Dispatches from Deena Stryker
How many times have progressives heaved a sigh of relief, believing that the horrible war in Syria was almost over and that Bashar al-Assad had won?
Cover image: Nikki Haley—Trump’s official liar and Imperial Insulter at the UNO. No relief from the ghost of fellow Neocon Samantha Power. (Donkey Hotey)
Aside from the fact that Nikki Haley’s English is questionable — the UN Ambassador stated that “there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to initiate action” — it’s clear that the Trump administration is being told to do a one-eighty on its promise to cooperate with Russia to defeat international Islamic terrorism. The war that President Obama wisely chose not to start with Russia over Syria is now happening as a last-ditch attempt to wring victory from the jaws of defeat.
Even more alarming, the hype over the recent chemical attack that Russia believes was caused when a bomb struck a clandestine lab, is being stretched to include Iran, in order to justify a long-held desire by US hawks to attack that country. Appearing to ignore the fact — while being well aware of it — that Islamic terrorists are Sunnis, US politicians and military continue to claim that Iran is the main state sponsor of Islamic terrorism. Iran supports the Shia Hezbollah Army in Lebanon as well as Sunni Hamas in Gaza because together they support Sunni-majority Palestinians rendered stateless by Israel. It is not well known in the US that the Iranian government melds basic socialist principles with a national brand of theocracy under religious leaders.
The current drumbeat against Iran follows the same crude propaganda campaign as the one against Iraq in 2003, and as was the case with Iraq, Iran enjoys Russian support because of its leftist political ideology. Aside from the importance of having a naval base in Tartus, one of the left’s basic principles is respect for the sovereignty of each nation. Russia will not abandon Syria, a stance that is presented to the American public as opportunism rather than fundamental geo-political ethics. Moreover, times have changed, and Iran is a key player on the Eurasian chessboard, which Russia and China are rapidly organizing.
The characterization of the current situation as a second Cold War implies that the world is still living in the Post-Soviet era that began in 1991, when in fact we are at a turning point: the American century is being succeeded by a multi-polar world. Recently, a guest on MSNBC may have been the first to use the expression on US television, but he opined that rule by a ‘benign’ (sic) hegemon was better, also failing to attribute the idea of a multi-polar world to the Russian President who has been calling for it for a decade. In a multi-polar world, the leading countries would each have their sphere of influence and would cooperate with each other to maintain peace. Based on respect for the sovereignty of each nation, it explains Vladimir Putin’s refusal to kow-tow to American diktats.
A few commenters have pointed out an important consideration, that it would not be in Assad’s interest to unleash a chemical attack on his own people, an attack with no real military value whatsoever, while it is perfectly plausible that his opponents would do so as a last, desperate attempt to prevent Assad from winning the civil war fomented by Washington — for whom the sovereignty of other nations is expendable, via regime change.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
1 comment
though of Indian origin, Nikki Haley has been christianized….
I much prefer Tilsi Gabbard…. has not sold out to christianity.