Category Archives: Iran

Kurdistan: Themes

17 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Kurdistan, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Syria

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1. Phantoms of the Soviet

Reference Abdullah Ocalan’s vision that misrepresents liberalism and true representative democratic process, which may in turn replicate what the Soviet axis always produced using “sweet words” combined with the rapacious temperament of the politically privileged in an autocratic system: kleptocratic strongmen in palaces and manipulated “masses” around them.

2. Phantoms of the Soviet – PKK

Related to the first point, the PKK set up in the Soviet Era with, apparently, related dogma for intellectual definition, and in that its presence in persons may persist beneath other banners, the same may serve to block western enthusiasm for an independent Kurdistan.  In other words and in relation to the Phantoms of the Soviet (a category referenced frequently on BackChannels in relation to other conflicts), the persistence of PKK ideas and actions, whether vengeful or provocative, cloud western support.  The only answer to that is to reconsider what is advanced in Kurdistan as regards practical ideals and political language (across languages) and adjusting for the distance in intellectual history between states of affairs in 1984 and those of this day.

3. Putin’s Feudal Revanche

Putin’s Russia represents another rapacious autocracy bent on producing conflict worldwide within a global system of feudal absolute power certain to drive wars of all against all.

The Federation represents Russia’s third flip — two revolutions, three governments — within 100 years  of the days of the tsars, and appears now to leverage deals on that basis, e.g., in range of Putin’s sway (and leveraged by the Turkish Stream energy pipeline project, Erdogan has diminished the democracy that initially empowered him and all but returned Turkey to a feudal estate from which he cannot be politically (by mere elections) ejected.

4. Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s Totalitarian Approach to the Creation and Presentation of Conflict

Assad, as flanked by Putin and Khamenei, incubated Kurdistan’s enemy, ISIS.

The intent was to produce a large piece of theater, truly, that would make Assad look good — he envisioned and helped into power the enemy  wanted — while producing a major headache for the west. By remaining somewhat fixed in past arrangements and ideas, the Kurdish community has perhaps been maneuvered into aiding the devil that most seeks to control it (and everyone else).

🙂

Related term of art for look-up: “malignant narcissism“.

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

5. State of Kurdish Administrative and Constitutional Development

It has been hard to see the coordinating and self-subordinating (“for the greater good”) character of Kurdish leaders to an overarching administrative and democratic (power checking, power displacing, power distributing, and culturally and politically evolving) system. The latent Kurdish state in fact that may be defined by the subordination of officials to greater institutional arrangements may be there, but the western / publishing-in-English journos haven’t laid out relationships, or I’ve missed that coverage, or the same is not wanted.

In deference to Ocalan’s “democratic communalist” vision, there may be little incentive (by way of example too) to bring western commercial elements and associated vulgarity into a culturally independent Kurdistan.  There are many other ways to pursue and sustain both cultural and political evolution and distributed economic development across a new polity (reference authors Brown, McRobie, Schumacher, among others).

Addendum to the Above: Found Posted on YouTube – October 17, 2017

6. Modern Kurdish Defense Considerations Against Adverse Feudal Estates

Much in favor of the defense of Kurdish independence may be the reversion of the Turkish government to feudalism and its history of persecution of the Kurds and others.  Clearly, the Kurdish community needs an effective defense against adverse egomaniac and ill-willed potentates.

7. Armed Proxies of Iranian Fascism

Washington needs to be pressed hard about the powering up and evident fielding of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militia in the latest suppression of Kurdish independence. At this point, Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s kleptocratic totalitarian ambition should be glaring, and the western public should join the Kurdish community in blocking greater Iranian fascism through armed proxies.

If there’s a secret to peace all around, it may be in the separation of the present western-backed governments from the external meddling of rogue dictatorships that wish to drag the region backward toward feudal barbarism using the most nefarious of political methods to do it. The leaders in that aggression have learned how to make money off the misery of others while they themselves remain remote from the nightmares they have created.

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Kurdish Struggle – Kurdistan v Iran-Aligned Shiite Militia

15 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Kurdistan

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The Kurdistan region enjoys autonomy in Iraq, and that has meant running its own airports; borders; maintaining its own Peshmerga security forces; and exporting oil through its own economic management.

Baghdad now wants to use the referendum as an excuse to roll that back.

With the war on the Islamic State seemingly close to an end, Baghdad wants to punish the Kurdish region for seeking independence.

Frantzman, Seth J.  “How Baghdad is Punishing the Kurds Post-Referendum.”  Jerusalem Post, October 4, 2017.

BackChannels has turned up the following themes related to the Kurdish struggle for independence:

  1. Iranian resistance expressed in Iraq via Iran aligned and backed Shiite militia.
  2. Persistence of the Kurdish PKK and a perhaps too robust relationship with a persistently feudal and political absolute, criminal, and totalitarian Russia.
  3. Inability, so far, to attenuate the power of chiefs and produce a disciplined and power balancing democracy.

Reference – Iraq: Iran Aligned Shiite Militia

Note, please, the date year associated with reference.  Whether 2015, earlier, or later, BackChannels’ Kurdish source has cited Iraq’s Iranian-aligned Shiite militia as posting a persistent challenge to the defense of the Kurd’s ancestral land.

Khedery, Ali.  Iran’s Shiite Militias Are Running Amok in Iraq.  Foreign Policy, February 19, 2015.

Washington’s response to the Islamic State’s (IS) advance, however, has been disgraceful: The United States is now acting as the air force, the armory, and the diplomatic cover for Iraqi militias that are committing some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These are “allies” that are actually beholden to our strategic foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which often resort to the same vile tactics as the Islamic State itself.

Vatanka, Alex and Sarkawt Shamsulddin. “Forget ISIS: Shia Militias Are the Real Threat to Kurdistan.” The National Interest, January 7, 2015:

 . . . from the KRG perspective, two Shia militia forces—Asaib Ahl Haq and the Badr militias—are uncontrollable.

Both these militias are backed by Iran, and the their military operations are effectively overseen by Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force, which serves as the external arm of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

Rudaw.  “Peshmerga commander warns Shiite militias a threat to Kurds.”  September 8, 2016.  The piece winds around but ends this way:

Hashd al-Shaabi is the defender of “Iraqi sovereignty and its unity,” he declared, and it will not fight any other group except ISIS.

Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militia forces have clashed several times in Kirkuk’s southern ethnically-mixed city of Khurmatu in recent months. Several people from both sides were killed in the confrontations.

 

Ahmad, Aziz.  “The Defeat of ISIS Must Mean an Independent Kurdistan.”  The New York Times, July 13, 2017.

A century after the breakdown of the Ottoman boundaries, Iraq remains a forced union of peoples whose national aspirations and sense of identity have been suppressed. Members of my family spent decades in exile from successive Iraqi governments that, since the turn of the 20th century, butchered generations of Kurdish men, women and children who struggled to find their place in this artificial state.

Thus there has always been a lingering, unresolved question of identity for the Kurds of Iraq. That identity will finally achieve resolution when the people of Iraqi Kurdistan vote in the referendum. This expression of popular will should not only close a long chapter of grief but also bring new certainty and stability to an increasingly volatile region plagued by sectarian conflict and bloodshed.

Hannah, John.  “The United States Must Prevent Disaster in Kurdistan.”  Foreign Policy, October 2, 2017:

Of special concern was the possibility that Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq could seek to gain political advantage by challenging Kurdish control in the oil-rich, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk and other disputed territories also claimed by the central government in Baghdad.

John Hannah relays a chilling list of actions taken or threatened by Iraq and Turkey in their pique with the Kurdish referendum. He goes on to note the following and then pleads for Washington’s regaining its own initiative in moral courage in partnering with the Kurds and forestalling the escalation of force applied in keeping them captive to forces clearly out of step with Washington’s moral and political missions:

I was taken aback by the intense frustration and anger directed at a critical wartime ally and longtime, loyal U.S. partner whose history of oppression and even genocide at the hands of other nations leaves it with — if nothing else — an almost unimpeachable moral case for self-determination.

Reference – Kurdish PKK

Posted to YouTube August 21, 2017.

Posted to YouTube June 29, 2017.

Backgrounder (January 2, 2014)

(More is in the works).

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FTAC: Moscow-Tehran – Slow Diplomacy with the Untrustworthy

25 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Russia

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Given Tehran / Moscow-Tehran’s duplicity where their ambitions have been concerned, State would have known the Iranian treaty worthless before it was signed and consequently used weakness (remember Kerry’s pink tie?) to purchase time for other measures.

In that Moscow-Tehran tie together in analysis, the same policy in diplomacy has helped Moscow-Damascus destroy Syria while running down Moscow’s ready cash base. Possibly: we weren’t going to be blackmailed by the incubating of ISIS or the threat of mass migration; instead, in time-honored fashion, we have been watching the enemies of the west destroy themselves.

The Saudi deal — billions in arms — seems more complex but pursues similar ends in relation to the continued diminishment of the once Soviet Era axis that Moscow has been trying to sustain and Washington has been trying to neutralize and transform. In that the Saudis have had a long history with The English and today are today heavily invested in western success (look over Kingdom Holdings) and taking some steps to alter the deeply medieval character of the state — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ — the relationship may be more valuable than the arc of time involved in getting a medieval state that has contained itself from violently aggressing against the west — into position for updating.

That these “moves” work too slowly and across Administrations dissatisfies us, but some — well, maybe just me — who take the long view of Russian, Islamic, and post-revolution Iranian politics, the popular demand for direct-fast change promises primarily to deliver the chaos and violence of revolution and war (which may have to be met in any case given Moscow-Tehran’s commitment to feudalism, feudal political methods, and the sustaining for their populations a medieval worldview). It would seem better to maneuver both into being less ready for war on a large scale — one by allowing the leadership to run the state short on ready operating cash (Russia) and the other (Iran) by way of the modern wants of its constituents, who will find they cannot get what they want if their regime cannot contain itself.

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FTAC: “Claims regarding Iran’s innocence . . . .”

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Political Psychology, Russia

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Claims regarding Iran’s innocence in relation to global terrorism are fallacious. The state supports Hezbollah and Hamas and is itself an immense kleptocracy — http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 .

As regards Sunni-based terrorism, a fair look-up of “Zawahiri, Russia” should straighten that out. In the wake of the Soviet defeat in the 1980s, the criminals appear to have picked up on the CIA/ISI method of producing a treasury-draining proxy (Charlie Wilson’s Taliban) and throwing it back at the west.

The Kingdom has invested heavily in western success (via Kingdom Holdings) and has embarked on cultural updating sufficient to produce an iconic set of accomplished women — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ . However, sigh, in the medieval worldview, the legitimacy of kingdoms rest on the persuasive power of clerics.

My trope for all dictatorships: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”

They all produce leaders who look good on the outside — well, maybe Qadaffi’s a stretch on that — but turn out irredeemably ugly on the inside. I call them “MaligNarcs”, short for “Malignant Narcissists”.

The greater east-west framework: feudal methods, medieval worldview v modern democratic rule of law and the constraint of power by representative means. On that, the House of Saud has a long history with “the English” and may be expected to lean westward with time. The same may not be said today of Moscow / Moscow-Tehran and all the related phantoms of the Soviet Era.

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Also in Media: “Maryam Rajavi appeals to the nation to help Iran’s homeless in the cold season” – January 2, 2017.

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Syria

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The 18 to 20 million people who live in 2700 shanty towns and illegal dwellings, particularly around major capitals, the rampant phenomenon of trafficking of young women and girls to other countries, the rising number of women who post ads on the walls to sell their infants, and the 30 per cent of the population who according to the admissions of the regime’s officials are starving, are but a few examples indicating how the Iranian people’s lives have been destroyed under the repressive rule of the Velayat-e Faqih, Khamenei.

Such devastation coupled with incessant executions and daily arrests of some two to three thousand people comprise the security the mullahs claim they have provided for the people of Iran by engaging in the slaughter of the people of Syria, Iraq and other countries in the region.

Source: Freedom Lovers 4 Syria & Iran – 1/2/2017.

Also on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/01/18/on-human-rights-day-iran-is-again-covered-in-blood-maryam-rajavi/ – 1/18/2015.  The People’s Mojahedin has had a checkered history in the Iran-Iraq region, but for many years it has been producing the kind of humanist outlook expressed above in the Freedom Lovers 4 Syria & Iran blog.  BackChannels inclines to accept the talk but with some background supplied by earlier efforts with this blog.

 

Triple Vision – Iran – From Nazanin Fatehi to Nazanin Afshin-Jam to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe- 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2016

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Great Britain and United Kingdom, Iran

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Nazanin Fatehi appears to have committed a murder in self-defense as a 17-year-old girl in 2005.  The regime initially found her guilty of murder and sentenced her to death by hanging.  The human rights community took up her cause and the lunatic processes of what passes for justice in Iran released her (with financial obligations) in 2012.  She has disappeared.

Nazanin Afshin-Jam, an Iranian-Canadian possessed of gorgeous looks and multiple talents took up Fatehi’s cause on top of the cause of freedom in Iran and became part of the run-up to the 2009 challenge to the regime. As an advocate for Nazanin Fatehi, she published a book, The Tale of Two Nazanins (2012).

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is today a British citizen held by the regime on secret charges — an affront to British Power, a potential casus belli — and part of an absurd diplomacy involving provocative behaviors (e.g., seizing patrol boats in open waters) that appears to play out between Iran and its western marks with fair regularity.

Posted to YouTube December 22, 2006.

Posted to YouTube April 27, 2007.

Posted to YouTube June 21, 2009.

Posted to YouTube June 3, 2012 (22-minute interview).

Posted to YouTube May 10, 2016.

Posted to YouTube December 19, 2016.

As of July 2012, the whereabouts of Fatehi, age approx. 25, were reported as unknown by individuals in the West with whom she had prior contact, with current contact being only the most sporadic.[2][6][10] A book from Canadian supporter and activist Nazanin Afshin-Jam appeared in 2012 chronicling the divergent lives of these two Iranian Nazanins, whose lives intersected during the period of Fatehi’s trial;[11] media responses to the book were generally positive

Nazanin Fatehi — the “Nazanin” referred to in the 2012 interview with Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Nazanin Afshin-Jam, Canadian Human Rights Activist

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, British Citizen capriciously and currently imprisoned by the Iranian Regime

Related ‘Fast-Link” Reference

http://news.sky.com/video/nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe-is-serving-five-years-in-prison-for-charges-that-remain-secret-10667803 – 11/22/2016.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/22/british-woman-jailed-iran-must-take-two-year-old-daughter-prison/ – 12/22/2016.

Change.org Petition

https://www.change.org/p/free-nazanin-ratcliffe

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FTAC – A Compressed Note about “Assad OR The Terrorists”

21 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

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Keep in mind that “Daesh” was incubated (manipulated into existence) by Bashar al-Assad to serve for political blackmail (“Assad OR The Terrorists”), as a goad to the west (a nice present to pack along with refugees bound for NATO states), as a foil (for Russian, Syrian, and Iranian forces), and for target practice (Russia has been showing off). https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/

BackChannels readers are more than welcome to independently research and review each claim.

BackChannels believes that the “Syrian Conflict and Tragedy” represents a complete theater of politics and war put on display by Putin, Assad, Khamenei and with Baghdadi’s organization their most useful villain.

Moscow’s own approach to terrorism, generally speaking, may be reflected in its hosting PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) and refusing to designate either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.  Although its state interests may differ from those of Tehran, its relationship has proven friendly enough for flying sorties into Syria from out of an Iranian base.

BackChannels way of addressing this relationship between “political absolutists”: “Different Talks – Same Walk.”

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FTAC – A Reductionist Rationale for War

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Russia, Syria

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Suggested: “Interest” x “Values” x “Value” | Rationale.

From a humanist’s standpoint, the Syrian Tragedy hasn’t looked at all rational, but viewed through a lens that takes in “absolute power”, “feudalism”, “malignant narcissism”, and the wholesale producing of a theater of war as a demonstration of power, well then it makes perfect sense, horrific though that may be.

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