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One of Great Satan's brainiac Fo Po cats unleashes a killer bit about Allies. Actually, about alienating Allies...
A recent Wall Street Journal story started this way:
The Obama administration and Iran, engaged in direct nuclear negotiations and facing a common threat from Islamic State militants, have moved into an effective state of détente over the past year, according to senior U.S. and Arab officials.
The shift could drastically alter the balance of power in the region, and risks alienating key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates who are central to the coalition fighting Islamic State.
See,
The story has one inaccuracy: it says this shift “risks” alienating key allies, when in fact it has
already done so, and done so badly. For Israelis facing the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the United States appears not only resigned but anxious to do a deal that allows Iran to enrich uranium and won’t require it to destroy one single centrifuge.
Whatever diplomats say about the package they assemble, everyone in the Middle East will see it as a huge Iranian victory that allows Iran to get even closer to the bomb. Washington is moving to containment while administration officials tell themselves and all who will listen that they are not doing that.
For the Arabs, what the King of Jordan once called a “Shia crescent” is forming before their eyes: Iranian hegemony from Yemen through Iran to Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. And their former protector, the United States, seems happy with this development because it sees Iran as a potential partner. If a nuclear deal means that sanctions on Iran begin to crumble, Iran will have more resources with which to project force through war and subversion.
For our allies in the region, the sharp drop in oil prices means this is an excellent moment to step up the pressure on Iran, increasing sanctions until they agree to real compromises on their nuclear weapons program. Instead, the administration and not Iran seems desperate for a deal. In my conversations, I also heard the idea that once the President loses the Senate (if that does happen) he will be left only with foreign policy as a playing field. And he will want to do something fast after November 4th that asserts that he is a not a lame duck and is still in charge. What better than an Iran deal?
Our allies also wonder about our Iraq/Syria policy, for many reasons. For one thing, no one has explained to them how the policy can work, or why American officials think it is working: Jihadis continue to flow into the extremist groups; ISIS is not notably weaker; and above all the United States has no coherent Syria policy. There isn’t even much of a theory as to who, on the ground, will seriously fight ISIS, nor is there an explanation of how we will get rid of Assad. Or is he another potential partner, like Iran? More détente?
For another thing, from the Sunni Arab viewpoint American policy is suspiciously indifferent to Sunni deaths and soft on Shia killers. From their perspective, it’s noteworthy that the United States acted fast to save the Yazidis and is bombing more and more to save the Kurds in Kobane. That’s nice, one Arab diplomat said to me, but who in the United States had ever heard of the Yazidis a couple of weeks earlier? Meanwhile, he went on, you did nothing to save 200,000 Sunnis in Syria. You humored Maliki as he drove the Sunnis of Iraq into desperation. You have no policy on how to get rid of Assad, the butcher of Sunnis. That’s all another reason why, he said, there’s so much suspicion of U.S. policy, which seems to us pro-Shia.
So the view of U.S. policy has a double-barreled quality: they argue that we are weak, and that we seek deals with enemies rather than victory and security for allies and friends. Détente with Iran, not stopping Iran. Attacks on ISIS, but hands off Assad while he butchers more Sunnis. This is obviously not how people in the White House see the world and their own policies, but they have failed to persuade our allies in the region that they have a coherent, cogent policy. From Arabs and Israelis the refrain I heard over and over again was “how will we get through the next two years?”
A final note, this one entirely from me and not based on any conversations with people from the region. Against the background described above,The damage done by administration officials who savaged Prime Minister Netanyahu is deep, including among Arab leaders. Those remarks made a bad situation among our allies far worse. That’s not because they like Netanyahu, but because it suggests that administration officials are callow, undisciplined, and untrustworthy. After all, those remarks were made with the intention that they be published; they were not off the record.
The speakers (and there was more than one) obviously thought that in the 44th administration, trashing allied leaders in the press is fine and people above you will just chuckle; anyway, you are reflecting their views. Those remarks were not acts of rebellion nor leaks against administration policy.
The officials who made those remarks did serious damage to U.S. credibility, and not just in Israel. That no one was punished, that no one was fired, is a signal that the whole situation is not being taken seriously.
Which is one reason why, more and more, and very dangerously, American foreign policy is not being taken seriously.
Pic - "1/2 hearted"
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” 44 said in his first inaugural address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Cutting an ungood new clear deal with Iran's Preacher Command just for the sake of cutting a new clear deal?
Repudiated, isolated, ineffective, stymied, 44 cannot persuade the Iranians of the strength of the American position. So he will move as far as he can in the direction of the Iranian one.
Unable to make Iran pro-American, he will settle for making America pro-Iranian. It is part of his dismal, pathetic, ill-considered, shortsighted, and injurious “legacy.”
For six years the White House has been careful not to provide the Iranians with any reason to reject negotiations, to prevent his fantasy from becoming real. To the contrary: It has been solicitous of Iran and Syria, in a demonstration of its willingness to address their grievances.
That is why Democrats called Bashar al-Assad a reformer, why 44 remained silent during the 2009 protests over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rigged election, why the State Department doesn’t include human rights or ballistic missiles in the scope of its negotiations with Iran. It is why 44 has resisted overthrowing Assad even after he crossed the red line of chemical-weapons use, why he refers to the “Islamic republic of Iran,” bestowing legitimacy on the revolutionary regime, and why administration officials reject congressional proposals to reinstate sanctions should the negotiations with Iran fail.
These decisions are not made in light of the national-security interests of the United States. They are made to keep alive 44’s dream of peace with Iran. And the purpose of these decisions isn’t to mollify American politicians.
It’s to satisfy Iranian ones.
Pic - "By neglecting the even more deadly peril from an Iranian nuke and allowing Tehran to think they have nothing to lose by stiffing the West in the talks, 44 is endangering U.S. security and setting himself up for a legacy of foreign policy catastrophe."
Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice is the new book by the cat who made COIN an international brand starting with How to Eat soup with a Knife
When John Nagl was an army tank commander in the first Gulf War of 1991, fresh out of West Point and Oxford, he could already see that America’s military superiority meant that the age of conventional combat was nearing an end. Nagl was an early convert to the view that America’s greatest future threats would come from asymmetric warfare—guerrillas, terrorists, and insurgents. But that made him an outsider within the army; and as if to double down on his dissidence, he scorned the conventional path to a general’s stars and got the military to send him back to Oxford to study the history of counterinsurgency in earnest, searching for guideposts for America. The result would become the bible of the counterinsurgency movement, a book called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.
But it would take the events of 9/11 and the aftermath of the Iraq invasion to give counterinsurgency urgent contemporary relevance. John Nagl’s ideas finally met their war. But even as his book began ricocheting around the Pentagon, Nagl, now operations officer of a tank battalion of the 1st Infantry Division, deployed to a particularly unsettled quadrant of Iraq.
Here theory met practice, violently.
No one knew how messy even the most successful counterinsurgency campaign is better than Nagl, and his experience in Anbar Province cemented his view. After a year’s hard fighting, Nagl was sent to the Pentagon to work for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, where he was tapped by General David Petraeus to coauthor the new army and marine counterinsurgency field manual, rewriting core army doctrine in the middle of two bloody land wars and helping the new ideas win acceptance in one of the planet’s most conservative bureaucracies. That doctrine changed the course of two wars and the thinking of an army.
Nagl is not blind to the costs or consequences of counterinsurgency, a policy he compared to “eating soup with a knife.” When it comes to war, there are only bad choices; the question is only which ones are better and which worse. Nagl’s memoir is a profound education in modern war—in theory, in practice, and in the often tortured relationship between the two.
It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of America’s soldiers and the purposes for which their lives are put at risk.
Pic - "9 Lessons..."
The Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.
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See you next week!
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Now that's ironic irony for ya!
While 44's Jay Vee team decries wicked Little Satan crafting a buffer zone of sorts with apartments, shopping centres, cinemas and libraries -at the expense of darling Palestine - Pyramidland is using bulldozers, panzers and dynamite to craft a no man's land buffer zone -
at the expense of darling Palestine!
LOL
The demolitions, cutting through crowded neighborhoods in the border town of Rafah, began with orders to evacuate Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last Friday.
The resort to a harsh counterinsurgency tactic — destroying as many as 800 houses and displacing up to 10,000 people to eliminate “terrorist hotbeds,” as el-Sissi’s spokesman put it — highlighted the difficulties the military has faced in breaking the militants as well as the anger that operations like Wednesday’s inevitably arouse.
The border clearing came as the authorities have signaled a growing determination to expand their security reach across Egypt, to counter militants, they say, but also to crush outbreaks of ordinary dissent, rights advocates say. It was also the latest instance of the government using the overwhelming force of its security apparatus to confront what it sees as a threat to Egypt’s existence, whether the growing strength of militants or the demonstrations by thousands of Islamists during the overthrow of the government of Mohammed Morsi.
The decree, which was issued while Egypt does not have a sitting Parliament, stipulates that people who commit crimes against public utilities are subject to prosecution in military courts — a provision that could potentially ensnare protesters marching on public roads.
Pic - "Holocaust of the week!"
Chicken Chiz!!
Oh, you didn't know?
It's true!! That rowdy rascally Little Satan has jammed up the world scene beyond repair with her cussed leader Uncle BiBi.
See,
The administration critique of Netanyahu as a coward stems from its disgust with his failure to make peace with the Palestinians as well as their impatience with his criticisms of their zeal for a deal with Iran even if it means allowing the Islamist regime to become a threshold nuclear power. But this is about more than policy. The prickly Netanyahu is well known to be a tough guy to like personally even if you are one of his allies.
But 44 and his foreign-policy team aren’t just annoyed by the prime minister. They’ve come to view him as public enemy No. 1, using language about him and giving assessments of his policies that are far harsher than they have ever used against even avowed enemies of the United States, let alone one of its closest allies.
So rather than merely chide him for caution they call him a coward and taunt him for being reluctant to make war on Hamas and even to launch a strike on Iran. They don’t merely castigate him as a small-time politician without vision; they accuse him of putting his political survival above the interests of his nation.
It’s quite an indictment but once you get beyond the personal dislike of the individual on the part of the president, Secretary of State Kerry, and any other “senior officials” that speak without attribution on the subject of Israel’s prime minister, all you have is a thin veil of invective covering up six years of the 44th administration failures in the Middle East that have the region more dangerous for both Little and Great Satan. For all of his personal failings, it is not Netanyahu—a man who actually served as a combat soldier under fire in his country’s most elite commando unit—who is a coward or a small-minded failure. It is 44 and Kerry who have fecklessly sabotaged a special relationship, an act whose consequences have already led to disaster and bloodshed and may yet bring worse in their final two years of power.
It was, after all, 44 (and in the last two years, Kerry) who has spent his time in office picking pointless fights with Israel over issues like settlements and Jerusalem. They were pointless not because there aren’t genuine disagreements between the two countries on the ideal terms for peace. But rather because the Palestinians have never, despite the administration’s best efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their favor, seized the chance for peace. No matter how much 44 praises Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and slights Netanyahu, the former has never been willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn. They also chose to launch a peace process in spite of the fact that the Palestinians remain divided between Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas-ruled Gaza, a situation that makes it impossible for the PA to make peace even if it wanted to do so. The result of their heedless push for negotiations that were bound to fail was another round of violence this summer and the possibility of another terrorist intifada in the West Bank.
On Iran, it has not been Netanyahu’s bluffing about a strike that is the problem but 44’s policies. Despite good rhetoric about stopping Tehran’s push for a nuke, the president has pursued a policy of appeasement that caused it to discard its significant military and economic leverage and accept a weak interim deal that began the process of unraveling the international sanctions that represented the best chance for a solution without the use of force.
So why is the administration so angry with Netanyahu? It can’t be because Netanyahu is preventing peace with the Palestinians. After the failure of Kerry’s fool’s errand negotiations and the Hamas missile war on Israel, not even 44 can think peace is at hand. Nor does he really think Netanyahu can stop him from appeasing Iran if Tehran is willing to sign even a weak deal.
The real reason to target Netanyahu is that it is easier to scapegoat the Israelis than to own up to the administration’s mistakes. Rather than usher in a new era of good feelings with the Arab world in keeping with his 2009 Cairo speech, 44 has been the author of policies that have left an already messy Middle East far more dangerous.
Rather than ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his decision to withdraw U.S. troops and to dither over the crisis in Syria led to more conflict and the rise of ISIS. Instead of ending the Iranian nuclear threat, 44 is on the road to enabling it. And rather than manage an Israeli-Palestinian standoff that no serious person thought was on the verge of resolution, 44 made things worse with his and Kerry’s hubristic initiatives and constant bickering with Israel.>
Pic - "The administration will engage in a “showdown” with Netanyahu over Iran"
A magical place where justice and peace rule - where ebberdobby is answerable to the law.
That's part of the appeal for a head chopping, Xian killing, girl hating Caliphate.
Al-Baghdadi's brutal regime does not, of course, remotely conform to the classical Muslim understanding of what a caliphate should be, but it does evoke an aspiration with a powerful and increasingly urgent resonance in the wider Muslim world.
The last caliphate - that of the Ottomans - was officially abolished 90 years ago this spring. Yet in a 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims living in Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan, two-thirds of respondents said they supported the goal of "unifying all Islamic countries" into a new caliphate.
Why do so many Muslims subscribe to this apparently unrealisable dream?
A significant source of the caliphate's appeal today is the memory it stirs of Muslim greatness. The era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs was followed by the imperial caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids.
The caliphate was finally extinguished by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, in 1924. He believed the abolition of the institution was essential to his campaign to turn what was left of the empire into a 20th Century secular nation state. The last Ottoman caliph was expelled from Istanbul to live out a life of cultured exile in Paris and on the Cote d'Azur.
But the institution he represented had by then existed for nearly 1300 years, and the impact of its abolition on Muslim intellectual life was profound.
Muslim thinkers in the 1920s suddenly found they had to ask fundamental questions they had never confronted before: "Do Muslims need to live in an Islamic State? What should that state be like?"
everything changed in the Middle East with the foundation of the State of Little Satan, and Pan-Arabism was wrecked on the rock of Israeli military might. Pan Arabism drew its legitimacy from the fact that it was going to return the Arabs to their position of glory and liberate Palestine, with the abject defeat of 1967 (the Six Day War) it exposed a hollowness to the ideology of Pan Arabism.
In the early days of the Arab Spring, the revolutions in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were interpreted in Western capitals as evidence that the Muslim future lay with democracy. Then in Egypt came the overthrow of the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the army under General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi - and then came the horrors of Islamic State amid the bloody chaos of civil strife in Syria and Iraq.
The success of IS does, in a grim way, reflect what a powerful and urgent aspiration the Caliphate has become. The IS project is certainly megalomaniac and atavistic, but it is building on an idea that is much more than a fantasy.
Pic - "Peak Power"
