The Coming War in the Middle East (2013)
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They were not completely correct. They seem to underestimate the stability and staying power of Jordan. Both US and Israel help to make sure that Jordan is protected. Stability of monarchies are typically underestimated.
Syria's government has not fallen, and Nusra (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) never managed to unify the rebel to any great extend and build a real powerful land and tax base. Thanks to Russia and Iran Syria is (very) slowly winning the fight against the rebels.
Looking from Saudi Arabia into Yemen we see as somewhat different picture now. Al Qaeda has a solid branch in Yemen but they have been very much infused into the culture and politics of the region. They lack real reach and hitting power for global jihad. They are to busy marrying tribal chiefs daughters and smuggling (mostly gas).
The real issue for the Saudis in Yemen is not Al-Qaeda (who are in the South) but rather the Hutti rebels that live right along the border to Saudi Arabia. These guys have been extremely successful and Saudi Arabia does not like it at all, they are spending Billions to fight them, much more then they spend to fight Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
They seem to view the Hutti mostly as a Iranian Proxy (maybe future proxy) even while the evidence for this is currently rather thin. The Hutti seem to want Iranian support but the Iranians seem to think that even without much direct support the Hutti are already doing a good job. Saudia Arabia is spending money like nobody buissness and the Iranians handle the same conflict with a tight budget.
Its the other way around in Iraq/Syria, there Iran is blowing the money and the Saudis can be rather conservative.
One interesting thing for everybody to know is also the strong decentralisation of Al-Quida, groups like ISIS and al-Sham (Nusra) do their own thing now. Al-Quida in Yemen is also not a very good branch of Al-Quida central.
(People seem to have stopped talking about AQ in the context of Syria?)
Assad wants ISIS to linger around since the focus would be on it rather than him, and he is focused on fighting the Sunni militias (freedom fighters according to US kind of like 80s afghanistan), Turks do not wants Kurds to be powerful and are interested in marginalizing them in Northern Syria. Kurds want to fight ISIS with help of US and score brownie points for Kurdistan. Sunni militias do not have much problem with ISIS want to fight the Alawite regime and make Syria Sunni Again ;). Iraqi Shia and Iran want to marginalize the Sunnis supporting ISIS. To say the least its a giant clusterfuck and US is willingly in bed with Al Qaeda ( wannabes like Al-Nusra front)
The US support of different groups has been overplayed. The US efforts were rather small and "in bed with AQ" is just spouting new headlines. The US tired to build a fraction, but failed, they have largely abandoned the effort.
"Kojave"
Or do you mean a greater Kurdish State?
I hate when people write stuff like that! Thanks largely to Russian intervention, the US/Saudi/Qatar axis has, so far, failed to topple Assad. But no, they've not given up.
Far from it.
"Assad must go" is still official policy. Just remember that we have boots on the ground. Rebels (read: terrorists) are being pummeled in Aleppo, but we're still doing all we can to to support them.
The real obstacle is Russian firepower. Without, it, Assad would have been history, and Syria in worse shape that it is right now.
I have not said that they have. My statement was specific about us training of "moderate rebels". The programs were done both by the CIA and DoD but both were not all that successful and policy focus has shifted.
The US still does other things. Those are not the subject I was talking about.
> we're still doing all we can to to support them
Thats why I continue to read about all those nuclear attacks ...
This is absolutely bullshit propaganda trying to tie Assad to ISIS.
The Syrian Armed Forces have been the most effective fighting force against ISIS and it's creation has been infinitely problematic for it - from the capture of key oil fields, the capture of Hasaka and Der Zor (and key Air Force fields), to the ideological turn against the Shia/Baathist government based in Alawite territory.
I don't know where you heard this, but you should carefully check that source.
> Sunni militias (freedom fighters according to US kind of like 80s afghanistan)
I don't know if you know how ironic that is...
> Turks do not wants Kurds to be powerful and are interested in marginalizing them in Northern Syria
Definitely.
> Kurds want to fight ISIS with help of US and score brownie points for Kurdistan.
Mostly they are just interested in obtaining autonomous Kurdish zones, like Kojave in Northern Syria. We have not gotten the Kurds to invade further South. Their involvement in Iraq has been similarly in land near Kurdish territory.
> Sunni militias do not have much problem with ISIS want to fight the Alawite regime and make Syria Sunni Again
More than that many have made core alliances with them, with the FSA rebuking the US labeling of ISIS a terrorist organization.
> To say the least its a giant clusterfuck and US is willingly in bed with Al Qaeda ( wannabes like Al-Nusra front)
Amen. Though Nusra is hardly a 'wannabe'...
Well, I have a problem with saying "Saudis are funding them". Some people, even some in government are funding many different groups and maybe ISIS. The state itself does not directly fund ISIS.
ISIS today is self funded, they function more like a normal state and they are taxing people, selling of assets and more.
> While the Russians are supporting the status-quo Assad/Alawhite faction
Yes. The Russians support Assad.
> the American backed "liberation" factions have mostly died out
There never really was such a thing. Different American organisations have given support to different fraction, but it was never very much of unified front.
The US does still support the Syrian Kurds. The Kurds are usually not seen as part of the "rebel" fraction.
> (People seem to have stopped talking about AQ in the context of Syria?)
As I said in my comment, AQ is fractured. ISIS, al-Sham (Nusra) are all splinters of AQ (or spliters of splinters). AQ central can not control them and those groups fight each other as well.
I don't know if there is a "formally" affiliated AQ branch in Syria or Iraq atm, not a powerful one.
Iran is trying to defeat ISIS as well. They mostly want to have strong foot in Iraq and they want to prevent Syria from falling. This is why Hezbollah is fighting in Syria, and in Iraq there are groups like it as well.
Turkey is trying to prevent a Kurdish controlled belt from the sea along the sudden boarder because the see the PKK and YPG as the same.
The State does, through 'donations' and by laundering money through private entities.
Just as it has supported the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations that have benefitted it - it has done this 'off the record'.
Don't take the lack of an announcement seriously.
Its very hard to say who is pulling the strings and if its the government.
I find it hard to believe given the current leadership of Saudi Arabia.
ISIS has long ago transcended being on peoples pay list, they are a de-facto state with taxes and other incomes. They are most certainly not mainly funded by the Saudis or other foreign entities. The US has a major effort underway to cut of money flows and those have been effective, ISIS could not survive without a local base.
Don't be confused by propaganda and the fog of war.
[1] Joe Biden has said it: https://youtu.be/UrXkm4FImvc?t=1h32m4s
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Black-Flags-Rise-Joby-Warrick/dp/0804...
[3] http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-...
[4] https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/1...
Iona Craig and Peter Salisbury are both excellent on the current, horrible proxy war in Yemen.
And yes, that includes ISIS! If the people who live there can not defeat ISIS American help will not work long term.
It's harder to criticize that. It's bad for the locals, but America needs to do what's good for America.
In this case though, it's entirely "for" the locals, so America should stay out of it because it's not actually helping the locals.
In fact, the only war America participated in that ended up being a net good for America was World War 2, which resulted in the devastation of much of Europe and allowed American industries to expand and advance virtually unchallenged for almost 50 years.
The Vietnam War however was a disaster of epic proportions. So was the Iraq War. The latter, instead of installing a friendly regime that guaranteed the uninterrupted flow of cheap oil, resulted in even more instability in the region, not to mention further radicalization of extremist forces. And things continue to go downhill.
At the end of the day, it is worth understanding that America's wars benefit only a small number of people in America: higher ups in the military-industrial complex, the oil companies and the construction conglomerates. For everyone else, it's a waste.
Afghanistan was pretty clear cut. AQ was there, the US wanted to kick them out and install a regime that would prevent further use of Afghanistan at a base, so the Taliban had to go. There is little argument about this.
Iraq is the real question. I have spent quite a bit of time on this. Its really a mystery because it simply does not make sense. There were a combination of ideas that 'infected' a small group of top military and political people.
Iraq was actually the just a first step of a grand policy to rework the middle east. You can say about Bush and friends what you like, but at least they had a strategy. They basically wanted to demonstrate US power and US ability to install liberal democracy. This would split the Iran-Syria-Hezebolla Axis. It would pressure Iran and be helpful to Israel.
With this success in hand, they could use soft power way more effectively to 'control' weak regimes like Sudan. The idea was, join the US and if you don't you will get hammer in the ground and replaced with a democracy.
This strategy was of course thrown overboard when the Republicans lost the congress, Bush dumped Rumsfeld over board with it.
Since then they are back to having no strategy and a ad-hock fire brigade style of policy making.
And they were. Now we have instable areas, but the US prevented the Soviet Union from continuing to expand and collapsed it by overwhelming it with military costs to stabilize its periphery.
In some circles that counts as a net positive to the US.
The War in Vietnam was far more costly and destructive then any 'damage' that was done to the Soviets. It was a absolute net lose in every way, money, lives, credibility and so on. It was a major victory for communism and all anti-imperialist colonialist struggles.
You are just repeating the same failed and disproven logic that people like J.F. Dulles were advocating. They looked at everything in cold war terms, black and white. The reality however is different. Just because some countries are neutral or maybe communist does not make them automatically Soviet puppets and the countries in the same region do not automatically fall to communism because of that.
Had J.F. Dulles just accepted the situation in 1953 the US would have been in a much better position during the cold war. Vietnam would not have been allied with China and Russia against the US. The idea of "world communism" is a fantasy that should not be a guid to policy.
> support of the Afghanistan insurgency
That was a great policy. Problem is just that even at the time people pointed out that it was unlikely (almost impossible) that the Soviets would attack threw Iran to the Golf. So there were no vital US interests at stack. The Soviet, we now know, had no plans to do so, and not the capability.
In order to support the insurgency the US had to massively support Pakistan, they ignored Pakistani spread of extremism, they ignored the Pakistani nuclear program and the money flowed to the kind of insurgence that should not get money, rather then to the moderate afghani nationalists that should have gotten the money.
How people defend this policy in still today is insane to me. A nuclear Pakistan and India is one of the greats dangers for nuclear war in the world right now.
I'm definitely repeating the logic of the state. To be clear here, this isn't old logic attributable to Dulles or Eisenhower but the rationality behind current US strategy.
This military/security logic is consistent over the past 70 years of great power struggle and I add it here not because I buy into all of the conclusions but because the arguments must be understood from the perspective of policy and decision makers in order for there to be a real dialogue between citizens and the state. Namely, citizens have to acknowledge the paranoid and aggressive tendencies of the state and understand reasoning from their perspective to counter the arguments.
When this isn't the case (look at Libya and Syria) the state interprets citizens' unhappiness to have to do with the number of soldiers killed (for example) or the financial costs of insurgency and so pursues proxy wars, support of terrorism, economic warfare, information warfare and other types of irregular aggression.
Anyway, pretty much fully agreed with your reply here.
The US had plans, if those plans had worked out, it would have been good for the US. These objectives failed.
All expert universally agree that the US policy has many helped Iran, not the US.
First of all, the US had a signed a agreement, breaking that would have been terrible (maybe read something about the history of foreign military bases that were not wanted in Iraq). Second, the US could not have sustained the force for financial reasons. Third, the US had done a horrible job of setting up the state and fixing that would have been almost impossible.
"stable enough" could easily mean multiple decades or never. Britain has tried that as well.
These problems were predicted by anybody who had a head on its shoulder in 2003. Invading Iraq was called the worst foreign policy failure since Vietnam by many important people form within the US government.
Staying there even longer and spending even more money (long term strategic resources) on a essentially doomed nation building process. The US has already shown that they are absolutely terrible at nation building.
The agreement was perused because the US government wanted to withdraw. I have no idea what you are trying to argue here (aside from circular logic). If the US didn't didn't withdraw ... it wouldn't have negotiated a withdrawl.
>Second, the US could not have sustained the force for financial reasons.
This is false.
>Third, the US had done a horrible job of setting up the state and fixing that would have been almost impossible.
Also false. At any rate, it was the Iraqis that elected leaders to draft their constitution and developed their government.
>Staying there even longer and spending even more money
And the Syrian refugee crisis coupled with our current and future involvement in Syria is free?
>The US has already shown that they are absolutely terrible at nation building.
You mean aside from the successes in Europe, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and others, right?
> This is false.
Sure. If the US really wanted, it could have sustained 1 Million guys there for the next 20 years. This is however totally absurd from a cost benefit analysis and it has absolutely no support in the population, the congress, foreign policy community, budget bureaucrats and essentially everybody accept a tiny group of right wing warmongers.
> Also false. At any rate, it was the Iraqis that elected leaders to draft their constitution and developed their government.
Clearly you have never read any analysis of the Iraqi state. It was one of the most corrupt in the world. It was politically exclusive to large groups of the population. It was not at all democratic. The constitution was absolutely meaningless.
> And the Syrian refugee crisis coupled with our current and future involvement in Syria is free?
And the US saying in Iraq would not have prevented the problems that arose from the Arab Spring. If you believe that you live in a fantasy land that nobody can help you out of.
Even if that were true, the action in Syria are much, much, MUCH cheaper then a decades long occupation with large ground forces. Maybe read up on the history of foreign occupation in Iraq to give you some estimations what would have happened.
Also, the US is not forced to 'stay in Syria'. That another fantasy, some war mongers on both sides convince them selfs of.
For example it says: "Just as Al Qaeda in Iraq has ostensibly been fighting to free Baghdad from what it calls heretical “Persian”—read “Shia”—domination, the Nusrah Front today fights to free Syria from the supposedly heretical rule of the nominally Shia Alawite regime of Bashar al Assad."
But then later posits: "If Al Qaeda/Nusrah can establish a base in Jordan, Saudi Arabia will find itself threatened by Al Qaeda franchises on both north and south that will be well-positioned to resume the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s core goal of toppling the Saudi monarchy and “liberating” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina."
Al Qaeda is and has been fighting a pan-Islamist fight to extricate foreign influence - what it sees as continued colonialism - from the Arab World.
Interestingly, both the Ba-athists (Shia governments of Syria and Iraq) and Al Qaeda claim to be fighting against the forces of foreign manipulation. The Ba-athists approach it from a Pan-Arab manner rather than Pan-Islamist, but have histories of Western support (indeed the Alawites in Syria were originally militarily conceived by the French and the prior Sunni regime in Iraq conceived by the British) that can spoil their claim to independence.
The article also misses the regional proxy war aspect, where Gulf Countries and the United States have been arming proxy groups to achieve geostrategic ends, such as the establishment of energy pipelines and determining the future of Mediterranean access.
If anything, it seems like a made up "threat" the US officials can use to justify whatever the heck they're doing.
I know it is a joke, but I really have to say: THANKS OBAMA.
Anyway I think in this thread we were talking about direct military operations or indirect actions through funding the training and arming of rebels or freedom fighters or whatever. And the question was about middle east, not eastern euorpe.
As opposed to trying to influence the political and economical decisions or public opinion through "propaganda" or whatever the means?
Unfortunately the history of US intervention is entirely ruled by strategic objectives, and the popular support narrative ruled by cherrypicked facts and selective attention to context.
The Syrian war, which we have a heavy hand in - before and after it began, started in 2011. That article was written in 2013. And did you check the bio of the author.
It's easy to predict a war after it has started and when you have inside knowledge and a hand in how the war should proceed and end.
In 2011, the US was in the process of normalizing relations with the assad regime. Obama had appointed a new ambassador the year before. Clinton thought assad was a 'reformer.'
The war broke out for a very simple reason: assad's forces kept shooting peaceful protesters.
Despite assad's violence, the Revolution remained largely peaceful for several months. It became a full-blown war almost a year after it began, when it became clear assad was not interested in reform, much less stopping the killings.
This contributed to destabilising the place and offered a supply of Sunni recruits to ISIS. That's why the furthest extent of ISIS territory was an arc across Syria, Iraq and up to "Kurdistan".
You should find out how those "peaceful protests" started, and the activities of the US ambassador to Syria just before the protests broke out. It's from the same playbook that was used successfully in Libya and Ukraine, and almost succeeded a few years ago in Cuba.
It's an interesting exercise if you have the time. Venezuela is in the same neighborhood too.
Which serves to infantilize the entire population of every other country in the world. See the GP's belief that apparently a few words by the US Ambassador is more powerful than thousands of years of history and culture, very difficult conflicts between religious sects, clans, and tribes, etc.
So if due to some political agenda there is profit or benefits to be reaped from nudging certain conflicts this or that way, there's a high probability that people in power would try to obtain said benefit. I think it's in that sense that "America puts its nose into every conflict around the world".
Not saying that I agree or disagree with that view, but I do think it's a bit naive to say that America is the root of all evil, as much as it's naive to think that the most powerful nation in the world (for different definitions of most powerful) would have no interest in other countries' conflicts or in influencing them to their benefit.
In other words, if for whatever reason an escalation in the conflicts in Syria or other parts of the Middle East (or the world for that matter) could benefit the US, would it be so far-fetched to think that they would have a vested interest in creating the conditions for that escalation to actually happen?
The reasons behind any particular policy are of course complex. Some may be for good and noble reasons, others for not so good reasons. A few turn out well, many go badly or not at all as intended.
Many people in foreign countries even try to get us to intervene. Often they want us to fund them or to suppress their enemies. Some want us to suppress violence in other countries, just because they think we can - see Darfur. Their motives aren't any cleaner or dirtier than ours are, just saying we aren't uniquely or cartoonishly evil.
I think the important part to remember is that our real ability to change things abroad is very limited indeed and fraught with risk. We can nudge things a bit, sure. If a country is on the verge of civil war, we can maybe nudge them towards it or away from it, but we can't create the war from scratch, or control what the sides are. If they really want to fight, they will, and we can't stop them. If they really have no desire to fight, we can't make them. If we try to nudge, we may just cause the opposite thing to happen instead. It's a mess, and it's likely to continue to be a mess no matter what we do or don't do. There's always the hope that we can encourage things to be a little bit less messy, but that may not be in the cards.
With due respect the United States is a global hegemonic superpower. Sure it isn't all powerful, but to recognize it's influence as punching above the weight of foreign populations isn't to infantilize them.
Nor can the OP be appropriately summarized the way you did. It's really easy to defeat straw men, sure, but the people who contribute to Hacker News are intelligent enough to recognize that straw man for what it is.
Consider Nicaragua -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Nicaragua#Pr...
Countless videos show assad forces shooting at unarmed protesters, in some cases killing and wounding dozens. I do not deny some soldiers were killed in the early stages of the Revolution. Some were killed for refusing to follow orders. Others may have been killed in isolated incidents.
But again, the protests were largely peaceful, and assad forces were (and still are) responsible for the majority of deaths.
Edit: typo
Please clarify how this is possible. I don't see how this narrative can be correct.
First two protesters were killed 18 March 2011 (Hussam Abdel Wali Ayyash and Akram Jawabreh.) Then already in March 23, 2011 two another men who were killed (Sa’er Yahya Merhej and Habeel Anis Dayoub) were part of the Syrian Arab Army and not civilians. It seems that initially peaceful protests turned into violent almost immediately because they were hijacked by organized militants. Armed gunmen were already moving into Syria long before the protests. http://www.innercitypress.com/LASomSyria.pdf
According to the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, 2,569 Syrian government forces were killed by March 2012 while total number of people killed was 5,000.
Qutar has natural gas.
Europe relies almost solely on Russia for natgas.
The west doesn't like that at all. So they want to build a pipeline from Qutar to the med through Syria.
Assad says absolutely not.
Assad is now enemy number one for denying the pipeline which would've freed Europe from Russia's natgas stranglehold.
This is all about energy folks. It's that simple.
No expert on foreign policy, or the middle east I have heard give talks in the last years, considers this to be true. The only people who believe this narrative are naive leftist who don't understand the real situation.
They want to what??? You really need to look at a map before saying things like that.
I just.....
Do you realize Qatar is on the coast? Why would you need to build a pipeline to another coast?
And why go through Syria of all places? There are so many other routes you can take, and you think they want Syria so badly they triggered a war?
The proposed pipeline goes from Qatar, though Saudi Arabia, through Syria, into Turkey and then would provide Natural Gas to Europe.
There's a second proposed pipeline people often don't talk about... it would go from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria to Europe. Guess which one Europe and the United States want.
I get that it's a bit shorter to go through Syria, but a war, just for that?
There's a major station in Doğubeyazıt, you can link to that.
And no, the war is not merely about this pipeline. But it is one of the 'prizes' at stake which has gotten the support of foreign countries spending money and shipping arms into Syria proxy forces (notably, in this case, Qatar).
Take a look at the Center for Strategic and International Studies policy assessment for Gulf Countries during the Syrian Proxy Conflict: https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/1...
That's the popular 'opinion' induced by Russian propaganda and they're notorious for ignoring the reality.
Please look at the pipelines and read about the actions and incentives of the Gulf State. In particular, Qatar supported al Qaeda in Syria (Nusra as well as the Islamic State Group in addition to a number of other terrorist factions) with the pipeline project as a key aspect of its strategic calculus, even sabotaging, in a way, relations with Iran that had been started to improve.
The gas pipelines are a huge reason, for sure. But it's not the only reason. Many different actors have many different reasons why supporting their side of the proxy war makes financial and strategic sense.
That's because foreign meddling is absurd.
The FSA was organized out of Turkey, with it's high level leadership and intelligence feeding in over the border. The primary branches of al Qaeda and militant groups were funded and supplied by foreign organizations. Special forces in the United States had been perturbing for revolutions and US propaganda operations performing a regional 'blitz'.
True, Obama came in with a set of foreign policy objectives that were not inline with standing US foreign policy. So he lost that battle.
He was very reluctant to involve the military, especially in the ME. So in Libya, for example, and even in Syria, he was accused of leading from behind.
Even with respect to Russia, recall that he wanted to "reset" relations with that country, but that, too, was not in line with what the military guys, that is, the guys who actually run the country, wanted. So he lost that battle too.
A huge amount of disinformation in this thread, including people who are pushing personal opinions and state narratives as fact.
Sad to see this on Hacker News.