Thursday, September 11, 2014

Eradicate the brutes?

So apparently the armed might of the United States (sort of...well, the armed aerial might, anyway) is to be deployed to "eradicate the cancer" of the Islamic State. But that's okay because we're not going to send in the 1st Infantry Division and the Iraqi "government" is now a sweaty love-heap of nonsectarianism and the Saudis really, really promise not to send money to the Islamic theocrats in Fallujah and...well, because we're Good and they're Evil and Good always wins in the movies. And who doesn't love a good movie, right?

Well, okay then!

I know I was advocating using the USAF to act as the Iranian-Iraqi airforce a couple of months ago. I still think that the offer of CAS might have opened up a way for my country to slowly regain some sort of diplomatic re-entry into a region where it has done everything possible to help create geopolitical conditions as fucked up as a football bat but was largely convinced by my commentors here that it was a bad idea then and I don't see anything to suggest that this is any better an idea now that it's being proposed as some sort of regional U.S. aerial fun-fair.

The rabid Sunni theocrats and 8th Century wannabes that run the so-called "Islamic State" are some real sonsofbitches alright and like all theocrats of every variety the notion of their controlling anything more than the local soup kitchen gives me the giggy. But - and, admittedly, he writes purely for the comic effect - Gary Brecher has a damn good point:
"What the jihadis have accomplished is grim enough, but their showoff videos of beheadings and mass executions are minor surges in what is, like it or not, a rational process: The partition of Iraq into three, rather than the previous two, ethnic/sectarian enclaves. Before I.S.I.S made its big move, Iraq was an unstable, immiscible column divided into Kurdistan and “everything else,” with “everything else” ruled by a weak Shia army.

Now the natural three-term partition is in place again, with the Sunni of the center, Saddam’s tribe, back to doing what they do best. I don’t mean to minimize the brutality of the operation, but this is a fairly bloody part of the world, and we contributed rather significantly to that blood-mush ourselves."
Um. Oh, yeah, that. Oops.

I have never had much of an opinion of people in general. The Public IS an ass, by and large. But this is more than usually asinine. Something like 61% of the U.S. public thinks that more rubble = less trouble in the Sunni portions of Iraq and Syria. And that's because...John McCain says so?

What the fuck, people?

The bottom line is that in the zero-sum game of Middle Eastern politics it was always going to be difficult to resolve the issues inherent in the multi-sectarian post-Ottoman, post-colonial "states" like Iraq and Syria. There was the "old" way to play it - where the ruling faction (Tikritis in pre-2003 Iraq, Iranian-Shia clients in post-2008 Iraq, Alawite Shiites in pre-rebellion Syria) butchered the non-ruling factions if they ever got uppity. But we largely helped break that mold when we rampaged into the region killing people, breaking shit, proving that the old post-colonial secular governments were useless other than for being corrupt and weak, knocking groups around and throwing arms and anger all over the place. After that, and given that we ensured that the Sunnis in Iraq were dealt a bloody losing hand, it was nearly inevitable that if they didn't just roll over and die that they would choose to fight. And the more bloody and worse losing hand they were dealt ensured that the fighters they'd throw out would be the most ruthless they could find. The "Free Syrian Army" isn't a loser because they can't fight; they can't fight because they're the losers, the "moderates", who still see options other than red-handed war. The IS guys aren't that stupid. They know that the best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.

And we think a couple of GBU-28's is gonna change that?

The Sunni in the region are going to be horribly, bloodily crushed. Or they will find leaders and fight and will, eventually, establish some sort of polity that will probably be led by someone and look like something the U.S. isn't going to "like". If the U.S. is going to get involved in this hot mess - which I'm not sure we need - we need to start from there. Anything else, any other "policy" is based on complete foolishness, as is this. IF we're going to spend blood and treasure, we should at least understand what we're spending it on and what it might buy. This nonsense tells me we haven't the slightest fucking clue other than to play some idiot game for the morons in the U.S. public and the courtier press.

Honestly, people. Can't anybody here play this goddamn game?

24 comments:

  1. FDChief - Good points all. Although I may have PARTIALLY changed my thinking also. In the opposite direction of yours.

    Back in July I railed against any suggestion of airstrikes in support of maliki. And although I am still against airstrikes in support of the new so-called 'inclusive' Abadi government, I have only limited objections against air support to the Iraqi Kurds. The airstrikes in support of the humanitarian airdrops on Sinjar mountain turned out to be R2P at its finest. The airstrikes in other areas maybe not so much. But consider that the Pesh have no military air arm of their own.

    Abadi has an Air Force and is using it against the Daash (and BTW is also using it against civilian targets whether intentional or thru faulty targeting). Abadi's Air Force has Russian provided ground attack jets and helos. He has Iranian Sukhois and Iranian pilots. He does not need American airstrikes. Assad has a Russian provided Air Force but he too seems to be targeting civilians.

    Instead of giving the Pesh 1960s era small arms the world should give them an air arm of their own. I realize that Baghdad, Tehran and Ankara will object. But if Baghdad considers the Pesh to be a National Guard of sorts, then why shouldn't they have an Air National Guard as well?

    My biggest fear with the current situation is that Cheney's doctors-of-interrogation and ministers-of-pain are going to start crawling out of the woodwork. The Shiite miltias have already started. Why should we support those who kidnap their neighbors and subject them to questioning with electric drills and hammers?

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    1. Couple of points, mike.

      1. "...air support to the Iraqi Kurds" is, in effect, U.S. recognition of an independent Kurdistan. You mention Abadi's air arm; techincally, the Kurds are also Iraqis and that's supposed to be THEIR air arm. IT's not, you know it's not, we know it's not...but for the U.S. government to openly state that will be to make the de facto admission that the old colonial borders are a fiction. That was something that the Bushies HAD to accept because nobody in the region wanted to open that Pandora's Box.

      I don't really have problems with that, either, on a personal scale. Of the factions in the region I "like" the Kurds best; they're a tough people with a hard history and have done as well for their own people while doing as little harm to others as anyone in this huge nutty cluster of fuck. But for the U.S. government to step up and make it clear that we are officially supporting one region of "Iraq" over the others is to admit that our 2003 invasion partitioned the country and we've always, consistently, INsistently denied that.

      2. We support the torturers and goons because, frankly, it's hard to find ANYONE in the region who doesn't have torturers and goons. And we knew that, going in, in 2003, but pretended we didn't (or, at least, the lying bastards in the Cheney Administration said different and we pretended they knew what they were talking about) so we could feel good about ourselves.

      The problem I have with this is that we're STIL pretending. There's only two ways this will play out; either the Sunnis in western Iraq and eastern Syria are crushed, the old way, the Roman way, with massive deaths and rapes and tortures and all the other horrors the end of servile rebellions always elicit. Or the Sunni rump-state estabilishes itself, and probably with some very cruel, brutal sonsofbitches in charge. Because the deaths and rapes and tortures have burned out all the kindness and moderation, crushed the carbon of Sunni humanity into the hard, clear, cold cruel diamond of pure hatred and revenge.

      And that's what's going to happen. I any U.S. "policy" that's conditioned on anything else is a fucking Disney-movie fantasy and as likely to result in a real-life happy ending.

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  2. PS - BTW good link to Brecher. Thanks.

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    1. Count on the War Nerd to find the humor in horror. But I have to say - his consistent skepticism about the "danger" of these medieval wannabes has always struck me as more sensible than the Chicken Littleism coming from the Usual Idiots.

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  3. I'm sorry, how about the option of "when in a hole, stop digging"?

    Continue to buy oil from them at world price and if Iran/Turkey/Saudi Arabia/Israel decide that they need to do something, then let them do it, modulo international law and the security council.

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    1. I think the answer to that is that for some people - the sort of people who were cheerleading Dubya's Excellent Iraqi Adventure, the sorts of people who are foaming at the mouth that we're not parachuting the 82nd into Ramadi - this isn't a hole, it's a secret passage to the Middle East they'd like to see, the Middle East the plays by the Washington Rules.

      The fact that those rules have often been shown to be a boneheaded way to cause more trouble rather than solve it is usually elided by the same people.

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  4. Personally, I don't think ISIS dream is sustainable...achievable, yes, but keeping it once it's there...nah...to many people in that region wanting to be on top of the heap.

    People are people...and these guys, for all their, "WOOOHOOOO, WE'RE FORMING A CALIPHATE!" are going to find that what they're building isn't going to be too cozy to their ideas of what a CALIPHATE will mean for them...which means they'll get antsy, start saying the tards on top have lost their way, and start a new purge that will A) Kill more people, B) Continue their "Hey, lets take this shit over to that country!" spread, and C) pull more suckers who are bored with their lives in Europe and America into their shit-storm of stupid.

    Me, I say pack up, wave goodbye, and un-ass the Middle East ASAP...cause, and here's my prediction...it's going to be a cluster-fuck of epic proportions with a shit-sheer velocity that will make hurricanes look like cool evening summer breezes...and nobody is going to want to be within a ICBM range of that region when it happens.

    sheerahkahn

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    1. I agree that the whole "caliphate" nonsense is a bunch of emotional-12-year-olds playing prophets-and-infidels. The Sunni irredentism will ensure that they have too many enemies in their immediate neighborhood to do much more than stave off the Return of the Kneecap-Drillers to worry about conquering Rome or Malibu.

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  5. Here are my thoughts.

    1. Our current plan supports Iran and Assad. No matter how you sugar coat it. Iran considers the fall of Assad and ISIL on their borders as existential threats (stated positions, not just my assessment). If we weren't dropping bombs in northern Iraq, Iran would be. They already have brigades worths of men on the ground fighting in Iraq and defending Baghdad. If we weren't helping out Iraq, Iran would be forced to remove their resources from Syria (that are protecting Assad) to protect their western border.

    2. If you really want to stick it to Iran and Syria, we would support an independent Kurdistan. That would infuriate Iraq, Iran and Turkey (there's the rub, Turkey, we rely heavily on air bases in Turkey). Maliki (read as Iranian proxy) was very apprehensive of US support to the Kurds when this first started. There was a lot of diplomatic pressure placed on the US to prevent too many forces being placed in Irbil out of fear that the US would offer too much support to the Kurds.

    3. It is the American media that has not allowed Obama to take the course of action of sitting of the sidelines, which would have been the best COA if we truly had a congruent policy in the region. No action would have forced Iran to defend Iraq, taking away resources from Assad. It would be Iran who would have to take on ISIL, and it would be Iran's and Assad's regimes (both enemies as per our policy) who would have resources drained by figthing an ugly war with ISIL. But our mainstream media decided that they must pressure Obama to take action, and he did. War makes better headlines (and better ratings) than sitting on the sideline. We had no obligation to defend Iraq. We could have pulled out our people and said, "you guys figure this shit out, you didn't want us here, remember?"

    What we need more than anything, and what we won't get from this administration, is a consistent policy to work off of. The news cycles drive this adminstration. It is exhausting.

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  6. Let's ceate new borders. Make the IS land a secular state with some oil and lots of autonomy in a loose confederacy called Mesopotamia that includes southern Iraq, Kurdistan and the Levatine coast. None of the Players in the Middle East wants strong new independent states. Lumping Syria and Iraq together in a number of small autonomous secular states in one union along religious divides with some oil or coastlines for exporting the oil could work. A secular a state with religious apartheid can be a very good US ally, as Israel highlights every day. There's one problem, the many Christians of Syria need a political home, either in Shia or Sunni alliance - that's what the secularism is for, because the Christian integration allows for a better economy that makes a nation with more than 50% unde 18 have real perspectives when growing up. Rape, murder and plunder Nazi-style are their current solutions to that problem, making IS hell bent on expansion. I think the Mongols were nice guys with longterm planning in comparison.

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    1. I c typos now, sry.

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    2. The good side is that the more clusterfucked the region gets, the less technically and economically capable it will be. Afghanistan for all their years of warfare did not put up much resistance. The problem, where Western forces messed is establishing a ruling structure. It helps reading some Roman classics on this issue of not democracy, but tribal rule with lip service to some strange ideology. What really always mattered was getting the economy going. Rebels will always surrender, when they can get a better life with a regular job, while killing them is like screwing for virginity. Establishing a democracy is something a society must do from within and this needs a certain economy. The better the economic structure, the easier this transition, just ask South Korea.

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    3. Well, that's what our IS boys are doing, in effect; creating a new polity out of the wreckage of the old colonial "states" of Iraq and Syria. Whether or not they can KEEP that polity, well...I have no idea. My suspicion is that some sort of Sunni-Arab "thing" will emerge from this fucking disaster. What it is, what it does, and what it will do? I haven't the slightest idea.

      The only problem with closing the doors and allowing the brutes to exterminate each OTHER is that, as we've found out, the communication and transportation revolutions of the 20th and 21st Centuries allow these gawdawful failed-state regions to 1) brew trouble and troublemakers and then 2) export them. While the Middle East may not me "technically and economically capable" how friggin' capable do you have to be to figure out Semtex? Warmaking is a Late Stone Age skill and the environmental selection pressure on the warmakers in these regions is pretty intense.

      Mind you, I don't know what the U.S., or any other Western power can DO about this hot mess. But it's worth keeping in mind that usually more rubble = MORE trouble...

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  7. "What we need more than anything, and what we won't get from this government, is a consistent policy to work off of. The news cycles drive this adminstration. It is exhausting."

    Sorry, BG, but I fixed that for you.

    It's not just Obama and the Democrats, it is all of them. Dem's and Republicans, and to the larger extent, those who have a...well, lets not be coy with words, "VESTED" interest in the regions resources. Mr. Baker III did spell out in the 80's that part and parcel of America's foreign policy is to go to war to protect the flow of Oil. It's just what Mr. Baker defined as "go to war" and what today's American government defines "go to war" don't seem to share the same idea.

    Anyway, agreed about the spirit of the whole quote in general...it is exhausting, and dismally disappointing.

    sheerahkahn

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    1. Good point about vested interests. One common feature among imperial trajectories is the evolution of private interests into expensive governmental policies. Typically, this happens as powerful people (who got rich from raping some corner of the world) use their influence to get the government to bail them out of the inevitable consequences of their rapaciousness.

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  8. Something else for the group that I've been thinking about. One of the points of the plan is to build a coalition. This has been a common theme for the last several years in the Army is parter building and security force assistant.

    Is fighting war through coalitions nothing more than fighting a war by committee?

    Just like the vested interests discussed above, each member has their own agenda, own interests and their own desired outcomes. So as a result, instead of the desired outcome of a horse, instead we end up with a camel.

    Is it possible to fight a war by committee (a large coalition) and not expect an outcome that looks different from your desired outcome?

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    1. Coalitions are important because they greatly reduce the chances of leadership being given one way tickets to the Hague. It is a hang together or hanged separately kind of thing. The actual outcome of the war is not nearly as important.

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    2. Coalitions are, in my opinion, are another form of the US political system called, "Bi-partisanship" which has come to mean... "We're not going to expose our asses without some assurance that our opponents are all-in on this shit-wagon, too."

      However, I will concede that in the international arena Coalitions fall more along the economic policy route of limiting exposure to bad decision making ( aka "risks") by spreading the "exposure" over a larger swath of investors...sorry, I meant, countries.

      And if memory serves, that was a great idea ten years ago...oh wait...no, no it wasn't.

      No, Coalitions are just a political ploy to pull others into our cycle of crap decision making by spreading our poor ideas amongst a larger circle of suckers.

      Sheerahkahn

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  9. bg - "Is it possible to fight a war by committee (a large coalition) and not expect an outcome that looks different from your desired outcome?"

    Depends on whether you are a strong committee chairman with a few yes-men in your pocket, or a fringe member. Or in the case of ww2 on whether you were one of the big three or one of the other 22 hangers on and client states. In retrospect that conflict certainly had some undesired political outcomes. Choose your friends carefully.

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    1. Germany, sure, you bet, they were already heading down the road of autocracy, and Russia...yeah, boy, Stalin was already having some hate for his komrades below him, so it didn't take much for him to go autocratic oh his own house of bitches. Italy, well, el douche really should have looked in the mirror more and asked the question, "Does what I think of myself really match what I'm seeing in the mirror?" And Japan was already way ahead of their compatriots when they cracked open their can of worms of wanting lebensraum.

      But again, autocratic governments produce directional motivation from the top which is why the can get things done in their own countries, but fuck everything up when they move beyond that.

      Today, we're facing a similar, albeit, different, but still their are some similarties to draw parallels between then and now...one of which is nationalism. Now granted, no single person has straddled that horse to lead it to it's typical conclusion of world conquest....well, alright, lets just say ISIS has some grand visions of itself but it doesn't have the basis of infrastructure and military production it wishes it had...but as far as the largest countries go...I have a feeling that it will be a proxy war for some time...risks of getting ones hands dirty, and looking like the world douche bag..I think..limits the willingness to do what is necessary to bring order to the chaos.

      Personally, I blame Hollywood, but only because they have perpetuated the mentality of the "White Hat" good guy who does the Dudley Do-Right thing all the time.

      Sheerahkahn

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  10. Funny how the conventional view is that a cognizant choice to do nothing is seen as being indecisive, even if doing nothing is the most prudent course of action.

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  11. Kurdish news sources are reporting that the Daash jihadis have destroyed Saladin's castle in Tikrit.

    Also reported are rumors of cholera outbreaks among the refugees.

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  12. Very good, Chief. On the U.S.'s end, it is "some idiot game for the morons in the U.S. public and the courtier press." The People behave like one gelatanized blob of sheep being led 'round the field, their phase-changes predictably tied to the pap fed them by the press. Probably nothing new here.

    Sheerah: I do think the ISIS state will be sustainable for awhile. Pity is, the longer we hang 'round as "advisers", etc., the more we prolong the inevitable burning out of this fire.

    Amazing that people do not see this.

    --Lisa

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  13. One comment, about 'the Public'. Remember that the American people have been systematically and quite deliberately lied to about what's going on. The media was not honest about the Iraq War and protected the A-holes who helped get us into it. Now they're hyping ISIS as a serious threat to the USA, with the same A-holes hyping this war.

    More and more I think that Chomsky's comments about the US mass media were if anything under cynical.

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