ISIS destroyed Jonah's tomb and other historical sites

[Irbis]

So, 3 years ago, when we were discussing Libya and Syria, I claimed NATO with UN support removing Assad and strengthening secular opposition to not allow well funded fundamentalists supported by our dear Gulf 'allies' to hijack the whole thing would be right thing to do. I wonder, did people who back then said to sit and do nothing still think so?

And to think until recently people here said Libya was in worse shape than Syria...

How the quote went? "The West had to choose between intervention and shame. They chose shame. They will get intervention too."

[K. A. Pital]

Baathists have fought islamists for decades. You seem to think the West, NATO, UN are somehow better at that.

They are not.

Western intervention only strengthened Islamists. All over the World. Starting from the very first CIA coups to Afganistan's mujahids, to now.

The West does not want secular nations. They want islamist crazies and pariahs to make Middle East hell on Earth.

[Siege]

I'm part of 'the West' and I sure don't want anything of the sort. I don't dispute that there are interests in the West that want to see the Middle East fractured and easily manipulated, but let's not steep to making it appear as if everyone, or for that matter even every government, is somehow gunning for making that happen.

[K. A. Pital]

I don't think that the Netherlands can greatly influence the decisions made by core NATO warmakers. So certainly I meant only people who can either make or influence decisions like this.

That is, I would say that people who steer Western military interventions want it. I do not think populations or governments with no say want it. I cannot know what they want, as they are either speechless or powerless to stop it.

[Channel72]

Baathists have fought islamists for decades. You seem to think the West, NATO, UN are somehow better at that.

They are not.

Western intervention only strengthened Islamists. All over the World. Starting from the very first CIA coups to Afganistan's mujahids, to now.

The West does not want secular nations. They want islamist crazies and pariahs to make Middle East hell on Earth.

This is certainly true - but it's not fair to say the West doesn't want secular nations. The West simply wants nations that serve their interests, which, up until two decades ago, was primarily to stop the spread of Communism. Of course, the Arab Socialists/Baathists were great, up until Hussein started gassing his own people. But really, the goals and ideology of the Baath party were admirable. But the Islamists pretty much won... and not only because of Western meddling (note that the Iranian Islamist revolution was not due to US meddling).

[K. A. Pital]

Of course, the US deposing an elected ruler by a dictator who rooted out all opposition, sans the mosque, had nothing to do with it. I am amazed just how brazen you are.

[xerex]

In the mean time IS is shifting direction , going slow in Iraq and focusing on Aleppo in Syria instead.

[Channel72]

Of course, the US deposing an elected ruler by a dictator who rooted out all opposition, sans the mosque, had nothing to do with it. I am amazed just how brazen you are.

The pre-Ayatollah government was sponsored/created by a joint British/Soviet effort, so I don't know what you mean by "US deposing an elected ruler" ...

Anyway, to this day, most people are baffled over the 1978 incident; Iran was prospering - but there was an underlying blend of anti-Western-sentiment/socialism/religious fervor that somehow coalesced and gained enough traction to overthrow the Shah. Do you seriously think Iran is better for that, under the Ayatollahs?

[K. A. Pital]

Once again
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Ira ... '%C3%A9tat

[Simon_Jester]

What's wrong with a short-term goal?

Nothing's wrong with a short term goal like "disrupt the spread of ISIL, save the minorities." The catch is that you want short-term goals. Other people are, more or less, proposing to achieve long term goals with the same tools you're proposing to use for short-term goals.

If you have a hacksaw, you can do a lot of things. You can potentially save lives with a well-placed hacksaw in some situations. You can contribute to the building of a house with a hacksaw. A hacksaw is a valuable tool.

But you can't build a whole house with a hacksaw alone.

Other people, who my post was more directed at, seem to keep wanting to use their one tool (bombing) as a tool to accomplish larger, more complicated and permanent goals than air power can achieve.

A few remarks on the article cosmicalstorm quoted. What little I know of the author's political background makes me suspicious of his conclusions, though I have a nasty feeling that his basic thesis (there's going to be wars blowing up in the Middle East for the next couple of generations) is probably right.

Another 30 year war?

Sherman’s 300,000 and the Caliphate’s 3 Million

Posted By David P. Goldman On August 12, 2014 @ 3:31 am In Uncategorized | No Comments

...

Well and good: I predicted in 2006 that the George W Bush administration’s blunder would provoke another Thirty Years War in the region, and repeated the diagnosis many times since. But I doubt that Mr Haass (or Walter Russell Mead, who cited the Haass article) has given sufficient thought to the implications...

The way to win such a war is by attrition, that is, by feeding into the meat-grinder a quarter to a third of the enemy’s available manpower. Once a sufficient number of who wish to fight to the death have had the opportunity to do so, the war stops because there are insufficient recruits to fill the ranks. That is how Generals Grant and Sherman fought the American Civil War, and that is the indicated strategy in the Middle East today.

It is a horrible business. It was not inevitable. It came about because of the ideological rigidity of the Bush Administration compounded by the strategic withdrawal of the Obama administration. It could have been avoided by the cheap and simple expedient of bombing Iran’s nuclear program and Revolutionary Guards bases, followed by an intensive subversion effort aimed at regime change in Teheran. Former Vice President Dick Cheney advocated this course of action, but then Secretary of State Condileeza Rice persuaded Bush that the Muslim world would never forgive America for an attack on another Muslim state...

Now this part I just don't buy. The Iranian regime has been involved in what's been going on, but they did not create this conflict. Certainly they didn't create the "demographic bulge" this guy is talking about, or the fact that most regimes throughout the region (Libya, Syria, and Iraq being high on the list) are feckless, corrupt, and tyrannical to the extent that even a bunch of religious fanatic guerillas can reasonably hope to overthrow them once the knives come out.

The Bush Administration was too timid to take on Iraq; the Obama administration views Iran as a prospective ally. Even Neville Chamberlain did not regard Hitler as prospective partner in European security. But that is what Barack Obama said in March to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg: “What I’ll say is that if you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. And that isn’t to say that they aren’t a theocracy that embraces all kinds of ideas that I find abhorrent, but they’re not North Korea. They are a large, powerful country that sees itself as an important player on the world stage, and I do not think has a suicide wish, and can respond to incentives.” Bush may have been feckless, but Obama is mad.

...And he thinks this is mad? On what basis does he assume that the Iranians are some sort of frothing lunatic-state who cannot be negotiated with?

With Iran neutralized, Syrian President Basher Assad would have had no choice but to come to terms with Syria’s Sunni majority; as it happens, he had the firepower to expel millions of them. Without the protection of Tehran, Iraq’s Shia would have had to compromise with Sunnis and Kurds. Iraqi Sunnis would not have allied with ISIS against the Iranian-backed regime in Baghdad. A million or more Iraqis would not have been displaced by the metastasizing Caliphate.

I question this part. Is it not roughly as likely that the Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis would have opportunistically rebelled anyway? It's rare that removing the people backing a client state makes war against that client state LESS likely, especially when the client state is widely unpopular.

The occupation of Iraq in the pursuit of nation-building was colossally stupid. It wasted thousands of lives and disrupted millions, cost the better part of a trillion dollars, and demoralized the American public like no failure since Vietnam-most of all America’s young people. Not only did it fail to accomplish its objective, but it kept America stuck in a tar-baby trap, unable to take action against the region’s main malefactor. Worst of all: the methods America employed in order to give the Iraq war the temporary appearance of success set in motion the disaster we have today. I warned of this in a May 4, 2010 essay entitled, General Petraeus’ Thirty Years War (Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010).

I agree with most of this, except that I am honestly uncertain of whether Iran can be counted as "the region's main malefactor," although they do legitimately have a claim on the title given that they've done a lot of nasty things in their attempt to carve out a regional sphere of influence.

Ultimately, ISIS is a distraction. The problem is Iran. Without Iran, Hamas would have no capacity to strike Israel beyond a few dozen kilometers past the Gaza border. Iran now has GPS-guided missiles which are much harder to shoot down than ordinary ballistic missiles (an unguided missile has a trajectory that is easy to calculate after launch; guided missiles squirrel about seeking their targets). If Hamas acquires such rockets-and it will eventually if left to its own devices-Israel will have to strike further, harder and deeper to eliminate the threat. That confrontation will not come within a year, and possibly not within five years, but it looms over the present hostilities. The region’s security will hinge on the ultimate reckoning with Iran.

While the basic claim that guided missiles are harder to shoot down strikes me as bullshit (a GPS guided missile will simply make a beeline for a specified target, and has no need to 'squirrel about;')... There is a point here, which is that Hamas having more firepower means Israel will respond with more firepower. This will tend to make the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza worse, because Gaza is the battlefield that's going to get caught in the crossfire.

[Siege]

That author is clearly a moron of the highest order. From 'evil genius Richelieu' to shifting blame for the Middle East's woes onto Iran without any proof whatsoever (also, what would've made this region more stable is another war on top of recent wars? Are you fucking kidding me?), to 'don't mind the army of raging religious fanatics rampaging across Syria and Iraq, we should be talking about Hamas instead', he's clearly a lunatic armchair general with delusions of grandeur and a worldview that's simultaneously scary and suspect. And his article is terribly written too, which is an even bigger crime: if he's gonna waste anyone's time with his crazytalk then he should at least have the courtesy to write it up in a decent manner.

[Simon_Jester]

Unfortunately, this clown is the sort of thing that passes for intelligentsia among the Republican Party in the US...

[cosmicalstorm]

Baathists have fought islamists for decades. You seem to think the West, NATO, UN are somehow better at that.

They are not.

Western intervention only strengthened Islamists. All over the World. Starting from the very first CIA coups to Afganistan's mujahids, to now.

The West does not want secular nations. They want islamist crazies and pariahs to make Middle East hell on Earth.

That sounds crazy, explain yourself.

I imagine that the west want subservient leaders.
Leaders who will not hesitate to sign free trade whatever agreements that give the entities that are best at bribing themselves into power in Washington and Brussels, free access to oil, minerals, internal markets, cheap third world donor organs, and so on.
But wanting crazy religious guys?
Who wants them?
They are (partially) a consequence of idiotic western intervention
But who wants them there?

[K. A. Pital]

A sensible regime would not tolerate its citizens living like pigs in squalor; it will demand money, and lots of it, to better their lives.

Islamists will sell oil for food. And they will never pose a credible challenge to the West because of their luddite nature and thus inability to progress technically beyond making Kalashnikovs in the backyard.

The West has enough strong competitors in Asia as it is; it does not want more of them, it does not want to hasten its own decline.

[Thanas]

I don't think that the Netherlands can greatly influence the decisions made by core NATO warmakers. So certainly I meant only people who can either make or influence decisions like this.

That is, I would say that people who steer Western military interventions want it. I do not think populations or governments with no say want it. I cannot know what they want, as they are either speechless or powerless to stop it.

Who are you talking about then?

If the west were so very much chomping at the bit to gain control of the middle east (which I think is the last thing the EU wants), why did they not intervene against Syria to put a puppet government in place?

I think they opposed the baathist as soon as they thought they could have better alternatives. They failed due to an astounding naivete but it is not like anybody is happy about the middle east taking attention, treasure an-d bodies. Nobody wants another Bin Laden.

Also, what decline of the west are we talking about here?

[K. A. Pital]

Because control is irrelevant? People are so hot about 'control', but really, why? If you just ruin the place, they will sell oil, gas and everything they have simply for food, while at the same time never posing a credible challenge economically, militarily or intellectually. It will also keep them disunited.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Baathists have fought islamists for decades. You seem to think the West, NATO, UN are somehow better at that.

They are not.

Western intervention only strengthened Islamists. All over the World. Starting from the very first CIA coups to Afganistan's mujahids, to now.

The West does not want secular nations. They want islamist crazies and pariahs to make Middle East hell on Earth.

That sounds crazy, explain yourself.

I imagine that the west want subservient leaders.
Leaders who will not hesitate to sign free trade whatever agreements that give the entities that are best at bribing themselves into power in Washington and Brussels, free access to oil, minerals, internal markets, cheap third world donor organs, and so on.
But wanting crazy religious guys?
Who wants them?
They are (partially) a consequence of idiotic western intervention
But who wants them there?

I think the West will back any Islamist nation that sucks up to them. Malaysia has a pretty strong strain of Islamism but is tolerated, and so does Indonesia.

The same goes for Pakistan too. THere happens to be an Islamist government in power too.

[K. A. Pital]

Pakistan is a story of peculiar interest; the US sponsored it during the genocide in Bangladesh, where over 2 million people were mercilessly slaughtered, and even sold it weapons, secretly, through third parties.

That is a nation with a life standard on par with Sub-Saharan Africa where women are routinely killed in honor killings, where large parts of territory are controlled by islamist gangs and whose intelligence service supported with tons of cash just about every radical jihad group that there is.

[Thanas]

Because control is irrelevant? People are so hot about 'control', but really, why? If you just ruin the place, they will sell oil, gas and everything they have simply for food, while at the same time never posing a credible challenge economically, militarily or intellectually. It will also keep them disunited.

And you have to spend billions of dollar to ensure that:
a) not that many refugees do drown when trying to reach Europe
b) spending to combat illegal immigration
c) spending on the security forces to prevent terrorists to retaliate
d) spend hundreds of million to intervene when things get too hot

Really, your scenario makes no sense. What the west wants is easy and cheap access to resources. That is not the case when there is no country to speak of and the shipping lanes are threatened. Not a single goal is achieved by making the middle east miserable.

The idea that there is a vast western conspiracy to encourage terrorism and civil war is completely ludicrous.

[Channel72]

Once again
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Ira ... '%C3%A9tat

Stas, I'm talking about the 1978 coup, which had nothing to do with Western meddling.

But my point is that your claim that the West wants Islamist crazies in charge is self-evidently absurd. The US installed secular dictators in both Iraq and Iran, as your own link demonstrates! The 1978 coup in Iran in fact was not something the US wanted at all.

The US wants nations which will serve their interests, and Islamist crazies tend to be more difficult to control than secular, "iron-fist" dictators (although your mileage may vary).

Islamists will sell oil for food. And they will never pose a credible challenge to the West because of their luddite nature and thus inability to progress technically beyond making Kalashnikovs in the backyard.

The West has enough strong competitors in Asia as it is; it does not want more of them, it does not want to hasten its own decline.

Okay, that's really way out there, in the realm of totally absurd conspiracy theory thinking.

The US has no single policy for keeping Middle Eastern nations "down" - different administrations use different policies. The Bush Doctrine in fact called for the democratization of all Arab nations, which is not at all the kind of policy you're describing of "install Islamists everywhere to keep the MidEast a shithole." (The fact that democracy often results in Islamist regimes seems to have been something that the Bush administration didn't appreciate.)

At most, we can say US meddling tends to result in Islamic radicalization - but this is not intentional. Again, the US installed secular governments in Iraq and Iran, and supports governments like Jordan (which are mostly secular). The US wants more governments like the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, which are secular and serve US interests, because it turns out Islamist crazies usually don't want to serve US interests.

And the only reason the US supported the Islamist Mujahideen in Afghanistan is because of the Soviet Union, and nothing to do with an overall policy of trying to radicalize the MidEast, as you damn well know.

[Welf]

So, 3 years ago, when we were discussing Libya and Syria, I claimed NATO with UN support removing Assad and strengthening secular opposition to not allow well funded fundamentalists supported by our dear Gulf 'allies' to hijack the whole thing would be right thing to do. I wonder, did people who back then said to sit and do nothing still think so?

And to think until recently people here said Libya was in worse shape than Syria...

How the quote went? "The West had to choose between intervention and shame. They chose shame. They will get intervention too."

There wouldn't have been UN support since Russia and China would have vetoed this. They prevented even strong worded notes if they didn't also condemn the rebels. Also, why would this resolve different than Libya? I do remember all the proclamations from back how the tribes of Libya are not islamists, and how they want to continue a unified Libya. In Syria the same would have happened, with tribes and groups fighting each other for dominance until the ISIS emerges as strongest force.
Except of course we are talking about permanent occupation like Iraq with 150.000+ forces on the ground.

A sensible regime would not tolerate its citizens living like pigs in squalor; it will demand money, and lots of it, to better their lives.

Islamists will sell oil for food. And they will never pose a credible challenge to the West because of their luddite nature and thus inability to progress technically beyond making Kalashnikovs in the backyard.

The West has enough strong competitors in Asia as it is; it does not want more of them, it does not want to hasten its own decline.

And can you explain why the three most important allies of the USA in east Asia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, are also the highest developed countries there?

[Channel72]

Essentially, the US basically wants stable, safe, secular nations in the Mid East - because these nations are likely to be allies and serve US interests.

Stas' idea that the US is intentionally trying to destabilize the region is total bullshit. In fact, the US has spent billions building up the infrastructure of Iraq - an effort which has been frustrated severely by Islamic militants blowing shit up all the time.

Back when I was working for Stony Brook University in 2004/2005, the US government (via USAID) gave our department millions of dollars to go to Iraq and build medical schools and environmental monitoring centers in Baghdad, Basra and Mosul (and later in Erbil as well) to help clean up the devastated environment in Iraq and give Iraqi students access to high-quality equipment and scientific textbooks. (Yeah... we really wanted to make that place a shithole.)

So we did just that. But you know what happened? Around 2006 the government pulled our funding. Why? Because it got too fucking dangerous. The insurgency became so active that doing anything required spending ridiculous amounts on security. The EHERC's we setup were abandoned or destroyed (except the ones in Kurdistan.) Hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment we were trying to ship was "lost" (read: stolen). So yeah, the US was trying to make Iraq a stable, decent country. They just totally failed to account for the fact that there was a widespread anti-US Islamist sentiment in Iraq and in the surrounding nations that would capitalize on the power vacuum. (Seriously, if it wasn't for Paul Bremer's stupid decision to disband the army, things probably would have played out differently and Bush may have even been partially vindicated in the long run.)

[Ziggy Stardust]

Stas, I'm talking about the 1978 coup, which had nothing to do with Western meddling.

You seem intensely confused about Iranian history. Read the wikipedia articles.

The Allied powers invaded neutral Iran during World War II and deposed Reza Shah for not being cooperative. They installed his son Mohammad Reza in power as the Shah, explicitly for the purpose of making Iran a client state to allow for easy shipments of war material to the USSR (our ally at the time, obviously). Although the Shah was nominally in power, in the late 1940s Iran was actually a functioning democracy. That is, until in the early 1950s, the democratically elected prime minister (Mossadegh) was overthrown by the CIA for nationalizing the oil industry. Mossadegh had been an intensely popular (and, again, democratically elected) leader, and the US's role in forcing him out and replacing him with the hardliner Zahedi. The US even instigated riots to try and convince people Mossadegh was unpopular.

After the 1953 coup, the Shah's government became increasingly centralized and despotic (and unpopular), while continuing to receive massive amounts of support from the United States as a prop against Soviet influence in the region. In 1975 he formally abolished the multiparty system, which had already been functionally defunct for several years due to the Shah's secret police and intimidation tactics towards the opposition. He was an intensely unpopular ruler; the Iranians despised him, and a huge part of that was because of the perception that he was a essentially a proxy of the United States.

Seriously. Read any fucking history book (or wikipedia) article about the Iranian Revolution or the Pahlavi dynasty. One of the major reasons the Ayatollah was able to rally the population against the Shah was because of nationalism; one of the rallying calls of the entire Revolution was removing American influence from Iranian government. The Iranians by and large viewed American policy in the region as neo-colonialist.

[Channel72]

Seriously. Read any fucking history book (or wikipedia) article about the Iranian Revolution or the Pahlavi dynasty. One of the major reasons the Ayatollah was able to rally the population against the Shah was because of nationalism; one of the rallying calls of the entire Revolution was removing American influence from Iranian government. The Iranians by and large viewed American policy in the region as neo-colonialist.

What the fuck are you talking about? I'm saying the 1978 revolution was something the US didn't want to happen - which goes against Stas' bullshit theory that the US purposely wants to setup Islamist regimes.

[Ziggy Stardust]

What the fuck are you talking about? I'm saying the 1978 revolution was something the US didn't want to happen - which goes against Stas' bullshit theory that the US purposely wants to setup Islamist regimes.

I never said otherwise. I was simply responding to your claim that the 1978 revolution had nothing to do with Western meddling. It was the direct result of Western meddling. I disagree with Stas's about the US wanting to setup Islamist regimes. But that doesn't mean I agree with your mischaracterization of Iranian history. Also, earlier in the thread you claimed that the 1978 revolution was "baffling" and acting surprised that anti-Western sentiment "somehow" coalesced to propel the Ayatollah into power. There was nothing baffling about it; in the eyes of the Iranians, the Shah's government was seen as illegitimate, and simply a puppet of the United States. That perception was a direct result of decades of occasionally violent meddling and coercion.