Can I suggest that if Sam and Claudia want to
continue this discussion they do so privately?
Jack
At 09:42 AM 4/24/2013, Sam Friedman wrote:
>The article he sent was sectarian. I do not
>know the author, so I do not know if this
>reflects the author's own (or organization's)
>political style or whether it reflects the frustration I described.
>
>I think we agree that it is legitimate to
>support oppositions to regimes regardless of the
>US position on them; and that US military
>interventions are always to be opposed; and that
>other US interventions into the politics of
>other countries are in behalf of imperial
>aims. So I think at this stage, we should smile
>and say "all apologies accepted" since there was
>a degree of confusion over each other's positions.
>
>best
>sam
>
> >>> Claudia Chaufan <[log in to unmask]> 4/24/2013 12:10 AM >>>
>Dear Sam,
>
>It is true that you did not say that Tugrul
>supported the Syrian government (nor did I
>suggest you did). You did write however that the
>article (or post, as I referred to it) he sent
>was sectarian and reflected the position you lay
>out in #2, of some in the "left" (your quotes)
>who support any regime that the US opposes (which you presume to be my case).
>
>To which I said, and reiterate, that I have a
>problem with the assertion that opposing US
>military intervention (and not merely
>'opposition') against governments of other
>countries, whatever your views about its
>motives, entails supporting those governments.
>
>But if this is not what you mean, then I apologize.
>
>Regards,
>
>Claudia
>
>
>
>Sent from my Verizon Wireless
>
>Sam Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Dear Claudia,
>
>Please read what I said again. I never said
>that Tugrul supports the Syrian government or its policies.
>
>I am not sure about Lantier's position on
>this. Nor for that matter about yours, Claudia,
>since you did not clarify it here. (From things
>you have sent,I suspect my point #2 might apply
>to you--but if not, I apologize.)
>
>best
>sam
>
> >>> Claudia Chaufan <[log in to unmask]> 4/23/2013 11:13 AM >>>
>
>Sam and others,
>
>I see no evidence that the post sent by Tugrul
>‘supports’, let alone promotes, the Syrian
>government’s policies per se, let alone all of
>them, merely because it critiques Western or
>other military interventions in the Syrian civil
>war. Many individuals/governments throughout the
>world believe that how the US treats its
>prisoners, including prisoners of war, or how it
>is trampling the basic political rights of its
>own citizens, etc., etc., is outrageous, but do
>not invade it militarily, or ship weapons to the
>‘opposition’ or to resistors of US govt.
>policies, for that reason (probably because they
>cannot even if they wanted to, but that’s another story).
>
>I have a problem with the view that suggests
>that failing to support US/Western military
>interventions against an authoritarian regime is
>equivalent to supporting the said regime, if I
>understood correctly what you suggest. It
>reminds me too much of ‘you’re either with
>us or against us’, or ‘if you critique the
>Democrats you’re a Republican’, etc. It’s
>a disturbing way to silence meaningful critique
>of what we as US citizens have control over (in
>this case, not the Syrian government policies but our own).
>
>For a much better elaboration of these issues, I
>recommend “Ideal Illusions” by James Peck,
>and other titles that people on this list have already mentioned.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Claudia
>
>
>*********************************************************************
>Claudia Chaufan, MD, PhD
>Assistant Professor of Sociology and Health Policy
>Institute for Health & Aging
>University of California San Francisco
>
>http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?Person=4606434
>http://claudiatmu.wordpress.com/
>
>“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil,
>but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
>Albert Einstein.
>
>
>From: Sam Friedman <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 11:20 AM
>Subject: Re: The ³Liberal Left² Promotes
>the CIA¹sCovert War on Syria By Alex Lantier
>
>Dear Tugrul,
>
>I found the article you sent around to be very
>sectarian in its framing and its tone. I
>suspect those it criticized may have written some hostile responses.
>
>I have seen this many times before in recent
>years. Generally, it seems to me to reflect one or more of the following:
>
>1. Frustration. There are many situations
>where promising revolts from below fail to
>overcome the state they oppose. Their
>development then becomes very messy indeed, and
>groups like the USA, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and
>many others try to win influence with money,
>weapons or other tools. In this circumstance,
>there may well be no possible outcome (at least
>in a localized struggle) from the perspective of
>the Left or that even of human rights. At that
>time, partisans of the different sides start insulting each other.
>
>2. The existence of many on the "left" who tend
>to support any regime that the US opposes. This
>is particularly true if the regime in question
>proclaims itself as anti-imperialist and perhaps
>even has a few nationalized industries or social
>welfare programs it can point to. When
>revolutionary movements occur in these
>localities, the supporters of the
>"anti-imperialist" regime accuse everyone else
>of supporting imperialism. This "enemy of my
>enemy is my friend" kind of thinking has
>discredited much of the left in the eyes of
>billions of people for generations.
>
>#2 has its counterpart, of course, in those on
>the "left" who see America or the EC as defining
>true freedom and human rights.
>
>I do not know if this set of thoughts is useful
>or not. I hope it is. It has helped me over the years.
>best
>sam
>
> >>> Douglas Parker <[log in to unmask]> 4/20/2013 12:56 AM >>>
>Global Research puts out stuff that is
>suspect. Nevertheless many issues are raised by
>this article and I can only respond now to a few
>of them. First of all, Global Research and
>others (people and organizations) routinely
>overestimate the capabilities of the CIA. I
>remember objecting to this in the past and
>someone said I should read a book about the CIA
>which I did but not only were there no
>references but the opening chapters of the book
>were all about failures of the CIA, e.g., the
>Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba which occurred in
>part because of the intervention of a Marine
>Corps general who refused to send regular and
>reserve marines (I was one of them) into such an
>incredibly bad landing area as the Bay of
>Pigs. What do we hear about now? U.S. special
>forces (perhaps the Navy Seals or Marine force
>reconnaissance) are setting up a base in Jordan
>to be able to insert more military forces and to
>move quickly into Syria to seize Assad's
>chemical weapons as well as Assad himself and
>others in his government. Are U.S. forces doing
>this? I do not know but I also do not believe
>that this is anything other than a
>diversion. If U.S. forces are going into Syria,
>the way that they will enter Syria will not be
>announced in advance. The limited military
>group in Jordan is there to protect the border
>of Jordan. They are functioning as forward
>observers which I received training for when I
>was in a Marine Corps reserve unit in San Francisco many decades ago.
>
>
>From: Tugrul Keskin <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Sent: Fri, April 19, 2013 5:00:04 PM
>Subject: The ³Liberal Left² Promotes the
>CIA¹s Covert War on Syria By Alex Lantier
>
>The “Liberal Left” Promotes the CIA’s Covert War on Syria
>By Alex Lantier
>Global Research (Centre for Research on Globalization) - April 13, 2013
><http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-petty-bourgeois-left-promotes-the-cia-war-in-syria>http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-petty-bourgeois-left-promotes-the-cia-war-in-syria
>
>The “liberal left” has reacted to the
>publication of detailed reports on the CIA’s
>role in backing Islamist forces in the US proxy
>war in Syria by intensifying their support for
>the war. Forces like the International Socialist
>Organization (ISO) in the United States and the
>New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France are
>functioning as conscious propagandists for a neo-colonial CIA operation.
>The ISO’s April 9 article by Yusef Khalil,
>“Why the Left must support Syria’s
>Revolution”which cites Gayath Naïssé, one
>of the NPA’s main writers on Syriabegins by
>slandering opponents of the CIA war in Syria as
>supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
>Khalil begins, “’Airlift to Rebels in Syria
>Expands with CIA’s Help,’ screamed a New
>York Times headline in late March. ‘Foreign
>intervention!,’ screamed back supporters of
>the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.” He
>continues, “Some on the US and international
>left continue to cling to the idea that the
>regime presiding over this violence and
>repression is progressiveand that the uprising
>against it was engineered by Western governments.”
>Khalil’s statement, which mocks the idea that
>Western imperialism is behind the Syrian war,
>stands in blatant contradiction to the
>widely-acknowledged fact that the CIA and its
>regional allies are arming the opposition to
>destabilize Syria and topple Assad. The
>implication that all opposition to the US war
>comes from “supporters of the Syrian dictator
>Bashar al-Assad” is a slander and a political
>lie. It is aimed at blocking a struggle to
>mobilize the working class in struggle against
>both the Assad regime and, above all, the
>intervention in Syria of the most ruthless sections of American imperialism.
>By ruling out such a struggle, Khalil is
>supporting a bloody CIA operation and, behind
>it, the Middle East policy of US imperialism,
>whose war in Syria has had devastating consequences for the Syrian people.
>Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, and Turkey helped
>purchase and transport a “cataract of
>weaponry” coordinated by the CIA into Syria,
>in the words of one US official cited in the
>Times ’ March article, which is friendly to
>the Syrian opposition. The paper
>“conservatively” estimates the quantity of
>munitions sent to Syria at 3,500 tons. In the
>ensuing fighting, some 70,000 Syrians have died,
>and nearly 5 million have been forced to flee their homes.
>US foreign policy experts have stated that
>Washington’s shock troops are the Al
>Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front, which still
>receives support apparently unhindered by the
>CIAeven though Washington declared Al Nusra a
>terrorist organization last December. (See also:
><http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/08/pers-a09.html>Washington’s
>proxy in Syria: Al Qaeda )
>The ISO statement makes clear that it supports
>the anti-Assad militias’ decision to take
>weapons from the CIA. Khalil writes, “The
>vital question facing the Syrian opposition is
>how to get aid from sources that can provide
>what the revolution needs, which is weapons,
>while maintaining independent Syrian
>decision-making. This is a tough question to answer, but not impossible.”
>Khalil’s claim that one can maintain
>“independent Syrian decision-making” while
>taking arms from the CIA is an absurd fiction,
>concocted to disguise the fact that the ISO is
>supporting a war coordinated and organized by Washington.
>As US officials speaking to the Times made
>clear, weapons shipments are closely overseen by
>the CIA. The Times writes, “American
>intelligence officers have helped the Arab
>governments shop for weapons, including a large
>procurement from Croatia, and have vetted rebel
>commanders and groups to determine who should
>receive the weapons as they arrive, according to
>American officials speaking on condition of anonymity.”
>It adds that former CIA director David Petraeus
>was “instrumental in helping to get this
>aviation network moving and had prodded various
>countries to work together on it.”
>The open support of the ISO and the European
>petty-bourgeois “left” for CIA-led wars is a
>culmination of their evolution as
>pro-imperialist bourgeois parties, operating in
>the periphery of the Democratic Party in the
>United States or of the social-democratic parties in Europe.
>Staggered by the outbreak of a global economic
>crisis with the Wall Street crash of 2008, they
>have supported the ruling class in each country
>as they sought to impose the burden of the
>crisis on the working class. While they promoted
>sellouts by the union bureaucracy of workers
>struggles against austerity at home, their role
>abroad was even more nakedly aligned with imperialist policy.
>After the outbreak of revolutionary struggles in
>the Tunisian and Egyptian working class in 2011,
>they supported US-led interventions to overthrow
>regimes Washington viewed as obstacles to its
>interestsffirst the 2011 war in Libya and then
>in Syria. They did so, falsely claiming that the
>forces that were carrying out these wars were revolutionary.
>Khalil’s attempts to dress up the ISO’s
>pro-imperialist positions in a bit of “left”
>rhetoric, claiming that accepting CIA help was a
>revolutionary necessity, involve him in absurd falsifications.
>He writes, “Syria’s
>revolutionariesrespondingg to the
>dictatorship’s violent crackdownhad to
>develop a popular armed resistance to defend
>themselves and defeat the forces of the regime.
>Large parts of the country, including major
>military bases and airports, have fallen from
>the government’s hands, but they remain under
>heavy bombardment. Nevertheless, in many of
>these areas, Syrians are experimenting with
>local self-government, now that the regime has lost its grip.”
>The ISO’s fantasy that Syrians are now
>experimenting with radical forms of
>self-government under the jackboot of
>ultra-right, sectarian Islamist militias armed
>by the CIA is ludicrous. Syrian workers in
>opposition-controlled areas are either simply
>trying to survive as Islamist guerrillas loot
>their workplaces, schools, and homes, or are
>actively protesting the opposition’s thuggery.
>A series of interviews in the Guardian with
>opposition militia forces in Aleppo last
>December laid out the basic character of the
>Islamist militias, who plunder the population
>for cash to buy CIA weapons. One militia
>commander said, “I liberate an area, I need
>resources and ammunition, so I start looting
>government properties. When this is finished, I
>turn to looting other properties and I become a thief.”
>Another opposition official noted the death of
>an opposition fighter, Abu Jameel, in a fight
>with other militias over how to divide the loot
>from the seizure of a steel warehouse. He said,
>“To be killed because of a feud over loot is a
>disaster for the revolution. It is extremely
>sad. There is not one government institution or
>warehouse left standing in Aleppo. Everything
>has been looted. Everything is gone.”
>Given Aleppo’s role as the center of Syria’s
>state-run pharmaceutical industry, the
>opposition’s raids on factories and other
>state facilities have had a devastating impact.
>Critical medicines are running out, notably
>diabetes medications and antibiotics. State
>flights carrying vaccines into Syria have been
>shot at, and chlorine for water purification is
>banned for import by the imperialist powers
>under the pretext that Assad could use it to
>create chemical weaponsresulting in a spread of water-borne diseases.
>Abdul-Jabbar Akidi, a former Syrian army colonel
>and a leading official in the opposition’s
>military council in Aleppo, confessed that there
>is deep popular hostility in Aleppo to his
>forces: “Even the people are fed up with us.
>We were liberators, but now they denounce us and demonstrate against us.”
>The ISO and the NPA have maintained a studious
>silence on popular protests against the
>Islamist, CIA-led opposition forces they have
>promoted. These protests are, however, one
>indication that a revolution based on the
>working class in Syria would take the form of an
>uprising against the opposition forces supported
>by Washington and the ISO, as well as against the Assad regime.
>Struggling to find a bright side to the
>reactionary forces it is promoting in Syria, the
>ISO writes: “It would be wrong to reduce the
>Syrian Revolution to the question of the armed
>struggle and the role of imperialist powers in
>trying to shape and co-opt that struggle. Take
>the role of women in the uprisingsomething that
>has not been appreciated in the mainstream
>media. Women have been very active participants
>and leaders since the beginning As a group of
>women activists in Aleppo wrote, ‘We will not
>wait until the regime falls to become active.’”
>The ISO’s presentation of CIA-backed Islamic
>fundamentalists as defenders of women’s rights
>is absurd and repugnant. Should Al Qaeda-type
>forces conquer Syria with US and Saudi help,
>Syrian women—who largely lived in modern
>conditions under the secular Assad regimewill
>be forced to live under conditions like those
>faced by women under the Taliban regime in
>Afghanistan or in Saudi Arabia. There, women are
>considered legal minors and are denied basic
>rights, including the right to drive a car.
>As it turns out, the Aleppo women activists the
>ISO cynically held up as examples of the
>opposition’s supposedly progressive character
>have not fared well. “In early March, the
>revolutionary local council in Aleppo was
>elected and didn’t include a single woman,
>despite some well-known female activists being
>nominated,” the ISO writes, complacently
>adding: “So there islike everywhere in the
>worldsome distance to go before women have equality in Syria.”
>The ISO’s attempts to somewhat distance itself
>from Washington’s Middle East policy likewise
>reek of dishonesty and cynicism. Khalil writes,
>“Like every other regional and international
>power, the US government has its fingers in
>Syria. It is maneuvering to shapeand
>ultimately, to curtailthe Syrian Revolution on
> Throughout the carnage inflicted by the
>regime, the US has kept very tight limits on the
>support, especially the military support, it has provided.”
>Khalil quotes the NPA’s Naïssé on the
>reasons for US involvement in Syria: “The
>major imperialist powers, led by the United
>States, have always supported what they call an
>‘orderly transition’ in Syria, which means
>only superficial and partial changes to the
>structure of the regime. This is for
>geo-strategic reasons, including protecting the
>Zionist entity [i.e., Israel] and preventing the
>revolution from succeeding and spreading to the
>entire Arab east, including the reactionary oil monarchies.”
>Leaving aside the false dichotomy Khalil
>establishes between US policy and the CIA-led
>war he calls “the Syrian Revolution,” these
>passages make one point clear: the policies
>supported by the ISO and the NPA are in fact
>entirely compatible with the strategy of
>American imperialism. These include keeping
>Persian Gulf oil revenues under the control of
>reactionary, pro-US monarchs, and maintaining
>the division of the Middle Eastern working class
>between Jewish and Muslim workers that is
>established by the existence of the Israeli state.
>Although neither the ISO nor the NPA say it, the
>US war against Syria also aims to deprive Iran
>of its main regional ally, thereby facilitating
>US preparations for a major war against Iran.
>The ultimate goal of these operations is to
>ensure that Washington maintains and extends its
>hegemony over the oil-rich, strategically
>located Middle East. This goal is entirely
>supported by the petty-bourgeois “left” parties.
>If Washington has concerns about the anti-Assad
>“rebels,” it is not that they are
>revolutionary. Rather, it fears that if it arms
>its Islamist proxies in Syria too heavily, they
>might turn these weapons over to dissident
>Islamist factions inside the unstable Persian
>Gulf monarchies, or use them to mount terrorist
>attacks on Israel or the United States.
>Inside Syria itself, war unleashed by the
>CIA-backed opposition—recruited from layers of
>Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority discontented
>with the Assad regime, whose ruling personnel is
>drawn from the minority Alawiteshas developed
>largely along sectarian lines. It is thus
>returning Syrian society to conditions that
>existed under French colonial rule in the early
>20th century. At that time, French troops and
>proxy forces maintained French control of Syria
>by setting Christians, Druze, Sunni, Alawite,
>and other Syrians against each other.
>The US-backed opposition is thus reactionary in
>the classical sense of the term: it returns
>society towards a more primitive and oppressive past.
>
**************************************************************************
Scratch the surface of some of the efforts to
reform state universities and you find more than just
legitimate qualms about efficiency and demands
for accountability. You find the kind of indiscriminate
anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism popular
among more than a few right-wing conservatives.
--Frank
Bruni, NYTimes 4-21-13
***************************************************************************
Jack Hammond Phone: 212-772-5573
Sociology Department Fax: 212-772-5645
Hunter College e-mail: [log in to unmask]
695 Park Avenue twitter: @soc_tchr
New York, NY 10065 skype: jhmmond [no a]
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/sociology/faculty/john-hammond
**************************************************************************
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