We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, July 17, 2016

Allying with political Islam: The United States’ tactical alliances with Al Qaeda and its associates in Syria

Click here to access article by Stephen Gowans from What's Left
The US priority in Syria is Arab nationalist-elimination, and not the elimination of Islamist terrorists, who remain useful to Washington in clearing away the last of the Arab nationalist state obstacles to total US hegemony over the Arab world.
Not only does Gowans describe the US-led Empire's double role of supporting terrorist armies in Syria while pretending to fight terrorism, but he reminds us that the US support of terrorism in Syria fits well with its own historical use of terrorism when it is "defined as the deliberate politically motivated infliction of harm on non-combatants". Terrorism seems to be okay to the Empire's many apologists when it is done in support of the Empire's hegemony. 

Cartalucci makes essentially the same argument in a piece entitled "Syria's "Moderate Rebels" are not Moderate, not Rebels".
...Al Qaeda has from the beginning, and still does, represent the vast majority of those fighting Damascus and its allies in Syria. Regardless of superficial labels used mainly by the Western media to delineate specific groups, it is clear, even through official statements by both the wider militant movement and specific groups like Jaish al-Islam itself, that they fight beside and under Al Qaeda's banner.