Category: Civil War

That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

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President Obama just called the Republican cowardice explosion over Syrian refugees a sign that they were afraid widows and orphans:

President Obama is lashing out at Republican politicians who oppose allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S., accusing them of being “scared of widows and orphans.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning in the Philippines, Obama scoffed at attempts to block refugees following the Paris terror attacks as “political posturing” that “needs to stop.”

“Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America,” Obama said of Republicans. “At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

Obama apparently directed his ire at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who said Tuesday he opposes allowing people fleeing the conflict in Syria to resettle in the U.S., even “orphans under five.”

………
“We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic,” he said. “We don’t make good decisions if its based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.”

What is going on with the refugees right now is cowardice, naked pants-soiling cowardice, and it’s nice to see Obama calling it out.

Between France and Russia, It Appears That the US May Adopt a Syria Strategy

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Putin & Obama Talk, Wingnut Heads Explode

Notice that I did not use the modifier, “New”.

Up to this point, the US has not had a plan beyond, “Freedum bomz!” up to this point.

Notice for example, how the US has hit Syrian government oil and energy facilities, but has done nothing to ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever fuel convoys that have typically exported through Turkey.  (One assumes that this was because the Turks wanted to keep their profits from this trade, and we needed their airbases)

This has changed:

The U.S. claims it wants to hit the Islamic State but in one year of bombing it never really touched one of its biggest sources of income. Hundreds of oil tanker trucks are waiting every day at IS distribution points to smuggle oil to Turkey and elsewhere. Only one such distribution point was ever bombed and that attack was  by the Iraqi air force.

 Now the Russian President Putin played some “name and shame” at the G-20 meeting in Turkey and, lo and behold, the problem gets solved.

 The Obama administration recently claimed it would increase attacks on the most expensive Syrian oil infrastructure which is owned by the Syrian government but under IS control. But it said it would still not hit the large truck gatherings.

While the American-led air campaign has conducted periodic airstrikes against oil refineries and other production facilities in eastern Syria that the group controls, the organization’s engineers have been able to quickly repair damage, and keep the oil flowing, American officials said. The Obama administration has also balked at attacking the Islamic State’s fleet of tanker trucks — its main distribution network — fearing civilian casualties. But now the administration has decided to increase the attacks and focus on inflicting damage that takes longer to fix or requires specially ordered parts, American officials said.

The obvious target to stop the oil trade is to hit the trucks. Without trucks the other infrastructure is useless for IS as the oil can not be sold. With trucks destroyed the men behind the smuggling will lose all profits and leave the business. The “civilian casualties” argument does not hold. There could be warnings to avoid human damage or one could consider that these oil smugglers are dealing with terrorists and thereby accomplices. The real U.S. reluctance to hit the oil smuggling might be out of deference to the Turkish government which of course profits from such oil transfers.

 ………

Putin provided that information and the photos yesterday. Obama must have been deeply embarrassed and pissed. Suddenly, a day after Putin exposed the U.S. reluctance to hit IS where it is needed, a big truck assembly was bombed:

Intensifying pressure on the Islamic State, United States warplanes for the first time attacked hundreds of trucks on Monday that the extremist group has been using to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria, American officials said. According to an initial assessment, 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area in eastern Syria that is controlled by the Islamic State.

MoA’s analysis is a bit simplistic, it is far more likely that this is happening because the US does not want France to invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which would mandate a heightened involvement by the military alliance, probably involving the dreaded “boots on the ground”.

There is also the not so subtle call by French President Holland for the US and Russia to get their sh%$ together:

French President Francois Hollande says he will meet with U.S. and Russian leaders to discuss pooling their efforts to destroy the Islamic State group.

Hollande, speaking at a special joint meeting of the upper and lower houses of parliament in the Palace of Versailles, said he had requested meetings with Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.

Hollande said he wanted the talks “to unify our strength and achieve a result that has been too long in coming.” Hollande called for “a union of all who can fight this terrorist army in a single coalition.”French President Francois Hollande says he will meet with U.S. and Russian leaders to discuss pooling their efforts to destroy the Islamic State group.

Hollande, speaking at a special joint meeting of the upper and lower houses of parliament in the Palace of Versailles, said he had requested meetings with Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.

Hollande said he wanted the talks “to unify our strength and achieve a result that has been too long in coming.” Hollande called for “a union of all who can fight this terrorist army in a single coalition.”

Reading between the lines, this translates to, “Enough with the Cold War nostalgia tour, we have sh%$ to do.”

Again, I think that the threat of an Article 5 invocation hovers above this statement.

It does appear that there appears to be some improved communication between US and Russian intelligence agencies:

The head of the CIA is “determined” to keep conversations open between the intelligence communities of the United States and Russia and wants to see relations between the two nations “enhanced” to prevent future terrorist attacks, particularly from the Islamic State group, commonly known as ISIS or ISIL.

 John Brennan also said the “ISIL threat demands” an “unprecedented level of cooperation” among the international intelligence community, mere hours before the Obama administration announced new rules easing the sharing of intelligence with France in the wake of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks.

 Speaking Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan broadly addressed the need for greater information-sharing around the globe, but saved his most expansive comments for a partner that may surprise those who have watched the relationship between the US and Russia disintegrate since Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian territory in 2014.

This is a major turnaround for the US state security apparatus, which had, until recently, seemed to be longing desperately longing for a return to the Cold War.


Tu-160


TU-22M3


TU-95

While I do not whether this is anything more than talk by the US, the Russians appear to be escalating in Syria:

Russia sent nearly 40 heavy bombers and escorting fighter jets on a massive air raid in Syria. Moscow has now showed off almost all of its aerial arsenal in strikes in the embattled Middle Eastern country.

 Flying from bases in Russia, 25 Tu-160, Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 bombers launched more than 30 cruise missiles and dropped dumb bombs on targets in Idlib and Aleppo provinces. A dozen Su-34 and Su-27SM fighter jets escorted the bombers on their mission.

 “The targets destroyed include command posts that were used to coordinate ISIL activities [and] munition and supply depots in the northwestern part of Syria,” chief of the Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov said, using a common acronym for the Islamic State terrorist group.

This is a big deal, but it is far less involved than a similar strike would be if conducted by the United States.

The Russians are about 1½ hours from their targets, while US bombers would likely sortie from  Diego Garcia, which is about a 7 hour trip, and would require multiple refuelings.  (The B-2s, would likely deploy from the US, which would be a 20+ hour trip one way)

Most significantly, the Russians provided advance notice to the US of the air strikes, so as to preventa possible incident:

For the first time since it began military operations in Syria, the Russian government alerted the United States of planned airstrikes, Defense Department spokesperson Peter Cook said Tuesday.

 Cook also said the Russian airstrikes were concentrated on targets from the Islamic State group, best known as ISIL or ISIS. That is a change from Pentagon statements in the past, which have identified the vast majority of Russian strikes as attacking non-ISIS forces aligned against the government of Syrian president Bashar al Assad.

 “In this instance, their most recent airstrikes, [Russia] did give us advanced notice through the memorandum of understanding that is in place,” Cook told reporters.

Russia appears to have launched a wave of new strikes in Syria over the last 24 hours, including cruise missiles and the first ever use of the Tu-160 strategic bombers in combat operations.

The US and Russia reached an agreement on deconfliction in October, but details on the agreement have been kept quiet, something the US said was at the behest of the Kremlin. This is the first time Russia has communicated directly to the US about incoming strikes, however.

Hopefully this presages a thawing, and I further hope that indicates a path forward for the US that actually has a modicum of coherence, but I am not holding my breath.

Two Suggestions for Dealing with the Paris and Lebanon Attacks

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Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically — a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with assault rifles and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. Inside the hall, 89 people, who had been listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.

Meanwhile, we see very little coverage of what happened the day before in Beriut:

A fiery double suicide bombing terrorized a mostly Shiite residential area of southern Beirut on Thursday, ripping through a busy shopping district at rush hour. The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 43 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in the worst attack to strike the city in years.

 The Islamic State extremist group, which controls parts of neighboring Syria, claimed responsibility for the attack. The group portrayed its motives as baldly sectarian, saying it had targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it views as apostates. It mentioned almost as an afterthought that it had targeted Hezbollah, the Shiite militant organization that backs the Syrian government in the civil war raging next door.

 Hezbollah maintains tight security control in the district that was hit, and the bombing seemed aimed at hurting the group by attacking civilians in an area where it has many supporters. But the stricken area also typifies working-class Beirut, where Palestinians, Christians and Syrian refugees (mostly Sunnis) live, work and shop.

First, I think that we need to understand that this is state sponsored terrorism:

It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla…er…indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away.

It’s been known for years that these regimes, in particularly the House of Saud, have been ATMs for the terror movement for decades.

To that particularly unsavory lot, we need to add our NATO ally Turkey, where the increasingly autocratic and delusional Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had decided to throw in for Sunni fundamentalist hegemony for his neighbor to the south, which is also his goal for Turkey.

Quiet diplomacy is not working with these folks. They need to be named, shamed, and sanctioned.

Additionally, changing the goal in Syria, and actively supporting the Assad regime as the best of a bad lot, which has the advantage of being true, and also has the effect of thwarting the goals or Turkey and the potentates on the Persian Gulf, and letting them know that they have crossed a line.

The fact that the Assad regime is that best alternative for the Syrian people and the world is a very real indictment of Western foreign policy.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

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UN weapons inspectors have found conclusive evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria, by the insurgents:

Inspectors have conclusively identified mustard gas as the toxic agent used in an attack by insurgents in northern Syria this summer, according to a statement released Friday by an international chemical weapons watchdog.

The findings by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are the first confirmation that non-state actors have used mustard gas in Syria’s four-year-old conflict. They also are the first confirmation of the use of the toxin since the Syrian government agreed two years ago to destroy its stockpile of chemical weapons. Since then, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have been accused of carrying out many attacks using chlorine gas, a choking agent.

The OPCW did not specify which group used mustard gas in the attack, which the organization said killed at least one person, an infant, on Aug. 21 in the village of Marea. Doctors and an aid organization in the village north of Aleppo blamed the attack on Islamic State militants who for months have been battling rebel groups in the area.

The use of mustard gas by either the Islamic State or rebels, or both, is a significant escalation in a conflict that has killed 250,000 people and displaced millions.

“In this case, the team was able to confirm with utmost confidence that at least two people were exposed to sulfur mustard, and that it is very likely that the effects of this chemical weapon resulted in the death of an infant,” the OPCW statement said.

Sy Hersh wrote about this over a year ago, noting that Turkey has been actively supporting chemical weapons development by ISIS and other Islamic insurgents in Syria.

The manufacture of mustard gas is not that difficult, particularly with state support.

Well, Someone in the Pentagon Can Think beyond Dick Swinging

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The Russians and the US are developing communication protocols in Syria.

I am not talking about some sort of foreign relations touchy feeley crap.  I am talking about about the actual technical protocols to allow Russian and US forces to communicate with each other:

US and Russian fighter pilots communicated directly in the skies over Syria on Tuesday in a successful test of new procedures for avoiding incidents as they pursue separate air campaigns, the Pentagon said.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said the test, carried out between one aircraft from each side over south central Syria, lasted three minutes and “met its intended objective.”

“This test assured that the first time this mode of communication was used would not be during an unplanned encounter,” Davis said.

The United States and Russia signed a “memorandum of understanding” on Oct. 20 aimed at de-conflicting their air operations over Syria, where they are waging parallel air campaigns with different objectives.

………

A US defense official said Tuesday’s test did not amount to joint training with the Russians, as Moscow has described it in a statement.

“We put on hold all military to military cooperation following the onset of Russian aggression in Crimea, and that remains in effect,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Actually, what this means is that someone in the US military has realized best case scenario with all of this is that we don’t have US and Russian forces shooting at each other.

When one considers the facts on the ground:

  • The US is bombing ISIS and supporting al Qaeda affiliated fighters it has labeled “moderates” seeking to overthrow Assad, while supporting the Kurd’s fight against Isis.
  • The Turks bombing the Kurds and supporting both Isis and Al Qaeda affiliated fighters seeking to overthrow Assad.
  • The Saudis supporting both Isis and Al Qaeda affiliated fighters seeking to overthrow Assad.
  • The Russians coordinating airstrikes with the Assad regime against both ISIS the al Qaeda affiliated fighters seeking to overthrow Assad.

It’s a wonder that they haven’t already started shooting at each other, what with all the all the bullets flying in different directions.

Not this Sh%$ Again!

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Obama has decided to put boots on the ground in Syria, and as near as I can figure, it’s because we cannot admit that our policy has failed:

In a dramatic shift in policy, the United States is preparing to send about 50 special operations forces to Syria within days to begin training and assisting “moderate” rebels fighting the Islamic State.

The U.S. military has sent elite forces into Syria before to conduct short in-and-out raids, but the move will for the first time keep American service members on the ground — and in harm’s way — in a four-plus year conflict that has killed over 200,000 people. It marks a significant departure in strategy for a White House that has repeatedly ruled out any U.S. “boots on the ground” in either Iraq or Syria and bristled at any suggestion that the American forces would take part in combat.

The U.S special operations forces being deployed to Syria will not play a direct combat role, at least initially, a senior defense official said Friday. Instead, the small number of commandos will focus more on advising local Arab and Kurdish rebels who are fighting the Islamic State in northern Syria.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Defense Department is not ruling out direct action raids in the future, but for now, “they will remain singularly at the headquarters” of the rebel groups, to ”help with operational planning.”

Still, the American forces could come under fire in their new mission, which could last weeks or months, officials said.

This is nucking futs.

The problem here is that we have mindlessly supported the policy goals of  the House of Saud.

As Pepe Escobar aptly notes, “But the problem was never Iran. The problem is the ideological matrix of goons who metastasize into Caliphs: Saudi Arabia,” and now that it has proven to be an abject failure, we have do double down, because our state security apparatus is unwilling to the failure of this policy.

So, now the White House and the Pentagon are so afraid that someone, anyone, else might approach something resembling a resolution in Syria that we are now supporting al Qaeda affiliated groups that we are calling “Moderates”.

This is insanity.  This is stupidity.

This is  ……… There are no words.

I’m Begiunning to Think That US and Allied Military Forces Are Targeting MSF Hospitals

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Last week, as a part of the Pentagon’s “investigation” of a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) bombing in Kunduz, sent in investigators ……… in a tank ……………… which ground much of the evidence to dust:

A US tank has forced its way into the shell of the Afghanistan hospital destroyed in an airstrike 11 days ago, prompting warnings that the US military may have destroyed evidence in a potential war crimes investigation.

 As calls grow for independent inquiry into Kunduz airstrikes, the president of Médecins Sans Frontières demands that those responsible are held to account

 The 3 October attack on the Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz killed 10 patients and 12 staff members of the group.

 In a statement on Thursday, the medical charity, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said they were informed after Thursday’s “intrusion” that the tank was carrying investigators from a US-Nato-Afghan team which is investigating the attack.

 “Their unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear,” MSF said.

 The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported intrusion, which came as new evidence emerged that US forces operating in the area at the time of the attack knew that the facility was a hospital.

And now we have another MSF hospital bombed, this one in Yemen.

Considering the US record on such things,* one has to wonder if perhaps our military establishment is sick of

Airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition targeting rebels in Yemen have destroyed a small hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the northern province of Saada, although there were no deaths and only one injury, the aid group said Tuesday.

The first of several strikes came around 11 p.m. on Monday and hit a building housing the facility’s administration offices, according to Hassan Boucenine, the aid group’s head of mission in Yemen who spoke to The Associated Press by telephone from the southern port city of Aden.

No one was inside at the time, he said, adding that by the time a second strike targeted the main nearby building about 10 minutes later, its occupants — some 12 staff and patients — had been evacuated.

“This attack is another illustration of a complete disregard for civilians in Yemen, where bombings have become a daily routine,” Boucenine said later in a statement by the group, also known by its French acronym MSF.

It urged coalition forces to explain the circumstances around the attack, saying that the hospital’s GPS coordinates were regularly shared with the Saudi-led coalition and its roof was clearly identified with its logo. The bombing of civilians and hospitals is a violation of international humanitarian law, it added.

The group operates in eight Yemeni governorates at a time when many foreign aid groups and even United Nations personnel have been evacuated. In its statement, it said the destroyed hospital had treated roughly 3,400 patients were since MSF began supporting it in May.

The Saudi-led, U.S.-backed coalition has been launching airstrikes against Yemen’s Shiite rebels, also known as Houthis, and their allies since March. Saada, the Houthis stronghold, has faced a particularly intense bombardment.

The United Nations said the facility was the 39th health center hit since the violence escalated in March, adding that critical shortages of fuel, medication, electricity and water could mean many more will close. Amnesty International said the strike may amount to a war crime and called for an independent investigation.

MFS treats anyone regardless of politics, and I’m beginning to think the Pentagon, and the Saudi state security apparatus, don’t like this.

It does seem rather similar to the spate of bombing of well documented Al Jazeera facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

*Donald Rumsfeld justified the bombing of hospitals during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, because they were treating combatants, which was a remarkably blithe admission of war crimes, since treating the enemy does not remove a hospital’s protected status.

Quote of the Day

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If you’re keeping score at home, in Syria, we’ll be fighting alongside the people against whom we’ll be fighting in Syria. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the friend of my friend is the enemy of the enemy of my friend. And the friend of the devil is a friend of mine. This isn’t foreign policy. It’s a Lewis Carroll poem, and it’s getting to be a longer one.

—Charlie Pierce on how the misruling class in DC seems determined to put boots on the ground in Syria.

It appears that Obama’s statements in 2003 that he opposed “Stupid Wars” is now inoperative.

What We are Seeing Here is an Actual Plan on Syria

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And it ain’t us, it’s Putin that has the plan, as evidenced by Bashar Assad’s surprise trip to Moscow to meet with Putin:

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has visited Moscow on his first overseas trip since the civil war broke out in his country in 2011.

 During the surprise visit, he had talks with President Vladimir Putin.

 Russia launched air strikes in Syria last month against the so-called Islamic State (IS) and other militant groups battling Mr Assad’s forces.

 Mr Assad said Russia’s involvement had stopped “terrorism” becoming “more widespread and harmful” in Syria.

 For his part, Mr Putin said Moscow’s hope, in providing a “positive dynamic in the fighting”, was that a “long term resolution can be achieved on the basis of a political process with the participation of all political forces, ethnic and religious groups”.

 The visit happened on Tuesday evening, but was not announced until Wednesday – after Mr Assad had returned to Damascus.

 ………

 President Assad’s surprise visit to Moscow represents a sign of growing confidence by the embattled Syrian president. He feels it safe to leave Damascus for the first time since the civil war in Syria erupted.

 It is also a visible symbol of Russia’s confidence in the current Syrian regime. Having Mr Assad turn up in Moscow shows that there is little doubt that for now at least, President Putin is intent on shoring up Mr Assad’s position.

 But the trip may also mark a new stage in Russia’s efforts to roll out a diplomatic plan alongside its military intervention in Syria; an illustration that Russia deals with Mr Assad, and that for now at least Mr Assad has to be part of any interim solution.

Russia is looking for an end to the civil war that serves their broader foreign policy goals.

It is clear that the Russians are not wedded to Assad’s continued leadership of Syria, but neither is his removal an important goal.

Their goal is a stable state, or at least a stable rump state, that allows them to maintain their base in Tartus and influence in the region while short circuiting Jihadis who will go to kill school kids in Grozny or Moscow.

Or, as Putin pithily put it, “We are not that preoccupied with the fate of Assad’s regime.”

Their tactics seem to be basically sound.

In comparison, the US is just looking to “lead” with no idea as to a final goal beyond removing Assad, preferably in a manner that demonstrates American hegemony, even if it means that we ware supporting al Qaeda factions.

BTW, the US strategy seems to be working swimmingly, with Iraq appearing to take steps to move into a closer alliance with Russia:

Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi is alleged to be under “enormous pressure” from Shiite militiamen and hardliners to seek Russian airstrikes on Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) targets. On Oct. 1, he had announced that such Russian intervention in his country would be welcome.

On Wednesday, the largest bloc in parliament, the Shiite Da’wa Party from which al-Abadi springs, sent a letter to the Prime Minister asking for Russian intervention.

He has established a joint intelligence center in Baghdad where reports are shared among Iraq, Iran, Russia and Syria.

But this week the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, visited Iraq and said he got assurances from PM al-Abadi that Russia would not fly missions against Daesh on Iraqi soil.

He said that there had been “angst” in the Pentagon when al-Abadi mentioned this possibility.

………

In any case, the Iraqi press and parliament think that Gen. Dunford is being far too categorical in the way he describes Baghdad’s pledge. The Shiite militias, such as the Badr Corps and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, intend to go on lobbying for Russian intervention. And, Parliament will take up the matter later this month.

From the point of view of the Shiite militias and politicians, the US air strikes have been way too leisurely. For the most part they seem to aim at containment of Daesh rather than rollback. The Shiite militias have been watching the extensive air strikes by Russia on rebel targets, with increasing envy. They want that kind of action.

………

My guess is that the Obama administration hasn’t wanted to roll back Daesh quite yet, precisely because it would be the Badr Corps and similar hard line pro-Iran Shiite militias that would conduct the attack on Mosul. And that configuration would enrage the Sunni Iraqis further. The US is reaching out to Sunni tribal chieftains and wants to delay the taking of Mosul until there are enough such Sunnis and they can be positioned as the leading edge of the attack.

………

The US desire to keep Russia out is likely in part a declaration of an old 19th-century style “Sphere of Influence.” Spheres of influence are exclusive. ………

Our foreign policy is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and seems to have as its only goal the maintenance of American dominance.

It really does look like the end game of an empire, doesn’t it.

Quote of the Day

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Credit where credit is due, this is well executed CAS

It just goes to show there’s only one man named Ash you should listen to, and he’s too busy chainsawing evil dead to talk nonsense like this.

— The War Nerd On why Ash Carters on the Russian intervention in Syria are 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag. (Paid Subscription usually required, but you can access it for the next 24 hours)

The always entertaining War Nerd makes some very good points on the complete incoherence of the US/Nato campaign in Syria:

I stole that headline from an Ernest movie, Scared Stupid. Always loved that title. “Scared Straight”? I’ve never seen fear make anybody smarter. When people get scared, they get stupid.

And at the moment, the Anglo media is all scared about the Russian air strikes in Syria. So they’ve started a counter-bombardment of their own, dumping tons of stupid on us helpless civilians.

It’s not even a consistent brand of stupid. It’s all over the map: the Russian air strikes are bad because they’re helping Islamic State, or because they’re brutal, or because they’ve failed.

That last claim, that the Russian campaign has already failed, is the most ridiculous of all. Take this headline from the Daily Telegraph: “Russia Reducing Air Strikes against Syrian Rebels as Intervention Fails.”

“Fails,” huh? Already? After—well, lemme take my shoes off so I can count up the days since Russia started bombing Syria. Comes to 17 days, by my finger-and-toe reckoning. Who knew that an air bombardment campaign could be called a failure after slightly more than two weeks? Somebody should tell the USAF about this rule, because if memory serves, they’ve run a few bombing campaigns that went on a little longer than 17 days before getting their reckoning.

Buried deep in that story is the Russian command’s actual statement:

“The intensity of our military aviation operations decreased slightly in the last 24 hours….a result of active offensive operations by the Syrian armed forces, the front line/front-line [sic] with the terrorists is changing.”

That’s a plausible account. The first rule of close air support is, “Don’t bomb your own people.”  And that’s a tricky job when Russian-speaking pilots and air controllers are working with what’s left of the Syrian Arab Army, a disorganized lot at the best of times. So the Russian claim may be the simple truth. Or not; who knows? All you can say for sure is that claiming a dip in sorties on Day 17 means the air campaign has failed is laughable BS.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter joined the chorus, predicting “the Russian campaign in Syria is doomed to fail.” Doomed, yet!

And why, Mr. Carter, are those Russkies so doomed? Carter explained,

“Fighting ISIL without pursuing a parallel political transition only risks escalating civil war in Syria… There is a logical contradiction in the Russian position and now its actions in Syria.”

It just goes to show there’s only one man named Ash you should listen to, and he’s too busy chainsawing evil dead to talk nonsense like this. Actually, Russia’s campaign is much more simple and logical than the USAF’s messed-up mission in Syria. Russia is using its air force to try to blast out a viable territory for an Alawite/Shia state along the Syrian coastal hills. Assad’s people are longtime Russian clients and allies, and the Russian air force is helping them maintain their key turf against a much more numerous enemy. It may fail, but at least that’s a reasonable plan.

………

Maybe our Secretary of Defense knows something I don’t know—I mean beyond the best place for prime rib in Georgetown—but it seems to me that the Russian air campaign makes very straightforward military sense.

If there’s an air force whose mission in Syria really does have “a logical contradiction at its core,” it’s a little group called the USAF. Not that it’s the USAF’s fault; they do their jobs very well. But what job, exactly, what mission, were they given?

If you were to sum it up, it’d go something like this: “Hit Sunni targets east of the coastal hills, but ignore everything to the west; help the Kurds in the north, but grudgingly, as little as possible, for fear you’ll offend Turkey; and while you’re attacking Assad’s enemies, keep reassuring the Israelis that you’re just as anti-Assad as you are anti-Islamic State.”

Sound stupid? It is. It’s a ridiculous compromise adopted to please the Israelis and Saudis, based on the dumb-ass notion that Sunni fighters in eastern Syria are evil sectarian bastards, but the Sunni fighters facing off against the SAA in the west are “moderates.”

It’s true that Islamic State is uncommonly vile, but let’s not lie; the only faction in Syria that even tries to rise above sectarian hatred are the young Kurdish commies of YPG/J. Every other group is sectarian, and militias that start out sectarian only get meaner as they go, by the iron logic of primitive war, where massacre is the norm. And this sectarian taint isn’t new. Syria’s Sunni were chanting “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” long before the fighting started. For once, Robert Fisk got it right, in an article called “Syria’s Moderates Have Disappeared, and There Are No Good Guys”:

“The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West’s fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – “moderates” whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed.”

The crazy US policy of ignoring Sunni militias in the west made for some fat, soft targets. No wonder the Russian air force jumped at the chance to intervene. They must’ve spent months drooling over drone and satellite photos from the west, between Homs and Aleppo—targets totally untouched by the USAF.

………


Then the Russians decided it was time to show, Gulf War style, that they had some fancy shock-and-awe munitions of their own. These belated colonial wars are, among other things, great sales videos for arms exporters like the US and Russia.

To see a typical Russian sales video, check out this clip of a Russian attack on a defensive line, mixing bombers, CAS, and rocket launchers scattering cluster bombs. Watch it and see if it looks like a “failure.” Because me, I personally would not want to be anywhere within five km of the target zone.

………

Notice how the guy filming it keeps saying, “Allahu Akbar”? That seemed odd to me. It’s a Salafist battle cry as a rule. You never hear Alawites from the SAA shouting it in their battle videos. So I asked around, and apparently it marks the narrator as Sunni, a pretty slick, cinematic way of implying that the Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah/Alawite side has some Sunni allies.

So…failure? No. Any advance will probably be slow; the lines don’t change much in Syria, because the level of combat power across the board is very low. These are forces who’d rather bombard each other than engage. Only Hezbollah has real combat power, and they’re spending it thriftily.

But there are already signs the Russian air strikes are allowing some advances.

That doesn’t mean the Russian campaign will succeed; like Gandalf used to say, “All courses may run ill.” But at least they have a sane, comprehensible, achievable goal, unlike the US in Syria.

Now for the next accusation, that the Russian strikes are brutal.

Well, yeah, they are. That’s the general idea. I don’t mean to be flippant here, but air strikes only look neat when you stay up there and watch from the pilot’s angle. On the ground, even the supposedly “surgical” strikes are nightmarish. Which, again, is the whole idea. And if we’re going to be honest about it, we can stop pretending there are any neat, clean surgical strikes. A new report just came out showing that nine out of ten people hit by those targeted drone assassinations are civilians who happen to be in the vicinity.

As a rule, you can tell when the media approve of air strikes by the angle. If it’s all nice clean pilot’s-view of distant explosions, it’s a good strike. If they show you funerals, weeping relatives, blasted apartments, it’s a bad strike. So you can tell, just from the headline—“This Is What the Russian Air Strikes in Syria Look Like from the Ground”—that it’s a bad strike. For example, ground-angle stories on Israeli airstrikes only started hitting the US media in the past few years. Now they’re fairly common but for most of my lifetime you just didn’t see those weeping Palestinians. When the strike is done by our own airforce, you still don’t see them unless you go to foreign or marginal leftist sites. But boy do they start popping up when it’s the Russians playing their air-to-ground video games.

………
The Russians are bombing more or less the way all the other foreign air forces in Syria are bombing. They’re having a more powerful effect because they’re hitting targets that haven’t been hit by first-world CAS til now. That’s the only difference.

………

Truth is, Russia and Islamic State have different projects going in Syria, projects that don’t even overlap much. Syria is more full of bad projects than the ninth-grade Metal Shop class where they set my jacket on fire with a soldering iron (while I was wearing it). That place was full of projects thought up by adolescent psychopaths, all designed to kill or maim, and mostly ineffective.

Which, come to think of it, is not a bad description of Syria at the moment. For a smallish country, Syria has more theaters of war going than a multiplex doing a Private Ryan marathon. The Kurds of YPG/PKK have their own project going in the north, along the Turkish border. The Alawites are trying to survive and carve a rump state for themselves in the coastal hills. The Christians have executed a simple plan: “get the Hell out of here while we can.” Hezbollah’s project could be summed up as, “Ugh, I guess we gotta help these weak-ass Alawites after all, damn it.” Israel’s project is “Attack Hezbollah nonstop, but never touch the Sunni militias because they’re not a real threat.” Jabhat-an-Nusra, Ahrar-as-Sham, and the other Sunni militias are competing for ownership of the inland Sunni state they hope will come out of this chaos.

But Islamic State? Their project isn’t really about Syria at all. IS is an Iraqi outfit. Yeah, they have all these noisy foreign volunteers, the whole C-minus demographic of Birmingham, Dusseldorf, and Marseille, but that’s not their real power. IS inherited Saddam’s officer class, and their goal is to regain Baghdad. Syria is a side bet, one of the vacuums they’re so good at occupying. Eastern Syria—a flat dry place with few people except along the Euphrates—was mostly abandoned by both the Alawites and the other Sunni militias, who focused on trying to win the more valuable real estate to the West. That’s when Islamic State moved in from its Iraqi base and started a Syrian franchise.

So the war Russia has joined isn’t even really the same war that Islamic State is fighting. IS wants to embiggen its Iraq-based “caliphate”; Russia wants to drive the other Sunni militias off that key highway, M5, so the Alawites can start a mini-state along the coast.

Meanwhile, the “moderate” Sunni militias are getting hit hard for the first time. As that happens, IS will push from the east, and the SAA/Hezbollah/Revolutionary Guards from the west. At some point, Russia’s air power may meet IS head-on. But a lot of other dumb, bloodthirsty rival projects will have to get ground away in this multi-faction, multi-loon war before that happens.

I think that the Brecher is actually being a bit too sympathetic of the goals and strategy of the US here.

Basically, Obama, once again is trying to please everyone, so you have him trying to appease:

  • The delusional interventionists on the right (Richard Pearle) and the left (Samantha Power)
  • The US officer corps (particularly the wild blue yonder set) seeing this as another opportunity to further their careers
  • The House of Saud’s desire to prosecute their thousand plus year old great game against the Shia.
  • Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s delusional desire to extend Sunni hegemony over that part of the world while killing as many Kurds as possible.

And while he is doing all of that, Obama is cowering in fear that he will be accused of “losing” Syria in the same way that Truman was accused of “losing” China by Nixon.

Notwithstanding his running, and winning, on opposing “Stupid Wars” in the 2008 Presidential campaign, this war is even stupider than the invasion of Iraq.

Bush and his evil minions™ were completely delusional and willfully ignorant, but at least they had a goal, while Obama and his evil minions™ are intervening simply because they think that they can.

H/t to Naked Capitalism for unlocking this for a few days.

Great. Now We Are Just Throwing Them Weapons Willy Nilly

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We are now randomly dropping weapons to fighters in Syria:

After scrapping its vetting program to aid Syrian rebels against the Islamic State, the US military has airdropped tons of ammunition to a new band of fighters while softening its opposition to using its materiel to attack the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad.

A spokesman for the US military taskforce said on Tuesday that discussion of lifted restrictions on targeting was a “moot point” since the 50 tons of ammunition airdropped to the Syrian Arab Coalition was not in an area where regime forces fight or Russian pilots overfly.

While the US military previously vetted each Syrian militant receiving US sponsorship, now the program vets only the leadership of rebel groups, raising the prospect that US weaponry could migrate to the broader Syrian civil war. This was the main rationale once used by Barack Obama to limit the US commitment in Syria, before indefinitely “pausing” the effort to build a Syrian anti-Isis force.

The White House announced on Friday that it was pausing the yearlong initiative to build the force that would pledge not to turn its US-provided weapons and training against Assad.

………

Legislators have said the restriction helped account for the paltry numbers of Syrian fighters the $500m program fielded. But Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman, argued Tuesday it was “too soon” to call the program a failure, contending that the vast majority of the $300m the US spent out of its $500m purse went to weaponry it is sending to its new and mostly unvetted Syrian allies.

“They’re not anywhere near regime forces, they are specifically near Isil, which is who we are interested in fighting,” Warren told reporters on Tuesday.

The Russians are supporting Assad, and in an exercise in dick swinging, we are airdropping weapons, because we have some sort of narcissistic need to lead, even when there is no benefit.

This is insane.

Interesting Point

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The Archdruid notes that the Russians have done more to stop ISIS in one week than the US, NATO, Turkey*, and the Gulf Monarchies have done in 2 years:

………

Last night, working on this post, I wrote: “The Russian airstrikes so far have concentrated on rebel forces around the edges of the territory the Syrian government still holds, with some longer-range strikes further back to take out command centers, munitions dumps, and the like. The placement of the strikes says to me that the next moves, probably within weeks, will be against the rebel enclave north of Homs and the insurgent forces in Idlib province. I expect ground assaults backed up by artillery, helicopter gunships, and close-in air support—vastly more firepower, in other words, that any side in the Syrian civil war has had at its disposal so far.” This morning’s news confirmed that guess, and added in another factor: Russian cruise missiles launched from the Caspian Sea fleet, most of a thousand miles from Syria. Once Idlib and the rest of western Syria is secured, I expect the Russians and their allies to march on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s notional capital—and I don’t expect them to waste any more time in doing so than they’ve wasted so far.

All this poses an immense embarrassment to the United States and its allies, which have loudly and repeatedly proclaimed the Islamic State the worst threat to world peace since the end of the Third Reich but somehow, despite a seemingly overwhelming preponderance of military force, haven’t been able to do much of anything about it. Though it’s hard to say for sure, given the fog of conflicting propaganda, it certainly looks as though the Russians have done considerably more damage to the Islamic State in a week than the US and its allies have accomplished in thirteen months of bombing. If that’s the case, some extremely awkward questions are going to be asked. Is the US military so badly led, so heavily burdened with overpriced weapons systems that don’t happen to work, or both, that it’s lost the ability to inflict serious harm on an opponent? Or—let’s murmur this one quietly—does the United States have some reason not to want to inflict serious harm on the Islamic State?

I suspect, though, that what’s actually behind the disparity is something far simpler, if no less damaging to the prestige of the United States. I commented in an earlier post here that the US has been waging its inept campaign against Islamic State as though it’s a video game—hey, we killed a commander, isn’t that worth an extra 500 points? Look at that from a different perspective and it becomes another example of the total disconnection of abstraction from reality.

The abstraction here is “fighting Islamic State.” You’ll notice that it’s not “defeating Islamic State”—in the realm of dysfunctional abstractions, such differences mean a great deal. Obama has decided that under his leadership, the US is going to fight Islamic State, and that’s what the Pentagon is doing. At intervals, accordingly, planes go flying over various portions of Syria and Iraq to make desultory bombing runs on places where some intelligence analyst in suburban Virginia thinks an Islamic State target might have been located at some point in the last month or so.

That’s “fighting Islamic State.” Nobody can point a finger at Obama and say that he’s not fighting Islamic State, since the Air Force is still obligingly making those bombing runs. It doesn’t matter that none of this has done anything to slow down the expansion of the Islamic State militia, or to stop its appalling human rights violations; that’s in the grubby realm of realities, into which fastidious minds in Washington DC are unwilling to stoop.

I think that the Druid is part right: The US is more interested in, “Fighting the Islamic State,” than it is in defeating the Islamic State.

I think that there is also this: The non-Russian players in this game are fighting a war against both sides, the Syrian Government and Isis, and cannot allow either side to win, so they cannot do anything meaningful while continuing their search for moderate rebels, who are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Russia, on the other hand has a non-contradictory and coherent goal, and so, they have actually made progress toward that goal.

*I know that Turkey is in NATO, but as one of the governments that explicitly funded and supported ISIS, and that it considers the Kurdish armies fighting ISIS to be a bigger threat than Salafist militants, its strategic position is completely different.

A Literal Shot Across Our Bow

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Russia just launched precision cruise missile strikes against Salafi rebels in Syria.

The missiles were launched from their flotilla in the Caspian Sea, probably because they could get permission from the countries in the flight path, Iran, Iraq, and (of course) Syria, which makes it rather different from the US/NATO airstrikes who have been conducted without Syria’s permission:

Russia added a new dimension to its military campaign in Syria with warships firing cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea, while President Vladimir Putin urged the U.S. and countries in the region to form a coalition against Islamic State and other militant groups.

 Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported that Russian bombers had hit 112 targets in Syria since the campaign began on Sept. 30 and that “the intensity of the strikes is increasing.” Naval vessels in the Caspian 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) away fired 26 missiles at 11 objects on Wednesday, destroying them all, Shoigu said.

 Russia should “continue to work with our foreign partners,” Putin told Shoigu in a meeting shown on Rossiya One state television. “Without the participation of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United States of America, Iran, Iraq and neighboring states of course, this work is unlikely to be carried out successfully.”

 Russia is flexing its muscles in its first military campaign outside the former Soviet Union in three decades as it supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is also backed by Shiite-dominated Iran in the fight against predominantly Sunni groups. While the bombing campaign has escalated tensions between Moscow and NATO members, Shoigu said Russia is ready to accept what he called U.S. proposals on coordinating strikes against Islamic State, a notion dismissed later on Wednesday by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

 ‘Precision’ Strikes

 A video released by the Defense Ministry in Moscow showed what it said was a Russian naval strike group launching missiles from the Caspian that streaked across the night sky, then traced a route across Iran and Iraq, hugging terrain from as low as 50 meters, before hitting targets in Syria within a range of accuracy of as little as three meters.

While these missile strikes might or might not make a big difference in the war in Syria, this is a significant milestone:  This is the first combat use cruise missiles by a non-US military as far as I can tell.

As such this constitutes a major development, particularly when one considers the fact a that there are about  ½ dozen export customers.

Also, there is a variant in which the missile is stowed in what appears to be a commercial shipping container, which makes detection that much more difficult.

Finally, while I understand why they launched this from the Caspian, I was completely unaware that Russia had a significant naval presence there.

It’s the the largest completely enclosed body of water in the world, and only ⅓ as salty as the oceans.

After some Googling, I determined that the Russians have a canal between the Don and the Volga,  which allows moderately sized ships to transit between the Black and Caspian seas.

It appears that the missiles were launched from ships in the 1000-2000 ton range, which is in the range of Corvettes or small Frigates.

Good

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It appears that the Russian military deployment to Syria has put the kibosh on plans for establishing a no fly zone in Syria.

Considering what “No Fly Zones” are these days, the military overthrow of a sovereign nation, (see Libya) this is a good thing:

Russia’s bombing of anti-regime rebels in Syria has been described as a disaster for the US-led coalition’s efforts to destroy Isis, the Islamist militant group, but the Kremlin’s real challenge to Washington is in the skies above the war-torn country.

Alongside a modest Latakia-based contingent of two dozen Su-24 Fencer and Su-25 Frogfoot jets — planes designed to strike land targets — Moscow has deployed assets which render the prospect of no-fly zones enforced by the US or its allies over Syria impossible to enact.

Just weeks ago, after months of diplomacy, officials were close to an agreement on enforcing aerial safe-zones to end the Assad regime’s bombing of civilians in northern and southern Syria, according to diplomats and military officials in the US-led coalition. The agreement was based on Jordanian and Turkish plans presented earlier this year.

………

“The ultimate reason all this is happening is because of the renewed focus on Syria and the need for some sort of political solution there — something which we thought we could achieve by enforcing no-fly zones, safe zones,” said one senior European diplomat.

But any hopes of military co-ordination with Russia to achieve this, even in the wake of its disruptive deployment, are swiftly being dashed.

Nato’s supreme military commander in Europe, US General Phillip Breedlove warned last week that the alliance was “worried about another A2/AD bubble being created in the eastern Mediterranean.” A2/AD stands for anti-access, area denial.

Gen Breedlove’s fears have been realised in the past days as Russia’s small deployment of four Su-30 “flanker” jets, which are at Latakia’s Bassel al-Assad air base — highly manoeuvreable aircraft designed to shoot down other aircraft — has been augmented with a far more powerful arsenal.

Russia’s ministry of defence announced on Friday the deployment of its navy cruiser the Moskva to Latakia. The Moskva is armed with a complement of 64 S-300 ship-to-air missiles, Russia’s most powerful anti-aircraft weapon.

………

“The Russian forces now in place make it very, very obvious that any kind of no-fly zone on the Libyan model imposed by the US and allies is now impossible, unless the coalition is actually willing to shoot down Russian aircraft,” says Justin Bronk, research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute.

“The Russians are not playing ball at deconfliction — they are just saying, ‘keep out of our way’. The coalition’s operations in Syria will be vastly more complex from a risk assessment point of view and from a mission-planning point of view.”

Just to remind you, the Libyan model was for the air forces to provide close air support for the rebels while arming them to the teeth.

Libya is now a complete mess, of course, with no functioning central government, and ethnic cleansing of  their more darkly complected citizenry.

And this is the model that General Strangelove Breedlove wants to repeat.

I’m Sure That the Pentagon Will Conduct a Full Investigation with All the Thoroughness and Integrity of the Pat Tillman Investigation

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Ashton Carter is promising a full investigation of what led to a 30 minute long barrage of munitions on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF):

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Sunday promised a full and transparent investigation into whether a U.S. aircraft providing support for American and Afghan commandos was responsible for the explosions that destroyed a hospital in northern Afghanistan, killing 22 people.

Speaking to reporters traveling with him to Spain, Carter said, “the situation there is confused and complicated, so it may take some time to get the facts, but we will get the facts.”

He said he spoke to Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and to Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during his flight to Madrid, adding that “there will be accountability as always in these incidents, if that is required.”

Carter said he told Campbell to make sure that the U.S. provides any medical care needed for those in the northern city of Kunduz.

U.S. officials said American special operations forces advising Afghan commandos in the vicinity of the hospital requested the air support when they came under fire in Kunduz. The officials said the AC-130 gunship responded and fired on the area, but Carter said it’s not certain yet whether that was what destroyed the hospital.

Carter said he believes the U.S. will have better information in the coming days, once U.S. and international investigators get access to the hospital site. Officials said the senior U.S. military investigator is in Kunduz but hasn’t yet been able to get to the site because it continues to be a contested area between the Afghans and the Taliban militants.

If Mr. Carter is really interested in investigating what happened at this hospital, and I rather doubt that he is serious about a full and honest investigation, he will be dealing with an officer corps determined to obstruct him, and to the degree that they fail, they will be determined to ensure that any consequences flow as low on the chain of command as possible.

Nothing to see here, move along.

More Freedom Bombs………

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It looks like the US military launched an intense and sustained airstrike against a hospital in Kunduz, Afthanistan:

An airstrike apparently carried out by U.S. forces heavily damaged a charitable hospital in northern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least 19 people — three of them reportedly children — in an incident that a senior U.N. official equated to a war crime.

The airstrike occurred before dawn when a Doctors Without Borders trauma center in war-torn Kunduz was struck while doctors were treating dozens of patients. Hospital officials said they were assaulted from the air for 30 to 45 minutes, resulting in a large fire that burned some patients to death in their beds. Among those killed were 12 of the charity group’s staff members, the group said.

“This attack is abhorrent and a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” said Meinie Nicolai, the group’s president.

While the charity’s workers reported waves of bombs hitting their facility, the U.S.-led military coalition in Kabul issued a statement confirming one American airstrike that may have caused “collateral damage” to a “medical facility.” Authorities said it was launched against “insurgents who were directly firing upon U.S. servicemembers” who had traveled to Kunduz to advise Afghan security forces.

………

It was unclear how close Taliban fighters may have been to the hospital Saturday or whether the U.S. military didn’t realize the building was a hospital. Afghan security officials said Taliban fighters had been pouring into the facility in recent days seeking treatment for gunshot wounds and other injuries.

The charity and other international organizations reacted with outrage, and the hospital’s management said it had repeatedly informed the U.S.-led coalition of the facility’s precise GPS coordinates over the past few months. The location of the hospital was last conveyed to the international coalition three days before the airstrike, officials added.

………

“This event is utterly tragic, inexcusable and, possibly, even criminal,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, adding that “if established as deliberate in a court of law, an airstrike on a hospital may amount to a war crime.”

Jason Cone, executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States, said hospital officials in Kunduz immediately reached out to U.S. military officials when the airstrike occurred.

“The bombing continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed,” the organization said in a statement.

A U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely, said the strike appears to have been carried out by an AC-130 gunship, a heavily armed warplane.

I will make a point here: An AC-130, notwithstanding its bulk and lumbering appearance, is a precise weapon, arguably much more precise than guided bombs, if just because they engage at a fraction of the distance.

They hit what they were ordered to hit, and they did so for nearly an hour.

The only questions is whether their orders were an error, or if the the targeting was deliberate, either because MSF was treating members of the Taliban (a war crime by the US) or because the Taliban was using the hospital compound for military purposes (a war crime by the Taliban).

Rather unsurprisingly, MSF is demanding an independent investigation, but given the record of the US military on such matters, and the continuing cover-up of the Pat Tillman friendly fire incident, I would not hold my breath.

What actually happened is unclear at this time, but what is clear, and in fact is certain, is that this will be used by the Taliban for a long time as a recruiting tool.

Fail.

And in the Ongoing Clusterf%$# in Syria………

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There is a very good reason why Presidents should never, Ever listen to the war mongering interventionists (on both sides of the political) who prowl the halls of power in Washington. Because they are always wrong.

All they bring are disaster and misery, in this case, of course, we are talking about Syria, where our support for regime change in Syria, particularly when juxtaposed by the Saudi desire to overthrow a secular Arab government at all costs has created an unrelenting string of disasters.

First, we are now seeing a realignment in the Middle East, with Russia, Iraq, Iran, and Syria sharing intelligence to aid each other in their fight against ISIS:

For the second time this month, Russia moved to expand its political and military influence in the Syria conflict and left the United States scrambling, this time by reaching an understanding, announced on Sunday, with Iraq, Syria and Iran to share intelligence about the Islamic State.

Like Russia’s earlier move to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad by deploying warplanes and tanks to a base near Latakia, Syria, the intelligence-sharing arrangement was sealed without notice to the United States. American officials knew that a group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad, but they were clearly surprised when the Iraqi military’s Joint Operations Command announced the intelligence sharing accord on Sunday.

It was another sign that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was moving ahead with a sharply different tack from that of the Obama administration in battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, by assembling a rival coalition that includes Iran and the Syrian government.

For the second time this month, Russia moved to expand its political and military influence in the Syria conflict and left the United States scrambling, this time by reaching an understanding, announced on Sunday, with Iraq, Syria and Iran to share intelligence about the Islamic State.

Like Russia’s earlier move to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad by deploying warplanes and tanks to a base near Latakia, Syria, the intelligence-sharing arrangement was sealed without notice to the United States. American officials knew that a group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad, but they were clearly surprised when the Iraqi military’s Joint Operations Command announced the intelligence sharing accord on Sunday.

It was another sign that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was moving ahead with a sharply different tack from that of the Obama administration in battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, by assembling a rival coalition that includes Iran and the Syrian government.

The ineptitude of our foreign policy apparatus has allowed Russia to resurrect the Soviet era relations that used to exist there.

It gets even worse, with even the Syrian Kurds approaching Russia military aid:

The Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) has asked Russia to support it in its fight against ISIS as well as the Al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front.

YPG chief Sipan Hemo told Sputnik Türkiye—which is owned by Moscow—that his fighting force requested arms from Russia as well as general military coordination, according to a translation of the interview prepared by Turkey’s Anadolu news agency.

“He also called on Moscow to bomb Al-Nusra Front’s positions,” Anadolu added a day after Russia began its airstrikes in Syria on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

In turn, the report added that a foreign relations official for the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party—which controls the YPG—said his party was “ready to cooperate with any actor fighting ISIS.”

I rather expect that the YPG does not expect Russia to support them, after all they want to secede from Syria, but this is a a great way to whipsaw the US into bombing other Islamist targets, and, more importantly, keeping the Turks from bombing the Kurds.

Yet another failure in a chain of failures.

It really is beginning to look like the end stage of empire:  Increasingly delusional policies that lead to failures, which lead to doubling down on delusional policies.

This is part of a series of failures that feed on themselves.

Stop Whining, Bitches

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I am referring, of course to House of Saud:

Saudi Arabia has called on Bashar al-Assad to give up power or be removed by force, raising the global stakes at a time when the Russians are shipping troops and military hardware to Syria in an effort to prop up its beleaguered leader.

The threat was made on Tuesday by Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Adel Al-Jubeir.

“There is no future for Assad in Syria,” Jubeir told journalists at the UN general assembly. “There are two options for a settlement in Syria. One option is a political process where there would be a transitional council. The other option is a military option, which also would end with the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power.”

“This could be a more lengthy process and a more destructive process but the choice is entirely that of Bashar al-Assad.” The foreign minister did not specify how Assad would be forcibly removed, but pointed out that Saudi Arabia is already backing “moderate rebels” in the civil war.

The Saudi intervention fuelled an already heated row at the UN over Syria’s future, where the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, issued a forthright defence of the Syrian regime, describing it as fighting a lonely and “valiant” battle against Islamic State extremists.

You know, I know that you have all kinds of butthurt over the fact that the secular* Arab government in Damascus is still standing, even after they created ISIS to attempt to create another Sunni dominated sectarian state.

You are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.

The fact that you are unable to accomplish your agenda in that part of the world is a good thing.

*And murderous. The regime is murderous too, but the House of Saud has no problem with murderously genocidal regimes, see Bahrain as an example.