Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

Heard on the BBC, former Prime Minister Blair calling him a reformer because more women are in universities now. Then the Amnesty International guy responded that while that was good, most of those women were likely from well-to-do families; plus the human rights issues remain horrible there and women can't drive, etc.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/23/saudi-arabias-king-misremembered-man-peace/

Who wants to bet Dick Cheney flies over to attend Abdullah's funeral.

I'm not watching this video fwiw but hey great friends of the US amirite

http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/21/middleeast/saudi-beheading-video/

my eurocentrism led me to believe all monarchial systems had pretty clear rules of succession. whoops!

He had suggested to an American counterterrorism official that electronic chips be implanted in detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

He said it had worked with horses and falcons, to which the American replied, “Horses don’t have good lawyers.”

truly a force for moderation

the American's reply is worse i think

whole exchange is disgusting, the American wink-wink "joke" included

Getting worse in Yemen:

Yemen Government in Limbo Amid Uncertainty Over President’s Resigation

Yemen could easily become a worse humanitarian crisis than Syria. Sana'a was already [running out of water](http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/aug/27/solution-yemen-water-crisis) when it had a semi-functioning government.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/yazidi-militia-makes-public-request-for-israeli-help/

ISIS in the Sinai, Yazidis on the right, here I am...

In Washington Post neo-con Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt's mind Obama's not trying hard enough to find the moderates throughout the region that the US should support. Not that I approve of US support for Saudi and Egyptian dictators or that I approve of the handling of Libya and elsewhere, but Hyatt does not seem to recognize just how difficult it is to find those moderates :

“After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be,” the president said.

So what happened? The Arab Spring didn’t go as hoped — and the United States began to lose the war. An al-Qaeda offshoot shockingly conquered large swaths of Iraq and Syria. Libya descended into civil war. Yemen, which Obama cited just last year as proof of his successful strategy, is on a similar downward spiral. The Taliban is gaining ground in Afghanistan. Boko Haram is carving out another space for barbarism in Nigeria.

When Obama is questioned about this picture, he generally stands up his favorite straw man: “If the assertion is, is that had we invaded Syria we would be less prone to terrorist attacks, I’ll leave it to you to play out that scenario and whether that sounds accurate,” he said during his recent news conference with British leader David Cameron.

But that is not the assertion. What critics suggest is that Obama should implement the strategy he outlined in a speech at West Point in May: not a U.S. invasion, not a subcontracting of the war to heavy-handed dictators, but “a network of partnerships from South Asia to the Sahel” with moderate forces committed to fighting extremism.

Unfortunately, Obama has put little meat on that strategy. He toppled Libya’s strongman, then abandoned the country. He pulled all advisers out of Iraq and vows to do the same to Afghanistan. He emphasizes drone strikes, but with little of the institution-building that would engender cooperation over the long term. Help for Syrian moderates has been promised again and again for four years, with little to show for it. And instead of building public support for what must be a long and difficult effort, Obama barnstorms the country boasting that “our troops are coming home.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fred-hiatt-obamas-troubling-counterterrorism-allies-dictators/2015/01/25/56ad3d76-a288-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html

big suicide bombing in pakistan today - shiite target

I'm reading Lawrence Wright's "Thirteen Days in September" now (about the Camp David negotiations) -- Mordy (or anyone else) have you read it? Thoughts? So far it seems very pop history in style, and maybe indulges in some speculation about motivations, but very good nonetheless.

this is the one that just came out last year? wright is an engaging writer, but i haven't read it yet

yeah that one. friend lent it to me, I enjoy his writing a lot (have read Going Clear and a lot of his New Yorker work).

Jordan pilot hostage Moaz al-Kasasbeh 'burned alive'

ISIS hijacking UN aid to Syria, slapping their logo on it

all these hostage murders... what do they think they're achieving, exactly? so far, no one meets their demands, they kill the guys in a brutal fashion, rinse and repeat. I guess it keeps them in the headlines/furthers their notoriety but it seems kind of pointless from a tactical standpoint. If anything it just sharpens the resolution of their opponents, I would think.

helps w/ recruitment i'd guess

saddened to live in a world where that's a successful recruiting tactic

In this case, it is

The horrific hostage murder strategy is probably subject to the law of diminishing returns by now. But it is interesting to note that beheading individual westerners gave them greater attention and notoriety in the USA than when they were massacring hundreds of locals as they captured cities in Syria and Iraq.

idk what's interesting about that we have a long history of not giving a fuck about people who are not US citizens

I think you'll find that mindset is not exclusive to the US.

i can't believe ppl care more about ppl from their country than ppl not from their country - this is surely unique to the US

lol xp

The release of the video has prompted Jordan to announce it will execute all prisoners convicted of association with ISIS 'within hours'. This includes Sajida al-Rishawi - the female failed suicide bomber whom ISIS had originally demanded Jordan release in exchange for Kasasbeh.

Within an hour of the video's publication, Jordan reportedly moved five ISIS-linked prisoners to a jail in the south of the country which is usually used for state executions.

it obviously sharpens the battle lines, but I'm not sure this is really to ISIS's tactical advantage. at some point they're going to have made an awful lot of enemies, too many for them to realistically overcome or deal with.

i mean that's what i'd think but isn't the conventional [left?] wisdom about this kind of thing that provoking attacks helps them bc it helps recruitment and lends them credibility?

is that what this is, a provocation tactic...? ie they are expecting either the west or other enemies to overreact and bomb some innocents and thereby come off looking even worse than ISIS? (afaict this is not really happening)

No I don't think it's that at all

The hostage killings were one of the reasons public sentiment kind of got behind US involvement. Their problem is that there don't seem to be that many civilians in the areas they're operating, for obvious reasons, so it's not particularly challenging for the bombers to wipe out the convoys of dozens of jeeps racing across arid desert.

Without the new videos, the biggest news would be about how badly they got rinsed by the Kurds and Americans in Kobani.

theres nothing ive seen that is particularly enlightening wrt the motivic elements and psychopathology of the new iteration of jihad as distinct from the prior lot

the pilot was always going to die, a hundred other insurgent groups islamic or otherwise would have done the thing, it's really only the burning alive part and the mma promo styled .flv of it that is different and disturbing

among other things this is a statelet being run by people with an average age and educational level probably lower than that of an american mma fan

I had to look up what mma was lol

also u probably don't get into the jihad game w/out having a disposition towards horrific violence + murder

I disagree somewhat with nakh. imo, the abilities of the people who are running ISIS are more comparable to the promoters of mma than to the fans.

seems like their goal is to draw clear lines between themselves, as the righteous new caliphate, and the infidels (ie everyone else). which has some kind of logical consistency behind it, but the implication that the logistical requirements of establishing a state and militarily defeating Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the U.S. and a half-dozen smaller proxy nations eludes them is kind of crazy. they think they can provoke all these countries into a large-scale conflagration with their territorial pissings and hostage beheadings (not that farfetched), but that they will ultimately win that conflict? granted delusions of grandeur are not altogether uncommon among jihadists, but that's a level of delusion that's hard to fathom.

I would assume they are thinking extremely long term in that regard. Still delusional, but I don't think they expect to defeat any of those countries in the next 5-10 years.

woah this is super interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-is-said-to-use-oil-to-lure-russia-away-from-syrias-assad.html

all these hostage murders... what do they think they're achieving, exactly? so far, no one meets their demands, they kill the guys in a brutal fashion, rinse and repeat. I guess it keeps them in the headlines/furthers their notoriety but it seems kind of pointless from a tactical standpoint. If anything it just sharpens the resolution of their opponents, I would think.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, February 3, 2015 1:28 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Notoriety is the point. They're jihad with an advanced social media strategy. They're building a brand.

They only have to kidnap/kill a couple of people and broadcast in in HD, and they get a huge recruitment boost -- it's pretty cost-effective, really.

As far as provoking the US and other powers, I would guess they have to play a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, provoking just enough response to further their aims without provoking full-scale military involvement aimed at destroying them. I don't know how skilled at that they actually are, but that's what I assume they're going for.

Was it Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that predicted he'd be running the whole Islamic world within three months?

they remind me a little of ungern-sturnberg, then in his early 30s, and his 'asiatic division' of white russian soldiers, various central asian irregulars, criminals etc who briefly ruled mongolia after the first world war and spent most of that time slaughtering people and devising edicts borne of his strange mix of tsarist absolutism and lamaism

the leadership contain a few ex-baathist officers but most of the people throwing homosexuals from tall buildings seem to be college age or thereabouts, one of their senior field commanders is a 28 yr old chechen

There was a great discussion of the ramifications of the Jordanian hostage and domestic Jordanian politics in the Feb 1 Ian Masters Background Briefing. Moaz al-Kasasbeh was a scion of an important tribe in southern Jordan, which protested encouraging a hostage trade. Meanwhile Jordan's king is viewed as aloof from domestic affairs, Jordan's cities are packed with poorly documented Iraqi Sunni and Syrian refugees, and the Israeli right has announced intentions to invade if the Jordanian regime were to fall. Nightmare scenario material.

and the Israeli right has announced intentions to invade if the Jordanian regime were to fall.

uh, no.

i have heard for a number of years that the IDF has a 24-48 hour plan to occupy all of jordan but more as like a rumor than anything specific

Militaries have hypothetical plans for a lot of things that they never intend to do.