Torry Mercer: Musings of a Pro-Airstrikes Anarchist
By Nick Cooper
How would you like to be identified?
Torry Mercer, a left leaning anarchist
What does Assad’s rule meant to you?
I have always hated dictators, right and left, and only tolerated the benevolent dictators, Fidel and Khadafy, while they were benevolent and tolerant, and justified my compromise by knowing that they were under the gun for being a counter weight to US foreign policy.
I stopped liking Khadafy when he got cozy with the international capitalist oilygarchs and groomed his sons to succeed him. He was no longer a revolutionary, just another corrupt hereditary dictator.
I give him a lot of credit for the good things he did, mainly making high quality education available to the Libyan people. Ironically, this policy was one of his un-doings. He was never educated and the young population of Libya was. They saw Khadafy as an ignorant and corrupt old coot. When he was about to hand over control of Libya to one of his sons, a completely outrageous act, people of Libya justifiably rebelled. This was a homegrown rebellion by the Libyan people.
I don’t give a fuck what RT news or the Communist idiots have to opine about it. Khadafy at this point was just another pig and he deserved what he got. The #1 thing that pissed me off about Khadafy was when he started bombing his own cities, his own civilian populations, from the air! Out-fucking-rageous! At that point I would have welcomed the devil herself to help take him out, or NATO, or the USA. I am glad he is gone because now the people of Libya have a chance to struggle and grow through the very difficult social, cultural, economic, and political dialectics that were stunted by Khadafy’s completely vertical regime.
The same thing goes for Assad. I don’t care if he was once Santa Claus. That piece of shit bombed his own cities, his own civilian populations, from the air, and now he is going to pay the price for the 200,000 murders he has committed. Anyone that has any tolerance for Assad is an idiot with no sense of history and no moral compass and I have no time or tolerance for these assholes.
Do you support missile strikes by Obama? Why? If so, do you have any reservations?
I am a historian. I already know that every US president is a war criminal with as much or more blood on their hands as Assad. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The difference is that the US is not having a popular uprising and no US presidents have bombed any US cities to dust for over 150 years. You can’t justify the cowardice of sitting idly by while Assad commits genocide on his own people because of the ignoble history of US foreign policy.
Is this position the same as you have taken regarding past US interventions in the Muslim world? If not, why is this one different?
I know my protestations will fall on deaf ears when it comes to many on the left who are committed to an ideology that has calcified into a clogged artery. They are intellectually dead and don’t even know it. They are left-wing reactionaries. While the world grows more complex around them they grow old and simple minded, viewing events in the world through the prism of an ideology that is ultimately American-centric; that whatever the US might ever possibly do could never possibly be good. All I am saying is give the devil her due; acknowledge that after all the bloody and useless carnage of US foreign policy that it is a good thing that Kurdistan is becoming independent, Afghanistan just elected a progressive anthropologist for president, Khadafy and Saddam Hussein are rotting in Hell, and Bashar al-Assad is on his way to join them.
You seem to be focusing on Assad, what about strikes against ISIS?
ISIS is a CIA asset and they don’t even know it. The CIA could not overtly arm ISIS to 1.) go after Assad or 2.) pressure Maliki out of office, and nobody wants to send/spend US troops to do these two jobs, so the CIA basically just left the keys in the tanks and walked away (CIA: “dude, someone stole my tank!”). ISIS already snagged a pile of CIA piñata small arms in Syria that were “budgeted” for the liberal opposition. The liberal opposition was smart enough not to use them in a suicide mission without US aerial support, but ISIS did not shy from this task and used these weapons to take thousands of square miles of Syria. Point goes to ISIS and Obama, meanwhile the liberal opposition sips cardamom coffee in Turkey. The US left, libertarian right, and Israel stopped Obama from bombing Assad a year or so ago when he agreed to give up the WMDs. ISIS getting US tanks from Iraqi troops has covert CIA black-op written all over it. Bombing Isis in Iraq is a steering function, like herding cows. It is just to get them to turn around and use the US tanks they picked up in Iraq at the CIA store back home in Syria against Assad. The CIA, AKA Obama, wants ISIS and Assad to besiege and whittle away at each other. ISIS has already taken the parts of Syria that it could without tanks. With tanks they will be able to besiege the Alawite strongholds of Assad. Then ISIS runs out of gas, ammo, and suicide commandos. Assad is further weakened, and the liberal opposition comes out from hiding in Turkey for the coup de grace (and a child is born; a bouncing new baby Kurdistan!). Bombing ISIS in Syria will open a way for the FSA to initiate home rule in the liberated zones and the very first Syrian democracy, and will not serve to keep Assad in power. When Assad tries to regain land from his own people and confronts US backed FSA then the US will escalate and take out his air force, radar, communications, tarmacs, and central command structures.
Then this will all work out somehow to bring about a more democratic future?
Then the locals get to the messy business of developing a horizontally organized society. This is all about knowing the board and how the chessmen move around it. My hat is off to Obama for knowing how to play the game, i.e. getting around the idiot left, the idiot right, the corporate Congress, the Russian military contractors, and the Zionist lobby. I was and am standing with the revolutionary Syrian people represented by the liberal revolutionaries of the FSA, and in opposition to Assad, ISIS, Israel, Iran and lesser known shit-heels.
And what do you say to the peaceniks on this one?
You saw me standing with them a couple of years ago, a couple of hundred thousand Syrian civilians ago. I saw you, my progressive, radical, anarchist and socialist friends on the opposite corner of Westheimer and Post Oak in Houston standing with Republicans, Libertarians, and various other leftists. We smiled and waved at each other. Remember? Israel got what it wanted, Assad’s WMDs, and dropped support for Obama’s plan to zap Assad’s command and control mechanisms. The Zionists prefer a de-clawed mass murdering dictator in Syria to a democracy or an Islamic state, either of which would be better than Assad who bombs his own cities to dust. There are several chess games going on at once here. Try to pay attention and focus. You either support the revolutionary struggles of the Syrian people or by default you support Assad and ISIS. Howzabout some solidarity with the revolutionary people of Syria? Confusing a revolutionary struggle in Syria with US imperialism belies an American-centric perspective that is itself a subset of imperialism. This is not about America or Americans. This is about the people of Syria. The only question here is what is best for the Syrian people. It is clear that the Assad regime and their backers, Russia and Iran, and the various jihadis are not looking out for the vast majority of Syrians. The Russians, Iranians, and foreign jihadis are the imperialists in Syria. The Free Syrian Army is the only militant group representing home rule, i.e. anti-imperialists. I don’t believe for a second that the US is not acting out of self-interest. Pentagon folks chafe at seeing a warm water port for Russian ships. US corporate oilygarchs want the subsurface resource contracts. The people of Syria should have control of these strategic and natural resources, not the genocidal Assad regime. We can only hope that the new government of Syria will have open international ports and nationalized natural resources. That is most likely with a horizontally organized and democratic people’s government. I do agree that there is no reason to trust the US. This is about supporting the Syrian people who are asking for our help to take out Assad’s capacity to bomb them from the air. The oldest saying in the Middle East is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It fits this situation well. The Syrian people fighting Assad are under no illusions that the USA ever acts altruistically and are not asking for US battalions or a US friendly dictator, they just need some good ol’ USAF Hellfire.
