Mosul falls to Islamist

[FedRebel]

I guess this means that we all get to invade again in another few years to reliberate the Iraqi people.

..and play for keeps this time.

Leaving...more to the point announcing that we plan to leave ultimately caused this problem.

The insurgents generally kept up their actions because when we did honor our promise they could claim "victory" gain support and start carving out their own Empire. If we keep delaying our planned departure it only emboldens those groups and they grow all the faster. The cherry on top is forging a ramshackle "government" to cover our departure, the new "government" is too weak to deal with the emboldened insurgents circling like starving sharks...and boom we have the Hell Iraq has become.

I'm not saying "Team America F*ck Yeah!" should've conquered in '03, on the contrary through a conquerors eye, Iraq's bad real estate (more trouble than it's worth due to the powder keg demographics, etc.)

Wars of "Liberation" are a fools errand.

[Metahive]

No, what caused the problem was invading the gorram' country in the first place and then fumbling the subsequent occupation and rebuilding process with gusto. Disbanding the army, occupying with two few troops and relying on mercenaries, setting up "democracy" without any care for the sharp ethnic and religious divides present in the country and then resorting to just bribing the people into keeping the peace as long as you were there (the "surges").

Getting your troops out was the only clever decision made. Or did you think US troops could have stayed there forever to clamp down on popular movements? Learned nothing from the Viet Nam fiasco I see.

[Grumman]

Leaving...more to the point announcing that we plan to leave ultimately caused this problem.

Keeping it secret was not an option. Even assuming it was physically possible to withdraw from the country without telegraphing our intentions, doing so would have left the Iraqi government in confusion - likely long enough for that weakness to be exploited.

[Purple]

I get the feeling it would have been better to have just left Saddam in power. Much less trouble that way all round.

[Thanas]

Much less suffering for the Iraqi people as well (especially for the women).

[madd0ct0r]

the kurds I work with would probably disagree.

[Thanas]

the kurds I work with would probably disagree.

Sure, they are the true victors of the war. Everybody else lost and is still losing.

[Thanas]

This is an interesting article from Spiegel:

A country Implodes: ISIS pushes Iraq to the brink

The terror group ISIS has occupied vast portions of Syria and Iraq in the hopes of establishing a caliphate. The jihadists' success lays bare Iraq's disintegration and could ignite yet another civil war between Shiites and Sunnis in the country.

Masoud Ali, a tall, friendly man with a beard and green eyes, was a taxi driver in Mosul until a few days ago. He likes the desert, and he loves his wife and his yellow Nissan. He never paid much attention to politics until now. "Inshallah," he says. Whatever happens is God's will. But then fighters with the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," or ISIS, overran the city of two million.

An evening curfew has been in force in Mosul since last Monday, says Ali. He and his family heard gunshots near their apartment on Tuesday, and when Ali looked outside, he saw a dead body lying on the street. Then the rumors began. "They've occupied all government buildings and the airport," said a friend. "The power station and the water works, too," a neighbor added. There were television reports of banks being robbed, the release of thousands of prisoners and the confiscation of oil wells. A day later, Masoud Ali loaded his family into his car and stepped on the gas. As they drove away, they could see police uniforms and abandoned military vehicles in the ditch. Government troops, most of them Sunnis, had surrendered to the Sunni ISIS fighters.

Ali, like most residents of Mosul, is also a Sunni. He had heard the mayor calling for the citizens of Mosul to defend themselves against ISIS. "But why should I have defended myself?" he asks. "For the Shiite government? For Prime Minister Maliki, who oppresses the Sunnis?" He shakes his head. "The conflict has escalated because people in Iraq don't like the government anymore."

Now Ali is standing in a tent outside the city of Erbil in the country's Kurdish north, Iraq's newest refugee camp. It's time for Friday prayer, but instead of resting his forehead on the ground to pray, he presses it against the forehead of a child. His four-month-old son Mohammed is lying on a tarp, surrounded by cans of powdered milk, fresh cucumbers and plastic water bottles. He is crying because he has a fever.

There wasn't even enough time to pack a suitcase, says Ali. "We left in a panic. We just wanted to get out." He fans his son's head with a scarf and blows air across his nose, hoping to provide some relief from the unrelenting desert heat. He keeps rocking his child back and forth, as if to shake off the experiences of the last few days.

New refugees arrive everyday, with some coming on foot. On their way in, they pass only a short distance from Ali's tent. Cars are lined up for miles at the Chasar checkpoint, a one-hour drive from Mosul on the road to Erbil. Dust rises between the wheels and thousands of plastic bottles and bags litter the ground. Up to 800,000 people have already left Mosul, with about half coming to Erbil Province. They feel safe there, in territory controlled by the Kurdish regional government.

A New Civil War

These days Erbil is one of the few cities north of Baghdad where calm prevails. The Kurdish regional government has an estimated 200,000 men, known as Peshmerga, and they are the best-trained combat force in Iraq. They are also the only force in the country that has been able to slow down the jihadists. The Peshmerga also secure borders, cities and oil wells around Kirkuk against the advancing Islamists, as well as defending the Kurdish population and its interests.

More than a decade after the American invasion, Iraq is facing the prospect of a new civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. In contrast to 2006 and 2007, when fighting between the two religious groups claimed thousands of lives, the Americans are no longer there to intervene though Washington has, in recent days, beefed up its presence in the Persian Gulf and dozens of troops are now in Baghdad to defend the US Embassy there.

The advance of the ISIS forces is not the reason for the country's collapse, but rather a consequence of it. With the capture of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, the Sunni Islamist army, which fought and gained strength inthe Syrian civil war, has achieved its greatest success to date. From Mosul, it continued to advance southward and on Tuesday, ISIS forces advanced to Baquba, only 60 kilometers (37 miles) from Baghdad, before retreating.

Within a short period of time, ISIS has managed to unseat Al-Qaida as the world's most vicious terrorist group. It hasn't launched any attacks in the West yet. Instead, it aims to establish a 7th-century style caliphate in the Middle East. The organization, comprised of up to 15,000 fighters, including many young Europeans, is still a long way from being a state. Nevertheless, it now controls a cross-border region the size of Jordan.

ISIS's advance into Iraq didn't come as a surprise. The offensive has apparently been in the works for more than a year and the extremists captured the Iraqi city of Fallujah in January. In Mosul, they have been exacting a "jihad tax" from the population for months in addition to committing political murders and suicide bombings.

ISIS's rapid success notwithstanding, the force which occupied Mosul was likely no more than 1,000 soldiers strong. Potentially only a few hundred continued southwards. There was no need for more. The Sunni minority, which controlled the country under former dictator Saddam Hussein, has increasingly been marginalized under the Shiite leadership of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in recent years. Indeed, most Sunnis are not standing in the way of the advancing ISIS fighters, allowing the radicals to do as they please. And militias of former Saddam supporters, such as the Naqshbandi group, are joining them. Last week, Sunni militias occupied Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, where they raised flags bearing a likeness of the former dictator.

Disbanding Military

The country's lack of cohesion prompted the Iraqi army to largely dissolve when faced with pressure, despite the roughly $25 billion (€18 billion) the United States spent to arm Iraqi troops and the years of training they received to fight Islamist extremists.

In Mosul, two divisions -- a total of 30,000 soldiers -- fled from the roughly 1,000 ISIS fighters, even though the army is vastly superior in terms of arms and equipment. In recent years, the Iraqi government has bought F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters and M-1 tanks. Tikrit saw two divisions disband as well.

The fact that Sunni soldiers and policemen are avoiding confrontation with the advancing ISIS is reflective of a population that tends to see the Islamists as the lesser evil when compared to the hated Shiite central government. Only primarily Shiite divisions have remained loyal to the Maliki government. But even they are increasingly merging with Shiite self-defense groups forming in Baghdad and southern Iraq.

On Friday, the highest-ranking Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called upon his fellow Shiites to take up arms against ISIS. More than 30,000 volunteers reported for duty in Baghdad to help defend the city.

There has been much talk in recent days about two men who have long been dead. In 1916 Mark Sykes of Britain and Frenchman François Georges-Picot divided the Middle East into French and British zones of influence. They drew the artificial borders between the countries of Iraq, Syria and Jordan, borders that, for the most part, still exist today. The dividing lines forced Kurds, Alawites, Sunnis and Shiites into shared nations.

This fragile order, which paid no attention to tribal history and religion, has long fueled regional conflict and is now in the process of crumbling. Indeed, the ISIS wishes to eliminate the borders as currently drawn. The group posted images online of members tearing down border fortifications between Syria and Iraq.

Ironically, it was the 2003 American invasion that destroyed the region's fragile balance. In Iraq, the Sunni minority of dictator Saddam Hussein, which constituted only 20 percent of the population, ruled the Shiite majority. When Saddam was overthrown, the Sunnis were deprived of their power. Similarly, in Syria, the dictatorship of the Alawite Assad clan suppressed tensions between the two religious groups for decades. Today's bloody civil war is the result.

Steady Influx of Radicals

Starting in 2013, ISIS developed a reputation in Syria for being the most brutal and successful jihadist group around. It is also known to be exceedingly secretive. In its "emirate," which stretches from the cities of Bab and Manbij in eastern Aleppo Province, through the provincial capital Al-Raqqa and into the eastern province of Hasaka, the fanatics ruled with terror and increasingly grotesque decrees. In Al-Raqqa, those who remain outdoors or who dare to keep their shops open are at risk of losing their lives. Hairdressers have been forced to blacken the images of women on packages of hair dye. Music is no longer allowed at weddings, and at livestock markets in the region, the genitals of goats and sheep must now be covered with rags.

ISIS has been spreading through northern Syria since last spring, drawing on a steady influx of radicals from Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Europe and even Indonesia. From the very beginning, the group appeared to be pursuing a dual strategy. On the one hand, there were the foreign jihadists, who came to the region lacking local knowledge or military experience -- and were sent to the slaughter at the front.

On the other hand, the apparently Iraqi leadership of ISIS planned its resistance in a professional way, forming small cells housed in secret apartments and recruiting Syrian informants, often former regime spies. Rebel commanders, local officials and other influential people were kidnapped or murdered, enabling ISIS to take control of entire towns and cities.

The Iraqi leadership of ISIS, which is said to consist mainly of former officers and officials from Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, is highly secretive, such that ordinary fighters are only familiar with their local "emir." In addition to the local units, a special force consisting of about 100 Iraqis and Tunisians was formed early on. The group is in charge of abductions, murders and attacks, and it acts independently. It is likely responsible for many targeted killings of rebel commanders outside the territory controlled by ISIS, as well as for kidnappings.

ISIS has no lack of weapons and munitions, partly the result of its recent captures of modern arms from the Iraqi military. But the group would also appear to have plenty of funding, even remains unclear where the money comes from. It profited for a time from the sale of oil to the Assad regime and it presumably received millions from Paris and Madrid in ransom payments for kidnapped French and Spanish citizens in April. It is also thought that the group might have secured as much as $420 million from the Iraqi central bank during its recent foray through Mosul.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi likewise remains in the shadows. He was allegedly born Awad Ibrahim al-Badri in the Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971, and he claims to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. He was reportedly a preacher during the US invasion and, for a brief period afterwards, participated in the Islamist uprising. In 2005, US troops detained Baghdadi and incarcerated him in the Bucca prison camp, where he reportedly came into contact with Al-Qaida. After his release, he joined the terrorist group and became the leader of its Iraqi offshoot in 2010. Three years later, he assumed control of ISIS and had a falling out with Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Americans have since placed a bounty of $10 million on his head.

Reign of Terror

It is unlikely that ISIS will be able to permanently occupy a large amount of territory in Iraq. The rules it imposes on the population are too draconian and its reign of terror too violent. Last week, its supporters boasted of having executed thousands of Shiite soldiers.

"But ISIS is the catalyst for the next civil war in Iraq," says Michael D. Weiss, a US expert on the Syrian terrorist group. Such a conflict could ultimately result in the current territory of Syria and Iraq being divided into a Kurdish, a Sunni and a Shiite state.

There are, however, still Iraqis, like Abdul-Jabbar Ahmed Abdullah, who believe in the continued existence of their country. Abdullah is a political science professor in the Sunni stronghold of Baghdad and a respected analyst. Last week's escalation was "completely predictable," says Abdullah. Since the overthrow of Saddam 11 years ago, "all attempts to developed functioning institutions in Iraq have failed."

Abdullah holds Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responsible for the problems. He sees the premier as a religious zealot who is only interested in the dominance of his religious group and his own political survival.

Maliki's behavior, says Abdullah, is marked by a "deep mistrust of everything and everyone," from the Kurds in the north to his fellow Shiites in the south. He is deeply hostile to the Sunni bloc in the middle of the country, says Abdullah. Under Saddam, Maliki was ostracized as a member of the opposition, and he was forced to go into exile to save his life. The fact that he found refuge in Syria and Iran explains his close relationship with the mullahs in Tehran and his support for Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus.

His government aligned itself with the Americans when it seemed expedient. "Only Iraq's interests are important to us," Maliki said in a March interview with SPIEGEL in his sumptuous office in Baghdad. Maliki swept aside the accusation that he marginalizes the Sunnis with a wave of his hand. Conflict between religious groups is part of "a perfectly normal political process," he said. Besides, he added, each party had "received the share it earned based on its election performance."

The Symbolism of Mosul

When asked about US President Barack Obama's admonition, during Maliki's last visit to the White House in November 2013, that he seek reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites, the premier scratched his beard and made it clear that he was not taking instructions from the United States. "I already advocated national reconciliation before Obama even became president," Maliki said.

The capture of Mosul also has great symbolic meaning, because it marks the end of a 10-year development. In the years after the invasion, the Americans sought to turn Mosul into a model city, achieving calm there by virtue of free spending and a massive troop presence. The first free local elections in Iraqi history took place in Mosul in 2003 and 2004, organized by a then unknown US general, David Petraeus, who commanded 23,000 men in northern Iraq in early 2004. But then, in 2007, the occupying force was suddenly reduced from 9,000 to 3,000 troops, leading to the complete erosion of an already precarious security situation.

President Barack Obama, who came to office in 2008, had always felt that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and wanted to withdraw US troops as quickly as possible. Indeed, for the last two-and-a-half years, there hasn't been a substantial US military presence in the country at all. The withdrawal was widely as it was taking place, but now many experts are criticizing the move for having come too soon. In Washington, Republicans are accusing Obama of doing nothing to prevent Islamist advances in Iraq.

In fact, Obama could soon see himself forced to support the Iraqi government militarily. He said last week that his administration is considering all options but has ruled out the deployment of ground troops. But air attacks or the use of drones do not seem out of the question. On Friday evening, Obama announced that he could imagine providing military support as long as Maliki is willing to make political concessions to the Sunnis. "Ultimately it's up to Iraq as a sovereign nation to solve its problems," Obama said.

'We Will Die for Kurdistan'

Nevertheless, a strange coalition could emerge. Last week, Iran sent out feelers regarding a joint response with the US to the situation in Iraq and the two countries held brief talks on the issue on Monday. Their shared interest is clear: curbing Sunni extremism. Still, both sides said after the talks that military coordination was not in the offing. The US may also opt to support other Syrian rebel groups that are fighting ISIS, despite their misgivings.

Masoud Ali, the refugee in the camp outside Erbil, misses his city and wants to return to Mosul as soon as possible. "I want peace," he says, and yet he knows that peace will remain elusive for now. He doesn't trust ISIS, but he also fears an attack by government troops. He speculates that Maliki could use aircraft to bomb Mosul.

The Kurdish Peshmerga have built a base a few hundred meters from Ali's tent. They use the Kurdish flag as their symbol: red, white and green with a sun in the middle. Aras Muhammad is wearing the flag on the right sleeve of his camouflage uniform, along with sunglasses and a purple beret. He is carrying a Kalashnikov. "We will die for Kurdistan," he says. "A Peshmerga never thinks of himself, but only about protecting others. He doesn't run away. He is strong." The Peshmerga are sending fighters to Mosul to safely remove families from the city. They are also protecting the refugees outside Erbil.

During the day, water from a fountain sprays onto wooden benches lined up on the central square in Erbil, next to a bazaar where sticky sweets are sold. An old man with a deeply wrinkled face is sitting on one of the benches. He is furious. He doesn't want to tell us his profession or his name. All he wants to say is that the United States is to blame for his country's disintegration. He shouts his words and waves his cane in the air. "The Americans shouldn't have simply left," he shouts. "They brought my country to the breaking point."

[cosmicalstorm]

Another way to look at ISIS

OP-ED: Let the Islamists Have Their Caliphate—Then Bomb Them

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militant group has occupied a huge swath of northwestern Iraq and, it claims, executed more than a thousand Iraqi army troops its fighters captured.

ISIS says it wants to establish an Islamic caliphate in what is now Syria and Iraq. In the following op-ed, Franz Gayl, a U.S. Marine Corps science adviser, argues that maybe the world should let that happen.

We’ll offer a rebuttal of Gayl’s idea on June 17.

When civilized peoples confront savagery—like that of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria today—they’re always at an initial disadvantage, always surprised. Who expects barbarians in the modern day?

Moreover, the militants embed themselves in rational states. They blend in until they strike. They surround themselves with innocent civilians as human shields.

They make themselves hard for us to attack.

Nevertheless, we can still turn the tables on ISIS. In this, a geographically-defined extreme caliphate—which ISIS claims is its goal—may be just what we need.

It would greatly simplify our targeting challenge.

The non-state status of terrorists and militants has generally been problematic. They are nowhere and everywhere. So we end up fighting messy counterinsurgencies and a long war on terrorism. We also accept debilitating restrictions on where and how we can attack.

We have seen political fanatics like ISIS before. These extremists are merely new manifestations of Nazi and Japanese imperialists—who are essentially their psychological analogs. The common hallmark of these thug ideologies? Arrogance.

They can’t imagine that the very thing they want … is also their greatest weakness.

Our major disadvantage today is that our enemy lacks a geographical home. This has prevented us from targeting these barbarians and their sympathetic and supportive families and communities.

A new caliphate would mitigate this disadvantage. A hardline Islamic state would reflect the basic characteristics of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, which we managed to defeat by conventional means.

It would include cities and villages that we can identify on a map. It would have infrastructure that we can easily destroy. It will also feature ideological purity, helping to ease the moral dilemma of our own massive attack on the state. Everyone in the caliphate would be a combatant or the combatants’ direct supporter.

Our enemy would be concentrated … and eminently bomb-able.

Extremists in this century deserve no more humane consideration than did the radicalized German and Japanese empires of the last one. Our demand for unconditional surrender then meant the enemy had to submit or die.

Our strategy was effective. The world is better off for it.

The cancer of extremism threatens most modern states—Russia, China, most Arab countries … nearly everyone. Whatever our differences, we all are civilized and rational states facing an existential threat.

And I must point out that the militants’ sadistic bloodlust has nothing to do with Islam. Such attitudes and behavior are the antithesis of Islam and all other revealed scripture.

The Sunni-Shia rift occurred after the Prophet Muhammad’s death—and he would have condemned indiscriminate cruelty like ISIS’ as arrogance and disbelief. He would have turned his face from such self-idolizing hypocrites, frauds who reject true belief as they come to see themselves as god-like.

So let’s accept the extremists’ desire for a caliphate. It’s for just such geographically-concentrated, unrelenting and un-reformable aggressors that we developed strategic air power.

Let them have a caliphate. And then let’s bomb it.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/op-ed- ... 3e2bdace74

[Broomstick]

I've long suspected that there is a faction in the US government that wants this sort of disorder and chaos in the Middle East, and has since the oil embargo of the 1970's. During the embargo there was deep, deep resentment at how much control OPEC had over a resource seen as essential. Strong governance and peace in the Middle East means that the US has to negotiate just like everyone else for oil.

That doesn't mean a particular president, or a particular administration, holds that position just that I don't think the US government sees true stability in the Middle East as in the interests of the US, unless the US is in control. Thing is, the American people aren't interested in occupying and colonizing another part of the world right now, or paying the price in blood and treasure that would require in order to do the job "properly". The effort is half-assed so the results are half-assed.

But that speculation aside, it seems to me we were better off with Saddam in charge in Iraq. Sure, the guy was despicable and his sons probably worse, but people were able to exist and make a living under his regime. All we've really done over the past decade is get a fuckton of people killed and lot of shit destroyed.

I really don't see how the US gets out of this. Oh, sure, we could just up and leave, but the result would be a bloodbath.

I don't know - maybe letting the artificial borders fracture and the place reform under more sensible alliances would lead to long term stability, or at least more stability that there is at present. I just don't see that happening peacefully, or without protests by governments fearing their nations would fracture next.

[madd0ct0r]

@comicalstorm

yeah, becuase that's just what taxi drivers in Mosul need, an area the size of Jordan being bombed back to the stone age. Fucking idiot clearly hasn't read up on the American wars in Indochina.

[Broomstick]

I read that more that they just wanted to go home, as in, back to how things used to be, and wasn't really thinking about all the ramifications.

[Purple]

@comicalstorm

yeah, becuase that's just what taxi drivers in Mosul need, an area the size of Jordan being bombed back to the stone age. Fucking idiot clearly hasn't read up on the American wars in Indochina.

Well to be fair. If america was allowed to completely exterminate all life in the region that would by relation help limit ISIL recruitment options.

[madd0ct0r]

for clarification: the fucking idiot is the person who wrote the article that comicalstorm quoted, not the poor taxi driver.

@purple. they've tried that before. how many kilotonnes of explosive were dropped on north korea, cambodia and vietnam?

[Purple]

for clarification: the fucking idiot is the person who wrote the article that comicalstorm quoted, not the poor taxi driver.

@purple. they've tried that before. how many kilotonnes of explosive were dropped on north korea, cambodia and vietnam?

I wasn't saying it's a smart or practical thing to do. Just that technically speaking if they did pull it off the logic is sound.

[cosmicalstorm]

Another one, pragmatic.

Shrugging at the Abyss

In Ramadi, protesters raised black jihadi flags, representing the extremist Al Qaeda offshoot that had dominated the city during the American occupation. “We are a group called Al Qaeda!” a man shouted from a stage in the protesters’ camp. “We will cut off heads and bring justice!” The crowd cheered.
...
She looked at me with tired eyes. “We are going into—how do you say it?” she said.

“The abyss?” a colleague offered.

“Yes—the abyss,” Edwar said. “Yes, yes, yes.”

And so, after so much by so many - that is where we find ourselves in mid-2014 in Iraq.

For this post at least, let's not look back at where we were, what was, and would-could have been - no - let's look at where we are. Facts on the ground have changed, leadership has changed, and the mood of the American people is at a different place.

A few basics first:
1. The Obama Administration has no desire to engage the US military in any foreign entanglements of significant size and duration. This is not a pacifist Presidency - it is a disentanglement one. It will avoid, retreat, and turn away. It does not care to think long term, and indeed, the true believers are ideologically incapable of seeing any long term positive outcome from foreign use of American military power in a decisive manner. It is as foreign to them as a fish is to beat-box.
2. Even if we had a President who decided to lead, it is too late for all that. The American people will not follow. If there is another large scale attack on the USA. the American people will only have time for the most punitive of expeditions - one that is exceptionally nasty, brutish, and short. This Administration will not have its name - we are talking about Obama & Kerry mind you - associated with something so kinetic as this. What would they do? Hard to say, but I doubt anything on order of what the American people would stomach. As a result, a few drone strikes perhaps, combined with a good squirt of ink and a swoosh away.
3. No one wants to die for lines drawn on a map by Brits and French over a century ago, not any more. It is their nature.

What was once the Most Dangerous Course-Of-Action just a decade ago - one that thousands of Americans and her allies died to avoid - has now become the most likely COA. What is that? Regional sectarian conflict starting with an Iraqi civil war including direct Iranian intervention from the Levant, to the Gulf States, eastern Saudi Arabia, down through to the Bab-el-Mandeb - with a few ethnic conflicts thrown in for good measure as it probably grows beyond a pure Sunni-Shia war. For Iraq - the once laughable Biden option of breaking the nation in to three parts seems inevitable. It isn't that Biden was right; at the time he was wrong - it is just that the calculus and facts on the ground have changed. With time, even Biden can be right.


In summary - everything that is being done on the ground right now makes the project of a united Iraq only an excuse for civil war. There will be a war if you want united Iraq or to break it in to parts - perhaps we should let them work it out for themselves as nations have done for thousands of years.

Europe has been at relative peace for decades largely for two reasons - it fought itself out in the 20th Century, and after round two, there was a massive amount of ethnic cleansing to finish out the years of blood letting. After the major migrations in Central Europe, there have been minor ones here and there as the process of dis-aggregation continues.

There are no longer Sudeten Germans. Polish towns now have Ukrainian names, and so on. In 2003, Serbs represented 95% Srebrenica's population.

We tried modern methods in the Middle East to create peace, perhaps it is best to let the old ways work themselves out. It is, after all, a local solution. This is not a radical concept;

... there’s a very good chance that a Middle East that was more politically segregated by ethnicity and faith might become a more stable and harmonious region in the long run.

Such segregation is an underappreciated part of Europe’s 20th-century transformation into a continent at peace. As Jerry Muller argued in Foreign Affairs in 2008, the brutal ethnic cleansing and forced migrations that accompanied and followed the two world wars ensured that “for the most part, each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality,” which in turn sapped away some of the “ethnonational aspirations and aggression” that had contributed to imperialism, fascism and Hitler’s rise.

But this happened after the brutal ethnic cleansing that accompanied and followed two world wars. There’s no good reason to imagine that a redrawing of Middle Eastern borders could happen much more peacefully. Which is why American policy makers, quite sensibly, have preferred the problematic stability of current arrangements to the long-term promise of a Free Kurdistan or Baluchistan, a Greater Syria or Jordan, a Wahhabistan or Tripolitania.

If we do not have the desire to deploy hundreds of thousands of American men and women for force our will on a people who do not want it - then what can we do?

If this is our path - to let go - yet still try to spin things a desired way in the broadest sense, then here are some things to consider. Yes, it will cost blood, but it will be their blood by the barrel and ours by the thimble. It won't turn out perfect ... but when does it ever?

1. Kurds: Release the Kurdish people. Let them carve out their state in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. They deserve it, and will do more with it than anyone else. If they can take and hold Mosul, Kirkut, and Arbil from ISIS and afterwords kick all Arab Sunni out of the area as the Poles did with Germans in East Pomerania, then so be it. Let them draw their own lines. Let the Shia and Sunni of Iraq fight over the rest. If Iran moves in, so be it as well. It won't be long until the Arab v. Persian animosity breaks that in to bits once the holy cities are secure.
2. Israel: Let them do what they must. Anyone that even hints that the Golan is not part of Israel proper should be laughed at. They deserve defendable borders. The Palestinian Arabs have had decades to be helpful they are not. Which leads us to ...
3. Palestinians: They had their chance and they lost. After the bloodbath of the Great Sunni-Shia war, there will be plenty of places in Arab Muslim lands for them to live. If all Gaza is for them only a place to kill Jews from - then they don't deserve it. If the West Bank is just a Gaza-lite, then most of them need to be removed. Give them walking money and a map. There are approximately 4-million Palestinians in the Gaza and West Bank. Since WWII, about 1-million Jews were kicked out of Muslim countries, and even more Christians. They have found lives elsewhere, so can you. Heck, my ancestors were mostly kicked out of their nations of their birth ... so get on with it, you've got lots of company. If Sunni can do it to Shia, Arab to Kurd, Muslim to everyone - then the Jews can too.
4. Jordan: We should do what we can to help protect this nation that has tried more than others to survive and be left alone with bad neighbors. With few resources or holy sites, she might have a chance. As a logical place for expelled Palestinians to go, it may not survive the chaos. Sad. I like their king.
5. Afghanistan: If there is a Shia-Sunni war, it will come to AFG in spades. There you have Shia in the body of the persecuted Hazara. All bets off. Get out of the way and let them fight it out, again.
6. Refugees: Under no circumstances let tens of thousands of refugees from the Shia-Sunni war come to the USA. Help refugee camps in other nations - but keep them out of here. You want that war to come here? Bring them here.
7. Gulf States: Many, especially Kuwait and Bahrain, have significant Shia populations. Others like UAE and Qatar are mostly populated by foreign nationals. What happens when things go sideways? Who knows. Let them work it out.
8: Saudi Arabia: The oil rich parts of Saudi Arabia is also the home of the persecuted Shia tribes. Along with the Gulf States, don't expect it be be a solid anti-Persian block.

There are your eight ponderables. Ugly and nasty? Yes, but when the power that kept much of the post-WWII structure in place decides to retreat from its role - that is what happens.

You either are a global superpower that bends other to its will, or you are not. If not, then events will bend in different directions.

The above is bad enough? How can it get worse?
1. Suez Canal to Indus River: That should be the east and west boundaries of the major areas of the Sunni-Shia war. If it bleeds over either border, you can more than double the death toll - especially the Indus. That could quickly turn in to a Indo-Pak war ... one that in the stress of a broader conflict has a good chance to go nuclear. At that point, it just becomes a general war; Sunni-Shia was just the entering argument.
2. Central Asia: Start with a return to a fighting Chechnya and expand from there. From Turkmenistan to East Turkestan ... do they continue their slumber, or will a leader emerge to add them to the bearded army from Khurasan?
3. Turkey: Will they be happy with a Kurdish state? Will they try to move forces in? Will the Turkish Kurds decide to take advantage ... or more likely, will the Turks act thinking they may?

There are wildcards:
1. China: What will they do when Americans are not willing to expend blood and treasure to ensure the free flow of their oil at market prices?
2. Russia: While they move to nibble on the western fringes of the old Russian/Soviet Empire - what will they do if the Sunni-Shia chaos moves radicalized Islam further north?
3. India: See the Indus River. It isn't like they and Pakistan aren't ready for another round ... and with well over a hundred million Muslims inside their borders, the tinder is there is the heat from outside is enough to light it off.

Where we are looking better:
1. Fracking: True, our larger economy would be significantly impacted from the global economic cratering that would result from such a war, but we have enough North American petroleum that we would not have to rely on the Middle East for fuel.
2. Not Europe: Europe does not have our resources, and has open border to a huge wave of people escaping the carnage such a war would unleash. The Western European nations are already stressed by the millions of non-productive and non-assimilated Muslims already in their nations - the younger generations radicalized and violent in ways their parents and grandparents never were. Add a few million with thousands already radicalized on the sectarian battlefields? 2nd and 3rd order effects for European politics could lose many of the demons that Continent has kept locked away.

Where we are weakest:
1. Economics: It didn't stop WWI, but our global economy would react in unknown ways to such a disruption to the Middle East. In nations that still have not recovered from 2008, there is little room to absorb impact.
2. Debt: The USA and most Western nations are so saddled with debt that even if they managed to find the political will to change course, there is not enough treasure and time to rebuild and reorient. Who would lend the money?
3. Political leadership: If I were wanting to smash and grab on a global scale - now is the time to do it. The USA has signaled weakness for years now - there is no reason to expect an Obama Administration to become a Bush43 or even Truman any time soon. Each crisis emphasizes this fact. Europe is no better, and there are no other players on the globe with the appetite, ability, or institutional culture to do anything but try to keep the beast from breaking in their own front door.

There you go. One morning's pondering on where this Sunni-Shia conflict from Syria and Iraq can potentially bring us.

The above is the Miss Mary Darkcloud thinking. What is the best case? Best case, Syria and Iraq contain their conflicts to their own borders. Besides a few special operations forces in the holy cities in southern Iraq, the Iranians stick to being a meddler. The Shia in the Gulf Stated, Saudi Arabia, and other places follow old habits and do nothing more than march now and then - place a small bomb here and there. Turkey demurs as is her nature; Russia gets lucky; China keeps thinking about the Pacific and growing old.

The USA? We manage to get through this all without getting too many people killed.

All we sacrificed for last decade? That milk was spilled and what should have been won't be. It is what the American people wanted. It is what we got. As we old-line Southerners can tell you - it is no good to go around whistling Dixie.

http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.se/2014/0 ... abyss.html

[madd0ct0r]

where are you finding these fucking lunatics from?
in the same blogpost the guy tries to claim Europe has got rid off all of it's ethinic minorities AND that it has millions of un-assimalted 'muslims' living in it.
I've seen better fucking anaylsis of a risk game.

[Elheru Aran]

I don't think I've seen a more repugnant article upon foreign politics in a while.

Would letting the various ethnic, religious and racial factions fight themselves to a standstill solve the problem? In a hyper-pragmatic, essentially sociopathic look at the situation, long term, yes, it would.

However I don't think anybody with a shred of decency could argue that a continual state of war in the Middle East for the next, oh, twenty or thirty years, would be a good thing. I don't think anybody who takes their ethics seriously would be able to support what would realistically amount to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The difficulty is deciding how much other nations can and should intervene in the matter in order to return peace to the region and preserve it, if the incumbent powers are incapable of asserting their control.

(EDIT) Among other things which I am currently not caffeinated enough to think of...

[cosmicalstorm]

The War Nerds take on ISIS

http://pando.com/2014/06/16/the-war-ner ... a-i-s-i-s/

As the Scriptures remind us, “Do not believe the hype.” The hype of the moment is ISIS, the Sunni militia that just drove the so-called Iraqi Army out of Mosul, Tikrit, and other Iraqi cities.

This is one of those dramatic military reverses that mean a lot less than meets the eye. The “Iraqi Army” routed by ISIS wasn’t really a national army, and ISIS isn’t really a dominant military force. It was able to occupy those cities because they were vacuums, abandoned by a weak, sectarian force. Moving into vacuums like this is what ISIS is good at. And that’s the only thing ISIS is good at.

ISIS is a sectarian Sunni militia—that’s all. A big one, as militias go, with something like 10,000 fighters. Most of them are Iraqi, a few are Syrian, and a few hundred are those famous “European jihadis” who draw press attention out of all relation to their negligible combat value. The real strength of ISIS comes from its Chechen fighters, up to a thousand of them. A thousand Chechens is a serious force, and a terrifying one if they’re bearing down on your neighborhood. Chechens are the scariest fighters, pound-for-pound, in the world.

But we’re still talking about a conventional military force smaller than a division. That’s a real but very limited amount of combat power. What this means is that, no matter how many scare headlines you read, ISIS will never take Baghdad, let alone Shia cities to the south like Karbala. It won’t be able to dent the Kurds’ territory to the north, either. All it can do—all it has been doing, by moving into Sunni cities like Mosul and Tikrit—is to complete the partition of Iraq begun by our dear ex-president Bush in 2003. By crushing Saddam’s Sunni-led Iraq, the Americans made partition inevitable. In fact, Iraq has been partitioned ever since the invasion; it’s just been partitioned badly, into two parts instead of the natural three: the Kurdish north, and the remainder occupied by a weak sectarian Shia force going by the name of “The Iraqi Army.” The center of the country, the so-called “Sunni Triangle,” had no share in this partition and was under the inept, weak rule of the Shia army.

By occupying the Sunni cities, ISIS has simply made a more rational partition, adding a third part, putting the Sunni Triangle back under Sunni rule. The Shia troops who fled as soon as they heard that the ISIS was on the way seem to have anticipated that the Sunni would claim their own territory someday. That’s why they fled without giving even a pretense of battle.

So, Iraq is now partitioned on more natural, sensible lines, thanks to ISIS. It’s going to be a messy transition, as Iraqi transitions tend to be, with mass executions of collaborators like those already happening in Mosul and Tikrit.

But in the long run, ISIS has simply swept into a power vacuum, like it’s done from the start.

ISIS has always been good at generating scary stories about itself, like the notion that it was kicked out of Al Qaeda for being “too extreme.” It’s true that ISIS has a beef with Zawahiri, the nominal head of Al Qaeda, but the issue isn’t extremism. Their quarrel was a turf war about who would get the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria, and it just showed ISIS’s most pronounced characteristic in action: A real knack for moving in on vulnerable turf.

In fact, ISIS’s quarrel with Zawahiri was a lot like a corporate boardroom feud. It’s always worth remembering that Jihadis are just friggin’ people, and their disagreements tend to be about very ordinary organizational issues. Granted, it’s a little harder to see that when they solve those disagreements with public beheadings and overly-cinematic rituals, but at heart this is just standard human behavior—primates squabbling for rank and power, Game of Thrones with Islamic voiceover.

Even the name, “I.S.I.S.,” is the result of a series of policy disputes and turf wars. “I.S.I.S.” is an English-language acronym, standing for “The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams [Greater Syria].” You may have seen people insist on calling it “I.S.I.L.,” because they translate “al-Shams” as “the Levant,” the old-fashioned term for the Eastern Mediterranean shore. Arabs don’t use either of these acronyms; the Arabic acronym for the group is “Daash,” as in this headline describing the aftermath of I.S.I.S.’s conquest of Mosul: “Daash Executed 12 Imam [sic] who refused to pledge allegiance.”

The most important thing about this name is that it’s clear about policy—“Islamic State”—and very flexible about territory. The Islamic State is supposed to cover the whole world, so it doesn’t matter very much which chunk of turf it starts on. None of the borders of the Arab Middle East—Iraq, Syria, Jordan—mean much if you believe in a Caliphate that should encompass the whole Ummah, every believer in the world. So I.S.I.S. has always been vague about territory. It’s a fluid group, moving away from pressure and toward chaos, toward regions where authority is weak and there’s room to expand. Think of I.S.I.S. as something between a liquid and a gas, always striving to fill a void.

It started with a small group of Sunni militants who agreed, around the turn of the Millenium, to overthrow the monarchy in Jordan. You may remember a shadowy Scarlet Pimpernel figure called “Al Zarqawi,” who was built up into the Mister Big of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq by US public-relations mouthpieces. He was called “Al Zarqawi” because he came from the town of Zarqa, a town in Jordan founded by Chechen refugees who gave the peaceful Arabs an infusion of Chechen ferocity.

Zarqawi’s group didn’t do very well in Jordan. Jordan’s Bedouin security guys don’t play around, as the PLO found out in what came to be known as Black September.

By 2002, Zarqawi was in bad shape, on the run with a bullet in his leg. Things were looking bleak for Sunni Islamists all over the Middle East…until the Spring of 2003, when a couple of guys named Bush and Cheney gave them new life by invading Iraq, crushing Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Iraqi state, and pushing millions of Iraqi Sunni into armed insurgency.

Within a few months, insurgent groups formed in every Sunni neighborhood in Iraq. That’s how insurgencies begin, with the strongest, most charismatic guys in the neighborhood (let’s face it, Sunni insurgencies are male-dominated, and I’m not going to go bother with de-gendered pronouns here) rounding up their cousins, choosing a pious, identifiably Sunni name, and planning a first strike.

It’s a brutal learning curve for these groups. Some are penetrated and betrayed before they can do anything—somebody’s cousin wasn’t as trustworthy as they thought. Some are wiped out the first time they attack an army patrol, or lose the leaders who kept the group together. Some break up over trivial ego issues, and the loser informs on the winner. The death rate is appalling in this sped-up unnatural selection, and those who survive it are the ones who are willing to be flexible about territory, moving away from pressure, toward chaos, rather than fighting to the death.

Zarqawi’s career is a classic example of that fluidity. Even after jumping from Jordan to Iraq after the invasion, he didn’t move immediately to the Arab cities of the Sunni Triangle. He started with a Kurdish jihadi group, Ansar al-Islam, that was holed up in Halabja, a hill village a few miles from Suleimaniya, where I used to teach. When I was there in 2010, locals still boasted of the battle that drove Ansar al-Islam out of Halabja, killing most of the core membership.

Zarqawi survived that attack and landed in the Sunni Triangle, working with the usual alphabet soup of jihadi groups, which go through more name-changes than a band full of speed freaks. Some of these names, coming straight out of the gaudy tradition of Islamic rhetoric, really don’t translate very well—“The Oath of the Scented Ones” being a prime example.

Zarqawi’s group, one of many forming and bursting in the Sunni Triangle, went through several name changes before it finally settled on the no-nonsense title of “The Islamic State of Iraq,” or “I.S.I.” in the Autumn of 2006. By then, Zarqawi was dead, vaporized in a U.S. air strike in June 2006.

At the time, American reporters crowed over his death, going for the old “Mister Big” theory of insurgency that never fits the facts. Insurgent groups go through leaders like Spinal Tap went through drummers, and often the cull makes them stronger, since every new generation selects for the most ruthless, cunning survivor in the group. Eager martyr types die fast. Macho idiots die even faster. Only the most cautious, hard-bitten, businesslike jihadis survive long enough to move up to a leadership position.

It’s amazing how well combat selects for talent. Nothing rewards talent less than a peacetime army, and nothing rewards it faster than an army actually in combat. And irregular forces, which usually suffer something like a 10:1 casualty rate against conventional occupiers, go through a nightmare-quick selection process.

ISIS went through a lot of commanders before one stuck. He was a product of Islamic schools and US prison camps. He called himself Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, which means exactly nothing except that he’s claiming to be from Baghdad. He got out of prison in 2009 and walked into a leadership vacuum created by an airstrike which killed his predecessor—nothing like airstrikes to make room at the top—and oversaw ISIS’s move away from pressure once again, out of the cities toward the deserts of Anbar Province where Sunni sheikhs maintained strong clan networks. It wasn’t much, but it was a safe base, and that’s something any mixed militia/guerrilla force requires.

ISIS got its second great break when The Syrian Civil War exploded in 2012. They looked west, across the Anbar deserts, and saw a huge organizational opportunity opening up in Syria. Assad’s troops had abandoned most of Eastern Syria to focus on defending the Alawite heartland along the coast. That vacuum created an opportunity for lots of people: The Syrian Kurds, who occupied a tier along the Turkish border in the northeast; dozens of local mafia/resistance groups, who mobilized to profit from the wide-open borders; and the nucleus of ISIS, who saw a chance to set up a little emirate in this new no-man’s-land in the wastelands of eastern Syria, along the borders with Anbar.

That’s the key here: ISIS is a physics demonstration in guerrilla form. It began as a Jordanian insurgent group. Jordan was too tough to crack, and the group was under deadly strain until Bush and Cheney gave it new life with the 2003 invasion. It moved into Iraq, first to the north, in Kurdistan, and then, as the pressure grew up there, to the south and west, landing in Anbar. And when a new low-pressure system opened up to the west in Syria, ISIS flowed into it like a rain cloud—right along a natural pathway, the Euphrates River, which flows eastward into Anbar from Syria.

Syria should have been ISIS’s greatest moment, but things didn’t work out for it there. Not because it was “extreme,” but because it tried too hard to dominate the market against savvy local competition. Syria was a wide-open market for jihadi organizers, free to operate openly over most of the country after decades of effective repression. Money was pouring in from fat armchair jihadis in Saudi, Kuwait, and the Emirates—enough to pay jihadis a first-world salary of $1,500/mo. If you had a good line of patter and a few Quranic passages memorized, you could score some investment money. And military entrepreneurs poured in to take advantage of the opportunity; so many that by 2013, there were 1,200 different jihadi groups operating in Syria.

These baby militias popped up, prospered for a while, then vanished like Ethiopian restaurants. And out of the chaos, ISIS was ready to make its move, with a decade of guerrilla knowledge gained the hard way over the border in Iraq. ISI (soon to be ISIS) started well, grabbing the strategic town of ar-Raqqah in central Syria, upriver on the Euphrates from ISI’s home base in Anbar, over the border. ISI(S) now had a safe base of operations, a luxury it had never experienced before.

ISI(S) felt entitled to lead the jihad. Syria, Iraq—what was the difference? Those were fake borders anyway (which is sort of true, actually). The Sunni on the Syrian side were the natural allies of the Sunni in Anbar, and ISI(S) had been leading them in Anbar for years.

So Abu Bakr started asserting himself a little in Syria. A little too much, in fact. Jihad may be a universal, but politics, as they say, is always local—and the locals weren’t happy with the foreign fighters telling them how to do their war. It wasn’t a matter of being more “extreme,” or more “Islamist.” In fact, every single Sunni militia in Syria is “Islamist.” There are no secularists in Syria, at least none who’ll admit it. It ain’t a healthy thing to admit. All 1,200 resistance groups are “extreme” and “Islamist.” There’s not much point in being a friggin’ jihadi if you don’t believe in jihad.

The issue was power and precedence. Who owned the resistance? Of course, there were front groups like the “Free Syrian Army” (pause for laughter), set up to convince the West to give up some serious weaponry by playing at being “moderate.” But how many divisions did the FSA ever have? None, really—a few officers who’d defected from Assad’s army, but very few fighters willing to die for the cause.

There were only two real claimants, ISI and Jabhat al-Nusra, and both were as extreme and Islamist as anyone could ask. JaN had deeper roots in Syria, but ISI had been bleeding for jihad for ten long years, and Abu Bakr felt entitled by that decade of combat to step in as emir of the Syrian operation. Like a good CEO, he moved west to take over the new, expanding Syrian operation, and changed the firm’s name from ISI to ISIS to reflect the new Syrian focus.

But when you have 1,200 different factions to deal with, you have at least 1,200 egos to massage, and every damn one of them has a few dozen, or a few hundred, men ready to kill, and die, at his command. These nay-sayers were not in the mood to let some Iraqi interloper take over the Syrian revolution, and insisted on localizing what ISIS saw as the inherently universal mandate of jihad. The local/universal tension is deep in Islam, which borrowed Christianity’s universalizing mandate. In theory, a Chechen who knows the Quran is as entitled to tell a Syrian what to do as anyone else. In practice, he’s a jerk, and if he tells you to do things a different way than your family has done them for generations, you don’t care how many verses he can quote at you. You’re pissed off.

ISIS’s Syrian forces were full of loudmouthed young Islamic pedants, all heavily armed, and all eager to tell the locals how to live. It didn’t go over very well. It wasn’t about “extremism” as much as “localism.” ISIS was eventually forced out of Aleppo in favor of Jabhat al Nusra and the Islamic Front—both every bit as extreme as ISIS, but with more local recruits who didn’t rub everybody the wrong way quite as much. Zawahiri chimed in from his hiding place in Pakistan to scold ISIS, saying in typically florid jihadi lingo something that amounted to “You’re gonna screw us up in Syria just like you and Zarqawi did in Iraq!” His verdict was that ISIS should move east to Iraq, and Jabhat al Nusra should be Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria.

Abu Bakr did not take kindly to this sort of provincialism. When you’ve been fighting for ten years, and seen pretty much everybody you care about killed, often in fairly gruesome ways, you don’t really want to hear a lot of noise about how local sensibilities must be respected, and corporate HQ back in the mountains of Pakistan must be obeyed.

ISIS replied with a program of assassinations directed at dissenting jihadis, starting in January 2014. When they killed al-Suri (“The Syrian”), Zawahiri’s envoy sent to settle the dispute, in February 2014, it was flat-out war between ISIS and every other faction in Syria. More than 2,000 casualties later, that feud is still simmering.

But as the pressure ramped up in Syria, a new low-pressure area was opening up to the east in Iraq. Since the Americans left Iraq at the end of 2011, ISIS had been picking away at their Shia replacements, always testing, looking for weakness. And they found plenty of it. In July 2013 they broke into Abu Ghraib prison—yes, THAT Abu Ghraib—and broke out hundreds of their comrades who were fed back into the war against the Shia in Iraq. The Shia security services were showing weakness, and it doesn’t take long in the gigantic maximum-security institution we call Iraq for your fellow inmates to smell weakness and jump you.

All ISIS had to do was tilt to the east, along the axis of the Euphrates River. This river defines the territory of the Sunni insurgency. It starts in Syria, passes through ar-Raqqah, ISIS’s HQ in Syria, and crosses into Iraq, passing through ISIS strongholds like Ramadi and Fallujah before veering south toward the Gulf. The Euphrates defines the insurgency, not because ISIS fighters actually need it to travel but because, before the 20th century, settlement was only possible along its banks, so the Sunni Arabs built their towns along the river.

And at the beginning of 2014, ISIS, facing a tough fight from angry jihadi rivals in Syria, simply headed downstream, along the Euphrates, back to the area of weakness it had smelled in Iraq. Think of the Euphrates as a see-saw; when pressure on the western end pushed it up, ISIS just slid down to the other end of the plank, the city of Fallujah. ISIS took control of Fallujah at the beginning of the year 2014.

That wasn’t such a shock. Fallujah has always been a combative Sunni city, as the US military discovered a couple of times during the US occupation. Many irregular forces grab cities for short periods as a show of strength, then retreat when the regular army moves in. But that didn’t happen in Fallujah, and that was very bad news for Maliki and the Shia coalition that rules Iraq (more or less). Their expensive, American-trained army was unable to take back Fallujah, which is still in ISIS’s hands.

That was showing weakness on a Vegas-size billboard, and other Sunni strongholds got the message very quickly, especially Mosul, where Saddam’s officer corps has been simmering since it was dismissed with prejudice by the US occupiers. Mosul fell to ISIS in the second week of June, 2014.

ISIS now controls most of Anbar as well as a huge chunk of eastern and central Syria. It’s a de facto Sunni state, straddling the Syria/Iraq border between Kurdish and Shia territory.

And that’s as far as it will go. ISIS has done well to take back its natural constituency, the Sunni center of Iraq. It will push against the Shia to the south, but they’ll fight much better on their own turf. And if it has any sense, it won’t even try to push against the Persh Merga. I used to see the Pesh Merga every day, and they ain’t nobody to mess with.

So out of all this chaos and blood comes something like a vindication of the laws of physics, as expressed in ethnic turf wars. But with one modification of those laws: Some things really don’t abhor a vacuum, especially transnational ethnic militias. They love a vacuum more than Alice did on the Brady Bunch.

[K. A. Pital]

That would be a valid argument if any actor - state or otherwise - had offered and paid billions for the destruction of artifacts.

In some ways the destruction pays off if the motive is economical. New wealth is created.

I was saying that destruction of artifacts is ongoing in many nations.

That is true. however, senseless destruction is a more limited concept. For it to be truly senseless the destruction has to bring no real, material benefits. It should only serve a figment of people's imagination. Which is perfectly in line with the radical islamist acts.

If the Romans were the yardsticks by which we measure present values then we'd find it okay to throw prisoners to the lions.

We do keep prisons and we do execute prisoners in many parts of the world. I was making a general point that the following civilization always destroys a huge share of whatever is left of the preceding one.

Which super-old European cities are you talking about here, exactly, and what are your comparisons for the bulldozing you seem to prefer?

Uh... Rome? As for the comparisons - well, quality of life in German cities certainly is higher where streets are wider and transport access is well planned (which is impossible without building railways or subways over the place; destroying a lot of old structures in the process). The Asian supercities still manage to allow efficient transit even when population reaches tens of millions exactly because a lot of the old urban planning feature, sad as it is, were done away with.

[Thanas]

That would be a valid argument if any actor - state or otherwise - had offered and paid billions for the destruction of artifacts.

In some ways the destruction pays off if the motive is economical. New wealth is created.

And then we run into the old problem of how you value the past, which is exactly what I am saying - that societies do not value the past.

That is true. however, senseless destruction is a more limited concept. For it to be truly senseless the destruction has to bring no real, material benefits. It should only serve a figment of people's imagination. Which is perfectly in line with the radical islamist acts.

To me it is a scale problem. The islamists in Iraq are a lot less threatening if they are destroying a few statues than China is in razing the most important Buddhist monastery we know of. That is how the threat to history should be evaluated on in my book.

We do keep prisons and we do execute prisoners in many parts of the world. I was making a general point that the following civilization always destroys a huge share of whatever is left of the preceding one.

Sure, but what argument follows from there?

Which super-old European cities are you talking about here, exactly, and what are your comparisons for the bulldozing you seem to prefer?

Uh... Rome?

Rome actually has a pretty amazing public transport system, having just experienced it the past week. Metro, Trams, Bus. The Bus system is a bit overloaded but the Trams and metro worked perfectly. In any case, even if this was not present, you can walk from one half of the city to the other as Rome is somewhat small in area compared to other cities. Heck, walking from the Vatican to the city centre only takes half an hour for example. I can't say the same for most German cities.

As for the comparisons - well, quality of life in German cities certainly is higher where streets are wider and transport access is well planned (which is impossible without building railways or subways over the place; destroying a lot of old structures in the process). The Asian supercities still manage to allow efficient transit even when population reaches tens of millions exactly because a lot of the old urban planning feature, sad as it is, were done away with.

I would dispute that quality of life is better in German cities per se. For once, Rome is quieter and feels very relaxed, meaning far fewer levels of stress than in German inner cities due to absence of noise and traffic. You can do most of your shopping on foot as supermarkets are not huge affairs, but usually tucked away in back alleys or underground. You get free drinking water courtesy of the state. I always feel much more relaxed when I live in Rome than in Germany. That being said, it certainly is better for the economy to have such wide streets in modern cities. But I am not in favour of the economy being the end all of planning, nor should modern buildings who are not expected to last that long automatically be valued more than buildings that have stood the test of time, in some cases even millennia.

[AniThyng]

Why should we be sentimental about physical buildings and objects that hold no other intrinsic value beyond intangible historical value if there is progress to be made? How is this different from someone lamenting that the youth of today have no respect for tradition and culture and religion?

[The Romulan Republic]

@comicalstorm

yeah, becuase that's just what taxi drivers in Mosul need, an area the size of Jordan being bombed back to the stone age. Fucking idiot clearly hasn't read up on the American wars in Indochina.

Well to be fair. If america was allowed to completely exterminate all life in the region that would by relation help limit ISIL recruitment options.

Let's not argue in favour of mass murder of civilians for living in the wrong part of the planet.

[Borgholio]

Why should we be sentimental about physical buildings and objects that hold no other intrinsic value beyond intangible historical value if there is progress to be made? How is this different from someone lamenting that the youth of today have no respect for tradition and culture and religion?

An old man sitting in his rocking chair bitching about kids these days is just someone who doesn't like change. He's not lamenting the loss of culture exactly, he's just pissed that the next generation don't agree with his values and viewpoints. That is a far cry from being concerned about the destruction of an artifact or location that can be studied so we can actually gain insight into where we came from and learn facts about the past that may have remained hidden until that point.

There are very real practical benefits to be had by studying the past. I don't think you should be so quick to discount the value of knowledge and education just because the concepts are less tangible than an office building or a coal mine.

[Broomstick]

However, there is the dilemma that people actually LIVE in cities, and we can't fossilize cities. We can't save EVERY building, statue, park, etc. Choices need to be made. If this is done wisely we can at least document what is being cleared away so some knowledge of it remains. If it's done poorly you get the Alien Mothership Fucking Soldier Field in Chicago.

Certainly, despite the terrible losses of the fire of 1871 Chicago benefited immensely long-term by having its central portion leveled, allowing rebuilding with wider roads and a logical addressing system. New history was made on the old ashes, and now those "new" buildings are considered historical. There is also the problem of old structures not always being as safe as new building methods. We can either risk things like major urban fires or "violate" history sufficiently to put in modern safety systems to protect both people and historical structures from that sort of destruction.