The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    We created catastrophe in Iraq and Syria. Canada takes 30,000 of our victims. Greece sinks, the EU crumbles, we posture. God sees.

    By jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 7:21am |

    No rational and honest observer can deny that our invasion of Iraq brought chaos there, which spilled over to Syria destroying the life support system and forcing millions of innocent people into misery, life threatening migration and finally, grinding poverty ,privation, and despair.

     

    Indeed, even an irrational and dishonest observer, Donald Trump makes one-half the connection although he eschews any responsibility for remediation.

     

    In the midst of this insanity, Canada is welcoming 30,000 refugees.  By proportional burden sharing, the 10,000,admission of whom  President Obama is unsuccessfully seeking is pitifully small.

     

    We broke it, but do not wish to buy it.

     

    Look upon our works:

     

     

    Who can possibly deny that the United States is a rogue state and a cause of world scale evil?

    Exceptionally powerful, stupid, selfish, short sighted, self regarding and irresponsible.

     

    A nation of sociopaths.

    Comments

    I am with you on this.  We need to do more for the refugees. American exceptionalism is that we are exceptional jerks.


    by trkingmomoe on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 8:03am

    I agree that our invasion of Iraq was the catalyst, and we bear responsibility for that, but I question the assumption that if we hadn't intervened, the Middle East would still be the brutally-repressed-but-more-or-less-stable land that we fondly remember from the late 20th century.

    The invasion of Iraq did not create the socio-political tectonics driving the conflicts today--sectarian strife, religious fundamentalism, democratic yearnings, regional power games, and proxy warfare. The old order of the Middle East seemed stable on the outside, but that balloon was ready to pop. We made the mistake of pricking it.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 8:37am

    In this case, I think we can point to arming Syrian rebels as more the catalyst for ISIS than the conflict in Iraq, but the Syrian conflict spilled *back* into Iraq. Not that it was peace and quiet in Iraq, but until the big push on removing Assad or supporting rebels started, our concerns in Iraq was local Al Qaeda and the ever-present Shia-Sunni fights, but not the regrouping of the Ba'ath officers corps that had been dispanded 11 years before.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 10:06am

    They never went away.  Isis/ aka AQ in mesopotamia IS the old corps.  Izzat al Duri (ace of something or other) was their top military guy til he snuffed a year or two ago.

    ETA:

    The fall of Mosul and Iraqi Civil WarEdit

    Al-Douri played a role in the Northern Offensive as commander of theNaqshbandi Army. Reports soon surfaced that he had links with the jihadist group ISIS, helping them take the city of Tikrit and coordinating attacks against Iraqi security forces.[48] On June 13, a Twitter account, @wikibaghdadi, claimed a "Meeting between ISIS and Naqshbandi Army near al-Qayara area south of Mosul had taken place with representatives from Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi."[49] In July 2014, al-Douri issued an audio recording praising "the heroes and knights of al Qaeda and the Islamic State" forces in attacking Iraqi government positions within Saladin, Kirkuk, Diyala and Nineveh province. His connections with Islamist elements in Iraq is said to have emerged as far back as during Saddam's regime.[50] According to the Soufan Group, al-Douri had close ties with senior ISIS officials Abu Muslim al-Turkmani and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi. Both men had served in the Ba'athist regime under Saddam Hussein, with al-Turkmani being a Lieutenant colonel and serving in the Istikhbarat andSpecial Republican Guard. Al-Iraqi had been a Colonel in Iraq's Air Defense Intelligence.[51]

    Al-Douri has been pointed out as one of the main commanders responsible for successful takeover by rebel groups of North Iraq and the city of Mosul in June 2014.[52] The Naqshbandi Army, along with other groups led by former Ba'ath officers, are reported to have assumed an increasingly large role in the governance and administration of occupied cities. Militants were reported to have appointed fellow Ba'ath generals Azhar al-Obeidi and Ahmed Abdul Rashid as the governors of Mosul and Tikrit.[53] Shortly afterwards, reports emerged that the Ba'ath Party, under al-Douri's leadership, declared war on ISIS in response to the displacement of Christians from Mosul.[54] Other reports still maintained that there was a limited degree of cooperation between the two groups.[55][56]

    In May 2015, an audio recording alleging to be that of al-Douri, criticized both ISIS and Iran. He also hailed the Saudi-led alliance targeting the Houthi militias in Yemen. On ISIS he stated "We do cross paths ... but what stops us from meeting is that even if we wanted to, they would not accept because they consider the Ba'ath infidels". He used the word Daesh, an Arab acronym considered derogatory by ISIS, and claimed that the group was detaining a third of the Ba'ath's command. Al-Douri then went on to claim the number of ISIS victims in Iraq "does not equal 1% of those killed by the militias". On Iran, al-Douri called for the "Iraqis in Al-Anbar and Karbala to strongly fight the Persian criminal plan, which aims at swallowing Iraq." He stressed that Iran is the main player in Iraq and it is working through the Quds Force.[16][57]

    In October 2015 it was reported that al-Douri's Naqshbandi Army was involved in secret discussions with the Iraqi government, alongside other insurgent groups, as part of a move to create a new Sunni force to fight ISIS in Iraq.[58]

    Allegations of deathEdit

     

     

    Saddam's revenge.

     

    He PROMISED a guerrilla war.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 11:00am

    Correction:  king of clubs

     

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_Ibrahim_al-Douri

     

     


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 10:48am

    I think you're roughly confirming my contention that something happened with Syria around 2011-2 to change the equation, and that pushed these guys into a much more hardcore Islamist posture/strategy (possibly that Islamist belief is less an ideal for the founders than a convenient organizational strategy to spread the movement). Anyway, I don't know enough about it to comment any more.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 11:46am

    I thought you were aware of the naqshbandi antecedents of your favorite armenian


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 1:02pm

    Sadly unaware - will do my homework, thanks.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 1:14pm

    He PROMISED a guerrilla war.

    It takes time to train a guerrilla army. Often the guerillas are inadequately supplied and have to use what ever is a hand to train with, even rocks and hollow trees.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 3:34pm

    There was a meme pushed last year trying to equate the Islamic State with the remnants of Saddam's military and claiming they were in control of the IS which is nonsense.  Some of these Ba'ath personnel have been used by the IS because of their expertise in intelligence and other skills but they must submit to the authority of the IS. The next to last paragraph above shows any  alliance between these groups was situational and didn't last long.


    by Peter (not verified) on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 8:48pm

    I suspect it's a little of both.  If theres one permanent element of post Ottoman geopolitics its that all alignments are temporary, save the enmity between the adherents of Ali and the Tentmaker.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 9:15pm

    NB, special for PP.

    Al- douri' s religion is listed as " Naqshbandi"


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 10:51am

    RFK Jr. Speaks to this, citing a Pentagon analysis:

     

    " Pentagon authors of the seven-page report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the ISIS caliphate: “If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.” The Pentagon report warns that this new principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul and Ramadi and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

    Of course, this is precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria occupied by the Islamic State exactly encompass the proposed route of the Qatari pipeline.

    But then, in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and driving a million refugees toward Europe. “Strategies based upon the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be kind of blinding,” says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force from 2004 to 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq between the FBI, the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. military. “We made the same mistake..."


    by jollyroger on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 3:42pm

    I'm not sure if you meant arming the " moderate " rebels in your post, as opposed to the AQ in Iraq agents who were actually enlisted.  

     

    One recalls John McCain's  http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/if-john-mccain-thinks-its-good-idea-16764"> John McCain's enthusiasm for rebel-arming which pretty certainly was not informed to this level of granularity.


    by jollyroger on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 3:50pm

    Applying the tort principle that you take your victim's eggshell skull as you find it, we were the proximate cause.

     

    Moreover, from mossadegh (1953) through the iran iraq war and Afghanistan (1989), we have inserted ourselves enthusiastically not to mention operation, what was it infinite resolve ?( desert storm).


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 4:08pm

    Correction, infinite resolve brought order to Afghanistan.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 4:11pm

    I will accept proximate cause, your honor


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 8:09pm

    Nice to see a leftie taking responsibility, but you aren't, really, you're just faking.  You're still blaming the problems in Syria on Bush, which absolves you.  Thing is, Bush was out of power when the Syrian civil war erupted.  It was all during Obama's reign, and mostly after Bashar al-Assad had a good look at how Obama treated Ghadaffy in Libya, and decided he would not lie down peacefully when the "Arab Spring" came his way.

    Iraq was not peaceful, but it was in a much better state at the beginning of Obama's regime than it is now, and at its worst was still a lot better than Syria under Obama.

    Will you take responsibility for inflicting Obama on the world?


    by Lurker on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 6:55pm

    1.  Aggressive war is the supreme war crime, thus Bush '03 and Obama '11 deserve the Hague for Iraq and Libya respectively.

    2. Could a continued troops presence without the odious requirement of immunity from local law been an option ?  If yes, perhaps the Sunnis 'revolt might have continued in restive abeyance . certainly we could have continued paying them off assuming Republican congressional agreement ( doubtful).  Ultimately the only long term prospect for peacefully unwinding the legfacy of the Ottoman empire and sykes piquot is divorce( pace Joe Biden) with a community property aftermath enforced by the UN  ( ed note, good luck with that)

    3. Libya was a gratuitous stupidity.

    4. I'm a world government trotskyite, don't blame me for Obama .


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 7:44pm

    There were 150K American troops in Iraq when Obama came to office. If they were still there, I imagine that the Iraq would be in much better shape than it is today. But we Americans aren't interested in a semi-permanent occupation. Can you blame us? You're Canadian right? And what was Canada's stake in the great "Coalition of the Willing?"

    If we sent 150K troops to Syria and kept 'em there, I imagine that Syria would be doing better too. Or we could have bombed Assad from the air and let Nusra/ISIS clean up the scraps. Or we could have armed the "secular" rebels and watched Nusra/ISIS buy and capture the lion share. Yeah, lots of great options.

    I dunno, I'm just a little tired of people with no skin in the game lecturing us about why more of our soldiers are obliged to kill and suffer and die.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 8:29pm

    You're a bit thin-skinned for a citizen of the country whose State Department endlessly tut-tuts every nation in the world.  How many of your soldiers are obliged to kill and suffer and die in the Ukraine?  In the South China Sea?  In Israel?


    by Lurker on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 1:13am

    That's an odd use of "thin-skinned." I'm not insulted or offended. I'm irritated. And yes, I'm sure that Russians and Chinese and Israelis get quite irritated by American tut-tutting, as you call it. That's sort of the point of the criticism. But I see some difference between denouncing a nation for expansionism or human rights violations and denouncing a nation for not sending its sons and daughters to war.

    But really, foreigners aren't the biggest offenders on this score (aside from a few crusty Canadian neocons). The biggest proponents of more intervention are American neocons--who also have no skin in the game. The fact is that the American people--many whom do have skin in the game--are tired of sending our soldiers to kill and die in fruitless foreign wars. They choose not to be the world's policeman.


    by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 10:18am

    And that's an odd use of "skin in the game", if American conservatives don't have it, but liberals do.  Or do you mean that only those who fight (and their families) should decide whether or not to send forces overseas?  That's a view I hadn't come across before.


    by Lurker on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 5:30pm

    It's not a conservative-vs-liberal point. It's a politician-vs-public point. The American people are no longer willing to make the sacrifices that certain leaders and foreign policy strategists demand.


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 03/03/2016 - 8:11am

    "There were 150K American troops in Iraq when Obama came to office. If they were still there, I imagine that the Iraq would be in much better shape than it is today."  It would be less violent but it wouldn't necessarily be in better shape and would become chaotic and likely implode as soon as we left.  Your argument is akin to the claim that a gamaholic is in better shape because his parents keep paying off the bookies  He's not in better shape.  He remains a gamaholic who will have his knees broken as soon as the parents stop. 


    by HSG on Thu, 03/03/2016 - 3:52pm

    It's not my argument, Hal. I was just starting from Lurker's premise. Best take it up with him.


    by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 10:21am

    The problem is once we broke Iraq there were no good options available.  That is why Clinton's failure to learn from the disaster and her decision to repeat it in Libya and her push to repeat it in Syria make her a very bad choice to be commander-in-chief.


    by HSG on Thu, 03/03/2016 - 3:56pm

    Change the metaphor, Hal.  Think of a scab covering an inflamed wound, preventing more bacterial infection (from outside forces), while making it easier for the white blood cells (the good guys) to build up and overwhelm the germs (the bad guys).  Sometimes the wound takes a long time to heal, and the scab stays around.

    American troops are still stationed in South Korea and Japan and Germany decades after the fighting stopped, and nobody thinks much about it.  If American forces had remained in Iraq long enough for a stable polity to form and become established, things might be different today.


    by Lurker on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 7:18pm

    Iraq asked the U.S. to leave.


    by moat on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 8:03pm

    Cuz GW lying us into getting Saddam was so much like World War 2 and the Middle East is so much like Europe.


    by NCD on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 8:49pm

    More like Kennedy getting into the Vietnam War or Truman getting into the Korean War.  Which political party were they?


    by Lurker on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 2:05am

    Democrat. Communists were actually leading  a brutal bloody insurgency into South Vietnam in violation of international agreement. Communists violated WWII armistice by sending troops into South Korea, pushing down into toehold of Pusan within 3 months, so the Allied response was to defend South Koreans.

    Compare that with Iraq, where Hussein wasn't actually reconstituting his WMD programs.

    Additionally, the Korean War was run very competently, despite its military complexity. The Vietnam War was run worse, but still much more complex than a policing action that was carried out haphazardly despite 6-8 months preparation for invasion.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 5:05am

    I think in all these cases, the President concluded that vital US interests were in danger, and ordered troops in to protect them.  US forces exist to protect US interests.  We don't know what information the President had on which to base his decision.  In all these cases the decision resulted in massive loss of lives, some of those lives American.

    We can debate the counterfactuals forever:  what would have happened if the US had not intervened.  Would it have been worse?  We'll never know.

    The attempt to depict Bush's war in Iraq as somehow different from the other wars is just stupid party politics.

    We can see the results of Obama's decision not to intervene:  500,000 dead in Syria, Europe falling apart, the growth of Iranian hegemony and Russian power...


    by Lurker on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 6:25pm

    As stated before, the Iraqis did not want the U.S. to stay any longer.

    Obama was trying to get a deal for a force of 3,000 while the GOP wanted many more but it didn't matter because Iraq was more interested in the number zero.


    by moat on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 7:14pm

    Your riposte is instructive, informed as it is by the casual assumption that there is something other than immanent self defense (  " vital interests" ) that can justify the projection of lethal force.


    by jollyroger on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 10:44pm

    Read RFK JR'S article.  The root of those problems in Syria was our pursuit of the " vital interest " of a Qatar to turkey natural gas pipeline

     

    When come back, bring informed viewpoint.


    by jollyroger on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 10:50pm

    Well, I finally read the article, which was interesting indeed.  He blames the CIA for everything that has gone wrong in the Middle East for the last 70 years, which is a refreshing change from blaming Israel.  But it still feels like conspiracy paranoia:  a small group of evil/foolish fiends are to blame, and everybody else is absolved.  Too pat.

    But even if it's true, or mostly true, the CIA reports to the President, and does his bidding.  If they screw up, it's the President who was ultimately responsible.  The CIA's reports are just one of the many inputs facing the President.  He, not the CIA, has to decide what to do.

    And if you think there is nothing "other than immanent self defense (  " vital interests" ) that can justify the projection of lethal force", you agree with would-be mass-murderers Maiello and Wolraich.  But Presidents of both parties disagree.  As do people who still have a conscience.


    by Lurker on Wed, 03/09/2016 - 6:31pm

    Its not whether you or I agree as to the standards for legally launching a war in the absence of a security council resolution (which, after all, is what we are deconstructing here...), it is the utility to be extracted for a people hoping to navigate nation- state relations with a claim to legitimacy.

     

    Would you agree that the absence of legitimacy is likely to render the projection of power self defeating in the long run?


    by jollyroger on Wed, 03/09/2016 - 8:24pm

    Love it when Lurker tries to score partisan points over his latest count of dead in Syria.  As if he cares or has skin in the game.


    by NCD on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 10:56pm

    Their party was AMERICAN... Do the dead of My Laii or the 500.000 children dead of sanctions or the Palestinians swimming in shit lagoons care about our faux political disputes?

     

    Will you get pass from st peter because you voted repugnant?  Will I get a pass because I voted dem?

     

    Gimme a fuckin' break.

     

    Drop the straw argument.  It ain't about dem vs pug,its right v wrong and WE are WRONG


    by jollyroger on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 2:43pm

    Who can possibly deny that the United States is a rogue state and a cause of world scale evil?

    Any hyper-power will inevitably fit this description.  But in terms of U.S. action abroad, you have to consider the alternatives.

    In Iraq, we wound up creating a failed state.  But what was it before, exactly?  It had been, for decades, a fascist dictatorship where the leader regularly committed genocide within his own borders and actively sought chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in order to do worse.  That the leader in question did those things, for a lot of his reign, with U.S. support, only makes things worse.

    As big a mistake as the Iraq war was, you have to remember what came before.  There was Gulf War I, where we slapped Saddam in the nose for overreaching his bounds and not conforming to the New World Order.  Then there was a decade of sanctions, no fly zones and the like.  Now, from the perspective of world security, I am fine with the notion that Saddam was well contained.  But do you remember the objection from the left during the 1990s (led, in part, by Christopher Hitchens)? It was that the economic sanctions against Iraq were a human rights catastrophe because Saddam was gaming the system (the "Oil for Food" program -- note the byline but those typos are not mine). Given that everything was terrible after the U.S. invaded Iraq, you can't tell me things were acceptable before.


    by Michael Maiello on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 10:24pm

    I do not concede most of the  premises underlying your analysis. Both as to the facts of the situation in iraq circa 1970 and forward, and the geostrategic role we played thereafter.

     

    Likewise I think your characterization of the Kuwait crisis misses our role in its precipitation, the equities on Iraq's side, and the hypothetical outcome had we not launched our intervention.

     

    That said, its super tuesday.  Sufficient unto this day is the evil thereof.  I'll address your points seriatim tomorrow.

     


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 11:53pm

    Pending a full rebuttal, for which I will draw heavily on the work of Chalmers Johnson, a brief point:

     

    Even a reluctant hyper power is morally obliged to clean up after itself.

     

    Let me direct your attention to the math in the post title.

     

    Canada, 30,000 Syrian refugees.  Us, not so much...


    by jollyroger on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 3:55pm

    At least if they go to Canada, they'll get healthcare.


    by Michael Maiello on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 4:33pm

    Where is the rim shot emoji when a guy needs it?  

     

    Ironically, a local firestorm is raging over just the issue of preferred choice of refuge, refugees in France and elsewhere resisting registration and settlement despite at least having escaped the caldron of death that is the middle east and perhaps survived the Mediterranean crossing because they hope to eventuate in Germany or Sweden.


    by jollyroger on Wed, 03/02/2016 - 4:45pm