Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Middle East Page 15 of 21

The Rise of the Islamic State

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On April 27, 2015

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Islamic State Flag

Islamic State Flag

Der Spiegel had an excellent article on how ISIS rose to power, based on files recovered from the ex-Baathist spy master who planned most of its structure and early strategy.

It boils down to two main themes. First, ISIS set up charity offices in the territory it would later try to seize. The men assigned to those offices were tasked with finding out who the most important people in the area were and marrying into the most important families, if possible.

When ISIS went active, they had complete files on the power structures of every area. They knew who had power, who was likely to oppose them, and, to put it crudely, where they lived. Their enemies knew next to nothing about them, but they they were able to bribe, blackmail or kill anyone who was in a position to be useful or pose a threat.

Second, and especially interesting, the initial ISIS force was comprised almost entirely of people not native to Syria. On the face, this seems like a bad idea, but lack of local ties, combined with ferocious operational security, meant that ISIS could move its troops from place to place and the locals couldn’t easily track those movements.

ISIS soldiers who were local would have talked, their movements would have been easy to track. Foreigners with few to no local ties, not so much.

As a result, ISIS was able to make a small army effectively much larger than it seemed. They would march almost all their troops to the next theater, and because their enemies didn’t know it, they couldn’t take advantage.

The result of this was that ISIS’s local enemies, the local elites, were often unable to effectively oppose them (since they got dead or blackmailed if they did). Additionally, ISIS possessed operational flexibility their armed opposition didn’t have.

The entire article is worth reading if you’re interested in how ISIS rose and worth thinking on how it could be applied elsewhere, or stopped. It’s also an excellent reminder that the best of the forces rising in the Islamic world are staffed and run by people who are brilliant and not to be underestimated. (They ought to be the best; a very harsh Darwinian selection has been run on them.  Slip up, wind up dead.)

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Iranian Concerns About the Nuclear Deal Are Reasonable

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On April 9, 2015

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Picture of Ali Khamenei

Picture of Ali Khamenei

We have, today, the news that Khamenei is dubious about the nuclear deal.  His two main complaints are:

  • He wants sanctions ended immediately;
  • He does not want military facilities inspected under the guise of enforcing the deal.

These are more reasonable than they seem at first blush. The current deal calls for an end to sanctions when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concludes that Iran has met its part of the deal.  Seems fair enough, but, as Gareth Porter writes:

Iranian negotiators have pointed out to Western diplomats that the IAEA could take up to 15 years to arrive at a final judgment, as it did in the case of South Africa, the source said.

A senior Iranian official told the International Crisis Group last November that IAEA officials, responding to Iran’s question about the time required, had refused to rule out the possibility that it would take more than ten years to complete its assessment of Iran’s case.

And, as Porter points out, much of what Iran is agreeing to do is effectively irreversible.

As for the close inspection of military facilities, remember that such inspections were done in Iraq before the invasion of that country and the results were used to help draw up the bombing targets in the war. The IAEA teams will certainly include people who will share the information with America and Israel, after all.

I want to put this entire mess in perspective:

First, Iran having nukes would change nothing except making it impossible to invade Iran. That’s what we’re really talking about. If Iran were to use its nukes pre-emptively, Iran would become a glass parking lot.

Second,  China and Russia messed up by allowing UN sanctions on Iran. Royally screwed up. The West has been picking off, or attempting to pick off states in order to isolate them, from Libya and Iraq to the Ukraine, with massive pressure on Venezuela. It simply is not in either Russia or China’s interest to allow such states to be destroyed.

Third, Libya gave up its weapon program. Iraq had no weapons program. Giving up your weapons program (ie, giving up your sprint capacity) is really dangerous. As commenter MFI noted, Qaddafi wound up getting sodomized by a knife because he made a deal with the West to give up his program.

The sanctions are absolutely crippling and I understand why many Iranians are absolutely desperate to make a deal. But some deterrent must be maintained. If it isn’t, well, the record of what happens to such countries is simply not good.  This is one reason why Khamenei is leery–he knows his neck is on the line, and his death could be very unpleasant.

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The burning of the Jordanian pilot

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On February 5, 2015

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I’m with Robb on this.  It’s barbaric and no one should be burned alive.  I also strongly believe in good POW treatment (though, obviously, ISIS is not a party to the Geneva conventions.)

But pilots are more hated than virtually anyone.  They kill and maim (and often burn people to death) and they do it with what seems like complete impunity.  The Afghans used to throw Soviet pilots to the women, and, well, you don’t really want to think about what happened to them.

Pilots aren’t given sidearms to kill the enemy with if they are shot down.  They’re given sidearms to kill themselves.

The Kipling rule applies: always save the last bullet, for yourself.

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Obama’s Speech on War with the Islamic State

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On September 12, 2014

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Let’s just quickly point out the obvious: air power only works if you have effective ground troops backing it up, or your enemy is easily dissuaded from war by losses of infrastructure. Otherwise it wrecks great destruction, and does little more.

To put it simply, this strategy will certainly help those fighting the IS, but it won’t make that big a difference, and it isn’t new, it’s what the US has been doing for some time.  Failure to coordinate with Syria is a mistake, and the only people in the region who have significant numbers of troops capable of defeating the IS are Iran and Hezbollah.  Hezbollah is unlikely to move large numbers of troops into Syria out of fear of Israel attacking them, and there is no assurance Obama can give them of that not happening, because America answers to Israel, not Israel to America.

Meanwhile the US is still giving arms to so-called moderates like the FSA, which wind up in the hands of ISIL.  The Peshmerga have proved largely incapable, though they are more willing to fight than the pathetic Iraqi army, and the IS is filling up with ex-Baathists: very capable soldiers.

The alliance is also laughable: Turkey has been funneling weapons to the Syrian opposition for some time and Saudi Arabia is the spiritual home of the form of Wahhabism the IS believes in.  That said, I do believe that the Saudi royal family is soiling themselves over the IS, because their ideology requires them to overthrow the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia and conquer Mecca as part of their caliphate.  The Saudi royal family deserves nothing more, this is an exact result of their pushing Wahabbism as the ideology of Jihad for decades.

And so it goes.  Obama hasn’t managed to fight a war yet that didn’t destabilize multiple countries.  I wouldn’t expect this to be any different.

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It seems the Kurds had to retreat because they ran out of ammo

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On August 10, 2014

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No, really.

Maybe instead of giving weapons and ammo and money to the Iraqi army so they can abandon it on the field to ISIS (now calling themselves the Islamic State), the US should be supplying the Kurds, who will actually fight.

Just a thought.

As for Iraq, the government policy of trying to fiscally strangle the Kurds is coming back to bite them,hard.  If they’d let the Kurds sell some oil, the Kurds might be holding ground.

I’m sure the supply situation will change. Once it does, there’ll be a real test of the Kurds ability to defeat ISIS.  They’ve taken two towns back with American air support, but they will have to do far more to defeat ISIS.

I suspect part of the problem here is that others who could help, like Iran, Syria, and Turkey are not doing so, since they all have Kurdish minorities and rather like the idea of Kurdistan being defeated and Kurds being slaughtered.

That’s a big mistake.  The Islamic State is far more dangerous to them than the Kurds ever were.

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Kurdish Peshmerga fail to hold Sinjar Mountains

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On August 5, 2014

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This is bad.  Very bad.

As the article (which you should read) points out, the Peshmerga had the higher ground, and still lost (holding out all of 2 hours). I don’t expect these are the best Kurdish units and the article does not speak to numbers (though ISIS, traditionally, wins while outnumbered), but it is also true that the Peshmerga today are not what they were even 10 years ago: peace and expansion means they are not the hardened fighters of the past.

The Peshmerga need a victory against ISIS.  I will also suggest that they need to call back up the old veterans, many of whom will still be of fighting age.  This is only the first battle, but the loss was unexpected and should cause the Kurdish military and government to reevaluate.

ISIS is a plague, whose first act is to destroy holy sites of other religions (Shia is another religion to them.)  They do not even reliably keep the Koran’s rules about tolerance (with a tax) of other Abrahamic religions.

This is an existential issue for Kurdistan, the caliphate will not allow a Kurdish homeland.

Those fools who called for the Iraq war and who bungled the Iraq operation, along with those idiots who armed the Syrian rebels are directly responsible for the routine war crimes of ISIS.  Absent the Iraq invasion, ISIS is nothing; absent the Syrian civil war (which was heavily backed by outside arms and money) ISIS is weak.

Fools.

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To Summarize the Israeli/Gaza War

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On July 27, 2014

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1) The causus-belli, the kidnapping and death of three Israeli teenagers was false.  This has now been admitted by Israeli officials. There was never a scrap of proof, only supposition.

2) Bibi said Hamas did it, and started a war based on that, for vengeance.

3) Ooops.

4) Except that we all know it was just a pretext.  Doing it based on a lie just rubs that in.

5) Hamas has been fighting better than last time, inflicting enough Israeli casualties to matter.

6) Israel has been deliberately leveling large parts of Gaza.  The damage is much worse than Cast Lead.  Most refugees will have no home to go back to.

7) Israel wants truces now, but by and large it’s Hamas who is refusing them.

8) Why?

9) Because the status-quo ante is unacceptable. Gaza was under siege, unable to bring in most goods, food, water and so on and most residents could not leave, even for life-saving medical care.

10) Hamas’s condition for the end of the war is substantially “life the siege”.  If the siege is not lifted, the parts of Gaza which have been flattened cannot be rebuilt, because the equipment needed cannot enter Gaza.

11) Israel can inflict as much collective punishment (a war crime) as it likes on the Gazans, but it can’t make Hamas stop fighting, or shooting missiles.

12) Israel also wants, as part of a condition for peace, for Hamas to let it keep hunting down the tunnels. In other words, it wants Hamas to allow Israel to destroy its ability to fight back even a little.

Israel has a problem.  It takes two to make peace, and Hamas won’t.  Israel could re-occupty Gaza, of course, but that leaves them with occupation troops in Gaza indefinitely, and while they’ll eventually root out Hamas, they’ll take significant casualties doing so.  Plus, then, they have to run Gaza rather than just try to starve it into submission.

Though I know of no polling, I have seen more than one interview where non Hamas Gazans have supported Hamas continuing the war until the Israelis lift the siege.  The general consensus seems to be that living in Gaza is death already.

The larger problem is simple enough.  Israel is an apartheid state which wants to pretend it doesn’t rule its Bantustans while at the same time slowly strangling them to death, and in the case of the West Bank, continuing to settle them.

This is an unsustainable position.  Israel needs to either become a secular state with equal citizenship for all residents regardless of religion or ethnicity; or the logic of situation will require them to remove the Palestinians once and for all.

As a bleeding ulcer, Israel does not work.  More and more diaspora Jews are turning away from it.  At some point the foreign aid it requires to exist will go away.

Israel was always a profoundly ill-considered venture: the idea of giving Jews a homeland by pushing current residents out, in many cases literally, of their homes, could only be an ongoing war crime and this is no longer the great colonial era, where genocide to create settler states is acceptable (nor is there a great plague to target only Palestinians and wipe out 90% of their population, as with the Native Americans.)

Israel is a state which, as currently constituted can only continue to exist by engaging in regular and ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Its right to exist is irrelevant, its ability to exist is the question.  Israel will either engage in as great a crime as was used to justify its existence after World War II, or it will become a secular state.  The two state solution is dead.

Media Coverage of Israel’s killing of Palestinians

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On July 20, 2014

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During Operation Cast Lead, the last time Israel decided to concentrate a large number of war crimes into a short period by kicking the shit out of Gazans despite the fact that Palestinians offer exactly zero real military threat to Israel I wrote a lot about it, and received the strongest pushback of my writing life: rich donors don’t like it when you say bad things about Israel.

Coverage in the US, of Israel, is so slanted that the Washington Post runs with 2 Israeli soldiers dying rather than over 60 civilians being slaughtered.

Simply put, for most news organizations, when Israel goes on a rampage, inflicting massively disproportionate collective punishment (a war crime), you have to make your bones.  Ideally you should cover for Israel: make excuses or slant coverage.  Of course the Post mentions that many more Palestinians are being killed by Israel than vice-versa; and of course the Washington Post will get around to mentioning the number of children killed

But the Washington Post editors know what all news editors know: about half the audience only reads the headlines.  Half of the remaining audience reads only the first paragraph.  If you don’t get around to mentioning inconvenient facts until later, most people will never read them.  You can feel virtuous “we covered that”, while being a propaganda outlet at the same time.

As with a lot of topics, writing about Israeli war crimes endangers your career.  The publishers and editors don’t want to hear; powerful politicians don’t want to read it.  Those who wrote against the Iraq war tended to get demoted or lose their jobs.  It’s not so bad for Israel and Palestine, of course: if you’re the sort of person who might write such articles, you’ll never make it to a position to write those articles.

Oh, to be sure, there are exceptions, and there are more in Britain than in the US.  But they are exceptions.

Writing about Israel and just noting the facts even handedly (starting with the higher casualty numbers, say), if you’re career minded, or just want to be able to feed your family, is a bad move.  It’s just not worth it.

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