Category: Syria

There is No Moderate Opposition in Syria

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In looking for rebels to supply, the government seems to be unable to fine forces that are not affiliated with terrorists:

Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists.

But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.”

The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict.

Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict.

We have created a situation where the government of President Bashar Assad is the closest we have to a non terrorist non jihadi alternative.

We have lost.  Let’s cut our losses and get the f%$# out.

I Think I Understand What Turkey is Doing

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This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.

Things in Syria are out of control, had have been since Turkey and Saudi Arabia founded ISIS to take down the Assad regime.

While silliness, like the brouhaha over a (hopefully soon to be court martialed and discharged) Russian soldier who brandished a rocket launcher while transiting the Bosporus, people are ignoring the fact that Turkey just invaded Iraq:

Turkey said on Monday it would not withdraw hundreds of soldiers who arrived last week at a base in northern Iraq, despite being ordered by Baghdad to pull them out within 48 hours.

The sudden arrival of such a large and heavily armed Turkish contingent in a camp near the frontline in northern Iraq has added yet another controversial deployment to a war against Islamic State fighters that has drawn in most of the world’s major powers.

Ankara says the troops are there as part of an international mission to train and equip Iraqi forces to fight against Islamic State. The Iraqi government says it never invited such a force, and will take its case to the United Nations if they are not pulled out.

Washington, which is leading an international coalition against Islamic State that includes Turkey, Arab states and European powers like Britain and France, has told Ankara and Baghdad to resolve the standoff, and says it does not support deployments in Iraq without Baghdad’s consent.

The Turkish troops’ presence is an embarrassment for Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Abadi, under strong pressure from powerful Iran-backed Shi’ite political groups to kick them out.

I have made the point numerous times that evidence indicates that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is determined to remake Turkey, and Syria, into Islamic states.

This neglects some of his other behavior, where he has attempted to efface the memory of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and to hearken back to the Ottoman Empire.

His attempts to recreate Ottoman buildings in Gezi Park, which led to massive protests, is one of the more prominent example of this.

I am now thinking that he is not just interested in Islamizing his neighborhood.  I think that he wants the return of something like an Ottoman Empire, or at least something very much like it using spheres of influence.

As a historical note, what is now Mosul was captured by the British after the armistice, and Turkey disputed its allocation to Iraq ferociously in the early 1900s.

I will note that my thesis is “Out there”, and that other folks are suggesting that this is a way to sabotage the Kurds autonomy in Iraq (likely), or a way to extort a route for a Qatar Turkey natural gas pipeline to replace the now moribund plan to run such a pipeline through Syria.

In either case, this is getting really ugly really quickly.

Can We Please Give Texas Back to Mexico

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The state of Texas has just sued the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in an attempt to prevent them from reuniting a Syrian refugee family in Dallas:

Texas has filed a lawsuit aiming to block Syrian refugees from settling in the Dallas area, in the latest salvo of an escalating row between the state, an aid group and the federal government.

Relatives of Faez and Shaza, who fled Syria for Jordan in 2013 and were settled this year in a Dallas suburb, are expected to arrive as early as Friday.

They are being helped by the Dallas branch of the New York-based International Rescue Committee (IRC), but Texas officials sent letters to IRC asking them to halt their assistance to the refugees. The humanitarian group issued a statement on Wednesday refusing to comply with instructions from Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, and Chris Traylor, the head of the state’s health agency.

In response, Texas’s health and human services commission filed a federal lawsuit against the IRC and the Obama administration this week that asks the court to stop the family from arriving in Texas in the next few days.

It accuses the defendants of potentially endangering public safety by failing to cooperate closely and share sufficient information about the background of the refugees.

This is just repulsive.

Syria is Confusing

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And now it appears that Russia and Israel will be expanding military coordination in Syria:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday praised bilateral efforts to prevent unintended clashes of their air forces operating in Syria and pledged to broaden so-called deconfliction measures to include forces operating from the ground as well.

Meeting in Paris less than a week after the Turkish Air Force downed a Russian fighter that had allegedly entered Turkish airspace for a brief period of time, Putin characterized measures first proposed by Netanyahu as efficient and said both leaders were “satisfied with the progress of bilateral” ties.

“The mechanism … [that] presupposes contacts between the militaries to prevent incidents due to the dramatic developments in the region has been efficient,” Putin told Netanyahu.

Referencing Ankara’s downing of the Russian fighter, Netanyahu said to Putin: “The events of recent days prove the importance of our coordination, our deconfliction mechanisms, our attempts to cooperate with each other to prevent unnecessary accidents and tragedies, and I believe that we’ve been successful. It’s important.

“I hope that Israel and Russia can see eye to eye on all the strategic matter, but I want to assure you that we believe that it’s within our powers to have very good coordination on the ground and in the air so that we do not create the kind of problems that we’ve been experiencing,” Netanyahu said.

The policy makes good sense, but I cannot but conclude that its public announcement was intended as an enormous f%$# you to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

This is the Least Surprising News of the Day

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Russia accused Turkey of buying ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever oil. Turkish President Erdogan called this a false slander.

But guess what? Putin is ready to give the world pictures:

Russia’s defense ministry said on Wednesday it had proof that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his family were benefiting from the illegal smuggling of oil from Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq.

Moscow and Ankara have been locked in a war of words since last week when a Turkish air force jet shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian-Turkish border, the most serious incident between Russia and a NATO state in half a century.

Erdogan responded by saying no one had the right to “slander” Turkey by accusing it of buying oil from Islamic State, and that he would stand down if such allegations were proven to be true. But speaking during a visit to Qatar, he also said he did not want relations with Moscow to worsen further.

At a briefing in Moscow, defense ministry officials displayed satellite images which they said showed columns of tanker trucks loading with oil at installations controlled by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and then crossing the border into neighboring Turkey.

The officials did not specify what direct evidence they had of the involvement of Erdogan and his family, an allegation that the Turkish president has vehemently denied.

“Turkey is the main consumer of the oil stolen from its rightful owners, Syria and Iraq. According to information we’ve received, the senior political leadership of the country – President Erdogan and his family – are involved in this criminal business,” said Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov.

“Maybe I’m being too blunt, but one can only entrust control over this thieving business to one’s closest associates.”

“In the West, no one has asked questions about the fact that the Turkish president’s son heads one of the biggest energy companies, or that his son-in-law has been appointed energy minister. What a marvelous family business!”

………

The Russian defense ministry also alleged that the same criminal networks which were smuggling oil into Turkey were also supplying weapons, equipment and training to Islamic State and other Islamist groups.

“According to our reliable intelligence data, Turkey has been carrying out such operations for a long period and on a regular basis. And most importantly, it does not plan to stop them,” Sergei Rudskoy, deputy head of the Russian military’s General Staff, told reporters.

The defense ministry said its surveillance revealed hundreds of tanker trucks gathering at Islamic State-controlled sites in Iraq and Syria to load up with oil, and it questioned why the U.S.-led coalition was not launching more air strikes on them.

“It’s hard not to notice them,” Rudskoy said of the lines of trucks shown on satellite images.

Russian officials said their country’s bombing campaign had made a significant dent in Islamic State’s ability to produce, refine and sell oil.

Oh, snap!

Russian Shootdown Update

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First, it appears that Erdogan’s Son Bilal owned the oil trucks that were bombed by Russia on the day before the shootdown. Funny how that works:

The prime source of money feeding ISIS these days is sale of Iraqi oil from the Mosul region oilfields where they maintain a stronghold. The son of Erdoğan it seems is the man who makes the export sales of ISIS-controlled oil possible.

 Bilal Erdoğan owns several maritime companies. He has allegedly signed contracts with European operating companies to carry Iraqi stolen oil to different Asian countries. The Turkish government buys Iraqi plundered oil which is being produced from the Iraqi seized oil wells. Bilal Erdoğan’s maritime companies own special wharfs in Beirut and Ceyhan ports that are transporting ISIS’ smuggled crude oil in Japan-bound oil tankers.

 Gürsel Tekin vice-president of the Turkish Republican Peoples’ Party, CHP, declared in a recent Turkish media interview, “President Erdoğan claims that according to international transportation conventions there is no legal infraction concerning Bilal’s illicit activities and his son is doing an ordinary business with the registered Japanese companies, but in fact Bilal Erdoğan is up to his neck in complicity with terrorism, but as long as his father holds office he will be immune from any judicial prosecution.” Tekin adds that Bilal’s maritime company doing the oil trades for ISIS, BMZ Ltd, is “a family business and president Erdoğan’s close relatives hold shares in BMZ and they misused public funds and took illicit loans from Turkish banks.

BTW, it now appears that between the Russians deploying a guided missile cruiser and S-400 long range SAMs, has created a no-fly zone in Syria, for the Turks:

The Turkish army has suspended flights over Syria as part of an ongoing joint military campaign with the United States against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) after it shot down a Russian jetfighter, sparking an unprecedented crisis between Ankara and Moscow.

The decision was taken following the eruption of the crisis with Russia in which a Turkish F-16 downed a Russian warplane early Nov. 24 after it allegedly violated Turkish airspace, according to diplomatic sources.

Sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, stressed that the suspension of the Turkish jetfighters’ participation in the U.S.-led military operations against ISIL was in fact a mutual decision taken with Russia, which also halted its aerial campaigns near the Turkish border. Both parties will continue to be as careful as possible in a bid to avoid a repetition of such incidents until they re-establish dialogue channels to reduce the tension.

Turkish and Russian military officials held initial talks on the incident on Nov. 25 as the office of the Chief of General Staff invited defense and military attachés from the Russian Embassy to military headquarters to inform them about how the incident took place. However, there is still a need for high-level political meetings to let the two parties reconcile and reduce the tension.

I would take the bit about Russia standing down, because we have numerous report of continued airstrikes by Russia against targets across Syria.

The important part of Turkey standing down in Syria is probably that the Kurds, who are now supported by both the Russians and the US are likely to have far greater freedom of operation, as they will not have to worry about Turkey bombing them.

Rather unsurprisingly, we now have a timeline, with the Russian jet in Turkish airspace for less than 18 seconds according to Turkish claims (how you warn an aircraft 10 times in 18 seconds is an activity I will leave as an exercise to the reader), which implies that this was not a timely response to a Russian provocation, but a predetermined and preplanned shootdown, which indicates that the (absurd) Turkish assertions that they did not know the plane was Russian are lies.

Meanwhile, the Russians have implemented a series of sanctions against Turkey.

Most significantly, it appears that this will involve the shutting down the tourist trade to Turkey, which is something like a quarter of Turkey’s tourism business, though it will also likely involve agricultural products and textiles.

Russia is not doing anything involving natural gas exports at this time.

I think that sanctions involving natural gas are highly unlikely:  Turkey actually pays for its gas, and were they to do so, it would spur alternate pipelines to Turkey, and perhaps to through Turkey to Europe.

It’s a mess, but in the short term, it appears, in the short term at least, that Turkey is coming out the worse on this, because they will be less able to prosecute their policies in Syria.

Our NATO “Ally”

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Journalists in Turkey uncovered arms shipments from the Turkish Military to ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever.

Of course, the response of Ankara was to charge those journalists with espionage and treason:

A court in Istanbul has charged two journalists from the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper with spying after they alleged Turkey’s secret services had sent arms to Islamist rebels in Syria.

Can Dundar, the editor-in-chief, and Erdem Gul, the paper’s Ankara bureau chief, are accused of spying and “divulging state secrets”, Turkish media reported. Both men were placed in pre-trial detention.

According to Cumhuriyet, Turkish security forces in January 2014 intercepted a convoy of trucks near the Syrian border and discovered boxes of what the daily described as weapons and ammunition to be sent to rebels fighting against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

It linked the seized trucks to the Turkish national intelligence organisation (MIT).

The revelations, published in May, caused a political storm in Turkey, and enraged president Recep Tayyip Erdogan who vowed Dundar would pay a “heavy price”.

He personally filed a criminal complaint against Dundar, 54, demanding he serve multiple life sentences.

Turkey has vehemently denied aiding Islamist rebels in Syria, such as the Islamic State group, although it wants to see Assad toppled.

“Don’t worry, this ruling is nothing but a badge of honour to us,” Dundar told reporters and civil society representatives at the court before he was taken into custody.

Understand, the very fact that they were charged with, “divulging state secrets” means constitutes an admission on the part of the Turks that they did sent arms to ISIS.

This is not a surprise.

Erdogan is looking to establish an Islamic state in Turkey, so it’s no surprise that he is supporting the Islamic state in Syria.

It does put that shoot-down of the Russian in perspective, though.

Oh Crap………

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Turkish Radar Track


Competing Russian Radar Track

The Turks just shot down a Russian SU-24 near the Turkish border:

NATO faced being thrust into a new Middle Eastern crisis on Tuesday after warplanes from member state Turkey shot down a Russian jet that Turkish officials said had violated their country’s airspace on the border with Syria.

 The incident marked a serious escalation in the Syrian conflict that is likely to further strain relations between Russia and the NATO alliance.

 Russian officials confirmed that a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft was shot down Tuesday morning but insisted it had not violated Turkey’s airspace.

 Russia’s Defense Ministry said one of at least two pilots probably died during the incident, and a marine also was killed by apparent Syrian insurgent fire during a helicopter rescue operation to retrieve the downed airmen.

 The downing brings renewed attention to a scenario feared for months by the Pentagon and its partners: a potential conflict arising from overlapping air missions over Syria — with Russia backing the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a U.S.-led coalition conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State.

………

Russian President Vladimir Putin had strong words for Turkey, calling the incident a “stab in the back.”

By way of scale, that little bit of Turkey is in dispute is about 2 miles wide, while the Russians are maintaining that the Turkish aircraft entered Syrian airspace during the shoot-down.

This is a F%$#ing mess, and the US is between a rock and a hard place.

The Turks are clearly providing tacit support to Jihadis, including (in the past, at least) ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever, but they are also NATO allies, which means that the US is treaty bound to support them.

Particularly when juxtaposed with the fact that the elements of the US military and foreign policy establishment are still aggressively supporting the idea of the violent overthrow of the Syrian government, (which worked so f%$#ing well in Libya) this has all the makings of a fiasco.

An Interesting Perspective on Russia’s Goals in Syria

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I hadn’t thought about it before, but there are thousands of Russian Jihadis in Syria, and should they win, whey will come back to the Caucuse:

I find nothing sinister or difficult to understand in Russia’s increased involvement in Syria. In June, extremists declared the Dagestan Governorate of the Islamic State in Russia’s southernmost republic. Think about this for a sec. Russian jets started flying missions three months later.

This is a legitimate security issue for Russia, as things like Chechnya and Beslan show.

It doesn’t matter if  the fighters are fighting with ISIS, or al Nusra, or the Kurds, or the Turkomen.

If they win, they will be back in Gorzny and Moscow with their new friends.

For all the crap about “Fighting them there” that we have in the US, the Russians actually have a real problem with people bringing terrorism back.

Speaking Truth to Bigoted Cowards

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They mayor of Dallas, Mike Rawlings makes an obvious point, that there is more to worry about from white men with guns than there is from Syrian refugees:

The mayor of Dallas is pushing back against politicians who say Americans should be skeptical of Syrian refugees, saying he is “more fearful” of armed white men than people fleeing civil war in the Middle East.

Speaking to MSNBC on Saturday morning, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was asked to discuss the growing anxiety over Syrian refugees entering the United States, purportedly over concerns they could be potential agents for militant groups such as ISIS. Rawlings staunchly rejected the assertion that Syrians are somehow uniquely prone to violence, saying he is more concerned with the rise of white supremacy and the recent flurry of mass shootings committed by white men.

“I am more fearful of large gatherings of white men that come into schools, theaters and shoot people up, but we don’t isolate young white men on this issue,” Rawlings said.

He also said that vilifying refugees only helps ISIS, as doing so falls into their “trap.” He then pushed back on the notion that ISIS is somehow representative of Islam.

This is so true.

The Military Faked Intelligence Data? Say it Isn’t So!

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They always say that truth is the first casualty of war.

What they don’t say is that senior officers in the Pentagon have a long history of lying to their superiors in civilian leadership. Maybe they should:

When Islamic State fighters overran a string of Iraqi cities last year, analysts at United States Central Command wrote classified assessments for military intelligence officials and policy makers that documented the humiliating retreat of the Iraqi Army. But before the assessments were final, former intelligence officials said, the analysts’ superiors made significant changes.

In the revised documents, the Iraqi Army had not retreated at all. The soldiers had simply “redeployed.”

Such changes are at the heart of an expanding internal Pentagon investigation of Centcom, as Central Command is known, where analysts say that supervisors revised conclusions to mask some of the American military’s failures in training Iraqi troops and beating back the Islamic State. The analysts say supervisors were particularly eager to paint a more optimistic picture of America’s role in the conflict than was warranted.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon inspector general seized a large trove of emails and documents from military servers as it examines the claims, and has added more investigators to the inquiry.

………

Staff members at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are also poring over years of Centcom intelligence reports and comparing them to assessments from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others. The committee is not just examining reports about Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State, but also about Afghanistan and other areas under Centcom’s purview. The insurrection inside Centcom is an important chapter in the story of how the United States responded to the growing threat from the Islamic State. This past summer, a group of Centcom analysts took concerns about their superiors to the inspector general, saying they had evidence that senior officials had changed intelligence assessments to overstate the progress of American airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

………

Senior lawmakers have begun their own inquiries into the military’s intelligence apparatus. Representative Mac Thornberry, the Republican from Texas who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview that his committee was examining intelligence assessments from Centcom and other military commands to see if there was a systemic problem of dissenting voices being muffled by senior military commanders.

………

That investigation was prompted by complaints this past summer from Centcom’s longtime Iraq experts, led by Gregory Hooker, the senior Iraq analyst. In some ways, the team’s criticisms mirror those of a decade ago, when Mr. Hooker wrote a research paper saying the Bush administration, over many analysts’ objections, advocated a small force in Iraq and spent little time planning for what would follow the invasion.

Lawmakers originally said that the Centcom investigation would be completed in weeks. But Pentagon investigators have found the work painstaking and it could span months. In addition to determining whether changes were made to intelligence reports — and if so, who ordered them — the investigators, like the staff members of the House intelligence committee, are studying reports from other intelligence agencies produced at the time to determine what was actually occurring in Iraq and Syria when the reports were written.

This sort of sh%$ needs to stop.

This is simply unacceptable. It is antithetical to the idea of civilian control of the military.

Anyone in the chain of command for these actions need to be sent stateside now.

Once the investigation is done, any responsible for this should be court martialed. Anyone who should have known and did not make a report to the inspector general should be fired.

This was a deliberate attempt to deceive the SecDef and the President. It cannot, and should not, be tolerated.

Traitors

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And no, I am not talking about treason against the United States, which is, as I have noted before, very specifically defined in the Constitution, the only crime so defined.

Rather, I am suggesting that the House vote to exclude Syrian refugees is treason against the whole of humanity, which necessary has a less specific definition:

Responding to increased fears of terrorism in the United States following the Paris attacks, the House of Representatives passed a Republican-backed bill Thursday that would temporarily freeze Syrian and Iraqi refugees’ entry into the United States and revamp the vetting process. The bill passed 289 to 137, with near-unanimous support from Republicans and 47 Democrats backing the measure.

………

The bill “would immediately shut down resettlement of refugees from the Syria and Iraq region,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said Wednesday. “This rash reaction ignores the fact that all of the Paris attackers identified thus far are either French or Belgian, and that many terrorist threats are homegrown.” A Syrian passport was discovered by the body of one of the Paris attackers, but French officials said soon afterward that it was a forgery.

The bill does not explicitly halt admission of Syrian refugees, a response that some Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), called for this week. But it does require additional vetting of refugees by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, without specifying the procedures. Implementing the bill “would cause a pause” in the admission of refugees, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters.

It would also increase the FBI’s role in the screening process and require the secretary of homeland security, the FBI director, and the director of national intelligence to personally certify to Congress that each individual refugee is “not a threat” to the United States.

I’m sure that someone out there is going to talk about the reality of politics, but most of these districts are safe enough that the only way that a caught on camera eating babies.

When I make quick look at the list, a few names stick out;

  • Patrick Murphy, who was a Republican bankster until he wanted to run for Congress, and is now the establishment’s choice to run for Florida Senate.
  • Steve Israel, former Blue Dog who has been single minded in attempting to restore that caucus.
  • Marcy Kaptur, who defeated Dennis Kucinich in the primary after they were redistricted together.
  • Dan Lipinski, who inherited the seat from his father, and is the most reactionary Democrat in Congress.

There are a couple of Reps on this list who are not complete tools, like Louise Slaughter, but it doesn’t matter.

This vote is that bad.

After the break is a list of the Dems who voted for this.

  • Pete Aguilar (CA-31)
  • Brad Ashford (NE-02)
  • Ami Bera (CA-07)
  • Sanford Bishop (GA-02)
  • Julia Brownley (CA-26)
  • Cheri Bustos (IL-17)
  • John Carney (DE-AL)
  • Gerry Connolly (VA-11)
  • Jim Cooper (TN-05)
  • Jim Costa (CA-16)
  • Joe Courtney (CT-02)
  • Henry Cuellar (TX-28)
  • John Delaney (MD-06)
  • Lloyd Doggett (TX-35)
  • Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02)
  • John Garamendi (CA-03)
  • Gwen Graham (FL-02)
  • Gene Green (TX-29)
  • Janice Hahn (CA-44)
  • Jim Himes (CT-04)
  • Steve Israel (NY-03)
  • Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
  • Bill Keating (MA-09)
  • Ron Kind (WI-03)
  • Annie Kuster (NH-02)
  • Jim Langevin (RI-02)
  • Dan Lipinski (IL-03)
  • Dave Loebsack (IA-02)
  • Stephen Lynch (MA-08)
  • Sean Maloney (NY-18)
  • Patrick Murphy (FL-18)
  • Rick Nolan (MN-08)
  • Donald Norcross (NJ-01)
  • Scott Peters (CA-52)
  • Collin Peterson (MN-07)
  • Jared Polis (CO-02)
  • Kathleen Rice (NY-04)
  • Raul Ruiz (CA-36)
  • Tim Ryan (OH-13)
  • Kurt Schrader (OR-05)
  • David Scott (GA-13)
  • Terri Sewell (AL-07)
  • Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-09)
  • Louise Slaughter (NY-25)
  • Marc Veasey (TX-33)
  • Filemon Vela (TX-34)
  • Tim Walz (MN-01)

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.

I Would Call Chuck Schumer a Schmuck, but a Schmuck has a Head

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The distinguished gentleman from New York just came out publicly against allowing Syrian refugees into the United States.

I’m sure that if he had been alive in 1939, he would have been comfortably playing Mahjong with friends while the passengers on the MS St. Louis were sent back to die at the hands of the Nazis:

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, on Tuesday said it may be necessary to halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.

Republicans immediately seized on Schumer’s comment, which breaks with other Democrats who have argued against halting the program.

Schumer, however, declined to take the option off the table ahead of a special briefing scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on the process that is now used to vet refugees entering the United States.

“We’re waiting for the briefing tomorrow, a pause may be necessary. We’re going to look at it,” he said.

Schumer is widely expected to become leader of Senate Democrats in the next Congress, after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) retires.

A spokeswoman for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) highlighted Schumer’s statement as an example of “bipartisan concern” over refugees.

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) signed a letter to President Obama Monday calling on him not to allow another Syrian refugee into the country unless federal authorities can guarantee with 100-percent assurance they are not connected to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Other Democrats have rejected freezing Obama’s plan to resettle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the current fiscal year.

What a toxic combination of stupidity, cowardice, and evil.

His position is deeply wrong, and will be seized on by Islamist terrorists as a recruiting tool.

I wish that I was registered to vote in New York so that I could vote against him.

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.

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.