Category Archives: Middle East

Will The Arabs Fight Or Turn Tail?

Having grown up in Israel, I confess to harboring a bias about the mettle of the Arab fighting force. We grew up seeing images of army boots piled up high in the Sinai desert, where in 1967, Egyptians shed those shoes and fled before the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). Al Qaeda and ISIS reversed my bias; they’re fierce fighters. But the old preconception is creeping back again.

Reports DEBKAfile:

US officials disclosed Wednesday that the UAE [United Arab Emirates] had suspended air attacks against the Islamic State in Syria over concerns about their pilots’ safety, after the Jordanian pilot who was burned alive a month ago was captured in early December. The UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain joined the US-led coalition against ISIS in September.

The UAE appears to want guarantees that if downed, their pilots will be rescue by our guys. The Emiratis are demanding that American Ospreys “be located in northern Iraq, near the site of most raids,” to mount rescue operations. You’d think they’re doing the US a favor by protecting their neighborhood from the advancing demons.

I realize there’s more to it than cowardice: Many in the Arab world see “the Islamic State not as an Arab but as a US-European war. This line resonates widely in the other Arab countries aligned with the coalition.”

The Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nasser Judeh, talks a good game: “You have to target them wherever they are,” he says. No doubt, King Abdullah, like his father, is a man of action. But for rest, could it be that Brian Williams, the NBC anchor who made up self-aggrandizing war stories, is not the only high-powered person who’s lying? Hints DEBKAfile:

It is noteworthy that neither Washington nor Amman has disclosed the scope of Jordan’s aerial activity since the pilot was captured …
… Although the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Bahrain joined the coalition from the start, most observers believe their participation was more symbolic than active. Iraq has no air force to speak of and its army turned tail against Islamic State forces; the Saudis allotted a trifling number of planes to the effort; while Bahrain doesn’t have an air force at all. The UAE has the biggest and most modern air force in the Gulf region and so its withdrawal is a major blow to Washington’s war effort, such as it is.

* “ISIS in full swing under ex-Iraqi general with 70 deaths in a month.”

* Chucky Krauthammer is unhappy about Jordan’s apparent enthusiasm for the battle against ISIS. As always, Chucky wants the US to lead and dominate, because that means he assumes his rightful place in the world. Behold:

On Killing The ‘Right Way,’ For The ‘Right’ Reasons

Democracy, Islam, Jihad, Just War, Middle East, Terrorism

“Killed in an un-Islamic way” is how Jake Tapper of CNN described the torching by ISIS of a captive, caged Jordanian pilot. In case you didn’t know, beheading is killing the Islamic way.

Killing à la America, now that’s an entirely different matter. We do it right. The US is civilized: America strafes from above.

Villagers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen already know it, although the people on the ground near American drone bases in Somalia and Ethiopia are still blissfully unaware of it—Barack Obama is the uncrowned king of the killer drone. In Iraq, ordinary men and women scan the skies nervously for the telltale metallic shimmer, wondering whether they are being simply surveilled from above, as promised, or targeted by Hellfire missiles. Ditto the Iranians, who once even downed, and promptly displayed to the world, an RQ-170 Sentinel, launched into Iranian airspace by Uncle Sam.

Here is the face of disfigurement by American forces.

Still, the “good” killers can claim they are without mens rea—criminal intent—we don’t mean to disfigure and kill all the little Shakiras we’ve disfigured and killed.

The child, reported London’s Daily Mail, “was burned beyond recognition by a U.S. drone and left for dead in a trashcan. … She was found by a medical mission team two years ago and was described as ‘lucky’ by staff as two other children found with her were killed by the military attack.” “[B]rought to the U.S. from her home in Pakistan,” the girl’s American surgeons patched her up.

As you can see, not much remains of the small, charred face. Nevertheless, as the narrative goes, the little girl and tens of thousands like her, should be grateful that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put little Shakira together again. (Or would have if they could have.)

That’s how we role; we reduce the “bad guys'” countries to rubble, decimate their neighborhoods with Daisy Cutters—all with good intentions and for a good cause: Democratizing the devils!

Ours is “The Jupiter Complex”: “the ability granted by the possession of huge air forces, to rain thunderbolts on the wicked.” “The Jupiter Complex,” writes (neoconservative) historian Paul Johnson, “was to be with the United States for the rest of the century.”

And into the next.

Savages all, if you ask me.

Al-Sisi Is No Sissy

History, Islam, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Being neoconservatives for the most, American pundits are without a concept of history. This was manifestly obvious during the democracy spreading mission to Iraq, a mission the British had tried a century ago and failed.

In this context, I am unsure whether Jonah Goldberg’s likening of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to “Atatürk — the Turkish strongman who modernized and secularized Turkey a century ago,” is warranted.

Addressing the assemblage of imams in the room, al-Sisi called for a “religious revolution” in which Muslim clerics take the lead in rethinking the direction Islam has taken recently. An excerpt (as translated by Raymon Ibrahim’s website):

Goldberg quotes al-Sisi as saying this, at Al-Azhar University:

“I am referring here to the religious clerics. … It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
“That thinking — I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world! … All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.
“I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”

The Egyptian leaders that came before President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—the unseating of the last, Husni Mubarak, was cheered by the West—governed in a secular manner. Their influences ranged from Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Arabism to socialism and anticolonialism, but not Islamism. They all fought ruthlessly against the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. Anwar Sadat was assassinated by this faction for making peace with Israel. But repeated attempts were made by the Islamists on the lives of the other two, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Hosni Mubarak. Perhaps Al-Sisi is simply an Egyptian in the mold of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak.

One thing is true: Al-Sisi is no sissy

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. …