Category Archives: Foreign Policy

The ‘Chickenshit’ Comment

Stephen M. Walt is no friend of Israel. He and John Mearsheimer have condemned the “Israel lobby’s” influence on U.S. foreign Policy in an eponymous book. In Foreign Policy, this week, Walt, however, condemned the White Houses’ “chickenshit” comment, vis-a-vis Bibi Netanyahu, for assorted reasons, one of which is that “Netanyahu’s decision not to attack Iran wasn’t a show of cowardice (or being a ‘chickenshit’); it was a sensible strategic choice”:

… the idea that Netanyahu is a coward who lacks the guts to pull the trigger against Iran assumes Israel had a genuine military option vis-à-vis Iran in the first place. In fact, Netanyahu’s saber rattling towards Iran has always been a bluff, because Israel lacked the military capacity to conduct a strategically significant strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Sure, the Israeli air force could do some damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but it doesn’t have enough aircraft or the bunker-busting capacity to destroy all of its enrichment capacity. This situation with Iran isn’t remotely like Israel’s 1981 Osirak raid against Iraq, or even its 2007 attack on a reactor site in Syria, which involved bombing a single vulnerable location. An Israeli attack might delay Iran’s far more advanced program by a few months or maybe a year, but it would also encourage Iran’s leaders to start an all-out sprint for an actual bomb. And that is why prominent members of Israel’s national security establishment went public with their own concerns about Netanyahu’s hollow threats. A few Israeli Strangeloves might have believed an attack would draw the United States in to finish the job, but the risks were enormous and both Bush and Obama made it clear this gambit wasn’t going to fly. …

MORE.

UPDATE II: The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (‘The Turkish Problem’)

Feminism, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Middle East, Socialism, States' Rights

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is often dismissed as Marxist–Leninist, or as “a fusion of revolutionary socialism and Kurdish nationalism.” CNN’s Arwa Damon describes the PKK’s ideology as “an idealistic philosophy, one that combines Kurdish nationalism with certain communist goals, such as equality and communal ownership of property.”

As the movement’s salient ideological features, Wikipedia lists Kurdish nationalism, libertarian socialism, communalism, feminism and democratic confederalism. Still imprisoned by the Turks, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan is said to have “abandoned Leninism, leading the party to adopt his new political platform of “Democratic Confederalism” (influenced strongly by the libertarian socialist philosophy of communalism).”

Öcalan himself described the PKK’s idea of governance as follows:

The democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a State system, it is the democratic system of a people without a State… It takes its power from the people and adopts to reach self sufficiency in every field including economy.

The PKK, it would appear, leans towards a matriarchy.

You have to be a tinny libertarian automaton not to hope this cohesive people is able, one day, to form a peaceful community of their choosing.

UPDATE I: About “the Turkish problem,” Patrick Cockburn writes this:

… US planes attacking Isis forces in Kobani had to fly 1200 miles from their bases in the Gulf because Turkey wouldn’t allow the use of its airbase at Incirlik, just a hundred miles from Kobani. By not preventing reinforcements, weapons and ammunition from reaching Isis in Kobani, Ankara was showing that it would prefer Isis to hold the town: anything was better than the PYD. Turkey’s position had been clear since July 2012, when the Syrian army, under pressure from rebels elsewhere, pulled out of the main Kurdish areas. The Syrian Kurds, long persecuted by Damascus and politically marginal, suddenly won de facto autonomy under increasing PKK authority. Living mostly along the border with Turkey, a strategically important area to Isis, the Kurds unexpectedly became players in the struggle for power in a disintegrating Syria. This was an unwelcome development for the Turks. The dominant political and military organisations of the Syrian Kurds were branches of the PKK and obeyed instructions from Ocalan and the military leadership in Qandil. The PKK insurgents, who had fought for so long for some form of self-rule in Turkey, now ruled a quasi-state in Syria centred on the cities of Qamishli, Kobani and Afrin. Much of the Syrian border region was likely to remain in Kurdish hands, since the Syrian government and its opponents were both too weak to do anything about it. Ankara may not be the master chess player collaborating with Isis to break Kurdish power, as conspiracy theorists believe, but it saw the advantage to itself of allowing Isis to weaken the Syrian Kurds. It was never a very far-sighted policy: if Isis succeeded in taking Kobani, and thus humiliating the US, the Americans’ supposed ally Turkey would be seen as partly responsible, after sealing off the town. In the event, the Turkish change of course was embarrassingly speedy. Within hours of Erdo?an saying that Turkey wouldn’t help the PYD terrorists, permission was being given for Iraqi Kurds to reinforce the PYD fighters at Kobani.

Interesting analysis.

UPDATE II: A column I wrote on 10/19/2007, fingered Bush for betraying the Kurds. While he doesn’t veer into opinion, Cockburn illustrated a similar dynamic, also in 2007:

… There are 100,000 Turkish troops just across the northern Iraqi border preparing to launch an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan in the hope of eliminating the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The US has labelled the PKK ‘terrorists’ and the Iraqi government – despite the arguments of its Kurdish members – has told the guerrillas to disarm or leave its territory. Iran has denounced the Iranian wing of the PKK as a pawn of Israel and the US, and intermittently shells its camps in the Kandil mountains. The PKK, which led the failed rebellion of the Turkish Kurds between 1984 and 1999 and had been largely forgotten by the outside world, is suddenly at the centre of a new crisis in Iraq. President Bush is due to talk to the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Washington on 5 November to discuss how to deal with the PKK without a Turkish invasion of Iraq being launched. The US army in Baghdad is worried that its supply lines through northern Iraq will be cut if the Turks declare an economic embargo or launch a military attack. …

NATO’s Worth Nothing

Europe, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Islam, Jihad, Middle East, States' Rights

Why doesn’t he provide a solution to the siege by the Islamic State (ISIS) of Kobani (or Ayn al-Araba in Arabic), a Kurdish city in the Kurdish regions of northern Syria? He is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, who has issued a dire warning to the West: “dropping bombs from the air will not provide a solution … the time [has] come to ‘cooperate for a ground invasion.’”

Turkey is a NATO ally with a sizable, modern army, quite capable of tackling ISIS. The problem Turkey, the US, the European Union and NATO face stems from these great centralizers’ opposition to the PKK. The PKK is a long-standing Kurdish, separatist movement, which the US, Turkey and the rest aim to eliminate or undermine, for obvious reasons. Statists struggle with secession, separation or States’ Rights.

National Post:

The Turkish leader is strongly mistrusted by the Kurds of Turkey and Syria. Many accuse his government — anxious about Turkey’s own Kurdish separatist movement — of conniving with ISIS and of failing to act to prevent it committing atrocities against the Kurds in Syria. Meanwhile, Washington is becoming increasingly frustrated with its NATO ally. There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” an unnamed U.S. official told the New York Times. “After all the fulminating about Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe, they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe. “This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border.”

If the US is so cut up about Turkey’s craven indifference to the Kurds, it could collude with NATO members to strip Turkey of its NATO membership, for what that’s worth.

Excoriated though he was, in his attempt to “absolve the US of any guilt in the matter,” to quote an RT expert, Vice President Joe Biden had a point. Via RT:

“our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria,” elaborating that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were “so determined to take down Assad,” that they started a “proxy Sunni-Shia war.” Biden went on saying that “they poured hundreds of millions of dollars, and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

DER SPIEGEL on the quagmire:

The country has been strangely reserved when it comes to dealing with the Islamic State. It is the neighboring country that is perhaps most threatened by the jihadist fighters, but it has refrained thus far from joining US President Barack Obama’s anti-terror coalition, even if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan strongly hinted over the weekend that it might do so soon. When it comes to combatting the Islamic State and putting an end to the Syrian civil war, Turkey has a key role to play.

The government in Ankara had justified its hesitancy by pointing to the dozens of Turkish diplomats taken hostage by the Islamic State in Mosul. Now that they have been released, however, all eyes are on Turkey to see what responsibilities it might take on. On the way back to Turkey from the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Erdogan told reporters that his country is now prepared to join the coalition. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Istanbul on Sunday he added, in reference to the fight against the Islamic State: “We cannot stay out of this.”

Jim Webb, Salt-Of-The-Earth Democrat

Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, States' Rights

I think it’s fair to call Jim Webb the last of the Southern Democrats (propaganda from both parties, notwithstanding, Southern Democrats were salt of the earth, states’ rights advocates). Another who’d qualify as such is the late great Robert Byrd, an old Southern gentleman, and an admirable and “stern constitutional scholar.”

Webb, formerly a senator from Virginia, “is genuinely thinking about a White House bid in 2016”: “I’m seriously looking at the possibility of running for president,” he said in a speech last week.

I have a soft spot for Sen. Webb. [In 2007], he was a junior senator and a defecting Republican who had served in the Reagan administration as Secretary of the Navy. When I first began writing against [W’s] war for WorldNetDaily.com, he had e-mailed me in approval and sent along some of his own anti-war editorials. Sen. Webb’s motives for safeguarding [the military] were always beyond reproach: love of country and kin. The Senator comes from a military family; he himself is a Vietnam veteran, son of a World War II warrior, and father to a marine who fought in Iraq. According to “ThinkProgress,” Webb’s son had a brush with death in Iraq in 2006.

It’s a shame that dumb Democrats will not give Webb the time of day and will, instead, cleave to dynastic nominee Mrs. Clinton.

Read:

* Webb on “‘The Myth of White Privilege.”

* Wonkette against The Webb.

* How Webb Walloped ‘W.’