[Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars

[Karen Aram]

Here is my thoughts on the Achcar article, thank you Carl for posting it on FB:

 Achcar is and was a war supporter. In this article he refers to the US having boots on the ground fighting ISIS since 2014. The US was not fighting ISIS, we were supporting them. Also, the US was in Syria covertly likely going back to 2011, when Achcar refers to Russians and Iranian involvement predating US.

Any assumption that Moscow will agree with the US to insist on Iran leaving Syria is nonsense. The Russians are smarter than that, they know they need to support Iran vs. the US. Syria isn't just about the oil, its about containment of Russia, and Iran is what comes after destruction of Syria. So no matter what this guy has to say, he is obfuscating US imperialism.
The US wants partition, and plans to occupy permanently.

His suggestions and prognostications are an attempt to make the US look good, and Russia, Iran look bad when they don’t compromise and give in to our demands.




On Feb 21, 2018, at 13:58, C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com<mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com>> wrote:

Morgenthau’s character was undoubtedly noble, but nobility doesn’t bestow infallibility (nor inversely, as perhaps in the case of Achcar), as I’m sure you admit.

An example: the recent presidential election raised the question of American exceptionalism. Was one candidate (DJT) veering toward isolationism? Or would he (like the other - HRC) proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism?

Can the matter be decided by determining which candidate was more noble?

Aristotle asked, Would you rather have your sandals made by a good person, or a good cobbler?

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The [isolationism/exceptionalism] debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality ‘realist' school of international relations. Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a 'transcendent purpose' that it 'must defend and promote' throughout the world: 'the establishment of equality in freedom.’ The competing concepts ‘exceptionalism' and ‘isolationism' both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application...

The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others.

Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages.

At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery.

To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.”

But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.”

In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively.

Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny.

Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers.

Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses.

The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.”

Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens.

One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder.

That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.”

Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response.

She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.”

And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years.

But that is mere abuse of reality.

It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons.

Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.”
===================================================


On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu<mailto:fboyle at illinois.edu>> wrote:

I don’t read Vietnam Warmongers either. They revolt me. Dan is an exception because he risked life in prison to end that war. Fab.

Louis B. Zimmer’s The Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. C and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Lexington Books: 2011).
by
Professor Francis A. Boyle
University of Illinois College of Law


Hans Morgenthau was my teacher, mentor and friend. He recommended me for my law professorship. It was my great honor and distinct pleasure to have studied with Morgenthau while he was heroically leading the forces of opposition to the genocidal Vietnam War at great personal cost to himself and his family. Morgenthau’s stellar example of brilliance in the service of courage, integrity and principles has inspired and motivated me now for over four decades. After reading Zimmer’s compelling book, Morgenthau will do the same for you. Zimmer vividly brings back to life Morgenthau, his epic battle against the Vietnam War, and those tumultuous and tragic events that shaped my generation and determined the destinies of two nations only now beginning to reconcile -- a volte-face preternaturally predicted by Morgenthau during the darkest days of the wars.  This book is required reading for all those seeking to pursue peace with justice in today’s increasingly troubled and endangered world. Humanity desperately needs more like Morgenthau in order to survive. Zimmer explains why.  A real tour de force of engaged historical research and scholarship.


Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)


-----Original Message-----
From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 2:27 PM
To: Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com<mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com>>
Cc: Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu<mailto:fboyle at illinois.edu>>; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>) <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:discuss at lists.chambana.net>>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Achcar covering up his support for Middle East wars

But is his analysis of the current situation correct, regardless of his past sins and errors?

I think it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Do you? If not, why not?

Cogent critics of the Vietnam war, such as Daniel Ellsberg, often began as fervent supporters.



On Feb 21, 2018, at 2:11 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:

I just wanted to look him up, and was overwhelmed with the information and critiques of his support for war in both Libya and Syria.

Rather like Louis Proyect, and Ashley Smith, so called socialists, but obviously not. A socialist never supports imperialism. Any suggestion that what took place, before, during or after in Libya as now Syria, to be anything but “imperialism,” is sheer nonsense and propaganda.



On Feb 21, 2018, at 12:01, Boyle, Francis A via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:

Yeah, Achcar stinks to high heaven. All the Imperialist Warmongers came out of their “Leftist” and “Socialist”  closets when it came to Libya and Syria.
Fab



Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)

From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net]
On Behalf Of Karen Aram via Peace-discuss
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 1:47 PM
To: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss
<peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Achcar covering up his support for Middle
East wars

Reading anything this guy has to say is rather like reading what any other supporter for war has to say, especially after his cover has been blown.
Gilbert Achcar seeks to cover up his support for Middle East wars By
Alex Lantier
13 August 2013
In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.”
Working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and within the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain, Achcar has been a leading propagandist for the wars in Syria and in Libya, which he claimed were waged in defense of human rights. Despite the fact that pro-war propaganda has enveloped his political persona with an ineradicable stench, Achcar now protests that his positions on the Middle East wars have been grievously misrepresented. Thus, he attacks an article by Sarah McDonald in the Weekly Worker, the publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which called Achcar a “social-imperialist.”
In dismissing McDonald’s epithet, Achcar vents his outrage against the “countless politically illiterate people” who “have accused [me of] of ‘supporting’ NATO’s intervention in Libya.” He pompously adds, “I will not waste my time and that of the readers in reminding them here of what I really stood for.”
Though Mr. Achcar does not care to review the record of his political support for the neo-colonial enterprises in Libya and Syria, he cannot be allowed to rewrite his own history. The record is clear: Achcar publicly supported imperialist wars and discussed their prosecution with US and French intelligence assets. He bears political responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
From the outset of the Libyan operation, Achcar played a key role in promoting the propaganda required by imperialism to build a pro-war constituency within the milieu of the “leftish” affluent middle class. In March 2011, two days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing war in Libya, Achcar published an interview praising the war as a humanitarian operation to keep Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from attacking opposition groups in Benghazi.
While noting that “there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” Achcar said: “But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.”
He acknowledged the right-wing politics of the NATO-backed opposition, but hailed the war as similar to revolutionary working class struggles that had toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the month before. He called NATO’s Libyan allies “a mixture of human rights activists, democracy advocates, intellectuals, tribal elements, and Islamist forces—a very broad coalition … The bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.”
Two years later, it is clear that the war Achcar embraced was an act of imperialist plunder. The NATO powers seized Libya’s oil revenues and oil fields, carpet-bombed cities, including Tripoli and Sirte, and killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It brought to power a NATO stooge regime based on a patchwork of Islamist militias that were NATO’s main proxy force to topple and murder Gaddafi.
Achcar repeatedly demanded that NATO funnel more weapons to Libyan opposition militias. Thus, in a largely sympathetic comment on Obama’s April 2011 speech on the war, he said the best way to “enable the uprising to win, in conformity with the Libyan people’s right to self-determination, is for the hypocritical Western governments—who have sold a lot of weapons to Gaddafi since the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004, and Gaddafi turned into a model—to deliver arms to the insurgency.”
Finally, as Libyan government forces began to collapse under NATO air strikes in August 2011, Achcar criticized NATO for not striking Libya harder. He issued a statement citing right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot’s observation that NATO warplanes had flown 11,107 sorties against Libya, but 38,004 sorties in the 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo.
He wrote, “The crucial question then is: why is NATO conducting an aerial campaign in Libya that is low-key not only in comparison with the air component of the war to grab similarly oil-rich Iraq, but even compared to the air war for economically unimportant Kosovo? And why is the alliance at the same time refraining from providing the insurgents with the weaponry they have consistently and insistently requested?”
Achcar’s support for the war epitomized the unrestrained movement of a layer of pseudo-left middle class intellectuals into the camp of imperialism. He functioned not only as a media publicist for war, but also as a strategist, hobnobbing with various US and French intelligence personnel and collaborators to discuss how best to present the wars to minimize popular opposition to them.
In his latest piece, Achcar seeks to distort the facts surrounding his October 2011 meeting in Sweden with Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC). During this meeting, he advised Ghalioun not to call for a NATO invasion of Syria—which would risk provoking mass popular opposition—but for “indirect” intervention to arm opposition forces.
In the event, this is the policy NATO ultimately pursued, arming the SNC and other Islamist opposition forces, including some tied to Al Qaeda. It led to a devastating proxy war in Syria that, in two years, has claimed over 100,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes.
In his current article, Achcar denounces as a “canard” claims that “I took part in a meeting of the Syrian National Council (whereas it was actually a meeting of the left-wing National Coordination Council) in order to urge them to call for an imperialist intervention in Syria (whereas my contribution to the meeting was dedicated to exactly the opposite).”
Achcar’s denial is simply rubbish. He himself publicly announced that he had met with Ghalioun and described his advice to the SNC in an article published in November 2011 in the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar. The NPA reposted the article, including on its English language web site, International Viewpoint .
In this article, he wrote: “I was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital, Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC—who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council—its president, Burhan Ghalioun.”
Professor Achcar can lie to his heart’s content, but the objective record of his reactionary political role has left smudges all over the internet.

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