Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

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.

Israel has openly said it would defend the Jordanian regime against attack, however.

I would think that the Israeli right tends to announce all kinds of batshit things

I haven't found Master's or Nicholas Heras source for that (discussed in the last few minutes), but its not difficult to find Israeli opinion pieces that assert Israel is the "ultimate guarantor" of the Hashemite regime.

Defending the regime and "invade" kind of have different connotations.

there are few more unlikely evidential appeals than 'its not difficult to find Israeli opinion pieces that assert '

tactical victory

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/04/uae-united-arab-emirates-isis-air-attacks-pilot

the daily mail is pleased today to find a prominent muslim ready to condemn the barbaric killers of kassabah, some enlightened cleric from egypt who demands that they be crucified because only god may punish by burning

the more i read about ISIS the more i think this is, to a great extent, a matter of disaffected people--including a lot of psychopaths--converging on one part of the world and given nearly free rein. ISIS is like a magnet for these folks, and the results aren't surprising in that light.

i kind of wonder if this is what the crusades were like.

w/o mass media, of course

this is not that uncommon a pattern throughout history, the crusades were a license for freelance thuggery and theft and there must be some amount of habitual criminals in isis for whom the opportunity to brutalize, thieve, siphon, extort and disappear is considerably more appealing than the prospect of being martyred

also having dismissed ogmor's claim that isis twitter' game was particularly distinctive or notable or uncannily imitative of the_west, and suggested that the killing of daniel pearl was the last great breakthrough in jihad public relations, this intricately constructed new video and the suggestion that wacky new execution methods were being crowdsourced on twitter prior to its release does represent some degree of innovation

psychopaths and sadists can be enormously useful to those aiming to achieve political ends by force, cf Chris Kyle

and war is also enormously useful to violent psycopaths, so it's a win-win really

psychopaths and sadists can be enormously useful to those aiming to achieve political ends by force, cf Chris Kyle

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Wednesday, February 4, 2015 9:48 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is probably the movie clint eastwood should have made, but would never make-- of course.

FWIW I heard the screenwriter say something to that effect, though in milder terms (he never called Kyle a psycopath or sadist, he just said he was used by his government)

psychopaths and sadists can be enormously useful to those aiming to achieve political ends by force, cf Chris Kyle

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Wednesday, 4 February 2015 15:48 (26 minutes ago)

topical social commentary ;)

even as I wrote that post I thought "this might be a little...trenchant"

A former operative for Al Qaeda testified that members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family were major donors in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy.

This is a surprise to who now...?

this is so sad and awful:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/world/middleeast/shaimaa-el-sabbagh-tahrir-square-killing-angers-egyptians.html

seems pertinent:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/31/terrorism-spectacle-how-states-respond-yuval-noah-harari-sapiens?utm_content=buffer38676&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

it's interesting bc this terrorism calculus only really makes sense in the modern world where things like "mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion wavers, questions are asked, neutrals change their stance and the balance of power shifts," are attenuated in their impact. in a time where overwhelming military response or atrocities are the status quo, or where you don't have the nature of war weariness / resistance found in democracies, etc, many of these things are defused. i think in one sense this is how terrorism exploits western ideals - it tries to force us to be untrue to our own ideals and expose our hypocrisies (that all predate that particular attack). i think this is also behind a lot of my skepticism about the value of terrorism. obv if you can pull a country like the US into a long protracted and expensive war (like Iraq) you can deal actual damage to their system (though still probably far less than conventional destruction of military assets). but for the most part terrorism victories, like that piece says, are theatrical, or ideological victories. but i'm not sure that theater or ideology translate substantially into actual victories. like you can get the US public to demand we pull out of Iraq, but you can't get the president to stop drone bombing yemen. you can increase US debt, but you can't destroy natural resources, trade affiliations, production, etc.

AMMAN, Jordan — There was one feeling that many of the Middle East’s fractious clerics, competing ethnic groups and warring sects could agree on Wednesday: a shared sense of revulsion at the Islamic State’s latest excess, its video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive inside a cage.

In Syria, the government denounced the group that has been fighting it for months, but so did Qaeda fighters who oppose both the government and the Islamic State. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government for once agreed on something, the barbarity of the militant group for the way it murdered the Jordanian, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Cairo’s thousand-year-old Al Azhar institute and a leading Sunni scholar, was so angered that he called for the Islamic State’s extremists to be “killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut off.”

Never known as a charismatic leader, King Abdullah got rave reviews at home for his tough talk in Washington, where in a meeting with congressional leaders he said his retribution would remind people of the Clint Eastwood movie “Unforgiven.”

He is considered to be one of the most moderate Sunni clerics in Egypt.[1]