ISIS, wild and cruel, has proven through its criminality and inhumanity incapable of governance except through continued sadism. Call it deeply intoxicated by brute power, it is as it displays itself.
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Although the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — a marauding army of Sunni Muslim jihadists — has turned south toward Baghdad, Kurds in the semi-autonomous oil-rich northeast expect that they may have to face their fellow Sunnis, who left a trail of death and destruction in overrunning the Iraqi army in taking the cities of Tikrit and Mosul.
The crisis caused by the sudden advance of the Isis insurgents has driven world crude prices past $114 a barrel in recent days and led to warnings of shortages from industry experts.
. . . a stark illustration of one of the most alarming aspects of ISIS’s rise: the group’s growing ability to fund its own operations through bank heists, extortion, kidnappings, and other tactics more commonly associated with the mob than with violent Islamist extremists.
ISIS appears to be as well-endowed economically as any such group can be endowed by conquest, by plunder and by voluntary contributions. How do they make their money?
Pharaoh to Hitler to Assad to ISIS: let’s have our talk about power, personality, and politics.
Now.
I don’t know what metaphor suits that concept that is time when it is time for one to seal off a section of history, to have arrived at the end of a chapter of one’s own story, and to have to look across a river (in time) or desert (in time — add the biblical term of forty years for wandering lost in the foyer to the future) — and to leave one bank (in time) to wade, swim, or bridge and walk to that other shoreline.
Is there parochial time?
Is there universal time that contains parochial time?
I feel that with the destruction of Syria, which carnage has exceeded that involved in the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (70 CE) and the challenge posed today by ISIS in Iraq, some Islamic introspection and review of Sunni-Shiite rivalry (throw in Arab anti-Semitism while at it) might be helpful.
Iraq is a test: will parochialism seek through blood letting a nation divided by sectarian identification that guarantees perpetual war — or will the middle, mild, and moderate of Sunni and Shiite humanity recognize ISIS as an alien force inimical to the survival of either and therefore band together to eject and destroy it?
What is the timeline for the development of either path?
The world would seem to have all of the time in the world for this conflict between (BackChannel’s trope coming right here) “two mad wasps in a bell jar”.
There’s a terrific political cartoon by artist Talal Nayer at this location: http://tnayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/sunni-vs-shiite.html.
Irshad Manji has featured the same on her Facebook fan page, and it has been shared about 500 times, a good indicator that others are seeing the same thing.
Power.
I think the Jews — because our stories compel us to argue about these things and one may have opinions — took the monotheist power represented by Pharaoh and threw it out into the universe — and beyond the universe — to an abstract conception of God (“King of the Universe”) — and that was that for the people who walked away from what Pharaoh represented as a power unto himself.
Where: Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Tapestries, Room 94
INSTALLATION
Put on a headset to ‘walk’ the streets of Aleppo and enter a refugee camp full of children, as real events occur. The ongoing war in Syria has displaced nearly a third of the population; a terrible truth that can be hard to grasp at a distance and put you on scene as a witness to the unfolding events. Project Syria uses cutting-edge virtual reality technology to remove that distance.
V&A Director Dr Martin Roth has been instrumental in making sure Project Syria is hosted at the V&A during International Refugee Week 2014. Dr Roth clarifies that the V&A is a historic institution with a radical mission: to bring art and design to all. Prince Albert, its founder, was inspired by the work of Gottfried Semper…
It took Paul Bremer less than ten minutes to dissolve the Coalition Provisional Authority but it will take years, if not decades, for the Iraqi government to restore the messy legacy the Americans leave behind. The success of this new government hinges on its ability to convince skeptical Iraqis that they are nationalist caretakers of Iraq and not merely puppets controlled by Washington.
Farnaz Fassihi’s book, which I am still reading, in part recounts the American abuse of Iraqi civilians in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom and well describes the consequences of that abuse.
While one may note also the ensuing chaos in the Iraqi-generated vendetta, sectarian assaults, and insurgent terror that provoked enormous IDP and refugee numbers while pumping casualty rates through the roof, the shadow looms large as regards American military incompetence related to “managing the peace” or the post-war transition overall.
When all goes well, people don’t give that normalcy a second thought.
Detain and torture the innocent (at any rate per capita): those stories mix with the war stories of a generation to become part of the national lore.
Having finally been extricated after nine years of trying to fix Iraq’s dysfunctional political culture, re-engaging in response to recent advances by Sunni extremists would be a mistake.
In a section titled, “We shouldn’t be taking sides in a religious war,” Loren Thompson notes, “The fundamental divide in Iraq that makes it ungovernable by anybody other than dictators is the split between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the two major sects within Islam.”
While I find much else in Loren’s article appeasing, disagreeable, and patronizing (on the political left), the hint that involvement in Iraq’s issues would engage in a deeply anachronistic and unreasoning cultural animosity tells a hard truth: The two deeply aggrieved camps have not been made to discover their common humanity.
The dreaded phantoms of the west, including Israel, made fearful by the propaganda of malignantly narcissistic leaders and spoilers all over the middle east cannot help them.
ISIS, as an infection pushing before it all potential victims of its ravenous appetites while subduing with fear all left to deal with it, may work that magic on the body politic, Sunni as well as Shiite.
After taking the weekend to ruminate on the suboptimal options available to him for dealing with the rapidly escalating crisis in Iraq and acting on none of them, the president awoke on Monday to his former acting CIA Director Mike Morell telling CBS’s This Morning hosts that the ISIS insurgency in Iraq poses an immediate threat to American national security.
FTAC – from correspondence immediately after posting this blog: “https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/06/17/iraq-go-no-go/ Perhaps people have to sort themselves out, do they not? Resentment of the foreigner plus the foreigner’s inept qualities may have isolated Iraq. If anything like a national government wants its uniforms back, it’s going to have to get them itself.”
As regards the above noted article, I am also reading http://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Ordinary-Day-Unraveling-Life/dp/B003D7JUF8 , which caught my eye at the used book store — $4. Apparently, American military forces and the mentality that accompanies them make a mess of relationships with even better-willed or moderate elements in the state’s culture and society, so it’s not so great sending in the Marines even though today’s Iraqi live in a world, a larger world, immensely different and unconcerned with the concerns of their own.
Elsewhere, I’ve characterized Sunni-Shiite rivalry (in neighboring Syria) as “two mad wasps in a bell jar” — they’re in this confined space, however large it may seem to those involved, bent on killing one another en masse in relation to aspects of religious history completely alien to most of the world — i.e., to Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and others. That long embedded cultural content — the literature of the mind — holds sway against a clouded and uncertain political and spiritual future that wants for a sea change in the perception of humanity. If that change is happening, it’s happening around a storm front, the challenge posed last week by ISIS being exactly that. Before other thought may be entertained, the ISIS (radical Sunni) advance has to be stopped (by Shiite opposition within the framework adopted and endorsed over the course of centuries) and its power contained and reversed.
In neighboring Syria, it seems the one thing Obama and Putin may agree on has been containment rather than address of the issues in the space involved. Islam-by-the-sword, the legitimacy of political absolutism, the murderous Shiite-Sunni dispute have been essentially left alone in space to do as they wish, a de fact stance helpful primarily to war profiteers.
ISIS, meanwhile, announced that its capture of Mosul has triggered a recruitment surge, as radical Sunnis from around the region have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the group. Residents in Mosul told the New York Times that ISIS has pacified the city, and that they prefer to be governed by a group al Qaeda deemed too radical than by the Shia-dominated government.
“Almost unanimously Iraqis tell me that America will initially win the military war but will face a fierce resistance for establishing peace. The exiled opposition, with its varying agenda, will pull Iraq further apart.”
I fear to download the weekend’s e-mail, this having signed on to enough lists to receive from the vending and politics communities about 5-MB of email per day.
That’s a lot of slush.
Then too, the world has a lot of absolutely senseless problems driven more by vainglorious egos — so I harp: malignant narcissism — and the mafia societies they create through, in, and around themselves, than any other cause for bellicose behavior.
When “Shrubya” left office, he had said of the American narrative, “We left too many people behind” (perhaps not before exploiting them — or doing a lot of business with the tyrants who represented them).
In any case, weak states invite an audacious violence, and today, it appears to Iraq’s turn to be a state so weak as to have its military flee the arrival of the worst of the worst — the baddest ever — of Islamist shock troops.
Forget about the loot, although coming into a cool half-a-billion bucks of someone else’s money inside of a day is a pretty good heist for a barbarian, the same will have access to Iraqi military uniforms, equipage, and materiel.
There will be a blood bath.
One correspondent suggested yesterday that the “big picture” was to draw Shiites into battle within a larger (certainly vicious) Sunni environment and destroy it.
To a modern ear, it sounds implausible; to a medieval spirit, it might just be on track:
Shiite religious leaders, including Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, used Friday prayers to call on the faithful to take up arms against the radical Sunni Muslim insurgents. In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani urged anyone who can carry a weapon to “defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.”
Come forward of our respective ethnic religious positions.
Bond?
Global challenges and issues : global innovation and response.
Resist?
Evil.
I have followed the Islamic Small Wars for some years now, but with the blessing of the Ukrainian Revolution, Euromaidan, one realizes the true axis of conflict throughout the world is not Islam but simply The Despotic vs The Democratic.
Political mafia has their good thing going on one side while political idealists struggle to get good things going on the other side.
Here: liberal communitarian. Better public policy : improved benchmarks in qualities of living.
Through chat this morning with a conversational partner 220 kilometers south of Baghdad, two signal nouns — among much else — surfaced in the course of the talk.
First was the suggestion that to Iraq’s Sunni community, events of the moment signal a Third Battle of al-Qaeisiyyah, the first, of course, taking place in 636 CE with the Islamic conquest of Persia and the second represented by Saddam Hussein’s assault on Iran. Here again comes an essential Arab Sunni expansion of territory.
Item two: the idea that the granddaughter of King David, a Jewess, gave birth to al-Mahdi, the disappeared 12th Imam expected to return to mankind as the Messiah, a note signalling the Jewish heritage involved in Shiite Islam.
In response, I noted that for institutional development, the base — 🙂 — in reality may have been the compassion, ethics, and decision making methods laid out by Hillel the Elder, the older and near contemporary of Jesus (Hillel appears to have lived between, approximately, 35 BCE and 10 CE). Then: Jesus-Paul-Constantine (not quite at the same time) to be followed centuries later by General Muhammad.
With access to Judaism blocked by Jewish ethnicity and varied histories of enmity — it’s no secret, however, that the first Christian were Jews, as was Jesus Jewish — the authors of each New True Religion would set out to destroy the Old, but that old time religion
has proven the “good religion that it used to be”.
The United States contains multiple — thousands of — separate cultural, ethnic, and religious communities with each their influence in local, regional, and state politics beneath the aegis of a Federal system that maintains the autonomy and security of each in its (this with apologies to Native Americans) fairly obtained and settled place. This heightened level of the political integration of many cultures — and kinds of people — into a unified representative polity seems practically unknown in the middle east.
In that inability to appreciate and enjoy differences is a root feeding energy to conflict without end.
The psychological reality: language programming and scripting sustained in the only seemingly attractive legacy of lore and legend compels proofing through violence, and so there they are in Syria and Iraq reveling in cruelty, murder, and plunder, believing with justification that they represent the best and most noble of Islam.
Captivated, energized, powered up, and speeding along at full throttle, such as ISIS cannot channel themselves out of the state — the mentality — in which they first soak and then drown themselves and others insensate in blood.
As with “malignant narcissists” of other type — Bashar al-Assad’s a fine example today — there is no “off button”: in their heads, their program is working just fine.
The Emergency session of the Parliament that was supposed to be held today to declare State of Emergency was canceled due to not having enough MPs in the building!!
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