dagblog - Comments for "Enough already"

Yeah,

A Guy Called LULU — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 03:42:57 +0000

In reply to Yeah,

Yeah,

And self-tailing wenches, ... I mean winches.

Yeah,

Flavius — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 02:54:04 +0000

In reply to Cole makes a strong point

Yeah,

Cole makes a strong recommendation: that we destroy ISIS no matter what the neighboring players think but provides no help on how to do that.

A bit like saying My Policy is to go to the Moon.Everything else is merely details which I leave to you guys.

Or like a new husband telling his wife that there'll come a time when they'll own a yacht. And he knows that you can't just have a broad objective like that, you have to do real planning.

So......it will have teak decks, two cabins, air conditioning.............

Cole makes a strong point

moat — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 20:06:29 +0000

In reply to Enough already

Cole makes a strong point about Daesh not doing much in the way of state building but he doesn't address how the Syrian civil war plays into why the "pirates of the desert" have safe havens. It is not only a matter of setting aside: "political concerns about the image of Kurdish or Shiite allies of the US on the ground conquering Sunni Arab populations". It is also about having such actions directly relating to the regime in Syria. Cole seems to be saying that the "pirates" can be taken out without getting into the regime change business.

That conundrum, after all, is the only reason the "pirates" are still there. Negotiate an end to the civil war and Daesh will be put out like a cigarette butt.

And that negotiation will require involving all the people in the surrounding region. Take for instance the news piece posted by NCD regarding the U.S. strike on the oil tankers. Now there has been a lot of controversy over whether Turkey has stopped the oil smuggling that was rampant a year ago. Whatever the truth of the matter, Iraq has canceled a major petroleum deal with Turkey on the basis of that perceived trade. While the Daesh may be pirates, they are organized to run a business that many others have an interest in continuing.

Cole's treatise- goes more or

Flavius — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 18:06:52 +0000

In reply to Enough already

Cole's treatise- goes more or less like this

Analysts thought that Isis was different from al-Qaeda because Isis wants to take territory

The Paris attack seems to contradict that

AQ had tried and failed to attack local governments " the near enemy" and had been driven by that failure to instead attacking the "far enemy" -us aiming to draw us into a ruinous war.

But "Paris" was a risk for Isis because it does indeed have a "home address"

Until now Isis has resembled pirates who had scattered strongholds

"They don't actually do much governing of the places they dominate,Mainly extract resources from them"

And their public beheadings are also similar to the pirates as a way of increasing the likelihood of future ransom

But isn't Isis hyper puritanical unlike the pirates?

No way. Isis buys and sells slave girls and uses then in the process

Looked at this way "Paris" was like a pirate attack

And was probably intended like the 2004 Madrid bombings to cause the French back off -as Madrid caused Spain to get out of Iraq

"The analogy, as with all analogies, is inexact.But seeing Daesh as a set of raiding pirate strongholds rather than as a conventional state makes sense of its various activities"local crooked actions, oil and drug smuggling, human trafficking.

The policy implications of this way of viewing it is that President Obama's containment strategy won't work. As a raiding state Daesh can't be contained. It has to be rolled up, and political concerns about the image of Kurdish or Shiite allies of the US on the ground conquering Sunni Arab populations simply have to be set aside.

As a long time follower of Cole's this conclusion was surprising. Is he right?