Month: June 2012

Via Daniel Larison, this Pew survey finds broad Arab support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to step down and very little support for a Western military intervention:

 As Larison notes, “the farther removed from Syria’s immediate vicinity they are, respondents tend to be more supportive of coercive measures,” for obvious reasons. At the very least this should prevent interventionists from arguing an intervention in Syria could at all be a part of the Arab Spring or fulfilling related aspirations, as they claimed in Libya.

This Associated Press article comes from reporters who spent two weeks with opposition fighters in northern Syria. It is notable because almost all of the reporting on the conflict in Syria has been through second or third parties, often from a station in neighboring Lebanon or something. The result is actual criticism of the rebel forces, as opposed to uncritical recitation of “activists” claims.

Simply put, no one is in charge.

…Rebel coordination rarely extends beyond neighboring towns and villages and never to the provincial or national level. Many rebels don’t even know the commanders in towns two hours away.

While the regime has been brutal, so have some of the rebels — another cause of concern for the West.

Opposition activists filter most information about the rebels sent outside the country, making it hard to get an accurate picture. But several groups said they had sent captured soldiers “to Cyprus,” which in rebel shorthand means execution. So many poor Syrians have died trying to reach the island that the phrase “send to Cyprus” has become synonymous with “put to death,” usually by gunfire.

One group said it had killed two brothers caught collaborating with the regime — one during interrogation, the other by firing squad.

Nothing about this account is new information, but very few mainstream accounts have detailed the deplorably fractured nature of the opposition fighters and the fact that these disparate groups continue to commit brutal crimes. Still, we have the Obama administration openly aiding and coordinating with these militias and the CIA helping to distribute arms and heavy artillery to them across the Turkish border. This is effectively a policy of regime change, a dangerous approach that is exacerbating the conflict. See here, here, and here for more on the potential for this policy to draw disastrous consequences.

Rep. Ron Paul has introduced legislation that criticizes the President for keeping Congress in the dark in his “march toward another war in the Middle East.” Unfortunately, there isn’t a chance it will gain enough congressional support.

Antiwar.com economic analyst David Henderson appeared on Russia Today’s Crosstalk. Peter Lavelle hosts, along with other guests Dan Williams of Reuters, and Sadegh Zibakalam of the University of Tehran.

David explains that Iran is not our enemy and that there is no evidence that they are violating any nuclear rules.

Watch the video (25:29) below

Writing in the New York Times, Brian Doherty, author of a recently published book on Ron Paul, asks the question: “For the Ron Paul Wing, Now What?” In the midst of an otherwise insightful and sympathetic piece, we get a disapproving reference to a lawsuit against the Republican National Committee by one of Paul’s supporters, and this:

“While Ron Paul has no future in politics, the Ron Paul machine and his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, will. That’s why the political pros in the Paul movement don’t appreciate acting-out like Richard Gilbert’s lawsuit. That’s also why Rand Paul risked the wrath of his father’s hardcore fans by endorsing Mitt Romney, just as soon as Ron Paul admitted he would not win.”

Gilbert’s lawsuit, which contends the RNC cannot legally bind pledged delegates to vote for Romney, and Rand’s embrace of the warmongering, anti-libertarian Mitt Romney are related — how? The link is only in the minds of those alleged “political pros”– the same ones who ran insipid campaign ads, consistently played down foreign policy issues, and sucked up to Romney early on.

Basically reiterating the line being put out by Rand Paul’s apologists, Doherty writes:

“Senator Paul knows he needs to reach beyond his father’s 10-15 percent base in the primaries to more mainstream, red-state, talk-radio Republicans. He can’t do that by marking himself as a traitor to the party. So he stands behind nominee Romney and plans to actively campaign for him.”

Appealing to “red state talk radio” Republicans is code for selling out on the vital foreign policy issue. Sen. Paul claims he had a personal meeting with Romney and that he was reassured that President Romney would conduct American foreign policy in a “mature” manner — whatever that is supposed to mean.

As for this business about being considered a “traitor”: George Romney never endorsed Barry Goldwater. Indeed, he spent a good deal of his energy branding the party’s 1964 nominee a reckless extremist.  He went on to run for president in 1968, and, far from being considered a “traitor,” went on to serve in the Nixon administration as HUD Secretary. George H. W. Bush’s Points of Light Foundation conferred on the elder Romney its Lifetime Achievement Award. You can’t get much more Republican than that.

If there is some rule that all Republican officeholders must formally endorse and campaign for the national nominee, then it apparently doesn’t apply to the Romneys. (Then again, this is precisely why Romney’s candidacy is doomed from the start: the widely held view that the Romneys of this world live by different rules from the rest of us.)

In any case, Doherty’s own views, rather than those of the Rand Paul circle, come across loud and clear when he writes:

“On the one hand, Ron Paul’s refusal to run as the candidate of a third party shows that he sees his cause’s fate linked with the future of the Republican Party. On the other, his refusal to endorse Romney shows that if they want to help shape that party in a more libertarian direction, he and his supporters can’t just go along to get along.”

In endorsing Romney, who has learned nothing from a decade of futile and draining wars, the younger Paul is going along, but one wonders how far along it will get him. By tying himself to a loser like Romney, the ambitious Rand is likely to cut himself off from the very elements he’s seeking to appeal to — who were never that enthralled with Romney to begin with, and still aren’t.

In the meantime, Sen. Paul is alienating his national base — and, worse, splitting and disorienting the movement his father built. It is an absolute disgrace, and one that will not go unchallenged. If the good Senator thinks blood is thicker than ideology in libertarian circles, he is very much mistaken. In a movement devoted to individual liberty, the idea of a hereditary leadership seems more than a bit odd: by endorsing Romney, he has forfeited his claim to lead what he calls the “liberty movement.” He has, in short, become just another Republican Senator, albeit one with a particularly lean and hungry look.

 

An odd story is emerging today, revealing that at least some Apple Stores are refusing to sell products to ethnically Persian people and claiming it is because of the US embargo on Iran.

The reports begin in Georgia, where a 19-year-old US citizen was barred from buying an iPad after she admitted her ethnicity to the clerk.

Apple’s website has the same generic “export compliance” page that most computer manufacturers do, noting that it is illegal to export certain technology to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria without prior US government approval. Apparently this was the source of the employee’s reasoning that the sales weren’t allowed.

But of course that only applies to export, and not Iranians in the United States, and most certainly not random American citizens who happen to be ethnically Persian. The very same export page also provides a list of countries excluded from a ban on using Apple products to develop nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, with neither India, Pakistan nor Israel on the list. Yet can anyone imagine Apple refusing to sell computers to ethnically Indian people, or ethnically Pakistani people, or Jews using the same rationale?

Adding to the oddity, incidents were reported in more than one Georgia Apple Store, as well as one in Virginia. Apple corporate is simply refusing to comment, suggesting this may be, incredible as it may sound, their actual policy.