Tom Friedman, The New York Time’s meaningless columnist in chief published one of his best pieces yet last week – a true testament to his ability to regurgitate banal pseudo intellectual garbage week after week. The ludicrously highly paid Friedman churns out articles on the modern world that string baffling metaphors together, sequencing them to give the impression of coherence while laughing all the way to the bank.

In an article titled ‘This Ain’t Yoghurt’, Friedman tackles the crisis in Syria, using his typical arsenal of childish analogies and implied comparisons to make an incredibly simplistic point that he could have tweeted in 40 characters or less.

The argument, as far as I can deduce, goes something like this:

One of Friedman’s Arab friends told him a proverb about eating hot soup and getting your tongue burnt (apparently you’ll always blow on your yoghurt afterwards).

Friedman then equates this with America invading Iraq and Afghanistan (tongue burnt) and the conflict in Syria (which ‘ain’t yoghurt’, but hot soup again).

Friedman draws comparison between the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring, concluding eventually that they aren’t similar at all.

Friedman uses a birth metaphor about Syria being Iraq’s twin and needing a midwife to become a blooming democracy.

Friedman then expresses hope Arabs can “transition from Saddam to Jefferson without getting stuck in Khomeini or Hobbes” and argues for an Arab Nelson Mandela figure to fix all their problems (or a midwife).

Friedman then concludes that none of this is possible and the only way to solve the problem is to “occupy the entire country, secure the borders, disarm all the militias and midwife a transition to democracy”.

Friedman then says this is not possible and doesn’t want America to get heavily involved  (remember, this ain’t yoghurt).

Friedman finally concludes that we must wait until everyone is exhausted from fighting to send the midwives back in.

If you are scratching your head at all of this, don’t worry. Friedman’s piece makes about as much sense as standard Glenn Beck rant on Obama’s closet Communism. It’s not that Friedman doesn’t get it – if you mine through the nonsense, he clearly sees Syria is screwed and US intervention won’t do much. He just packages his thoughts in a series of garbled paragraphs that any half decent English teacher would dismiss as bullshit from the 9th grade upwards. Friedman clearly prides himself on being able to distill complicated events into easily digestible nuggets of prose – hence his relentless use of metaphors – which makes reading him all the funnier. It’s like watching a mal-coordinated tennis player serving the ball into the net over and over again while strutting infront of the crowd to remind them of his athletic prowess.

And while Friedman’s columns are a genuine source of comedy (see Matt Taibbi for some epic takedowns) , they should also be a cause for serious concern. The New York Times is a respected paper and Friedman has an enormous platform to spread his musings on foreign policy and current affairs. This means hundreds of thousands of people get to see the world through Friedman’s dangerously simplistic eyes.

In Friedman’s world, incredibly complex events can be turned into neat parables to give his readers dinner party talking points. And while they might go down a treat after a few glasses of wine, his readers should be wary that upon closer inspection, a Friedman distillation might not be as clever as it sounds. As Taibbi points out, “Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.”

Want to talk about slavery? Here’s a Friedmanesque metaphor: “Slavery was the Walmart of its day, arguing against workers rights while offering slaves benefits”. World War Two?: “Hitler was the big bad wolf trying to turn Europe into sheep for him to lead”. [Editors note: these are made up Tom Friedman metaphors]

There are only two rules for a Tom Friedman metaphor: 1. They must be childishly simple. 2. They must not make sense if you examine them closely.

So while Friedman’s “This Ain’t Yoghurt” piece kind of makes sense if you boil it down its core argument (Syria is buggered and we shouldn’t go anywhere near it until the fighting stops), you have to wade through a litany of stupid metaphors and analogies about midwives refereeing countries that are like post Soviet Union Eastern Europe but aren’t, imagining non existent Arab Nelson Mandelas and yogurt that is actually hot soup.

Thanks Tom. It’s all perfectly clear now.

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President Barack Obama and King Abdullah II of Jordan make statements to the press prior to a bilateral meeting, in the Oval Office, April 26, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

By Robert Parry

For several years now, President Barack Obama has resisted demands from neocons, Republicans and hawkish Democrats that he intervene militarily in Iran and Syria, but he also has failed to negotiate seriously with those two governments, thus making a drift toward war more likely.

In 2012, there appeared to be a chance for a breakthrough both in talks with Iran over its nuclear program and with Syria’s Assad regime over a power-sharing arrangement with the country’s disaffected Sunni majority. Some people involved in those initiatives thought that after the U.S. election, a victorious Obama would have the political space to make concessions as well as demands. Then, when nothing happened, some thought he was waiting to install a new national security team and didn’t want to risk Senate obstruction of his nominations.

However, now it looks as if Obama simply has reverted to a more traditional (or default) foreign policy approach to the Middle East – shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State John Kerry regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and provision of more military aid to “allies” through Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

So, 2013 could represent another lost opportunity, when the United States turned its back on creative strategies that could deliver peace and thus risked a drift toward war. Something similar occurred in 1989 when President George H.W. Bush rebuffed a proposal from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for a power-sharing arrangement to bring the brutal Afghan civil war to an end.

Instead of working with Gorbachev, Bush listened to deputy national security adviser Robert Gates and other hardliners who believed, incorrectly, that the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedeen would quickly overthrow Najibullah’s communist regime in Kabul after the Soviets withdrew the last of their troops in February 1989.

Najibullah was far from an ideal negotiating partner, but his government was secular, had a workable bureaucracy and advanced the rights of women. The mujahedeen – though touted by U.S. propaganda as “freedom-fighters” – actually represented some of Afghanistan’s most reactionary elements, pushing a medievalist version of Islam, engaging in gruesome treatment of captives, and demanding the cruel subjugation of women.

The triumphalist choice by Bush and Gates, insisting on a clear-cut victory by the Muj over the Soviet-backed Najibullah, proved disastrous in a variety of ways: first, the mujahedeen failed to win on the expected Bush-Gates timetable; second, their cause degenerated into mindless brutality; third, the chaos opened the door to the Taliban, which took power in 1996 (and then murdered Najibullah); and fourth, a pathway was cleared for al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base for terrorism. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Obama’s Dilemma

A similar dilemma confronts Obama in 2013, with the neocons and many other pundits hectoring him to intervene militarily to overthrow the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad, who generally represents Syrian minorities, including his own Alawite religion (an offshoot of Shiite Islam) and Christians from the Armenian diaspora.

Assad’s principal opponents are from Syria’s majority Sunni community which resents the favoritism toward the Alawites and other minorities. However, as the Sunni uprising gained strength over the past two years, radical Islamist groups emerged as the most effective fighters and now dominate rebel-controlled territory.

This radicalization of the Sunni uprising can be traced to the Islamist tendencies of its chief benefactors, especially Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist Sunni monarchy, which played a comparable role when it funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, through Pakistan, to the most right-wing elements of the Afghan mujahedeen.

Today, the Saudis are supplying weapons to hard-line Syrian rebels, via Turkey and Jordan, with comparable results, spurring a fight-to-the-death between Assad’s repressive secularists and the murderous Sunni fundamentalists. This reality was highlighted by the New York Times on Sunday, reporting the spread of Islamist rule across “liberated” sectors of Syria.

“Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists,” wrote Times correspondent Ben Hubbard. “Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

“Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”

With the black flags of Islamic extremism flying across rebel-held parts of Syria – and with no matching militancy among the anti-Assad secularists – the West can expect that the overthrow of Assad will lead to either the sort of violent chaos that enveloped Libya after the ouster and murder of Muammar Gaddafi or – perhaps worse – an Afghan-style outcome with Islamists allied with al-Qaeda in the heart of the Middle East.

Given those prospects, the best-of-the-bad solutions might be to work with the Russians and even the Iranians to negotiate a power-sharing coalition between Assad’s group and the more moderate Sunni factions. That, however, might require concessions from Obama and other Western leaders who have demanded Assad’s removal.

Obama faces intense opposition in Official Washington toward any concessions on Syria or Iran. The pundits – from Fox News to the neocon Washington Post to some hosts on liberal MSNBC – are clamoring for action. They complain that Obama should have intervened militarily much sooner and now – after reports that Syria may have used chemical weapons in a limited fashion – Obama has no choice but to take aggressive action.

Virtually no one will countenance a counter-narrative that Obama’s big mistake was in not pressing for a negotiated solution two years ago. Back then, Washington’s conventional wisdom was that the Syrian uprising had to be supported, that Assad had to go, and that any idea of compromise had to be rejected. As in 1989 with Afghanistan, triumphalism prevailed regarding Syria.

So, facing a difficult reelection in 2012, Obama finessed the Syrian issue. Yet, even after he won a second term, he has remained frozen in inaction. Now it looks as if he is simply dragging his feet as he is pushed and pulled toward another disastrous Mideast war.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Following President Barack Obama’s address to an audience of Israeli students in Jerusalem last month, progressive commentators in the United States hailed the speech as “a passionate appeal for peace” that “placed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict squarely back on his agenda.” But those intoxicated by Obama’s rhetoric will soon experience a painful hangover. For the President’s Israel speech and the rest of his Middle East trip were focused, first and foremost, on domestic politics here in the United States.

And Obama’s Middle East strategy is marked by a growing discrepancy between the arrogance of America’s regional agenda and its declining capacity to realize this agenda.

Understanding the tragedy of Obama’s Middle East policy requires some historical perspective. Two decades ago, America came out of the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf War with a degree of strategic supremacy like the world had not seen for centuries. This supremacy seemed especially pronounced in the Middle East.

Since then, though, America has not been content to maintain its primacy in the Middle East, defend its interests there, and deal effectively with the region’s complex political and security dynamics. Instead, it has succumbed to a post-Cold War temptation to act as an imperial power in the Middle East, trying to coerce political outcomes with the goal of consolidating a pro-American regional order.

The United States did this by retaining military forces on the ground in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states after the first Gulf War — something it did not do, to any significant extent, during the Cold War. It did this by leveling sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime that led to the deaths of more than a million Iraqis, including half a million children. It did this after 9/11 by invading Afghanistan and Iraq and pursuing prolonged occupations that have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

It is doing this today with escalating sanctions, covert operations, and cyber-attacks against Iran. Linked to all of these policies is Washington’s perpetual insistence that everyone in the region not just accept Israel but tolerate virtually any definition of its security requirements and territorial needs put forward by the Israeli government.

This imperial turn has proven not just quixotic but deeply damaging to American standing, in the Middle East and globally. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama seemed to understand this when he pledged not just to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq but to end what he called the “mindset” that led America into the strategic mistake of invading Iraq in the first place. But, as president, Obama has pursued the same kinds of policies as his predecessors, extending the damage they did to America’s strategic position.

Among other self-damaging policies, Obama has, like his predecessors, bought into the proposition that an Israel with nearly absolute freedom of military initiative bolsters U.S. supremacy in the Middle East, by helping to subordinate regional players aspiring to some measure of strategic independence. Consequently, he is presiding not just over a stalled Middle East peace process, but over the very demise of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In this context, Obama’s primary mission in Israel was making peace not between Israelis and Palestinians but with the Israel lobby and Congress, to boost his chances of passing a domestic agenda before congressional elections in 2014. While the Israel lobby does not take positions on domestic issues, it nonetheless has real impact on a president’s ability to get domestic initiatives through Congress — for congressmen are less willing to take politically difficult votes, even for a president of their own party, if that president’s foreign policies generate friction with the lobby.

In Jerusalem, Obama was out to persuade “pro-peace” constituencies in his electoral coalition that he has not abandoned the project of Israeli-Palestinian peace — but without offering the substantive definitions of the requirements for a viable two-state solution that so offend the Israel lobby. He made only the most passing reference to prior statements about 1967 borders as an essential baseline for negotiating a territorial settlement, or to halting Israeli settlements as essential to progress.

More tellingly, Obama’s admonitions that only direct negotiations with Israel can produce peace and that Palestinians must not try the “short cut” of seeking further UN recognition for a Palestinian state are clear signals that realizing Palestinian rights is not his priority. Two decades of direct talks between Israel and Palestinians have produced neither peace nor a Palestinian state.

While Israel continues vaguely professing interest in peace — and Obama insists the Palestinian Authority help police Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank — for most Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims there is no moral case for peace (much less Israeli security) when Palestinian rights remain subjugated.

If Obama were serious about Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, he would have the United States sponsor Palestinian membership in the United Nations, not veto it — so that the International Criminal Court could hear Palestinian claims about occupation and Israeli human rights violations.

But Obama won’t do that — even though U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Arab populations and military aggression grows ever more damaging to America’s standing as regional publics become more mobilized — because he is on board with the established strategy. And so he promotes a peace process — not actual peace, just a process — designed to protect Israel’s capacity to dominate its neighbors militarily.

Obama’s support for Syrian oppositionists reflects the same sort of hubristic thinking. His administration started backing opposition elements in 2011, not to help Syrians but to weaken Iran’s regional position and perhaps even spark the Islamic Republic’s overthrow. This proved unrealistic, for Assad’s government even today represents sizable constituencies.

As time passed and Assad didn’t fall, concern that jihadi extremists gaining ever greater prominence in opposition ranks would target U.S. interests (as happened in Libya) prompted the administration to temper its stance in advance of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Now it is returning to the imperial game, disregarding risks to both U.S. security interests and regional stability.

That’s why, in contrast to his charade on the Palestinian issue, Obama put real effort during his Middle East trip into brokering a renewal of Israeli-Turkish relations — for, in Washington’s view, Israeli-Turkish cooperation could facilitate a renewed push for Assad’s removal.

Just three days after Obama’s Jerusalem speech, Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Baghdad, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki beside him, that Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton, assured him Maliki “is going to do whatever I say.” (Maliki immediately replied, “We won’t do it.”) Though fobbed off as a “joke,” Kerry’s talking points for what he later described as “spirited” private talks with Maliki reflected a conviction that Washington can in fact leverage Baghdad’s compliance with U.S. demands on Syria.

Kerry told Maliki that barring Syria-bound Iranian aircraft from Iraqi airspace is a condition for Iraq’s inclusion in discussions of Syria’s post-Assad future. Kerry also warned that failing to cooperate in ending the Syrian conflict on Washington’s preferred lines — through Assad’s removal — raises the danger that fighting will “spillover” and destabilize Iraq.

This ignores that Maliki’s interests are profoundly threatened by Assad’s prospective displacement by U.S./Saudi/Turkish-backed opposition forces. (That’s why Maliki said that, while wanting good relations with Saudi Arabia, he will conclude a formal alliance with Iran if Assad falls.)

The most likely result of rebel “success” is not the Assad government’s replacement by a coherent, nationwide alternative. It’s Syria’s devolution into warring fiefdoms, with forces loyal to what’s left of the government battling increasingly fractious opposition militias that fight each other as much as they fight the Assad camp. Under these circumstances, Washington has no plausible claim it can stop extremist jihadis now fighting in Syria from taking their campaign for a new salafi ascendancy into Iraq.

Maliki has a clear interest in seeing the Syrian conflict stop. But the only credible way this can happen is if America and others backing Syrian rebels get behind a new political compact for Syria, based on power-sharing between government and opposition.

Until then, Iraq’s interests — like those of Iran, Russia, and China — lie in thwarting efforts by Washington and its partners to remake the regional balance by targeting the Assad government. That’s a recipe for prolonged carnage, in Syria and perhaps elsewhere, that smarter — and less imperial — U.S. policy could avert.

Flynt Leverett served as a Middle East expert on George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff until the Iraq War and worked previously at the State Department and at the Central Intelligence Agency. Hillary Mann Leverett was the NSC expert on Iran and – from 2001 to 2003 – was one of only a few U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq. They are authors of the new book, Going to Tehran. [This article was originally published at Al Jazeera and Huffington Post.]

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before a poster of his late father, Hafez Assad.

By Ivan Eland:

The U.S. government recently designated the Syrian opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra Front a foreign terrorist organization. The move was designed to build Western support against the Syrian government by alleviating fears that money and weapons donated to the opposition would flow to a militant group.

The designation means that Americans cannot have financial ties to the Nusra Front and is meant to be a precedent for other nations considering imposing similar sanctions on the group. U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford noted that “Extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra are a problem, an obstacle to finding the political solution that Syria’s going to need.”

What the ambassador forgot to mention was that U.S. Middle East policy has played a big role in the group’s rise and potency. The group has some of the Syrian opposition’s most competent and battle-hardened warriors, and the reason is that the group is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Nusra Front gets funding, fighters, and training from its Iraqi brethren.

And of course, al-Qaeda in Iraq came into being to fight the ill-advised U.S. invasion of Iraq. Critics of the Iraq War predicted that battle-tested fighters from the conflict would be exported, after it was finished, to other Islamic countries to destabilize their governments. Of course, you didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see that that prediction would likely come true.

In addition, U.S. sanctions are mere symbolism, because during a chaotic civil war, arms sent to the Syrian opposition by, say, Turkey, Qatar or Saudi Arabia could easily end up in the Nusra Front’s hands, either on purpose or because of the unsettled conditions in the country. Likewise, if John McCain and the other salivating American hawks have their way, and the U.S. begins overt arms supplies to the rebels, the United States could become an inadvertent arms supplier to a group on its own terrorism list.

Even now with supposed U.S. vetting of Syrian groups getting weapons from the three aforementioned countries, more and more weapons are getting into the hands of Islamist militants. And there are other militant groups in Syria besides the Nusra Front.

In the worst case, by putting the Nusra Front on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist groups, the United States, as it has done many times before, will create a new enemy. A group that wasn’t focusing its attacks on the United States may begin to have incentives to do so, as has happened with the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from Yemen.

And all of this is occurring in Syria in the face of many previous examples of inadvertent consequences of arming either foreign groups or countries. For example, in 1980s, the United States funneled arms and money through Pakistan to the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets. The Pakistanis gave the military aid to the most radical groups, which morphed into the anti-U.S. terrorist group al-Qaeda.

Now, the United States is giving arms and aid to a Pakistani government that is supporting Taliban insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan; some of the American aid is leaking through to the Afghan Taliban.

Lastly, the chaotic Western war against Libya liberated many of Muammar Gaddafi’s weapons stocks from Libyan government control. Those arms ended up being used by al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist rebels to create a potential terrorist sanctuary in northern Mali. Not learning a thing, the United States is pushing Mali’s African neighbors to use force to take out the Islamists by force. Who knows where the weapons from that potential war might end up?

Given the very real possibility of inadvertent adverse consequences from any U.S. intervention in Syria, the U.S. should not ship arms or money to the Syrian rebels, should not have deemed the Nusra Front a terrorist organization, and should not have imposed financial sanctions on the group, which is no enemy of the United States. The United States already has enough enemies and doesn’t need more.

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. His books include Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Free Syrian Army fighters carry their weapons as they stand on a street in Aleppo’s al-Amereya district December 11, 2012. Picture taken December 11, 2012. REUTERS/Aaref Hretani

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From Reuters:

Syria’s chemical weapons could be used at “a moment’s notice” and the international community should not accept any assurances from Syrian officials that they will not be used, U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said on Wednesday.

U.S. and other Western officials recently issued sharp warnings to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad not to deploy chemical weapons. Syria called those warnings a “pretext for intervention” in the civil war.

Rogers, a Republican, told Reuters in an interview that the Syrian government’s activities related to chemical weapons were a shift in posture and a major concern.

“I believe that they have put elements of their chemical weapons program in a condition of which they could be used at a moment’s notice, which is very different from before,” Rogers said.

“And some notion that they have promised not to use them, I don’t think the international community … should take that on face value,” he said.

“This is a regime that’s getting more desperate by the day. They have affirmatively put elements of their chemical weapon program in a position for use, that is something that we should all be concerned about.”

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A Syrian army helicopter flies over the northern city of Aleppo in October. Iraq has shut its airspace to four Syrian flights scheduled to pick up attack helicopters that had been repaired in Russia, the Iraqi Prime Minister’s spokesman said Tuesday. (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/GettyImages)

Iraq has shut its airspace to four Syrian flights scheduled to pick up attack helicopters that had been repaired in Russia, the spokesman to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Tuesday. Syria has failed several times since June to retrieve the refurbished helicopters from Russia, and the regime of Bashar al-Assad appears to be growing more desperate as fighting intensifies.

Iraq’s denial of the flights appears to be a diplomatic breakthrough for the U.S. Although Baghdad has said it won’t allow arms shipments to Syria and has recently begun to inspect some planes flying from Iran, White House and State Department officials have been pressuring Iraq to act much more aggressively to choke off military aid.

Two U.S. diplomatic officials who are closely monitoring Iraq-Syria relations expressed relief when told that Baghdad said it had denied Syria’s overflight request for the helicopters.

But one of the officials emphasized caution, noting that flights continue over Iraqi airspace from Iran to Syria. Iraq has maintained that the flights carry humanitarian goods but the United States suspects they contain matériel. “The abuse of Iraq’s airspace continues to be a concern,” the official said. “We urge Iraq either to require flights enroute to Syria over its territory to land for inspection or deny overflight requests for these aircraft.”

ProPublica reported on the Syrian fly-over requests last week, noting that the cargo plane expected to pick up the helicopters did not land or take off at the scheduled times at a military airfield near Moscow. The reason was unknown at the time.

Ali al-Mousawi, the prime minister’s media adviser, told ProPublica on Tuesday that Syria’s requests had been denied by the Iraqi Civil Aviation Authority.

“We will not authorize any overflight until we make sure that it does not contain any military equipment in line with the Iraqi government’s policy which firmly rejects allowing transporting any military shipments via our airspace from or to Syria,” he wrote in an email.

Syria has tried various ways to retrieve its attack helicopters from Russia.

In June, a cargo ship carrying helicopters from the Russian port of Kaliningrad to Syria was turned back after the ship’s insurer withdrew coverage in response to sanctions. A second attempt by sea a month later also failed.

The new plan, according to flight records obtained by ProPublica, was to fly an Ilyushin IL-76 cargo plane in late November and early December from Damascus to Ramenskoye Airport outside Moscow, also known as Zhukovsky Airport. The records described the cargo as an “old helicopter after overhaullling” (sic) and identified the model as an Mi-25 — a heavy combat helicopter that has been filmed in online videos appearing to fire at rebels.

Some of the flight records were posted by hackers associated with the online collective Anonymous. Many of those documents, as well as others, were obtained separately by ProPublica, which reported last week that Syria appears to have flown 240 tons of bank notes from Moscow this summer.

One of the U.S. diplomatic officials said Iraq’s decision to block the flights — and to acknowledge doing so publicly — risks angering Moscow. Failure to deliver the helicopters, this official said, could mean a delay in payment for the Russians. Russia has long been Syria’s main supplier of arms.

Officials at the Russian Foreign Ministry and its lead arms exporter Rosoboronexport did not return phone calls from ProPublica. The 150 Aircraft Repair Plant, which is listed as the charterer of the flights, declined to answer questions.

Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev told reporters last week that Russia was obliged to fulfill its existing contracts even in the teeth of international pressure.

Until last year, Iraqi airspace had been largely controlled by the U.S. Air Force. But American officials have gradually turned over control to the Iraqis and now have little involvement in day-to-day operations, according to U.S. aviation advisers working with the Iraqis.

The New York Times reported Sunday on the struggle of American officials to stop arms shipments from Iran. According to the Times, Iraq’s foreign minister promised Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in September that Iraq would inspect the flights from Iran. But since then, the newspaper said, it has only inspected two planes, including one that was returning from Syria.

President Obama, speaking yesterday at the National War College, said, “We will continue to support the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people — engaging with the opposition, providing them with humanitarian aid and working for a transition to a Syria that’s free of the Assad regime.”

(Originally posted at ProPublica)

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From NBC News:

The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said. As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the “precursor” chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded inside the bombs. […]

U.S. officials stressed that as of now, the sarin bombs hadn’t been loaded onto planes and that Assad hadn’t issued a final order to use them. But if he does, one of the officials said, “there’s little the outside world can do to stop it.”

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From Huff Post:

The White House and its allies are weighing military options to secure Syria’s chemical and biological weapons, after U.S. intelligence reports show the Syrian regime may be readying those weapons and may be desperate enough to use them, U.S. officials said Monday.

President Barack Obama, in a speech at the National Defense University on Monday, pointedly warned Syrian President Bashar Assad not to use the weapons.

“Today I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command: The world is watching,” Obama said. “The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Prague for meetings with Czech officials, said she wouldn’t outline any specifics.

“But suffice it to say, we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur,” Clinton said.

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It really is a guilty pleasure, but I do love it when clever, funny writers take on not so clever, humorless writers. Intellectual slap downs are like junk food to journalists, and Matt Taibbi has provided years of unhealthy food to people like myself, largely at the expense of the New York Time’s resident metaphor butcher Tom Friedman. I try not to poke fun at other writer’s too much, but with Friedman it’s hard to resist.

In his latest Rolling Stone blog, Taibbi takes apart Friedman’s latest attempt to explain the crisis in Syria with a series of metaphors so absurdly convoluted you wonder whether Friedman might be having his readers on. Inexplicably, Friedman seems to have changed his views on the state of Iraq post America’s invasion and occupation, at least in comparison to what we’re now seeing in Syria. Friedman had once used described Iraq as a “pottery barn” that had been “broken” by “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Friedman described the pottery barn (Iraq) as being “held together only by Saddam’s iron fist,” that was subsequently smashed by the US invasion. Friedman then argued that Iraq was a disaster in part because the US didn’t give it “political therapy” during its occupation.

But now the emotionally stunted broken pottery barn once held together by Saddam’s iron fist looks rather appealing, at least in Friedman’s eyes. Writes Taibbi:

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