An Alternate Version of the Stein/Ware Campaign’s Response to Mehdi Hasan
Complex issues require nuanced and serious discussion, not sound bites. In addition to discussing who is a war criminal, we need to discuss why there is a war.
Recently, Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and her running mate, Professor Butch Ware, had a contentious interview with journalist Mehdi Hasan. Hasan, a devoted Democrat despite strongly disagreeing with the Democrats on Israel/Palestine, appeared much more confrontational with Stein and Ware than he’s tended to be with other politicians he’s interviewed, such as outgoing Democratic Congressman Jamaal Bowman. Channeling Piers Morgan, who “interviews” people with opinions divergent from his own by constantly interrupting them and insisting that they answer questions that require extended responses to properly answer with “yes” or “no,” Hasan at one point asked Stein whether she thought Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were war criminals.
Stein and her team, dissatisfied with the lack of “opportunity for nuanced and serious discussion of important and controversial topics,” as they put it, issued a statement in which they elaborated on the campaign’s position regarding Putin and Assad, stating among other things that “we condemn all war criminals, including Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and many others who are responsible for untold human suffering. We condemn Benjamin Netanyahu in the strongest terms for his ongoing atrocities in Gaza, which amount to genocide and war crimes.”
In my opinion, the Stein/Ware campaign’s brief statement did not provide the appropriate degree of nuance and detail regarding the issue, as both the Ukraine War in which Russia has been involved since 2022 and the Syrian War in which Russia interceded in defense of the Syrian government in 2015 are complex topics that a brief statement cannot possibly do sufficient justice to. As I put it in a response to Dr. Stein’s Twitter/X post regarding the statement, “although it's true that there was a lack of opportunity for nuanced, serious discussion during the interview w/Mehdi Hasan due to his constant interruptions & deceptive framing of issues, you've had all the time in the world to issue a nuanced statement. This ain't it.” Having closely followed and written extensively about the Ukraine War and being relatively familiar with the Syria War, I decided to write my own statement representing how I would have responded in writing to Hasan’s query. That statement follows below. Because it is already quite lengthy, I have omitted discussion of the importance of diplomacy, although the Stein/Ware campaign statement devoted most of its 635 words to that. Needless to say, given how dangerous the situations in Ukraine and the Middle East are, I agree wholeheartedly with their sentiments.
Discussing Who is a War Criminal Without Discussing Why There is a War Just Won’t Do
Mehdi Hasan’s Shady Interview Tactics
In a recent interview with us, Mehdi Hasan asked “Is [Russian President] Vladimir Putin a war criminal?” and asked the same question about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. We do not believe this question was asked in good faith. The point of this particular question was to get us to acquiesce to a simplistic “both sides are bad” framing that ignores or downplays the geopolitical context within which war crimes by Syrian and Russian troops and political leaders (and troops and political leaders on the other side of the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts) are alleged to have occurred. While we agree that all allegations of war crimes on both sides of any armed conflict should be investigated, we believe it is vital to discuss that context, not because it excuses the commission of war crimes by any of the parties involved, but because it is vital to the pursuit of peace to understand how the wars in question occurred in the first place and what it would have taken to avoid them—and any resulting war crimes. Accordingly, we discuss this below.
However, we’d first like to comment on Mehdi’s general approach to the interview. He didn’t only ask one question that seemed to us like it wasn’t asked in good faith; his whole approach was confrontational. Rather than simply letting us answer the questions he asked, he interrupted us so often that we had to repeatedly ask him to let us finish. And as if to confirm our impression that he wasn’t interviewing us with the objective of helping us reach more voters via his large audience, he paywalled the interview and only released two short clips to the general public.
Moreover, though he strongly disagrees with most Democrats on some issues such as the Palestine conflict, nonetheless he brought up most of the standard DNC talking points that we’ve been hearing for years: the claim that Jill supposedly “spoiled” Hillary Clinton’s election in 2016 by getting more votes than Donald Trump’s margin of victory in key swing states, the claim that the Green Party was focused on the presidential race and doing little to build on a local level, the claim that Jill Stein might be a “Russian asset” because Vladimir Putin once briefly sat on the other side of her dinner table at a banquet she attended in Moscow nine years ago, and the issue that is our focus here, the insistence that candidates for political office must jump through the major parties’ hoops and condemn heads of state the US government dislikes for war crimes they are alleged to have committed. (We have responded to the other talking points at length in various interviews and statements which are available on our campaign website or via our social media accounts, so we will not address them here.)
The US: Still Trying to Be the Global Hegemon
The central fact that needs to be understood about geopolitics is that the US has been the most powerful imperial nation in the world for many decades, with its economic and military hegemony only recently being seriously challenged by the rise of China and Russia. It has resorted to military force and other undemocratic means to interfere in the affairs of other countries more than any other country: engaging in 251 military interventions just since 1991, backing dozens of coup attempts or military coups, interfering in dozens of elections, and imposing economic sanctions on dozens of countries. And the aim of these interventions has been to make other countries politically and economically subservient to the US, resulting in greater profits for US-based multinational corporations, rather than allowing them to be sovereign, independent nations pursuing their own developmental path. Similarly, the US has sought to undermine all national liberation movements (e.g., efforts by Palestinians to liberate themselves from Israeli colonial occupation) and their supporters (e.g., the “Axis of Resistance” consisting of Syria, Iran, Yemen, Hezbollah, etc.).
US Subversion of Syria
Syria and Russia (and, previously, the Soviet Union) have very much been among the victims of US imperialism’s efforts to sabotage countries’ sovereignty. Syria has been in the crosshairs of the US empire ever since it gained its independence from France in 1946, with several CIA-backed coups and coup attempts taking place over the ensuing decades. A 1986 CIA document stated that “In our view, US interests would be best served by a Sunni regime controlled by business-oriented moderates.” In other words, the CIA was arguing for the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, which was allied with the Soviet Union, by pro-Western Muslims. And in 2001, the Bush administration’s Department of Defense wrote a memo calling for the overthrow of seven governments of Muslim majority countries, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Shortly thereafter, in 2005, the Bush administration began funding the Muslim Brotherhood and other Syrian opposition forces.
Only a decade later, the so-called “Arab Spring,” political uprisings in several Arab countries that included Syria and Libya, broke out (with considerable “help” from the US government), providing opportunities for US regime change efforts. In Libya, the popular government of Moammar Qaddafi, under whose leadership Libyans had the highest standard of living in Africa, was overthrown by the combined efforts of “rebels” who were largely CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalists and, despite Libya being nowhere near the North Atlantic, a NATO bombing campaign. In Syria, a multitude of countries or forces participated in an attempt to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad, including the US, Israel, Turkey, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Netherlands, Kurdish nationalists, and various largely Islamic fundamentalist armed factions, including ISIS and al Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate. Under President Obama’s Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA armed and trained what were misleadingly described at the time as “moderate rebels”—largely religious extremists who had as their goal the establishment of a Muslim fundamentalist caliphate in Syria.
With such a wide array of forces attempting to overthrow it, Assad’s government would not have survived without foreign help, which it got initially from the Lebanese group Hezbollah, with Iran helping by supplying arms and Russia, a longtime Syrian ally dating back to the days of the Soviet Union, helping diplomatically. However, the “moderate rebels” advanced to the suburbs of Damascus, Syria’s capital, and accordingly the Syrian government asked Russia to directly intervene militarily, which it agreed to do. Many Western leftists have objected to Russian or other intervention to defend the Syrian government or even supported the efforts to overthrow Assad’s government on the grounds that it is authoritarian. But Assad is the elected president of Syria and is relatively popular among the Syrian people. Even if he were unpopular like, for instance, current US President Joe Biden or his predecessor Donald Trump, how many Americans, even if they were among those who truly hate the sitting president, would support a foreign-backed military campaign to overthrow the US government, with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists playing a leading role? Hardly anyone would, and they would also be rightly suspicious of the motives of those foreign powers. Syrians feel similarly.
US Subversion of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine
As with Syria, there is a long history of the US and other Western nations attempting to subvert the Russian and, before that, the Soviet government. Following the Russian Revolution, more than a dozen countries, including the US, invaded Russia in an attempt to overthrow the new Bolshevik government. Following World War II, as if to add insult to the injury of the Nazis killing 27 million Soviet citizens, the CIA began backing Ukrainian Nazis (who had collaborated with Nazi Germany in slaughtering over a million Ukrainian Jews), resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Soviet citizens during the ensuing decade. (Note that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union at the time.) After the fall of the Soviet Union, efforts to weaken Russia and undermine its sovereignty continued. US-backed President Boris Yeltsin implemented neoliberal “reforms” such as mass privatization, removal of price controls, and an open door for foreign investment at the behest of Western economists. The result was utter economic collapse, and considerable Western control over Russia’s economy. Wishing to see Russia continue such policies, the US massively interfered in the 1996 Russian presidential election to make sure Yeltsin was re-elected despite the unpopularity of his economic policies. It was hardly a covert operation; Time Magazine boasted about US meddling in the election, making it their cover story
in July 1996. Steady expansion of NATO continued throughout the 1990s and 21st century, with military bases and exercises and advanced weaponry moving eastward as well, despite US assurances that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany.
The US also backed “color revolutions” in neighboring Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, as well as the better-known Maidan Square coup in 2013-14 when the descendants of the very same Ukrainian Nazis that the US had backed in the ’40s and ’50s achieved an unprecedented level of power. In addition to banning the Communist Party and other left-wing parties and imprisoning, torturing, or executing political dissidents, the coup government attacked the language rights of the ethnic Russian minority. Anti-government protests broke out in cities around the country, particularly in the predominantly ethnic Russian eastern (Donbass) and southeastern (Crimea) regions, where polls indicated the overwhelming majority of the population opposed the Maidan “revolution.” These protests were violently attacked by the Nazis, resulting in strong separatist sentiment. Residents of both Crimea and the Donbass provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine, with Crimeans additionally voting to join Russia. A civil war between the coup government and the Donbass provinces broke out, resulting in 14,000 deaths between 2014 and 2021. Russia attempted several times to settle the conflict between the Kiev government and the Donbass region, starting with the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, but Ukraine refused to abide by them, and the US and NATO ignored a Russian proposal to settle it and create a framework for peace in Europe in December 2021.
Then, in mid-February 2022, the Kiev regime dramatically escalated its shelling of the Donbass, and intelligence indicated that it was about to launch a ground invasion of the Donbass. (Additionally, Zelensky reiterated his desire for Ukraine to join NATO, expressed a desire for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons, and threatened to invade Crimea.) Upon learning of that information, the provincial governments of Donetsk and Luhansk requested Russia’s help in fending off Ukrainian troops, and the Russia-Ukraine (or Russia-NATO) war began. As Scott Ritter has pointed out, given that Donetsk and Luhansk had declared independence and Russia had recognized them as independent, Russia has a case that its invasion was legal under the circumstances. Whether it was the right thing to do to address the government’s violence and threats is another matter, and we think there were other, better options. [I know Jill and Bruce disagree with Russia’s invasion, so this is their opinion that I’m presenting here—I personally think it may have been the least bad among the options.] But, although we lack the requisite legal qualifications to say for sure, we acknowledge that there’s a plausible case for its legality.
The Importance of Putting Alleged War Crimes in Context
The above discussion by no means is meant to excuse any war crimes that Syrian or Russian troops may have committed or dismiss the possibility that they occurred. However, Russian and Syrian forces could not have committed war crimes had the wars in Syria and Ukraine not happened, and they would not have happened had the US not attempted to make them happen in pursuit of its imperial objectives. As political commentator Stephen Gowans puts it:
From the birth of the US empire as 13 English colonies in a stolen land to the present day, the foundation of the empire’s foreign policy has been to crush any force of local independence and national assertiveness that stood in the way of enlarging the empire’s dominant economic interests, whether it was those of land speculators, slave holders lusting after land, manufacturers seeking foreign markets, or financiers pursuing profitable investment opportunities abroad. In the grips of an expansionary profit-making imperative, Washington is driven to replace all foreign governments which resist integration into the US economy, including the Syrian, Cuban, North Korean, Venezuelan, and Iranian governments [and, it should be added, the Russian government].
Although the US ruling class frowns on explicit public declarations of these motives such as Donald Trump’s acknowledgement that US troops are occupying the northeastern part of Syria in part in order to steal Syria’s oil, it's not as though the US’s motivations regarding Syria and Russia are deeply hidden. According to US special representative to Syria James Jeffrey, the US wishes to establish “a degree of control over Syria similar to what it had in Japan at the end of the Second World War.” US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin publicly stated that the US’s objective in its involvement in the Ukraine War (along with the draconian economic sanctions that Trump and Biden have imposed on Russia) was to “weaken Russia,” and a 2019 Rand Corporation document characterized the US’s objective regarding Russia as being regime change in Russia, followed by the unrestrained pillage of Russia’s vast natural resources by foreign predators. Moreover, it advocated using Ukraine as a tool for effecting destabilization of Russia.
Western Propaganda About Its Enemies
In evaluating the possible commission of war crimes by the US government’s declared enemies, it is important to bear in mind that the US ruling class has a strong incentive to distort or fabricate evidence in this regard, and there are many examples of this occurring. For instance, the US has repeatedly accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons, but such allegations have repeatedly been debunked, and Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles were destroyed under OPCW supervision in 2013-2015. Another example is the evidence-free claims of mass rape that have been made against Libyan, Russian, and Palestinian soldiers. The claim that Palestinians committed mass rape on Oct. 7 is repeated to this day by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, while she and her fellow politicians ignore the openly acknowledged commission of mass rape of Palestinians by Israeli military and security personnel. The US and its NATO allies have also accused Russian troops of committing a massacre of civilians in Bucha and other war crimes that the evidence suggests were instead committed by Ukrainian military or security forces, and war crimes committed by the “moderate rebels” in Syria have similarly been misattributed to Syrian or Russian forces. Even Western human rights organizations and leftist media outlets and organizations are not immune to making false or misleading claims about the perpetration of war crimes by US adversaries such as Syria and Russia, perhaps because their funding sources often include the US government or US foundations and billionaire “philanthropists.”
Moreover, even the International Criminal Court appears to have a pro-US/Western bias. There is an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Llova-Belova for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children despite a lack of evidence that this occurred, but as of this time there is still no arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, even though video documentation of Israel’s war crimes appears in social media on a daily basis.
To reiterate what we said earlier, credible allegations of war crimes should be investigated by international courts regardless of which side of a conflict the alleged perpetrators are on. As for Mehdi’s question regarding whether we consider Putin or Assad to “be war criminals” (bear responsibility for war crimes), we acknowledge that it is plausible that they and/or their troops are responsible for war crimes given how commonplace it is for war crimes to be committed in the course of wars. Though it is almost universally believed that the Allies were on the right side of history when they were fighting against the fascist Axis powers, the Allies nonetheless committed war crimes, such as carpet bombing Dresden or nuking Hiroshima. War crimes have also been committed by national liberation movements such as those in Algeria, South Africa, or India. That said, to focus exclusively on who is a war criminal while ignoring why wars occur in the first place and what the motives of those involved are is to ignore the forest for the trees.