The US antiwar movement is not going to be right so long as it supports Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians & only opposes US-coalition bombing. Misleaders of the corrupt movement have justified support for Syrian & Russian bombers by saying Assad invited Russian bombers to help him so they are not intervening illegally like the US-coalition. They also pioneered the twisted nationalist notion that the antiwar movement only opposes interventions by its own governments, not those of other countries. They forget that the anti-Vietnam War movement would not have been so powerful had it not been coordinated in hundreds of cities on every single continent. For these corrupt activists, it is all about the national sovereignty of a dictator; the cultist Jeff Mackler even calls it Assad’s right of self-determination when the concept of self-determination has never adhered to a dictator but only to an oppressed people. When Mackler, et al, endorse the sovereignty of a dictator against a popular uprising for democracy, they make theoretical asses of themselves. And not for the first time.
The antiwar movement is never going to be right so long as it is led by “retired” CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials like Coleen Rowley, Ray McGovern, Ann Wright. It is “retired” in quotes because McGovern openly admits they consult regularly with active duty CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials. McGovern is making headlines in Russian media now because of his grandstanding display at the Gina Haspel hearings. It’s good that at the age of 78 McGovern has become opposed to CIA use of torture but it’s just not believable when he never spoke out against torture between 1963 & 1990 when he was a high-level operative in the CIA operating out of the White House. He can’t even try to play stupid about CIA torture in those years because CIA recruiters were being driven off US campuses by antiwar & human rights activists–especially after exposés in the 1970s that the CIA trained SAVAK, the Iranian secret service under the Shah of Iran, in the most unspeakable forms of torture including of children in front of their parents.
As for Rowley, it was in 2003, less than three years after she flagged my criminal record for using a WMD & after she was retired from the FBI, that she came out as a whistleblower opposed to the Iraq War. Today she posted an Islamophobic article by a screwball libertarian claiming John Bolton is an advocate of Islamic terrorism in the White House. That rancid idiocy is fully in accord with the US war on terror where the battle cry is nothing but the rise of Islamic terrorism.
Ann Wright is a retired US army colonel (29 years) & diplomat for the State Department (16 years) who operated in Grenada after the US invasion, Nicaragua, Somalia, Afghanistan, & in several US wars before her retirement in 2003 when she came out against the invasion of Iraq. She suddenly grew a repugnance to war at the age of 66 after serving in several brutal wars without question? She is a supporter of US politician Tulsi Gabbard, an Islamophobe who supports Modi, General Sisi in Egypt, & Assad. Wright just published an article in the Assadist rag Consortium News that Syria & Russia did not use chemical weapons in Douma but that the well-documented attacks were in fact carried out by unspecified armed militias. On what evidence does the hard-nosed military colonel make this claim? None, but a list of US “false flag” operations that she probably peddled during her military tenure. She may not stand with Bartlett & Beeley & the Kremlin in claiming the children filmed foaming at the mouth were crisis actors chosen from among kidnapped children but she still stands with the Assad dictatorship against the Syrian Arab Spring uprising.
How do McGovern, Rowley, & Wright serve US military interests despite their faux-whistleblowing & grandstanding? By confusing the hell out of what is going on & by fostering nihilism, the belief that nothing can be known, that everything–even that which is documented–is fake news & false flags. Nihilism cuts both ways: when Syria & Russia bomb civilians, it is just MSM fake news; when the US-coalition bombs civilians, it is only credible if it appears in state-owned alternative media like RT, Sputnik News, TeleSur because nothing “Zionist-controlled MSM” reports can be trusted. All three of them seek legitimacy in Palestinian solidarity when in over four decades of service to the US government, none of them uttered a peep about Palestinians. Mostly, these reprobate functionaries of the US military serve by misleading the US antiwar movement into being an appendage of Assad & Putin, by legitimizing Islamophobia, & by fomenting anti-Semitism rather than educating about Zionism.
The principled antiwar movement that must be built will have no place for the likes of these characters. It will be a day of good riddance to them.
(Photo is Rowley on left, Wright in middle, McGovern on right)