By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all my public links/profiles) October 18, 2023 (*UPDATE late evening October 18/early AM October 19: further analysis on hospital explosion); *UPDATE October 31: I had some massive technical issues on my site, and an update to the Hospital explosion story mysteriously disappeared, so I have redone that update to include even more information that has been coming out since then about the responsibility for the explosion); all casualty figures are according to respective local officials unless otherwise noted.

(Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית) The second article in a series of special reports about the 2023 Israel-Hamas-Middle East Crisis.

See related July 28, 2014 article The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

“How we choose to fight is just as important as what we fight for.”

—Ezra Bridger, Star Wars: Rebels

SILVER SPRING—As I wrote in my last piece, a level of violence has been perpetrated against the Jewish people not seen since the Holocaust and against Israelis like never before, a vile terrorist act by war criminals and legally constituting genocidal ethnic cleansing of an up-close-and-personal nature, in which an increasing toll of over 1,400 Israelis are now known to have been killed since October 7, the vast majority on that single day and defenseless civilians butchered in their homes or a at a peace-themed music and dance festival, in addition to over 4,200 wounded and some 200 hostages abducted into Gaza.

An Ugly Atmosphere but with Rays of Hope Thanks for Biden and Blinken

Obviously, emotions are running high and there are understandable calls for vengeance in the air in Israel.  But emotions and vengeance—and dehumanization—cannot be allowed to eclipse sensible policy that can bring about some of the best possible outcomes.  As America knows from its own “War on Terror,” in Israel’s current situation, counterproductive actions and mentalities will help no one, not Israelis, not Palestinians, not anyone else in the region except extremists who would bring about more death and destruction.  And keep in mind Gaza is one of the worst places anywhere to be conducting a military campaign as far as the 2.3 million local civilians are concerned: they cannot leave what has been called an “open-air prison” because of restrictions imposed by Israel—which, as I have noted in detail before, exercises much of the meaningful de facto sovereignty over the Gaza Strip—and Egypt, it is one of the most densely populated territories on earth, about half of the population is children, and the Palestinians in Gaza have been suffering from a humanitarian crisis for many years already.

Even considering, all this, Israel cannot tolerate a Hamas governing Gaza that is now trying to imitate ISIS, not after what Hamas did.

And so Israel must invade.

Unfortunately, already some 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed (before yesterday’s hospital bombing, discussed in measure 4), some 12,500 wounded, including whole families wiped out.  Those numbers are significantly increasing daily, with Israeli strikes still happening in the south of Gaza, right where Israel has told civilians to evacuate.  And while nobody knows how many Hamas members are included in those numbers, footage coming out of Gaza indicates most of the dead are civilians, especially as Hamas has access to its underground tunnel system that civilians do not and that many, perhaps most, Hamas dead would be buried underground in most strikes successfully targeting Hamas terrorists and fighters, therefore, many of them are likely not included in health officials’ body counts easily or quickly, if they even know there are tunnels underground in any given location, which they may not.

Yet even in this bleak atmosphere, I am heartened by U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy, President Joe Biden’s skilled behind-the-scenes engagement (as was the case with another Gaza flareup 2021), and other top Biden Administration officials’ diplomatic efforts.  In just days, they have already mitigated some of the worst: an initial, insane demand by Israel for all residents of the northern Gaza Strip—some 1.1 million people—to evacuate within twenty-four hours has seen that timeframe substantially extended (though it may still be a breach of international law, according to the United Nations), water service to Gaza has been partly restored by Israel (though from live interviews I saw on CNN two days ago, including with a senior United Nations humanitarian official, damage to the water infrastructure is so severe that only one of the main water pipes was functional, severely limiting the effect of the partial turning back on of the water supplied by Israel), and there is confused but progressing talks about opening the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt to get foreign nationals out, humanitarian supplies in (five United Nations fuel trucks two days ago were allowed through but that is it so far), and perhaps letting some other civilians out (in fact, just as I was wrapping parts of this article up Monday night in what may be a major diplomatic achievement, Blinken announced—after a marathon negotiation session with Netanyahu under Hamas rocket fire (such attacks being war crimes)—that Israel had agreed to the delivery of humanitarian aid, that safe zones for civilians were a major topic of discussion, and that Biden would be coming to Israel and Jordan today (the Jordan leg was canceled shortly after the hospital disaster, discussed in measure 4).  Biden’s trip may very well delay Israel’s near-inevitable assault on Gaza, giving more time for civilians to evacuate and supplies to be delivered to Gazans, saving many lives.

If you track the public statements of both Biden and Blinken, it is clear they have been and are emphasizing—will continue to emphasize—these concerns about protecting Palestinians in their discussions with Israeli leaders; clearly, Israel began on a harder line and clearly the U.S. has been pushing back behind the scenes against some of Israel’s worst impulses as in convulses in grief.  Biden specifically has been emphatic in repeatedly standing up for the vast majority of Gazan Palestinian civilians who are innocent and have nothing to do with Hamas and has even made clear on one of the flagship U.S. news programs, CBS’s 60 Minutes, that it would be a “mistake” for Israel to reoccupy Gaza in the long-term and right after reiterated U.S. support for a two-state solution, which would much displease Netanyahu as he has been against this his entire career in action whatever deceitful verbiage he has uttered to the contrary and still is.  There remain serious obstacles—especially after that hospital tragedy—but knowing Biden and Blinken leading Israel’s closest ally in America are clearly, forcefully, and consistently prioritizing saving Palestinian civilian lives in their private interactions with Israeli officials and their public comments on the crisis are a serious source of hope for me.

Hamas Must Be Neutralized, But Civilians in Gaza Must Be a Priority (and that Would HELP Israel)

Before proceeding, let us condemn Hamas and make it clear that for all their flaws, Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benajmin Netanyahu and his extremist government of right-wing religious zealots and bigots—and I have been extremely critical of them, even examining Israel’s moral flaws in its military targeting and tactics in great detail—are not the moral equivalent of Hamas, a terrorist group that had for quite some time also functioned as something of a government in Gaza but that now has veered in its brutality into ISIS territory and is resembling ISIS in this brutality more than it resembles its own version of itself from five years ago.  And in recent polling, it is also clear that Hamas is not very popular with Palestinians.  During this latest violence, Hamas is even telling Gaza’s civilians not to evacuate, framing leaving as allowing Israel to push Palestinians from their homes, take more Palestinian land, and enact ethnic cleansing; Israel, the U.S., the UK, the EU, NATO, and others have long claimed that Hamas is cynically using innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields, purposefully putting them in harm’s way to get them killed to turn global opinion against Israel and/or lessen the intensity of Israel’s attacks (the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, claims Hamas is blocking civilians from evacuating, though despite this claim, at least some 600,000 Palestinians have evacuated from the north as of a few days ago).  While some prominent human rights organizations and other analysts argue the reality is complicated when it comes to whether or not Hamas uses civilians as human shields, what is fairly clear is Hamas cannot be trusted to look after the safety and welfare of the innocent civilians of Gaza, and it will certainly fail in its responsibilities to them.

But this does not mean that Israel can simply dump the entirety of the responsibility for the welfare of Palestinian civilians in Gaza on Hamas, shrug its shoulders, and do anything it feels like at this particularly emotional moment, with the consciousness of the global Jewish community, not just Israeli Jews, reeling in its worst collective moment in close to 80 years.

In short, the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust cannot be answered by one of the worst mass displacements in a generation: currently some 1.1 million Gazans being told to evacuate northern Gaza by Israel, without anywhere really safe to go.  Israel’s tragedy cannot be followed by cutting off food, water, fuel, and power to 2.3 million Gazans, including thousands of wounded, 50,000 pregnant women with 5,000 due to give birth in the coming month, and babies in incubators in hospitals who will surely die without power, water, fuel, and food.  One war crime atrocity, no matter how vile, cannot be answered by another war crime.  And while there is certainly legitimate concern as to Hamas appropriating some of any aid that would go into Gaza, the solution cannot be for Israelis to simply throw up their hands and block all aid.  And especially as the U.S. is the main guarantor of international law globally along with the United Nations and that Israel tries to sell itself to the world as abiding by international law in comparison to Hamas, both risk looking like gross hypocrites if the U.S. stands by Israel as commits war crimes.

This would play into arguments and/or propaganda and gaslighting from Russia, China, and others (sometimes rooted in legitimate concerns, many that do not hold up to scrutiny) that international law is a joke and that the West only applies international law to its enemies, not itself.  It is in time like this, though, that international law matters most as ultimately, no matter how horrific a terrorist attack a country might suffer, the response when there are credible accusations of serious violations of international law and war crimes being committed by the responding party cannot be “But look at these pictures of our dead babies!  Let us violate the rules!”  Such an emotional response suggests that international law can simply be set aside when rage and grief arise in response to barbarity on the part of one party, but the point of international law is to ensure fewer dead babies and civilians of all types overall.  Pictures of one side’s dead babies cannot be used to justify illegal war crimes leading to more dead babies on the other side: there may an inevitability to some dead babies on that other side, but international law is there to minimize the amount.  The laws of war must be upheld by all parties that profess to adhere to them regardless of how low another warring party may sink.  Sadly, we cannot expect much from Hamas but it is to Israel’s credit that compliance and conduct of a far highest caliber than Hamas is expected of it, not an unfair double standard.  Hamas’s failure, then, to honor its moral and legal obligations is not an invitation or an excuse for Israel to abandon its own moral and legal obligations.  Because once we view international law protecting the most vulnerable of innocent civilians in war time as something to be tossed aside when one side engages in atrocities, international law truly is meaningless can protect no one consistently.  The only solution is to follow international law even if those we are fighting do not, to have it protect some people some of the time, rather than nobody any of the time.

Unlike Hamas, Israel is a legally legitimate nation recognized within its 1967 borders by over 160 nations (with 165 total offering some form of recognition: the U.S. under Trump extended recognition beyond the 1967 borders and recognized Syria’s Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory, something of  a pariah move).  I know some people don’t like the reality that Israel has long-been a recognized legitimate state under international law but tough, and while people are free to and can even reasonably disagree over the justice and morality of establishing Israel as a state and the manner in which that happened, that Israeli is a recognized international state is history: that ship has sailed and there is no time machine going back to before Israel became a state in 1948.  But the privilege of having statehood as a legitimate nation and a democracy (at least within its proper borders if obviously not in the West Bank) that is a signatory to the major human rights conventions, that comes with the responsibility that it is rightly expected to follow international law, that it can and should be expected to follow all international laws regarding civilians in wars zones and to be held to those standards.  Sadly, while the international community and especially Hamas’s backers can and should press Hamas to do the same, Hamas is a terrorist organization that has a modus operandi of defying international law.

While Israel itself has a questionable track record on international law, there is not an equivalent record between the Israeli government and Hamas: they are not moral equals, and after what Hamas pulled off in its insane attack on October 7, Hamas has signed its own death warrant: the status quo is over and Israel simply cannot tolerate Hamas’s existence right at its border and near its communities any longer.  Israeli must neutralize Hamas (and its mini-me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad), whether destroying it, taking prisoners, some sort of exile, or otherwise demilitarizing (and destroying seems to be the most likely option given Hamas’s posture).  As is the situation with Ukraine’s fight against Russian colonialist imperialism, the “give peace a chance/there need to be negotiations to stop the war” crowd does not understand the reality of how Hamas on October 7 moved itself beyond the pale of what Israel can tolerate, let alone make peace with, and the Israeli voting public would absolutely not accept leaving Hamas in power in Gaza even is in some fantasy world the current government did: the coalition would collapse and voters would put in a new one that would continue with the campaign to remove Hamas.

But that last point only refers to Hamas.  Conversely, Netanyahu’s lack of willingness to engage in real negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party running the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority (PA): the de jure Palestinian government in the West Bank propped up by Israel’s much more sovereign de facto “governance” there through its military for well over half a century now.  Fatah has long renounced violence against Israel and cooperated with Israel to prevent terrorism against Israelis, making Netanyahu’s longtime willingness to boost Hamas as a way to undermine its rival Fatah even more shameful—Israel even helped to create Hamas decades ago to do just this—and, as I have noted before, Israel should be engaging with Fatah even now, should have been for years, and advancing Palestinian statehood.  By not doing this at all, Netanyahu has literally incentivized violence by punishing cooperation and nonviolence over many years, sending the message that occupation, dispossession, and privation are the makeup of Israel’s long-term plan “for” Palestinians, and making Abbas and the PA look like mere collaborators in the eyes of Palestinians.

While Israel has to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and that means there will be many innocent Palestinians killed in the crossfire, that does not mean “anything” goes as far as Israel’s conduct, that all safety for civilians is Hamas’s responsibility, or that there cannot be some sensible measures not currently being undertaken by Israel that will make the situation far better, save many Palestinian and some Israeli lives, and lead to a better outcome for Israel and Gaza.

With that in mind, here are my thoughts on some sensible, very possible, very practical steps that if adopted can minimize the worst of what is to come, keep international public opinion from turning even more against Israel than it would otherwise, and minimize the risk of protests in perhaps the West Bank other nearby countries like Jordan and Egypt from boiling over while also reducing the chance that actors like Hezbollah and Iran will enter the conflict in a major way.

My Six-Point-Plan for Mitigating the Horror that Is to Come

So my very first two recommendations are as follows: especially as Gaza is surrounded on three of four sides by Israel and is mostly dependent on Israel for water, electricity, fuel, and food by Israeli design, receiving those supplies at deeply insufficient levels for Gazans even before October 7 (since 2007, day-in, day-out, most Palestinians are malnourished and much of the day there is no power), 1.) the collective punishment of cutting off of water, power, fuel, and food to 2.3 million Gazan Palestinians must end.

Secondly, 2.) Israel must say loudly and unambiguously that the vast majority of noncombatant civilians who end up leaving northern Gaza or Gaza altogether will be allowed back into their homes in northern Gaza or Gaza overall (or what’s left what they left behind) shortly after the fighting stops, that there will be no mass expulsion of peaceful civilians, no ethnic cleansing, no mad pipe dreams that existed throughout Israeli history and in the mind of prominent rightist Israelis like former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, among other prominent Israelis even still today, to expel Palestinians into the barren Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and create a “Palestine” there.  This is actually one major reason why Egypt is so reluctant to open the Rafah border crossing to outgoing civilians in Gaza: they fear new refugee camps that will become long-term fixtures, that, left unaddressed, festered instability, insurgencies, civil war, and even terrorism like so many camps set up for Palestinians after 1948 and 1967).

Frankly, given Israel’s track record, that this or subsequent Israeli governments can change their mind or break their word, and the composition of much of the current extremist Israeli government (especially before this unity government), Egypt and others would be justified in doubting whatever assurances Israel would give regarding allowing fleeing Gazans to return:  in what is still regarded as a deeply controversial and illegal move (though quite understandable from Israel’s perspective), Israel has allowed very, very few Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled in 1947-1949 and in 1967 to return, either to Israel or to the Palestinian territory Israel occupied in 1967.

That cannot be the situation with the current possible waves of flight within or out of Gaza.  I personally would not bet on most Gazans that might move into Sinai ever returning unless the U.S. can pressure Israel into agreeing beforehand that they would be allowed to return soon after the fighting stops (in a live CNN interview with the always-stellar Christiane Amanpour I saw two days ago while writing this, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid declined to say whether Israel’s leadership would provide a guarantee that displaced Palestinians would be allowed to return to their homes of if he would support such a move).  And it may be temping for Israel to turn all of northern Gaza into a bulldozed buffer zone, but this, too, would be a war crime and illegal under international law, and would be cramming all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people—already in a Gaza that is one of the most densely populated places on earth—into roughly half the territory they were living in before.  This would turn an already intolerable living situation into one that would be catastrophic.

Related to the last measure, this is a conflict mainly between Israel and Hamas; Israeli is in no position, morally or legally, to impose the problem of Palestinian refugees on Egypt and dump the responsibility for accounting and planning for their welfare onto Egypt is a not a party directly involved in the conflict as a primary party but is one that has every right to suspect Israel will be wanting to permanently dump Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai.  Israel is deciding to clear out half of the Gaza Strip and to invade a Gaza from which they are not currently allowing anyone to exit from the three sides of Gaza it controls.  As a major party to the conflict and as the party forcing civilians out of their homes, Israel is just as responsible as Hamas for their welfare as one of the two major belligerent parties, and Hamas’s moral and legal failures do not absolve Israeli form its moral and legal responsibilities, nor are those responsibilities Egypt’s.

Yet I am only hearing that “Egypt should open the Rafah crossing” without any mention that Israel could open one or both of its crossings and set up temporary shelter in its territory.  The simple fact of the matter is the land and infrastructure in Israel surrounding Gaza is far more hospitable, connected, and resourced than the desolate Sinai peninsula near Rafah, that Israel is far more capable of hosting humanitarian operations and a series of temporary refugee camps, and—especially now that Hamas is boxed into Gaza—southern Israel near Gaza is far more secure that the anarchic Sinai Peninsula, which has for many years has been filled with untamed Islamic terrorist insurgents from al-Qaeda and more recently a branch of the Islamic State (ISIS, remember them?).  ISIS even famously used a soda-can bomb to take out a Russian civilian airliner over Sinai in 2015, killing 224 people.  Thus far, the Egyptian government has not been able to quell these insurgent terrorists, despite multiple attempts over the years.

Considering this, throwing a large number of Palestinians into refugee camps into the mix in Sinai would seem to be setting up a disaster for the future in an already volatile area, could lead to a destabilization of Egypt, and, should ISIS gain a presence in the camps and launch, say, rocket attacks into Israel with any frequency or intensity, could also lead to Israel striking into Egyptian territory in response in a repetitive cycle the like had developed in between Israel and Gaza up until this point, a disaster for the region that should be avoided at all costs by taking Sinai off the table as far as discussions of where to settle Gazan Palestinians, either temporarily or otherwise (indeed, the current ISIS franchise in the Sinai has fired rockets into southern Israel multiple times before, though to shruggable effect).

Israelis, ever lacking strategic thinking, would likely consider the problem more or less “solved” if they could pawn the Gazan Palestinian “problem” off onto Egypt, and be much happier worrying, but worrying less, about Palestinians in Egypt than Palestinians closer by in Gaza and would feel less incentive to move the refugees back into Gaza, perhaps playing the semantic games that come so easy to Netanyahu without ever getting to a point of moving Palestinians back into Gaza.  Tellingly, in an interview yesterday with the always-excellent Nic Robertson for CNN, an Israeli man living near Gaza in Sderot, hit hard by Hamas, called for transferring the Gazan Palestinians “into other Arab countries,” a view Robertson noted was “typical of many” there.

Conversely, if Palestinians were in camps in set up in southern Israel on the Gazan border, Israel would want to get the Palestinians there back into Gaza as soon as possible and not a day later.  The dynamics are far more likely to pressure parties into a far better result with the Israel camp option than the Sinai camp option, keeping the conflict and the bulk of responsibility for a competent, swift resolution with Israel and not dragging Egypt into it, which cannot even handle its own situation in the Sinai.  Therefore, 3.) Israel should allow several camps on its own territory neighboring Gaza for many of the civilians who want to exit Gaza, especially women and children (obviously military-age men are going to be more difficult to process but not impossible to at least partly screen).

And Israel does not need to deal with this alone: apart from the UN and NGOs that will certainly be willing to aid (and feel much more secure operating in Israel than the Sinai), Israel can and very much should bring in Abbas’s and Fatah’s PA.  There is obviously great concern about what is the plan is for Gaza after Hamas is defeated, as Israel clearly has none and is not shy about admitting this repeatedly publicly and privately, even to the Biden Administration despite U.S. pushback for not having such a plan.  After Netanyahu has spent so many years deliberately weakening and undermining the only major alternative to Hamas, allowing PA officials into these temporary camps can help the PA build credibility among Gazans up from its current crisis-low levels, allowing the idea of the PA moving into Gaza to govern after Hamas is defeated to actually be built in the hearts and minds of Gazans, bolstered by international and aid organizations (for all its issues, can anyone think of a better choice than the PA to fill this role?).

If a post-Hamas future for Gaza begins with Israel, the PA, and international partners working to the benefit of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, that is about as good of a new start one can hope for.  Without Hamas as a player on the scene, the only good path forward that can lead to justice, safety, and freedom for large numbers of Israelis and Palestinians is one that immediately begins building up a new Palestinian partner in Gaza for self-rule and to restart life there.  And for this, the PA is the only realistic option in the here and now.  Flatly speaking, there cannot be a military solution to what is fundamentally a political problem, and such Israeli-PA political cooperation (as opposed to just security cooperation) is long overdue.  Gaza after Hamas is a good chance for this (along with the West Bank if restrictions are eased and settlers reigned in) and there is no sense in putting it off, which would risk a collapse of the PA while it and Abbas are at their nadir along with a radicalization of its members.

Quite nobly and bravely, some Palestinian doctors, nurses, and medical staff are pledging to stay in northern Gaza—in the hospitals there—dozens even paying with their lives, so as not to abandon their patients, including newborn babies, who will die if they leave.

Especially in light of this, quite sadly and horrifically, the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City in northern Gaza was struck by an explosive projectile in northern Gaza just as I was finishing this last night, with estimates in the dead ranging from roughly 300 to 500.  I’m not a weapons expert, but on the one hand, this confirmed video of the strike does not resemble other videos of misfired Palestinian rocket attacks, as the IDF claims caused the blast and deaths, and seems closer to resembling a video of an Israeli airstrike especially given the size of the explosion; but on the other hand, factors that can push the conclusion in the other direction are still being digested, such as a lack of a large impact crater, video footage of a Palestinian rocket exploding high above the hospital just before the explosion in question and showing the explosion from a distance immediately after, and that if it was a rocket that misfired, it would have had more fuel so early in its journey, resulting in a larger explosion than normal.  The fog of war is still enveloping this situation even if it has become a Rorschach test, with people expressing certainty before having the facts and the incident understandably inflaming the region, making Biden’s visit and diplomatic push far more challenging.  At first, I believed with strong confidence it was an Israeli airstrike, but most of the evidence put forth of the publicly verifiable type favors Israel’s explanation. Still, there is yet doubt and dispute about what happened as of the publishing of this article and I am not sure definitive proof has been presented.

*(UPDATE: Throughout the day more analysis has come through. Despite Israeli’s track record of being caught lying in prominent cases like this, as excellently discussed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour here, the forensic evidence, from subsequent video to crater/blast analysis, points very strongly, perhaps overwhelmingly, to the conclusion that this explosion resulted from a misfired Palestinian rocket and was an accident. As for the audio presented by Israel purported to be Hamas, it may or may not be authentic; in our present age, this audio could very well be an edited or fabricated cherry that Israel is adorning to the top of its cake of evidence to help win the public relations war it is losing, and some experts have called the audio out as fake; so that and some other aspects of the Israeli narrative are far from perfect. The audio may possibly be a distortion or a lie, but the lack of a large crater and the confirmed video evidence is not. On the other side of things, there is no hard evidence that has been presented to be able to draw the conclusion that this was an Israeli airstrike. I have discussed Israel lying in the past myself, and indeed, a whole article could be written about that [Israel in the past lied about airstrikes, including an incident last year in which it claimed categorically as fact that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had killed 5 children, it being later reveled there were no rockets launched or falling near the children and they were actually killed by an Israeli airstrike; conversely, as documented by Amnesty International, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad lied and blamed Israel for two rocket misfires in a 2014 incident that killed 13 civilians—11 of them children—claiming they were killed by Israeli attacks; thus, it is wise to not take everything any of these parties to this conflict say at face value without scrutiny] but even if the audio is possibly not credible, the overall circumstantial evidence is credible and very strongly does not indicate an Israeli airstrike and does indicate a misfired Palestinian rocket, whether from Islamic Jihad or Hamas, was responsible, and without any substantive counterevidence, we must go in the direction of the existing evidence unless further substantive evidence changes the picture substantially.)

*(SECOND UPDATE) Since my last update, there have been multiple other independent investigations, most of which admit they can not make a definitive conclusion in the absence of an on-the-ground investigation.  Among the new investigations are ones from the AP and CNN, both of which concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the most likely explanation behind the tragic explosion at the hospital.  The CNN investigation also allowed for the possibility of an IDF artillery round, but found that possibility less likely based on the available evidence.  I personally messaged the serially reliable CNN military analyst, Col. Cedric Leighton USAF (Ret.), to weigh in, and he echoed the CNN investigation in also offering his view that the available evidence strongly favored a misfired Palestinian rocket based on available evidence versus other explanations but also could not rule out an Israeli artillery shell.  The Washington Post’s own investigation corroborated Israel’s and the U.S. assessment that a failed Palestinian rocket was the best explanation.  Following up on its earlier investigation that also found a misfired Palestinian rocket the most likely explanation but cast doubt on details of both the official Palestinian and official Israeli narrative, the UK Channel 4’s more recent investigation found further evidence to discredit what seems to be doctored or altered audio released by Israel that it claimed to be of Hamas operatives and that also cate doubt on Israel’s account of the trajectory of what caused the explosion (likely exposing Israeli hasbara, Israel’s unique brand of information warfare trying to make Israel’s narrative more convincing than the evidence alone would make it).  A New York Times investigation disputed that videos that have been widely cited by other investigations as showing strong evidence that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible actually showed what those other investigators concluded, including the aforementioned; rather, it corroborated some other interpretations that stated the videos do not show a misfired Palestinian rocket, casting the situation into further confusion and intensifying the fog of war.  The UK-based Forensic Architecture presented its analysis conducted with partner organizations that presented seemingly decent analysis discrediting parts of the official Israeli narrative and favoring the theory that an Israeli artillery round caused the blast, but the organization also seemingly presents the problem of anti-Israeli bias in its presentation: it refers to the IDF as “IOF,” which stands for “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Israel Offense Forces,” or “Israel Offensive Forces;” IOF is a pejorative term that some critical of the IDF and Israeli policy towards Palestinians have taken upon themselves to use to replace IDF; I will simply say that I do not find North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and often referred to by the ensuing acronym DPRK, to be either democratic of belonging to the people; to use another Asian example, China’s army is named the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but it is neither liberating anything, nor run by the people; in both cases, I do not invent cute if accurate pejorative terms based on my own views, I use the official terminology because that is how the world works in the realm of journalism and research organization, otherwise we could start renaming everything and retitling anyone based on how we personally feel about them; those that do rename based on personal views more than suggest the presence of bias.  Al Jazeera put forward its own investigation, but it comes off fairly propagandistic: it presents information it claims disproves that a Palestinian rocket was responsible, but it is not convincing or conclusive at all and does not actually provide any evidence it was an Israeli airstrike, not even addressing the issue of crater size.  For its part, Hamas has also not produced any evidence the blast was from an Israeli airstrike or Israeli artillery round.  Greatly adding to the confusion around this incident, there have also been glaring errors made by media outlets throughout this process, with few owning up to their errors and both governments and international organizations not adjusted their narratives to newly revealed facts.  And one independent analyst who has not received proper clarification after reaching out to multiple major outlets may have even exposed that the figure of 500 killed that supposedly came from the Hamas health ministry—a figure later seen as widely non-credible, though numbers coming out of Gaza from all the other violence are generally seen by aid organizations and the United Nations as largely credible—may have no specific confirmation or evidence supporting that such a claim was actually made. After reviewing all of these, my own view—given the preponderance of independent investigations’ conclusions and the indications of “high confidence” U.S. intelligence—is that a failed Palestinian rocket is still the most likely explanation, but I feel less confident in this conclusion given several other investigations that have different interpretations of video analysis and that it seems very likely both Hamas and the IDF are lying about certain aspects of this in addition to no definitive investigation having yet been conducted on the ground; thus, I went from being pretty convinced it was an Israeli airstrike, to being even more convinced it was a failed Palestinian rocket, to still favoring the Palestinian rocket theory with less confidence and more doubt/questions to be answered.

Your not-so-humble author here has little to add to this incredibly inspiring self-sacrifice of the medical staff or the horror of the still-staffed hospital being struck by some weapon to devastating effect.  With the staff, the concept of the Hippocratic Oath taken to such an extreme level will inspire long after this conflict.  The bottom line for the purposes of my article is that, hypothetically speaking, if it was an Israeli strike, such a situation is generally quite avoidable, especially given how large hospital complexes tend to be.  Yet it is far less avoidable with the current Israeli approach.

Their bravery and sacrifice of the medical staff and the helplessness of their patients mean that, despite the crimes of Hamas, these doctors and their patients deserve all the care Israel can take to save them.  Even if this situation was not the result of an Israeli strike—and I am not stating that is the case—the current approaches leave such a possibility wide open, even likely, to still happen.  To this end, 4.) I call on the IDF and other Israeli authorities to reach out directly to the administrators of the hospitals and to try to coordinate delivery of aid to the hospitals and to coordinate if possible the IDF securing the hospitals as safe zones for civilians and patients unable to be safely moved as well as for the medical staff tending to them.  To the degree that Hamas avoids using these hospital as defensive positions or staging areas, there is great opportunity for clear, careful, open coordination avoiding needless loss of life or IDF attacks at these hospitals.

Israel also has to be careful about provocations and incitement against Palestinians by leaders, politicians, settlers, police, soldiers, and perhaps even more normal civilians after such traumatizing events.  This has been a huge problem in Israeli society in recent years, with one of the most complex, top-of-society-to-the-bottom examples being the horrible events in 2014 leading to Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir’s abduction and murder by being beaten and burned to death by Israeli settlers—a “price tag” revenge for the kidnapping and murder by Palestinians of three Israeli teens, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach—so heartbreakingly portrayed in the excellent HBO and Keshet (an Israeli TV station) joint-miniseries titled Our Boys.  The show was so revealing of the toxic and dangerous effects of Netanyahu’s style of politics and the warped ideology of many of his supporters that he even outrageously called the joint-Israeli production “anti-Semitic.”  This incident back in 2014 was part of the runup to the worst Israel-Hamas violence before the current fighting.

Yet there are many examples going back years before and years beyond that prolific one.  These include multiple acts of violence, terrorism, and murder against Palestinians by Israeli settlers acting with sheer impunity in the West Bank, including ambushing and killing a father and a son just days ago who were attending a funeral of four other Palestinians recently murdered by settlers.  Israel’s security forces had already been massively escalating the situation in the West Bank all year with provocative raids and arrests before October 7, too.  Overall, the violence earlier this year hit levels not seen in East Jerusalem and the West Bank—both occupied illegally by Israel from 1967 on—since 2005 and is only exploding further now after Hamas’s October 7 pogrom and Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza: 61 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 1,250 wounded since October 7, destined to get worse especially after the Gaza City hospital horror. 

There are nonviolent issues that drive violence that must also be considered: just the additions to, expansions, and continued presence of illegal-under-international-law Israeli settlements in the West Bank on land that that is supposed to be Palestinian are themselves provocations, with the U.S. condemning Israeli settlement expansion moves multiple times just last month and also earlier this year repeatedly, a year that has seen Netanyahu’s unprecedented right-wing extremist government dramatically accelerate settlement expansion.  The recent eviction of Palestinians from their home in East Jerusalem so they can be replaced with Jews and even some recent displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank—textbook ethnic cleansing on a slow, small progression—also adds to the poisonous atmosphere and the feeling held by Palestinians that they are under constant siege and assault.  

Statements from too many Israelis are also incitement, even lawmakers and senior members of the current government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—previously suspected and convicted, respectively, in Israeli legal cases of terrorism against Palestinians—Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and inciter-in-chief Netanyahu himself.  Such statements can even include denying the very identity of Palestinians as a distinct people and pushing for mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land or can surprisingly even recently come from Israel’s leftist figurehead president Isaac Herzog, and though he later walked back some of his worst remarks, he was clearly thinking what he said at the time. 

Additionally, the focus of Netanyahu’s multiple governments on normalization with Saudi Arabia and others while totally ignoring any political negotiations with the Palestinians, along with his recent predecessor Naftali Bennet pledging his government would literally do nothing to try to make political progress with Palestinians, were in themselves provocations because the clear subtext to Palestinians was that “You don’t matter and we don’t care about your political and nationalist aspirations at all,” an unsustainable illusion given false credence by a Trump-Kushner Abraham Accords that totally ignored Palestinian nationalist aspiration (I will be writing a whole article about this later).  And last but hardly least, the Israelis under Netanyahu’s new government have been provocative throughout the year at one of the holiest sites of Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem’s Old City, including in the days just before the Hamas pogrom on October 7.

Israel needs to put its best foot forward during its Gaza operation in regards to these incitements and provocations, which it is already failing to do, or risk blowback that will see more Israelis and Palestinians get killed and complicate what are already a complicated Gaza offensive and simmering, even now exploding, regional dynamics.

The key measures that must be taken here are that 5.) Israeli leaders must police and reign in officials engaging in hate-speech, the language of anti-Palestinian incitement, or ordering provocative security force deployments or actions at Al-Aqsa while prevent any settlement expansion in the West Bank or ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem during this fighting in Gaza.  And they must not only prevent terrorist settler violence against Palestinians but must also prosecute any settlers guilty of such terrorism against Palestinians.

These first five measures absolutely will help to stem criticisms of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” currently being leveled against Israel’s Gaza campaign, and they are prolific and not without meriting concern given some of the statements coming from Israeli quarters, discussed above (indeed, if the Palestinians leaving northern Gaza are not allowed to ever return, that would be the legal definitions of those accusations, and the damage to Israel for playing into the these legitimate criticisms would be considerable on the world stage).  Blunting such criticism with substantive action would not only be effective public relations and buttress Israel’s campaign against Hamas, it will actually save many innocent lives.

Finally, while there is rightly and emphatically condemnation of Hamas’s abduction of children among the hostages, there is an ugly truth that receives far too little attention: according to Save the Children (full in-depth report here), each year, Israel detains without civilian due process but through military authorities between roughly 500-1000 Palestinian children, most of whom are physically abused in custody, a large portion of whom are denied timely legal assistance access (often interrogated before any assistance), and many of whom are “denied a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves against allegations.”  Human Rights Watch also shows Israeli military authorities handling and detaining the children are regularly abusive and that they are often denied anything resembling an acceptable due process, with the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem showing more detailed figures and that Israeli authorities have not been transparent or forthcoming when it comes to inquiries about detained children. 

From various statements coming from official Israeli spokespeople, the rescue or exchange of the hostages taken by Hamas into Gaza seem to be taking a backseat to the desires of the Israeli government first and foremost to destroy Hamas, and, indeed, those two goals are largely incompatible; thus, it must be said this does not augur terribly well for the survival of the many Hamas hostages.  And while there is a current proposal that was just floated by Hamas offering to release all civilian hostages if Israel ceases airstrikes and would release all military hostages if Israel releases all Palestinian prisoners, this is ambitious and complicated and probably unlikely to be accepted.  Perhaps Israel offering to exchange the most vulnerable and least culpable prisoners in its custody—the children discussed above—in exchange for some or all the hostages in Gaza would put Hamas even more so on the defensive in the international arena for not acting on a legitimate, balanced, serious offer to exchange civilian life for civilian life, to free children and not all prisoners, including clear terrorists, from prison, so my last proposal is that 6.) Israel should offer to release all the children in its custody in exchange for at least the civilians held by Hamas.  It might not work but it doesn’t hurt as far as posturing and could put pressure on Hamas while showing that Israel is willing to explore ways to save hostages beyond military methods.  This would also be appreciated by many members of the Israeli public, who seem anecdotally in many, many interviews and from looking at social media posts of people I don’t know and people I know personally to at least seem to want Israel to prioritize getting the hostages free.

Conclusion: 6 High-Reward, Low-to-Moderate Risk Steps to Benefit Israelis and Palestinians Alike

As America’s Israel-whisperer, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, noted repeatedly and emphatically, if Israel does not take measures like the ones I am suggesting into consideration and just hurtles itself into Gaza with the sole consideration of destroying Hamas rapidly, then it will be playing into the dreams and interests of Iran, Hezbollah, and all who wish Israel ill in the Middle East and beyond.  Getting drawn into a bloodbath in Gaza in which very doable, practical, and eminently possible measures to minimize civilian casualties and keep civilians fed, hydrated, and overflowing hospitals powered up are simply not taken or only minimally implemented is exactly what Iran, Hezbollah, and all of Israel’s enemies want to see or believe Israeli will do.  Like Friedman writes, Israel should be asking itself, “What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?”  How can Israel prove the cynics and haters wrong?  Israel can hope to influence, but cannot control, the actions of other parties, but it can control its own.

The below picture is a of pair of twins who were just born in Gaza after their mother fled Israeli bombardment.  The world they grow up in—if they even survive—will be largely defined by what Israel and other states and factions decide and do in the coming days, weeks, and months.  If the measures I have suggested are adopted, there is a good chance worthy of a big bet that world will be less awful than if they are ignored, that the dynamics driving decades of conflict will be lessoned significantly by Israel in reducing its own contributions to them regardless of what its enemies do or do not do.  By seriously adopting these six measures, Israeli will serve its own interests and see the obstacles to peace weakened, the rays of hope largened and brightened, with a lot more people actually alive to see the improvement over time, not only many Palestinians, but also plenty of Israelis.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) October 31, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Almost by happenstance, I ended up at one of those DC Insider Parties this past weekend, hosted by one prominent scholar and thinker, Shadi Hamid, at the invite of one Ani Chkhikvadze, a journalist.  While the details, shenanigans, and gossip of the conversations had at this private party shall remain sacredly private, I was delighted to have a moment of sheer serendipity when I was reviewing some of the work of the two en route to their party.  Ani had recently tweeted an article she had penned for the Spectator World during a recent sojourn to Kyiv, while Shadi had recently posted to his Twitter an article of his for The Atlantic from 2017.

Unbeknownst to either of the two friends, their two pieces, written half-a-decade apart, synergized on some key themes spectacularly, causing inspiration to erupt deep within me in an almost primal way.  Thus, I highly recommend you read both articles, first Ani’s, then Shadi’s, as together they amplify each other’s messages’ profundity beautifully, before continuing here.

Ani

Chkhikvadze is from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and works for the U.S.’s Voice of America (VOA) .  While in Kyiv, Ani was inspired to put together a piece for another publication, as mentioned.  The result is short, powerful, and struck me to my core.

Early in her article, she described the atmosphere in Kyiv:

Journalists and volunteers, fighters and chancers, people from all walks of life are drawn to a city in the spotlight of history.  Visiting grandees make stops in Irpin and Bucha to see with their own eyes the horrors of Russian occupation.  Foreign fighters mix with Ukrainian soldiers at the train station. Ukrainian flags fly on the balconies, murals of the war cover apartment buildings, barricades and sandbags block entrances to government buildings.  On the streets, you hear English, French, Polish and of course Georgian, my native language.

My immediate reaction (while reading on my small phone screen and unable to see text that came after until I scrolled down) was that this must have been what the spirit and atmosphere were like in Republican Spain, in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War.  And lo and behold, Ani’s very next sentence made the same comparison: “There is, I imagine, something of the feel of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War.”  My heart raced as I came across a writer that, at least on this subject, was a true kindred spirit.

My next thought, naturally, turned to what Orwell might have made of the current situation in Kyiv, and I was certain that the same Orwell who flocked to the Spanish Republican banner would have just as enthusiastically—likely even more so—joined the cause of Ukraine today.  Chkhikvadze then upped the ante on my feeling a sense of connection to her as a fellow writer in her next sentence:

“It is the same in all wars,” George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia.  “The soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”  Those lines ring true today.  Things are clearer cut in Ukraine, but as with Spain in 1936, Ukraine has become a magnet for believers in search of a cause.

I was so eager to read the article I didn’t even notice at first that the title was “Homage to Kyiv,” an obvious homage to Orwell’s work form his time in Spain.  As I kept reading it seemed almost like my writer’s spirit was communicating with Ani’s. 

The rest of Chkhikvadze’s short-but-sweet piece is really inspiring, particularly for those wary and weary of the excess cynicism of our age, even with her dispatch coming out of a Ukraine in the midst of a horrific war in which the Russian military’s killing of defenseless civilians and endless stream of war crimes are constant realities throughout the country.  Because, as Ani notes, something special in history and not felt for some time on this scale is happening there.

Ukrainians know full well this is not simply a defensive war for them against an archaically colonialist and imperialist Russia; it is, more than any major conflict for many years, a war of “freedom over slavery,” democracy against autocracy, good versus evil, fought for Europe and the West against genocidal Russian fascism.  Thus, Ukraine fights not for just itself, but proudly for Western civilization and for the whole world against the most reckless of the major powers of our era, one that is antithetical to notions of freedom and justice and that seeks to destroy the Western-democracy-led post-World War II international order.

Like Gondor against Mordor in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Ukraine is a buffer between us and Russia and its fight against Russia benefits and protects the rest of Europe, the West, the world.  Like Gondor fighting against Mordor, we see a Ukraine that prizes life and the lives of its people fighting against a Russia that is callously careless and barbarically cruel even to its own soldiers, called often by Ukrainians “orcs” in homage to Tolkien’s world (and, in perhaps the most Russian thing ever, two decades ago, a Russian scientist wrote a new version of The Lord of the Rings in which Mordor and its orcs are heroically fighting against the evil Western imperialists, led by a very different Gandalf).

And plenty outside Ukraine also realize this, hence, not only the tremendous international governmental support, but the support of thousands of non-Ukrainians coming to fight as volunteers within the Ukrainian military or to tend to Ukraine’s wounded.

Ani engages in a beautiful exploration of why: 

It’s easy to be cynical and dismiss these people as mere adventurers and war tourists, but there’s something honorable happening here too.

The war in Ukraine has given concepts of humanity, democracy, and freedom genuine meaning at a time when in the West many have become sarcastic about them.  We find it hard to still believe in the idea of inner honor, the sort that makes you die for your friend.

Orwell explained his decision to join the anti-fascist cause with a characteristically simple phrase: “common decency.”  This is what I encountered again and again in Kyiv. Common decency.  A desire to stand alongside these people as they face down the threat of oblivion.  Amid all the misery that Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, that is an encouraging thought.

When Chkhikvadze quoted Orwell—“common decency”—I teared up, overcome by emotion. And I did the same, again, when reviewing this section to write my piece you are reading now.  That Ukraine has brought out within much of the collective West a sense of “humanity, democracy, and freedom”—of the “common decency” in standing up for these things in the face of those who would trample them in pursuit of narrow ideas of imperialistic power exercised over others against their will—and has done so in a way we simply have not felt in any grand sense in a very long time—decades, even—cannot be denied, no matter what the cynics say.

It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies: Gettysburg, when Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20^th Maine Volunteer Infantry, discusses the motivations of himself and his men in fighting the U.S. Civil War: “All of us volunteered to fight for the Union, just as you did.  Some came mainly because we were bored at home, thought this looked like it might be fun.  Some came because we were ashamed not to.  Many of us came because it was the right thing to do.”

It also reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in all of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, when a despairing Frodo asks Sam near the end of The Two Towers, “What are we holding onto, Sam?”  Sam replies: “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

Shadi

While Shadi’s piece, though written five years before Putin’s current major escalation of the war in Ukraine, did not make me tear up, it is also deeply relevant to this aspect of the Ukraine war in ways similar to Ani’s even if his does not discuss Ukraine at all.

His piece is titled “The Political Thrill of Having an Enemy.”  Shadi—a scholar at The Brookings Institution—opens by writing: “I didn’t have a cause to die for.”  But many of the Egyptians he talked to during the Arab Spring and after, including to a Muslim Brotherhood member who had been imprisoned in Egypt, felt they had a transcendent cause in standing up to what they viewed as unjust governments supported by an unjust international system propping up those governments.  “I want to break the international order,” the man told Hamid. “No matter how hard it is, this is the goal I want.  That’s what I’m living for, even if I die in the process of fighting for it…Why am I entering this conflict?  Not because of this life but because of the next.”

Hamid notes that, when witnessing in person back in 2011 the initial joy in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the early, heady days of the Arab Spring in Egypt, he was “almost feeling a certain envy” of their joy in this moment of history, which was theirs and apart from him; he writes: “I wondered what it would feel like to be part of a revolution, to be denied freedom your entire life and then to feel even a whiff of it.”  He considers that it is often in stable Western societies where “boredom” permeates politics: nothing too threatening, nothing too existential is coming from the government.  This is a boredom, he notes, that is foreign to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members suffering from or fleeing the murderous persecution of General Sisi’s Egyptian dictatorship.  Shadi deftly quotes Andrew Sullivan to note that an authoritarian dictatorship can seem like an omnipresence that overwhelms you on a daily basis, invading your very psyche.

For Americans, this means that, in the era of Trump, many were experiencing something akin (but obviously not fully) to the non-boredom the Egyptians talking to Hamid described; the oppression and anxiety felt generated a level of excitement and purpose to life—at least political life—that has been generally absent in large proportional quantities in the West in recent decades.  Some even wanted Trump to win for thrill of the chaos he would create, apart from his politics or agenda.  Channeling Fukuyama, Hamid asks us to consider if the end of ideological competition would always only be temporary because without such competition, public intellectual and political life seems far less interesting, and that people would foster some new ideological conflict just to make things exciting again.

Next, Shadi references the late, great Christopher Hitchens as one of the prolific romantics of our era, who clearly felt a constant desire to be connected to humanity through one great struggle or another, to stand up to some great evil, in a way that defined much of who he was in life as both a writer and a person.  Hamid quotes a reviewer of one of Hitchens’ last books published before his death from cancer at the end of 2011 to put out the idea that people like Hitchens replace God with themselves, but I’d like to think they replace God with a humanist cause.

Near the end of his piece, Hamid pens the following phrase that is also the article’s lede: “Knowing what you’re against has a way of clarifying the mind and sharpening the focus.”  He concludes his entire piece with the following: “Being in a constant state of alarm, wanting to be alarmed, can be unusually thrilling.”

While Shadi is right, Ani’s piece makes me think how much better it is to be feeling just as strong that you are for something, not just for destroying or stopping another thing, but really for something in a positive sense.  America fought two significant wars in recent decades against the brutal Taliban in Afghanistan and against Saddam Hussein’s brutal Iraqi regime, its remnants, and other brutal terrorists in Iraq, whether al-Qaeda, ISIS and its precursor, or other sectarian elements.  But for much of those sad conflicts, it was hard to feel much passion for a lot of what we were fighting for: an inept, terribly corrupt Afghan government, not much good at fighting without U.S. support?  A weak Iraqi government riven by sectarianism?

Like Shadi’s article, Ani’s piece certainly makes us aware than an enemy like Russia can inspire unity.  But what is the even more powerful takeaway from her eloquent discussion, what is exponentially more inspiring and unifying is a Ukraine fighting against an enemy like Russia.  Some say “Putin united the West.”  I prefer to think, even more so, that Ukraine did.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 20, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 20th, 2018 (republished in slightly edited form on the English version of Al Bawaba News on June 20th, 2018, and by The Muslim Times on June 20th)

AFP/Getty Images

AMMAN — Recent protests have led some analysts to characterize Jordan as weak and going through destabilization. Instead, Jordan has pretty much schooled the entire Middle East (and, indeed, many other places) on protests, civic engagement, and how government can and should respond to both. Rather than produce fear and apprehension in the eyes of analysts and other observers, Jordan and Jordanians have rightfully earned a tremendous amount of respect, whether or not those that should show this respect realize this.

Longstanding Grievances Flowing Together

Something remarkable has happened—is happening—in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the past few weeks. The small but relatively very stable country has seen a confluence of several trends and grievances that have spilled over—erupted would be rather too strong—into a flowering of national protest.

One long-running trend in for Jordan is that it has been a dumping ground for refugees from various regional conflicts for years now (really decades, but especially of late). The majority of today’s Jordanians are Palestinian refugees from the wars with Israel and those refugees’ descendants. A decade ago, Jordan was hosting from around 700,000, perhaps as many as a million, Iraqi refugees. Today, there are some 1.4 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, including informal, unregistered refugees, comprising roughly 20 percent of the small Kingdom’s total population. The Syrian refugee influx, in particular, has had serious negative economic consequences for Jordan, especially in terms of soaring rent increases, food price increases, and increased youth unemployment, with Syrian refugees costing Jordan some six percent of its GDP, or about one-quarter of Jordan’s yearly governmental revenue, roughly $2.5 billion a year according to a 2016 World Bank report.

Many Jordanians see the conflicts driving these refugees to Jordan as being driven and orchestrated by the U.S. (conspiratorially, so much so that, after four years in Jordan, I have yet to hear a Jordanian that blames the American people, whom they usually see as pawns being manipulated by elites, and many do not even blame Trump, Obama, Bush, or other past presidents, seeing them as puppets of a mysterious international cabal) and Saudi Arabia.

With recent Saudi comments and moves indicating an informal alliance of common interests between Saudi Arabia and Israel, many in Jordan (especially Palestinian) see the Saudis as selling out to Israel, and feelings towards Saudi Arabia in Jordan are far from warm.

Indeed, there is a perception among many Arabs that there is an emerging U.S.-Israeli-Saudi axis that is throwing the Palestinians under the proverbial bus. And it was in this context that Donald Trump threw more gas onto the fire when he announced in early December, 2017, that he would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, breaking decades of official U.S. neutrality on the subject (both Israelis and Palestinians claims Jerusalem as their capital) and prejudicing the Israeli side in any future negotiations. After the first Friday noon prayers (the Muslim equivalent of Christian Sunday mass) at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Islam’s third holiest site after Mecca and Medina) after Trump’s announcement, worshippers, of course, vented anger at Israel and the U.S., but were also very vocal in blaming Saudi Arabia, too, for seeming to at least tacitly support the U.S. decision behind the scenes. Saudi Arabia is also a driving force behind the rebellion against Assad, particularly in its support of Sunni rebel militias challenging his rule, and yet, Saudi Arabia has not taken in a single official Syrian refugee, content to let Jordan and others shoulder that burden despite the Saudis intense involvement in Syria.

That same Friday, this led to massive (but peaceful) protests in Amman, witnessed by yours truly. 

Protests were hardly limited to Jerusalem, Amman, or Jordan.

In particular, protests have been organized mainly by Hamas in Gaza—under an Israeli semi-siege for over a decade—since late March, protests in which many thousands of Palestinians have approached, and even rushed, Gaza’s militarized border manned by Israel. While the vast majority of these protesters, including women and children, have not been armed, many have still thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, as well as rolled burning tires towards them and sent kites with burning material attached over Gaza’s border with Israel in an attempt to start fires on the Israeli side. No Israeli soldiers have been killed or wounded by these actions, but Israeli gunfire against the protesters have killed over 120 Palestinians and wounded another 3,800 more in actions much of the rest of the world calls disproportionate.

Many Jordanians, even those not of Palestinian descent, feel an intense emotional connection to their fellow Arabs—often kin—living across the Jordan river under some form of Israeli control. Thus, is has been very difficult these past few months for them to accept Trump’s decision and to witness the violence from the Israeli army in Gaza meted out on the protesters.

The bloodiest day was the day of the official move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a day in which at least 58 people were killed and several thousand more injured.

The move was officially made on May 14th of this year, on the Western calendar reckoning of Israeli’s Independence Day, in this case the 70th anniversary the end of the British Mandate and the declaration of Israel as a state, an event Palestinians remember as al-Nabka, the Catastrophe, in which some 700,000 Arab Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during a conflict in which the Jewish state of Israel was established on most of British Mandate Palestine, an area which had been majority Arab for many centuries. The embassy move in 2018 came just two days before the holy month of Ramadan began, a month of intense day-long fasting, reflection, and spirituality. But with this Ramadan coming right after U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the bloody Gaza protests, and the relocation of America’s embassy to disputed Jerusalem, from a Palestinian-centered standpoint (a view shared by an overwhelming majority of Jordanians, whether they have Palestinian blood in them or not), this was a Ramadan with all too much that was unpleasant left to linger in the minds of Jordanians as they engaged in deep reflection.

Tone-Deaf Policies Lead to a Chorus of Protests

In the months leading up to this, there was another form of violence occupying the minds of Jordanians besides the violence in Gaza: the assault of steady price increases throughout 2018. The year began in January with a series of tax increases in January, first increasing sales tax and taxes on a range of goods, including cigarettes (extremely popular in Jordan: Jordan has the 8th-highest smoking rate in the world), with the first major decrease in bread subsidies since 1996 announced shortly after, leading to the main staple bread in Jordan going up in price by 60%. The move sparked unrest back in 1996, and the deeply unpopular moves to start this year were also met with some protests. Early in 2018, Jordanians in general were estimated to have to increase spending by 10-15 percent just to maintain their current living standards after these changes.

A least a proposed tax increase on medicines that month was canceled after over half of the parliament voiced disapproval, though.

But more pain was to come.

While in February, Jordan raised the minimum wage, a tax increase was levied that month on non-essential goods and the government also raised taxes on cigarettes again and on widely-consumed soft drinks and telecom services, including mobile phone plans and credit used by virtually everyone. There were further increases in electricity in March (sparking some protests) and also in April, and in In May, it was more increases, a minor one in fuel and an over 13 percent increase in electricity costs.

While in these months, the increases in electricity excluded households that consumed lower amounts of electricity, that exemption was absent for an announced whopping 23.5 percent increase in electricity prices for June that was also accompanied by a smaller fuel price increase.

The series of price increases and proposed tax increases were in part a result of an agreement made between the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) and the Jordanian government. Despite a lot of ignorance and conspiracy theories about what the IMF is and what it does, it is not simply a tool of U.S. control and “neoliberal” “imperialism” designed to keep countries like Jordan poor and weak, though, as with so many things in this region, it is easy to understand why such misperceptions and conspiracy theories flourish. In reality, the IMF is a global financial institution that is part of the United Nations group of institutions and is somewhat economically proportionately dominated by the wealthiest nations with the biggest economies and that contribute the most to the IMF’s fund. The U.S., as the largest contributor and world’s largest economy, has by far the largest voting share (less than 17 percent) in the IMF, and, to be sure, it wields a lot of influence in the institution beyond that voting share, but the point to recognize here is that the IMF is a broad international financial institution that generally reflects the collective will of the world’s largest economies, and if they decide to provide financial assistance to other countries, like any loaner, they have a right to attach conditions to those nations who want their money. At the same time, the agreement for a $723 million IMF loan between Jordan and the IMF—reached back in 2016—seems to have clearly overestimated Jordan’s capability to enact reforms at the desired pace and significantly underestimated the continuing problems posed by the refugee crisis and other maladies plaguing Jordan, and that should have been clear to both sides when the agreement was made.

Even before June’s price increases were announced, on May 22nd, a major proposed income tax law overhaul designed to keep pace with agreed-to IMF reforms was approved by the Cabinet, to be sent to and debated by the parliament. This tax law would have greatly increased the corporate tax rates, empowered tax collection capabilities to deal with tax evasion, and doubled the income tax base (only 4 percent of Jordanians currently pay income tax).

By May 30th, Jordanian civil society had organized a massive general strike of the professional middle class: doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, pharmacists, journalists, and others, along with some of the key related professional organizations and unions. Other Jordanians, in particular youth, joined the protests. 

A tone-deaf government then announced the aforementioned June major price hikes the following day, the day before Friday prayers and during Ramadan, no less, when fasting and reflective moods would only contribute to the agitation felt by the new policy proposals after many months of steady increases. In fact, one could not think of a much worse time than on a Thursday during Ramadan, the day before main Friday noon prayers—the traditional time to go through with major protests in the Muslim world—and coming so soon after the Jerusalem-Gaza drama that affected so many Jordanians so deeply on an emotional level.

These Jordanians may not have been able to stop violence in Gaza or reverse Trump’s Jerusalem decision, but they were not going to look at these latest government tax increases and price hikes with the same spirit of frustrated (if rage-filled) resignation. Unlike Donald Trump and Israel, Jordanians would expect their government to listen, and they would be sure to make sure their government heard their voices loud and clear.

The same day as the announcement, and just one day after the civil-society-orchestrated general strike against the tax law, a far more spontaneous series of mass protests broke out throughout Jordan against the utility price increases specifically and in general against the overall price/tax increases. As noted, the timing all but guaranteed mass protests on Friday, after noon prayers. Seeing the mass public outcry, later that day King Abdullah II froze the just-announced price hikes, responding swiftly to what was clearly widespread public pushback against them.

Yet the protests did not diminish, not Friday night, not throughout the weekend. If anything, they grew and intensified around the country. No one-off temporary freeze on price hikes would suffice: the people were focused wanted an indication of deeper change, also taking up the cause of the earlier civil society protests against the changes to the income tax law; if anything, the two seemingly separate protests had clearly merged into one nation-wide movement.

These were the most intense protests in Jordan focused on domestic policy since the 2011-2012 “hirak” protests over a range of issues that were concurrent with the heyday of the Arab Spring, then fluctuating between price (especially gas) increases and tribal and Islamist issues, peaking in early 2011 and late 2012, with a few notable flare-ups in violence that were still ultimately minimal, especially considering the regional context.

Arab Spring 2.0?

Unlike the wider Arab Spring protests, despite some exceptions the overwhelming focus of the 2011-2012 protests were not overthrowing the government but on calling for action on specific policies. Those protests were more sporadic and less representative of the overall population that the recent protests that just took place, which had a very unified, mass-participatory character that transcended what happened before even as Jordanian protesters and civil society organizations built upon what happened back then.

In fact, Jordanians in the past few weeks seemed largely committed to avoiding the mistakes of the larger Arab Spring with these latest protests, almost as if they had studied them in detail and took away specific lessons of what not to do, making clear their peaceful intentions and enthusiastically waving abundant Jordanian flags. The same could be said of both government leaders and security forces. If 2011-2012 could really be seen as a major emergence of civil society, even a birth (or rebirth?) of it in Jordan, then 2018 can be said to be Jordanian civil society’s coming of age, perhaps even an Arab Spring 2.0 that can avoid much of the tragedy of the first iteration.

As the 2018 protests continued into the following week, on Monday the King sacked Prime Minister Hani Mulki, who had stood by seeing the bill through to a parliamentary debate and had thus drawn the ire of protesters. But still the protests continued.  So the King appointed reform-minded, liberally-inclined Omar Razzaz as the new prime minister, who had been a supporter of civil society and had also held a significant position at the World Bank and was thus poised to be able to balance the competing interests in question. Yet still the protests continued, and for several days, until Razzaz promised to withdraw the income tax law. He promised dialogue and an unprecedented, robust engagement with civil society. The King himself directed that such an approach be undertaken, too, so it seems clear that Razzaz will have support from the highest levels of the Jordanian system.

It truly seems as if the people and civil society have won: by all indications since Razzaz took over, the government will take into account input from the people and civil society, especially on reforming the tax law, and it seems highly unlikely that the same attempted price hikes will be tried again to that degree anytime soon, as the people made clear they were able to organize quickly and sustain their pressure if only cosmetic adjustments were made. Thus, after the eighth day of what were almost entirely peaceful protests, after it was announced the tax law changes would be tabled, the protests basically ended on Thursday, June 7th, one of their epicenters in Amman’s Fourth Circle near the Prime Ministry with a far smaller group of young people celebrating their achievement that evening, replacing the protesting crowds of earlier, far tenser nights.

In fact, things seem to be coming together nicely for Jordan: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait just pledged some $2.5 billion in aid to Jordan, the EU has indicated that it will keep supporting Jordan economically, and Jordan has indicated it will push the IMF for a slowdown in the reform plan. Together, these three things could really alleviate the strain of the increasing economic burdens on Jordan’s weary population.

It is probably safe to say that, when the civil society-organized strike began on Wednesday, May 30th, that nobody imagined that things would be where they are now. In a region—heck, a world—starved of positive political developments and hope, this series of events in underappreciated Jordan is nothing short of remarkable.

*****

A Model the Cynics and Extremists Can’t Easily Dismiss

In the end, Jordan—its people, its civil society, its security forces, its government, and the King—all faced a series of challenges in the past week and then some; all overall conducted themselves in a deliberative, focused, organized, respectful, restrained way. The preceding adjectives are basically impossible use if you are trying to describe the angry hordes of protesters and activists, both right and left, that seem to monopolize protest scenes in the West and many other places of late, as well as both traditional and social media and can, therefore and unfortunately, be more effectively described as ineffective mobs content to do what satisfies their emotional needs as opposed to doing anything that might even be remotely described as helping to bring about effective change. 

This was not a group of radicals hijacking a disciplined civil society movement, as has happened far too often in history.

This was no amorphous Occupy rabble, no Tea Party mob, no Women’s March asserting their collective identity as a gender against a misogynistic president but not having any overwhelmingly clear aims.

This was not a Tahrir Square crowd vaguely demanding unspecified massive change or a whole new government, and this was certainly not a mass of Palestinians calling for a total reversal of the entire status quo.

No, this was a disciplined, focused, restrained coming together of civil society, the middle class, and the working class. 

It was the population of Jordan speaking out more or less in one clear voice, about clear specific desires on specific issues.

And this is a model the whole world can learn from, as much of it seems to have forgotten that this is how change happens: incrementally, with discipline, organization, patience, and non-violence.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

As opposed to weapons, Molotov cocktails, or rocks, protesters chanted peaceful slogans and even handed refreshments to security forces, and the security forces returned the favor. Only very small numbers on either side were looking for trouble: the rest were looking to make a difference and/or keep things peaceful. There was respect all around here in Jordan over the past few weeks, between protesters and security forces, between the people and government, between civil society and both the people and the government.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

That’s right: tiny little Jordan has just schooled the world as how to mount an effective protest movement that leverages civil society to bring about meaningful change, bringing the people and the government closer together in their positions on specific policies.

What is remarkable is that so few people either here in Jordan or in the international media seem to understand what has happened, and how urgently this needs to be celebrated and respected and—most importantly—copied.

In the end, a reformer who is perfect for this moment now leads Jordan’s parliament, the two major problems—the tax law amendments and the price hikes that were the focus of protesters—will not proceed as originally planned, civil society showed it is now truly a force to be reckoned with in Jordanian politics, the government showed its people and the world it is ready to listen and respond to the people, and the people showed all would-be protesters how to get the job done.

If you’re Jordanian, you can hold your head up high after a truly special week in Jordan’s history. And if you’re not Jordanian, swivel that head to pay attention to Jordan, and be sure to take notes.

See a related article by the same author in Venture Magzine: Relief and Development: Ending the Zero-Sum Myth

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg in an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. The views expressed here necessarily represent only his own, not necessarily the views of any organization with which he has been, or is currently, associated. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 10, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 10th, 2017

NBC News

AMMAN — In banana republics, in increasingly-dictatorish dictatorships like Egypt, when someone challenges the Dear Leader, they are removed from power. When the dictator feels far more powerful, like Kim Jong-Un in North Korea, that person may be executed with an anti-aircraft gun.

If liberals smug in their “accomplishments” in their marches (I’ve lost track of how many disparate marches there are) think they and the nation are winning against Trump now, it’s time for them to wake the *&^% up, put aside their “boutique issues,” and unite behind the Democratic Party (for all its imperfections), which is the only entity in the here and now able to stand up to Trump besides the bureaucracy within the government (a government that is clearly intent on and is in the process of carrying out a purge of that bureaucracy), before we succumb to what I label democratic fascism.

Liberals and America are not winning. Every temporary win is at the mercy of the presidents’ whims; the Muslim ban? Trump will have plenty of time to appoint new judges to do his bidding and an unusually high number of them. Flynn out? Trump is already souring on McMaster, his replacement, one of the few “adults in the room” in the “axis of adults” that non-Trump supporters desperately try to tell themselves and the public will moderate/are moderating the “madness of King Donald” (and remember, as quickly as Trump “moderated” on any particular issue, he can just as quickly un-moderate). Senate Republicans have zero women working on health reform after the House’s passage of Trump/Ryancare. What does the women’s march mean when women’s health services are gutted, when judges are appointed that will take away women’s access and ability to decide on how to handle their own pregnancies? And Trump and the unhinged überpartisan Republicans will now be able to appoint an FBI director (Giuliani? Christie?) who will, in effect, bury the FBI’s investigation into ties between Trump and Russia and the 2016 election.

To quote Gen. Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA chief, “I’m trying to avoid the conclusion that we’ve become Nicaragua;” to quote Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s all-star legal analyst, “this is not normal;” and to quote Bill Maher, to those of you who though Hillary Clinton was merely the lesser of two evils, “go &^%$ yourselves,” because we now have the worst threat to our system of government, to the survival of our republic as a republic, since the days of Nixon, mainly because you couldn’t bring yourselves to support a candidate who was easily closer to your politics and beliefs and instead saw that a serial-lying narcissistic monster of a man-child was installed in the White House after only winning 46.1% of the vote in what was a de-facto two person race, since far too many of you threw your votes away on non-Clinton non-Trump votes.

In fact, the only times anything like this Comey firing has happened with a president was during Nixon’s presidency, during the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired the special prosecutor—Archibald Cox—investigating the Watergate scandal, and arguably when Andrew Jackson—Trump’s apparent historical idol—ignored the Supreme Court when it came to removing Native American tribes from America’s Southeast. In Nixon’s time, significant numbers of Republicans put country over party and helped to lead the fight against Nixon’s abuse of both office and power. 

Does ANYONE not drinking GOP Kool-Aid think that today’s farcical Republicans will do the same? Whether the “Benghazi” (really Clinton e-mail) “investigation” (really witch hunt) or the recent Russia hearings where the vast majority of Republicans focused on leaks and unmasking, it’s clear that, no, Republicans in Congress will not put country over party, even when it comes to vital issues of national security. Even as I write this, I am seeing Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defend Trump’s firing of Comey using hackneyed partisan talking points that ignore the current context. I fully expect Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to do the same thing, and I expect the same as well from the vast majority of Congressional Republicans or at least expect their reactions to be far from condemnation, and so far, this has clearly been the case.

If you read Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s letter about Comey’s firing, you’d think that Trump fired Comey because of his unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton during the e-mail/server investigation, treatment of which I wrote about repeatedly before the election and which, all things being equal, seems to have cost her the election (not that other factors did not also play into the loss). So, yes, objectively, Comey should have been fired, but fired by Obama long ago, and yet, this would have looked so unseemly for Obama, Clinton, and the Democrats, and been such political suicide for Obama, that that was never really an option. Long after these events in question, Trump apparently expects us to believe that those reasons related to the handling of the e-mail/server investigation are why he fired Comey.

Nothing could be more absurd or further from the truth. 

There are three real reasons for why Trump fired Comey: Russia, Russia, and Russia (and a fourth: Trump feeling he could not control Comey). And Trump made it clear that the investigation of both Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian election interference (cyberwar!)was at the center of his concerns when he mentioned that investigation in his own letter firing Comey.

It is fitting that Trump included what is virtually certainly a lie—that Comey thrice told Trump that Trump was not under investigation—in his own letter; still, I don’t believe nearly enough people are paying close attention; rather, I believe this is how democracy dies. So soon after Star Wars day, Trump is showing his authoritarian Emperor Palpatine colors faster than some would have anticipated.

Oh, and all this is the same day (just hours after!) that federal grand jury subpoenas went out in relation to the Russia investigation, just days after Comey had requested more resources to conduct his Russia investigation, just one day after Sally Yates’s testimony in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee had made it clear she was fired just days after she had warned the White House about Gen. Flynn being compromised by Russia, and with Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who had pledged to recuse himself from all Russia/election 2016-related matters because of his own misconduct—acting to help remove Comey, who had been leading the Russia investigation, despite Sessions’ vow of recusal.

This is where we are now, and this is the first truly tipping-point moment in Trump’s presidency: many years from now, historians will look at this moment and look at how the people and their elected political leaders reacted, in particular the leaders of the Republican Party now (especially in the Senate) and the American people when they get to weigh in during the 2018 midterms. If we don’t handle this appropriately, this moment will likely be seen as a moment when the system failed and a lurch toward tyranny happened; even if that lurch doesn’t put us firmly in the realm of tyranny and authoritarianism, it will be a tall task to lurch back in the right direction and it will put us ever closer to even more dangerous tyrannies that may yet be self-inflicted upon our body politic.

The ancient Roman Republic lasted far longer than America’s republic has thus far lasted; looking at its example of the erosion of democratic (small “d”) republican (small “r”) institutions and their eventual collapse, once centuries-long precedents were broken, the ensuing consequences proved fatal for a system that had been stable for longer than America has existed as a nation; this should all give us pause as we wait and see if, or to what degree, the United States has descended/will descend to the level of a banana republic under President Trump, his Administration, and with the help of his supporters, enablers and voters.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles:

Trump & GOP Destroying the Pillars of Democracy

The Trump-Russia-Mob Connections Details You Won’t Find Anywhere Else

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

If people thought 2015 was bad, 2016 shows no sign of letting on up on risk.  The Middle East, China, Europe, Central Africa, even the United States will all raise serious questions about risk in 2016.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 7, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 7th, 2016 (Altered version posted on Global Risk Insights January 26th)

?

AMMAN — The year 2016 will pose a number of major risks for the international community, and many of these risks were already major issues in 2015.  Not only typically high-risk areas like the Middle East and Africa are highlighted, but also China, Europe, and America.  Here are five of the largest ones that will be headlining the news throughout the year.

1.) Middle East Morass

Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune

The greater-Middle East will continue to present a number of challenges to the world in 2016.  While the situation with Iran moving towards de-escalation over nuclear tensions and a lifting of sanctions that could happen as early as January is indeed welcome, there is little else occurring in the region that is reassuring.  The general Sunni-Shiite divide will continue to present problems.  Though ISIS has been gradually pushed back throughout the year and lost some territory in Iraq (including, most recently, Ramadi) and Syria, there is no guarantee that ISIS will not be able to retake what it just lost as the dynamics in its spheres of operations are incredibly complicated.  There is reason to fear that Russia’s recent foray into Syria will continue to bolster Assad’s brutal regime and make things worse for non-ISIS rebels as well as Syrian civilians, all while having at best a minimal effect on ISIS itself; Putin has not shown any indication as of yet that he will be changing what Russia’s military forces are doing there. 

Not much will come out of Turkey’s shooting-down of a Russian military jet that will have larger effects beyond either country, except that both Putin and Erdoğan will be able to use this to bolster their support at home.  With Turkey having long been an example of secular democracy of a sort in the Middle East, the world can only disappointingly expect the recently further empowered Erdoğan to continue his country’s march towards increasingly Islamic and authoritarian single-party rule (he just recently cited Hitler’s Germany as an “effective” political system) as well as conflict escalation with Turkey’s own and the region’s Kurds.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also seems set to continue his country’s slower march to eroding liberal democratic values in favor of more theocratic, Jewish-ethnocentric laws, practices, and regulations while simultaneously provoking Palestinians into higher-levels of violence with increased settlement building and occupation coupled with no serious attempt to engage with Palestinians on a two-state solution.  This, in turn, will eventually provoke more serious military responses from Israel, which will only further empower extremists like Hamas or worse at the expense of the apparently crumbling Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, in turn only further empowering Israeli extremists.  As if also reading from a similar card, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seems set on pursuing a path of oppression against Islamists which will only see further violence and escalation in an already escalating mini-insurgency of sorts.  Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was cut in the same vein as these leaders, but thankfully the Obama Administration, Iraqi Shiites, and even Iran all worked together to nudge him aside in favor of the far less sectarian Dr. Haider al-Abadi in 2014.  The retaking of Ramadi—without civilian-casualty-intensive tactics—by Iraq is a significant victory for Abadi’s government, but it remains to be seen if this success is one that can be maintained and to what degree if any Abadi’s situation stabilizes enough for the Iraqi government to make any further gains, let alone prevent fresh losses, though as of now the trends are positive, and Ramadi could be a sign that Obama’s strategy for dealing with ISIS is beginning to pay off; only time will tell and the most difficult fights are yet to come either way. 

Jordan and Lebanon have done a surprisingly good job of holding togetherunder the enormous pressures refugees have been exerting on their state systems, but there is no guarantee 2016 will not produce a tipping point or points for either or both of these smaller states.  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and its coalition seem capable only of mismanagement in their Yemen war, where they have been careless in inflicting civilian casualties, while Libya, too, remains problematic and is now having to deal with a growing ISIS presence in its territory.  And refugees keep pouring not only into places like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, but also, now, into Europe.  Which brings the reader to the next big risk issue for 2016…

2.) Big tests for Europe’s Union

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

While talk of the European Union’s demise is incredibly premature, 2016 opens with the EU facing several challenging trends, and its response to them could well define it for years, perhaps decades.  The welfare-state system as it now exists has shown itself to be unsustainable and there are more than a few ailing economies that present problems for the whole Union, Greece, of course, being the worst but not the only economic thorn in the EU’s side. 

Just these economic problems alone would be an enormous challenge, but, unfortunately for the EU, it is also facing several other crises.  The influx of refugees into Europe, including many Syrians, comes at the worst possible time.  Before this new wave of refugees, Europe was already seeing a rightward tilt politically speaking; a smattering of terrorist incidents in 2015, which peaked with the spectacular attacks in Paris this November, have only naturally added a large dousing of fuel to the right’s fire of anti-immigrant demagoguery.  Unsurprisingly, the tinder of anti-immigrant sentiment and fears of terrorism have created quite the pyre for rightists to illuminate themselves attractively to European voters, and all over Europe right-wing parties are gaining significant power or are even coming to lead governments.  This is making it exceedingly difficult for the European Union to come up with any sort of a coherent policy on refugee migrants, and when leaders and governments try to accept more refugees, the political cost is a zero-sum one that penalizes them and rewards the right-wing parties with more public support (and this from the continent that has been the banner carrier for liberal values for some time). 

If all this was not enough, voters in key EU economic trouble spots like Greece, Spain, and Portugal seem to be rejecting the EU’s economic prescriptions and a degree of political chaos is ensuing.  If the EU cannot collectively create and enforce policies on major issues like refugees and the economy, and if its efforts to do so are soundly rejected by voters in key EU nations, 2016 will likely raise serious questions about what the EU actually is and what it wants to be in the future.  However, political chaos is hardly limited to the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean…

3.) America’s semi-chaotic election year

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Between Europe and America, Democratic systems are hardly playing their A-game these days.  The rise of Donald Trump and the more unhinged wing of the Republican Party supporting the likes of him and obstructionist (and demonstrable charlatan) Ted Cruz (a first-time senator largely responsible for the 2013 government shutdown who has caused much political chaos and has no serious legislative accomplishments under his belt), as well as Dr. Ben Carson (a medical doctor with no relevant political experience or expertise), have made this political race the most unpredictable in recent memory.  Many accuse Trump of being racist and bigoted, but a more astute observer would look at similar politicians in Europe and see that he is playing a very smart game, leveraging Americans’ inflated fears about both terrorism and immigration to channel populist angst and ride that wave for all it is worth.  Sadly, this is as American as apple pie; even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a champion of liberal values and the architect of victory over both the depression and the Axis powers in WWII, interned well over 100,000 residents and citizens of Japanese descent; Trump even cited this action of FDR’s as a precedent. 

Such outside the system wild-cards like Trump, Cruz, and Carson looking more and more likely to become the Republican Party’s nominee for the president of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy is hardly a reassuring thing for the rest of the world.  Many Americans seem to have always naturally had a disdain for the political class throughout American history, but this election cycle may see the most dramatic materialization of this trend in American history.  Though likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton seems quite likely to defeat such a challenge, nothing is certain in American politics these days, and the unraveling of one of America’s two political parties cannot be shrugged off; even if Clinton were to win, America’s two-party system does not function when both parties are roughly the same size and one is not interested in governing (just ask Barack Obama).  What this means for the global economy and for international relations is one huge question mark of political risk.

4.) Asian economic woes

Reuters/VOA

The slowing of the Chinese economic juggernaut to its lowest officially announced growth since early 2009 was a big surprise in 2015; perhaps less surprising was Japan coming very close to entering a recession in the third quarter of this year (only escaping this label after revised numbers were released), struggling with an ageing population and low birthrate.  How the two economic giants of East Asia (and two largest economies in the world after the U.S.) tackle their economic challenges—or fail to do so—will be big narratives for the year 2016.  While nothing catastrophic is expected to happen in terms of Japan, if there is little good news coming out of that nation in 2016, that will not help the rest of the world deal with its economic funk.  China, though, is of larger concern: if things were to get dramatically worse, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has already had a difficult time dealing with public unrest from democracy-oriented mass protests in Hong Kong to worker dissatisfaction to Muslim Uighur unrest in Xinjiang will have a tough time keeping order with a Chinese public that has grown to be bolder and more frequent in voicing dissatisfaction with the government over the past few years.  There have already been tremendous ripple effects from China’s economic downturn, not the least of which is contributing to the falling price of oil since China’s enormous demand for that energy source has weakened along with its economy, but if China’s stability were to even remotely become an issue, investors and markets around the world would react far more negatively than they already have.  CCP officials have done a fine job of transitioning China from the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s to the wild success of its economy over the past few decades, so there is some reason to hope for a competent response; at the same time, that this is happening at all suggests CCP leaders are not so sure about how to manage this crisis, and it remains to be seen if 2016 will see the situation improve or become even worse.  And, of course, there are the concerns over the how various territorial disputes with other Asian nations and with Taiwan could factor into a politically less stable environment….

2016 has already started off very badly for China; just today, China halted stock trading for the day (for the second time this week!) as Chinese stocks fell more than 7% in just 29 minutes.

5.) Recipe for conflict in Africa’s Great Lakes region

REUTERS/Jean Pierre Aime Harerimana

If Rwanda’s internal ethnic problems served as a catalyst for the series of conflicts known as Africa’s World War (the deadliest conflict in the world since WWII and one that is still ongoing), current problems that are spiraling rapidly out of control in Burundi threaten to plunge the region into conflict again.  In Rwanda in 1994, that country’s Tutsi minority was almost wiped out in a genocide carried out by the majority Hutus.  The government that came to power in the subsequent revolution led by Paul Kagame was one of Tutsis, and Kagame is still in power now.  He has shown a willingness to aggressively project Rwandan military power outside of his own borders, and the UN even accused his forces of possibly committing a countergenocide against Hutus.  Kagame successfully changed his system be able to keep himself in power after pledging he would step down, something Burundi’s Hutu President Pierre Nkurunziza did by running for, and winning in July, a third term in violation of that country’s constitution.  When protests erupted in Burundi in response, the government began a crackdown that just this December began to look a lot like Tutsis were being targeted.  Burundi’s military is led by both Hutus and Tutsi officers, but recently Tutsi officers have been forming rebel groups and the president has been pushing Tutsi officers out of major positions of power or has sidelined them from more important missions.  Tensions are already rising between Burundi and Rwanda, and if Burundi erupts into civil war, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda may find themselves sucked in in one way or another, and the simmering but quieting Congo conflict, involving Hutus and Tutsis in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, could also flare back up as well.  Ethnic conflict and hatred could well embroil this region again if events continue on their current trajectories.

*****

There are certainly other trends to watch in 2016, but these are very likely to dominate headlines for quite some time in the new year.  Only time will tell if these trends will improve or get worse, but for now, there are appropriately-high degrees of concern and worry about these trends.

Related article: 2015 Year in Risk Review: Risky Business

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Just because Obama’s ISIS, counterterrorism, and Middle East strategy is complex and will not fit on a bumper-sticker or in a soundbite does not mean it is not a good one, and a bit of time trying to understand it will reveal that Republicans criticizing Obama’s strategy are dangerously unfit for office, as their alternatives betray a total lack of understanding of the basic dynamics behind ISIS, terrorism, and the Middle East, with Republican policies like to be advocated in the coming debate certain to make ISIS stronger and expose Americans to even more danger.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 14, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 14th, 2015

The White House

Note: the chart used later in this article can also be shared through its own post here

AMMAN — Though a common refrain among Republicans for some time, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, we are hearing with renewed force that Obama cowardly refuses to call out our enemies “by name,” i.e., he avoids calling them Islamic or Muslim extremists terrorists, avoids saying that we are “at war” with “radical Islam.”  The rationales Obama’s critics suggest as to why he apparently does this range from a cowardly, timid sense of liberal political correctness all the way to claiming that Obama actually sympathizes with the terrorists and/or is a Muslim himself.

There is something of a legitimate point encased behind the more incredulous claims made by the Republicans: that Obama is avoiding emphasizing the Islamic character of the terrorists and the fact that they are Muslims (some people would like to argue that these extremists committing terrorism are, in fact, not Muslims because of their extreme actions, but the sad truth is that while all faiths have violent extremists that the majority of their co-religionists would like to disown, these extremists do find inspiration for violence from those very faiths and their faiths’ history, traditions, and texts, and must, in fact, be owned by these faiths and their co-religionists whether they want to own them or not).  But the Republicans’ point itself is a myopic one because Obama’s decision to avoid emphasizing the Islamic aspects of ISIS is, in fact, based on a very sound overall strategy to deal with the groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, etc.

As usual, the Republicans can’t see the forest for the trees and are way off on their strategy; I don’t even mean this in a pejorative sense, but in a demonstrably-provable-trend sense of the Republican Party being incredibly myopic and short-sighted in its approaches to a whole host of issues, both in terms of foreign affairs and domestic issues (and that could be a whole series of separate articles). 

Before we continue in assessing Obama’s approach and choice of language, we must realize that there are other actors on this stage: the terrorists themselves.  And we must understand what they want.

Now, some of the readers might at this moment begin to get emotional, and accusations of this writer here being a “terrorist sympathizer” might be forming in some minds.  To that I would inquire, “Does a detective ‘sympathize’ with a murder suspect when trying to establish a motive, when trying to investigate and learn about this person?”  No rational person would say that this is the case; rather, it is a basis of good police-work to know as much as possible about suspects and their motivations.  Well, it is absolutely no different with terrorism.

Understanding the Forces Behind Terrorism’s Success/Appeal

Much has been made of an Atlantic article by Graeme Wood titled “What ISIS really wants,” and it will be addressed shortly; but the mother-of-all articles to come out since 9/11 regarding terrorism would have to be Mark Danner’s “Taking Stock of the Forever War,”written for The New York Times Magazine.  In this landmark article, released on fourth anniversary of the attacks and when America was well into its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a sickening truth was made plain for all to see if they had not yet realized it…

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda played the U.S. like a harp. 

What is incredible is that, in the very nature of how the U.S. conducted its war in Afghanistan, the U.S. more or less avoided the trap al-Qaeda was hoping to set.  But not so with Iraq…

See, bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s philosophy and aims are hardly inscrutable; they had, rather, made their aims clear with statements known publicly for many years.  For bin Laden, there was the “near enemy:” the non-Islamic regimes ruling over Muslim lands, whether they were democracies, monarchies, or dictatorships.  These regimes were supported by the “far enemy:” distant, powerful governments in the West, with the United States leading, that supported the “near enemies” with military, economic, and political aid.  In terms of bringing about the ideal system—Islamic governance based on the Golden Age of early Islam—attacking the “near enemy” regimes would be fruitless without first addressing their major Western backers.  The plan was simple: draw the West, especially the U.S., into a lengthy ground war in at least one Muslim country, one that would inflict casualties on Western forces, sap Western economic strength in the process, and leave Western publics war-weary enough that when the West eventually withdrew, Western appetite for intervention in the Muslim world would be exhausted or at least vastly reduced and the path for toppling the “near enemy” regimes would be clear Western road blocks cleared or minimized.

In the initial American intervention in Afghanistan, the entire U.S. approach was designed to be minimalist: the Taliban was brought down by air-power and U.S. Special Forces aiding local fighters.  It was not until Obama’s presidency that large numbers of U.S. troops were deployed to Afghanistan (and that was largely an attempt undo some of the damage of the Bush Administration’s policies).  Thus, the U.S. spent relatively little money there and exposed itself to only minimal damage and risk. 

This was not the case with Iraq, and though there was also a bit of a minimalist approach initially adopted there, that quickly devolved into a costly disaster requiring far more troops over a longer period of time to mitigate the damage.  But much damage had still been done: much higher casualties were incurred than American leaders told Americans would be the case; the war cost much more than advertised as well, and also lasted much longer; in late 2008, America elected one Barack Obama as president largely because of his anti-war stance and his pledge to withdraw from Iraq. 

As for al-Qaeda, the Iraq War was many ways a dream come true: while it never established the caliphate it dreamed of, its 9/11 attacks did start a chain of events that most certainly did sap American economic strength, did cause many American casualties, and did cause a war weariness in the American psyche that has meant the country is today far more reluctant to intervene in Muslim countries than it was in 1990 during the Gulf War or in 2001 and 2003, when the Afghanistan and Iraq wars started, respectively. After the Iraq invasion of 2003 especially, terrorism became far worse; Al-Qaeda itself saw its stature, number of operations, and membership increase dramatically over the course of both wars, and far more people are killed by terrorism today than before the Iraq invasion. By invading Iraq the way Osama bin Laden wanted, we performed exactly the part he laid out for us, and we suffered many of the consequences he hoped we would.

What enabled the U.S. to mitigate what could have been an unmitigated disaster, though, was not U.S policy in supporting a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government: it was the murderous extremism of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi branch(which began calling itself the “Islamic State of Iraq”late in 2006 as part of a coalition with other jihadist groups) against not only Shiites but also many Sunnis that alienated many Iraqis and drove them into the arms of U.S. forces during the “Surge” and the “Sunni Awakening” in 2007, combined with a major adjustment in U.S. counterinsurgency strategy that placed Iraqi civilians first.  The local al-Qaeda branch’s actions also created tension with al-Qaeda HQ: Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wanted their Iraqi branch to focus on U.S. forces and to avoid attacking Iraqi civilians.  But al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia, first led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and later others, focused on creating a civil-war in Iraq by targeting civilians in an overtly sectarian manner, and also by broadly targeting any civilians who did follow their extreme, strict version of Islam (except submissive Christians).  Al-Qaeda—including what would become ISIS—was crushed by local Sunnis fighting alongside U.S. forces.

The model for defeating terrorists that emerged here would be a key component of what has come to define Obama’s approach: win over locals to your side, and fight side-by-side against terrorism with such support.  Partnering with local communities this way became so effective that towards the end of the “Surge” forward, the newly minted “Islamic State of Iraq was” rarely more than a nuisance for Iraq until the year 2013, over a year after the U.S. had fully withdrawn from Iraq.  Its resurgence was due mainlyto Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s extremely sectarian policies that would drive the same communities that had aided in the fight against al-Qaeda/the Islamic State of Iraq in 2007 into open rebellion against Maliki and Iraqi’s government at the end of 2013.  Under those conditions, the formerly titled Islamic State of Iraq, now calling itself ISIS (an acronym meaning Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham/Levant, encompassing also Syria, Lebanon, and other areas) and now formally broken away from al-Qaeda, came into Iraq and entered an alliance of convenience with many Iraqi Sunnis against Maliki’s oppressive Shiite government.

This put the Obama Administration into a quandary: it have moved to fulfill Obama’s campaign promise to withdraw from Iraq, and if Obama was going to be sucked back into conflict in Iraq, he and his administration were going to be damn sure to be careful and that the conditions under which it would reenter conflict in Iraq would make sense for its overall goals for the region.  The core of this strategy was moving away from the U.S. shouldering the majority of initiative, burden, and responsibility for fights against regional extremism and also away from larger invasions, wars, and occupations like those that were initiated and (mis)prosecuted during the (W.) Bush Administration, all while moving towards America being a friend, supporter and ally of the local and non-oppressive forces in the region fighting extremism. 

When people complain about Obama “not having a strategy” for the Middle East, they clearly seem to have missed this obvious strategy here, as exemplified by virtually all of the Administration’s actions and inactions in the region for some time.  This strategy is quite sound, as 1.) it avoids making the U.S. the main target as would happen when having its forces lead, 2.) it allows the fight to be properly framed primarily as a local vs. extremists fight, rather than a U.S./West vs. Muslims conflict, 3.) it helps to avoid generating more extremists by assisting with less-oppressive local partners rather unconditionally supporting more oppressive regimes.

This last point is particularly important in light of the Arab Spring, but also in general; many of those behind terrorist attacks against Americans—including most of the 9/11 hijackers—are from countries with oppressive governments that are supported by the United States;  hence, the “far enemy” supporting the “near enemy” rhetoric.  Even without completely ending it relationships with oppressive regimes—an ideal if impractical approach—the Obama Administration has been careful to distance itself from such regimes in the Middle East, at the very least avoiding the warm embrace of past administrations.  Egypt is a good example of this, and so is Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, but perhaps the best example is Iraq…

When Maliki’s Iraqi government asked for heavy U.S. assistance in the face of ISIS’s onslaught last summer, Obama knew that it was Malik’s own oppressive, heavy-handed policies targeting Sunnis that had largely created the crisis.  If Obama had unquestioningly come to the aid of Maliki and his government in Iraq when it was seen as brutally oppressing Iraqi Sunnis, Obama’s assistance would have just played into ISIS’s strategy of framing the conflict as the U.S. and Iraqi governments merely being forces of oppression against Sunnis.  Rather, Obama knew it was crucial to U.S. interests and strategy not be seen as aiding in Maliki’s oppression, and told Maliki that he would need to change his ways, or, failing that, told the Iraqis they would need to find a new leader worthy of American support if such support was to be forthcoming; Maliki did not swerve his course under heavy U.S. pressure, but Iraq’s political establishment did and forced Maliki out for a new, far less divisively sectarian Dr. Haider al-Abadi.  As I have written before, Obama’s withholding of support for Maliki’s oppressive government to bring about major internal Iraqi changes was a consummate diplomatic victory that was a win for America, Iraq, and the region.  If Obama had come to Maliki’s aid without demanding the Iraqi government treat Sunnis better, that would have been a gift to ISIS and further inflamed sectarian tensions and added to ISIS’s legitimacy and support among disaffected Sunnis.  Basically, Obama has signaled an end to doing dictators’ dirty work for them, and leaders that go past a certain point of heavy-handedness will find America more hesitant to help them than before.

Going back to the earlier analogy of a detective investigating a murder suspect: as I have noted before, violent crime and terrorism are actually similar problems with similar solutions; in the short term, force and deterrence is important, but in the longer run, “soft power” approaches that involve community and international development emphasizing human rights are even more important.  Obama is mocked for even suggesting this, but those doing the mocking only reveal their own myopia and disqualification from having anything to do with U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Obama’s Strategy

Note: chart is highlighted in its own post here

This leads up to the central aspects of both Obama’s Middle Eastern strategy and his ISIS/counterterrorism strategy, with Iraq as a springboard: gone are the days when Middle Eastern regimes would avoid tough political compromises with minority or disaffected ethnic, religious, and political groups, waiting for the U.S. to bail them out with military aid and sometimes military action that would simply beat these groups into destruction or submission; from Lebanon to Israel and Palestine, to Iraq and Yemen, to Syria and Egypt, many of the recent and also past conflicts revolve around a government oppressing various groups and using force, rather than politics, to achieve a “solution.” 

With Obama more than any other president, American aid the degree of it depends on whether regimes use politics over force.  Obama distanced himself from Maliki, and has also distanced himself from Egypt’s oppressive Sisi; though Syria’s Assad would be a good ally against ISIS, America working with Assad has been ruled out based on his morphing into a mass murderer.  At least rhetorically, Obama has even clashed repeatedly with close ally Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his heavy-handedness with the Palestinians.  The clear reality is that these regimes and others were able to use (the expectations of) American support and/or American military action to continue oppression carte blanche.

Now to Graeme Wood’s important article about ISIS: If bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s main aims was a long struggle to drive out western support for non-Islamic regimes with the hope of establishing a caliphate in the distant future—emphasizing the here-and-now-struggle over the caliphate—then ISIS’s focus is different: its people want to be the barrier carriers and enforcers of what to them is the only acceptable version of Islam (one based closely on Koranic text and theology), purifying the world with the blood of the non-compliers (ISIS’s expanded definition of takfir apostates) and to use this status to build both a following and a caliphate here and now, with the eventual, more distant goal of fulfilling apocalyptic prophecies.  Their power, then, begins with them claiming the mantle of Islam, the “true” Islam that will stand up to the West.

Thus, even if it does not find itself supported by a majority of Muslims, it is also undeniably Islamic; as noted earlier, most religious people are not extremists, but all religions have their extremists and religion in general tends to intensify and barbarize conflict.  More than anything else, ISIS wants and needs to be associated with Islam.

Which bring us to the other main aspect of Obama’s Middle-Easter and ISIS strategies: when defining and speaking about groups like ISIS, the smart play is to de-emphasize their Islamic nature.  Conflicts are not won with each side presenting objective descriptions of each other and each other’s characteristics and motivations; they are won with convincing and resounding narratives that almost never tell the whole story.  Propaganda, or information war, is often crucial to victory, and this has been true for thousands of years.  That does not mean that it is often best or advisable to engage in fantastical, blatant distortion, but in the case of ISIS, on the part of the West, it must mean to go out of the way to do as much to separate ISIS from Islam as possible in public statements and speeches.

Obama did not win the presidency by being a stupid man, and, in general, is not stupid, but very shrewd, even for all his flaws.  Of course he knows that ISIS is Islamic and his unwillingness to associate ISIS with Islam is not out of any sense of political correctness, timidity, or cowardice: rather, it is a very important and necessary part of a sound strategy to counter and eventually defeat ISIS.  By going out of its way to not associates radical extremist Islamic jihadist terrorists with Islam, the Obama Administration has been able to hurt terrorists’ narratives all over the world; bin Laden himself wrote of this (and the arena of narratives is one of the crucial battlefields of this war).  One of our most important allies in this conflict, King Abdullah of Jordan (a mainly Muslim country in case you did not know), is completely behind this strategy. 

ISIS’s apocalyptic vision called for a great final battle in northern Syria between itself and a great (Western?) army of “Rome,” the final showdown between faithful, true Muslims and the kuffar infidels before the end times.  The more some prominent Republicans constantly associate ISIS and terrorists publicly with Islam, the more they “shamefully…blur the linebetween [normal] Muslims and Islamic extremists,” the more they question and apply scrutiny to all of Islam and all Muslims, the more they call for massive U.S.-led military (ground) operations against ISIS, the more this gives ISIS’s murderous extremists exactly what they want, the better they can sell their narrative, the more recruits they will find, the more successful they will be. 

We saw this happen for al-Qaeda when we invaded Iraq, the aftermath of which saw a swelling of al-Qaeda’s rosters and of terrorism worldwide.  We seem to be particularly amnesic with regards to history, and, especially of late, with counterinsurgency and picking quality allies.  In the Vietnam War, America backed a regime unworthy of its professed values or the Vietnamese people, one that had no respect for human rights, and the population turned against America and the South Vietnamese government.  Another example is American support for Iran’s Shah, and America is still paying the price for that support.  Now, Republicans are calling for more robust support for Egypt’s oppressive President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi against Islamist insurgents there, including an ISIS affiliate.  They seem blithely unaware that such support might actually empower the insurgents fighting against Sisi’s regime.  In fact, if the U.S. were to go back to robustly aiding dictators who show no regard for human rights, it will prove ISIS’s propaganda true: that America and the West are teaming up with non-Islamic oppressors, who together are working against the masses of regular Muslims. 

And, crucially, more people will line up to fight us than if we were to be more careful about who we strongly supported, to whom we gave weaker support to, and who we did not support.  Iraq’s recent history proves this: the Sunnis in Western Iraq fought with American forces to defeat al-Qaeda in 2007; in 2014 they fought with ISIS against a Shiite government in Baghdad, led by Maliki, that shared no power, offered no compromise, gave no quarter to Sunnis, all while using the security forces of the state to promulgate violence against Sunni leaders and villages.  Iraq’s Sunnis were willing to fight against extremists Sunni Islamic terrorists when they believed they would get a fair shake in the Iraqi political system; when they instead were forcefully and deliberately marginalized, many of them allied with the same terrorists they had recently fought.

Instead of accommodating aggrieved groups and working out long-term compromise, these regimes will just use American support to get away with literal murder, fueling even more instability and conflict in the future.  This was a major lesson of both 9/11 and the Arab Spring, but the myopia of the Republicans leaves no room to even acknowledge this.  Instead, Obama seeks to force these regimes to engage in political compromise—the only way to defuse the sectarian tensions raging across the Middle East today—by using American aid as leverage.  By pushing these regimes to become something that locals will see as governments worth fighting for, there will emerge local government forces of Muslims with enough motivation and legitimacy (in addition to American and Western support) that can stand up to ISIS and deprive ISIS of the narrative and territory on which it feeds and survives.  Obama correctly understands than an organization like ISIS cannot be defeated by America: it must be defeated by the Muslims and governments in ISIS’s sphere of operations, and America can be there to help, but it must be the locals who lead.  A big part of any success will be the degree to which ISIS becomes divorced from Islam in the minds of the region’s Muslims.  The foolish Republicans and others who do not understand how important this aspect is to the regional dynamics and ISIS’s ability to both absorb and project power only empower ISIS in the long run.

Conclusion

The above describes Obama’s broader strategy for dealing with ISIS, counterterrorism, and the Middle East.  It is a complex, nuanced strategy for a complex, nuanced problem.  To be fair, the Obama Administration has hardly been perfect in its messaging of its complex strategy and how its components fit together.  Yet the strategy is also hardly rocket science, and even a modest understanding of Middle Eastern dynamics reveals that it is not only the best strategy, but the only one that yields a good chance of long-term success and short-term progress against terrorist extremists like ISIS.  Particularly troubling is the dominant Republican view, that if a strategy cannot fit into a bumper sticker (Trump’s “bomb the shit out of” ISIS) that means it is not (and that there is no) strategy; also, their idea that the solution to complex foreign policy problems should be modeled on John Wayne westerns.  Among many other reasons, these are reminders why the Republican Party and their leading candidates are not fit for high office, let along prosecuting a global fight against ISIS and its ill-intentioned brethren.

Getty Images

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 25, 2015   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 25th, 2015

Getty Images

A much shorter version of this piece focusing on Putin’s mentality/political calculus was published by Global Risk Insights. This was also published by by the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) here and was “Post of the Month” for December/January.

What the Hell Happened?

AMMAN — After weeks of increasing tension between Russia and Turkey, yesterday, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter-bomber jet that Turkey alleges violated its airspace.  The Russian jet had been bombing Turkmen positions/villages—part of a series of Russian bombings in recent days that have targeted Turkmen—on the border area of Turkey and Syria.  Turkey is supporting these Turkmen rebels against Assad that Russia is bombing, and had previously asked Russia not to bomb them.  Turkey also claims it warned the plane ten times before it fired, but Russia denies this.  The alleged violation of Turkey’s airspace comes after several earlier violations and a clear pattern of Russia flagrantly violating NATO and other American allies’ airspace over the past several years, and after clear warnings from Turkey that this behavior would not be tolerated.  The Turkmen who had been bombed by the Russian place killed the pilot, who had ejected from the plan and landed in the Syrian area controlled by the Turkmen.  The plane’s navigator was rescued by Russian and Syrian special forces, but one Russian contract marine was killed in the process and a Russian helicopter was downed as well.

Don’t Expect WWIII Out of This

While this is hardly good news, we should also hardly expect a Russo-Turkish war, a Russian-NATO war, or WWIII in the coming days.  As with the situation in Ukraine, both NATO and Russia should avoid panic.  For one thing, Turkey and Russia have very close economic ties, both in terms of tourism in Turkey and in terms of energy exports from Russia; these ties are very profitable for each nation and for both Putin’s and Erdoğan’s regimes and would not be scrapped lightly over such an incident.  Secondly, and this is something less talked about, Russia and Putin fear NATO greatly; this has been a driving force behind first Soviet and then Russian policy for many decades, as NATO dwarfs Russia both in terms of military and economic power.  It is helpful to think of all of Putin’s posturing, including his airspace violations, and akin to the guy driving the gigantic hummer with huge tires and fire designs spray-painted onto its sides: this is all undertaken to overcompensate for an insecurity.  Putin has been smart to calculate that the U.S. and NATO will not risk a war with Russia over Georgia, Ukraine, or Syria; he is certainly smart enough to not start a war with Turkey and, by consequence, NATO now even after such an incident as this. Putin is not stupid, and he is hardly not in control; the repeated violations of NATO and others’ airspace is unquestioningly a series of deliberate provocations directed by Putin.  Sure, one or two may be an honest mistake by a pilot, but there have been far too many violations by Russia over time that these violations, in general, are no accident.  For the sake of argument, let’s say this one was an accident; Putin still knows he made his own bed with these previous violations, and he knows he has no grounds for starting a serious military confrontation over this as a result.  And deep down, Putin probably respects Erdoğan’s move as a fellow hardball politician: Putin called Turkey’s warning a bluff, but Erdoğan demonstrated he was not bluffing.  This is the language Putin understands.

Putin may be miscalculating here in general, but he is certainly smart enough to know a war with Turkey, and therefore NATO and the West, is not at all in Russia’s interests right now.

Why, Mr. Putin?

AFP

Coming off of all this, many questions arise as to the risk-gain, cost-benefit analysis going on inside Mr. Putin’s head.  One must hope that Mr. Putin’s actions in Syria are not going to continue to be as either myopic or as cynical as the best possible explanations indicate they thus far been. 

On the myopic side, you have Putin thinking that risking the ire of almost all the Sunni governments, Sunni people, and Sunni jihadists by helping Shiite Alawite Assad massacre mainly Sunni rebels and civilians with the help of Shiite Hezbollah and Shiite Iran just for Russia’s having a naval base on Syria’s coast and a few new bases inside Syria as well as a client in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who accounts for roughly 10% of global Russian arms sales is worth it (oh, and there’s knee-jerk opposing American and Western aims in Syria partly out of spite, from which I would also wonder what Putin thinks he will gain).  Over the longer term, Putin is playing a game to win over the more despotic regimes in the Middle East, letting them know that America may abandon you if you give up all pretense at democratic reform and massacre your own people, but Russia will not (see Putin and Assad as BFFs).  One of the big prizes Russia is eyeing here is Egypt and Hosni Mubarak’s second–(perhaps harsher) coming, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.  The gamble here is that Egypt’s restive population will tolerate an Egypt aligning itself with Shiite-led Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah and that Egypt’s own explosive and volatile domestic security situation with its own people and an ISIS franchise running amok in the Sinai (one which apparently was able to blow up a Russian airliner) will not be major liabilities.  Egypt has a large population but is mainly devoid of resources that Russia would find useful.  Sure, Russia can increase arms sales to Egypt, but that does not seem to be so great of a prize.  If Putin thinks that the real prize—Saudi Arabia—will be aligning itself with Russia anytime soon, that may have been a possibility without Russia’s forceful backing of Assad and linking up with Iran and Hezbollah, but now that possibility seems as remote as ever even as the U.S. and the Saudis put some distance between them and their relationship cools; a cool relationship with the U.S. still yields a lot more for Saudi Arabia than a new alliance with Russia ever could.  In general, Russia hardly has a strong position in the Middle East; Putin’s desperation to help Assad, his one main ally in the region (it would be a stretch to say that Iran and Russia are general allies even as they are allies in the Syrian Civil War), even at the expense of empowering ISIS, is a reflection of this weakness. And as Putin cozies up to dictators like Assad and Sisi, he risks severely undermining any chance of real long-term gains where he and Russians seek them the most: in Europe.  Democracy-loving Europe will not sit and has not sat idly by while Russia has provoked war and secessionist rebellion in European and democratic Ukraine while fighting against rebels in authoritarian Syria in a way that intensifies the war there. 

Thus, the term myopic is particularly appropriate for Putin’s strategy because his methods of pursuing whatever gains he seeks pose risks that threaten to harm Russia’s interests more than those gains would help them: Russia is particularly vulnerable to Sunni extremist terrorism for a number of clear reasons and its moves in Syria, as I have written before, are only going to expose Russia to further attacks.  If Russia is so concerned with 10% of its arms sales and access to a few military bases in Syria, I am certain the West would work out a deal to ensure these interests are preserved by a new Syrian government if Russia would agree to push for Assad’s ouster, as this would be a reasonable price to pay to see a realistic possibility of an end to this incredibly destructive and lethal war.

On the cynical side, there is the ability for confrontation with the West and Turkey in Syria to help Putin sell his narrative to his own people and the extremist gullible conspiracy-theorists who are intense RT.com and Sputnikconsumers; no doubt the shooting down of a Russian jet by Turkey and the related casualties will galvanize popular support among the Russian people who famously rally behind Putin whenever he is challenged from the outside; thus, provoking a crisis with Turkey and NATO certainly serves to increase Putin’s power at home.  And yet, he is so popular there already, one must either question this as a solid basis for his actions or question the level of paranoia inside the Russia ruler’s mind.  Therefore, it is harder to accept this explanation on its own but we cannot rule it completely out.  Is it some kind of combination of the myopia and the cynicism?  That is a difficult question to answer.  My own gut tells me that to ascribe this mainly to Putin playing a domestic political game seems is quite an intense assumption to make. 

We know that Ukraine and Moldova are prizes Putin has been eyeing, in one form or another, for quite some time, although trying to guess how he will play the European theater and Middle Eastern theater in terms of each other is mainly speculative at this point.  If there is some big move Putin is planning in Europe, it will be interesting to see what it is, but my money is on the idea that Western sanctions (coupled with falling oil prices) have constrained Putin’s behavior there and that this will continue to be the case, even in light of this incident.  Putin hay have been having fun time routinely violating NATO and other American allies’ airspace over the past few years without any serious consequences, but Turkey sure put an end to that, and while I am no fan of Turkey’s President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan for numerous and significant reasons, given Putin’s track record of airspace violations, I am willing to believe that Turkey would not risk shooting down a Russian plane unless it actually did violate Turkish airspace and that the Russian had been warned.

What will be interesting to see is if Putin is now willing to continue to risk the lives of brave Russian pilots to play political chicken with his rivals, and even more interesting will be trying to figure out what he hopes to gain should he pursue such a course. 

And yet, Putin is not the only actor here: Turkey and the U.S. have been flirting with a call for no-fly zones in parts of Syria, including the Turkish-Syrian border; if Russia pushes Turkey and NATO too far, this will only increase the odds of NATO no-fly zones that would severely limit Russia’s freedom of action in Syria and the region.

Time to End the Kabuki Theater Charade and Join the Big Boys on the Main Stage

Perhaps most frustrating of all in this situation is that if Russia actually took a broader, less myopic view of its interests, and actually behaved in a way that matched its deeds with its stated purpose, there is a tremendous amount of room for mutually beneficial cooperation.

See, Russia framed its intervention in Syria as primarily one aimed at striking against ISIS terrorists; then, despite its heroic efforts to dissembleand deceive through the propaganda of its foreign ministry and state-funded media operations RT.com and Sputnik that present contrary “information,” Russia used over 90% of its military strikes to hit non-ISIS, often Western-backed rebels fighting Assad’s regime, strikes most often occurring where ISIS had no presence and not even anywhere near to where ISIS had any presence.  The strikes have even helped ISIS gain more territory at the expense of these other rebel groups.  Strikes like these are the ones that led to the incident yesterday, as Russia was bombing Turkmen who are not fighting for and are nowhere near ISIS.

The New York Times

I get it.  Russia likes Assad, and since ISIS is mainly between Kurdish rebels on one side and non-ISIS other rebels no the other, and that second group of rebels is the group near most of the Syrian regime’s zones of control, it makes some sense for Russia to attack those groups that are more threatening to Assad.  Yet Russia keeps propagandizing these attacks as attacks against ISIS in its public statements.  Sure, Russians inside Russia and avid RT/Sputnik readers might unquestioningly buy up these claims, but the fact is this: Russia is inside Syria to pursue its own war against mainly non-ISIS targets, whatever public relations fantasies it wants to sell.  Few people around the world are buying what Russia wants to sell, so any idea that Russian actions in Syria would buy Russia some goodwill from Europe has been dispelled since Russia is not doing what it claims to be doing.

Institute for the Study of War

It Putin was smarter, he’d shift gears.  The thing is, not too long ago it seems an ISIS affiliate blew up a Russian airliner killing 224 people, almost all of them Russians.  ISIS has fertile ground in and around Russia to recruit terrorists and carry out attacks against Russians.  It is manifestly in Russia’s interests to join the current anti-ISIS coalition and to focus on ISIS now, not the other rebels, as even with its small percentage of attacks being against ISIS, Russia has still become a object of ISIS’s wrath.  If Russia were to at least mostly suspend its campaign against non-ISIS rebels and cooperate with the U.S., France, Turkey, and others against ISIS, it would win a tremendous amount of goodwill from the West, which would welcome a helping hand.  Instead, blatantly lying about targeting ISIS, bombing rebels that are allies with Western powers and Turkey, and violating Turkey’s airspace will do nothing to improve relations with the wider world, reduce crippling economic sanctions, or combat the jihadist threat now facing Russians all over the world.  If we could truly join together in common purpose in Syria—ending the war and seeing Assad step aside, and all with the support of Russia—it is difficult to imagine that the West would not work to preserve Russia’s currently existing interests in Syria in exchange for their support and the end of their intransigence.

But if Putin wants to turn everything into a he said/she said contestbetween the Western media and RT/Sputnik (a tactic that has not worked in Ukraine and is not working in Syria), if Putin wants to keep his attention focused away from ISIS even though ISIS has now killed many Russian civilians, Putin only leaves himself and his nation more isolated, more weak, more vulnerable.  The old playbook of being against the West for the sake of being against the West is not going to work.  Putin has already gained a lot in Ukraine by annexing Crimea; he has shown that if his interests are not considered in a final settlement in Syria that he is prepared to use military means to secure them; if Putin would just deescalate in Ukraine and start focusing on ISIS in Syria, there is a very real chance that both sanctions relief could be on the table and that a final peace deal that removes Assad would see Russian strategic and arms trade interests preserved.  Yet if he continues down his current path, he risks destroying important relationships with Turkey and Europe, increased sanctions, a future Syria that will do everything it can to expel Russian influence and a Russian presence, more dead Russian military personnel through incidents like the one yesterday, and more dead Russian civilians from terrorist attacks in a war that will not end anytime soon and keeps empowering ISIS, in part thanks to Russia’s actions in Syria.

The choice is clear for Mr. Putin: stop the charade and begin real cooperation with the NATO and other powers against ISIS, or go down a much more difficult path of pain, confrontation, and isolation.  Russia could have taken former approach some time ago, and avoided yesterday’s regrettable incident.  Even now Russia just made clear it will keep bombing the Turkmen, but it does not have to be this way.  To Putin we must say, there is another way, and not everything needs to be zero-sum.  Whether he listens, well, that is up to him.

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January 13, 2019 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 3, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 3rd, 2015

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

As I begin to write this piece, I must confess that I am filled with some very mixed and intense emotions.

I am so proud of Hillary Clinton and how she conducted herself in the face of what was clearly a witch hunt of epic proportions and during proceedings disrespectful to her from the moment questions began, proud of the Democrats on the Select Committee on Benghazi who substantively and skillfully exposed the nonsense and deception of their Republican colleagues and stood up for truth and justice; I am hopeful and confident after seeing Clinton’s amazing conduct in the hearing, and after her “spectacular” debate performance a few weeks ago, that soon-to-be President Hillary Rodham Clinton (barring a disaster initiated by Clinton herself or a major change in the Republicans’ behavior, I see this as almost inevitable and I see this hearing as the moment when she cemented herself as far and above the best candidate in the eyes of enough of the American people to make it happen) has a chance to save America from itself and build on the Obama legacy. 

At the same time, I am sad at seeing the sorry level of dysfunction and the utter lack of seriousness or genuine interest in serving the people that the Republican Party as a whole has displayed; I am disgusted at the level of games and tricks based on selective presentation and false, repeatedly debunked (even by Republicans) claims that the seven right-wing Republican partisan hacks on the Committee who were utterly devoid of substance threw at Clinton over and over again; and I am enraged at the level of unmerited disrespect that so high and so substantive a government official as former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton has had to endure, enraged by a hearing in which a committee claiming to be focused on the Benghazi attacks and honoring the memory of four dead public servants instead twisted their memory to attempt to win cheap political points against Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.  That the Republicans utterly failed is an honor to the memory of those brave public servants who perished on September 11th, 2012, letting the country know that their deaths cannot be easily used for partisan shenanigans.

What Eight Prior Investigations Have Already Told Us 

The record is important.  This record involves eight prior investigations: in order, one commissioned by the State Department and produced by an Accountability Review Board (ARB) initiated by then-Secretary Clinton and led by former Ambassador Thomas Pickering who had served both Republican and Democratic presidents for over forty years and by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Admiral Mike Mullen, one Republican-led House committee that investigated the ARB, two bipartisan Senate committees, and finally four more committee investigations by the Republican-led House.  While a few of these included criticism of Clinton, they were unable to tie any specific decision or non-decision of Clinton to any wrongdoing or negligence, e.g., one report criticized Clinton for the State Department’s reduction of security personnel in Benghazi from 2011 to 2012 even though she testified that she did not personally receive any requests for additional security in Benghazi; what they did generally show was specific wrongdoing by a handful of other people not directly part of Clinton’s staff and some confusion amid conflicting reports and mixed messaging throughout the Obama Administration; in other words, Clinton was not deserving in any way of a significant portion of the blame for the failure to protect the lives of four Americans in the attack and was not the person responsible for making the specific decisions that led to inadequate security.

Republicans Hope the Ninth Benghazi Investigation Will Magically Blame Clinton in Ways Eight Others Could Not

As for the current, and ninth official, investigation, Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy, Republican Representative of South Carolina, opened proceedings with a statement that was petulant, partisan, angry, defensive, and self-congratulatory in tone, a tone that, as chance (or, more accurately, design) would have it, characterized the entire proceedings in regards to the behavior of the seven Republicans on the Committee: Gowdy (202-225-6030), Susan Brooks of Indiana (202-225-2276), Jim Jordan of Ohio (202-225-2676), Mike Pompeo of Kansas (202-225-6216), Martha Roby of Alabama (202-225-2901), Peter Roskam of Illinois (202-225-4561), and Lynne Westmoreland of Georgia (202) 225-5901).  None of these representatives were in office before 2007, and most were not in office before 2011, some only since 2013; in other words, note the lack of senior, well-respected Republicans with gravitas (feel free to call their offices and let them know how you feel after reading this!).

In some ways, the aforementioned tone was not and should not have been surprising.

Yet in other ways, it was very surprising: the sheer repetitiveness of the questions; the shocking ignorance of the most basic inner working of the State Department and other federal agencies; the stunning myopia of an inability to see the larger picture; the rehashing of old arguments that have repeatedly been debunked on a bipartisan basis before, during, and after the hearing; the striking inability to incorporate any of Clinton’s testimony into their reasoning or statements or questions; the level of rudeness and disrespect… all these combined to truly make the Republicans look childish, uninformed, unstable, and pathetically unfit for office in what can only be described as a blatant and obvious manner.  When they tried to muster anger and indignity, they simply came off as silly, unserious, ridiculous, forced, and, frankly, as bad actors in a bad movie. 

If that is not bad enough, they all repeatedly demonstrated these qualities in the presence of a Hillary Clinton who is one of the few active elder states(wo)men left in American politics.  Throughout the proceedings, she generally remained cool, calm, and collected, with a near-superhuman level of patience during her eleven-hour ordeal.  Never once did she descend the level of those attacking her, and the few times she expressed exasperation and wounded pride (most often in defense of others) at the shameful suggestions, among others, that she did not care or try to help her staff when they were in danger, she did so in a dignified way and only after repeatedly enduring the same accusations, displaying some fire and emotion in such a way that any non-conservative-partisans (and perhaps even some conservative partisans) would not be able see as anything other than justified.  Clinton also demonstrated a depth and breadth of knowledge that put those taking cheap shots at her to shame, effortless recalling an astounding level of detail and providing very sensible explanations for every line of attack mounted against her.  She skillfully showed that those interrogating her had either not reviewed relevant material or were either selectively presenting an incomplete picture.  Perhaps most amusingly, most of the Republicans repeatedly smirked smugly, clearly thinking they had got the better of Clinton when only they themselves and their core supporters are delusional enough to even come close to thinking that. 

With some fellow Republicans expressing concern about how this would play out, that this hearing could backfire against the Republican Party, it is dumbfounding that the Republicans on the Committee proceeded as they did, the very definition of hubris and incaution, seemingly oblivious to the possibilities that any of them could be wrong in their calculations or that the public would not see things in the way they wished them to see them, so visceral, it seems, was their hatred of Hilary Clinton.  Every single one of them spewed non-stop contempt, not realizing the amount of public and national contempt they were earning themselves.  In the end, the eleven hours of proceedings became a marathon campaign commercial for both Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and the hearing may very well go down as one of the key moments of the 2016 presidential election.  After this hearing and the debate, it is very difficult to see how Hillary can be stopped in her quest for the presidency, either by Bernie Sanders or by the Republicans.  It is now hers to lose, largely thanks to an unintended own-goal on the part of the Republicans that could go down as one of the greatest political blunders/gaffes/miscalculations in modern memory.

Don’t believe me? You can watch the entire proceedings here: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4; also, transcript here.

But, if you don’t have an entire day to do so now (although I strongly encourage you to do so over time), I will break the hearing down for you and discuss it here.

Let the Inquisition Begin 

Rep. Roksam was the first in a series of salvos against Clinton.  Roksam’s effort, consistent throughout his questioning, was to portray the entire Obama Administration’s policy as being Clinton-concocted, Clinton-pushed, Clinton-owned, basically a Clinton policy.  The idea he kept pushing was that she was responsible for Libya overall and that Libya overall was a failure.  Such a simple characterization of responsibility for a policy defies reality and defies this case specifically; as Clinton explained, she was just one person in the Administration, President Obama himself was the one who made the decision, and there were a number of America’s closest allies who were eager to join together to intervene and to have U.S. assistance in any intervention.  As for the idea that the Libya policy is a failure, that is incredibly myopic; the appropriate question to ask is what was the situation before the intervention, what effect did it have, and what is the condition of Libya in the period after the intervention.  Republicans seem to think that Libya was some sort of paradise before NATO intervention, and that the intervention ruined Libya; the reality is that Libya was in the middle of a raging civil war and that massive amounts of civilians were under immediate threat from Qaddafi’s forces, who had threatened mass killings.  The intervention prevented many of these killings and brought an end to the war in months, both of which saved many thousands of lives.  Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are only the latest examples of how civil wars and civil conflict in the greater Middle East/North Africa region, left to their own devices, generally burn out only over long periods of time and take many, many years to resolve at a high cost in human life.  Afghanistan and Algeria are other examples stretching back further in history.  It is far more likely that the Libyan Civil War of 2011, left to its own devices, would have continued to rage at a high level, drawing many foreign fighters, displacing millions of people, and destabilizing its neighbors, not only in North Africa but also in Southern Europe.  As bad as the situation is in Libya today, it could have been far worse, and just because Libya faces severe instability and continued fighting does not mean that the NATO intervention was not successful in mitigating the levels of violence and saving many thousands of lives; it was never designed to produce a stable, secure, safe Libya in the long-term as that was wisely not a responsibility NATO chose to undertake, but, rather, left that to the Libyan people and its neighbors.  That they have not succeeded is not something a sound analysis can place within the responsibility, President Obama, or Hillary Clinton.  That is not to suggest that more could not or even should not have been done, but the idea that Roksam aggressively pushed, that Hillary Clinton is personally responsible for ruining Libya and, therefore, for the events that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in September, 2012, is simply ridiculous.  It is important to have a discussion about our Libya policy, and how it could have been better but also what good it did do.  However, the scope of this hearing is supposed to be focused on the September 11th, 2012 Benghazi attack, not to put the Administration’s entire Libya policy on trial.

In addition, Roksam tried to portray Clinton’s ideas on Libya as motivated mainly by a desire for personal political gain and being able to take credit for the policy, twisting the contents of a handful of e-mails to make his flimsy case for such an outrageous and disrespectful accusation for which there is no serious evidence.  These unfair and unsubstantiated charges were repeated throughout the hearing by Roksam.

Up next for the Republicans was Rep. Brooks.  With a smile on her face, feeling that she was about to have a “gotchya” moment with Clinton, she put two stacks of paper printouts of Clinton’s e-mails in front of her; one contained all her e-mails about Libya from 2011, when U.S. military forces were intervening in a raging civil war, and it was a big pile; the second pile was a tiny pile, and contained all the e-mails from the beginning of 2012 until the day of the attack.  Brooks clearly felt as if the number of e-mails sent and received on the subject in her e-mail account signified a “lack of interest,” as if e-mail is the primary method that a U.S. Secretary of States uses to conduct business, not phone calls, meetings, classified documents that are not allowed to be transmitted through e-mails, memos, briefings, etc.  This absurd notion betrays a stunning ignorance about how the State Department and presidential Cabinet officers operate.  Clinton gave a reasonable and substantive answer that detailed how she did not conduct most of her work over e-mail, but Brooks continued her line of questioning as if Clinton had never explained that, continue to focus on the lack of e-mails in 2012 as if that proved that Clinton did not care about Libya then.  What was not said was that it was appropriate for Clinton to put less energy into Libya and have a reduced focus on Libya in 2012 because the NATO intervention had ended.  The Secretary of State has to deal with crises all over the world, and it is natural that focus shifts over time.  So of course Libya was not going to warrant the same attention in 2012 when the war and intervention were over as it did in 2011.  That does not mean Clinton did not care, nor that the attention she gave to Libya was insignificant.

Republican Rep. Roby continued in this same vein of complaining about the disparity in the number Libya e-mails from 2011 to 2012, annoyingly, as if Brooks had not just done the exact same thing.  At one point she cited a tiny number of e-mails from two State Department employees who seemed to question if Clinton knew State had a facility in Benghazi, two employees that she referred to as “your staffers” when addressing Clinton.  Clinton asked for their names and it turned out they were not her staff at all, except in the large sense of the fact that they worked for the State Department, as did over 70,000 other people, but they were not at all part of Clinton’s personal team and therefore did not work for the Office of the Secretary.  Clinton rightly pointed out that she could not be responsible for any confusion or mistaken impressions two staffers out of tens of thousands had regarding her Libya policy.

Roby then opened up a line of attack that would be repeated ad nauseam throughout the hearing: that Secretary Clinton was personally responsible for the specific security measures taken at the Benghazi facility, and, by implication, all of the more than 250 State Department installations around the world.  The way that Roby and other Republicans would frame this issue, everything from the physical defenses to the number of security guards are the personal and direct responsibility of a Secretary of State and (OR?) Hillary Clinton.  If something goes wrong at any of these 250+ diplomatic facilities, the Secretary of State should be shamed into disgrace.  It is hard to imagine anything more absurd than such a gigantic level of ignorance about basic State Department and Executive Branch agency operations, which makes me consider that these Republicans, in fact, actually do know better and are simply maximizing the political theater.  It is hard to say because it is hard to imagine an elected official being so wrong and so ignorant, but then again, the bar seems to be getting lower and lower in recent years.  For the sake of argument, let us take their statements at face value:  such a concept of responsibility is the equivalent of saying the Secretary of Defense is personally responsible for the details of every single military base’s defense, or that the New York City Police Commissioner is personally responsible for every single police department’s security details.  In fact, with cybersecurity being such an issue of late, using the Republicans’ logic one could say that the Secretary of State is personally and directly responsible for all details of cybersecurity in the State Department.  Considering how specialized the field of IT is and how only IT experts can be reasonably tasked with such responsibility, that is clearly also absurd; well, physical security is similarly also a very specialized field, and a person with such diverse responsibilities as a U.S. Secretary of State is invariably not going to be a top-notch, specialized expertise in the realms of IT and cybersecurity or physical diplomatic security and planning specific defenses against violent attacks; invariably, such tasks are and should be handled by dedicated specialists.  Yet the Republicans on this committee seem oblivious to this reality.  Such an utter inanity would be amusing, were the subject not so serious.  Of course a senior Cabinet-level position is not even supposed to come close to micromanaging details of security such as physical barriers and the number of guards present.  Such responsibilities are necessarily delegated to lower-level specialist positions.  It is simply a poor use of the time of someone as senior as the Secretary of State to spend a significant amount of time micromanaging such things and the Republicans of the Select Committee who do not understand this are unfit to even be in government at all, let alone lead an investigation ostensibly dedicated to looking into attacks on American government facilities.

Democratic Rep. Adam Smith was up next, and complained about the Republicans’ focus on Clinton’s e-mails and on criticizing the Administration’s overall Libya policy rather than a focus on a more relevant scope that might actually help the Committee learn more about the specific events surrounding the attacks in Benghazi (you know, the stated purpose of the Committee’s existence!).  He noted that the CIA and Defense officials were absent from the current hearing even they were all heavily involved in the events in question, that only Clinton and only the role of the State Department that she led were being questioned.  He noted that when two attacks six months apart in 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 258 Americans (the first attack being a bombing of the U.S. Embassy that killed seventeen Americans—including both the CIA station chief and the CIA’s top Middle East analyst—and dozens of others, the second a bombing of a military barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers) that the then-Democratic Congress actually conducted a demonstrably non-partisan investigation of the Reagan Administration that was focused on avoiding a repeat of such a tragedy, not on scoring political points, even though the Reagan Administration’s negligence then was far worse than the failures that contributed to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012 (Reagan’s ludicrous explanation for his Administration not taking better precautions six-months after a major attack? “Anyone who’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.”).

Smith also spent some of his initial time discussing with Clinton the fact that while Republicans were focusing on individual requests for security that were turned down within a vast State Department bureaucracy, they were totally avoiding the fact that the Republican-dominated House had been leading the way in underfunding the State Department’s diplomatic security (with even some of the those most prominently criticizing Clinton over Benghazi voting for the cuts) and that the partisan gridlock in Washington that has failed to pass annual budgets for some time, making it far more difficult to plan ahead and allot resources for security issues preemptively, was also an issue.  That is not to say that it is not State’s responsibility to plan with the resources it has, but it is to point out a level of hypocrisy among those so concerned about security and especially blame after an attack, but who were not willing to give the State Department the funds it had requested in the run-up to the attack.

Next up for the Republicans, Rep. Westmoreland; he tried to disparage diplomatic security (who continually risk their lives and who successfully protect thousands of Americans in hostile environments 24 hours a day, 365 days a year), which got a polite though stern rebuke from Clinton. He continued, as others had and others would, to hold Clinton personally and individually responsible for specific security decisions at specific diplomatic installations. 

He also built up on Brooks’ line of attack, that Clinton seemed not to care about Libya that much in 2012, but his accusations took on a much more sinister and despicable turn, and he would not be alone in this: he noted she was friends with Sidney Blumenthal, a former reporter and a confidante and friend of Clinton’s, and that Blumenthal had her e-mail; he then noted that Clinton said she was friends with Stevens, and asked whether Stevens had her e-mail, and Clinton answered that she did not believe he did, to a smiling Westmoreland; the clear implication was that Clinton was lying about really being friends with Stevens, and that if they really were, and that if she really cared, Stevens would have had her e-mail.  Quite an insulting, baseless absurdity, given that Clinton has already explained she did not conduct her business primarily through e-mail.  Yet in the mind of Westmoreland, one can imagine a dramatic scene in which Clinton tearfully says goodbye to her dear friend Chris Stevens, gives him a warm embrace, and then after he turns to go, clasps his forearm with her hand, and says, heavy with emotion, “Chris, if you need anything, anything at all, e-mail me!  Here is my e-mail!”  Except this cartoon fantasy is not at all how Cabinet and senior-level officials interact with each other in Executive Branch agencies; e-mail is for friends like Blumenthal to reach another friend in an unofficial capacity, to discuss event planning, for tech support, for coordination; e-mail is not where serious policies are made, and it is most certainly not the norm for a sitting ambassador to use an e-mail channel directly to the Secretary of State for official requests concerning security measures and personnel.  That Westmoreland smugly and clearly felt he “nailed” Clinton by getting her to admit Stevens probably did not have her personal e-mail is primarily an advertisement of his own stunning ignorance of basic State Department culture and operating procedure.  Clinton herself cannot hide her bemused expression as she explains to him that when she and Stevens had something important to discuss, it was in meetings and phone conversations, not over e-mail.

The next myopic grandstander for the Republicans was Rep. Pompeo, who wore a scowl of scorn throughout all of his interactions with Clinton and tried to suggest that the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Defense Review (QDDR), a major review of America’s diplomacy initiated by then-Sec. Clinton, only having two pages on diplomatic security out of over 270 means that it was not important to Clinton.  But once again, here, and this is common theme with Republicans these days, a stunning ignorance of what the QDDR is was displayed here; the document is intended to lay out the global strategy for both the State Department and USAID; were this Apple publicizing its global business strategy, how much of such a document would be devoted to talking about specific physical security procedures for Apple facilities?  The idea of the departed Steve Jobs laying out his vision for Apple at a major company meetings and talking about gates, guards, security cameras, and locks at such meetings is absurd, just as is Pomepo’s purpose in bringing up the QDDR.  

After, like his predecessors, he continued to hammer Clinton with the idea that somehow Clinton was responsible for the specific security approvals.  He then adds another layer of inanity to complement his and his colleagues’ previous ones: he tries to fault Clinton for not firing someone after the Benghazi attacks.  Here again, we are being treated to a stunning display of ignorance in Pompeo’s bombast: it is illegal to fire bureaucratic government workers except under very specific conditions—breach of duty—so Clinton did not have the personal discretion to fire these people because of the very regulations of the agency and government for which she works.  Even if those conditions are met, there is a complicated series of laws and regulations that govern how such a process can be carried out and offers individuals methods to challenge and protect themselves.  In other words, Clinton cannot pick up a phone and say, Trump-like, “You’re fired!,” to the vast majority of State Department employees.  But Pompeo was not interested in the rules and procedures or even knowing about them, clearly; he was more interested in his own talking points, unfounded on anything resembling reality or a familiarity of the subjects he was tasked to investigate, a trait he shared with his Republican colleagues.  Additionally, he talked about a meeting between State Department personnel and jihadists on the day of the attack before the attack.  He had no information on which State Department employees were at this meeting, but still referred to them as “your team” when addressing Clinton, as if they had some sort of close personal tie to Clinton.

He also continued to go after Clinton on the Blumenthal e-mails, claiming that Blumenthal was her primary source on Benghzai, an outrageous claim that also displays a stunning level of ignorance and that has been repeatedly refuted as “factually not correct.”  For one thing, Pompeo should know that actual intelligence of a sensitive nature does not go through e-mail in that way, and that most of the information being conveyed to her about Benghazi that she could not read in a newspaper would come from diplomatic cables, classified briefings/documents, and phone calls on secure lines.  In any event, After Pompeo’s waste of everyone’s time, Democratic Rep. Sanchez had a clip played from a major interview in which Pompeo’s absurd claims about Blumenthal were corrected on live national television by a reporter with an extensive background in covering the State Department.

The next Republican lightweight, Rep. Jordan, chose to traverse ground already well-covered that bordered on conspiracy theorist lunacy, one that centers on a truly myopic understanding of the world and the attacks.  Like many others before him, Jordan tried to portray some confusion about mass, global protests that were inspired by an anti-Islamic video denigrating the Muslim prophet Mohammed and its relationship to the attacks in Benghazi as some sort of deliberate cover-up on the part of the Obama Administration, in which then-Secretary Clinton was deeply involved and lied directly to the American people while telling what Jordan termed “the truth” to her own family and foreign leaders.  Because of the very real confusion at the time surrounding these incidents and some very confused and sloppy messaging on the part of the Obama Administration, this line of attack has been proved to resonate among the uninformed particularly well, especially among partisans and conspiracy theorists for whom there is no such thing as sloppiness or honest mistakes in communication.

Specifically, in the days before the Benghazi attack, the American produced-and-originated video that heavily mocks Mohammed was uploaded to YouTube in versions accessible to Arabic speakers.  The videos generated outrage and mass protests throughout the world on the part of Muslims, especially in Muslim countries.  Both Tunisia and Egypt, to Libya’s northwest and east, respectively, experienced massive and violent protests on September 11th, 2012, that required the intervention of Tunisian and Egyptian security forces in order to save American lives.  Attacks and violent protests were hardly limited to these two countries, either.  As was made clear throughout the hearing, the U.S. only had a minimal presence in Benghazi at the time, though this presence included Amb. Stevens and his small security team.  Still, the lack of American personnel means there was very little information coming in directly from U.S. personnel and a lot confusion resulted when things began to go badly on September 11th, 2012.

Now, here is where things get complicated: in some countries, there were protests that turned violent, without the violence being part of any planned attack.  In the situation in Benghazi, the attacks were premeditated and planned, and not part of any protests that became violent spontaneously, though some people seemed to have joined the attack and/or looted spontaneously.

With very little information coming in and widespread outrage in the Muslim world over the video, it was a perfectly reasonable assumption that the violence in Benghazi was related to the video (and, I will soon explain, that still has not been disproven).  At this point in time, senior officials at the time like Sec. Clinton, Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, President Obama, and various press officials for the White House and various agencies were having to respond to unfolding events around the world, all of which either already had or potentially could have put American lives and facilities in danger.  And without detailed knowledge of what was going on, the whole series of global and often deadly incidents looked very much to be in reaction to the video.  The day of the attack, Clinton released a press statement and Rep. Jordan chose to focus on one sentence of that statement as grounds for his claim that Clinton lied and was telling the American people that the attack was all because of the video: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” read her statement.

Read, and reread, because Jordan’s claim is so stupendous as to boggle the mind: Clinton is clearly mentioning that some were using the videos as an excuse to commit violence; in no way is she justifying the violence, in no way is she saying “I have sought to justify,” in no way is she saying this video is the only explanation or motive.  Clinton asked to and then read more of her statement before the Committee, including a line which Jordan had conveniently chosen to not read, one three sentences after the line he did read: “But let me be clear, there is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”  Jordan then focuses on two conversations and an e-mail, two conversations that Clinton had the evening of the attack, one with the President of Libya, one with the Prime Minister of Egypt, where she discussed that it was an attack by a terrorist group and not simply a protest gone spontaneously violent; she also noted in an e-mail to her family that evening that it was a terrorist attack.  In the time between her initial statement and these conversations and e-mail, a terrorist group had claimed responsibility (and later retracted) so Clinton’s story evolved with the information she had at the time.  U.S. officials also did not receive video of the incident until September 18th, the first time it became clear to them that there were no protests involved in the attacks in Benghazi.  

However, this should be made clear: distinguishing between protests against the video that became spontaneously violent and premeditated attacks does not mean that the premeditated attacks were not also inspired by the video, in part or fully.  But the way the Republicans seize on this, in their worldview is has to be either one or the other, and if this distinction is not rigidly made, it is evidence of a cover-up and outright lying.  Such a mentality reduces terrorism and its motives to a cartoon and clear-cut understanding of a very complex phenomenon with very complex reasons, motivations, and actors involved.  Jordan and his colleagues’ view that linking the premeditated attack in Benghazi to the video in any way amounts to willful lying shows them to be grossly unfit to analyze anything involving foreign policy or terrorism.  One can hope voters will notice this, too.  In any event, when one of the leaders of the attack was apprehended almost two years later by the U.S. military, he told his interrogators that the video was very much a motivation for the attack, that the attack was a response to the video.  This, of course, Jordan does not mention.

Picking up where his colleagues left off and telling the world absolutely nothing new, Chairman Gowdy focused his first session (but hardly stopped there) exclusively on the Blumenthal-Clinton e-mail exchange.  Clinton had said they were unsolicited in general, but that she did respond to some and occasionally asked for more.  Gowdy, an experienced prosecutor, played on the fact that Clinton had actually responded to and asked sometimes for more information to try to damage Clinton’s credibility, to make her look like a liar since she had used the word unsolicited but had actually engaged him some of the time.  Really, he spent his entire first session playing word games.  Clinton easily made clear that it was both quite possible to receive unsolicited e-mails from a source in general, but to occasionally engage and respond while still characterizing the body of e-mails as “unsolicited.”  Gowdy utterly failed to make anything out of “unsolicited” or to actually even discuss anything specifically related to Benghazi.  And he is the Chairman of the Committee…

Thus ended the first of many, many rounds of questioning that were to last some eleven hours including breaks.  After the first round of questioning, Democrats and Republicans blew up at each other, complete with interrupting and shouting in what is exceedingly rare behavior during a Congressional hearing.  Democrats complained about the focus on Clinton’s e-mails and Blumenthal at the expense of actual issues related to Benghazi, and claimed that Blumenthal’s own testimony before the Committee contradicted Republican assertions and thus demanded its release, noting that only his e-mails and Clinton’s had been released but that his testimony was behind closed doors.  When the second session began, a vote to release Blumenthal’s closed-door session into the public record was defeated in a party-line vote, with all five Democrats voting to release the information, and all seven Republicans voting against the release.

The shouting match, and subsequent partisan vote, served an indicative point of symbolism for the entire proceedings.

CNN

*****

More (and More) of the Same and Going Nowhere

Over the many subsequent hours of testimony, the Republicans stayed on their favorite topics: Clinton’s e-mails, Blumenthal and his e-mails to Clinton (what Gowdy unprofessionally termed “drivel”), the idea that Clinton was personally responsible for the specific security arrangements in Benghazi, the idea that Clinton did not care about the safety of Amb. Stevens and other personnel, the “issue” of the video in relation to the Administration’s sloppy early attempts to explain the Benghazi attacks, and the idea that the whole Libya policy was designed by Clinton as a vehicle of self-promotion.  Most tediously, the Republicans not only unproductively repeated the statements and questions of their Republican colleagues as if they not already been made (and discredited/refuted already), the individual Republicans even often repeated their own statements and lines of questioning rather pointlessly, in ways that revealed nothing new; not only could they not coordinate effectively among themselves, but they also failed to mentally do so within their own heads.  All throughout, their “evidence” amounted to little more than splitting hairs in regards to sets of one or several e-mails out of tens of thousands or presenting information devoid of context that did not involve Clinton or her specific scope of action (for example, presenting data on security requests even though Clinton did not personally handle those, a fact repeated many times but, sadly, to no effect).

The ensuing sessions were simply more of the same in either content or style or both. Pompeo later read from an ARB from 1998 that stated “first and foremost, the Secretary should take a personal and active role in carrying out the responsibility — ensuring the security of the U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad” in an effort to portray Clinton as negligent for not having personally taken control of the details of security specification, procedures, and personnel at American diplomatic facilities around the world, but it took Democratic Rep. Schiff to read from the rest of that section, which stated that “in the process, the Secretary should re-examine the present organizational structure, with the objective of assuring that a single high-ranking officer is accountable for all protective security matters and has the authority necessary to coordinate on the Secretary’s behalf.”  Pompeo’s selectivity, manipulation of the facts, and dishonest partisanship could not be more apparent, but Pompeo and other Republicans showed no sense of shame throughout the proceedings.

Occasionally, a Republican might actually bring up something that had not been beaten repeatedly like a dead horse.  Most notably, Rep. Martha Roby brought up the issue of when, specifically, Clinton spoke to the survivors of the attack and where she physically was the night of the attack.  This continued the despicable “You didn’t care!” motif and truly made the questioners appear despicable, Roby doing her part here.  Roby tried to act as if Clinton not personally speaking to/meeting the survivors right after the attacks and going home the night of the attack were indicative of some sort of dereliction or uncaring approach.  She did, in fact, meet with them shortly after they returned to the U.S. and the State Department.  CIA Director David Petraeus also went home that night and monitored the situation from home, just like Clinton, who stayed up all night and operated from a skiff complete with secure lines built into her house.  But this was not enough for Roby, who badgered Clinton with insulting questions designed to make it look as if Clinton could care less about her personnel and went home for a full night’s sleep the night of the attack, a portrayal that is nothing more than fantasy serving partisan politics.

In contrast, the Democrats seemed like schoolyard teachers (appropriately) defending  Clinton against a gang of bullies.  They were generally very measured, mature, and calm, but even they became exasperated and lost patience and some self-control, most notably Elijah Cummings, the Ranking Member (leader of the minority side in the Committee).  Even a big chunk of the conservative media saw that Clinton had performed well and that the Committee’s Republicans came off looking terrible. The differences between the two parties could not have been starker, and the fact that this “hearing” was a farce was on display for all to see.

The Big Picture

In the end, the highly public and covered proceedings succeeding in highlighting the Republicans’ mean-spiritedness, ignorance, myopia, willingness to mislead and be selective in their presentation, their pathological hatred of Clinton, their blind rage and irrational approach to an issue of deadly seriousness, their obsession and need to make her personally responsible for the deaths of four Americans, and their utter contempt for decorum and respectful behavior, while at the same time highlighting Clinton’s best qualities: her patience and endurance, her command of the facts, her ability to discuss just about anything in detail, her distinguished career as a diplomat, her statesmanship, her willingness to be tough when her questioners crossed a line, her quiet but visible emotion when she was insulted beyond any degree of propriety, her willingness to sick up for committed public servants, and her grace under fire.  Let Donald Trump or Dr. Ben Carson, or a party that set up such a sham investigation, compete with that.

© 2015-2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcomeBrian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating hereFeel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

*****

You may not respect his message, his positions, or the man himself, but you must respect his candidacy for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 10, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 10th, 2015 UPDATED (see bottom)

Also published by Stupidparty Math v. Myth.

AP

AMMAN — In the ideal America, egocentric and eccentric billionaire and reality-TV personality Donald Trump would never have a realistic chance at getting the nomination of one of America’s two major parties to be its candidate for president of the United States. Many liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, would not dispute this statement.

However, this is not an ideal world, and America is far from an ideal society too. If you don’t understand the very real reasons why Donald Trump has a real chance at being the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, then you don’t understand the Republican Party, American politics, or American society. Below are the main reason why Trump isn’t going away and why he has a real shot at winning the Republican primaries, if not the general election.

1.) The Republican Party Is-A-Changin’

The Republican Party is in a state of open division and flux, and for all you Game of Thrones fans, remember: “Chaos is a ladder” (spoilers for GoT in this link). The whole significance of the Tea Party movement is that it was a bloody, forceful attempt to pry the steering wheel out of the hands of the establishment and the elites who had been in tight control of the party for years. This peaked in some ways with the 2010 midterm elections in which extremist Tea Party candidates (Christine O’Donnell, anyone?) lost some key and very winnable Senate races to vulnerable Democrats but still managed to win many elections and were the major factor in the Republicans taking the House of Representatives from the Democrats. However, Tea Party candidates were thought to have gone too far in the 2012 election, hurting the Republican Party and even Mitt Romney in Obama’s reelection. Much of the conventional wisdom maintains that the Republicans learned their lesson from the 2012 Tea Party-driven electoral disaster, and have since moderated. What has actually happened is that the Republican Party has lurched to the right, with the Republican Establishment coopting the Tea Party style and message (and lack of substance) out of the fear of being “primaried”: incumbents losing in primaries before even having a chance to go toe-to-toe with a Democrat and losing to extremists within their own party who accused them of being too moderate. The party was hardly moderate before, but even now, it still falls short of the extreme rightist platform and style envisioned by true Tea Partiers. So there is still a war going on within the Republican Party; before Trump’s meteoric rise, this was perhaps best exemplified by the clash between freshman Senator (and all-around disingenuous charlatan) Ted Cruz on the one hand, and more moderate republicans like Speaker of the House John Boehner, Representative Peter King, Senator John McCain, and the Republican leadership on the other. Cruz is hardly alone in his extremism, though: the likes of Representatives Louie Gohmert and Steve King are but a few examples.

Into this struggle for the soul of the party strode Donald Trump. Among other things, he is very aggressively taking on the Republican Establishment in a way that electrifies the base, insulting John McCain, feuding with Rupert Murdoch, attacking both George W. and Jeb Bush, and, in addition, he has enough money (“TEN BILLION DOLLARS,” to quote Trump directly) that he is not at all dependent on the establishment for financing or support. Trump also has no experience as part of the Washington, DC, political machine, thus, he can avoid having to check the rather unpopular box of “Washington insider.” So can Jeb Bush, but he has the last name Bush (and will be reluctant to criticize his brother or father) and will be tainted with that label as a result. Other candidates who want to draw the non-Washington insider vote will most certainly be competing with Trump.

2.) Divided They Fall

History is full of weird winners. In particular, it is not difficult at all to find examples of when one faction or person was able to triumph because its numerous opponents could not unite and stop fighting among themselves. Ancient Rome, for example, was eventually brought down by much weaker “barbarian” factions because its intermittent civil wars among different Romans devastated Rome’s strength and left it vulnerable in ways it should never have been. The Egyptian opposition to Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood could not unite in elections during the Arab Spring, and thus paved the way for Morsi’s victory and troubled presidency, which, in turn, paved the way for General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s countercoup/counterrevolution and the destruction of a nascent Egyptian democracy. Al Gore lost to George W. Bush because immature liberals in Florida and New Hampshire voted for Ralph Nader—a realistically hopeless liberal alternative to Gore and thus a merely symbolic vote that gave Bush victory in both states—because they viewed voting as a masturbatory act of self-gratification instead of a duty to vote with an eye towards the real world impact of voting and not as act designed to make you most pleased with yourself and your conscience, the real world be damned… I’m sure you can think of other examples easily.

As for the Republican primaries, there are currently seventeen Republican candidates. Though Donald trump is nowhere close to garnering support from a majority of Republicans, he still has a commanding lead over his rivals in the latest round of scientific national polling, and even if a full third of the candidates dropped out tomorrow, that would still leave ten other candidates among whom to divide the non-trump vote. The latest polls have trump with the support of about 25% of Republicans nationally. That means the other 75% of support is currently divided among the other sixteen candidates (if that vote is divided equally, each candidate would have only roughly 4.7% of the vote). Jeb Bush, in second place, barely broke into double-digits, and the other fifteen candidates did not break into double-digits. Trump is doubling (or more) the level of support of the candidate right behind him in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, what are supposed to be the first three contests for the Republican nomination.  And in Florida, where Jeb Bush was governor for eight years and Marco Rubio has been a sitting U.S. senator since 2011, Trump is ahead of Bush by 1 % and ahead of Rubio by 20 % as of the latest poll! The first three contests are just six months away or less, and Florida just seven; a lot can change, and a lot must change, for Trump to lose at least the first three contests. But if he manages to stay ahead—and it’s his to lose and the burden is on other candidates to rise up—and wins the first three contests (let alone carry that momentum into Florida and prevail there), it’s very hard to see him losing the nomination.

Normally in the Republican primaries, there is one frontrunner or two candidates duking it out, maybe one dark horse candidate, and everyone else is on the bottom. In this case, there are fifteen candidates currently averaging in single digits. Where normally the few bottom dwellers would drop out and lose campaign cash relative to those on the top, almost all the candidates here are bottom feeders feeding on scarce resources. What this means is that almost all of them are close in both polling status and resources, making the incentive for staying in the race that much higher and the incentive for dropping out that much lower. This, in turn, means that they will likely continue to divide the non-Trump vote among them for months into the primaries, only helping Trump’s chances. The battle for being number #3 (or #4?) , with enough delegates at the convention to dictate things to the eventual nominee, including maybe even forcing the nominee to pick a certain vice presidential nominee, could thus carry a significance that no recent election has shown and bring us back to the old days of backroom wheeling, dealing, and kingmaking of the old-school political conventions. A divided or unpredictable convention, in the world of twenty-first century media, would be a political spectacle like nothing we’ve seen since the Florida debacle in 2000. In such an atmosphere, a man like Trump who seems to thrive on his cantankerous relationship with the media could indeed use the chaos to his advantage and that could very well mean a Trump ascension of the Littlefinger ladder to the Iron Throne of the Republican nomination (if you’re interested, read my take on the political and foreign policy lessons from Game of Thrones).

3.) Republican Primary Voters are a Different Breed

They Republican base voters are in an active revolt against their party’s establishment, and are in a perpetual revolt against the media. Trump picking a fight with Fox News—yes, even Fox News—and debate moderator/Fox News personality Megan Kelly (who did, frankly, in some ways seem hostile and out to get him even if her questions were totally legitimate)—works brilliantly for him in important ways. See, two things members of the Republican base hate are 1.) being told by The Republican Establishment/Elites who to vote for and 2.) being told by The Media Establishment/Elite who to vote for. They way they and Trump see it, both the Republican and Media Establishment (Fox News combines both of these) are out to get Trump, and this is actually true in a number of ways. Mainstream America thinks of Fox News as representing Republicans, and compared to most media, it does in a relative sense. But the base really gets its kicks from media sources like Breitbart and Drudge that have been quite friendly to Trump. They are also even generally older and whiter than the Republican Party in general, a party already known for being older and whiter than the average American, proportionately speaking. This makes them an extreme element in a party that has, as discussed, already become more extreme. In flocking to Trump and his extreme statements, along with Trump the GOP base is giving a big proverbial middle-finger to their own party’s Establishment and to the media in general, who both seemed eager to dismiss him as a farcical sideshow. All this leads directly to the final point…

4.) Trump Knows How to Play the Media to His Advantage Like a Harp

Trump is also brilliant at playing the media here; his provocations ensure he is dominating the news coverage and this is depriving oxygen to other candidates desperate for attention and airtime and who are at risk of suffocation, while at the same time any hostility from the media plays into his narrative that the media is out to get him and is trying to control the election, a narrative that the Republican base is only too eager to believe. That the Republican Establishment’s principal way to go after him is through the media itself is not lost on the base here, either. So in many ways, what others see as mistakes that will “doom” Trump’s campaign are actually nice big plates of red meat for the Republican base, the exact type of people whose support he needs to win primary contests and win the nomination. He is the incarnation of their resentment and they seem eager to support him because of that. And the more these feuds continue, the more that the media, frankly, can’t look away from him because they know covering him will draw viewers and make them lots of money, as the recent debate’s ratings proved (see below). The satirical newspaper The Onion captured the sentiment the best with a faux piece satirically “written” by Trump for parody purposes titled: “Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You?”

*****

I am not here to say that I think Trump will win. I am here to simply say that dismissing him as a sideshow is naïve. Currently, he is the show (not only was the debate featuring Trump the most-watched primary debate ever with some 24 million viewers, it was the most watched program ever broadcast [only] by cable news and easily beat the NBA finals’ and a typical Monday Night Football game’s ratings). Again, as mentioned, someone has to climb up from the pack and beat him. Bush had (see below) been the second highest in the polls, and has raised a lot of money ($100 million+ including his PACs). But he has not been impressive thus far and would need to greatly improve his performance for him to win, and his greatest advantage—his name—is also his biggest curse. Walker had (see below) been third generally, but not even generally above 10 %; he, too, would need to cover a lot of ground to reach first and hardly distinguished himself during the debate even if he did ok. Both Rubio and Fiorina had a good night (the latter only at the kids-table debate where no rivals treated her as a threat or challenged her), but one good night for candidates so low in the polls does not bestow a crown upon either, and they are both quite vulnerable in their own ways (to be discussed in a forthcoming piece). With early signs showing Republican voter support strong and not falling for Trump in multiple unscientific flash polls and in the first scientific poll released since the debate (the latter showing him still nearly doubling the second-place candidate who is now Ted Cruz!), with Bush and Walker falling to be tied now for sixth place, the burden is on one of these problematic candidates or another to make up the gulf in popular support between them and The Donald. Love him or hate him, just don’t be writing Trump off yet.

UPDATED: Another national poll just released today taken wholly after the debate has Trump up to 32 % with a big post-debate boost, almost tripling the support for second-place-Bush who is at 11 %. Ben Carson (!?) has jumped to third place with 9 %, and Walker and Rubio tie for fourth place at 6 % each. In addition, a new Iowa-specific poll has trump increasing his lead, putting him at 19 % to Walker’s and Carson’s tied second-place 12 %, followed by Bush at 11 % and a big boost to Carly Fiorina nipping at Bush’s heels with 10 % and Cruz just behind her at 9 %… As I suggested above, one can almost see Trump as a Roman emperor watching his rivals hack at each other as gladiators in the Colosseum in the sense that he rises above the (polling) fray and the rest take votes away from each other…

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 16, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 16th, 2015

Republished by Movie Pilot

SPOILERS for the first five seasons, including the season 5 finale, but NOT for season 6

Varys: You have many admirable qualities- self-pity is not one of them. Any fool with a bit of luck can find himself born into power, but earning it for yourself? That takes work.

Tyrion Lannister: I’m not well-suited for work –

Varys: I think you are. You have your father’s instincts for politics- and you have compassion.

Tyrion Lannister: Compassion? Yes. I killed my lover with my bare hands, I shot my own father with a crossbow!

Varys: I never said you were perfect.

AMMAN — Game of Thrones, the award-winning hit HBO series that keeps setting new internet piracy records, is an incredibly unique show for many reasons. And though it has dragons and magic and frozen zombies, one of the reasons it is so unique is that it dares to tell us harsh, uncomfortable lessons about the very real world in which we live. Below, ten of the most important and salient will be discussed.

1.) A revolution, a campaign, and winning a war are all far easier than actually governing

“King Robert was strong; he won the rebellion and crushed the Targaryen dynasty. And he attended three Small Council meetings in seventeen years of ruling, and he spent his time whoring, hunting and drinking until the last two killed him. So, we have…a man who thinks winning and ruling are the same thing.” —Tywin Lannister

_____

“Killing and politics aren’t always the same thing! When I served as Hand of the King, I did quite well with the latter, considering the King in question preferred torturing animals to leading his people. I could do an even better job… advising a ruler worth the name, if that is indeed what you are.” —Tyrion Lannister to Daenerys Targaryen

_____

Hizdahr zo Loraq: Politics is the art of compromise, Your Grace.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m not a politician. I’m a queen.

Hizdahr zo Loraq : Forgive me. You’re right, of course. Still, it’s easier to rule happy subjects than angry ones.

Those who are good at climbing the path (or ladder, if you will) to power often find that exercising power or holding onto their new seat of power is far more challenging than the climbing process that got them there in the first place. In the same vein, often the skillset that allows one to ascend to power is not the same skillset that allows one to hold onto power and/or effectively govern. From Robert Baratheon to Daenerys Targaryen, we’ve see powerful characters stumble and struggle to maintain control and to rule the lands they have conquered (and for Jon snow, how many days did he last as the Lord Commander?). An army and dragons can’t govern. Robert’s hold on the Seven Kingdoms was short-lived, and Daenerys’ ability to govern her eastern cities seems precarious at best.  Let’s replace dragons with fighter jets and we can see the same basic experience for the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. We can also see echoes of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt and both Barack Obama (he is better at campaigning than governing) and Nelson Mandela (legendary as a non-violent civil rights leader and revolutionary, not-so-great as South Africa’s President once in power). Americans were fortunate that their revolutionary generation of Founding Fathers could both lead a revolution and lead a government exceptionally well. France’s Revolutionary leaders during the French Revolution fell far short of the American mark when it came to governing. This show reminds us starkly the difference between getting power and using it well.

2.) Bad and good can and do coexist, even within the same person, policy, or country

Tyrion Lannister: So here we sit, two terrible children of two terrible fathers.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: I’ve heard stories.

Daenerys Targaryen: Why did you travel to the other side of the world to meet someone terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: To see if you were the right kind of terrible.

Daenerys Targaryen: Which kind is that?

Tyrion Lannister: The kind that prevents your people from being even more so.

_____

“You were a hero, and a smuggler. A good act does not wash out the bad. Nor a bad the good.” — Stannis Baratheon to Ser Davos Seaworth

_____

Melisandre: Are you a good man, Ser Davos Seaworth?

Ser Davos Seaworth: I’d say my parts are mixed, my lady, good and bad.

Melisandre: If half an onion is black with rot, it’s a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.

When it comes to Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark, two of the show’s most beloved characters, most people are ready to sing their praises. And yet, when Tyrion had a chance to escape he murdered both his former lover and his father without needing to do so to escape. Arya herself seems driven by revenge and little else, and was content to let The Hound—the closest thing she’s had to a friend for a long while—die a slow and painful death. At the same time, we have Jamie Lannister—poster child for incest and attempted child murder (remember Bran?)—making us swoon by helping Brienne of Tarth, sticking up for his incest-love-child Myrcella, and standing up to both his father and Cersei on behalf of Tyrion. Sandor Clegane has many awful deeds on his resume, including murdering the butcher’s boy who was friends with Arya—yet he also saved Loras Tyrell from his own brother, Gregor Clegane, when Gregor (The Mountain) was being a sore loser in a jousting tournament, and Sandor also showed more kindness to both Arya and Sansa than arguable anyone else in recent memory except for maybefaceless-man Jaqen. Who here didn’t feel sympathy for The Hound when Arya just left him to suffer? Who didn’t come away from that scene feeling at least a little different about Arya? Then we have Stannis, touchingly showing Jon Snow respect and giving him a lot of leeway even as he sacrificed his own daughter to fire and a stake and murdered his own brother. Even Catelyn Stark killed an innocent girl who was Walder Frey’s ill-treated wife as her last act just before she herself was killed. Perhaps the most conflicted character still alive is Theon Greyjoy, now the shadow of a human being known as Reek. Even one of the Sand girls, who had poisoned Bronn and who was ready to murder a young Myrcella just because she was a Lannister, was willing to save Bronn with an antidote to that poison and didn’t mind showing a man who was down and in jail her lovely breasts as a pick me up.

One of the things that makes Game of Thrones so unique is its complex portrayal of characters as something more than simply “bad” or “good,” to which so many other shows and movies tend to reduce things. Human beings seem to always have had a tendency to lionize or demonize their heroes and villains in an oversimplified way that bears little resemblance to reality. Robert E. Lee is revered by most white American Southerners as some sort of saint, even as he fought to destroy much of what was the United States and the Constitution in favor of preserving aa society based on race-based chattel slavery. Russians today seem to revere Putin. Ronald Reagan is practically deified as a saint even though his record as president is highly questionable and often shameful. Richard Nixon is demonized even as he made peace with China, created the E.P.A., and ended the Vietnam War (though clearly not in the best way possible), hardly an all-bad legacy and full of significant, commendable achievements. George W. Bush may have objectively had one of the worst presidencies in American history, but he did more than any other president (including Obama) to combat AIDS, spending billions of dollars and saving millions of lives. Billions worship Jesus of Nazareth without really factually knowing much of anything about him, and billions others revere the Prophet Mohammad even though they factually know very little about him. The United States often tries to do good, but does more bad in the process. The NSA spying program helps to keep Americans safe but also violates their privacy. Even Pope John Paull II—literally a saint—had a pretty bad record on the child sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is in our DNA, but it makes us poor judges of character more often than not and blinds us to the very real truth when we try to make so many public figures into either heroes or villains. We can love or revile characters for certain reasons, and then feel the opposite about the same characters for other reasons. And that’s ok. It’s better than reducing people to simply “good” or “bad.”

In particular for policymakers, this can help people in power to realize that making deals with people who can actually make a positive difference should not be based simply on whether or not they are thought of as “good” or “bad.”

3.) Sexual violence against women is pervasive and often there is no justice for either the victims or the perpetrators

“And to my son, the stallion who will mount the world, I will also pledge a gift. I will give him the iron chair that his mother’s father sat upon. I will give him Seven Kingdoms. I, Drogo, will do this. I will take my Khalasar west to where the world ends and ride wooden horses across the black salt water as no Khal has done before! I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses! I will rape their women, take their children as slaves and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak! This, I vow, I, Drogo, son of Bharbo. I swear before the Mother of Mountains as the stars look down in witness! As the stars look down in witness!”­ —Khal Drogo, translated from Dothraki

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“Have you ever seen a war in which innocents didn’t die by the thousands? I was in King’s Landing after the sack, Khaleesi. You know what I saw? Butchery. Babies, children, old men, more women raped than you can count. There’s a beast in every man, and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.” —Ser Jorah Mormont

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“Elia Martell. I killed her children, then I raped her…then I smashed her head in, like this! ” —Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane

I will simply link to feminist writer Amanda Marcotte’s brilliant and very true MUST READ article shooting down all of the specious arguments about why Sansa’s rape scene and others in Game of Thrones are somehow “wrong,” should be done “differently,” or are “sexist” and “misogynistic.” Does anyone think that Steven Spielberg is an anti-Semite because he showed Jews being killed in the Holocaust in Schindler’s List? Today, even in 2015, sexual violence is pervasive all over the world, and even often in the most progressive and modern societies, from the U.S. to Sweden (Stieg Larsson, anyone?) Only about 5% of cases are even ever reported to authorities, which means that for 95% of women even in the modern world, justice for the raped and the rapists almost never happens. Yet people get furious with Game of Thrones because it displays a medieval world (where rape was pretty much institutionalized and far more widespread than it is today) that shows us just that. Whether with Sansa or Wildling women, the show should make us damn uncomfortable with rape, and it does.

If you want a rape story with a happy ending, watch an network TV movie-of-the-week or Lifetime. If you want to be taught an adult lesson about the real state and results of sexual violence in the real world, and walk away with the obvious truth that rape is a mostly unpunished crime suffered by unknown and silent victims, internalize that, be far more outraged about rape that you would with a misleading happy ending complete with justice and healing, and use that outrage to both care and do even more about rape in society, then watch the show. If you want to childishly be coddled and made to “feel good” that rape, actually, isn’t a silent, hidden, mass horror, don’t watch the show. But don’t pathetically try to claim the showrunners or George R. R. Martin are misogynistic, patriarchal, bad people who are encouraging rape simply by portraying it realistically and who have failed in their “duty” to give us stories that reinforce and reward our smug, modern sense of self-righteousness that cries “BAD” whenever things turn out in a way we don’t like. I’m all about women’s empowerment, but the ever-present public talk of women’s empowerment has led too many to believe that this empowerment is a common reality in many places and instances where it is not. A huge portion of the women on earth—perhaps a majority—are not “empowered” and are at risk of abuse committed with impunity, including rape; that’s the unfortunate reality. All (the mostly unknown and unheard) victims of rape are lucky that a show is as brave and bold as this one to make people realize just how terrible and pervasive rape, with its near total lack of justice for its victims, truly is.

4.) The noble path does not necessarily lead to success and the good guys often don’t win

“Poor Ned Stark- brave man, terrible judgement.” —Jamie Lannister

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“I’m not Ned Stark, I understand the way this game is played.” —Tyrion Lannister

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“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” —Ramsay Snow

There is perhaps no other show on television that reminds us as starkly that the good guys don’t always win and following moral and ethical principles does not guarantee success; heck, in real life it often maybe even usually does not. It began with Ned Stark losing his head. And it has hardly ended there, as any fan of the show or books can tell you. Among the ranks of the powerful, there are more Joffreys than Neds. George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns used some pretty dirty and shameful tricks to falsely smear two decorated war veterans—John McCain and John Kerry—and we all remember who won those contests. It is easy to lose track of how many crimes Silvio Berlusconi, longtime Prime Minister of Italy, has been accused of over the years. We have many states ruled by murderous dictators, from Bashar al-Assad in Syria to Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Putin and the Koch Brothers have immense wealth and power, and can hardly be considered nice guys. Many of the brave people who stand up to these people and challenge them simply lose. Other times, they don’t simply lose, they lose their lives as well (see, quite recently, Boris Nemtsov). Or see Benjamin Netanyahu winning re-election in Israel through race-baiting. Or Hamas winning an election, period. It is useful to remember that, more often than not, this is the way the world works. Ned and Robb Stark, after all, were naïve to proceed as they did and it cost them their lives.

5.) The most horrible acts are often done for the most predictable reasons

“Just how safe do you think Myrcella is if the city falls? Do you want to see her raped and butchered like the Targaryen children?! Make no mistake, they will mount her pretty little head on a spike right beside yours.” —Tyrion Lannister to his sister Cersei, mother or Myrcella

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Petyr Baelish: Tell me, Ser Loras., what do you desire, most in this world?

Loras Tyrell: Revenge.

Petyr Baelish: I have always found that to be the purest of motivations.

We often hear the term “senseless horror.” But, quite disturbingly, horror often has a purpose behind it that is fairly banal and predictable, even as it is still often inexcusable. Stannis sacrificed his own daughter to be burned to death, but it was almost boringly easy to explain why: he wants to be king, the one thing which defines him more than other aspect of his character. Joffrey has a bunch of babies killed, simply and predictably because he doesn’t want any competition. Jamie Lannister almost murders little Bran Stark, simply because he doesn’t want his incestuous secret to get out and also to protect his love: his sister. Daenerys reopens the fighting pits to keep the peace and lets her dragons burn a man alive to make an example. Lord Bolton wipes out most of the Starks and their supporters at Robb Stark’s wedding because he wants to be warden of the North. And Theon betrays the Starks to win the affection and respect of his father (which he didn’t).

Likewise, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and nuclear-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in large part because it hoped these acts would end WWII faster and to intimidate a muscular Soviet Union. The U.S. much more recently invaded Iraq because it hoped it could bring democratic reform to the Middle East through invasion and occupation in order to reduce the root causes of terrorism and help stabilize a region ripe with fossil fuels. Israel invades and occupies the Palestinians for close to fifty years now mainly because it is afraid for its own survival. Terrorists often use terror because they are weak, oppressed, and have no hope of fighting a conventional military force. ISIS kills dissenters so it can maintain its grip on power more easily. Even the Rwandan Genocide was carried out mainly by one group (Hutu) against another (Tutsi) that was oppressing it, and then a reverse countergenocide was launched in revenge. One can hope that because of the sheer predictability of these crimes, they might at some point become easier to anticipate and prevent, especially for policymakers.

6.) Even in a brutal world, random acts of kindness are powerful

“I’ll stand for the dwarf.” —Bronn, volunteering to fight for Tyrion as his champion

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“Leave him be!” —Sandor “The Hound” Clegane as he rushes to defend Loras Tyrell against his brother, The Mountain

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“I will be your champion. ” —Oberyn Martell to Tyrion Lannister

Even in as brutal and cruel a world as that of Game of Thrones, there are still random acts of kindness that can surprise even the most cynical. Perhaps the biggest was when Bronn offered to fight for Tyrion at the Eyrie in front of crazy Lysa. Just a few episodes ago, a big hulking beast a fighter, who had no relationship with Tyrion, cut Tyrion free from his shackles so he could join Jorah in the arena and make his case to Daenerys. I already mentioned Bronn’s new love interest saving him from poison, and then there’s Jamie risking his neck to help out Brienne. The Hound saves Sansa and Loras as I’ve also discussed. Ser Davos sticks up for Robert Baratheon’s bastard after Melisandre sets her sights on him, and Sam goes way out of his way to help the wilding girl Gilly and her baby. Robb stark shows mercy to Osha the wildling who almost captured Bran, then she ends up helping to save Bran and Rickon Stark and is still looking after Rickon. And Tyrion goes out of his way to treat Sansa with kindness, passing on sex with her even though, within Westeros, he was well within his rights to insist, as we can tell from the distasteful bedding ceremony. All of these acts of kindness either do or presumably have big consequences for the show, too, and the characters receiving them (many of whom would have died without the help). The big exception, of course, is Oberyn Martell fighting for Tyrion as his Champion in Tyrion’s (second) trial by combat, since Oberyn loses, dies, and then Tyrion is found guilty.

The real world is also full of random kindness, of the type that’s sometimes just enough to not lose hope. As Gandalf says in The Hobbit, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.”

Then again, sometimes good deeds don’t go unpunished. Ned Stark thought he would give Cersei the courtesy of a heads-up that he had figured out Joffrey was an incest-bastard borne of her and Jamie. Lot of good that did him… Similarly, the U.S. had little to gain in Somalia helping hundreds of thousands fend off starvation and ended up with the Black Hawk Down episode, dead Americans, and an Osama bin Laden emboldened by the American withdrawal…

7.) Religion is dangerous

“Trial by combat: deciding a man’s guilt or innocence in the eyes of the Gods, by having two other men hack each other to pieces. Tells you something about the Gods.” —Tyrion Lannister

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“We all must choose, man or woman, young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same. We choose light or we choose darkness. We choose good or we choose evil. We choose the true god or the false.” —Melisandre

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“Death by fire is the purest death.” —Melisandre

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“Belief is so often the death of reason. ” —Qyburn

The world of Game of Thrones may be fictional, but it is deadly accurate at showing how dangerous and even deadly religion can be. The Lord of Light priests/priestesses, especially the vampy Melisandre, are clearly fanatics willing to do anything to further their agenda. Getting a major character like Stannis to sacrifice his own daughter by burning her alive was just the latest of her outrages and atrocities. Stannis quite literally played with religious fire, and now he and his wife and daughter are dead. With Melisandre, we see when a cause and religion are united, there are no more rules of decency for the fundamentalists and fanatics. And face-changing Jaqen and whatever sort of Many-Faced-God temple-cult he has brought Arya into seem to employ magic and death and assassination in equal measure. Not to be outdone cult-wise, Jonathan Pryce’s Sparrows—more or less the Taliban of Westeros—are about to turn King’s Landing into the 1990s Kabul of the Seven Kingdoms. They already seem all too happy to murder people who are gay (good luck Loras!), among other fanaticisms. Religious-backed or religion-associated violence are omnipresent not just throughout human history, but in the present day as well, and studies show that religion tends to amplify cruelty and violence in conflict, rather than the reverse, a point I have made before. Groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the (Christian) Lord’s Resistance Army, Srebrenica, both Buddhists and Hindus killing Muslims in South(east) Asia, and, not too long ago, the (Christian) Ku Klux Klan, the IRA/UDF and Catholics and Protestants killing each other in Ireland, and Europe’s pogroms against Jews (just to name a few examples!) are all indicative of this trend. 

Politicians too often simply focus on religion’s positives and blame its negatives on outside forces, but this is specious reasoning at best. The better leaders will be able to recognize the perils and pitfalls of religion and the faithful and be able to guard against them. Cersei Lannister unleashed a demon with her supporting Jonathan Pryce’s High Sparrow, not wholly unlike the U.S. when it supported mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Fiction that inspires fanatics can be dangerous in both the fictitious and real worlds, it would seem, and the more rational would do best to try to wield and engage such forces cautiously, if at all. Better to avoid playing with fire. The U.S. did not, and 9/11 was one of the long-term results, while Cersei suffered her own personal 9/11 as a result of her poor decisions with that naked walk of shame she had to endure. Thus, the problems with religion in Game of Thrones mirror the problems with religion in our own world.

8.) Trust, loyalty, and friendship are possibly the most prized commodities and they are also among the rarest, while backstabbing and secret agreements are much more common

“Backstabbing doesn’t prepare you for a fight and that’s all the realm is now: backstabbing and scheming and arse-licking and money-grubbing. Sometimes I don’t know what holds it together.” — King Robert Baratheon

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“People work together, when it suits ’em. They’re loyal when it suits ’em. They love each other when it suits ’em- and they kill each other, when it suits ’em.” —Orell (the Wildling)

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“Yes, Ned Stark had many admirers- and how many of them stepped forward when the executioner came for his head?” — Olenna Tyrell

It’s rare, but friendship still shines in Game of Thrones. Tyrion and Varys, unlikely duo that they are, seem to have really bonded on that ship even more than before. Sam and Jon of the Night’s Watch are also quite the bromance, and even Sam and Maester Aemon Targaryen were getting quite close before Aemon died with same at his side. Podrick is touchingly loyal to both Tyrion and Brienne. King Robert and Ned Stark had a touching friendship, too, so much so that Ned Stark was almost the only person Robert Baratheon thought he could trust towards the end. Hodor’s undying loyalty to the stark children is also touching (kind of like a mentally challenged Samwise Gamgee à la Frodo in The Lord of the Rings). Ser Davos gets an honorable mention for his deep loyalty to Stannis, though the loyalty is not returned and Stannis seems to be pretty unworthy of Davos’ fidelity, who even lost his son at Blackwater Bay fighting for Stannis. Perhaps more interesting is the bond he developed with Stannis’s daughter, Shireen.

Note how short the above the list is… There are far more betrayals in the show and if I listed them here I’d be giving a summary of the whole series. I think anyone reading this already realizes the value of friends and allies in the real world because how many of us really have many especially close friends, but Game of Thrones can be a good reminder. In international relations and politics, true friends and allies are also incredibly rare. The “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK is a very rare example of steadfast allies staying together over time, for example. Japan and the U.S.are another good example. Most alliances, however, are borne out of convenience and last only briefly (think USSR and Nazi Germany, then USSR and the Allies in the same war!). This is true in politics too, as we can see politically how many Democrats were afraid to even be associated with Obama in the midterm elections of 2014 (to their detriment), even though Obama was a big part of the reason why many of them previously won in tight races. There is often a negative price to pay for staying loyal. It is hard to tell which city has more backstabbing: King’s Landing or Washington, DC. For non U.S.-readers, I am sure you can pick up your local paper and read similar stories of backstabbing about your own country’s politics. Political and geopolitical winds can shift faster than the power rankings for the houses of Westeros. In the real world, “Red Wedding” Bolton-Lannister style backstabbings are more common than true friendship, sadly. Now, with the Season 5 finale, we can also add Jon Snow’s backstabbing (to his face) at the hands of his own brothers of the Night’s Watch. The policymaker who is on his guard but also values true friends and alliances will be the one to listen to, then, in the end.

9.) The rich and powerful generally do not care about the masses and treat them as their playthings

Tyrion Lannister: Listen to me, Queen Regent, you’re losing the people. Do you hear me?!

Cersei Lannister: The people? You think I care?!

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Olenna Tyrell: If it’s equality you want, so be it. When House Tyrell stops sending our crops to the capital, everyone here will starve. And I’ll make sure the hungry know who’s to blame.

High Sparrow: Have you ever sowed the field, Lady Olenna? Have you ever reaped the grain? Has anyone in House Tyrell? A lifetime of wealth and power has left you blind in one eye. You are the few, we are the many. (Walks away slowly and then turns back) And when the many stop fearing the few… (Exits)

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“The powerful have always preyed on the powerless- that’s how they became powerful in the first place. ” —Tyrion Lannister

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“The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.” —Tywin Lannister

You don’t need to read Marx or agree with communism to know that the rich and powerful ruling classes care for little more than themselves (and if you don’t agree with this statement, there is a really good chance that you are rich or powerful and in the ruling class). This goes for most of human history and continues quite powerfully today. And there are even academic studies that prove those on top are more selfish and have less empathy in their bones. There are so many examples of this in Game of Thrones, the way each House and wannabe ruler is so willing to spend human lives to get what they want. Even Daenerys, who exhibits some concern for her new subjects, also expects them to serve her and die for her claim to a distant throne in a land almost none of them have ever seen. Mance Rayder cared for his people. And Mance Rayder is dead. Tyrion and Jon Snow (and the many departed Starks) seem be the only characters in positions of power who routinely try to look out for those less powerful than them. A lot of good it did Jon Snow, as this very compassion is what incited a rebellion of his own Night’s Watch brothers when they killed him at the end of season 5. But almost all the powerful leaders in Westeros seem to only think of their people as objects, breaking Kant’s rule to always treat people as ends themselves, not means to an end. That is still sadly how the world works most of the time, even today. Syria (and now Yemen) and its people have become one giant chessboard, it people all pawns in a deadly game of international rivalries. CEOs make billions and treat their many workers as poorly as they can get away with. The list goes on and on, but the point is, there are very few powerful people who really fight for the masses, and Game of Thrones does a great job reminding us of this.

10.) Preparation and organization are key

“Winter is coming.” —House Words of House Stark

Last, but not least, the show emphasizes that preparation is key. Daenerys has been prepping for her invasion of Westeros for five seasons now (but did not plan her occupations of Mereen and Yunkai well, and thus had revolts in both). Both Tyrion’s preparation for the Battle of the Blackwater and Jon Snow’s preparation for the Wildling assault on The Wall allowed each to save the day. Robb Stark was great at winning battles but Tywin outmatched him by planning for a long game and even turned the Starks’ bannermen Boltons over to his side, defeating his enemy with secret diplomacy. We see preparation paying large dividends. Likewise, in the real world, this also is very true. Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 with a meticulously planned political campaign. But the same man just recently failed to plan for, anticipate, or engage opposition enough for his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and the deal was voted down by the House as a result. The American occupation of Japan after WWII was planned well and far in advance, while the more recent occupation of Iraq was clearly not; the many and telling differences in results are clear. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israelis are famously well-prepared and organized, and have been for the entire conflict, compared to their famously disorganized Palestinian and Arab rivals. That is a big part of the reason why today there is a full and functional Israeli state, while the same can hardly be said of a Palestinian state, sadly. Game of Thrones mirrors our real world well in showing how serious preparation can really pay off, a lesson policymakers should never forget.

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In conclusion, we can see that the world of Game of Thrones is very harsh and brutal indeed. It is perhaps the most important thing about this work of fiction that is able to so powerfully remind us of how brutal and harsh our own world still is, and to stimulate discussion about these truths and how to address them, both in popular fictional culture and in terms of what we do in the real world.

See related article: Game of Thrones and the Gift of Empathy

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If you can’t understand that Obama’s overall Middle East strategy is starting to work, you don’t know what you’re talking about

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 21, 2015   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 21st, 2015

This piece was The Russian International Affairs Council’s (RIAC) “Post of the Month” for June/July, and was also published by Stupidparty Math v. Myththanks to Patrick Andendall and by Tuck Magazine.

The cocks who crow “failure” every time the sun rises about the Obama Administration’s overall Middle East strategy—and we will be hearing their mindless crowing at its highest decibels since the competition within the Republican Party for the Party’s presidential nomination is now officially underway—have no sense of strategy themselves and dangerously substitute tactical-here-and-nows and pointless posturing for real strategy. That’s not to say some of the Obama Administration’s Middle East policies aren’t lacking, but overall the Administration has more progress and sound approaches to point to than failures and mismanagement. Below, all of the Obama Administration’s major Middle East policies are broken down and given a letter grade. Here, then, is a look at all the major efforts of the Obama Administration in the Middle East, and as it covers a lot of territory this has been broken up into three parts, this being Part I and covering the U.S.-Muslim world reset, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine.

Other articles in this series:

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy (Sensibly): Part II: Syria

A tense triumvirate in September, 2009- Doug Mills/The New York Times

AMMAN — Well, here we are again. Far too many “experts,” from the far leftto (especially) those who lean right and even many non-Americans, are ready to claim that Obama is practically starting the apocalypse with his foreign policy. While hysterical, laughable claims about possible nuclear warover Ukraine and many other issues fall into this category, the Middle East situation in particular inspires a remarkable number of myopic and dim-witted exclamations not only from the Republican White House hopefuls, but also many in the commentariat and the Twitteratti. Never mind the track record of this commentary-class who are naysaying Obama’s moves (and to a degree lack thereof, but more on that later), and never mind that the generally ill-informed Twitteratti emerge practically every day with some new hysterics that that there is barely time to call them out on their hysterics of old. These Chicken Littles of all levels proclaim that the sky is falling so often, that one must marvel that there is any sky left for us to enjoy at this point if even a fraction of their panic-mongering can be taken seriously. What is particularly amusing is that many of the people who are blaming Obama for the imminent collapse of the world order and Pax Americana are the same people who blame him for U.S. economic woes, as if things were great in January 2009 and America was not in the midst of the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. Still even more amusing and amazing are that many of these people are both the people who led America into the Great Recession and into invading Iraq.

Having said this, I will am quite happy to repeat that I find the Obama Administration’s foreign policy to be far from perfect, and have made some of my own disagreements with it quite vocally and publicly on matters from Syria to Israel/Palestine, among others. So I write this neither as an apologist nor as a hater, but as someone who has studied the Middle East for much of the past fifteen years (including some studying abroad in the region and, most recently, actually living in the Middle East). Rather from a position of ideology, I simply try to look at each situation, country, organization, etc. in light of whatever current issue is at hand, and try to see who is trying to make things better, who is disrupting for less-than-altruistic reasons, and how successful these various parties are in their efforts and whether or not such efforts actually help people or hurt people in both the short and long-terms.

A few basic points, though, need to be reiterated before we launch into a discussion here:

• Obama took office in January, 2009, and had to deal with a Middle Eastthat had become an overall festering disaster from the actions of the Bush Administration but also from the terrible policies of local rulers, from Hosni Mubarak in Egypt to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to (the recently departed) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and also from the actions of a number of other foreign patrons, like Russia. While some of the American disasters had been partly mitigated by some competent self-correction (see Secretary of Defense Gates, General Petraeus, and the 2007 “Surge”), it is still undeniable that Obama inherited a situation in the Middle East that was probably worse than any previous American president ever had to deal with before. And those who say the situation got worse for a while under his watch may be right, but that is a statement of fact that in no way includes presiding over with responsibility, as this would be like blaming Lincoln for the Civil War or FDR for WWII. Rather, events were in motion and grievances raw and waiting to explode long before January 2009, it just took some time until after that for it all to boil over.
• The crises of the “Arab Spring” and its offshoot situations in Libya, Yemen, and most of all Syria had little to do with anything Obama did, and those trying to place primary blame for any of these local revolutions and wars are way off the mark. Locals were just as surprised as Americans at the Arab Spring, as well.
• As far as Israel/Palestine, Obama inherited a Bibi Netanyahu who had little-to-no desire to take the steps necessary for peace and an emasculated Palestinian Authority led by an emasculated Mahmoud Abbas, with the emasculation largely by Israeli design not just over the past few years but over decades.

Now that we have reminded people that the Middle East was not Vancouver or Switzerland before Obama took office, we have to think about what Obama’s major goals have been for U.S. policy in the region, why he has these goals, and how successful he has been in moving towards or fulfilling these goals. We can then give a letter “grade” on each of these for Obama and his Administration’s efforts so far.

In no particular order, let’s go through these major goals:

1.) Resetting U.S. relations with the Muslim world

I think we all remember Obama’s lofty Cairo address at Al-Azhar University, merely months into his presidency. At that point, Muslims were still in the “he’s not George W. Bush, he’s black, and his father was raised in a Muslim family” mode. However, escalation of U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan (a.k.a. Obama’s “surge”), Obama’s (wise) overall policy of not shying away from the use of drones in principle to go after terrorists training, plotting, and operating in ungoverned spaces, the taking out of Osama bin Laden by violating Pakistani sovereignty, still failing to fulfill his promise to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay over six years into his presidency, and lack of progress for the Palestinians achieving statehood combined with continued(and increasing) U.S. support of Israel have all led (unfairly, but quite understandably) to a feeling among Muslims that there was little to distinguish between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The fact is that the lofty rhetoric and high idealism of the (now somewhat infamous) Cairo speech was not matched with much of the action that Muslim publics wanted to see from a U.S. President: an end to drone strikes and military operations, the closing of Guantánamo, and real, substantive pressure on Israel and a lessening of U.S. support for Israel on behalf of Palestinians. While it was not realistic to expect any U.S. president to take away most of or all military options for dealing with terrorists in many of the weak states of the Muslim world, based on his own rhetoric Obama would have to be guilty of raising expectations on both Guantánamo and on Israel and the Palestinians far beyond what he has delivered and far below the amount of effort that should have come after such a speech.

Grade: D+ overall; more recently: C-

We don’t give Mr. Obama an F here because we are talking about the Muslim “world,” which, although mostly the people, also includes leaders and governments. This is because, despite his unpopularity on the street-level, the coalition he has put together to confront ISIS includes several Middle Eastern Muslim nations not just financing operations, as has been standard operating procedure in the past, but actually taking part in hostilities in a significant way. So one can say that recently, Obama has shown to have increased his ability to work with Muslims leader, if not endear himself to their people. In this way, then, Obama resembles George W. Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, who was able to include a wide array of regional Muslim nations in the 1990-91 Gulf War, more George W. was able to include in his 2003 misadventure. So even if Obama remains deeply unpopular among Muslims publics in many parts of the world, he deserves credit from getting more out of Muslim leaders recently than his predecessor.

2.) Ending U.S. combat involvement in Iraq while maintaining the U.S. role of a key ally and supporter of Iraq

Here is a goal that no one should be surprised about: Illinois state senator Obama, U.S. Senator Obama, Democratic presidential primary candidate Obama, and Democratic presidential nominee Obama all made it clear his goal was to end the Iraq War, specifically to end the U.S. combat role there. The fact that he opposed it more vocally than, and before, Hillary Clinton, who had voted for the authorization to use force in Iraq, was arguably the issue which most distinguished Obama from Clinton, and which propelled him to a Democratic primary victory over her. I will state here that I was, in much of the period before he was elected President, concerned about this position of his. While it was clear to me that Iraq had been a disaster and that the decision to invade was wrong, I felt that we owed the Iraqi people a lot for invading them erroneously and destroying their society through a combination of carelessness, incompetence, stupidity, and hubris. Yet before Obama was running for president, we had been able to improve the security situation greatly through some major changes in leadership and the accompanying “Surge,” as I have noted a few times before, but there was still a lot to be done and while I was more and more doubting the ability of the U.S. to achieve its goals in Iraq, I had not yet come to the position where I was comfortable with a withdrawal of U.S. forces from a combat role. In other words, I didn’t even want to go into the store, but having broken the merchandise once we were in the store, I felt we had to fix things and couldn’t just leave (see Colin Powell’s so-called “Pottery Barn” doctrine). In some ways, Obama struck me as a bit naïve and idealistic in his articulated foreign policy, and that was one of many reasons why I was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. I was particularly nervous that he was going to pick a vice presidential candidate who was very light on national-level and foreign policy experience, someone like Virginia Governor Tim Kaine or others who were rumored top picks at the time. John McCain’s long experience as a moderate “maverick” Republican who was willing to stand up to his party and to do so often, allowed me to consider voting for him at this juncture, in the summer of 2008. But when Obama nominated Joe Biden as his vice president, my fears of a radical, naïve foreign policy were assuaged and I felt the pick sent a clear signal that Obama would not do anything too quickly and too drastically in Iraq that would cause a catastrophic, sudden power vacuum. Conversely, McCain’s picking of the almost cartoonishly buffoonishneophyte Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential nominee made it clear to me that the aging maverick was unfit for the presidency.

As events in Iraq continued to show no serious political progress despite our security gains, the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government, in the midst of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign to determine Bush’s successor, completed negotiations and agreed on a withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. And let’s just repeat that tidbit from the last sentence, for all the world and especially American conservatives to see: the administration of George W. Bush committed the U.S. to withdrawing its combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, which is exactly the same time frame in which Obama would eventually do just that. Years later, Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State in 2008 and a major player in the negotiations, maintained that the Administration’s intention was for that deadline to be renegotiated and/or for a “residual force for our training with the Iraqis,” but the Bush Administration—again, this is key—found itself unable to come to agreement with the exact same issue the Obama Administration found was its primary obstacle to negotiating for this same residual force: immunity of U.S. troops from prosecution by the Iraqi government, standard in any such agreement, known as status of forces agreements (SOFAs). And what is not to be missed here is that the Bush Administration, in agreeing to the 2011 withdrawal timeline mere months before it would be out of office, punted the responsibility to changing that agreement to what it actually intended it to be to the next president’s administration. So basically, regardless of any intent to change or add onto the Bush Administration’s 2008 agreement later—and betting on a future round of negotiations is always a risky bet since you cannot ever guarantee the same leaders or conditions—the Bush Administration still set the stage and the timetable for a withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops by 2008 through its own choice, through its own actions, by failing to obtain any agreement on a residual U.S. force because the Iraqi government would not agree to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution (which is exactly why the Obama Administration was unable to come to agreement on the very same issue!). By putting the onus on a future administration to either undo or change the agreement they had negotiated just before leaving office, those senior Bush Administration officials involved in the 2008 agreement who are criticizing Obama’s not coming to SOFA agreement on a residual force in Iraq are criticizing Obama’s team for what they themselves were unable to do. It is impossible to take any such criticism coming from them seriously, which can only be considered absurd or hypocritical at best.

Around the same time the 2008 Bush Administration agreement to withdraw from Iraq was finalized, I was starting to become comfortable with the idea of a gradual, eventual withdrawal from Iraq, and with Biden’s selection as VP, Obama’s subsequent elaboration on his ideas on Iraq, and the selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State once Obama had been elected, I became more confident that Obama’s team would not conduct a withdrawal hastily or irresponsibly. Still, I was torn on the issue of a withdrawal itself, but as Obama’s early years in the White House unfolded and the security situation in Iraq improved without any major political agreements being forged by Iraq’s Shiite political leadership—led by Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Kemal al-Maliki—with the Sunni or Kurdish minorities, agreements that would be key in creating any lasting stability in Iraq, I became convinced that there was little more that U.S. forces could accomplish in Iraq. Having helped establish a dramatic improvement in security in 2007 with the surge compared to the previous year, and seeing each year U.S. forces remained in Iraq have a significant reduction in violence and Iraqi civilian casualties, the U.S. had succeeded in giving Iraq and its leaders the security space necessary to negotiate politically without concurrent violence dictating terms to those threatened by such violence. Even once U.S. forces had totally withdrawn in December 2011—and the withdrawal had been going on since 2010—the year 2012 saw virtually the same level of dramatically improved security as 2011 and 2010, with all three years being the safest in Iraq since before the 2003 U.S. invasion. Yet Maliki, Prime Minister since before the 2007 “Surge,” and his supporters squandered very real, very workable opportunities from during and after the surge over the course of over five years—which is more time in office than some U.S. presidents—and set the stage for rebellion in 2013 instead of reconciliation, as I have previously written. If Maliki was not going to use the massive gains in security in from 2007-2011, while American troops were still in Iraq, to make the necessary compromises in order to calm down angry Sunnis and Kurds and to put Iraq on the path away from sectarian division and civil war and towards stability and reconciliation, what was the point of having U.S. troops there anymore, shoring up a government that was unwilling to govern in the interests of all Iraqis? If anything, having U.S. forces there to support and protect his government when he was unwilling to compromise gave Maliki more cover to avoid reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds.

So by the time the Obama Administration completed the withdrawal of U.S. troops in December 2011, I had come to agree that, having spent blood and treasure to give Iraqi politicians breathing room to make politics work—the explicit stated objective of the “Surge”—while having seen no serious effort at politics on the part of Iraq’s government, having seen that our leverage and influence (being eclipsed by Iran) was clearly no longer high enough in Iraq produce meaningful results, and having seen Iraq clearly align itself with Iran over America, it made sense to get out. The “Surge” and subsequent maintaining and improving of its security gains may not have 100% fulfilled our moral and ethical responsibility for all the damage we caused and contributed to in Iraq from 2003-2006, but in 2011 especially it was clear there was no point in staying at all, especially if Maliki would not give U.S. troops immunity. So the right decision had been made, but the Bush Administration deserved some credit as well for agreeing to the initial timetable to which Obama stuck. And, as will be discussed below, he handled the ISIS in Iraq debacle in a way that very much aided Iraq’s long-term interests.

Grade: A+

Obama withdrew from Iraq and was ahead of the curve compared to many in realizing American troops could not bring about the politics necessary to stabilize Iraq, but he did so in a responsible, gradual way that no sane person could say caused a drastic power vacuum or directly caused Iraq’s more recent woes. Just like Bush (and like any U.S. president would have), he chose not to agree to allow a U.S. residual non-combat force to stay and train/support Iraqi forces when Maliki would not grant them immunity. Nothing to complain about here, and I agree that a residual force would have been better but that is 100% on Maliki not granting immunity and having already committed to his Iranian allies that he would see our troops out in 2011. We will come to ISIS (and Obama’s mild military reengagement in Iraq) and Syria as separate issues.

3.) Israeli/Palestinian Peace

Here, one may be tempted to make more of the efforts of the Obama Administration than they actually represent, but at the same time we should not minimize them.

To be sure, Obama has publicly and in speeches, beginning especially with his big Cairo speech (see above) months into his presidency, highlighted the plight of Palestinians and the need for Israeli settlements to stop expanding into what is supposed to the core of a Palestinian state. Obama tried (perhaps too hard), and failed, to get Israel to agree to a full stop, or freeze, in settlement construction early in his presidency as a way to build up badly needed faith on the Palestinian side that Israelis were serious about negotiations, instead meekly settling for a “partial” Israeli freeze from late 2009 through much of 2010 after applying no substantive pressure to Israel beyond speeches and meetings. Even while the Obama Administration was trying shore up support for the talks, Israel announced the construction of 1,600 settlement housing units to be built on illegally occupied, disputed land in East Jerusalem (which was occupied in 1967 along with the West Bank and Gaza and which Israel has held in defiance of multiple binding resolutions of the United Nations Security Council over the decades since, beginning with the unanimously-agreed-upon Resolution 242 that included a “yes” vote of the U.S.). Moreover, this announcement came as Biden was visiting Israel to lead the charge for making the peace talks happen. This is equivalent of two people negotiating over splitting a pizza, and one side eating slices the other is claiming during negotiations, and eating this pizza right in front of the sponsor of the negotiations. Even after the partial freeze was agreed to, Israel continued building in in East Jerusalem and allowed thousands of announced “exceptions” and some unannounced exceptions that were in violation of even the limited freeze to which it had agreed. In addition, Israel also allowed a much higher than usual number of settlements to be approved before it agreed to the partial freeze so that, even while new construction was not authorized for some time, the pace of building hardly changed at all, and the pace only increased greatly after the nominal freeze.

Despite such disingenuous behavior on Israel’s part, at no time did the Obama Administration publicly even raise the prospect of reducing Israeli’s billions in military aid. In fact, throughout Obama’s entire presidency, U.S. aid has increased every year Obama has been in office, with the exception of a minor reduction in 2013 due to mandatory across-the-bard budget cuts imposed by the sequestration process, the outcome of Congressional inability to agree on a budget. And yet, when the recent hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for Israeli and joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense systems, including the highly effective Iron Dome system used to great effect against Hamas and others’ rockets in the Gaza conflict in the summer of 2014, is considered part of U.S. foreign aid to Israel (it is formally part of the U.S. defense budget and not classified as foreign aid), 2013, like every other year, saw an increase in aid. In addition, the Obama Administration has made many moves to block actions against Israel in the United Nations Security Council before they even came to light, and was the only “no” vote(which also served as a veto, given the U.S. position as a permanent veto-wielding member of the Security Council) against a resolution condemning Israeli settlements at a crucial juncture in February 2011 after talks between Israeli and Palestinians had broken down. Rather than pressure Israel substantively to stop settlement expansion and begin substantive talks, with its veto the U.S. instead encouraged Israel’s course of intransigence, occupation, and settlement expansion, even as it publicly condemned such action but only with mere words. The veto was not only hypocritical, it undermined the stated policy of every U.S. president since 1967 beginning with Lyndon Johnson and needlessly undermined the Obama Administration’s own concurrent efforts. Even with well over three more years of Israeli defiance on the settlements issue, the most substantive action the Obama Administration has taken to date was to merely delay for a short period of time some arms shipments last summer at the height of Israel’s grossly disproportionate assault on Gaza.

In other words, Obama sent Benjamin Netanyahu, then (and still) the Prime Minister of Israel, a clear message: “Go back on your agreements, play words game and with technicalities, completely undermine the spirit of an agreement, provoke the Palestinians by building on land you are supposed to be negotiating over, and we will complain publicly but still happily, freely, and increasingly give you lots of money and assistance, as well as diplomatic cover. I am too timid politically to actually threaten anything substantive against you even if you disrespect my Administration and even my Vice President personally, so, though you are the junior partner in the relationship, feel free to do anything you want, to ignore what me and my team say, and to not worry about your billions in U.S. aid. In fact, get ready for that aid to increase…”

Now, this is not what the Obama Administration intended to convey. It certainly did not say this, and there has been a valiant effort first by Obama then especially by Secretary of State John Kerry to try to help Israel see that its settlement policy not only harms Palestinians but also harms Israel’s interests by keeping millions of West Bank Palestinians under Israeli control and forcing the Israeli Jewish-majority democratic state of Israel to either become an Arab-majority country that outvotes Israel’s Jewish minority or to become a non-democratic, apartheid-like state which denies equal rights to the Arabs under its control in order to preserve Jewish control of the government. Other options that would forcibly remove millions of Palestinians from the West Bank or Israel would cause Israel majorproblems with the international community and seem not highly possible in implementation or probable.

Thus, to America’s credit, it has tried being a friend to Israeli in emphatically pressuring it with public speeches and in private meetings, including some unpleasant and animated meetings between Kerry and Netanyahu during the last round of failed talks which precipitated the violent confrontation in Gaza last summer. Senior U.S. officials—including Kerry and, apparently privately, Obama—and many others—Including Tzipi Livni, one of Israel’s own chief negotiators—have made it clear, as I have pointed out, that Netanyahu and the Israeli government bear the majority of responsibility for the lack of progress in peace talks with the Palestinians. So, let’s be clear: that is not Obama’s fault, nor that of his Administration.

What Obama can be blamed for is for not using any of his real leverage with Netanyahu and Israeli hardliners: the what is now well over $3 billion in annual aid to Israel and the U.S. veto power of what would be binding United Nations Security Council resolutions against Israeli actions regarding settlements and its occupation and control of Palestinian territory. All carrot and no stick over a long period of time is not a recipe for success. By leaving this leverage untouched and essentially rewarding Israel for its stubbornness and settlement expansion, the Obama Administration, despite any words or speeches, has encouraged Israel’s (self-)destructive policies, empowered Israeli’s right-wingers, and weakened Israel’s left, a left which is more serious about peace. In a very similar way, U.S. actions have also undermined Palestinians moderates like Mahmoud Abbas and Salaam Fayyad and empowered extremists like Hamas, as I have previously pointed out.

While, again, Netanyahu and the Israeli government are the most responsible for driving the dynamics, U.S. policy has not helped, and, overall, has only made things worse. And even as senior Israeli officials outlandishly disrespected Kerry when he was in the midst of leading talks in 2014, even as Netanyahu just delivered a major speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress—wholly unprecedented because both a foreign head of state was invited by the American domestic opposition (Republicans) without the involvement or approval of the White House or the State Department in a blatant violation of protocol (a violation publicly criticized by over 180 former Israeli security officials for damaging Israel’s relationship with the U.S.) and because this foreign head of state delivered an insulting-to-Obama, not to mention misleading speech before a formal session of Congress to rally support against the Obama Administration’s own policy on Iran (Netanyahu foolishly wants more sanctions on Iran and illogically opposes Obama’s sound framework for, and attempt at reaching, a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, while Obama wants to hold off while negotiations are taking place and close the deal outline by the framework—one must wonder how much abuse and disrespect the Obama Administration is willing to suffer at the hands of Netanyahu’s Israeli government before there are any real consequences or penalty. Because in addition to undermining the whole Israeli-Palestinian peace process by holding back so timidly and encouraging unending chutzpah on the part of Netanyahu, such non-action on Obama’s part undermines the office of the presidency and American standing in the world, as well as humiliates Obama personally, when all can see how America’s supposedly closest “ally” mistreats it when there are serious disagreements on policy and that there are no substantive consequences for such mistreatment.

Grade: D+

Obama deserves some credit for robust public diplomacy consistently condemning Israeli settlement expansion and even condemning the tactics used in Gaza last summer, and as well as the verbal efforts during many private meetings between senior Israeli and American officials including Netanyahu, Obama, and Kerry. That is why an “F” grade is not given here. But, at a crucial time during this conflict when every year without an agreement makes getting to an agreement dramatically harder, not using America’s veto power or billions of dollars in annual aid to Israel as leverage while relying just on words to pressure Israel into saving itself and treating Palestinians humanely has clearly been ineffective throughout the more than six years of Obama’s presidency. To keep doing the same thing over and over again with the same approach is to invite the same result, a result that has not helped defuse a very unstable situation and serves only to increase tension and bloodshed. Basically, Obama has literally failed to put U.S. money where his mouth is, and the interests of America, Israel, and Palestinians have all suffered as a result. In addition, humiliating treatment by Netanyahu & Co. with no serious response from Team Obama has diminished the prestige of and respect for the office of the presidency, not to mention Obama himself.

*****

Continue to Part II

That’s it for Part I, in the next two parts: first the Obama Administration’s policies on the Syrian Civil War, then (overall) Arab Spring, ISIS, reducing America’s dependency on Mideast oil, and Iran (saving the more positive for last). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 17, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter: @bfry1981) February 17th, 2017; a condensed, edited version of this article is featured on War Is Boring, and a Kindle edition, a Nook edition, an Apple iTunes iBook edition, and an EPUB edition are available with previously unpublished content. 

5.) Why Democratic Fascism Is Not a Label Too Far For Trump & His Movement

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.” — Henry A. Wallace, 1944 , Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

AMMAN — By the standards discussed in Part I, Donald Trump is clearly a democratic fascist and the Trump Administration is moving America into democratic fascist territory, with the Republican Party, by and large, following Trump on a leash, as has mostly been the case since even before the Republican National Convention; the consequences of this will be disastrous and far worse than even the considerable damage the George W. Bush Administration was able to inflict upon America and the world. Trump and a core of his team have created a kind of cult around Trump as Leader and campaigned and are now governing on much of the traditional fascist political platform—demonization of immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and other minority “others;” a promise to “return” to the glorious past; vacuous promises to “destroy” ”enemies;” creating an atmosphere of permanent conflict; cultivating a sense of national victimhood, hatred of elites, contempt for diplomacy and the modern international system; corporatism; a disaffected populism—and style—bullying, bellicosity, fantasy, the dramatic and theatrical, exaggeration of threats, dumbing-down of language, serial lying, conspiracy-theory believing, anti-intellectualism, shutdown of any debate, an emphasis on action over discussion, misogyny, an obsession with weapons, treating the government as if it is Trump’s personal plaything—and each of these to an intense degree so that the overall resemblance to fascist movements of the past in far too many ways is indisputable, with the differences accounted for by the new, at least outwardly milder and far less violent democratic iteration of what we had hoped were the long-exiled ghosts of fascism.

The New Yorker’s Gopnik, writing in May of 2016, would approve of my term democratic fascism to describe Trump’s campaign and presidency:

There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist [quoting George Packer’s description of Trump as “a celebrity proto-fascist with no impulse control”], or American-variety fascist—one of that kind, all the same.

For some experts, the term fascism can’t fit movements that are not overtly anti-democratic (although one should consider the very real possibility of a difference between stated aims and actual aims) or violent, but that is why I like discussing fascism’s evolution and reincarnation into today’s democratic fascism. Writing two months later, Gopnik correctly notes that it is myopic to argue that Trump is not fascist because of one or a few major differences between historical fascism and Trump’s democratic fascism:

…to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s. 

Stefan Zweig, a globally celebrated Austrian liberal intellectual of the interwar years of the twentieth century, furiously penned in the summer of 1941 in exile in the United States a memoir he aptly titled The World of Yesterday, much of it an analysis of what enabled Hitler to rise and how so few saw his rise coming; many of the dynamics he discussed—namely the failure of traditional democratic elites and the ensuing desire of the masses to punish and replace them, that intellectuals ridiculed the leaders of these fascists as boorish and unwashed while failing to give proper weight to their programs, of the essential role that mass propaganda and sensationalism had in destroying the line between fact fiction and desensitizing the public, respectively, of the diminishing power of “the word” and journalism and intellectual discourse and writers to counter fascism, of the role serial lying had in propelling fascists to power, of the belief that such a powerful and liberal and sophisticated society could never fall under the sway of illiberal goons, of the faith that a society built on the rule of law would be strong enough to resist those who would destroy it, of how the extremism of fascists enables even the slightest recalibration to appear to opponents as a hopeful sign of moderation, of the fascists’ gradual and strategic introduction of their most extreme portions of their program to test public reaction and desensitize the public over time, and that one seismic ill event once such people were in power could be the point “[w]hen it’s too late to stop fascism”—are so painfully obviously present in America with Trump that to read the New Yorker article discussing Zweig is more than enough to send shivers down one’s spine (as for Zweig, he and his wife committed suicide only months after he penned his memoir).

Scholars of a mid-twentieth century German-originated school of thought known as the Frankfurt School noticed the power of American mass media that stifled diversity of thought (something Tocqueville noted long ago when he observed the power of the American press to influence American public opinion but also its subservience to public opinion, how that affected American public life, and recognized the overall oppressive lack of diversity of thought in America) to combine with an authoritarian leader and “large numbers of people…susceptible to…psychological manipulation” who were also “potentially fascistic individuals” as a recipe for disaster; reacting to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, these academics predicted the rise of fascism in America in their own time, and while their predictions were then premature, the dynamics they predicted would lead to fascism in America are in many ways far more present today; like others mentioned earlier, they saw a particular danger in the mass blurring of fact and fiction.

To quote Andrew Sullivan (who was also a friend of the late Hitchens and a fellow admirer of Orwell) in a seminal piece written last spring that was his return to writing after a long hiatus:

…[Trump’s] movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

Sullivan continues:

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

and then quotes from Sinclair Lewis’s aforementioned It Can’t Happen Here. His nightmare having come true, writing the night of the election in a piece titled “The Republic Repeals Itself,” Sullivan remarks that “This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media,” just what a successful democratic fascist needs to have done to set his democratic fascism up to “succeed,” as much as that word can be applied to a movement of this nature.

He further elaborates that

…the now openly revanchist right — far more radical than the Tory government in Britain — [will have] total control over the levers of power. They will not let those levers go easily. They will likely build a propaganda machine more powerful than Fox and Breitbart — and generate pseudo-stories and big lies that, absent any authoritative or trusted media, will dominate the new centers of information, Facebook or its successors. We will be in a new political and media universe in which an authoritarian cult will thrive. This is how fascists tend to govern.

The generally spot-on William Saletan, writing for Slate, noted in October, 2016, how, without equating the two, Trump was even thematically and stylistically “sound[ing] more and more like Hitler,” albeit approaching the younger Hitler of the early 1920s. And just this month, in case people might think that only Trump at the top is the source of all the fascist-y stuff, Saletan explained how Trump’s far more well-regarded Vice President, Mike Pence, “is the chief enabler of the president’s fascist ways;” on top of that, let’s not forget the Republican Party as a whole, which seems far more partner than hostage to Trump and that just put out a survey that seems deliberately crafted to advance what we’ve described as democratic fascism, harping especially on “illegal immigration,” “radical Islamic terrorism,” and “the mainstream media” and clearly trying to hurt the reality-based media’s coverage of the first two issues in favor or more hysterical views (Question 13: “Do you believe that political correctness has created biased news coverage on both illegal immigration and radical Islamic terrorism?” and Question 24: “Do you agree with President Trump’s media strategy to cut through the media’s noise and deliver our message straight to the people?”); yes, the GOP is doing its part, some enthusiastically, some reluctantly, some in between, some unwittingly, and with only a minuscule resistance, even if it is larger than commonly found in a relatively monolithic and extremely monochrome Republican Party (all new GOP congressman from the 2016 election were white and out of 293 senators and representatives, only 14, or less than 4.8%, were non-white; in contrast, Democrats had 89 non-white members representing about 37% of their Members of Congress), a resistance whose voices generally come from a tiny group of out-of-power elites with something of a megaphone who are far less representative of the Party’s rank-and-file or current elected officeholders. So, lest we forget, Trump has plenty of help.

Michael Kinsley, writing in The Washington Post, focuses on Trump’s corporatist tendencies that resemble fascism’s past corporatism, that “Donald Trump is a fascist,” and while “[i]t’s ridiculous to compare any living person to Hitler or Mussolini…I mean ‘fascist’ in the more clinical sense.” For Kinsley, Trump’s

seemingly erratic behavior can be explained — if not justified — by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.

The realization that Trump is something of a fascist hardly comes from the left or the media class alone; renown counterterrorism expert Peter Bergen also labeled Trump a “proto-fascist,” while conservative academic Max Boot tweeted all the way back in late 2015 that “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it” (he has also referred to Trump as a “fascist demagogue”). One of Boot’s fellow conservative academic travelers, Robert Kagan, wrote in May 2016 that Donald Trump

…is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.

And they are not alone on the right (Sullivan is something of a conservative), with even the fairly restrained Ross Douthat noting, all the way back in December, 2015, that, “[w]hether or not we want to call Trump a fascist outright, then, it seems fair to say that he’s closer to the ‘proto-fascist’ zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative or his recent predecessors in right-wing populism,” and that “Trump may indeed be a little fascistic;” later, in May, 2016, when it was long clear to all but those bingeing on denial (not that there was a shortage of prominent conservatives fitting this description) that Trump would be the nominee, he referred to Trump as “a proto-fascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control.”

I remember when some liberals called George W. Bush a fascist or a Nazi; they were very few, and never anyone of particular importance or who was widely-respected as an intellectual, a journalist, a politician (and no, Dick Durbin’s ill-phrased Guantánamo criticism can in no way honestly be represented as an attempt to call Bush or his Administration fascist in their overall nature, and that is the closest thing that comes to mind), but, rather, were often fringe rabble-rousers or small numbers of individual protesters, which was ridiculous (and I am not fan of Bush or his disastrous presidency), and I was happy to call out anyone calling Bush a fascist or a Nazi.

Well, this is different; across the political spectrum, a number of widely respectable, mainstream, serious, non-hyperbolic, measured, thoughtful people—some of whom were very critical of Bush and yet were hardly labeling his Administration “fascist”—who have been generally prescient and correct in their commentary are writing pieces unlike any they have written before, sounding the alarm that democracy and Western civilization is in peril; when I wrote my own similar call to arms—ahead of much of the crowd—it was more a call to arms that, while discussing a theoretical possibility of Clinton not winning, was meant more to play out the severe challenges a (second) Clinton Administration would face; I was extremely confident in a Clinton win at that point, but it turned out the far worse hypothetical would be our current nightmare of a reality. Sage people I’ve never known to be hysterical are using the words “fascist” and Trump in the same sentence, though this is generally an elite print media crowd and the reality of our new democratic fascism is not widely seeping through the television news crowd and the population as a whole, and that even allows for a huge portion of Americans who know this is very bad, very unprecedented, and yet still don’t know how bad it is. Today, more and more people do seem to be catching on because there is a sharp rise in the public consumption of dystopian, Orwellian fiction.  If the reader will indulge me in a bit of speculation, I think there are some very wise political leaders—senators, congressmen, governors, etc., of both parties (though clearly far fewer on the Republican side) who see that this is a form of fascism but avoid using the term so as not to turn away voters who would see such a term as “unfair” or “partisan,” a non-use aimed at laying the groundwork for bringing in even some of the reluctant Trump voters to help oppose him at some point in the future; this approach makes sense, and just throwing around the word “fascist” is both unproductive and counterproductive (more on that in a bit); I submit democratic fascism used consistently instead of just plain fascism is a remedy for some of the concerns that crowd might have, and I do hope they will begin to bring the term into the current lexicon.

Another point that must be made: these respectable commentators calling Trump out for his fascistic tendencies are not lunging towards the far left, and are not part of some intelligentsia that has suddenly already found itself there (though, if the “Sandernista” Bernie Sanders-wing of the Democratic Party and the far left in general has its way, the left and the Party may yet radicalize in the future, and that process may already be underway); no, it is not a symptom of the problems of the left that fascist is being applied as a label for Trump and his agenda; it is simply a product of the man and that agenda and where the right now finds itself, and while it is not common to use the label fascism or some sort of prefixed-fascism (as I am doing), to call him out, those doing so are not members of an extremist minority who have lost their moorings but are a minority of the most prescient, bravest, sharpest voices, whose their records back up their description as such.

And that is why this moment is, these moments are, are so terrifying.

Hell, even the U.S. Holocaust Museum has a poster “Early Warning Signs of Fascism” that reads almost entirely like this election’s Republican Party Platform or the Trump White House to-do-list:

@RaRaVibes

While Trump is clearly a democratic fascist, then, it important, here again, to make the point that being such, Trump is all the way on one end of a fascist spectrum, an end that overlaps slightly with democracy, while Hitler is all the way on the other end of that fascist spectrum. Despite important similarities between the two, it is crucial to note that Hitler was in most respects much more intense and went much further than Trump and that Hitler embraced genocidal mass killing, which Trump does not; thus, those who would correctly call Trump out for his democratic fascism must take care not to equate or appear to equate Trump with Hitler or his movement with Nazism or even come close to this, for doing so only plays into Trump’s hands and diminishes the chances both of those calling out Trump for what he is to be taken seriously and, in turn, that he and his movement can be stopped; in this effort, the prefixing of democratic before fascism is eminently useful.

Yes, Trump, is a very serious threat that could very well destroy American democracy, Western democracy, the West, and the international order as we know it and we can ill-afford minimized his menace, but we must also not exaggerate his threat, as awful as it is, as it seems he would not do these things through genocidal mass killing and world war or generally use violence the way the twentieth-century fascists did; obviously, this brings little comfort, but if Western civilization is to remain intact, we must defeat Trump by being fastidious in our distinctions and accusations and make those distinctions, however nuanced, clear, because Trump’s war on civilized values is also a war on truth; those opposing him by making facile, lazy, even just somewhat inaccurate comparisons and accusations weaken our best weapon against him: the truth. For if those fighting democratic fascism embrace a twisting of the truth to try to beat Trump, they will be trying to use a tactic that their opponent has already mastered; Republicans who tried to out-insult Trump in the primary failed miserably, and others wishing to out-Trump Trump in other ways will also fail spectacularly. In the end, sacrificing the truth to win short-term attention and political points will lessen the distinctions between the democratic fascists and those opposing them; this is not politics as normal, and the opposition can’t afford to turn more of the people more likely to oppose Trump away from politics by creating more apathy and cynicism in behaving more like him. So we in the opposition must not only not call Trump Hitler or a Nazi or his movement fascism or Nazism, we must call out those who do.

That is why democratic fascism is such a useful term: it helps to make those important distinctions away from Hitler, Nazis and other historical fascists that are so necessary, and yet still communicates the serious and insidiousness of Trump and his movement.

6.) Democratic Fascism: A Global Problem

In Sullivan’s election-night piece, he began by quoting Orwell:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle,” George Orwell famously observed. So what is it that we have just seen?

We are witnessing the power of a massive populist movement that has now upended the two most stable democracies in the world — and thrown both countries into a completely unknown future. In Britain, where the polls did not pick up the latent support for withdrawal from the European Union, a new prime minister is now navigating a new social contract with the indigenous middle and working classes forged by fear of immigration and globalization. In the U.S., the movement — built on anti-political politics, economic disruption, and anti-immigration fears — had something else, far more lethal, in its bag of tricks: a supremely talented demagogue who created an authoritarian cult with unapologetically neo-fascist rhetoric. Britain is reeling toward a slow economic slide. America has now jumped off a constitutional cliff. It will never be the same country again. Like Brexit, this changes the core nature of this country permanently. 

Sullivan places Trump squarely in a broader global movement. And that movement is one set out to destroy Western democracy as we know it, one that is far larger and far more organized than most people in the West have realized thus far.

If America was seeing the rise of a leader like Trump, the most extreme version of the Republican Party ever to exist, and pervasive extremist news outlets, that would be catastrophic enough; but when one takes into account similar trends all over Europe, in Russia, Turkey, in Israel, in India, and in the Philippines, to name the most salient examples, there is a worldwide trend in important democratic centers of charismatic leaders of right-wing parties/coalitions playing on hatred, fear, and division and pushing agendas that go against core democratic, liberal values, all while being backed by a megaphone of sympathetic extremist media that often either blend fact and fiction or ignore facts altogether. And America’s counterparts in this movement are arguably as dangerous because these leaders are dressed up in more of the proprietary graces and trappings of conventional politicians and are thus better able to mask tendencies that Trump could not hide even if he tried, making then sneakier, their threat less obvious, their appeal more infectious.

Though to varying degrees, one of the strongest common threads in this reactionary political movement is that the right wing parties and voters that are either rising in power or have come to power care little, or even not at all, about minority rights and about their leaders’ and parties’ publicly expressed willingness, either in words or in actions, to apply one standard of the law and enforcement to themselves and their supporters and to use a looser standard on political opponents and minorities (ethnic, religious, or otherwise, e.g., immigrants) who are not in line with the ruling parties and groups; if anything, they and their supporters embrace such double standards. 

In a Europe already seriously weakened by Brexit, these rising or newly empowered rightist democratic fascist parties that are enjoying successes across the continent exhibit a hostility and unequal application of the system that applies mainly to immigrants, in particular but not limited to Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa; recent polls now show anti-EU, anti-immigrant far-right populist parties in the lead in the Netherlands, Italy, and, perhaps most alarmingly, in France, while Germany’s election, perhaps the most important test for Europe’s future, remains fluid and uncertain, even if, for now, prospects seem much better for saner heads to prevail there than in the Netherlands, Italy, and France. To add to the growing concern, in a just-released survey of over 10,000 Europeans in 10 EU countries, 55% agree on having a Trumpian travel ban that would stop all migration from Muslim-majority countries; only 2 of 10 countries did not have a majority approve, and the disapproval rate in none of the 10 countries exceeded 38%; Poland had the highest approval at 71%, and France, Germany, and Italy all had majorities that also approved, all of this boding ill for centrist, pro-EU, pro-tolerance candidates. Meanwhile, the Slovakian Prime Minister recently directly called the far right party that is his country’s fifth-largest and is on the rise fascist; “[s]ome people say that fascism is creeping here in Slovakia. It’s not creeping here, it’s present here,” he said. And rather presciently, at the end of 2015, The Economist worriedly noted the progress of these movements, with the title of the relevant article saying it all: “The march of Europe’s little Trumps.”

In Russia, this hostility, sometimes lethal, is directed towards ethnic minorities that try to assert their rights or protest their treatment and any sort of organized political or media opposition to Putin and his party, especially those speaking out against Russian actions in Ukraine; but the lack of protections hardly stops there: a bill with apparently robust public support partly decriminalizing wife-beating and child-beating easily passed the Russian Duma (the lower house of parliament) and was signed into law by Putin this month; additionally, the only politician who had any kind of serious chance of beating Putin in the next presidential election—Alexey Navalny—was just convicted of (likely trumped-up) fraud and barred from running against Putin (Navalny vowed to fight the conviction; let’s see how that goes…). The Russian people aren’t helping, either: a just-released survey found out 46% of them think positively of Stalin, the highest level in 16 years; only 21% had negative views and 22% responded with neutral feelings; that means Russians like Stalin by a margin of over two-to-one compared with those who don’t like him (and none of this even touches on the energetic activities Russia is doing to advance democratic fascism outside of its own borders; more on that soon).

In Turkey, this hostility has broadened not only to Kurds, the main Kurdish political party, and political opposition, but to purging journalists and news outlets and entire swaths of civil society and thousands in the government bureaucracy that Erdogan and his AKP party feel they cannot control or will not be loyal or silent in their opposition, even as Erdogan seems poised to transform the country’s constitution to give himself dramatic, sweeping new powers with an upcoming referendum. At the same time, both Turkey’s government and media feed their public with outlandish conspiracy theories centered on the the idea of America undermining Turkey at every step of the way and as the root of all Turkey’s present ills, drawing attention away from the both the government’s and media’s slide to one-party authoritarianism.

In Israel, the hostility is generally against Arabs but includes other groups, too. While Benjamin Netanyahu certainly deserves credit for not being authoritarian in the mold of Putin, Erdogan, or even Trump, the trendlines under his extensive watch are clear and the direction in which they are moving is shared by the others in this unfortunate list (we will elaborate a bit more here because, at least in the U.S., there is more doubt when asserting Israel is part of this trend than, say, Turkey or Russia). Netanyahu is a huge part of the problem himself, with a penchant for playing fast and loose with facts and an aptitude for even weaponizing history, perhaps most notably when he claimed a Palestinian had inspired the Holocaust, resulting in strong condemnation even from Israeli and German historians and a subsequent retraction; he is a huge champion of (adding) settlements—illegal in the eyes of the entire rest of the world—and their expansion, among the most extreme parts of Israeli policy and those bearing the most resemblance to fascism; and he continually engages in demagoguery designed to incite ethnic and religious division that empower him and his Likud Party. Yet Netanyahu is hardly alone, and is often pressured to move even further to the right by other politicians and public opinion, for not only many politicians, but many Israelis themselves—more and more of them—are embracing racism and illiberal undemocratic values; even mob violence inside Israel, not just settler-instigated violence in the Palestinian territories, is not rare enough, and punishment of Jews who commit violence is comparatively mild when compared to punishment of Arabs who commit violence, just one of the most salient qualities demonstrating how unequal Israel is as a society. Israel’s rightist government is also cracking down on liberal NGOs and has a racist migrant/immigration policy. And while Israeli courts, to their credit, have pushed back against the legitimization and establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank that were illegal even under Israeli law—with some of them being established on land owned by Palestinians who can prove their ownership—Israel just adopted a law that basically negates the court rulings, making those settlements legal, though the courts may yet overturn this law; yes, Israel basically just passed a law that allows the government to take land belonging to Palestinians because they are Palestinians and give it to Israelis because they are Jewish, something that squarely fits in the fascist tradition. And let’s not forget how much admiration Netanyahu and Trump have expressed for each other.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling right-wing Hindu populist BJP party (both fans of Hindu religious nationalist rhetoric), since coming to power over two years ago, have sought to curb free speech, encourage and/or turn a blind eye both to police abuse and to sometimes violent religious nationalism on the part of right-wing Hindus who target minorities, and are cracking down on civil society groups critical of the government and its human rights record. 

In the Philippines, anyone involved in illegal drugs have essentially lost the protections of due process and equal application of the law, with President Duterte himself bragging about killing criminals when he was mayor as his extremely controversial drug war that has killed thousands of Filipinos in the less-than-a-year he has been in office continues in full force. As far as accountability, a Filipino senator who criticized the drug war was even removed from her investigative committee role, part of an increasing trend of the government using its power to limit criticism of Duterte and his government; experts fear the longstanding Filipino democracy, one of Asia’s oldest, may be in trouble.

And in the United States, we have now (mostly) sworn in a government that at the very least seems unenthusiastic about or unwilling to protect minority rights and may even be downright hostile both to preserving these rights and to minorities asserting their rights, whether African-Americans who are grossly mistreated by police and the criminal justice system, members of the LGBT community worried about losing their newly won rights, Muslims who saw anti-Muslim hate groups rise from 34 to more than 100 last year, or women worried about losing both access to contraception and their ability to decide on pregnancy without government interference. Basically, like the people backing right-wing populism in other countries, Trump voters see the America in which they reside as “theirs” to the exclusion of others and resent those other groups asserting equality (“when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”), seeing this assertion as a loss of their own prerogatives and politics as a zero-sum game in which they can only benefit in denying benefits to others and keeping those benefits, or the degree to which they are enjoyed, to themselves. These people don’t care if such sentiments and their end results directly violate the spirit of and/or laws of their very nations; in fact, they seek to remake their nations into illiberal systems that favor themselves and discriminate against certain others officially, longing both to recreate past discriminations and hierarchies, if perhaps more subtly, and part of this is to recreate a false mythological image of the past in present reality in which their ethnic, racial, religious, or other forms of superiority existed unquestioned and unchallenged (even in America, where slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution—though only reluctantly and initially—opposition to slavery was still exhibited during the colonial era and the subsequent constitutional conventions in which the Constitution itself was drafted and ratified). Real or not, on this weaponization of history perhaps no one here is more succinctly instructive than Orwell in 1984: “…if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

7.) Putin Leads an Assault on Western Democracy and Reality

And right now, the Russian government is by far the most skilled and prolific weaponizer of information—of spreading fake news, false history, and false facts—in the world, and this is where things get even scarier.

I wrote about a year ago that Western democracy was on trial, more than any time since WWII, that internal problems and forces growing in the West were posing a threat to the survival of the Western liberal democratic order that was greater than any Soviet armies or nuclear arsenals of the past; little did I know that the Soviet Union’s successor in Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, would lead a brilliant campaign—including the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—to exacerbate, further, and accelerate these trends, and effort that, so far, has been enough to ensure that the West is largely failing these tests, most notably in the oldest continuing and most powerful democracy in the world, the United states of America. And with the very latest revelations that multiple Trump campaign officials were in constant contact with Russian intelligence operatives, there is even less of an excuse not to realize that Putin and his people acted to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s campaign with the aim of helping Trump secure the White House, in addition to their also being a much higher possibility that there was collusion of some sort between (some staff on) the Trump campaign and this Russian effort.

In a Foreign Policy piece published just after Trump’s election by Yascha Mounk titled “Donald Trump Is the End of Global Politics as We Know It” and with a subheading of “What it means to live without a leader of the free world,” what is described is Vladimir Putin’s dream come true, and it makes you think about how much was at stake in this election and how the consequences of a world devoid of American leadership or with an American leadership that is cartoonishly incompetent, damaging to its own bedrock alliances and its own society, and blithely self-defeating were exactly the results Russia’s campaign against the United States was designed to bring about. By the time Trump is out of office, it’s entirely possible that there is no more EU and no more NATO, and it is likely that even in the realistic best-case scenario they are substantially weakened; how could things be worse? Just imagine Russian troops and Russian bases in various European NATO deserters, hardly an impossibility.

Putin is certainly imagining this possibility and acting to make this possibility a reality. “We’re on the verge of a new global order,” to quote one spokesperson for a movement within Putin’s own Russian United political party that is trying to help France’s far-right, anti-EU, very pro-Russia candidate triumph in the upcoming French election.

As I pointed out not long ago, Russia has a history of actively meddling in elections and votes in other countries; in a few cases where the final tallies were very close (the UK with Brexit and the U.S. with Trump), the burden of proof is on people asserting Russia made no difference, so large were Russia’s efforts, be they hacking, disinformation, or both. In other places like Bulgaria and Moldova the meddling has been longstanding and finally paid off with the victories of new pro-Russian leaders over the last few months; in other cases like Sweden and the Baltic States, there is a constant effort as well that has made an impact, though these countries are still very much on the alert and seem very unlikely to shift to overall favor Russia in their politics anytime soon; with other cases like Italy’s recent election, it’s hard to argue that Russian meddling made the difference, even though it seems Russia was still quite active in trying to hurt pro-EU centrist parties with fake news; with elections early last year in Germany, it seems Russian propaganda efforts did hurt the ruling party in regional elections. 

Some support and cooperation has been far more overt and public, though, than the shadowy hacking, fake news dissemination, and covert funding programs: all over the continent, from the UK to Italy to Austria (where fake news was rampant during its recent presidential election but that as yet has not specifically been tied to Russia) to France and beyond, Putin, his government, and Russian-government-dominated media has offered praise—sometimes even formal audiences in Moscow or political alliances with Putin’s own ruling party, United Russia—to right-wing populist and anti-EU parties along with criticism of pro-EU rivals of these parties; sometimes, this has even extended to financial support from Russian-government affiliated financial institutions, most notably in Le Pen and her party’s case in France; these parties often respond by adopting pro-Russian policies (for example, being against Western sanctions against Russia) and expressing enthusiastic public support for Putin and his program. Coupled with the massive disinformation campaign, Russia is clearly trying to manipulate public opinion and offer direct support to specific parties in Europe in an effort to change the politics of the whole continent. And even when these democratic fascist movements do not succeed in winning, they are still increasing their support and representation in parliaments; thus, all over Europe, they are on the rise and on the march with a purpose, a purpose that very much serves Putin’s goals of weakening Europe so that the EU and NATO will crumble and Russia will be able to extend and intensify its spheres of influence.

Putin’s efforts here are not a random or haphazard one; after years of exerting influence, he has sympathy and supporters spread over one-quarter of the European Parliament, and Russia’s efforts are, as before, pinpointing countries with upcoming elections, with the Netherlands, France, and Germany (and possibly Italy) the big tests for 2017; there are questions about whether these votes may lead to more exits from the EU, say, a Nexit or a Frexit (with a Grexit perpetually in the realm of possibility, too).

The Dutch vote in less than a month, and officials are nervous enough about hacking and interference that they are going to be counting all ballots by hand amid increased Russian cyberactivity targeting Dutch entities and suspicions Russians might have been involved in swaying an eventual Dutch “no” vote in a referendum on a free-trade pact between the EU and Ukraine last April, likely derailing the whole agreement. The party of the man called “the Dutch Donald Trump”—Geert Wilders—is leading in the polls and there are serious worries he may win, especially with so many Dutch voters still undecided (as was the case in America) and the rise of so many new, tiny parties that make the way a coalition will be formed much more unpredictable. One thing is quite predictable, though: he wants to hold a referendum on the Netherlands leaving the EU and very clearly wants to leave it, and some of Wilders’ policies are even more extreme than Trump’s: “[h]e wants to ban the Quran, shut down mosques and…cut all foreign aid,” and some of his tactics are quite Trumpish (he recently caused an uproar when he tweeted a fake photo of a rival with a “Shariah for the Netherlands” sign). If his party does well and especially if he becomes Prime Minister, that could increase enthusiasm for like-minded parties and voters in other European elections on the horizon, just as Brexit and Trump’s win might already be doing that.

France votes in two rounds in late April and early May. So far, France’s race has been incredibly tumultuous of late; the last few weeks, various revelations have upended the race. First, starting late in January, a French newspaper published a series of damning revelations that conservative and moderately pro-Russian candidate François Fillon had used his position in France’s National Assembly (it’s lower legislative house) to pay nearly $1 million in public funds to his wife and children for “bogus” positions, which seems now to have knocked him from the lead to on track to miss the runoff (only the top two advance but he is not a distant third); this seemed to make France’s independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron the favorite; but now it seems Russia is trying to hack his campaign much like it did Hillary Clinton’s, and Russian-controlled media like RT and Sputnik are slamming him (going so far as to spread rumors that he is gay); while praising his rival, far-right, very pro-Russian, and Putin’s favorite candidate: Marine Le Pen. 

Le Pen is similar to Trump: she is extremely anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and is pledging to remove France from the euro currency, even NATO, and possibly the EU entirely. Also like Trump, Le Pen has a globally-spread army of internet trolls engaging in shadowy tactics to boost her and hurt her rivals, and she has the highest internet engagement numbers of any of her rivals. She is furthermore like Trump in that she has not disclosed her campaign fundraising or spending, though her rivals have; this is a particular issue because she had been funded back in 2014 to the tune of a €9 million loan by a Russian bank with strong ties to the Russian government (the deal was even brokered by a member of Russia’s Duma and was suspiciously close in timing to her announcement that she believed Russia’s annexation of Crimea was legal, with incriminating evidence that she received financial support at Russia’s direction in return for her adopting this position); at the same time this happened, a €2 million loan was given to a political fund named Cotelec run by her father from a mysterious Cyprus-based company run by ex-K.G.B. agent Yuri Kudimov who is known to run “the financing arm of the Kremlin,” and from there it went to Le Pen’s party for its 2015 regional elections; this past December she just received a €6 million loan from her father’s Cotelec, and after her 2014 Russian lender was shuttered by the Central Bank of Russia (possibly because of a possible embezzlement scandal) and as she is being shunned by other mainstream lenders, she may be may be seeking another loan from a Russian entity to cover a €20 million shortfall in her campaign war chest.*

*(As an aside, if you are familiar with my work and this reeks of the familiar, your nose is not deceiving you; this is remarkably similar to the gigantic Eurasian gas scheme I wrote about— including some exclusive revelations—just before Trump won, a scheme involving billions of dollars in shady gas deals and the profits from them being laundered by the Russian mafia to buy Ukrainian politicians and corrupt the Ukrainian government so that Putin could dominate Ukraine; Paul Manafort—Trump’s future Campaign Chairman for some of the most crucial months of the Republican primaries when he clinched the GOP nomination and through the Republican National Convention—was one of the major players in this massive scam, and Rick Gates was definitely involved as was possibly Carter Page, both future Trump campaign advisors; in many ways this gas scheme led to the current war in Ukraine, and this modus operandi of “diplomacy” is more the vehicle of Putin’s foreign policy than the Russian Foreign Ministry).

While Le Pen is leading and has for a while now in the first-round polling, conventional wisdom holds that she won’t be able to get enough support to triumph in the second-round-runoff… And yet, conventional wisdom said Donald Trump had no chance of beating Hillary Clinton; the thing is, once a candidate starts winning—be it Trump in the primaries or possibly Le Pen in the first round of voting—that has a way of changing how people think and vote, and with scandals and propaganda efforts embroiling her rivals, the confidence that Macron should triumph in the second-round of voting against Le Pen is weakening, with at least one just-released credible big-data analysis from an investment firm predicting she will pull off a Trumpian upset and the French bond market already showing negative effect from its worries about the possible outcome of a Le Pen victory that seems less remote now than before. 

France’s foreign intelligence chief expects Russian internet bots to make millions of posts to help her candidacy and also fears that there will be releases of hacked private e-mails of her rivals; government officials are worried that the Russians will be working actively to alter the outcome of the French election, and there is also concern that Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks—Russia’s stooges, be they unwitting or witting—will have an impact, as they are already teasing thousands of documents related to the candidates, with indications that it will be trying to help Le Pen and hurt her rivals. And WikiLeaks overnight just released what it said was a CIA document showing orders for the U.S. to spy on the French elections of 2012; while such actions are routine even among allies, it is clear that WikiLeaks is selectively releasing this now with the intent of drumming up anti-American sentiment, which will, in turn, harm centrist candidates that support the current global order; this echoes previous recent efforts by WikiLeaks to discredit Merkel’s government for cooperating with a U.S. NSA intelligence-gathering program.

Speaking of Germany, it’s up next, having elections this fall. De facto leader after Trump’s win of the Western liberal international order and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (and her party) have already been a target of Russian fake news and WikiLeaks. While the far right Alternative for Deutschland party has gained in polls overall in recent months, for now, it seems safely behind both Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led bloc and the party of her rival coalition partner, leader of the German Social Democrats party Martin Schulz, who are neck and neck in the latest polls. Still, an EU task force has noted in the past few weeks that Merkel is a specific target of Russian fake news, and German government officials, like their French and Dutch counterparts, are worried about Russian attempts to alter the outcome of their election. And as we saw with Hillary Clinton, there is plenty of time for Russia’s efforts, and the damage they may do, to fundamentally alter public opinion in Germany.

And if Italy holds an election? Who knows…

The Czech Republic, we may add, was also recently hacked by what its officials suspected was a foreign power, and few countries would have more incentive to hack the Czechs than Russia; the EU is generally trying to improve and prioritize its efforts to fight back against Russia’s hacking, disinformation, and electoral interference, but it remains to be seen if such efforts will be successful. What is certain is that, with precision, Russia and WikiLeaks are targeting the opponents of the far-right in Europe and proponents of centrism and the EU, including its NATO military alliance formed to check the USSR during the Cold War. According to one expert quoted all the way back in April, 2016, “Russia is starting to weaponize electoral processes in Europe,” and today, we can remove the word “starting” from that quote. Right now, fear of Russia is spreading among officials all over Europe as it seeks to advance the cause of democratic fascism.

And it’s not just Putin and Russia seeking to support these democratic fascist movements and undermine the EU: Trump’s master strategist, right-wing nationalist, and disinformation master Steven Bannon wants to link up and partner with these movements, too, as well as see his former fake news factory Breitbart expand into Europe, in particular, France and Germany, even as Trump criticizes NATO and reaches out to Putin. The EU President Donald Tusk recent wrote a letter to all 27 EU national leaders stating that the Trump Administration was a “threat” to the EU, one of the most dangerous it has ever confronted, along with Russia; on top of this, another top EU official flat-out said that Trump and Bannon were existential threats to the EU—which he said they were seeking to break up—along with two other such threats: Putin and “radicalized political Islam.” In fact, applying the analytical framework outlined in NATO’s recent Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, Donald Trump is doing the Russians’ work for them, for:

As the  Handbook emphasizes, Russian information warfare thinking anticipates that trolls and bots not under Kremlin control will amplify the messages and effects of Russia’s own information operations. However, having a U.S. president, his administration, and his own networks of disinformation playing these roles is probably beyond the wildest dreams of Russian strategists and tacticians of information warfare. Putin will not squander this opportunity.

This point is echoed by Saletan and, in fact, some European allies are so nervous about Trump’s relationship with Putin that they are spying on Team Trump’s communications.

Lastly, Putin is not only cultivating and using the far right; he is also weaponizing the far left as his “useful idiots;” while generally not taking the bait on the Kremlin’s pro-Trump propaganda, far-lefties in America were all too eager to gobble up its anti-Clinton efforts, and we’re not only talking about supporters of Jill Stein and the extreme-far-left in America, but also supporters of (relatively-to-Stein-&-Co. moderate) Bernie Sanders; these far leftists were often blithely retweeting RT articles about Hillary and echoed their distorted talking points. When it comes to stein, Putin even invited her to a gala in Moscow honoring RT propaganda station, where the now scandal-ridden Gen. Michael Flynn was also a guest of honor, and Stein is a regular on the channel. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here: the far left has no chance electorally in the way the far right does, so Putin can throw support at it knowing he is safe from its agenda but happy to see it weaken the center and take votes away from credible parties that can help stop his far-right darlings; in this way, the far left helps the far-right come to power through their myopia, narcissism, and willful blindness, as clearly happened in the U.S. election, particularly with liberal Millennials. By constantly attacking “the system” and the center and the mainstream reality-based media, it also generates specific mistrust of crucial institutions and general apathy and cynicism among those on the left, apathy, cynicism, and mistrust that also worked handily in favor of Trump over Clinton. This has even succeeded to the degree of compromising respectable leftist publications like The Nation into putting out apologias for Russian behavior, and it goes beyond propaganda and is happening, and has been happening for some time, all over Europe to the degree that Russian efforts help to explain the less-often-discussed rise in the success of far left parties in Europe; there is apparently evidence of clandestine funding of far-left parties and groups by the Kremlin, in addition to its more salient efforts to covertly fund the far-right. And besides Russian propaganda, “WikiLeaks is clearly the online epicenter of the 21st-century’s red-brown convergence”: Trump couldn’t stop talking about WikiLeaks, and neither could Bernie Sanders supporters.

Yes, Russia under Putin now is succeeding in projecting its power and influence in ways way few Soviet or Czarist leaders could ever realistically envision, not with troops and tanks, but with a brilliant master strategy that plays on and exploits the flaws and vulnerabilities in Western democracy and the very worst in human nature, with the media and cyberwarfare as its main weapons of war, all fueled by the aforementioned* massive oil-and-natural-gas-scheme of epic proportions (and in which some of Trump’s associates—including one very senior one, Paul Manafort—were involved). Yes, we are at war for the survival of our very way of life, and we still don’t even realize it yet. Perhaps the damage and worry Donald Trump is generating not even one full month into his presidency is a good example of how much more we should be alarmed when we look at it in conjunction with this global campaign as a whole and what is happening in Europe and other bastions of democracy.

8.) Conclusion: Democratic Fascism is on Track to Destroy the West As We Know It, Or, Time to Break the Glass, This Is an Emergency

Again, in light of my old piece published about a year ago, I write with a sad and terrified heart now: I never imagined so much damage would be done in so short a period of time; at the time, I saw the threat, but thought it more distant and thought we’d be beating it back more successfully at this point; instead, we—the West, Western democracy, liberals who believe in liberal values and multiethnic democracy—are losing, and losing badly.

Revolutions tend to have far-flung roots and can spread in unpredictable ways, but the beginning of this wave of massive populist discontent on the right was the Tea Party protests that began early in 2009 (or, if you want to really go far back, the religious conservatives’ global return to public life in the 1980s); if 2009 can be thought of as the global democratic right’s 1789 French Revolution Bastille-storming moment, we are now in something of the beginning of a political Reign of Terror, much as the initial French people’s uprising of 1789 gave way to a far more extreme (and the original) (Jacobin) Reign of Terror in 1793 (in the words of Trotsky, “Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism”). More polite, less bloody efforts directed at limiting or rolling back the power of the governments in Washington and Brussels, over taxation and regulation, have now exploded into outright culture wars in which aggrieved dominant group on both sides of the Atlantic felt like other groups gaining rights and increased diversity were assaults on their status and responded increasingly ferociously towards these groups, often embracing racism and xenophobia to these ends; “Kick them out!” no longer applied to mainly the current politicians in power, but to whole groups of people: Hispanics, Muslims, even other European immigrants; a similar spirit in the U.S. was directed at kicking disadvantaged minorities off of government assistance, even as their economic plight had worsened relative to those wanting to deny them assistance. Angry white people were… angry, and they were going to punish not only the political elites, but people who looked and dressed and prayed and spoke differently than they did, denying them either a physical space in their country or resources from the government, even if they were, at times, fellow citizens (that seemed to not matter too much). The political systems which governed America arguably since the Founding but at least clearly since the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act are now to be overthrown in America, just as the post-WWII EU-centered systems in Europe are also to be overthrown if Trump and his Bannon-led crew—and their allies in Europe—succeed in their endeavors.

If we think Western civilization is not capable of some sudden collapse, then we are deluding ourselves. As Adam Gopnik noted in July, 2016:

Those who think that the underlying institutions of American government are immunized against [fascism]…fail to understand history. In every historical situation where a leader of Trump’s kind comes to power, normal safeguards collapse. Ours are older and therefore stronger? Watching the rapid collapse of the Republican Party is not an encouraging rehearsal. Donald Trump has a chance to seize power.

And seize power he did; I have a hard time believing many Democrats really switched from Obama to Trump, and the evidence is that Trump’s popular-vote-losing, historically very narrow Electoral College victory (narrow despite Trump’s outlandish characterizations to the contrary) came largely at the hands of white rural conservatives who voted in larger-than-usual numbers and white centrists and white liberals (and Millennials of all stripes) staying home or voting third party. Because of that, there may only be one way to stop the collapse and self-destruction of Western civilization and Western democracy as we know it: the left as a whole uniting behind the center-left faction with the broadest support, whatever qualms the far-left may have with this compromise towards the center; if we—and yes, I include myself—do not unite, if too many on the left who claim to care about liberal causes and values and other human beings don’t step up and actually do what is necessary to prevent democratic fascism from becoming the new modus operandi of the West, if many leftists—Bernie Sanders supporters included—embrace myopia, impatience, and narcissism as their approaches to politics, then we won’t need jackboots marching down the Champs-Élysées or Pennsylvania Avenue to know that democracy is losing or defeated. Worst of all, the defeat will have come at the hands of our own stupidity, because if Trump and his ilk aren’t enough to make the liberals of the world unite under whichever factions get the most votes in their elections, then perhaps we don’t deserve the democracy we inherited, and perhaps we deserve democratic fascism instead. Perhaps we need to suffer to appreciate how amazing the post-WWII international system—pejoratively and inaccurately labeled “neoliberal,” as if Reaganism and Thatcherism still reigned supreme and dramatic improvements and changes have not happened globally since the end of WWII and especially in the decades since the end of the Cold War—actually is, no matter what ludicrous anarchist, libertarian, Marxist, or fascist-oriented schools of thought claim to the contrary.

In the 2016 American election, African-American and Hispanic voters, especially those old enough or with enough education to understand how much has improved even while understanding how much work still needs to be done, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton both against Sanders and against Trump (and Hispanics almost certainly voted for Clinton in much higher numbers than the exit polls suggest as indicated by data from special surveys that capture the notoriously-difficult-to-measure Latino vote much more accurately than normal exit polls); these wise (the wisest!) voters, these voters of color were practical all the way through because that is the only way they know their people have seen gains over time. For Hispanics, many of them came from places that did not offer them anywhere near as much opportunity, safety, or social justice; they had suffered enough to appreciate the Western system, warts and all. For African-Americans, there was a deep understanding of how much effort and blood had been spilled for them to earn the rights that many younger people today take for granted; from slavery through Reconstruction and segregation and beyond, mature black voters have been and are only too painfully aware that allowing one’s emotions to overtake reason and practicality by putting one’s hopes behind candidates that overpromise and offer easy fixes, that don’t have a plan, that seem too good to be true, that this all too often turns into bitter failure and disappointment, even catastrophe, and with dire consequences that are not overcome by speeches and wishful thinking; they know all too well that progress is a hard struggle and a long-march that is gradual and always leaves more to be desired.  That’s not to wholly reject idealism: idealism is beautiful and necessary, but it must be channeled practically “to hard thinking about means and ends,” to quote Krugman, or it is self-defeating, as history shows only too clearly to those who study it and study it well. 

But if millions of voters in a two-party system voted for someone other than Clinton or stayed home when they knew Trump was worse than her, if the impassioned entreaties of their favorite pop stars and pro-athletes and movie stars and their parents and sensible friends and mentors and a president they voted for twice and civil rights legends (sorry, Cornell West has nothing on John Lewis) weren’t enough to convince them to do their duty to stop a madman from taking over the most powerful office on the planet, then maybe those people need to suffer in a way that makes them realize this is not a game, this is not simply an exercise in abstract self-expression, this is not simply about them, that voting carries real world consequences that affect other people, sometimes a neighbor, sometimes someone living half a world away. Because if the left can’t unite—not with a minority of it screaming at majority to undemocratically accept their minority wishes, program, and leadership when they were unable to convince a whopping majority of their fellow liberals to accept their program or their candidate—then, it seems, we will have one-party rule in a democratic fascist state, not just for a few years, but for a long time to come. The same can be said of Europe: if too many liberals there selfishly and childishly vote for tiny parties that don’t even pass the threshold required to get seats in parliament, just like third party voters in the U.S., all they will succeed in doing is diluting the liberal vote away from parties that can actually compete with Democratic fascism; you must vote strategically with an eye to the relative support of different parties and the likelihood they can win and have an actual impact on the outcome in favor of advancing your espoused values, not simply drawing away votes from other competitive parties by voting in a way that only leaves a snowball’s chance in hell of your vote actually helping to advance that values you so loudly proclaim but are apparently unable to think through with enough effort to understand how to help, not hurt, them.

Perhaps some pain is required then, in order for enough of the left to mature and become more practical for us to actually start winning elections when we don’t have a candidate with once-in-a-generation charisma, because if the does not mature and mature fast, pain will surely come, and almost surely come in the form democratic fascism and the destruction our societies, democracy, the West, and the international system as we know it. Democratic fascism, in its possible triumph, may actually do some good, then: it may finally teach the most naïve of us with objectively good intentions and who say we believe in human rights, social justice, and equality that a vote is never something to wastefully throw away, and that its effects often go far beyond ourselves, let alone our sense of personal satisfaction.

The Economist

*****

Even as I write this, I am watching Trump talk to a crowd in South Carolina at a Boeing facility to talk about Boeing military-industrial-complex products and ordering billions in new weapons systems; yes, a day after the worst and most unintentionally farcical press conference in American history and after his new choice for National Security Advisor declined the job offer after the previous one had to resign amid an exploding scandal after less than a month on job, Trump is going to his base to offer platitudes and fetishize the idea of American greatness by appealing to militarism and weapon fetishism; “God bless Boeing,” he finishes his speech, and yes, that came after “God bless America,” with a CNN panel of generally solid pundits playing right into his game by saying it’s a great speech compared to his press conference, giving him compliments for improvement after he set the rhetorical bar lower than any president since 1789 (including, yes, Andrew Johnson’s infamous drunk VP-swearing-in speech); yes, Democratic fascism is here: the question is, what do we, what can we, do now?

The choice is clear and, sorry kids, limited: liberals can stand united against democratic fascism and halt its progress before it’s too late or stand divided in the face of its systemic, Putin-backed onslaught and empower fascism in spite of their unwitting selves and professed values. That is your choice, and as a citizen and a voter and one who professes to subscribe to liberal values, in the end, if you choose that second option history will judge despicably and judge you totally independent of whatever linguistic or intellectual contortions in which you engage to frame your action as something else other than empowering this democratic fascism, and history’s harsh judgment will matter far more than how you personally judge yourself or how often your like-minded peers in a social media echo chamber give you self-serving likes and comments, retweets, or any other number of shallow accolades; democratic fascism, though it thrives on social media, is a result far deeper and more lasting that any tweet or like. 

And this democratic fascism is approaching faster and with more momentum than just about any but the most prescient of us, even at this late hour, can see; the time for debate is limited, the time to fall in line is soon, and unless we face “hard truths” about our present realities, what is possible and not possible now in these upcoming elections, idealistic dreams will remain fantasies and we will all be living in a nightmare in which the best we can dream of in the foreseeable future will be a fantastical ability to again make use of the chances to make a true difference that we already blew back when we had that chance to actually do so, before it became too late, back when we were living in a flawed but still historically magnificent system that still gave us the power actually make a difference in a democracy of liberal democratic values, before democratic fascism and we, through our own stupidity, destroyed that precious system like Shakespeare’s Othello when he “threw a pearl away (5.2).”

*****

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related article: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

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