Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

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.

To say their case is fundamentally different is to say that there is a particular human right attached to Jewishness that does not attach to any other cultural, religious or ethnic identity not currently having its own dedicated homeland. How did that happen?

it is p different altho idk about fundamentally

i (as u can imagine) have a lot of thoughts on this issue but i think there's a way in which an ethical/rights reading and historical reading of the jewish people merge in a 'fundamentally' different way from these other ppls in the sense that since 70 AD (and really earlier) jews have lived in diaspora among other communities, not under just one thumb but under hundreds, and in varying ways, but as a nigh-constant, suffered for it. one of the answers to this was found in the enlightenment + the development of bills of rights for all humans, but even that trend in society didn't stop the shoah. there are still fewer jews alive in 2015 than there were in 1938. i think it's easy for someone to look at all that history and conclude that the world can't be trusted to protect their jewish communities*, that other nations will never be as invested in the safety of jews as a jewish state. there's really only one serious exception to that history and it is the home to a little less than half of world jewry. *i tried to find a way to soften this statement to make it more palatable but i think it's probably best stated plainly.

a book i'm reading at the moment has a section where the author visits Yad Vashem and writes:

Yad Vashem.

A representative of the museum greets the festival people, sharing some statistics with us. Before WWII there were 18 million Jews in the world, now there are 13.5 million.

Yad Vashem is shaped like a triangle representing one half of the Star of David. The other half, the missing half, represents the Jews that were killed. They are no longer, nor the second triangle.

We walk by the horrible pictures of dead Jews and all I can think of is this: some of the people here are – were – my own relatives and this is how they ended their lives.

I don’t want to see this. I would rather see a movie at the Cinematheque.

jews have lived in diaspora among other communities, not under just one thumb but under hundreds

yeah this occurred to me and I wasn't sure how to express it but it is obviously a big difference between Jews and Kurds, Uighurs, Basques, Tamils, whoever. the only real point of comparison is ... the descendants of African slaves.

xp

Or Roma?

do Roma aspire to a national home? i thought they were culturally committed to the transient lifestyle?

Most are settled but idk if there is any push for a nation state.

I thought of the Roma too but I'm not sure where they were initially displaced from, a point which no one seems to agree on

a few ppl over the last couple years have noted the irony of seeing graffiti saying 'jews out of palestine' on european walls that had earlier said 'jews get out.' you can't stay here and you can't go home.

let's all move to Mars

Mordy otm on the fundamentally different part. The point about African slaves is also good; I'd like to hear Obama elaborate on that.

I know this isn't the expected reaction, but I don't see the force of the argument that being in a hundred different places, and therefore under a hundred different thumbs, one for each place, is fundamentally worse than being in just one place and therefore under one thumb. The oppression in each case probably feels pretty similar.

i think it's more that those peoples continue to exist in their current situation. when israel was founded there was - again w/ one major exception - a major crisis for world jewry. it looked like the possibility for survival in diaspora was very low. like you see how people speak out about the situation in gaza - they call it genocide, ethnic cleansing, nazi war crimes, etc - and there are more palestinians in gaza today than there ever have been in history. by contrast all of european jewry was liquidated all at once. it's an argument from need - there was nowhere else to go, so the existence of a nation state for the jews became mandated by history itself. they needed a place to put themselves, so they put themselves there.

now maybe you feel like the world has changed and the need for a nation state for world jewry is no longer necessary. i look at the world and think that conclusion is crazy but you're not alone in thinking it. lots of people (well, comparatively very few, but not a zero-number of ppl) think the jews should leave israel and go back to europe, or go to florida, or just turn israel into a binational state. the majority of jews are not ready to give up that nation state. maybe at some point in the future world jewry will decide israel is no longer necessary. i don't see that happening today though.

(um, probably not comparatively few people believe that - but few among jews, americans, etc, i'd think)