I Never MENA Hurt You; I Never MENA Make You Cry 2017 (Middle East, North Africa, and Other Geopolitical Hotspots)

if it happened, but wasn't fatal, then I doubt would change much in Syria any time soon. his policies would run along on simple inertia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obamas-white-house-worked-for-months-on-a-plan-to-seize-raqqa-trumps-team-deemed-it-hopelessly-inadequate/2017/02/02/116310fa-e71a-11e6-80c2-30e57e57e05d_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumpsyria-320pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.76b81e4045b7

Trump's new plan better be better than the one they had in Yemen

Stephen Walt:

Or consider this. For the past 15 years or more, people like me have been consistently and at times powerfully critical of American neoconservatives. I still regard their views on U.S. grand strategy and U.S. Middle East policy as dangerous and wrong, and I believe they bear considerable responsibility for the continuing fiasco we are dealing with in the Middle East. If William Kristol, Eliot Cohen, or David Frum got close to wielding power again, I’d worry that their advice might be taken seriously and I’d do what I could to challenge their analysis and their prescriptions. But as of today we’re on the same side, because the threat that Trump, Bannon, and their incompetent cronies pose to our constitutional order and core political values overrides our continuing differences on other foreign-policy questions. The neocons may change their tune if Trump does decide to attack Iran — we’ll see — but for now their concerns are justified and their warnings should be heeded.

It takes a danger of considerable magnitude to get realists and neoconservatives to agree on anything, but we agree on Trump. And you can add to that unlikely coalition the traditional left, the largely apolitical civil service, the heads of a growing number of major corporations, and many dedicated foreign-policy professionals Trump might have won over but didn’t even bother to try.

Assad appears to be still alive, and he has allegedly had executed 13,000 opponents who were detained in jails in recent years

the Amnesty International report says the magnitude and severity of abuse has "increased drastically" since 2011. Citing the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, the report says "at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody between March 2011 and December 2015, an average of 300 deaths each month." The victims — political dissidents, journalists, doctors and aid workers — were perceived opponents of the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

On the basis of its own investigation, Amnesty International estimates that between September 2011 and December 2015, between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed without legitimate trials at Saydnaya.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/06/513804240/amnesty-international-reports-organized-murder-of-detainees-in-syrian-prison

But will he agree to a trade deal with the UK and has Theresa May offered him a state visit yet?

Mass murder was always going to be the result of an Assad victory.

I was listening to a v grisly + depressing report on this earlier, people are often notified of their death penalty within minutes of the hanging - which is sometimes taking up to 15 minutes to kill them, often executioners are having to pull their legs to finish off the job. I think I'd rather take a bullet than go through such an horrific death as that.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-turkey-idUSKBN15N02J

The Turkish sources said Pompeo would discuss both the YPG and steps against the network of U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey accuses of orchestrating last July's coup attempt. Gulen denies any involvement.

Turkey has been frustrated by what it considers to be Washington's reluctance to hand over Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999.

"As you know, we have two fundamental issues with the U.S. administration inherited from Obama’s period. One is the support given to YPG and the other is the (Gulen) problem," Kalin said.

"Our president spoke about these openly and clearly. Trump was informed on these and, without going into too much detail, he said let’s ask our teams to work on this and let’s give the necessary instructions."

freezing out the Kurds

Wouldn't be the first time the Kurds were encouraged to shed blood at the behest of the USA and then left hanging out to dry when backing up our words with actions became inconvenient.

I'm thinking the US military has different ideas on this, then the US politicians in the White House and CIA have on this. That's why the latter dropped the Obama plan mentioned upthread

ugh the whole Gulen thing is so 1984 it makes me sick.

erdogan is a fool if he really wants to get his hands on gulen. dude is obviously so much more valuable as a distant scapegoat than he could ever be in custody

Targeting the Gulenist movement would continue even if Gulen himself was in jail. Öcalan is in prison.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/liberman-offers-gaza-seaport-airport-40000-jobs-asks-for-disarmament-hostages-soldiers-bodies/

he must only be offering this bc he knows hamas will never agree to disarmament

this is still insane btw just making the offer is kinda boggling my mind.

...thanks trump?

AN AIRPORT.

if i were hamas - and assume i'm 100% committed to staying armed - i'd accept, disarm, and then just BRING IN ALL THE WEAPONS I WANTED THROUGH MY BRAND NEW AIRPORT.

I am sure that Hamas views itself as the legitimate government of Gaza and it should be obvious to any neutral party that they have very solid factual grounds for this view. Legitimate governments everywhere are 100% committed to arming themselves. If I were Hamas, I would need a hell of a lot more than an airport to pursue disarmament. I'd need a very detailed and comprehensive peace deal with Israel.

So not gonna happen.

and it should be obvious to any neutral party that they have very solid factual grounds for this view

lol tell me aimless when was the last time they held elections

terrible suicide bombing in pakistan today
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/16/asia/pakistan-shrine-bombing/index.html

Mordy, the factual basis for thinking Hamas is a legitimate government rests on the fact that they do in fact attempt to administer to the civil needs of the population and provide a stable and predictable set of services in return for the taxes it levies. Elections are not the only measure of legitimacy, and given the ease and frequency with which they are manipulated, should not be the most salient measure.

If you want to apply liberal political ideals to the notion of legitimacy, the number of nations admissible to the UN would take a pretty drastic hit.

You're glossing over a lot like the fact that they run a totalitarian dictatorship within Gaza and engage in numerous crimes against their citizens including torture, religious enforcement, etc, not to mention the war crimes they commit - firing at Israeli civilian targets is not even the worst of it since now there's the Iron Dome, but it seems clear to me that there's firm evidence that they do use hospitals, schools, children, civilian apartment buildings, etc as shields against counter strikes on missile sites. Which is to say that they are legitimate as much as any theologic authoritarian gov that has led its people into poverty and misery can be. More important I think is that they see themselves as the military vanguard against Israel and it would deconstruct their entire identity to disarm (not to mention would injure their legitimacy among even more radical splinter groups in Gaza like Islamic Jihad and ISIS-offshoots and would likely lead to their demise either through a coup or a people's revolution).

as any theologic authoritarian gov that has led its people into poverty and misery can be

I'll freely grant they are theologic and authoritarian. iirc, the poverty and misery predate their creation, let alone their assuming the government of gaza.

it would deconstruct their entire identity to disarm

you agree with me, then: so not gonna happen.

lead to their demise either through a coup or a people's revolution

it seems internally contradictory to me to imply they do not represent a legitimate government because they have not held elections recently, yet think that their most central policy is so popular with the governed that changing it would lead to their overthrow by the general population. that's kind of a weird compartmentalization.

Maybe I spoke poorly because I think you misunderstood me. Hamas is not popular afaict in Gaza. However they have many weapons which can be useful for staying in control. Without those weapons they will leave themselves open to a coup or a people's revolution that they might otherwise be able to fend off through their [pseudo]-monopoly on armed resistance. With regard to these splinter groups, I think a combination of Hamas' militant superiority and at least some tolerance of Hamas' level of antagonism keeps them in check. But only just barely - they are constantly threatening Hamas (normally by firing weapons at Israel and daring the IDF to strike back at Hamas as punishment) and pushing for even more militant strategies. So I think Hamas is not popular, and that if they were put in a weaker position there are both other militant groups as well as the general populace who would be interested in pushing them out. In terms of their identity, I see this more as an existential issue relating primarily to their self-conception. Is this a clearer explanation? I see no compartmentalization at all in this diagnosis.

However they have many weapons which can be useful for staying in control.

Since you seem to be saying this in the context of a discussion of why hamas won't even begin to consider disarming itself in return for a big airport (which is what both of us are saying, but from different perspectives), I can only read "weapons" in that context as referring to literal armaments, since those would be the only weapons they would be divesting themselves of, not the apparatus of governance.

I do not imagine any government anywhere on earth would agree to disarming to the extent they could no longer police their population, or prevent an armed "splinter" from overthrowing them, nor disarming to the point where they would be defenseless against an invasion by their larger, more powerful neighbor, without a comprehensive, detailed and internationally enforced peace treaty with that neighbor. An airport is a piddling bribe and a dismally stupid offer.

We got into this little tussle because you lolled at the idea that hamas was a legitimate government and by extension lolled at my posting that included that statement. You seem to have stopped lolling. You want to sign an armistice?

Yeah, I wasn't trying to be cruel - I just thought it was a somewhat funny way of putting things since from my perspective their need for weapons comes directly from their essential illegitimacy. Maybe I'm revealing a tad naiveté but of course as a Western I like to believe that my government's legitimacy comes from the people and from the consent granted by the ruled. Hamas, like many dictatorships, rules through might and oppression. When you wrote that no legitimate government would give up their weapons my mind immediately went to the legitimacy of representative governments in maintaining weaponry in order to protect their citizenship. Even with a comprehensive peace with Israel (something that ending the blockade would suggest at least an opening towards) Hamas cannot afford to disarm, and it has nothing to do with their neighbors. In the end I was just quibbling and I'm sorry if you were annoyed.

If Hamas did have a sincere interest in ending the blockade perhaps they could make a counter offer to disarm their rocket arsenals and other weapons clearly intended for waging war against Israel, but get to keep their more conventional arms that they need to suppress internal dissent. I suspect they will not, though, for the first reason I gave. Their entire raison d'etre is refusing to compromise with Israel. (On a least overt level I believe this existential reason is responsible for much of the conflict between Israel and Palestinian nationalism but that's a huge conversation I'm not really interested in getting into atm.)

Remember Aleppo. Curious about what's happening there lately I googled and just found this--

Less than 20 hours after water supply was fully restored in the eastern Aleppo countryside, ISIS shut it down once more after a month-long outage in the Al-Khafseh area.

This region represents an area which has seen the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) capture over a dozen villages from ISIS in the past month; effectively, the water shutdown can be seen as a infrastructural way for the Islamic State to retaliate.

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/islamic-state-cuts-off-water-supply-aleppo/

http://www.timesofisrael.com/praising-trump-saudi-fm-urges-progress-toward-israeli-arab-peace/

The Saudis have obviously figured out that flattery is essential when approaching trump.

The U.S. military commander in Iraq has said he believes

U.S.-backed forces will retake both of IS's urban bastions - Mosul and Raqqa in neighboring Syria - within the next six months, which would end the jihadists' ambitions to territorial rule three years after they declared a "caliphate".

...

"This is the grim choice for children in western Mosul right now: bombs, crossfire and hunger if they stay – or execution and snipers if they try to run," the Save the Children humanitarian agency said in a statement. It added that children comprise about half the population in the city's western sector.

Up to 400,000 civilians could be displaced by the offensive, with western Mosul suffering food and fuel shortages and markets closed, according to the United Nations.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-mosul-idUSKBN1601VT

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/new-houthi-weapon-emerges-a-drone-boat

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The Houthi boat that attacked and hit a Saudi frigate Jan. 30 in the Red Sea, reported earlier as a suicide boat, was instead carried out by an unmanned, remote-controlled craft filled with explosives, the US Navy’s top officer in the Mideast said.

“Our assessment is that it was an unmanned, remote-controlled boat of some kind,” Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan, commander of the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet and head of US Naval Forces Central Command, told Defense News in an interview here Saturday.

The attack on the frigate Al Madinah appears to be the first confirmed use of the weapon which, Donegan said, represents a wider threat than that posed by suicide boats and shows foreign interests are aiding the Houthis.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/20/rockets-fired-into-southern-israel-from-egypts-sinai

Isis being driven up north, this seems a 'logical' attack from their side. I don't believe ISIS can do any real damage in Israel, luckily, but I do wonder if stuff like this will get Bibi (even) more on board with Trumps supposed plans to "fight ISIS" more? Stingy for Israel to get involved with ISIS imho.

If Bibi dedicates resources to fighting ISIS I don't think it'll be bc of rockets from Sinai but because he thinks it'll curry favor with either Trump, Saudis or both.

Yeah, that's what I am thinking. Even Bibi would not act on this threat without an outspoken, full support of Israel's allies imho. Hitching the wagon to allies seems the best option for Israel, instead of reacting solo.

koplow on how the republican congress is more hawkish on PA aid than the Israeli ministry of defense, AIPAC, and the IDF:
http://www.matzavblog.com/2017/03/perplexing-problem-propping-pa/

The US religious right enjoys the position of being ultra-hawkish about wars they wish to be fought, by others, somewhere far from their own homes.

also there are american zionist orgs that are more hawkish than aipac and the idf, like the ZOA which supports the taylor force act.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mounting-claims-of-civilian-deaths-after-us-targetsal-qaeda-in-syria/2017/03/17/350d5838-0ae9-11e7-8884-96e6a6713f4b_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_syria-920a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a02e803c7f2b

trump administration wants to give the cia back its droning powers (currently only with DOJ) so we can expect more of this and less accountability in the future

Frankly, the inability to ensure that there was more legal oversight over drone warfare in undeclared wars was one of my biggest objections to Obama administration foreign policy.

I think its possibly morally acceptable for the US to make drone strikes against persons that don't present an immanent threat to US territory (and really, no one in the target countries really does), but the extension of presidential powers to wage undeclared war doesn't make a whole lot of sense outside of the context of strategic/nuclear threats, and *immanent* threats. Its just a recipe for long-term blowback.

I think it was a huge mistake to not to encourage some legislative restrictions on this in 2012-, considering our electorate is only 4 for 6 in picking non-demented commanders-in-chief over the past 36 years.

Meanwhile, Israel went on an excursion into Syria in search of Hezbollah from Lebanon

Syria fired missiles at Israeli warplanes on a mission to destroy a weapons convoy destined for the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah prompting it to deploy its missile defense system, Israeli officials said Friday, in a rare military exchange between the two hostile neighbors. ...

"Our policy is very consistent. When we identify attempts to transfer advanced weapons to the Hezbollah, and we have the intelligence and the operational capability, we act to prevent that. That is what was and that is what will be," Netanyahu said.

Hezbollah is fighting alongside President Bashar Assad in the brutal Syrian civil war. The Iran-backed group is sworn to Israel's destruction and fought a month-long war with the Jewish state in 2006.

The firing of missiles from Syria toward Israeli aircraft is rare, though Israeli military officials reported a shoulder-fired missile attack a few months ago.

Israeli Channel 10 TV reported that Israel deployed its Arrow defense system for the first time against a real threat and hit an incoming missile, intercepting it before it exploded in Israel.

...

The pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen TV, which has good sources within the militant group, dismissed reports by other Arab media outlets that a Hezbollah commander, Badee Hamiyeh, was killed in one of the airstrikes. It said Hamiyeh was killed Thursday in the southern Syrian region of Quneitra, near the Israeli-held Golan Heights.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-syria-israel-airstrikes-20170317-story.html

If you want to help with creation of an online Arabic dictionary app that references formal written Arabic and geographic dialectshttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/675665171/mobile-apps-for-the-living-arabic-project/description

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/675665171/mobile-apps-for-the-living-arabic-project/description

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman has warned Syria that Israel will destroy its air defense system if Syria fires an anti-aircraft missile at Israeli aircraft again.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/19/middleeast/israel-syria-air-defenses-liberman/

Well good luck with that. If it was that easy, it would probably have been done.

done by whom? FSA or ISIS? i don't doubt israel could do it but the considerations would obviously be what kind of reaction it would invite from hezbollah, iran, or even russia.

Wasn't the whole reason the US wouldn't do a no-fly zone that the cost of destroying the Syrian air defense system was too high? Obama didn't hold back out of care for the Syrians.

Maintaining ongoing control of air space seems a bit more ambitious to me than bombing air facilities once.

No, in the long run there are no other choices. Everything else is avoidance.

Neither Iran or Saudi Arabia is likely to be very helpful; some will continue to choose to rationalize supporting or working with certain authoritarian governments but not others

The EU is currently working with Erdogans Turkey to keep out immigrants, but clearly that's not a longterm solution either.

everything else is avoidance of what? what are you saying exactly? why can't a country limit immigration, build walls, etc and continue on ignoring the misery going on outside the walls? isn't that history of most of civilization? xxp

the problems with the EU bribing Turkey and Libya to be their border control are frightfully obvious.

xpost: And it has never worked in the long run...

Also, it's really not true, most states throughout history has been trying to expand, I'd say.

there are other choices that are real choices and much more likely than either of those

I understand your concern that immigration is strengthening the trend toward fascism in all western nations. But you seem to be preemptively embracing the solutions proposed by the radical nationalists, as a way of undercutting them. In my view this not only makes you their unwilling ally, but also concedes that a huge swath of their political principles are legitimate. You might be hitting yourself in the hope that the blows will be softer if self-administered.

And, yes, I know this is a huge issue with massive ramifications that is bound to increase rapidly in the next couple of decades and it isn't at all clear what is the most practical means of dealing with it.

fwiw I am not particularly concerned nor am i advocating for anything. i'm just observing what seems to be a fait accompli at this point.

fwiw it does not work to compromize with the radical nationalists at all. They've been pretty much in control of Danish immigration politics for 12 out of the last 16 years, and the government in the remaining 4 years didn't to anything that different. It's a mistake to say radical nationalists in Europe are for closed borders, and if only the left closes them enough, they will be mollified. They are 'tough on immigration' parties, and their whole raison d'etre is to always be tougher than the other parties. Any law they get through, and any move in their direction, only lead to further demands, while also in most cases hurting actual efforts at immigrating people who have legitimate reasons to be here. Which of course leads to further problems, leading to more demands, leading to more problems, etc.

'integrating' not 'immigrating', sorry.

fred otm about the hard right. however

The responses to the migration crisis are either open borders or a serious, comprehensive plan for alleviating global inequality. There is no other choices.

imo the choices are either fascism, or a serious comprehensive plan for alleviating global inequality (feat. open borders). open borders without the latter will have the results mordy describes.

this is why revolutionary internationalist leftism and fascism are the only real political positions and everything else is fantasy tbh.

One too many. Revolutionary Internationalist Leftism. Everything else is reaction.

lol well sure but the reactionaries might win, which is more than you can say for anyone else but us. i mean we could comfort ourselves by saying that actually it wouldn't count as winning because their civilization would extinguish itself. but that would be no comfort at all so instead we'd have to hope that they escaped the dying earth and constructed a monstrous fascist empire throughout the stars that much later fell to revolutionary internationalist leftism. which aside from requiring an even greater exertion of teleological faith would actually feel even worse.

lads

your two realistic options for how to resolve the migration crisis is "revolutionary international leftism" and "fascism" - neither of which mean anything.

#IntergalacticRevolutionaryLeftism

Do keep up

fascism would look pretty much like how it usually looks.

revolutionary internationalist leftism would aggressively redistribute global wealth downward by every means possible, redistributing political power along with it, in the belief that this would relax the stresses that give rise to fascist nationalism, maintain habitability on the maximum planetary surface, and produce the minimum possible 21-22c death toll.

imo if i can be monday morning stoned on anyone's middle east north africa and other geopolitical hotspots thread it's mordy's.

thoughts?

http://www.rojava-info.com/2017/12/us-gives-ypg-500-million-weapon-aid.html?m=1

Take that with huge handfuls of salt. The US does arm the YPG but it’s a sticky point of negotiation between various parties. Turkey believed it secured a commitment from Trump to stop sending them weapons, the US has said that they will reduce arms deliveries and may phase them out over time, it is still up for discussion. If they were going to spend half a billion next year, they wouldn’t be announcing it.

Actually, I think the US technically claims to arm SDF divisions under YPG command rather than the YPG directly. The $500m figure seems familiar - it might be the total cost of supporting the SDF and aligned groups.

Have any writers critiqued the Politico allegation re the Obama White House allegedly derailing an in investigation into alleged drug dealing by Hezbollah, in order to ensure that the Iran Nuclear Treaty would be reached?

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/20/572195727/politico-reporter-says-obama-administration-derailed-hezbollah-investigation

http://www.jpost.com/International/Hezbollah-scandal-perfect-timing-for-Trump-administration-520038

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obama-hezbollah-drug-trafficking-investigation/

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

saw some references to the CIA/FBI not giving a fuck about whatever the DEA is up to because of the pecking order in these sorts of things..

The obvious critique is- who cares? If you consider the threat of Iran obtaining nuclear capability to be a serious one, you'd obviously prioritise that over aome drug trafficking by an Iranian proxy.

Sounds like US done played itself, letting the drug trafficking continue for the sake of halting a fictional weapons programme.

Idk if Purdue pharma pretended to have a nuclear weapons programme lol

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa/mattis-sees-larger-u-s-civilian-presence-in-syria-idUSKBN1EN1H8

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday that he expected to see a larger U.S. civilian presence in Syria, including contractors and diplomats, as the fight against Islamic State militants nears its end and the focus turns toward rebuilding and ensuring the militants do not return.

Hmmm, wonder who will decide on the contractors...

no-bid contracts, here we come!

Thread on Iran protests from yesterday

Thread: Iran’s protests--including in traditional cities like Qom and Mashhad--are a reminder of the country’s deep political, social, and above all economic frustrations https://t.co/PRT1RUTdNX

— Karim Sadjadpour (@ksadjadpour) December 29, 2017

Trump tweeting about Iran being an “oppressive regime “ after he has been selling military ware to Saudi Arabia and sucking up to China, Philippines, and Russia is well typical. Plus Trumpies tweeting that CNN is ignoring the protests is wrong . If Glen Greenwald tweets about Iran it will probably just be a mention of the CIA’s history in Iran.

Any 2018 thread name ideas?

MENA, MENA, Tekel, Parsin 2018

Confess that I had to google that, but it works

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belshazzar%27s_feast

Seems legit.

I took Mordy's suggestion and started a 2018 thread

MENA, MENA, Tekel, Parsin (Middle East, North Africa & other Geopolitical Hotspots) 2018