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!!
I will tell you that the speaker of the Parliament Usama Al-Nujaifi is also the brother of Atheel Al-Nujaifi the Governor of Mosul who didn’t allow the military to get in a few months ago and kept on fighting them and kicked the Federal police (the Shiites from the city) and said we can protect it ourselves , and many more decisions that lead to this and he was the first to flee to Kurdistan
And Usama backed his brother in all his decisions against the government of Baghdad
Also for you informations Usama went to the States and convinced the Congress in not arming the Iraqi military cause he said that they will use the weapons to kill the Sunnis
I could tell you a few things about “malignant narcissism”, the “psychology of small differences”, the difference between
mafia and system-by-relationship
and
open courts and meritocratic justice and fairness,
but I would have a more difficult time addressing the matter of psychology’s “internal saboteur”.
It appears Atheel Al-Najaifi may have gambled on Sunni-based affinity to maintain Masul and, perhaps by chit-chat, to repulse such as ISIS, but as Mosul melts into ISIS, the same, Sunni or not, may have lit out for the border.
Except in Israel, perhaps Lebanon at the moment, that “middle temperament” seems to be having a hard time surviving n the middle east.
The fascists, secular or religious, dictators or religious warriors, seem to have the more effective armies, and those possessed inherently of a “middle temperament” suffer mightily, endlessly at the onslaughts and impositions of both.
From a location 217 miles north of Baghdad, there’s a fine photograph of Atheel al-Nujafi at this location: http://www.knoxnews.com/photos/2014/jun/11/480986/
One may hope that Iraq will find its “middle temperament” and that Iraqi Sunni and Shiite adherents (for there is no compulsion in religion — or is there?) find the courage to build and cement the army that represents it.
Addendum
Perhaps I have made more of the mechanics than is deserved. In the west, we would couch the same request — defense by local or regional militia — as associated with “local rule” and reasonable autonomy within a greater federal system.
The one thing known to politicos about the al-Qaeda affiliates: they make themselves the controlling agents of others until stopped cold. They may or may not believe they are the soldiers of God Almighty himself, but (also given the numbers confused about this), they are really the Soldiers About Themselves Experiencing Power Revolving Around Themselves — pretty much the same as any other ordinary dictator.
Social media accounts associated with the Islamic State also triumphantly announced the end of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the demarcation of modern Middle East borders by France and Great Britain after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The group released credible but unconfirmed footage of heavy equipment adorned with the black flag of the Islamic State destroying fences and earthen berms along the Syrian border.
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