Washington stretches meaning of "humanitarian assistance" to give aid to Syrian rebels

Here we go again. It's 'just' a pledge at the moment to provide communications equipment but this would happen on April Fool's Day. The joke being on the fools here in the USA who believed the State Department's solemn assertions a couple weeks ago that "we" can't provide military aid to the Syrian rebels because they're so disorganized that "we" don't know which faction to help and besides some factions are al Qaeda.

This move, of course, is against Syria's patron Iran. What else can I say except to note that the only governments left that believe in the concept of Westphalian sovereignty are ones U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deemed "despicable" for blocking the will of the International Community (pictured above) on the matter of Syria.

So, comrades and comradesses, I hope you like being a citizen of the International Community because that's what you are. If you're trying to find the member state of the USA in the above photo, I think we're the milk carton on the left-hand side of the counter.

Now I must go practice my stiff-armed salute. All hail the International Community! Hail!

U.S. Joins Effort to Equip and Pay Rebels in Syria
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.
April 1, 2012
The New York Times

ISTANBUL — The United States and dozens of other countries moved closer on Sunday to direct intervention in the fighting in Syria, with Arab nations pledging $100 million to pay opposition fighters and the Obama administration agreeing to send communications equipment to help rebels organize and evade Syria’s military, according to participants gathered here.

The moves reflected a growing consensus, at least among the officials who met here this weekend under the rubric “Friends of Syria,” that mediation efforts by the United Nations peace envoy, Kofi Annan, were failing to halt the violence that is heading into its second year in Syria and that more forceful action was needed.

With Russia and China blocking United Nations measures that could open the way for military action, the countries lined up against the government of President Bashar al-Assad sought to bolster Syria’s beleaguered opposition through means that seemed to stretch the definition of humanitarian assistance and blur the line between so-called lethal and nonlethal support.

There remains no agreement on arming the rebels, as countries like Saudi Arabia and some members of Congress have called for, largely because of the uncertainty regarding who exactly would receive the arms.

Still, the offer to provide salaries and communications equipment to rebel fighters known as the Free Syrian Army — with the hopes that the money might encourage government soldiers to defect, officials said — is bringing the loose Friends of Syria coalition to the edge of a proxy war against Mr. Assad’s government and its international supporters, principally Iran and Russia.

The assistance to the rebel fighters as Mr. Assad’s loyalists press on with a brutal crackdown could worsen a conflict that has already led to at least 9,000 deaths and is increasingly showing signs of descending into a sectarian civil war. Some say that enabling the uprising to succeed is now the best bet to end the instability and carnage sooner.

“We would like to see a stronger Free Syrian Army,” Burhan Ghalioun, the leader of the Syrian National Council, a loose affiliation of exiled opposition leaders, told hundreds of world leaders and other officials gathered here. “All of these responsibilities should be borne by the international community.”

Mr. Ghalioun did not directly address the financial assistance from the Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, but he added, “This is high noon for action.”

But for some inside Syria, the absence of promises of arms far overshadowed the financial and communications aid. Mohamed Moaz, an activist in the Damascus suburbs who coordinates with rebel fighters, held Mr. Ghalioun responsible for failing to unify the gathered nations on sending arms, calling him “a partner with the regime in these crimes.”

“I’m the only one who watched this conference in our neighborhood, because there was no electricity and people don’t care,” he said. “I only watched it because Al Jazeera wanted my comment.”

At the conference, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Mr. Assad had defied Mr. Annan’s efforts to broker an end to the fighting and begin a political transition. She said that new assaults had begun in Idlib and Aleppo Provinces in the week since Mr. Assad publicly accepted the plan. It does not call for him to step down, but rather for an immediate cease-fire followed by negotiations with the opposition.

“The world must judge Assad by what he does, not by what he says,” Mrs. Clinton said in a statement to officials who sat around an enormous rectangular table the size of a basketball court. “And we cannot sit back and wait any longer.”

Molham al-Drobi, a member of the Syrian National Council, said that the opposition had pledges of $176 million in humanitarian assistance and $100 million in salaries over three months for the fighters inside Syria. Some money was already flowing to the fighters, he said, including $500,000 last week through “a mechanism that I cannot disclose now.”
[...]

"Hollowed out" Mexico and hollowed-out USA

The Republic of International Community as seen from satellite

CNN and FNC -- America's two national cable TV all-news channels -- have been too busy during the past week reporting on the murder trial of Casey Anthony and the antics of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to squeeze in reporting on Mexico (actually they're always too busy to do more than glance at Mexico) so in the manner of a public service I present links to the following recent reports on Mexico. All the reports are important but I think the Reuters one is the 'must read' and biggest shocker.

June 1 - Reuters, Special Report: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls.

June 2 - The Los Angeles Times, How many have died in Mexico's drug war?

June 5 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexico peace tour: How the drug war changed once-calm Cuernavaca

June 7 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexican drug traffickers' latest weapon: 'monster' narco-tanks

June 8 - Wall Street Journal, Mexico Tourism Feels Chill of Ongoing Drug Violence

A companion read is Zenpundit Mark Safranski's April 5 review of Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries, a series of monographs edited by Dr. Robert J. Bunker. Before I quote Mark's summary of the book, in which he mentions the need for better U.S. policy on Mexico, an aside:

I hate to be the one to break this news to Mark but there can no longer be an American policy on Mexico because there is no longer a United States of America. He doesn't know this because he doesn't watch much television news, but a few weeks of watching CNN will clue him that the USA is no more. In its place is a country called The Whole World (aka RIC - Republic of International Community), which for reasons known only to the rascals who run CNN excludes every world region where CNN is not in hot competition with al Jazeera.

I myself speak of the "country" of the USA, which I think is what seems to be a box of cookies or a milk carton in the foreground of the above satellite photo of the RIC, only as a matter of convention.

As for FNC (Fox News Channel): currently too busy taking pot-shots at other TV news outlets for initially covering up the Weiner story and otherwise too busy trying to find a Republican who can win the White House to notice that a U.S. government is a memory.

(Memo to FNC: The other TV media were initially quiet about Weiner's texting problem not because he's a Leftist but because his wife is Hillary Clinton's closest aide and they didn't want to have to tell the American public that the person closest to the U.S. Secretary of State is an American Muslim of Indian-Pakistani heritage who was raised in Saudi Arabia, you nitwits.)

So before we try to upgrade U.S. policy on the hollowed-out state of Mexico, as the Narcos book terms it, I say let's examine how the U.S. got hollowed out.

One more point before I cede the floor to Mark: His summary doesn't indicate whether the book addresses racism and apartheid in Mexico. I know that Mark is aware of the subject so I think he would have mentioned it, if any of the monographs dealt specifically with racism; frankly I'd be surprised if any did because the topics of Mexican racism and apartheid are taboo in both the USA and Mexico.

Later this week or the next I'll try to rip myself away from the Afghan War long enough to return to those issues, which I touched on in an earlier post. For now, I'll just say that I think Mexico's type of racism is the true "virus" that Dr Bunker talks about.

Now to Mark's summary (see the article at Zenpundit for links to topics and sources):

[...] Narcos Over the Border. ... is one of the more disturbing academic works recently published in the national security field, not excluding even those monographs dealing with Islamist terrorism and Pakistan. If the authors of this granular examination of Mexico’s immense problems with warring narco-cartels, mercenary assassins, systemic corruption, 3rd generation gangs and emerging “Narcocultas”of Santa Muerte are correct - and I suspect they are - Mexico’s creeping path toward state failure reprsents a threat to American national security of the first order.
[...]
Some impressions I gained from reading Narcos Over the Border include:

> The Narco-Cartels and the Zetas, which fight each other as well as Mexico’s military (Mexican police generally are infiltrated, intimidated, outgunned and seriously outclassed by the Cartel gunmen, Zetas and Guatemalan Kaibiles) are better armed and better trained than are the Taliban. The deadly and efficient Zetas and Kaibiles are superior to regular Mexican military forces and have established safe haven training camps in Central America.

> Narco-cartels are properly speaking, no longer narco-cartels but transnational criminal syndicates involved in a wider array of revenue generating activities, but with professional intelligence and military capabilities, and increasingly, political, social and religious agendas that are functionally reminiscient of Hezbollah and HAMAS.

> The Mexican state is severely hampered in its response to the threat presented by the cartels by its own strategic use of corruption as a cost-saving measure and a tool for sustaining elite control of Mexican politics, as well as a method of personal enrichment by members of Mexico’s ruling class.

> The eschewing of the extreme violence by the cartels North of the border appears to be more of a sign of a strategic policy by cartel and Zeta bosses than a lack of capacity or evidence of a lack of infiltration into American society. To the contrary, Mexican cartel links to acutely dangerous American prison and street gangs such as the Mexican Mafia and MS-13 are significant and well documented.

> The cartels are global, not regional or local operators.

> The culture of the Narco-cartels, which draws on some romantic Mexican social and religious underground traditions, particularly the hybrid cartel La Familia, is morphing into a very dangerous “Narcocultas”, a neo-pagan, folk religion featuring ritualistic violence, beheadings and torture-murders carried out for reasons other than economic competition.

[See also Zenpundit's summary , Skulls and Human Sacrifice: Bunker and Sullivan on Societal Warfare at Small Wars Journal]

> Mexico has departed the realm of having a serious law enforcement problem and has graduated to a significant counterinsurgency war against the cartels in which the Mexican state is treading water or making progress against some cartels (possibly displacing their activities to weaker states in Central America).

The authors do not assume the worst-case scenario for Mexico; i.e., state collapse, but rather an insidious “hollowing out” of the state by the cartels and a mutation of Mexico’s native culture to host a 4GW nightmare. As Robert Bunker writes:

What is proposed here is that Mexico is not on its way to becoming a “rotting corpse” but potentially something far worse - akin to a body infected by a malicious virus.

Already, wide swaths of Mexico have been lost to the corrupting forces and violence generated by local gangs, cartels and mercenaries. Such narco-corruption faced few bariers given the fertile ground already existing in Mexico derived from endemic governmental corruption at all levels of society and in some ways, it even further aided the ‘virus’ spreading through Mexican society from this new infection. Among its other symptoms, it spreads values at variance with traditional society, including those:

... conceivably derived from norms based on slaveholding, illicit drug use, sexual activity with minors and their exploitation in prostitution, torture and beheadings, the farming of humans for body parts, the killing of innocents for political gain and personal gratification and the desecration of the dead.

While meticulous, Narcos Over the Border is not all-encompassing in scope. A fundamentally Mexico-centric collection of scholarly articles, it does not deal extensively with American policymakers involved in Mexico’s narco-insurgency, the intricacies of cartel financial operations or undertake case studies of narco activities in Mexican-American communities, though the authors do track narco-cartel and gang presence in cyberspace.

Narcos Over the Border represents a starting point for deeper investigation of narco-insurgency and for a national security community that has thus far treated Mexico as a third-tier problem, a policy call to arms. Strongly recommended.