Chris Hedges's Blog, page 133

Neoliberalism Is the True Villain of ‘Joker’

After 11 years of inundating cineplexes with status-quo defending super cops and soldiers, Hollywood has finally given us a blockbuster movie with a protagonist willing to fight for common people against the economic system oppressing them. He just happens to be a comic book villain.

“Joker” has, at best, a tenuous relationship to its DC Comics source material. In an homage to Martin Scorsese’s early work, Todd Phillips’ film serves as a dark character study of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a professional clown living with his ailing mother in a tumultuous early 1980s Gotham City.

The film follows Arthur as he tries and fails to smile through his fight against mental illness, poverty, loneliness and severe depression. He is utterly powerless to slow down the decay of his mental state and at one point even considers committing a crime in hopes of being recommitted to Arkham State Hospital.

Arthur’s only moments of happiness come from entertaining children and watching television with his mother—specifically a late-night show hosted by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), a nod to Rupert Pupkin’s idol Jerry Langford in “The King of Comedy” (1982). When the machinery of capitalism strips Arthur of even those modest pleasures (along with his access to therapy and medication), the movie reveals its true nature—not as a prestige drama but a pulpy revenge thriller.

Much has been written about the politics of “Joker,” and almost all of it wrong. It is certainly not a “toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels,” as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich described it. Fleck’s anger is not aimed at women or people of color but specifically at those who have wronged him: the billionaire his mother used to work for, a trio of Wall Street goons on the subway and finally the celebrity who mocks his disability on national television.

The violence of “Joker” has been similarly pilloried. It is truly shocking, but that is because the film takes human life seriously. Only a handful of people are killed during the film—far less than you’d see Iron Man or Captain America kill in an opening fight scene—and each is genuinely disturbing. But Fleck does not commit murder because he’s mentally ill. Instead, his violence is a response to that which he experiences as a result of his mental illness. Beatrice Adler-Bolton of the podcast Death Panel called the film the “‘I Spit on Your Grave’ of medicalization.” It’s a revenge flick for those pulverized by a system that renders them invisible.

The true political implications of “Joker” center on Bruce Wayne’s father and the film’s antagonist, Thomas Wayne. Whereas the comic book character is a generous philanthropist, the Wayne of “Joker” is recast as a Mitt Romney-like figure who uses his immense and unearned riches to push his way into politics. His sneering disdain for those who haven’t “made something of themselves,” with its faint echoes of the then-Republican candidate for president’s 47% remarks, severs the film from the Batman lore. No longer is wealth a tool for Gotham’s benefactors to help the less fortunate but a means to a sinister, real-world end—the power to control, dominate, mock, abuse and scorn those who don’t have it.

“Joker” subverts the Batman mythos by suggesting the Waynes were not the innocent victims of a robbery gone wrong. Rather they are killed in a deliberate act to stop billionaire Thomas Wayne from becoming mayor and exerting still more power over the proletariat. The Bruce Wayne in this universe does not need to hunt criminals in hopes of finding the person responsible for his parents’ death because in “Joker” that person is his father.

For much of the film, Fleck is bemused by but disconnected from the anti-wealth demonstrations that his killing of three Wall Street brokers (and Wayne employees) inadvertently inspire. “KILL THE RICH: A New Movement?” one newspaper headline asks as masked “clowns” riot against the wealthy and hold signs demanding an end to their predations.

Fleck doesn’t quite see his part in all this, even as the funding for his treatment is cut by austerity measures and a billionaire ignores pleading from Fleck’s mother for financial assistance. But as the film reaches its climax, Arthur is literally and metaphorically embraced by this mass movement. No longer is his alienation atomized; Fleck and the audience understand that he is channeling the righteous anger of the sick, the poor and the downtrodden.

In a dream-like sequence—that may or me not be one of Arthur’s many fantasies—a crowd of clown-faced protesters wills the injured Arthur to his feet and he begins to dance, blood streaming out of the corners of his mouth as he smiles in classic Joker fashion. Arthur looks in wonder at a new world he has created in which people are no longer invisible because they’re ill, no longer crushed because they are poor, no longer forced to smile through the violence they suffer. They are no longer powerless.

Setting the film in 1981 serves the dual purpose of grounding it in the gritty New York of “Taxi Driver” and placing the film in the early days of our current global neoliberal order. Although Arthur Fleck declares he is not political, it’s impossible to view the film as anything other than a condemnation of the austerity and immiseration ushered in by corporations like Wayne Enterprises with the aid of politicians like Ronald Reagan. The film makes clear that when people are only as valued as their ability to produce profit, they will invariably fight back. “The greater danger to society may be if you DON’T go see this movie,” wrote documentarian Michael Moore in a recent Facebook post. “Because the story it tells and the issues it raises are so profound, so necessary, that if you look away from the genius of this work of art, you will miss the gift of the mirror it is offering us.”

That Todd Phillips has smuggled this deeply scornful view of the established order into a comic book movie underwritten by a major corporation is what makes “Joker” so subversive. It is increasingly uncommon for blockbuster fare to challenge audiences on a moral or political scale, but by conceiving the film as a throwback to rebellious New Hollywood cinema, Phillips has made perhaps the most left-leaning major release of 2019.

With a recession on the horizon, unchecked climate change propelling us toward global catastrophe and a political system unwilling or incapable of addressing the widening gap between the haves and the have nots, we will likely look back on the controversy surrounding “Joker” as quaint. While the film is set in the past, the class-based uprising it depicts is an optimistic glimpse into a future in which the invisible and marginalized rise up and take to the streets.

A Prehistoric Reminder of the Immense Damage We’ve Done

For the entire 2.5 million years of the Ice Age epoch called the Pleistocene, it was a low-carbon world. Atmospheric carbon dioxide hovered around 230 parts per million. Not only did Homo sapiens evolve on a low-carbon planet, so did Homo erectus and most other human species now known only from fossil evidence in Europe and Asia.

And this long history of a planet kept cool and stable by low levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere continued long after the discovery of fire, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the fall and rise of empires and the Industrial Revolution.

Only in 1965 did carbon dioxide levels pass 320 ppm, after a century of exploitation of fossil fuels that released ancient carbon back into atmospheric circulation.

By 2019, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere had tipped 410 ppm and is still rising. In less than a century, human action had raised planetary average temperatures by around 1°C. At present rates, this average could reach 3°C by the end of this century.

Researchers have known for a century that humans emerged in a cooler world, but much of the story of the distant past was based on the evidence of fossils and sedimentary rocks. The latest research pushes the detailed atmospheric carbon dioxide accounting back to at least 2.5 million years.

“This current high carbon dioxide experiment is not only an experiment for the climate and the environment – it’s an experiment for us”

Researchers report in the journal Nature Communications that they studied the pattern of carbon isotope readings preserved in the deep yellow soils of China’s loess plateau. What they found confirmed 800,000 years of annual evidence from the ice cores of Antarctica and Greenland – and far beyond that limit.

The wind-blown loess of China dates back to at least 22 million years and each successive layer carries isotope evidence that can be read as testimony to the atmospheric conditions in which the soils were laid down.

The latest find confirms that the normal state of the planet during human evolution was cool, with low levels of atmospheric carbon. Homo erectus was the first known human predecessor to exploit fire, systematically fashion stone hand axes, and to leave Africa for Asia and Europe.

“According to this research, from the first Homo erectus, which is currently dated to 2.1 to 1.8 million years ago, we have lived in a low-carbon environment – concentrations were less than 320 parts per million,” said Yige Zhang, a geoscientist at Texas A&M University in the US, who worked with colleagues in Nanjing, China, and California Institute of Technology.

“So this current high carbon dioxide experiment is not only an experiment for the climate and the environment – it’s an experiment for us, for ourselves.”

The World Is Blithely Ignoring the Longest Catastrophe of Our Time

GOMA, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo — The boy was sitting next to his father, as he so often did. He mimicked his dad in every way. He wanted to be just like him, but Muhindo Maronga Godfroid, then a 31-year-old primary school teacher and farmer, had bigger plans for his two-and-a-half-year-old son. He would go to university one day. He would become a “big name” — not just in their village of Kibirizi, but in North Kivu Province, maybe the entire Democratic Republic of Congo. The boy was exceedingly smart. He was, Godfroid said, “amazing.” He could grow up to be a leader in a country in desperate need of them.

Kahindo Jeonnette was just putting dinner on the table when someone began pounding on the front door. “Open! Open! Open!” a man yelled in Swahili. Jeonnette was startled.

The 24-year-old mother of two looked at her husband. Godfroid shook his head. “I can’t open the door unless you say who you are,” she called out.

“I’m looking for your husband. I’m his friend,” came the response.

“It’s too late now. My husband can’t come out. Come back tomorrow,” she replied.

The man shouted, “Then I’m going to open it!” and pumped several bullets into the door. One tore through Godfroid’s left hand, leaving him with just a thumb and two-and-a-half fingers. For a moment, he was stunned. The pain had yet to hit him and he couldn’t quite piece together what had happened. Then he turned his head and saw his tiny son splayed out on the floor.

The grieving parents can’t even bring themselves to utter their late son’s name. “I’ll never forget seeing my baby lying there,” Jeonnette told me, her eyes red and glassy, as we sat in the kitchen of her two-room, clapboard home in a tumbledown area of Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province. “I close my eyes and that’s all I can see.”

No one knows who exactly killed Jeonnette and Godfroid’s son. No one knows exactly why. His death was just one more murder in an endless tally; a killing somehow tied to a war started decades before he breathed his first breath; a homicide abetted by an accident of birth — the bad luck of being born in a region roiled by a conflict as interminable as it is ignored.

Lightning Fast Lava, an Exploding Lake, and “the Most Dangerous City in the World”

The attack on Jeonnette and Godfroid’s home, the violence they endured, was no anomaly, but another painful incident in one of the most enduring catastrophes on the planet. A new report, “Congo, Forgotten: The Numbers Behind Africa’s Longest Humanitarian Crisis” by Human Rights Watch and the New York University-based Congo Research Group, finds that between June 1, 2017 and June 26, 2019, there were at least 3,015 violent incidents — including killings, mass rapes, and kidnappings — involving 6,555 victims in the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu.

An average of 8.38 civilians were killed per 100,000 people in those two provinces alone, a number that exceeds even the 2018 death rate of 6.87 civilians in Borno, Nigeria, the state most affected by the terror group Boko Haram. It’s more than double the rate — 4.13 — in all of civil-war-torn Yemen, where Houthi rebels and civilians have, for years, been under a relentless assault by a U.S.-backed coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

“The fighting in recent years shows that peace and stability in eastern Congo are elusive,” said Jason Stearns, director of the Congo Research Group. “A comprehensive approach is needed, including an invigorated demobilization program and deep-seated reforms at every level of the state to counter impunity.”

The chances of that happening anytime soon are, however, remote. Violence has stalked the Congo’s far east since at least the nineteenth century, when slave raiders plied their trade here and local mutineers from a Belgian colonial expedition rampaged through the region. And since the end of the last century, North Kivu has been an epicenter of conflict.

For its part, Goma — home to two million people — has been called “cursed,” labeled a “magnet of misery,” and identified as “the most dangerous city in the world.” While it might not sit directly over hell, beneath the volcano that looms over it, Mount Nyiragongo, is a burning lake of lava — an estimated 2.3 billion gallons worth. At the same time, Lake Kivu, the body of water on whose shores Goma sits, could potentially asphyxiate millions in the event of an earthquake, thanks to gases building up beneath its surface. Then again, Lake Kivu itself might just explode — as it does about once every thousand years.

Goma is, to put it mildly, a tough town and, in recent times, it’s endured some genuine tough luck as well. In 1977, Mount Nyiragongo erupted, sending lava racing through the outskirts of the city at the fastest rate ever recorded, around 62 miles per hour, just shy of the speed of a cheetah running at full tilt. Several outlying villages were obliterated and almost 300 people burned alive.

In 1994, after the overthrow of a Hutu-led regime that had committed a genocide on the Tutsis of neighboring Rwanda, more than a million refugees, mostly Hutus, swamped Goma, prompting aid agencies to set up camps for them. Those camps, in turn, became bases for the ousted genocidaires to launch cross-border raids into Rwanda. In addition, cholera ravaged those refugee camps and Tutsis who had also fled the genocide were soon being attacked in Goma just as they had been in their native Rwanda.

The aftermath of that genocide birthed what came to be known as Africa’s World War, a conflict that raged from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s and saw Goma become a rebel capital controlled by a military elite, while more than five million people in the region died of violence or its fallout: hunger, starvation, and illness. Then, as if things weren’t bad enough, in 2002, Mount Nyiragongo erupted again, sending more than 14 million cubic meters of lava flowing down its southern flank. Two raging rivers of molten rock tore through the center of Goma, destroying 15% of the city, killing at least 170 people, leaving 120,000 homeless, and sending 300,000 others streaming into Rwanda.

Despite a regional peace deal that same year, Goma became the target of a Tutsi group that evolved into the March 23 Movement, or M23, a militia that would then battle the Congolese army for the better part of a decade, leading to yet another influx of displaced people settling into yet more camps and slums on Goma’s peripheries. Worse still, in 2012, the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels briefly seized and sacked the city, while carrying out an assassination campaign in and around it.

Today, Goma is officially at peace, but it’s never really peaceful. “Since the start of 2019, a series of murders, violent robberies, and kidnappings have taken place in peripheral neighborhoods of Goma,” reads a report released this spring by the Rift Valley Institute, which investigates conflict and its costs in the Democratic Republic of Congo. An armed robbery described in the report bears an eerie resemblance to the attack on Jeonnette and Godfroid’s home in Kibirizi. One of the victims explained how bandits carried out that home invasion in a neighborhood on the edge of Goma:

”I was sleeping downstairs with my wife and the baby. They entered the front door by shooting through it. We fled our room to take the stairs to go inside. Downstairs, they forced one of our daughters to show them the rooms upstairs. We locked ourselves in the room. The bandits shot through the door, hurting our baby, right above her eye and in her arm. We fled to the shower. The baby was bleeding very much. They came in and I started to give them everything they wanted from us… It was very traumatizing. My wife, who was pregnant, gave birth too early, but the baby is more or less OK. While locked in the bathroom, I called the chef de quartier and the colonel I know but they started to talk about fuel, [more specifically, the lack of fuel, which prevented them from intervening] so no one came to help.”

In the face of such violence, most Congolese are left with few options but to endure or flee. Last year, 1.8 million people — more than two percent of Congo’s population of 81 million — were internally displaced, second only to Ethiopia. All told, there are currently 5.6 million displaced Congolese and it’s estimated that 99% were made homeless due to violence.

Conflict Minerals Trumped by Conflict Alone

From the 1990s through the first years of the present century, an estimated 40 armed groups operated in the eastern Congo. Today, more than 130 such groups are active just in North and South Kivu Provinces.

With at least $24 trillion in gold, diamonds, tin, coltan, copper, cobalt, and other natural resources beneath the ground, it’s often assumed that Congo’s violence is intimately connected with the desire to control its mineral wealth. The Congo Research Group’s Kivu Security Tracker data, however, indicates that there is “no systematic correlation between violence and mining areas.” Instead, that land’s conflicts have become their own revenue stream. A “military bourgeoisie” has used the country’s complex set of conflicts-within-conflicts for career advancement, financing their private wars through kidnapping, the taxation of commodities and the movement of people, poaching, and protection rackets of every sort. Violence has become just another resource in the eastern Congo, a commodity whose value can be measured in both pain and Congolese francs.

Between June 2017 and June 2019, about 11% of the killings and 17% of all clashes in the Kivus occurred in the Fizi and Uvira territories of South Kivu and yet the epicenter of the violence in the region remains Beni territory in North Kivu (also a hotspot in the current and widening Ebola outbreak that even powerful new vaccines are unable to stem). Thirty-one percent of all the civilian killings in the Kivus took place in or around Beni, according to the Human Rights Watch report, “Congo, Forgotten,” with most of the bloodshed attributed to conflict between the Congolese armed forces and the Allied Democratic Forces, or ADF, a decades-old group that only recently rebranded itself as an Islamic State franchise.

Nearby Rutshuru territory experienced 35% of all the kidnappings in the two provinces, according to “Congo, Forgotten.” Recently, Sylvestre Mudacumura, a leader of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, an armed group founded by Hutu genocidaires in 2000, was killed there by the Congolese army. Rutshuru and neighboring Lubero territory are also home to two loose coalitions of opposing militias — the Nyatura and the Mai-Mai Mazembe — that draw from and nominally defend different ethnic groups in the region.

And so it goes in one of the most persistent bloodlettings on this planet, which is likely to continue taking a terrible toll in the years to come as the world turns a blind eye to it all.

Slow Burn

Muhindo Maronga Godfroid and Kahindo Jeonnette, both from the Nande ethnic group, hail from Rutshuru. While they don’t know for certain who attacked their home on November 24, 2017, they suspect that Nyatura, a Congolese Hutu militia, was behind it.

When the couple returned from the hospital following the shooting, they found their home completely looted. Fearing for their lives, they fled to Goma, where I met them, with their five-year-old daughter Eliane. All three now live in a two-room shack in a rough part of town where dirt and volcanic rock serve as the floors of most homes.

With his injured hand, Godfroid has been unable to find work. The family survives on the money Jeonnette makes by selling lotoko, a potent local moonshine.

Wearing blue jeans and a red Liverpool soccer jersey, Godfroid continued to talk with me about their son until Jeonnette walked over and waved her hand as if to say, No more. The conversation had left her shaken and she didn’t want to hear about or talk about or think about that horrible night for one second more. Jeonnette said that she needed a drink. Would I like to join her? After an hour of my questions about the violence that had upended her world, about the death of a son whose name she couldn’t bring herself to utter, how could I not?

Jeonnette can’t forget that night, the sight of her son, the moment her life fell apart, but the world has forgotten the humanitarian crisis in Congo — to the extent that it was ever aware of it in the first place. After several decades of conflict, after a “World War” most people on this planet don’t even know happened (let alone killed millions), after rebel raids and village massacres, after countless attacks and uncounted murders, Congo’s constellation of crises remains largely ignored. It’s a burning reservoir of pain for which — the yeoman efforts of Human Rights Watch and the Congo Research Group aside — there is neither an accounting nor accountability.

Retreating to the back room, Jeonnette emerged with a metal cannister of crystal-clear liquor and poured a bit for each of us. As we toasted the memory of her son and I savored the slow burn of the lotoko, Jeonnette took a deep breath and leaned toward me. “This trauma lives in my heart. I can’t escape it,” she said, her eyes brimming with hurt. “This country keeps pulling us back. We just can’t move forward.”

2 Florida Men Tied to Giuliani Arrested on Campaign Charges

WASHINGTON — Two Florida businessmen tied to President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have been arrested on campaign finance violations resulting from a $325,000 donation to a political action committee supporting Trump’s reelection.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested on a four-count indictment that includes charges of conspiracy, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission and falsification of records.

Parnas and Fruman were central to Giuliani’s efforts to get government officials in Ukraine to investigate business dealings by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter in the war-torn former Soviet republic.

Records show that Parnas and Fruman used wire transfers from a corporate entity they controlled to make a $325,000 donation to the America First Action committee in 2018. But wire transfer records that became public through a lawsuit show that the corporate entity reported as making the transaction was not the true source of the money.

John Dowd, a lawyer for the men, hung up on an Associated Press reporter calling about the case.

The men, who were arrested at Dulles International Airport, were expected to appear later Thursday in federal court in Virginia. Two other men were charged in the case.

The indictment says Parnas and Fruman “sought to advance their personal financial interests and the political interests of at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working” and took steps to conceal it from third parties, including creditors. They created a limited liability corporation, Global Energy Producers, and “intentionally caused certain large contributions to be reported in the name of GEP instead of in their own names,” according to the indictment.

Prosecutors charge that the two men falsely claimed the contributions came from a liquefied natural gas business. At that point, the company had no income or significant assets, according to the indictment.

The big PAC donation in May 2018 was part of a flurry of political spending tied to Parnas and Fruman, with at least $478,000 in donations flowing to GOP campaigns and PACs in little more than two months.

The money enabled the relatively unknown entrepreneurs to quickly gain access to the highest levels of the Republican Party, including face-to-face meetings with Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

The AP reported last week that Parnas and Fruman helped arrange a January meeting in New York between Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, and Giuliani, as well as other meetings with top government officials.

Giuliani’s efforts to launch a Ukrainian corruption investigation were echoed by Trump in his July 25 call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. That conversation is now at the heart of a burgeoning congressional impeachment inquiry.

A whistleblower complaint by an unnamed intelligence official makes reference to “associates” of Giuliani in Ukraine who were attempting to make contact with Zelensky’s team, though it’s not clear that refers to Parnas and Fruman. That could put the two men squarely in the middle of the investigation into Giuliani’s activities.

___

Neumeister reported from New York. Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.

The Hong Kong Standoff Is Dragging in Unexpected Players

First it was the NBA. Now it is esports that has found itself in the middle of the standoff between Chinese leaders and the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.

The mega-U.S. gaming company Activision Blizzard is under fire after its one-year suspension of a top professional esports player after he spoke out in favor of the Hong Kong protesters during a postgame interview.

Ng Wai Chung, known as Blitzchung, lives in Hong Kong and is one of the top players in the Asia-Pacific region of the online card deck game Hearthstone, which is based on Activision Blizzard’s widely popular World of Warcraft and has a user base of more than 100 million people.

After Ng won a Hearthstone game in a recent Asia-Pacific Grandmasters tournament, he appeared for a post-game interview in a respirator mask and goggles, much like those worn by the Hong Kong protesters, and shouted a popular pro-democracy slogan, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

That protest cost him. According to Yahoo News, Ng said on Twitter that he lost $10,000 of prize earnings from the tournament.

You can see the interview below:

[BREAKING] Hong Kong Hearthstone player @blitzchungHS calls for liberation of his country in post-game interview:https://t.co/3AgQAaPioj

@Matthieist #Hearthstone pic.twitter.com/DnaMSEaM4g

— 

The War in Afghanistan Turns 18, and No One Notices

On the 18th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump said on Twitter, “… it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.” He added, “WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.” But rather than referring to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Trump was actually talking about the role of U.S. troops in northern Syria, about which he had just made a serious decision. One wonders whether Trump would take greater interest in the longest official war in U.S. history if he had real estate interests in Kabul. He made absolutely no mention of Afghanistan on the anniversary of the war. But neither did most members of Congress.

There was a near blackout of the anniversary in the media as well. Of the major newspapers, only the New York Times paid some attention to it with a lengthy special called ‘We Are Inside the Fire’: An Oral History of the War in Afghanistan. While the report centered on the voices of Afghans, the paper minimized the role of the U.S. For example, the first section covering 1989 to 2001 was described in this way: “After the Soviet occupation, Afghanistan fell into a civil war between factions that were mostly bound by personal loyalties.” The Times did not see fit to add the civil war was largely fueled by U.S. weapons and cash flooding into the hands of the anti-Soviet jihadi warlords the CIA had deployed against the USSR. Those warlords and weapons set the stage for the Taliban and the brutality that followed. Still, the Afghan voices in the narrative consistently mentioned the futility of the U.S. war, with one doctor in Kandahar saying:

It would be better if Americans had never come here. Fewer people would have died. This war is not Afghanistan’s war; it is the war of the world, but they are fighting it in Afghanistan.

All that Trump has done since he took office is increase the number of U.S. troops that had been serving, at least initially, and most recently walk away without warning from the years-long effort to sign a peace deal with the Taliban. Although the president rails about the “endless wars” that the U.S. is engaged in, the longest of all wars is the seemingly never-ending one in Afghanistan that he appears to have swept under the rug for now. But this is par for the course. In its 18 years, the Afghan war has never quite managed to capture the attention of presidents or the public for any sustained period of time. It was the reason why my co-author James Ingalls and I titled our 2005 book about the war “Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence.” Nearly 14 years after its publication, the phrase “Propaganda of Silence” remains tragically relevant.

When the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush’s stated goals were to stop the country from being a haven for terrorists like the 9/11 hijackers and rescue ordinary Afghans from the brutality of the Taliban—an attempt at claiming “humanitarian intervention.” In practice, the war was essentially retaliation for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Afghan babies born when the war began are now old enough to vote, but it is highly unlikely that most of them cast ballots in the recent Sept. 28 elections, postponed twice because of a major spike in violent attacks by the Taliban.

On election day, Afghanistan was on lockdown, paralyzed by Taliban threats of a bloodbath and Afghan government security efforts to thwart any attacks. Reports indicate that only 20% to 30% of registered voters showed up to the polls. According to The Guardian newspaper, “Militants attacked communications towers to take down mobile phone networks, cutting off nearly 1,000 polling stations from their headquarters in Kabul. More than 2,000 polling stations never opened on Saturday because of Taliban threats.” Although about 10 people were killed across the nation (double the official estimate), that relatively low figure was more a measure of poor turnout than a peaceful election. Compare this to  15 years ago, when 90% of the electorate registered to vote and 60% to 83% actually voted in the nation’s first post-Taliban presidential elections, a reflection of the excitement then among Afghans for a chance at democratic participation.

The results of this year’s race are expected in mid-October with the same two rivals that ran in elections five years ago facing off for the second time: Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah. In 2014, vote counts were too close to call and both men declared themselves the victor. Their political stalemate ended only after the U.S. cobbled together a clumsy power-sharing deal, installing Ghani as president and Abdullah as his chief executive. This time around both men are once more claiming victory and say they would refuse a similar deal. Reports of electoral fraud through ballot box-stuffing are also adding uncertainty to the race. Ultimately the real winners will likely be the Taliban, whose intention was to thwart the elections and who are reveling in reports of low turnout. In a statement, the organization said the low number of voters reflected an “absolute rejection and boycott by the nation,” but made no mention of the relentless threats, intimidation and violence it has inflicted on the Afghan people.

There are few good options left for the war other than ending it. In the past, American troops offered some measure of strength to government-backed forces against the Taliban and provided security for government officials. But the U.S.’s presence has had such an overall negative impact that as the doctor from Kandahar told the New York Times, “It would be better if Americans had never come here.” Today, even with U.S. troops present, a return to a pre-Oct. 7, 2001, era is more likely than ever. By the Department of Defense’s own assessment, “The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces remain in control of most of Afghanistan’s population centers and all of the provincial capitals, while the Taliban control large portions of Afghanistan’s rural areas, and continue to attack poorly defended government checkpoints and rural district centers.”

Just as Afghans born at the war’s start are now coming of age, Americans born at the same time are now old enough to serve. Private Hunter Nines was only 7 months old when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. He now heads to Afghanistan to serve in a war that more than three quarters of a million American troops have served in. In an interview with ABC News, Nines revealed the same ignorance about the war in Afghanistan as our politicians and media, saying, “Honestly, I don’t think a lot about it.” All he knows is that “I’ve got a job to do, and that we’re still over there right now and it’s not done yet.”

 

Power Cut to 1 Million in California to Try to Prevent Deadly Fires

SONOMA, Calif. — California’s biggest utility cut power to more than a million people Wednesday for what could be days on end in the most sweeping effort in state history to prevent wildfires caused by windblown power lines.

The unpopular move sparked a run on supplies at stores and came after two years of catastrophic fires sent Pacific Gas & Electric into bankruptcy and forced it to take more aggressive steps to prevent blazes.

The drastic measure caused a wave of impacts, from long lines at supermarkets and hardware stores to backups at traffic lights that had gone dark. Schools and universities canceled classes, offices were closed and many businesses were shuttered.

With the sun shining, not a wisp of smoke in the air and only gentle breezes, the historic action was condemned by those inconvenienced.

“It’s unreasonable. There’s no wind. It’s nothing. There’s no reason why they should shut the power off,” said Joseph Pokorski, a retiree who had been drinking beers and cocktails by lantern light at the Town Square bar in Sonoma in the early morning. “They’re … closing everything down so they don’t get sued. They don’t trim the trees, so we suffer.”

More than 500,000 customers in Northern California were without power, the utility said, and about 300,000 more outages were planned later to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires during winds forecast to build. About 2 million people were expected to be affected for up to several days.

“To everyone asking, ‘Where’s the wind? Where’s the wind?’ Don’t worry, the wind is coming. Go for a hike above 4,000 feet and you’ll feel it,” said Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office. “Obviously PG&E doesn’t want to cut the power when there’s already strong winds. You want to cut the power before it happens.”

Before the lights went out in the East Bay town of Moraga, cars were lined up at gas stations and customers filled carts at the town’s only supermarket with bags of ice, canned goods, loaves of bread, breakfast cereal and water.

Lines were also long at pharmacies and hardware stores, where emergency supplies were running low.

“Do you have any lanterns?” a concerned Elma Lear asked at Moraga Hardware and Lumber. “Or candles?”

The store was out of both and had also run out of batteries and coolers — even ultra-pricey Yeti coolers that cost as much as $400, owner Bill Snider said.

On Tuesday, the store sold 500 flashlights. Other high-demand items were extension cords, propane tanks for barbecues and butane for camping stoves. Generators were almost impossible to find.

Lear, who had stocked up on nonperishable food, cash and filled her gas tank, was directed to a home decor shop nearby where she had to fork over $40 for long lasting beeswax candles.

“I’m going to bite the bullet,” she said.

The utility planned to shut off power in parts of 34 northern and central California counties to reduce the chance of fierce winds knocking down or toppling trees into power lines during a siege of dry, gusty weather.

Gusts of 35 mph to 45 mph (56-72 kph) were forecast to sweep a vast swath of the state, from the San Francisco Bay Area to the agricultural Central Valley and especially in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and virtually incinerated the town of Paradise.

So far, wildfires have only burned a tiny fraction of the acreage burned in recent years. Through Sunday, only 63 square miles (163 square kilometers) had burned, compared to nearly 1,000 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) at the same time last year and an average of about half that figure in the past five years.

Very few fires were currently burning.

Deliberate outages could become the new normal in an era in which scientists say climate change is leading to fiercer blazes and longer fire seasons.

The winds will be the strongest and most widespread the region has seen in two years, and given the scope of the danger, there was no other choice but to stage the largest preventive blackout in state history, PG&E said.

“This is a last resort,” said Sumeet Singh, head of the utility’s Community Wildfire Safety Program.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said people should be outraged by PG&E’s move.

“No one is satisfied with this, no one is happy with this,” he said Tuesday.

The utility needs to upgrade and fix its equipment so massive outages are not the norm going forward, he said.

The outages came as residents in the region’s wine country north of San Francisco marked the two-year anniversary of deadly wildfires that killed 44 and destroyed thousands of homes. San Francisco is the only county in the nine-county Bay Area where power will not be affected.

It could take as many as five days to restore power after the danger has passed because every inch of power line must be checked to make sure it isn’t damaged or in danger of sparking a blaze, PG&E said.

To the south, Southern California Edison was considering power shut-offs to nearly 174,000 customers in nine counties as Santa Ana winds were predicted Thursday. San Diego Gas & Electric has notified about 30,000 customers they could lose power in backcountry areas.

The cutbacks followed a plan instituted after deadly wildfires — some blamed on downed PG&E transmission lines — destroyed dozens of lives and thousands of homes in recent years and forced the utility into bankruptcy over an estimated $30 billion in potential damages from lawsuits.

The outages Wednesday weren’t limited to fire-prone areas because the utilities must turn off entire distribution and transmission lines to much wider areas to minimize the risk of wildfires.

Classes were canceled for thousands of schoolchildren and at the University of California, Berkeley, Sonoma State University and Mills College.

Hospitals would operate on backup power, but other systems could see their generators fail after a few days. Outages even posed a threat that fire hydrants wouldn’t work at a time of extreme fire danger.

Counties activated their emergency centers and authorities urged people to have supplies of water for several days, to keep sensitive medicines such as insulin in cool places, to drive carefully because traffic lights could be out, to have a full gas tank for emergencies and to check the food in freezers and refrigerators for spoilage after power is restored.

PG&E set up about 30 community centers offering air conditioning, restrooms, bottled water and electronic charging stations during daylight hours.

___

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Janie Har and Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco, Jocelyn Gecker in Moraga, Don Thompson in El Dorado Hills, Haven Daley in Oakland, and Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine Is a Scandal on Its Own

What follows is a conversation between journalist Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone. Read a transcript of their conversation below and watch part one of their interview below.

There is growing evidence that President Donald Trump briefly froze U.S. military assistance to Ukraine for political goals. Max Blumenthal explores how the Ukrainegate scandal overlooks the dangers of those weapons sales to Ukraine and the corrupt interests behind it.

Under Trump, U.S. military assistance has prolonged a bloody proxy war with Russia, killing thousands in Ukraine and enabling far-right Ukrainian forces — all while enriching weapons manufacturers and DC lobbyists.

Guest: Max Blumenthal, Editor of The Grayzone and author of “The Management of Savagery.”

Watch/read Part 1 of this interview here.

 

TRANSCRIPT

AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback, I’m Aaron Maté, here with Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone and author of several books, including his latest, The Management of Savagery. We’ve been talking about several of the other facets of the Ukrainegate scandal that have gone ignored.

In this part, Max, let’s focus on the military assistance to Ukraine that Trump briefly froze and the outrage about that. We’ve been talking in the previous segment about the corruption of Joe Biden and others when it comes to Ukraine. Let’s talk about it now in the context of this military assistance, and I have to note that Kurt Volker, who up until just this week was the State Department envoy, the US envoy to Ukraine, has a huge conflict of interest that is not being discussed. So I want to read to you a paragraph from the Washington Post talking about Kurt Volker. It says, “Volker started his job at the State Department in 2017 in an unusual part-time arrangement that allowed him to continue consulting at BGR, a powerful lobbying firm that represents Ukraine and Raytheon. During his tenure, Volker advocated for the US to send Ukraine Raytheon-manufactured anti-tank Javelin missiles, a decision that made the missile firm millions of dollars. BGR has said Volker recused himself from all Ukraine related matters in response to criticisms about conflicts of interest.” That, from the Washington Post this week.

So, Max, we have here the top US envoy to Ukraine keeping his job as he’s in this post at a lobbying firm that is making millions of dollars off the sale of missiles that he himself is lobbying for in his position. So there’s that angle and then there’s the fact that what is the impact of all this. Well, the impact on the ground has been to prolong a bloody and disastrous proxy war between the US and Russia because it’s US military assistance that has kept this thing going, basically, similar to what the US did in Syria. And all this is not being discussed. Your thoughts on this, Max Blumenthal.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, it is being discussed in the sense that Trump is selling out our ally, and there’s all of this outrage that, quote-unquote, aid is not being provided to Ukraine. The aid being military assistance, and it’s sort of, it seems to be aid the way that it’s provided to Israel, where loans are given to Ukraine and they’re paid back to the American arms industry to, what, create jobs? Today it was announced by Raytheon that they’re expanding their Tucson campus to handle new weapons manufacturing demands, thanks to the $39 million deal just approved by the Trump State Department to send these Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.

Now, I reported on Kurt Volker’s relationship with the BGR Group, which is headed by Raytheon, one of the Raytheon’s top lobbyists in Washington, Ed Rogers, while he was also executive director of the McCain Institute, named for the man who issued, who authored the bill in the Senate, demanding all of this military assistance to Ukraine and serving as Trump’s liaison to Ukraine. And I thought this was a bizarre relationship, and I wrote about it again last year in 2018 and nobody in Washington paid attention. The mainstream media wasn’t really concerned about this obvious case of official corruption, and now they are because Volker’s out, he’s kind of maybe considered a bad guy because he played a role in shepherding Giuliani to Ukraine or helping Giuliani to dig up dirt on Trump’s opponents. But this was a serious issue. I think that Volker was actually seen as a check on Trump’s impulse to do détente with Russia, and that’s why this wasn’t brought up. Because Volker did play a role in influencing Trump to authorize, for the first time, to do something that Barack Obama refused to do: to authorize the initial shipment of these Javelin anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian military to turn up the heat on Russia.

Now, if you go back to the Republican convention in 2016, you can start to understand the origins of this Ukrainegate scandal that we’re talking about now. It was there in Cleveland where [senior Campaign advisor on policy and national security] J. D. Gordon, [rejected a proposed amendment to] the Republican National Committee platform about [sending] offensive weaponry to Ukraine, which was, a call for “offensive weaponry” [instead of] “appropriate assistance.” [“appropriate assistance” was the final language used]. And this was immediately seized on by the Democrats, who were starting to ramp up their Russiagate narrative and push the collusion theory that Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo with Putin to remove a call for offensive weapons to Ukraine in exchange for Putin interfering in the election against Hillary Clinton and hacking her emails, or whatever. Seems, it seemed, like, patently ridiculous to me, but, you know, the Huffington Post went with a headline at the time, “The Big Winner at the Republican National Convention: Vladimir Putin.” And so it’s always…it’s a win for Putin when one of the major parties in the US takes a turn towards détente and peace. Barack Obama had refused to authorize those very same offensive weapons because his National Security Council and his foreign policy team believed in advancing the Minsk II accords, at least to some extent, which would have de-escalated the proxy war in the east of Ukraine. Of course, all those people and the Ukrainians, they’re just bullet stoppers to us, we don’t care about them. And so the pressure mounts on Trump to authorize these offensive weapons, do something to prove that you’re not a Russian puppet! And Trump explicitly says, “I am NOT a Russian puppet. I authorized anti-tank busters to Ukraine!” He actually has come out and said it. It was a symbolic arms shipment for Trump to show that he wasn’t a Russian puppet.

For the Ukrainians, for the people in the east of Ukraine who are on the pro-Russian side, it means something very different, because they’ve been engaged in a trench war since 2014-2015. People in the frontline communities there have been dying in the sporadic artillery attacks, and there hasn’t been a tank battle since 2015, so the point of sending these Javelins, it doesn’t provide any defensive…it provides no defensive quality for Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. All it does is continue escalating this proxy war.

And so what we’re talking about now is not something that is in the interests of progressive people. We’re not talking about suspending human…, you know, aid for humanitarian programs, the way Trump has done to the Palestinians. Talking about suspending aid that actually directly interferes with something that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been elected to do, which is to make peace with Russia. There is a constituency for peace throughout Ukraine on the pro-Russian side and on the nationalist side, and he was elected to do what he’s doing now, which is called the Steinmeier Formula, named for the foreign minister of Germany, where elections will be held in pro-Russian areas in the Donbass in exchange for a withdrawal of Russian military support. And that is just, that just seems to me to be a good thing. The “quote unquote” international community is behind it. You know who’s against it? The neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society who are out in the streets protesting it and hardliners in Washington, including people who are close to Joe Biden, who’ve been wanting to constantly turn up the heat against Russia and use Ukrainians as bullet stoppers. And so I think it’s time to look into how this deal developed and what the effect is on the ground.

And one last point. Who put together the plan that McCain advanced in the Senate? It was the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution, two centrist, militaristic think tanks in Washington. And who funds both of those think tanks? Raytheon. Who is the defense secretary right now, who has signed off on this deal with $39 million of Javelins to Ukraine? The former lobbyist for Raytheon, Mark Esper. Who was funding John McCain? Raytheon. Who was supporting the firm of the former Ukra…ah, US liaison to Ukraine, Kurt Volker? Raytheon. So basically this deal is also the product of official corruption in Washington.

AARON MATÉ: Max, I’m going to add one more name here, someone who’s playing also a very prominent role in this, and that is Adam Schiff, the leader of the impeachment inquiry. As you reported on, I’m going to quote from you here, that the arms industry has rewarded Schiff handsomely as he has pushed Russiagate, which has pushed Democrats into adopting the same kind of militarist posture that Ukrainegate is doing now, and you write that, “Schiff’s largest donor in a previous campaign cycle at $12,700 was Northrop Grumman, the defense giant. Raytheon, the manufacturer of the Javelin anti-tank missile system, was close behind it with $10,000 in contributions. In all, arms giants accounted for over one-sixth of Schiff’s total donations.”

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, and the Atlantic Council just paid to send one of Schiff’s top staffers to Ukraine on some mysterious trip in September. But, yeah, Schiff has never met a war, a Washington war, he didn’t like. He’s even supported the US-Saudi war on Yemen, and he is one of the favorite donors…a favorite, uh, you know, recipients of arms industry donations. I mean, you just look at how much money this previously unheard-of member of Congress in California gets; I mean, he’s just raking a millions of dollars from corporations in the arms industry.

In 2013 Adam Schiff actually was treated to a $25,000, sorry, $2,500-a-head fundraiser by Ukrainian-born, California-based arms dealer named Igor Pasternak, and Pasternak has really benefited from the proxy war in eastern Ukraine. He got a lucrative contract, a lucrative contract to supply the Ukrainian state border guard with surveillance systems, and then he got another deal to replace the Ukrainian military’s old AK-47s with the new version of the M16. And the funniest thing is, I think PolitiFact has done some fact check on whether Schiff has a relationship with a Ukrainian arms dealer named Pasternak, and they declare that it’s mostly false by focusing on the fact that Pasternak has US nationality and that he was only born in Ukraine, but he’s from Kazakhstan, and they kind of nitpick. But it’s completely true that Schiff is deeply involved with the arms industry and they’re paying him for a good reason. This is someone who has pushed a narrative. I think it’s a…this is a ricochet effect of it. I think, you know, Schiff has his own vain ambitions for being in the limelight and pushing Russiagate, but there’s a ricochet effect which is benefit…it’s benefitting his donors for him to push this Cold War narrative.

AARON MATÉ: And, you know, I don’t claim to say that it’s intentional, but I have to note that as all of this outcry is going on in Washington about Trump briefly freezing the military assistance to Ukraine — because again under Congressional pressure he did unfreeze it and now it’s been approved as we saw with new Javelins sold just this week — but as that was going on, as you mentioned, this Ukrainian peace process is going forward. Just this week Zelensky, agreeing to hold elections in the Donbass, this region where Ukrainian forces are backing Russian-backed forces, which is a huge step forward. And it’s in this outcry over Trump and this claim that he’s endangering Ukraine, what is actually happening on the ground in Ukraine is being ignored. And as we wrap, Max, I’m wondering if you can comment on just how the scandals that Democrats have embraced, how aligning themselves with the national security state throughout Trump’s presidency, instead of resisting him for all of his dangerous policies to the country and to the world, but resisting him from the point of view of the imperatives of the national security state, where they don’t like his talk about having better relations with Russia, for example, about what that has done to just the overall progressive/liberal cause in general.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I saw Common Dreams, one of the websites that was really one of the major sources of critical analysis and reporting during the invasion of Iraq, retweeting David Frum yesterday, and it really reflects the atmosphere where the kind of progressive movement has been, un…almost unwittingly domesticated and neutered by the national security state into this kind of anti-Trump resistance where anything that harms Trump is…and anything that opportunistically hurts him is acceptable, even if it advances a new Cold War, which no progressive should support. And so here we are again, freaking out about the suspension of $400 million in military aid at a time when the Ukraine is going through a historic shift, moving towards peace.

We should be talking about how this affects Zelensky. You know, and it also upset me the way Trump treated Zelensky, that he kind of just treats him like this…this little colonial puppet. It upset me the way that Joe Biden treated Viktor Shokin, where the American vice president can just simply come in and fire the attorney general of another country and then go to the Council on Foreign Relations and brag about how he got rid of the “son-of-a-bitch.” It just shows our whole colonial relationship with Ukraine. This country has been turned into bullet stoppers by Washington. It’s been through two color revolutions, the Maidan coup has destroyed its gross domestic product, its export sector has been wiped out because its historic trading relationship with Russia is gone, corruption is sky-high, the people who looted all of the IMF loans and put them into foreign bank accounts are in power, and Ukraine has seen a migration crisis that’s almost on par or maybe worse than Venezuela’s, but we never hear about it because it’s of our doing.

So, we should actually start looking at this from an anti-war point of view, and we should also consider the fact that Ukraine’s interior ministry is controlled by someone, Arsen Avakov, who has been the benefactor of the world’s largest collection of neo-Nazis and helped integrate a neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Battalion, into the country’s National Guard. So that they now receive or have received US military assistance and Canadian military assistance. This is serious, like, you know, the progressives and anti-Trump people who are freaking out about the Proud Boys marching through Portland. Why aren’t they talking about the fact that we keep sending hun…tens of millions of dollars of offensive weaponry into a military that has a literal neo-Nazi battalion integrated into its ranks?

The 2018 NDAA blocked — thanks to some intervention by Democrats in the House — supposedly blocks assistance to the Azov Battalion, but it’s impossible to know how that will take place. There…it’s…we’ve reported at The Grayzone, as Asa Winstanley reported at Electronic Intifada, that the Azov Battalion is receiving Israeli weapons, and actually the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel attacked us for it. But they confirmed it at the same time. And they are taking US weapons into the field. So we should actually be talking about arming neo-Nazis with US taxpayer dollars and we should also talk about the fact that, as you and Ben Norton discussed, a would-be US domestic terrorist who wanted to kill Beto O’Rourke, and many others sought to go to Ukraine to train with the Azov Battalion. We should talk about how the Rise Above Movement, a white nationalist group in Orange County, actually did go to Ukraine to train with the Azov Battalion, and how Ukraine is becoming a global center of white nationalist activity, as the US is sending these advanced weapons there. But that discussion is only taking place within some sectors of alternative media that still maintain an anti-war point of view. It’s not taking place on Democracy Now!, it’s not taking place that I’ve seen at The Intercept, and I just don’t know how an institution like Common Dreams comes to retweeting one of the architects of the Iraq war, David Frum, just because he’s against Trump. But that’s really a sign of the times.

AARON MATÉ: You know, on the media front, I can only think of one exception, which is an article in Ha’aretz, which is headlined “Rights Groups Demand Israel Stop Arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine,” speaking to that controversy that you mentioned before. We’re going to leave it there, though. Max Blumenthal, final comments as we wrap.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Go to The Grayzone.com for more great reporting like this.

AARON MATÉ: Sounds good. Max Blumenthal, senior editor of The Grayzone, author of several books, his latest being The Management of Savagery, thanks very much.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks a lot, Aaron.

Turkey Launches Offensive Against Kurdish Fighters in Syria

AKCAKALE, Turkey — Turkey launched a military operation Wednesday against Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria after U.S. forces pulled back from the area, with a series of airstrikes hitting a town on Syria’s northern border.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the start of the campaign, which followed an abrupt decision Sunday by U.S. President Donald Trump that American troops would step aside to allow for the operation.

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Betrayal Is American Foreign Policy



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

Trump’s move represented a shift in U.S. policy that essentially abandoned the Syrian Kurdish fighters who have been America’s only allies on the ground in Syria. They were longtime U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State group.

After Turkey’s offensive began, there was sign of panic in the streets of Ras al-Ayn— one of the towns under attack with residential areas close to the borders. Cars raced to safety, although it was not clear if they were leaving the town or heading away from border areas. Near the town of Qamishli, plumes of smoke were seen rising from an area close to the border after activists reported sounds of explosion nearby.

The Kurdish forces have warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” that could potentially unfold because of the Turkish military operation.

“Our mission is to prevent the creation of a terror corridor across our southern border, and to bring peace to the area,” Erdogan said in a tweet.

He added that Turkish Armed Forces, together with Turkish-backed Syrian fighters known as the Syrian National Army, had begun what they called “Operation Peace Spring” against Kurdish fighters to eradicate what Erdogan said was “the threat of terror” against Turkey.

Minutes before Erdogan’s announcement, Turkish jets began pounding suspected positions of Syrian Kurdish forces in the town of Ras al Ayn, according to Turkish media and Syrian activists. The sound of explosions could be heard in Turkey.

A photograph released to Turkish media showed Erdogan at his desk, reportedly giving orders for the start of the operation.

It was difficult to know what was hit in the first hours of the operation.

Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, said Turkish warplanes were targeting “civilian areas” in northern Syria, causing “a huge panic” in the region.

Before Turkey’s attack, Syrian Kurdish forces that are allied with the United States issued a general mobilization call, warning of a “humanitarian catastrophe.”.

The Turkish operation meant to create a so-called “safe zone” carries potential gains and risk for Turkey by getting even more deeply involved in the Syria war. It also would ignite new fighting in Syria’s 8-year-old war, potentially displacing hundreds of thousands.

Turkey has long threatened to attack the Kurdish fighters whom Ankara considers terrorists allied with a Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. Associated Press journalists on the Turkish side of the border overlooking Tal Abyad saw Turkish forces crossing into Syria in military vehicles Wednesday.

Expectations of an invasion increased after Trump’s announcement, although he also threatened to “totally destroy and obliterate” Turkey’s economy if the Turkish push into Syria went too far.

Turkey has been massing troops for days along its border with Syria and vowed it would go ahead with the military operation and not bow to the U.S. threat.

Trump later cast his decision to pull back U.S. troops from parts of northeast Syria as fulfilling a campaign promise to withdraw from the “endless war” in the Middle East. Republican critics and others said he was sacrificing an ally, the Syrian Kurdish forces, and undermining Washington’s credibility.

Fahrettin Altun, the Turkish presidency’s communications director, called on the international community in a Washington Post op-ed published Wednesday to rally behind Ankara, which he said would also take over the fight against the Islamic State group.

Turkey aimed to “neutralize” Syrian Kurdish militants in northeastern Syria and to “liberate the local population from the yoke of the armed thugs,” Altun wrote.

Erdogan discussed plans for the incursion with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Erdogan’s office said the Turkish leader told his Russian counterpart by phone that the planned military action in the region east of the Euphrates River “will contribute to the peace and stability” and also “pave the way for a political process” in Syria.

In its call for a general mobilization, the local civilian Kurdish authority known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also asked the international community to live up to its responsibilities as “a humanitarian catastrophe might befall our people.”

The Kurds also said that they want the U.S.-led coalition to set up a no-fly zone in northeastern Syria to protect the civilian population from Turkish airstrikes.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish group urged Moscow to broker and guarantee talks with the Syrian government in Damascus in light of Turkey’s planned military operation. The Syrian Kurdish-led administration said in a statement it is responding positively to calls from Moscow encouraging the Kurds and the Syrian government to settle their difference through talks.

Syria’s Foreign Ministry condemned Turkey’s plans, calling it a “blatant violation” of international law and vowing to repel an incursion. Although it blamed some Kurdish groups for what is happening, saying they were being used as a tool to help an alleged “American project,” it said Syria is ready to welcome back its “stray sons if they return to their senses,” referring to the pro-U.S. Kurdish fighters.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Washington of playing “very dangerous games” with the Syrian Kurds, saying that the U.S. first propped up the Syrian Kurdish “quasi state” in northeastern Syria and is now withdrawing its support.

“Such reckless attitude to this highly sensitive subject can set fire to the entire region, and we have to avoid it at any cost,” he said during a visit to Kazakhstan. Russian news media said Moscow communicated that position to Washington.

Earlier Wednesday, IS militants targeted a post of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, which was once the de facto IS capital at the height of the militants’ power in the region.

The SDF, which is holding thousands of IS fighters in several detention facilities in northeastern Syria, has warned that a Turkish incursion might lead to the resurgence of the extremists. The U.S.-allied Kurdish-led force captured the last IS area controlled by the militants in eastern Syria in March.

In the IS attack, three suicide bombers struck Kurdish positions in Raqqa. There was no immediate word on casualties. An activist collective known as Raqqa is being Silently Slaughtered reported an exchange of fire and an explosion.

The Observatory said the attack involved two IS fighters who engaged in a shootout before blowing themselves up.

IS claimed responsibility, saying one of its members killed or wounded 13 SDF members.

Also Wednesday, Iranian state TV reported a surprise military drill with special operations forces near the country’s border with Turkey, in Iran’s Western Azerbaijan province. The TV didn’t mention the expected Turkish offensive into Syria or elaborate on the reasons for the drill.

___

Mroue reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey; Mehmet Guzel in Akcakale, Turkey; Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran; and Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed.

The Washington Post Goes to War With Elizabeth Warren

Just two weeks ago, our survey of media coverage of Elizabeth Warren (FAIR.org, 9/23/19) found a fairly—though not exclusively—positive tenor, with stories often contrasting her favorably to Bernie Sanders and highlighting her outspoken commitment to capitalism. But with erstwhile frontrunner Joe Biden under fierce attack from Donald Trump, and Sanders recovering from a heart attack (FAIR.org, 10/7/19), establishment Democrats and their big donors are suddenly looking at Elizabeth Warren’s rising poll numbers as a sign that her candidacy has very real potential—and is a very real threat to their power.

As centrist Democratic sources go, so go the media.

Among the “events of the past two weeks [that] have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race,” the Washington Post (10/6/19) lists “persistent doubts among some party leaders” about Elizabeth Warren.

Under the headline, “Uncertainty Takes Over the Lead in the Democratic Presidential Race,” the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer and Matt Viser (10/6/19) report that recent events “have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race.” Those recent events? For Sanders, a heart attack; for Biden, an uncomfortable role in the impeachment inquiry; and for Warren, the curiously un-event-like “persistent doubts among some party leaders that she is too liberal to win the general election.”

The Democratic Party has many leaders from both its left and right wings; for the Post, the adjective “some” serves to obscure the fact that its sources expressing those doubts are almost exclusively from the right.

People like former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who lost her 2018 re-election campaign (in which she emphasized how often she voted with Trump) by more than 10 percentage points—who better to turn to for an opinion about how to win an election?

Or there’s consultant Donna Bojarsky, who has donated to Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker—all representatives of the corporate wing of the party. How about former Obama adviser David Plouffe, who went on to flack for Uber after his Obama years, and now runs policy for Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy company? Then you have self-described “radical centrist” Mitch Landrieu, who told the Post:

[Warren] says she can do all these things. There’s a thing called political reality….  Aspiration is wonderful, but you can’t eat aspiration for lunch and send your kids to college on it. That’s a fundamental decision that Democratic primary voters need to make a decision on.

The best bits come from , though, who are given cover to sow fear about a candidate whose policy proposals (like a wealth tax and a lobbying tax) would directly impact their own finances and political influence:

As Warren has steadily marched upward in the polls, the reality that she could become the nominee has unsettled some of the party’s top donors, who worry that she would hand the race to Trump. If it starts to look like Warren will win the party’s nomination, a longtime Democratic bundler said, “there will be efforts to stop that.”

Another anonymous donor, who the paper tells us is “seeking a moderate as a nominee,”

expressed worries that if Warren is the nominee, her presence would ruin any Democratic chances to win the Senate, because voters would perceive having a Republican majority as “the only way to keep her in check” as president.

To end the hit parade, the Post reminds us that even if Biden falters, we still have centrist choices—calling up Michael Bennet and Tim Ryan, candidates currently polling below 1%, for some closing thoughts.

There’s obviously a lot of uncertainty at the moment; it’s just that the Washington Post, relying on its corporate centrist cast of characters, can’t give anything like an honest accounting of it.