Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

surely must've changed over the last year tho?

Yes, though I think it's still a major exporting country. I checked and it was 4th two years ago but just for conventional weapons.

http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2015/6/5/8735325/germany-bought-2006-world-cup-votes-by-sending-saudi-arabia-rocket

Turkey’s Ruling Party Loses Parliamentary Majority

Great news that the HDP looks like it has crossed the 10% threshold for the first time in any of its incarnations. Nearly 60% of postal votes from the UK went to them and i can hear the celebratory car horns going all over the neighbourhood.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11657918/Why-business-is-booming-under-Islamic-State-one-year-on.html

The ISIS 1 %

The jihadists have mostly eschewed the demand in Islamic law that the zakat be used to sustain the poor, instead using the funds to buy weapons and inflate the salaries and benefits of their own fighters.

A female resident of Minbij recounted to the Telegraph how the restaurants and shops are frequented almost exclusively by Isil fighters, with most of the civilian population unable to afford them.

I see that ISIS is also now selling some artifacts, rather than destroying them

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/islamic-state-isnt-just-destroying-ancient-artifacts--its-selling-them/2015/06/08/ca5ea964-08a2-11e5-951e-8e15090d64ae_story.html?hpid=z5

isis is doing some serious nation-building; starting to think they might pull this off (i.e. establish a relatively "stable" "state”; though that may not be compatible with ideology of relentless expansionism)

meanwhile, maybe near last days for assad, one way or another

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/syrias-assad-nears-the-tipping-point/2015/06/04/ae9af080-0af4-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/09/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idUSKBN0OP0Z32015060

corrected link

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/09/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idUSKBN0OP0Z320150609

a lot of this is about missile technology but it's an interesting take on the recent Houthi missile strikes

http://pando.com/2015/06/08/the-war-nerd-scuds-patriots-the-armies-of-this-age-are-weird/

http://www.wsj.com/articles/spy-virus-linked-to-israel-targeted-hotels-used-for-iran-nuclear-talks-1433937601

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-white-houses-iraq-debate-military-brass-pushed-for-doing-less/2015/06/13/8db17e30-1138-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html

Interesting-

As President Obama was weighing how to halt Islamic State advances in Iraq, some of the strongest resistance to boosting U.S. involvement came from a surprising place: a war-weary military that has grown increasingly skeptical that force can prevail in a conflict fueled by political and religious grievances.

Top military officials, who have typically argued for more combat power to overcome battlefield setbacks over the past decade, emerged in recent White House debates as consistent voices of caution in Iraq. Their shift reflects the paucity of good options and a reluctance to suffer more combat deaths in a war in which America’s political leaders are far from committed and Iraqis have shown limited will to fight.

“After the past 12 years in the Middle East, there is a real focus by senior military leaders on understanding what the endgame is,” said a military official, “and asking the question, ‘To what end are we doing this?’ ”

The military’s reluctance belies a prevalent narrative in Washington of a cautious president holding back his aggressive generals. The Pentagon’s position was most evident in the White House debates after the surprising retreat of Iraqi army and police in Ramadi last month.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/14/africa/us-airstrike-libya-mokhtar-belmokhtar/

No US casualties this way

The Libyan government said Belmokhtar was killed in the strike, something that U.S. officials have not confirmed.

Federal prosecutors in New York had charged the one-eyed Belmokhtar in 2013 with crimes related to a brazen attack on a gas facility in Algeria were 37 hostages died. Three Americans were among the dead.

"It was a single strike conducted by a manned aircraft," a Pentagon official with direct knowledge of the operation told CNN. There were no U.S. personnel on the ground, the official said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-15/israel-minister-sees-possible-renewal-of-talks-with-palestinians

Leading members of Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas convened in Qatar over the past several days to discuss a proposal for a long-term ceasefire with Israel, the Palestinian Al-Quds newspaper reported Monday.

According to Palestinian officials quoted by the paper, Hamas representative Moussa Abu Marzouk went to the Qatari capital of Doha on Saturday in the hopes of finalizing a three-to-five year truce with the Jewish state.

The truce proposal, which is backed by both Qatar and Turkey, is based on an outline formulated by UN special envoy to the Middle East Nikolay Mladenov, according to the Israeli NRG news site.

The report added that Abu Marzouk held a series of meetings in Qatar with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal as well as other senior officials in the organization.

The truce proposal reportedly includes a clause regarding the establishment of a seaport in Gaza, NRG reported. The port, according to the proposal, will be subject to Israeli or international supervision.

interesting that these discussions are being broached with/through/under auspices of arab states (egypt, jordan, turkey, gulf states), with (it seems) no US involvement

maybe that's auspicious

according to ex-ambassador Michael B. Oren, http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-obama-abandoned-israel-1434409772

there's this incredibly depressing news as well out of syria:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/16/syria-assad-regime-is-weaponising-chlorine-us-congress-to-hear

“In separate strikes last week on veteran al-Qaeda leaders, the United States demonstrated again the extent to which it has perfected an almost eerie capability to find the world’s most wanted terrorism suspects in some of the world’s most chaotic environments and deliver lethal blows from above. But the continued spread of al-Qaeda’s ideology and the emergence of brutal new offshoots, including the Islamic State, have underscored the limitations of a U.S. strategy that remains largely reliant on ‘decapitation’ strikes.”

...

But the latest U.S. operations “have little relevance to what ISIS is building and growing in the heart of the Middle East,” Zarate said, using an alternative term for the Islamic State, “and may actually strengthen their hand in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Libya.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/why-decapitation-strikes-have-killed-terrorist-leaders-but-not-al-qaeda/2015/06/16/560c3c1e-143e-11e5-9ddc-e3353542100c_story.html

^depressing persuasive take.

Many officials and experts in the U.S. counterterrorism community now see the destruction of al-Qaeda and its progeny as a more distant goal than at any time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

isis mutated into something v different, more formidable than a-q-- taking astute & thorough advantage of power vacuum/chaos, shockingly effective recruitment propaganda, ideology & praxis of actual state formation

"more formidable" = eh idk about that, the ideology just switched tactics/goals

and the goals of "filling a local power vacuum" are way easier to accomplish then "destroying the United States, Israel, etc." which they are nowhere near close to accomplishing, and will never come close to accomplishing.

what did al-q accomplish exactly? they didn't topple the US. they did embroil the US in a longterm war in Iraq but that mostly destroyed Iraq and led to most of Al-Q's senior leaders being hunted down and killed. so they're formidable at symbolic terrorism but not really at anything else of lasting value. by contrast Daesh is running a state and controls vast oil resources.

like ppl who say that OBL's plan was to force the US into a war in Iraq, ok, he was successful but damn what a pyrrhic victory that ultimately did little to forward the destruction of the Great Satan

I think we're in agreement tbh. these clowns were never (and are not) particularly formidable.

well of course idea of global caliphate, conquering great satan = fantasy

but there's quite a lot vastly short of that that's v alarming about establishment & expansion of daesh state in ME, as well as its ideologically seductive propaganda effectiveness in the west and ME alike

yeah i feel like the difference is that Al-Q was totally committed to destroying G.S. (great satan) so anything that fell short was a total failure. Daesh can be committed to destroying GS (and LS) but in the meanwhile they are actually establishing a State along the way.

http://pando.com/2015/06/17/the-war-nerd-a-glorious-victory-for-once/

Al-Q was committed to getting the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia (which they achieved by 2003), and miring it in Mideast insurgencies that bankrupt the government and alienate Muslims worldwide, and provide recruitment to Wahhabi militants. Al-Qaeda achieved those aims, even at the expense of decimation of its mujahideen cadre. Favorable ratings for the U.S.have fallen from 52% to 21% in Turkey, 30% to 16% in Egypt, 25% to 14% in Jordan, with 49%, 26%, and 29% respectively considering the US as more of an enemy than a friend. Turkey and Egypt are the major Muslim regional powers, so its hard to overstate how disastrous the U.S. response to 9/11 was.

I think both things can coexist. US's response to 9/11 was disastrous and Al-Q's strategic goals are quite stupid. Intelligent actors don't bait a superpower into hunting them down in the hopes that they'll secure a PR coup for their cause. (Hamas obv has a similar strategic vision.) You could say that it's the refuge of actors that don't feel they have any other options to address their grievances, but contrast this scorched earth bullshit w/ Daesh who have actually put institutions in place + haven't invested their time + energy into the, really, really ill-considered, 'bait the superpower' MO.

(You could say that the beheadings were intended to bait the West, but it's obviously not the primary plank in their project.)

Also I think it's a bit unfair to link Egypt + Turkish attitudes to the US exclusively to US actions in the region. There are plenty of events, and ideological developments, that have happened in both countries that they own themselves. Maybe you could make a case that the US invasion of Iraq helped validate Erdogan in the eyes of his people and helped him gain the electoral + political dominance he currently has, but it's Western-centric to give all the credit for Turkey's path down religious fanaticism to the US's invasion of Iraq.

I was gonna say

surely Egypt's shift in attitude is due more to what happened during the uprising and the US response to it than anything AQ-related

helped validate Erdogan in the eyes of his people and helped him gain the electoral + political dominance he currently has

Not so dominant now.

still fairly dominant. his party is still the largest in the country. cf http://ottomansandzionists.com/2015/06/08/did-the-akp-win-or-lose-yesterdays-election/

Imagine a country in which the ruling party—having won three consecutive national elections over the past decade-plus—wins its fourth in a row, beating the second-place party by over fifteen percentage points, and yet nearly every outside observer declares the result to be a disastrous loss for that party. This is the situation in which Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) now finds itself following Sunday’s parliamentary elections. Prime Minister turned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still ensconced in his thousand-room palace, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will remain at his post, and the AKP is going to continue dominating the government as either a minority ruling party or as the lead party in an extremely lopsided coalition. Wherever you look, though, the AKP’s political obituary is being written.

It is easy to understand why schadenfreude reigns supreme among the 60 percent of Turks who voted for a party other than the AKP. In the span of one election, the AKP has gone from 49.8 of the vote and just three seats short of a coveted supermajority in the Grand National Assembly to having to rely on the backing of another party for the first time since it came to power in 2002. Six in every ten Turkish voters cast their ballots for an opposition party, and when taking into account Erdogan’s very public drive for the AKP to win 400 seats in order to give him the increased presidential powers that he so desperately covets, it is in many ways a devastating blow. The path to a formal presidential system—one that many feared would put Turkey on the fast track to full-blown democratic breakdown—has petered out. This in itself is plenty cause for celebration. However, the exuberance that reigns supreme in many quarters should be tempered; although the results of this election will prove good in the long run, the short-term aftermath may prove decidedly unpleasant.

It really depends on the timeframe. By all accounts, al-Zawahiri, Atef. al-Adel, Bin Laden, et al have all viewed their political objective to recreate the Caliphate on very long term time frames (on the order of a century). None of them expect (or expected) that ultimate goal during their lifetimes.

Guerrillas have always baited conventional forces into retaliation that brings more civilians into the fold: tadicalizing the politically aloof is the objective. If I recall correctly, Bin Laden was upfront about this in a Robert Fisk interview from long ago. A tiny group of a few hundred true believers, with little initial outlay of lives or capital, managed to radicalize hundreds of thousands in the Sunni world, anywhere where the Sauds built mosques from Mali to Indonesia, channeling resentment towards the West towards their own longer term objective.

on the order of a century

this is p short in terms of caliphates actually

Intelligent actors don't bait a superpower into hunting them down in the hopes that they'll secure a PR coup for their cause.

Yes they do, sometimes, and it works, sometimes. Have you seen the Battle of Algiers?

Algiers a little different since it was an ongoing occupation. I'm sure OBL believes he scored a tactical coup by getting the US to invade Iraq but I'd suggest that a dispassionate evaluation of the results of that invasion indicate very poor results for people living in the Middle East (as well as the ongoing assassinations of Al-Q leadership including the killing of Nasir al-Wuhayshi yesterday) and mostly no impact on the US. Sure, the US populace is now more reticent to invade a Middle Eastern country, but in terms of destroying the Great Satan any success claimed by Al-Q is utterly delusional.

Sanpaku crediting Al-Q w radicalizing large swathes of young muslims, I'm not sure how to objectively evaluate that. It seems like some of that was happening/would happen anyway (Taliban already going strong, Israel doing a bang-up job as local bad guy, oppressive regimes like Egypt and SA driving radicalization etc.) but idk how you put numbers to that kind of claim.

tbh i've always found that 'oh we meant to do that' argument from OBL to be a. transparently self-serving and b. pretty outlandish. even OBL couldn't have predicted that GWB would've invaded Iraq in response to 9/11

haha yeah I'm p sure invading Iraq was *not* what OBL had in mind, he probably assumed he would be the center of attention

even OBL couldn't have predicted that GWB would've invaded Iraq in response to 9/11

altho tbf I did predict this

Yes, doesn't seem too outlandish.

I don't think OBL anticipated the invasion of Iraq. I think probably he didn't anticipate any particular result besides a strong response from the US. It was a move designed to shake up the status quo of the Middle East, but I don't think he was a particularly brilliant strategist for having successfully induced chaos in the [already precarious] countries around him. Whatever would've happened I'm sure he would've taken credit for, but compared to counterfactuals I don't think this was OBL's most successful result. In general I think it's a pretty poor result.

During the 90s, OBL regularly talked about Iraq (esp the death of children during sanctions, and the airstrikes in '93, '96, '98). His view was it was all of a piece, a crusade by Zionists and Americans against the ummah. I don't know if he expected Americans to be reckless enough to topple Saddam, but he certainly wanted American boots in the Mideast so that the US could be humbled as the USSR had been.

... just not in the country of the two holy places (Arabia).

i know nothing about cypriot music (or really cyprus except for its role for jewish refugees during ww2 and its current occupation by turkey) but this album of cypriot folk music is lovely + jaunty:
http://worldmusiccentral.org/2015/06/19/seasoned-cypriot-folk-music/