#81
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
The "Let's do the Sunni Awakening Again But Better This Time" is a popular hawk idea right now, I see it all over the place, and the basic line seems to be that it worked as long as the money was flowing and the American troops were there to back it up and the central government was playing along. Which isn't really true but even if it were, the entire reason it was called a "surge" was because it was supposed to be temporary. The whole thing was premised on the idea that they could buy off people and throw troops at hot spots and gain time, but they had no idea what to do after that, when all the people they hooked into their scheme were basically like "well, now what". And the insurgency wasn't defeated at all, if anything it regrouped and coalesced into something coherent enough to fight openly.
#82
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

getfiscal posted:

There used to be modest Christian communities in Anbar and such but they mostly fled. Creating an ethnic rump state probably wouldn't draw them back. But I think every neocon has to put a line about protecting Christians in the Middle East in every article just so that right-wing Catholics and hawkish fundies feel protective of them.



it seems like a solid plan for how to create later reasons to bomb people as those sorts of things go.

#83
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
i mean i agree with the guy that it's in the united states' interest to establish ISIS as a recognized state pronto.
#84
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +

cars posted:

i mean i agree with the guy that it's in the united states' interest to establish ISIS as a recognized state pronto.

one of the things that i've heard recently is people talking about how ISIS evolved out of the sunni insurgency against the occupation, like, around al-Zarqawi etc., and it started drawing in a lot of ex-military people. so people point out that ISIS military structure includes a lot of people who were in Saddam Hussein's military. but i do wonder how the sunni awakening worked on a local network level to maybe facilitate the rise of ISIS. i don't know much about such things but yeah.

because the theory was that local sunni militia would fight against al-qaeda by sort of reclaiming their towns, while parallel efforts would allow people to give up fighting and hand in weapons. and i do expect that a lot of those militia were tied to kin groups who were trying to carve out local control - which was the main complaint of both the Iraqi government and the recent criticisms by the US foreign policy people, that it wasn't integrated into the military enough to remain autonomous from local conflicts. but i've got to wonder if a lot of those people they trained up ended up defecting to ISIS (like you see via "moderate rebels" in Syria to people like al-Nusra), and people they decommissioned maybe just joined back up, and if ISIS did take over a locality then the "collaborator" people were probably killed or whatever. What was durable about all that?

#85
Post rating: ~

getfiscal posted:

The "Let's do the Sunni Awakening Again But Better This Time" is a popular hawk idea right now, I see it all over the place, and the basic line seems to be that it worked as long as the money was flowing and the American troops were there to back it up and the central government was playing along. Which isn't really true but even if it were, the entire reason it was called a "surge" was because it was supposed to be temporary. The whole thing was premised on the idea that they could buy off people and throw troops at hot spots and gain time, but they had no idea what to do after that, when all the people they hooked into their scheme were basically like "well, now what". And the insurgency wasn't defeated at all, if anything it regrouped and coalesced into something coherent enough to fight openly.



i read that the point of the surge was to create breathing room for the central government to train its own army and build its institutions for keeping people loyal to it

#86
Post rating: +

cars posted:

getfiscal posted:

There used to be modest Christian communities in Anbar and such but they mostly fled. Creating an ethnic rump state probably wouldn't draw them back. But I think every neocon has to put a line about protecting Christians in the Middle East in every article just so that right-wing Catholics and hawkish fundies feel protective of them.

it seems like a solid plan for how to create later reasons to bomb people as those sorts of things go.

Well seeing as it is literally the exact justification used to start the actual original Crusades...

#87
Post rating: +
a 'hands on' investigation into the detail on how nato/gcc powers have been arming terrorist groups in syria

https://off-guardian.org/2016/07/30/making-a-killing-the-1-2-billion-euros-arms-pipeline-to-middle-east/

Arms bought for Syria by the Saudis, Turks, Jordanians and the UAE are then routed through two secret command facilities – called Military Operation Centers (MOC) – in Jordan and Turkey, according to Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria.

These units – staffed by security and military officials from the Gulf, Turkey, Jordan and the US – coordinate the distribution of weapons to vetted Syrian opposition groups, according to information from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a think tank that has a unit monitoring the conflict.

“Each of the countries involved in helping the armed opposition retained final decision-making authority about which groups in Syria received assistance,” Ford said.

A cache of leaked cargo carrier documents provides further clues to how the Saudi military supplies Syrian rebels.

According to the documents obtained by BIRN and the OCCRP, the Moldovan company AeroTransCargo made six flights in the summer of 2015 carrying at least 250 tonnes of ammunition between military bases in Saudi Arabia and Esenboga International Airport in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, reportedly an arrival point for weapons and ammunition for Syrian rebels.

Pieter Wezeman, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a leading organisation in tracking arms exports, said he suspects the flights are part of the logistical operation to supply ammunition to Syrian rebels.

From the MOCs, weapons are then transported by road to the Syrian border or airdropped by military planes.

A Free Syrian Army commander from Aleppo, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his safety, told BIRN and OCCRP that weapons from Central and Eastern Europe were distributed from centrally controlled headquarters in Syria. “We don’t care about the county of origin, we just know it is from Eastern Europe,” he said.

The Saudis and Turks also provided weapons directly to Islamist groups not supported by the US and who have sometimes ended up fighting MOC-backed factions, Ford added.

The Saudis are also known to have airdropped arms and equipment, including what appeared to be Serbian-made assault rifles to its allies in Yemen.

Ford said that while he was not personally involved in negotiations with Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania over the supply of weapons to Syria, he believes that the CIA is likely to have played a role.

“For operations of this type it would be difficult for me to imagine that there wasn’t some coordination between the intelligence services, but it may have been confined strictly to intelligence channels,” he said.

The US may not have just played a role in the logistics behind delivering Gulf-sponsored weapons from Eastern Europe to the Syrian rebels. Through its Department of Defense’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM), it has also bought and delivered vast quantities of military materiel from Eastern Europe for the Syrian opposition as part of a US$500 million train and equip programme.

Since December 2015, SOCOM has commissioned three cargo ships to transport 4,700 tons of arms and ammunition from ports of Constanta in Romania and Burgas in Bulgaria to the Middle East likely as part of the covert supply of weapons to Syria.

The shipments included heavy machine guns, rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons – as well as bullets, mortars, grenades, rockets and explosives, according to US procurement documents.

The origin of arms shipped by SOCOM is unknown and the material listed in transport documents is available from stockpiles across Central and Eastern Europe.

Not long after one of the deliveries, SOCOM supported Kurdish groups published an image on Twitter and Facebook [https://twitter.com/westkurdistan/status/722373819474776065] showing a warehouse piled with US-brokered ammunition boxes in northern Syria SOCOM would not confirm or deny that the shipments were bound for Syria.

US procurement records also reveal that SOCOM secured from 2014 to 2016 at least 25 million euros (27 million dollars) worth of Bulgarian and 11 million euros (12 million dollars) in Serbian weapons and ammunition for covert operations and Syrian rebels..

#88
Post rating: ~

getfiscal posted:

one of the things that i've heard recently is people talking about how ISIS evolved out of the sunni insurgency against the occupation, like, around al-Zarqawi etc., and it started drawing in a lot of ex-military people. so people point out that ISIS military structure includes a lot of people who were in Saddam Hussein's military. but i do wonder how the sunni awakening worked on a local network level to maybe facilitate the rise of ISIS. i don't know much about such things but yeah.



The Iraqi military was since it's inception a Sunni outfit originating in the Ottoman system where officers from the local Sunni community where trained militarily in Turkey and if its not the Baath party they side with its going to be the most common kind of far right over there which is good old Sunni fundamentalism. Isis was something any informed observer of Iraq should've seen IMO, that a paramilitary far right group based in the long established gap between the armed Sunnis and majority Shia

Edited by EmanuelaBrolandi ()

#89
hi
Post rating: +
so ISIS isn't a result of US geopolitical manipulations greased up with GCC oil money and arms smuggling networks but the inevitable result of Those Barbaric Supremacist Sunnis. noted.
#90
Post rating: ~
No dipshit it is a result of US manipulation as I explained in my post. The US has always played to Sunni interests in Iraq as they're more inclined to far right paramilitary action as a local occupying force than local Shias who don't have he history of occupier supported violence

Edited by EmanuelaBrolandi ()

#91
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
language.
#92
Post rating: ~
If some twitter liberal accuses me of Orientalism im finna swear. Thats just how it is *crosses arms*
#93
hi
Post rating: ~
sorry
#94
Post rating: ~
Remember that social media campaign where us soldiers posted pics saying they didn't enlist to fight on the same side as al qaida?
That was pretty good as far as Troops go I think (and was there any evidence to say it wasn't organic?)

What was it that killed that campaign of?
The poison gas attack proved by brown Moses to be by the Syrian government (later proved to be by the terrorist groups of course), or was it something else?
#95
[account deactivated]
#96
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
I was thinking, you know how China sold weapons to Pakistan to help arm the mujahidin against the Soviet liberation of Afghanistan... Did they ever apologize for that? Seems like a jerk move.
#97
Post rating: ~

glomper_stomper posted:

i remember a time when cnn would only show like 5 seconds of official al-qaeda footage. now, uhhh lol


holy shit. lol

#98
hi
Post rating: +

getfiscal posted:

I was thinking, you know how China sold weapons to Pakistan to help arm the mujahidin against the Soviet liberation of Afghanistan... Did they ever apologize for that? Seems like a jerk move.

China did a lot of fucked up shit just to spite the USSR.

#99
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
*hans zimmer strings as bhpn leaps from rooftop to rooftop*
#100
Post rating: +

getfiscal posted:

I was thinking, you know how China sold weapons to Pakistan to help arm the mujahidin against the Soviet liberation of Afghanistan... Did they ever apologize for that? Seems like a jerk move.

They were just planning ahead, those weapons were later used against the american invasions.

#101
Post rating: +
Some blairite just called me privileged for not supporting the US bombing Syria lol.
#102
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +++++

SparksBandung posted:

Some blairite just called me privileged for not supporting the US bombing Syria lol.

I remember when Trots said it was like "not bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz."

#103
Online
Post rating: +++++
That a diplomatic team led by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power advocated military action against Gaddafi may be a footnote in the Libyan conflict—but it is a significant mark of our nation's evolution, argues John Avlon.

The Libyan airstrikes mark the first time in U.S. history that a female-dominated diplomatic team has urged military action.
#104
ive gender
Post rating: ~
#105
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
http://bgsdc.com/our-team/
http://dayontheday.com/2016/08/05/former-bush-ciaer-endorses-hillary-with-strange-statement-bio-sources-go-missing/
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130903/DEFREG02/309030006


http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2013/09/03/former-hillary-clinton-aides-form-bipartisan-consulting-firm/

Edited by drwhat ()

#106
[account deactivated]
#107
hi
Post rating: +
this is why archive-dot-is is necessary:

http://archive.is/fv8Pa

they don't remove stuff.
#108
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

HenryKrinkle posted:

http://archive.is/fv8Pa



abulafia..

#109
Post rating: +

SparksBandung posted:

Some blairite just called me privileged for not supporting the US bombing Syria lol.


You are... you don't live somewhere scheduled for democracy

#110
[account deactivated]
#111
Post rating: +++++
It must be awkward being the translator at the training camps. You got some jacked up Chris Kyle type trying to explain killing people and he's all like "I know that before I exhale I will have sent one of the godless savages to atone before god" and the translator would be like "...uhhhh, he says hold your breathe when you aim."
#112
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +++++
I was listening to an older interview with Patrick Cockburn on Radio War Nerd and they sort of laid out these points with a punchline:

1. When random people show up in Turkey or ISIS terrority and are like "I want to join ISIS" then the group sort of checks out if they have any skills. And since a bunch of the recruits are just random idiots, they don't really know what to get them to do. Especially because they have all these imagined ideas of like fighting for the cause when in reality military life for them will be like... go patrol that neighbourhood for a few hours and just come back and tell us if anyone shoots at you.

2. ISIS is scared that these random recruits will be spies, because it would be relatively easy to send spies through recruiting channels rather than cultivating them from within the organization. Like if you can send a guy who has experience to some hotel in Turkey, that's way easier than trying to contact people in the field already and flip them.

3. Since some random kid from France who has never fired a gun has a very high chance of just whining about how his boots are uncomfortable, and there's a chance that if he doesn't whine he's a spy, and commanders are fairly busy with actual tasks, they consider these guys completely expendable.

4. Someone needs to drive a truck of explosives into a checkpoint. Who will it be? Ah, this man from France appears to be a hero, and has already shown himself to be valuable by washing most of the dishes he has been assigned to wash, therefore we are asking him to drive the truck into the checkpoint. They film it and put it on liveleak or whatever, encouraging more people to join up, and the guy who showed up doesn't have much choice in the matter and never complains afterwards.

5. Countries don't send spies through normal recruiting channels because the investment in an agent is such that it is generally unwise to put them into situations where they will be asked to drive truckloads of explosives into checkpoints.

Brilliance.....
#113
Post rating: +

getfiscal posted:

1. When random people show up at the organization office and are like "I want to join your org" then the group sort of checks out if they have any skills. And since a bunch of the recruits are just random idiots, they don't really know what to get them to do. Especially because they have all these imagined ideas of like fighting for the cause when in reality volunteer work for them will be like... go poster that neighbourhood for a few hours and just come back and tell us if anyone shoots at you.

2. The org is scared that these random recruits will be spies, because it would be relatively easy to send spies through recruiting channels rather than cultivating them from within the organization. Like if you can send a guy who has experience to some event at the university, that's way easier than trying to contact people in the scene already and flip them.

3. Since some random kid from the suburbs who has never read a book has a very high chance of just whining about how direct action makes him uncomfortable, and there's a chance that if he doesn't whine he's a spy, and organizers are fairly busy with actual tasks, they consider these guys completely expendable.

4. Someone needs to drag a barricade onto a highway. Who will it be? Ah, this man from the burbs wants to be a hero, and has already shown himself to be valuable by washing most of the dishes he has been assigned to wash, therefore we are asking him to drag the barricade onto the highway. They film it and put it on liveleak or whatever, encouraging more people to join up, and the guy who got arrested doesn't have much choice in the matter and continuously complains afterwards.

5. Conservative think tanks don't send spies through normal recruiting channels because the investment in a provocateur is such that it is generally unwise to put them into situations where they will be asked to drag barricades onto highways.

Brilliance.....


#114
Post rating: +
I put three of these up on campus at a college I don't go to a couple of weeks ago. Maybe someone even read them before custodians took them down.
#115
Online
Post rating: +
http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/washingtons-sunni-myth-and-the-civil-wars-in-syria-and-iraq/
#116
Post rating: +
#117
Post rating: ~


rip
#118
Post rating: ~
#119
[account deactivated]
#120
Post rating: ~
syrian government are apparently launching airstrikes on the kurds now