Yves here. We are running a new piece by Andrew Korybko which is very likely to provoke informative reader discussion. Having said that, Korybko likes to paint with exceedingly bright colors and his disinclination for nuance has the unfortunate tendency to undercut his observations.
His frame is a criticism of the Alt-Media Community. I must confess that I have no idea what that is. Is there a secret handshake? A membership process? He depicts them as a monolith and of acting in bad faith by telling their audiences what they want to hear.
As I mentioned yesterday, the commentariat had a very lively discussion of the group-think among the anti-globalists and how they were blindsided by Israel, with US and Turkiye help (and the Russians believe, the UK too), managing to very suddenly turn the tables in its neighborhood. Some of the most influential commentators are on YouTube, and as interviewees, are not earning a dime for offering their views (save arguably Scott Ritter, who is also writing for publication and so keeping his profile high helps with readership-building). For instance, Colonel Larry Wilkerson and Ambassador Chas Freeman were of the same view Korybko attributes to Alt-Media Community. Even in post-Syria-collapse appearances, Wilkerson and Freeman still depict Israel as in very fundamental trouble.
Regarding the YouTube appearances, there is a vector for group-think on Judge Napolitano. He has a propensity to take the same clip, often of a particularly offensive or stoopid official statement (think of Sebastian Gorky puffing his chest about how Trump is really gonna put Putin in his place) and ask his guests to comment, often with leading questions. So one means of creating orthoxody-opposed opinion convergence is having YouTube hosts influencing the content.
Additional evidence of Israel’s apparent weakness were elements like the reported large number of Israelis leaving the country, particularly highly educated professionals who could land work abroad, the growing revolt among IDF reservists about serving, the parallel rejection of Haredim of demands that they be drafted, and the continuing strain on the economy, such as by Houthi (and the earlier Hezbollah) shelling.
Another contributor to groupthink was the limited number of experts with meaningful military and/or diplomatic experience in the region. On that short list are aforementioned Wilkerson, Freeman, and Ritter, plus Alastair Crooke. Crooke makes a point of maintaining a professionally cool posture, but the others, even the normally very careful and measured Freeman, have found it hard not to show their disgust for the Israel government. That hatred, which most of the world shares, in turn looks to have contributed to confirmation bias in reading considerable signs of Israel’s weakness as evidence of an irreversible deterioration.
I must have missed the discussion of whether Russia supported the Resistance. Aside from the possibility that it was helping the Houthis, Russia was pointedly sitting this one out. Russia is believed to have helped Iran after Israel started attacking Iran directly. But as much as the Anglosphere media would like people to believe, that is not the same as helping Iran with its Resistance efforts. Where were the S-400s in Lebanon, for instance?
PlutoniumKun, in comments yesterday, noted that Syria was important to Russia for long-standing reasons that had nothing to do with Israel:
As for Syria – as usual there is far too much attention paid to the big non-Middle Eastern players in this, when the real roots of what happened is much closer to Syria – in particular the UAE, Kuwait and KSA, all of which have devoted billions (and mountains of weapons) to the conflict to their various allies, and who have far deeper and better intelligence insights than anyone else. The Turks have very strong influence in the area via their traditional allies and the Muslim Brotherhood, and they’ll be using these to exert further influence, but it will only be in private agreements with Qatar, KSA, etc. They will work out something between them. If they don’t there will be chaos. Neither the US, Russia, China, Iran or anyone else will be anything but observers….
Turkey, btw, did not, as some claim, betray or lie to Russia and China (not that China has a particularly big role). They see themselves as the key regional power there, everyone else as annoying outsiders who they occasionally have to mollify. Its highly unlikely the Russians took anything they said at face value (not least because the Russians scrupulously held Assad back from striking at direct Turkish interests. Turkey had always made it clear – to the extent of shooting down at least one Russian fighter – that it saw itself as the big beast in that area and would not have made any promises to what it sees as intruders to their zone of interest.
The value of Syria to Russia was far more than just its port and airfields and position on the Mediterranean. It was its leverage point with the Gulf region as a whole and it allowed Russia a say in what is still the worlds center for oil and gas. Its now lost any influence in the region, including to a significant degree with Iran – both countries, while working well together in some respects, also have fundamentally differing strategic needs in the Caspian region. This would well worsen relations between them, especially if Russia continues to favour Azerbaijan. While the area is not a core strategic interest of Russia, it is still an area they can’t afford not to be involved in, and the absence of their presence, which has always acted to some degree as a break on the US (and others) having everything their way, could well have many unexpected second and third order effects on the regional balance there. One thing to look out for is Chechnya – there are rumours of Chechens with Russian military training fighting with the Syrian rebels – any sign of a weakening by any power in the region could well cause some unexpected revolts in any number of regions from the Black Sea to the Caspian and across to the former Soviet Republics and Pakistan.
There will be renewed talk about pipelines via Syria to the Mediterranean, but these may create unlikely allies (and enemies). Qatar wants to dominate via a land link through KSA, but their main gas reserves are essentially shared with Iran, so any agreement will involve quiet discussions with Tehran. Qatar has to thread carefully due to its ‘issues’ with KSA and the other Gulf States, but with so much money involved, expect some possibly unexpected realignments. Iran, which is also desperate to find new gas markets, may renew their focus on Armenia and Georgia.
Now to the main event.
By Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity in the New Cold War. He has a PhD from MGIMO, which is under the umbrella of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Originally published at his website
Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to “Zionist influence” like some in the Alt-Media Community now ridiculously claim to defame him after being mad that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance.
The Iranian-led Resistance Axis has been defeated by Israel. Hamas’ terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 prompted Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, which set into motion a series of conflicts that expanded to Lebanon and Syria. Israel has also bombed Yemen and Iran. Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s leaderships were destroyed, leading to a ceasefire in Lebanon, while the Assad government was just overthrown by a Turkish-backed terrorist blitz that severed Iran’s military logistics to Hezbollah.
These outcomes were already surprising enough for those who believed the late Nasrallah’s claim that “Israel is weaker than a spider web”, but many were shocked that they occurred without Russia lifting a finger to save the Resistance, with whom they thought that it had allied against Israel long ago. That second-mentioned false notion will go down in infamy as one of the most successful psy-ops ever conducted against the Alt-Media Community (AMC), and ironically enough, by its own top influencers.
It was explained in early October “Why False Perceptions About Russian Policy Towards Israel Continue To Proliferate”, which readers should review for more detail, but which can be summarized as top AMC influencers telling their audience what they thought they wanted to hear for self-interested reasons. These include generating clout, pushing their ideology, and/or soliciting donations from well-intentioned but naïve members of their audience depending on the personality involved.
The preceding analysis also lists five related ones about Russian policy towards Israel since the start of the West Asian Wars, including this one “Clarifying Lavrov’s Comparison Of The Latest Israeli-Hamas War To Russia’s Special Operation”, which itself links to several dozen others. All of them also reference this May 2018 report about “President Putin On Israel: Quotes From The Kremlin Website (2000-2018)”. All of these materials rely on official and authoritative Russian sources to arrive at their conclusions.
They prove that Putin is a proud lifelong philo-Semite who never shared the Resistance’s unifying anti-Zionist ideology, instead always expressing very deep respect for Jews and the State of Israel. Accordingly, as the final decisionmaker on Russian foreign policy, he tasked his diplomats with balancing between Israel and the Resistance. To that end, Russia never took either’s side and always remained neutral in their disputes, including the West Asian Wars.
The most that he ever personally did was condemn Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians, but always in the same breath as condemning Hamas’ infamous terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. As for Russia, the most that it ever did was repeat the same rhetoric and occasionally condemn Israel’s strikes against the IRGC and Hezbollah in Syria, which Russia never interfered with. Not once did it try to deter or intercept them, retaliate afterwards, or give Syria the capabilities and authorization to do so either.
This was due to the deconfliction mechanism that Putin and Bibi agreed to in late September 2015 shortly before the Syrian operation. It was never confirmed for obvious diplomatic reasons, but these actions (or rather lack thereof) suggested that Putin believed that Iran’s anti-Israeli activities Syria posed a legitimate threat to Israel. For that reason, Russia always stood aside whenever Israel bombed Iran there, but Russia still sometimes complained due to Israel’s attacks formally violating international law.
It’s an objectively existing and easily verifiable fact that Russia’s opposition to Israel’s regional activities, be they in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iran, always remained strictly confined to the political realm of official statements. Not once did Russia ever threaten to unilaterally sanction Israel, let alone even remotely hint at military action against it as punishment. Russia won’t even symbolically designate Israel as an “unfriendly state”, though that’s because it doesn’t abide by US sanctions and won’t arm Ukraine.
Therein lies another fact that most in the AMC were either unaware of or in denial about and it’s that Israel isn’t the US’ puppet otherwise it would have already done those two things long ago. It’s beyond the scope of the present piece to explain this, as well as why the Biden Administration has tried to destabilize and overthrow Bibi, but this analysis here dives into the details and cites related articles. The point is that Russian-Israeli ties remain cordial and these two are far from the foes that some thought.
It therefore never made sense to imagine that Putin, who considers himself to be the consummate pragmatist, would burn the bridge that he personally invested nearly a quarter-century of his time building with Bibi between their two nations. After all, Putin boasted in 2019 that “Russians and Israelis have ties of family and friendship. This is a true common family; I can say this without exaggeration. Almost 2 million Russian speakers live in Israel. We consider Israel a Russian-speaking country.”
He was speaking before the Keren Heyesod Foundation, one of the world’s oldest Zionist lobbying organizations, during its annual conference in Moscow that year. Whenever members of the AMC were confronted with these “politically inconvenient” facts from official and authoritative sources such as the Kremlin’s own website, they spun a “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theory alleging that he was just “psyching out the Zionists”. Top influencers also aggressively “canceled” anyone who brought this up.
The end result was that these false perceptions of Russian-Israeli relations as well as Putin’s own views towards this subject continued to proliferate unchallenged through the AMC, thus leading to the impression that they were secretly allied with Iran due to their allegedly shared anti-Zionist ideals. This notion became a matter of dogma for many in the AMC and correspondingly turned into an axiom of International Relations for them. Anyone who claimed otherwise was smeared as a “Zionist”.
It’s now known after Russia didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance that they were never actually allies. Some of those that still can’t accept that they’ve been lied to by trusted AMC influencers who duped them for self-interested reasons (clout, ideology, and/or soliciting donations) now speculate that Russia “betrayed” the Resistance and “sold out to the Zionists” even though Russia was never on either’s side. If they don’t soon shake off their cognitive dissonance, they’ll detach themselves further from reality.
In retrospect, Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Resistance Axis since it would have needlessly ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars. Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to “Zionist influence” like some in the AMC now ridiculously claim to defame him after being mad that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance.
The takeaways from this are several: 1) Putin and his representatives don’t play “5D chess”, they always say what they truly mean; 2) Russia isn’t anti-Israel nor anti-Zionist, but it also isn’t anti-Iran nor anti-Resistance either; 3) the AMC is full of charlatans who, for self-interested reasons, tell their audience whatever they think they want to hear; 4) their audience should thus hold them to account for lying about Russian-Israeli and Russian-Resistance relations; 5) and the AMC requires urgent reform.
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Thank you for the counterpoints. I think people in this so called “AMC” tend to gloss over two glaring facts that mean Israel will continue to dominate the region.
1. They don’t have to pay for anything in terms of materiel.
2. Most importantly, the Arab nations are culturally incapable of working together in any meaningful capacity.
https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/why-arabs-lose-wars
This article again… you don’t have to resort to vague orientalist tropes to figure out why Middle Eastern countries can’t win peer wars against the US-Israeli empire. The Westphalian nation-state concept foisted on the region by the British doesn’t make any more sense there than it does in Africa. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc as drawn on the map are arbitrary buckets containing diverse patchworks of different religious and ethnic groups that have cohabited for centuries. It should be no surprise that they don’t exhibit a nationalist espirit de corps when it comes time to fight for these artificial constructions.
There’s also many many billions spent by Gulf despots on their media and proselytizing work. Also Americans subverting every secular Arab Republic multiple times – Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen.
This guy is the end product – https://x.com/AbujomaaGaza/status/1867216750841913610
In Gaza, wife and son killed by Israelis, but still hates Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria far more than Israel.
tribal enmity goes so deep, best tool in the colonial/settler toolbox.
works in prison systems as well.
It’s much more a nurture than nature thing.
The Sunnis, Shia, Christians, and various smaller sects got along decently until the Europeans showed up and intentionally divided the locals on sectarian lines and played them off of each other. Then the Gulf funded extremism and media promoted anti-Shi’a positions. Even with the objective sacrifices made by Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah for the Palestinian cause, many of them still hate Shi’a because their imans and tvs tell them to do so.
Xinjiang Uyghurs practiced a very lax form of Islam until the radical imans came in the 1990s. They bred terrorists who primarily targeted “accommodationist” (ie traditional) Uyghur Muslims.
ty, I should have understood it’s religion. I default to tribal when I think of divide and rule, here religion wasn’t proselytized at all (other than of course by europeans).
My friend it is not vague, I have lived among them. It might be the result of european influence but regardless that is the way the culture is now.
Yes, sadly its only Houthis who are ‘all in’…….and the true conscience of the world.
Houthis are not “the true conscience of the world”. No one is.
Yes, you are.
Yves S.: Korybko likes to paint with exceedingly bright colors and his disinclination for nuance has the unfortunate tendency to undercut his observations.
Meh. I find this guy as overblown in his absolute certainties as the people he — rightly — criticizes. Everyone comes with priors and Korybko doesn’t seem any more interested in interrogating his than Ritter, and co. This here mostly comes as PR for Putin as realpolitik pragmatist. But most intelligent observers would take that position, so why Korybko’s bloviation about the obvious?
I do like Crooke. He comes on like a sleepy old dormouse and he has his verbal tics, such as ‘If you like,” but he knows his stuff and defines the limits of his knowledge most of the time.
Yves. S: ...the Alt-Media Community… Is there a secret handshake? A membership process?
Come on, Yves. You’re holding out on us, but we’re not fooled. You know the secret handshake.
Korybko does include a link to his explainer of the alt-media community. He mainly seems to be interested in the multi-polar foreign policy version. I must admit that I find some of those sources to be significantly more useful than the captured legacy media available in the U.S.
I only started following members of that community a few years ago, but what is interesting to me is the extent of overlap with other alt-media communities, such as anti-vax. They do seem to have a tendency to herd toward any anti-PMC narrative.
Yes on the overlap with anti-vaxers–though I’d actually call them anti-mitigators, since mRNA scepticism seems valid in many respects, but then they go whole hog with anti-masking and anti-quarantine guff. I haven’t heard any of this from Ritter, Freeman, Wilkerson, thankfully. It seems even more pronounced among the anti-censorship crowd–even Taibbi seems to have crossed over, and Dore has become so extreme in that respect that I couldn’t watch him any more (but my distaste for his recent sidekicks like Kurt Metzger pushed me away too).
From his link:
This strikes me as an oversimplification (can we really say that all non-MSM media have ‘a common interest in multipolarity?’) If that’s the definition, I think it’s unrealistic to attribute views and interests to them as a monolithic whole.
It’s also at least partly self-referential (the AMC includes ‘some of the folks who might come to the reader’s mind when thinking about the AMC’) which is unhelpful.
Korbykov likes to paints bright red – specifically a herring. As a regular listener to judge Napoolitan, I do not recall a majority of visitors ever claiming that Russia did anything but follow its national interests.
I listen closely to Crooke – he seems to have very good information and also often takes the big picture.
Crooke is probably my favorite out of that somewhat amorphous grouping….for his language as well as his acumen. been reading him for a very long time.
as for the ones who get real excited, and thus often…ahem…come too quick to a wonderful conclusion…Pepe is still my fave.
he’s often wrong, but he seems to be my kinda guy, and would be a hoot around the fire at the wilderness bar.
imagine the stories that guy could tell!
This will be my last comment on this site but I don’t follow what is referred to as AMC media in this article and when I hear commenters and linked takes about Russia / Israel / Iran / China – there is so much groupthink as in US is always bad and Russia / China / Iran are paragons of goodness. Also people don’t seem to actually speak or know anyone in the US or MENA regions and it’s obvious. I work in DC media sphere and know plenty of people who have worked in Moscow and China bureaus as well as lobbyists for Israel / Turkey / Azerbaijan / Saudi and while there is a lot of bias there and bad intentions, at least people know what they are talking about. The situation in Syria has been especially egregious. Why attack Israel so much and pretend to care about Palestinians but not Syrians? It’s obvious that the brown people of the world are just pawns in the “who is smarter and thinks they have some kind of obscure special information” game among certain Westerners.
Sticking to facts
1. the ICC indicted Netanyahu for war crimes. Assad hasn’t been indicted.
2. The alt-media sprung up because the mainstream press created a vacuum. Historically, the press in the United States has taken a neutral or skeptical view towards US foreign policy. This changed sometime over the past 30-40 years. Instead of questioning foreign wars, they acted as cheerleaders. Instead of viewing themselves as a watchdog, and act as an import pillar of freedom of expression and the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution, they pursued profits above everything else. The alt-media aren’t any less vulnerable to the foibles of being human than a reporter for CNN is, but the difference is that the CNN reporter works for a corporation that puts profits above their mission to report the news in a way that is objective.
3. Sulking and pouting is bad form. If you aren’t prepared to engage intellectually with those of us on this site who are willing to let facts determine our arguments, goodbye.
Minor note. You said that Assad does not have an ICC warrant like Netanyahu does. Would you believe that the US has suggested precisely this – but it did not go down so well-
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241210-reporters-laugh-as-us-calls-for-icc-case-against-assad/
That hypocritical bastard … he knows full well that the US is not a party to the ICC. And even passed a law that threatened to invade the Hague if the ICC ever indicted a US servicemember.
Laughter is what he deserved.
West just managed to deliberately crater Syrian economy, push its people into poverty (and yes, it was deliberate, that’s the point of sanctions), just so they can install al-Qaeda government there and slice the territory for themselves. But if you don’t cheer for that and for the western potentates doing it, apparently you are not caring about Syrian people enough.
From your comment, it sounds like you have a background that would contribute to some interesting exchanges here, to everyone’s edification, if you chose to engage in discussion. Tant pis.
– “I work in DC media sphere and know plenty of people who have worked in Moscow and China bureaus as well as lobbyists for Israel / Turkey / Azerbaijan / Saudi and while there is a lot of bias there and bad intentions, at least people know what they are talking about.”
Before you log off for good, could you give us an example of what you are talking about – or rather, an example of us not knowing what we are talking about? Your statement is obviously true to some extent, but as you yourself note, there is often bias – and I would add knowledgeable lying – among officials and “experts” who are supposed to “know what they are talking about.” There are also knowledgeable observers that, while they might not be “experts” themselves, know, read, and talk to those who are and are able to parse evidence and arguments. So… give us an example so that I can know what you are talking about.
I ask this because the main comment I recall from you regarding Syria concerned Assad’s viciousness the other day. As many of us pointed out, it sounded like someone who had drunk the Caesar sanctions kool-aid. Believe me when I say that I do not think Assad was a “paragon of virtue.” Nor do I think that about Russia, China, or Iran (or any other nation). But your comments did sound like you been in “the DC media sphere” too long. If you could give me an example or two of who you are referring to that “know what they are talking about” with regard to Syria, that would help me respond to your comment more adequately.
Regarding Syria itself, many of us would agree with you that the situation in Syria has been especially egregious. That is why what the US and its allies have done to that country is especially despicable. Syria in particular has been of interest to me from the beginning of the conflict in 2011. Do you believe that the goals of the US and its allies were “humanitarian”? I’m really interested in where your comment is coming from.
I’m not sure what you are talking about but the alt-media referred to here has a number of experienced commentators who do know what they are talking about. They, like many of us who are outside the Washington media-sphere, have been cut-off from input into that “sphere” which operates only with the permission of editors who, in turn, take their direction from the Blob, Deep State, the interagency and so on. If they stray, they lose their jobs so they try to justify their views. Evidently you are in the same sphere, something, btw, I am somewhat familiar with or at least how it was 15 years ago. When I left the stink of Imperial Washington which I could have sympathy if the competency you imagine they have really existed–my impression of most of those characters is that, at best, their education was very as weak as their personal ambitions were high.
This explains a lot.
Indeed.
Pilar, maybe you should stick around. You might learn something that would enlighten those in the “DC media sphere” who mostly just repeat the propaganda talking points handed to them every morning.
Also, people here do tend to hold similar political opinions, but to claim the commentariat here are a bunch of groupthinking naifs shows you haven’t been paying attention and maybe need to let go of your own biases.
I’d say most people here subscribe to the IF Stone mantra that “All governments lie.” I know I do. Since the majority here are likely USians, it is much easier to see when the US government’s pants are on fire as we are much more familiar with the players and their methods.
aye. and many of us have been wrangling here at NC for a long time.
some, since the beginning.
that does not necessarily mean “groupthink” has occurred, just that we know each other(“know” is such a strange word for internet ‘friends”).
i agree that Pilar should at the very least lurk…issuing a pseudo-ad hominem like that and stomping off is bad form.
never learn anything thataways.
vibe i got from that comment was that her worldview/assumptions have been challenged just a little too much….and that is, indeed, scary….especially, i assume, if one works in DC in media, and is thus surrounded by the very people we deride, here, every day….but that exposure, too, can be useful to the overall project we’re working on here, in our collectively disparate endeavors.
my dad having worked for DIA and Nasa was fundamental to my understanding of USA and its works, for instance…
i’m well used to believing that my country(USA) is the real “Evil Empire”…the scales falling/curtain burning was a process that began when i was still in high school.
for newbies, that process can be quite fraught.
so, stick around, Pilar…we’ll help ya through it.
“Why attack Israel so much and pretend to care about Palestinians but not Syrians? It’s obvious that the brown people of the world are just pawns in the “who is smarter and thinks they have some kind of obscure special information” game among certain Westerners.”
This is a distressing justification for Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
What-about-much? Assad is not a good guy, but the anti-Assad policies seemed to be driven by Israel lobby and the same idiocy behind the occupation of Iraq.
People pretending to care about the people of Syria also pretended to care about the people of Iraq. How many millions have they killed due to sanctions then the disastrous occupation?
Assad is a mild-mannered ophthalmologist who inherited the family business, but didn’t quite master the adt of using it effectively. At the end, he didn’t even seem interested in governing at all, which is one reason why he fell so quickly.
Was there torture in Syrian jails? Probably… but there is no shortage of torture in the US gulag, not to mention its “dark” detention facilities in various corners of the world, and ask Julian Macfarlane how life was in Belmarsh. Assad didn’t mastermind his gulag, he inherited it and its bureaucracy.
Then there is the laughable “Barrel Bomb” nonsense and the entirely OPCW-discredited stories of Assad gassing his own people, propaganda that wasn’t enough to win the hearts of the increasingly economic-dispossessed of the West to support the baying for blood coming from their Capitals.
So at the end of the day, the West armed its terrorists to finish the job, which seemingly makes the West the biggest state sponsors of terror. When does the anti-terror bombing start, and which Western cities go first ?
Statements like “Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars” really seems a bit hyperbolic and premature. Can’t help but see the analogy with Iraq/Libya, where the defeated in fact weren’t enemies in any meaningful sense (Syria had last shooting war with Israel fifty years ago), they just couldn’t become outright Western puppets while maintaining their power.
For how long will the jihadist be able to gush in media interviews how much they love West & Israel as Israel is bombing them and continues to enlarge its “buffer zone”?
The author’s points about Russia having its own angle & & the alt-media concocting wild conspiracy theories are all 100%
Which is why it’s so weird to hear him say such goofy things like Israel is an undisputed winner in all this. And he hasn’t even started looking at the 2nd order effects, the longest term ones most people still aren’t considering.
On the few claims of the rebels expressing support for Israel, the fog hasn’t cleared yet, but it’s starting to look like that was just a few people being amplified among the southern front rebels (the West really needs to get out of its “psy-ops are for self-soothing” phase). If teaming up with Israel & the US was part of the plan though, it looks like some big players didn’t get the memo:
From Al-Jazeera
From Daily Sabah
From Al-Arabiya
Too many in the US government look at those reports as a reason to keep US military personnel in the area.
Absolutely, but this is the main point I keep coming back to: what Americans want, whether in the government or opposed to its policies, is increasingly irrelevant.
The US military already has to ship National Guardsmen and screen them for Palestinian sympathies just to keep a couple airbases & a few thousand people in the middle of the Syrian desert. And every month, fewer people are willing to sign up for that, and the ones that do are getting burned through quicker & quicker by the op-tempo (the US military’s dependence on Adderall & friends is maybe one of the most under-reported aspects of our current imperial decline).
And in terms of allies, both at the local & national levels, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now (Milei in Argentina is exhibit A in my mind). It’s not a rigorous argument, but I really think the simple fact that the rebels have been so successful is evidence they’re not US or Israeli puppets. It’s become too dumb of a club for people capable of long-term thinking to join.
Even Milei proved insufficiently bottom of the barrel as he shows good sense to try to kiss and make up with the Chinese.
They pretty much have to focus on politicians with at least one high level Nazi ancestor to assure proper compliance.
That claim stuck out to me too. It sure seems like Israel was bogged down in Gaza and Lebanon prior to the “ceasefire” with Hezbollah – they can drop lots of bombs against opponents with no air force, but they didn’t didn’t so well on the ground when it came to actually fighting. All they’ve done in Syria is walk in with practically no resistance, and then start bombing everything.
At some point, somebody is going to punch back against the Zionist entity, and it can’t come soon enough. The US can’t divide and conquer the Arab world forever, can they? Even the “squabbling Greeks” managed to get their act together a couple times to fend off opponents back in the (ancient) day. The Arab world is surely aware of that history, since they were the ones who played a large role in preserving it.
“At some point, somebody is going to punch back against the Zionist entity, ”
But no one ever does. And all the Arab nations do is talk. Ian W is good on this today.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/taking-the-hit-for-stopping-genocide/
As for now, Israel has won a decisive victory. HizB neutered, and isolated, Leadership all killed. Iran apparently too scared to do a decisive strike. Syria turned into a failed state (the US’ always goal). Next to go down will be the Houthis, probably. The last domino. then there is no “Resistance” left.
Will this victory be Pyrrhic? Probably. Turkey now has a border with Israel, and they both covet the same territory. But in the mean time nothing stops the genocide, and the Palestinians will probably be force moved to the Syrian desert and the west bank taken over. It looks like Oct7 will turn out to be the biggest own goal of the young 21st century.
Idk. Much of Xerxes’ army (and most of his navy) was Greek: Ionians who were his subjects plus mercenaries.
I think that this guy is trying to put his own spin on the facts. The only way that Russia could stem the collapse was to put a major force on the ground but quickly saw that the Syrian army was not going to fight. Since Assad had run down the army, replaced his fighting generals with loyalists (who weren’t really), got rid of most of the Iranians leaving only a force of ‘consultants’, refused to meet with Erdogan, refused to meet with the BRICS, etc, there was not much to be done so they cut their losses. But they have not done so with Iran who is a fellow member of BRICS. They sent all that defensive gear and anti-air which made the super-duper Israeli attack a flop. Another factor is that Likud in Israel has declared Russia to be their enemy which Putin will have to factor in. Why did they do that out loud? Don’t know. But certainly Russia is providing all sorts of help to Hezbollah and Yemen which shows with their capabilities. So rather than Russia trying to defend everywhere which means that they would have been defending nowhere, they are picking and choosing their aims due to what resources they have. Th interesting bit will be after the war in the Ukraine ends which will free up a lot of military resources.
Years ago, The Saker, who is no longer on the web, but is a friend of Martyanov i I believe, had said Soviet and Russian military doctrine was to not extend their military forces more than a 1000 km from the country due to logistics, and the fact that the Soviet/Russian military was to defend the homeland, not protect an empire. Syria was at that limit according to him, but had support from the country and Iran, etc. It may be that Russia was ready to help, but as said by others, if Syria will not do it, why should Russia, especially since they are in a bad logistical position without it.
I also find it hard to believe that Hezbollah had only one way of getting supplies, and that through Syria. It would seem also hard to believe that since Iran and Russia are said to have been warning Assad of what was coming, that alternatives had not at least begun to be implemented.
On Israel, yes they get everything for free, but one thing you can not buy is men. The Israeli army seems to be so used to killing unarmed woman and children, they are not able to do well when getting shot at. I have not seen many people argue the Lebanon war was a success for Israel, or that Hezbollah suffered many losses. Civilian losses were high, as always.
Please look at a map. The Lebanese coast is heavily patrolled and ships are regularly boarded and searched. Lebanon borders only Syria and Israel.
“The Iranian-led Resistance Axis has been defeated by Israel. Hamas’ terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 prompted Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza…”
His framing of what happened in October 7 makes pretty clear where he stands. The Palestinians had a right to armed resistance on what is their territory under international law, but he chooses to frame it as a terrorist attack and phrases his article to give legitimacy to Israeli actions. The rest of the article is just as bad as he impugn bad intent on group that has suffered from social media bans, demonetization, shadow banning, fired from jobs, and up to getting detained at airports and worse in the US, UK, and Germany.
The talk about Israel’s weakness isn’t just coming from the people identified here as AMC such as Ritter. It is primarily coming from the few anti-Zionist Israelis such as Alon Mizrahi, Miko Peled, Shir Hever, and Ilan Pappe. While they have a particular anti-Israel perspective, they do back it up with statistics and what their contacts in Israel are telling them.
They’re reporting a country where the wealthier secular Zionists are increasingly distressed by the growing power of the escatalogical Zionists, where physical security that was largely taken granted has been broken, where public services such as medical care have broken down with departures of doctors and professionals, where huge numbers of businesses have gone bankrupt because the system wasn’t set up to handle long wars. We’re also talking about a society that is so sick that a majority defends gang raping prisoners to death and exterminating the entire population of Gaza and possibly beyond. That kind of sickness is just not going to result in a functional “liberal democracy” that can situate itself in the international community, no matter how much cover the sickos at the top of Western governments and media chooses to give it
As for Putin, maybe AMC people that Korybko listens to says that he would join AoR but I’ve listened to thousands of hours in this space in the past year and I’m not aware of anyone (including Ritter and Haiphong who tends to talk big and fast) saying that. Russia has always been extremely careful about cultivating friendly relationships with all countries (including the US and EU countries) and avoid enmity, so joining an explicitly anti-Israel and anti-US alliance would make no sense given its overall approach. Supporting individual states in specific capacities is one thing but supporting an explicit alliance against specific other countries is another matter.
There’s also information coming out that Russia did try to defend the SAA initially, but were forced to stop when they realized that the SAA wasn’t even bothering to put up a defense. Russia was also willing to train and finance a rebuild of the SAA in 2018 and was rebuffed. This all suggests substantial willingness and commitment to support Syria. Maybe I’ll be completely wrong as other information comes out, but I think Russia cut Syria loose because it didn’t want another Afghanistan on its hands where it would be seen as directly fighting for Assad’s government, especially at a time when it’s still threatened by Western encroachments on all sides.
We shall see Russia’s commitment to the region next month, when the updated partnership agreement with Iran is publicly released.
Thank you for writing what would have been my comments on all this. My only caveat here is that Israel may not have “defeated” the resistance axis but partly defanged it in the short term. The struggle will change and evolve. The plight of the Palestinians will, eventually, become something more people in the West will have to face or at least those with some kind of moral compass–certainly a minority within the Western Empire but if that number were to increase to 20% or so it could make a difference in the unbridled support of Israel by Washington–remember older people like me will pass on and younger people online will have more and more influence.
I agree with you. After the pit of despair last weekend, I see this as a serious setback but by no means a total loss for AoR. Supplying Hezbollah will be harder and Israel gets the win it desperately needs to end the war on a high note and possibly ability to steal water, oil, and gas from its neighbors.
But Hezbollah is a strong organization. They already have a substantial weapon stockpile and capable seasoned fighters in their 30s and 40s. They will put up far more resistance than the SAA for anything that comes.
For the rest, Iran can now focus on committed allies with shorter supply lines rather than the reluctant Syria. Everybody has also now seen another demonstration of what the West will do to its enemies, even as it’s vassals poured honeyed words down their ears.
Israel still has to figure out how to control the situation and their past history suggest they’re far too arrogant to properly understand their opponents, so they rely on cruelty, subversion, mass surveillance on “the Arabs”.
Meanwhile their reputation and their backers’ reputations are dirt. They can’t build weapons of sufficient quality or quantity to even beat Hamas or Ansarallah in a fight, and God help us all if Iran does decide to cut off Hormuz or China stop selling us stuff, including from its overseas factories. And that’s before we get to facilitating more bilateral trade and figuring out a non-dollar international settlement system.
And then, maybe some patent and copyright breaking, banning Western media and NGOs in more and more places, and perhaps BRICS+ social media apps.
I hope your current predictions fare better than the magical thinking we heard from you about the SAA, the AoR and Russia standing fast in Hama, and then Homs (for sure this time, really!), and then…
In the long(est) term, this may be a Pyrrhic victory for Israel, but it helps no one to cop out on what a catastrophe has just transpired and the groupthink – from which I do not exempt myself – which led many of us to overstate the Israelis near-term weakness and vulnerability, and which led to the shocking surprise almost everyone felt.
Between the fog of war, propaganda (including one’s own), cultural differences and nuances, and the jive bs that frequently is the Internet, we should be more humble and skeptical, especially towards our own priors.
Oh, and in addition to humility and self-skepticism, add respect for the enemy, however gross they may be.
Note that what I said was that at the time, it sounded like there was a battle being set up in Homs and it was plausible that SAA could win that battle. While there were reporting about SAA lines collapsing, I also heard others say that units of SAA fell back in good order and Hezbollah and Iraqi fighters will join them. Both kind of information in the heat of battle could have been misinformation intended to psych out the other side. I didn’t say that the SAA would for sure win the battle, just that it was still too early to call it a loss at that time.
If you want to call that magical thinking, so be it. I have to make my calls based on the information I know at the time. When new information came along, I adjust my analysis with the new information.
If you think that because I maintained the room for some optimism at a thing that hadn’t yet happened at that time, discredits my comments going forward. Then I suggest you skip my comments because I’m never going to live up to your standard for rigor and non-magical thinking.
Sure, if you say so…
Russia has interests in Syria and its government from time to time. Iran had interests in a particular Syrian regime. Ergo Russia keeps its bases, Iran gets pushed back to the Iraq border.
I suspect Iran can stir the pot in jihadi Syria quite nicely from Iraq, though: the issue for Iran is how to support Hezbollah without a land bridge and to come to terms with Turkey across their other points of conflict (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, the Kurds).
Lebanon’s future and Hezbollah’s, between Israel and a failed state Syria, is a much bigger question. And if Iran has medium-range missiles, what does it need a local proxy for to threaten Israel.
Pushing Iran back inside its boundaries is surely a recipe for Iran to cross the nuclear threshold. It’s like extending NATO into Ukraine….
We shall see about Hezbollah, which is far more important to Iran than Palestinians who were fighting against Syria until recently. If support of Ansarallah is any indication, they may only be snuggling key components while letting Hezbollah build out the full weapon systems locally. Smuggling is probably not that hard with the right combination of boats, shipping containers, “unobservant” border guards, and such. Plus Hezbollah may have intentionally held off on using their weapons stock precisely for a situation like this. I would be shocked if they don’t have enough missiles to maintain deterrence capacity, which would be enough to destroy all major military installations, critical infrastructure, and pipelines and gas extraction platforms.
I suspect Hezbollah will not be motivated to fight for Palestinians or least Hamas for some time to come, now that their grassroots realizes how much Qatari media has poisoned the Sunni minds, exactly as intended.
I suspect Hezbollah will supply itself as well as the Houthis did during the years of US assisted naval blockade. Smuggling is an ancient occupation in most of the trade crossroads, which Damascus has been for a couple of millennia.
Yes, those 100 IDF F-16 sorties damaged almost nothing of Hezbollah long range fires despite what the IDF’s MIC salesmen scream!
Put on its “hind foot” Hezbollah would shot a lot of drones and missiles.
Russia has interests in Syria and its government from time to time. Iran had interests in a particular Syrian regime. Ergo Russia keeps its bases, Iran gets pushed back to the Iraq border.
I suspect Iran can stir the pot in jihadi Syria quite nicely from Iraq, though: the issue for Iran is how to support Hezbollah without a land bridge and to come to terms with Turkey across their other points of conflict (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, the Kurds).
Lebanon’s future and Hezbollah’s, between Israel and a failed state Syria, is a much bigger question. And if Iran has medium-range missiles, what does it need a local proxy for to threaten Israel.
Pushing Iran back inside its boundaries is surely a recipe for Iran to cross the nuclear threshold. It’s like extending NATO into Ukraine….
I don’t think that fall of Assad materially changes the situation in Syria. It creates some short-term turmoil, but long-term alignments will remain, in fact rise of islamists will strengthen these. HTS and Turkish-supported islamists bought their way into power rather than winning by conquest. This leaves traditional Syrian power structure in place, same structure that kept Assad in power and whose support any future Syrian government will need to survive.
The situation here is very reminiscent of Afghanistan, the real power in the country are different tribal and regional leaders. Islamist force is by all account fairly small, 10-20,000 fighters, so it has no hope of holding on to power in Syria without massive external support or by reforging old ruling alliances.
So anyone hoping to hold onto power in Syria will need to build a coalition, including some combination of Christian and Alalawites in the west, Druze in the south, Kurds and Arabs in the east, and Turkmens in the north. Right now HTS is only drawing from the north and even there is splitting support with Turkish-backed SNA, so they will not be able to hold power for more than a few months.
Hezbollah and Iran will remain influential players because they have influence at the local and regional level, their support was not tied to Assad. Once the new ruling coalition is assembled, they’ll be able to resume their business as usual, where the new government would either cooperate or at minimum turn a blind eye to weapons shipments from Iran.
I see Israel as the loser of this war, their preferred outcome should have been to keep Syria divided, especially the rich oil and wheat regions in the east. Islamic government in Damascus is a disaster, they are essentially creating a second Hezbollah, but richer and state-supported. Destruction of Syrian army as a fighting force is irrelevant, that army was a relic of the past. New Syrian army is likely to be rebuilt as a modern fighting force, light on expensive armour, but well equipped with drones and light, mobile vehicles like Toyota Technicals, so the kind of force that is tailored to defeat equipment-heavy IDF.
Pondering how useless Syria actually has been for “The Axis”, the though occurred to me that very likely Mossad had many of the Assad’s regime top dogs on the payroll as informants.
So, hearing the scuttlebutt about coming attacks and that Assad was likely to fail, they quickly pushed trough the cease-fire with Hezbollah so they had the freedom to create the buffer zone in southern Syria, now that all their informants have either left the country or are being moderately tortured to death.
What used to be Israel’s window to the dealings of the Resistance is now a blind spot for them.
Just a thought.
That’s a good one. Blinded themselves, they did.
Yes, excellent point. Makes me wonder if some of identities and whereabouts for the assassinated Hezbollah leadership came out of that nest of vipers.
If it pans out the way you say, Israel will indeed be the loser, and I understand a lot of people in Israel are nervous about the possible outcome. I think it’s far from a given that Syria will be united after this, though. If anything I think it’s more likely that, in the near term, the civil war will enter a new and even more confusingly divided stage, as the winners and the survivors fight over the vacuum led by the government. But we’ll see.
The main purpose of this article is to discredit alternative media in general and commentators who did not predict the implosion of the SAA (I don’t believe anyone did).
The SAA was either paid off, or collapsed in the face of new Turkish combined arms drone tactics which they perfected in the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijan war (see the book “7 seconds to die” for details). However a payoff is looking more likely due to suspicious troop redeployment prior to and during the Turkish offensive.
The author is blaming alternative media for not being aware of this. However, I doubt even the US or Israel were aware. Possibly the Turks themselves had not counted on the speed of the collapse. If the US was aware, there would be plans for an interim government and UN interventions and swift seizures of state assets all lined up and ready to go. There would have been pre-deployment of US forces to Syria in expectation. The IDF would have been prepared to seize far greater swathes of Syria, down as far as Jordan in a once in a lifetime opportunity. There is nothing. They were not prepared and this is unexpected. The continued stand-down of the SAA and the destruction of its equipment is a possible argument against this, but that is also explained by the natural vacuum now created.
This article is general propaganda about the futility of turning away from the (eternally wrong) MSM narratives about Ukraine and Syria, because alt-media are unable to predict moves even the US itself may not be aware of. It’s the general demoralizing nonsense about Israel being invincible and Gaza being a holiday camp instead of a shattered death camp. The reality is Syria has now become Iraq-3. A shattered ME state where chaos now reigns. Israel faces a playground for insurgencies (as in Iraq) on its border with a massive Turkish army behind it. None of the other fronts are resolved, and the US is in no better shape to intervene now than it was a month ago.
There is some other nonsense in the article about the the alt-media thinking Putin was under “Zionist influence”, etc. I’m not aware of a single serious commentator who ever claimed this. Smarter posters should realize the goal of this scattershot is not to hit the target, but to get you to use the newly minted acronym “AMC”, which is to be employed henceforth to label any alternative media outlets whose audiences have grown too large. You can bet your last dime the MSM will be using this one in the coming years, on whatever audience they have left.
I’ve been reading Korybko, on and off, for a long time. He is definitely not an apologist for or advocate of “MSM narratives.” Nor is he a supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Many of his points about group-think and confirmation bias among *some* commentators in the “alt media” are valid, as a number of people here at NC have been arguing themselves recently. But as Yves rightly points out, the “alt media” are not some unified entity that share an identical perspective or move together like a flock of birds. So Korybko himself is overstating his case. I wouldn’t call it a “straw man” argument exactly, since what he is describing does obviously apply to some. But as others have pointed out, creating this entity, the “Alt Media Community” (AMC) as a target of his criticisms is artificial.
That said, I don’t know of *any* commentator, anywhere, who does not have biases or blind spots that reflect their own interests and experiences. And we all are susceptible to confirmation bias. This has certainly been true of myself, and of everyone I read at times. And as Vicky Cookies says below, we often react – or overreact- to the obvious propaganda of official narratives and MSM reports by assuming the opposite. Checking ourselves against these tendencies is hard – especially when our biases have been confirmed by history so often! But warnings to guard against them are probably useful anyway.
I’m certainly open to checking my blindspots, which is why I continue to listen to people like MacGregor, Ritter, a bunch of liberal “pro Palestine” people who condemns Hamas, and this guy even though I know that I’m likely to disagree with them on most points. That’s why I bother to type up rebuttals and see if my knowledge can withstand a counterargument.
But in this case, he’s making unsupported statements about the “AMC” without identifying who they are and how his accusations sticks. The profiting fraudster accusation is particularly odious because lots of pro armed resistance people have absolutely been shunned and demonetized and some cases put up on terrorism charges.
He is also saying that the AMC said Russia is part of the Axis of Resistance when no serious person would say that, Iran never included Russia on any such list and Russia is still trading with and having regular communications with Israel. Maybe somebody said that somewhere, but nobody serious would have said that because the Russian position in Israel has been clearly neutral throughout.
On his support of genocide or not. He doesn’t come out and say he loves genocide when Israel does it, but he does position Hamas as terrorists and what Israel has done as retaliation. I don’t think I ever saw him refer to it as genocide either but I don’t read all his articles.
” There would have been pre-deployment of US forces to Syria in expectation.”
a lil anecdata to potentially counter that assertion:
my cousin’s eldest son is navy EOD(yeah, he signed up at the get-go to be the hurtlocker guy)….usually deployed alongside Seals.
he got sent to Rota, in Spain, some many months ago…and totally disappeared 2 or 3 months ago.
even his mom hasnt heard from him.
cousin has a thing on his fone that tells him that a text he sent has been read(way above my skillset,lol)..and says that the texts he’s sent have indeed been read…he assumes by an AI or some contractor in a room full of deployed soldiers’ cell fones.
i have no idea.
he talked to an acquaintance with connections who looked into it, sub rosa, and said kid was alive, at least.
i suspect he’s in Syria, or maybe Iraq.
which means, more than likely, that Seals are there, too.
because thats who his unit shadows.
(i am not of that world(military), but the us navy special forces in the dern desert just seems weird, to me…but apparently its a thing…of course, Syria has a coastline…with a bunch of Russian naval assets in place)
cousin, usually rather aloof about the life his son has chosen(he, and i tried to talk him out of it)…is worried as hell.
Criticism of any expression of group think among any media commentariat is always merited and personally I’m pissed off–not by the mistaken analysis of what turned out to be the fall of Syria but by the supreme confidence with which many commentators assured us the jihadis would be crushed.
That said, a lot of intel agencies will have gotten it wrong, too, with access to far more and more current information.
I know Yves is working from the framing that Korbyko gave this but that framing I think misleads us here. Two points:
1. Just because Syria was far weaker than expected doesn’t make recent assessments of Israel’s material and moral weakness wrong.
2. Israel’s very dramatic reversal of fortunes has much more to do with the forces at least potentially opposing a rampant genocidal and wounded ZioAtlanticist Empire than it does with Israel.
The locus of the mistaken group think, I would venture, lies not with Israel but with the inevitability of the emergence of a multipolar counterforce.
So much that could be said here, of course, but the issue that I will not be alone in brooding upon is the adequacy of ‘strategic patience’ alone in the face of a counter-strategy of a maximalist escalatory mindset–an apparent willingness, even craving, to burn the world down if control of it can’t be maintained. Even if–and I say *if* here–the strategic patience camp has better fundamentals, any faith in the mathematical inevitability of triumph here stands to have overestimated the sufficiency of mathematics as a way of fully understanding the game and to have underestimated the possibility that the game board itself can be overturned by the advent of a new (here apocalypticist) game. Or indeed by something less like a game than insanity and nihilism in the attempt to wield Chaos.
Taleb: The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost-benefit analyses are no longer possible.
Which raises the question of what sorts of analysis *are* valid before the prospect of catastrophic outcomes.
Bright colors, indeed, but his point is taken as a useful counterbalance.
However vaguely defined (though I think we know what he means), this ‘AMC’ has generally ignored some of the stable Russian positions the author recalls; of course, as Rev Kev has pointed out above, the author ignores some data himself in his broad brush technique. He does point to a tendency that I think is identifiable, and which can be distorting, but I think goes too far in assigning motivations when there are certainly other possible reasons.
One possibility I see is that commentators who were and are outraged at Israeli atrocities had a moral framing activated, inducing more binary thought. We see a bunch of children being murdered, think how awful that is – even evil – and then when considering the context of related events, are compelled to use this same framing, with the attendant limitations on our thinking.
Another is that anti-propaganda is influenced by official propaganda, in that it has to counter or reject MSM or state viewpoints. The latter include an ideology wherein the machinations of Russians and Chinese are behind every event they disapprove of, and every one they do approve of must be a blow to this evil axis.
Facts are hard to come by (and to agree on). Independent media trade in dramatic current events, which means that they’re relying on reporting, or are reporting themelselves from sources. Little of the knowledge of that alt media atmosphere is first hand. Think of a newspaper story about a situation you have more familiarity that the reporter with, your job, or an area of passionate interest. How closely does – or can – the reporting ever correspond with your experience? Unless you’ve trained your mind to see what is relevant in the same terms as a news editor, probably not too closely.
While it can be helpful to try and keep analysts and alt media folk honest and sharp, zooming out we see a broader mediasphere in which MSM and official doctrine still holds much greater influence, and whose actual dishonesty enables killing on a large scale. Peddling wishful thinking is not useful (what did Spengler say about optimism?), but let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture and turn on one another.
“Think of a newspaper story about a situation you have more familiarity that the reporter with…”
This is an excellent point. You can see this in action if you ever attend local city council or other government meetings and then read the reporting on it afterward. Meeting participants have often spent many hours or days or weeks studying the issue at hand before opining about it at the meeting, whereas reporters might be hearing things for the first time and trying to piece it all together for a quarter page article due the next morning for the local weekly. There has been more than one occasion where a quote I made was taken out of context when included in a news article, and times when I wondered whether the reporter was even at the same meeting I was, so different was their interpretation of events.
“we see a broader mediasphere in which MSM and official doctrine still holds much greater influence, and whose actual dishonesty enables killing on a large scale.”
Canada has voted at UN YES for ceasfire as well as in defense of UNRWA. Canada gov is adefinite, staunch Israeli defender. However, the visible evidence of blood libel (bloodletting perpetrated with intention and delight) is doing good work here.
I welcome different perspectives, as they are useful for modifying one’s analytical framework, which in any event is always subject to recalibration as new information becomes available.
I am especially leery of triumphalism in any direction where conflict in West Asia is concerned; the spectacular violence on the surface at any given moment may well be a distraction if you’re trying to understand deep and relatively slow tectonic shifts across generations — for instance the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire followed shortly thereafter by the French and British Empires who drew up the borders we mostly still see on our maps today. That those borders never really mapped onto the kinds of Westphalian “nations” which frame Western thinking about international relations leads, I find, to unhelpful assumptions — and that’s before even taking into account the nefariousness behind Sykes-Picot and its ilk.
Israel was pretty triumphalist, iirc, in 1982 after the invasion of Lebanon “succeeded” by defeating the PLO. That turned out to be very premature.
I stand by my view that Syria is what Lebanon was in early 80s except much bigger and far more complex. This will not go well for anyone who gets involved.
Those nations didn’t work that well even in Europe… until ethnic cleansing was deployed, most prominently in the 1940s. Arguably the Middle East is just catching up, though this progress is nothing to celebrate in my view.
An objective observation of Russia’s assets and capabilities in the theater and Putin’s choices of when and where to deploy those capabilities or not, clearly showed that Russia was never a strategic or ideological card carrying member of the resistance. In fact some thinkers regularly noted that Russia is a “supporter” of both Israel and Iran, because for them it was never a binary zero sum choice to their strategic interests.
We should never forget that, even putting aside that he was placed in power by the West
https://www.thetimes.com/article/mi6-regrets-helping-vladimir-putin-to-get-elected-says-ex-spy-chief-tbttxxljf
And that ‘we’ supported his war on Chechnya
https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-uk-ignored-chechnya-war-crimes-to-push-bps-oil-interests-as-it-worked-to-get-vladimir-putin-elected-in-2000/
Putin supported our invasion of Afghanistan (despite the fact that this was only vaguely in Russian interests, and arguably wasn’t), supported the invasion of Iraq, supported (rather surprising this) the early stages of the war on Libya, and only ‘bailed’ on the neoconservative project when the West began their long war on Syria, which threatened Russian naval bases (which of course was a war he ended up losing). Economically he is a straightforward neoliberal, and as the article in the OP points out, he is, and always has been, a Zionist.
In other words, many in the Alt-media have projected onto Putin all their fantasies about what they would like Putin to be, rather than what he is. He is an extremely cautious, ‘Conservative’ (in both senses) centre-right Russian leader who sees Russia as a great power and wants it to be taken seriously by other great powers (especially the United States), and has been bitterly disappointed to find out that that’s not on the menu. I doubt seriously that he genuinely wants to overthrow the American Empire, and as others have pointed out, his position in West Asia is one of extreme pragmatism: to put it bluntly, he will back anyone who is winning (at the moment he is being ‘friendly’ to both Israel and Iran, to try and cover his options).
At the moment Israel looks as if it is doing well and Putin sees no reason to jeopardize Russia’s long standing links to Israel, especially over something as nebulous as ‘human rights’. Putin is an old man now, and he is not going to throw away a lifetime of caution and suddenly turn into Lenin or Castro in his dotage.
Putin is the West’s enemy because the West has made him so. Putin is also just one man whereas Russia is run by many individuals with many different interests, but most are Russian patriots.
The West wants a weak and corrupt Russia, preferably a fractured one, that is easy to exploit. Putin and those around him cannot accept these conditions and see themselves divided up like Yugoslavia.
What matters for the rest of the world is not that Putin is socialist but that he’s anti-imperialist and willing to extend a helping hand to other anti-imperialist countries.
We should never forget that, even putting aside that he was placed in power by the West…
This is London Times fantasy: deciding that Britain or the West actually controlled the Russian Duma and millions of Russian voters in 1999 and 2000. The characterization of President Putin, is a Rupert Murdoch press fantasy.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1BGSi
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for Russia and Germany, 1990-2023
(Indexed to 1990)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1BGXm
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for Russia and France, 1990-2023
(Indexed to 1990)
Hidari: We should never forget that, even putting aside that he was placed in power by the West
CA: This is London Times fantasy …. The characterization of President Putin, is a Rupert Murdoch press fantasy.
Here’s the link to an archived copy of that TIMES piece MI6 regrets helping Vladimir Putin to win power, says ex-spy chief so it’s out from behind the paywall —
https://archive.ph/TYwyF
So first of all the claim about helping to promote Putin as a replacement for Yeltsin is not, firstly, made by the Times and Rupert Murdoch, but by the ex-spy chief in question.
And, interestingly, that’s Sir Richard Dearlove. Dearlove was and is quite a significant figure behind the scenes. Here’s the sanitized version of Dearlove’s bio, which includes, “as C, from 1999 until 6 May 2004, he was head of MI6 during the invasion of Iraq …and was criticised …. for providing unverified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.” And so on—
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dearlove#HM's_civil_service
What isn’t there that Dearlove is not claiming responsibility for, but was almost certainly behind is the instigation of Russiagate in the US.
Briefly, Christopher Steele and a cadre of other former Six operatives under Dearlove fabricated and supplied Hillary and the DNC with the Russiagate ‘evidence’ in 2016. Why?
Had Hillary been elected then, the Ukraine war — in some format — was set to kick off under her. Trump’s election derailed that timetable.
Why did Dearlove want the Ukraine war then? The likeliest presumption is because he was one of the City/Establishment/Deep State figures who strongly pushed for Brexit in 2016. Had the Ukraine war kicked off then, the degradation of the EU wrought by the war now would have commenced at that time.
And of course —
“Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIiVqiK-Ewg
I don’t think Putin is a zionist. That comes with embracing genocide, ethnic cleansing and territorial expansionism. Putin’s brother died of starvation.
While Putin does respect and is interested in existance of Israel, I don’t think that he is in the ranks of actual zionists. Norman Finkelstein doesn’t deny Israel’s right to exist… Does that makes him a zionist?
Finkelstein was and may still be a liberal Zionist. He hates things that Israel does, but he is emotionally attached the Jewish state of Israel. He also opposed armed resistance and BDS. Basically the only kind of resistance he supported was the Great March of Return and when that failed horribly, he admitted that he just got depressed and gave up on the Palestinian cause until October 7. In this he’s far less committed than other anti-Zionist Jewish activists who have been working tirelessly for decades as allies.
I would say Putin just doesn’t let other countries’ morality get in the way of doing what he believes is in the best interest of the Russian Federation. There’s a substantial clutch of influential Zionists in Russia that needs to be managed and he does that. Like Turkey, Israel is also a useful channel and a reality he has to deal with in West Asia. China, which makes far greater claims to moral high grounds, also trades with Ukraine and Israel. It also trades with Turkey and Gulf States even though they funded Uyghur extremist terrorists in Xinjiang.
I heard Finkelstein having some Saul type of moments with respect to the March of Return. As for Israeis, he thinks they are now a death cult…
Yes. But he also thinks Palestinian resistance is insignificant and continue to think of Hamas as terrorists and not resistance fighters. Until Syria happened, I don’t think it was a sure thing that Israel won and Hamas/Hezbollah lost.
Completely ridiculous. Have you watched a single interview with him?
He accepts the existence of Israel and is complaining about what it does. At least pre October 7, he also didn’t support armed resistance or BDS. Recently he is defeatist and dismissive of any of the achievements of armed resistance.
Oh, so immediately proven wrong about Finkelstein – you obviously didn’t read or ignored his comments on October 8th, or his analogy between October 7th and the Nat Turner uprising – you pivot to his most recent comments.
You may succeed in continuing to delude yourself, but this is a tougher crowd here.
Hopium, copium and now mischaracterize-ium… a bad and semi-desperate look.
So you’re saying that I should not consider his historical track record of not supporting armed resistance or BDS, nor his current abject defeatism.
Rather, if I understand you correctly, you think the relevant consideration is what he said shortly after October 7. I did hear his comments during that period and he prefaced by how much he dislikes Hamas and mischaracterized the rightly disciplined military actions.
In my opinion, Nat Turner isn’t the right analogy to use. It should be the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to armed resistance to fight invaders to their land.
“… Rightly disciplined military actions.”
That’s a hot one. Do the math: subtract IDF members – occupier/combatants
And thus legitimate targets – and the unknown number of Israelis killed by friendly fire under the Hannibal Doctrine… and you’re still talking about a lot of civilians killed, settler/occupiers or not. Now, either those civilian deaths were intentional, and this “disciplined” (which I doubt you are willing to admit), or they were not, and your “disciplined actions” argument falls apart. Finkelstein has the intellectual honesty and humanity to acknowledge that, while also finding justification in a valid historical analogy, whether you agree with it or not.
I think the essence of Zionism is supporting the existence of the State of Israel, if not necessarily in its current borders or with its current policies (adjustable in either direction). If not, then what else is it?
That said, I’m not sure Putin “supports” it so much as acknowledges it as a fact unlikely to change soon. Israel, to him, is 1) a country he can do business with (though that is incerasingly complicated now by its US ties) and 2) a country that some people in his circle are personally, economically and emotionally attached to.
Please elaborate on Point #2.
russia has a long history of supporting african and ME countries starting notably with Ethiopia in the 1870’s and their fight with italy.
putin says that the collapse of the soviet union was a major tragedy, yet no one should resurrect it.
even the Tsars knew better.
that caspian basin should be protected at all costs for russia, otherwise it might be split in half, or even worse.
just having a nice economic relationship with russia is not enough to protect russia, see Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, the Ukraine and now Syria.
with Georgia and Armenia coming into the mix.
no wonder Russians muslims are contemplating revolts again with this obvious public weakness.
with two russian army basis in Tajiktistan for stability and protection, and Afghgan taliban now asking for russian help, it should be obvious that economic interests alone, is not enough
the current russian leadership is a by product of the gorbachev/yeltsin combination of a naive idiot and a gangster.
and has only been rivaled by the clinton/obama unraveling of americas great industrial advantage which made america into a true super power.
same can be said in the U.K. thatcher/blair, as with the rest of the west now. all following blindly the example of what happened to the ottoman empire.
if i was the newly freed africa countries, i would for sure understand russias neoliberalism, and organize and arm pronto.
anyone with half a brain could see what was unfolding in the Ukraine before the over throw.
all one needed to do is look at what happened to yugoslavia.
later on it will be found out that the zionists were supporting the southern russian muslims extremists, then putin showing obvious public befuddlement.
i am not even sure if the current russian leadership even understands what protectionism and still having control of around 70% of the economy has meant to their country.
they seem to be wishing they can be part of the WEF club as equals. not gonna happen.
Mr Putin has many of the virtues of Pitt the Younger, his social welfare policies lately are what I would like to think Pitt had in mind just before he died. He was placed in power by those behind the curtain at a young age and took his time to learn how to govern.
Like Pitt who was lauded at one stage as the preserver of Europe he won’t fight your wars for you, but he will help you if you decide to fight for yourself. Some of his speeches reach the heights of Pitt’s famous one that couldn’t be recorded at the end of the Peace of Amiens. Hopefully even if he dies his followers will continue his policies just like Pitt’s did.
The West is running a kind of Continental system like Napolean’s against England against Russia and if they can hold on long enough eventually the West will be forced to do the equivalent of march on Moscow, this time it means to march on China. That should complete the cycle.
Israel has decided to live by the sword. Escalation to the use of nuclear weapons seems inevitable in a region in which hatred dominates politics. With luck, the rest of the world will enact sane arms controls after the mushroom clouds in the Mideast have drifted away.
Listening to Ritter on Haiphong speak of the assault on Syria as grassroots organic, devoid of great-power influence was unsettling.
I’m eating crow over his case.
What I want to know… is how deep does the manipulation go? Given the underlying sectarian conflicts, and Hamas’s now seeming optimism about the loss of Hezbollah’s supply lines… was 10/7 intended to lure Hezbollah into conflict? Given the resistance’s awareness of that enmity with Hamas, and assuming Hamas acted independently of the resistance… why did Hezbollah cross that divide to defend them? To maintain the legitimacy of the resistance? Opportunism? We all assumed the resistance had great-power backing somehow… that view started to fade in Dahiyeh… what were they thinking…
Ritter has been wrong on so much. He keeps repeating stuff that’s already been debunked or questioned elsewhere on “AMC” channels so I wonder where he’s getting his information from.
He’s getting his information from the Internet, just like everyone else. He doesn’t have some network of secret agents on the field, and those that do don’t go around Youtube talking about it. We are all using same open sources, and extrapolating from there (based on “gut feeling”).
Spoiler alert: So are the intelligence agencies. No really.
Nah, they are worse. I have been following Larry Johnson for a while, and he is full of stories of inner workings of US intelligence. They dismiss open sources, and take for granted whatever “their man in Havana” sends, and then modify it to fit the desired narrative. The Russian shovels meme came directly from British Intelligence (and, probably, their source in Kiev scriptwriting studio).
My point was that Ritter overlooks publicly available information that is circulated on channels that he writes and interviews for. It’s one thing for him not to agree with them, but he should have at least acknowledged them (things like the rapes and atrocities that EI and Grayzone immediately started to poke holes in
https://johnmenadue.com/the-october-7-hamas-assault-on-israel-the-most-successful-military-raid-of-this-century/
Emma: “It’s one thing for him not to agree with them, but he should have at least acknowledged them (things like the rapes and atrocities that EI and Grayzone immediately started to poke holes in”
Scott Ritter per article linked above: “The Israeli government has had to walk back its claims that Hamas beheaded 40 children and has provided no credible evidence that Hamas was involved in the rape or sexual assault of a single Israeli female.”
Seems to me that Scott has addressed your concerns.
I stand corrected on this. Thank you!
I tend to think that Hamas was sincere and likely forced to act. The Israeli provocation over Al Aqsa and the planned invasion of Gaza forced their hands. In retrospect it was a trap for them and Hezbollah. But if October 7 didn’t happen, Israel would have kicked in something else or just continued with their salami tactic. They’ve been trying to overthrow Assad for 15 years and spent untold billions, until they finally got the chance.
On the other hand, what Israel did to Gaza and Lebanon is now clear for everyone to see. The level of Western government support for Israel to do whatever it wants, laws be damned, is for everyone to see. I think that reveal is very important.
Plus I still do believe that the Israel that emerges out of this is going to be a basket case. Access to stolen oil and gas plus the American printing machine can only do so much. More importantly it’s dragging the American empire down with it. International law and international system of governance, both highly beneficial to the West, has been completely discredited. Fighting “terrorism” is discredited. The power of Western military tech has been discredited.
The only thing they haven’t discredited is their absolutely to perpetrated extreme acts of subversion and mass terrorism. Hope everybody in the “jungle” was paying attention.
October 7 was definitely a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” moment. They and other Palestinian resistance groups weren’t getting any closer to liberation; Israel became more intense and severe with their surveillance in Palestinian territories, control of Gaza’s resources, and assassination; and Palestine’s old allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are all too happy to throw them under the bus to join Israel’s club. The whole thing reeks of desperation.
And I don’t think Tel Aviv wanted an October 7 to happen nor did they need to set up a “trap” for the resistance. Just look at how they acted during the first month of the war. They were definitely caught flatfooted, and the IDF had no idea what they were even doing in Gaza. They still don’t have an idea now.
The 10/7 “trap” wouldn’t be for the resistance, but for the international community. The “trap”, would justify ethnic cleansing and Israeli expansion. Israel would much prefer to nuke Gaza and be done with it, fallout notwithstanding, for the reasons you state above.
The trap would be set by only a few, by selectively ignoring the intelligence and creating the conditions for a successful incursion. Furthermore, they were very quick to put out stories of extreme Hamas brutality and cover up mass Hannibal actions on that day, creating conditions for a genocide.
The focus on the military engagement ignores what Israel has done in Gaza, which is to create conditions utterly hostile to the sustainment of human life in the area. These weren’t military engagement but killing camps. They did okay on this front though it took a lot longer and cost them a lot more dead soldiers than they care to admit.
Honestly, Gaza residents may be better off in exile elsewhere. Who knows what long term exposure to that much munition and building debris does to people. There are going to be lots of horrible chronic conditions coming out of this for years to come.
They noticed, and now every monkey is walking upright Emma. The brutality wasn’t a revelation, it was a demonstration, and it would seem warfare > lawfare. If we could learn from Lebanon, that our ideals are not a shield.
Overt fascism is a costly way to govern and has a way of throwing up surprising new opponents. We were mostly living under covert fascism before, which was a lot easier for the managers.
Anyhow, I say the bigger picture is that Israel showed that it can’t defeat Hamas in the battlefield, Russia is outproducing NATO on arms, and China can shut down everything everywhere by simply refusing to export. Yes they snatched “wins” by brutalizing people and employing Joker tactics. Those gaslines and oil drilling to save Europe are all years away and Iran might decide to finally deal with the duplicitous Qataris and UAE after all in the meantime.
The actions of Israel in Palestine and the 200% commitment of US to support them rang around the world and Malaysia and Indonesia realy heard the sound and they are not amused.
I am looking to see how is the US trying to convince them to join in isolating China… claiming that Uyghurs are genocided in Xinjiang…?! I wonder how that will look with Gaza and West Bank cleansed…
Curious how the local Sunni population feels about Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran. It looks like the Arab population has been heavily indoctrinated to hate them and I’m wondering if that carries over to SEAsia.
re:” a demonstration”.
i dont remember where i saw the phrase, but it struck me enough to actually write it on the wilderness bar in a spot everyone was likely to notice:
“Gaza is a Method”
this opens the door to discussing things like the Jakarta Method, and so on.
the 3 people who have actually said something about that bit of graffiti got to learn about the contra wars, operation ajax, the various usarmy field manuals on counterinsurgency, the cia/crack connection, and just a whole lot of other stuff like that that ive been learning about for decades.
none of those 3 ended up wanting to know this information, notably.
the other maybe 30 people who have seen it and said nothing, decided, apparently, to let it go, lest they obtain even more uncomfortable information from Amfortas than they already had,lol.(ag policy, etc)
“Every bombed out village is my home town”, James Baldwin
(thats on the bar, too)
Read Norman Finkelstein’s book on the Gaza wars in 2009-2014. The behavior of the IDF was largely identical. The only thing Oct 7th changed was the magnitude, not the degree of their violence against the Gazans. Israel didn’t wake up a genocidal state on Oct 8th. Rather like all genocides it was a mentality long brewed and media nurtured. Ethnic cleansing, at least, has always been on the table
Why, if I already said I agreed on these points.
Norm Finkelstein isn’t a particularly good scholar on Israel or decolonization, despite claiming to be a Maoist. He doesn’t know Arabic and I think he might not even know Hebrew. Here’s Justin Podur and Jon Elmer dissecting some of his work and critiquing his defeatism.
https://youtu.be/p7fmqWVilYE?si=aQ4iHw6yM73C80Vg
Pappe and Peled are much stronger on knowledge about Israeli history and social conditions in my opinion. And much more pleasant to listen to.
Israel “won” on October 7 by murdering hundreds of Israeli civilians who were captured by Hamas, and then blaming Hamas for killing them. I don’t think Hamas leadership ever contemplated that Israel would defeat their plan to capture hundreds and hundreds of Israelis and hold them hostage by murdering as many Israelis as they could once they were initially captured.
Additionally, Hamas was the victim of bad luck. Unknown to them, the promoters of the Nova Festival moved the Festival square in the middle of Hamas’ planned raid route two days before October 7 and only extended it to October 7 on October 6. The unfortunate placement of a rave on Hamas’ intended invasion route allowed Israel to portray the October 7 raid as a terrorist attack on partying civilians. While Israel and its Western allies most likely would have used their media to portray the October 7 raid as “another 9/11” in the absence of the Nova Festival, having the Festival there certainly didn’t hurt.
Was moving the Super Nova festival to Reim smack in the path of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood down to “bad luck” — or was it done with the intent of adding a large cohort of secular HaAvoda-voting ravers to the Hannibal Directive Apache/Hellfire inferno that was intended to provide the pretext for a final solution to the Gaza Question?
Asking for a friend.
That type of fact free speculation is always unhelpful. And in this case it’s easily disproven by the fact the Festival’s two promoters were killed on October 7.
Not fact-free. Israeli press has reported that authorities moved the festival two days before it was to take place, not the promoters. Even Times of Israel reported that concerns of local IDF garrison were overruled. Gaza was a Shin Bet panopticon. How could they not have known?
Such an interesting post – though of course the “AMC” is hardly a monolith.
It would seem to me that that as the mainstream corporate press becomes increasingly dishonest, and a purveyor not just of propaganda but shameless and self-contradictory propaganda, then surely people will want to engage sources that appear to realize this. The problem is that the “AMC” does not have any sort of institutional backing, it mostly can’t do independent investigating of primary sources, it is reduced to reading between the lines, and there is little editorial/institutional depth. The old rules of the legacy newspapers, thrown out by the new corporate press, have not not been resurrected by the AMC.
Just because the corporate press is totally dishonest, does not mean that it doesn’t often tell the truth, when the truth happens to fit the current desired narrative.
We are left with a population divided between those who mindlessly follow the party line, and those who see through the party line but the alternatives are so disconnected and chaotic, that they are lost in a mindless haze. Which I am sure suits the rich and powerful just fine.
The multi-polar pundits I value are the retired officials who spent decades at the commanding heights of their institutions–Wilkerson at State and Army, Ritter at UN, Freeman at State, McGovern and Johnson at CIA, McGregor at Army, etc. Their institutional knowledge dwarfs that of journalists, and surely they still have connections to players in their fields who are not retired, and thus not at liberty to speak publicly, but willing to speak privately with these elder giants.
The fall of Syria seems to be having a psychic effect on the anti-empire crowd on the scale of Trump Derangement Syndrome for PMC liberals, and understandably so. It hit like a Mahlerian sledge-hammer, out of nowhere. Literally stunning, and I admit to still being stunned. And somewhat crushed.
When even the well-connected graybeards above didn’t see it coming–Wilkerson, Freeman, Crooke, and McGovern especially–I don’t see much cause for recrimination. Acts of God–as usual, an evil one–do happen, and did here.
It wasn’t the not-seeing-it-coming that should lead to sharp critique, but the automatic self and audience-comforting bs about how the SAA/Resistance/Russia were about to hit back hard, which was essential to maintaining the (unjustified) assumptions and numbers for the audiences they’d developed. As for courageous people who I admire and respect like Ray McGovern and Larry Wilkerson, frankly, they’ve been out of government for decades – McGovern, bless him, is in his eighties – so how current can their contacts be, so that they and we aren’t vulnerable to their priors?
Not saying this as a tout for traditional media – I still check out most of these people, if less frequently and with a more vinegary outlook toward their raps – but if we’re going to tell others not to get high on their own supply, we need to hold ourselves to the same standard.
In simple terms Syria went bankrupt, unpaid soldiers won’t fight and our most effective weapon is US Dollar.
We could bribe our way instead of fighting. It would cost less to just put Syrian government on our payroll instead of deploying our combat forces into the region.
In retrospect, Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Resistance Axis since it would have needlessly ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars. Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests
I can’t help contrasting with Paul Craig Robert’s post yesterday, would PCR be considered AMC?
The extraordinary defeat that Israel and Israel’s American neoconservatives have dealt to Russia and Iran pre-empts Trump from any peace moves. The West has recovered its hegemony with Russia’s defeat in Syria and is on a roll. Washington will insist on Russia and Iran’s obedience…
Did the Russian and Iranian governments understand that the stakes in Syria were Washington’s hegemony and Israel’s hegemony over the Middle East in the form of Greater Israel? Do they realize the enormity of their defeat?
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/12/11/syria-has-disappeared/
Roberts on Nima a day or two ago was forceful in arguing that Russia re: Ukraine and Iran and Hezbollah re: Israel tragically failed to punch their respective bullies in the face with enough force to communicate in the only language they seem to understand: violence.
Before Syria’s collapse, I caught myself musing, even expecting, the same thing myself. It really seemed a civilized approach would not work with either of their enemies, and that their enemies were begging for a demonstrative humiliation that would send them skulking off the playground licking their wounds.
Now that window seems to have closed, possibly for a depressingly long time. I hope I’m wrong.
Well, Russia, re: Ukraine, was avoiding showing escalatory dominance for fear of a nuclear response from the Imperialists; slow and steady appears to have worked, so far.
Roberts is an interesting example. He represents a sub-genre of “alt media” commentator. He is a harsh critic of US policy and therefore an “anti-imperialist” as we might define that term. But instead of the rosy cheerleader stereotype Korybko criticizes, who sees the empire collapsing any day now, he is the type that constantly asserts that Putin is too conciliatory and wimpy. He *always* makes this argument, about every major occurrence in the current Cold War conflict. Cheerleaders like Martyanov ridicule and dismiss such pessimists among the “bloggers,” explaining away apparent Russian setbacks as insignificant, or even intended as part of a larger Russian strategy. The pessimists keep harping at Putin to be more forceful. Both types became so predictable that I quit reading them regularly. Fortunately, as many have pointed out here, these two types don’t exhaust the “alt media” universe.
At least in Afghanistan, Russians left a government that survived longer than the USSR. In Syria, everything became sand. Russians had a loosing proposition. It is not Russia that lost, but ultimately Syrians. I understand that the Mukhabarat was a nasty piece of work, but seeing the numbers for the freed prisoners, etc. it looks that the state oppression was humanely exagerated, at about 10 times as it was.
But deprivations would bring people to this. If opposition would have run in elections, including with the islamists as a party, they wouldn’t have received a majority in Syria, same way Ukronazies wouldn’t have had more than 2% of the vote. Nevertheless, the coup in 2014 brought them to actual power.
And Russian genie cannot be put back in the bottle. The so called set back in Syria will only harden the spine of Russians and likely for Putin, to go to the deep end in Ukraine. Same for Iran, same for China.
All this triumphalism in the west about Syrian loss in Syria is becoming a wimper when the west starts looking at Ukraine, where there is the question whether or not Ukraine will end up collapsing like Syria in the end…
And like in Ukraine. The longer they fight us, the colder their hearts for Europeans and Americans. China will never bail us out like they did in 2008 and may do things to hasten our decline and immiseration.
“If opposition would have run in elections, including with the islamists as a party, they wouldn’t have received a majority in Syria, same way Ukronazies wouldn’t have had more than 2% of the vote.”
Yes. Likewise, when the Bolsheviks ran in elections immediately after the October Revolution, they lost miserably despite their advantages. Fortunately, they were able to simply dismiss it with minimal political consequences. Civil war is not a democracy; it’s not won by majorities, but by well-organised and determined minorities, such as Islamists, Ukrainian nationalists, etc.
stopped reading at “the Hamas terrorist attacks…..”
tantamount to (hypothetical) “communist dictator Putin…..”
When ideology prevents an honest view of a given subject I assume there are other gaping holes in their commentary.
no offense Yves, a personal bias of mine.
reading the NC comentariat reaction here allows digest of the article without the corresponding gnashing of teeth when reading.
Attacking and kidnapping non-combatant civilians is terrorism—even if they are colonial squatters.
Putin is not a dictator.
And that said, if I was a Palestinian leader, I’d begrudgingly resort to terrorism too. High-ground morality only goes so far.
Killing civilians is allowed in times of war, it just can’t be the intent of the actions and precautions taken to minimize the loss. The civilians taken were largely unexpected since thru didn’t expect the Nova festival to occur there and were taken as protection while retreating. And Hamas immediately offered to return the civilians in return for Israel not invading.
Israel practiced mass Hannibal on the people on the ground and then lied outrageously about it.
I’m not dismissing the possibility of individual war crimes happening, but that’s not terrorism and does not discredit the armed struggle.
So what actually is the difference between these civilians and the colonial squatters held in Kurdish “detention camps”?
Louis agree with all your points, I was never comfortable with Hamas taking hostages (not that my comfort with what anyone fighting for freedom does is relevant) but when it was pointed out they would exchange them for the thousands of Palestinian hostage I accepted the reason.
They were also willing to return the civilian hostages in return for non-invasion and only negotiate on the POW to Palestinian hostages/POW trade. Israelis rejected that deal so they ended up negotiating women and children for women and children deal.
Emma, didn’t know that. ty
FWIW I like Korybko and read his stuff via RSS. And re Crooke here he is in a transcript for those of us who don’t much Youtube.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-assad-and-what-it-means
And I believe most of us know that Putin sees himself as buds with the Israelis. The question is whether that friendship goes both ways.
Still who can deny that we, not Russia, are the dog that the tail is wagging. Whether or not Russia’s view of the Middle East is justified, ours–in terms of US interests–is nuts.
Here is why I only skimmed and never read Korbykov – fortunately, in the first line,
“The Iranian-led Resistance Axis has been defeated by Israel.”
Did I miss the surrender of Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthi’s?
Anyone claiming to know the future, especially in war before marine-level math takes over, is blowing hot air out of an orifice. Its really unclear how the Syrian cards will fall or that Chaos in the long term is in the US or Israeli interests.
You have to be whack to think anything will be better for Syria or it’s people with WokeAQ in charge.
I don’t think there has ever been any alliance between Russia and Iran. Russia sold the S400 system to Turkey but not to Iran. The agreement on the exploitation of hydrocarbon fields in the southern Caspian Sea is extremely favorable to Russia and oppressive towards Iran. The purchase of drones from Iran has been pumped up by Western propaganda but is scarcely relevant. The construction of the nuclear power plant in Bushehr and the new reactors planned do not indicate that Iran is a country preferred to others, Rosatom has built and is building reactors in many countries, including Turkey. Likewise, there is no transfer of sophisticated technologies from China to Iran. Relations between Russia and Israel have always been excellent, only now they seem colder but is it probably linked to the distorted personality of Netanyahu who not even the Americans trust. In essence, with all due respect to those who can’t stand the United States and their politics, like myself, Iran is a country that no one fully trusts.
The extermination of Palestinians by the Israelis really look like the Generalplan Ost that the Werhmarcht applied in USSR. That doesn’t sit well to anyone in Russia, including with Purtin, who’s older brother died of disease/starvation in thge siege of Leningrad…
Thanks for calling out the air of triumph that sometimes goes with assertions of Israel’s incompetence or errors. Not a good look if we’re continuing to (try to?) assert any kind of rigorous investigative approach, retain credibility as observers. The Manichean impulse in all of us is obviously strong, but it’s never been the case that we needed to embrace Russia’s actions in order to deplore Ukrainian corruption or Nazism. Or that (even as we defend the right of Palestinians to fight for what is theirs) we have glory in the deaths of a few IDF kids here and there while we bemoan the murder of Palestinian children.
This is why I just can’t do guys like Jimmy Dore. . .
Oh, no, nobody is calling Israelis incompetent or having made errors. The level of ingenuity applied in killing and starving palestiniens, while pretending that it is not happening will become a field manual for many to study…
Yeah, wasn’t saying that. But Israel has blundered during many of these steps along the way–and sustained an enormous number of casualties. Glorying in those missteps, or deaths, is not a good look.
there aren’t any “IDF kids”. they’re european terrorists armed by the US. the actual kids dying are indigenous, slaughtered by those “kids” europeans glorify.
IDF kids versus Palestinian possible terrorist young ladies. Amirite?
Who is living in stolen land, killing and terrorizing civilians day and night, and want to wipe Amelek off the face of the planet again?
If you have some suggestions for effectively resisting Israeli killers nonviolently, I’m all ears.
I will say I don’t trust Ritter. His possible wild swings from on trump ukraine this past month made me suspicious.
Recently when talking about the South Korean coup he stated “South Korea’s reason for existing was reunification with North Korea”. Supposedly now that North Korea has announced it is no longer looking for reunification South Korea has to find a new reason why the state should exist? I’m sorry, but hearing this without some sort of explanation, it sounds bat guano crazy.
I don’t see this as a matter of trust but needing to discount for his emotionalism.
This seems to run in Marines. I have a Marine as an attorney and see similar patterns.
As I’m not acquainted with any Marines, I appreciate that comment, Yves. And I’m fond of Ritter, though he’s often wrong in his predictions. That is, he fervently believes in what he’s saying at any given moment so what you get comes from real conviction, however fleeting or mistaken it may prove to be.
I did a quick search of NC for pieces on Syria before the latest development. One was by Conor, who didn’t make any predictions but gathered a number of data points indicating that things were going down in relation to HTS and Turkey. Another was a cross post from Korybko himself, who opined that activity in the region was ‘not a big deal’ but predicted Russia would stand aside if anything major happened there. So we could call that one out of two for him.
Overall I don’t see any evidence that the positions he attributes to the ‘Alt-Media’ were advanced here at NC (which would definitely be included under his definition).
And I wouldn’t give Korybko that one yet. Russia May well have wanted to stay in Syria if SAA showed the will to fight and Assad didn’t do a world historical flake on his obligations as head of state (there could be reasons not yet disclosed). Quite a reversal from someone who bravely stayed on in Damascus for years when he could have left for a comfortable exile in London or Paris at any point.
For what it’s worth, Rami al-Shaer, a Palestinian-Syrian emigre in Russia, who used to teach Assad’s siblings to ride and has apparently operated as a messenger between Russia and Assad (he claims to consult Russian MoD in Syrian issues – and there are pictures of him with Lavrov and Bogdanov [Special Representative of the President of Russia for the Middle East]), is now saying that it was actually Moscow that forced Assad to order his troops to stand down and leave the country to avoid a new round of bloody civil war.
After receiving information about the impending assault, Russia tried to get Assad to engage the opposition politically, knowing they had more support among the population. After he refused, Russia consulted with Turkiyet and Iran about how to avoid a bloody civil war, and what we see is the result.
But then, that’s what he would say, wouldn’t he?
I’m guessing that if that’s the case, Assad will not be allowed to speak about it for a long time. Maybe his generals will eventually speak on this? This version is actually more hopeful than the other version as it suggests that Russia/Iran didn’t think losing Syria was significant enough to be worth fighting for, so somehow less of a loss for them and not as much a win for Usrael.
Or just more magical thinking by me.
Polar Socialist is on to something here. The Cradle reports that Fars Iranian News Agency quotes IRGC officials that “Russia and the UAE had managed to convince him [Assad] to step down, so there was nothing we could do.”
Ha’aretz reported over the weekend that 70 percent of Hezbollah’s weapons stocks were of Russian origin and published photos of guns, bombs, and missiles still in their crates with recent Russian export stencils to the Syrian Arab Army through Tartus. Not a good look. Assad was called to Moscow on November 29 for consultations.
Lavrov was in Doha with the Iranians and the Türks when the Israelis uncovered these tons of Russian arms. I suspect that Lavrov and the politicals in Moscow told the Russian military, “Enough!” and conveyed this to the Iranians, the Türks, the Qataris, the Israelis and most importantly to both the Syrian Arab Army and the Hayat-Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The SAA had given-away their own weapons and Hezbollah was in no position to return them, so the SAA simply changed into their civvies and faded away.
HTS burned-out the Iranian embassy in Damascus, but thus far they have left the Russian embassy alone, as well as the bases in Latakia and Tartus. I smell a “deal” between the Russians and HTS. To me, Lavrov doesn’t look like a dog with its tail between its legs; he looks pissed-off.
Russia’s advantage over 404:”Ukraine” is in technology. Transfer of Israeli technology into “Ukrainian” hands could quickly shift the balance against the Special Military Operation. Aside from Putin’s long personal affinity with Netanyahu, the Russians need to keep the Israelis on the sidelines.
Putin and Lavrov are going to take lots of heat from Russian ultras but it’s better than Israeli technology giving the “Ukrainians” the ability to kill more Russians. I do think that the Russian ultras are a significant political force — they seem to have been behind l’affaire Prigozhin.
Note that Hayat-Tahrir al-Sham is coo-ing sweet nothings at the Israelis as well as at the Russians. The other side of this is that it’s evident that the Palestinians are well and truly screwed. Again.
*Sigh* This is nonsense. I assume Escobar, who traffics in any and all rumors.
Assad had been preparing to step down for YEARS. He had his entire family take the 6 years it takes to become fluent in Russian before he fled. Fluency in Russian is a requirement for obtaining Russian citizenship.
Then why did the SAA chose this moment to stand down? Why didn’t the Russians bomb and strafe the advancing jihadi forces as they have for a decade? Why is HTS leaving the Russians in Damascus, Tartus, and Latakia alone? Why isn’t Israel complaining more loudly about 70 percent of Hezbollah’s weaponry being of recent Russian origin?
These are facts, not speculation.
On the subject of AMC. Recently Scott Ritter wae announcing that the reason South Korea existed as a country was to reunify with North Korea. On the face of it, this is bat guano nutty. Yet Nima of Dialogue works let this statement go multiple times uninterrogated.
I can imagine arguments for NK eventually coming out ahead of SK, especially comparing there relative birth rates, but that SK, now existed as a State to Reunify with NK?
Zero hedge put up the Korybko article at 5 PM today.
I do not agree with Darden editorials on most political positions
Posting this is worrying
Quite why France is ignored in this matter eludes me. It is France through DGSE and whatever other historical linkages it has in Lebanon snd Syria which is a key player. I doubt Britain has as much influence in that region as France and DGSE has new helmsmen
March 2024 MIT the Turkish Intelligence arrested Syrians working for DGSE through a cutout NGO.
“In retrospect, Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Resistance Axis since it would have needlessly ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars.”
Russia may want to be friends with Israel but Israel can never be Russia’s friend because Israel is already America’s friend and America wants to Balkanise Russia and rob its resources. Israel also wants change the government in Iran to an Israeli friendly one which would also be an American friendly one. This would put an enemy of Russia on Russia’s southern border.
Recommend this interview, as Jacque Baud knows the substance in the ME region, including Syria very well.