Have seen at least four FB posts & as many articles written by Assad supporters who claim Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte is in the US Pentagon’s crosshairs. First comes the demonizing, they claim, followed by a war-mongering campaign to overthrow him.

You can only write that kind of idiotic rubbish if you have not spent one moment investigating Duterte’s political history or Filipino politics, particularly its neoliberal capitalist rural & urban policies & the re-militarization of the country in collaboration with the US.

Regrettably it’s the same analytical method applied to understanding Syrian politics, particularly an adamant refusal to investigate credible allegations of human rights & war crimes against Assad. Behind this method is a bereft understanding of capitalist politics & how militarism is an essential part of it, including Syrian, Russian, & US militarism.

It’s become cliched among Assad supporters, including prominent antiwar activists, to either deny Syrian & Russian use of barrel bombs or to make numb-skulled assertions that the carnage created by barrel bombs is not worse than the conventional bombs used by the US.–& to claim anyway that those being targeted with barrel bombs are not civilians but terrorists & “jihadists.” How do helicopter pilots dropping barrel bombs distinguish civilians from “jihadists” when they’re bombing cities? Or when all that high-tech surveillance equipment refuses to provide evidence of who is bombing?

Since when do antiwar activists adjudicate which kind of bomb is the preferred kind for bombing people to death? That is the method of banal apologetics, of rightly opposing US military intervention but justifying Syrian & Russian bombing.

The only principled stand in Syria is to demand the complete, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign foot soldiers & war planes & to demand Assad stop bombing the people of Syria.