Introduction by Roger Annis, Nov 16, 2015 (updated)
Enclosed are two commentaries from Counterpunch on the Nov 13, 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, France. A reported 129 people died in the attack. The first commentary begins, “We are all France. Apparently. Though we are never all Lebanon or Syria or Iraq for some reason. Or a long, long list of additional places.”
Further below the two commentaries is a link to a review of two books examining the origin and development of ISIS and its various branches, published in the New York Review of Books in August 2015.
Some news reports from France are contrasting the public response to these killing compared to those at the time of the killings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris earlier this year on January 7. Twelve people died in that attack. At that time, expressions of anger and defiance quickly took place in Paris and across France. ‘Nous sommes Charlie’ or ‘Je suis Charlie’ became watchwords. This time, there is much anger and there will be protests. Right wing forces in France will take full advantage of the anger and frustration to push a racist, anti-Muslim political line.
But there is also fatigue. It’s been fourteen-plus years of the George W. Bush-declared ‘War Against Terror’. Where is the end, where is the peace? A Canadian residing in Paris told CBC radio this morning that he is seeing a lot of similarities in the responses of Parisians to the two events. AS with ten months ago, “there is a lot of disbelief. But this is much more serious.”
Canadians expressed war fatigue through the course of the federal election that took place on October 19. The defeated Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged Canadians on to more endless war in the Middle East and more accompanying attacks on civil liberties at home. His party’s electoral base of five million voters agreed with him and voted accordingly. But a surge of three million new voters disagreed by voting for the Liberal Party and its message that it would end Canada’s participation in the illegal, aerial bombing campaign by the United States in Iraq and Syria and instead focus on improving social and economic conditions at home.
Post-election, the new Liberal government is backtracking on the promise to end participation in the U.S.-led bombing. CBC reports on November 12:
Asked whether the Canadian flights might continue to the end of the current commitment in March 2016, [Defense Minister Harjit] Sajjan said Canada is in discussions with its allies. Pressed whether Canada has been asked to continue its contribution to the bombing mission, Sajjan again said he wanted “to make sure that we have good discussions with our allies before we make a decision.”
The Department of National Defence said in a statement today that two Canadian fighter jets took part in coalition air strikes earlier in the day in support of Iraqi forces, striking an ISIS ammunitions cache near Sinjar in Iraq. Capt. Kirk Sullivan said Canada’s mission would continue “for the time being under the mandate previously directed by government.”
Canada’s new finance minister Bill Morneau told CBC News at the G20 summit meeting in Turkey on November 15 that his new government has not changed its election commitment to withdraw its fighter jets from bombing in Iraq and Syria, “but in the broader context, we remain absolutely committed to the [Iraq-Syria bombing] coalition”. That same day, Canadian jets took part in bombings in Syria.
Foreign Minister Stephane Dion said in Manila where he is attending an APEC conference, “We have always said that we want to be more optimally effective in the coalition.”
The government is under intense pressure to formally withdraw the election promise to end the aerial bombing. A propagandist who writes as a columnist for Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain, has a front page column today saying it is an “outrage” that Prime Minister Trudeau has not swiftly cancelled the promise in view of events in Paris.
On Nov. 17, the Globe and Mail published a stirring call for greater warfare in the Middle East written by the Russophobic, purported French philosopher Bernard Henry-Lévy. The following day, it published another pro-war feature, this time by Chris Alexander, defeated Conservative Party election candidate and former immigration minister of Canada. Alexander’s words were couched in the language of defending refugees. He became notorious during the election campaign when it was revealed that he had a personal hand in refusing a refugee application by the Syrian family named Kurdi whose mother and two children drowned while fleeing from Turkey to Greece on September 2.
Defense Minister Sajjan is coming under scrutiny for the time he served as a military intelligence officer in the Canadian military in Afghanistan. He did three tours of duty there in the mid 2000s. Successive federal governments have refused to convene a public inquiry into revelations made by the Globe and Mail and Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin of Canada’s facilitation of, if not participation, in the torture of Afghan citizens detained by Canadian soldiers. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper canceled (‘prorogued’) a session of Parliament in late 2009, with the blessing of then-Governor General Michaëlle Jean, in order to deflate pressure to convene an inquiry.
It was a Liberal Party government in 2001 that joined Canada to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan shortly after the attacks in New York City on September 11.
AFP news agency is reporting today: Obama, Putin agree need for UN-negotiated Syria talks, ceasefire. Another setback to U.S. ‘regime change’ policy towards Syria.
Writer and professor Vijay Prassad of Trinity College in Connecticut speaks to Democracy Now! today in a seven-minute interview.
Postcript: On November 17, Justin Trudeau spoke to reporters about Canada’s intentions in Syria while flying from the G20 meeting in Turkey to an APEC summit meeting in the Philippines. Canada will increase its military engagement in northern Iraq and Syria he said. This will take the form of more special operations forces on the ground, in what the CBC television program The Fifith Estate has termed Canada’s “hidden war” in northern Iraq. The program broadcast a full edition report on the story on October 31.
Trudeau sounded the same “more, not less, war” theme of the president of France following the Paris attacks. “There’s no question that this is not going to be a short engagement,” he said. “It’s a lot of people working together in different ways to create stability and security in an area that has been unstable and insecure for a very long time.”
Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan is musing that not just the numbers but the geographic scope of Canada’s training mission in Iraqwill also expand. Presently, the mission is active in the northern, Kurdish region of Iraq. The Globe and Mail reports on Nov 19: “When asked about the chances that Canadian soldiers might end up training Iraqi forces – who tend to be farther south – instead of just Kurdish peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq, Mr. Sajjan said he’s ‘looking at the entire theatre’ right now.”
On NOv 16, Trudeau said he would stick to his election promise that Canada will withdraw its fighter jets from bombing in Syria. But he provided no date for when that would occur. According to a Globe and Mail report, Canada has about 600 Canadian military personnel stationed in Kuwait where they support the air-combat mission. That includes surveillance aircraft and tankers.
The Toronto Star has recently reported that some 40,000 Canadians die prematurely each year due to poverty.
Non-French war deaths matter
By David Swanson, Counterpunch, Nov 13, 2015
We are all France. Apparently. Though we are never all Lebanon or Syria or Iraq for some reason. Or a long, long list of additional places.
We are led to believe that U.S. wars are not tolerated and cheered because of the color or culture of the people being bombed and occupied. But let a relatively tiny number of people be murdered in a white, Christian, Western-European land, with a pro-war government, and suddenly sympathy is the order of the day.
“This is not just an attack on the French people, it is an attack on human decency and all things that we hold dear,” says U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham. I’m not sure I hold ALL the same things dear as the senator, but for the most part I think he’s exactly right and that sympathy damn well ought to be the order of the day following a horrific mass killing in France.
I just think the same should apply to everywhere else on earth as well. The majority of deaths in all recent wars are civilian. The majority of civilians are not hard to sympathize with once superficial barriers are overcome. Yet, the U.S. media never seems to declare deaths in Yemen or Pakistan or Palestine to be attacks on our common humanity.
I included “pro-war government” as a qualification above, because I can recall a time, way back in 2003, when I was the one shouting “We are all France,” and pro-war advocates in the United States were demonizing France for its refusal to support a looming and guaranteed to be catastrophic and counterproductive U.S. war. France sympathized with U.S. deaths on 911, but counseled sanity, decency, and honesty in response. The U.S. told France to go to hell and renamed french fries in Congressional office buildings.
Now, 14 years into a global war on terror that reliably produces more terror, France is an enthusiastic invader, plunderer, bomber, and propagator of hateful bigotry. France also sells billions of dollars of weaponry to lovely little bastions of equality and liberty like Saudi Arabia, carefully ignoring Saudis’ funding of anti-Western terrorist groups.
When U.S. militarism failed to prevent 911, I actually thought that would mean reduced militarism. When a Russian plane was recently blown up, I think I imagined for a split second that Russia would learn its lesson and stop repeating U.S. mistakes. When people were just killed in France, I didn’t have any time to fantasize about France coming to its senses, because a “socialist” president was already doing his Dubya-on-the-rubble imitation:
“To all those who have seen these awful things,” said François Hollande, “I want to say we are going to lead a war which will be pitiless. Because when terrorists are capable of committing such atrocities they must be certain that they are facing a determined France, a united France, a France that is together and does not let itself be moved, even if today we express infinite sorrow.”
The video doesn’t look like Bush, and the French word combat does not necessarily mean war just because the Washington Post says it does. It can mean fight in some other sense. But what other sense exactly, I’m not sure. Prosecuting anyone responsible would of course make perfect sense, but a criminal justice system ought not to be pitiless. It’s a war that ought to be pitiless. And it’s a war that will guarantee more attacks. And it’s a war that France has begun.
“It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners,” said Albert Camus.
Please go back to thinking, France. We do love you and wish you well and are deeply sorry for U.S. influence against your better tendencies.
Hell comes to Paris
By John Wight, Counterpunch, Nov 13, 2015
Years spent depicting head chopping fanatics as rebels, moderates, and revolutionaries in an effort to effect the toppling of another secular government in the Middle East. Years spent cultivating Saudi Arabia as an ally against extremism and fanaticism rather than treating it as a country where extremism and fanaticism resides. Years spent treating the Assad government, Iran, and Russia as enemies rather than allies in the struggle against this fanaticism. And years spent denying any connection between a foreign policy underpinned by hubris and its inevitable blowback. All this together has succeeded in opening the gates of hell.
The aforementioned hubris was on display just hours prior to the horrific events in Paris, when British Prime Minister David Cameron elevated the killing of Mohammed Emwazi by US drone strike in Raqqa, Syria, to the status of a major military victory in the war against ISIS. Out came the podium from Number 10, and out he came to proclaim that the killing of Emwazi (aka Jihadi John) had “struck at the heart of the terrorist organization [ISIS].”
That Cameron could venture such a fatuous boast the very day after an ISIS suicide bomb attack in southern Beirut killed 43 and wounded over 200 people was yet more evidence of the extent to which Western governments are detached from the reality of the Frankenstein’s monster their foreign policy has helped create and let loose upon the world.
There is also the truth that in the minds of people whose worldview is grievously impaired by a Western prism, the deaths of Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, and Kurds – in other words those engaged in the struggle against ISIS on the ground – constitute a statistic, while the deaths of Europeans and Americans to the same barbarism are an unspeakable tragedy.
In years to come historians will prepare such a scathing indictment against this generation’s leaders of the so-called free world, it will make the indictment prior generations of historians have leveled against the authors of the Sykes Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the Treaty of Versailles, the Munich Agreement, and the Suez Crisis seem like a playful tap on the wrist in comparison. In fact, the only issue of debate in the course of preparing it will be where it should begin and where it should end. As things stand, it is on track to be open-ended.
In response to 9/11 the decision by the Bush administration, ably assisted by the Blair government, to crash first into Afghanistan without an exit strategy, followed by Iraq in the mistaken belief coalition troops would be greeted as liberators rather than occupiers, marked the day not when a new dawn of democracy and freedom was about to break across the Arab and Muslim world, but the day the hand of the West first reached for that rusty bolt securing in place the gates of hell, and slowly started to pull it back. Over the succeeding decade back ever-further the bolt came, inch by inch, until in 2011 the gates finally, and inevitably, flew open with the West’s ill-fated intervention in an Arab Spring in Libya that by then had arrived at the end of its reach.
NATO airstrikes succeeded in dragging the Libyan ‘revolution’ from Benghazi all the way to Tripoli and victorious completion, whereupon the aforementioned David Cameron and his French counterpart at the time, Nikolas Sarkozy, descended to hail the Libyan people for “choosing democracy.” The hubris of those words, the military intervention which preceded them, have sent thousands of men, women, and children to the bottom of the Mediterranean in the years following, marking a tragic end to a desperate attempt to escape the democratic paradise the British Prime Minister described.
Regardless, on we continued, driven by a myopic and fatal rendering of the brutal conflict in Syria as a revolution, even as legions of religious fanatics poured into the country, most of them across the border of our Turkish ally while Erdogan looked the other way. In the course of the long years of total war that has engulfed the country since, the world has witnessed every conceivable variety of bestiality, carried out under the black flag of ISIS. But wait a minute, the barrel bombs, you say. Assad is killing his own people. He is the cause of all of this mayhem and carnage.
Allowing for a moment the idea that the Assad government was the main cause of the Syrian conflict when it began in 2011, in 2015 the same government is without any shadow a necessary part of it ending with Syria’s survival. Barrel bombs are an atrociously indiscriminate weapon, for sure, and their use rightly comes under the category of war crime. However just as the war crime of the allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945 did not invalidate the war against European fascism then, neither does the atrocity of Syrian barrel bombs invalidate the war against its Middle East equivalent today. When the survival of a country and its culture and history is at stake, war can never be anything else but ugly, which is why the sooner it is brought to a conclusion in Syria the better.
This is where we come to Russia’s intervention, which came at the point where the Syrian government was slipping towards the abyss. President Putin’s forensic accounting of the perfidious calamity of events leading up to Russia’s intervention, in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 28[1], should have heralded the glaringly and obviously necessary volte face required to turn a Western policy responsible for disaster into one approximating to coherence.
But, no, instead a moral equivalence has continued to be drawn between a secular and sovereign government under which the rights of minorities were and are protected, and a medieval death cult intent on turning the country into a mass grave of said minorities, along with others deemed superfluous to the requirements of the Caliphate.
This shorthand history of the elemental conflict currently raging across Syria, and also northern Iraq, and which has now come knocking on our door, places the crassness of David Cameron’s boast of ‘striking at the heart’ in its rightful context. We – i.e. the West – are in truth striking at the heart of nothing when it comes to the struggle against ISIS. Russia on the other hand is striking them, along with the Syrian Arab Army, the Kurds, and Iran. The extent to which their efforts are succeeding can be measured in this shocking series of attacks that have been carried out beyond Syria’s borders – starting with the downing of the Russian passenger aircraft over the Sinai, followed by the recent suicide bombing in southern Beirut, and now with this latest grisly episode in the heart of Europe. They reflect the desperation of a group that has suffered significant reverses in Syria and Iraq in recent days and weeks.
No matter, if terror was the aim of the Paris attack, it has undeniably succeeded, leaving the French, British, and US government with a dilemma over how to respond, both in terms of security measures at home and their ongoing role in the conflict in Syria.
Responding to this latest atrocity in the French capital, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed Russia’s condolences and said: “The tragedy in Paris demands that we all unite in our fight against extremism.”
These are no mere empty words. The longer Russia’s call for unity in this struggle goes unheeded and ignored, the longer it will take for the gates of hell to be bolted shut again – assuming, of course, they ever can be.
Note:
[1] A video of President Putin’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Sept 28, 2015 with the UN’s translation voiceover is here. A video and text of the speech on the website of the Kremlin is here.
Further reading:
The mystery of ISIS, New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015. Reviewing: ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror
, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, Regan Arts, 270 pp; and
ISIS: The State of Terror
, by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, Ecco, 385 pp.
Now the truth emerges: how the U.S. fueled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, by Seumas Milne, The Guardian, June 3, 2015
