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The Islamic State Prepares For A Big Attack – Baghdad Or Aleppo?
A month ago I wrote that the Islamic State (IS or ISIS) is now the only game in town when it comes to insurgents fighting against the Syrian (and now also Iraqi) state:
In a few month the Islamic Front will no longer exist. It will vanish like that phantasy of a Free Syrian Army. Parts of it will swear allegiance to the Islamic State, parts will give up fighting and parts will change over to the government side. Then the real war against ISIS will start.
The "moderate rebels" Washington has been searching for for years are a unicorn. Whomever the U.S. gave weapons to and trained in Jordan and Turkey is now part of ISIS.
The Islamic State consolidates itself (recommended) in west Iraq and across the east and north of Syria:
The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria Isis has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, …
By now IS generates enough money from oil sales and blackmail to support itself. It has taken an immense haul of weapons from four Iraqi divisions and now also from the Syrian Brigade 93 which it defeated a week ago:
In addition to 5+ 122mm D-30 howitzers, the IS captured approx. 20 T-55 tanks & 1 ZSU-23-4 Shilka SPAAG
Note: The haul in Iraq was much, much bigger than this one.
The Islamic State has enough experienced soldiers to handle these weapons. How good its logistics are run though is an open questions. Those may eventually turn out to be its weak point.
The Islamic State also gained in numbers. Even the ardent promoter of the non-existent Syrian Free Army Hassan Hassan now admits that all these folks are under IS control. International forces so far aligned with Al-Qaeda are moving over to IS. Tribes in the newly captured areas pledge allegiance to the Islamic State and add to its forces.
One military expert says:
ISIL has now progressed from local victories to a regional strategy. They have moved from what is referred to in Counterinsurgency warfare as Phase II to Phase III operations, or transformation from fixed covert insurgency to an overt war of mobility. This is when a terrorist group grows strong enough to come out of the shadows to transform into a mobile “liberation army”.
Colonel Pat Lang remarks:
Today I am told that DoD has decided that the IS force is the most capable non-Israeli army in the ME. pl
IS has lots of light and heavy weapons, it has money, it is led by experienced senior officers from Saddam's old army and it has a large force of indoctrinated foot soldiers. What is it going to do with these capabilities?
In his speech declaring the Caliphate Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi promised to do something big. He needs a big event to consolidate his position. The former Saddam officers aligned with IS want to capture Baghdad and regain their old status. The current attack against the Kurdish Erbil is not the big one but just a sideshow. Baghdadi wants to eliminate it as a U.S. position that could otherwise be used to attack his back. As Pat Land sees it:
When they are done in the north they will return to the problem of eliminating the present Iraqi government. I doubt if they plan to occupy the Shia south of Iraq but the destruction of what remains of Iraqi government central authority is certainly possible.
If they succeed in doing that much, Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf will beckon.
But over the last weeks the Islamic State also consolidated its position in Syria and connected the two battlefields into one.
Elijah J Magnier, a Middle East analyst and journalist with excellent sources, suggests a different target for the big attack as storyfied here. Excerpts:
Hundreds of tanks & sophisticated anti-air artillery gained from #Iraq & #Syria are gathering for a spectacular attack Baghdadi promised.
…
2my mind, #IS is pulling z attention on #Iraq 2hit harder in #Syria, knowingly that a) #SAA & #Assad would attract less interntionl help
Magnier suggests that the Islamic State will run a spectacular attack on Aleppo and will probably capture the city. He is right to believe that – should the Islamic State use its full force – the weakened Syrian army will have little chance to hold this important city. The result would be a huge bloodbath.
While the U.S. would probably try to stop an attack on Baghdad, though impossible with a few pinprick airstrikes, it is unlikely that any international help would come to counter an attack on Aleppo. Patrick Cockburn concurs:
Isis may well advance on Aleppo in preference to Baghdad: it’s a softer target and one less likely to provoke international intervention. This will leave the West and its regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – with a quandary: their official policy is to get rid of Assad, but Isis is now the second strongest military force in Syria; if he falls, it’s in a good position to fill the vacuum. Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by descending into fantasy.
In my view the Islamic State is at its core a genocidal and extremely dangerous force that should be defeated by all means as soon as possible. There are now believable claims that it just killed or buried alive some 500 Yazidi. This isn't its first or last massacre it committed. The Islamic State has thereby very different dimensions than the laughing stock Al-Qaeda threat we were told to fear over the last decades. If it has more time to gain additional resources it will become much more difficult to defeat.
Unfortunately, because the threat of the old Al-Qaeda was over-hyped, this new force has little to fear from the "west". Obama promised to only protect Erbil for its oil and for its value as an intelligence base. A few air attacks from a far away carrier can not hold a city against a determined capable force. Erbil may soon fall.
Obama withholds any further weapons or help to the government of Iraq because he wants to blackmail it into some phantasy of "national unity government":
The ongoing strikes, which began Friday, address “immediate” concerns of protecting Americans, besieged minorities and critical infrastructure in the north, Obama said. But comprehensive aid to push back advances by the Sunni Muslim extremists through much of the country over the past two months will require a new Iraqi government, he said.
For the first time I can think of I -in this case- agree with the neocon warmonger John McCain:
Mr. McCain said he would favor sending combat air controllers into Iraq to help identify targets for airstrikes. Heavy military equipment should be rushed into Erbil, the Kurdish capital, the senator said. And he said he believed the airstrikes must extend into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria.
Airstrikes can not win wars and can not take ground away from the Islamic State. Local forces will have to do that. But airstrikes can destroy its heavy weapons and the ammunition depots it captured. The Syrian air-force is too small to achieve this. An Iraqi air-force does not exists. Turkey and Jordan have some capabilities but are either unofficially allied with IS or fear its retribution. The U.S. could run such an air campaign. It would take the U.S. air-force supported by special operation groups on the ground only a few weeks to reduce the Islamic State to an infantry force incapable of larger geographic actions.
But Obama and the people informing him still believe that the Islamic State, which they partially helped to grow, is some cuddly homegrown Al-Qaeda that can be used to further this or that geopolitical phantasy. They are wrong to believe this.
What b is talking about is a very good example of the crudity of US policies: first they arm these wahhabi militias to the teeth, then they pour large quantities of weaponry, money and training resources into preparing them for battle. And then, when the jihadis actually do what they say they will do, the US, now desperate either to recover its arms and munitions or to give the world the impression that they wish to do so, starts bombing their positions. Or pretending to do so, probably by looking out for wedding parties or tribal gatherings.
There are two aspects to this: the first is that US policy is characterised by tactical virtuosity and strategic illiteracy. It really has no idea how to achieve its ends, hence the succession of enormously expensive military campaigns ending in disastrous failures, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Vast amounts of resources poured out with only one certain result-death and suffering, rubble and ruined lands. All that expense of blood and treasure and the net result is a bump in the number of international refugees.
Those who wish to do so, as we know, will go to any length to prove that what appear to have been failures were in fact stunning successes, that the US has tightened its grip on the world oil supply, that it was all part of the Israeli plan
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39376.htm
to destroy Iraq.
And there is some truth in this.
Which leads to the second aspect of US policy, which is that, apart from the Pentagon’s specialists training, arming and assisting these wahhabis, who appear to know their business, those involved in directing US policy are so much at cross purposes with each other, and there are so many competing factions, with such a variety of conflicting objects, some peculiarly zionist and Israeli, others frankly electoral and partisan, others wholly economic and related to the MIC scams which have been the engine of the US economy since 1940, others on behalf of Riyadh and still others with the general aim of simply promoting chaos, regionally and globally, under the theory that international disorder will lead to general acceptance of US hegemony as world policeman.
The reality is that the US is losing control. It is creating so much chaos in so many places that it can no longer follow what it is doing. Everywhere it is delegating its super-power to very questionable agents. In Ukraine the neo-nazis, weird volkish cultists. some of them, who haven’t left the beer kellar in half a century, the sort of loonies who probably would try and shoot down Putin’s jet. Does anyone think that, had the US desired such a thing it would not have carried out the plan with more subtlety?
Then, in Iraq/Syria, they have empowered, quite openly, really, the proto-Caliph and his motley followers who under the disguise of that wild eyed mad mullah persona that the western media insists upon, appear to be emerging as highly rational, strategically astute operatives.
No good can come from US intervention-no good has come from US intervention.
But it cannot be stopped, whether or not its aircraft carriers in the Gulf bomb ISIS positions is only a side issue: the reality is that, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and their agents, which include Egypt right now, between them constitute US power in the region in a much more permanent way than American expeditionary forces and navies. By the same token the forces resisting that power, essentially centred on Iran, may or may not prevail. If they do it will be because they have drawn Russia and China to their assistance. Which takes us back to those earlier posts in which b talked of the shifting of tectonic plates in the world community.
Posted by: bevin | Aug 10 2014 19:52 utc | 24
guest77 is correct, you are way off base here, b. Less emotion and more analysis is called for.
The “moderate rebels” Washington has been searching for for years are a unicorn.
These are the type of throwaway lines in your analyses that I always have the most trouble with. What evidence is there that the West ever wanted a moderate solution? — historically, they have always used the most extreme forces for destabilization purposes. Focus upon what they do, not upon what they say — but we all know that by now.
You have not accounted for where this new huge boogieman army suddenly came from. Just a month or two ago, we were told that the zombie forces were exhausted, in retreat, losing 100 or more men a day, and that their mobilizable strength was falling to below 60k and their lines of supply threatened, if not outright cut. Now suddenly they are able to take over, control, and administer “an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark.” (Gee, I wonder if the R2P crowd will call for civility, free doughnuts, and prompt elections, and if not, than why not? Samantha, Victoria, HRW, and assorted friends, its time to step up to the plate here; your faces and logos are on the global jumbotron.) More seriously, what is the implication of this oversight for the reporters of this world? How sustainable is this purported accomplishment? And, is it real?
Pat Lang breathlessly frets that
“Today I am told that DoD has decided that the IS force is the most capable non-Israeli army in the ME.”
Told by whom? Aside from some major confusion over the DoD’s cognitive dissonance in comparing ISIS with the ever-diminishing assessments of the Israeli Army (as opposed to air force), who can’t defeat — and are afraid to directly confront — a tiny impoverished ghetto, one wonders if that assessment includes the army of a technologically advanced nation of some 80 million people, namely Iran. It barely merits mentioning that we have commented rather acidly upon the utility of US intelligence previously; perhaps the esteemed Colonel has missed these appraisals. If not, I have Ray McGovern’s email to share with him. (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, oddly enough, does not appear to have an email or website.)
This hysterical apocalyptic media buildup and resultant call to action has all the hallmarks of what is popularly referred to by the misnomer, the “Hegalian Dialectic.” Problem, Reaction, Solution. Create a problem, engineer the outrage, and swoop in with what you wanted to do in the first place, but couldn’t because of public opinion.
(For those new to this concept, David Icke, despite his bizarre theories of how the world works which I do not hold to or defend, is an excellent public speaker and has several very good expositions of this process on youtube. If this concept is new to you, it can take a while to sink in. But it is used by those in power to subvert the pubic will all over the world. Indeed, one might say that it is the oldest trick in the historical handbook of governance. And there is no need to get lost in the fog of conspiracy theorizing surrounding every false flag in the world to apprehend how the concept works. The process is as simple and direct as, lower taxes, announce a financial “cliff,” and propose privatizing valuable public assets as the only solution: This pattern — or more accurately, model — was used in the fall of the Soviet Union, and it is used in the calls to break public unions in cities across America and privatize Detroit’s priceless art collection today. There is nothing mysterious about the process and it is not “Conspiracy Theorizing.”)
In this case, the adherence to the P-R-S model is glaringly obvious: Create an out of control marauding army, publicize some horrifying atrocities on “social” media, and intervene against public will with the long term goal of toppling the two governments resistant to Western hegemony: Syria and Iraq, thereby setting up a base of operations to take on the next task: Iran.
Patrick Cockburn, by the way, is the perfect example of an apple that fell far from the tree, and continues to roll further down the hill with the passage of time. (Since this point is rather perpendicular to the thrust of my argument, I will leave my observation there for the present, but I invite readers to go back over the past ten years of archives and compare his assessments, analyses, and predictions with what has actually occurred and why.)
More to the point:
*Did those six million people (where have I heard that phrase before?) suddenly convert to Takfiri views, or are they being suppressed by terror, and if so, how sustainable is that?
*Where are these endless hordes being trained? Their leadership appears to have an almost unlimited set of highly advanced capabilities.
*What is their ultimate number?
*Who has trained them in the use of advanced weapons, cutting edge 4th generation military planning, civil governance, large scale provisioning and quartermastering, advance weapon maintainence and repair, graphic design and media outreach (including access to the western military/social media nexus for posting their choreographed atrocities), etc.?
*Where do the supply lines come from?
*Who is purchasing the oil?
*What pipeline/transportation systems are conveying the oil?
*Who is providing financial services on the international market; remember, the innocent indignant protestors that the monster Gaddaffi was evilly plotting to kill had somehow figured out the intricacies of setting up international oil banks recognized by the West from their simple mud and brick residences in Bengazi; this new horde appears equally savvy.
*An alliance of Baathist generals (the cards that mysteriously fell out of Bush’s “deck of cards?”) with Takfiri monsters sounds most improbable on the surface. What does each side of the alliance think will happen to the other side should they prevail? And who was their matchmaker? Perhaps the true leadership, and their patrons, prefer to keep allegiances more occult.
That is to say, who exactly are their patrons, who sustains their interactions with the outside world, and what are their goals? To say that ISIS exists off of the revenue from oil sales (without the interaction of the outside world) is a prize-winning furphy — and an impossibility. To argue that their public intellectuals have crafted some sort of overwhelming mobilizing ideology, which like communism, is capable of inspiring the masses in their aspirations for a better and more stable life into an historically unprecedented and suicidal action, is plainly ludicrous. To argue that ISIS’s strength has appeared spontaneously, ex nihilo, or de novo is to consciously ignore the Pasteurs of political analysis at the indulgence of the bewailing Cassandras. And the pathetic liberal plaint, that what we have here is a “Frankenstein,” an experiment that unfortunately “got out of control,” is clearly nonsense to anyone attempting to answer the few detailed questions (and to those knowledgeable in these affairs, there are many, many more) as to who their benefactors are, right now, TODAY, not when the well-meaning but accident-prone doctor first entered his laboratory. It is to deny how complex of an undertaking toppling two — admittedly shaky and destabilized — countries really is, and how much knowledge, management and co-ordination is involved in such a task. If I cannot get a better political analysis of who is behind the celebrity-like phenomenon of ISIS, then I am wasting my time in political discourse, which might be more profitably employed in taking up wildcrafting, or in re-watching the Bugs Bunny cartoons of my childhood.
Finally, your recommendations beg the six million dollar question: when did aerial bombing by a superpower ever make anything better for the people involved in a conflict? Dresden, or Tokyo perhaps? If Howard Zinn or Kurt Vonnegut were still around, I’m sure they could tell us.
Moreover, b, your oversight in failing to connect current events in the Middle East with global geopolitical developments is most problematic. For surely, these utterly sudden and extreme events do not occur in a vacuum. The Western alliance of global institutions, and lock-step financial, economic, scientific, and social policies, and singular media propaganda system as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, the so-called “Washington Consensus,” the austerity control system, is under global assault at this very moment. And the rulers of the world who most benefit from current arrangements are fighting back with everything they have — every dirty trick and scheme, every bought and compromised politician and “celebrity,” every fake opposition activist and public intellectual called to task, every possible destabilization and false flag, everything — they are throwing their entire playbook up in the hope that something will stick to the ever more assaulted wall of human social order. They have become the very personification of what Pepe Escobar calls, “The Empire of Chaos.” US and European advisors and operatives have been deployed on the very border of a nuclear-armed and now universally demonized Russia, with, according to Russian politician Evgeny Fedorov, a destabilization of that country planned for the fall. The global fever pitch and danger level has never been higher, and numerous prominent and experienced voices like Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts, are warning us of this threat, and the madness of the brinksmanship of our leaders of “the free (our way or bust) world.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the US development of the atomic bomb, once quoted from the Bhagavad Gita in an interview: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — today, that vision is a perfect representation of the dying order of the “End of History.” The only question is whether or not we passively follow Shiva down the road to uncreation. Not to be melodramatic, but that is how important the accurate analysis of events is today, how much is riding upon “getting it right”.
And really, not to be as monocausal (and certainly not as shrill and repetitive) as JSore (since I don’t believe as he and most of your readers do that “the Joos run the world”), it does seem that all of the nations of the world are being presented with a rather stark and public binary choice at the moment: Would you prefer a single global center of power dictating all social and political positions, or would you prefer the world broken up into several smaller regional blocks of power? That’s it, no social justice, eco-utopian visions or possibilities — just one simple question is being put to the elites of the world: one single capo di tutti capi or several competing capos. And, by its nature, the polarized essence of this proposition precludes the possibility of “non-aligned” nations: “Well, gee, we here in Utopiastan don’t really care whether our marching orders come from the Uncle Sam across the lake or MacKinderville down the road.” The new boss might be as bad as the old boss, but it won’t be the same. The history of the world system since the fall of the Soviet Union should have some instructive lessons for us in this regard.
Therefore, I maintain that it is impossible to view what is going on in the Middle East as separate from that question. Of course, the foot soldiers in the battle are completely ignorant of even the existence of the proposition; but not so the powers who fund, train, arm and direct these forces. For them — the hidden directors behind the curtains, the Jordans, Turkeys and Qatars, among others, of this world — the refrain “Which side are you on” pounds in their brains every conscious moment, for the blandishments, threats, and stakes keep mounting. The train, which stopped for a while at the wreckage of Francis Fukuyama station, is now moving again, and picking up speed — and, as we all know, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Running a public blog, and putting your political views up to scrutiny every day for years is hard. Lord knows that I am not capable of it, and if I had compiled such a public account of my opinions we could all enjoy some merry moments laughing over some of the boner calls I would have made. Nevertheless, calling for US involvement in the form of bombing attacks on ISIS in the heart of the Middle East is the single worst call you have made in the history of Moon, to my mind.
Sorry to be so rough on you here, my longtime friend.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 11 2014 0:56 utc | 78
guest77 is correct, you are way off base here, b. Less emotion and more analysis is called for.
The “moderate rebels” Washington has been searching for for years are a unicorn.
These are the type of throwaway lines in your analyses that I always have the most trouble with. What evidence is there that the West ever wanted a moderate solution? — historically, they have always used the most extreme forces for destabilization purposes. Focus upon what they do, not upon what they say — but we all know that by now.
You have not accounted for where this new huge boogieman army suddenly came from. Just a month or two ago, we were told that the zombie forces were exhausted, in retreat, losing 100 or more men a day, and that their mobilizable strength was falling to below 60k and their lines of supply threatened, if not outright cut. Now suddenly they are able to take over, control, and administer “an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark.” (Gee, I wonder if the R2P crowd will call for civility, free doughnuts, and prompt elections, and if not, than why not? Samantha, Victoria, HRW, and assorted friends, its time to step up to the plate here; your faces and logos are on the global jumbotron.) More seriously, what is the implication of this oversight for the reporters of this world? How sustainable is this purported accomplishment? And, is it real?
Pat Lang breathlessly frets that
“Today I am told that DoD has decided that the IS force is the most capable non-Israeli army in the ME.”
Told by whom? Aside from some major confusion over the DoD’s cognitive dissonance in comparing ISIS with the ever-diminishing assessments of the Israeli Army (as opposed to air force), who can’t defeat — and are afraid to directly confront — a tiny impoverished ghetto, one wonders if that assessment includes the army of a technologically advanced nation of some 80 million people, namely Iran. It barely merits mentioning that we have commented rather acidly upon the utility of US intelligence previously; perhaps the esteemed Colonel has missed these appraisals. If not, I have Ray McGovern’s email to share with him. (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, oddly enough, does not appear to have an email or website.)
This hysterical apocalyptic media buildup and resultant call to action has all the hallmarks of what is popularly referred to by the misnomer, the “Hegalian Dialectic.” Problem, Reaction, Solution. Create a problem, engineer the outrage, and swoop in with what you wanted to do in the first place, but couldn’t because of public opinion.
(For those new to this concept, David Icke, despite his bizarre theories of how the world works which I do not hold to or defend, is an excellent public speaker and has several very good expositions of this process on youtube. If this concept is new to you, it can take a while to sink in. But it is used by those in power to subvert the pubic will all over the world. Indeed, one might say that it is the oldest trick in the historical handbook of governance. And there is no need to get lost in the fog of conspiracy theorizing surrounding every false flag in the world to apprehend how the concept works. The process is as simple and direct as, lower taxes, announce a financial “cliff,” and propose privatizing valuable public assets as the only solution: This pattern — or more accurately, model — was used in the fall of the Soviet Union, and it is used in the calls to break public unions in cities across America and privatize Detroit’s priceless art collection today. There is nothing mysterious about the process and it is not “Conspiracy Theorizing.”)
In this case, the adherence to the P-R-S model is glaringly obvious: Create an out of control marauding army, publicize some horrifying atrocities on “social” media, and intervene against public will with the long term goal of toppling the two governments resistant to Western hegemony: Syria and Iraq, thereby setting up a base of operations to take on the next task: Iran.
Patrick Cockburn, by the way, is the perfect example of an apple that fell far from the tree, and continues to roll further down the hill with the passage of time. (Since this point is rather perpendicular to the thrust of my argument, I will leave my observation there for the present, but I invite readers to go back over the past ten years of archives and compare his assessments, analyses, and predictions with what has actually occurred and why.)
More to the point:
*Did those six million people (where have I heard that phrase before?) suddenly convert to Takfiri views, or are they being suppressed by terror, and if so, how sustainable is that?
*Where are these endless hordes being trained? Their leadership appears to have an almost unlimited set of highly advanced capabilities.
*What is their ultimate number?
*Who has trained them in the use of advanced weapons, cutting edge 4th generation military planning, civil governance, large scale provisioning and quartermastering, advance weapon maintainence and repair, graphic design and media outreach (including access to the western military/social media nexus for posting their choreographed atrocities), etc.?
*Where do the supply lines come from?
*Who is purchasing the oil?
*What pipeline/transportation systems are conveying the oil?
*Who is providing financial services on the international market; remember, the innocent indignant protestors that the monster Gaddaffi was evilly plotting to kill had somehow figured out the intricacies of setting up international oil banks recognized by the West from their simple mud and brick residences in Bengazi; this new horde appears equally savvy.
*An alliance of Baathist generals (the cards that mysteriously fell out of Bush’s “deck of cards?”) with Takfiri monsters sounds most improbable on the surface. What does each side of the alliance think will happen to the other side should they prevail? And who was their matchmaker? Perhaps the true leadership, and their patrons, prefer to keep allegiances more occult.
That is to say, who exactly are their patrons, who sustains their interactions with the outside world, and what are their goals? To say that ISIS exists off of the revenue from oil sales (without the interaction of the outside world) is a prize-winning furphy — and an impossibility. To argue that their public intellectuals have crafted some sort of overwhelming mobilizing ideology, which like communism, is capable of inspiring the masses in their aspirations for a better and more stable life into an historically unprecedented and suicidal action, is plainly ludicrous. To argue that ISIS’s strength has appeared spontaneously, ex nihilo, or de novo is to consciously ignore the Pasteurs of political analysis at the indulgence of the bewailing Cassandras. And the pathetic liberal plaint, that what we have here is a “Frankenstein,” an experiment that unfortunately “got out of control,” is clearly nonsense to anyone attempting to answer the few detailed questions (and to those knowledgeable in these affairs, there are many, many more) as to who their benefactors are, right now, TODAY, not when the well-meaning but accident-prone doctor first entered his laboratory. It is to deny how complex of an undertaking toppling two — admittedly shaky and destabilized — countries really is, and how much knowledge, management and co-ordination is involved in such a task. If I cannot get a better political analysis of who is behind the celebrity-like phenomenon of ISIS, then I am wasting my time in political discourse, which might be more profitably employed in taking up wildcrafting, or in re-watching the Bugs Bunny cartoons of my childhood.
Finally, your recommendations beg the six million dollar question: when did aerial bombing by a superpower ever make anything better for the people involved in a conflict? Dresden, or Tokyo perhaps? If Howard Zinn or Kurt Vonnegut were still around, I’m sure they could tell us.
Moreover, b, your oversight in failing to connect current events in the Middle East with global geopolitical developments is most problematic. For surely, these utterly sudden and extreme events do not occur in a vacuum. The Western alliance of global institutions, and lock-step financial, economic, scientific, and social policies, and singular media propaganda system as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, the so-called “Washington Consensus,” the austerity control system, is under global assault at this very moment. And the rulers of the world who most benefit from current arrangements are fighting back with everything they have — every dirty trick and scheme, every bought and compromised politician and “celebrity,” every fake opposition activist and public intellectual called to task, every possible destabilization and false flag, everything — they are throwing their entire playbook up in the hope that something will stick to the ever more assaulted wall of human social order. They have become the very personification of what Pepe Escobar calls, “The Empire of Chaos.” US and European advisors and operatives have been deployed on the very border of a nuclear-armed and now universally demonized Russia, with, according to Russian politician Evgeny Fedorov, a destabilization of that country planned for the fall. The global fever pitch and danger level has never been higher, and numerous prominent and experienced voices like Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts, are warning us of this threat, and the madness of the brinksmanship of our leaders of “the free (our way or bust) world.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the US development of the atomic bomb, once quoted from the Bhagavad Gita in an interview: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — today, that vision is a perfect representation of the dying order of the “End of History.” The only question is whether or not we passively follow Shiva down the road to uncreation. Not to be melodramatic, but that is how important the accurate analysis of events is today, how much is riding upon “getting it right”.
And really, not to be as monocausal (and certainly not as shrill and repetitive) as JSore (since I don’t believe as he and most of your readers do that “the Joos run the world”), it does seem that all of the nations of the world are being presented with a rather stark and public binary choice at the moment: Would you prefer a single global center of power dictating all social and political positions, or would you prefer the world broken up into several smaller regional blocks of power? That’s it, no social justice, eco-utopian visions or possibilities — just one simple question is being put to the elites of the world: one single capo di tutti capi or several competing capos. And, by its nature, the polarized essence of this proposition precludes the possibility of “non-aligned” nations: “Well, gee, we here in Utopiastan don’t really care whether our marching orders come from the Uncle Sam across the lake or MacKinderville down the road.” The new boss might be as bad as the old boss, but it won’t be the same. The history of the world system since the fall of the Soviet Union should have some instructive lessons for us in this regard.
Therefore, I maintain that it is impossible to view what is going on in the Middle East as separate from that question. Of course, the foot soldiers in the battle are completely ignorant of even the existence of the proposition; but not so the powers who fund, train, arm and direct these forces. For them — the hidden directors behind the curtains, the Jordans, Turkeys and Qatars, among others, of this world — the refrain “Which side are you on” pounds in their brains every conscious moment, for the blandishments, threats, and stakes keep mounting. The train, which stopped for a while at the wreckage of Francis Fukuyama station, is now moving again, and picking up speed — and, as we all know, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Running a public blog, and putting your political views up to scrutiny every day for years is hard. Lord knows that I am not capable of it, and if I had compiled such a public account of my opinions we could all enjoy some merry moments laughing over some of the boner calls I would have made. Nevertheless, calling for US involvement in the form of bombing attacks on ISIS in the heart of the Middle East is the single worst call you have made in the history of Moon, to my mind.
Sorry to be so rough on you here, my longtime friend.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 11 2014 1:08 utc | 81
1)
guest77 is correct, you are way off base here, b. Less emotion and more analysis is called for.
The “moderate rebels” Washington has been searching for for years are a unicorn.
These are the type of throwaway lines in your analyses that I always have the most trouble with. What evidence is there that the West ever wanted a moderate solution? — historically, they have always used the most extreme forces for destabilization purposes. Focus upon what they do, not upon what they say — but we all know that by now.
You have not accounted for where this new huge boogieman army suddenly came from. Just a month or two ago, we were told that the zombie forces were exhausted, in retreat, losing 100 or more men a day, and that their mobilizable strength was falling to below 60k and their lines of supply threatened, if not outright cut. Now suddenly they are able to take over, control, and administer “an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark.” (Gee, I wonder if the R2P crowd will call for civility, free doughnuts, and prompt elections, and if not, than why not? Samantha, Victoria, HRW, and assorted friends, its time to step up to the plate here; your faces and logos are on the global jumbotron.) More seriously, what is the implication of this oversight for the reporters of this world? How sustainable is this purported accomplishment? And, is it real?
Pat Lang breathlessly frets that
“Today I am told that DoD has decided that the IS force is the most capable non-Israeli army in the ME.”
Told by whom? Aside from some major confusion over the DoD’s cognitive dissonance in comparing ISIS with the ever-diminishing assessments of the Israeli Army (as opposed to air force), who can’t defeat — and are afraid to directly confront — a tiny impoverished ghetto, one wonders if that assessment includes the army of a technologically advanced nation of some 80 million people, namely Iran. It barely merits mentioning that we have commented rather acidly upon the utility of US intelligence previously; perhaps the esteemed Colonel has missed these appraisals. If not, I have Ray McGovern’s email to share with him. (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, oddly enough, does not appear to have an email or website.)
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 11 2014 1:14 utc | 83
4) malooga
Finally, your recommendations beg the six million dollar question: when did aerial bombing by a superpower ever make anything better for the people involved in a conflict? Dresden, or Tokyo perhaps? If Howard Zinn or Kurt Vonnegut were still around, I’m sure they could tell us.
Moreover, b, your oversight in failing to connect current events in the Middle East with global geopolitical developments is most problematic. For surely, these utterly sudden and extreme events do not occur in a vacuum. The Western alliance of global institutions, and lock-step financial, economic, scientific, and social policies, and singular media propaganda system as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, the so-called “Washington Consensus,” the austerity control system, is under global assault at this very moment. And the rulers of the world who most benefit from current arrangements are fighting back with everything they have — every dirty trick and scheme, every bought and compromised politician and “celebrity,” every fake opposition activist and public intellectual called to task, every possible destabilization and false flag, everything — they are throwing their entire playbook up in the hope that something will stick to the ever more assaulted wall of human social order. They have become the very personification of what Pepe Escobar calls, “The Empire of Chaos.” US and European advisors and operatives have been deployed on the very border of a nuclear-armed and now universally demonized Russia, with, according to Russian politician Evgeny Fedorov, a destabilization of that country planned for the fall. The global fever pitch and danger level has never been higher, and numerous prominent and experienced voices like Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts, are warning us of this threat, and the madness of the brinksmanship of our leaders of “the free (our way or bust) world.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the US development of the atomic bomb, once quoted from the Bhagavad Gita in an interview: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — today, that vision is a perfect representation of the dying order of the “End of History.” The only question is whether or not we passively follow Shiva down the road to uncreation. Not to be melodramatic, but that is how important the accurate analysis of events is today, how much is riding upon “getting it right”.
And really, not to be as monocausal (and certainly not as shrill and repetitive) as JSore (since I don’t believe as he and most of your readers do that “the Joos run the world”), it does seem that all of the nations of the world are being presented with a rather stark and public binary choice at the moment: Would you prefer a single global center of power dictating all social and political positions, or would you prefer the world broken up into several smaller regional blocks of power? That’s it, no social justice, eco-utopian visions or possibilities — just one simple question is being put to the elites of the world: one single capo di tutti capi or several competing capos. And, by its nature, the polarized essence of this proposition precludes the possibility of “non-aligned” nations: “Well, gee, we here in Utopiastan don’t really care whether our marching orders come from the Uncle Sam across the lake or MacKinderville down the road.” The new boss might be as bad as the old boss, but it won’t be the same. The history of the world system since the fall of the Soviet Union should have some instructive lessons for us in this regard.
Therefore, I maintain that it is impossible to view what is going on in the Middle East as separate from that question. Of course, the foot soldiers in the battle are completely ignorant of even the existence of the proposition; but not so the powers who fund, train, arm and direct these forces. For them — the hidden directors behind the curtains, the Jordans, Turkeys and Qatars, among others, of this world — the refrain “Which side are you on” pounds in their brains every conscious moment, for the blandishments, threats, and stakes keep mounting. The train, which stopped for a while at the wreckage of Francis Fukuyama station, is now moving again, and picking up speed — and, as we all know, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Running a public blog, and putting your political views up to scrutiny every day for years is hard. Lord knows that I am not capable of it, and if I had compiled such a public account of my opinions we could all enjoy some merry moments laughing over some of the boner calls I would have made. Nevertheless, calling for US involvement in the form of bombing attacks on ISIS in the heart of the Middle East is the single worst call you have made in the history of Moon, to my mind.
Sorry to be so rough on you here, my longtime friend.
Posted by: test | Aug 11 2014 2:30 utc | 91
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