27 Tuesday Mar 2018
Tags
American politics, cultural birthright, ethnolinguistic co-evolution, ethnolinguistic cultures and statehood, heritage and land, Israel, Land of the Hebrews, middle east cultures, middle east politics, Native American
School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA)
George Washington Univeristy
805 21st Street NW
Room 309
Washington, DC 20052
Phone: 202-994-6227
smpa@gwu.edu
Google Maps
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17 Tuesday Oct 2017
Tags
Ante Feudal, conflict themes, Kurdistan, medieval v modern, modern democracy, modern democratic culture
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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15 Sunday Oct 2017
Tags
21st Century Feudalism, Iran-aligned Iraqi Shiite militia, Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militia, Kurdish community, Kurdish struggle, Kurdistan
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.
BackChannels has turned up the following themes related to the Kurdish struggle for independence:
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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.
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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03 Monday Apr 2017
Something to know about ISIL: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/
ISIL — the “Islamists” — have been long “played” by Moscow and Tehran as a goad to the west and a useful foil in their feudal struggle to sustain the medieval political absolutism that in turn supports their respective dictatorships.
President Trump’s bearing down on ISIS threatens to remove that plaything from the Moscow-Tehran (old “Red-Green Alliance”) toy box. Under pressure, and as much may have taken place in St. Petersburg earlier today, ISIS has now to displace and redistribute its criminal program.
The kind of manipulation involved between Moscow and an assortment of terrorist organizations may often be indirect. As the editor of Back-Channels, I believe that the al-Qaeda presence in Syria was “incubated” of de-emphasized in Syria’s combat planning, so as to shape and “frame” the look of the developing civil war. That’s what the piece is about, and there’s more online to support it.
Regarding the St. Petersburg train bombing — today’s event — there are some tweets now crediting ISIS with the attack.
The prompt: the suggestion that ISIS was finished in Iraq.
Jared Kushner’s visiting Iraq may be overshadowing the battlefield story.
There may be more signs likes this one, however — http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/islamic-state-kills-imam-mosque-western-mosul/ — that ISIS, ever murderous and disinterested in the fates of the living, has grown desperate in Iraq and gone in for “motivating” resistance by summarily killing those unwilling to cooperate in their own suicides.
Reliant on the open source, BackChannels has been finding it difficult to obtain data regarding the ISIS presence in Mosul and elsewhere in the combined Syrian-Iraq Theater of War. This may be the closest one may get with today’s field reporting:
Some posters on Isis forums linked the explosions to Russia’s backing of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is fighting Isis as well as other groups in the Syrian civil war.
The group hasn’t yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but often takes as long as a day to do so. If it does claim responsibility for the incident – which it has done with attacks that officials have later said it had no role in – it would be far from the first time it has done so, after it said it had inspired attempted attacks in Chechnya and Russia earlier this year.
“Syria conflict: Raqqa’s civilians foresee last days of Isis: City residents describe a kind of anarchy as jihadis prepare for final battle”: https://www.ft.com/content/db290a58-1847-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87
Note: Undated URL’s were published on the same day as the BackChannels post.
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04 Wednesday Jan 2017
Posted in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Syria
Tags
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.
15 Friday Jul 2016
Tags
foreign affairs, malignant narcissism, Moscow, political manipulation, political psychology, political theater, politics, Putin, Putin-Khamenei, theater of politics and war
Posted to YouTube February 14, 2012.
The response-sparking comment had to do with yesterday’s attack in Nice, France: “Qaddafi was right.”
From the BackChannels side of the awesome conversation:
It’s not Islam — it’s Putin (he who has brought the Russian Orthodox Church back into state favor). Playing ends — Far Right and Far Left — against the middle, he has a special relationship with Islamic extremists. http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582
From my blog: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/
The last piece posted in October 2015, and it may need an update. However: having incubated ISIS to blackmail and goad the west, Putin has now the option of demonstrating “revived” Russian military prowess by eating ISIS alive but not too much at a time. Khamenei-favoring Shiite militia in Iraq, long hosting Revolutionary Guard advisors, have also their convenient foil.
As regards Europe, Moscow-(Tehran) favors resurgent nationalism — le Pen or Orban (and Jobbik), which is exactly what terrorism compels or encourages in the states it targets.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of narcissism / malignant narcissism (and cowardice and — what sets off the narcissism — “narcissistic mortification”) that would build such a theater of politics and war as Syria-Iraq and a troubled Europe, but go back to the Cold War, which was supposed to have ended 25 years ago, and drag forward the Soviet / KGB Era methods in manipulating whole “chess boards” — both sides of any conflict to advantage.
Then look again at Moscow.
How has Moscow played both sides of a conflict?
There’s a related history lesson in this gem of a BBC video interview:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1 – 4/7/2016 “The Ogaden War”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union – excerpt as viewed August 8, 2016:
Soviet secret services have been described by GRU defectors Viktor Suvorov and Stanislav Lunev as “the primary instructors of terrorists worldwide.”[4][5][6] According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky once said: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”[7] He also claimed that “Airplane hijacking is my own invention” and that in 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB-financed PLO.[7]
Lt. General Pacepa described operation “SIG” (“Zionist Governments”) that was devised in 1972 to turn the Arab world against Israel and the United States. According to Pacepa, the following organizations received assistance from the KGB and other Eastern Bloc intelligence services: PLO, National Liberation Army of Bolivia (created in 1964 with help from Ernesto Che Guevara), the National Liberation Army of Colombia (created in 1965 with help from Cuba), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969, and the Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia in 1975.[8]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11515835/Russia-bought-Marine-Le-Pens-support-over-Crimea.html – 4/4/2015. There may be in these stories the KGB-style “framing” of Le Pen, but the “9 million euro” loan from First Czech-Russian Bank” seems uncontested, so one may ask what such loan approval buys, if anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/08/russia-europe-right-putin-front-national-eu – 12/8/2014 – “We should beware Russia’s links with Europe’s right” (by Luke Harding in The Guardian).
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https://www.thenation.com/article/decrying-ukraines-fascists-putin-allying-europes-far-right/ – 5/21/2014
https://eu.boell.org/en/2015/05/05/i-am-eurasian-kremlin-connections-hungarian-far-right – 5/5/2015
http://hungarianspectrum.org/2016/01/20/is-the-hungarian-far-right-jobbik-party-financed-by-russia/ – 1/20/2016
*
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/30/opinions/russia-soviet-fighters-istanbul-bombing-bergen/ – 7/1/2016 – Note: ISIS has also served Moscow as a target to which to channel its own Islamists. In effect, ISIS by existing in numbers in Syria provides a “KZ” or “kill zone” in which to concentrate fighters for later warfare. HOW such fighters may then come to launch actions against NATO members forms a question beyond the means of this blog to address.
*
The last word on this post goes to Stratfor’s Scott Stewart:
In an earlier column, I briefly addressed the similarities between the utopian ideology of the Islamic State and that of the global communist movement. I have also compared the counterinsurgency efforts used against the two movements in the past. But as I was writing about the structure of the Islamic State last week, I encountered more and more parallels to the global Marxist movement.
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/what-cold-war-can-teach-us-about-jihadism – 7/14/2016.
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07 Thursday Jul 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Chilcot, commentary, foreign affairs, political perspective and time, post-Cold War, post-Soviet
BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.
Note too that Russia today refuses to designate either Hezbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations; that is has met in recent years with PFLP (easily looked up online), well recognized for the hijacking of airliners in the 1970s; and, sigh, that it is most responsible for allowing / enabling / encouraging Assad to incubate ISIS — by deselection for bombing and combat — in Syria as that conflict got under way.
Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).
Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:
10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.
It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.
I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.
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25 Wednesday May 2016
Tags
foreign affairs, Iraq, ISIS, Islamic Small Wars, Russia, Russian political and military strategy, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Let’s try this model . . . .
We, including Muslims, have before us the archaic manifestation of a legacy in religion owned by about 1.6 billion souls. Some, and for reasons ranging from how they were raised to the possession of the adolescent messianic narcissism known to dictators, would place themselves somewhere beneath the Muslim Botherhood (intentional) umbrella.
Wouldn’t the moderate and peaceful, truly peaceful, want the hotheads and the improvident to get up and go where they might be seen and subjected to the horrors of their own dreams?
As I have argued elsewhere (any may feel welcome to ask), the incubating of the al-Qaeda types, including ISIS, in Syria appears to have been designed as political theater — a theater of the very real — to both blackmail and goad the west into concessions before the Assad regime. It was a good KGB-style plan, and, please note, Russia got to channel the worst of its own Chechnya rebels to the fighting (and it slipped in a few spies as well); however, update: NATO may sting post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia and its alignments (Damascus, Tehran) with its own wasps.
While ISIS has been growing or distilling out of other populations those most prone to join the fight as 7th Century barbarians in Syria, the greater world has been witness to the we’re-not-those-Muslims Muslim repudiation of the al-Qaeda types, the common use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” and such to separate the same from the greater Ummah going forward, and, of late, the appearance reform-minded discussions (e.g., New Age Islam) and organizations (e.g., Muslim Reform Movement). Expect traction to take some time.
There are other facets . . . like that of getting the Iraqi military to hold itself together against not only ISIS, from whom it has been wresting territory this past month, but also from Khamenei’s aggression through Iraq’s more “fiery” Shiite militia, long infested with Revolutionary Guard officers.
Archaic | Feudal-Toward-Modern Main Body | Cultural Avant Garde –>
Quite possibly for the public accustomed to ironic simplifications, what Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have developed in Syria looks a little like the mirror image of CIA’s support for the Taliban in association with Zia Haq’s own conservative Islamism pitched against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In today’s Syrian Tragedy, it’s Moscow, essentially, that appears to manipulate the Sunni-aligned jihadists munching away on the landscape (and enriching itself with oil sales by way of whoever hands over the cash for it).
Be that as it may, it’s looking like the west has been neither blackmailed nor goaded by “Assad vs The Terrorists” has instead absorbed the fallout in finger-wagging (for not intervening) and refugee migration, and may well stick Moscow (Damascus and Tehran) with “The Terrorists”. It may be toward that purpose that the Russian military has strengthened it presence in Syria.
The inspiration for the response: claim that ISIS had been strengthened under the Obama Administration in relation to the Administration weak response to terrorism.
BackChannels counterpoint: the strategy to move the medieval world (and the representatives of political absolute power) toward the modern one (and distributed, checked, and representative power) has a slow track, and in relation to the Islamic Small Wars involves making the feudal world sufficiently visible for fighting. IF that idea works, THEN the post-Soviet axis (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) has done a right thing for the wrong reasons: intending to get at the west, it has helped produce an enemy in space that can be addressed with conventional forces from every side opposed to it.
BackChannels. “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
BCC. “Syria conflict: IS ‘destroyed helicopters’ at Russian base.” May 24, 2016 — (breaking story today, May 25, and still frequently updated).
Fox News. “ISIS claims female Russian spy infiltrated terror network.” May 9, 2016.
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