President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appears to have become nearly the latest of a long line of American allies, many of them autocrats like himself, who were told the U.S. would always look out for them only to be kicked to the curb after they were no longer useful to the United States.
Ties between Syria and Russia go back not only through the Soviet Union but even to Czarist Russia. Now, presumably because Russia is so focused on Ukraine, it was unable to save its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, from being deposed by Islamist insurgents. Assad is safely in Moscow but Damascus is a different matter.
Americas who remember the optimistic coverage of the fall of Baghdad in 2003 know better than to take similar images and coverage seriously now. International security analyst and Russia expert Mark Sleboda joins Ted Rall and guest co-host Robby West (filling in for Manila Chan) on “The TMI Show” to talk about the broad international implications of the collapse of the Syrian state, rising instability, and where Russia and Iran go now when it comes to influence in the Middle East.
This feels like a movie you’ve seen before: a secular socialist government where women and ethnic minorities have rights that are respected is targeted by the United States and its allies in large part because it shows that left-wing politics can be successful. The Carter administration armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, setting the stage for Al Qaeda and 9/11. The Bush Administration overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq, creating a failed state that became a vassal of Iran and a home for ISIS. Obama killed Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, creating a failed state where slave markets have reappeared and radical Muslim fundamentalists hold sway. Now an officially designated terrorist organization has, with the help of the US and Israel, overthrown Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its reformist leader Ahmad al-Sharaa keep their promise to limit their ambitions to Syria? Will they impose radical Taliban-style sharia law on Syria? What are the implications for Russia, which accepted Assad but did not provide sufficient air support to protect his regime? Israel has already started bombing Syria, saying that its 1974 peace deal was with the Assad government which no longer exists; will the war in Lebanon and Gaza spread into Syria even more? What are the security implications for Israel, which wanted this regime change, right next-door?
On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss Trump requesting delayed sentencing.
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss a wide range of topics from around the globe, including the Trump hush money trial, Egypt-Israel relations, and more.
It may come as a surprise, especially to conservatives, that the Left believes in law and order. Of course we do. Without it, you can’t have much else.
In November 2001, I went to Afghanistan as a reporter. It felt like the 14th century if the late middle ages took place in an Islamist dystopia and everyone carried an AK-47. To call it a failed state would have been too kind; there were no governmental functions of any sort. There were no paved roads, no operational schools, no reliable form of currency in circulation, not even names for the streets, which was just as well since there weren’t any signs either. When I returned to the United States, interviewers asked me what the people of Afghanistan needed and wanted most. Westerners offered suggestions: elections, a free press, democracy. Afghans actually wanted roads and electricity; they could do the rest. I suggested: law and order. There’s no point building a road if bandits rob travelers. You can’t hold elections if candidates can easily be assassinated.
Leftists object to bourgeois and capitalist systems of policing because they use violence to prop up a system we seek to tear down. Under a leftist government, however, counterrevolutionary, reactionary and corporatist forces will try to undermine our efforts to create a more just and equal world every way they can, including call trying to terrorize citizens and new institutions by creating an atmosphere of lawlessness. Socialists don’t want their banks robbed or their stores fleeced by shoplifters. The leftist approach to law and order must, however, not merely recreate capitalism’s inherent brutality but must reflect the values of dignity and respect that characterize our struggle. Similarly and even more importantly, the criminal and civil justice systems must serve as both a counterexample to the Right and a reinforcement of our belief that all humans can be redeemed and that society has a moral obligation to do everything that he can to help them do so.
It almost seems ridiculous to put it into words, but it must be said because it’s rarely followed: the purpose of policing is to keep people as safe as possible. Reactive policing is the apex of this mission. When you call 911, a man or woman in uniform should come quickly, thoughtfully assess the situation and act with the bare minimum of physical force necessary, if any, to resolve it. In other words, the opposite of what happened on July 15, 2017, when a 31-year-old Australian-American woman, Justine Damond, called Minneapolis police to report her fear that a woman was being assaulted behind her home. When the cops arrived, she went to talk to them. They were startled, so they shot her.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen in the United Kingdom because the police are trained to guard citizens, not hunt lawbreakers, and also they don’t carry guns, and also they’re not jumpy and scared. Police should not carry guns. In a situation where firearms might be required, such as a hostage situation involving armed gunmen, a specially trained tactical team can be dispatched to the scene.
Then there’s the matter of deterrent law enforcement, in which police officers are placed in visible locations to deter criminals and to serve as a point of contact for law-abiding people who need directions or other forms of assistance.
What cops should never be doing is what they mainly do now, roaming neighborhoods with lots of poverty and ethnic minorities while stopping on occasion to harass the locals or worse, and writing tickets for parking and moving violations. The police need to be trained to understand that disadvantaged populations need their help more than anyone else and that, no matter how sketchy an area looks, 99% of the people who live there are just like them, trying to survive without hurting anyone else.
If government is interested in public safety, it will abolish regressive monetary fines for parking in the wrong place at the wrong time, driving too fast, making an illegal turn, forgetting to renew an automobile registration, even for driving drunk. Society has a vested interest in maintaining orderly parking patterns, encouraging motorists to drive below the speed limit, obey regulations, make sure their car is in working order and obviously for ensuring that no one gets behind the wheel of a car under the influence of alcohol. But enforcement measures based on revenue enhancement inevitably are abused; the police write tickets to people who are innocent, they exaggerate the gravity of offenses, and they can easily escalate into violent confrontations because poor people can’t afford exorbitant fines. A broken headlight isn’t cause to shake someone down for money; the driver probably doesn’t even know it’s broken. Pull the driver over and let them know they need to get it fixed. If you are trying to get people to stop speeding, issue them tickets with a point system; if they get too many, they lose their driving privileges. There’s really no reason whatsoever to renew automobile registration other than to sit down  tax drivers, so just stop requiring it.
In major cities, take cops out of their squad cars and turn them into pedestrians so that they interact organically with members of the community. Stop recruiting from the ranks of traumatized former military veterans trained to adopt a “warrior” mentality rather than the “guardian” viewpoint—a good cop is far more worried about whether you get home safe at night than whether he gets home safe at night.
Bourgeois police officers are deeply imbued in a “gotcha” approach. They receive praise and promotions for catching people doing bad things and nailing them for it. Instead, we must train the police to prevent bad things from happening. Coming out of a bar late at night in a small Ohio town not long ago, I was immediately pulled over by a cop who obviously had been lurking outside the tavern and hoped to catch patrons driving home drunk. I had only had one beer and everything about my driver’s license and my car was kosher, so he let me go with a distinct air of disappointment. Wouldn’t it have been better for that town, and my opinion of the police, if instead he hung out in front of the bar and offered to drive someone who had had one too many drinks back to their house?
Next time, what the Left should do about crime and punishment.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
The government’s services keep getting worse.
Even their lies.
The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam had WMDs. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had proscribed weapons.
Sure, they were lies. But they were plausible lies. Theoretically, UBL might have snuck into Afghanistan. Saddam might have acquired WMDs. Those things could have been true.
Now they’re giving us implausible lies. Not only are their lies, well, lies—they say things that are untrue and can’t possibly be true and that no one, no matter how stupid or uninformed, could believe.
Democrats go on and on about how nothing is more important than defeating Trump. Democracy itself hangs in the balance! After Trump redux, the re-deluge. Like Hitler, but worse.
But they don’t really believe that. If liberals really actually thought Adolf Trump was going to suspend the constitution and send his enemies—them—to camps, their sense of survival would have prompted them to select the most charismatic, brilliant, popular, vigorous, 2024 Democratic presidential nominee possible. Instead, they gave us Biden.
You can’t think Trump is dangerous and go with Biden-Harris. For Democrats, protecting their party’s corporatist status quo matters more Trump’s purported threat to democracy. That’s the truth. We all know.
Republicans won’t shut up about out-of-control deficit spending and the $34 trillion national debt which, according to them, will tank the economy because, like a family that has to live within its means except for credit cards and student loans and car loans and home mortgages, the government can’t keep spending cash it doesn’t have even though it owns the U.S. Mint and has gotten away with it for, like, a century.
We know that the fake deficit hawks don’t actually believe what they are saying in real time, as they’re saying it, because while they’re threatening to shut down the government every few months, they keep throwing even more billions of dollars at the Defense Department than the DOD even asks for, so much that the military sucks up more than everything else the government does combined, and that’s not including the wars they put “off the books” and the proxy wars and the wars they charge to the State Department, not to mention debt service on old wars.
These diametrically opposed lines of rhetoric represent a dramatic shift away from old-fashioned political hypocrisy. If the military is your biggest expense by far and you keep raising it, and you claim to worry about spending, you are lying. No amount of cognitive dissonance can convince us otherwise. You know we know it’s crap yet you keep right on going.
“Normal” communication by political elites has become prima facie impossible to take seriously.
We used to be able to accept the announcement by a defeated primary candidate that they would endorse their rival and tour for him because primary campaigns involved incremental ideological variations and hadn’t yet devolved to bloodsport.
No more. Even after Trump implied that Ted Cruz’s father assassinated JFK and had his surrogates impugn Ron DeSantis as a eunuch and a fey cuck, he collected both men’s endorsements. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden red-baited Bernie Sanders as an existential threat to the Democratic Party yet were rewarded with his fealty. This, we are supposed to think, is adults being adults and maybe this is so, but more than that it’s proof positive that nothing any primary candidate claims to stand for or against should ever be trusted.
Everywhere we look, politicians are deploying lies whose obviousness is evident out of the gate. Elites will never be believed, they know it, and they don’t care.
Israel’s war cabinet tells its traumatized citizens that October 7th came as a surprise at the same time countless specific warnings and the IDF’s eight-hour response time (!) prove that cannot possibly have been the case. As people shout “bring them home,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s trying to do just that. But that’s a lie and it has to be a lie because you don’t bomb a place where hostages you care about are being held lest you kill them and anger their captors.
Families of the doomed hostages cannot believe him and do not believe him yet they do not demand that the bombs stop falling or that those who drop them be removed from power.
Ukraine, they say, is a fellow democracy even though it has canceled all elections forever and its press is censored and opposition parties are banned, and as a democracy it must be defended by us, who are not really much of a democracy either as Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and others who have been denied access to ballots can attest. The idea that this famously corrupt post-Soviet republic could have posed as a democracy was cute on its face, of course…shut up and fly your blue and yellow flag.
Taiwan, Biden says, is a country that must be defended from a Chinese invasion. At the same time, Biden also says, Taiwan is not a country at all nor should it become one, China is the One China and Taiwan is part of it so China can no more invade Taiwan than the U.S. can invade Ohio, but still, we’ll defend Taiwan but really we won’t. “Realists” call this “strategic ambiguity“ but really, it’s just one of those lies-you-see-coming.
Gender identity, woke elites insist, is not merely psychological but physically real as well: a transwoman is a woman, period. This cannot be true; a transwoman swimmer is not generically the same as her cis female competitors but they tell us that we should tell cis female athletes to chill, it’s not an issue when clearly it’s an issue but the authorities don’t want us to take their ridiculous word for it, just as it is with DEI and its clumsy flip-replacement of one form of systemic discrimination with another, they just want us to shut up.
The era of the lie-you-know-from-the-start may be over soon.
Next up: insane truths without the thinnest varnish of deception.
Though not a renowned rhetorician, our president surely deserves historical credit as the first American leader to say, at the start of a war, that we will lose. Days after the U.S. military began what it plans to be a prolonged bombing campaign against Yemen, an effort to stop the Houthis from attacking ships in the Red Sea, Biden announced that future strikes would not succeed. “Are they [US airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No,” Biden told reporters. “Will they continue? Yes.”
They’re not even trying anymore.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Over and over, the military tells Americans that grave consequences would follow unless we fight and win in some overseas conflict. Yet we keep losing, and nothing terrible happens. When, if ever, will we see through the military’s fear-mongering?
I talked to a lot of people in Afghanistan, where I reported about the fall 2001 U.S. invasion. Young or old, urban or rural, no matter their ethnicity, they all expected the victors to work miracles after the Taliban’s defeat.
“America will build roads, schools, buildings, everything.”
“Now Afghanistan will be beautiful.”
“We will have freedom! We will choose our new government.”
And after that? I asked. What will the U.S. do?
“They will leave,” people told me.
If only things were that simple, I remember thinking.
History is repeating itself in Gaza. A devastating surprise terrorist attack by Islamist extremists has again been followed by a ground invasion. Now the postwar scenario is being considered. It’ll either be the full-fledged ethnic cleansing centered around the expulsion of the Gazans, or regime change. Israel will have the victorious army, control over 2.3 million people (minus the 100,000 or 200,000 it will have killed) and it will soon face some of the same high expectations for reconstruction and the establishment of a post-Hamas government as the U.S. contended with after defeating the Taliban in 2001.
What form would a post-Hamas Gazan government take? “It might entail greater control for the Palestinian National Authority based in Ramallah, some sort of new local governance, governance under the tutelage of the Israeli military, or perhaps a coalition of Arab states,” Jon B. Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies speculated at the start of the war.
America’s approach to post-Taliban Afghanistan should serve as a case study of what Israel should not do if and when it topples Hamas. After the U.S. orchestrated the presidency of Hamid Karzai, he and his successor Ashraf Ghani were consistently viewed as weak and corrupt puppets installed by exploitative foreigners. Two decades, two thousand soldiers and two trillion dollars later, the U.S. found itself where it started, with the Taliban back in charge.
The seeds of America’s humiliating withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021 were planted by a few disastrous decisions by the Bush Administration in the months immediately following the collapse of the first Taliban regime in December 2001.
The Americans’ first major mistake took place at the Bonn Conference in November 2001, where they allowed the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance the highest number of delegates. The Northern Alliance was America’s ally in its war against the Taliban, but it only enjoyed the support of a tiny minority of Afghans, mostly in the remote mountainous northeast of the country and was the fervent enemy of the nation’s Pashtun majority. Accountable only to their American patrons, the Northern Alliance threw restraint to the wind, appointing warlords reputed for violence and corruption to cabinet positions and provincial governorships.
Members of the Taliban, whose government had controlled more than 90% of the country’s territory before 9/11, were excluded from public life under a misbegotten policy of “detalibanization.” Many fled across the Hindu Kush mountains to Pakistan as a result, biding their time as they organized Taliban 2.0.
Though telegenic and charismatic, Karzai—the man elected at Bonn as chairman of Afghanistan’s interim government—could not have been a worse choice. Though sold by the Tajiks leading the regime as a sop to his fellow Pashtuns, his close ties to the CIA and the fact that he had been living in exile on 9/11 added to the suspicion among Afghans that he had been parachuted in to serve as the country’s Philippe Pétain.
A traditional loya jirga tribal council convened in June 2002 in order to choose a permanent leader. Once again, the Taliban—by far the biggest ideological cohort—were excluded.
Making matters worse, Washington refused to let democracy, or Afghanistan’s traditional form of representative democracy, decide the future. When the exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, emerged as an early frontrunner as the figurehead of a potential unity coalition, the U.S. panicked. Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad clumsily buttonholed him behind the scenes until the humiliated former monarch agreed to withdraw from the race and endorse Bush’s choice, Karzai—at a U.S.-held press conference. “Together, these actions convinced many that the loya jirga is a puppet of [Northern Alliance] Panjshiris and foreigners, and that the Bush administration is not willing to let Afghans engage in any democratic debate that might contradict American views,” S. Frederick Starr and Marin J. Strmecki wrote in The New York Times on June 14, 2002.
The U.S.-backed Afghan government committed countless errors over its ensuing 19 years in power. Regardless of its performance, however, it never stood a chance of being considered legitimate after such dismal origins.
Like an individual, a regime only has one chance to make a good first impression. The Afghan debacle teaches Israel two important lessons about regime change, should it choose to impose a government upon Gaza. First, disenfranchising a substantial segment of the population will hobble Gaza’s next leadership, no matter how well-intentioned or democratic the process otherwise appears to be. Dehamasification would be as much of a disaster as detalibanization and debaathification in Iraq.
The other lesson is the most important: a democracy in which outsiders keep their thumb on the scale is an oxymoron. If—which I seriously doubt—Israel seeks to spread democracy to the occupied territories, it must let it play out organically and abide by the results no matter what—especially if they’re disagreeable.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Jimmy Carter will almost certainly be remembered as a liberal lion. That reputation, however, stems from his post-presidential work with Habitat for Humanity and his role attempting to mediate peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. His affable manner and trademark smile contributed to that impression.
But Carter’s leading role was as President. Personal rebranding and the haze of history have obscured the fact that the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia was conservative. As a right-wing “New Democrat,” he ushered in a radical shift of his party from champions of the working class and skeptics of foreign interventionism to the bellicose defenders of big business currently occupying the White House.
Domestically, Carter was notable primarily for what he did not do. His inactions invariably leaned left.
Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose an anti-poverty bill since the realignment that brought FDR to power in 1932. A deficit hawk more concerned about inflation than unemployment, he broke his 1976 campaign pledge to push for a national healthcare plan. He considered, but rejected, proposals from fellow Democrats for a universal basic income and increasing welfare benefits. Though he personally favored and campaigned for decriminalizing cannabis, he backtracked and allowed the brutal War on Drugs to continue.
Empathetic statements bemoaning the ills and injustices of late-stage capitalism in the post-Vietnam era of deindustrialization, coupled with executive dithering, set the template for Clintonism: liberal rhetoric on the stump, conservative laissez faire in reality.
“Fundamentally, Jimmy Carter ended the New Deal and started America on the path of pushing wealth and power upward, a path dramatically accelerated by his successors,” Matt Stoller, author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” told The Washington Post. “As just one simple example, one reason Americans today can’t sue airlines for consumer protection or safety violations is airline deregulation, passed in 1978 and signed by Jimmy Carter. Carter cut capital gains taxes in 1978, and under the term ‘deregulation,’ removed public rules from the banking, telecommunications, railroad, trucking, natural gas and airline industries.”
Carter was a man of peace—technically. He didn’t start any wars. He talked about human rights in international affairs, criticizing America’s coddling of dictators. He distanced the U.S. from apartheid-era South Africa and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza. And he negotiated a peace deal between Israel and Egypt.
But his foreign policy hawkishness made the world more dangerous. The president’s highflying rhetoric was full of “built-in hypocrisy,” Foreign Policy magazine’s Jonathan Alter observed in 2020. “The president’s new policy was selective and inconsistent from the start, especially as applied to strategically important allies. Vital interests took priority over moral ones, most fatefully in the case of Iran, where Carter toasted the shah and raised the abuses of his secret police only in their private meetings. When the shah was driven from power in 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Carter’s support for the monarch led to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Tehran.”
Carter’s anti-communist national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged him to arm the radical Islamist mujahedin in Afghanistan, drawing the Soviet Union into a proxy war that helped set the stage for 9/11. He used the Soviet invasion as an excuse to politicize the 1980 Olympics by boycotting the Moscow games. In a transparently ridiculous attempt to look tough he restored draft registration, which remains in force despite the all-volunteer military.
And it was Carter who started the giant defense spending spree of the 1980s credited to Ronald Reagan. There may not have been any cash for infrastructure or healthcare or poverty, but when it came to nuclear saber-rattling against the Soviets, money was no object. “I am committed as a matter of fundamental policy to continued real increases in defense,” Carter told Congress in his 1980 State of the Union address. Reagan later acknowledged Carter’s massive defense spending. “My predecessor had proposed a five-year expansion of the defense budget,” Reagan said in 1986.
By 1979 the liberal voting base of the Democratic Party had had enough of Carter’s rightward shift. And then they had their champion: Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy challenged Carter from the left in the 1980 primaries, “trying to run on sort of FDR-type policies, the old-style liberalism, you know, trying to be a populist,” said journalist Jon Ward, author of a book about that race.
Kennedy’s defeat was fateful. 1980 marked the rise of the centrist-right Third Way/Democratic Leadership Council control over the Democratic Party apparatus, which went unchallenged until Bernie Sanders in 2016. Clinton continued Carter’s aggressive foreign policy and embraced right-wing domestic projects: NAFTA, the crime bill, welfare reform. Obama perfected Carter’s style, controlled and measured and calm in an effort to deliver a vaguely liberal impression rarely reflected by his policy decisions.
Carter is considered to be a great ex-president, mainly because his post-1981 life of humanitarian service contrasts with his presidential reputation as an incompetent, vision-free micromanager. But Carter did have a vision, one that was consequential if ignored. He sucked the liberalism out of the Democratic Party, rendering the American Left homeless, marginalized and alienated within electoral politics as the country spiraled into a half-century of rightward decline with no end in sight.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
