Category Archives: Wars of the Middle East

The gun that made the Nineties roar.

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The story of the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle can stand in for the history of the Soviet Union more generally. First, there is the story of its designer. Timofey Kalashnikov was a “kulak” (one of the well-off peasants who had profited from the pre-revolutionary regime’s “wager on the sober and the strong”). In 1919 Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was born. His parents nurtured him through the Russian Civil War. In 1921 the Bolshevik Revolution ran up against the resistance to “common ownership of the means of production” by the peasant-proprietors like Timofey Kalashnikov. The Bolsheviks settled for control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, while allowing peasants and shopkeepers to retain possession of their property. They didn’t like doing this, but they recognized reality. Then Stalin came to power. In 1928 he launched the transition to real Communism. He ordered the “collectivization” of agriculture, by seizing the lands of the kulaks, and by plowing resources into building industry. The Kalashnikov family had their farm seized, then were deported to Siberia. Old Pa Kalashnikov soon died. An older brother mouthed off and got slammed into the Gulag. So Mikhail Kalashnikov grew up in fear and hardship. In 1938 Kalashnikov got drafted and learned to drive a tank; in June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union; in October 1941 Kalashnikov was badly wounded. While in hospital he became interested in weapons design and managed to get transferred to a design unit for the rest of the war. No Stalingrad for him. At the end of the war the Allies captured a bunch of German designers. The US got the great rocket scientist Werner von Braun; the Russkies got the great arms designer Hugo Schmeisser. Taken to Russia, Schmeisser “helped” design the AK-47, which—oddly—bears a marked resemblance to his own earlier design for the Wehrmacht’s “Sturmgewehr” assault rifle. So, what did Mikhail Kalashnikov add?

That question brings us to our second theme, the Soviet system of industrial production. There was a Soviet-era joke that ran: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Even the best-rewarded Soviet workers weren’t always delighted with their situations. A lot of people did sloppy, crude work, chipping at the vodka bottle during the work day. As a result, the AK-47 is garbage by Western engineering standards. It isn’t very accurate: it has an effective range of only 200-300 yards. It is crudely made, rather than engineered so that the pieces fit tightly together. Perversely, herein lies one of its virtues. You can get it dirty; you can forget to oil it; and you can blaze away at something without cleaning out the carbon build-up: it still fires. Then, it is stubby, especially with the butt-stock folded forward, and light, only about ten pounds. Herein lies a second virtue. Short and light made it the weapon-of-choice for both child-soldiers and terrorists. Short, light, and reliable made untrained, even moronic, soldiers a deadly enemy. In sum, it is a weapon perfectly adapted for war in the Third World.

Third, there is the story of the Communism versus Capitalism. Colt only manufactured as many M-16s as the market demanded. The Soviets manufactured stuff to keep their workers employed, without any regard for what the market wanted. As a result, there are 10 million M-16s, but there may be 100 million AK-47s. The Soviets gave the surplus arms away to “movements of national liberation” all around the globe during the Cold War. Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are awash in these things.

As for Kalashnikov, he had all the rewards and special privileges reserved for a “Hero of the Soviet Union” heaped upon him: he was rich enough to buy a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator, and even a car. All were built on the same lines as the AK-47. No wonder the place folded up.

See: C.J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

The last helicopter from Baghdad.

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As we embark on an attempt to salvage Iraq from both the misdeeds of its post-Saddam Hussein/post-American occupation government and from the claws of ISIS, here’s a cold, hard lesson from History.

After his election as president in November 1964 Lyndon Johnson increased American troops in the war in Vietnam to a maximum of 540,000 men. In January 1968 the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) launched a massive offensive to coincide with the Tet lunar New Year celebration. The Americans and the South Vietnamese managed to defeat the Tet offensive on the ground, but not in the eyes of American voters. Up until Tet Americans had tended to believe the assurances of progress that were being made in Vietnam on the part by their leaders. Tet changed that. Now a majority began to doubt that victory was possible and that American leaders were telling them the truth about the war. In March 1968 President Lyndon Johnson announced a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam, solicited peace talks, and announced that he would not run for re-election.

Peace talks began in Paris in May 1968. When they failed to make progress, President Johnson resumed bombing until the North Vietnamese came to their senses in October 1968. However, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon encouraged the South Vietnamese to block further talks until after the November 1968 elections.

Nixon narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey in the November 1968 election. Nixon’s goal was to extricate American forces from Vietnam without the whole house of cards coming down immediately. As his foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger put it, “We’ve got to find some formula that holds things together for a year or two [i.e. until late 1970 or 1971].” That formula appeared to be “Vietnamization”: shifting the chief burden to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). While negotiations with North /Vietnam continued, Nixon began to draw down American forces. By late 1971 the total number of American troops had fallen from 540,000 under Johnson to 157,000 under Nixon. Unsurprisingly, the negotiations went nowhere since the US was obviously withdrawing and the North Vietnamese could anticipate swift victory once the Americans were gone. In March 1972 Nixon unleashed a massive air attack on North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese gave in, negotiations resumed, and a cease-fire was declared in January 1973. Most of the remaining American troops were withdrawn by March 1973.

The Republic of South Vietnam survived until early 1975. Then the North Vietnamese attacked. The ARVN collapsed, and huge numbers of refugees-in-the-making converged on Saigon in hopes of being evacuated by the Americans. Many (6,200) were, but most were not. Saigon fell on 30 April 1975.[1]

What are the parallels, if any, between South Vietnam then and Iraq now? Neither government enjoyed much legitimacy in the eyes of at least a large minority of their people. Both governments were up against ruthless and competent enemies. There are limits to what can be accomplished by airpower. The American administrations that had to clean up the mess weren’t the ones who had caused it.

Perhaps the differences are more important. Having escaped the Indochina disaster, Americans refused to recommit when a new crisis arose. The world did not end.

[1] “Leaving Vietnam,” The Week, 9 February 2007, p. 11.

 

Clueless in Gaza.

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Israel captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the 1967 “Six Days War.” In 2005 Israel ended its military occupation of the Strip, handing over government to the Palestinian Authority. In 2007 Hamas won elections in the Strip (although not among all Palestinians), then followed up electoral victory by seizing control of the government in Gaza from the Palestinian Authority.   Israel saw this development as a grave danger. Hamas does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. Hamas militants backed up words with deeds by firing rockets into Israel. Israel responded by imposing a tight blockade on Gaza. All sorts of things–from computers to food–were barred from entry, and most Palestinians were barred from leaving Gaza.

The blockade wrecked the economy of Gaza. In early Summer 2014, there were 1.8 million people living in the Gaza Strip; 40 percent of them were unemployed; almost half of them received food aid from the United Nations; and 80 percent of them lived under the level defined by the UN as in poverty. At the same time, Hamas circumvented the blockade by digging many tunnels into Egypt which allowed the import of all sorts of goods. (It is difficult to believe that there wasn’t also a large “black” economy that never figured into UN calculations of living standards.)   So long as the Egyptians tolerated the Hamas tunnels, Israel’s blockade could not have full effect as a form of non-military coercion. However, Hamas had begun as an extension of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. When the Egyptian military overthrew the government of Mohammad Morsi, the new government cut-off the Hamas tunnels. The people of the Gaza Strips suddenly began to suffer a great deal more than before.

In April 2014 Hamas went so far as to form a unity government with its old rival Fatah, which rules the West Bank (after a fashion). This got Hamas nowhere. Israel sank the peace-talks being pushed by the United States rather than deal with Hamas.

Hoping to force an end to the blockade, Hamas went onto the offensive in Summer 2014. Hamas could not hope to coerce Israel directly. Hamas could hope to provoke a humanitarian crisis that would lead to international pressure on Israel to ease or end the blockade. Hamas had imported a large stock of missiles through the tunnel system before the coup that put Morsi in prison. Now these missiles began to rain down on Israel. The Israelis struck back with air attacks, artillery fire, and a ground incursion. In the process, the Israelis discovered many tunnels that ran not into Egypt for smuggling, but into Israel. Between 2001 and 2005 Palestinian suicide bombers had killed 800 people in Israel until the Israelis walled themselves off from the Palestinians. Finding this defense penetrated by the tunnels, the Israelis went wild.

Israel’s air and ground offensive against Hamas certainly provoked a huge humanitarian crisis. It killed about 1,900 people; destroyed 10,000 homes; and forced the emergency relocation of perhaps 400,000 people within the confines of the tiny area. Criticism of Israel’s actions came from all around the world. Israel has been pushed back toward revisiting the situation of April 2014 in the sense that it will negotiate through the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. On the other hand, Hamas also came in for much criticism for using Palestinian civilians as human shields as they fired their rockets from the midst of civilian areas. Much of this criticism, little noticed in the West, comes from other Arab governments. Moreover, Israel demands the effectively-supervised disarmament of Gaza as a prerequisite to ending the blockade. Fatah sees a chance to make gains against its rival, Hamas.  Hard to make a deal when no one wants a deal.

“Misery in Gaza,” The Week, 22 August 2014, p. 11.)

Peachy and Danny

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Soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the Seventh Century AD, Arab Muslin tribes burst out of the Arabian peninsula to begin a wave of conquest that ran on for centuries. Muhammad’s successors as leaders of the Muslims took the title of Caliph (“Successor” to the Prophet). The single large Arab empire soon fragmented into multiple kingdoms. Sometimes the rulers claimed the title of Caliph. The last important ruler to claim the title was the Ottoman emperor. The title went unclaimed after the fall of that empire at the end of the First World War. As more and more of the Muslim world fell under direct or indirect control of non-Muslims, especially of European states, nostalgia grew for the days of Muslim power and unity.

Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai was born in Samarra, Iraq in 1971. He claims to be a descendant of Muhammad’s own Quraysh tribe. He earned a doctorate in religious law and set up as a preacher. Salafism was all the rage among Sunni Muslims at the time and he found himself attracted to it.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, al-Badri joined the resistance. In particular, he joined not the Sunni Iraqi tribesmen fighting against the Americans and the Shi-ite majority, but Al Qaeda in Iraq. This franchise of al Qaeda sought to foster war between Sunni and Shi’a in order to make the Iraq occupation a disaster for the United States. In 2005 American troops arrested him during a raid on a resistance group. He spent some time locked-up in Camp Bucca. In the United States prison sometimes serves as a sort of advanced education in crime and as an anti-social networking site. That seems to have been the case with Camp Bucca as well. Al-Badri got to know a lot of people with views similar to his own. As part of its effort to disengage from the war in Iraq, the Americans turned over many of their prisoners to the new Iraqi government. As part of its effort to mend fences with former opponents, the Iraqi government let many of them go. Badri was among those released.

He went back to the struggle against the Americans and the government they had created. During his time in prison, much had changed. Sunni tribesmen had grown weary of both the bloodshed and the strict Islamic fundamentalism pushed by al Qaeda. The “Awakening” movement among Sunnis combined with the American “surge” to put al Qaeda on the ropes. The survivors were rethinking the whole strategy of fighting Shi’ites instead of just the Americans, who were plainly eager to get out of Iraq in the near future. The newly-released Badri must have had a Rip van Winkle moment. He argued for sticking to the old course. When he saw that he wasn’t winning the argument, he started making his own contacts with the rich men in the Persian Gulf states who had funded al Qaeda. This gave him an independent source of money. He adopted the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr having been the father-in-law of Muhammad and the first Caliph.

Thereafter, Badri/Abu Bakr went on a rampage. He gathered fighters drawn to his ideas and his oratory. He moved his operations into the eastern parts of war-torn Syria, where a vacuum of power existed. Syria itself was full of jihadist enthusiasts, either Syrian ones or foreigners drawn to the struggle. Many of these fighters shifted their loyalty to what Abu Bakr now called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He emptied banks, exported oil from wells ISIS had seized, sold plundered antiquities, and taxed local people. With a huge war-chest and 10,000 enthusiastic followers, Abu Bakr set out to recreate the Caliphate.

History is unlikely to repeat itself, but there’s only one way to find out.

“The man who would be caliph,” The Week, 19 September 2014, p. 11.

 

Just like imam used to make.

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Trying to help foreigners understand America, the Gummint pays for some of them to study in the US as Fulbright scholars. Nasser al-Awlaki and his wife came from Yemen in 1971 on a Fulbright to study agricultural economics. He got an MA from UNM, then a Ph.D. from Nebraska, then taught at Meenasotta for a couple of years. Almost immediately, he and the missus had a child. They named the sprout Anwar al-Awlaki. Having been born in the USA, Anwar was an American citizen. In 1978 the family returned to Yemen.

To be perfectly honest, the goat pizza available in Yemen paled in comparison to what could be had in the States. In 1990, Anwar al-Awlaki started in at Colorado State University. One summer he spent the break fighting in Afghanistan. (Must have made for interesting conversation in the dorm that Fall. “So, Bill, what did you do this summer? I picked lettuce on my uncle’s farm. Hoo-whee, we had some wild times on Saturday night. How ‘bout you Anne-War? Well, I ambushed opposing mujahedeen, then walked around shooting the wounded in the head.”) Anyway, by 1994 he got a B.S. in Civil Engineering and was a part-time imam in a mosque in Denver.

In 1996 he landed a job as an imam in San Diego. Here he got an M.A. in Educational Leadership from SDSU. However, Shaitan (in the form of babes in bikinis) beset him: he got hauled in for soliciting prostitutes a couple of times. In 1999 the EffaBeeEye came around, wanting to know if he had any ties to the “blind sheikh” who had organized the 1993 WTC truck bombing or to the then-munchkin terrorist Osama bin Laden. He said “no” and that was good enough for them. Meanwhile, a couple of the future 9/11 guys were attending services at his mosque. In 2000 he landed a job as an imam at a big mosque in northern Virginia. (We can’t even keep alcoholic child-molesters from becoming school bus drivers, so why blame a mosque for hiring an imam who can’t keep his pants on?)   During 2001 he worked toward a doctorate in Human Resources Development at George Washington University’s Education School. (He actually didn’t have much in the way of Islamic scholarly credentials, so his charismatic appeal to ignorant fanatics seems to arisen from what he picked up in American Ed. Schools.)

Then 9/11 came along. “The US was at war with al-Qaeda, not with Islam.” So, Awlaki got invited to a lunch at what was left of the Pentagon. They probably served pork chops or crab cakes, because the next thing you know (March 2002), he was on a plane to Yemen. From 2002 to 2004 he bounced between Yemen, the US, and the UK as an advocate of jihad.

After a variety of adventures, Awlaki settled down as a long-distance recruiter and inciter of jihadis. His fluent English and knowledge of American society, his charismatic personality, and his ease in using modern media made him a prominent figure despite hiding out in a remote area of one of the most backward places on Earth. The London subway bombers, the Times Square bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and many others all had his sermons on their computers or had exchanged messages with him. Since he has said that “jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding upon every other able Muslim,” he probably wasn’t trying to calm them down. When the Underwear Bomber said that Awlaki helped train him for his mission, the government got fed up and decided to kill him. On 9/30/11 they did.

Can the United States execute an American citizen without trial, without even producing the evidence upon which the decision to kill him is based? Would you really want to establish the legal precedent? Talk about “death panels”! So, civil libertarians opposed the execution. On the other hand, some of them say the US can’t “execute” anyone anywhere without trial. It will be hard to fight a war on terrorism with those hand-cuffs in place. What to do?

Carlotta Gall on Afghanistan

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The British had an empire all over the world, so both British journalism and the British intelligence service had an unusual reach. Many of the empire-builders, journalists, and intelligence officers were willing to go where others feared to tread. Henderson Alexander “Sandy” Gall (1927) grew up on a rubber plantation in Malaya, went to school in Britain, and then went to work for a series of news agencies. He reported on the Suez Crisis (1956); the Hungarian Crisis (1956); the Congo Crisis (1960-1963); the Vietnam War (various times, 1965-1975); the Six Days War (1967); Uganda (where he was arrested by Idi Amin’s police in 1972 while reporting on the expulsion of the Indians); and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Along the way, Gall did some work for MI 6, the British intelligence service. He slowed down a bit for a decade to work as the news presenter on a television show and to have a family. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 he went there to make a series of documentaries about the “mujahideen” fighting against the Russkies.

His daughter, Carlotta Gall (1971?- ) is a chip off the old block. She went to Cambridge University, where she “read” Russian and French, then got an MA in International Relations and Journalism. This provided her with a launching pad to become a reporter for the Moscow Times, covering the war in Chechnya (1994-1998). She briefly covered the Caucasus and Central Asia for the Financial Times and the Economist (1998-1999), then went to work for the New York Times. For a couple of years Gall covered the wars attending the break-up of the former Yugoslavia (1999-2001). Then she went to Afghanistan to cover the American war against the Taliban and al Qaeda (2001-2013). Now she is supposed to be covering the Middle East, but the Times sent her hot-foot to Ukraine when trouble cooked-off there.

Right at the moment (September 2014), she is best known for her book The Wrong Enemy.[1] Based on her years of reporting in and deep knowledge of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gall argues that Pakistan is the force driving the Taliban in its fight against the Americans. The Soviet invasion of Pakistan put a hostile state on the western border of Pakistan. Both the Americans and the Pakistanis involved themselves in supporting the “mujahideen” resistance to the Soviets. When the Soviets left in 1989, so did the Americans. The Pakistanis stayed. Soon, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) aligned itself with the Taliban, the victors in the civil war that followed the Russian defeat. Briefly, after 9/11, Pakistan aligned itself with the Americans who overthrew the Taliban as part of their hunt for Osama bin Laden. When, after several years, it became apparent that the Americans would not be leaving Afghanistan any time soon and appeared to be creating their own client-state in Kabul, the ISI re-entered the fray by reviving the alliance with the Taliban. The chief culprit here has been Pakistani General Ashfaq Kayani, who headed the ISI from 2004 to 2007, and then became chief-of-staff of the army in a country with a long history of military intervention in politics. Under Kayani’s direction, ISI armed, trained, and directed the Taliban in a war that has killed 2,300 American soldiers, 1,100 other foreign soldiers, and somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans.

Why haven’t the Americans recognized that they are fighting “the wrong enemy”? Possibly because the ISI is good at hiding its hand. Possibly because of long-standing deficiencies in the CIA. Possibly because the incompetence and corruption of the Karzai government is so much easier to see. Possibly because it would be difficult to explain to the American people.

[1] Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

Arab Youth

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Can one be optimistic about the future of the Middle East? Not if you read the newspapers. What if you read the work of knowledgeable scholars? Then there might be more cause for optimism. Juan Cole has argued that a watershed divides the older generation of Arabs from the youth of today. The older generation is poorly educated and often illiterate, largely rural, and religiously observant. Fundamentally conservative, they have accepted a “complacent, stagnant and corrupt status quo” in politics and the economy. Younger people, Cole argues, are better educated, more concentrated in urban areas, more familiar with all kinds of technology, and less religiously observant than are their parents and grandparents. In Egypt, half the population is less than 25 years old. They are also un-employed and under-employed at “Depression-era rates.” On the one hand, this gives them serious grievances against their own society. On the other hand, it leaves them with a lot of free time for complaining, talking, organizing, and demonstrating.   Their familiarity with social media magnifies these tendencies. Cole argues that these sorts of young people played an important role in the “Arab Spring” uprisings that brought down authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.[1] Cole focuses in particular on “left-liberal youth living in towns and cities” whom he sees as forming a credible opposition to both traditional authoritarian governments and to Islamic fundamentalists.

There are objections to Professor Cole’s optimism. For one thing, if you track the historical background to the “Arab Spring,” you can see a rising wave of public discontent. In early 2003, there were demonstrations opposing the American attack on Iraq; in 2006, came Youtube videos of Egyptian secret police abusing suspects in custody; in late 2008, there were demonstrations over the first Gaza war between Israel and Hamas; and in early 2011, video of Tunisian police firing on demonstrators started the ball rolling for the “Arab Spring.” The trouble is that these were equal parts anti-Western (US, Israel) and anti-authoritarian.

Second, the concept of rootless, estranged young people is an umbrella category. Estranged young people looking for a cause don’t have to choose left-liberal progressivism. Young people in the Thirties flocked to Nazism with as much enthusiasm (and in greater numbers) as they did to the International Brigades that fought for the Spanish Republic. Jihadists shelter under the umbrella just as much as do progressives. A familiarity with social media is no vaccine against Islamism. Both ISIS and Anwar al-Awlaki could master modern social media as well as can the progressive young people of the Middle East.

Finally, faced with a choice between Islamists governments elected after a “revolution,” and a return to the old order under the auspices of a military-economic elite complex, the progressive young people celebrated by Professor Cole seem to have opted for the latter. Now that the old order is back in power, the young progressives appear to have come in for as much repression as has the Muslim Brotherhood.

However, the real question is not what mistakes were made by the young people studied by Professor Cole, but what they have learned from those mistakes. They will get another chance. The fighting in Libya will—eventually—burn itself out. The al-Sisi government doesn’t appear to have any solutions for the deep social and economic crises of Egypt. ISIS is going to give radical Islamism a bad name in many quarters. The older generation will gave way to the younger generation. Time is on their side.

[1] Juan Cole, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

Arming the Moderates

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Controversy has swirled around President Obama’s Syrian policy. In particular, people have talked a good deal about the need to support the “moderates” opposing Bashar al-Assad. It has been said that the failure to support the “moderates” allowed the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) to expand its power. In light of this discussion, it is interesting to revisit a piece in the New York Times from April 2013 by Ben Hubbard.[1]

According to Hubbard, the rebellion against Assad began among, is led by, and continues to draw most of its support from conservative Sunni Muslims. They were pro-Islamist from the start. In contrast, the supporters of a “democratic” Syria mostly have been “civilian activists, protesters, and aid workers.” Such people played a role in igniting the rebellion, but soon found themselves pushed to the curbside. Instead, the Ahrar al-Sham group and the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front raised soldiers, obtained arms, and launched attacks. Early small successes snowballed into greater successes later on. Rebels armed-up and added more recruits by seizing Syrian army posts, then towns, and then key resources. ISIS represents this pattern carried to an extreme.

Hubbard reported that one moderate rebel military leader had claimed that most Nusra Front recruits had “joined the group for the weapons, not the ideology” and “some left after discovering the al-Qaeda connection.” However, he acknowledged that the Nusra Front fielded the strongest military force in his area and spoke “on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.”

A year and a half ago Hubbard reported that “nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” Instead, “More than two years of violence have radicalized the armed opposition fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, leaving few groups that both share the political vision of the United States and have the military might to push it forward.”

 

A couple of observation and questions.

Islamist jihadis come to fight for ISIS. Why don’t equivalent figures come to fight for a democratic, secular Syria? Rich people and governments arm the Islamist rebels in Syria. Why don’t equivalent figures or governments in other Arab countries arm the supporters of a democratic, secular Syria? Is it because the supporters of secular, democratic government are few and far between in the Arab world? This isn’t to argue that such people don’t exist. Television talk-shows are full of them.

The American conjecture that fighters flow toward the Islamists because they are the ones with the guns, rather than because of ideology, is belied by the many foreign jihadis who have come to Syria and by the growth of ISIS at the expense of the Nusra Front.

Would Western efforts to arm the moderates just lead to the supporters of the Islamists upping their own support?

Would supporting “moderates” sufficiently to bring them to power just create a puppet-government that has no legitimacy with the majority of the Syrian people? One that is scorned by other Arab governments?

Is it possible that “moderates” just don’t want to fight? Maybe they’re just too “moderate.”

[1] “Islamist Rebels Create Dilemma on Syria Policy, NYT, 28 April 2013, A1, A8.

 

CrISIS.

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Between 2003 and 2008 al-Qaeda in Iraq came to play an important role in the civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites and in the resistance to the occupying American forces. However, they wore out their welcome with the Iraqi Sunnis. In 2008 the Sunni “Awakening” movement swung most of the Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaeda in Iraq, while the American “surge” added to American strength in the fight. By the end of 2008 the remnants of al-Qaeda had been driven into Syria’s Raqqa province. Syria is torn by a different civil war, so it is in no position tp control its own borders. Here the defeated survivors split into quarreling factions. Al-Qaeda “Classic” lost the initiative to the more radical Islamic State (ISIS). ISIS went about building its power base by recruiting enthusiastic fighters. Many of them are volunteers from Muslim countries outside Syria and Iraq, and perhaps 500 of them come from Western countries. Estimates of the numerical strength of ISIS forces vary widely, from a low of 7,000 to 10,000 actual soldiers to a high of 10,000 to 15,000. ISIS also raised a lot of money through extortion and systematic kidnappings for ransom. In February 2014 al-Qaeda “expelled” ISSIS followers from its clubhouse. As if they cared.

In 2011 the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Iraq. This allowed Shi-ite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to reverse the course of Sunni-Shi’ite reconciliation that had paved the way for the defeat of al-Qaeda. When al-Qaeda renewed its attack in Iraq, many disgruntled Sunnis renewed their cooperation with the jihadists, while the Iraqi army had been degraded through neglect and corruption. Maliki and the Shi’ites had created a disaster.

In early 2014, perhaps 3,000 ISIS fighters invaded Iraq. Iraqi forces failed to hold them back. In June 2014 a small force of ISIS troops (estimated at 800) drove away in panic 30,000 Iraqi Army troops and seized the city of Mosul. Later they advanced toward Baghdad.[1]

 

To what extent should we worry about ISIS? The ISIS fighters appear to be professionally competent irregular soldiers with experienced commanders. They are adept at terrorism. They attract a good number of recruits from abroad. They have what looks to journalists to be a big war chest funded by crimes. They have the “momentum” so beloved of sports enthusiasts. They scare the living daylights out of a lot of people.

At the same time, they have won their successes in badly fractured countries whose professional soldiers were preoccupied and divided by other conflicts, and where there exists no political consensus. What happens if and when ISIS slams up against opponents with solid governments, real economic and military resources, and a disposition to fight? Turkey, Iran, and Israel form a cauldron in which the ISIS experience is likely to come to an end.

People will immediately scoff at this idea. Iran, Turkey, and Israel cooperating in spite of their bitter grievances with one another? A historical analogy is useful here. Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union all were at odds with one another before the Second World War. The common danger posed by Hitler’s Germany forced them into what Winston Churchill called the “Grand Alliance.” That alliance began to unravel as soon as the danger had passed.

Another historical analogy is that of Sino-Soviet relations in 1949. Americans assumed that the Soviets would alienate the Chinese. The Korean War then prolonged the Sino-Soviet alliance. Now some Americans assume that ISIS will alienate Sunnis. What if the unexpected happens, as it often does? Which historical analogy is correct, if either one is correct? Should the United States take the lead in solving this problem?

[1] “Rise of a terrorist state,” The Week, 11 July 2014, p. 9.

Palestine.

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Back in the very many days ago, there were a couple of runty little Jewish kingdoms in what is today Palestine (between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean).  Then came the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks under that psycho Alexander, and the Romans.  No more Jewish kingdoms.  Jews ended up spread all over the Middle East and Europe.

Flash forward to the end of the 19th Century.  Everybody else gets a country (Germany, Italy, Rumania for crying out loud), why shouldn’t the Jews have a country too?  This idea is called Zionism.  Trouble is that the place where Zionists wanted to have that country, Palestine, was now full of Muslims and belonged to the Ottoman Empire.            Then, jump to the First World War.  The Ottoman Empire fought on the same side as Germany (which lost) and against Britain (which won).  The Ottoman Empire got broken up, with the British in temporary charge of Palestine.  Also, during the war the British had supported the creation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.

Next, along came the Nazis, who tried to wipe out the Jews of Europe.  After the war many of the survivors of the Holocaust didn’t want to remain in Europe.  One bright idea: let them go to Palestine.  Zionists liked the sound of this.  Arabs didn’t like the idea because they were starting to set up their own countries and didn’t see why they should take in a bunch of European colonists just because some other Europeans had done some bad stuff.  Brits weren’t too crazy about this idea because it would make the Arabs mad.  Nevertheless, the Zionist managed to ship the Jews to Palestine, then fought a war (1948-1949) with the Arab countries in order to create the state of Israel.

Lots of Palestinian Arab Muslims got driven off their land during the war.  They ended up living in refugee camps in Egypt (Gaza Strip), Jordan (on the West Bank), and Syria.  Arab countries weren’t too good about taking in their fellow Arabs, although they were pretty good at chasing out all the Jews from their own countries and stealing their property.  Instead, the Arab countries kept talking about wiping Israel off the map and letting all the Palestinian refugees go home.

However, the post-Holocaust Jews of Israel weren’t the pre-Holocaust Jews of Europe.  After the Holocaust the Israelis always took people seriously when they said that they wanted to wipe out the Jews, then spent a lot of time figuring out how to beat up on people who talked that way.  They beat up on Egypt in 1956; then Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967; then Egypt and Syria in 1973; then they bombed a nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq in 1981.

Outcomes of the war of 1967. First, Israel took the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which were full of Palestinian Arab Muslims.  So they have this huge population of captives who hate their guts.  Second, the Palestinians got fed up with Mickey Mouse Arab countries talking about wiping Israel off the map, only to get beat up on by Israel, always making the situation of the Palestinians worse than it was before the Arab countries tried to “help.”  Palestinians decided that they were going to have to fight on their own to create a country.  It had worked for Israel, so be like Israel.  They didn’t have an army or an air force, so they turned to terrorism.  Israel doesn’t want to turn loose of the West Bank and Gaza if it is just going to turn into a safe-haven for extremists who will try to wipe out Israel, but the longer Israel holds these people captive the more anti-Israel the Palestinians become.  If that’s possible.