Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

yeah, what he said

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-orpQMN6oJow/VRQvPpjOjzI/AAAAAAAAoeI/w6gbGkkwxU4/s1600/What%2BIran%2BWon’t%2BSay%2B2.png

Egypt Says It May Send Troops to Yemen to Fight Houthis

hey Mordy have you noticed that Iraqi Shi'ite militias do not seem to be v impressed with Obama's "pro-Shi'a" policy

I did lol that now we r bombing Tikrit for the Shia militias and not only are they not going to participate but they'll badmouth the U.S. while they sit out

we're robbing them of their victory!

they were gonna be so victorious, you have no idea

feel like the big question w/ GCC is after they suppress houthis (assuming they're successful) does everyone just go home or do they go to eg syria

Israel releases withheld tax revenues to Palestinian Authority

Mordy, why is Shia supporter Obama providing intell to Sunni Saudi Arabia about Yemen?

Also x-post-- I don't see the Saudis/Gulf Coop Council going to Syria. Much tougher job than Yemen (which won't be easy either)

i would attribute all unfathomable Obama decisions in the Middle East to "hilarious US incompetence."

oh it's all p fathomable

i would guess his decision here was to support the somewhat stable in-exile President Hadi over the militant Houthi rebels bc of a bias towards the status quo, but it's just as likely that it was a good faith gesture to Sunni countries angry over the Iran negotiations.

btw Mordy, they found some of the missing Pentagon stuff, you can purchase to keep em outta the wrong hands.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/missing-military-tech-ended-ebay-craiglist/

Wow.

The US has long been supporting the Saudis, the US has had bases there in Yemen for awhile, the US had been working with Hadi for awhile, nothing surprising about it.

i see a lot of military generators in my industry and there are super undesirable. parts are too hard to replace, the tech doesn't work for most civilian implementations, etc. i don't know if there are similar issues w/ other military gear.

they look really nice tho

curmudgeon - you'd agree that this is about stability primarily, tho, right? like the drone campaigns that predated this invasion were targeting Al-Q members, not Houthi rebels (afaik? maybe there were some Houthi bombings as well? al-alwaki bombing was in yemen, tho). so essentially we're fighting two rebel groups in favor of the status quo. maybe i'm wrong tho and we've been fighting houthi all along?

it's certainly a little discombobulating to be bombing both houthis + al-q at the same time - at least in january there was an idea that the US might continue to bomb Al-Q w/ tacit Houthi support despite Iranian opposition to drone campaigns: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/middleeast/experts-see-signs-of-moderation-despite-houthis-harsh-slogans.html

i see a lot of military generators in my industry and there are super undesirable. parts are too hard to replace, the tech doesn't work for most civilian implementations, etc. i don't know if there are similar issues w/ other military gear.

― Mordy, Friday, March 27, 2015 4:01 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they look really nice tho

― Mordy, Friday, March 27, 2015 4:01 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

american engineering at its finest. is it expensive? check. does it look nice? check. is it practical? nope. check.

it's certainly a little discombobulating to be bombing both houthis + al-q at the same time

Yemen had one dictator for awhile I think, then Hadi (who had been part of the prior dictatorial government but was perceived as more moderate). The US just wanted to keep droning Al-q and did not seem to perceive the Houthis as that big of a threat. CIA failure to see this maybe. Or is the US defense establishment gonna claim they were giving Hadi advice to be nice to all including the Houthis but Hadi didn't listen; just as they they similarly did so the government in Iraq and various governments in Egypt....

Standard operating procedure where US supports these types of authoritarian governments and then gets surprised about the amount of different groups that have issues with them

just as they they similarly CLAIM THEY HAVE DONE with the government in Iraq and various governments in Egypt....

i guess i just find the critique that obama's lacks a coherent, unifying strategy for the middle east to be resonant - as they continually seem caught off-guard by new developments. maybe US FP has always been thus, and as i've said before obama admin has never done anything as stupid as gwb's occupation of iraq so he's not the worst FP president ever. like hillary said tho, "Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle."

"great nations need organizing principles" is exactly the kind of meaningless, unhelpful, abstract blather that foreign policy wanks adore and that actual ppl conducting real-world foreign policy tend to laugh at. when has u.s. foreign policy ever had an "organizing principle"?

does "money" count as an organizing principle

the Monroe Doctrine? (j/k, kind of)

a coherent, unifying strategy for the middle east

the middle east is an incoherent morass of conflicting agendas and ideologies that often are unpredictable and unstable, a "coherent, unifying strategy" is not possible

applying any kind of consistent principle will immediately lead to direct conflict with one faction or another

an organizing principle could be as simple as "constrain russia's ability to annex parts of predominately ethnic-russian europe" - just some idea that they have an objective w/ some coherence. i have no idea what their objective is. sometimes it seems isolationist, but then they conduct huge drone wars + air bombings in MENA. is it pro-stability? american actions in ukraine before the revolution, support for anti-mubarak protesters, said drone bombings, etc suggest not. stopping atrocities? in libya yes, in syria no. rapprochement w/ iran, or reaffirming traditional sunni + israel alliances in middle east? god, who really knows.

maybe obama is playing nth-dimensional chess and he knows exactly what he's doing, or maybe he was being honest that his theory of FP is "don't do stupid shit" and he really has no vision of how america should operate in the world.

kiss my ass "great nation"

morbz, think of "great" as "big" and "powerful" and not as "does stuff i like"

then doing nothing is a great idea vs the last 60 years

i have no idea what their objective is

no. 1: prevent Americans from being killed

except obama FP is not doing nothing. it's doing a ton.

no. 2: kill people who are planning to or may have been thinking about or were maybe somehow connected to killing Americans while expending the smallest amount of resources possible

xp

no. 3: democracy is cool, as long as it results in regimes that are friendly to the US. when it doesn't, uhhh we're outta here, I guess the new dictator is cool

curmudgeon asked: "Mordy, why is Shia supporter Obama providing intell to Sunni Saudi Arabia about Yemen?"

houthis are not a threat to america or american lives, so what is the motivating factor here?

the Monroe Doctrine? (j/k, kind of)

― sleeve, Friday, March 27, 2015 6:11 PM (7 minutes ago)

that's actually a perfect example of how "organizing principles" tend to work in u.s. foreign policy (as opposed to the abstract world of "strategy"), because the u.s. talked up the monroe doctrine nonstop for decades but almost never actually enforced it until the 1890s (when, tbh, other concerns were far more paramount). you could say the same for the cold war, when we interfered in some communist scenarios and not others. "organizing principles" are basically a cover for whatever we feel like doing at the moment.

houthis are not a threat to america or american lives, so what is the motivating factor here?

iirc "Death to America" is in the Houthi logo

also the iran logo and we're in the middle of negotiating a nuclear deal w/ them

[March 21, 2015] Khamenei told a crowd in Tehran that Iran would not capitulate to Western demands. When the crowd started shouting, “Death to America,” the ayatollah responded: “Of course yes, death to America, because America is the original source of this pressure.

“They insist on putting pressure on our dear people’s economy,” he said, referring to economic sanctions aimed at halting Iran’s nuclear program. “What is their goal? Their goal is to put the people against the system,” he said. “The politics of America is to create insecurity,” he added, referring both to US pressure on Iran and elsewhere in the region.

i lol'd at "of course yes." so nonchalant

as simple as "constrain russia's ability to annex parts of predominately ethnic-russian europe"

Conservatives see this as simple, but others say should we constrain, and who do we support to constrain Russia and how and will it work? If we do x, y, and z, what could be the result? Will other countries join us? As noted by the others here, every location is unique and different factors have to be considered.

ok but it's not like it's too complicated so obama isn't doing anything. he still sent ppl to foment revolution in ukraine.

also the iran logo and we're in the middle of negotiating a nuclear deal w/ them

hmm gee what is the difference there I wonder

you seem to be requiring a clarity and consistency of vision that does not address actual political realities. the last time we had people like that in the white house things didn't turn out so well

lol ok so we believe that when it's an iranian sponsored militia group whose activity has been entirely confined to yemen saying "death to america" that's a national security threat worth a military intervention. when it's a government pursuing nuclear weapons with a track record of sponsoring terrorism abroad saying "death to america", then we should sit down to talk.

did you miss the part where Yemeni/al Qaeda groups directly targeted Americans - obviously O's concern with Yemen is keeping a regime friendly to the US that continues to allow us to dronestrike whatever Al Qaeda jokers are still running around out there.

I can't rememeber the last time an Iranian-back group successfully attacked Americans, unless we wanna get into random shit that happened during the Iraq War. And besides, threat of nuclear power is obviously totally game-changing in terms of what strategies are on the table and what will be effective.

we're sitting down to talk with Iran because we don't have any proxy nations that are going to keep them in line militarily, and we can't invade, or fly drones over there to assassinate people. completely different scenario.

houthi != al-qaeada