Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

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

it's so grotesque to see such slicky-designed (and reasonably well-written) propaganda in the service of such hate. it's as if jeffrey dahmer hired the services of a madison avenue press agency.

Some light relief
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXKSvEktGmw

ha. is there any background for that?

Friends of al-Baghdadi have previously told of how he was a talented footballer, with one former team-mate even describing him as the 'Lionel Messi of our team'.

The Lionel Messi of the caliph game

is this one of those things like where we wonder what would have happened if fidel castro had been recruited by a MLB franchise?

like before 1953 or after?

http://richard-kemp.com/submission-to-the-united-nations-independent-commission-of-inquiry-on-the-2014-gaza-conflict/#more-393

Kemp has been making such submissions since 2009 (I see in Wiki).

Asked about his pro-IDF point of view, Kemp responded: "I consider myself as having an objective view of what's happening over here. The IDF does not need me to defend them; they have proven it over the years," he said. "It's the dispassionate military perspective that I bring." Regarding media bias, he said: "It was clear to me that there was a great deal of propaganda that was being generated against Israel, and then being exploited by people who didn't understand military matters and didn't want to question it, it suited their agenda to vilify Israel."[25]

http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/02/20/3625446/atlantic-left-isis-conversation-bernard-haykel/

An analysis of that Atlantic article

i started going through that post point by point to demonstrate why almost all the criticisms against that Atlantic article are actually strawmanning, but i think that if someone really misunderstood the original article to such a degree, this serves a good function in explaining what is and isn't true about ISIS.

like yes, you can be a muslim and not agree w/ ISIS. i don't think you need a professor of near eastern studies to tell you that, but if you somehow came away from the atlantic article believing that a medieval literalism approach to the koran is the only authentic way of reading religious texts, i'm glad think progress will set you straight.

i do wonder if a lot of these (what haykel calls PC) responses to ISIS are actually not about gingerly protecting the majority islam population from being associated w/ ISIS but more about protecting other fundamentalist/radical groups from being besmirched by a comparison to ISIS, ie Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi, general Wahhabism, etc - like instead of finishing the equation as "ISIS is not Islam," [but] moderate Islam is, it's "ISIS is not Islam," [but] Saudi Arabian fundamentalism is, or whatever. that it's more about realizing that ISIS is a toxic brand than an actual theological dispute.

Here's another one

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/20/atlantic-defines-real-islam-says-isis/

The Atlantic ignores Muslim intellectuals, defines "true Islam" as ISIS
by Murtaza Hussain @mazmhussain

the atlantic doesn't do that tho! it's not such a nuanced argument that ppl should be misunderstanding it. there's a big difference between "this ideology is firmly based in both an interpretative tradition and textual literalism" and "this is the true face of islam." conflating tho two is either indicative of idk, ignorance or disingenuity. like if some jews took over jerusalem, reinstated the sanhadren, and started giving sabbath violators + adulterers the death penalty, i'm sure 99% of world jewry would disagree that this is an appropriate representation of judaism (esp in 2015), but they'd also be right to say that the Torah explicitly discusses the role of courts in giving the death penalty for sabbath violation + the death penalty and tho it hasn't been put into practice for two thousand years it's obv a form of judaism and not some other new religion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/nyregion/damages-awarded-in-terror-case-against-palestinian-groups.html

Well well well: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/leaked-spy-cables-netanyahu-iran-bomb-mossad

lol i take it you didn't actually read the leaked report linked to from that guardian article

guardian is pretty shit but they're not doing their readers any favors by making up an obv bullshit narrative for the leak. mossad isn't disagreeing w/ bibi - they all agree that iran is developing the infrastructure to reach breakout capacity. that's what bibi's silly bomb graphic at the UN was about. but the guardian is trying to pretend as tho bibi has been claiming that iran is actually building the bomb itself (?) and that therefore mossad saying that iran is building infrastructure (which they explicitly write in the report they believe will be used for military purposes) contradicts that?

lol, you bullshitting, I take it you didn't read the article? You're basically just making shit up with no basis in the article.

okay i mean i read the actual document they're reporting on as well as the article about it, but sure, rely on the misleading lede + not the actual data

they basically made up the scoop - the leak does not say or contradict what they're claiming. the article's claim is just a fabrication.

except you're making up a bunch of bullshitty claims about their claims, so whatever.

Iran’s enrichment abilities continue to improve. The quantity of material enriched to 20% is not increasing at this stage as some is being converted to nuclear fuel for TRR. In addition, Iran is making great efforts to activate the IR40 reactor (which is expected to produce military-grade plutonium) as quickly as possible.

does this sound like mossad believes iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons?

or are you just saying that guardian is selling the scoop that hard? in which case why the big "well well well" when you came into the thread? and why is guardian running this like it's a big scoop?

the guardian /isn't/ i meant

The article never says 'not pursuing nuclear weapons', that is another madeup bullshit claim of yours. The article says that Iran is “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons” which is an actual quote from the fucking report.

The Mossad briefing about Iran’s nuclear programme in 2012 was in stark contrast to the alarmist tone set by Netanyahu, who has long presented the Iranian nuclear programme as an existential threat to Israel and a huge risk to world security.

That's the Guardian's claim. Does this just mean that the Mossad wrote about their concerns about Iranian nuclear progress in a more sterile tone than Bibi? The Mossad report says:

Bottom line: Though Iran at this stage is not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons, it is working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate such as enrichment, reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given.

Bibi said in 2012 at the UN:

The red line should be drawn right here…………..

Before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.

Before Iran gets to a point where it’s a few months away or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

Each day, that point is getting closer. That’s why I speak today with such a sense of urgency. And that’s why everyone should have a sense of urgency.

Obviously both Bibi and the Mossad in 2012 were discussing Iranian enrichment so I just don't see the scoop from the Guardian here.

Maybe you didn't understand Bibi's argument in 2012? It was always about closing the enrichment gap and reducing the breakout time. More Bibi:

For Iran, amassing enough enriched uranium is far more difficult than producing the nuclear fuse.

For a country like Iran, it takes many, many years to enrich uranium for a bomb. That requires thousands of centrifuges spinning in tandem in very big industrial plants. Those Iranian plants are visible and they’re still vulnerable.

In contrast, Iran could produce the nuclear detonator – the fuse – in a lot less time, maybe under a year, maybe only a few months.

The detonator can be made in a small workshop the size of a classroom. It may be very difficult to find and target that workshop, especially in Iran. That’s a country that’s bigger than France, Germany, Italy and Britain combined.

The same is true for the small facility in which they could assemble a warhead or a nuclear device that could be placed in a container ship. Chances are you won’t find that facility either.

So in fact the only way that you can credibly prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, is to prevent Iran from amassing enough enriched uranium for a bomb.

As soon as i saw Seamus Milne's name connected to this story I knew to ignore it.

Yet more Bibi bullshit: “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move[d] on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.”

Leaked pages "the amount of 20% enriched uranium is therefore not increasing"

How does those two statements not oppose each other? And both those quotes are in the Guardian article.

Like, the enrichment rate is zero, how could that lead to bomb-capability in a year?

According to the Mossad document enrichment rate is not zero.

Enrichment: Activity at the Kashan and Qom sites has expanded to a limited extent only, apparently because of a lack of available centrifuges, but there has been a significant increase in the rate and efficiency of enrichment - approximately 230kg uranium is enriched to 5% per month, and approximately 12kg is enriched to 20% per month.

Iran has thus far accumulated about 5,500kg of uranium enriched to 5% (after about 1,500kg were allocated for enrichment to 20%) and about 100kg enriched to 20% (after 75-100kg were converted into nuclear fuel for TRR).

[…]

We understand that Iran continues to improve its enrichment abilities. And is even liable to advance them significantly when the advanced IR2M or IR4 centrifuges, currently being run in in [sic] the pilot facility in Natanz, are put into service.