It seems that this has been going on for a long time now, although of course different sources call the strikes ‘against militant terrorists’, ‘freedom fighters’…well, you know how it goes. The tweets below are about Kurds in SE Turkey and now Kurdistan, but Akbar Shahid Ahmed at www.huffingtonpost.com brings context from last fall in Syria:
“ISTANBUL – Last fall, Islamic State fighters launched a coordinated, large-scale assault on the Kurdish town of Kobani on Syria’s northern border with Turkey. Fresh from victories that granted them an aura of invincibility, the extremists were about to remove the single irritant on a wide swath of the border they otherwise controlled.
The world watched in resignation. The lone superpower said it would not help. U.S. officials grimly predicted the city would fall. Yet the small band of Kurds held on for days, then weeks. The U.S.-led coalition against the self-described Islamic State began to help, first with a smattering of airstrikes then with daily assaults. And by January, in a stunning turnabout that has been called a contemporary Stalingrad, the Kurds won.
In succeeding, the Syrian Kurds defended not just a strategic outpost in the Middle East, but also a utopian idea of government they’re putting into practice — what they talk about as a space where decisions are made at the neighborhood level, where gender equity and ethnic inclusion are legally mandated, and where barter is becoming more important than currency.”
In his ‘Syrian Kurds: Governance Without Hierarchy, Patriarchy Or Capitalism’, Ahmed tells a bit of the story of Kurdish leaders basing their social experiment on the ideas and a long engagement with Murray Bookchin, ‘who fused Marxist and anarchist ideals into a vision of a world where citizens’ assemblies supplant state bureaucracy and environmentalism is king’. He expands at length on Bookchin’s version of Utopia; it’s seriously interesting.
Now in a propaganda war with so many ‘sides’, he seems in thrall to the US hegemon, and takes this ‘Good Kurds v. Bad Kurds’ tack:
“Washington sees the Syrian Kurds’ success defending Kobani — and other parts of Rojava – as the chief example of how U.S.-led air power and partnerships with forces on the ground can effectively defeat the Islamic State.
But this is an especially odd partnership. The Syrian Kurds’ ties to Ocalan and the PKK, the designated terrorist organization he leads, enrage Turkey, the most important U.S. ally in the region. And the Rojava vision is dramatically at odds with the more feudal nationalism of another group of Kurds who are used to being Washington’s favorites — those in Iraq. The Syrian Kurds’ growing autonomy and unwillingness to launch an all-out offensive against Assad has also upset the Syrian Arab nationalist rebels that the U.S. has courted for years.”
Yes, over a hundred of those outlawed PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) terrorists have been killed in this latest iteration of civil war:
“A two-and-a-half year ceasefire between the two sides broke down in July, giving new life to a war that has raged across the region for the last thirty years. The PKK first launched its insurgency fighting for an independent Kurdish state in 1984. Since that time, over 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict. In recent years the PKK has been pressing for greater autonomy and rights for the Kurds, Turkey’s largest minority.
The offensive is by far the largest of its kind since the beginning of the ceasefire. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has continually vowed to wipe out the PKK, a group that the Turkish government and its allies, including the United States and the European Union, consider a terrorist organization.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu gave a speech to the supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) where he vowed to eliminate the PKK’s threat.
“We will not get tired,” Davutoglu said. “We will fight day and night until all mountains, cities, districts and neighbourhoods of this country are cleansed of terror centres.”
The fighting mainly took place in the predominantly Kurdish cities of Cizre and Silopi in Sirnak province and inside a neighbourhood in Diyarbakir. Conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state has continued in spite of the continued war against the Islamic State, in which the PKK plays an active role, as previously noted by Inquisitr.”
(three hours ago)
(a dissenter replies below another twitter pic)
Of course I was curious to see what the US State Department was saying about their glorious NATO partners in peace, so I got on their (and Kerry’s) account and found:
(“@NSCPress This account is run by President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC). Tweets may be archived.) Clearly, these folks below the Tweet were frustrated at best.
@NSCPress @POTUS why doesn’t President Erdogan stop attacking the Kurds? We can see through this hypocritical veil – placed on the West.
@POTUS did he tell the Turks to stop marketing ISIS black market oil? Turkey is complicit with funding of terrorism
@POTUS it is concerning to humanity you won’t call Turkey’s bluff & their motives for obtaining oil via ISIL
Some were kinda funny in a way, like:
@POTUS He couldn’t say something about the attack against the #Kurds in #Turkey ? You can loose the kurds to #Russia
Meanwhile, I’m seriously not amused if what Pepé Escobar is saying is so in his ‘You Want War? Russia is Ready for War’: that Putin has threatened launching nukes if, if, or if…. scenarios.
“Since mid-2014 the Pentagon has run all manner of war games – as many as 16 times, under different scenarios – pitting NATO against Russia. All scenarios were favorable to NATO. All simulations yielded the same victor: Russia.
And that’s why Erdogan’s erratic behavior actually terrifies quite a few real players from Washington to Brussels.”
He then takes readers on ‘a missile cruise’, and oh, my.
At any rate, my heart goes out to the Kurds in general. The Empire has been selling them out in massively hypocritical perfidy since the First Gulf War, urging them to revolt, then failing to help them as promised. Like Charlie Brown and Lucy’s football funnies, they fell for it again at least twice, as I remember it.
But lest we start believing that the Empire isn’t satisfied waging endless war against brown and black people around the globe, at least the administration has its eyes on the Most Important Big Prize for ‘the little people’.
The election results from Spain were in last night; Podemos in fact did better than earlier projections, and good on them and the voters.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
So, all US’ prior tariff Treaty DEAL$ were even bigger Turd $ANDWICH$ ? And the Nuking FUT$ Nipponese don’t care for American beef; they prefer Minke (Whale, that is!) :
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/japans-whaling-fleet-set-embark-hunt-333-minke-whales-n471121
ah, jeez, bruce. i can srsly have some heart for indigenous subsistence whalers and seal hunters, but…no, that is not scientific whaling, it’s ‘fine dining’, perhaps suchi.
bless the dedicated and courageous sea shepherds. greenpeace is not the same.
rumsfeld etc. on the missing trillions from the pentagon. (i know rummy probably does not mean what i mean by quoting him). if we get in a shooting war for baiting the bear one too many times, americans may find out that none/lots of their batman whizbang techno crap has n/ever worked. ever. or is easily tricked or otherwise thwarted or overcome. oh frabjous day! except we’ll have to endure endless dochschlosslegende howling about which admin “betrayed” the pentagon and our boyz in uniform. (lemme guess: the dems gladly fall on their sword for that one.) and it’s doubtful “our” nukes are frauds, but maybe in a shooting war w/the Bear all the nuke silo techs will have done their duty by getting so hammered the night before they all fail to show up for work. “sorry i couldn’t make it for the ‘nuke moscow’ festivities; i was too hung over.”
the pentagon budget: biggest fraud in human history.
(does any of this ABM stuff actually work? let’s hope the russkies are not dump enough to adopt pepe escobar’s seeming faith their system is effective).
OT, but if sanders (or anyone) wanted to derail Trump, couldn’t they take a camera crew & just walk around Atlantic City for a few minutes? “Here’s Trumponomics, right here.” maybe? but they won’t do it cuz, well, you’d have to talk about more than Trump, about what Trump is an exemplar of, and that ain’t gonna happen.
yanno what they say: ‘a trillion here, a trillion there…sooner er later it starts to add up to real money’. i do remember that once upon a time, nick turse tried to hunt down the actual factual military budget, and he found entries all over the budget map that just about doubled the publicly stated amounts.
dunno about the effectiveness of ABM systems, but nato sure loves the hell outta them, no? but pepé may also be close to correct in his assessment; i have no idea.
sorry i won’t comment on that T person just reading headlines with his name in it makes my stomach roil.
but hell’s bells, so many of the super jets,, stealth and otherwise, that the pentagon didn’t even want….are still being built because, and eugene jarecki said: parts manufacturing is farmed out to as many states as possible. some don’t even work, or didn’t, and the cot-over-runs are gargantuan. share the gravy style. (i wanna say the f-35 of some iteration or other)
on edit: from dec. 18:
“Let me also say what NATO’s missile defence capability is not. It is neither designed nor directed against Russia. And is not capable of undermining Russia’s strategic deterrence capabilities. We have made this clear to the Russian authorities many times. However, Russia has made threatening statements, especially against those Allies that are contributing to NATO BMD. Such threats are totally unjustified. They do not help to build trust or lower tensions.
As the name shows, this is a defensive system, not an offensive one. But be convinced that NATO is and remains committed to defend its members against any kind of attack.”
i can’t speak about russia’s abm system(s), but they assume, rightly i think, that NATO’s abm system is offensive, not defensive. “as the name shows.” lol. words, how do they work? maybe n korea’s missiles will (someday) fly across russia so amb systems need to be in poland & romania &…? just to be safe.
those bastards who set up this natsec state knew what they were doing when they implicated so much of the american economy in “defense.”
yeppers, jason. and how to instill massive fear of _____ (fill in the blank at will).
but somebody thinks the rooskies’ abm systems just might be able to ‘work’. ;-)
“oh that’s a load of commie bull!” as buck turgidson might say. except the US & co. don’t seem too eager to find out if it is bull or not.
too bad the Rus’ abm sys doesn’t seem to work on the Big Bombs. (or maybe they’d act just like the US if they tho’t it did work on icbm’s? or worse? though it’s prolly a pipe dream that some defensive system is gonna prevent any party from being forced to learn to cooperate simply in order to survive. the “universal wolf” at last cannibalizes itself, that sort of thing. but we delude ourselves about what our weapons can do.)
and thanks for the link. it may not be fair to grin w/that shameful joy aka schadenfreude, but i can’t help it when uncle sam’s bluster & chest-puffing & worse gets thwarted, even if temporarily. who does not rejoice at that awful, tedious kerry grovelling before bad vlad? bill kristol?
for me, too, jason. it’s one of the reasons i love nato on twitter so much. so much bluster, so much pecker-measuring, so much bellicosity looking for multiple missions and endless war.
‘kristol?’ was great.
and “support” for the kurds in sy-raq has given the US an excuse for intervention going on 25 years now, hasn’t it? to be supported or betrayed as needed.
at least since papa bush, as far as i know. but…oh…WMD (ack!) and incubators stolen from preemies (ack!).
sorry, i tried to read THD’s sy hersh piece (oh, sooooo long) and my eyes failed, not even blistex revived them. my, i live such a different schedule than all of you, and by this time of evening…
but a good winter solstice to all of us. how good it will be to see the days lengthening, no? mr. wd keeps reading me the daily snow forecasts at NOAA, and it looks as though CO will be…the bomb. sadly, that means no kids here for christmas, but our hearts will be together.
tomorrow, yes? and a song if i can find it… will humanity ever learn? or our rulers stop needing it?
Seymour Hersh uncorks one on exactly this conundrum and the multi-way alliances with respect to Syria. And he wonders WTF the President is thinking while the DoD is moving to intelligence-sharing agreements to work around Erdogan, the Saudis and the Gulf States. It seems to be a zoo of ad hoc, cross-cutting, and contradictory relationships.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military
The situation seems to be filled with situations in which one part of the bureaucracy is operating independently of and contrary to another part of the bureaucracy and yet another with respect to another part of the military.
The fact that the US military and the Russian military continue to have independent (that is of their heads of state) relationships based on their success in reducing nuclear weapons is at the same time slightly comforting and very disturbing in its absence of the ability for public restraint.
The YPG are the most valuable fighting force in the midst of the chaos if only by geographical location and ability to hold a position. But they are at the same time the odd group out in all of the alliances at the various tables. What Erdogan did with his attack was break the maneuver that was pressing on Raqqa and presenting the problem of non-sectarian organization of the territory jointly occupied by Kurds and the Sunnis that DAESH has held hostage for over a year. Islamist Sunnis like Erdogan’s Turkey and the Saudi Arabian royals see a non-sectarian state as a threat. A lot of effort in their diplomacy has gone (likely with bribes to Congress as well) into ensuring a sectarian Sunni future, whether Moslem Brotherhood, Salafist, or some other Islamist politics, such as that of aspirational caliph Erdogan. Turkey is a NATO ally; Erdogan has been supportive of both the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State; that is as straightforward a contradiction of direction as one can have. At one level none of the US policymakers in DC (including the President) have a clue about how to square that circle and maintain existing alliances.
NATO is increasingly looking like a military alliance looking for an enemy but each country having entangling alliances that make difficult a consensus on who that enemy is.
After reading Hersh’s article, I’m more curious as to where the lines of conflict are in the US national security state. It seems much less monolithic than it has for quite some time. Or people who have different opinions are much more willing to shared them with Hersh than for the past decade.
holy crow; i found the cliff’s notes version at RT this mornin’, and i’m assuming they got it at least half right. but what a clusterfuck with the various fiefdoms playing out!
now i’m so ignorant on all of this i had to look up YPG (popular protection unit). i’ll read your long paragraph beginning with that a few more times to see if it can stick with me.
mr. wd pointed me to the final few graphs of sy’s, and it gets even more weird reading dempsey’s replacements’ (joe dunford) words: ‘russia is an existential threat’, etc.. tulsi gabbard seems to know what a dangerously stupid game obama is playing.
i dunno. while i was on the state dept. twitter thing, susan rice was all over it. i skipped to her account, and was jut bowled over by her comments to paul kagame, her former BFF (hers and clinton’s business partners). i went hunting for the simple versions, found a couple and a thing at trnn that was pretty weak tea. might stick it up and let y’all add to it.
‘Erdoğan vows Kurdish rebels ‘will be buried in trenches they have dug‘; Turkish president says operations against militants will continue as state-run news agency reports 115 Kurdish rebels killed’
I hate it every time a put up a long, informative link like Hersch’s. Boy-oh did he draw blood. Ezra Klein is out there trying to knock it down as crazy man talk. Watch this unfold.
From James Carroll’s House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power we learned that the major split in the US national security state is between the large, well-financed military and the dirty warriors of the intelligence service who “don’t have to pay attention to no stinkin’ laws”. From David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government we learned that might extend to the assassination of the President of the United States. So play out the the power relationships here. President Obama from the beginning was clearly operating in many cases with the maxim, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Thus Hillary as Secretary of State until she went to pursue her Presidential ambitions. Thus Obama and John Brennan (more than Clapper) being joined at the hip; Brennan also has deep ties with Saudi Arabia, which complicates advice that might seek to rein in Wahabi Salafism. It also biases how he sees Sunni jihadis in states in which Sunnis are even a slight majority. But Obama cannot threaten his relationship with Brennan. No doubt Obama has picked Brennan’s brain about everything he knows about the Saudis. There’s the resistance that Dempsey and the Department of Defense side of the national security state are sensing. Obama has Brennan; he thinks he knows the Saudis cold. Moreover Obama needs Brennan’s protection as a de facto Praetorian Guard. But Obama also needs the military to obey the Commander-in-Chief. Or the threat comes from the military in some way, more likely of a political nature. Like sabotaging the orders to provide weapons to “moderate rebels” who looked to the military like the guys who were shooting at them in Iraq. That scenario is credible to me given the Middle Eastern clusterfuck.
What is left unsaid is the treasonous role of the Congress itself in pushing the “moderate rebels” line and Secretary of State Clinton’s role in echoing what she did not understand, most likely with the experienced foreign service personnel at the Department of State, particularly Jeffery Feltman, now at the United Nations as Under-Secretary General and head of the UN Department of Political Affairs.
His successor is Anne W. Patterson, an Arkansas native and Wellesley grad, entered the US Foreign Service in 1973 and was routinely posted as Career Ambassador after 25 years. She was Ambassador to Egypt from 2011 to 2013 (the Morsi period), Ambassador to Pakistan from 2007 to 2011 (yes, appointed by George W. Bush). It gets more interesting. Patterson has experience as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, was Ambassador to Colombia and first appointed by Bill Clinton as Ambassador to El Salvador. She is who advises John Kerry to this very day and IMHO is on the short list for Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton is elected President. She most likely is an old F. O. H. back to the late 1960s. There is strikingly little biography of David R. Patterson, her husband, listed as “retired from the US Foreign Service” has a whiff of the Plame-Wilson relationship about it, without the exposure.
Now do you understand how trusting expertise can lead to a clusterfuck. It gets bad when the DoD are the ones scrambling to avoid more war. And the State Department apparently is pushing war.
So we have Nuland in European-Eurasian Affairs out to take down Putin and Patterson in Near Eastern Affairs out to take down Assad. Cause the guys don’t respect ladies who aren’t ruthless and tough. The epitaph of the US experiment in democracy will read, “But really, they were the toughest ass nation that ever wuz.” Just ask their publicists.
oh my goodness, THD. and here earlier i’d thought to come back when i had time to ask if it were possible that any of this were by way of disinformation. clearly you believe not.
but dayum, it took me far too much of my available time for now to find the ezra piece. i finally got on his twit machine, and found this at vox, except that it’s by max fisher. is it the one? made my head swim, it did, following links, most notable of which was the NYT piece in which dempsey was said to have been in favor of the petraeus plan to ‘arm moderate rebels’. how amusing (or is it?) that clinton took a long break to nurse a ‘concussion’. among a dozen questions, is this kinda/sorta about teflon-coating hillary? nah, not so much…
i had no idea of brennan’s history with the KSA, nor any of the other incestuous relationships you’ve mentioned. when i get a chance, i’ll try to make any sort of sense of it, but bother, this day got more complicated than it seemed earlier.
one amusing thing i do remember from the fisher piece was that he ballasted his argument by saying (in essence) that everybody who was anybody knows that deposing assad is the necessary first step. ha ha, nice job.
If deposing Assad is the necessary first step, the obvious tactic would be to give the bad guys in the black robes more Toyota trucks and black flags and let them do to Damascus what they did to Palmyra. Make the Saudis and Erdogan ecstatic. In that statement, Fisher comes off as a fool or a tool. I didn’t mean for you to search out Ezra’s tweet, just know that the usual suspects were pushing back against Hersh. I never sensed Hersh to have political loyalties to the point of grinding axes for people, but he seems to have a loyal group of sources, who apparently include Patrick Lang, who commented on Hersh’s article on Sic Semper Tyrannis. Not much detail; just a “Hersh makes sense” paragraph or so and two paragraphs from Hersh’s article.
I think it’s a signal from one part of the military that they are not going to misused like they were by being sent to make a war just for the President’s ego. It could also be a signal for the likes of McCain and Graham to back off on the political pressure seeking to have Obama fail. No doubt there are a few of the brass not used to a cutthroat prodding of the President into overreaching just to make him fail.
What I found about the State Department says that it is damn hard for either Obama or Kerry to step out of Hillary Clinton’s shadow except through carefully policed direct orders from the President. As usual with the federal government at the highest levels, it is office politics from hell.
fool or tool: perfect.
on a brief break, i looked at wikileaks. remember he’d published a hella lot of cables on syria? they’re impossible for me to read, and don’t remember him pointing to any essay using them. but he said sy is on democracy now today, and indeed he is. i’ll try to listen while i do chores, but sometimes that doesn’t work all that well. a scan of the transcript looks as though amy’s asking questions based on fisher’s hit job.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/22/seymour_hershs_latest_bombshell_us_military (transcript)
prolly boring, but pt II
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/22/sy_hersh_backing_assads_ouster_has
Some notes from my reading of the transcript.
Hersh is recounting the results of a study that was completed about the time that Syria was willing to get rid of its chemical weapons after Russia made a couple of feints at intervention.
The JCS decided that creating another failed state was not going to be helpful after having gone forward on Libya.
The JCS found that McCain and Graham and their pals (and the neocons in the Obama administration) were blowing smoke about “moderate Syrian opposition” just like the Bush neo-cons were about democratic opposition to Saddam Hussein.
The JCS found that the CIA had established a supply ratline of arms to Erdogan’s Turkey for passage to jihadis in Syria. The CIA also was running a ratline moving Chinese Uighurs through Kazakhstan and Turkey into Syria as jihadis.
The Uighur ratline to Syria is something I missed in reading the LRB article.
The Israelis were working with the JCS on this even as Netanyahu was politically counting coup on Obama on the Iran agreement. I wonder what that cost in arms to Israel.
No direct communication with Assad; yet the information was guaranteed to get to him and help him against the rebels.
Important point is that Dempsey’s agreement with the CIA on arming “vetted groups” of the opposition was with Leon Panetta, pre-Petraeus, pre-Brennan.
Extremely important point if you want pilots to fly missions. They must know the risks.
This is an important fact that Americans overlook. It also raises the question about whether the first Chechnyan separatist war was stoked in the 1990s by the CIA and its Saudi allies. And the current neo-con obsession with Russia has to do with keeping this going.
Hersh argues that when you depose a dictator, you should have an idea of what comes next.
Put bluntly, why is the US putting their hands on the scales on behalf of anti-American jihadi organizations seeking to be states that also seek to terrorize the US? Why is the US destroying secular states? (Hint: They are aligned with Russia and have “socialist” governments.)
The end of the last Hersh segment on Democracy Now is that the President is continuing to perform the kabuki with respect to Saudi Arabia and Turkey (both vereeee important allies; remember that Sibel Edmonds was all about the lobbying power of Turkey in DC acting contrary to US interests; remember that 15 of the 19 9/11 highjackers were from Saudi Arabia and Saudi nationals got special FBI clearance to leave when other aircraft were grounded). Something has been very strange about US relations with those two countries for some time. Hersh knows something is fishy but doesn’t have the story yet. Forget the idea of personal obtuseness; it’s too persistent for that. Even after the JCS sabotage.
And the real news: “Sy Hersh is currently working on a book on Dick Cheney’s vice presidency.”
Thanks for linking the transcripts as my sound has died.
Short take. Dempsey rebelled, tried to get some sense, fell on his sword, and the DoD got shoved back into line with the CIA and State. But got enough sanity to produce diplomatic momentum that Kerry has to pursue and the Putin-Lavrov can bargain with. That’s our thin thread of sanity at the moment.
whoa, thank you for long cliff’s notes, thd. i did manage to hear some of it, but the best news is…now i won’t have to start again. IS origins in chechnya i didn’t know about, nor the ‘uighur ratline.’
all key questions you’re bringing up, but protecting the saudis and israel are a mission above missions, and will be to clinton. i reckon he’s wrong about her coming learning curve: she knows exactly what’s up. but how stupid that a) the power vacuum crated by deposing assad would be, especially if b) it would lead to a non-secular govt. on israel’s doorstep, and c) that the Empire can choose which *permitted secular candidates* can run for president.
wow, the US puppet government in egypt all sure worked out fine and dandy, didn’t it?
no, i’d forgotten that edmonds’ revelations concerned turkey, to say the truth. but oh, yes, i remember the empty skies on 9/12.
as they say: cuz i can, and need to counteract some of the dark mood i’m in today, this never fails to thrill me to laughter and tears:
somehow i always seem to be eating dried wasabi peas when i watch this & manage to get some in my eye. eyes, if unlucky.
ain’t it too fun for words? the shock, glee,, and total wonderment of the chirren (and not a few adults) make me cry every time. that they even hauled the timpani and cellos outdoors…my.stars.
each time i watch i notice something new; this morning it was the papa holding his child, and bouncing a little stuffed wabbit by the ear…up and down in time to the music.
and a little zaccheus on the lamp post.
sweet child dressed in radish colors?
i guess. i’ve watched it too many times already!
bless your ♥. have a good christmas day, jason. we’re snow-bound, but whoosh, seeing all the fresh critter tracks in the pristine snow is incredible. some are x-files, i swear…. they lead…nowhere. one wonders if critter x (fox, jackwabbit, etc,) might have been sucked up in Teh Rapture. ;-)
but this mornin’ a huge, fat and fluffy coyote bounded through by the house, across the big hay meadow and out to the bridge to the dryland. he had to leap leap leap, given the depth of the snow, and his moves were a bit like porpoises arcing through ocean waves. sublime.
nice. no pix of the coyote? it’s 75 degrees here just outside WDC. only critters stirring are people making beer runs to the only store open, CVS.
i’m a texas brat, no snow growing up, but i lived a few in boston area. it’s easy to be romantic about being snow-bound when one is inside safe & snug, maybe by a fire, but, if not then, when be romantic about it? getting so much snow that the whole world becomes still & quiet with nothing to do & nowhere to go. good for the soul.
no pix, it all happened so quickly. even if not, my camera only has a 12x zoom, and the hay meadow he was crossing is about 7 acres. i did get a photo of a gorgeous bear who came in the daytime (always at night, afaik), and we were maybe ten feet apart when i got out onto the porch. to say the truth, i was aware of being a bit glad that she turned away when she saw me. the only halfway decent shot i got was one of her rapidly retreating hind end. glorious long fur, as though she jut had had it shampooed and conditioned. yellow on her face in a pattern that was so demarcated that it was like she had on a mask.
a doe and two fawns are out the window, up to their knee in snow. mr. wd must have swept the rocj walkway and tossed em some apples; they seem to be munching away.
texas brat, eh? ;-) boston i’ve never visited, but snow…i can imagine. we lived one winter on the co/wy border (hahn’s peak), serious snow country, and there were weeks of -40 nights, brrrrr. crap old stove in an uninsulated cabin, snow so deep once when i hitchhiked home from work that i really had to swim my way to the cabin. couldn’t do it again, for sure.
the silence is fine, though, and seeing the tracks of night visitors. and oh, do we need the snow for next year’s water. it’ll help.
Interesting that this priority is one that outlasts Congresses and Presidents. That means that it is embedded in the working relationships of the people in the national security agencies with the people in Israeli and Saudi national security agencies. And likely in the lobbying consulting firms in DC. Who owns whom?
For all of the reversal, the events in Egypt accomplished one purpose; it showed how eager the Moslem Brotherhood was to take over the entire society by rigging the political system in the same way that the military had. That had the effect of siphoning off a lot of the frustration with Mubarak’s heavy-handed methods that cause most people to see a coming Syria situation with 80 million people. It will be another decade or two before the situation gets back to that point. And Sisi has tilted toward Saudi Arabia (wahabism/salafism) to counterbalance the MB.
https://theintercept.com/2015/12/18/beacon-global-strategies/
The foreign policy consulting firm employed by Rubio, Cruz, and Clinton — Beacon Global Strategies. Don’t think that representatives of other nations could possible hire Beacon Global Strategies for their own “consulting” work, do you? It seems to be getting much easier to follow the money in geopolitics. Advisers used to work for candidate for the future job in the diplomatic corps. Now everything is is post-political profit-making. Interesting, eh.
well, when heads of state hire madison avenue firms on issues: for instance “saddam stole incubators from preemies”, etc., and various alleged human rights watch organizations are puppets of the Empire, and folks like the incestuous Avaaz are quite effective in ‘pimpin for war’, following the money (financing) can prove a bit harder, imo. i’ll blow by the ‘3 harpies’ 4 R2P libya’….
i just happened to look it up as peer the guardian’s: ‘amnesty int’l claims putin’s bmbings in syria may have been a war crime’, and finding it was HRW’s report that spurred their claim.
anyhoo, there’s this from yesterday:
‘A Call for Proof on Syria-Sarin Attack’ by Ray McGovern Tuesday, 22 December 2015
not sure i’d ask kiriakou to sign, but…there it is. YMMV as some say.
ha; i just found this at dissident voice by by Steven Chovanec / December 19th. it’s filled with interesting items, and toward the top ‘the white helmets’ slick propaganda campaign link goes to avaaz, kristof, purpose, etc.
I have to wonder what the Spooks for Sanity con-men such as McGovern and Kiriakou are up to with this latest attempt to project guilt away from their favorite ME Autocrat Assad and onto the Sunni ‘Terrorists’. Demanding intelligence assessments from both the US and Russia is clever because the US has no, on the ground, agents to report and the Russians would never release anything that might implicate Assad, in fact they have blocked any UN investigation until recently.
It’s telling that McGovern parrots the rumors, speculation and unverified reports about the source of the Sarin as if they were evidence and facts while the only verified facts and evidence show that Assad was the only one who possessed or had the ability to produce Sarin in or near Syria.
McGovern’s ‘Call for Proof’ along with Sy Hersh’s rambling Pot-Boiler, which begins with a false timeline in Syria seem to not be about informing people but stirring up more confusion in an already overly confused conflict.
It’s probably not wise to trust everything/anything that ex-Spooks or any of these Intelligence people tell us even if they claim to be ‘reformed’!
‘favorite autocrat’ is way over the top, wayoutwest, at least in my book. their caution has been equally documented earlier, as per hersh’s ‘red lines and rat lines’ piece from last year.
that dempsey took note of some reports on the claim of ‘assad sarin gassed his own people’ seem to have caused obama to go to congress for ‘permission’ to go to full-tilt war against syria.
i remember yours and others’ dissent against kiriakou, but why mcgovern? or the others, for that matter? and could you explain what you mean about hersh’s false timeline in syria? i’m way behind on everything IS, but i assumed he meant uigurs and chechnyans must have been early on.
but this post was about erdogan and the kurds, and i did mange to clip this from the tag end of his interview with amy goodman:
“SEYMOUR HERSH: —the head of Turkey, Erdogan, yes, in France, and came out and said, “I’m with him all the way,” etc., etc., etc., when in fact all of the intelligence for a long time has been that he has, particularly in Hatay province, which is a contested province Syria controls, those—the border has been open for the Islamic groups, and he has not only been funneling—he’s been funneling arms and money to the most extreme groups for years. We know about it. There’s been a lot of intelligence reporting on it. His planes, once he began to join—allegedly join—with us in flying out combat missions, one of the first targets was, of course, the opposition Kurds, who are the best fighters inside Syria against the Islamic State, but he also bombed some of the Syrian army’s own specific units—exactly the contrary, opposite of what was what he said to do and what was being reported in the press. He wasn’t helping us. “
i’ll try to save time to go look up avaaz’s PR in this again.
Everything I have read written by McGovern and Hersh about the sarin gas attacks has favored Assad or at lease tried to deflect any guilt away from him. The BS and repeated assumptions in both of their writing told me something smelled much like the propaganda coming from SANA, Fars News and the Russians, even before I read other writers who debunked their claims.
If the research I read is accurate these fables came from Col. Mustard (Lang) from his source in Lebanon who happened to be a close Assad family friend and this was and is used by VIPS and Hersh as the ‘reliable’ but never identified source of their combined assault on any actual verified facts about the sarin attacks.
The timeline fudging by Hersh is about his claim about some ‘secret’ report in 2013, not secret if he quotes from is but doesn’t print it, that repeats the released DIA paper from 2012 and then claims that Turkey was supporting the Islamic State who didn’t exist in 2012. There is no evidence that Turkey supported anyone but the rebel groups that have been identified including the Turkmen.
Hersh, McGovern and Col Mustard are all connected and friends who many people want to believe no matter how much fable they offer and they create doubt that favors Assad. This latest regurgitation from McGovern seems to be about deflecting attention from the most recent chemical attack by Assad.
i appreciate you responding to my questions, wayoutwest, but i confess i have no heart at all for any of this today. maybe tomorrow? i will say that i haven’t cared for pat laing, mainly because of his visage, and charges that a commenter at ian welsh’s had made about him. carol newquist, he called himself, and said that somehow laing had threatened him via email. may be bullshit, but somehow stuff like that sticks. oh, yeah, and he was rather pointedly calling mark from ireland on ‘bullshit’, so maybe ‘the enemy of my detractor might seem more of a friend’ stuff was at play. crap, yes; i know. ;-)
but good holidays, christmas, to you.
i’ve decided to forgo making any counterarguments, wayoutwest. i’d even opened up the word doc for this post to dig for relevant themes and whatnot. but in the end, we won’t convince one another of anything, really, so it would seem a better use of my time to work on the next diaries i have links for.
perhaps we are all captive to ‘confirmation bias’ to some degree, but analysis of the sarin gas seems a worthy endeavor, especially if it’s the basis for a war on syria foretold years ago in the Wikicables.
hope you were able to see the cold full moon last night. 8 degrees here now, and brrrrr.
I long ago gave up trying to convince people about fact versus manipulation so I appreciate you not hitting me with a blizzard of links, people can only convince themselves about what is real and what is something else.
I could only respond with one link, to the UN’s definitive report based on the facts and verified evidence about the attacks. They were careful not to directly assign blame because that wasn’t their mandate. The facts show that there were multiple surface to surface missiles of Russian and Syrian origin filled with a large quantity of high purity sarin only available from Syrian military stockpiles used to attack not one area but four different areas, this sarin was identical to the sarin used in earlier attacks.
It’s not as cold here and we didn’t get any snow, I did see the full moon rising
well, if you believe that the UN isn’t a puppet of the US empire plus colonialist lackeys, samantha power cheers you on. next you’ll deny that Human rights watch isn’t funded by soros, avaaz, and relate imperialists-for-war-and resources NGOs. ah well, different stokes, i reckon.
full moon was fine, but yes, you must be in the banana belt, comparatively. so glad that la luna bella was visible there. perspective from the night sky helps a lot, methinks.
I must be getting old, WD I completely forgot about Yosemite Sam Powers and the complete lock the Hegemon has on anything and everything the UN does. The Russians didn’t like the report but all they could offer against its findings was a vague claim of bias and the Iranians asked for more research. The Russians seem to have accepted the findings and are now allowing the investigation to assign blame for the attacks which they blocked for over two years, I don’t expect any results for years and probably too late to matter.
Sy Hersh’s claim to fame, his three reports on My Lai I just read are interesting in that he uses the same unidentified Military sources he uses today, connections he made in VN. The other thing I noticed is that it wasn’t his investigation that brought him to this story but it was fed to him by Geoffrey Cowan but he did then interviewed Calley and other soldiers who were involved some of whom had already told their stories. He couldn’t get the story printed by the MSM but used the little known Dispatch News Service who somehow got 31 papers to print them.
Geoffrey Cowan is real interesting, he went on to head VOA under Clinton and then the US Information Agency and now heads ops at Annenberg’s Synnylands, talk about connected.
Hmmm … al Sham couldn’t smuggle sarin stockpiles outta Hellary-liberated Libya in 2 years between her 2011 Quadaffi overthrow and 2013 sarin use in Syria; but they could define a whole ISIS caliphate in the 1 year between our anti-0bama war preventive protests of 2013 and their after-Labor Day 2014 rollout of Baghdadi? BS/BS (Bush Shad0bama/BoogedyCompany Spooks)!
i’m sure you would translate that for those of us whose brains are made more of swiss cheese holes day by day, yes, bruce?
this isn’t the one i was searching for, but close enough for now.
jay taber on avaaz and syria.
on the sidebar, >Gearóid Ó Colmáin’s ‘The Empire’s War against Burundi: War Propaganda in Preparation for an R2P “Humanitarian Intervention”
yep, and all paul kagame gets from power and rice is: ‘now, now, paul’.
The necessity of showcasing chemical weapons occurred when the President made accusations about Syria’s stockpiles and “drew a red line in the sand”. I believe that occurred in February 2013. The Daesh offensive in 2014 occurred in June and did not gain US media attention until the fall of Mosul and capture of US heavy weapons. The White House Labor Day scramble for a policy was preliminary to the Fall 2014 political campaign that suddenly got jammed by ISIS-Ebola-Putin to freak out those not paying attention. But NewsMax, never strong on medical science was warning in August 2014 that ISIS could turn Ebola into a bioweapon in another example of how NewsMax weaponizes ignorance. In truth all that happened is that Democrats went on an August vacation and the shock jock contingent found the equivalent of an August shark attack story.
not a ‘missing blonde white gurl’?
Whatever happened to Gary Condit anyway? Did any of the news media ever apologize to him for their defamation? Exactly at the moment that W was telling the CIA briefer to run along (almost hear “boy” in the recounting) you’ve covered your ass. Such a strange response to that report.
but at the end of the day here in SW Co, we had the first of several blizzards forecast by NOAA. seems el nino will be replenishing our mountain snowpack and resultant water supply a little bit. the various water entities in the CO basin are already jockeying to make claims on the water, according to mr. wd.
but we had maybe 16 inches in the last 24 hours, and ‘blizzard’ was accurate, as in blowing snow and low visibility, even out the windows. brrrrr..
but tonight there were tiny patches of clear sky in the east by northeast as the moon was rising. now christmas will be the full moon, which apparently won’t occur for fourteen more years. but:
the moon was almost a sphere as patches of sky broke through the clouds, and moved so quickly to the southeast that the moon seamed to race to the northeast in a most unusual optical illusion. dirty pink clouds hovered around the edges as it seemed to travel. like seeing the milky way on a small moon night, peering into the universe from our edge of it, it reminds me that human concerns often lack perspective of the greater picture.
for me, i’m so grateful to at least live in a small, snug, hogan with solar windows and a nice stash of juniper in the woodshed to warm us in our woodstove. i think of how many in the world have no clean water, food, shelter, or safety.
i know the song is cliché by now, maybe more for non-believers, but….
oh, my; a remix version of this tune i love followed; how purrfect, as well for these times.
“if we poison our children with hatred, then a hard life is all that they’ll know.”
The poor Kurds admired by many people on the Left for their Socialist/ feminist inspired government and century of oppression. They misses out on gaining their own petty nation state after WW1 and will probably never see more than autonomy inside other states now. They can’t even get along among themselves due to their own divisions and competing factions.
The Turks have certainly been oppressive and vicious towards them but thirty years of war will harden any government especially if the insurrectionists are also mean and vicious.
This latest outbreak of violent conflict between these forces surprised me because the Kurds had made huge political gains in Turkey during the cessation of hostilities and had stopped Erdogan from becoming President for Life. The Kurds responded to an Islamic State attack with a frenzy of lynching and murder against old enemies, civilians and police, none of which were responsible for the attack, no matter what the tinfoil hats were claiming. What should or could Erdogan have done besides renewing the war. .