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Insincere Plans
Yesterday Bush just told the U.S. what he was going to do. He did not even attempt to ask for support. He just proclaimed his plans.
He talked about Iraq and, maybe more important, about Iran.
Froomkin analyses:
Bush’s new proposal is so internally contradictory, so incremental, so problematically dependent on Iraqi good behavior, and so unlikely to galvanize public support that it seems to me that it’s open season on alternate explanations of his motivation.
The things Bush said about Iraq and his plans there are unrealistic and
contradictionary.
The U.S., he says, can not leave Iraq because that
would be catastrophic. But if Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki does not
perform Bush threatens to leave. Maliki of course will take note and
not perform.
Five additional army brigades plus 4,000 Marines for Anbar are supposed to be the "surge".
Nine sectors in Baghdad with each having one Iraqi Army brigade, one
Iraqi police brigade and a U.S. batallion tasked to "clear and
hold" their area – this according to Bush. But Iraq is said to have
only mobilized three brigades for this, two of them Kurdish Peshmerga
and one from the South.
Since 1991 the Arabic language is not taught in Kurdish schools. The
troops from the South are Shia, either Badr corps or al-Sadr folks. The
U.S. troops have hardly any competent translators at all. Who will talk
to the inhabitants of the Sunni districts these troops are supposed to
secure or pacify?
If five brigades are added in Iraq and three U.S. brigades (three batallion
each) are assigned to those nine Baghdad districts, what are the other
two brigades going to do?
Astonishingly after all the anti al-Sadr propaganda we have recently heard, Bush in his speech did not mention any Shia insurgents in Iraq but in the role of victims:
Al
Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents … blew up one of the holiest
shrines in Shia Islam, the Golden Mosque of Samarra, in a calculated
effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy
worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death
squads. …
Is this the Shia option? Abandon the Sunni and fight on the side of the Shia to gain control of Iraq?
As Gen. Odierno recently said:
There
are some extreme elements (of the Mehdi Army) … and we will go after
them. I will allow the government to decide whether (Sadr) is part of
it or not. He is currently working within the political system.
That does not sound to me like the long propagated and expected immediate confrontation with al-Sadr and his army.
But the recent raids and daylong fights along the Sunni Haifa street certainly are open warfare on Sunni forces.
Now lets turn to the Iranian front Bush opened with a diplomatic affront and throughout his speech:
Iran is providing material support for attacks on
American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will
interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out
and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to
our enemies in Iraq.
I have not read of any proof for the advanced weaponry shipped from Iran, but as Arkin opines:
There
is an ominous element here: When the President pledged to ‘seek out and
destroy the networks supporting our enemies in Iraq,’ to me, that means
the threat of strikes on targets in those two countries.
Also there is this weird step of sending a second Carrier Strike Group into the Persian Gulf.
Bush:
I recently ordered the deployment of an additional
carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing
and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and
allies.
The Gulf is already crowded with nearly
unmaneuverable very large crude carriers. To add a strike group with
some 6 to 8 big ships certainly doesn’t help traffic control there.
To me this seems insincere. There are enough airports available for the
U.S. to attack Iran from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman and elsewhere. Why
would one need an additional carrier group, a seagoing airport, but for
provocation?
When the fighting begins, the only way out for such a group is a 13 mile wide channel parallel to the Iranian border –
not exactly any Admiral’s dream …
So next to incoherant plans for Iraq, we also hear incoherent plans to attack Iran.
Will this attack happen? I do not know. But the results of such an
attack would be even more devastating to all parties than the results
of the attack on Iraq have been.
small coke (#8) wrote AQ are Sunni Wahabi fundamentalists
from naylor’s book
Often misnamed “Wahhabi” after Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the sect’s eighteenth-century founder, the correct term is salafi (follower), since it demands strict adherence to doctrines laid down not by Abd al-Wahhab but by the Prophet Muhammad, his immediate companions, and the leaders of the two generations that followed. The objective of the salafi movement is to purge Islam of subsequent accretions, including notions like jihad-as-a-sixth-pillar, which bin Laden learned from his theopolitical mentors.
this sixth pillar — “the requirement of jihad, with the further notion that it means military action” — which, as naylor points out, “owes more to Trotsky than to Muhammad”, is what the radical islamists bring to their interpretation, and something that UBL has endorsed.
continuing w/ naylor
However, even in Saudi Arabia the salafi sect has competitors. The da/wa line has a following among the urban educated; there is a small but noisy bunch of jihadists; and there are subvariants. Even the official voice has many tongues. For three decades the grand mufti (the leading religious scholar), Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, gave the House of Saud legitimacy by issuing rulings in their favor, including one to permit US troops in the kingdom. On his death in 1999, the party line fragmented into competing claims whose influence was reduced further by their perceived status as government hirelings – the state provides them with salaries, cars, and houses and periodically purges those who refuse to toe the line. This, of course, gives urban middle-class Saudis a further pretext to shed their religious accoutrements at the door of their homes, then break out the scotch whiskey, French cosmetics, and US rock music once safely inside. For the very rich, and those of royal blood, the job of indulging their whims is even easier – they simply ban the religious police from the areas wehre they choose to live.
If, on closer examination, Saudi Arabis’a theologicial uniformity becomes, along with the puritannical piety of many of its people, a convenient myth, the notion of bin Laden as a “fundamentalist” agitator who ascribes to the “Wahhabi” creed looks even more dubious. The bin Laden family comes from a region of Yemen, the Hadhramout, which is a stronghold of Sufi sects. Sufis are in some ways the opposite of salafis. A Sufi searches for a personal experience of God by meditation, repetitive prayathons, hypnotic dancing and whirling, or even sometimes by drugs. Sufis, too, gather at the tombs of their founders in rituals that, to the Islamic literalist, smack of saint worship of an almost Catholic nature. During a nineteenth-century invasion of Yemen, followers of Abd al-Wahhab desecrated the tombs of Hadhrami saints.
Certainly bin Laden is not Sufi saint; but, to critics, his pronouncements are contaminated with traces of Sufi belief. Leaving aside the question of whether suicide bombers are truly motivated by religion, or simply grab onto it for consolation and reinforcement after they have made a decision to die for the cause, suicide attacks, which bin Laden applauds, have no legitimacy in the Sunni tradition. (Most respected Shi’a clerics also denounce them.) Even more interesting, his Syrian mother was from an ‘Alawi family. While the divide between Shi’a and Sunni was originally based on a dynastic dispute – the Shi’a believing that the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law ‘Ali was the rightful successor to the Caliphate – over time it evolved into substantial doctrinal differences, which further muddle the usual simplistic stereotypes. But the Shi’a themselves produce spinoffs. None are more contentious than the ‘Alawi, who seem to regard ‘Ali with almost the same veneration that Christians accord to Jesus, making them heretical even in the eyes of fellow Shi’a and apostate in the minds of Sunni literalists. Yemenite Sufi and Syrian ‘Alawi? Usama’s theological heritage might well be doubly dubious in the eyes of a genuine Saudi “fundamentalist.”
and later
Blowing bin Laden metaphorically out of all proportions before blowing him physically off the face of the Earth is consistent with a US tradition of personifying infamy by inventing supervillains with whom superheroes do battle, inevitably to a victory that, if not real, is certainly loud and publicaly declared. While the practice may be politically expedient (and profitable for the infotainment industry) in the short run, it obscures understanding and therefore impedes sensible action in the long.
Similarly with al-Qa’idah. The original construct was built on myths about “criminal organizations” as large-scale, transnational, centraly run entities, which were extrapolated from the criminal justice to the “national security” fields. Just as crime is almost always the preserve of individuals or of loose ad hoc associations without serious long-term staying power, so, too, with “terrorist” groups. To the extent that relationships ever do exist between various militant factions beyond the merely rhetorical, they are temporary alliances of convenience among those with essentially local grudges rather than the result of those groups (usually guided by men with huge egos) being departments or subsidiaries of some hierarchically controlled international conspiracy. Under these circumstances to attempt to combat them using measures created to deal with either countries (with a geophysical existence) or organizations (with a supposedly corporate one) is like furiously throwing lethal punches in the air and hoping there are not too many innocent bystanders, or at least no independent witnesses, in the general vicinity. Even worse, by effectively creating, then advertising, an al-Qa’idah brand name, the US and the West at large gave local groups a global significance they otherwise would not likely have had, guaranteeing further sets of imitators in the future.
AQ started as a database of affiliated names
Posted by: b real | Jan 12 2007 7:15 utc | 28
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