Tag Archives: ISIS

Your country gets an F.

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In days of old when knights were bold and Nationalism was in flower, the sociologist Max Weber defined a State as a government that maintained law and order within the borders of the country, provided basic services to citizens, managed the economy, and dealt with foreign countries. Some countries do this really well. Who wouldn’t want to be a Canadian, eh? Other countries do this less well. Weber was discussing European countries at the end of the 19th Century.

However, in the 19th and 20th Centuries Western imperialism gobbled up a bunch of territories that had never been countries (notably in Asia and Africa), then divided them in to “nations” when the tide of imperialism ebbed after the Second World War. The imperial powers had not had the time to do very much to turn these places into “nations,” so some of them have come unglued in the years since independence. Tribal or religious loyalties may be stronger than patriotism; corruption may be so bad that the government can’t provide adequate public services; or rebels, war-lords, or terrorists can operate without much hindrance from the government. When these things happen, a country can be called a “failed state.”

The ten worst-off countries in 2011 were: Somalia, Chad, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Iraq, and Cote d’Ivoire (Coat Dee-Vwar). Most of them have made the Top Ten list since 2005. (See: rut.)

You know how people try to cheer you up by saying that there’s somebody in the world with worse troubles than you? Well, Somalia is the last guy in that chain. Somalia is in the “Horn of Africa,” on the east coast across from the Arabian Peninsula. It is close to the equator, arid, with very little land to farm. Herding and fishing are important to the economy. Britain, Italy, and Ethiopia all conquered chunks of the territory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Mogadishu has some Art Deco buildings worthy of South Beach.) Much of it became independent in 1960, although Ethiopia held on to important chunks. An army general named Siad Barre seized power in 1969. He became a Communist, started a war with Ethiopia, and ran the economy into the ground by 1990. Just to get even, Ethiopia stirred up various tribes against the government. Siad Barre got chucked out in 1991, but no one could agree on who to put in his place. Northern Somalia declared its independence, various soldiers tried to seize power elsewhere, and civil war broke out.

The war caused a famine, bandits (called “technicals”) molested the humanitarian aid workers, and the US sent troops to stop the parts of the violence that might accidentally get on American television. This didn’t work out and left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth about intervening in humanitarian crises. (See: “Black Hawk Down”; see: Rwanda a little while later.) Civil war dragged on to the point that government just disintegrated; after 9/11 the US got very hostile to “Islamists,” of whom there are a great many in Somalia and encouraged people to fight them; many Somali fishermen and soldiers turned to piracy on the Indian Ocean; and drought hit the country in 2011. There are probably a million refugees and internally displaced people. Curiously, it has some of the best internet and cell-phone service in Africa. What about Nigeria?

Euro Muslims.

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Ten years ago, almost to the day, Ross Douthat made the following observations.[1] Then, about 4 percent of the population of Europe was Muslim.[2] This seemed likely to change. Demographers projected that the low and falling birthrate among Christian Europeans would reduce the European population from 728 million people to about 630 million by 2050. Moreover, it will be an aged population dependent upon young workers from somewhere else to finance their pensions and medical care. Already about 900,000 immigrants entered Europe each year. This was about enough to off-set native European population decline and to keep the population at about the 1995 level. However, in 2000 a UN study projected that the countries of the European Union will require over 13 million immigrant workers EACH YEAR to preserve the 1995 ratio of workers to retirees. Thus Europeans may be compelled to organize a huge increase in immigration over the coming decades. Much of this population growth will come from nearby Muslim countries.   In addition, Muslims in Europe have a younger demographic profile and a birth rate triple that of non-Muslims. As a result of these trends alone, and disregarding immigration, demographers anticipated that the Muslim share of European population would reach eight percent by 2015. Moreover, many Europeans are not so much Christian as non-Muslim. If we suppose that a future renewal of European religious enthusiasm is possible, why would Christianity benefit? Might not wide conversions to Islam take place?

Already in 2005 Europeans were being forced to consider the possibility that Muslims within Europe uphold values that are hard to reconcile with currently prevailing norms: the French expelled an imam who insisted that the Koran authorized wife-beating (and what if the imam is correct?); in 2002 and 2004 Muslim militants assassinated two Dutch politicians who warned against the danger posed by Muslim immigration; and the Madrid (2004) and London (2005) train bombings reminded Europeans of the dangers of Islamic radicalism.

Ten years on, Reuel Marc Gerecht makes a number of important points.[3] First, jihad has become charismatic for some EuroMuslims. ISIS is conquering territory, not just blowing up things. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men have gone to fight under the black banners. They come from Europe as well as the Arab countries. To my mind, it is their Spanish Civil War.

Second, European Community states are not likely to sit still for selective targeting of their Muslim citizens by American immigration officers. Hence, American security against European radical Islamists depends on the French and British domestic security services. Both governments have robust security services, while the Americans have little human intelligence from among European Muslims. If the British MI-5 and the French DCRI fail in their efforts to track Euro jihadis and thwart their plots, then the United States is in for a bad time.

EuroIslam may succeed where EuroDisney failed. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 the Hagia Sophia cathedral became a mosque. Will we live to see the day when American tourists line up to enter the great mosque on the isle de la Cite, and when the nearby statue of Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel who defeated an Arab army at Tours, seems like a monument to Muslim persistence?[4]

[1] Ross Douthat, “The World in Numbers: A Muslim Europe?” Atlantic Monthly, January-February 2005, pp. 58-59.

[2] The admission of Turkey to the European Union would raise the share of Muslims in the population to 15 percent. There is no way that will happen now, given the Islamist tilt of the current Turkish government.

[3] Reuel Marc Gerecht, “France and the New Charismatic Jihad,” WSJ, 8 January 2015, A11.

[4] OK, that’s alarmist. My imagination got the better of me.

Thoughts for the New Year.

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I don’t know anything. So, here are my thoughts on a couple of issues.

Climate change is a grave reality. However, I doubt that people can entirely hold back (let alone turn back) global warming. Carbon-burning is central to the industrialization of developing-economies. There aren’t a lot of cheap and ready-to-use alternatives. Instead, there is going to be a long period of adaptation to worsened conditions. It is going to make environmentalists, intellectuals, and other “progressive” people very angry that there will turn out to be market-driven profit opportunities when statist restrictions might have provided more desirable outcomes.

In terms of foreign policy, Vladimir Putin is considerably more of an adult than are American leaders. Balance-of-power politics and spheres of influence are realities in world politics. Power and influence are not the single and permanent prerogative of the United States. For one thing, Ukraine is to Russia as Mexico is to the United States. (“Pity poor Mexico. So far from God, so near the United States.”) For another thing, Putin has tried to help the US out of a couple of ditches into which American leaders have driven it. Syrian chemical weapons and a possible solution to the Iranian nuclear problem are the key examples. All the while he has been vilified because he isn’t a democrat at home and he’s resisting the onward march of Western power around the borders of Russia.

In the Middle East we are witnessing a re-writing the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Iraq is fragmenting into Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish enclaves. This fragmentation is being papered-over during the current emergency. The Shi’ites will never be able to repair their behavior during the Maliki period. Syria is going to fragment into Alawite, Sunni, and Kurdish enclaves. A Kurdish state will emerge. This new country will have trouble with both Turkey and Iran. Will Jordan or Saudi Arabia absorb the unstable and impoverished new Sunni micro-state in western Iraq?

The “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t. Israel cannot afford to have a Palestinian state created. That state would be implacably revanchist, regardless of whatever professions its spokesmen might make in order to obtain sovereignty. Over the centuries, many people have felt that the problems of the world could be resolved if only the Jews would die and stop bothering people. Well, the Israelis aren’t buying this line.

The United States gets much less from the US-Israel alliance than does Israel.

ISIS isn’t a serious problem. The enthusiasm for “jihad” among many Muslims is a serious problem. It is likely to be around for a long time. I’m not sure that it can be de-legitimized by Western propaganda. I’m not sure that playing military whack-a-mole with every new outbreak will solve the problem.

Much as I agree with the objectives being pursued by President Obama on some key issues, I don’t believe that he has the authority for some of his actions. The Supreme Court is likely to overturn the authority-grab carried out by the EPA. The immigration problem wasn’t/isn’t a crisis. It’s just a stick with which to beat the Republicans and an effort to keep Hispanic-American voters on the side of the Democrats. American liberals are going to rue the day that they celebrated his unilateral actions on coal-burning energy generation and immigration. One day, a Republican president will invoke the Obama example.

Islamism as a story.

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The current theater of operations for ISIS lies in the midst of ancient and modern historical places. On the one hand, Tel Megiddo, in northern Israel, is the place identified with Armageddon in the Bible’s Book of Revelations. Farther north, in Syria, Dabiq appears in the Hadith as the name of a village where a final confrontation between the armies of Islam and Christendom will fight to a decision. Dabiq is near the Syrian-Turkish border. In Summer 2014 it fell to the ISIS forces. In July 2014, during its own “surge” in Iraq, ISIS began publishing an on-line magazine called “Dabiq.”

On the other hand, it is commonplace for people in the Arab states to explain the decline from earlier Muslim power and prosperity by blaming Western intervention and exploitation.[1] Islamists extend this narrative. Islamists celebrate the breaking of the grip of the Byzantine Empire on Syria and Palestine, and the conquest of “al-Andalus” in the in the 7th and 8th Centuries. The Abbasid and Umayyad caliphates are held up as the ideal for what the Islamists hope to create. Similarly, the Medieval Crusaders are analogized to contemporary Western states.

The American invasions of Afghanistan in 2011 and of Iraq in 2003 certainly gave the proponents of this view a lot of material with which to work. Young Islamists have mastered modern social media just as well as have young non-Islamists, along with young everyone else. Al Qaeda led the way by launching a media campaign: audio cassettes, DVDs, and Internet forums preached the Islamist interpretation.

Recognizing that people like Anwar al-Awlaki[2] had played a role in fomenting and recruiting for terrorism, in 2011 the United States Department of State created a Center for Strategic Counter-Terrorism Communications (CSCC). One chief function of the CSCC is to engage in on-line debate with Islamists. The goal here is to dissuade young people from supporting or joining Islamist groups.[3] The CSCC has a Digital Outreach Team with members working in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, Somali, and English.

The means to the goal is to propose a different narrative of history than the one upheld by many Muslims. The CSCC’s counter-narrative focuses on recent history, rather than on a more remote past. It emphasizes the tolerance of pre-Islamist Muslim society. This view clashes with both the restriction imposed under the Islamists’ version of sharia and the brutality with which it is enforced.

The question–not much addressed by Western scholars or journalists or counter-propagandists–is why the messages of either an “End of Days” or a revival of the Caliphate appeals so strongly to thousands of young Muslims. What are they missing about motivation?

 

Shatha Almutawa, “Historical Narrative in American Counterterrorism Operations,” American Historical Association, Perspectives, September 2014, pp. 12-13.

Noor Malas, “Ancient Prophecies Motivate Islamic State,” WSJ, 19 November 2014.

[1] This explanation ignores the pervasive weaknesses of Medieval Arab society that exposed the region to conquest by successive waves of Muslim Turkish tribesmen, followed by the long decline caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire. Western imperialism had a much briefer period of influence. Not all of those influences were negative. However, the performance of the post-independence Arab states contrasts badly with those of other “developing” societies.

[2] See: “Just like imam used to make.”

[3] One might be forgiven for believing that another purpose is to draw them out so that their other communications can be tracked by the NSA. I’m all for it, but it could lead to “getting flamed” for some hasty remark—by a drone.

What God abandoned these defended

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Soldiers who fight for pay, rather than for a cause, are generally seen as disreputable. For example, American Patriots hated Hessian “mercenaries.” In contrast, idealists who go to war eventually command a degree of respect. One recent estimate has been that 16,000 Islamist enthusiasts have flocked to the black banner of ISIS. Clearly, ISIS represents a cause worth fighting for in the minds of many young Muslims, just as did the Spanish Republic in the 1930s for many young leftists.

In 1992 the American military began spinning-off many of its logistical and support functions to private contractors. (See: Cry of the Halliburton.) The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq led to a huge increase in the number of contractors in the combat areas: at their peak 155,000 in Iraq and 207,000 in Afghanistan. These numbers equaled or exceeded the number of US troops present. About as many contractors have been killed in the two wars (6,800) as have US military personnel (6,838). The use of the contractors has raised several concerns.[1]

On the one hand, there is the venerable anxiety over “waste, fraud, and abuse” (WFA).  The US paid out $200 billion for “contractors.” In 2008 Congress created a Commission on Wartime Contracting to search out WFA. Inevitably, it found many instances of over-billing and under-performance. Its estimates of spending lost to waste or fraud range between one-seventh and almost one-third of money spent, depending on what they were looking at.[2]

On the other hand, there have been concerns over unjustified violence visited on civilian populations by armed contractors. The case of Blackwater guards who shot-up Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, killing 17 Iraqi civilians, has led to the conviction of one guard for murder and three others for manslaughter.

Still, contractors may be used in the current unpleasantness in Iraq and Syria. President Obama has pledged that there aren’t going to be American combat troops in Iraq. However, no one in the American government wants to totally cede the ground to Iranian advisors either. Using security contractors might offer a way to square this circle. Many of them are veterans of the US or other military forces. They could train Syrian “moderates” (to the extent that anyone can find some) and Kurdish immoderates. They could even be grouped into small combat units to directly engage ISIS forces. Backed up by US air strikes, they might make a useful contribution to the war without a name.

Contractors offer an attractive solution to several sorts of problems. First, having contractors handle logistics, maintenance, and other support functions allows the US military to concentrate its troops on war-fighting. The number of contractors can be expanded and contracted rapidly to meet the circumstance. The alternative would be to maintain a permanent large force of regular troops to handle these missions in both wartime and in peace time.

Second, nobody but their families care if they get killed. Their wounded don’t go to Walter Reed Hospital. They don’t get veterans benefits. The names of their dead don’t get printed in agate type at the bottom of an inside column in the New York Times and their faces don’t get broadcast in respectful silence on the PBS NewsHour. There isn’t going to be a Monument to the Fallen Contractor on the Washington Mall anytime soon.

[1] “Paid boots on the ground,” The Week, 14 November 2014, p. 11.

[2] The Iraq War cost at least $1.1 trillion and the long-term price may run as high as $3 trillion. Since the war itself offers an example of WFA, I’m not sure that getting nickel-and-dimed by private contractors should be our first area of concern.  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

 

Ammo.

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            C.J. Chivers came to reporting for the New York Times by an unusual rout. He graduated from Cornell in 1987, then went in the Marines as an officer. He served in the First Gulf War, then in peace-keeping operations in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots. He left the Marines as a captain in 1994. Graduate school in journalism at Columbia followed. His first reporting job came with the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. He worked there from 1995 to 1999. In 1999 he moved to the Times, where he had the police beat until 2001. Thereafter he became a foreign correspondent covering the wars with radical Islam. He’s covered the Americans war in Afghanistan, the Russian war with Chechnya, and the American war in Iraq. Lately, he’s been covering the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

As a former Marine, Chivers knows more than does the usual reporter about military weapons. As a war correspondent in the Greater Islamic Area, he’s run into a lot of AK-47s. These qualifications give his reporting a certain cast. He can make firearms themselves tell an interesting story about the conflicts in which they are used. For example, he wrote The Gun (2010), a history of the AK-47. (See: The Gun That Made the Nineties Roar; The Arms Barometer).

Recently, he published a story about the ammunition that has been recovered on the battlefields where troops have engaged ISIS. It turns out that ISIS captures much of its ammunition from defeated foes. Indeed, it appears to select target for attack to some degree or in some cases by the prospect of capturing important stocks of weapons. It isn’t hard to do because a lot of the opponents of ISIS don’t put up much of a fight. Sometimes, anti-Assad groups of Syrians rebels or the Syrian troops they are supposed to be fighting just sell to ISIS the arms that they have been given by foreign patrons.

About 80 percent of the ammunition examined came from the Soviet Union before its collapse, post-Soviet Russia, the United States, China, or from Serbia (the perpetual bad-boy of international morality). A lot of the ISIS ammo came out of captured Syrian warehouses—or off dead Syrian troops. The Soviet Union/Putinia were long-terms sponsors of Syria, so about 18-19 percent of the ammo was manufactured in some version of whatever we’re calling Russia this week. Most of this was produced between 1970 and 1990. So, did the Russkies stop selling to the Syrians from 1990 on? Or was more recently supplied ammo stored in warehouses closer to the center of power? Or was this AK-47 ammunition purchased by the US government from an American re-seller of ammo to fit the AK-47 and other Russian weapons and then given to either Iraqi security forces before they were supplied with American M-16s or to Syrian “moderates”? About 26 percent was manufactured in China during the 1980s, but it is impossible to tell when it was shipped to Syria. About 18 percent of it was manufactured in the United States during the 2000s, so this is ammo supplied to the Iraq security forces after the American invasion of Iraq. Probably, most of this ammo came into the possession of ISIS after the collapse of the Iraqi army in Spring-Summer 2014.[1]

The story by Chivers complicates the Obama administration’s idea of building up “moderate” alternatives to ISIS. For one thing, why is it necessary to train and arm “moderate” fighters when the solution that occurred to ISIS was to go get the weapons that they needed by brute force? Why didn’t “moderates” seize the arms they needed from Syrian forces? Fpr another thing, “moderates” appear to have sold some of the weapons that they have received to ISIS to avoid trouble. Won’t they do that with any new weapons that they receive?

[1] C.J. Chivers, “ISIS’ Ammunition Is Shown to Have Origins in U.S. and China,” NYT, 6 October 2014.

Shi’a pets.

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The Prophet Muhammad died in 632 AD. Who should succeed him as “caliph,” the leader of the Faithful? Should the succession be “elective” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s chief followers? If so, then the leading candidate was Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law and a powerful prop of Islam. Or should the succession be “hereditary” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s sons-in-law so that the blood of the Prophet would run in the veins of future caliphs? If so, the leading candidate was Ali, the favored son-in-law. The majority supported the “elective” solution: Abu Bakr became the caliph. Ali and his followers sulked and schemed. Eventually Ali seized power as the fourth caliph, only to be assassinated. Since the debate over the succession, Islam has been split between a majority which sprang out of the supporters of Abu Bakr, the Sunni, and a minority that sprang from the “party of Ali,” the Shi’a[t Ali].[1] Eventually, the caliphate passed to the Ottoman sultan. The majority of Ottoman subjects were Sunni Muslims, with Shi’ites a minority located in what would become Syria and what would become Iraq. The great majority of Shi’ites were found in Persia/Iran.

Events in the 1980s turned up the flame under this conflict. The Iranian Revolution led to the creation of a revolutionary theocratic republic. Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran led to a long war in which other Sunni states supported Iraq. Iran largely created the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon.

At the start of the Twenty-First Century, Syria under the Assad dictatorship offered a mirror-image to Iraq under the Hussein dictatorship. In the former, a Shi’a minority ruled a Sunni majority in the latter, a Sunni minority ruled s Shi’a majority.[2] The overthrow of these regimes then opened the door for the oppressed minorities to seek revenge.[3] Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, the Assad government has seen half the country secede from its control. In Iraq, the Maliki government got right to business as soon as they had waved good-bye to the all-too-willing Americans in 2011.

Both sides in the Syrian civil war have found supporters among their co-religionists abroad. Shi’ite Iran and the Shi’ite government of Iraq have aided the Shi’ite Assad government. Sunni Qatar, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Sunni foreign fighters have supported the Sunni Islamists who are doing most of the heavy lifting against the Assad government in Syria and who have attacked the Shi’ite government in Iraq.[4] (See: “A Dog in This Fight?”)

“The Sunni-Shi’ite War,” The Week, 1 November 2013, p. 9.

[1] Wait. They’re fighting a gory war over something that happened 1400 years ago? Well, not exactly. During the 1400 years the two sects developed different religious practices which divide them. They also developed a history of conflict, oppression, and resistance linked to these two different faith traditions. So, they’re fighting a gory war over stuff that began 1400 years ago and continued—in widely varying degrees of intensity—down to the present. It probably isn’t helpful to try to analogize it to history-based conflicts in Western culture, like Protestant versus Catholic in Northern Ireland or the struggle for African-American civil rights.

[2] Do minorities create dictatorships as a defensive response to past or potential threats from the majority? That’s a political science question, rather than a historical question.

[3] While effete Italians assert that “revenge is a dish best tasted cold,” Arabs appear to prefer take-out.

[4] Is it possible to compare the Syrian Civil War to the Spanish Civil War? Or aren’t young Muslims entitled to a romantic commitment to an idealistic cause that subsequently turns out to be soiled by Great Power scheming?

 

The heirs of Mustapha Kemal

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Turkey has been an emphatically “secular” country since its foundation. Mustapha Kemal “Ataturk” (“Father of the Turks”) wanted a secular state, not one of those messed up backward Arab countries. He prohibited the wearing of the fez for men and veils for women. He granted women equal rights with men (including the outlawing of polygamy). He insisted upon the separation of Church and State. This included banning the “sharia” (Islamic religious law).   Kemal was a general and the army he created has been the guardian of Turkish identity since its foundation. The army has overthrown governments from time to time when they strayed too far from honest or secular government. Explicitly religious parties have been banned from time to time.

A bunch of the religious politicians migrated from the banned parties to the Justice and Development Party, which was formally not a religious party. (Wink, wink.) In 2002 the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a majority in the parliament and formed a government under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Hostility soon mounted between the AKP and the army. In 2007 the generals were alarmed by the direction being taken by the AKP. They made a veiled threat of a coup. Many Turks took offense at the threat and voted for the AKP in the next election, increasing its majority. In 2008 the army tried to get the Constitutional Court to declare the AKP illegal on the grounds that it was trying to impose the “sharia” on the country. The Court rejected this charge. The AKP government then launched a hunt for conspirators among the ranks of present and—especially—retired officers. From 2008 to 2010 hundreds of officers were arrested and many were charged with conspiring to commit terrorist offenses. At the same time journalists, professors, and human-rights activists also were targeted. The government alleged a plot to provoke Islamists into violence, then to use that as a justification for a new military government in place of the AKP. The government leaked a huge file of documents to the press. The army’s response is that all the government has found are the records of contingency planning for an Islamist revolt.

“The struggle for Turkey’s soul,” The Week, 26 March 2010, p. 15.

The quarrel between the secularist military and the democratically-elected AKP has important implications. First, Turkey has been trying to get into the European Union. The Europeans are deeply concerned about Muslim immigration and Muslim fundamentalism. What Frenchman wants to see Notre Dame turned into a mosque? So the prospect of a fundamentalist government in Turkey does nothing for the country’s prospects of admission into the European Union.

Second, the United States sees Turkey as an important regional power in an area of American concern. The Greeks are nice, but the Turks are tough. The Turks offer a model of what other Muslim countries might become if they would just get their ten pounds in a five pound bag. Turkey borders on the Kurdish part of Iraq and contains its own large Kurdish population. The possibility of Kurdish nationalism messing up conditions in both Iraq and Turkey is very real. Turkey was the one Muslim state that was reasonably pro-Israel. American officials dread that “one man, one vote” in an Islamist Turkey might take place only one time, leaving the country in the hands of a pro-fundamentalist, pro-Iranian, and anti-American government.

Third, ISIS is on the southern border. So the Army will protect the Republic, right?

The Weight of the Past in Iraq

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The Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. The Sunni minority, which had traditionally dominated Iraq, didn’t like the invasion or the empowerment of the Shi’a majority, so they fought a guerrilla war against the Americans. Then Al Qaeda in Iraq joined in as allies of the Sunni. Then, Al Qaeda in Iraq sought to foster a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites in order to a) make the American position in Iraq unsustainable, and b) punish the Shi’ites for being “in error” about religious truth. Death squads and suicide bombings and car bombings and deaths-by-power-drills abounded.

Then Al Qaeda in Iraq tried to force their Sunni allies to submit to “sharia” (Islamic religious law). The Sunni Iraqis living in Anbar Province didn’t much like this. In 2006 many tribal leaders began to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq, forming “Awakening Councils.” They sought a truce with and help from the Americans. The Americans responded positively, then General David Petraeus made this a central part of his “surge” strategy in 2007. Awakening Councils spread from Anbar Province into the other areas with large numbers of Sunnis. With the US paying $300 a month and providing equipment to each “volunteer,” there were soon about 80,000 Sunni militia men fighting against Al Qaeda rather than against the Americans. Al Qaeda in Iraq took a savage pounding, while the Sunni component of the insurgency all but disappeared.

American politicians and even many in the media are prone to down-play the role of the “Awakening Councils” in the ending of the insurgency. Instead, they laud “the Surge” of American troops into Iraq. As is so often the case with American political discourse, the reality was different. In 2009 there were about 30 million Iraqis. About 20 million were Shi’ite Arabs; about 5-6 million were Sunni Kurds; and about 5 million were Sunni Arabs. US Army counter-insurgency doctrine held that 20 soldiers per 1,000 people were needed to defeat an insurgency. The US would need 100,000 troops, just to deal with the Sunni Arab part of the country, with many more troops required to garrison the Shi’ite parts. Thus, the “Awakening Councils” and their fighters made possible a radical shift in the balance of forces.

What did the future hold for the “Awakening Councils”? One problem is that the Sunnis have multiple hostilities. Al Qaeda had risen to the top of the list in 2007-2008, but next on the list were the Shi’ites and then the US itself. To take one example, the leader of a Baghdad neighborhood “Awakening Council” was a former officer of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. In 2008, he saw the Iraqi government as a pawn of Iran. Another problem was that the Americans hoped to see the councils and their militias integrated into the police and military of the new Iraq. The Shi’ites always opposed this and wanted the militias disbanded as soon as possible. They foresaw a civil war following the American withdrawal. Finally, in the absence of a single strong leader among the Sunnis, the various Awakening Councils fell fall into conflict with one another as they struggled for turf, weapons, American aid, and control of the local economy.

Thus, by early 2008 it was possible to foresee ugly developments. It all depended upon what the Shi’ites did with power once the Americans departed. Now we know.

Putting the pieces back together again isn’t going to be easy. Islam allows “taqiyya” (dissembling) to avoid persecution. Long oppressed by the Sunni minority, the Shi’ites are regarded as habitual dissemblers. How to build trust once again?

“The Sunni Awakening,” The Week, 1 February 2008, p. 9.

The Kurdish Serbia.

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Arab historians like Ibn Khaldun noted the tension between the simple, tough, and often war-like people of the mountains and deserts, on the one hand, and the refined, soft, and often feckless people of the towns and plains, on the other hand.[1] It’s not bad as an organizing principle, but in fact the silk slipper was often on the other foot. The Kurds offer a good example of this truth. Their hopes for a nation of their own were frustrated by the nationalism of other peoples. After the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the Sunni Muslim, non-Arab Kurds found themselves divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. All of these governments repressed the Kurds. Iraq draws most of the attention for this, but all the governments did it.

Saddam Hussein found the Iraqi Kurds disloyal during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989), so he used poison gas to slaughter some and then had many of the male survivors shot. The Americans encouraged and then betrayed a Kurdish revolt at the time of the First Iraq War (1990-1991). To show remorse, the Americans then fostered a semi-autonomous Kurdish area in Iraq through a no-fly zone and humanitarian aid. This potential nation cooked along better than the rest of Iraq for a dozen years.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 greatly stimulated Kurdish separatism. Elections in 2005 made the Kurds the second largest group in Iraq’s parliament. More adept at bargaining than their Arab compatriots, the Kurds wrestled-away ever greater degrees of autonomy from Baghdad. The American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 allowed the Shi’ite government to run amok at the expense of the Sunni Arabs. Again, the Kurds were better able to defend themselves. They built an oil pipeline to Turkey to gain a greater degree of economic freedom from the central government. The crISIS of 2014 then provided the Kurds with yet another opportunity to loosen the bonds between themselves and the failing Iraq state. Kurdish troops took advantage of the collapse of the Iraqi army in the north to expand their territory to include the city of Kirkuk. Similarly, the Kurds of Syria have looked to their fellow Kurds in Iraq and Turkey for aid against ISIS. Regardless of how the crISIS ends, it will be hard for Baghdad to corral the Kurds. The shattering of Syria and Iraq could lead to an enlarged Kurdistan on its way to statehood.

This will have long-term consequences. For one thing, it will be harder to hold Iraq together if it is merely a federation of mutually-hostile Shi’ite Arabs and Sunni Arabs. Kurdistan’s wresting-away of much of Iraq’s oil will leave Baghdad with fewer resources with which to buy-off opponents. For another thing, the majority of Kurds live inside Turkey. The Turks have fought a long struggle to repress separatism among the Kurds. For the moment, they seem willing to have the Iraqi Kurds serve as a bulwark against ISIS. However, an independent Kurdistan will again come to be a magnet for Turkish Kurds. This will threaten Turkish territorial integrity. The Turks might be well-advised to concede this demand ahead of time. They’re not likely to do so. The artist formerly known as Yugoslavia grew out of the Serbian desire to gather all the South Slavs in one state. The Austro-Hungarian Empire might have been well advised to concede this demand ahead of time.   Vienna preferred war.

“The other Iraq,” The Week, 25 July 2014, p. 9.

[1] European Orientalist art of the 19th Century adopted the same perspective as a way of introducing some adventure and soft-core pornography into the lives of highly inhibited European bourgeois gentlemen. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=Orientalist+art&client=firefox-a&hs=i1a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Hg0oVPhByoHKBKe4gKAL&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1150&bih=657