Patrick Lawrence
Two articles have surfaced recently that deserve commentary from those plucky few of us who have not joined Robert Fisk, Stephen Kinzer, David Bromwich, David Duke and millions of other intellectuals, journalists, politicians and self-described anti-imperialists in rallying around Bashar al-Assad. Years ago, when I first joined the Trotskyist movement, old friends from my bohemian days used to tell me that my new-found radicalism was some sort of psychological overcompensation related to unresolved issues with my mother that a therapist could help me overcome. Do I have the same problem today? Is my objection to MIG’s bombing hospitals a neurotic symptom? If so, I prefer to live with it.
On November 26th, Salon published an article by Patrick Lawrence titled “The war is over in Syria, and America lost” that as the title indicates sums up the sentiments of the aforementioned Assadist camp. Apparently, there must have been some complaints to editor Andrew O’Hehir over the far too candid wording and was recaptioned in a day or two as “American policy totally failed in Syria — let’s be thankful”. Nothing changed besides this. Even the ghoulish photo of Assad and Putin remained.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving Day, just 3 days before his article appeared, Lawrence was thankful that Donald Trump joined him, Fisk, Kinzer, Bromwich, Duke et al in dumping Obama’s “regime change” policies and seeing eye to eye with an ultraright racist who keeps people up at night worrying about nuclear war with North Korea. Good old Donald Trump has seen the light. Yes, he has screwed poor people, backed Roy Moore to the hilt, opened up national parks to drilling, retweeted Britain First’s Islamophobic videos and generally been Salon magazine’s worst nightmare. But on Syria, he warms the cockles of Lawrence’s heart.
Showing an utter incomprehension about the reactionary character of the Assad-Putin axis, Lawrence also cheers on the reorientation of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and even Israel to the Putin-Assad axis. “For what it is worth — and I cannot evaluate this — even Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, includes Putin in his loop since the outcome in Syria became evident some months ago.” He cannot evaluate this? Okay, let’s do it for him. Israel is also drawing closer to Saudi Arabia as this Jerusalem Post article points out. Both powers might still be hostile to Iran but nonetheless agree that the Arab Spring was “destabilizing and unleashed dangerous forces”.
So, we have a commonality of interests between Trump, Putin, Assad, Turkey, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia about the need to keep Assad in power. If Lawrence weren’t a half-assed, has-been “investigative journalist” resting on his laurels like Fisk, Cockburn and Hersh, he’d understand that there is a class explanation for this. These powers seek stability in the Middle East in order to create fertile ground for capitalist investment. The poor, rural, and often religious rebels who took up arms against Assad 6 years ago were an inconvenience to powers that were in fact happy to be seen shaking hands with Assad over one deal or another in 2010 before the uppity rebels spoiled everything. Here’s just one example from dozens of photo ops:
Writing for the Nation last January, Lawrence was giddy with excitement over signs that Trump had dispensed with the “liberal, postwar order” that had produced “regime change” operations repeatedly. He was confident that a new détente with Putin could usher in a new world of peace and harmony between nations. His analysis was closely linked to that of the degraded Stephen F. Cohen whose wife Katrina vanden Heuvel was chief editor at the liberal magazine.
One supposes that the Nation and Salon got what they bargained for when they signed Lawrence up. On August 9th, a Lawrence article about Russiagate relied on the word of VIPS, a group of ex-spooks led by Ray McGovern that has defended every murderous step taken by Assad, including the sarin gas attacks. Not long after the article appeared, vanden Heuvel wrote an editor’s note that appeared above the article stating, “As part of the editing process, however, we should have made certain that several of the article’s conclusions were presented as possibilities, not as certainties.” In other words, the editors failed to do their due diligence when Lawrence’s bullshit crossed their desk. Even some of the spooks differed sharply from the report issued in their name. “This VIPS memo was hastily written based on a flawed analysis of third-party analyses and then thrown against the wall, waiting to see if it would stick.”
Hastily written and based on a flawed analysis? That sounds like 99 percent of the crap that is written on Putin and Assad’s behalf.
In trying to absolve Russia of hacking Clinton’s email (and who cares if they did) by establishing it as an inside job, Lawrence resorted to a technology-steeped analysis that showed him to be as inept as Theodore Postol or Seymour Hersh are on the chemistry of sarin gas. Relying on an “expert” only known as Forensicator, Lawrence wrote, “1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.” This was supposedly much too fast for any Russian hacker sneaking into Clinton’s email server. The VIPS dissidents pointed out that data transfer rates across the Internet from far-off locales can reach that speed and even exceed it while a server sitting in the same room as a client computer can be slower. Even the Forensicator was forced to issue a correction.
Finally, Ray McGovern, who Lawrence relied upon for his shoddy article, is not too particular about who he schmoozes with. In fact, before the article appeared in the Nation, McGovern gave an interview to the crypto-fascist and terminally obscurantist LarouchePAC making the same arguments.
Max Abrahms
John Glaser
Next we turn to Max Abrahms who co-authored LA Times op-ed with John Glaser titled “The pundits were wrong about Assad and the Islamic State”. I am familiar with Abrahms’s Assadist propaganda but had not stumbled across Glaser before. It turns out he is a staff member of the Cato Institute who has an M.A. in International Security from George Mason University. Did you know that Koch Industries’ executive vice president for public policy, Rich Fink, heads two Koch-funded programs at the school? Nice.
Like Patrick Lawrence and David Duke, Glaser is dead-set against “interventionism”, even going so far as to bad-mouth Trump for not breaking with the “liberal, postwar order” that Lawrence predicted he would. While being opposed to America’s wars overseas, Glaser has no problem with the war on the poor inside its borders (and Chile, I guess) as his valentine to Milton Friedman would indicate.
The gist of the article is to point out the error of neoconservatives like Max Boot who argued that ISIS could not be defeated as long as Assad was in power. While I have nothing in common with Max Boot, did he really argue that vanquishing the Islamic State was futile unless the U.S. also moved to depose the “Alawite regime in Damascus” as the article alleges? If you take the trouble to track down Boot’s article, which is unlinked in the article, you’ll see a somewhat different formulation: “The president also needs to do a better job of mobilizing support from Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, as well as from Turkey, by showing that he is intent on deposing not only ISIS but also the equally murderous Alawite regime in Damascus.” In other words, defeating Assad was not a precondition for defeating ISIS. Did Abrahms and Glaser think that LA Times readers would not fact-check them? What arrogant pricks.
They also claim that reports of Assad avoiding military confrontations with ISIS were false. They refer to numerous engagements that clearly did take place but only within the context of an all-out war on ISIS jointly coordinated by the USA and Russia. Before Obama made fighting against ISIS his sole interest in Syria, there were clear indications of a united front between Assad and ISIS against the Syrian rebels.
Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center’s (JTIC), hardly a citadel of pro-rebel sentiment, took note of the non-aggression pact that was obvious to everybody outside of the Assadist old boys network:
Forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Islamic State fighters (IS) in Syria appear to be avoiding each other on battlefield, as they focus their efforts fighting other groups in the war-torn country, data published by NBC news suggests.
Two out of three attacks carried out by IS militants in Syria this year targeted other non-state groups, according to data by Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center’s (JTIC).
The figures suggest that IS and Assad’s forces are mostly “ignoring each other,” said Matthew Henman, head of JTIC.
“They both recognize there’s a mutual benefit in crushing other groups,” Henman said.
Only 13 percent of the militants’ attacks during the same period — this year through Nov. 21 — targeted Syrian security forces.
Most of the article consists of academic political science blather but this particular sentence is worth noting: “The Realist paradigm reminds us that the U.S. need not share the same ideology of a nasty international actor to countenance working with him against a mutual foe.” This obviously is another way of saying that Assad was a lesser evil to ISIS even though you have to wonder what criterion the authors are using. This table dated January 7, 2015 will give you a good idea who is producing mass murder on an industrial scale:
Finally, it must be noted that Ben Norton, Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek have cited Max Abrahms in their Assadist propaganda since he shares their obsession with the jihadist threat. This is the same Max Abrahms who is on record as saying things like “Clearly, Palestinian society still places greater value on maintaining peace with the terrorists than with Israel” and “To staunch the bleeding from Israel’s July 2000 openhandedness, the Israel Defense Forces used an iron fist. Operation Defensive Shield, initiated in March 2002, brought the fight to the terrorists by deploying massive numbers of troops to the West Bank. This was language terrorists could understand. Evidently, it worked.”
And these three are supposedly pro-Palestinian? God help us.
“If you take the trouble to track down Boot’s article, which is unlinked in the article, you’ll see a somewhat different formulation: “The president also needs to do a better job of mobilizing support from Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, as well as from Turkey, by showing that he is intent on deposing not only ISIS but also the equally murderous Alawite regime in Damascus.” In other words, defeating Assad was not a precondition for defeating ISIS. Did Abrahms and Glaser think that LA Times readers would not fact-check them? What arrogant pricks.”
The article to which you refer is at a website called defenseone.com from 2014. That is not the link that is indeed provided in reference to Boot by A & G.
For the record, Glaser & Abrahms do indeed link to a different and more recent Boot article in Commentary from October 2016.
Here is the relevant paragraph from G & A:
“John Bolton, former United Nations ambassador under George W. Bush, insisted in the New York Times that “defeating the Islamic State” is “neither feasible nor desirable” if Assad remains in power. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham asserted that “defeating Islamic State also requires defeating Bashar Assad.” Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution prescribed a policy of “building a new Syrian opposition army capable of defeating both President Bashar al-Assad and the more militant Islamists.” Similarly, Max Boot, a contributing writer to this newspaper, argued that vanquishing Islamic State was futile unless the U.S. also moved to depose the “Alawite regime in Damascus.” Like other regime-change salesmen, he pitched a no-fly zone across the country to facilitate airstrikes against the Assad government, while boosting aid to the so-called moderate rebels.”
The word “pitched” in the last sentence is linked to this Boot Commentary article: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/cleaning-up-obama-syria-mess/
Commentary does not allow you to copy. However, Boot makes it clear that he supports Kenneth Pollack’s proposal to “create a new Syrian army” to defeat “both the regime and the extremists.” (quotes from Pollack). This seems pretty in character for Pollack, who wrote the book on invading Iraq.
So Louis, you can read Boot’s quote of Pollack from a completely different article, and decide whether or not B & P support a U.S. military strategy to create and army to both defeat ISIS and overthrow Assad.
Comment by David Green — December 13, 2017 @ 5:40 am
Didn’t you understand my point? The Commentary article did not contain the words “Alawite regime in Damascus” or anything about deposing it. That Boot article was here: https://www.cfr.org/report/defeating-isis. I evidently didn’t include a link to it, which was my intention.
Comment by louisproyect — December 13, 2017 @ 1:22 pm
Louis, you haven’t deigned to address my concern. The Commentary article by Boot that A & G linked to quotes Pollack’s support a “new” Syrian military “capable of defeating the regime and the extremists.”
You are picking nits in order not to address the fact that you deceptively referred to a different and less recent Boot article than the one that A& G actually linked to.
But of course I expect nothing but arrogance and condescension from you; even more so when you’ve been caught in a lie.
“Didn’t you understand my point?” Yes, Louis, I understood your point. I checked on your sources, and found deception, intentional or otherwise.
So what if those specific words were not used in the Boot article?
Comment by David Green — December 13, 2017 @ 6:17 pm
I am pleased to hear some of these one act ponies are being shown the door. But why were their overall opinions not scrutinised in the first place? As for those who betrayed international solidarity when it could have made a difference, and think they can just move on to other issues — who could ever trust them? I forget his name,,,, But it really is true what that Syrian in exile wrote, often quoted by this website, that westerners who betrayed Syria have not appreciated the damage they have done to themselves…
Comment by seaspan — December 13, 2017 @ 6:35 pm
Green, you are the stupidest trolI have run into yet here. Abrahms and Glaser write that TOPPLING ASSAD IS A PRECONDITION FOR DEFEATING ISIS and cite an unlinked article by Boot that supposedly makes such a case. I FUCKING TRACKED DOWN THE MOTHERFUCKING ARTICLE and showed that it said no such thing. It said that the USA must seek both the defeat of Assad and ISIS. That is Boot’s position, not mine. My complaint is that they misrepresented Boot. If you’ve been reading this blog over the years, you might understand that the brunt of my articles on Syria is to point out the lies and distortions of these pieces of shit who you obviously adore.
Comment by louisproyect — December 13, 2017 @ 6:54 pm
This guy…. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh
Comment by seaspan — December 13, 2017 @ 7:03 pm
Thanks for this piece of great work. This should shake the populist Left out of it hypnotic trance but if not the renewal of the Arab Spring will do it for them.
Comment by abraham Weizfeld Ph.D. — December 13, 2017 @ 7:08 pm
It was the revolutionary opposition who insisted on defeating the Assad regime first, and then secondly to mobilise a newly constituted national armed forces to go after ISIS — to unite Syrians, maintain territorial integrity, and to expel all foreign forces. The US has been doing everything in their power to subvert and co-opt them, effectively doing its part to protect the regime. As for Assad, the torture prisons and the starvation sieges — issues still topping the opposition agenda in Geneva talks — Obama indicated US policy long ago: Why all this fuss by “farmers or teachers”?
Comment by seaspan — December 13, 2017 @ 10:07 pm
I believe the Putinite-Assadist fraud on the pseudo-left is at best what is termed a “self-reinforcing dogma.” If, as seems to be the case, Assad has emerged victorious and ISIS has pretty well had it, that doesn’t show that there was never a real policy of regime change–no, it must show that heroic Vlad and heroic Trump and heroic Assad have united in a People’s Glorious Victory against the forces of imperialism.
This will lead in the next chapter to a highly technical discussion of the unique properties of super-thermite.
What Boot actually said is less important than the fact that G&A are setting him up as a straw man for their Putinite-Assadist advocacy as opposed to the alleged “imperialist” conspiracy–a strange notion, because in neither version does B. seem to represent the official voice of the U.S. government at all, no matter what his tiny neoliberal brain may be trying to bring about on the great world stage of Policy.
He’s just another Social Sciences academic fraud blowing hard, a la Kissinger, no doubt in hopes of a little sexual predation when the lecture is over.
Associating Boot with Pollack proves nothing about the great Clinton/Obama conspiracy, so fortunately averted by the forces of Good. It’s guilt by association–one worthless, braying jackass with another–without proof of anything, since no case is being made except the paranoid obsessive one about Louis’s alleged lies.
The worst Louis could be accused of–and I reject this–would be a slight confusion in sources or a faulty interpretation of a relatively minor point. It’s sheer paranoia to seize on this relatively minor matter as proof of some fiendish deception, especially when one does not state a position on or even acknowledge the larger case that is being made.
Are we pro-Putin and Assad or not? Why not just come right out and say it? Why all this creepy slinking about and and indirection–and then the wild name-calling?
Comment by Farans Kalosar — December 14, 2017 @ 2:27 am
So, according to Louis, not using the word “precondition” (for defeating ISIS) gets someone who wants to set up an army to overthrow the Syrian regime off the hook. Right. I mean, these are neocons we’re talking about here, with a track record in Iraq and Libya. But playing “gotcha” on such a trivial point is somehow monumental. So monumental that it deserves not one f-bomb but two. Stay classy, Louis.
Comment by David Green — December 14, 2017 @ 3:46 am
John Glaser, before joining Cato, was an editor at Antiwar.com, which is of course home to the deranged rantings of pro-Trump libertarian Justin Raimondo.
Comment by Charles Davis — December 14, 2017 @ 6:35 am
‘The only way to defeat the extremists is to end the civil war and create a moderate state,’ comes from the Boot article and it is this idea that the pro Assad writers are saying has been disproved. All seems a moot point to me, I mean who are the main extremists in Syria. Putin-Assad-Iran -Hezbollah as the bar graph above indicates has long been the most murderous axis in Syria. The pro Assad writers ignore the fact that for many months and years IS has demonstrably not been the prime focus of their mass bombing , in Idlib, Homs, Aleppo, Daraya, Douma etc and that Raqqa, the capture of the capital of IS in Syria was not the work of the regime. IS has undoubtedly been a benefit for the regime and it has long recognised that. That doesn’t mean that the regime with Russia and Iran can’t extinguish it when they are ready and when the mass movement of non-IS Syrians who opposed it have not been forced into exile, prison, and the grave.
Comment by Matthew Jackson — December 14, 2017 @ 1:03 pm
Green, Louis stated clearly that he does not endorse Boot’s position in either article, but is calling attention to what he sees as the misrepresentation of that position by a third party. as part of a larger critique of the third party’s approach. Whether he has cited the right article or not (irrelevant to this point)–and even if his conclusion were wrong or debatable–this is perfectly logical. A somewhat analogous situation might be a case where attention is called to some commentator who in the course of a larger argument says Hitler was a socialist. Calling this a distortion would not, logically speaking, make one an apologist for Hitler. That is, denying this would not be “letting Hitler off the hook.”
You make much of your supposedly incontestable and unsurpassed mastery of argumentation, yet in this instance prove yourself impervious to basic reasoning. The lack of any direct engagement with the main thrust of Louis’s piece makes this more glaring.
Comment by Farans Kalosar — December 14, 2017 @ 4:11 pm
But playing “gotcha” on such a trivial point is somehow monumental. So monumental that it deserves not one f-bomb but two. Stay classy, Louis.
—
To avoid this sort of thing in the future, please make the effort to understand what I was writing. I have no interest in defending Max Boot’s neoconservative politics. My intention was to point out Abrahms and Glaser’s dodgy reporting. In terms of the actual substance of what I wrote, it appears you are okay with Max Abrahms being the go-to guy for Norton, Blumenthal and Khalek even though he is an apologist for the IDF. Interesting.
Comment by louisproyect — December 14, 2017 @ 6:16 pm
Louis, I’ve been the primary Jewish dissident regarding Israel/Palestine in my community for two decades, and very publicly so. I’ve taken every criticism in the book, and very publicly so, across the spectrum from liberal Zionists to the Christian right.
Actually, I’ve been the primary critic Jewish or otherwise in the larger local community, which has many Muslims, and very publicly so. And now I’m critical of Jewish Voice for Peace, of which I’m a member, because of a misplaced emphasis on anti-Semitism.
Blumenthal’s record and journalism on Palestine speaks for itself. You, on the other hand, support U.S. imperial policies that are synchronized with support for Israel; and you never say jack about Israel/Palestine, because it doesn’t allow you to beat up on the people you hate.
I’m obviously no fan of A&G; I’d never heard of them in fact. Abrahms views on Israel are reprehensible, if he still holds them. That doesn’t discredit this article. It’s perfectly sensible, that’s the way it goes sometimes. It’s not exactly hard to make a case against neocons.
When it came to Mondoweiss, I was harshly critical of the Israel Lobby Mearsheimer/Walt arguments, especially of Jeffrey Blankfort (along with the hated Max Ajl). And of Annie Robbins, as were you. I’m not at all afraid to be a dissident, although not just for the sake of being an asshole in regard to people I may not like.
And again, where’s your criticism of Black Agenda Report. Your Identity Politics mentality determines your targets. When you excoriate Glen Ford, I’ll at least respect you for your consistency. But you don’t want to be seen as attacking black radicals, and that’s telling in terms of your intellectual (dis) honesty.
Comment by David Green — December 14, 2017 @ 6:48 pm
Just to clarify, Max Ajl was my ally in the argument against Blankfort; another example of someone who doesn’t deserve to be bullied by you, Louis.
Comment by David Green — December 14, 2017 @ 7:08 pm
@Charles Davis: It’s ridiculous to label Raimondo as pro-Trump; very dishonest.
Comment by David Green — December 14, 2017 @ 7:10 pm
Abrahms article is not ‘perfectly sensible’, its a lot of rubbish that misrepresents others views to parrot Russia-Assad-Iran propaganda. He is horrible supporter of a regime that is right now refusing access of Red Cross to starving children in eastern Ghouta. Why are you writing here if you are just an apologist for a criminal regime anyhow, David Green?
Meanwhile,
‘Coalition partners kill 20 ISIS fighters in southern Syria yesterday, capture others, including foreign fighters. These Daesh fighters freely moved through “liberated” territory of Russian-backed, pro-Syrian regime forces in the area’. Abrahms would call that a lie no doubt, Putinist shil that he is ,whilst meekly supporting every lie the regime and Russia ever told about sarin, barrel bombs and the targeting of hospitals and aid convoys. Horrible.
Comment by Matthew Jackson — December 14, 2017 @ 9:35 pm
I think most of us had a lot of use for young Blumenthal when he was writing his books on Israel. His Assadist turn, which came later, was a big disappointment. Ben Norton is an altogether lesser figure, but he too took a turn that was a radical departure from previously held positions.
It really does seem that they may simply be following their paychecks. When it comes to even less substantial figures like John Wight and Mike Whitney, there seems to be no doubt about it.
I do think–without making any concessions to their “turned” characters–that this reflects the difficulty for young people (indeed anyone) in making a living in journalism–or blogging, or whatever. I don’t think that justifies anybody in sucking at the tits of RT and Sputnik News, but the fact that some are doing this does reflect on that larger situation. it’s just damn hard to get paid for writing nowadays–this certainly affects the quality and output of writers. You have to be a star, and you have to dance to the tune of your paymasters. You will prevail and prosper over the dead bodies of your former comrades. It’s a very disturbing form of corruption.
It’s also another reflection–like the coming destruction of the open Internet–of the way in which capitalism is striking more deeply than in recent memory at the intellectual roots of dissent.
The reality is that “Vlad” as Mike Whitney so cozily calls him, is not your friend. He isn’t even the friend of his numerous fascist-like admirers who, I am sure, are just is ridiculous in the eyes of A. Dugin and his followers–the true ideologues of Putinism–as liberals and Marxists. The fact that people who ought to know better can’t or won’t see this is quite remarkable. This problem is central to the stalemate and decline of the left in our time. Louis is doing heroic work in engaging with it.
Comment by Farans Kalosar — December 15, 2017 @ 2:43 am
It’s revealing of the threadbare nature of your argument, and Louis’s that you accuse Blumenthal of pecuniary motives. That’s about as transparently low and vapid as it gets.
Comment by David Green — December 15, 2017 @ 4:24 pm
Blumenthal has pecuniary motives. Nobody would pay you to piss on a fire, so you of course do not.
Comment by Farans Kalosar — December 16, 2017 @ 6:33 am
‘Intense #Russian air strikes with incendiary ammunitions on towns in #Hama province now, where #ISIS and #Assad advance vs. Syrian rebels.’
What is revealing about the nature of your arguments David Green is how uselessly pro Putin and Assad regime they are. Reality is that Russian airplanes bomb civilians with incendiary weapons and lie about ‘withdrawal’. Abrahms, David Green , same thing really, idiotic worshippers of a Fascist regime they live very far from.
Comment by Matthew Jackson — December 17, 2017 @ 7:09 pm
from a left-wing opposition new agency inside Syria (translation a bit difficult to follow in parts):
http://en.hawarnews.com/al-tabqa-civil-administration-regime-handed-over-syria-to-sectarian-militias/
Comment by Tony — December 20, 2017 @ 9:31 pm
Ahem… https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/21/did-obama-arm-islamic-state-killers/
Comment by Bill J. — December 21, 2017 @ 9:40 pm
Actually, the title of the article should be “How ISIS wrested arms from the arsenal of Iraqi soldiers fleeing Mosul”. I dealt with that here:
https://louisproyect.org/2016/10/16/saudi-arabia-syria-and-the-smoking-gun/
Comment by louisproyect — December 21, 2017 @ 10:25 pm
This article almost made me vomit. This has got to be the rubicon moment for all those who’ve invested too much to turn back now, for their murderous dictatorship. Maybe you can muster the strength to write an article on it, Louis,,,,
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-sick-children-cancer-humanitarian-aid-bashar-al-assad-putin-war-worse-a8132056.html
Comment by seaspan — December 30, 2017 @ 2:11 am