Iraq & Syria: A Spark that Lit an All-Consuming Fire, Advocate, 05/10/2016

One of my arts & advocacy projects is my work with the Syria Film Festival. This is an organization that gave me my first communications gig after I finished my business program, an internship for their public relations work.

Though Blumenthal doubts their legitimacy because of it, the White
Helmets are simultaneously humanitarians and publicists for
democratic activism. But advocacy and humanitarianism have
never been separate.

The friendships and professional relationships I’ve built in my work with SYFF have been ethically and professionally rewarding. And aside from my personal fulfillment, I’m proud to be part of an artistic and advocacy network that strives for a peaceful and free Syria – an end to the world’s most brutal ongoing war and an end to the culture and institutions of dictatorship that laid the conditions for that war.

So it burned me pretty hard to see Max Blumenthal’s recent articles floating around my social media networks. These amount to hit pieces on The Syria Campaign, a public relations firm whose focus is building support for humanitarian work in Syria – in particular, advocating on behalf of the White Helmets – and for an end to the Assad regime. 

None of these are objectively bad things. In a war – especially one as horrifying as Syria’s – humanitarian workers are needed. And the Assad regime from Hafez to Bashar has been a Stalinist totalitarian police state, organizing its institutional power along ethnic-religious sectarian lines. 

Ending that dynasty’s decades-long reign would be a chance for a new beginning. And with a population inside and outside Syria of highly educated, democratically-inclined people, that country would have a good chance of growing into an Arab democracy.

The problem is that we in the West have heard all this sort of stuff before.

Substance: Lobbying & Image-Making

Blumenthal does a fine job of tracing the links between the White Helmets, the Syria Campaign, and a variety of activist individuals and organizations who’ve worked with and drawn funds from the American government’s democracy promotion agencies like USAID, the Office of Transition Initiatives, and affiliated contractor companies like Chemonics. 

He’s found examples of individual members of White Helmet brigades who – when out of their humanitarian uniforms – have carried out terrible acts of violence. Who have tortured people who’ve been claimed to work for the Assad regime. Who have apparently picked up a gun with Al Qaeda affiliated organizations like Jabhat Al Nusra.

Seriously. You should go.

He concludes, after combing through the history of all these links, that the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets are not non-partisan humanitarians but are open agitators in the Syrian war. For him, that implies that their humanitarian work is a sham, a mere “public relations” move. 

The move that leads Blumenthal to condemn the Syria Campaign, though, is their new campaign to lobby for a no-fly zone over Syria. This would require a massive military intervention to enforce. Given the current state of Assad’s alliances, this would essentially require a shooting war between the United States of America and the Russian Federation.

That’s a situation that could easily escalate into a true nuclear war. That is something we should all be afraid of. I’d dare say it’s one of the reasons why the United States hasn’t intervened in Syria. Given Putin’s aggressive stance, a more nuanced strategy is needed to stop him without provoking him into authorizing nuclear weapons use.

Between a Quagmire and a World in Flames

Leave aside all the pragmatic arguments, though I can easily make them. Most of them are obvious – the necessity to play power politics when trying to unseat a brutal totalitarian regime like Bashar al Assad’s. 

Yes, you have to lobby with powerful states that have military capabilities to cripple and destroy the regime you oppose. Public relations, building alliances, building popular support in the countries whose governments you want to enlist to your goals. 

The power of the UN is that its neutrality lets them mediate between
even the most horrible actors. I remember stories in his biography
of Sergio Vieira de Mello of how he negotiated with the Khmer
Rouge. But that neutrality is precisely why the Syria Campaign
can't get on the UN bandwagon in the war. Revolutionaries can't
be neutral in their own fight.

Public relations – done right and with an ethical conscience – is the organization of democracy. It’s mobilizing people, taking part in the marketplace of persuasion, ideas, and competing social goals. 

Yes, it’s manipulative – but even the least amount of media literacy, which is near-universal today, gives the public power over advocates. A critical eye can still defend yourself against being a patsy, and hold tight to your freedom when others want to seduce you.

Frankly, it’s easier to act entirely on your conscience when you live far from a war zone. When you do, you have to make what alliances you can to raise your chances of surviving just a little longer. It’s sanctimonious of a Western journalist like Max Blumenthal to demand total virtuousness to the point of saintliness of humanitarians who have to work in horrifying conditions.

This is at the heart of why the Syria Campaign critiques the United Nations and UNHCR for working so closely with the Assad regime. The UN has a mandate to maintain neutrality in all conflicts – it has to be a non-partisan actor because its primary role is as the mediating forum for global politics.

So UN organizations have to work with even the most distasteful regimes. They have to recognize their legitimacy, despite their violence and terror. Even when a brutal government is under siege, the UN has to work with them. And they work with the groups uprising against that government too.

All too often, that need to work with the government of the day impedes the UN’s humanitarian mission. Because the UN and the UNHCR become dependent for access to populations in need upon the very leaders who are intent on slaughtering those populations. 

That is why the Syria Campaign, along with more than 70 Syrian human rights and democracy organizations, denounced the UN’s complicity with the Assad regime. Blumenthal describes their opposition to UN strategy and operations as a sign of their corruption, their being stooges of American military interests.

The Syria Campaign makes no illusion of neutrality in the war. They’re democrats. They want Syria at peace and Assad gone. They want a democratic Syria.

Seeing Shadows

That’s at the heart of Blumenthal’s accusation toward the Syria Campaign and White Helmets: You want regime change. 

Pictured above: Not Bashar or Hafez Assad. Remember that.

For the Western left, that’s a charged phrase. A phrase with a lot of deep and terrible meanings and implications. Regime change.

Since the late 20th century, the Western left has opposed the broad ideology of the American government and the circles of think tanks and lobbying organizations that surround that institution. It kicked into gear with protests against the World Trade Organization, opposing the imposition of global economic rules and institutions running according to what we now call neoliberal austerity.

That opposition gained a military dimension in the Bush years, with the massive protest movement against the American invasion of Iraq. That time made many in the left lose our faith in the global spread of democracy.

It seems to make no sense at first. Why would the progressive left give up on democracy? 

Because we saw it delivered at the barrel of a gun, with a plan designed by a set of neoconservative think tank dorks that was barely up to the task. Within months of the American occupation of Iraq, an Al Qaeda terror campaign began in Baghdad and Anbar, while a sectarian army arose in Shia territory.

No matter how sincere Bush, Cheney, and their crew were about the power of the American army to secure a democratic Iraq – and I have no doubt that they were truly sincere – all they achieved was six years of barely organized violence by the national army and rapacious piracy from leagues of mercenaries.

Through it all ran the not-very-secret word: regime change. The original American plan for Iraq was to install the exiled liberal party of Ahmed Chalabi as the democratically elected ruler of Iraq. Much of the faulty and false intelligence that the Bush Administration used to justify their invasion was supplied by Chalabi’s group and their affiliate lobbying organizations.

When Max Blumenthal looks at Syria, he sees Iraq.

In Syria, the revolution is televised. And ongoing.

It Began With Revolution

That’s why he denounces the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets as stooges for American military expansion and a new invasion of the Middle East. He sees public relations and media lobbying – its methods updated for the online media universe – as more of the same manipulation from liberal autocrats like Chalabi.

He sees the Syria Campaign and other activists calling out the United Nations for their complicity with the Assad regime as a new version of Bush’s railroading of the UN in 2002. A repetition of the old dismissal of the legitimacy of the grounding institution of all international law.

He paints Bashar Assad as the legal and tolerable – if horrid and distasteful – rightful leader of Syria, under siege from a superpower desperate to prevent its military decline. Just as Saddam Hussein was, the totalitarian bugbear of American neoconservatism.

But Syria in 2016 isn’t Iraq in 2002. Syria has already been embroiled in a civil war for years that began in a revolution against Assad’s regime. Blumenthal erases the will of millions of Syria’s people, seeing only public relations firms and shadowy manipulations of empire-minded deep organs of American government.

If you’re going to criticize American military intervention, there are plenty of ways to do it. Mostly because their efforts tend to self-destruct and fall apart through mismanagement. Or they’ll be out-maneuvered by a more ruthless Vladimir Putin, who isn’t squeamish about dropping bunker buster bombs on schools and hospitals.

Don’t forget that the unfolding violence of Syria’s war began – and continues – a revolution against a totalitarian tyrant. In a way, that’s quite an American story. It’s certainly a democratic one.

Thinking Terror I: Peace in the Ruins Is Easy, Research Time, 07/06/2016

This biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello is one of the best biographies that I’ve read in quite a while. I think the last one I read that was as good as Samantha Power’s treatment of the murdered diplomat’s life was Louis Althusser’s autobiography The Future Lasts Forever.*

* Just check out Althusser’s Wikipedia page for how disturbing the last years of his life were. We’re talking some Lynchian-intensity psychological terror here.

Vieira de Mello’s life is a catalogue of lessons about the potentials and limitations of seeking peace in our violent world. And he was willing to take incredible risks for the sake of peace. 

Sergio Vieira de Mello in Cambodia, where he was in
charge of making sure hundreds of thousands of refugees
returned to the country, even on barely functional buses
that could barely run on what was left of the roads.

Here’s an example. It’s 1991. Vieira de Mello’s first major global assignment was overseeing the peace settlements in Cambodia, and the return of refugees there from camps on the Thai border in time for elections. That peace settlement were between the forces of the country’s dictator Hun Sen and the Khmer Rouge guerrilla organization.

You know, the Khmer Rouge who killed more than two million people in a three-year period. The literal Killing Fields. Vieira de Mello’s job was to get them to sign a peace treaty. Hun Sen – standard authoritarian dictator that he is – was no fun either, as he rarely hesitated to kill and torture political enemies. 

Vieira de Mello hiked across dangerous stretches of Cambodia to Khmer Rouge territory on the first outreach of the international community. Welcoming horrifyingly violent men who purposely set about systematic class-based genocide to the table for peace talks.

That's the terror of what the United Nations’ policy of impartiality in conflicts was built to accomplish. The thing is, it’s a necessary terror. You have to deal with monsters, because monsters can rarely be beaten by force. You have to deal with monsters so that they return to our society and everyone comes to understand that we’re all people.

When I sit down and write Utopias, it’ll include many chains and threads, different ways to understand how we develop, use, and relate to our ideals. Stories about Vieira de Mello will be narratives of how the United Nations embodies so many paradoxes of putting ideals into practice. 

That’s the United Nations as an institution as well as Sergio Vieira de Mello the person. 

The overall purpose of the UN is to progress humanity along the road to genuine world peace. In that sense, it’s a pacifist organization, at least in its founding ideals. But it’s also an organization that was formed in the shadow of the Holocaust. So the institution is also invested – from its birth – with the knowledge of the true horror we can all accomplish.

Ieng Sary, the old guy in the white, looks like any
annoying old guy you might run into at a convenience
store complaining about the ATM's service fees. He
was one of the central planners of the torture and murder
of millions of Cambodians in the name of building a
utopian vision of his country as a giant collective farm.

The United Nations – a global diplomatic institution born in the knowledge of humanity’s most horrific monstrousness, yet imbued with the faith that peace is possible through though work in the gritty material of the world.

Yes, that sounds like a very good strain to include.

A couple of chapters after Vieira de Mello shakes hands with Ieng Sary, one of the architects of the Cambodian genocide, he’s meeting Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia. To anyone who paid attention to cable news in the 1990s, those names are chilling. They’re the face of ethnic cleansing and the terror of nationalism.

Even though Cambodia fell into dictatorship just a few years after the 1993 elections that Vieira de Mello’s work helped make possible, he arrived more than a decade after the 1975-8 genocide. 

The Khmer Rouge still made insurgent attacks against Hun Sen’s government, but the war was over. By the 1990s, politics in Cambodia was a power game played in the ruins of a country.

His relationships with the Bosnian Serb leadership was very different. The UN was one of the last lines of defence against a genocide in progress. Bosnia, particularly the capital Sarajevo, was in the middle of a war that would reduce that country to ruins.

You can be impartial when the most brutal fighting is over and all sides have something of an interest in brokering something resembling peace. Impartiality is still an ethically good stance – you’re the negotiator settling the end of a conflict.

A morality of impartiality can’t work for a war in progress, particularly a war where one side (or even worse, both) is dedicated to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Yet going into Bosnia, that was all Vieira de Mello had. . . . To be continued

Destroyer III: A Dream of the United Nations, Research Time, 27/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . They sure had their problems. They were never perfect. They let horrible things happen sometimes, both under their watch and even within their own ranks. But the United Nations was built as humanity’s last, best hope for peace.

And I don’t just mean the peace of leaving dictators and militaries to oppress people within their national borders, even though many have treated international law as if that was the point. The idealism that has driven the United Nations since its inception was that its forum would be a foundation for genuine world peace.

It seems that with all these flags, everyone is included.
But there are only states and governments here.

The UN was designed to be a forum for international multilateralism. A place where virtuous state leaders could build alliances to help the disadvantaged, poverty stricken, and war victims. Most importantly, a venue where negotiations between sovereign states could happen up to the last minute, to pre-empt and prevent war.

The vision of a venue for multilateral negotiating to achieve common ends was the foundational structure for the progressive ideal of global peace after the Second World War. Part of what I want to do in the most explicitly political section of Utopias is explore this concept. Because it animated Western people’s vision of global progress for decades.

Its catastrophic collapse was only recent. And I don’t really think the mainstream of progressive politics has figured out what will replace it.

There were a lot of forces conspiring against the relevance of the United Nations. And it goes a lot deeper than the fact that none of its members ever really wanted to give the organization what it needed to achieve its ideals. Like a standing peacekeeping force or a sanely structured Security Council. Or enough money.

The most important contributor to the decline of the United Nations was the transformation in the global economy and communication over the last few decades. Toni Negri describes it pretty clearly in Commonwealth: the knowledge economy escapes the control of nations, whether or not they’re united. 

The UN’s process and power depends on states being the most powerful actors in the world. I even noticed this in small details. There’s a throwaway comment in that biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, which I found really enlightening. It’s in the chapter that describes de Mello’s tenure as a leader of the United Nations peacekeeping mission during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

The story of de Mello will be one of the roots that Utopias
will have in the messiness of the real world. I think a lot
of examples of idealism in action will come from his life.

The UN’s priorities were about engaging state (or aspirational state) leaders to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict. In this case, de Mello’s priorities meant that he’d mix with professional diplomats and government officials from the state of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. 

But his actual guides on the ground in Beirut and southern Lebanon introduced him to the people who had real power to make changes in this situation. These were the militia heads, whether they were with Hezbollah or were just local gangsters. That’s the growing obsolescence of the United Nations in microcosm.

So the United States invasion of Iraq destroyed the power, relevance, reputation, and general self-respect of the United Nations in one magnificently malignant gesture. But it was facing the pressure of its own time passing already. 

Its effectiveness and its entire model of operating depended on the world order being a function of states, their power, and what they did. Project for a New American Century and their Presidential administration under Bush Jr failed to build a new unilateral order. But even the multilateralism of the United Nations approach was crumbling.

Bush, Cheney, and the PNAC neocons wanted the world to have a single pole of power in Washington. A pro-UN progressive would work toward building a multi-polar world, where alliances of states worked together for a common goal of peace. Even the multi-polar world that seemed at first to emerge from the Cold War of several different alliances competing with each other* would still be a fairly clear, simple, global politics.

* The usual structures are a US & EU pole, a Chinese pole, a Russian pole, a Japanese pole, and a Brazilian pole, with an African pole like maybe Nigeria to emerge by the end of the 21st century. Sounds positively simple compared to how we’ve ended up.

Instead, we have a world where power is distributed wildly over many different kinds of groups – states, corporations, charities, associations, personal fortunes, warlords, drug traffickers, terror and militia groups, activists. 

Not evenly or equally, of course. Most states are still pretty powerful, for example, but many countries are at the mercy of corporate masters or even a few super-rich oligarchs. But power in our era is no longer a simple question. 

What could make America great again in this kind of Earth? . . . To be continued.

Destroyer I: He Calls It a Coup and It Sort of Was, Composing, 24/05/2016

When I write Utopias, it’s not going to be an ordinary book of philosophy, in the academic style. There’ll be philosophical interpretation and thinking, of course, and it will draw explicitly on many different texts in and out of the tradition. 

But there’ll be more going on in the book than the straight-ahead arguments of a work of philosophy. Metaphors, imagery, and personal reflections on how the world has unfolded over the last two decades will be a major part of the book’s argument too. 

At this point, I think I can safely say that, on the scale of
our whole society, he's become more metaphor than man.

It’ll be a way of understanding the world – what the legacy works of philosophy themselves are. Philosophy hits its highest intensity and its greatest value for current and future readers and writers in the tradition when a work has that level of ambition. When it’s just as much art as argument.

One of the most important of those metaphors will unfold from exploring the meanings in the years of the Bush Administration in its destruction of Iraq, the wrecking of new liberal economics, and embracing the destruction of New Orleans. 

Those events didn’t cause the political situations that have flowed from them in a direct sense – the rise of ISIS, the Trump movement, the Occupy and Sanders movement, the foundation of outrage in the cry that Black Lives Matter.

But the Bush years formed a nexus of endings and beginnings. Any attempt at a comprehensive account of the political and social currents of the West in the 21st century has to reckon with their meaning. 

Utopias will do that. Through these exploratory posts on the blog, it’s doing that pretty regularly. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt did that in Commonwealth, though to a lesser extent. Negri and I have rather different goals in writing, after all. But the meaning of those years is important to us both.

I love how he calls the Bush years a coup. It’s a simple choice of word that clearly and directly communicates what a radical act of violence the American government unleashed on the world at the direction of Dick Cheney and George W Bush and all the rest of their administrators and advisors.

A clip from Threads, the BBC film that depicted nuclear
war and winter realistically, and will scar you for life.
The United Nations was a major part of why we never
actually experienced any of this hell.

But what was it a coup against? Not the United States government, as Bush was elected (and re-elected) fairly according to the ridiculous yet legitimate rules of their institutions. It was a coup against multilateralism, against the legitimacy of the United Nations. 

This is a long, sad journey, so I’ll spell it out over several posts this week. 

The dream of the United Nations was to overcome the the basic human tendency to want to kill each other. The UN emerged from the Second World War into an era when nuclear standoff dominated global politics. Ensuring world peace between superpowers was important not only to avoid general slaughter like the wars in Europe, China, and the Pacific. It was necessary to ensure the survival of humanity.

Genuine progress toward global peace and a more equitable human society occurred thanks to the United Nations. Generally, the UN provided a high profile diplomatic forum for conflict settlement between states, and later to pressure member countries about internal civil conflicts. 

It provides humane services for refugees around the world, and peacekeeping forces in terribly dangerous wars. It brought an end to the formal imperialist era, providing an institutional framework to negotiate national independence of more than a billion people throughout Africa and Asia from colonial oppression in European empires. 

It’s easy to focus on the failures of the United Nations from the Second World War to the Iraq Occupation, and it’s certainly easy to focus on its structural flaws. 

Any organization whose procedures allow a horrifying violator of human rights domestically and in foreign wars like Saudi Arabia on an official human rights committee has some issues they need to work through. And the Security Council needlessly entrenched the contingent arrangement of the Second World War’s victors' being leaders of a global peace organization.

I recently bought a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello,
the career UN diplomat who led the official United
Nations mission in Baghdad after the US occupation in
2003. He only led it for a few weeks before being
blown to bits by a truck bomb along with the UN
building and more than 80 other staff. De Mello
may will become another key metaphor in Utopias.

But the UN was still a massive improvement over the violent chaos of the 50 years before its creation and the brutal global imperialism of the 100 years before that.

Then came 2003 and the United Nations was destroyed. It was one last effort to establish a unilateral, militaristic world order directed by a single world power. The goal of Bush, Cheney, and the politicians and intellectuals in their administration’s ranks, was literally making the 21st century America’s.

Multilateralism could never allow the true growth of democracy and freedom around the world, said the thinkers of Project for a New American Century. It allowed too much compromise with people Bush would simply have called “evil.” Only a massive military led by the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy could fight evil around the world.

That army of justice would land its first victory in Iraq, invading in 2003 to be greeted as liberators. The people would be set free from dictators to embrace electoral democracy. The economy would be set free from state control and immediately welcomed into the international system of free trade.

I think we all know now that they didn’t really think this through. . . . To be continued