Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

the problem of shame is that in the hands of overreaching naifs, it creates a counterproductive reaction....weaponised shame, deployed by one group against other, seldom has the desired effect, it has to be felt and not foisted from without

hence the witless to-and-fro about the dogshit clint eastwood film.....people might have misgivings but they won't have their beloved armed forces shamed by being treated as genocidaires etc

https://twitter.com/coachjim4um/status/585980002648199168

obv it's easier to shame others than to feel shame yourself

an example where a country committed a great crime that turned out very well for it.

― Mordy, Friday, 15 May 2015 19:02 (5 minutes ago)

the armenian genocide -- ataturk's programme relied upon a sense of the unitary nation that would not have been possible had the greeks and the armenians not been killed or deported (the kurds are the exception proving the rule, but then they needed the kurds to massacre the armenians)

and moral censure never gets very far because major nations like america, under the auspices of the wise and the just like obama, always find turkey has enough geopolitical goodies to offer that it cannot be condemned

so again one legal nihilist (the genocidaires) is being supported by another (the realpolitikers)

even american critics of american crimes probably don't experience any level of personal shame but anger directed at those they feel shamed their country. a kind of disassociation from their membership in the country.

Morsi sentenced to death, unsurprisingly.

Western nations probably won't comment on it. US gives current Egyptian regime military aid.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/16/us-mideast-crisis-usa-idUSKBN0O10FP20150516

American special operations forces killed a senior Islamic State leader who helped direct the group's oil, gas and financial operations during a raid in eastern Syria, U.S. officials said on Saturday.

The White House said President Barack Obama ordered the overnight raid that killed the man identified as Abu Sayyaf. U.S. officials said his wife, Umm Sayyaf, was captured in the raid and was being held in Iraq.

This was the first known U.S. special forces operation inside Syria apart from a failed secret effort to rescue a number of U.S. and other foreign hostages held by Islamic State in northeastern Syria last year.

But elsewhere

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/isis-looting-destroying-ancient-syrian-sites-industrial-scale-n359461

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/world/middleeast/isis-fighters-seize-government-headquarters-in-ramadi-iraq.html

A U.S. military official described the mission, which was met with heavy resistance from ISIS, as a "hugely successful operation" and represents a "significant blow" to the terror network operating in Syria and Iraq.

"Despite the rhetoric, (ISIS) is suffering significant losses in leadership and the ability to conduct operations," the official told NBC News. "Through strikes in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish offensive in northern Syria and military successes in Iraq, (ISIS) is desperate.”

In Washington, American officials sought to play down the significance of the fall of the government headquarters in Ramadi.

“We’ve said before that there will be good days and bad days in Iraq. ISIL is trying to make today a bad day in Ramadi,” a State Department spokesman, Jeff Rathke, told reporters.

“Ramadi is important,” Mr. Rathke added. “It’s been contested for some time.”

BAGHDAD — The last Iraqi security forces fled the provincial capital of Ramadi on Sunday, as the city fell completely to the militants of the Islamic State, who ransacked the provincial military headquarters, seizing a large store of weapons, and carried out executions of people loyal to the government, according to security officials and tribal leaders.

The fall of Ramadi to the Islamic State, despite intensified American airstrikes in recent weeks in a bid to save the city, represented the biggest victory so far this year for the extremist group, which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the vast areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls. The fall of Ramadi also laid bare the failed strategy of the Iraqi government, which had announced last month a new offensive to retake Anbar Province, a vast desert region in the west of which Ramadi is the capital.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/world/middleeast/isis-ramadi-iraq.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/05/19/why-the-iraqi-army-keeps-failing/

The answer given is not Jeb Bush's one, that the US somehow should have forced the Iraqi government into letting US military stay.

While that article blames the US Bush admin for the dissolution of the Iraqi military and recent and current Iraqi governments for failures to unite the people and unite the military, more conservative folks are still pushing a different option:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fall-of-ramadi-was-avoidable/2015/05/18/37bb2df6-fd6e-11e4-833c-a2de05b6b2a4_story.html?hpid=z3

Even at this stage, however, the Islamic State remains unable to stand against even a limited deployment of U.S. military forces if those forces are properly resourced and allowed to operate against the enemy. A few thousand additional combat troops, backed by helicopters, armored vehicles and forward air controllers able to embed with Iraqi units at the battalion level, as well as additional Special Forces troops able to move about the countryside, would certainly prevent further gains. They could almost certainly regain Ramadi and other recently lost areas of Anbar, in cooperation with local tribes. They might be able to do more.

"No matter how many billions of dollars you spend you cannot buy experience. You cannot buy legacy. You cannot just manufacture that out of nowhere," Marine First Lt. Dave Jackson, who fought alongside Iraqi troops on two deployments, told Al Jazeera last year after the fall of Mosul.

otoh the french army that got its ass so badly kicked at dien bien phu had already fought in numerous theaters of WW2 (north africa, italy, south france, germany) and for almost a decade in Indochina. a conventional army needs to be extremely aggressive to adequately repress guerrilla/unconventional attacks. this is pretty damning: "The army don’t have the fighting spirit. They were there waiting for the Islamic State to attack. They are poorly equipped compared to the Islamic State. We are fighting with guns and pistols while the Islamic State has Humvees and IEDs and suicide bombers."

i do believe that even a limited deployment could make an immediate impact on ISIS' ability to make gains however, a) it won't be enough to push ISIS back, b) ISIS can wait indefinitely and we are not prepared to keep a deployment in Iraq indefinitely, and c) the US is historically unable to embed in foreign armies and train them up enough to fight adequately

v significant victory (real & symbolic) for isis

The answer given is not Jeb Bush's one, that the US somehow should have forced the Iraqi government into letting US military stay.

tbf (not to bush but for the record), when it was convenient for obama, this was presented as obama’s (not iraqis’) decision

https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/260415484674068481

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

(imo to now claim iraqi govt alone was responsible for non-renewal of sofa is at least a bit disingenuous)

agree that (after invasion) disbanding iraqi army & bad mishandling of sectarian realities/ consequences were huge mistakes

what should be done now is separate (albeit related) question (from apportioning blame for isis takeover in middle east)

i don’t know

:(

the problem with coming up with a solution is that whenever you plug one of the holes in the dam another dozen open up. start rapprochement w/ iran, saudis invade yemen. minimally speaking at this point, the prerequisites to dealing IS a substantial blow would require reconciling the situation in Syria - which either requires a serious sustained effort to topple Assad, or negotiations that would keep Assad in power. neither of which are things i think the US/NATO want to do. Shiite government in Iraq needs to either be replaced by a popular Sunni government (which carries the risk of sympathy for IS), or Iran needs to agree to make it a bireligious government and include Sunnis in it, which I don't think they want to do. like when you're strategy for containment involves making the Shiites and Sunnis get along -- it's probably not a great strategy and v unlikely to succeed.

i don't think a direct confrontation between US/NATO and Daesh can work tho, or certainly can't work alone. even if the US could bring overwhelming force to Iraq (which sounds politically impossible to me), who would they leave in charge once they left? the same shiite government that alienated the majority sunni population? a sunni government defended by an iraqi army that flees at the first sign of danger? and if we aren't willing to bring an overwhelming force to bear on IS, what is going to push them back? they aren't looking for a negotiated agreement. and clearly Iraq army alone can't do anything.

fwiw bob gates was on charlie rose last night. he blamed bremer and the provisional authority for disbanding the army and an overly-broad debaathification campaign that emptied out what civil society iraq had. he also blamed maliki for, he said, replacing the US trained officer corps with "hacks"

if only there was a strong presence in iraq that the sunnis could look up to and provide a counterweight to iran.

not only does a solution seem impossible but it's hard to even think of a way to ameliorate the situation at all.

multi-xp

Armies historically fight well only when there is something they value that they are fighting for. It can be as intangible as pride and patriotism, or else as tangible as preventing an enemy from killing your family and burning your house, but there has to be something the soldiers think is worth putting everything on the line to gain. The Iraqi army probably doesn't feel fiercely enough about the outcome of their battles with ISIS. You can't manufacture that by sending in a few hundred advisors. Certainly the Iraqi government doesn't inspire those sorts of feelings.

i don't know / understand the situation with the Iraqi army. presumably it's drawn from places like Ramadi so you'd think they'd have their families + homes to fight for, but apparently not. is it bc the command structure of the army is so incompetent? or bc they actually sympathize w/ Daesh over the current government? or are they like the rest of the Sunnis and apathetic? actually i could imagine a Sunni preferring ISIS since apparently if you are the right kind of Muslim you get all kinds of stuff like free healthcare, the feeling of righteous superiority, etc. maybe it's a combination of all the above - ideologically uninspired, militarily underfunded + undertrained, etc. maybe the horrific solution is just letting ISIS have Iraq (maybe cutting out pieces for Kurdistan, Shiite minority, etc). what do you think? are ISIS a group you can negotiate with?

"So you also want to come to Europe?" Todenhoefer asked him.

"No, we will conquer Europe one day," the man said. "It is not a question of if we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain ... For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines.

"Our expansion will be perpetual ... And the Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. And those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed."

Todenhoefer asked the fighter about their treatment of other religions, especially Shia Muslims.

"What about the 150 million Shia, what if they refuse to convert?" Todenhoefer asked.

"150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter to us," the fighter answered. "We will kill them all."

mmm i'm going to say no

That interview is a good example of a soldier with a fierce pride in his army and their ability to conquer. That is a soldier who will throw himself wholly into a battle.

maybe house of saud can modernize and use the largest military budget in the middle east for a conventional army and not for maintaining strict control over their own populace.

ISIS Finances Are Strong

The Islamic State has revenue and assets that are more than enough to cover its current expenses despite expectations that airstrikes and falling oil prices would hurt the group’s finances, according to analysts at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that researches public policy.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/19/world/middleeast/isis-finances.html

The Shia are a large majority in Iraq, not a minority. Xps

The problems with the Iraqi army are numerous and include non-payment of wages, massive fraud, terrible equipment and even worse command. Even if there was a basic degree of motivation there once, it has been eaten away. Morale couldn't be lower.

There is no long-term military solution unless there is something on the table for Sunnis to unite around. It's not going to be ruling the country again so some form of enhanced federalisation might be an option. There are Sunni militias who can probably stem the spread of IS but they aren't going to do so if they are fighting for the current structure. Even now, the fact that Iranian troops are pouring into Anbar is a massive kick in the teeth.

The Shia are a large majority in Iraq, not a minority. Xps

Didn't realize -- are they mostly concentrated in particular areas in the east?

It's about 40 years since the Fall of Saigon now. I just watched that doc, Last Days in Vietnam. It feels awfully real right now.

Xp Yes and no. The south east is overwhelming Shiite (Najaf, etc) but quite a lot of the country is mixed. The west is mostly Sunni but it isn't as densely populated.

There are roughly 3x as many Arab Shiites in Iraq as there are Arab Sunnis. The total Sunni population is only bumped up by Kurds.

anybody read "Arabs at War"?

http://www.amazon.com/Arabs-War-Military-Effectiveness-1948-1991/dp/0803287836

no, looks interesting but i think i'm a little biased against arguments about the quality of the personnel. military histories i've read tend to emphasize things like supply, geography, military size, technology, unconventional tactics, etc. does the book discuss at all why the personnel are generally bad? like is it a deficiency in the way they train officers, or the organizational structure of the army? is it a cultural issue in the broader populaces?

never read it! Wondering if you guys have.

Nope.

More discussion of what is going wrong in Iraq. Boehner blames Obama and then there is this re internal Iraq blame-game:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/fall-of-ramadi-reflects-failure-of-iraqs-strategy-against-islamic-state-analysts-say/2015/05/19/1dc45a5a-fda3-11e4-8c77-bf274685e1df_story.html?hpid=z1

Nearly a decade ago, with an insurgency raging in Anbar, Sunni tribes there switched sides and joined the American-led effort to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor of the Islamic State. But the Sunni “Awakening” forces lost government support after the U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

This time, a number of tribes in Anbar held out for months against the Islamic State. But they complained that neither they nor the security forces got support from the central government.

Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, says ISIS controls 50% of Syria

jfc

Always worth keeping in mind that the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights is one guy living in a semi-detached house in Coventry so a pinch of salt is required.

Well, that's an oversimplification, they do have affiliates on the ground in Syria but it's a very small group with a very clear agenda.

“There’s a direct line between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination and persecution, and the right of African-Americans to vote and have equal protection under the law,” Obama said.

^ Not sure how hostile he could be if he's saying things like that tbh.

(obama’s never had much of a problem finding the right rhetoric, for different occasions, on a variety of issues (sorry to be cynical))

no for sure - you're right to be cynical, but it's still a very strong statement imo. he'd have to be very very cynical to compare the defense of israel to black civil rights in the US and not believe it.

I think he's right, but I'd like to hear how he spells out that "direct line", because it brings together an international issue (the existence of a nation) with a national issue.

xp ok, hope you're right, nb it's a v vague statement (would rather not get into topic of obama statements as expression or not of what he believes)

SV point taken, hope it's exaggeration (also 50% of "landmass" may be less dramatic than it seems)

i just meant that he's linking it to something that is presumably very sacred + near to his heart

iirc he makes that analogy pretty often when speaking on international issues, re many forms of injustice in different countries (especially when speaking internationally)

which doesn't mean he's cynical about it! or that it's not sacred & near to his heart (i believe it is). just that making analogy itself (to black civil rights in US) is not that telling of specific substantive policy beliefs

re many forms of injustice

& historical tribulations & struggles, etc

post-Ramadi changes...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/world/middleeast/us-to-send-rockets-to-iraq-for-isis-fight.html?ref=middleeast

The United States is rushing 1,000 antitank rockets to the Iraqi military to help combat the massive suicide vehicle bombs that Islamic State militants used in capturing the provincial capital of Ramadi

The immediate American objective over the past four days, the official said, has been to work with Iraqi political leaders and commanders to consolidate the retreating Iraqi forces — many of whom were physically and psychologically traumatized by car bombs roughly the magnitude of those used in the Oklahoma City attack in 1995 — and prevent any further retreat.

The training of Iraqi Special Forces would be an alternative to using American troops to accompany Iraqi forces on the battlefield to call in American and allied bombing attacks. So far, Mr. Obama is not considering using Americans to call in airstrikes, the State Department official said, although Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has pushed the idea.

Mr. Abadi complained during his visit to Washington that it had been taking too long for the United States to carry out airstrikes on behalf of Iraqi forces.

Hard to do airstrikes in urban areas even if you have folks positioned within range and reporting promptly though.

if US ramps up bombing urban areas you're going to start seeing a lot more stories like this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32840132

In the NY Times article on Palmyra, the other location ISIS has recently captured, there was this:

Residents videotaped airstrikes coming close to the town’s medieval citadel and wondered why the militants had not been bombed earlier — by the government or, for that matter, by the United States-led coalition waging a parallel air war against them — while they were traversing miles of open desert roads.

I cannot help but think that treating "the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland" as a settled principle and precedent opens a huge can of worms as soon as it is generalized to all other "peoples" who are trying to assert a similar right to a homeland. The Kurds and Uighars come swiftly to mind.

yeah, who decides who gets to have a homeland (Palestinians didn't leap immediately to mind Aimless?) - kinda the crux of the problem

The USA's announced policy (even if it is one very weakly supported by its actions) is a "two state solution" with a Palestinian state as a homeland. We have no such policy in regard to Kurds, Uighars, Basques, not to mention dozens more central Asian, African or other "peoples" who would be thrilled to know they have such a right.

The case of the Jewish people is fundamentally different than those, I've come to believe.