Category Archives: Regions

Kurdish Fighter Comments on the Arabization of Northern Iraq

26 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Regions

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(8:21): “Terrorists and ISIS want to make this place just like all the others by killing and committing crimes here.”

VICE interviewer Danny Gold tweets as @DGisSERIOUS.

The web would seem to be coming along for near real time experience of the world’s war zones.  This environment from field signal to page makeup to Twitter publicity to blog to reader is not another generation’s evening network news: I’m not holding my breath but am waiting for the waves of live remote feeds to come marching over the virtual berms at any time.

Par for the middle east course and evident in the above clip: deeply shared Kurdish and Arab tribal animus, and that with each attempting to align the other with ISIS (of the two, I would suggest the Kurds have the more coherent view of the fighting and how it will play both to their autonomy, defense, and expansion).

The “love of the land” also plays in the Kurdish script as regards how things should be and, therefore, how events should unfold for the Kurds as a people free — self-determining — in their own lands.

We shall see how that motivation plays in the coming days.

ISIS appears to be its own wild and piratical machine.

In fact, ISIS reminds me of the al-Shabaab saga in Somalia in which Islamic anarchists, essentially, have long terrorized the state, at times controlling the bulk of it, at others finding their footprint reduced to their southern reaches.  To this day, they’re still part of the Somali landscape and proven capable of instigating or conducting attacks on targets in their vicinity.  One expects that even a smashed ISIS will continue spinning around Iraq’s landscape as a human version of the chemist’s “free radical”.

While ISIS makes progress in Iraq it has also gotten itself surrounded by either natural enemies or enemies it has been making on its beyond-all-limits killing spree in Iraq.  It’s presence has urged a nation to its feet, but the same today has many different kinds of feet, and they seem not to want to advance in the same direction.

Externals: the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei becomes now the dictator Khamenei-Assad-Putin driving a Russia-aligned Shiite bloc against the Saudi sphere’s NATO-aligned Sunni bloc, the same that was to have produced a modern people’s revolution in Syria.  Probably, that alignment has run its course, worn itself out, and pushed the White House into deep reconsideration of how to sort out the middle east for its own sake, for oil, and for NATO’s existence and the values it promotes.

Aside: America’s chief oil suppliers have been Canada and Mexico, and as American energy policy produces greater flexibility in access to crude, one may expect related politics to follow.

Back to Iraq: It turns out deposing Saddam the Tyrannical was the easy part.  Then too, perhaps the way in always is, for everything else having to do with the middle east has been twisted up, torn apart, patched back together, and totally fucked up beyond all repair (FUBAR).

Oh Bummer!

What next?

We shall see.

Soon.

Just about as fast as it happens.

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Aside

19 Thursday Jun 2014

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

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Compiled Fast Reference: ISIS: 6/19/2014

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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.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/06/19/kurds-outgunned-by-fanatical-isis-hope-looming-baghdad-battle-buys-time-for/ 6/6/2014.

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.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/18/dwindling-iraq-oil-reserves-cause-price-spike 6/18/2014.

. . .  nearly 100 militants had been killed as his forces repelled wave after wave of attacks since Tuesday.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/06/19/witness-claims-isis-flag-flies-over-key-iraq-refinery-baghdad-says-soldiers/ 6/19/2014.

 . . . 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.

http://complex.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/06/16/isis_uses_mafia_tactics_to_fund_its_own_operations_without_help_from_persian_gulf_d 6/16/2014.

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?

http://wlrn.org/post/how-isis-endowed-conquest-stocks-its-war-chest 6/18/2014.

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Proposed: A Great Conversation About Power

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Regions

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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.

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Iraq Go No Go

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions

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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.

Fassihi, Farnaz.  Waiting for an Ordinary Day.  New York: Public Affairs, 2008.

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.

Thompson, Loren.  “Iraq Crisis: Six Reasons Why America’s Military Should Not Re-Engage.”  Forbes, June 16, 2016.

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.

We shall see.

And soon.

Related Reference

Kagel, Jenna.  “Could the Terrorist Group That Executed 1,700 People Force the U.S. Back Into Iraq?”  PolicyMic, June 17, 2014.

CBS News.  “Will ISIS plan a 9/11-style terror plot against the U.S.”  June 16, 2014.

Rothman, Noah.  “Obama’s former acting CIA director warns ISIS in Iraq is a threat to U.S.”  Hot Air, June 16, 2014:

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.

This Day in History.  “Mar 19, 2003: Bush announces the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Addendum

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.”

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FTAC – Iraq – Mad Wasps in a Bell Jar

16 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions

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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.

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The “above noted article” mentioned at the top of this relay was Matt Schiavenza’s “Why Ayatollah Al-Sistani’s Iraq Fatwa Is So Important” (International Business Times, June 13, 2014).  Excerpt:

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.

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Aside

An “Ordinary Day” Away from the EMadding Crowd . . . .

15 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Regions

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“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.”

Fassihi, Farnaz.  Waiting for an Ordinary Day.  New York: Public Affairs, 2008.

More than 99 notifications await me on Facebook.

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.

Not particularly exceptional in this, even Hamas in Gaza lives in mansions.

Whatever they’re about (psst — murder and plunder), they’re not about justice, much less God.

Perhaps I should be receiving 10-MB of e-mail per day.

Or not.

Here one may make a case for a quiet space far from the emadding crowd, a fair cup of coffee, and a good book.

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“Shiite Volunteers”, Muthenna Airbase, Baghdad, June 11, 2014

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Regions, Visual Data

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Shiite Volunteers, Mothana Military Airport, Baghdad, June 11, 2014. No EXIF data.

Shiite Volunteers, Mothana Military Airport, Baghdad, June 11, 2014.

The title of the post: set according to data sent by source, who notes, “they had to close the airport due to the huge numbers that arrived.”

Reference Related

Vela, Justin.  “Al Maliki’s sectarian policies proving disastrous for Iraq’s stability.”  June 11, 2014.

Whitaker, Brian.  “The rise of Arab sectarianism.”  Al-Bab, January 2, 2014.

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