Portside

Portside's posts did not go out as scheduled Saturday and Sunday. Our service provider, May First, upgraded all of their servers Saturday, to prevent coordinated hacking and DOS - Denial of Service attacks. Unfortunately there were conflicts between the new server software and the software that Portside uses to send posts. We have identified the problem, and are now working to correct it. Below is an Index of the posts that were posted to our website over the weekend.

The greatest hope for a peaceful and democratic Syria is its civil society, now in tatters as a result of regime repression and the rise of the militias.

Americans are being told that the virtuous course in Syria is to fight the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian partners. We are supposed to hope that a righteous coalition of Americans, Turks, Saudis, Kurds, and the “moderate opposition” will win.This is convoluted nonsense, but Americans cannot be blamed for believing it. We have almost no real information about the combatants, their goals, or their tactics. Much blame for this lies with our media.

Reader Comments: The Bernie Generation, and Bernie and After, and Hillary; Clinton's Attack on Reconstruction; Backlash to Corbyn and Sanders; Flint, Racism, African Americans and the Criminal Governor Snyder; The Syrian Peace Talks; Announcements: Building on Bernie: What Comes Next; Migrant Labor in China: A Post-Socialist Transformation; #BlackLivesMatter - Books on Black Liberation

To no one’s surprise the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) was unable to come to agreement on Jordan’s proposed list of 160 terrorist groups that should be precluded from participating in peace negotiations between the Assad regime and the Syrian opposition. Jordan presented the list to the ISSG December 18th, and it was tabled. And on December 25 Qatar’s Foreign Minister announced his country’s opposition to the development of any list before negotiations begin.

Ted Cruz leads way as candidates discuss carpet-bombing and attacking terrorists’ families, despite Geneva Conventions ban on ‘indiscriminate attacks’

Germany is constitutionally barred from foreign missions but that never bothered anyone in the government. Germany's rulers, in coalition armchairs or skulking in lobbies behind them, are very determined to expand political, economic and military power, not just in Europe but to far distant shores as well. Some dangerous bombs from the last century are still found in Germany; they must be defused. This applies equally to dangerous ideas.

The chaos in the Middle-east which has led to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing ISIL’s barbarous rule is the result of fifteen years of Western interventionism. How can France ever take a convincing stand against ISIL while claiming to be the main ally, and provider of fighter planes, to the Gulf monarchies. The real question, to which French diplomacy has so far given no convincing answer, is not how to win the war but how to put an end to it.

It's not a world war—at least not yet— but the increased regional and global focus on the Islamic State militant group that currently holds territory in both Iraq and Syria is brewing an increasingly volatile situation that is reverberating from the heart of the Middle East to the major cities of Paris, Beirut, and Moscow, and taking center stage in the political conversations in the U.S., across Europe, and beyond.