Category: Middle East

Today’s Must Read

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Ted Rall’s essay Obama Destroyed Libya. (alternate link here, the first link is twitchy)

He makes a number of points, that Libya under Gaddafi was generally prosperous, at least by the standards of Africa and the Arab world, albeit with a pretty horrific human rights record, and now it is a basket case with a growing lawlessness and it has become a locus for terrorist activity.

I think that the most important part of his essay though, is his conclusion that Barack Obama did not learn the lesson that he should have from this fiasco:

To Obama’s credit, he admits that he screwed up in Libya. Unfortunately, he drew the wrong lesson. In 2014, he told an interviewer that a large ground invasion force might have helped Libya’s post-Gaddafi government succeed. Because that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if he really believes that, why doesn’t he order in the troops?

 Obama’s real mistake was to depose a secular socialist autocrat and allow him to be replaced by a bunch of crazy religious fundamentalist militias whose factionalism ensured they’d never be able to govern.

 Bush committed this error in Iraq. Obama made it in Libya. And now he’s doing it again in Syria.

Obama’s already destroyed one country with a “stupid war”, and now he’s trying for a sequel in Syria.

The foreign policy consensus as regards the Arab world is a toxic mixture of hubris, which, when juxtaposed with the incomprehensible need to appease the various Gulf monarchs (UAE in Libya, Saudi Arabia with Syria) has produced nothing but failure and insecurity.

This all looks so much like Athens’ disastrous Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War.

H/T DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

It Appears that the Only People Surprised with the House of Saud’s Ties to Terrorists is US Anti-Terrorism Agencies

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It appears that members of the US state security apparatus has literally described as “inconceivable” allegations that the Saudis gave support to terrorists:

Former top-level US intelligence officials have lined up to discredit explosive allegations by a convicted al-Qaida operative that senior members of the Saudi royal family supported the extremist network, and that a Saudi diplomat discussed plans to shoot down the US presidential plane Air Force One.

 Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”, made the accusations in testimony filed in Manhattan federal court on Monday by lawyers for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks who accuse Saudi Arabia of providing material support to al-Qaida.

 Robert Grenier, the CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief, said Mousaoui’s allegations were “inconceivable”. A former top navy terrorism investigator, Robert McFadden, likened claims of official Saudi backing for the devastating attack to “a unicorn”.

 But the allegations – which came just a week after the US government made an ostentatious reaffirmation of US friendship following the death of Saudi King Abdullah – have once again focussed attention on the wisdom of Washington’s oil-fueled alliance with a leading exporter of Islamic extremism.

 Moussaoui, whose trial for his involvement in the 9/11 plot exposed a history of mental illness, echoed longstanding allegations that members of the Saudi royal family helped bankroll al-Qaida ahead of the attack.

 But he also made a dramatic new claim, alleging that he discussed a missile attack on Air Force One with a diplomat from the Saudi embassy in Washington.

It is telling that Mr. Grenier uses the term, “Inconceivable.”

He didn’t use the term, “fanciful,”, or “ludicrous,” or “ridiculous,”he used the term “Inconceivable.”

This choice of words is telling.

The House of Saud has a very long history of supporting Islamic extremism, both financially and through its policy of aggressively exporting local religious extremists in order to get them out of the country, but this “expert” cannot even conceive that they might have been providing aid to various flavors of Salafi (Wahhabi) fundamentalists who are tied to terrorism.

These are the words of a person who is fully immersed in denial, like the elements of FBI who arranged for charter flights out of the US for prominent Saudis immediately following the 911 attacks.

Saudi support for extremism is the elephant in the room among the US state security apparatus, and ignoring this fact is both required for career advancement, and cripples the anti-terrorism activities of those who do this.

It is clear that the House of Saud has bankrolled violent extremist groups, including ISIS, and it is even clearer that they use their money to promote religious schools and mosques that are the underlying infrastructure of Islamic terrorist groups.

I don’t care how much oil they pump, we need to stop looking the other way when they do this.

They are not our ally in this matter.

This is Not a Dilemma Unless You Let the House of Saud Make it One

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The collapse of the Yemeni government under the assault of the Houthi militias is a good thing for everyone but the House of Saud:

The American-backed government of Yemen abruptly collapsed Thursday night, leaving the country leaderless as it is convulsed by an increasingly powerful force of pro-Iran rebels and a resurgent Qaeda.

The resignation of the president, prime minister and cabinet took American officials by surprise and heightened the risks that Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, would become even more of a breeding ground for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has claimed responsibility for audacious anti-Western attacks — including the deadly assault on Charlie Hebdo in Paris this month.

The Houthi are Shia, and Al Qaeda is virulently anti-Shia, and if they take power, they will undoubtedly be an implacable foe of the terrorist organization.

This is not an issue for the United States.

In fact, a Houthi dominated government is likely to be better at fighting Al Qaeda, because they understand the genocidal ferocity of that group against Shiites.

The only people who should have a problem is the House of Saud, who have been applying pressure for years to ensure the complete disenfranchisement of Shiites pretty much everywhere.

Unfortunately, the US foreign policy establishment does not understand that their foreign policy interests are not the same as those of the Saudis.

Cue the Internecine Clusterf%$#

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The Saudi King, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, has died at age 90, and will be replaced by his brother, Salman ibn Abdilaziz Al Saud, who is 79 and is rumored to be suffering from dementia:

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has died at age 90, state television reported early on Friday, with his brother Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz succeeding him as the new ruler of the world’s top oil exporter.

 King Salman, 79, immediately appointed his half-brother Muqrin as his crown prince and heir, a move seen to avert widespread speculation about the path of the royal succession.

 State television said King Abdullah, who took power in 2005 after the death of his brother King Fahd, died of pneumonia. He was admitted to the hospital on December 31, state media reported at the time.

It’s pretty clear that Salman is a place holder.

It is tough to figure out what is going on in the mess that is the dynastic mess that is the House of Saud, but a year ago, I would a have argued that Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was next in line after King Salman, but seeing as how he has been the driving force behind backing the group now known as ISIS/ISIL/IS while trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, and it appears that he was fired from his position as Director General of Saudi Intelligence Agency as a result.

This sort of dynastic instability has does not bode well for the future of the House of Saud, which to my mind, is a good thing.

Well, I Missed this News Story

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Were any of the rest of you aware that a few days before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, ISIS managed to kill the Saudi general responsible for protecting the kingdom’s northern border against the terrorist group:

Last week, just before the Charlie Hebdo attack, ISIS sent a suicide team across the border into Saudi Arabia.  Here’s what happened.

  • The attack was successful.  The team found and killed the Saudi general (Oudah al-Belawi) in charge of the country’s nothern border zone at the outpost he was visiting (here’s a pic of the state funeral for some of the men killed in the attack).
  •  The target was significant.  General Oudah al-Belawi was in charge of the multi-billion dollar Saudi effort to secure the northern border against ISIS.  Not only has Saudi Arabia sent 30,000 additional troops to guard the northern border, it’s building a highly automated 600-mi security wall to protect itself (lots of robots and sensors).  Here’s a great graphic of the monstrosity from the Telegraph.  My take:  What a waste of time and effort. 

………

Here why this attack is signficant.  

  • It tells us that ISIS is starting to focus on Saudi Arabia –> with good reason.  The reason is that there’s simply no other way to unite the various groups under the ISIS banner.  ISIS, like all open source movements, needs to keep moving in order to stay alive (like a shark).  Right now, ISIS has stalled.  A jihad to retake the holy sites from the corrupt regime in Riyadh can serve as a simple plausible promise that can reignite the open source war ISIS started, on a global scale.

I can think of no better target for ISIS brutality than the House of Saud.

If this corrupt regime is devoured by the monster that they created, it would be poetic justice.

Unfortunately, it will be the subjects of that corrupt monarchy will bear the brunt of any conflict.

Finally, Someone Calls Out the House of Saud………

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Unfortunately, it’s the New Statesman, a respected but obscure publication, founded by Fabian Socialists and generally affiliated with the Labour Party, which has finally observed that Riyadh is the font from which Islamic terrorism springs:

Although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century.

………

As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the premodern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.

Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way”. Other members of the Saudi ruling class, however, look more kindly on the movement, applauding its staunch opposition to Shiaism and for its Salafi piety, its adherence to the original practices of Islam. This inconsistency is a salutary reminder of the impossibility of making accurate generalisations about any religious tradition. In its short history, Wahhabism has developed at least two distinct forms, each of which has a wholly different take on violence.

………

The soaring oil price created by the 1973 embargo – when Arab petroleum producers cut off supplies to the US to protest against the Americans’ military support for Israel – gave the kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to export its idiosyncratic form of Islam. The old military jihad to spread the faith was now replaced by a cultural offensive. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed Wahhabi translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal texts and the writings of modern thinkers whom the Saudis found congenial, such as Sayyids Abul-A’la Maududi and Qutb, to Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and established madrasas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, young men from the poorer Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who had felt compelled to find work in the Gulf to support their families, associated their relative affluence with Wahhabism and brought this faith back home with them, living in new neighbourhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. The Saudis demanded religious conformity in return for their munificence, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faiths would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan or Syria: everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism.

It provides a lot of insights into forces like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and makes it clear that the House of Saud, and that regime’s use of religion as a way to exert control and to promulgate a millennia long conflict between Arabs and Persians.

Saudi Arabia cannot be a part of any solution until they are forced to face the fact that they are the source of the problem.

Your Moment of Eric Arthur Blair

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The Obama administration is claiming that US human rights law does not apply to the mercenary rebels that the US is training and arming in Syria:

Buried down in a report about Pentagon plans to train more mercenaries to fight against Syria we find this declaration of intend by the Obama administration to (again) break the law:

The military screening plan came together after the Obama administration determined that the training program for the Syrians would not be subject to what are known as the Leahy laws, which typically govern U.S. security assistance to foreign forces.

Under those laws, a small office at the State Department works with U.S. embassies overseas to ensure that recipients of State or Defense Department security assistance aren’t linked to major human rights abuses.

…

Because the Syrian rebels will not be part of a state-sponsored force, the laws will not apply, U.S. officials said.

Wait a second. The U.S. congress has set aside $500 million to train, equip and pay these fighters. The U.S. military will do the training. And the Obama administration claims that these are not “state-sponsored forces”? Is the U.S. no longer a nation state?

 Besides that the Leahy law as codified for the Pentagon in Section 8057 of the 2014 Omnibus bill does not say anything about “state-sponsored forces”:

(1) None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for any training, equipment, or other assistance for the members of a unit of a foreign security force if the Secretary of Defense has credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.

(2) The Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall ensure that prior to a decision to provide any training, equipment, or other assistance to a unit of a foreign security force full consideration is given to any credible information available to the Department of State relating to human rights violations by such unit.

There is nothing about “state-sponsored” in the Pentagon relevant portion of the Leahy law. Will these trained be “foreign”? Yes. Will they be “security forces”? Arguably because they will likely bring more insecurity to Syria than security. But they will have weapons, will be organized in units and will fight. That seems to fit the expression “foreign security force”.

………

All the groups the CIA has trained and equipped to fight against Syria have committed major human rights violations. But the Leahy law does not apply to the CIA. Now as the Pentagon takes over the training of such groups the Leahy law becomes relevant. I dare anyone to find a group of Syrian insurgents fighting against the Syrian government that has not indiscriminately shelled civilians and not committed other major human rights abuses. There is none.

The Obama administration wants to avoid the applicability of the Leahy law because applying it would leave the Pentagon without any potential recruits to train as mercenaries against the Syrian government. It decided to break the law by using an interpretation that actually not covered by the laws wording. It has thus decided to break the law.

Barack Obama, who was a critic of the expansive view of the Unitary Executive advanced by the Bush administration, has become one of its biggest fans.

Worst Constitutional law professor ever.

Since ISIS was Created by Efforts to Overthrow Bashar al-Assad, It Follows that Fighting ISIS Might Involve Eschewing the Goals to Overthrow Bashar al-Assad

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One of the realities that is studiously ignored in the west is that the Syrian civil war has its roots in efforts by the Gulf monarchies to overthrow the Damascus regime.

These efforts sowed misery throughout the region, and boosted Salafist militias through the area.

Another reality being studiously ignored is that ISIS was, until recently, the private military of the House of Saud, assembled by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then head of the Saudi intelligence agency.

It comes as no surprise that it appears that people are discovering that fighting ISIS is incompatible with the immediate overthrow of the Baathist regime in Syria:

The Obama administration, as I wrote last week, has at least a hypothetical way forward in Iraq, but not in Syria, which it is currently treating as the rear sanctuary for Islamic State (IS) forces besieging Iraq. By the time its long-term plan to train insurgents to fight both IS and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad reaches fruition, there may be very little Syria left to save. Even that’s assuming that the administration takes its own plan seriously, which past history suggests it will not.

What, then, can be done — by anyone — to turn off the Syrian meat grinder?

Last week, David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote about a leaked document proposing a set of local cease-fires between Syrian rebels and the regime that might ultimately lead to a process of political reconciliation. The column whipped up a tornado of speculation in the very small world of Syria experts. That, in turn, led David Harland, the head of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), the Geneva-based organization responsible for the document, to produce a finished report outlining the proposal and then to send it to me. The document remains private, so I can’t link to it, but I can quote from it. The argument it makes must be taken seriously by anyone who cares about Syria.

………

The premise of the HD report, titled “Steps to Settle the Syrian Conflict,” is that neither the regime nor the rebels are capable of defeating the other. The savage stalemate creates conditions in which both IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al Qaeda offshoot, can thrive. Worse, the haplessness of mainstream insurgent groups has “radicalized and salafized” the rank and file, who are increasingly joining the jihadists. With the rout last week of American-backed brigades in the western city of Idlib, non-jihadi rebels are in danger of becoming a marginal force in Syria. At the same time, the Syrian state — which is now functional, but not much more, across much of the country — is coming ever closer to collapse. As the state grows weaker, criminal elements and militias grow ever stronger, while IS and al-Nusra fill the vacuum of governance. Syria could collapse into Somalia. There is an urgent need to preserve the state, so the argument goes, even if that also means keeping Assad in power. “Better to have a regime and a state than not to have a state,” as Harland pithily puts it.

I see any action that can be seen as a big f%$# you to the House of Saud as an independent good, so I am not an unbiased source, but I do think that this is the reality here.

Bush with a Tan

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Obama is escalating in Iraq:

President Barack Obama has approved doubling the U.S. military force in Iraq and allowing troops to venture beyond headquarters already established in Baghdad and Erbil, in an escalation of the U.S. effort to defeat Islamic State extremists.

………

The president’s approval to send as many as 1,500 personnel is in addition to 1,600 he previously authorized, 1,400 of whom are in Iraq today protecting U.S. facilities and assisting the Iraqi military. Troops that have been confined to Baghdad, the capital, and Erbil in Kurdish northern Iraq now will be permitted to train and advise Iraqi forces at a number of Iraqi military facilities, according to a White House statement.

This of course, not going any sort of escalation, they promise:

“U.S. troops will not be in combat, but they will be better positioned to support Iraqi security forces as they take the fight” to the Sunni extremists, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said today in the statement.

  • Double the troops.
  • Double the exposure to possible violence.
  • Double the possibility that one of them will be taken captive.

Nope, no escalation here.

The Pentagon wants its War, and Now they are Waging a War of Leaks

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We now get leaks of the military complaining that the Obama administration is “micromanaging” operations in Iraq and Syria:

Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

………

Other gripes among the top Pentagon and military brass are about the White House’s decision not to work with what’s left of the existing Syrian moderate opposition on the ground, which prevents intelligence sharing on fighting ISIS and prevents the military from using trained fighters to build the new rebel army that President Obama has said is needed to push Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into a political negotiation to end the conflict.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel himself is among the critics of Obama’s strategy in Syria. Hagel wrote a memo last week to Rice warning that Obama’s Syria strategy was unclear about U.S. intentions with respect to Assad, undermining the plan.

What is going on here is that the Pentagon, including Hegel want the US to move aggressively for regime change in Syria, because they feel that it is their God given right to wage war with, and overthrow, whoever they want.

We’ve seen what happens if they get their way, the clusterf%$#s that are commonly known as Iraq and Libya.

The fact that the adults in the White House (there is an expression I never thought that I would say) are telling the war mongers in the Pentagon that they cannot topple yet another government just because, they are leaking to the press.

The Banality of Evil at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

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The New York Times is reporting that Obama asked for a report from the CIA on the effectiveness of covert to rebels, and it revealed that it was an almost unbroken string of failure:

The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history — from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.

 An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.

 The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.

 ………

 But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.

George W. Bush was drooling idiot, and Richard Bruce Cheney is, well, Dick Cheney.  They don’t know any any better.

Barack Obama had doubts, and got research done, found out that it was a fool’s errand, and then he went ahead and did it anyway.

Barack Obama is in a very much a hostage of the inside the Beltway/Council on Foreign Relations bellicose consensus, which has led us to nothing but ruin since at least our little adventure in Indochina.

What’s more he is an enthusiastically willing hostage of this whole bomb/drone/invade everything and let God sort them out consensus, but he knows better.

If he didn’t he would not have called for the CIA study on backing insurgents.

But he let loose the dogs of war, even though he knew better:

What’s worse: Launching a disastrous military campaign under false pretenses to achieve goals you wrongly believe are attainable? Or launching a disastrous military campaign you know is doomed in order to help your party win an election?

I ask in light of today’s New York Times story about how President Obama asked the CIA a while back whether arming rebel forces – pretty much the agency’s signature strategy — had ever worked in the past.

He was told that it almost never has.

But then in June, once the political pressure for intervention in Syria got too great, he did just that — sending weapons to rebels fighting the Syrian military.

Yes: He knew better, but he did it anyway.

………

As it happens, Syria is hardly the first or most significant place Obama has used his power as Commander-in-Chief in ways that get people slaughtered, even though he knew better, primarily for political purposes.

Obama’s biggest such decision killed a lot of American servicemembers who he sent to fight and die in Afghanistan.
 During his 2008 presidential campaign, which was marked by his opposition to the war in Iraq, then-Senator Obama’s vow to re-engage in Afghanistan was seen by many as a ploy to avoid being cast as a dove, first by Hillary Clinton and then by John McCain.

What’s not clear to this day is precisely when Obama knew better; when he realized that the war in Afghanistan was hopeless.

By inauguration time, that conclusion seemed fairly obvious to many foreign-policy watchers. So why not him?

But one month into his presidency, Obama announced he was sending more troops there – 30,000, as it would turn out. Despite the obvious lack of what he himself had frequently described as a must — an exit strategy – he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 50 percent. And the monthly death tolls shot up.

Over 1,600 American servicemembers  have died in Afghanistan since the summer of 2009 — well over half of all the dead during the entire war – along with countless Afghans.

There were public signs in November 2009 that Obama was “rethinking” his plan. David Sanger, in his book Confront and Conceal, wrote that Obama actually began a “reassessment of whether the war was as necessary as he first believed” even earlier, in the summer of 2009. (At an off-the-record June 2009 dinner with historians the “main point” his guests tried to make was “that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson,” Garry Wills wrote  later.)

Unlike Dan Froomkin’s analysis above, I am slightly more charitable.  I do not think that politics was the primary motivation.

This is cowardice and hypocrisy, not the stupidity of Bush, or the violent delusions of Cheney.

On a moral level, this is worse than Bush, because he has the tools to do the right thing, and he chooses not to use them.

Not the Onion

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You can get a slightly translation in the subtitles

A motorcycle gang from the Netherlands is going to Syria to fight ISIS:

Already battling air strikes from the US and its allies, including the UK, terrorist organisation Isis (Islamic State) now have a new threat to look out for – a motorbike gang from the Netherlands.

The Dutch bikers, who go by the name No Surrender, reportedly journeyed to Iraq to fight alongside Kurdish troops against IS militants last week.

Charged with commenting on the legality of that move, the Dutch public prosecutor said that the bikers are not necessarily committing any crime.

Prosecutor spokesman Wim de Bruin told AFP: “Joining a foreign armed force was previously punishable, now it’s no longer forbidden.”

“You just can’t join a fight against the Netherlands.”

If it weren’t for the likelihood, that they are going to end up on the next ISIS beheading videos, the skills associated with being a bad-ass biker are not necessarily the same as those required for urban or desert warfare against a dedicated foe who is not constrained by the requirements of law enforcement in a western society.

This is not going to end well.

Not this Sh%$ Again!

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The so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels are complaining that actions against ISIS are aiding the Assad regime:

But the Syrian president’s ability to continue to attack his enemies without interference is fuelling anger amongst mainstream opposition supporters. “Syrian warplanes used to shell us two or three times a week but now they target us every day thanks to the coalition forces,” Faris Samir, from Harm in the northern Idlib region, complained on Thursday.

 “We are losing martyrs and many get injured but no one pays any attention. Now the Syrian army is taking areas bombed by the coalition forces after the Islamic factions withdraw. I have to say that the coalition military campaign is in the interest of the Syrian regime and against the Syrian people.”

I offer the “mainstream opposition”* a hearty f%$# you.

Get your war on if you want, but the actions against ISIS have nothing to do with your goal of overthrowing Assad.

I would argue that the gross incompetence of the “mainstream opposition”, which created an opening for sectarian governments to ship foreign Jihadis to Syria aid was a major contributing factor in the creation of ISIS.

Seriously.  Go f%$# yourself.

While we are at it, let us remember the advice of Machiavelli:

A prince should therefore be slow in undertaking any enterprise upon the representations of exiles, for he will generally gain nothing by it but shame and serious injury.

The Free Syrian Army should be viewed through this lens.

*Not sure how moderate these folks are. That whole martyr quote sounds like a dog whistle to religious extremists.

The New York Times Calls Out Erdogan on ISIS

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Not only do they criticize his inaction, the editorial board specifically calls out Turkey’s actions to support Jihadists and Islamic extremists which eventually led to the formation of ISIS:

This is an indictment of Mr. Erdogan and his cynical political calculations. By keeping his forces on the sidelines and refusing to help in other ways — like allowing Kurdish fighters to pass through Turkey — he seeks not only to weaken the Kurds, but also, in a test of will with President Obama, to force the United States to help him oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom he detests.

 ………

 But all sides — the Americans, Mr. Erdogan and the Kurds — agree that ground forces are necessary to capitalize on the air power. No dice, says Mr. Erdogan, unless the United States provides more support to rebels trying to overthrow Mr. Assad and creates a no-fly zone to deter the Syrian Air Force as well as a buffer zone along the Turkish border to shelter thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled the fighting.

 ………

 Mr. Erdogan’s behavior is hardly worthy of a NATO ally. He was so eager to oust Mr. Assad that he enabled ISIS and other militants by allowing fighters, weapons and revenues to flow through Turkey. If Mr. Erdogan refuses to defend Kobani and seriously join the fight against the Islamic State, he will further enable a savage terrorist group and ensure a poisonous long-term instability on his border.

(emphasis mine)

This is not the sort of truth telling that I expect from the “Paper of Record,” and I hope that they extend it to the House of Saud (specifically Prince Bandar, who was aggressively supporting ISIS until they were well into invading Iraq).

That won’t happen though.

As an aside, Erdogan actions in the matter have set back Turkey’s bid to join the EU by many years, because the Europeans already looked at intervening in Syria, and wanted no part of the Erdogan and the Gulf princes’ efforts to replace yet another secular Arab regime with a Sunni government.

Not not even the French, who still think of Syria as a colony in some ways, were unwilling to go on that adventure.

Given that there is no meaningful opposition to Erdogan and his AKP party for the foreseeable future, I’m pretty sure that any number of EU functionaries, as well as many governments, are now feeling a sense of relief that they have been slow walking Turkey’s application.

They Don’t Want the Truth to Come Out, That’s Why

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More Escalation, and More Turkish Machinations

Turkey has the 2nd biggest army in NATO, and much of it is stationed a few miles from ISIS, but, much to the disappointment of the Obama administration they are refusing to take any actions at all:

As fighters with the Islamic State bore down Tuesday on the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, President Obama’s plan to fight the militant group without being drawn deeper into the Syrian civil war was coming under acute strain.

 While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares.

 But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.

It gets better.

While refusing to take any action, Istanbul is demanding that the US put boots on the ground (see vid).

It’s pretty clear that Erdogan has been aggressively supporting the rebels in Syria, including some of the most extreme Jihadis.  (The so-called moderates could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag)

Turkey is reticent about taking action for a number of reasons:

  • They want the Kurds in Iraq and Syria to be neutralized as a military force that might ally with their own Kurds.
  • Erdogan is obsessed with replacing the secular regime in Syria with a Sunni one.
  • The Turks fear that if they go in on any operations against ISIS, their complicity in its formation will be revealed. 

I think that the last point is most of their concern wight now.

It’s why they went ape sh%$ over Biden’s comments regarding the Turkish role in the Syrian civil war.

Before ISIS was ISIS, Turkey and the House of Saud were the biggest backers of al Qaeda linked militants in Syria, and now that their little monster has become a potential threat, they are looking for plausible deniability.

Joe Biden Speaks the Truth

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So of course, he had to apologize for it:

A diplomatic rift between Turkey and the United States was patched over late Saturday after the American vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., officially apologized to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for remarks suggesting that Turkey helped facilitate the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group.

In remarks at Harvard University on Thursday, Mr. Biden said Mr. Erdogan had admitted erring in allowing foreign fighters to cross Turkey’s border into Syria, eventually leading to the formation of the group, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

Mr. Biden’s spokeswoman, Kendra Barkoff, said in an emailed statement that the two leaders spoke by phone on Saturday. “The vice president apologized for any implication that Turkey or other allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of ISIL or other violent extremists in Syria,” Ms. Barkoff said. “The United States greatly values the commitments and sacrifices made by our allies and partners from around the world to combat the scourge of ISIL, including Turkey.”

………

Mr. Erdogan, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, denied that Turkey’s long, porous border had enabled thousands of militants to cross onto the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. “Foreign fighters never crossed into Syria from our country,” Mr. Erdogan said. “They would cross into Syria from Turkey on tourist passports, but nobody can claim that they have crossed with arms.”

Seriously? How f%$#ing stupid do we think we are?

BTW, this is what Biden said:

Speaking at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Mr. Biden said allies including Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had extended unconditional financial and logistical support to Sunni fighters trying to oust the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“President Erdogan told me,” he said, according to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, “ ‘You were right. We let too many people through. Now we are trying to seal the border.’

“Our allies poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against al-Assad,” he said, including jihadists planning to join the Nusra Front and Al Qaeda.

I think that the appropriate response to Erdogan’s hissy fit is to tell him to go pound sand, which is why I would make a lousy diplomat.

He, and rest of the Sunni hegemonists were hip deep in supporting Al Qaedal linked militants, and Saudi Arabia directly supported what would become ISIS in their bid to overthrow the Assad regime.

The fact that this is not a part of the dialog about the US intervention in Iraq and Syria is a sign of just how completely the House of Saud owns our foreign policy apparatus.

John Oliver Certainly has a Way With Words

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John Oliver’s monologue about the US drone policy notes that US drone policies are like, “Harvey Keitel’s balls,” because, “From a distance you think, ‘Well, I understand the contours of those.’ But if you were to really examine them, you’d discover that they’re actually lost in a haze of fuzziness and gray areas. Much like the rules for our drone strikes.”

Barack Obama is giving Henry Kissinger some serious competition for “Worst American recipient of the Nobel Prize ever.”

I Guess that the word “Khorasan” is Arabic for “Gulf of Tonkin”

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Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain make a rather compelling case for The Khorasan Group being a construct of the Obama Administration to provide a legal fig leaf for dropping bombs on Syria:

As the Obama administration prepared to bomb Syria without Congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

 The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat – too radical even for Al Qaeda! – administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

 ………

 AP warned Americans that “the fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights.” It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group “is considered the more immediate threat.”
………

 The genesis of the name was itself scary: “Khorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan.” AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: “many U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence.”

 ………

 Orr then announced that while ISIS is “dominating headlines and terrorist propaganda,” Orr’s “sources” warn of “a more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland.” As Orr spoke, CBS flashed alternating video showing scary Muslims in Syria and innocent westerners waiting in line at airports, as he intoned that U.S. officials have ordered “enhanced screening” for “hidden explosives.” This is all coming, Orr explained, from ”an emerging threat in Syria” where “hardened terrorists” are building “hard to detect bombs.”
………

 On September 25, the New York Times – just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland – wrote that “the group’s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.” And the Paper of Record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland:

American officials have given differing accounts about just how close the group was to mounting an attack, and about what chance any plot had of success. One senior American official on Wednesday described the Khorasan plotting as “aspirational” and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works.

Literally within a matter of days, we went from “perhaps in its final stages of planning its attack” (CNN) to “plotting as ‘aspirational’” and “there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works” (NYT).

(emphasis mine)

What’s more, the folks at The Intercept also noted that no one ever heard of the group before it was a justification for the airstrikes:

Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual “Khorasan Group” was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC’s Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. Government’s claims about the group for Nightly News, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group’s existence, tweeting:


Syrian activists telling us theyve never heard of Khorasan or its leader
— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) September 24, 2014

Indeed, a NEXIS search for the group found almost no mentions of its name prior to the September 13 AP article based on anonymous officials. There was one oblique reference to it in a July 31 CNN op-ed by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier about Pakistan which mentioned the group’s name as something quite different than how it’s being used now: as “the intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur.” Tim Shorrock noted that the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and “expelled by” (not “led by”) Bahadur.

There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: ”We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets – eager, as always, to justify American wars – spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this – too secret! – but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it’s impotent.

This sounds an awful lot like George W. Bush saying, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

This is the product of the imperial consensus that emerged following the fall of the USSR, with a dash of venality and mendacity from the House of Saud.

I cannot help but think that we are close to seeing the end of the American imperium, and that it’s fall will be not be pretty.

This is Unbelievably F%$#ed Up

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Two nights ago, we bombed ISIS.

We didn’t just bomb ISIS though, we also bombed a separate group, the Khorasan Group, which might, or not be affiliated with abhat al-Nusra.

The kicker is that Khorasan Group and ISIS are enemies, which means that we are bombing two opposing sides of the Syrian civil war:

On Monday night, the United States struck targets in Syria for the first time as part of its expanded air campaign against ISIS—a campaign that had previously been limited to the Iraqi side of the terrorist group’s border-spanning domain. But the anti-ISIS mission Barack Obama outlined in an address on September 10—”We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL”—had expanded in another way, too, as the U.S. launched strikes on a separate group in Syria that many Americans hadn’t heard of until recently. The Khorasan Group, which the president introduced briefly on Tuesday morning as “seasoned al-Qaeda operatives in Syria,” appears to be part of a faction that is actively fighting ISIS, meaning America has now bombed two opposing sides of Syria’s many-sided civil war. Has the military operation announced by the president only weeks ago already outgrown its original mission?

The Khorasan Group made no appearance in Obama’s speech warning Americans that U.S. airstrikes in Syria were likely. And it’s unclear what the group’s exact relationship is to al-Qaeda’s better-known affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, or even whether it’s a distinct entity. Regardless, al-Qaeda’s international leadership has disowned ISIS, and at the local level, forces associated with al-Qaeda have fought the group for territory. ISIS, for its part, has been blamed for assassinating senior al-Qaeda figures in Syria.

On the night that “kinetic action” began, we bombed two sides in a conflict.  (To be fair, there are 3¼ sides in the Syrian civil war, ISIS on one side, Sunni Jihadis on the other side, the Damascus regime on yet another side, and then the “Free Syrian Army”, whom I count as ¼ of a side)

And need I mention, the Sunni Jihadis, one of the sides that we just bombed, will be trained by the American military in Saudi Arabia, but we’re going to be really careful not to train the really bad ones.

This is so transparently a complete cluster f%$# that it positively buggers the mind, and we are not even a week into this.