Isis

[broncofan]

So I think we've been waiting for the right opportunity to start this thread. And I expect it will be a controversial thread because many who frequent the politics side of the forum were opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In addition to being an ongoing humanitarian disaster and violation of international law, it has been an albatross around the neck of the U.S economy. It doesn't matter how much industry you have, you cannot spend 1.1 trillion dollars and not notice it. So many Americans are wary of more conflict, even in the face of a humanitarian disaster, and may be paying attention to dollars and cents.

But it is possible to have been opposed to the invasion of Iraq when it had a stable government (even though it was ruled by a despot) and think that what is taking place in Iraq demands a unified response. France appears to be taking that position. They got it right in the first instance, and were scorned by Republicans who coined a euphemism for french fries so embarrassing that it doesn't stand repeating. But they have just launched an attack against Isis.

So what do you guys think? Can ISIS be negotiated with? If so, what demands of theirs should the world accede to? An Islamic State within what borders? Or if the West should respond, should it only be within the borders of Iraq and stop at Syria because we're afraid that hurting Isis might help Assad?

This is a real challenge for our pacifists on the forum (). But to respond fairly, tell us the prescription. Abstention? Or War? What is the cost of abstention? What is the cost of war?

[LI SEAN08]

I keep hearing that OIL is the ingredient behind all the confusion, but all I know is that Im still paying over 3.50 a gallon.

[fred41]

good time for this thread bronco...there will probably be much debate here as this battle changes over the months...but in the meantime, this article - true or not - made me smile:
http://nypost.com/2014/09/19/isis-fi...female-troops/

[Stavros]

So what do you guys think?

Can ISIS be negotiated with?
If so, what demands of theirs should the world accede to?
An Islamic State within what borders?
Or if the West should respond, should it only be within the borders of Iraq and stop at Syria because we're afraid that hurting Isis might help Assad?

This is a real challenge for our pacifists on the forum (). But to respond fairly, tell us the prescription. Abstention? Or War? What is the cost of abstention? What is the cost of war?

Broncofan asks four questions, all of which spring from the immediate occasion, none of which address the fundamental causes of this latest version of the 'Islamic state'.

I do not doubt that the USA and its allies, using drones, bombers, special forces and whatever else is in their arsenal, will give IS a bloody good hiding. It might even smash this organisation, just as it 'smashed' the Taliban in Afghanistan (where are they now, one wonders), al-Qaeda I in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda II in Iraq, but not so far to al-Qaeda III in the Yemen (in spite of all the damage caused there), or al-Qaeda IV in Syria.

This looks rather like the same desperate measures that enabled the USA and Colombia to smash the drug cartels in Cali and Medellin....but not so far their replacements in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. Just as the American public -enough of them- demand the product the cartels have for sale, so the 'War on Drugs' (aka the 'War against Black People', or 'them' if you prefer), a war that has been 'raging' for nearly 50 years will drag on and on, filling prisons -and the pockets of the prison corporations; just as there will always be Muslims who yearn for an 'Islamic state' that they believe is as close as possible to the Community of the Faithful that Muhammad (is alleged to have) established in Madina between 622 and his death in 632.
Just as long as it doesn't revive the Constitution of Medina that Muhammad produced, with its express intention of accommodating the Jewish tribes into what these days would be called a 'multi-cultural, multi-religious' polity. Salafist dreamers and their wide-awake butchers have a tendency to re-write the history of Islam to edit out those embarrassing moments when their enlightened Messenger showed more compassion and pragmatic acceptance of Jews and Christians than they are willing to accept; just as the Jihad which in the Quran is mostly an individual's struggle with temptation, has been redefined for angry young men as a licence to kill.

In other words, in the short term the use of extreme violence may well achieve its objectives, but in the long term it will fail if the fundamental causes are not addressed, and these relate to the nature of politics in a region that has developed a political culture characterised by corruption, violence, and bad governance.

This political culture, in which negotiation, debate and and the accountability of politicians is replaced by violence, intimidation and autocracy infects all of the states in the region, including Israel which, though it has a vibrant civil society in which a robust critique of politics exists where it is absent in the Arab states, behaves in the Occupied Territories and the rest of the region with the same degree of violence it criticises in its neighbours. And as long as the military occupies the high ground and military solutions are the only ones being considered, then the alternatives will not have a chance to grow and show, through practical experience, that political, social, and economic issues can not be solved through violence or autocracy.

A Turkish blogger has written of the referendum of Scotland in mournful admiration, wondering why the same process of free and open debate followed by a conclusive vote in Scotland, is unthinkable for Turkey and its relationship to its Kurds.

IS, as currently formed, is a grim reflection of the political system that was created by Britain and France in the aftermath of the First World War and its bastard offspring. In Europe after the First World War, the colonies of the defeated Empires -Russia and Austria-Hungary in particular- were replaced by independent states, even though, in the particular case of the Balkans, the region had been convulsed by nationalist and communal violence for years before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand sparked the War to end all Wars. One state in particular, Yugoslavia, survived for 70 odd years before collapsing in on itself in an eerie repeat of the violence that followed the overthrow of the Obrenic Dynasty in 1903.

No such fortune for the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, even though they had not experienced anything like the violence that killed thousands and thousands of people in the Balkans in the years leading up to the war. The reason was candid enough -the Arabs were not good enough to rule themselves, simple as that, the same argument that justified handing over China to anyone except the Chinese, while the poor wretches of the Pacific Islands were described by Jan Smuts as being barbarians incapable of rising to the demands of civilisation which is why they needed grown up -and of course, civilised- countries to run them on their behalf.

President Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, did think that self-determination of the kind that emerged in Europe was applicable to the Arabs, while the King-Crane Commission sent to Syria endorsed the Wilsonian view, a fact which led an irritated British Foreign Secretary at the Paris Peace Conferences, Lord Balfour, to remark:
"To simplify the argument, let us assume that two of the 'independent nations' for which mandatories have to be provided are Syria and Palestine. Take Syria first. Do we mean, in the case of Syria, to consult principally the wishes of the inhabitants? We mean nothing of the kind. According to the universally accepted view there are only three possible mandatories -England, America and France. Are we going 'chiefly to consider the wishes of the inhabitants' in deciding which of these is to be selected? We are going to do nothing of the kind. England has refused. America will refuse. So that, whatever the inhabitants may wish, it is France they will certainly have."
-Note that Balfour uses the words 'universally accepted' to mean Europe and America, not the Arabs, because their views, like the people, were worth nothing to him.

Unrepresentative monarchies, one-party states, dictatorships -it all sprang from the legacy of Ottoman rule reinforced by the Imperial powers. What followed was rebellion, in Iraq, in Syria, in Palestine, as if the message had got through to London and Paris but was ignored because it signalled an end to imperial rule and to the British and the French that was unconscionable. It also meant that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, nationalist sentiment -which had been developing in Egypt and Syria since the 19th century- expressed itself in the violent overthrow of the monarchies -Egypt in 1952, Iraq in 1958- but produced regimes which looked suspiciously like the ones they had replaced.
An attempt to create a parliamentary democracy in Syria following the collapse of French rule, produced an array of parties giving an incoherent voice to Syria politics and an unstable political system, while in Lebanon a deal was struck which created in 'the national pact' a parliamentary system based on the distribution of jobs allotted by religious confession making any real change impossible. The irony in Syria, if it is irony, is that the military seized power in 1970, not when the politicians failed, but after their own spectacular failure in the war with Israel whose occupation of the 'Golan Heights' remained then, as now, a symbol of their abject failure. Three years into their own rebellion, there are worrying signs that for all their success in maintaining the government of Bashar al-Asad, the Syrian military is exhausted.

The problem is that these trends in Arab politics have given rise to a belief perpetuated by Bernard Lewis and the late Samuel Huntingdon, that this is somehow an indelible part of the Arab character, just as frauds and charlatans who have transformed themselves into Islamic scholars since 9/11 produce videos for YouTube which prove conclusively that Islam has always been a violent ideology fixated on world conquest, as if the same repertoire of spiritual issues such as sin, redemption, and virtue which exist in Christianity do not exist in Islam; just as some Muslims view Christianity in terms of imperialism and the Crusades and only those violent acts in which Muslims are the victims. In these cases the contemporary malaise becomes a perpetual defect which can never be corrected except through excision: the obliteration of the 'Islamic threat' on one side, the 'expulsion of non-Muslims from Muslims lands' on the other side.

There was a time when few people believed that Latin America would ever be free of its military dictators or that African states ever be free of Presidential embezzlers-that was how they did politics 'over there'. Autocracy in Singapore, Taiwan, Korea north and south -don't you see? 'They' are not like 'us', they will never embrace democracy like we do. They are condemned to be inferior, because they are inferior. When someone asks the question 'Why do they hate us?' they betray their assumption that the answer is in the question, but in doing so suggest that they don't want to know what the real answer might be, just as they can't think of a question to ask that is actually relevant to life as it is lived in Cairo, or Damascus, or Baghdad.

Obama, like most American Presidents before him, has approached the Middle East in a state of ignorance, as if he had spent all that time developing a career in politics with no idea that it was a volatile region that might consume so much of his waking life if he ever achieved high office. Whatever else he did when he was planning his political career, visiting the Middle East to sit and eat with the people who live there to find out who they are, and what they want, was not one of them. He finds himself like a fish stuck on the end of a hook called regime change in Iraq. On the one hand he can be criticised for withdrawing US troops from Iraq before they had developed an Iraqi security force capable of dealing with IS (see the link below) -but on the other hand, and on the basis of Nouri al-Maliki's utter contempt for the Sunni population, had Obama pledged to remain in Iraq until the security forces were mature enough to 'stand alone', the US would still be there, another trillion $ later, with no guarantee that the mission would ever be accomplished.

There is a good if slightly outdated background paper on IS in this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jn8l0g2sk4...inal%20PDF.pdf

British Muslims have condemned IS here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...e-9595893.html

[broncofan]

I agree with much of what you wrote. I have heard arguments about a half dozen tribes of people claiming they cannot govern themselves or they are unfit for democracy. I wouldn't find any of them convincing. I also assume that most Muslims criticize Isis, and that although the followers of ISIS are Muslims, they are an extreme organization that is repellent to most followers of Islam.

But we both know presidential terms are short and sometimes leaders find themselves in a quandary and they cannot begin at the root of a problem until they deal with the crisis. My sense is that if the United States does not use drones in the short term and help arm the Kurds or even use their own ground troops, that more civilians would die than otherwise.

I don't believe that ISIS intends to share any space with Shiite Muslims or Christians of any sect. And in the meantime they are killing people in the most brutal way; through mass executions that leave no doubt about their feelings toward those who disagree with them theologically.

I don't mean to frame the question so narrowly that we cannot consider root causes even if they extend far beyond the crisis in question. But past failures might not serve as a guide to current action. Obviously if western powers have made mistakes in the past we don't want to compound them, but those past decisions may be what economists call sunk costs. The decisions we've made are irrevocable and ISIS is here now. If they do need to be dispatched and obviously it would be a bloody business to take care of this particular organization, then only afterward is there a diplomatic path. But how can ISIS be part of any diplomatic solution? My view is they cannot...because they will not accept a compromise short of having their own state; not a power-sharing arrangement with the current regime in Iraq, but their own dominion with no guarantee they won't seek to expand this dominion.

[broncofan]

I didn't ignore the part of your post discussing Balfour's attitude towards the Arab people or even Western arrogance in dealing with the Middle East. That we make decisions that affect their region directly but with our interests in mind is clear. But if the lesson is that we cannot impose our wishes on other people, or that it is our self-serving meddling that has created various schisms in the fabric of their society, I still don't think the adequate response is to allow it to sort itself out.

We imposed an external force on the region that has now let loose a terror on the people. If we do not intervene, we will have created the problem and not contributed to the solution. The problem with meddling in a complex system without knowing all of the consequences of your actions is that you are no longer external to it. You can't just walk away as though you have no responsibility for what ensues.

[Odelay]

Hard to top Stavros' piece for underlying analysis. And without a deep understanding of the region, Islam, and the culture whereby such extremists emerge, it's pretty hard to render an informed opinion about broncofan's questions. Nevertheless, when does that ever stop us from spouting our opinions anyway.

I guess I start with my overarching opinion that a violent response to violence almost never solves anything in the long term. That said, I just watched 14 hours of documentary on the Roosevelts and it's pretty hard (impossible?) to argue against FDR's response to Germany and Japan's violence inflicted upon their neighbors.

Obviously, the big difference btwn ISIS and the Axis powers is/was worldwide hegemony, or the lack thereof.

I guess what I wonder is... what is the least response required that might actually do more good than harm. Arming the Kurds is a no brainer. Arming whatever other defenseless groups that are in the vicinity makes sense too, although from the reports, it sounds like it's difficult to identify who might be a part of these other groups.

Droning seems here to stay but I'm dubious at to whether it does more good than harm. How do we know that bombing the hell out Al-Qaeda versions 1-4 hasn't actually been the wellspring for the ISIS movement, in the first place? And ISIS seems far bigger and threatening than any of the Al-Qaeda incarnations.

So the question still is, should anything be done and what is it that should be done? The world watched in horror at what happened in Rwanda and even the most ardent peacenik cannot rationally argue that no response was the correct response in that situation.

I guess the answer points in the direction of where we did do something and it prevented something far worse from happening, and the best example I can think of is the worldwide response to the Balkans in the 90's. So applying the same formula to ISIS, it might be as simple as the UK and US simply following France's lead. as Stavros points out. Unfortunately, there are a lot of meatheads in the US for whom following anyone's lead is anathema. So I guess whatever path is defined, we're going to have to doctor it up so that it at least has the appearance that the US is involved in leading it.

[Ben]

I keep hearing that OIL is the ingredient behind all the confusion, but all I know is that Im still paying over 3.50 a gallon.

Precisely. War is great for the executive branch (Obama's powers are increased), it's great for oil companies [to a degree] and, well, military firms just love war. Why wouldn't they? I mean, it increases their bottom line.
War is a racket....

[Odelay]

Precisely. War is great for the executive branch (Obama's powers are increased), it's great for oil companies [to a degree] and, well, military firms just love war. Why wouldn't they? I mean, it increases their bottom line.
War is a racket....

Yeah Ben, we know. We've seen a million clips by Nader and Chomsky. The problem with posting 2 line gems from these guys is that it's ultimately a huge over simplification. If War can be boiled down to being a profitable racket, then why isn't there war everywhere, all the time? Why bother manufacturing widgets at relatively low profit margins, when instead you can just wage war on a neighbor and make much more money?

And in fact, the total amount of war and violence per capita, across the planet, is down, over the last 50 years. If it's so damn profitable, why aren't entrepreneurs increasing ways to wage wars.

[buttslinger]

If destroying ISIS is so important to the future of Planet Earth, why does no other nation than us want to send in troops? I say drop off all our explosives with an expired date on top of them, those damn thugs have met no resistance at all, except for the crack Iraqi soldiers we spent billions training. While the cat is away, the rats will play.