Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

Well, no one would peg these chumps as rational.

Of course, god is not fallible, so as long as you follow his lead you're good.

ISIS is a truly radical millennialism movement, apocalyptic, post-rational, etc

doing the same thing for 67 years and expecting different results is also post-rational.

i find these imminent messianic movements (Communism too I guess - and it's probably no coincidence that they believe in a kind of socialist ideal for followers of the caliph) really fascinating in how they are post-historical, no longer striving for the apocalypse but actively producing it

xp i have no idea what that means except as another bizarre, unenlightening equivocation?

ILX is post-rational.

oh come now v few ilx posts are rational

flag-post-rational

pre-post-rational

Pee Post: rational?
http://media.petsathome.com/wcsstore/pah-cas01//300/11752PL.jpg

like what the fuck does obama know about what is and isn't islam.

all he needs to know is that making mealymouthed speeches about it is a shinier diversion from bombing 7 Muslim countries than his shiny Nobel is.

The notion that we should just let folks in those Muslim countries kill each other ( and I guess kill non-Muslims who happen to be there) without US involvment, is also embraced in part by Pat Buchanan types on the right. Lumping all the countries together without noting any differences is something Greenwald and righty isolationists alike also do

it is possible to be skeptical of further u.s. military involvement in the middle east w/o framing it as "we should just let folks in those muslim countries kill each other." the mixed record of past u.s. interventions suggests that we ought to be more skeptical than we currently are.

is also embraced in part by Pat Buchanan types on the right

stopped clock syndrome

historically speaking US intervention results in higher casualties, not fewer

and I can distinguish between Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc. while still maintaining that ISIL is more of a problem for them than it is for us, and one that would be better resolved by the regional powers with a vested interest in resolving the conflict.

I suppose it's a regional problem unless they get nukes. Do they want nukes?

who doesn't

altho the idea of them getting anywhere close to Israel or Iran's stockpile seems p farfetched

A stockpile seems political. They only need one.

ok fine well the idea of them getting anywhere close to inside Israel or Iran's borders seems p farfetched

So will any of these regional powers help the Yazidis?

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/aid-workers-help-yazidi-women-return-life-after-isis-nightmare-n307206

Although I guess minorities are dying around the world, so why should middle eastern ones be any different

yeah, it's not like they're being killed by jews

<sorry, inappropriate i know>

it's amazing how many regional and world powers are engaged--at different levels of commitment--in fighting ISIS (aside from Syria and Iraq's governments, we have Egypt, Jordan, Hezbollah, Iran, US, France, etc.). but none of them seem truly invested in routing IS, rather the goal for now--in the absence of broad coordination--seems to be to kind of "manage" them. the Atlantic article suggest that this might work, not to defeat IS militarily, but rather to slowly choke the novelty and inspirational power of the group, which is what he argues is shoring it up at the moment. i don't know enough about the situation to agree or disagree, but i can understand why hawkish types aren't satisfied with this "solution."

def. seems to me that the group is among the most ideologically and actually vicious since (at least) the Khmer Rouge. even the KR weren't explicitly genocidal in their ambitions. i'm not comfortable occupying the seat of cynical non-interventionism on this one a la Morbs and Pat Buchanan. that doesn't mean I favor some kind of 2003 pt. 2 invasion, of course, but "not our problem" rhetoric makes me queasy.

it doesn't really matter, and it certainly isn't /useful/, but i don't hesitate to lay the blame for this at the feet of the Bush Administration. that doesn't mean they are the ultimate or only cause--oppressive regimes from Cairo to Baghdad and beyond, not to mention the idiocy of Islamic radicalism and official Islam itself, share in that blame--but i really doubt that nearly the entire region would have become the charnel house it is without Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield/etc. and their invasion without a plan. if only we could trade those folks for the other hostages, we'd have a win-win. /angry

If I were cynical (god forbid), I might speculate that a strategy of managing and containing ISIS in Iraq and Syria would be a good way of concentrating large numbers of fundamentalist islamist extremists in one relatively open and exposed place, where they could be subjected to constant attrition at a lower cost than if they were to remain scattered throughout the world at very low density. The extremists would even pay their own way to go there.

But of course this could not be true. Utterly ridiculous idea.

xp I've been thinking a bit about the counterfactual where we don't go to Iraq and what it might look like today. I feel like the Arab Spring would likely still have happened (since our invasion into Iraq didn't destabilize Egypt or Tunisia or Libya really), but would Syria have become destabilized? Not totally clear but it might have. Would Saddam have been able to survive until now without any revolt / instability? It's easy to forget that under Saddam the region wasn't exactly stable either. If he had remained in power is it feasible that he might've intervened himself against Assad if he lived to see the Syria revolution?

Aimless otm

i can't see the rise of IS without (a) the propaganda value of the US invasion and misbehavior in Iraq; (b) the instability of Iraq as a cauldron for militant groups. IS has benefited enormously from the breakdown of Syria, but they were forged in Iraq.

Iran maybe would already have the bomb. They'd need it more w/ Saddam still next door.

That's the real question - can Syria become the mess it has w/out an open flow of militants from the Iraqi border.

and i sort of doubt that the Arab Spring would have had the same resonance across the region w/o Iraq; maybe it would have been limited to North Africa. am I wrong to suggest that the only place where the Arab Spring has gone the "right" way (e.g. in the direction of genuine democracy and pluralism) is in Tunisia?

xposts

No, that's my impression as well.

i meant "i.e." rather than "e.g."

imo

i don't hesitate to lay the blame for this at the feet of the Bush Administration [...] i really doubt that nearly the entire region would have become the charnel house it is without Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield/etc. and their invasion without a plan.

Some blame can certainly be laid there; but you'd have to follow up and place more immediate blame on Obama as well, and his decision to pull all US troops out of Iraq, leaving a power vacuum. (Of course Obama later said this was not "my decision" and blamed Maliki instead. Eyes roll.)

iraqis agreed on nothing except that the americans had to leave

the seat of cynical non-interventionism on this one a la Morbs and Pat Buchanan

oh no you don't.

using "cynicism" in that context is a real slapper

plz enlighten me on the myriad interventions by the US that have "worked" since 2001

you can use 1961 if you prefer

i don't hesitate to lay the blame for this at the feet of the Bush Administration [...] i really doubt that nearly the entire region would have become the charnel house it is without Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield/etc. and their invasion without a plan.

Some blame can certainly be laid there; but you'd have to follow up and place more immediate blame on Obama as well, and his decision to pull all US troops out of Iraq, leaving a power vacuum. (Of course Obama later said this was not "my decision" and blamed Maliki instead. Eyes roll.)

― drash, Wednesday, February 18, 2015 1:23 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is true, but i can sympathize with obama since all of his choices were essentially terrible. bush et al made an active decision to invade a country, based upon a ginned-up crisis entirely of their own making. very different contexts from those two poor decisions.

morbs: your cynicism is all-encompassing and universally applicable (or so it appears based on your ILX posts), whether or not it's merited on a particular occasion. so i don't feel bad applying that word.

i am the observer. the actors are the cynics.

Morby the Observer

i think most of the actors here are probably operating on some admixture of cynicism, idealism, and fear.

One of the lesser known dub artists of the past 30 years (xp)

this article was heartbreaking: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/world/middleeast/from-a-private-school-in-cairo-to-isis-killing-fields-in-syria-video.html

I've been thinking a bit about the counterfactual where we don't go to Iraq and what it might look like today. I feel like the Arab Spring would likely still have happened (since our invasion into Iraq didn't destabilize Egypt or Tunisia or Libya really), but would Syria have become destabilized? Not totally clear but it might have. Would Saddam have been able to survive until now without any revolt / instability? It's easy to forget that under Saddam the region wasn't exactly stable either. If he had remained in power is it feasible that he might've intervened himself against Assad if he lived to see the Syria revolution?

― Mordy, Wednesday, February 18, 2015 7:12 PM (49 minutes ago)

i've thought about this a lot as well. it seems v. unlikely that a popular revolt could have overthrown saddam, and it's hard to imagine the military turning on him. most ppl in pre-invasion iraq didn't have cell phones or personal computers, so it would have been difficult to organize the kind of mass demonstrations that happened elsewhere. the only scenario i can imagine is that saddam might well have died at some point between 2003 and now (he was almost 70 when he was executed, after all, so he'd be almost 80 now), and the regime would almost certainly have been more vulnerable after that.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/muazdabiq.pdf