I think the Syrian and Russian worry, and rightly so, is that the US plan for Syria is effective partition of the country and a long-term US military presence in the Kurdish areas as part of a Iran containment plan.
What do you think of the Turkish presence in N. Iraq? I can't imagine that it's just about the PKK. I think the Turks and the Iraqi militias they're training are there to take Mosul. They're looking to right what they believe to be a historical wrong when the British incorporated Mosul province into Iraq. It's possible that the Mosulis would prefer to be absorbed into Turkey than a Greater Kurdistan or a Shiite-dominated Iraq.
"The kingdom’s geographical centrality to world commerce, with 30% of global trade passing through the 3 major sea routes that Saudi Arabia bestrides (not sure what the third is, after the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf)."
Right on. Yemen is not a Saudi puppet state yet! Maybe then they can claim the Indian Ocean!
"One thing you take away from these remarks by George H. W. Bush is that he is nowadays basically a Democrat."
Ha! I think that says more about the Democrats than Bush 41! If he's a Democrat, then there's no mainstream left-leaning party in America anymore. I suppose we all knew that but it's still hard to admit.
People talk about the Republican party as a party in crisis but the truth is that the mainstream voter is now center-right. Only the extreme racist "fringe" keeps the Republicans from one-party rule. But it hardly matters given how much the Democrats have moved to the right.
If nothing else, taking Aleppo is the first step towards closing off resupply lines for IS from Turkey. That in itself would have a major impact on their ability to hold Mosul.
Taking Aleppo is also important symbolically in that it brings Syria's second city back into the government fold. It would buoy Iraqi confidence in their own attempts to retake their second city.
The answer is that Obama doesn't want to upset our allies in the region, especially NATO ally Turkey, which despite all the talk is still "all-in" on removing Assad and is backing the Army of Conquest. The long-term problem for Russia is that Turkey is putting its thumb on the scale in the same way that Pakistan was in Afghanistan. Saudi (and the CIA) supply the weapons and Turkey is the go-between.
A related problem is the labeling of people with these ideas as "crazy" because it separates them out from the "normal" and "rationale, making them appear to be part of a lunatic fringe. However, poll after poll has proven that they're not part of some tiny minority of Americans. 30% of the general public believes that Obama is a Muslim. A new poll suggests that more 50% of Republicans hold that belief after years of counter-evidence. I don't have any doubts that there is a high correlation between these folks and the Birther movement too.
I think you're right to argue that the birther allegations cannot be separated out from anti-Muslim bias. The continuing belief that Obama is a Muslim and not American has everything to do with their belief that Obama is too sympathetic to Muslims (which is rich considering the largely negative American role in the Muslim world over the past 6 years). If he was rounding them all up in camps, the Birther movement would fizzle out.
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Does that also mean that God didn't intend for the white man to "discover" the Americas? You have to love the selective interpretation of God's will/the Bible by these evangelical dummies.
It sounds like these "friends" don't have much in common.
I'm sick of US administrations treating the Saudis like their eccentric old uncle. The oil weapon can't quite be used to devastating effect like in the past. It's time to draw a line.
The migrant crisis in Europe highlights the need for a negotiated settlement on Syria. That should be the top item on Obama's list when he meets with the Saudis. It's time for the Saudis to put aside their intransigence to a possible role for the Baathists in a future government. Nobody wants it but no one wants 11 million displaced persons either.
The Saudis are not willing to cooperate so it's no surprise that the SNC is out. The Russians aren't supporting the SNC financially and militarily. Khoja's decision was made by his patrons in Riyadh and elsewhere, who have made the calculation that Daesh is at present a nuisance that can be largely dealt with after Assad. I don't think we should assume that Turkey is ready to be part of any alliance with Assad either.
What worries me most, though, is the second part of the SNC head's statement: "Neither the head of the Syrian regime nor any citizens of the country who spill the blood of the Syrian people should be given any role in the transitional governing body. . .” Does this mean closing off the Alawites and Christians who have stuck with the Assad regime from being represented in a new government? Is the next step the kind of social cleansing we saw in Iraq?
"I can’t actually see how AKP could improve its fortunes by mobilizing Turkish Kurds. Maybe AKP leaders are convinced they lost the last election, or didn’t get 51% of seats, because of low turnout among ethnic Turks?"
It looks to me that if a snap election is part of the AKP's calculation in attacking the PKK, it's to steal votes from the ultranationalist MHP by showing that they can be tough on the Kurds too. The AKP has perhaps figured that they can use these attacks to move further to the right and grab the MHP's votes in the next round. It's the Likud plan recycled!
Looks like Israel has become the model for both Turkey and Saudi in their wars against their neighbors.
Was the suicide bomber a Turk or a Kurd? I've read elsewhere that the two major recruiting centers for ISIS in Turkey are Bingol and Adiyaman, both heavily Kurdish cities. The bomber came from Adiyaman.
This is an aspect of the current set of conflicts in the region that hasn't gotten enough coverage or nuance. There is a tendency in the media to see the Kurds as a unified bloc (and as more like "us" than the rest of the non-Israeli Middle East: meaning secular-minded, progressive, etc.). Just as many Turkish Kurds are not necessarily separatists pining for the establishment of a Kurdish state, there are also some who see Kurdish nationalism as an obstacle to the spread of the caliphate. In other words, there are Kurds on both sides of this fight (or more accurately, on multiple sides of this fight).
You ask some very good questions here, ones that I have thought about as well. I would only add that we need to take a look at who's watching tv news and who's watching tv, period, these days.
The news programs and channels have moved almost exclusively to celebrity watching or conflict and controversy-stirring coverage in response to changing audience demographics. Or more accurately, diminishing audience demographics.
Nearly 30 million households would tune in to watch Cronkite nightly. Now Fox News tops the primetime cable news ratings with something approaching a tenth of that audience.
People, especially men 18-54, have gravitated away from tv to other media (save for sporting events). What what seen by many execs as "saving" tv from totally cratering in recent decades was reality tv, which has drawn a female-skewed audience (both young and old). Reality tv is about creating celebrities from "ordinary" people (and then invariably tearing them down). It's about conflict and controversy. News tv has in turn adopted a similar model to draw on this "dependable" tv audience.
So when you watch the news, you need to keep in mind who's watching. If tv execs believe that the celebrity obsessed and the paranoid and conspiratorial are their audience, then news coverage will reflect that.
"The US doesn’t want to appear to be flying close air support missions for these Shiite militias, and, essentially, for Iran, against a Sunni population. Obama probably is withholding some air support to encourage al-Abadi to break with the Shiite militias or at least to induct them into the regular army.
But letting Ramadi fall in order to punish al-Abadi for not being inclusive enough in his policies (if that is what happened) was a major policy error on Obama’s part.
Soleimani is exaggerating when he says that the US has done nothing. But it is true that the US air force seems to be leaving a lot of pieces on the board for Daesh, and it is hard to imagine why that should be."
The US does not want to be seen supporting the Shiite militias with air strikes but the "Popular Mobilization" forces didn't tuck their tails and flee from Ramadi, it was the Golden Division (the so-called pride of the Iraqi Special Forces) that the US Army helped to rebuild after Saddam. A question that has not been adequately answered is whether the remaining units of the Iraqi Army are loyal to the Abadi government? Or are they still under the sway of al-Maliki and his cronies?
One of the problems with the US airstrikes, from what I've read elsewhere, seems to be heavy layers of bureaucracy that keep US military assets in the area from reacting quickly enough to events on the ground. In essence, it appears that every target is being vetted from Washington. By the time a decision comes down, it is sometimes to late to act.
If ISIS is the threat that the US claims it to be and the Obama administration is clearly interested in maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq as your previous posting this week indicates, then it would seem that the prosecution of the war from Washington is at odds with these goals.
ISIS has no shortage of advanced weaponry to face its enemies. In fact, they likely outgun the Shiite militias. Without US air support, this war with ISIS is an Iran-Iraq War-style stalemate at best.
"In short, Obama’s GCC summit will not be the high-powered equivalent of a G7 meeting, where the top leaders hobnob and make personal understandings. It will largely be a summit of crown princes, the people typically sent to the state funeral of lesser world leaders."
I think people are underplaying how important the younger generation have been to recent policy shifts in the Gulf states and recent events in the region like the Yemen crisis. From reading some available accounts, it would seem that the Yemen war is just as much about a power struggle between Abdullah's son and Salman's as it is about countering Houthi overreach and Iranian adventurism in the peninsula. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, for Obama to be meeting with the princes who have seemingly taken a larger role in the affairs of the sheikhdoms recently than with their aging rulers. I'm not totally convinced that this is the snub that some media outlets and the usual cast of panicky idiots in the UAE are making out.
Now that Netanyahu has insisted that Iran recognize Israel's right to exist as part of a final settlement on the nuclear issue, I'd like to see Zarif respond by insisting that Israel sign the NPT as part of a final settlement.
“If we had not made the country’s economy and the life of the nation dependent on oil, and if we had avoided the mistake of the beginning of the revolution, which was making everything government-run, and if we had really involved people in economic activities, could the enemy have inflicted this damage upon us by imposing sanctions on oil and on the public sector?”
Khamenei's 35-year struggle with Mousavi continues. Of course, what is left out here is that the oil economy and nationalizations made possible the creation of client networks in support of the Islamic Republic.
And I'm not sure how privatization would impede sanctions on Iran. The sanctions will just target the oligarchs who hoovered up the former state assets. We've already had some of that happen.
"he is unconcerned by the Syrian developments because he holds the incorrect theory that Israel is better off if the Arabs are busy with one another"
Absolutely agree. The reigning strategy of the Israelis for some time has been that chaos in the region is a good thing. Division, disharmony, and weakness among neighbors means that they're distracted elsewhere and so their "threat" to Israel is lessened. Chaos in the region also helps to keep ordinary Israelis preoccupied with potential external problems rather than internal ones like rising costs of living, a housing crunch, the Palestinian problem, etc.
Until Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS turn their attention to Israel, the politicians and the IDF are quite happy to let them weaken the Assad regime. Likewise, Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS are busy consolidating their position in the region and do not want to throw their own survival into question by inviting Israeli retaliation. Hizb Allah is already established in S. Lebanon and the Bekaa and so could stand to be "weakened" through Israeli attacks.
Of course, this detente feeds into conspiracy theories about ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra as Israeli proxies. But you don't have to look for conspiracies to make sense of what's happening. Unfortunately, the current situation is simply part of the Israelis' long-term but short-sighted strategy.
The Israeli gov't. and much of the citizenry no longer even imagine the possibility of a peaceful co-existence with stable Arab neighbors. The casual, everyday racism of many Israelis towards Arabs is a dead giveaway that we're well past the stage when anything but a siege mentality in the face of real and perceived threats makes sense to them.
In some ways, the bigger threat that Iran poses to Israel is its interest in the stability of its neighbors as currently constituted. Turkey and the GCC want stability (and ISIS and al-Qaeda neutralized) too but only after the political reconfiguration of the region. And people wonder why current US regional policy is so schizophrenic! When your "allies" are ginning up war and your "enemies" are trying to tamp down the flames, it's hard to formulate a consistent policy.
"I doubt Daesh rules more than 1 million in Syria, mainly in al-Raqqah Province, so Daesh probably has kidnapped about 3.6 mn. Sunni Arabs for its laughable ‘caliphate’, not the 8 million often touted by the pundits"
Prof. Cole, by the same token, we should probably be counting those sympathetic to the Daesh or Sunni extremist cause outside of Daesh territory. Iraq probably doesn't mean as much as it did once upon a time to many Iraqis but borders everywhere don't mean as much as they once did. That's one of the consequences of our "globalizing" world.
Continuing attacks on Shiite pilgrims and the assassination of an IRGC general in Samarra a couple of days ago are good examples of the "extra-territorial" dimensions of this war.
Daesh may be retreating on some fronts and the population under its direct administration may be shrinking, but as you rightly point out the sectarian problem isn't going anywhere.
I think the Syrian and Russian worry, and rightly so, is that the US plan for Syria is effective partition of the country and a long-term US military presence in the Kurdish areas as part of a Iran containment plan.
What do you think of the Turkish presence in N. Iraq? I can't imagine that it's just about the PKK. I think the Turks and the Iraqi militias they're training are there to take Mosul. They're looking to right what they believe to be a historical wrong when the British incorporated Mosul province into Iraq. It's possible that the Mosulis would prefer to be absorbed into Turkey than a Greater Kurdistan or a Shiite-dominated Iraq.
"The kingdom’s geographical centrality to world commerce, with 30% of global trade passing through the 3 major sea routes that Saudi Arabia bestrides (not sure what the third is, after the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf)."
Right on. Yemen is not a Saudi puppet state yet! Maybe then they can claim the Indian Ocean!
"One thing you take away from these remarks by George H. W. Bush is that he is nowadays basically a Democrat."
Ha! I think that says more about the Democrats than Bush 41! If he's a Democrat, then there's no mainstream left-leaning party in America anymore. I suppose we all knew that but it's still hard to admit.
People talk about the Republican party as a party in crisis but the truth is that the mainstream voter is now center-right. Only the extreme racist "fringe" keeps the Republicans from one-party rule. But it hardly matters given how much the Democrats have moved to the right.
If nothing else, taking Aleppo is the first step towards closing off resupply lines for IS from Turkey. That in itself would have a major impact on their ability to hold Mosul.
Taking Aleppo is also important symbolically in that it brings Syria's second city back into the government fold. It would buoy Iraqi confidence in their own attempts to retake their second city.
The answer is that Obama doesn't want to upset our allies in the region, especially NATO ally Turkey, which despite all the talk is still "all-in" on removing Assad and is backing the Army of Conquest. The long-term problem for Russia is that Turkey is putting its thumb on the scale in the same way that Pakistan was in Afghanistan. Saudi (and the CIA) supply the weapons and Turkey is the go-between.
A related problem is the labeling of people with these ideas as "crazy" because it separates them out from the "normal" and "rationale, making them appear to be part of a lunatic fringe. However, poll after poll has proven that they're not part of some tiny minority of Americans. 30% of the general public believes that Obama is a Muslim. A new poll suggests that more 50% of Republicans hold that belief after years of counter-evidence. I don't have any doubts that there is a high correlation between these folks and the Birther movement too.
I think you're right to argue that the birther allegations cannot be separated out from anti-Muslim bias. The continuing belief that Obama is a Muslim and not American has everything to do with their belief that Obama is too sympathetic to Muslims (which is rich considering the largely negative American role in the Muslim world over the past 6 years). If he was rounding them all up in camps, the Birther movement would fizzle out.
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Does that also mean that God didn't intend for the white man to "discover" the Americas? You have to love the selective interpretation of God's will/the Bible by these evangelical dummies.
It sounds like these "friends" don't have much in common.
I'm sick of US administrations treating the Saudis like their eccentric old uncle. The oil weapon can't quite be used to devastating effect like in the past. It's time to draw a line.
The migrant crisis in Europe highlights the need for a negotiated settlement on Syria. That should be the top item on Obama's list when he meets with the Saudis. It's time for the Saudis to put aside their intransigence to a possible role for the Baathists in a future government. Nobody wants it but no one wants 11 million displaced persons either.
The Saudis are not willing to cooperate so it's no surprise that the SNC is out. The Russians aren't supporting the SNC financially and militarily. Khoja's decision was made by his patrons in Riyadh and elsewhere, who have made the calculation that Daesh is at present a nuisance that can be largely dealt with after Assad. I don't think we should assume that Turkey is ready to be part of any alliance with Assad either.
What worries me most, though, is the second part of the SNC head's statement: "Neither the head of the Syrian regime nor any citizens of the country who spill the blood of the Syrian people should be given any role in the transitional governing body. . .” Does this mean closing off the Alawites and Christians who have stuck with the Assad regime from being represented in a new government? Is the next step the kind of social cleansing we saw in Iraq?
"I can’t actually see how AKP could improve its fortunes by mobilizing Turkish Kurds. Maybe AKP leaders are convinced they lost the last election, or didn’t get 51% of seats, because of low turnout among ethnic Turks?"
It looks to me that if a snap election is part of the AKP's calculation in attacking the PKK, it's to steal votes from the ultranationalist MHP by showing that they can be tough on the Kurds too. The AKP has perhaps figured that they can use these attacks to move further to the right and grab the MHP's votes in the next round. It's the Likud plan recycled!
Looks like Israel has become the model for both Turkey and Saudi in their wars against their neighbors.
Was the suicide bomber a Turk or a Kurd? I've read elsewhere that the two major recruiting centers for ISIS in Turkey are Bingol and Adiyaman, both heavily Kurdish cities. The bomber came from Adiyaman.
This is an aspect of the current set of conflicts in the region that hasn't gotten enough coverage or nuance. There is a tendency in the media to see the Kurds as a unified bloc (and as more like "us" than the rest of the non-Israeli Middle East: meaning secular-minded, progressive, etc.). Just as many Turkish Kurds are not necessarily separatists pining for the establishment of a Kurdish state, there are also some who see Kurdish nationalism as an obstacle to the spread of the caliphate. In other words, there are Kurds on both sides of this fight (or more accurately, on multiple sides of this fight).
You ask some very good questions here, ones that I have thought about as well. I would only add that we need to take a look at who's watching tv news and who's watching tv, period, these days.
The news programs and channels have moved almost exclusively to celebrity watching or conflict and controversy-stirring coverage in response to changing audience demographics. Or more accurately, diminishing audience demographics.
Nearly 30 million households would tune in to watch Cronkite nightly. Now Fox News tops the primetime cable news ratings with something approaching a tenth of that audience.
People, especially men 18-54, have gravitated away from tv to other media (save for sporting events). What what seen by many execs as "saving" tv from totally cratering in recent decades was reality tv, which has drawn a female-skewed audience (both young and old). Reality tv is about creating celebrities from "ordinary" people (and then invariably tearing them down). It's about conflict and controversy. News tv has in turn adopted a similar model to draw on this "dependable" tv audience.
So when you watch the news, you need to keep in mind who's watching. If tv execs believe that the celebrity obsessed and the paranoid and conspiratorial are their audience, then news coverage will reflect that.
"The US doesn’t want to appear to be flying close air support missions for these Shiite militias, and, essentially, for Iran, against a Sunni population. Obama probably is withholding some air support to encourage al-Abadi to break with the Shiite militias or at least to induct them into the regular army.
But letting Ramadi fall in order to punish al-Abadi for not being inclusive enough in his policies (if that is what happened) was a major policy error on Obama’s part.
Soleimani is exaggerating when he says that the US has done nothing. But it is true that the US air force seems to be leaving a lot of pieces on the board for Daesh, and it is hard to imagine why that should be."
The US does not want to be seen supporting the Shiite militias with air strikes but the "Popular Mobilization" forces didn't tuck their tails and flee from Ramadi, it was the Golden Division (the so-called pride of the Iraqi Special Forces) that the US Army helped to rebuild after Saddam. A question that has not been adequately answered is whether the remaining units of the Iraqi Army are loyal to the Abadi government? Or are they still under the sway of al-Maliki and his cronies?
One of the problems with the US airstrikes, from what I've read elsewhere, seems to be heavy layers of bureaucracy that keep US military assets in the area from reacting quickly enough to events on the ground. In essence, it appears that every target is being vetted from Washington. By the time a decision comes down, it is sometimes to late to act.
If ISIS is the threat that the US claims it to be and the Obama administration is clearly interested in maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq as your previous posting this week indicates, then it would seem that the prosecution of the war from Washington is at odds with these goals.
ISIS has no shortage of advanced weaponry to face its enemies. In fact, they likely outgun the Shiite militias. Without US air support, this war with ISIS is an Iran-Iraq War-style stalemate at best.
"In short, Obama’s GCC summit will not be the high-powered equivalent of a G7 meeting, where the top leaders hobnob and make personal understandings. It will largely be a summit of crown princes, the people typically sent to the state funeral of lesser world leaders."
I think people are underplaying how important the younger generation have been to recent policy shifts in the Gulf states and recent events in the region like the Yemen crisis. From reading some available accounts, it would seem that the Yemen war is just as much about a power struggle between Abdullah's son and Salman's as it is about countering Houthi overreach and Iranian adventurism in the peninsula. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, for Obama to be meeting with the princes who have seemingly taken a larger role in the affairs of the sheikhdoms recently than with their aging rulers. I'm not totally convinced that this is the snub that some media outlets and the usual cast of panicky idiots in the UAE are making out.
Now that Netanyahu has insisted that Iran recognize Israel's right to exist as part of a final settlement on the nuclear issue, I'd like to see Zarif respond by insisting that Israel sign the NPT as part of a final settlement.
“If we had not made the country’s economy and the life of the nation dependent on oil, and if we had avoided the mistake of the beginning of the revolution, which was making everything government-run, and if we had really involved people in economic activities, could the enemy have inflicted this damage upon us by imposing sanctions on oil and on the public sector?”
Khamenei's 35-year struggle with Mousavi continues. Of course, what is left out here is that the oil economy and nationalizations made possible the creation of client networks in support of the Islamic Republic.
And I'm not sure how privatization would impede sanctions on Iran. The sanctions will just target the oligarchs who hoovered up the former state assets. We've already had some of that happen.
"he is unconcerned by the Syrian developments because he holds the incorrect theory that Israel is better off if the Arabs are busy with one another"
Absolutely agree. The reigning strategy of the Israelis for some time has been that chaos in the region is a good thing. Division, disharmony, and weakness among neighbors means that they're distracted elsewhere and so their "threat" to Israel is lessened. Chaos in the region also helps to keep ordinary Israelis preoccupied with potential external problems rather than internal ones like rising costs of living, a housing crunch, the Palestinian problem, etc.
Until Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS turn their attention to Israel, the politicians and the IDF are quite happy to let them weaken the Assad regime. Likewise, Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS are busy consolidating their position in the region and do not want to throw their own survival into question by inviting Israeli retaliation. Hizb Allah is already established in S. Lebanon and the Bekaa and so could stand to be "weakened" through Israeli attacks.
Of course, this detente feeds into conspiracy theories about ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra as Israeli proxies. But you don't have to look for conspiracies to make sense of what's happening. Unfortunately, the current situation is simply part of the Israelis' long-term but short-sighted strategy.
The Israeli gov't. and much of the citizenry no longer even imagine the possibility of a peaceful co-existence with stable Arab neighbors. The casual, everyday racism of many Israelis towards Arabs is a dead giveaway that we're well past the stage when anything but a siege mentality in the face of real and perceived threats makes sense to them.
In some ways, the bigger threat that Iran poses to Israel is its interest in the stability of its neighbors as currently constituted. Turkey and the GCC want stability (and ISIS and al-Qaeda neutralized) too but only after the political reconfiguration of the region. And people wonder why current US regional policy is so schizophrenic! When your "allies" are ginning up war and your "enemies" are trying to tamp down the flames, it's hard to formulate a consistent policy.
"I doubt Daesh rules more than 1 million in Syria, mainly in al-Raqqah Province, so Daesh probably has kidnapped about 3.6 mn. Sunni Arabs for its laughable ‘caliphate’, not the 8 million often touted by the pundits"
Prof. Cole, by the same token, we should probably be counting those sympathetic to the Daesh or Sunni extremist cause outside of Daesh territory. Iraq probably doesn't mean as much as it did once upon a time to many Iraqis but borders everywhere don't mean as much as they once did. That's one of the consequences of our "globalizing" world.
Continuing attacks on Shiite pilgrims and the assassination of an IRGC general in Samarra a couple of days ago are good examples of the "extra-territorial" dimensions of this war.
Daesh may be retreating on some fronts and the population under its direct administration may be shrinking, but as you rightly point out the sectarian problem isn't going anywhere.