I was a guest today on KPFA with Raed Jarrar of AFSC and Chris Toensig of Middle East Report.
I kind of knew that Raed was someone who sometimes operates outside the boundary of reality as depicted in mainstream U.S. media. He runs with people who see the U.S. - supported, democratically-elected Iraqi government as an Iranian puppet regime, and Baghdad as being under Iranian occupation.
But I was nonetheless taken aback when he argued that it was a terrible mistake that the U.S. was bombing the Nusra Front, driving them into the arms of ISIL. He suggested that the idea that Nusra has something to do with al Qaeda was a dubious, unproven allegation.
What? Hello? By the normal standards of mainstream American political discourse, this is not a dubious, unproven allegation. This is a long-accepted fact.
Syrian Rebels Tied to Al Qaeda Play Key Role in War http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/world/middleeast/syrian-rebels-tied-to-al-qaeda-play-key-role-in-war.html
Some of these people on the left are attacking Obama with crazy. I wound up defending Obama from Raed's attacks. It wouldn't have been my first priority for things to do. But can you sit silently when someone says the President is a Kenyan-born Muslim? Aren't you obligated to say, "No, he's not!"
These people are nuts...
P.S. Chris Toensig was more sane. He said he "couldn't disagree with anything in Robert's realist analysis of the Obama Administration's actions." I said, yeah, I have a realist analysis - in the commonly-used English meaning of the term: someone who believes that we have to deal with the actual reality around us that we can observe. Ugh.
P.P.S. Raed claimed that the Iraqi Shiite militias "backed by the United States" are as bad as ISIL in terms of human rights abuses. I said: that's not going to fly in mainstream America. Everyone in the world - Americans, Syrians, Palestinians, Jews, everyone - view abusers who they think want to kill people like them as fundamentally different from abusers that they think don't want to kill people like them, and will always choose the latter over the former.
Oy gevalt!
Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org naiman at justforeignpolicy.org (202) 448-2898 x1
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 8:05 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 26, 2014, at 5:25 PM, Robert Naiman <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>
> wrote:
>
> > If I'm the USG, I don't see these developments as a problem at all;
> maybe I see them as good.
> >
> > A key longstanding goal of the USG is to isolate and marginalize ISIL
> and Nusra from other Syrian rebel groups. This has been controversial among
> many rebel groups; past attempts by the USG to marginalize Nusra from other
> groups have met with strong resistance, leading some of these groups to
> affirm solidarity with Nusra instead.
> >
> > If Nusra gets closer to ISIL, it's harder for other rebel groups to
> resist the US campaign to force them to cut their ties to Nusra.
> >
> > From the US point of view, any flavor of Al Qaeda is pretty much the
> same; people that it's way OK to bomb. Whether Al Qaeda types become even
> more extreme Al Qaeda types is not on their list of things to worry about;
> indeed, it strengthens the USG cause, just like the beheadings and other
> horrible things done by ISIL, looped on TV, have strengthened the USG cause.
>
> With what implications for the course of the uprising against the Assad
> regime and prospects for a negotiated settlement? The situation strikes me
> as extraordinarily fluid and confused with a lot of sorting out still to be
> done among the many players.
>
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