FAIR is once again unfair to the Syrian people

Jim Naureckas of an organization called Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, which cares about fairness, and accuracy, in reporting, is curiously convinced that when activists on the ground in Syria say that “None of the areas targeted” by Russia’s bombing campaign “were controlled by IS,” that they are in fact lying. To prove this, Naureckas cites an article from the French wire service AFP, citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an organization FAIR’s own writers concede they would not normally cite as an authoritative source on Syria, indicating that Islamic State militants “shot dead seven men in Rastan.”

Months earlier in a place not bombed by Russia.

Aha! The title of the post makes much of this: “No ISISWhere Russia Is Bombing – Except Last Week, When ISIS Was Killing Gay MenThere?" Except, again: There were activists, on the ground, with no apparent incentive to lie, stating quite clearly: “None of the areas targeted” – including “Zafaraneh, Rastan, Talbiseh, Makarmia and Ghanto” – were controlled by IS.

"We have been exposed to a wide range of weapons over the last five years, but what happened today was absolutely the most violent and ferocious, and the most comprehensive in the northern Homs countryside," a doctor in the town of Rastan told Reuters. Eleven people died, he said, including three children and their dad, when their home was demolished by a Russian ordinance. “It was as if the house never was.”

FAIR doesn’t get around to mentioning such casualties, concerned as it is with proving that the Russians government was telling the truth when it asserted that those it bombed were members of ISIS. It even uses a photo of ISIS executing men accused of homosexuality from another source it would never normally cite, The Daily Mail, to suggest again that the activists are liars – though the photo is from months before, in another city that is not Rastan.

I choose to believe the activists and the doctor who tried to save the lives of those killed as a result of imperialist air power. I choose to believe the article cited by FAIR’s own writer that notes that the “dominant factions in Talbiseh and the nearby town of al-Rastan are tied to the Free Syrian Army,” not the Islamic State. But if FAIR wants to go with SOHR? Sure, let’s go with them. Per Reuters: “While Russia says its raids on Wednesday targeted the Islamic State group, locals in the opposition-held area say the jihadist group has no presence in the region - echoing the assessment of a U.S. official and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.”

Perhaps, in the name of fairness, and accuracy, Naurecakas should amend the post with a devastating correction, as he did one of the last times he wrote about Syria and claimed a regime chemical weapons attack was a false flag. Perhaps, I would suggest, he stop writing about Syria altogether.

A review of 'Syrian Notebooks'

I read and then wrote things about journalist Jonathan Littell's account of his trip to Syria in January 2012. Read those things at Inter Press Service.

Netanyahu, Sisi and Assad: Peas in a pod

Israel:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened Hamas to al Qaeda, ISIS and other extremist Islamist groups Tuesday as he implored the international community to hold Palestinian militants responsible for the bloodshed in Gaza. Israel's top politician said Hamas must be held accountable for rejecting multiple cease-fire agreements and a relentless attack on Israeli civilians.
Netanyahu made his comments at a joint press conference in Tel Aviv alongside U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon. "What we're seeing here with Hamas is another instance of Islamist extremism, violent extremism that has no resolvable grievance," Netanyahu said. "Hamas is like ISIS, Hamas is like al Qaeda, Hamas is like Hezbollah, Hamas is like Boko Haram."

Egypt:

A month after an Egyptian court ruled that Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was a terror organization, another court on Saturday branded the entire group — including its political wing — with the same designation.
Since Egypt’s military ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the authorities have accused Hamas of aiding jihadists who have waged a string of deadly attacks on security forces in the Sinai Peninsula.

Syria (note: Resistance State):

The Syrian regime no longer has any relationship with former ally Hamas and will never trust the movement again, Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an interview published Friday.
"There is no relation at all on the formal level or on the popular level," the president told Swedish newspaper Expressen, adding, "I don't think the Syrian people will trust them anymore."
Assad alleged that the movement had allied itself with extremist militants fighting in Syria.
He said that recent events in Yarmouk refugee camp "have proved that part of Hamas, which is basically a Muslim Brotherhood organisation, supports al-Nusra Front."

All the news I feel like printing

"The Starving of Yarmouk, Then the Capture"

After Bashar al-Assad’s regime spent nearly two years massacring Palestinians in Yarmouk camp, after regime bombardments destroyed nearly 70 percent of the camp, after thousands were arrested and tortured to death, and after civilians were forced to resort to scavenging through trash and weeds to ward off starvation — after all this, the world is finally paying attention to the situation in this long-suffering southern Damascus neighborhood. And all they want to talk about is the Islamic State. I think this is a disgrace.

Fellas: If you're going to commit war crimes and, unlike the Islamic State, you don't want to attract the world's attention -- make sure you shave.

"Palestinian Envoy Broke PLO Line to Agree Yarmouk Deal With Assad Regime":

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) official who announced an agreement for a joint military operation between the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Palestinian factions against ISIS in Yarmouk refugee camp did so against PLO wishes and policies because of allegiances to the Syrian government and may be removed from his position as a consequence, Newsweek can reveal.

This week, Ahmed Majdalani, the former Palestinian Authority Labour minister, headed a delegation to the Syrian capital, Damascus, from the West Bank for talks with the Syrian government and yesterday confirmed that a “joint operation centre” will be created for Palestinian groups in Syria and the Syrian regime to coordinate an offensive against ISIS after the terror group captured large parts of the encampment last week.

However, a senior official within the PLO, speaking on condition of anonymity to Newsweek, said that members of the Palestinian executive body were “very upset” with Majdalani’s breaking of the PLO’s official line to announce cooperation with the Syrian government, claiming that he did so because the faction of which he is the secretary-general, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, is supported by the Assad regime.

#####

Another PLO official, Wasel Abu Yousef, said that the Syrian regime may destroy the encampment by bombing the site behind the claim of attacking ISIS, as eyewitnesses revealed to Newsweek yesterday that the regime had barrel-bombed the camp’s main hospital.

"We know that if the [Syrian] army, with its planes and tanks, would interfere, this would mean the complete destruction of the camp," Yousef told the Associated Press.

"Reuters Iraq bureau chief flees after death threats over story"

The Baghdad bureau chief for Reuters has left Iraq after he was threatened on Facebook and denounced by a Shiite paramilitary group's satellite news channel in reaction to a Reuters report last week that detailed lynching and looting in the city of Tikrit. The threats against journalist Ned Parker began on an Iraqi Facebook page run by a group that calls itself "the Hammer" and is believed by an Iraqi security source to be linked to armed Shiite groups. The April 5 post and subsequent comments demanded he be expelled from Iraq. One commenter said that killing Parker was "the best way to silence him, not kick him out."

Here's the story that has these Iranian-organized and U.S.-armed militias so upset. Meanwhile, from the BBC: "Karl Marx on Alienation." Gillian Anderson (yes) explains Marx's theory on how capitalism alienates workers, reducing them to cogs in the machine who only truly live a few hours a day when they're not toiling away making products they themselves can't afford so a rich person they've never met can become even richer.


Alienated though they may be, workers have not lost their humanity. "If We Left, They Wouldn't Have Nobody":

When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go. The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor. "There was about 16 residents left behind, and we had a conversation in the kitchen, 'What are we going to do?' " Rowland says. "If we left, they wouldn't have nobody," the 34-year-old Alvarez says. Their roles quickly transformed for the elderly residents, who needed round-the-clock care. "I would only go home for one hour, take a shower, get dressed, then be there for 24-hour days," says Alvarez.

Finally, a blast from the not-so-distant past, when another dictator beloved by the GlobalResearch.ca pseudo-left was cozying up to the absolute worst the imperialist West has to offer. "Gaddafi wants EU cash to stop African migrants":

"Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in," said Col Gaddafi, quoted by the AFP news agency. He was speaking at a ceremony in Rome late on Monday, standing next to Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. "We don't know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans," Col Gaddafi said. "We don't know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions."

In 2011, Syria 'did not know poverty'

A delegation of old crackpot commies associated with the Workers World Party, for whom every despotic government is either "U.S.-backed and bad" or "not U.S.-backed, so actually good and even communist," recently travelled to Syria to commend dictator Bashar Assad for killing tens of thousands of poor Syrians in his fight against imperialism and "a mercenary invasion of more than 20,000 fighters," by which they don't mean the more than 20,000 mercenaries and militiamen from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan being paid to fight for a regime running out of actual Syrians willing to take up arms on its behalf.

The trip is grotesque enough: Dialogue is one thing, lending "left" cover to a man whose family has grown extremely wealthy by exploiting the working class is quite another. What's especially galling is that, in an article recounting their fantastic journey, these "anti-imperialist" authoritarians allow a regime official to say the following:

“Syria was formerly one of the fastest developing countries in the world,” [Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban] continued, “and one of the safest. We have free education and health care. We did not know poverty; we grew our food and produced our own clothing. At universities, 55 percent of the students were women. In whose interest is it to destroy this heritage? Who is the beneficiary of this?”

One adequate response to this might be: "LMAO, what?" But seeing as this is a blog on the Internet and I have all the space in the world, allow me to quote another article, this one from the World Socialist Web Site.

"But aren't they Assad apologists too?" an earnest reader asks. And I'm glad they did because yes, the folks at WSWS kinda actually are -- but this article is from 2010, back before some leftists decided that "anti-imperialism" requires dismissing the efforts of tens of thousands of regular people to overthrow their neoliberal oppressors, U.S. aligned (Libya) or not (Syria), and reducing said uprisings to Zionist/American/Saudi imperialism. Back in 2010, some socialists were reporting on the actual factors that would cause the residents of rich, tranquil Syria to later rise up against their benevolent leader:

Poverty in Syria has increased significantly in the past five years. The United Nations Human Development’s study of Poverty in Syria 1996-2004 is the most comprehensive statistical report currently available. It found that the wealth gap widened and 11.4 percent of people, or 2.2 million of Syria’s 21 million population, lived in extreme poverty, defined as unable to obtain their basic food and non-food needs, a sum equal to SYP92 or US$2 per capita per day. Syria Today reports that a new United Nations Development Programme report due out shortly states that this figure rose to 12.7 percent in 2007.

A 2007 Central Bureau of Statistics report shows that the number of people living in poverty—those only able to cover a “reasonable amount” of their basic needs—rose from 30.1 percent to 33 percent between 2004 and 2007. But since 2007, the situation has deteriorated sharply. The property real estate boom and the removal of some of the subsidies have increased the cost of living.

The turn to the market and inward investment has led to few new decent-paying jobs, while the lifting of trade restrictions has increased imports and led to a fall in exports to Turkey and other countries, forcing small traders and services out of business. Unemployment is officially about 8 percent, but unofficial estimates put it at about 20 percent, with many more under-employed.

Real wage growth has fallen, according to official data, from 9.9 percent in 2005 to 3.2 percent in 2007, implying a fall in living standards as prices have risen, with little left over for education, culture or leisure activities.

On top of all this, Syria suffered a severe drought in the years leading up to the 2011 uprising, with 1.5 million people leaving their arid lands for the city, which "had a catalytic effect" in a country, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 While foreign meddling of the Russian, Iranian, Saudi, Qatari, Turkish and American variety has no doubt had a negative impact on Syria, leftists would do well to remember that outside agitators are historically ineffective at getting tens of thousands of people to take to the streets in a totalitarian state where chanting "down with the dictator" might very well earn one a bullet in the head. Imperial powers will always attempt to shape events in their favor, with varying degrees of success, but the masses are not as easily manipulated as the likes of Ramsey Clark and Cynthia McKinney; when poor people rise up, it's generally because they have nothing left to lose. That some of these superficially "left" Assad apologists would present a neoliberal dictator's denial of the existence of poverty in Syria as truth in the service of an easier to digest "anti-imperial" narrative speaks pretty loudly to the intellectual and moral poverty of the authoritarian left.

(h/t Ben Norton)

This ain’t ‘anti-imperialism’

Ah, 2003: When opposing imperialism meant opposing imperialism, not simply denying the existence of evil in the world or, worse yet, defending it as good and just. The warmongers' claim that opponents of invading and destroying Iraq were mere apologists for Saddam Hussein? Oh, grow up, you neocon creep. Where were you when Ronald Reagan was arming the guy? These “apologists” you speak of, George Galloway perhaps excepted, are not actually a thing, pal.

To be young again . . .

These days, most anti-imperialists still hold to the idea that opposing the dropping of bombs does not require simply ignoring or excusing the crimes of any nation-state that is not currently allied with the criminal regime in Washington. Being against war does not, actually, require that one reflexively defend war criminals – a word justly applied to those who would bomb and starve Palestinians, for instance, be they in Gaza or Yarmouk – under the infantile reasoning that raising awareness complicates the antiwar cause. Moral credibility is the anti-imperialist's strongest card and it's lost forever when dead children in one place demands all of our outrage while in another conspicuous silence is seen as the only way to be effectively antiwar, or the only way to not be an imperialist, even, which can get confusing: Is this sectarian death squad backed by America or Iran? Both? Damn, this is hard.

If you're an American, it makes sense to focus on American war crimes and support for them, but it also strikes me as increasingly indefensible to simply ignore the humanitarian crisis in Syria, to name one glaring example, where nearly a quarter million are dead and millions more living in destitution as refugees, because the man most responsible for the killing, hereditary dictator Bashar Assad, is not on good terms with the White House that feeds him intelligence on its bombing campaign against the Islamic State. What's become clear is that some who were the biggest critics of George W. Bush are some of the biggest defenders of Assad's "war on terror," every atrocity at worst the regrettable consequence of fighting "imperialism" and "jihadists," though the vast majority of victims are civilians and not all Sunnis with guns are members of ISIS.

To these sorts, the war in Syria is but an abstraction -- the West vs. a perhaps unsavory (though secular and moderate!) dictator -- but let's take a look at what is actually being defended by amoral "anti-imperialists":



What's seen in this video is what happened on March 16, 2015, in the town of Sarmin, where eyewitnesses report that “Syrian armed forces helicopters dropped four barrels containing [chlorine] gas," as noted by Amnesty International. A hundred people were exposed: “a small number of fighters from the Free Syrian Army armed group, but the vast majority . . . civilians,” including a an entire family with three small children that suffocated to death. As in every war, those who suffer the most are not the imperialists or the butchers who justify their butchery in the name of anti-imperialism, but innocent men, women and children. This sort of incident is no anomaly in Syria, though typically the atrocity is carried out the humane and enlightened way: with conventional weapons that tear people limb from limb.

“I saw body parts everywhere,” one resident of Raqqa told Amnesty after the Syrian military bombed a crowded marketplace there. “I carried 40 bodies to cars, ambulances and pick-ups that transferred them to [hospitals].” In the span of two weeks last November, regime airstrikes on the Islamic State-occupied city, in “most cases” on non-military targets, killed up to 115 civilians, including 14 children – more than the U.S.-led airstrikes on ISIS have killed in over six months (Syria's state news agency hasn't reported on civilians killed by either U.S. or Syrian bombs).

Again, even if one were to believe all that is claimed from Assad's apologists and the vulgar reductionists of the reactionary "left," the vast majority of people the Syrian government is killing aren't “jihadists” or “imperial proxies” or “Contras,” but Syrian civilians: 176,000 of them, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, on which the United Nations relies for such statistics; though the Islamic State boats of its crimes, more people have allegedly been killed by the regime snipers (5,761) than the social media-savvy terrorists. And according to Physicians for Human Rights, “The Syrian government is responsible for 88 percent of the recorded hospital attacks and 97 percent of medical personnel killings, with 139 deaths directly attributed to torture or execution.”

If one takes these numbers with an iceberg of salt – which would be fair enough given the fog of war in a country where journalists are denied access by the government and killed by ISIS – the overall picture is fairly clear and the idea that this picture is the product of a State Department fabulist is more than just an absurdity, it's an insult. Rather than denial, anti-imperialists ought to own the fact that a lot of evil can be perpetrated without the direct support of the U.S. empire -- and that the only thing that could make Syria even worse at this point would be an imperial “liberation" by way of airstrikes on the regime or Marines on the ground.

Skepticism is certainly warranted when allegations are made about a state the American empire doesn't like, but one can be skeptical without being an apologist who white-washes war crimes and baits as an "imperialist" anyone who doesn't believe every dead baby is the product of a rebel false flag. If I were a young intelligence officer (let me stress that: if) trying to come up with a PsyOp to discredit the anti-war left, though? I would suggest doing just that. There's no better way to tar anti-imperialists as rank apologists than having anti-imperialists become rank apologists.

Trend Watch: Former feds smearing antiwar activists

Coleen Rowley spent more than two decades with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. What's she up to now? Attacking antiwar activists by suggesting they're imperialists for being too critical of Syria's hereditary dictator.

In a piece published by both the Huffington Post and Consortium News, “Selling 'Peace Groups on US-Led Wars,” Rowley and co-author Margaret Sarfehjooy conclude that a group of Quaker pacifists in Minnesota – the “Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria,” or CISPOS, which is part of “Friends for a Nonviolent World” – is part of a campaign to promote democracy, “U.S. militarism style,” because it hosted “speakers and essayists with strong ties to the violent uprising to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, resulting in a war that has already taken some 200,000 lives.”

Observe the language here: the initially peaceful 2011 uprising in Syria is characterized as “violent” (a curious critique for a revolutionary leftist) and to blame for all the violence followed; the brutal crackdown by a state armed with modern fighter jets and crude, indiscriminate barrel bombs is left unmentioned, lest the authors themselves be accused of spreading propaganda for a war against a regime with which the White House is currently coordinating its air strikes on Syria. Rowley and her coauthor strongly insinuate that the peaceniks whom they are tarring as imperialists hosted speakers with ties to the US government, but the most they can come up with is that the State Department has given grants to some opposition activists – it's done the same in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia – and that the ex-husband of one woman who spoke to the group was once, nearly a decade ago, in the same room as Dick Cheney. All they have is innuendo and a series of links to tangentially related evidence that isn't really evidence of anything that undermines the argument that "this Assad guy seems like a bad dude," ultimately convincing only to those who skim articles that make arguments with which they are already inclined to agree.

There is a glaring omission, however, which was noted by commentator Louis Proyect: That just a few weeks before they were smeared by a former federal agent (right eyebrow status: hella fuckin' raised), the imperialists of CISPOS were promoting a protest “against US-led Coalition airstrikes on Syria.” Those strikes, like the Assad regime's record of mass murder, are not mentioned in Rowley's article, which might make those inclined to engage in a conspiratorial analysis go: Hmm. But one need not think the moon landing was directed by Stanley Kubrick to think that's really weird.

Indeed, let's think about this: Imperial powers are actively bombing Syria in the name of a U.S.-led “war on terror” that Assad has repeatedly expressed a desire in joining himself – he tortured people for George W. Bush and long ago labelled all who oppose him “terrorists," while the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, in The New York Times, has called for “capitalizing on Mr. Assad's anti-jihadi instincts” – and a former fed decides now is the time to go after those who oppose both bombing Syria and rehabilitating its brutal (but secular and beardless) dictator as a potential ally of the West? Strange, one might say. Makes ya think.

This isn't the first time a former federal agent has decided to weigh in on Syria by smearing as “imperialists” members of an antiwar movement they were quite late in joining themselves. In December 2011, former FBI agent Sibel Edmonds wrote of a “very troubling switch of position and changes at AntiWar.com.” The issue, in her view: The site's coverage of Syria, which by virtue of its being insufficiently apologist, was determined to be “MSM produced war propaganda,” a development – a site called AntiWar learning to love the bomb and go pro-war – she blamed on “mystery-undisclosed funders.”

“I have researchers who are compiling data on their recent changes,” wrote Edmonds, “and running background checks on their new team members who have successfully altered this once truly valuable source of information.” There have been no updates since, presumably meaning that the investigation is still ongoing.

Now, is there a conspiracy to co-opt the antiwar movement by targeting those in it who refuse to go along with the rehabilitation of a butcher who U.S. elites appear to now view as a lesser evil? Yeah, probably not, but regardless: the divisive and disingenuous way these former agents of the state have engaged those who -- by the way -- were on to the whole “antiwar” thing back while they were still serving empire suggests that, perhaps, the antiwar left has been a little too welcoming of those who haven't quite given up the with-us-or-against-us mentality of a federal agent. At the very least, we should be viewing their work with as much cynical skepticism as we do the work of other, lesser known freelance writers for web-based publications. And while their transformations are very likely genuine, the Left has every reason to distrust anyone who ever freely associated with the FBI.

Amusingly, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, with which Rowley is now associated, knows there's a good reason for that general policy of distrust, having been targeted by the FBI for allegedly providing “material support” for terrorism, which took the form of expressing solidarity with the victims of war -- like millions of Syrians, for instance, who are currently freezing in refugee camps across the Middle East. As Freedom Road's Tom Burke told me, the FBI infiltrated the organization during a rare moment of unity in the often divisive world of antiwar activism, the bureau having long sought to sow sectarian division on the left (to that end, the FBI's woman on the inside would often attack her comrades for being insufficiently militant, masquerading as the only real revolutionary in the room). Around the same time, Brandon Darby, an agent provocateur on the payroll of the FBI, helped entrap activists at the 2006 Republican Convention in Minnesota by encouraging them to set off incendiary devices. One of his favorite approaches for dealing with those who questioned the wisdom of his tactics? “Pointing fingers at and 'snitch-jacketing' other people, accusing them of being cops, FBI agents, etc.,” according to Lisa Fithian, one of the many activists he betrayed.

In the case of Syria, the trend embraced by Rowley and Edmonds before her is to “imperial-jacket” those who think maybe the opposition to Bashad Assad has something to do with the policies of Bashar Assad, not just the meddling of outside agitators; rather than engage in good faith those who may have a different opinion, and whose years of antiwar activism ought to buy them the benefit of the doubt, Rowley and others like her have chosen to paint them as tools of empire – perhaps willing ones, they not so subtly insinuate – at a time, ironically, when the empire is busy bombing Syria in the name of fighting terrorism, not Bashar Assad. They may not be in the pay of the federal government, but they're still policing the antiwar left and the effect of their work is the same, turning leftists against each other when they should be working together to fight the common enemy: those who would have us believe cruise missiles are an effective means of addressing a humanitarian crisis.

Bomb Syria for Obamacare

On Thursday, Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson told MSNBC's Chris Hayes that Syria is "simply not our problem." I am not a fan of this argument. The civil war in Syria may not be the US government's "problem," or at least it shouldn't be given its record from Vietnam to Iraq of killing the people it ostensibly wants to save, but I don't think people here should simply avoid addressing a problem because it's happening to people over there. We should probably just do it without bombs.

Some have called Grayson's comments disgusting, language they'd never use to describe a US air strike that kills civilians. I think Grayson's just trying to make what he believes to be the most compelling antiwar argument to the American public: that shit's bad enough here at home, so what are we doing trying to fix other people's problems? But Grayson is still perpetuating the idea that one's concern for a fellow human being should be determined by which nation-state they were born in, which is indeed gross. A better argument is that the US government never goes to war for "humanitarian" reasons and, when it says it does, it ends up making things worse.

But Grayson could be on to something: his argument may be the most compelling to the average American who still thinks Syria is a George Clooney film. And far more troubling than nationalist arguments against killing people is the partisan argument that we ought to maybe just give Obama his little war because: Republicans. That argument was put to Grayson by Hayes, who told the congressman:

You're going to have a conversation with Nancy Pelosi in the next few days in which she's going to say to you, not I think implausibly, if this vote goes down you're destroying the last three years of this president's administration, you're destroying his political capital and frittering away any opportunity to get any meaningful legislation passed because you have essentially declared your own party's president a lame duck.

There's nothing grosser than the suggestion that we must drop bombs on people in another country, not because it's a "last resort" or in self-defense or to save the whales or whatnot, but because the president needs his "political capital." Hayes says he would vote against an attack on Syria were he in Congress, so I don't fault him for bringing the argument up. It's revealing, though, as that is clearly the argument on the lips of Democratic partisans or else it wouldn't make it's way on to their preferred cable news network.

Indeed, the Democratic partisan's favorite political magazine, Mother Jones, notes the same argument. As editor David Corn writes, while Democrats in Congress may have "anti-war inclinations" -- let's let that one slide -- "this time the decision for many Democrats is more difficult due to the overarching political context." What's that context?

The president is about to engage the Republicans on two contentious fronts: a battle over the funding of the federal government (with a possible government shutdown at risk) and a fight over raising the debt ceiling (with a possible financial crisis at risk). And tea party Republicans are attempting to bring Obamacare into the brewing mess. (Their threat: If you don't defund Obamacare, we'll shut down the government.) With all this looming, Democrats certainly don't want Obama's standing weakened, and if he loses the vote on the Syria resolution, he will be diminished.

There are arguments for and against the bombing of Syria. Some of them are bad, some of them not so bad. That we need to bomb Syrians so Americans can be forced to buy overpriced health insurance is the worst.

Syria is not Iraq (and apples are not oranges)

Like other Democratic consultants with careers to keep in mind, Robert Creamer, husband of liberal Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, is currently busy reassuring progressives that Barack Obama's desired attack on Syria will be "completely different" from the shock and awe that George W. Bush and Senate Democrats helped bring to Baghdad. And, it should be said, there's a lot of truth to that. They are, indeed, different situations occurring at different times (the US government had more allies when it destroyed Iraq, for instance).

But while the situations differ and lazy comparisons should always be avoided, Creamer's number one reason for why Syria is not Iraq is wrong in a big way. Being generous, it's the result of a lazy misremembering of history. Being realistic, it's a lie.

According to Creamer, writing for The Huffington Post:

1). The President is asking for a narrow authorization that the U.S. exact a near-term military price for Assad's use of chemical weapons. He is not asking for a declaration of War - which is exactly what George Bush asked from Congress in Iraq.

George W. Bush did not ask Congress for a declaration of war, which no president has done since WWII. He asked Congress to pass an, "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq." Barack Obama, meanwhile, is asking Congress to pass an, “Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Government of Syria to Respond to Use of Chemical Weapons."

Obama's request does include a clause stating that it is not intended to authorize the use of "combat" troops on the ground. At the same time, while there does not appear to be much elite interest in a full-scale occupation of Syria at this point -- though calculations on all sides of the conflict could change when the bombs start falling -- the AUMF recognizes the president's "inherent" right to use military force to counter what he perceives to be threats to national security. Limits on "combat" troops are there for political reasons, not legally binding ones.

In other words, what Obama is asking for is "exactly" what Bush asked for, which is: political cover for using the US military any way he sees fit. What's different is the target and the perception that there's no real risk of being embroiled in a quagmire: just a few bombing raids carried out in time to pick up the kids from soccer practice.

You may be not at all surprised to learn that Creamer, who somehow managed to get this basic fact wrong, is a convicted liar. Indeed, he pleaded guilty to multiple felonies for defrauding a bank. But the people Creamer is lying to now don't run banks. Defrauding the public in order to sell a war won't get him a conviction, but a new hot tub and perhaps an appearance or two on a liberal chat show.

In terms of the dishonesty involved in selling a war on it, Syria is looking a lot like Iraq, actually.

Stockpiling inmates

I was unaware that Sarah Palin was still a meme, but the Democratic Party is apparently still using her to raise money and build their email lists. Apparently, because who cares enough to look it up, the former Alaska governor said the US government is "stockpiling bullets" to use against the public. And so a petition has been launched by the Democratic Governors Association to demand an apology because that is important:

Accusing our government of actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people is not only offensive and wrong -- it's downright dangerous. For Sarah Palin to insinuate that the United States is similar to the tyrannical governments in Syria and Iran who do carry out those types of atrocities is completely reprehensible.

Good on the governors for looping Iran into the mix, rather than a Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. President Hillary may have to bomb them someday, so it's important to lay the groundwork now. Sarah Palin and Iran: Bad. Got it.

Of course, the unfortunate thing is that the US government is "actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people" (no one cares about it using them against other people). You don't end up with 2.3 million Americans in prison cells by asking them nicely. You force them in at the point of a gun. The FBI alone gets over $8 billion a year to do this. Federal prisons get over $8 billion to keep them there.

Is that the same as the sort of political repression that goes on in Syria or Iran? No, it's different. The people getting shot in the streets by security forces are usually Black or Latino. And no one has anywhere near the size prison population that America does.

(via @FireTomFriedman)