The Syrian Conflict in 2013
Syria is still important to discuss and mention. The Washington consensus could call for an all-out war with Syria. The conflict continues. Dozens or more die daily in it. The Syrian forces outmatch the Western backed death squad terrorists. These terrorists are not true rebels. They are lawless invaders and hired killers sent to harm the Syrian people. Many of these U.S. proxy fighters are imported from dozens of nations. They are fighting against Syrian independence. Assad's military outguns and outflanks Washington's shock troops. There are reinforcements coming into Syria. Syria could be the next Libya or Libya 2.0. Now, Russia wants a September international peace conference, which should occur. It was at first planned for June. Washington still prioritizes war. Its reactionaries spurn peace. Last year's conference failed. Peace is hard to come by in this situation. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said the following words: "A military solution to the crisis is impossible. (T)he solution is only diplomatic.” The conflict can end if Washington stops funding proxy terrorists. The White House is involved with the Syrian civil war. The White House can end it. Joint Chief Chairman Martin Dempsey said that he provided the President with options for the use of force. He said the following words: “(I)t would be inappropriate for me to try to influence the decision with me rendering an opinion in public about what kind of force we should use.” John McCain is very hawkish and of course he wants to have a possible military intervention from the West into Syria. He wants a no fly zone implemented, he wanted more arms sent to the terrorists, and there are weapons sent to the rebels now. These actions are illegal without Security Council authorization. This is meddling in Syria's political, economically, and military affairs. These acts harm international law. The military commanders have asked the White House for options. Even the so-called liberal Senator Carl Levin wants Syria to be bombed. He wants Obama to attack airfields, airplanes, and massed artillery. He supports the terrorist insurgency. Many other Democrats love this action. The anti-Assad forces are fighting each other. Extremist Al Nusra insurgents are clashing with the Free Syria Army elements. On July 19, Russia Today headlined “Al Qaeda’s planned emirate in Syria is West’s own doing.” Most Syrians want a secular state. So, Al-Qaeda wants an evil theocracy while the people of Syria want a secular state. So, the extremists want the Western forces to more militarily intervene in Syria. America loves to fight smaller nations. We know that NSA spying undermines civil liberties. Senator Carl Levin and Angus King are still hawkish against Syria. We know that Washington directly aids Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.
Conclusion
Yemen is under assault now for a while. A drone strike killed 4 suspected Al-Qaeda members. Washington approved drone strikes that killed 4 suspected Al-Qaeda members in the Maarib Province in Yemen on Tuesday. This comes in the time of the Terror Alert proclamation issued by Washington last week. Reuters stated that “The New York Times reported on Monday that the closure of the U.S. embassies was prompted by intercepted communication between al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri and Nasser al-Wuhaishi, head of Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).” The report also said that “The Yemeni tribal leaders said five missiles struck a vehicle travelling in Maarib Province in Tuesday’s strike, killing all of its occupants. State news agency Saba also said initial reports indicated that four suspected al Qaeda militants were killed in the air strike in Maarib, but gave no further details.” There is a high probability of civilians being murdered by the drone strikes. In the past, civilians were killed by drone strikes in Yemen. The Obama's war on Al-Qaeda in Yemen has been more aggressive than in the previous Bush administration. This realityis according to the New America Foundation that was based in Washington, D.C. It states the following information: "...As of August 6, 2013, U.S. drone and airstrikes had killed an estimated 610 to 849 people in Yemen, according to the New America Foundation data. Of these deaths, 99% occurred during Obama’s presidency.” The drone strike initiative began under U.S. President George W. Bush. The current administration has expanded the drone war in the Middle East and other parts of the world. In a report conducted by the ‘Alkarama Foundation’ a human rights organization based in Switzerland called ‘The United States’ War on Yemen: Drone Attacks’ clarified what impact the drone war in Yemen has on the civilian population: "...From the first air strike in November 2002 until the month of May 2013, there have been between 134 and 226 U.S. military operations in Yemen, including strikes by aircraft, drone missiles, or attacks launched from warships stationed in the Gulf of Aden...While the Bureau of Investigative Journalism counted nearly 1,150 deaths between 2002 and April 2013 due to U.S. attacks, Dennis Kucinich, a representative of the U.S. Congress, placed the number of deaths in Yemen at 1,952, in a speech to Congress. He says: “We have not declared war on any of these nations [Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia] but our weapons have killed innocent civilians there. Highly reputable research shows that the number of high-level targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is estimated at about 2 percent.” The head of national security in Yemen, Ali Hassan Al-Ahmady, announced that during 2012, a hundred members of al-Qaeda had been killed by U.S. aircraft strikes..." Some reports believe that the U.S. drone strike in Yemen can be a prelude to a military intervention can led by American and British forces if the current civil war in Syria leads to an attack on Iran in the future. The Gulf of Aden is a strategic waterway for oil exports vital to America’s interests. The Gulf is located between Yemen, Somalia, and the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. The huge drone strike action is fueling anti-Americanism. Yemeni journalist and activist Farea al-Muslimi in a U.S. Senate hearing reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism last April said that the drone strikings are causing many Yemenis to depict America in a much more negative light. There are many children killed by these attacks. Many are angry over it. These actions are trying to assist Western oil shipments to the U.S. military and Western corporations. Yemen and Washington are allied. The question is whether continuous drone strikes in Yemen will only target Al-Qaeda and its leadership including Osama Bin Laden’s right hand man Ayman al-Zawahri who is affiliated with the leader of Jabhat Al-Nusra, Mohammed al-Jawlani who “is a CIA operative in the Al Nusra” according to former Al-Qaeda member Sheikh Nabil Naiim in a recent video or will it continue to kill and injure innocent civilians. Some want the U.S. to build military bases in Yemen. This is a further military occupation of Yemen. The West wants safe exports of oil from that region into the rest of the Earth. The Yemen Times reported on May 27th of this year that “In a speech delivered at the first Yemeni-Turkish forum held in Sana’a this past Saturday, oil and minerals’ minister, Ahmed Dares, confirmed that 35 international companies are currently competing to invest in 20 oil sites throughout Yemen.” The war on terror is evil and it is being strategically used a means to grow the military industrial complex at the expense of civilian deaths via drone strikes.
The immigration bill is being hashed out in Congress now. Folks hope that it will be passed later in the year. The bill is called S.744 or the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. The bill has been watered down as a means to suit the reactionary Republicans in Congress. Corporate America loves many portions of the bill indeed. The bipartisan Gang of Eight Senators drafted the bill. The bill has 844 pages. When you look at it, it has punitive measures, disqualifications and exclusions, and rampant enforcement. This is not amnesty at all. Anyone saying that this bill is amnesty is a liar and I said so. Some feel that the bill is a continuation of the attacks on immigration workers. This bill is advanced by the ruling class as a means to give concessions, but not revolutionary reforms in society. The bill S.744 deals with immigration as a national security issues filled with militarization and the criminalization of migrants. The rights of workers should not be bounded under the needs of big business at all. A low workforce expansion of a guest worker program, a merit based visa system, and a long, arduous legalization process are things that we don't need. Some in the GOP claim that we have massive immigration in America when according to a Pew Hispanic Research Center, the net cross border migration feel to zero in 2011. That means that an equal number of migrants were returning to Mexico as coming in. The reason is because of the recession. So, the militarization of the border has increased for decades in America. Further militarization of the border is not necessary. We have 71 traffic checkpoints and 21 permanent checkpoints in eight of the nine border region sectors. The immigration wants to have a collection of biometric data on all immigrant workers and it could extend to all workers. This is a violation of human civil liberties. A national biometric database is immoral in my opinion. E-Verify can be prone to error and can lead into mass firings. The bill represses many human movements and their ability to work including to participate in the legal process (for the sake of big business). Many sincere human beings support the bill for the purpose of rather having something than nothing. S.744 is intended to be a token measure not a revolutionary immigration reform bill. More reactionary bills like the Sensenbrenner bill have been rightly defeated.
The reactionaries always use faux history as a means to prop up their own agenda. They accept free market extremism like austerity as a cure for the recession. They love continuing the old health care dysfunction system (including the view that you are on your own). They claim to believe in the Framers, but even they would disagree with them on some issues. The reality is that Framers wanted the U.S. Constitution to allow the federal government to have sufficient authority to do what is necessary to promote the general welfare of the nation (including protect the nation). Many Framers never believed in a rigid states' rights philosophy where the federal government was so constrained in their power base at all. Many Framers like George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneu Morris (who authored the famous Preamble) all believed that a vibrant federal government was needed to control the squabbling states. These states once pushed the Articles of Confederation, which almost lead the new country on the brink of disaster. The Tea Party crowd followed the views of the Anti-Federalists, who said that the new federal structure would cause the cause the states to be bounded under the central government and endanger slavery in the South. Many of the Anti-Federation opposed the Constitution. So, this small government ideology being allied with the Framers collectively is conclusively exposed as a mean. We do not need austerity, free market fundamentalism, etc. Yet, the reality is that key drafters of the Constitution were staunch advocates of a strong central government invested with all the necessary powers to build a young nation and to protect its hard-won independence. Article One, Section Eight authorized a series of powers, including to “provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States” and “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.” In Federalist Paper 44, Madison expounded on what has become known as the “elastic clause,” writing: “No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever the power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it, is included.” At the time of the Constitutional Convention, Madison wanted a greater concentration of power in the central government. He wanted to give Congress the authority to veto state laws. This proposal was watered down into declared federal statues the supreme law of the land and giving federal courts the power to judge state laws unconstitutional. The Tea Party crowd, the libertarians, and the Republican reactionaries are ideological descendants of the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists wanted to protect slavery as a means to disagree with the strong federal Constitution. Led by pro-slavery Southerners like Patrick Henry and George Mason, the Anti-Federalists warned that the Constitution would concentrate so much power in the federal government that it would lead inexorably to the eradication of slavery. In battling the Constitution’s ratification in 1788, Patrick Henry warned his fellow Virginians that if they approved the Constitution, it would put their massive capital investment in slaves in jeopardy. Imagining the possibility of a federal tax on slaveholding, Henry declared, “They’ll free your n____s!” Patrick Henry was never a paragon of liberty or equality, because he wanted slavery to exist in America forever. Similarly, George Mason, Henry’s collaborator in trying to scare Virginia’s slaveholders into opposing the Constitution, is recalled as an instigator of the Bill of Rights, rather than as a defender of slavery. A key “freedom” that Henry and Mason fretted about was the “freedom” of plantation owners to possess other human beings as property. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, the hot button for Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected.” Besides the worry about how the federal government might tax slave-ownership, there was the fear that the President – as the nation’s commander in chief under the new Constitution – might ‘federalize” the state militias and emancipate the slaves. “Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.” James Madison later compromised as a means to appease Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists (like the Tea Party crowd now) pose as populists, but they were funded by the aristocracy (rich slaveholders then and corporate billionaires like the Koch Brothers including Rupert Murdoch today). In both movements, there also has been an undercurrent of racism, pro-slavery then and hostility to the nation’s demographic changes — and African-American president — now. Thomas Jefferson was an anti-Federalist who wanted the South to continue slavery as a means to grow agricultural interests in the South. Jefferson, the coddled son of a wealthy plantation owner, preferred a philosophic or romantic view of revolution, never fully confronting its human horrors and practical challenges. His experience representing the United States in France were marked by both his lavish lifestyle at the fringes of Louis XVI’s court and a blind enthusiasm for the bloody French Revolution. Hamilton despised slavery while Jefferson loved it and viewed blacks as innately inferior, which is a lie. Hamilton saw no problem with a multiracial society. Hamilton was more abolitionist than even John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Hamilton was not perfect, but he supported Toussaint L'Ouverture. Thomas Jefferson and his political allies falsely accused Hamilton and the Federalists of being secret agents of Great Britain (and wanted the Constitution to be replaced with a monarchy). Even Thomas Jefferson as Vice President under Adams devised states' rights views of nullification and even secession. Jefferson’s supposed commitment to a view of the Constitution as limited to the specific powers enumerated in Article One, Section Eight also was cast aside in 1803 when Napoleon offered to sell the Louisiana Territories to the United States. Though the Constitution had no provision for such a purchase, Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison suddenly found new merit in the Constitution’s elastic “necessary and proper” clause. The Louisiana Territories also opened up more agricultural land and thus the need for more slaves. The Federalists shrank into a narrow regional party in New England and eventually disappeared. Their abolitionist principles and pro-government attitudes suppressed for decades. Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite by claiming to be for all men are created equal, but expressing racism and sexually taking advancing of a young female named Sally Hemmings. A person like that will never have my admiration at all. Further marginalizing the Federalists, Jefferson continued to solidify his political movement, ensuring 24 consecutive years of Virginian control of the White House, with Jefferson followed by James Madison and James Monroe. Today, we see the reactionaries wanting free-market extremism to austerity in the face of recession to letting 30 million Americans suffer without health insurance – the Tea Partiers are convinced they are doing what’s right because it is what the Framers enshrined in the Founding Document. If that misconception is shaken, the Right will have nothing left to sell the American people, except perhaps bigotry and nihilism.
By Timothy
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