Tag Archives: Iraq

Iraq’s New Nightmare Begins

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

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

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These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:

The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.

CNN: Iraqi parliament delays first session as ISIS continues deadly march – 7/1/2014

Ditto.

” . . . and the chant becomes a dance . . . .”

From the related article: “They get about a week to 10 days of training, Nasir said.”

CNN: With little training but full of conviction, Iraq’s Shiites answer the call to arms – 6/30/2014.

The picture gets worse.

He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”

Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014.  Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.

As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.

Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?

Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?

Related: The American Conservative.  “The Folly of Arming the Syrian Opposition.”  6/30/2014.

Related: Mail Online.  “Does ISIS have a Scud missile? Islamic militants parade huge long-distance weapon in capital of newly-declared caliphate.”  7/1/2014: “‘Dawla Islamiyya (The Islamic State) has SCUD missile in #Raqqa. [God willing] its heading towards for a spectacular Eid ul fitr,’ an ISIS suspporter calling himself Ansar Udeen said on Twitter.”

About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).

How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?

The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.

The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.

I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth.  For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.

From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:

“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling.  Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.

In Wikipedese:

The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations

Related.  AP – Epoch Times. “Islamic State Declaration Could Lead to Sunni-Shia Schism” – 6/30/2014.

Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low.  From the same article:

“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”

Cannot or should not?

We may be certain of “should not”.

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FTAC – Conflict Axis Shift – x Affiliation x Personality

27 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Philosophy

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The difference in conflict axis discriminator may be found in the confusion between the worldview and intentions of personality (as with Ahmadinejad or Khamenei, also Assad, also Putin) and affinity or affiliation with nominal class (Shiite). While the American approach repeatedly tries to null discrimination by class (so our Protestants and Catholics now get along as regards the civil purpose that is governance), I don’t think that either the surface of the American leadership either pursues or promotes analysis in political psychology with an emphasis on our troubling “malignant narcissists” and, with ISIS, plain criminal sociopaths and psychopaths.

Whether Pope or Ayatollah, their respective adherents invest a great deal of faith in their perception and judgment, and sometimes to the extent of treating the same as infallible, at which point the same pick up the medieval chips, and unbridled, or nearly so, they can bring great damage to others.

To obtain freedom of worship within a secular system may mean addressing the despotic in persons — and specific organizational personalities — and channeling the same off to positions more safe for everyone else. In that regard, ISIS represents the criminal side of egotism unchecked and way beyond limits. That what they do works its way through an affiliate community, sufficient for the same to demur from battle with them, speaks to normative and social grammar. Barbarians and pirates may be criminals to all whose paths cross with theirs, but within their own enclaves, they are the normative reality. They think they’re just fine — and that God loves them most of all.

This is related to “civilizational narcissism”. Mobarak Haider has continued fighting the good fight against what I call the “God Mob” — the mafia that leverages religious faith into immense — and deadly and often soul deadening — power over others.

Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg

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The chat had to do with Iraq, the Sunni-Shiite schism, and, loosely, the ISIS alignment with Sunni Islam.  Be that as it may, the response corresponds with the interests of this blog, its notes in the area of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, and its cycling to and around “malignant narcissism” and the psychology of dictatorship and fascism.

Rodney King’s question, “Can’t we all just get along?” has been long answered in the main: not only “Yes, we can” but “yes, we do!”

Most of the time in America, it’s true: we are not at one another’s throats except all across the board and through the complex labyrinth’s of open civil and criminal courts.

We Americans have all the problems of the rest of the world but in much, much smaller measure, and for those smaller measures — whether having to do with blowing up abortion clinics or blowing up marathons at the finish line — we have our Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The lethal mix of external influence and incursion has also, alas, led to our supporting a massive domestic and foreign intelligence apparatus.

Still, that’s not because of us — it’s because of the world Out There!

Why can’t all the rest of you just get along?

🙂

The truth is most do but not on the basis of religious or other common affinity but rather according to moderate-middle sensibilities and temperaments that may be then free and secure to distill issues and promote policies and law that work for most on the basis of their shared general humanity.

Those that cannot do that deform into other and malignant souls.

Environments that encourage and sustain the latter, however, distress and mire themselves in conflict defined by dismal rounds of rule and subjugation.

Indeed, they are “dumb wars”.

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Link

http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/in-iraq-isis-channels-mao/

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/in-iraq-isis-channels-mao/

It’s more like a Hezbollah or Viet Cong, which tries to win legitimacy, than an al-Qaeda, which is mostly interested in showy attacks and ideological purity. Few revolutionaries govern well, but ISIS may be an exception. Its ability to consolidate its territorial gains and make the transition to stable peacetime rule, whether over part or all of Iraq, is a revealing indicator to watch.

Link

http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/iraq-crisis-the-economic-and-geopolitical-challenges-for-india/

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

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http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/iraq-crisis-the-economic-and-geopolitical-challenges-for-india/

Iraq has therefore put Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to its first test, not only with respect to foreign policy by also bringing Indians home safely (including those trapped in Mosul, Baghdad, and other cities). 

FTAC – by Tanit Nima Tinat – A Comment on Tyrannies

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Poetry, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology

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People, eventually will unite against any form of tyranny and dictatorship, be it religious fanaticism or other forms- as they did against puritans and the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell, who was known as : a self-styled Puritan Moses-in England, the copy of which exists in Iran, the so called Khamenei; who ironically refers to himself as Supreme actually, and so on. However, it is the actual people of a country themselves that have to bring about and cause a democratic government rather than an outside force. This might be the main reason for people criticizing America, or any other country’s role for that matter, in terms of interfering in their internal affairs. Many Iranians, on the other hand, and here’s the irony; actually criticize America and other countries silence during the bloody green revolution that took place in Iran a decade ago and was against the tyranny of Ahmadinejad.  They see America’s indifference to that secular movement as a green light to the continuation of the so called Islamic regime, which is not far from truth.

A big thank-you to my social network friend Tanit Nima Tinat.

My two-cent riff in reply —

The assumption that “regime change” and revolution may in order would seem to include the presumption that the change brought is what the people really wanted.

Americans have repeatedly given “blood and treasure” in the name of democracy and freedom for others, but once produced, whether in Iraq or in Afghanistan, it would seem up to The People and their own ethical and moral backbone to secure benefits obtained.

That may sound good to the ears, but the realpolitik of place includes themes not addressed by merely taking down a government.

Whether one speaks of Hamid Kharzai in Afghanistan or Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, one confronts the sways of loyalties against the possession of integrity and merit, and the resulting nepotism undermines “equality, fraternity, and liberty” — and security most of all.

In the people, one also encounters various attitudes toward authority, which in the west turns up often skeptical and questioning, but elsewhere may be cowed or ingrained when it comes to obedience before the powerful.  Such observation brings up the arch comment, “With democracy, people get the government they deserve!”

Of course, from the perspective of Christian-Greco-Judeo-Roman esprit, people may get worse than what they might be supposed to deserve.  Some Germans may have well deserved Hitler, for example, but what Hitler brought to Germany and what Germans were made to suffer at his hands and then at the hands of the enemies made sails beyond comprehension.

And what to do about The People, many for whom the cleric’s words are yet today received as if from God Almighty himself?

Such faith — or fear, laziness, or weakness — makes obedience blind.

Note: in the Torah, while God sets out a test for Abraham, the purpose of the test is never defined, and the vaunted “test of obedience” may well have been equally a more a “test of conscience”, which Abraham fails.

Divine infallibility — caliphate, empire, kingdom, or papacy — ought to be left to just one indefinable, unreachable, irreducible, nearly inconceivable entity or symbol: God.

All else — and all others — are mortal.

If a constituency must assert, declare, and support a divine alliance and avatar with taxes, then perhaps too it should keep itself invested in its own freedom of conscience and armed with countervailing power as well.

Earlier today on Twitter, I asked in regard to Syria’s agony, “Who defended the humanity in the middle?”

Bashar al-Assad had an army; the al-Qaeda affiliates are armies: who was there to defend the interests of the happy homeowner?

For a while now, I’ve suggested that for the purposes of analytical political psychology, Bashar al-Assad and al-Nusra in Syria are of the same malignantly narcissistic personality: different talk — same walk.

With ISIS on the move in Iraq, the ability to entertain and perhaps recognize this thesis may be crucial to the future economic and spiritual well being of the large population beset with murderous forces all around them.

In effect the Islamic Small Wars may be reduced to the The Despotic vs The Democratic — and in realpolitik, absolutists and extremists against everyone else.

Whatever the despots win, they really do not give a shit about anyone, much less everyone, else.  In fact, everyone else exists to serve them, adore them, aggrandize them. die for them, and generally keep them (and their families and favored old friends) in wealth and power beyond measure.

Remember: they are the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, and together they are defending absolutism.

ISIS is defending that too.

Where the people have bought into what those people are selling, they’re done.

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Iraq – Status Update – June 20, 2014 – Past Noon

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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When does one stop looking?

Some might ask me, when does one stop talking (chatyping)?

As I type, I’m listening to the Brookings forum noted (in bold) in reference.

I’ve also seen more than I would have wished.  The new answer to “Do you see what I see?” — click through.

While I may suggest that Islam in Iraq has come to a rift in time, a place where the Sunni and Shiite communities may turn their backs on the future and race backward in civil war, or they may bond in their inherent sense of decency, dignity, and humanity and evict ISIS and wrestle with the host of issues that revolve around a habit of deep and mortal discrimination that lives primarily in the head suspended in the language and related mythos of the culture.

The future will unfold for others all around the Iraqi Islamic world (and similar), and it will wait for Iraqis to gather at this edge in time in preparation for making the crossing.

Reference

AP.  “Top Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani call for new government in Iraq: Press on PM Nouri al-Maliki to resign as offensive by Sunni militants rages on.”  CBC News, June 20, 2014.

Breitbart.  “ISIS’s Gruesome Iraq Propaganda Includes Severed Heads, Music Videos.”  June 19, 2014.

Brookings. “Iraq in Crisis: What Options Does Washington Have?”  (forum video, 1.5 hours), June 19, 2014.

Fassihi, Farnaz.  Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq.  Public Affairs, 2008.

McClam, Erin.  “‘More Extreme than Al Qaeda’?  How ISIS Compares to Other Terror Groups.”  NBC News, June 20, 2014.

O’Hanlon, Michael.  “Iraq needs a new team at the top: Column.”  USA Today, June 16, 2014.

War Porn – Not “Work Safe”

ISIS.  “Criminality Daash with the general Muslim elders and children .. ..!!”  Firing Squad.  YouTube, June 20, 2014.  Encountered by BackChannels on Facebook and on Twitter, June 20,2014.

Relay from Brookings. “Iraq in Crisis: What Options Does Washington Have?”  (forum video, 1.5 hours), June 19, 2014.

Brookings Events regularly delivers conference and forum webcasts and after-the-fact videos from the same.

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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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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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