Syria still believe the war can be won outright, without recourse to negotiations that the United States has said offer the only way out of the Syrian tragedy.
A U.S. strike against a Syrian army position in the east of the country last Saturday exposed the deficit of trust between the two parties to the deal, with the Pentagon insisting it was a mistake but Russia accusing the United States of collaborating with the Islamic State.
But the deal may have been doomed before that, by conflicting interpretations of the war on the ground. Assad has repeatedly expressed his intention to reconquer all of Syria from the rebels he uniformly calls “terrorists,” and he reiterated that determination on the eve of the cease-fire.
Days before the truce took hold, the assortment of Iraqi militias, Hezbollah fighters, government militias and Syrian army troops finally completed the encirclement of rebel-held Aleppo, after months of fighting and hundreds of casualties that included several senior Iranian officers fighting alongside regime forces.
“The Russians were eventually seeing progress in their strategy without any cease-fire. The regime’s military situation was improving. Assad’s position was solidifying. Russia’s strategic goals in the region were being met,” said Jeff White of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “There was no compelling reason for them to push hard for a cease-fire. The person pushing hard was Kerry, but the Russians were sort of, ‘Meh, we can take it or leave it.’ ”
Iran’s support has proved as instrumental as Russia’s in shoring up Assad’s hold on power, with Iranian-trained and -funded Shiite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, reinforcing the depleted Syrian army on most of the important front lines.
Whether Russia ever would have been able to persuade Assad to comply with the deal is in question, said Robert Ford, who served as U.S. ambassador to Syria during the earliest years of the uprising against Assad and is now with the Washington-based Middle East Institute. It is also far from clear whether the United States would have been able to sell the fractious rebels on a deal that would have required them to separate from extremists, he said.
Posted by: okie farmer | Sep 24 2016 13:46 utc | 6
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