Tag Archives: malignant narcissism

FTAC – Clarification on Syria’s Medieval Meltdown

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syria

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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/06/02/assad-or-burn-it-assad-burns-it/

Moscow-Damascus-Tehran chose a long time ago to sustain political absolutism and produce between themselves a medieval spectacle, “Assad OR The Terrorists” AKA “Assad vs The Terrorists”. To get “The Terrorists”, Assad chose to bedevil noncombatants and early FSA, whose officers defected from his own corps, while allowing al-Nusra and others greater space and time — an act of incubation, deselection for combat — to consolidate.

No one likes this story — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ — because it suggests that Syria has been made into a complete theater of politics and war, courtesy of Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and, led into it by the early easing off, Baghdadi. The display or tableaux moves “the masses”, but it wasn’t necessary but to defend the politics of dictatorships (“different talks — same walk”) — and Syria has been all but destroyed by it.

We know there is such a thing as the medieval world because we look back on it.

The medieval takes up space in the world’s museums.

Is there such a thing as “modern”?

Perhaps time blends ages and experiences.

One may be certain, however, that what Assad has brought about in Syria combines modern aesthetic and social norms — recall that Concert at Palmyra — with a deeply medieval politics, one that feasts on blood and sets the other side up for doing as much.  Driven from the land or killed: noncombatants and perhaps the more modern of revolutionary units.

Posted to YouTube by Al Jazeera English, September 12, 2016.

Posted to YouTube by AFP News Agency, September 12, 2016.

BackChannels feels that Assad flanked by Putin and Khamenei and accompanied in their medieval journey by Baghdadi are “all in” for “absolute power” — “Different talks, same walk” — and none have either “internal brakes” or personal incentives for compromise.  However, external influences, starting with state (or “state”) money and either the want of it or the loss of it, might apply.

Also, for Putin, greater state interests plus, perhaps, interest in his reputation in history, may come to bear — no pun intended — for as the destruction of Syria intensifies and western intervention remains limited, it’s himself as much as Assad, the head of a Russian “client state”, who may in the world’s memory bear the brunt of responsibility for the horror of it.

Additional Reference

CBS/AP.  “Syria cease-fire — Assad’s “last shot” — seems to hold.”  September 13, 2016.

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FTAC – From Correspondence – Focusing on the Despotic

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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Dictatorships – “Different Talks – Same Walk” — they have nothing to do with any restricted political vision except to exploit language for the eventual attainment of “unlimited narcissistic supply.”

Truly, they flatter themselves, eventually leaving behind pyramids and billion-dollar mansions.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/malignant-narcissism/

Many make themselves living hell for others, unfortunately.

Successful states — plenty of cash across the geopolitical space and plenty to do as regards work — seem to me often well put together combines of public commitments and privately realized opportunities. As all things are worked out between actual persons and organizations, the general rule — public-private compacts, from the provision of infrastructure to area-wide tax policy to real estate development through to public regulation of production (environmental and labor legislation) and trade (controls on distribution and tariffs) — dissolves into improved qualities in living x area-sq.

In good societies, “qualities of living” (economic, physical, psychological, social, spiritual) should produce the benchmarks (casually stated: “are you better off today than you were so many years ago? And how so? And why?) to which constituencies and politicians respond.

The despotic evade popular judgment.

I think we focus too much on the “isms” and not enough on leadership and related social practices, but that feature in cultures need the poets out front. Depending on where one lives, the critics of power, especially despotic power, may be made to suffer in situ or in exile a long time.

Re. education — avoidance of indulging too many in the humanities and social sciences, or doing so through too much of a Far Right / Far Left professoriate, may make a political body too easily disinformed and misled. As I have no relevant power in that realm, or elsewhere, reparative action seems way beyond my reach.

I think generalists among writers have at best subtle influence over time.

A good conversation may be mild and yet moving.

The conversational partner had called for the removal of former communists from Russian politics; however, and President Putin included, the whole have transformed from the Soviet outlook and ditched the CPSU worldview, a process well underway but out of sight in the 1980s when the privileged of the Party had begun work on plans for afterward.  The “afterward” — December 26 of this year will mark 25 years of “afterward”) — has returned to Russians a deeply centralized national security state: FSB | Putin | Oligarchs.

Where the same has run the world into disturbing issues: Syria.

Barbarism, Corruption, and Cronyism v Rule of Law and Meritocracy

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Medieval Political Absolutism vs Modern Democratic Distribution of Power

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State-Based Development and Exploitation of Terrorists (as in the medieval realpolitik theatrical “Assad OR The Terrorists”) v Progressive Humanist Discipline in Military / Paramilitary Assessment and Response (as in modern Israel)

The items presented in “That v This” form need not be black-and-white in reality (or “realpolitik”) as the blend may be more the thing, but what’s on display in Russia- and Iran-enabled Syria is so bad as to make modern invention of the political themes involved very easy.  Stopping at an expanded “Medieval v Modern” three should suffice.

Through President Putin, certain features (like that KGB/FSB thing) of the Soviet Union have enjoyed a period of “Soviet Reunion”.  A number of characteristics associated with the period of dissolve around 1991 have been reversed, and the leader has returned to the people a certain boisterous quality.  However, the ambitious neo-medieval neo-imperial state’s “numbers” — military expenditures, reduced oil revenues, incidence of corruption throughout, capital inflows, reduced reserves — may be keeping internal development comparatively suspended.  That may do Putin’s popularity and reputation some damage over time.

General Reference

. . . the majority of the population sees the Kremlin not as the reason for the current economic recession but as the central power making a relatively successful attempt to consolidate society against external enemies that seek to strangle Russia economically. Somehow, it is not hard for the Kremlin-controlled media to find proof and symptoms—Western sanctions are presented as a major instrument of destruction, causing severe harm to the Russian economy; the oil price decline is declared to be the result of an anti-Russian plot; and even the situation around Ukraine is treated as an attack on Russian foreign trade, on Russia’s ability to cooperate with a neighboring market of 45 million people, and on the traditionally close economic ties between Ukraine and Russia. Over time, economic hardships have become a reason for the increase in public support of the president and his policies, not a reason for protesting.

Movchan, Andrey.  “Avoiding the Blame for Russia’s Economic Woes.”  Carnegie Moscow Center, March 30, 2016.

Oxenstierna, Susanne.  “Russia’s defense spending and the economic decline.”  Journal of Eurasian Studies, January 2016, 7:1, 60-70.

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FTAC – On Putin & Associates’ Search for Medieval Absolute Power

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia

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Moscow – Putin | Putin, Assad, Khamenei | Putin, Orban | Putin, Erdogan (never mind the superficial enmity and differences in “talk”) — supports political absolutism in relation to the malignant narcissism evident in the personalities of related leaders (like Orban, like Erdogan). For this reason, Putin has encourage both Far Left and Far Right political organizations and personalities; it is why his government has hosted PFLP (2014) and continues to refuse to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas. The form of power wanted by dictators — different talks: same walk — is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. On the cheerful side of that 🙂 — the acquisition of unlimited narcissistic supply. Whatever the west’s own issues may be with business, corruption, and crime, the power-distributing and power-checking political systems threaten the “malignant narcissist” — the autocrat, the absolutist — and that’s really what their battles are about. The power of the special sovereign / great leader has its place in Russian history but is by no means confined to Russia. In fact, I think feudal despotism more the way of the world, even if one hopes not its only future, than checked-and-distributed political power, and that at least two NATO states feature illiberal autocrats as heads of state — Hungary and Turkey — tells what the argument is really about: i.e., Medieval Absolute Power vs Modern Checked and Distributed Power.

The paragraphs may grow shorter as I retype and recast BackChannels’ main themes.

Why do dictators do what they do?

Ah, pride — but pride that compensates and covers psychic injury.  Terms of art may include the following:

Narcissistic mortification

Malignant and Reparative Narcissism — I would refer to this as “narcissistic pathing” or channeling.

Narcissistic Supply — that approving roar of the crowd.

Unlimited Narcissistic Supply — Ah, glorious, unless you have found yourself on the Great Leader’s wrong side, i.e., somewhere in the opposition.

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Dictatorships – Putin’s, Erdogan’s – ‘Different Talks – Same Walk’

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Political Psychology, Politics, Turkey

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Seldom nor so perfectly has the pot called the kettle black as at this moment.  “Failed Turkey Coup May Signal Beginning of the End for NATO” crows Sputnik News:

The failed coup attempt in Turkey led by a faction of the military seeking the overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan citing the leader’s abysmal record on free speech, democratic freedoms, and human rights may be the final death knell for both NATO and the European Union who are holding onto the increasingly undemocratic leader for dear life.

Mirror, please.

When it comes to freedom of the press, Moscow fairly owns the other category — “state-controlled press” — and one may suppose poor Erdogan will just have to catch up (even though he may not have far to go).

Human rights?

Again, Russia (okay: Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) kills it (if it’s moving) in the Syrian Tragedy, the world’s most magnificent display — from Assad’s barrel bombs to Baghdadi’s beheadings — of contemporary barbarism.

How About “Rule of Law”?

Chaika.

Of course, it’s complicated and funny in a very serious way.

Also online:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13489/putins-judicial-vertical-russian-rule-of-law-takes-a-step-backward – 1/14/2014.

As perhaps echoes the Egyptian experience with Islamism in force, factions of the Turkish military may have harbored more of the values of modern and democratic life than the democratically elected “malignant narcissist” brought into power and attempted a coup (if the situation was not manipulated by Erdogan himself to strain out of the military the last of his opposition in that estate).  Quite unlike the Egyptian experience, which appeared to have brought the very nation out into the streets in support of its military, the Turkish coup has failed, giving Russia finger-wagging power to point to NATO’s support of a dictatorship not unlike Russia’s own.

Putin’s Russian Nationalism : Erdogan’s Sunni Islamism: Different Talks – Same Walk.

Ak_Saray_-_Presidential_Palace_Ankara_2014_002.jpg

“White Palace” – “Presidential Palace”, Ankara, 2014 – by Ex13, Wikimedia Commons.

BBC Europe reports, “Turkey has arrested 6,000 people after a failed coup, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowing to purge state bodies of the “virus” that caused the revolt.”

Way back in March, journalist Dexter Filkins writing for The New Yorker had reported on “Erdogan’s March to Dictatorship in Turkey”.

“Not long after his initial election, Erdoğan’s agents embarked on a large and sinister campaign to destroy his political opponents, jailing hundreds—journalists, university rectors, military officers, aid workers—on trumped-up charges and fabricated evidence,” Filkins wrote — and wrote some more about the arrests of journalists, the taking over of opposition press, the delivery of arms to Jabhat al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate), the easy go with ISIS in favor of unleashing his military against Kurdish interests.

Other journalists have weighed in with similarly cogent observations.

Alon Ben-Meir, Consortium News, May 13, 2016:

Not surprisingly, once Erdogan assumed the Presidency, he continued to chair cabinet meetings and even established a shadow cabinet with a handful of trusted advisers. He pointedly sidelined Davutoglu, who quietly resented Erdogan’s usurpation of the role and responsibility of the prime minister as if nothing had changed.

The premiership became a ceremonial post and the ceremonial presidency became the all-powerful office without a formal constitutional amendment to legally grant him the absolute authority he is now exercising.

Reuters (with staff contributors listed at the bottom of the piece), January 20, 2016:

A Turkish court on Wednesday sentenced a female teacher to almost a year in prison for making a rude gesture at President Tayyip Erdogan at a political rally in 2014, local media reports said on Wednesday.

Insulting public officials is a crime in Turkey, and Erdogan, the country’s most popular but most divisive politician, is seen by his critics as intolerant of dissent and quick to take legal action over perceived slurs.

Today’s Telegraph UK has laid out the timeline of the attempted coup and listed the sorry statistics involving general arrests, the slaughter overnight (“265 killed”), soldiers imprisoned, and judges facing arrest.

Breaking in Fox News: “Detention orders were filed for 53 more judges and prosecutors while 52 military officers were rounded up for their alleged roles in the plot, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported.”

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FTAC – ‘It’s Not Islam – It’s Moscow’

15 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iraq, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions, Syria

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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”.

Fast Related Reference

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.politico.eu/article/le-pen-russia-crimea-putin-money-bank-national-front-seeks-russian-cash-for-election-fight/ – 2/19/2016;

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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http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4112/hungarian_neo_nazis_court_russia_as_inspiration_for_attacks_on_gays – 9/5/2013;

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

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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.

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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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FTAC -Longitude – The Hebrews, Judaism, and Law

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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While Judaism, Jewishness, and Zionism combine in the interest of Hebrew ethnolinguistic cultural and spiritual survival, the religion probably should not be confused with the practical motivation for related ethnic survival. For anti-Semites only, it’s all the same — Jews, Jewish faith, Israel, Zionism — but attacking Zionism in the age of tolerance becomes the more sustainable ploy.

In contemporary animus and conflicts targeting Jewish life, there are four themes:

1. Absolute Power — political power consolidated in one ruler;
2. Capricious Law — because the ruler is the law;
3. Idolatry – the ruler lays claim to divine right or historic inevitability for his legitimacy in power, and progressively conflates his image with God or the State, and expects followers to respond appropriately — or else!
4. Sadism — with confusion as to what is God and what is human, the permit to exercise a singular will to make others suffer with impunity comes into play.

However any may care to think about any number of political and religious figures in history, I feel the above describe the character of tyrants, small or large, or men or women on the way to becoming tyrants.

The Jewish program embedded in Christianity and Islam — attractive in Rome and useful in consolidating the Arab world — unfailingly promotes (from the git-go in Genesis) human consciousness, self-consciousness or self-awareness, and, most important of all, the possession of a human conscience. Moses later becomes the lawgiver who would oppose Pharaoh in the exercise of his contention that he himself was as if a god.

Game over.

The defense and transfer of concept over thousands of years has been apparently painful. The Jews, we Jews, are a mixed lot, including the atheist portion, but common to all has been mutual good regard, from Adam to Netanyahu, and the development of a conversation through time about divinity, ethics, and morality. We know discipline and order too, but Torah-derived or induced argument (regarding Isaac, should Abraham have talked back to God?) has led to a compendium of law sufficient for living, working, and trading in peace worldwide.

As an ethnolinguistic cohort, the Hebrews could grow only so much in numbers as Hebrews, but the uptake in Christianity and Islam fills in the story.

The “Abrahamic Faiths” should get off the bloody medieval and tribal merry-go-rounds and revisit their “operating instructions” line by line and in the context set by time — BCE, CE, feudal, medieval, mercantile, possibly “post-modern” — and eject the absurdity of global competition based on being born with a few labels in place.

As time is spacious and timeless, what other work than that of fostering ethnolinguistic cultural survival and co-evolution by producing a global political atmosphere in which mutual good regard matters.

Reference Off to the Side

Oppenheim, Lassa.  “International Law: A Treatise.”  London, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1905.

While “The West” draws its shape also from Greek and Roman civilizations, the “Judeo-Christian” contributions in thought and in woefully bloody history serve to have produced so far deeply desired and survivable codes of conduct and of law.  Whether we’ll be able to enlarge the familiar term to “Judeo-Christian-Muslim” contributions remains to be seen, for as implied by way of the awesome conversation, what Baghdadi has put on demonstration smacks of absolute power, capricious law, idolatry, and sadism, all of which greater portions of Islam seem to be rejecting as I type.

American Islamic Forum for Democracy.  “Declaration of the Muslim Reform Movement / Signed by AIFD (December 4, 2015).

Berman, Ilan.  “Morocco’s Islamic Exports: The Counterterrorism Strategy Behind the Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams.”  Foreign Affairs, May 12, 2016.

Varagur, Krithika.  “World’s Largest Islamic Organization Tells ISIS to Get Lost.”  The World Post / Huffington Post, December 3, 2015.

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FTAC — A Wrap-Up on Mentality — Malignant/Medieval and Reparative/Modern Narcissism

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In our common malignancy, perhaps, our narcissism lends repair to psychological damage to self concept. Life’s rough and in part insults us, less or more, but, again perhaps, the greater the insult to esteem — the heavier the hand — the more passionate the want of self-aggrandizement, security, and wealth.

In the healthy, it’s good having basic and somewhat above good circumstance in freedom, money, and general security. In the malignant, the same wants get Up There and Out There. On Back-Channels, I’ve likened such qualities to the recognized psychological pathologies that are bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. In our general political psychology and related sociology, we aspire and trade up in comfort and prestige, and we do that through laws an practices that accommodate a healthy general development with concern spanning the distance from penthouse to street.

The malignant do things quite differently.

Muammar Qaddafi’s Mullah Shweyga story (easily looked up) tells the difference. Such leaders take full advantage of the possession of the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. All of the crimes that may be visited on one may as well be extended to others: capricious “justice” or detainments, imprisonments, hangings, tortures. Each dictator asks: “who is going to stop me?” And off each goes into the high life on the backs of the hungry, the powerless, and vulnerable.

I’m always happy to share the Reuters piece on Khamenei (“Assets of the Ayatollah”), but I think it better that others embark on similar journeys as regards the entire host of figures whose power has proven malignant and resides in the brutalities and related fears and levers (e.g., bribery and patronage; intimidation and murder) known more to the medieval mind than the modern one.

Yes, this may be the only blog on earth suggesting the reader continue doing the research.

🙂

Here’s a related comment on Moscow’s role in managing conflicts in a manner fit to destroy those it manages to manipulate and prize from the same conflict-related income and, at least in its own hive-mind, power and prestige.

Moscow, representing Putin’s political police, himself, and the oligarchs, may be a greater power than Tehran. It may barely be keeping its political image clean — remember: officially, Moscow is helping Damascus fight “The Terrorists” — but it may have the habit of manipulating political situations to its advantage.

From Somali General Galal, who is still alive, here’s a densely compacted recap of the Somali vs Ethiopian war over the Ogaden: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1

In the PROCESS of that war, Moscow apparently manipulated Somali leaders into laying claim or reclaiming the Ogaden, pitting first guerrilla then regular forces against Ethiopian control of the space. As advances pushed Ethiopia out of the contested space, Soviet Russia stepped in to arm Ethiopian forces, who then pushed back the Somalis. The Ogaden continues to host some related “low-intensity conflict”.

Who won?

Getting away from one’s own interests, in this instance Syria, and venturing to overview Moscow’s involvements in conflicts worldwide across time may help us more brightly resolve (accurately perceive) states of affairs in Syria and the Middle East Conflict.

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Link – Iranian Provocation – Persian Gulf

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The incident began with the Iranians ordering the ship into Iranian waters. When the ships master refused, the Iranians began to fire in a way to try to disable the ship, not just as warning shots, the U.S. official said.

Several shots hit the cargo ship, but did not disable it. The ship went into UAE waters and the Iranians followed it into those territorial waters, continuing to fire, before breaking off.

Starr, Barbara.  “First on CNN: Five Iranian boats fire shots in the Persian Gulf.”  CNN Politics, May 14, 2015.

The Khamenei style makes for a bad movie, but, nonetheless, a movie in the making appears to be what the chest-thumper script follows.  Repeatedly.  Recall the 2007 header, “Iran seizes 15 British marines and sailors” (Aref Mohammed, Reuters, March 23); drift back to 2004 (thanks, Wikipedia): “2004 Iranian seizure of Royal Navy personnel”; and more recently in the news: Maersk Tigris, a cargo ship (the incident took place between April and May this year), Maersk Kensington (CNN URL dated April 29).

A senior Iranian military official warned that any effort to board a Yemen-bound ship – supposedly filled with aid supplies – would “spark a fire,” amid speculation that Tehran is using the shipment to try to provoke an incident.

One U.S. official told Fox News the Iranian ship has media aboard.

“Iran is begging for us to board the ship. This is all for show,” he said.

Fox News.  ‘All for show’? Iran warns against boarding Yemen-bound ship, US questions motives.”  May 13, 2015.

From the same piece: “”I bluntly declare that the self-restraint of Islamic Republic of Iran is not limitless,” Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of staff, told Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam state TV late Tuesday.”

There should be no question about the defects in personality involved in Iranian belligerence and its version of military and political reality testing in service to extraordinary kleptocracy and political manipulation in turn associated with an equally ambitious and piratical expansionism.

Connect the dots:

The Ayatollah appears incapable of restraint except when confronted with the prospect of main force — and the smaller parts of “main force” — “diplomacy”, sanctions, excoriations — appear of little concern given the regime’s comfortability with its criminality, limitless ambitions, and largely unimpeded operating style.

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