” . . . the kind of conversation you have in a free society . . . .”
28 Thursday May 2015
Author Archives: commart
Jerusalem in the Age of Terror
28 Thursday May 2015
Link – Iraq – Assessment – and Comment on Motivation
28 Thursday May 2015
The West insists on maintaining the illusion that the government in Baghdad is something other than a Shia sectarian-dominated entity in the process of entering a de facto military alliance with the Iranians. This stubbornness is producing the current absurd situation in which Western air power is being used in support of Shia Islamism.
It is important to understand that this is not taking place because there is no other option for stopping the advance of the Islamic State. There is another, more effective option: direct aid to the Kurds, and to the Sunni tribes further south.
Spyer, Jonathan. “The March of Folly in Iraq.” Rubin Center, May 19, 2015.
In the medieval mode, sectarian religious teleology — who wins the favor of God? How soon do we get to find out? — reaches the boundary of the ineffable: may God decide on the field of battle, and the sooner the better!
In the modern mode, the same narrative may be left to God to decide gently across millennia — or not at all: who needs must get to the end of the story in their lifetime or even want the same to arrive in their great grandchildren’s day?
BackChannels has been surprised by the tenacious hold given, so the blog shall refer to it, the “Great Sunni vs Shiite War” in Shiite circles and doubtless, whatever the proportions, in Sunni ones as well.
How is it for the west that so alien, primitive, and singular an unanswerable dispute may by ripples and waves spread to engulf the modern of two to several middle east states?
Ayatollah Khamenei’s expansion of influence, and this despite the regime’s infamous behavior in its own space, appears to proceed apace through the combined artifice of political theater — how conveniently the ISIS story links to the narrative “Assad vs The Terrorists” — and, in Yemen, just watch those Houthis go — war by proxy.
Fast Reference
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/saudi-arabia-and-iran-fighting-proxy-war-in-yemen-a-1027056.html – 4/3/2015.
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.
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Link – Criticism of Patrick Cockburn Also Tells About A Post-Soviet “Theater of the Real”
28 Thursday May 2015
By contrast, Cockburn takes a generous view of the regime’s belated and brief confrontation with ISIS. He has pronounced Assad’s army its “main military opponent,” deserving of Western support. But facts tell a different story. According to a Carter Center study, the regime has spared ISIS in 90 percent of its attacks; and an IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center (JTIC) study finds that in 2014, the regime targeted ISIS in only 6 percent of its attacks. (ISIS in turn directed its fire on the regime in only 13 percent its operations.)
Since Aboud Dandachi laid out the shaping of the battle by Assad forces in his refreshingly honest and entertaining history and polemic, The Doctor, The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between the World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (2014), the feudal perversion of a modest pro-democracy protest in 2011 into a brutal epic one might title “Assad vs The Terrorists” has been apparent but the statistics on how it was done never so well relayed.
BackChannels (oh the bias!) commonly invokes the term “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” in place of Bashar al-Assad alone to play up the axis, its Russo-Iranian core, and define the conflict in Syria as other and greater than “civil war”, a mere internal dispute, the greater dispute being that between medieval absolute power and modern democratic distributed or popular power.
Additional Reference
Amazon.com: The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict. eBook: Aboud Dandachi: Kindle Store – Kindle Edition, 94-101, 2/17/2014.
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2012 Report – Watching the Horror Born
27 Wednesday May 2015
From recent correspondence — so recent, it hasn’t even been sent!
You may wish to wonder at the goodness of your country in its domestic ideals. China and Russia work differently, and what they do has probably long “leaked” into our own analyses and options.
With Iran, “War by Proxy” is obvious everywhere the regime sows chaos, death, and sorrow. This week: Yemen.
With Russia, those criminals make war and lie about it. As much has been the story of the invasion of Crimea from the start.
The Chinese: they have built islands on the sly!
Darned Earthworkers!
🙂
This news appeared on Fox nine days ago:
Who OWNS that monster Out There in Syria-Iraq (“Syriaque”?*).
That it has served Putin-Assad-Khamenei, that person that has managed to pervert a a popular people’s protest into an ineffable tragedy one might title, “Assad vs The Terrorists” (mission accomplished), points to the forbearing of barrel bombing old terrorists positions when the districts of Homs proved so much more convenient and harmless and helpless for doing so.
This month (merry one of May) has brought an example of active observation but passive response to a challenge that has morphed from a negligible horror into a military and political scourge calling to mind the possibly more gentle manners of Attila the Hun.
The story released by Fox has been picked up on the Blogosphere, and the report itself may be located and downloaded as a PDF.
Additional Reference
Always on Watch. “The DIA: ISIS “A Strategic Asset”? May 26, 2015.
*“Syriac” is a language and “Syriaque” it’s French spelling.
While on the subject of the dismantling of Syria-Iraq boundary points, BackChannels has taken note of the strength of “nominal affiliation” and “sectarian teleology” in producing and sustaining brutal conflict in the region. The gamble on the favor of God and related glory appears to overmatch the promise of social cooperation and cohesion across sectarian lines that would produce a more sound freedom, peace, and prosperity while intellectual and social habits related to the experiences of fear and security prevail: Our People vs Those People, Sunni vs Shiite, appears to remain primary across population to some extent.
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Link – Amnesty’s Latest on Hamas
27 Wednesday May 2015
Posted in 21st Century Feudal, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Links
“Instead of upholding justice, the Hamas authorities and leadership have continuously encouraged and facilitated these appalling crimes against powerless individuals. Their failure to even condemn the unlawful killings, abduction and torture of perceived suspects leaves them effectively with blood on their hands,” said Philip Luther.
From the PDF of the Amnesty International Report (p. 12):
Amnesty International is concerned that the bodies and mechanisms set up by the Hamas de facto administration to carry out law enforcement and the administration of justice lack the necessary skills, independence, oversight, and accountability to ensure that the rule of law is respected for both victims and accused; to protect individuals from human rights abuses against them; to ensure that victims have access to effective mechanisms to obtain redress; and that accused persons are afforded due process. On the contrary, it seems clear that perpetrators of human rights abuses continue to enjoy impunity, and that the Hamas de facto administration lacks the political will to hold perpetrators of such crimes to account, particularly Hamas members, and to respect fundamental human rights, including the rights to life and to be free from torture.
Additional Reference Having To Do With The Rule of No Law
Schachtel, Jordan. “Hamas Worse Than Jews, Says ISIS in Gaza.” Breitbart, May 5, 2015.
UN Watch (blog). “Hamas’ Human Shield Tactic as Reported by Foreign Journalists.” July 22, 2014.
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Link – Reflection – Ukraine – “Novorossiya”
26 Tuesday May 2015
Posted in Links
Tags
The ties that bind are also contemporary and personal. Two Soviet leaders — Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev — not only spent their early years in Ukraine but spoke Russian with a distinct Ukrainian accent. This historic connectedness is one reason why their post-Soviet successor, Vladimir Putin, has been able to build such wide popular support in Russia for championing — and, as he is now trying to do, recreating — “Novorossiya” (New Russia) in Ukraine.
In selling his revanchist policy to the Russian public, Putin has depicted Ukrainians who cherish their independence and want to join Europe and embrace the Western democratic values it represents as, at best, pawns and dupes of NATO — or, at worst, neo-Nazis. As a result, many Russians have themselves been duped into viewing Washington, London, and Berlin as puppet-masters attempting to destroy Russia.
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FTAC – MEC – Distilled to Essence
26 Tuesday May 2015
Behind Hamas – Khamenei and other Islamist backers; with Khamenei, the now neo-feudal Putin; with Putin and Khamenei, the pack of old and new nationalist and nationalist-socialist parties. The “middle east conflict” has been and remains for now a much, much larger struggle than it looks. That struggle is also timeless: it is the struggle of the barbaric and malignant against the civil, the gracious, and the reparative.
BackChannels 