Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

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/

oops, i meant that for the outernational thread. oh well, not too off-topic here...

Louis to thread.

Neo-con Krauthammer's new strategy (with his standard dis of Obama thrown in, and well his opposition now to the Iraqi govt is consistent with his desire to blame Iran for everything and to want to put American lives in danger to stop Iran):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-strategy-for-iraq-and-syria/2015/06/18/20a52e28-15f1-11e5-9518-f9e0a8959f32_story.html?hpid=z3

Abandon our anachronistic fealty to the central Iraqi government (now largely under Iran’s sway anyway) and begin supplying the Iraqi Kurds in a direct, 24-hour, Berlin-style airlift. And in Syria, intensify our training, equipping and air support for the now-developing Kurdish safe zone. Similarly, through Jordan, for the Free Syrian Army’s Southern Front. Such a serious and relentless strategy would not only roll back Islamic State territorial gains, it would puncture the myth of Islamic State invincibility.

In theory, we should also be giving direct aid to friendly Sunni tribesmen in Iraq whose Anbar Awakening, brilliantly joined by Gen. David Petraeus’ surge, utterly defeated the Islamic State progenitor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006-2007. The problem is, having been abandoned by us once, when President Obama liquidated our presence in 2011, why should the Sunnis ever trust us again?

this should be interesting:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/19/us-saudi-wikileaks-idUSKBN0OZ1P320150619

From soon after 9/11, when I first started thinking about al-Q in any serious way, my take has been that one of their primary early objectives was to destabilize the existing authoritarian Arab regimes, which weren't radical enough to challenge the west. al-Q saw these governments as easy to sweep aside, given their unpopularity, and the Taliban provided al-Q with a model for the mujahedeen states that would move into the power vacuum. This seems like crude thinking, until you compare it to what has happened.

Their short term objective in 9/11 seemed to be to bait the USA into some kind of extremely heavy-handed tactics that would increase arab resentment toward both the USA and toward the cooperating arab regimes. Under the circumstances, the Iraq War was a gift of manna from GWB to al-Q.

Obama's drone warfare has definitely been effective at decreasing casualties among US soldiers and reducing the overall cost of operations, but like GWB's earlier tactics of invasion, occupation and creation of new puppet regimes, it still generates large quantities of resentment and anger, so that al-Q's basic grand strategy is still well served by Obama's on-the-cheap 'decapitation' war.

"If Baghdad continues to drag its feet, then this whole effort is doomed," Khedery said. "You can never have peace if Baghdad doesn’t want the Sunnis and the Kurds fully integrated as first-class citizens."

...

But the president's desire for a successful nuclear deal with Iran is likely getting in the way of a broad US strategy in the Middle East.

"Obama, because of the dramatic failures in every meaningful other part of his foreign policy, views the Iran deal as his 'Nixon goes to China moment,' his big legacy item," Khedery said. "So he and his team have been unwilling to do anything that would remotely upset the Iranians. This has emboldened Tehran and exacerbated regional tensions."

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-crippling-contradiction-in-obamas-isis-strategy-is-growing-2015-6#ixzz3dixARW5Q

My problem with this neo-con analysis, is that even if Obama was not working on a nuclear deal with Iran, and was instead focussed on trying to force the Iraqi government to treat Sunnis and Kurds fairly and support them on the same level as Shias, I don't think the current Iraqi government would be suddenly more open-minded

and Iran would be acting the same or even worse

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/attacks-hit-three-continents-amid-fears-of-escalating-islamist-violence/2015/06/26/c3a76c90-1c08-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html?hpid=z2

Terror attacks believed linked to Islamic militants hit three continents in a matter of hours Friday — deadly gunfire at a Tunisian resort, a beheading in France and a blast at a Kuwait mosque — raising fears of escalating violence during the Muslim holy month dedicated to prayer and peaceful reflection.

peaceful reflection

huh how's that working out

Religious extremists

On Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast, sunbathers raced off the beach and others dove for cover after gunmen opened fire, killing more than two dozen people.

extremists

just another day with more killings

idk if this works, and if it does for how long it will continue to, but if you want to read the new war nerd (about the kurds aka YPG/Jis taking over Tal Abyad) i was able to get around the new pando paywall w/ this link

xps god so horrible

yeah go kurds! i'm team kurds generally speaking

Like the Kurds, don't like War Nerd guy's writing style

152 killed in an IS attack on Kobane yesterday.

Imarat Kavkaz might not have sworn allegiance to them after all.

http://eng.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/32173/

Though huge numbers of fighters from the region are going individually.

Al-Shabab killed 30 at an African Union military base in Somalia

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33282778

iran nuclear talks going past deadline
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33304417

according to op-ed a few days ago, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/opinion/the-iran-deals-fatal-flaw.html

30 Britons dead, at least. This is major.

how so? do you anticipate a lot of blowback in the uk? i doubt the english are about to drop troops in iraq, or tunisia

As an attack on civilians goes, 30 dead is not exactly minor, but as you point out, it is more likely to sharpen the pursuit of present UK anti-terror policy than to escalate it into a new realm.