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.
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.
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!!
From the Vietnam Era’s evening newscasts from the killing fields of that war to this: having enough of a social network to be directed to a URL, one, however, that may raise more questions than can or will be answered: where was the above clip made? What happened to the children the soldier was carrying? What happened to military personnel assembled at that location? How many were killed in that battle? How many are missing in action today? What was gained? What was kept? What was lost?
This blog has a correspondent in Iraq, and with a little bit of difficulty in the language, this, nonetheless, is what he has had to say about Mosul recently:
. . . unfortunately I’m not sure about what happened to those kids but many of those who ran away got killed by those terrorists, but mainly the people of Mosul are happy and they are celebrating in the entry of ISIS and consider it a liberation, and the ISIS are really good with them now and I guess it will last untill the Iraqi and Kurdish armies try to enter the city and go deep , then they will kill many of those who welcomed them and film them to say that the Iraqis and Kurds killed them
It appears that the Sunni-Shiite division that runs through Iraqi society plus the exigencies of war half a million of Mosul’s residents to flee and left the remainder in place to be pleasant, genuinely so or not.
The paragraph’s a little garbled at the end but I’m not going to mess with it.
. . . . cause they are against them and most of them are Sunnis along to Christians and other minorities (since it’s a Sunni province) , and they hate them but Mosul is known in Iraq as a real hater for the Shiites (my mother studied at the University of Mosul and she saw that even though it was over 25 years ago and now they hate the Shiites more than ever… and let’s say that 1 million are just staying cause they are scares of running and think they are safe cause they are sunnis then that leaves us more half million aiding and supporting them and the Iraqi army had to keep its presence as minimum due to the hate of Mosul’s people against them, and the continues attacks by the people of Mosul more like the attacks that the IDF often have in the West Bank..
My distillation: Mosul is predominantly Sunni and by that along partially aligned against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s perceived Shiite-friendlier government. As happens often in politics, it may not be true, but if it’s believed, it’s treated as true. Those politics play in the field to leave state forces exposed to Sunni extremists, i.e., not engaged positively with state forces.
The soldiers who ditched their uniforms are mostly cops from the city (sunnis) and they are 52,000 And the army had to ran away cause their leaders (the Sunnis that were put cause the Governor of Mosul asked to since he didn’t want a Shiite or Kurdish general in the city) Then the soldiers had to leave their spots and far more they didn’t even have ammunition and they fought in the road to secure the people of Mosul who ran away
If for western readers the image of the state’s resistance in flight has made out Iraqi military and paramilitary forces a paper tiger, the reality relayed to me would seem to describe a very practical decision process predicated on 1) Sunni identification with Sunni force come to town 2) an ambivalent military not completely welcomed in Mosul and running low on ammo.
Time to skedaddle.
Recorded today, June 11, 2014, probably by Sunni bystander today: Round Street, Tikrit, Iraq. About that provenance, my correspondent says, ” . . . and at the end he said “exclusively for the Iraqi great revolution” which is a Sunni Iraqi term not ISIS way.”
We’re going to see a lot of this.
This one: yesterday, driving around:
My source: “They meant liberated by the ISIS and the police vehicles moving in the streets are in the hands of ISIS.”
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