Turkey has apparently shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter-bomber on its border with Syria, claiming yet another airspace violation. This time, its F-16 interceptors decided to pull the trigger.
Vladimir Putin is calling the incident a "stab in the back", while Foreign Minister Lavrov has cancelled a trip to Turkey. Beyond this, though, basic strategic reality limits the potential fallout with regard to the Syrian peace process.
Direct Russian retaliation against Turkish interests is a practical impossibility: Russia needs the Dardanelles no less today than a century ago during the Allied fiasco at Gallipoli, and Erdogan seems to be reminding Putin that the latter's present air campaign is only possible because of the free passage of Russian shipping from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean through the narrow, Turkish-controlled channel. This is Turkey's way of telling Russia not to get too carried away by its new role as key power broker in the region - that role is subject to a Turkish veto.
Strong elements within the Turkish military - traditionally that country's strongest institution - have doubtless been seething with rage over Russia's repeated (though definitely unintended, inevitable pass-through) incursions into its airspace over the past eight weeks. From the start, Moscow's intervention has been a huge embarrassment to Anakara, given that President Erdogan has risked so much since 2011 to help topple the hated Assad regime - his open southern border with Syria has, to this day, been the main conduit for anti-Assad rebel groups, including various non-ISIS radical jihadists with Al Qaeda affiliations, to funnel men and materiel to the northwest Syrian front lines that are the key to the nearly five-year-old civil war.
But Turkey's anger seems to have boiled over in the past week or so, with a new Russo-Syrian campaign in the far north against her kindred Turkmen in the border highlands. The signature "dumb bombing" by both Russian and Syrian air power claiming a large civilian toll among the mountain Turkmen tribes has crossed something of a red line, and by shooting down the Russian jet (whose two pilots bailed out but were apparently then killed by ground fire), Ankara is sending a message of extreme displeasure to the Kremlin.
Putin's in something of a bind, but he won't jeopardize the fundamental relationship with Turkey over one lost jet and crew; he may yet scale back the assault on the Turkmen enclave, even if it upsets Assad. There's almost nothing to be gained trying to get even; in the objective view, it was Turkey that somehow had to get even after two humiliating months. Perhaps Putin has indeed underestimated Erdogan's resolve to imitate his own strongman rule; that should make it easy to deal with him.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Powers still divided over Assad, but will Assad finally turn on ISIS?
Both Obama and Hollande have reiterated their conviction that Assad must be removed from office to end the Syrian civil war, despite the Paris bloodbath having given more pressing urgency to eliminating the terrorist threat from ISIS in that country.
The only problem: they'll have to do lots of bargaining with Putin to figure out a way to remove Assad while leaving the Syrian state essentially intact. An Australian piece points out the obvious: these Syrian state organs that Assad controls are anything but on the verge of collapse. The conclusion is telling:
But that brings us to the real question: has Assad now joined Russia in refocusing more of his campaign against ISIS? If so, that would bring to rest persistent Western criticisms, like this one, that Assad and ISIS have actually always been best buddies.
It's true that Bashar al-Assad takes after his father Hafez in that he has always used radical Sunni jihadists, who have no love lost for a secular Alawite Shia like himself, when it suited his purposes. Thus the following statement is accurate:
It's a whole other thing to say that this makes ISIS (and other Sunni extremists) true friends of Assad. I mean, the Nazis and Soviets were also pretty chummy for a while after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact (1939-1941), before Hitler finally concluded that he'd better break it before Stalin did. Perhaps we have finally reached that same tipping point between these two likewise brutal, anti-democratic forces in Syria, now that secular, pro-democratic insurgents have largely been marginalized on the battlefield. (Or have they?)
That's why these post-Paris Russian raids on ISIS targets are so crucial: if they herald a true intensification of the Russia-led Fatima coalition's campaign against ISIS to a level where the rogue statelet is as much a target as the Syrian rebels, sooner or later Assad will have to commit the boots on the ground against ISIS that he's been reluctant to so far.
The only problem: they'll have to do lots of bargaining with Putin to figure out a way to remove Assad while leaving the Syrian state essentially intact. An Australian piece points out the obvious: these Syrian state organs that Assad controls are anything but on the verge of collapse. The conclusion is telling:
But the post-Paris statements by Obama and Hollande won't be enough to reassure the Syrian opposition that Assad's still in the West's crosshairs: now that it's so obvious that Western public opinion wouldn't mind leaving Assad in place as the price for defeating ISIS, they're taking to the Western media to redouble their talking points about Assad, not ISIS, being the true enemy of global security, like here in the Guardian and here in Newsweek (an Italian diplomat apparently writing as a mouthpiece for the Iranian opposition, MEK).And none of the opposition groups will have national reach in Syria or control any of the levers of government or the sources of administrative and fiscal power on which most Syrians rely. Those are held by Damascus and have been maintained throughout the conflict.The Assad regime’s decision to maintain the functions of the state as far as is possible for as long as it can may end up proving a strategic masterstroke. Even if the regime hasn’t been able to win the war, by maintaining the facade of governance it still aims to win the peace.
But that brings us to the real question: has Assad now joined Russia in refocusing more of his campaign against ISIS? If so, that would bring to rest persistent Western criticisms, like this one, that Assad and ISIS have actually always been best buddies.
It's true that Bashar al-Assad takes after his father Hafez in that he has always used radical Sunni jihadists, who have no love lost for a secular Alawite Shia like himself, when it suited his purposes. Thus the following statement is accurate:
In the early stages of the uprisings against his rule, Assad released hundreds of jihadists from Syria’s jails, contributing to his strategy of portraying the war as an existential battle between secular forces of moderation and fanatic religious militants.But that was back in early 2012, when it seemed almost a foregone conclusion that with enough Western and regional Muslim backing, the secular militants of the Syrian opposition would make Assad go the way of Qaddafi. Back against the wall, Assad unleashed his ace in the hole: the very Sunni extremists who hated him most. Extremely Machiavellian, yes; but brilliant strategy. Saddam Hussein tried the same gambit against the US invasion in 2003: releasing thousands of Shia extremists, many of whom had violently opposed his minority Sunni regime, as cannon fodder (the "Fedayeen Saddam") against American high-tech weaponry. Where the Iraqi Baath failed, the Syrian Baath has apparently succeeded - and largely because the deposed Iraqi Baath gave the US occupation so much trouble that American public opinion had no desire left to keep expending the national treasury to secure the peace (which in fact was finally achieved around 2008) when Obama took office.
It's a whole other thing to say that this makes ISIS (and other Sunni extremists) true friends of Assad. I mean, the Nazis and Soviets were also pretty chummy for a while after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact (1939-1941), before Hitler finally concluded that he'd better break it before Stalin did. Perhaps we have finally reached that same tipping point between these two likewise brutal, anti-democratic forces in Syria, now that secular, pro-democratic insurgents have largely been marginalized on the battlefield. (Or have they?)
That's why these post-Paris Russian raids on ISIS targets are so crucial: if they herald a true intensification of the Russia-led Fatima coalition's campaign against ISIS to a level where the rogue statelet is as much a target as the Syrian rebels, sooner or later Assad will have to commit the boots on the ground against ISIS that he's been reluctant to so far.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Russian jet wasn't intended target of ISIS bomb: providential switch?
ISIS is now claiming that the soda can bomb it used to bring down the Russian jetliner over Sinai was originally intended for a western plane, but apparently some unexpected turn of events got it diverted to Metrojet Flight 9268:
Though it's still too early to tell if this will be a sustained escalation, for three days now the Kremlin has been unleashing some of its best long-range air and missile weaponry against ISIS, as well as joining intensified coalition efforts to degrade the group's oil assets. It's already a far cry from the early days of the campaign last month, when Russian attacks on ISIS were so few and far between that they seemed just for show, or to live-test their Caspian flotilla's cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, Moscow seems to be emphasizing to Western and Sunni Muslim powers on the other side of the negotiations at Vienna that just because it agrees that Assad can't stay on to lead a reunified Syrian state in the future doesn't mean he should be undermined now if the common enemy that all must join forces to defeat is ISIS.
Behind the scenes, it's likely Putin has been telling Assad that the manner in which he contributes to his own nation's stabilization - striking deals with moderates and banding together against extremists - will determine his own political future. If Assad does well, he can relinquish power with enough protection from his Alawite power base that it wouldn't threaten him personally; if he does exceedingly well, he may even gain such a long-term rapport with the Alawites that even if he can't win a national election, his own sect (and perhaps other minorities such as Christians) will get behind him to represent them under a new constitution.
Perhaps this was a providential switch: it has brought Russia and ISIS into more direct confrontation and thus drawn Moscow closer to Washington and European capitals; though it's probable that most Russian airstrikes will still hit predominantly non-ISIS targets, at least it's now undeniable that Putin's at war with the same enemy as France and the US-led coalition as a whole.Meanwhile, ISIS explained it had a different target in mind.“And so after having discovered a way to compromise the security at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport and resolving to bring down a plane belonging to a nation in the American-led Western coalition against the Islamic State, the target was changed to a Russian plane,” the message read.
Though it's still too early to tell if this will be a sustained escalation, for three days now the Kremlin has been unleashing some of its best long-range air and missile weaponry against ISIS, as well as joining intensified coalition efforts to degrade the group's oil assets. It's already a far cry from the early days of the campaign last month, when Russian attacks on ISIS were so few and far between that they seemed just for show, or to live-test their Caspian flotilla's cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, Moscow seems to be emphasizing to Western and Sunni Muslim powers on the other side of the negotiations at Vienna that just because it agrees that Assad can't stay on to lead a reunified Syrian state in the future doesn't mean he should be undermined now if the common enemy that all must join forces to defeat is ISIS.
Behind the scenes, it's likely Putin has been telling Assad that the manner in which he contributes to his own nation's stabilization - striking deals with moderates and banding together against extremists - will determine his own political future. If Assad does well, he can relinquish power with enough protection from his Alawite power base that it wouldn't threaten him personally; if he does exceedingly well, he may even gain such a long-term rapport with the Alawites that even if he can't win a national election, his own sect (and perhaps other minorities such as Christians) will get behind him to represent them under a new constitution.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
An East-West alliance to defeat ISIS? Don't hold your breath yet
Reports that Russia and France are coordinating their intensified air campaigns against ISIS, both in retaliation for the group's recent terrorist attacks against their citizens, have spurred speculation of broader East-West cooperation in defeating this common threat. CNBC has come out rather confident of the possibility; VICE News and CNN argue otherwise.
The other day, what appeared to be the biggest post-Soviet raid by Russian strategic bombers was conducted against ISIS with a go-ahead from US air command in Qatar; this was a day after President Hollande of France urged US-Russia cooperation against the rogue state. Reports have also surfaced of target intelligence sharing between the US-led and Russian air campaigns. While significant, these developments were actually already in the works before either last Friday's Paris attacks or the downed Russian jetliner at the end of last month; however, yesterday's official confirmation from the Kremlin that it was indeed a bomb that destroyed the jetliner was unsurprisingly the occasion for its massive heavy bomber strike.
Don't hold your breath just yet for any genuine US-Russian alliance against ISIS. No doubt both want ISIS punished for its transgressions from the air, but Moscow at this point is still 80 to 90 percent focused on weakening Al Nusra and other anti-Assad jihadists in the northwest of Syria; its attacks on ISIS may yet intensify, but it remains to be seen if these won't be primarily punitive and demonstrative as opposed to a precursor for a wider refocus of its attention against the group.
While one might argue that the Paris tragedy has strengthened Russian and Iranian leverage in Syria, it could also be said that Putin is now more flexible than ever regarding Assad's eventual fate. The key word is "eventual": the renewed Vienna peace talks over the weekend leave the next 6 to 24 months really up in the air in terms of just how much Assad will be involved in a post-ceasefire political transition.
As well, despite stronger calls for the EU to draw closer to Russia after Paris, it doesn't seem sufficient to end sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.
But probably even more crucial to the regional situation in the Mideast, though not much reported in the West, it seems Russia and Saudi Arabia are seriously considering a broader rapprochement. Such an accord has the potential to become the central pillar of Sunni-Shia peace in the region.
The other day, what appeared to be the biggest post-Soviet raid by Russian strategic bombers was conducted against ISIS with a go-ahead from US air command in Qatar; this was a day after President Hollande of France urged US-Russia cooperation against the rogue state. Reports have also surfaced of target intelligence sharing between the US-led and Russian air campaigns. While significant, these developments were actually already in the works before either last Friday's Paris attacks or the downed Russian jetliner at the end of last month; however, yesterday's official confirmation from the Kremlin that it was indeed a bomb that destroyed the jetliner was unsurprisingly the occasion for its massive heavy bomber strike.
Don't hold your breath just yet for any genuine US-Russian alliance against ISIS. No doubt both want ISIS punished for its transgressions from the air, but Moscow at this point is still 80 to 90 percent focused on weakening Al Nusra and other anti-Assad jihadists in the northwest of Syria; its attacks on ISIS may yet intensify, but it remains to be seen if these won't be primarily punitive and demonstrative as opposed to a precursor for a wider refocus of its attention against the group.
While one might argue that the Paris tragedy has strengthened Russian and Iranian leverage in Syria, it could also be said that Putin is now more flexible than ever regarding Assad's eventual fate. The key word is "eventual": the renewed Vienna peace talks over the weekend leave the next 6 to 24 months really up in the air in terms of just how much Assad will be involved in a post-ceasefire political transition.
As well, despite stronger calls for the EU to draw closer to Russia after Paris, it doesn't seem sufficient to end sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.
But probably even more crucial to the regional situation in the Mideast, though not much reported in the West, it seems Russia and Saudi Arabia are seriously considering a broader rapprochement. Such an accord has the potential to become the central pillar of Sunni-Shia peace in the region.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Russia and Fatima (part 2)
(Part 1: Russia as the eastern half of Christianity)
Part 2: The Western philosophical origins of the Russian revolution
I established in the first part of this series that Czarist Russia was, in essence, a proxy for all of eastern, or Orthodox Christianity.
When the communist revolution of 1917 destroyed this system, it not only took down with it - in one fell swoop - a millennial faith-based society, but created a gaping hole in the global family of civilizations that could only be filled by a radically new creed, whose sheer novelty would be its central claim to legitimacy.
After 100 million deaths worldwide in the 20th century at the hands of atheistic communism, including more Christian martyrs than in the previous 19 centuries combined, as well as the direct triggering of a violent reactionary backlash which killed 50 million in World War II, wiped out European Jewry, and divided the world into two camps that for decades threatened each other with thermonuclear annihilation, the Russian revolution can clearly be viewed as having an utterly apocalyptic dimension.
How in the world did so many souls get dragged down into the abyss decade after decade, most notably in Stalinist Soviet Russia and Maoist China, but also in gruesome mini-replays such as Cambodia (1970s) and, one might argue, even into the present century (North Korea)? The obvious answer is the unique combination of radical secularism with absolute despotism that was first realized by the communists in Russia and thereupon became a global force largely via its spread to China.
This part of the series will outline the radical secularist side of the communist revolutionary formula, by tracing the progressive decoupling of religious faith from political thought and practice in Europe since about 1500. Russia in 1917 represented the last in a chain of upheavals in European Christian societies brought about by this decoupling, which invariably triggered conflicts of varying degrees of violence as the forces of tradition resisted those of change; because Russia was last, hers was a clash between the most durable autocratic system in Europe against the most intellectually sophisticated, well-organized, and ruthlessly determined radical movement the continent had ever witnessed. The results were cataclysmic, especially when considering the subsequent chain of events over the 20th century, and yet, it is important to understand how and why this whole episode was the direct consequence of the history that preceded it.
At the close of the middle ages (circa 1500), European Christendom was at a crossroads. Its Eastern Orthodox branch had been wiped out with the destruction of the Byzantine empire and fall of Constantinople to the the Muslim Turks, and was only in the nascent stages of being resurrected in an ultimately grander incarnation in the form of Czarist Russia. At the same time, its Western Catholic branch was undergoing a devolution of temporal authority from the Roman papacy to increasingly powerful Renaissance monarchs and princes that had consolidated their territories at the expense of the feudal nobility, even as the imperative to find an all-water route to the Orient and the Indies (to outflank the mighty empires of Islam) launched the age of exploration and Western European mastery of the oceans.
Increasingly unfettered from the Pope and the Church hierarchy, Western Europe launched the modern era with the Reformation and scientific revolution (1500s), and commenced a four-century ascent to global domination of every other civilization from 1500 to 1900. Major watersheds in this rise were: the peace of Westphalia (1648), which essentially enshrined each nation-state's sovereign right to choose its own form of government, thus elevating the nation-state above the Church in political precedence; the settlement of the Americas, especially North America (1600s), as an effective laboratory for untested ideas and methods of social organization and governance; and critically, the industrial revolution (circa 1750), which ushered in a completely new epoch of human activity and altered the very fabric of social relations. These all culminated in the historic fruits of the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) which have become the very foundation of the contemporary world: the American (1776) and French revolutions (1789).
The American and French revolutionary period (circa 1776-1815) saw a further segregation of Western European thought into distinctly "Atlanticist" and "continental" wings. The former, founded upon the English and Scottish Enlightenments, emphasized private property rights, rule of law, and a separation of religion from state that was thought to be key to the success of both; these ideals were the basis of the American revolution and undergirded the rise of so-called "laissez-faire", free market capitalism in Britain and the United States. The latter, with its origins in the French Enlightenment, also promoted individual rights, but more as a means to the ultimate end of a just and equitable organization of the collective state and society; thus its liberal elements acquired such concerns as the egalitarian redistribution of wealth, an overhaul of the residual quasi-feudal stratification of society, and most significantly, a removal of traditional organized religion from not just governance, but general civic and public influence; these were the principles underlying the French revolution and undergirded the rise of the various strains of modern socialism.
This Atlanticist-continental divergence was a direct function of the respective positions of religion in the Anglo-American versus the continental European worlds: in the former, religion had steadily been eased out of social and political power structures and increasingly privatized since the 1600s with comparatively little violence; in much of the latter, religion and its associated social structures had remained largely intact in their archaic and rigid forms, even as society itself changed dramatically in the 1700s. The radicalization of the French revolution, in which the nascent republic erupted with horrific violence against the deposed monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy, was the consequence of this unresolved tension and fear of reactionary retrenchment.
The Napoleonic era (1799-1815) represented an accord between the revolution and the Church, whereby the former essentially co-opted the latter into a subservient but relatively secure position, thus mediating between those who wanted to extinguish religion and those who wanted to roll back the revolution. This equilibrium, which Bonaparte's conquests spread throughout Europe, truly matured in France herself only through two more iterations of revolution in 1830 and 1848, during the second empire of Napoleon III (1852-1870), and became a founding pillar of a new kind of increasingly secular national statehood that would peak in Europe in the late 19th century.
Meanwhile, heavily influenced by French republicanism, a new breed of predominantly German thinkers led by Georg Hegel laid the foundations of modern political philosophy in the first half of the 1800s, particularly with regard to the evolution of state and society in the new industrial age. The Hegelians, as they were called, branched off into a "right" and "left" faction, which respectively became the conservative nationalist and progressive socialist wings of political ideology that have retained their influence in the West to the present day. Notably, both right and left Hegelianism reinforced the tendency of the continental school of European thought to emphasize the whole over the individual. This planted the seeds of both extremes of totalitarianism which arose in Europe in the following century: fascism and communism.
Marx himself, a hard left Hegelian, published the Communist Manifesto as a young radical in the revolution of 1848, inspired by a sweeping vision of international workers' revolt against the capitalist (i.e. bourgeois) ruling class to establish a classless society (communism) in which material sufficiency for all would replace God as man's highest happiness. The revolution of 1848 had begun in France but attained its longest-lasting effects in his native Germany: within a generation she was unified as a single centralized state for the first time by an alliance of Prussia's military might with the economic nationalism of other German polities which had subscribed to right Hegelianism, a union that was crowned by Bismarck's resounding defeat of Napoleon III's second French empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Along with the unification of Italy for the first time since the Roman empire over the previous decade-plus, along with the first truly significant communist uprising, the Paris commune (1871), this fundamentally altered the political landscape of continental Europe, ending an over two-century French domination and setting up an unprecedented period of nationalist rivalry between the so-called Great Powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia), which collectively industrialized rapidly in four-plus decades of no major conflict between them (1871-1914) and, along with the upstart United States, propelled European Christian civilization to new heights of global domination in the golden era of imperialism (1880-1914).
And so, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the key ideas and principles, and even most of the actual modes of action and organization, that would vie for supremacy - capitalism versus socialism, nationalism versus internationalism, democracy versus dictatorship - took their clear shape across Europe.
Yet it was now Russia's turn, at long last, to be fundamentally transformed by the momentous social, economic, and political changes which had begun far to her west and had steadily worked their way eastward across the European continent over the course of the 1800s. By 1900 she was the only remaining true absolute monarchy among the Great Powers, whose rule remained inseparably united with the spiritual authority of her ancient Church even in the face of considerable socioeconomic changes. While the Kaiser's German empire ceded much domestic policy to the parliamentary social democrats, and Hapsburg Austria exercised an increasingly decentralized control over the polyglot collection of territories that formed her own empire, Russia moved in essentially the opposite direction under Alexander III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917), rolling back even the limited local democracy instituted by Alexander II after the emancipation of the serfs (1861); similarly, the regime redoubled its efforts to solidify Russian control over subservient nationalities on its periphery.
As it turned out, these were futile attempts by the decaying Czarist system to prolong its archaic and untenable autocracy, with ultimately dire consequences for the empire. The state's hardening of opposition to reform inevitably hardened the reformers themselves, creating a vicious cycle that would eventually spiral into violent confrontation. At the turn of the 20th century, the critical mass of socio-political elements which would topple the entire edifice of the Czarist state had begun to coalesce: its vigor was the relatively small but key minority of industrial workers, many of them peasants who had taken factory jobs since the late 1800s; its leadership was a tiny but influential elite of the urban intelligentsia.
There was considerable diversity of opinion within the reform movement, with truly radical Marxist socialists (i.e. those who advocated armed insurrection) such as Lenin's Bolsheviks only a small minority. More moderate socialist reformers aspired to the trade-unionist, social-democratic track that had made impressive gains in Germany without officially altering that state's monarchic character; still more moderate liberals whose focus was constitutional reform were stronger than all the socialists combined. This was the political landscape of Russia on the eve of the first round of its revolution, the 1905 revolution, which traces directly to the later, much larger events of 1917.
In the next part of this series, we will see how and why the Czarist state's continued reactionary retrenchment necessitated more repression of its own citizens, thereby not only hastening its own fall, but in the process ensuring that the most uncompromisingly radical and violent faction of the revolutionary movement - the communist Bolsheviks - would eventually rise to subjugate all others.
Part 2: The Western philosophical origins of the Russian revolution
I established in the first part of this series that Czarist Russia was, in essence, a proxy for all of eastern, or Orthodox Christianity.
When the communist revolution of 1917 destroyed this system, it not only took down with it - in one fell swoop - a millennial faith-based society, but created a gaping hole in the global family of civilizations that could only be filled by a radically new creed, whose sheer novelty would be its central claim to legitimacy.
After 100 million deaths worldwide in the 20th century at the hands of atheistic communism, including more Christian martyrs than in the previous 19 centuries combined, as well as the direct triggering of a violent reactionary backlash which killed 50 million in World War II, wiped out European Jewry, and divided the world into two camps that for decades threatened each other with thermonuclear annihilation, the Russian revolution can clearly be viewed as having an utterly apocalyptic dimension.
How in the world did so many souls get dragged down into the abyss decade after decade, most notably in Stalinist Soviet Russia and Maoist China, but also in gruesome mini-replays such as Cambodia (1970s) and, one might argue, even into the present century (North Korea)? The obvious answer is the unique combination of radical secularism with absolute despotism that was first realized by the communists in Russia and thereupon became a global force largely via its spread to China.
This part of the series will outline the radical secularist side of the communist revolutionary formula, by tracing the progressive decoupling of religious faith from political thought and practice in Europe since about 1500. Russia in 1917 represented the last in a chain of upheavals in European Christian societies brought about by this decoupling, which invariably triggered conflicts of varying degrees of violence as the forces of tradition resisted those of change; because Russia was last, hers was a clash between the most durable autocratic system in Europe against the most intellectually sophisticated, well-organized, and ruthlessly determined radical movement the continent had ever witnessed. The results were cataclysmic, especially when considering the subsequent chain of events over the 20th century, and yet, it is important to understand how and why this whole episode was the direct consequence of the history that preceded it.
At the close of the middle ages (circa 1500), European Christendom was at a crossroads. Its Eastern Orthodox branch had been wiped out with the destruction of the Byzantine empire and fall of Constantinople to the the Muslim Turks, and was only in the nascent stages of being resurrected in an ultimately grander incarnation in the form of Czarist Russia. At the same time, its Western Catholic branch was undergoing a devolution of temporal authority from the Roman papacy to increasingly powerful Renaissance monarchs and princes that had consolidated their territories at the expense of the feudal nobility, even as the imperative to find an all-water route to the Orient and the Indies (to outflank the mighty empires of Islam) launched the age of exploration and Western European mastery of the oceans.
Increasingly unfettered from the Pope and the Church hierarchy, Western Europe launched the modern era with the Reformation and scientific revolution (1500s), and commenced a four-century ascent to global domination of every other civilization from 1500 to 1900. Major watersheds in this rise were: the peace of Westphalia (1648), which essentially enshrined each nation-state's sovereign right to choose its own form of government, thus elevating the nation-state above the Church in political precedence; the settlement of the Americas, especially North America (1600s), as an effective laboratory for untested ideas and methods of social organization and governance; and critically, the industrial revolution (circa 1750), which ushered in a completely new epoch of human activity and altered the very fabric of social relations. These all culminated in the historic fruits of the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) which have become the very foundation of the contemporary world: the American (1776) and French revolutions (1789).
The American and French revolutionary period (circa 1776-1815) saw a further segregation of Western European thought into distinctly "Atlanticist" and "continental" wings. The former, founded upon the English and Scottish Enlightenments, emphasized private property rights, rule of law, and a separation of religion from state that was thought to be key to the success of both; these ideals were the basis of the American revolution and undergirded the rise of so-called "laissez-faire", free market capitalism in Britain and the United States. The latter, with its origins in the French Enlightenment, also promoted individual rights, but more as a means to the ultimate end of a just and equitable organization of the collective state and society; thus its liberal elements acquired such concerns as the egalitarian redistribution of wealth, an overhaul of the residual quasi-feudal stratification of society, and most significantly, a removal of traditional organized religion from not just governance, but general civic and public influence; these were the principles underlying the French revolution and undergirded the rise of the various strains of modern socialism.
This Atlanticist-continental divergence was a direct function of the respective positions of religion in the Anglo-American versus the continental European worlds: in the former, religion had steadily been eased out of social and political power structures and increasingly privatized since the 1600s with comparatively little violence; in much of the latter, religion and its associated social structures had remained largely intact in their archaic and rigid forms, even as society itself changed dramatically in the 1700s. The radicalization of the French revolution, in which the nascent republic erupted with horrific violence against the deposed monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy, was the consequence of this unresolved tension and fear of reactionary retrenchment.
The Napoleonic era (1799-1815) represented an accord between the revolution and the Church, whereby the former essentially co-opted the latter into a subservient but relatively secure position, thus mediating between those who wanted to extinguish religion and those who wanted to roll back the revolution. This equilibrium, which Bonaparte's conquests spread throughout Europe, truly matured in France herself only through two more iterations of revolution in 1830 and 1848, during the second empire of Napoleon III (1852-1870), and became a founding pillar of a new kind of increasingly secular national statehood that would peak in Europe in the late 19th century.
Meanwhile, heavily influenced by French republicanism, a new breed of predominantly German thinkers led by Georg Hegel laid the foundations of modern political philosophy in the first half of the 1800s, particularly with regard to the evolution of state and society in the new industrial age. The Hegelians, as they were called, branched off into a "right" and "left" faction, which respectively became the conservative nationalist and progressive socialist wings of political ideology that have retained their influence in the West to the present day. Notably, both right and left Hegelianism reinforced the tendency of the continental school of European thought to emphasize the whole over the individual. This planted the seeds of both extremes of totalitarianism which arose in Europe in the following century: fascism and communism.
Marx himself, a hard left Hegelian, published the Communist Manifesto as a young radical in the revolution of 1848, inspired by a sweeping vision of international workers' revolt against the capitalist (i.e. bourgeois) ruling class to establish a classless society (communism) in which material sufficiency for all would replace God as man's highest happiness. The revolution of 1848 had begun in France but attained its longest-lasting effects in his native Germany: within a generation she was unified as a single centralized state for the first time by an alliance of Prussia's military might with the economic nationalism of other German polities which had subscribed to right Hegelianism, a union that was crowned by Bismarck's resounding defeat of Napoleon III's second French empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Along with the unification of Italy for the first time since the Roman empire over the previous decade-plus, along with the first truly significant communist uprising, the Paris commune (1871), this fundamentally altered the political landscape of continental Europe, ending an over two-century French domination and setting up an unprecedented period of nationalist rivalry between the so-called Great Powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia), which collectively industrialized rapidly in four-plus decades of no major conflict between them (1871-1914) and, along with the upstart United States, propelled European Christian civilization to new heights of global domination in the golden era of imperialism (1880-1914).
And so, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the key ideas and principles, and even most of the actual modes of action and organization, that would vie for supremacy - capitalism versus socialism, nationalism versus internationalism, democracy versus dictatorship - took their clear shape across Europe.
Yet it was now Russia's turn, at long last, to be fundamentally transformed by the momentous social, economic, and political changes which had begun far to her west and had steadily worked their way eastward across the European continent over the course of the 1800s. By 1900 she was the only remaining true absolute monarchy among the Great Powers, whose rule remained inseparably united with the spiritual authority of her ancient Church even in the face of considerable socioeconomic changes. While the Kaiser's German empire ceded much domestic policy to the parliamentary social democrats, and Hapsburg Austria exercised an increasingly decentralized control over the polyglot collection of territories that formed her own empire, Russia moved in essentially the opposite direction under Alexander III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917), rolling back even the limited local democracy instituted by Alexander II after the emancipation of the serfs (1861); similarly, the regime redoubled its efforts to solidify Russian control over subservient nationalities on its periphery.
As it turned out, these were futile attempts by the decaying Czarist system to prolong its archaic and untenable autocracy, with ultimately dire consequences for the empire. The state's hardening of opposition to reform inevitably hardened the reformers themselves, creating a vicious cycle that would eventually spiral into violent confrontation. At the turn of the 20th century, the critical mass of socio-political elements which would topple the entire edifice of the Czarist state had begun to coalesce: its vigor was the relatively small but key minority of industrial workers, many of them peasants who had taken factory jobs since the late 1800s; its leadership was a tiny but influential elite of the urban intelligentsia.
There was considerable diversity of opinion within the reform movement, with truly radical Marxist socialists (i.e. those who advocated armed insurrection) such as Lenin's Bolsheviks only a small minority. More moderate socialist reformers aspired to the trade-unionist, social-democratic track that had made impressive gains in Germany without officially altering that state's monarchic character; still more moderate liberals whose focus was constitutional reform were stronger than all the socialists combined. This was the political landscape of Russia on the eve of the first round of its revolution, the 1905 revolution, which traces directly to the later, much larger events of 1917.
In the next part of this series, we will see how and why the Czarist state's continued reactionary retrenchment necessitated more repression of its own citizens, thereby not only hastening its own fall, but in the process ensuring that the most uncompromisingly radical and violent faction of the revolutionary movement - the communist Bolsheviks - would eventually rise to subjugate all others.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Paris burning: War with ISIS just got hotter by a few degrees
A horrendous series of attacks in Paris, apparently by ISIS, have reportedly left at least 153 dead.
This after it was reported earlier in the day that "Jihadi John" of beheading videos fame was killed in a US drone strike, and the Kurds and genocide-threatened Yazidis recaptured the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS.
The Paris attack is a day after a Hezbollah-controlled suburb of Beirut was bombed by an ISIS twin suicide attack, and less than two weeks after the apparent downing of the Russian jetliner by ISIS over Sinai.
When combined with the ISIS twin suicide attack in Ankara (the deadliest ever terrorist incident in modern Turkey) just a little over a month ago, the group has now inflicted four mass casualty attacks against four diverse target states within just five weeks: one Shia, one Sunni, one Catholic, one Orthodox.
And even as the international powers reconvene at Vienna for Syria peace talks this weekend, the fate of Assad and his Alawite minority regime appears as intractable a disagreement as ever.
The Paris attacks have already inflicted the first curfew in Paris since World War II, in addition to President Francois Hollande's emergency closing of French borders.
Are the chickens now coming home to roost for Europe? EU potentate German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under unprecedented domestic pressure for her open-arms policy towards Mideast refugees; perhaps this French disaster will compel her to slow down the rapid absorption of up to one million predominantly Syrian migrants. It absolutely doesn't help that cries of "For Syria!" were mixed with "Allah Akbar!" as the attackers cut down their helpless victims.
Vladimir Putin is no doubt smiling grimly behind all the consolation calls he's been making...France and Europe as a whole are in no position to retaliate strongly against ISIS without his help.
And the US? Well, just yesterday, Obama declared that ISIS has been "contained" and isn't gaining strength; needless to say, rabid right-wingers are mocking him for it now. In fact, Obama's technically right: ISIS has on the whole been contained since its peak in summer 2014. But events like today's massacres in Paris show that containment of such an entity is incompatible with open borders.
It would be quite shocking if something doesn't give now that more Europeans than ever will sense a critical choice between a wall and a total war to destroy ISIS. In fact Europe needs both: more secure borders and a tougher assault on the terror state. On both points, she looks set to lean even more heavily towards Moscow.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Syrian army regains key airbase as powers gear up for next round at Vienna
The Syrian army scored perhaps its biggest victory since the start of the Russian air campaign six weeks ago, liberating the long-besieged airbase of Kweires in Aleppo province, apparently outlasting ISIS in a battle of attrition that could be a milestone in the broader effort to reclaim the country's besieged second city of Aleppo.
The combined involvement of Syrian government troops, Russian air power, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Lebanese Hezbollah in this operation indicates both its importance to securing the Assad regime and the potential effectiveness of this Fatima-Shia coalition against ISIS when working in close coordination, which doubtless has not been a piece of cake at times.
Even more significant, if true, would be Russian reports that Syrian opposition actually supplied government forces with intelligence for targeting ISIS. Along with mention of the opposition providing targeting against Al Nusra in Homs province, this is an initial indication of what would be a tectonic shift in the almost five-year-old conflict.
It seems from recent reports that the most determined resistance against the Russia-led coalition in Syria is coming from either ISIS, Al Nusra, or other jihadist outfits linked directly or loosely to Al Nusra. The battle space for secular opposition like FSA has seemingly diminished, at least judging from who has been reportedly making the boldest counterattacks against the Syrian army.
If so, Moscow is well on its way to realigning the conflict to its liking: Assad versus terrorists, with all moderates having to choose one or the other.
So even as the West views the resumption of the Vienna peace talks this weekend as only the start of a long and protracted negotiation process, the ground may already be shifting decisively in Fatima's favor. The US has now come round to Assad sticking around at least for the early stages of the political transition - it may even assent to his being on the ballot in the presidential election to be held under a new constitution, which is clearly what Russia and Iran want.
That leaves Saudi Arabia and Turkey out in the cold: they still want Assad's departure before any substantive start of the political transition process. But if the moderate Syrian opposition is indeed beginning to cross over to the Fatima coalition, if even temporarily and tactically, they don't want to find themselves in a position where their only remaining battlefield leverage is Al Qaeda, i.e. Al Nusra and other jihadist affiliates. The peace process will inevitably expose the true extent to which the regional Sunni powers have been supporting "moderate" versus "terrorist" elements of the Islamist resistance to Assad.
Russia for its part knows it must get Syria on the political track soon. While I don't agree with this interesting assessment that Syria is already a quagmire for Moscow, I think it correctly highlights the degree to which Putin sees his air campaign as only a means to achieving a distinctly political end. To this end, he has indeed bargained away Yemen (mired in its own Sunni-Shia civil war which has become a proxy war between Iran and Saudi) for Syria:
The combined involvement of Syrian government troops, Russian air power, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Lebanese Hezbollah in this operation indicates both its importance to securing the Assad regime and the potential effectiveness of this Fatima-Shia coalition against ISIS when working in close coordination, which doubtless has not been a piece of cake at times.
Even more significant, if true, would be Russian reports that Syrian opposition actually supplied government forces with intelligence for targeting ISIS. Along with mention of the opposition providing targeting against Al Nusra in Homs province, this is an initial indication of what would be a tectonic shift in the almost five-year-old conflict.
It seems from recent reports that the most determined resistance against the Russia-led coalition in Syria is coming from either ISIS, Al Nusra, or other jihadist outfits linked directly or loosely to Al Nusra. The battle space for secular opposition like FSA has seemingly diminished, at least judging from who has been reportedly making the boldest counterattacks against the Syrian army.
If so, Moscow is well on its way to realigning the conflict to its liking: Assad versus terrorists, with all moderates having to choose one or the other.
So even as the West views the resumption of the Vienna peace talks this weekend as only the start of a long and protracted negotiation process, the ground may already be shifting decisively in Fatima's favor. The US has now come round to Assad sticking around at least for the early stages of the political transition - it may even assent to his being on the ballot in the presidential election to be held under a new constitution, which is clearly what Russia and Iran want.
That leaves Saudi Arabia and Turkey out in the cold: they still want Assad's departure before any substantive start of the political transition process. But if the moderate Syrian opposition is indeed beginning to cross over to the Fatima coalition, if even temporarily and tactically, they don't want to find themselves in a position where their only remaining battlefield leverage is Al Qaeda, i.e. Al Nusra and other jihadist affiliates. The peace process will inevitably expose the true extent to which the regional Sunni powers have been supporting "moderate" versus "terrorist" elements of the Islamist resistance to Assad.
Russia for its part knows it must get Syria on the political track soon. While I don't agree with this interesting assessment that Syria is already a quagmire for Moscow, I think it correctly highlights the degree to which Putin sees his air campaign as only a means to achieving a distinctly political end. To this end, he has indeed bargained away Yemen (mired in its own Sunni-Shia civil war which has become a proxy war between Iran and Saudi) for Syria:
Russian sources said that in return for Saudi concessions on Syria, including agreeing to Iranian participation in the talks, Moscow has offered what may be described as the Chinese approach to tough conflicts: Non-interference, non-objection, non-obstruction and non-facilitation with regard to the Saudi-led Arab coalition's actions in Yemen. According to sources in the Security Council, this development has been obvious in the Russian positions during the council's meetings, where Moscow has replaced obstruction with non-interference.And so it appears Putin has played his political game well: his military card looks well-thought-out as only a tool of the regional politics. If he is wise, he will engage the Syrian conflict diplomatically at this juncture not so much because he's already in a quagmire, but because the present stalemate is easy to defend. The ball's in Saudi Arabia's court: will they accept a deal now as the best they can hope for, or will they succumb to their own less compromising elements and still push for a military-induced Assad ouster that will likely all but expose them as Al Qaeda's bedfellows (which in fact they originally were when fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80's)?
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
A little primer about Russia and Fatima (part 1)
The apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 are well-known for her prophecy about Russia - the second of the so-called three secrets of Fatima. As the centennial of this most famous spiritual revelation of the modern Church approaches, I will use this blog to explain the continuation of the events that were foretold by the great Mother of God not only at Fatima, but in a series of her later appearances over the course of the last century.
A lot of historic background is needed, and I can't help but break this whole exposition up into parts, but I'll try to be as to the point as possible.
Part 1: Russia as the eastern half of Christianity
For starters, why Russia? Well, in 1917 Russia became the first communist country, and because of her sheer size and centrality to global geopolitics - each of the other five major power regions (Western Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and North America) have frontiers on the Russian world - communism quickly spread out from her and became a global force.
But even more importantly, in the context of religious history and God's plan for human salvation, modern Russia represents the eastern half of the Christian faith, the Russian Orthodox Church having been by far the largest and most influential Eastern and/or Oriental Orthodox communion since the end of the middle ages. Under Czarist rule from the late medieval period onward, Moscow prided itself as the "third Rome" (Constantinople having been the second), with the Czar himself the successor to the great emperor Constantine via a divine mandate bestowed upon him by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which in turn traces its ancestry to the Apostolic succession of Saint Andrew via Byzantium (later Constantinople and now Istanbul) through Kievan Rus'.
So the nation of Russia - and in a wider sense, the earlier Czarist Russian empire which over the course of its last dynasty, the Romanovs (1613-1917), controlled at one point or another a total area exceeding even the USSR - is practically a proxy for eastern, i.e. Orthodox or Greek rite Christianity. Western Christianity, of course, is rooted in the Latin rite See of Saint Peter (Rome and the Vatican), and includes not only the flagship Roman Catholic Church but also all the breakaways that branched out from it in the Protestant Reformation, whose own 500th anniversary will also come in 2017.
The crucial distinction between Western versus Eastern Christianity is that whereas in the West, spiritual authority saw a steady separation from political authority at the conclusion of the middle ages, in the East - and Russia particularly - it continued to exhibit a strong unity.
In the West, the Protestant Reformation and maritime migration of Europeans to the New World (the Americas) gave birth to strongly codified (that is, law- and rule-based) individual freedom and liberty - most critically private property rights - that promoted the decoupling (to various degrees) of religion from government. By contrast, in the East, Czarist Russia remained an essentially feudal system, with the spiritual power of the Church offering a divine mandate to rule to the sovereign dynasty and its supporting elite caste of landowning aristocrats, who practically owned the masses of ordinary peasants working the soil as their own property (serfdom).
This primitive edifice of the Russian state grew increasingly brittle as Europe as a whole progressed deeper into the modern era of the great revolutions: socioeconomically, the industrial revolution; socio-politically, the American and French revolutions. The freeing of the serfs in 1861 by liberal-minded Czar Alexander II unleashed an upsurge of social consciousness among ordinary Russians at just the moment when the intellectual forces of Russian society were acquiring the means to pressure for more threatening changes and reforms to the Czarist autocracy in much the same way that western and central European intelligentsia had already done since the French revolution and Napoleonic period.
Alexander II's tragic assassination in 1881 triggered a fierce reactionary retrenchment against political and social reform by his son, Alexander III. When Alexander III's own son, Nicholas II, ascended to the throne in 1894, he inherited the last major European power without even a semblance of representative rule, i.e. a parliament or constitution that, if managed well, would bolster the monarchy. But there wasn't enough urgency to liberalize in that manner yet: Russia was still at an early stage of industrialization compared to her western and central European peers, and at the turn of the 20th century it seemed as if she really just needed a better educated, technocratic central bureaucracy to close much of the gap with the West. With better infrastructure like the new Trans-Siberian railroad and a national telephone/telegraph system, the Czarist regime seemed to have a good shot at harnessing modernity to prolong or even strengthen its unelected rule.
Unfortunately, it was the ruling class itself that failed: young Nicholas II turned out to be too timid to deal with popular and intellectual currents clamoring for a greater voice for the masses, and the aristocracy - already mired in a long moral and spiritual decline - became increasingly lethargic and even decadent, with the result that the millennial bedrock of Czarist rule - the great divine mandate from the holy Orthodox Church - progressively weakened and crumbled from within.
Since it was all but unthinkable to alter its age-old essence, the Czarist regime could only resort to further military adventurism in both Europe and Asia - facilitated by its new infrastructure - to shore up its tottering legitimacy. So long as it did a fairly good job defending and promoting Orthodox civilization in the international arena, it could still claim to speak for its masses of still-destitute and illiterate peasants. This, however, would end up being its ultimate undoing.
Part 2 of this series will delineate the contours of the cataclysmic collapse of Russian Orthodox civilization - and of eastern Christianity - that occurred in 1917 with the Russian revolution.
A lot of historic background is needed, and I can't help but break this whole exposition up into parts, but I'll try to be as to the point as possible.
Part 1: Russia as the eastern half of Christianity
For starters, why Russia? Well, in 1917 Russia became the first communist country, and because of her sheer size and centrality to global geopolitics - each of the other five major power regions (Western Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and North America) have frontiers on the Russian world - communism quickly spread out from her and became a global force.
But even more importantly, in the context of religious history and God's plan for human salvation, modern Russia represents the eastern half of the Christian faith, the Russian Orthodox Church having been by far the largest and most influential Eastern and/or Oriental Orthodox communion since the end of the middle ages. Under Czarist rule from the late medieval period onward, Moscow prided itself as the "third Rome" (Constantinople having been the second), with the Czar himself the successor to the great emperor Constantine via a divine mandate bestowed upon him by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which in turn traces its ancestry to the Apostolic succession of Saint Andrew via Byzantium (later Constantinople and now Istanbul) through Kievan Rus'.
So the nation of Russia - and in a wider sense, the earlier Czarist Russian empire which over the course of its last dynasty, the Romanovs (1613-1917), controlled at one point or another a total area exceeding even the USSR - is practically a proxy for eastern, i.e. Orthodox or Greek rite Christianity. Western Christianity, of course, is rooted in the Latin rite See of Saint Peter (Rome and the Vatican), and includes not only the flagship Roman Catholic Church but also all the breakaways that branched out from it in the Protestant Reformation, whose own 500th anniversary will also come in 2017.
The crucial distinction between Western versus Eastern Christianity is that whereas in the West, spiritual authority saw a steady separation from political authority at the conclusion of the middle ages, in the East - and Russia particularly - it continued to exhibit a strong unity.
In the West, the Protestant Reformation and maritime migration of Europeans to the New World (the Americas) gave birth to strongly codified (that is, law- and rule-based) individual freedom and liberty - most critically private property rights - that promoted the decoupling (to various degrees) of religion from government. By contrast, in the East, Czarist Russia remained an essentially feudal system, with the spiritual power of the Church offering a divine mandate to rule to the sovereign dynasty and its supporting elite caste of landowning aristocrats, who practically owned the masses of ordinary peasants working the soil as their own property (serfdom).
This primitive edifice of the Russian state grew increasingly brittle as Europe as a whole progressed deeper into the modern era of the great revolutions: socioeconomically, the industrial revolution; socio-politically, the American and French revolutions. The freeing of the serfs in 1861 by liberal-minded Czar Alexander II unleashed an upsurge of social consciousness among ordinary Russians at just the moment when the intellectual forces of Russian society were acquiring the means to pressure for more threatening changes and reforms to the Czarist autocracy in much the same way that western and central European intelligentsia had already done since the French revolution and Napoleonic period.
Alexander II's tragic assassination in 1881 triggered a fierce reactionary retrenchment against political and social reform by his son, Alexander III. When Alexander III's own son, Nicholas II, ascended to the throne in 1894, he inherited the last major European power without even a semblance of representative rule, i.e. a parliament or constitution that, if managed well, would bolster the monarchy. But there wasn't enough urgency to liberalize in that manner yet: Russia was still at an early stage of industrialization compared to her western and central European peers, and at the turn of the 20th century it seemed as if she really just needed a better educated, technocratic central bureaucracy to close much of the gap with the West. With better infrastructure like the new Trans-Siberian railroad and a national telephone/telegraph system, the Czarist regime seemed to have a good shot at harnessing modernity to prolong or even strengthen its unelected rule.
Unfortunately, it was the ruling class itself that failed: young Nicholas II turned out to be too timid to deal with popular and intellectual currents clamoring for a greater voice for the masses, and the aristocracy - already mired in a long moral and spiritual decline - became increasingly lethargic and even decadent, with the result that the millennial bedrock of Czarist rule - the great divine mandate from the holy Orthodox Church - progressively weakened and crumbled from within.
Since it was all but unthinkable to alter its age-old essence, the Czarist regime could only resort to further military adventurism in both Europe and Asia - facilitated by its new infrastructure - to shore up its tottering legitimacy. So long as it did a fairly good job defending and promoting Orthodox civilization in the international arena, it could still claim to speak for its masses of still-destitute and illiterate peasants. This, however, would end up being its ultimate undoing.
Part 2 of this series will delineate the contours of the cataclysmic collapse of Russian Orthodox civilization - and of eastern Christianity - that occurred in 1917 with the Russian revolution.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Conflicting views of Russia's role in Syria
My onetime professor at NYU, Stephen Cohen, one of America's foremost Russia experts and formerly preeminent Sovietologist, was again interviewed on The John Batchelor Show. This was before the revelation that Russia's Metrojet Flight 9268 was probably downed by a terrorist bomb.
Since the Maidan revolution and Russian annexation of Crimea in early 2014, Mr. Cohen has become the best-known defender of Russia and Putin in Western media and academia. He isn't personally linked to Putin, so far as I've learned, but back in 2001 his friend Sergei Glazyev, who has been sanctioned by the West in relation to Ukraine and Crimea, spoke to our class in New York about early-Putin era Russia.
Thankfully, there are sane voices like John Batchelor who are clearly conservative white Americans, yet who aren't drunk on power lust and feel it's their God-given birthright to control the whole world. I'm personally sick of lunatics like Mark Levin who talk as if Russia's just a basket case that can be threatened into submission with Reagan-era "Star Wars" antics, and as if China's still a Maoist Potemkin village. But then again, they're such lunatics because they're sore losers whose worldviews are about 30 years behind and are rapidly being consigned to the dustbin of history, and they're not taking it too well at all; so may the Lord forgive me, as I should be praying for them to actually see some light.
Russia Today on the other hand just interviewed Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf, the typical Washington neoconservative Jew, in an at-times confrontational session that has him bashing Putin and saying that Russia's actually best served by continued chaos and bloodshed in Syria, i.e. it's not serious about defeating ISIS and only wants to perpetuate a horrible Baath dictatorship.
We should know before too long whether the Kremlin is in fact already focusing most of its efforts against true terrorists - i.e. Al Nusra and other Al Qaeda affiliates - even as it prepares for the more ultimate showdown with ISIS.
Since the Maidan revolution and Russian annexation of Crimea in early 2014, Mr. Cohen has become the best-known defender of Russia and Putin in Western media and academia. He isn't personally linked to Putin, so far as I've learned, but back in 2001 his friend Sergei Glazyev, who has been sanctioned by the West in relation to Ukraine and Crimea, spoke to our class in New York about early-Putin era Russia.
Thankfully, there are sane voices like John Batchelor who are clearly conservative white Americans, yet who aren't drunk on power lust and feel it's their God-given birthright to control the whole world. I'm personally sick of lunatics like Mark Levin who talk as if Russia's just a basket case that can be threatened into submission with Reagan-era "Star Wars" antics, and as if China's still a Maoist Potemkin village. But then again, they're such lunatics because they're sore losers whose worldviews are about 30 years behind and are rapidly being consigned to the dustbin of history, and they're not taking it too well at all; so may the Lord forgive me, as I should be praying for them to actually see some light.
Russia Today on the other hand just interviewed Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf, the typical Washington neoconservative Jew, in an at-times confrontational session that has him bashing Putin and saying that Russia's actually best served by continued chaos and bloodshed in Syria, i.e. it's not serious about defeating ISIS and only wants to perpetuate a horrible Baath dictatorship.
We should know before too long whether the Kremlin is in fact already focusing most of its efforts against true terrorists - i.e. Al Nusra and other Al Qaeda affiliates - even as it prepares for the more ultimate showdown with ISIS.
Friday, November 6, 2015
Black boxes point to bomb attack: ISIS has launched jihad against Russia
It has been revealed that a black box on the doomed Russian jetliner exhibited a sudden failure, strongly suggesting that it was indeed a terrorist bomb attack. Elsewhere, it had been reported that US/UK intelligence had traced down terrorist communications pertaining to smuggling an explosive device on board (most likely the luggage bay).
So ISIS has struck its first blow in its promised jihad against Russia...in all likelihood, this information disclosed today has been known by American, British, Egyptian, and Russian intelligence for days already, but held back pending confirmation and, as far as Moscow and Cairo are concerned, political timing.
A hint that the Kremlin has known this was an attack well before today is the fact that it apparently deliberately bombed key civilian targets in ISIS capital of Raqqa, Syria, back on Tuesday, November 3.
No one is surprised by these developments - least of all the Russian government and public, with their long experience of terrorism much closer to home in the 1990s and 2000s during the strife in Chechnya, Dagestan, and other predominantly Muslim parts of the Russian Federation-ruled south Caucasus.
So what now? A CNN breaking news report has pointed out that one positive which this tragedy has brought out is the level of international cooperation: despite their geopolitical differences in the region, the West and Russia have not hesitated to share intelligence and coordinate their security policy, which needless to say has now entailed the suspension of virtually all commercial air traffic from outside the region to not just the Sinai but also Egypt as a whole, even as thousands of British and Russian tourists remain stranded at Sharm el-Sheikh awaiting safe return passage.
So whatever else, the silver lining here is closer US-Russia cooperation over the problem of ISIS, and Moscow could engineer a propaganda coup against those elements in the West who still insist that its goal is not to defeat ISIS but to prop up Assad - at the very least, this attack dispels the loony theory, popular among Western liberals who still cling to their fantasies of Syria becoming a model Arab democracy without Assad, that Russia and ISIS actually like each other because in fact their greatest fear is the power of "free" people (lol).
In a larger sense, Moscow's geopolitical isolation has continued to decline, with even Europe now tilting back toward the Kremlin and away from the White House; perhaps it'll finally dawn on Obama that most of the civilized world doesn't view Russia as a rogue state with a basket case economy that's about to implode any minute that makes big foreign adventures necessary to shore up its leader's approval ratings.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
US/UK now say a bomb probably downed Russian jet, after all
Even as Russia and Egypt haven't said so, the US apparently believes it most likely that ISIS planted a bomb on the doomed Russian jetliner, while the UK has also come out in support of this theory.
While it's true that a US satellite detected a "heat flash" in the moment of the plane's sudden descent, this is completely inadequate to conclude that it was a bomb which caused it. If it was a mechanical failure, however, that doesn't preclude sabotage. Have US intelligence agents already gained access to some key investigation forensics that they can't disclose? Despite tensions with Washington since the failure of the Arab spring and the retrenchment of the military to power, Egypt remains a key American ally that probably wouldn't hesitate to have US intelligence involved in this investigation on account of concerns over ISIS - notwithstanding the potential awkwardness of joining Russia's own intelligence efforts on this case.
On the other hand, a Daily Beast article questions why UK Prime Minister David Cameron spoke as if a bomb is in fact the most credible explanation of the tragedy without any apparent evidence, at least publicly available, to back it up. And the Egyptian government itself was surprised by Cameron's remarks.
Whatever ends up being confirmed as the culprit, this disaster has already brought into focus the extremist presence in the Sinai that makes the bomb theory particularly believable.
Condolences and prayers to the families of the 224 victims.
More positive news: Syrian troops regain the southern supply route to Aleppo from ISIS, while US-backed forces make their own advances against ISIS in Iraq.
While it's true that a US satellite detected a "heat flash" in the moment of the plane's sudden descent, this is completely inadequate to conclude that it was a bomb which caused it. If it was a mechanical failure, however, that doesn't preclude sabotage. Have US intelligence agents already gained access to some key investigation forensics that they can't disclose? Despite tensions with Washington since the failure of the Arab spring and the retrenchment of the military to power, Egypt remains a key American ally that probably wouldn't hesitate to have US intelligence involved in this investigation on account of concerns over ISIS - notwithstanding the potential awkwardness of joining Russia's own intelligence efforts on this case.
On the other hand, a Daily Beast article questions why UK Prime Minister David Cameron spoke as if a bomb is in fact the most credible explanation of the tragedy without any apparent evidence, at least publicly available, to back it up. And the Egyptian government itself was surprised by Cameron's remarks.
Whatever ends up being confirmed as the culprit, this disaster has already brought into focus the extremist presence in the Sinai that makes the bomb theory particularly believable.
Condolences and prayers to the families of the 224 victims.
More positive news: Syrian troops regain the southern supply route to Aleppo from ISIS, while US-backed forces make their own advances against ISIS in Iraq.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Iran threatens to pull out of peace talks as Al-Nusra forms at least a temporary alliance with ISIS
Citing Saudi intransigence, Tehran has threatened to leave the Syria peace talks. Should Iran pull out, that would almost ensure the continuation, perhaps even escalation, of the Syrian civil war, especially the virtual proxy war raging between Saudi Arabia and Iran not only in that country, but also in Yemen and to a small extent in Iraq.
The seesaw conflict continues. ISIS has captured an important town in central Homs province, while the Syrian army made some gains recovering the supply lines to Aleppo.
As my blog suggested, last week's thrusts by ISIS and Al Qaeda were in fact coordinated against the dramatic resurgence of the common threat from pro-Assad forces:
Perhaps last week's setbacks weren't so bad for the Axis of Fatima, after all: Assad, Putin, and Iran may have determined that given their limited resources, they should focus on retaking Aleppo and securing at least one major supply route to it, even if it means conceding some less populated areas to ISIS, Al-Nusra, and other rebels between Aleppo and Damascus.
Like Assad, Russia clearly wants ISIS (and Al-Nusra) to gain at the expense of moderate rebels, squeezing their operating room between the truly hardcore takfiris and the Fatima axis, effectively compelling them to choose between Assad and ISIS. Moscow has already hosted talks with the secular FSA; it may be striving to make similar overtures to less extreme Islamists such as Ahrar al-Sham.
Meanwhile, not at all surprisingly, the new US coalition centered on the Kurdish YPG militia in northeastern Syria is struggling to get off the ground.
And finally, although ISIS' claim of responsibility for Saturday's tragic Russian jetliner crash over the Sinai in Egypt has been dismissed, especially given the current geopolitical climate of the Mideast, terrorism can't be ruled out yet, meaning Western airlines won't be flying over the Sinai until the investigation finds the cause.
The seesaw conflict continues. ISIS has captured an important town in central Homs province, while the Syrian army made some gains recovering the supply lines to Aleppo.
As my blog suggested, last week's thrusts by ISIS and Al Qaeda were in fact coordinated against the dramatic resurgence of the common threat from pro-Assad forces:
Further:The triple attack on Syrian opposition forces in Aleppo has pushed the Islamic State group and al Qaeda's Jabhat al-Nusra to coordinate attacks and even, in some cases, work with rebel groups they previously fought.To halt pro-regime advances, last week Jabhat al-Nusra launched an attack on the western front from Bilal al-Hus mountain range. In a simultaneous operation, ISIS fighters attacked the eastern frontline targeting a major supply road in hopes of cutting off the regime’s reinforcements.
Nusra and ISIS are working together in Aleppo, not because of an ideological partnership between the two militant groups, but rather political expediency -- a temporary military alliance to survive the regime’s sizable attack on their individual territories, which “forced them to retreat under heavy airstrikes by Russian warplanes,” Mustafa Suleiman, a rebel fighter in Aleppo told ARA News.Of course, as Ayman al-Zawahri's recording indicates, given the scale of the new threat from the Fatima coalition of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Hezbollah, this marriage of convenience between Al Nusra and ISIS may well solidify into something more substantive.
Perhaps last week's setbacks weren't so bad for the Axis of Fatima, after all: Assad, Putin, and Iran may have determined that given their limited resources, they should focus on retaking Aleppo and securing at least one major supply route to it, even if it means conceding some less populated areas to ISIS, Al-Nusra, and other rebels between Aleppo and Damascus.
Like Assad, Russia clearly wants ISIS (and Al-Nusra) to gain at the expense of moderate rebels, squeezing their operating room between the truly hardcore takfiris and the Fatima axis, effectively compelling them to choose between Assad and ISIS. Moscow has already hosted talks with the secular FSA; it may be striving to make similar overtures to less extreme Islamists such as Ahrar al-Sham.
Meanwhile, not at all surprisingly, the new US coalition centered on the Kurdish YPG militia in northeastern Syria is struggling to get off the ground.
And finally, although ISIS' claim of responsibility for Saturday's tragic Russian jetliner crash over the Sinai in Egypt has been dismissed, especially given the current geopolitical climate of the Mideast, terrorism can't be ruled out yet, meaning Western airlines won't be flying over the Sinai until the investigation finds the cause.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Important development: Al Qaeda now urging reconciliation with ISIS to band together against everyone else
In possibly another major reshuffle of the geopolitical landscape since Russia's intervention in Syria a month ago, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri (Osama bin Laden's physician, still wanted for his role as co-mastermind of 9/11) has urged all radical Sunni militant groups to put aside their differences and unite against Russia, the US, and the Shiite axis of Iran-Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah.
Such a statement has bearing on the situation in northwestern Syria, where a number of Al Qaeda affiliates, led by the Syrian Jabhat al-Nusra in a coalition dubbed the "Army of Conquest", form the main muscle against Assad's embattled Baath regime. It could herald a decisive break between jihadist and secular Syrian rebels that have to date cooperated, often reluctantly, against their common foe in Damascus.
The recent Vienna peace talks have opened the door, if only initially, to a political settlement in Syria that prioritizes the preservation of the Syrian state from total disintegration. A BBC article makes plain that concessions must be made by all sides for peace to have a chance: just as Assad can't be asked to leave before meaningful deliberations on the political transition even begin, neither can moderate opposition, like the Free Syrian Army (FSA), be asked to sacrifice all their hopes of a less dictatorial regime in their country's near future.
Another article in The Atlantic takes a decidedly anti-Assad stance, but even it acknowledges that Assad's removal must leave his security state fundamentally intact lest extremists like ISIS and Al-Nusra fill a power vaccuum.
However, the hard fact that Zawahri's recording reminds us of is that even if Syrian moderates reach an accord with Assad, they will have to be joined by at least some of their fellow Islamist fighters for the proposed ceasefires to stick. The trouble that can develop is easy to foresee: if more extreme elements of the opposition like Al-Nusra don't go along, they can effectively scuttle everything for everybody. They just need to cause enough instability where they can to wipe out whatever leverage the moderates have with Assad, by giving Assad justification for continued bloody repression; this will disillusion the moderates and may even turn some of them to extremism, thus continuing the vicious cycle that has "jihadized" most of the effective armed opposition to Damascus since the very start of the uprising in 2011.
And unfortunately, Al-Nusra and its fellow radical jihadists probably have every reason by now to torpedo the peace process. For one, they will feel a deep sense of betrayal that, after doing the brunt of the fighting (and dying) against Assad's murderous war machine, they're being put out to dry by secular apostates whose bargaining power with Damascus was bought largely by their own jihadist martyrs. Even worse, this is probably how Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states - whose support for the Al-Nusra-led "Army of Conquest" became all but open early this year - will feel, too.
Will the new Saudi King Salman go against human (especially Bedouin tribal) nature and lay aside the sense of vendetta against the hated Alawite heretic-thugs? Peace in the Middle East and security from terrorism in the entire world may hinge on it.
I'm not particularly optimistic...but whatever happens, it must happen because it can't be forestalled indefinitely anyway.
Such a statement has bearing on the situation in northwestern Syria, where a number of Al Qaeda affiliates, led by the Syrian Jabhat al-Nusra in a coalition dubbed the "Army of Conquest", form the main muscle against Assad's embattled Baath regime. It could herald a decisive break between jihadist and secular Syrian rebels that have to date cooperated, often reluctantly, against their common foe in Damascus.
The recent Vienna peace talks have opened the door, if only initially, to a political settlement in Syria that prioritizes the preservation of the Syrian state from total disintegration. A BBC article makes plain that concessions must be made by all sides for peace to have a chance: just as Assad can't be asked to leave before meaningful deliberations on the political transition even begin, neither can moderate opposition, like the Free Syrian Army (FSA), be asked to sacrifice all their hopes of a less dictatorial regime in their country's near future.
Another article in The Atlantic takes a decidedly anti-Assad stance, but even it acknowledges that Assad's removal must leave his security state fundamentally intact lest extremists like ISIS and Al-Nusra fill a power vaccuum.
However, the hard fact that Zawahri's recording reminds us of is that even if Syrian moderates reach an accord with Assad, they will have to be joined by at least some of their fellow Islamist fighters for the proposed ceasefires to stick. The trouble that can develop is easy to foresee: if more extreme elements of the opposition like Al-Nusra don't go along, they can effectively scuttle everything for everybody. They just need to cause enough instability where they can to wipe out whatever leverage the moderates have with Assad, by giving Assad justification for continued bloody repression; this will disillusion the moderates and may even turn some of them to extremism, thus continuing the vicious cycle that has "jihadized" most of the effective armed opposition to Damascus since the very start of the uprising in 2011.
And unfortunately, Al-Nusra and its fellow radical jihadists probably have every reason by now to torpedo the peace process. For one, they will feel a deep sense of betrayal that, after doing the brunt of the fighting (and dying) against Assad's murderous war machine, they're being put out to dry by secular apostates whose bargaining power with Damascus was bought largely by their own jihadist martyrs. Even worse, this is probably how Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states - whose support for the Al-Nusra-led "Army of Conquest" became all but open early this year - will feel, too.
Will the new Saudi King Salman go against human (especially Bedouin tribal) nature and lay aside the sense of vendetta against the hated Alawite heretic-thugs? Peace in the Middle East and security from terrorism in the entire world may hinge on it.
I'm not particularly optimistic...but whatever happens, it must happen because it can't be forestalled indefinitely anyway.
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