Kurdish and Arab forces in the Syrian Democratic Forces, the leading alliance of anti-ISIS militias, directly supported by the West and heavily tied with the Syrian Kurdish nation, finally liberated the city of Manbij from Islamic State occupation after a bloody and costly siege that lasted many months. This was, without a doubt, a cause for jubilation, and soon the internet was filled with wonderful photos of liberation. Propaganda, great optics, either way, people had been liberated from horrible persecution and depredation. As someone who has been following this conflict and the valiant efforts of the SDF, I found these events and the images of them heartwarming and beautiful.

Others did not find this heartwarming or beautiful, be they modern day Stalinists, Assad phalangists, lovers of Putin, supporters of genocide, or cuddly third party candidates for crunchy pseudohippie white Americans. Today, I'll examine why.

How did Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein react? Timid pooh-poohing, aping subtlety, the sort of thing you'd get from That One Guy on Facebook who can't help making passive aggressive memes about whatever a majority of people are popularly enjoying right now, be it "Pokémon GO" or whatever's hot.

https://twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/764302997404999680

Now, outside of the greater context I intend to present with this, the above statement may seem fairly innocuous, even justified. It's true, innocent people have been killed during the Western air campaign. It is, of course, important to note that this air campaign and our air forces serve at the behest and direction of local commanders and troops on the ground. In the dead of night, sighting a convoy of vehicles leaving an ISIS-held city, it's difficult for SDF commanders and Western pilots to truly discern what the right call is. Perhaps it's better not to take the chance, not to take the shot, maybe they're civilians or ISIS mixed in with civilian human shields. But then one considers how many people might be murdered by the potential ISIS elements fleeing to fight another day. It's a troubling choice.

During the greater part of YPG and SDF liberation offensives, we have essentially served as the Kurdish/Arab air force. Our military commitment in this region for the last two years has been absolutely key, brought about after President Obama couldn't keep waffling while the Islamic State ruthlessly murdered and massacred minorities during the Siege of Kobanî in 2014. Without it, the Kurdish and Arabic militias fighting the oppression of the Islamic state and liberating countless religious and ethnic minorities under threat, without this support they would have undoubtedly suffered greater bloodshed and massacre from ISIS and regime forces. The beautiful run of victories which has continued nearly without victory and forced ISIS into lashing out in more and more desperate terror attacks, which has ensured ISIS has been losing city after city, none of this would have been possible without Western assistance.

Now, it goes without saying that the foreign policy of the American government is self-interested and imperialistic. This is the realpolitik reality of every superpower in history, and is also true for essentially any foreign government out there you could name in the present. This is, however, the rare moment where our interventionist policy aligns with a good and achievable cause, namely the defense of millions of Syrians against the twin scourges of Assad and ISIS. Given the rare opportunity wherein our foreign policy finally aligns with actions that have saved multitudes of innocents and resulted in Kurds cheering bombing raids and naming their kids after Obama, our air, material and special forces commitment in Syria has been wildly successful and justifiable.

There are those who would point out that American involvement in the Middle East, Western interference in the region, these things have historically led to horrible atrocities and the creation of groups such as the Islamic State. Again, this is an understandable view, but the inherent implication with such an observation when utilized to argue against our current intervention of Syria tends to be, "Yeah, we f'd it up, but hell no we're not helping clean it up! Handle your own problems, brown people."

So, here is Dr. Jill Stein reacting to the liberation of Manbij because of U.S.-led forces, which she states herself...while simultaneously apologizing for our weapons which were the key reason this series of liberation has happened for the last two years. Somehow we are responsible both for the liberation and terrorizing of the Syrian people.

Note that this is not Jill Stein attempting nuance. She's not weighing in with a "I'm glad we've helped the SDF liberate Manbij, but I'm also obviously disheartened by any civilians killed as collateral damage," because, note her hashtags. #NoMoreWar and #PeaceOffensive. Surely the Kurds would have been saved from Assad barrel bombs and Islamic state massacre with a nice little air campaign of leaflets and granola bars. Never mind the fact that countless Kurds, Yazidis, Assyrians and Arabs would have been ruthlessly massacred if it were not specifically for Western arms and bombing. This is the sort of ideology that disregards context or detail. Jill Stein's response to this sort of situation is consistent -- every intervention is a War in Iraq, even if it isn't. That's not admirably sticking for your guns -- that's just responding to differing and nuanced situations with the same absolutist response.

This is the sort of pointed political gamesmanship and chicanery that exposes Jill Stein for what she is, just another politician, just another hypocritical one. It's similar to her waffling over vaccines wherein she initially tweeted that saying there was no evidence of vaccines causing autism and then deleted that so she could make the same tweet with a slight modification, saying that she was "not aware of evidence" that they did. It's the coy cynicism that one expects from Hillary Clinton.

Note that in her tweet she's not decrying the continued intentional Russian and Assad firebombing of population centers, or any of their campaign of massacre and atrocity, or the fact that they're more interested in bombing free Syrian rebels rather than actual terrorist factions. This is a key point. I understand, of course, that there's only so much space in a tweet. I'm not expecting her to end every Syria-related tweet with a series of attacks on the Russian/Assad/Iranian coalition, but it is interesting noting the things she chooses to highlight and the things she does not choose to highlight. The promotion of some sort of false equivalency between Russian/Assad actions in Syria and American actions in Syria only serves to whitewash the horror of the former. Putin and the Islamic Republic of Iran violently propping up a genocidal maniac whose people had attempted a peaceful revolution. They have been hitting a hospital an average of once every five days since their campaign began. Their campaigns to murder hundreds of doctors, spray population centers with gas and fire and brutally bomb civilian centers specifically because they're civilian centers, these are all well-documented. But in the course of human history America bombed hospitals every so often too, so it's completely the same thing and fine.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/syrias-war-on-doctors

Here's Jill Stein meeting with ruthless murdering authoritarian Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump's military adviser at a dinner for Russia Today, the propaganda arm of the Russian government that likes to float such ideas as "anyone fighting the Assad government is an evil brown terrorist who we are definitely justified in bombing." Weird, huh? Almost like she's in some sort of unholy political alliance that would definitely not fit with an actual moral backbone. Almost like she's just a politician. Almost like she's just a lesser of many evils.

https://twitter.com/zatchry/status/762055852991713280

How progressive!

Again, this isn't about the fact that American actions around the world haven't often been just as bad. There's no need to point out some obvious "Amerikkkan" hypocrisy like a junior high student. This is specifically about Syria, and specifically in this case Western actions are rescuing thousands while the actions of the Russian and Syrian government purposefully murder multitudes.

She chose as her vice president someone who supports brutal dictator Basher al-Assad's fixed elections because, get this, the West decried them as the fixed games of a murderer, as they were. Guess that means the opposite is true.

http://www.ajamubaraka.com/blog/2014/6/5/elections...

This is the same conceit followed by a whole wide variety of mostly white radical leftists and tankies. Imperialism, totalitarianism, genocide, they're all gauged as fine and acceptable when not committed by American regimes. They take the enemy of my enemy rhetoric to its most laughable mutated extreme, figuring that if a dictator like Kim Jong-Un or Bashar al-Assad is hated by the United States government then, well, they must be awesome guys.

It's the toxic sort of ideology that seems to completely disregard context or detail. Every American action and ally is venomous, NATO propaganda and any foreign state or leader nominally opposed to American policy while peddling their own noxious imperialism or atrocity, they must be just fine and dandy. The hilarious tragedy at the heart of this is that these people lack the fundamental basic ability to understand mutual exclusivity. It's possible, my friends, that American policy is imperialistic AND Russian policy is imperialistic AND Basher al-Assad probably isn't a very good guy. What with all the massacres, torture, chemical attacks and specific targeting of hospitals and doctors and civilians. Maybe the fact that America is nominally opposed to his alliance bloc does not happen to mean he's an unjustly victimized target of Western propaganda? Maybe you can accept that "America's bad" without deciding that therefore everything America opposes must be good?

It's important that such people, against mostly white liberals and hippie types, do not actually attribute agency to foreign people or people of color. They speak for Syrians and all Syrian people, they know there's no possibility that brown people on the ground actually begged for (when faced with certain annihilation) and widely celebrate our actions on the ground. After all, they know better. Just as you know better when you sanctimoniously choose third party instead of Trump or Hillary. Why vote for the lesser of two evils when you can vote for the lesser of three evils? No more blood for oil, man!