Obama's Confused Middle East Policy

Originally published on American Thinker on September 30, 2016

The Obama administration's policy in the Middle East appears to be designed to remove secular tyrants and replace them with more religiously oriented regimes.  Thus, Gaddafi ("We came, we saw, he died."  Ha ha ha.) and Mubarak were targeted.  Bashar al Assad is the current target.  This policy has been marked by monumental incompetence, mendacity, and confusion.  Nothing about it should be accepted without a healthy dose of skepticism, including what follows.

The Telegraph of the U.K. has a video of U.S. commandos fleeing a town under a barrage of insults ("Crusaders!  Infidels!  Dogs!  Get out!") from the Free Syrian Army, our supposed allies.  CENTCOM commander General Lloyd Austin testified that a 500-million-dollar program to train opposition soldier had resulted in "four or five" being trained.  CIA-backed rebels have had armed confrontations with Pentagon-backed forces.  Two of Senator John McCain's Libyan "heroes," Abdelhakim Belhadj and the late Abu Mosa, turned out to be ISIS leaders.  Turkish and Saudi allies clearly do not have the same objectives as the U.S.  Former U.S. Department of State senior adviser David Phillips said, "Turkey's role has not been ambiguous – it has overtly supported the ISIL."

This confused U.S. policy has led to speculation that the U.S. created and still supplies ISIS.  In an interview with a reporter from the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper, Abu Al Ezz, a militant jihadist commander with Jabhat Al-Nusra, claims, "The U.S. is on our side."  Abu Al Ezz claims that his tanks came from Libya and that they have been supplied with American-made TOW rockets.  He also claimed that "we had officers from Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and America here[.] ... Experts in the use of satellites, rockets, reconnaissance and thermal security cameras."  Al Ezz claimed that Jabhat Al-Nusra broke with ISIS because "[m]ost of the IS leaders are working with intelligence services, and it's now clear for us. We, the Jabhat Al-Nusra, have our own way."  Jabhat al-Nusra has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and U.N.

Al Ezz's allegations are supported by documents obtained by Judicial Watch that reveal early U.S. support for ISIS.  The same article reported that U.K.-based Conflict Armament Research's report traced the origins of Croatian anti-tank rockets recovered from ISIS to a Saudi/CIA joint program via serial numbers.  In 2012, Kenneth R. Timmerman reported that the Taliban fired on a CH-47 helicopter with a Stinger missile.  He reported, "The Stinger [serial number] tracked back to a lot that had been signed out by the CIA recently, not during the anti-Soviet jihad."  Jihadists have also obtained a "significant" number of tanks and Humvees from their operations in Iraq.  These weapons have undoubtedly led to the deaths of American servicemen.  Attacks on U.S. forces could have been led by released Guantanamo detainees.  The Washington Post reports that at least 12 former detainees have launched attacks against the U.S.

The anti-Assad coalition may also have used poison gas in order to justify a U.S. attack on the Assad regime.  The network nsnbc claims that evidence of approval leads directly to the White House.  Dr. Christof Lehmann has done an extensive study on the gas attack.  Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claims that Hillary Clinton approved sending the gas to Syria.  Although this attack was to be attributed to the Assad regime, the evidence would not justify a U.S. attack.  German intelligence claimed that it had intercepted phone calls between Syrian officers and the Syrian High Command that convinced them that none of the Syrian forces has used a chemical weapon.

Al Ezz also commented ten days prior to the attack on the aid convoy bound for Aleppo that Jabhat Al-Nusra would not allow the aid to go through.  The aid convoy was attacked on September 15, resulting in 20 civilian fatalities.  U.S. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that he had no doubt that it was a Russian attack and called it an "unacceptable atrocity."  He based this on the fact that two Russian aircraft were in the area of the strike when it happened, but he admitted he "had no facts."

Secretary of state John Kerry has proposed grounding Syrian and Russian aircraft over Syria.  However, according to General Dunford, "Right now ... for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia."  Defense secretary Ash Carter stated that U.S. jets conduct their strikes "with exceptional precision … that no other country can match."  He said this after U.S. airplanes struck a Syrian base at Dayr Az Zawr.  CENTCOM declared that they halted this airstrike when they were informed by Russian officials that the target hit by U.S. airplanes may have been a Syrian Arab Army base.  There is no evidence of coordination, but ISIS assaulted and overran the Syrian Army base right after the U.S. airstrike. 

The Dayr Az Zawr attack may have been the result of relying on intelligence provided by anti-Assad forces.  Apparently, U.S. intelligence does not have a good reputation.  Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, has stated, "Everyone is extremely skeptical about U.S. intelligence revelations."  A congressional task force has confirmed allegations that senior U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) leaders manipulated intelligence assessments in 2014 and 2015 to make it appear that President Barack Obama is winning the war against the Islamic State."  And two senior intelligence analysts at CENTCOM say the military forced them out of their jobs because of their skeptical reporting on U.S.-backed rebel groups in Syria.

A spokesman for the Syrian military called the Dayr Az Zawr strike a "serious and blatant attack on Syria and its military" and "firm proof of the U.S. support of Daesh."  (Daesh is the Arabic acronym for ISIS.)  A Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, announced, "The White House is defending Islamic State. Now there can be no doubts about that."  Our U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, said Zakharova should be embarrassed by that claim.

It is not only Russians and Syrians who question U.S. policy.  U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney has claimed, "We are not trying to destroy ISIS."  Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, asserted, "The CIA agenda is definitely not anti-ISIS [Daesh], it's primarily anti-Assad."  Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev claimed, "The strengthening of the Islamic State became possible partially due to irresponsible policies of the United States."

Naturally, U.S. policy has led to increased tension.  U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power stated, "It's apocalyptic what is being done in eastern Aleppo."  She may be closer to the truth than she realizes.  State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told the press, "I think when American lives are at stake, when we're talking about defending our own interests, we're not looking for the approval of the Syrian regime."  Why is the State Department so unconcerned about Syrian airspace yet scrupulous about Libyan airspace when an ambassador is under attack?

Croatia’s WWII Revisionism ‘Terrifying’, Says “Historian”

Following is an article appearing in Balkan Transitional Justice (http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/croatia-s-wwii-revisionism-terrifying-says-historian-09-26-2016) and my response.

Croatia’s WWII Revisionism ‘Terrifying’, Says Historian

British historian Rory Yeomans, who has researched the Croatian fascist Ustasa movement, says he is worried by attempts by politicians and academics to play down the crimes it committed in World War II.

Sven Milekic BIRN Zagreb

Rory Yeomans. 

Distinguished historian Rory Yeomans, who is currently an independent researcher financed by the British Council, told BIRN in an interview that revisionist views of the wartime Ustasa movement and the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia, NDH, have entered Croatia’s political mainstream in recent years.

“Such views used to be seen as the lunatic fringe; now they are part of the mainstream. That’s terrifying,” said Yeomans, the author of books including Visions of Annihilation: the Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941-1945 and The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia.

He also expressed concern that such views were being expressed by “would-be historians” in mainstream media in the country.

“Then you read the comments under the articles and you read that ‘Communists lied us for 70 years; there was no death camp in Jasenovac, there was no genocide; they lied about the NDH’,” he explained.

Between 1941 and 1945, Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian anti-fascists were killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp which was run by the Ustasa. The Jasenovac Memorial Site has managed to name 83,145 victims of the camp, while the total death toll is generally believed to be between 100,000 and 110,000.

Yeomans said that some journalists and historians in Croatia are disregarding the facts and claiming that Ustasa did not commit massive crimes against Serbs, Jews and Roma and that the NDH was “a benevolent regime”.

“If you say, I want to prove that the NDH was a cultured and civilised state, and then you go to the archives and you find all the information you can find that proves that and then you just discard everything which militates against that, that’s the bad way of writing history,” he explained.

Trends in Croatia and Serbia regarding the rewriting of WWII history are also quite similar, he suggested.

Yeomans cited the recent rehabilitation of Dragoljub ‘Draza’ Mihailovic, the Serbian nationalist Chetnik movement leader.

The Belgrade court cleared Mihailovic of his alleged WWII-era crimes, arguing that he did not get a fair trial under the Yugoslav regime, but Yeomans said that does not mean the Chetnik leader was innocent.

“Even if Mihailovic was tried today, he would be found guilty of war crimes, because, even if he wasn’t personally involved, he was the commander of the groups that committed really horrible crimes, mass killings,” he said.

Hatred of Communism

Yeomans suggested that many of the Croatian historians who are trying to rewrite the past are motivated by a “hatred towards communism and strongly dislike the socialist Yugoslavia”.

“And part of the reason why I think they are becoming more successful is that socialist Yugoslavia never dealt with the issue of Bleiburg and never dealt with post-war crimes, which there were many, not just against Croats, but as well Serbian nationalists and Slovenian nationalists, and Bosniak separatists,” he said.

After Ustasa and NDH forces - as well as other Yugoslav forces that collaborated with the fascists - surrendered to the British Army at Bleiburg in Austria, the Communist Partisans killed an unknown number of them, along with an unknown number of civilians who were accompanying them.

In Yugoslav times, victims’ families gathered at Bleiburg to commemorate the dead, but also partly to praise the fallen NDH, making it a symbolic place for Croatian right-wingers. After Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia, the state started to use the event to officially commemorate the crimes.

Revisionist historians claim that a conspiracy of silence existed among Yugoslav-era historians who sought to cover up Bleiburg and other post-war crimes. The revisionists also seek to downplay the crimes committed by the NDH.

But Yeomans emphasised that as early as April 11, 1941 – a day after taking power – the Ustasas arrested the first Jews in Zagreb.

Then in May 1941, a group of nearly 170 Jewish youths were arrested in Zagreb by the Ustasa police and transported first to the Danica concentration camp in central Croatia and then to Jadovno, near the coast, where all but three perished.

Yeomans also said the Ustasa regime started purges of state companies and institutions in May 1941 and completed them by July the same year, a process that took Nazi Germany around a decade.

“It’s very interesting listening to Croatian politicians then they say, ‘Well it was tragic, but unfortunately Croatia sided with the Nazis.’ It’s almost like they try to blame Hitler and Mussolini for what happened in Croatia, which had nothing to do with Hitler and Mussolini. Essentially, this was the decision of the people that led Croatia in 1941, although nobody voted for them and they didn’t have a popular mandate,” Yeomans said.

Tackling WWII myths

“In my opinion, from what I can see in Croatia, there are two basic myths,” Yeomans said.

“The first myth is that nobody supported the Ustasa regime and everyone was against them, apart from a few quislings, and that everyone supported the Partisans,” he explained.

The second myth, the one preferred by Serbian nationalists, is that the most Croats supported the Ustasa regime - although Yeomans cautions that it is “very hard to measure how much the general population supports the values of the regime”.

Politically in Croatia, the last government, led by the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, did not directly encourage revisionist ideas about WWII, but created an atmosphere in which they could flourish and gain legitimacy, Yeomans believes.

He cited the controversial culture minister Zlatko Hasanbegovic, “who has a problematic past when it comes to confronting the Ustasa regime and the Holocaust”, he said.

After Croatian newspaper Novosti reported that Hasanbegovic had written for a pro-fascist bulletin while he was a student, the minister responded by saying that he was never “an apologist for any criminal regime, regardless of whether it was an Ustasa or Communist regime”.

However he did not specifically apologise for the article in which he described the Ustasa as martyrs and heroes.

“These people create a certain ‘mood music’ and other factors react to that. I’ve read his interviews in different papers - Le Monde, Il Piccolo - and I think it’s very problematic when he says ‘we condemn all totalitarian movements’, actually saying that socialist Yugoslavia was equivalent to the Independent State of Croatia, and that isn’t true on any kind of level,” Yeomans explained.

“In that way, what one actually says is that the Holocaust that took place in the Independent State of Croatia is not exceptional and that it is not different to any other period of history,” he added.

He also noted that such revisionist tendencies were not seen under the previous HDZ-led governments of Ivo Sanader and Jadranka Kosor, between 2003 and 2011.

“Even under [1990s right-wing President] Franjo Tudjman, it was less extreme than now, because Tudjman in a certain way wanted to reconcile Partisans and Ustasas, bizarre as the idea was, and revisionist history reflected that,” he said.

“The new younger revisionists, by contrast, demonised the Partisan movement and sought to normalise and rehabilitate the Ustasa movement and deny their mass crimes, not just relativise them, by claiming the Partisans were the real war criminals,” he added.

“This can be seen in the way they are trying to turn Jasenovac from a concentration camp where Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascists were murdered into simply a ‘labour and collection camp’ which, they claim, after the war the Partisans used deliberately to kill Croats and destroy their national consciousness.”

My Response:

It is important that people know their history.  However, history can be used as a propaganda tool to perpetuate ancient animosities.  There are people today who are angry about the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.  They have been taught this.  This is not history it is propaganda.  It is the selective presentation of facts in order to further an agenda.  Every year a new film comes out about Nazi atrocities.  Rarely is there a film produced about Soviet crimes.  The greatest mass murderer, Mao, has escaped Hollywood’s attention entirely.  

Yeoman appears to be looking at Croatia’s past from an ideologue’s perspective.  Commentator Manet sees the article as “divisive and hateful,” while commentator guest saw it as “an excellent piece of scholarship that is another warning about the danger of rising fascism on Croatia.”  It is normal to downplay atrocities committed by those we admire and emphasize atrocities by those we oppose. Tito and his allies in the West did not emphasize Bleiburg or a thousand other atrocities.  The Katyn Forrest Massacre was denied to the bitter end.  Yeomans suggests that many Croatian historians are trying to rewrite the past because of their, “hatred towards communism.”  Tito’s historians wrote that history in the first place because they hated their opposition.  

Unfortunately much history is based on myths.  Yeoman explains, “The first myth is that nobody supported the Ustasa regime and everyone was against them, apart from a few quislings, and that everyone supported the Partisans.”  You can substitute Vichy or a number of other regimes for Ustasa in that sentence.  All of Europe had its share of Nazi collaborators.  Yeoman is troubled by those who see socialist Yugoslavia as equivalent to the Independent State of Croatia in the crimes they committed.  He views the Ustashi as more criminal than the partisans.  Others see the opposite.

It is unnatural for a nation to wallow in guilt for past crimes.  Germany is an exception only because of the psychological conditioning instituted following the Second World War.  Do Russians feel responsible for the crimes of the Bolsheviks?  The Chinese still revere Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in history.  It is troubling that many of the techniques used on the Germans following WWII are now being used on Americans.  Americans are being bludgeoned over slavery which was practiced over a century ago by a small minority of Americans.  The descendants of immigrants who arrived after the Civil War are also held responsible.  If historians are truly interested in slavery they might look into FDR’s policies.  Slave labor was an integral part of the Morgenthau Plan and the Yalta Agreement.  However, this subject does not suit the current crop of “historians.”    

Mark Pickles Joins the Linkedin Discussion

Mark Pickles: Perhaps you were in a hurry when you wrote the above, because it is incoherent and pointless. Yes, of course "young males" can run further distances and survive more oceans. Perhaps, John, as a young man were a rare type indeed, who can convince us you would have accepted death by fire or pulverisation by bombs, and not felt inclined to survive. I cannot believe that 80% of refugees are young men. All the refugee camps in the Middle East are full of families with children.

John Dietrich: My apologies for being incoherent and pointless. I was waiting for Godot at the time.  I don’t quite understand, “Perhaps, John, as a young man were a rare type indeed, who can convince us you would have accepted death by fire or pulverisation by bombs, and not felt inclined to survive.”  I am easily confused but I don’t believe I said or implied that.  I also have to apologize for my 80% figure.  Check, http://therightscoop.com/united-nations-says-72-of-syrian-refugees-are-men-only-13-are-children/.  Of course by Swedish standards you can be 46 years old and declare yourself a child.  The 80% figure is frequently used.

John Dietrich: I think I figured out that sentence I quoted.  Correct me if I am wrong but I believe you left out the word “you” between man and were.  If this is the case it is a very revealing sentence.  It exposes you as a thoroughly modern man.  It is a personality type described by Charles Reich in Greening of America and Norman Mailer in The White Negro.  A type all too common today.  A type that cannot conceive of sacrificing its life (or in some cases its comfort) in defense of those it loves.  I have never been in such a situation.  However, I would hope that I had the courage to die with dignity.

Je suis Pepe.

Mark Pickles

Writer

John.  Once again, what you have written is incoherent.

I write for a living. English is my native language, and I speak five languages, and I'm highly intelligent.  And so I suspect the inability to for us to communicate is not my problem

But, hey, I must make allowances for the Yanks. They are almost all monoglots, and apparently half of them cannot accept that planet Earth is over 6000 years old. And this is the same half USA: the "exceptional" nation, the "indispensable" nation that this year will choose to impose Clinton or Trump on the world.

The USA's own “Pew Research Center”, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan fact tank”, has a paper on its website called “People see a future of promise and peril”. In the paper we read that 58% of the people of the USA believe that a world war within a generation is “definite or probable”.  And we also read that 41% of Yanks expect that “Jesus will return to Earth before 2050” (this is 41% of the whole population, not just the Christians) and 13% don’t know.

58% of Yanks believe that an imminent world war is probable. And most of these believe that the USA is being called on by God to bring the world into a kind of violent redemption. 

In the meantime, the Peacemakers amongst us are getting on with the job, knowing that the USA will become as irrelevant as the Philistines were to King David.

Dear Mr. Pickles,

Thank you for informing me that you are highly intelligent.  As for our inability to communicate, I will leave that to a third party.  But then again they may be lacking in intelligence.  I too am a polyglot.  Does that make any difference.  I’m a Buddhist so I can’t speak for the Christians.  As for the U.S. becoming irrelevant as the Philistines, “Great” Britain has been doing a great job of becoming one with Nineveh and Tyre.  Please let me know what you “peacemakers” are doing to get on with your job.  Sounds like busybodies poking their noses in other people’s business.  We have plenty of those here in the U.S.