MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Never one to leave a press release lacking his name, John McCain (R, Getoffmylawnville) is free lancing foreign policy again. As usual, he gives guidance to the thoughtful: "Caution, this way lies madness".
McCain, last seen in a Baghdad market touting our prior venture into Sunni-Shia sectarianism ( that one went well...) now urges " arm the anti-Assad rebels...what could go wrong?"
Hint: Think The Thirty Years War.
In the split attendant upon the outcome at Kerbala where the grandson of Mohammed fell before the burgeoning Umayyid Caliphate, two strains of Islam continue in ( often deadly) struggle to this day. Accidents of British (Oil) Imperialism and reflexive anti-socialist cold war ideology have combined to place U.S. foreign policy solidly on the Sunni side of the scale, (with a slight distraction when we double-crossed our previously favored Sunni proxy (Saddam).
Oddly, the Shia Theocrats in Iran notwithstanding, by favoring anti-mullah Sunnis we have aligned ourselves against the more secular Baath party manifestations growing out of the old Nasserite UAR.
The latest turn in Iraq coupled with the disaster unfolding in Syria looks like the opening of the final struggle between the Mahdists and the adherants of the Tentmaker's successors As usual, we are uninformed, unsophisticated and unthinking in our policy.
Come to think, John McCain is the perfect symbol for a clownish failure to grasp the subtleties of a sectarian split that may well be sounding the Armagedon tocsin so longed for by the (weird) Christian Zionists.
In short ( ed note: too late...) it is far from clear that we have ever discerned, let alone effectively empowered, the "right" side in these intra-Islamic controversies.
One thing, though, we know for sure. Blowback is a bitch.
Comments
by jollyroger on Wed, 05/29/2013 - 10:24am
Arm a geddon tired of McCain.
by Flavius on Wed, 05/29/2013 - 10:36pm
by jollyroger on Thu, 05/30/2013 - 1:49am
by jollyroger on Thu, 05/30/2013 - 5:41am
by jollyroger on Fri, 05/31/2013 - 2:52am
McCain caught in pic hanging, around with kidnappers...That didn't take long, did it? .meanwhile he is fucking up the possibilities of a peace conference .
by jollyroger on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 4:04pm
McCain is the hawk of hawks. Me, I'm considering the option of abolishing the U.S. military.
by Aaron Carine on Sat, 06/01/2013 - 12:19pm
by jollyroger on Sat, 06/01/2013 - 12:28pm
by jollyroger on Sat, 06/01/2013 - 2:56pm
by jollyroger on Sun, 06/02/2013 - 5:48am
by jollyroger on Mon, 06/03/2013 - 6:51am
Shiite fighters from Lebanon and
Iraq have also entered Syria to
defend Shiite shrines and fight
alongside a government they see
as protecting their interests. NY Times
by jollyroger on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 5:32pm
Also too: The anti-Erdogan protesters in Turkey have many grievances - but the prime minister's record of support for the Syrian rebels may turn out to be the most explosive. Democracy Lab @ ForeignPolicy.com
by artappraiser on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 5:44pm
by jollyroger on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 7:27pm
by jollyroger on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 11:20pm
The very knowledgeable Phyllis Bennis weighs in here is a sectarian war that's underway. It didn't start that way, but it has become a thoroughly sectarian war between, on the regional side, Sunni and Shia, with the Alawite leadership in Syria on the Shia side. And that takes shape when you see Iraq and Syria and Iran on one side versus Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey on the other side.
by jollyroger on Thu, 08/29/2013 - 9:14pm
Utterly fascinating translated-from-Al-Watan interview with Ahmad Al Ibrahim, "Saudi expert in Saudi-US relations":
http://arabist.net/blog/2013/8/29/saudi-thinking-on-egypt
where, among other things, like elucidating their tribal position in the alignment of which your link speaks, it sounds like the Kingdom is just totally utterly fed up with the Obama helter-skelter approach to everything. Go figure, like most countries and leaders running the gamut from democratic to autocratic, sectarian or not, they've got actual goals in mind when they do stuff....
by artappraiser on Thu, 08/29/2013 - 10:13pm
by jollyroger on Fri, 08/30/2013 - 3:42am
I loved this line on that, that KSA don't want to be part of that game:
However, the Americans always say one thing do another. If we kept on playing along, the conspiracy will be on us next.
Among other things Al Ibrahim clarified for me how they come at things long term--i.e., they are thinking a Gohmert or McCain type could be the next administration--so why should they even bother to play along with an Obama who can't make up his mind from one day to the next? He'll be gone in a flash while they are still there dealing with the mess left behind...
Overall, it is getting real bizzarro how easily it is getting for so many different entities and groups in the world (including the Gohmert's and liberal Egyptian intelligentsia) to claim America is on now on the side of "the terrorists." (Just posted a news piece on Kurds saying the same, for example.)
All of this got me thinking more nuanced about Obama's seeming desire (so far, we'll see if it is bluster or not) to lob a missile or something about the chemical weapons use. I wonder now if he is thinking it is important to make a "we are the most powerful state in the world and won't stand for it" statement that use of chem weapons is unacceptable because "the terrorists" could have more easy access to the same shortly. I am reminded what Bill Clinton once answered in a NYT interview (late in Monica period, so no one paid any attention to it,) about what keeps him up worrying at night, that it was the possibility of a chemical or biological attack on the U.S. by terrorist group. Remember, this was pre-9/11, so I was surprised by the answer and I remembered it.
I don't want to make this sound an apologia by me for what the Obama admin is saying/doing right now, just trying to get my mind around it. I'm actually most sympathetic to the Yglesias argument.And one of the fascinating parts of the Al Watan piece for me is how it reinforces my continually growing fear that Obama is just a royal fuck up on foreign policy and always has been, just always doing "helter skelter." I think back to how early on he had to spend months agonizing over setting up an Afghanistan policy, and then he just backtracked on it pretty quick. That he has a tough time with the foreign policy stuff and would rather not do it. And how the exit from Iraq was not much more than following the Bush plan. That even bratty kid Yglesias could do better, can sound like a more confident leader, at least....I am wondering what the heck is going on with John Kerry, too, maybe I was under an illusion there, too, that he was a smart cookie when he's not.
by artappraiser on Fri, 08/30/2013 - 6:43am
P.S. On the royal fuck up question, I can't think of a foreign leader that seems impressed by Obama any more. Can you?
by artappraiser on Fri, 08/30/2013 - 6:47am
more of the same:
from
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-syria-mi...
by artappraiser on Sun, 09/01/2013 - 11:35pm
by jollyroger on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 4:32am
As they used to say on American Bandstand, I would rate either name a 2, I'm sorry.
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 5:13am
Under "it takes one to know one," that's "Professor Feckless Putz".
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 5:47am
by jollyroger on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 6:12am
Link still works for me, sorry. (Maybe it's because I've become a subscriber?) It's a GOP "shadow opposition" column. so we'll just ignore the summary takeaway; here's the applicable excerpt that's spot on, mho:
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 4:18pm
by jollyroger on Thu, 09/05/2013 - 6:07pm
I was planning on nominating him to run in 2016 until I read AA's article, but now? Fuggedaboutit.
by Verified Atheist on Thu, 09/05/2013 - 8:50pm
Sen. McCain Denounces ‘Symbolic’ Strike: Syria Strategy Must Threaten Assad
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/sen-mccain-denounces-symbolic-strike-syria-st...
Assad "euphoric" about Obama's decision on Syria strike, McCain says
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57600902/assad-euphoric-about-obama...
by artappraiser on Sun, 09/01/2013 - 11:46pm
SOLD! (that was fast, I fully expected him to hold out longer, arguing for much more intervention):
That means most of the conservative talk show hosts will be against it (on the basis of their grand moral principal of hating John McCain and sidekick Graham?)
by artappraiser on Mon, 09/02/2013 - 8:36pm
Obama, particularly with McCain and Graham on his side, will certainly receive authorization in the Senate. I could be wrong, but my bellybutton senses that the president will also receive authorization to take military action in the Republican-controlled House, and without much difficulty.
In the House, I could envision a Republican bloc trying to make hay without "bucking the commander in chief" by insisting on more hardcore tough talk etc. But there is no way, based on my understanding of how things work down yonder inside the Beltway, that the Republican majority in the House is going to allow itself to be seen as the party that rejected a president's call for military action, and I also believe that the Democrats fully understand and fear that a loss by the president on an issue of this magnitude could make him a lame duck even before the midterms.
Post-script--After I wrote above I found this piece by Jonathan Allen in Politico, far more pessimistic, even taking "support" by McCain into account (he wrote this before McCain's meeting with the president). Allen writes:
by Bruce Levine on Mon, 09/02/2013 - 9:16pm
Several of the articles I read were much less pessimistic. Like what Peter King called "the isolationist wing of the GOP" would have to make a coalition with leftie Dems for it to fail, and that the Obama machine would figure out how to make that kind of coalition a fail easy.
But I think it's too much up in the air to predict right now:
1) It depends on whether the U.N. report is strong on their side, which will affect other countries and then the media discourse and then Congress & American public. Other things affecting could happen at the G-20 meeting.
2) It also depends on whether what they want to do is clarified, i.e., if it becomes more clear that it's going to be a Clinton type missile punishment like on Saddam, or a Libya type thing with a few other countries, there would be changing reactions from constituents than the ones they are giving now. But if it remains a secretive open-ended thing that they can't talk about much, especially if they can't talk about how limited itis going tobe, which might be what they require, it will probably fail. Because of Bush II Iraq. (Iraq is defiinitely why it failed in UK; British people would not go for being Bush's fooled poodle again, they needed to know more.)
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 2:23am
as I slowly recover from the excesses of the West Indiain Day Parade ( and let me say this about that: the guy in the float in the thong was Anthony Weiner, not me..) I will address seriatim the points above. that said, are we simply accepting without further peradventure, the stated origin of the chemical attack at issue here? Pepe Escobar ( my new Facebook friend) who knows more about this shit than do I points out the disturbing stank clinging to the crucial sigint intercept upon which much subsequent certainty is founded...
by jollyroger on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 4:25am
West Indiain Day Parade
Thanks for inviting a large number of the neighbors over for the day, it waz quiet round here.
are we simply accepting without further peradventure, the stated origin of the chemical attack at issue here?
I actually don't believe that is the case at all. I see lots of evidence of congresscritters and just 'mercan people saying they want more data. If they don't get it, or don't like what they get, they are going to say no. But the admin seems willing to play some with that so far.
As to Pepe, I stopped being a fan around 2005, too much ranting, not enough sticking to what he actually knows--and I will admit that he sometimes has a line to good factuals-- but always has to embellish it with rant and a much bigger narrative of grandiose Howard Zinn stylistics.
Ya know,it's really hitting me of late, don't the guys that do that, don't they realize that they are doing exactly the same thing that bothers them so much about the gummint war sales team? Can we just all cut all the agitprop on all sides like 50%? Is that possible?
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 5:28am
by jollyroger on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 6:05am
Wrote good stories to use to teach children the difference between right and wrong, all depends on how you define perjorative, I guess.
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 4:17pm