What if what they say they want is what they actually want? Graeme Wood has expanded his September 2014 TNR article on “What ISIS’s Leader Really Wants” (which, yes, I linked here) for the Atlantic:
… Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million…
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal…
Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.
Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.
Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.
Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons…
I think this is a particular trap for Americans, because we’re used to our own protected subclass of “Christians” who use their “beliefs” as a tool to let them do exactly what they choose to do within the framework of our secular politics, without actually embracing the thornier tenets that might require personal sacrifice. We have every reason to believe that Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, or for that matter the Rev. Al Sharpton, are less interested in their clerical duties than in ensuring that they, and their immediate followers, get at least their “fair share” of the goodies right here on this particular plane of existence, under the current modes of secular politics. The dedicated followers of ISIS (IS, ISIL, the caliphate) are, I think, more like Cromwell’s New Model Army — a hardened core of seasoned, believing veterans maneuvering a dangerous supergang of young men with no better economic options, a postadolescent belief in their personal immortality, and the new convert’s fervor to spread their particular gospel. Cromwell’s war looks very romantic and toy-sized from our historical distance, but the damage he did while he almost broke the global empire of his day was not at all a minor skirmish.
On the other hand, per Wood’s earlier article, we may have a few years yet to enjoy our wanton Western ways:
… David Cook, a historian at Rice University who studies Muslim apocalypticism, points out that the battles preceding the Day of Judgment will take place in modern Syria, with a final showdown in the year 1500 of the Islamic Hijra calendar, or A.D. 2076…
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
So, basically, we’re dealing with heavily armed Rapture nuts.
Lovely.
Baud
At least the wars won’t be endless.
burnspbesq
Not an easy message to take on board, because of the clear implication that the only way to “win” is to kill every last one of them–which is probably impossible because there will always be a core of survivors who melt into the civilian population when the shit hits the fan–and the converse implication that leaving them alone to sort their shit with their neighbors isn’t a solution, either.
srv
And now we must bear the White Man’s burden to save Islam from itself, right? Good luck with that.
Am not sure why Muslim haters have a problem with Muslims killing other Muslims. You’d think they’d see that as a feature.
MNP
I’m going to say right out I wish Cromwell’s state had endured for various reasons.
? Martin
Well, the good news is that if we stall them for the next 61 years, we should be in the clear.
It’s a plan…
SatanicPanic
@burnspbesq: hmm, so what do we do?
Big ole hound
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Sounds like you’re right and just like some evangelistic members of the NRA
Paul in NC
Cromwell’s rotted head ended up on a spike.
srv
@MNP:
You know, if Ayn Rand hadn’t fucked up and been an athiest, we’d have lots of hardened cyberized dudebros ready for Crusades 2.0
Perhaps someone could do an abridged Atlas Shrugged and put it out as a pocket book.
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic: Promote our own interests, our true interests, from a safe distance.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Or a street gang with a theology.
Pogonip
This is exactly the sort of topic on which Amir could provide valuable instruction, especially to an audience with a good many members who have trouble understanding that, or how, people could take a religion seriously. I have no idea how far out of the Islamic mainstream ISIS is–pretty darn far, I’m guessing–but I bet Amir could offer much instruction. Bring on front-page Amir!
Baud
@Kropadope:
That’s not vague at all.
Baud
@Pogonip:
I have advocated that for a long time.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): That’s pretty much it.
The domestic version are just as deranged and dangerous.
beltane
Iranian hegemony in the region might not be such a bad idea. Humanity has seen such roving gangs of lunatics in the past, and they have often ended up being crushed by strong states.
Kropadope
@Baud: Basically, make sure U.S. assets are protected, make sure our allies have access to proper supplies and logistical support, and not to simply go bomb brown people to show how manly we are.
SatanicPanic
@Baud: He said he’s been offered a spot but turned it down. I agree he could help, but there’s still this problem:
This might be a gulf that no one can bridge.
Villago Delenda Est
@burnspbesq: Unfortunately, you’re correct. There’s no way to obliterate these creatures. Memes are pretty much impossible to eradicate, no matter how repellent they are.
All you can hope to do is keep them confined to beneath the rock from which they crawled in the first place.
SatanicPanic
@Kropadope: What about those brown people who don’t want to be killed by ISIS?
JDM
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): So, basically, we’re dealing with heavily armed Rapture nuts.
Lovely.
Countered, on our side, by rapture nuts with nukes. What could go wrong?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yep. Just poorly organized and not familiar with committing violence.
As Bill pointed out above by comparing ISIL to street gangs, it’s a lot easier to create murderers when they’re raised in a place where casual violence and murder is common, which is not how the majority of white American Rapture fans live.
MattF
I’m doubtful about taking what they say as a guide to their actions. Not that they’re insincere– but their crazyness is an integral aspect of their behavior. What they do is crazy and what they say is crazy. What is there to learn from that?
Baud
@SatanicPanic:
I didn’t realize he had received an offer. I’m sad that he didn’t accept.
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic: Accept refugees and accept that not every war is ours to fight.
Redshift
Gee, that doesn’t sound at all like American evangelicals and their “support” of Israel…
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est:
Seems like ISIS exists where there is a power vacuum. The problem with stopping them is that no one agrees on what should replace them.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kropadope: Yet, what are “our” “true interests”?
First we have do define “we”. The interests not of most Americans, but of a very small handful, launched us into an utterly illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq…which is directly responsible for the empowerment of ISIL/ISIS.
That small handful has profited immensely from it, leaving behind dead bodies and destroyed lives without the slightest of cares.
beltane
Funny how prior to the Iraq invasion, “ISIS” strictly referred to a rather lovely Egyptian goddess.
srv
@Pogonip: I don’t think Muslims are bad, but like many evangelical Christians, they don’t see their values as being extreme. Secular westerners are living in a bubble of their own creation.
Here’s a group in Norway – let them speak & vote for themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV710c1dgpU#t=2m17s
OzarkHillbilly
No where was it I ran into these people before? Oh yeah, the local abortion clinic.
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud: Then there are those who profit from the existence of ISIL/ISIS in the first place. A convenient diversion from their own activities. The Saudis (and their Wahhabist allies) come to mind at once.
BillinGlendaleCA
@beltane: It was also Verizon’s android tap to pay app, they recently changed the name.
SatanicPanic
@Kropadope: That sounds fine until you run into a situation like Rwanda. I don’t think there’s an easy answer either way.
beltane
@Baud: Yes, groups like ISIS tend to flourish in the aftermath of societal collapse. Contrary to libertarian fantasies, in the absence of strong government you tend to get rule by violence.
Anne Laurie
@burnspbesq:
No, but “we” have to start by taking them seriously. It’s a much larger, more dangerous version of American liberalism/modernism in the 1970s/80s — “we” didn’t believe more than a handful of revanchist nutters & no-hopers would fall for Nixon’s politics of resentment, or Reagan’s “morning in America” bullshit. But it only takes a handful of well-funded True Believers to undermine even a prosperous “modern” society, given enough time, and there’s few places in the Middle East that have as much economic slack as Fresno or Atlantic City or Cincinnati.
It’s not “our” job to go exterminate the brutes, even assuming their brutishness or our ability to exterminate them. But there’s a need to keep an eye out, police our own margins, support the vast bulk of decent non-fanatics, work on reducing IS till they’re more like the Amish or the glatt Orthodox Jews, enclaves of Believership no longer threatening to the general welfare (and with social borders porous enough to let young dissenters escape / outside ‘converts’ move from the larger world they can’t manage to control).
And, of course, keep our own True Believers from blowing up the world in response in the meantime!
Mike J
@Baud:
“That government is best which governs least.” George Bush gave Iraq the best government on earth.
beltane
There is also the possibility that whatever group or leader emerges to destroy ISIS will also not be palatable to the West.
dedc79
@beltane: It was also the name of the spy agency in the hilarious tv show, Archer. They decided to drop the name this season b/c of recent events.
Mike in NC
I no longer subscribe to The Atlantic, but we were recently in a coffee shop and I read the current cover article by James Fallows, in which he explains why this country seems destined to continue to blunder its way into pointless, unwinnable wars and waste trillions of dollars on useless weapons systems indefinitely. (The main reasons being that 99% of Americans have no connection to the military and Congress just can’t say no to any defense contractor.)
Anne Laurie
@srv:
Remember, Rand knew from personal experience what a Red Mob could do to a prosperous civil society. I think, in her wildest fantasies, she imagined the Objectivists doing that for her, but she was way too lazy to work hard enough to move beyond the “guru” stage.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Juan Cole doesn’t seem to have the same take:
It’s well worth a read.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
Dreading the day when these dudes decide “Hey, burning people to death 45 at a time seems too time-consuming, we should get some engineers and figure out how to be more efficient.”
I’ve read they’re pretty good with traffic control.
Anne Laurie
@MattF:
That a lot of people are willing to organize their lives around “crazy“!
burnspbesq
@SatanicPanic:
I have no f’in’ idea. If you have one, let’s hear it.
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic: People kill each other. Our nation doesn’t have the resources to police the whole world and prevent all wrongs. Trying to do so has hurt us and many of those we have tried to help. America will destroy itself if the principle of acknowledgement of the limitations of military intervention isn’t forced on the political class by the voters.
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan: There is a precedent for that , you know.
The Wansee Conference was convened to address precisely that issue. The then current methods for disposing of Jews was simply too time and resource consuming.
SatanicPanic
@burnspbesq: don’t know.
Mike J
@Anne Laurie:
Why? What does “taking them seriously” look like? OK, so we believe they have deeply held religious convictions, just like Hobby Lobby does. Does that mean we allow decapitations as long as they really, really mean it?
Xboxershorts
Holy COW!
The parallels to the American brand of evangelical Christianity in 3-4 different flavors are too numerous to count…..
Xboxershorts
@Mike J: I think that the more attention we give them (media wise) the more power they get…..
Thoughtful David
@beltane:
No, you *always* get rule by violence. This is the problem with actual libertarianism. It always decays almost instantly into warlord-ism, until one warlord is big enough to dominate the others, who you then call a “king.”
SatanicPanic
@Kropadope:
But
…
Who is arguing this?
beltane
@Thoughtful David: The conditions that allow soft, pampered, middle class youth to sit around smoking pot and reading Ayn Rand wouldn’t really exist without the modern welfare state.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mike J:
Ask a Republican, Obama just needs to call them what they are, “Radical Islamic Extremists”. Until he does that, he’s not taking them seriously. I learned this on “Morning Joe” this morning, before I turned it off.
ETA: They had Graeme Wood on yesterday’s show talking about this.
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic:
You responded to my suggestion that we shouldn’t get involved by pointing out the situation in Rwanda as an example of why we sometimes need to be involved in bad situations halfway around the world. So it would appear that you are arguing this.
andrew
I grew up on the Southern Baptist Mission Field, and came of age during the New Directions in Foreign Missions. For the uninitiated, that’s what happens when the largest protestant denomination in the US takes a page from Dilbert’s playbook in an attempt to jerry-rig end-times prophecies and force Jesus to return and get to smiting. Cult of the Cthulhu, now with middle management.
So this article makes perfect sense to me.
SatanicPanic
@Kropadope: If I were saying “we can’t prevent all wrongs” I would be talking about things like, say, border skirmishes or fraudulent elections. Yes, we can’t prevent all those. Genocide is something we should be devoting resources to
beltane
Here is an Arkansas state senator who takes ISIS more seriously than anyone else. He wants to nuke them: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/17/1365071/-Arkansas-State-Sen-Jason-Rapert-America-should-nuke-ISIS
BillinGlendaleCA
@andrew: I grew up in an American Baptist family. There was always a presumption that the End of Days was near. Then again, that’s been the case for 2000 years.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: Especially when the people talking are Joe and Nicole. I turned it off to preserve the health of my computer monitor.
Botsplainer
@Anne Laurie:
Russian civil society wasn’t prosperous as a whole during Rand’s youth. Small segments were, and there was a huge wealth gap which led to conditions where that society was ripe for revolutions in 1905 and 1917.
SatanicPanic
@SatanicPanic: “Genocide is something we should be devoting resources to” preventing genocide that is. Yikes.
raven
Ya’ll know I don’t like Pat Lang’s politics but this is an area where his blog offers a great deal of information:
ISIS: A Black Hole in the Heart of the Middle-East – Genesis of a Western Intelligence Failure
by Patrick Bahzad
He looked like a leader and talked like a leader, but the guy in charge – if there ever was one – was the “wild man” in the office down the hallway. A wild man on the loose, without adult supervision and under the influence of a bunch of sorcerer apprentices, coming right out of the “Neo-Con” school of witchcraft and wizardry, people so full of themselves, they thought they could not only destroy imaginary WMDs, but also build a viable democracy in Iraq, promote peace with Israel and reshape the balance of power in the Middle-East. In the words of a famous RAND Corporation analyst at the time, “Iraq was the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot and Egypt was the prize”.
Pogonip
@SatanicPanic: Well, I hope not. The eddicated class may not agree with us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t read the Church Fathers, or their equivalent in other religions, and ponder their ideas. I hope. Our government is largely populated by two extremes: the extreme secularists, and the Bible-waving Fundamentalists. Don’t know about the other religions, but the rest of Christendom thinks fundamentalists would be better off if they stopped waving the Bible and started reading it. Either way, our government is poorly equipped to deal not only with ISIS but with re-Christianized Russia, for example.
beltane
@raven: If you think of it, we might not have the right to call anyone crazy. A clique of flakes, crooks and ideologues managed to lead our passive nation into transforming the Middle East into a living hell and we’re scratching our head wondering where all the crazy people came from. I think it’s called reaping the whirlwind.
Cervantes
Ah, if only US foreign policy were as transparent as that.
Pogonip
I hope Amir reconsiders, but if he’s not up for front-paginess I hope he’ll at least continue to teach from down here in the cheap seats.
How does Cole pick his front-pagers, anyway? Has he ever said? (“Well, they gotta have Internet access…”). They do seem to make or break a site. I used to read Obsidian Wings but was unimpressed with Hilzoy’s replacement and unfortunately she did most of the writing. She seemed like a nice person but I found her writing too predictable.
Pogonip
@Pogonip: I wonder why FY Autocorrect only capitalized “fundamentalist” once? Can’t it make up its mind?
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic: The Rwanda situation escalated very quickly and suddenly if I remember correctly. The genocide was simply announced on the radio one day.
How does America counter something like this? Do we need anti-genocide squads posted all over the world and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice? Sounds awfully expensive for resources that would be idle much of the time. Unless you have a better suggestion?
Does that leave us to be the sole arbiter on these issues? How does one define genocide in a situation where there’s a high-casualty conflict along ethnic lines? What happens when we buy into a conflict heavily and create a situation where the targeted group has been successfully protected but remains part of the same nation and could not defend themselves against future genocide attempts? Is the U.S. left paying for the security of marginalized groups all over the world and several nations?
Even the circumscribed mission you suggest leaves the U.S. over-exposed and using more resources than it has. Stopping genocide sounds nice and all, but we have to be careful of how we approach it. It’s one thing to try to get the targeted group out of harm’s way, but going to war with the oppressors doesn’t seem to be the right approach, given recent history.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
That’s decidedly untrue. Memes exist in living minds, so they can be eradicated if all the minds they live in die. That doesn’t necessarily mean killing all those people, mind you; it might mean preventing their ideas from spreading while waiting for them to die off naturally. You can also try to kill memes off by replacing them with competing, incompatible memes, e.g. by converting people to a new religion.
Xboxershorts
@beltane:
Actually, I blame the deregulation of the American media for this. Prior to the rescinding of the “Fairness Doctrine” and the advent of Instant Media (the Internet), very conservative oriented corporations began to consolidate, first the radio broadcasters, then television and into cable and finally, the DrudgeFOXLimbaugh echo chamber was born.
40 years of demonizing “the liberal/Democrat/Progressive” is the ONLY reason Ayn Rand got more popular today than when her books sold within her lifetime.
Feeding the poor, the elderly and the working poor had nothing to do with the rise of Ayn Rand as an economic genius. The dumbing down of America, on the other hand…
Pogonip
@SatanicPanic: It’s an internal Islamic feud. People who know nothing about Islam–U.S. government, I’m looking at you–should let them deal with it. And if ISIS really does want to kill 200 million people, there’ll be plenty of pushback.
Mandalay
@OzarkHillbilly:
Here perhaps?
Pogonip
@MattF: Seems to me that, given the premises they start with, their approach is rigorously logical, not crazy at all. Poison mean, but not crazy.
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
Of the three, aren’t the first two at best ambiguous, if not downright dangerous in their ambiguity?
JMG
Mass religions have been conquered by fervor and mass conversions (happened in Islam a lot, in Christianity a lot as well) but by pure conquest of the sword, no. Also, a movement dependent on sociopathic young men faces the problem of what happens as young men age. That tends to evolve into a “kill our leaders” scenario.
Cervantes
@Pogonip:
Seconded.
I read Amir closely in the comments here, and would do so anywhere.
HRA
@Pogonip:
Finally after all these years, someone has said what I have believed all along.
“It’s an internal Islamic feud. People who know nothing about Islam–U.S. government, I’m looking at you–should let them deal with it. And if ISIS really does want to kill 200 million people, there’ll be plenty of pushback.”
Bobby B.
Thinking of Marlon Brandon’s speech in “Apocalypse Now”:”The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.”
Gin & Tonic
“Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe”
Is Ireland not part of Europe? Is Bosnia not part of Europe?
Pappenheimer
Mahdism flourished in the badly-governed Sudan, but the lifestyle the Mahdi preached was not practiced by many of his successors – most people are not fundamentalists to the point of giving up creature comfort. On the other hand, it took an Anglo-Egyptian army to overthrow those successors. Can someone with better sociopolitical sense than I comment on the staying power of a group like ISIS/ISIL/IS? Are such organizations overthrown from within?
Fred Dickinson
ISIS is not the biggest killer in the world today. That would be far and away global finance capitalism, aided and abetted by it’s handmaiden, the USA military and Imperial establishment. Makes ISIS look like pikers.
PIGL
@JDM: Dumping fewer billions of dollars worth of weapons into the area might help in that respect.
Laertes
I think they just hate us for our freedom. We should invade. We’ll be greeted as liberators.
jl
@Gin & Tonic: Good point. We tend to overlook problems in our own culture and cultures we closely identify with.
dedc79
I’ve seen no evidence in my lifetime (1979 on), or in the few decades that preceded it, that we are capable of a military intervention that will make the situation better rather than worse.
I wish there was a way to narrowly target and eliminate ISIS. I wish i could trust in our government and military’s ability to do so. But I don’t.
Cervantes
@Villago Delenda Est:
More like this, thanks.
Cervantes
@beltane:
Not strictly.
Laertes
What kind of savages murder innocents and then proudly circulate photographic evidence of their barbarism?
http://k.b5z.net/i/u/2183976/i/lynching.jpg
Fred Dickinson
@dedc79:
The point of military intervention isn’t to make the situation better- it’s to line the pockets of the MIC with some fresh blood money.
I bet in 30 years we will find out ISIS was midwifed by the CIA, similar to how Mossad helped create Hamas.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Actually, we’re dealing with Americanos, with very slight changes.
America was founded by the David Koreshes of Europe. Can anyone find it surprising that Americanos adhere to a fanatical chiliastic doomsday-cult end-of-history belief system that proclaims capitalism is the ONLY system, the ULTIMATE system, that capitalism can never NEVER fail but can only be failed…?
beltane
@Cervantes: OK, OK, I’m learning that all kinds of things were named after Isis, mostly in reference to the goddess though.
Holden Pattern
What I find sadly amusing about the Daesh freakout is that the narcos in Mexico and Central America have killed a lot more people (including in ways just as horrible as Daesh) and probably effectively control much more territory.
They’re just not trying to bait the US into an(other) invasion, and they’re not Muslims, so we don’t get drawn into the ridiculous struggle for civilization storyline.
NimmoENull
The War Nerd: Islamic State and American Narcissism
jl
Since we have two links to analysis of IS/ISIS/ISIL thought I would add a third.
Interview with Abbas Milani of Stanford. He says US boots on the ground would be a mistake and play into IS propaganda campaign. US should stick to supporting allies in the region. He says what really distinguishes IS is their access to money and cash; countries outside the region should focus on limiting IS’s access and ability to transfer large amounts of cash.
Can The U.S. Combat ISIS Without Playing Into The Terrorist Group’s Strategies?
Will it take United States military ground intervention to defeat ISIS or the Islamic State or does that play into the plans of these radicals?
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/audio/kcbs-in-depth/
Baud
@dedc79:
How about candygram for ISIS?
Bill Arnold
@Fred Dickinson:
Don’t want to start an argument, but heart disease is #1
The top 10 causes of death
beltane
Hyothetical situation. If some unifying, Saladin-type leader emerged who managed to eliminate ISIS but who was also hostile to the US, would he be tolerated by us or would he classified as the next Hitler?
Gin & Tonic
@Cervantes: And not strictly that, either.
Kropadope
@Cervantes:
I would say not.
What is a U.S. asset? An embassy, a military base, really anything the government owns. We protect those things. If it’s so isolated in hostile territory that we can’t do this without great cost of life and treasure, we close it. If that facility’s mission was so important that it can’t be abandoned, complete that mission somewhere safer. It’s the information age, it should be doable.
Intel sharing and ordinary commerce with nations with whom we share normal diplomatic relations. Not a difficult or dangerous concept.
Baud
@Bill Arnold:
Interesting that road causes are the only non-disease item that was significant enough to measure.
Cervantes
@Fred Dickinson:
Look what the cat dragged in!
More seriously — I think your four assertions above are pretty darn solid.
But incidentally, remember that I declined to immediately tar and feather you for your use of “Jew” (as opposed to “Jewish”) in “Jew privilege.” Instead I invited you to explain your usage — and I’m still waiting. As eloquent as you can be, I hope you oblige.
Laertes
If I was running one side of a struggle within the Islamic world, my top PR priority would be painting my side as the more anti-American side.
Baud
@beltane:
Once ISIS is gone, we would move on to our next nemesis, no?
Laertes
@Baud:
“Once ISIS is gone, we would move on to our next nemesis, no?”
No. Once we bomb ISIS into oblivion, the problems in the middle east will be over for good.
Fred Dickinson
@mclaren:
You are the first person I’ve seen on this website to actually Get it. At least there’s one person on the American “left” that isn’t a tool of capital.
@Cervantes:
English is not my first language and I was unaware of the negative connotation until explained.
Cervantes
@Laertes:
Thanks, I needed the laugh.
dedc79
@Fred Dickinson:
I see this claim re Israel and Hamas made a lot. Everything I’ve read suggests, at most, that Israel declined for a period of time to crack down on the organization that evolved into Hamas and rather allowed it to battle with the PLO. Is that what you’re referring to?
ETA: As just one example, in articles linking Israel to Hamas, it’s typically noted that Israel allowed an islamic university to open in the West Bank and that this same university is now a recruiting ground for islamic terrorists. But are the people who now criticize Israel for this actually taking the position that Israel should have cracked down back then, and, for example, prevented the university from opening? Or is it just that they want to blame israel for the conduct of its enemies in addition to its own conduct?
Fred Dickinson
@dedc79:
Yes that’s what I mean by “midwifed”. Israel and Mossad egged on Hamas and refused to confront them to weaken the PLO, if Israel had wanted it could have strangled Hamas in it’s crib. Instead it gave it milk.
In a similar indirect way I believe ISIS is ultimately the creation of the USA, a direct result of “debaathification” and the illegal, criminal, genocidal war on the Iraqis
Chris
Oh, I think there’s always a fair share of True Believers and cynical profiteers in any movement like this.
Remember, if the stories we’ve been reading about Daesh are true, quite a few of the people currently in the movement are former Saddam loyalists. That means they went from serving a secular government to a fundamentalist caliphate, a distinction that I’m sure isn’t lost on them. For a lot of these former Saddamists – and probably a lot of regular people too – I’d bet that the motivation isn’t end-times-religion so much as a tribal loyalty to Team Sunni Arab. In a chaotic place torn by ethnic conflict, you stick with your own kind regardless of who’s calling the shots (same logic as going to prison and joining the prison gang of whatever race you are, because if you don’t, the other prison gangs will eat you alive). I’d also bet my life that there are probably more than a few Huckabee/Palin type grifters is Daesh skimming off the top of the oil and antiquities trafficking that funds the movement.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that True Believers aren’t a big part of Daesh, quite possibly the leading part. And you’re right that they should be taken seriously. After all, even if we assumed that the Daesh leadership was made up of cynics, profiteers and grifters – I’m sure these people would be perfectly willing to let the True Believers run amok and kill people to their heart’s content. As we’ve seen everywhere from Saudi Arabia to the United States, the base needs to have red meat thrown to it or it gets restless.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Okay, not DougJ, but the same MO
Mandalay
@Kropadope:
That’s exactly what we did with the US embassies in Libya and Syria. And last week we closed our US embassy in Yemen, and rightly so, following an attack on a US Embassy car last month. That is not “cut and run”; that is sound policy.
Chris
@Pogonip:
This is why I’ve been sorry since last summer that Zaid Jilani didn’t last. I’d be a fan of having Amir as a front pager too, however.
Baud
@Chris:
While Amir’s perspective as a Muslim would be interesting, I want Amir as front pager because Amir is awesome.
mclaren
Botsplainer
Oh good, McLaren is here. All we need is Spincuck and Bob in Brighton Beach, and you’ll have a feature length Three Stooges extravaganza…
BillinGlendaleCA
@Fred Dickinson: Ah, another person who likes pie.
chopper
@BillinGlendaleCA:
yes, but it’s Jew pie, which is fucking delicious.
GregB
@Holden Pattern:
We have nothing to fear from the Catholic head choppers! It’s the Muslim’s who’ll kill us in our beds.
I still think that Saudi Arabia is the most malignant promoter of these kinds fanatics.
Cervantes
@Fred Dickinson:
OK — but I do think you should have explained earlier.
Meanwhile a number of brainiacs here had developed an entire theory of you in order to explain the utterance. If your explanation can be credited, they will be sorely disappointed.
Not to mention the pair of brainiacs who had developed an entire theory of me as well!
mclaren
@Laertes:
There. Fixed that for ya.
Forward to the barricades, comrades! Capitalism is nearly perfected! All we need is a few more mass genocides, a few billion more starving poor people, a few thousand new prisons, a few million more CCTV cameras and microphones and e-mail surveillance systems to keep the ungrateful proles from rising up against their global capitalist masters, and paradise will be at hand!
Fred Dickinson
@GregB:
And the biggest promoter and supporter of the Sauds is the USA going back to the hero of the American “left”, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Chris
@Pappenheimer:
Which is why most religiously restrictive societies tend to devolve into power hierarchies with hypocrisy built into the system, where the higher you are on the totem pole, the easier it is for you to break the rules and indulge yourself, while still holding people beneath you to the strict standards.
The obvious example is the man/woman imbalance in patriarchal societies, where in theory men are supposed to practice and guarantee respect for women and their purity, but in practice men are allowed to catcall, harass, and generally look for extramarital sex without much backlash, while God forbid a woman so much as wear a skirt. Or the status of gays, homosexuality being considered an unspeakable sin while things like divorce or premarital sex (at least when done by straight guys) are, at the very least, much more tolerated.
Tommy
@BillinGlendaleCA: Well then you have this, as a VW guy: The Ferocious New Corvette Z06 Is an $80K Ferrari-Killer.
Oh 0-60 to under 2.7 seconds. Fastest car in the world.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Tommy: Ah, that’s nothing. My ’86 Jetta can go 0-60 in 2.7 minutes, no problem.
Pogonip
@Cervantes: The meeting of the Amir Khalid Fan Club will now commence. Let the wild rumpus start!
jl
@Cervantes:
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!
And BJ commenters…
Edit: some of us also have the power to cloud men’s minds!
The Blog Dahlia
@Fred Dickinson:
I always use that explanation whenever I take a huge steaming dump in the punch bowl and walk away. Sorry, me no speak-a the English!
Fred Dickinson
@mclaren:
Late Capitalism is in it’s finale, senile descent into an orgy of self-destruction, it should be interesting to watch.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Blog Dahlia: BUUURRRRRRN!
Morzer
@jl:
Which brings us to the annual question:
Did the Shadow see his shadow?
GregB
@Fred Dickinson:
I knew it was his fault all along.
(Shakes fist and curses FDR’s embrace of Sharia.)
jl
@Morzer:
I have no clue.
What I want to know is if the Amir Khalid BJ fan club will be offering durian snacks and and quality cocktails at their meetings.
Chris
@Fred Dickinson:
Read the first entry on this blog page, from 2007 – http://www.empirenotes.org/february07.html. (Cervantes knows the blogger, don’t know if anyone else will). Long story short, it’s quite possible.
Tommy
@BillinGlendaleCA: No worries. At my core I am a car “guy” so I just love reading a story like the above.
Oh If I have be given or won a few hundred million I might buy this, Bugatti Veron. Try this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSFX9vrwJf8
priscianus jr
@MNP: “I wish Cromwell’s state had endured for various reasons. ”
That’s all very well, but it didn’t last more than eleven years, for even better reasons.
Pogonip
@jl: Durian yes, cocktails no: some folks have religious objections to booze, and besides, if you have durian, what else do you really need?
Chris
@Holden Pattern:
Yep.
It’s interesting; objectively, Afghanistan is just as much a story of warlords and trafficking networks fighting a gang war over who controls the drugs as Mexico is. And Mexico is just as much a story of fundamentalist lunatics burning things down in service to a religion gone mad – the Knights Templar cartel are their Taliban. The abridged narratives we get in the U.S. just happen to emphasize different things. Partly for understandable reasons – but it’s also why we get this notion that there’s something unique about the Muslim world’s problems, when, really, not so much.
The Blog Dahlia
@GregB:
Everything is FDR’s fault. He was a capitalist, remember.
jl
@Pogonip:
” if you have durian, what else do you really need? ”
thank you for your correction!
Chris
@Baud:
“Hey, where are the Sunni women at?”
max
The dedicated followers of ISIS (IS, ISIL, the caliphate) are, I think, more like Cromwell’s New Model Army — a hardened core of seasoned, believing veterans maneuvering a dangerous supergang of young men with no better economic options, a postadolescent belief in their personal immortality, and the new convert’s fervor to spread their particular gospel.
The New Model Army was a solid innovation and a very good and well disciplined army for its time. ISIS goons look pretty fanatical but not very disciplined or drilled. Hmmm, closest analogue would be the Taiping Rebellion. Those guys certainly combined religious fanaticism with the weird, dangerous but not well organized army. There are also some resemblances to the Zealots, and the Turkish Janissaries (in that they’re recruited from Western counties in large part).
max
[‘They’re definitely the Muslim Nazis in ideology.’]
Pogonip
@Chris: Over there as far from the durian as they can get.
mainmati
ISIS (I prefer Daish) have to deal with administering the territory they’ve occupied. Killing lots of people isn’t going to make the utilities, hospitals, food stores and all the other functions of even a basic state operate. Sooner or later, their Iraqi Sunni sympathizers will just get so pissed off that they will stop cooperating. Strangulating them by cutting off the funding, the oil wells and even food supplies is required. Sending US “boots on the ground” just fire up more recruits. The youth bulge guarantees many more years of violent instability but containment is the only realistic option for the US.
mclaren
@Fred Dickinson:
Some numbers to back that up:
The Lancet estimates the number of Iraqi civilians killed starting with America’s Shock and Awe attack on Iraq in 2003 at 695,000.
Source: Peer-reviewed study by The Lancet, The Human Cost of the War In Iraq, 2006.
Annual preventable deaths in the Third World by treatable illnesses which can’t be cured because America’s giant pharmaceutical companies charge too much for their medicines (vaccines, antibiotics, antimalarial drugs, etc.): 1.5 million, mostly children under 5 years of age.
Source: World Health Organization website, 2015.
Number of small farmers in India who have committed suicide since 1995 because they can’t afford to pay back the loans for their expensive new genetically modified seeds: 250,000.
Source: “The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops,” The Daily Mail, 2 November 2008.
Remember: if these numbers of annual deaths caused by globalized capitalism disturb you, simply repeat the mantra: “mclaren is one of the three stooges” and all will be well.
Chris
@mainmati:
Me, too. “IS” just looks like an English word capitalized for no good reason, “ISIS” is a perfectly good goddess who doesn’t deserve the association…
But actually, my main reason for “Daesh” is simple consistency. We don’t say “The Base,” we say “al-Qaeda.” We don’t say “the Students,” we say “the Taliban.” We don’t say “Party Of God,” we say “Hezbollah.” Hence, “Daesh,” not “Islamic State.”
And I… probably agree with you; how they turn out depends on whether they’re able to provide any decent governance/services. I think the Taliban were pretty bad at that in the nineties, but maybe Daesh is smarter. We’ll see.
magurakurin
@Fred Dickinson:
holy shit. Dude, I don’t think McLaren is who you think they are. Not sure if teaming up with the Mclarenster is the best move at this junction. You might want to wait on that. Just sayin’.
*and if English is your second language, it is pretty amazing that the only mistake in grammar and usage you have appeared to make to date is the use of a noun as an adjective, which happens to be a usage that implies an ethnic slur. Not calling you a liar, but it would be irresponsible not to ask if you are….a fucking liar. Just sayin.
oh and…
FIDO
mclaren
@Chris:
Except that U.S. troops are guarding the opium warlords’ poppy fields in Aghanistan.
As a result, Afghan opium production now stands at an all-time high.
Source: “Afghan Opium Production Hits All-Time High,” Counterpunch, 14 November 2014.
Anyone who finds these facts disturbing need only giggle and snicker and yelp the magic word “troll,” and all will be well.
Chris
@Baud:
Extremely true. I quite liked the other guy’s posts as well, though, for all of the month that they lasted.
Anne Laurie
@jl:
Not cocktails, certainly.
I’m another person who’d love to read Amir Khalid on the front page, but I can thoroughly understand why he doesn’t want the aggravation, too!
Gordon, The Big Express Engine
@Fred Dickinson: you are clearly not familiar with the collected works of Bob in Portland
Cervantes
@The Blog Dahlia:
Two things follow from your statement: you are aware that some people use that explanation credibly; and you should be grateful to them because they are giving you what can most charitably be called a free ride.
Can you acknowledge either one of these two things? Feel free to surprise me.
SatanicPanic
@Kropadope:
You do not remember correctly. There was plenty of advance notice, but the Clinton admin calculated that it wasn’t worth the minimal effort it would have taken to prevent the genocide.
Cervantes
@jl:
Mocktails, perhaps.
jl
@Anne Laurie: I didn’t necessarily mean alcoholic cocktails. Durian Shirley Temples would be fine. We could start a durian of the month club and give the proceeds to animal shelters!
And I simply cannot imagine any aggravation that would go with being a front page poster. What are you talking about?
@Cervantes: Thanks. You beat me to it. Durian Mocktails is what I was talking about.
Cervantes
@magurakurin:
Reasonable question, if you ask me, provided the part I emphasized is true.
Cervantes
@mclaren:
Thanks for doing that work. It may not prove anything to anyone’s satisfaction but it helps the discussion.
As I said above, I think his assertions were pretty darn solid — but I’m traveling in the Far East and not in much of a position or mood to do actual work out here on the beach.
mclaren
@Fred Dickinson:
No, I’m “one of the Three Stooges” and a “troll” because I persist in pointing out uncomfortable facts and using inappropriate logic.
America is, after all, the Greatest Nation Ever©, and the U.S. military is the Greatest Fighting Force In the History of the World® and the American people are the Greatest People In the World™ because of American Exceptionalism and Wall Street and flatscreen 60-inch TVs and whatever, dude. There is No Alternative To Globalized Capitalism, because…shut up, that’s why.
You should pay attention to the people warning you not to agree with me. You’ll wind up out on the fringe of the democratic party with the marginalized voices like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky and me. As Chomsky points out, the chief job of America’s current political system involves the manufacture of consent for inhumane corrupt policies prompte by multinational corporate greed, and as you can see from the comments section here, the manufacturing process has been going swimmingly.
The commenters on Balloon-Juice loudly ridicule the Republican for IOKIYAR (It’s okay if you’re a Republican) while just as loudly applauding Hillary Clinton for giving a $250,000 speech to Goldman Sachs explaining that we need to stop “bashing the bankers”…especially since her daughter Chelsea is married to one of the most rapacious and wealthiest hedge fund traders at Goldman Sachs, Mark Mezvinsky. IOKIYAR is evil, you see, but IOKIYAD (it’s okay if you’re a Democrat) is just dandy ‘n peachy-keen.
The Balloon-juice commentariat shrieks with rage at Dick Cheney’s global death squads murdering innocent women and children around the world, but cheer themselves hoarse at Obama’s “secret kill list” from which he picks 17-year-old American girls to murder in third world countries, without charging the victim with a crime or giving the victim a trial.
Source: “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, 29 May 2012.
Cervantes
@Chris:
Yes, I do. Rahul Mahajan has, among other qualifications, a doctorate in physics from UT Austin. That doesn’t justify his political writing — but then again, it doesn’t need to.
Glad you mentioned him. (Again?)
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@SatanicPanic:
I think you’re the one misremembering.
The genocide took all of 100 days. That was lighting fast compared to modern military operations.
It would have taken a months for the US to have any significant forces in Rwanda. Let’s recall that Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The air campaign of the Gulf War didn’t start until January 17, 1991 (over 5 months later). Kuwait is on a large body of water. Rwanda is land-locked.
The Rwandan genocide was horrific. We should have better understood the dangers there. But it’s not at all clear that once it started that Clinton (or anyone outside the region) could have done anything to stop it sooner.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris
@mclaren:
Yep, that’s us all right.
@Cervantes:
I quoted him once before a while ago. Don’t remember what about, but I do remember you’d heard of the guy.
catclub
@Laertes: Read the latest War Nerd article. He compares ISIS to the KKK and the analogy has lots of merit. Sunnis dominated Iraq for a long time, but have been displaced by the Shia underclass ( as the Sunni see them) in control of Iraq. The former army officers of Saddam’s army are a large part of the leadership of ISIS. Former Confederate officers led the KKK. Both depend on terror to re-impose their rule.
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic: Ethnic tensions and a civil war don’t necessarily constitute warning that a genocide is about to commence. In fact, it appears as though prior to the genocide, they were under a cease-fire and attempting to settle an accord. There was a catalyst in the form of a presidential assassination before this “final solution” was announced on the radio.
Until it happened, genocide was considered a fringe viewpoint. Then the facts on the ground changed. Yes, some wanted it for years before it happened. This doesn’t constitute planning a genocide any more than fringe ideas within the U.S. suggesting a Muslim genocide means it’s being planned.
Rwanda established a government a year later that prohibits any form of ethnic discrimination and is accepting Tutsi refugees back. Compare this to the situation in Libya where the U.S. did intervene to prevent a genocide. Now Libya is a mess and our involvement is both costly and a nonsense political football in the U.S.
mclaren
@SatanicPanic:
When radio stations throughout the country begin broadcasting messages urging members of one tribe to pick up machetes and murder members of the other tribe, this is generally considered a hint that trouble might be brewing.
The real reason that the Clinton administration decline to get involve in Rwanda is, of course, that there was no oil in Rwanda.
I Rwanda had boasted one third of the known oil reserves in the world, like, oh, say, Iraq, the situation in Rwanda would’ve been declared “a global humanitarian crisis” requiring an act of congress and boots on the ground and full mobilization of U.S. armed forces.
Follow the money. That’s how you understand America’s foreign policy.
As Joe Pesci’s character says about the mafia in the movie Casino:
Chris
@catclub:
I thought the same thing about it back when it was still the AQI. Both groups started out as a resistance against the occupying U.S. Army, made up of members of the historically dominant identity group (white people/Sunni Arabs), but quickly degenerated into their true calling of targeting members of the historically disenfranchised identity group (mainly black people in the U.S, and Shi’a in Iraq), presumably because it’s a lot easier than taking on an army.
Kropadope
@mclaren:
You’re painting with a very broad brush. I don’t think your claim holds up. One can find a wealth of opinions on this site which are roundly debated. They don’t tend to ban people here.
The troll moniker is being applied here for bad logic, factual error, and misrepresentation (see quote above).
Zinsky
Progressives can’t repeat enough that ISIS did not exist until the U.S. foolishly invaded Iraq, which posed no threat whatsoever to us.
Cervantes
@Chris:
I remember now.
Thanks again.
catclub
@Chris: I will point out that our/this/The war nerd’s analysis leaves out Syria and how that conflict generated ISIS. I got nothin on that.
Kropadope
@Zinsky: Right.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Care to give any specifics?
Which bad logic?
Which factual errors?
Which misrepresentations?
Do have any actual evidence to back up your claims? Or are you just name-calling?
Pogonip
@jl: Yes! People will pay handsomely to NOT have their Durian of the Month delivered!
Chris
@Cervantes:
Ah, thank you for digging it up (and you’re welcome!)
Yeah, his was the first left wing blog I discovered on the Interwebs, and I think probably the most radical one (that is not an insult) that I read regularly for a couple years. Was quite sad that he’s basically discontinued it – although one of his last posts said he hadn’t been posting much because of “profound political burnout,” something I more than understand.
I still check the blog not infrequently just to see if anything new’s come up.
Fred Dickinson
@mclaren:
I do not care a whit for the Democratic Party nor the American “left”. The USA is a rotten, grubby, pushy, inverted totalitarian rogue state hell bent on ensuring the global domination of finance capital.
Sadly, many members of the USA “left” don’t care that the proletariat gets fucked in the ass, so long as a black cock or a strap-on does the ass raping.
The best hope of the workers of the world is to see the USA collapse completely, as I expect it to do in my lifetime. I believe within the next 25 years we will see the beginning of dissolution of the USA as a country.
mclaren
@Zinsky:
From a larger geopolitical perspective, whenever you invade and blow up a functional state and then bug out leaving a failed state in its place, political and social pathologies are going to take root. ISIS merely represents one of those pathologies.
Many of the current nations in the current middle east are phony artificial states creating by arbitrarily drawing lines on a map the Treaty of Versailles in order to secure oil rights for the British and the American oil companies of 1919. The peculiar diamond shape of Iraq, a classic fake artificial country that jams together multiple incompatible ethnic and tribal groups from the former Ottoman empire, results from the need or American and British oil companies to include the oil fields on the eastern side of Mesopotamia.
Western meddling with and destruction of viable nation-states in the middle east didn’t start in 2003. It goes wayyyyyyyy back to 1919. The people in the middle east remember this. Americans don’t.
The Blog Dahlia
@Cervantes:
Some people say the best kind of cucumber’s a pickle.
Honestly, the number of fucks I give about your opinion is so small it can’t be measured.
mclaren
@Fred Dickinson:
You might want to be careful what you wish for. If the U.S. collapses, whatever comes after is likely to be worse. Imagine a bunch of tinpot warlord Huckabees running fiefdoms within the former United States of America…
Fred Dickinson
@mclaren:
Anything is better than the current racist, monopoly capital controlled, murderous, genocidal, rotten senile Superpower.
Those fiefdoms you speak of would be far less powerful and mostly hurt their own subjects.
Right now the USA, along with Israel, is the biggest threat to all of progressive humanity.
Kropadope
@mclaren:
Well, I’ll stick to things posted within this thread:
Let’s start with the very one I already pointed out where you responded to my post and didn’t acknowledge the example contained within (a misrepresentation unto itself). Plenty of criticism and defense of Democratic politicians occurs here. I engage in both. A handful of posters here are intolerant of dissent, but most people here are tolerant and open to debate heterodox opinions.
Many settlers from many nations came to America for many reasons, but most were not to establish a religious cult. Most were for commerce. Among those commerce-oriented settlers you can also see a wide range of approaches. Many were not violent and did not harm indigenous populations.
For all the problems big pharma actually has, this isn’t one. Even most underdeveloped nations manage to immunize the overwhelming majority of their population. these drugs are sold far more cheaply in most countries than they are in the U.S. Look at the list you provided of countries with insufficient preventative medicine and antibiotics, what you will find are severe structural problems.
Fred Dickinson
@Kropadope:
Ha. Hahhaha. BWAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!
America was conceived and born in racist violence full stop.
Anne Laurie
@mclaren: You, Fred D, and Bob in Portland ought to start your own blog. Imagine how beautiful that would be! Implement the change you wish to see in the world, comrades!
robzo
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: “Aum Shinrikyo isn’t your run of the mill Buddhism, though it probably is on the fringes of the Buddhist tradition (it released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995). Like Aum Shinrikyo, Daesh/ISIS is a fringe cult.” I have a lot of respect for Juan Cole, but that’s a terrible analogy. Soka Gakkai are a fringe Buddhist cult that are big enough to be noticeable and influential and operate in the open in Japan- Aum was cult of personality that combined a variety of half-baked religious ideas, and was very secretive with almost no public profile (unless one happened to live in their neighborhood, as I did) until they became very high profile indeed. As the Atlantic article points out, Daesh/ISIS is an extremist Sunni movement that has the unfortunate advantage of being able to play upon regional Sunni fears of losing in the Sunni/Shia schismatic conflict. ISIS looks a lot like the point of the spear in the Sunni pushback against regional Shia gains created by US/Western blundering in Iraq, and the challenge as I see it facing the West is how to stamp out ISIS without taking sides in the broader Sunni/Shia conflict. I think ISIS would relish a low-intensity conflict with the West in Iraq, Syria and beyond, and given the propensity for the US to do exactly the wrong thing (rather than, say, exposing and shutting down the financiers and suppliers of ISIS) I am afraid ISIS, like Al Qaeda before it, is going to get what it wants.
Kropadope
@Fred Dickinson: Dutch settlers from New York (then New Amsterdam) to Canada had a terrific working relationship with the indigenous folk. Who better to show them where to find the best fur to hunt and trade?
Jesuit missionaries were wonderful folk, eager to exchange information with the natives.
Across the English settlements you find examples of war and cooperation. This varied colony to colony and time to time as the situation changed, which tends to happen over a period of centuries.
Even the settlers most famous for their adversarial relationship with the indigenous, the Portuguese and the Spanish, were capable of cooperation. Hell, they wouldn’t have been able to conquer South America quite so easily if they hadn’t won allies among native tribes. Many of these tribes sided with them because the same sort of subjugation, slavery, murder, and other atrocities that our European forbears are so well known for were also committed by the dominant Mesoamerican chiefs and emperors.
The Pale Scot
@beltane: I’ve long thought that Iran is our natural ally , not the Wahhabi nutters.
Chris
@The Pale Scot:
I’ve thought that ever since 9/11, given their relations with the Taliban… and Saddam.
The only caveat to this is the Sunni/Shi’a context. The Sunnis are the overwhelming majority of Muslims, the Shi’a are only 20% or so, and Iran is the only major Shi’a power – Sunnis have Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, and that’s just in the neighborhood. In a time of increasing Sunni/Shi’a polarization, I can see the argument that throwing in with Iran isn’t good business given how many more people and nations are on the other side.
SatanicPanic
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I’m talking up the run-up to the genocide. That was considerably longer. Romeo Dallaire was issuing warnings months in advance. And we’re not talking about an Iraq invasion- RDallaire was able to save thousands with a very poorly equipped group of UN troops. A couple thousand more US troops could have been flown in
@Kropadope:
Is this the liberal “Who could have known?” Give me break.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
George Washington was known in the native Iroquois language as “burner of villages.”
The first recorded execution in America by British colonists was of a 17-year-old boy who had unauthorized sex. A classic example of puritan fanaticism. America was settled by puritans so extreme and so fanatical that their extremism was unacceptable in Britain…so they fled to the Americas, where they could erect cult compounds and pursue their fanatical extremist puritan beliefs to their uttermost extremes without interference.
We only need to take a look at photos like this to see that your “facts” are delusional nonsense.
But let’s back up a bit, to 1616:
In 1616 an epidemic wiped out 75% of the New England Indian population, so the Puritans landed in an area where Indians’ ability to resist was greatly weakened. In 1633-34 a smallpox epidemic hit the New England due of course to the presence of the Puritans themselves (see Jare Diamond’s Guns, Germs an Steel for more details), and the fanatical David-Koresh-type Puritans saw disease as God’s way of giving the lands of the heathen to them. They used the same logic for stealing everything they found, including robbing Indian graves.
This is the “good working relationship” the Puritan settlers had with their Indian “brothers.”
The charter of the first Masssachusetts colony explicitly stated: “The principall ende of this plantacion is to wynn and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge & obedience of the onlie true God & Savior of mankinde, and the Christian fayth.”
The Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay colony shows a native American Indian saying “come over & help us.”
In 1646 John Elliot established the Praying Towns in 1646, which were settlements where Indians got `relocated’ in order to convert and learn English culture. Of course, a more objective observer might choose another word than “relocate” or “settlement” — perhaps “forced death march” and “concentration camp” would prove more accurate, no?
Would you care at this point to revise your claims that when I asserted that America was settled by the David Koreshes of Europe, my “facts are bad”?
You’re going under or the third time here, and everyone can see the bubbles and hear the GLUB-GLUB noises you’re making.
mclaren
@The Pale Scot:
The Iranian people are by far the most pro-American of any population in the Middle East, excepting only Turkey.
The dark genius of U.S. foreign policy toward Iran has been to force the Iranian people to grudgingly support a fundamentalist Islamic regime that they deeply hate.
kc
@Pogonip:
It seems odd to me to assume Amir is an expert on Isis just because he’s Muslim.
SatanicPanic
@mclaren: Mostly I think they were upset that Somalia went so badly they didn’t want another failure on their hands. They managed to get one anyway.
Kropadope
@mclaren: I was right up front with what I had to say. It was complicated. Nothing you said does anything to disprove what I had to say. Another concrete example of your penchant for misrepresentation.
It must be real difficult navigating the world while only being able to see things in black and white.
mclaren
@SatanicPanic:
For years prior to the Rwandan genocide, radio announcers and newspapers urged Hutus to grab machetes and massacre tutsis. The Rwandan genocide did not come out of the blue.
Source: “Hate radio,” from the site Rwandan Stories.
Kropaope is spewing nonsense. But, as I’ve shown with his pervasively false claims about the alleged wonderful working relationship twixt Puritan settlers an native American Indians, that’s standard operating procedure for Kropeaope. He’s spouting more of the “no one could possibly have predicted” bullshit that Condi Rice made infamous.
Krepeaope’s disingenuous and pervasively false posts are, in fact, persuasive proof of my claim that IOKIYAD rules the Democratic party just as IOKIYAR rules the Republican party.
Southern Goth
@mclaren:
As far as I can tell, my earliest European immigrant ancestor came to America to fight for beaver.
He was French, of course.
mclaren
@Fred Dickinson:
A continent-sized Somalia is not better.
We are going to have to disagree on this point.
Fred Dickinson
@mclaren:
Excellent summar, but don’t forget the smallpox blankets.
The USA was founded in racist genocide, fact not lost on one Adolf Hitler who molded his plants for the conquered Slavs of the Soviet Union on what the USA did to it’s indigenous peoples. Hitler even said thst the Volga River would be the “German Mississippi “.
Manifest Destiny , indeed,
Fred Dickinson
@mclaren:
It is better insofar as it cannot affect the rest of the Earth with it’s disease, much like terminal cancer is better than smallpox.
Cervantes
@The Blog Dahlia:
Right — nor am I surprised …
Kropadope
@mclaren:
Funny how in this instance you isolate the Puritans when at no point in this discussion were the Puritans specified. I went over each different group of settlers individually, pointed out the positives and negatives of each. You make it sound like I wrote some hagiography of European colonization.
You lie and deceive. You do it without shame. You’re well known for that. Aren’t you proud of yourself?
The Pale Scot
@Chris: I don’t think that matters. With the exception of the Turks and Egypt, the Sunnis are divided by tribe. As climate change dries the region out the tribes will not be able to cooperate to keep the social fabric together, Iran Is already aware that their water supplies are diminishing. The rest of the ME depends on water flowing into their regions from other countries. Those countries are all planning to dam those sources and keep the water for themselves. Even the Sauds don’t have enough bank to buy water that doesn’t exist. Persia is nation with thousands of years of history, I believe they have the ability to collaborate and come a consensus to keep their country together.
The Syrian civil war is just the beginning. The rebels blame Assad’s government for selling off land to agribusiness that pumped out all the ground water. But that just accelerated the process. A NYT article interviewed a displaced Syrian farmer and focused on the lack of work, but the dude had 16 children! I don’t care who running the government, a population growing that fast is impossible to manage.
SatanicPanic
@mclaren: Absolutely, though I can maybe allow for some degree of questioning that was all talk. But when the UN guy on the ground faxes the UN that weapons are being stockpiled in preparation a full three months before it starts, that’s pretty important evidence. Then when the US gets word about what’s going on and starts asking the UN to remove troops, that’s pretty bad too. It’s pretty useful to remember that the UN was, at the time, underfunded because the US was being babies about paying our bills. Any way you look at it, we’re responsible for a lot of lives lost.
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic: No one is responsible aside from the murderers themselves.
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
That may be a little facile, no?
SatanicPanic
@Kropadope: Wow, really taking taking this a bit far aren’t you
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Mass murder gets excused with the caveat “it was complicated” — I like it!
Charles Manson should’ve tried that one on the police. When the investigators questioned him about Sharon Tate, Manson could’ve said “it was complicated.” Then the homicide detectives would surely have replied, “Oh, well, in that case, no problem. Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Manson.”
Anyone who doubts that millions of children in the third world die because greed-choked American big pharma companies overprice their antibiotics and vaccines is simply denying observable reality.
Anyone who disagrees that hundreds of thousands of farmers in India have committed suicide because the insanely overpriced “terminator seeds” peddled by Monsanto have destroyed those farmer’s livelihoods is disagreeing with documented facts.
Anyone who demurs that north of 600,000 Iraqis died because of America’s oil-coveting illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 is simply lying.
Casualties of the Iraq War, wikipedia.
“It was complicated” is the epitaph we put on the headstones of the Al Capones of the world to remind ourselves that where mass murder for money is concerned, things are really, really simple.
Kropadope
@Cervantes: No. I had no role in the Rwandan genocide. I assume you didn’t. Bill Clinton didn’t kill a single Tutsi. Radical Hutus committed these crimes. They are responsible.
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
I did not say everyone was responsible. I was questioning your limiting of responsibility to those who actually wielded the machetes.
Kropadope
@mclaren:
That wasn’t an excuse for mass murder, that was an accurate depiction of the nature of the relationship between European colonists and the indigenous population. There are several concrete examples of conquest and cooperation. How hard do you have to try to be this dishonest?
Kropadope
@Cervantes: No, I also hold those responsible who called for the genocide or otherwise worked to make it happen. Can you please name one American citizen who should be responsible for the Rwandan genocide?
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Between all your claims of my alleged dishonesty and lies, you’re the only person who ignores or waffles or tries to minimize the issue of millions upon millions of preventable deaths.
SatanicPanic
@Kropadope:
here, have a read
Kropadope
@mclaren: No, but you continue to lie about my doing so.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Beautiful!
And George W. Bush didn’t kill a single Iraqi.
See how simple it is to evade responsibility with these kinds of sophistries?
Josef Stalin never personally killed a single kulak, either. And Pol Pot never personally murdered all those millions of victims in the Cambodian killing fields.
So none of those people is responsible.
At this point, no one is taking you seriously.
You have now raised the art of lying to a level at which only an epic poem would do it justice.
SatanicPanic
@mclaren: to be fair to Kropadope, he’s just saying that if you hear that someone might be murdered, and then you see them being murdered, your are under no moral obligation to stop the murder, or call the police, and if, in fact, you were on the city council that cut funding for police, you’re still in the clear, morally anyway
Fred Dickinson
Mclaren is singlehandedly exposing the craven hypocrisy of the American “left”, and it’s fucking beautiful. The alliance between the Amercian “left” and Obama is perhaps the most cynical concordat since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic: I didn’t ask for an article. I asked you to name names. It would also be nice if you could explain to me why the U.S. should be responsible for stopping this sort of thing.
Here I had a range of questions for you including how you think is the best way to be able to respond to these situations effectively and efficiently, where the U.S. derives the authority to intervene from, how to handle situations where defining a genocide may not be so clear cut, and how to handle potential negative consequences.
You chose to ignore all these things and instead challenged me on one factual assertion. I then provided a detailed description of why you had the facts wrong. I was not the only one who did so.
I feel like I’ve addressed your concerns (even if only to describe why I disagree with you), I would appreciate you doing me the same courtesy.
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
OK, your earlier wording was a little vague on this point.
Let me tell you what a friend of mine said. Once head of the section of the US State Department that issues “human rights reports” (about other countries), he not so long ago gave an interview in which he discussed what happened in Rwanda. Here’s an excerpt:
That’s from someone who was in Bill Clinton’s State Department. Does it give you new insight?
(I should add that the Congress was still in the hands of the Democrats at the time of the Rwandan genocide. Newt Gingrich and company took over the House several months later.)
Kropadope
@SatanicPanic:
I said nothing of the sort. While I think you would be a fool to attempt to stop it yourself and have no authority to do so (vigilantism is illegal for a reason), I certainly think you should call the police, a legitimate entity charged with maintaining law and order within a given jurisdiction. The UUnited States has no such authority in Rwanda or Libya or anywhere else.
What you propose is akin to suggesting that the Portland police department should invade Detroit because it isn’t doing an adequate job preventing murders.
@mclaren:
Do you see the fallacy in that argument? Take a minute. Every single one of those individuals made the case and then gave the orders for the violence committed by their charges. The same can not be said for Bill Clinton’s involvement in the Rwandan situation.
ETA:
That’s freaking adorable coming from you.
I gotta recognize when I’ve been on a dead thread too long when I’m left talking to the cast of Looney Toons.
Morzer
@The Pale Scot:
It’s actually a standard feature of peasant populations that they produce numerous children to keep the parents in their old age. The difference between the ancient world and modern peasants is that better health care and sanitation combine to create a much higher infant survival rate.
Kropadope
@Cervantes: That’s sad and I understand why someone in that position may wish they had done more to help. However, I still fail to see what gives us the authority to intervene in these situations. I’m also still not convinced that intervention will lead to a better outcome. I feel pretty vindicated on that second point given recent history.
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
OK.
The UN Security Council, for example, is empowered to provide such authority.
In the case of Rwanda, authority was not lacking. Something else was.
Arguable, sure.
Just bear in mind which Clinton officials agreed with you about whether to do something, and which others did not.
Kropadope
@mclaren: And this is how you have a fair, mature discussion with someone who disagrees with you.
Kropadope
@Cervantes: As Rwanda is a member of the U.N. I will recognize their authority in the matter. They did intercede in the conflict, both before and after the genocide, but I don’t see that they ever approved U.S. military intervention in Rwanda. Arms embargoes, mediators, sure. They even did what I suggested is the appropriate role of the international community in these genocides, created a safe place for the refugees to go.
Villago Delenda Est
@Fred Dickinson:
“Nach Hitler, Uns”.
Yeah, sure. Be careful what you wish for. The French and Russian Revolutions started out as grand experiments in new, more enlightened societies, but degenerated rather quickly into tyrannies every bit as pernicious as the ones they replaced.
Napoleon and Stalin were not good guys.
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
If you’re the US government, the UN Security Council is not exactly a “they.”
The Blog Dahlia
@Anne Laurie:
But that’s work! Complaining on someone else’s blog is so much easier. Truly the vanguard of the revolution, these guys.
Cervantes
@The Blog Dahlia:
Among the many things you don’t know, we can surely include details of other commenters’ lives off line.
The Blog Dahlia
@Cervantes:
Aw, I’m real sorry, scrot. I know you’re on the beach in the Far East and still annoying people by trying to police this blog. What an exciting life you must have!
Either way, I’ll make sure to tone it down a bit, pops. Just for you.
Cervantes
@The Blog Dahlia:
Always missing, possibly even evading, the point — you seem incapable of doing otherwise here, or much of anything here, really.
By the way, I’m not on the beach at the moment. Just relaxing after dinner. Tomorrow is Chinese New Year’s Day, a hectic time in these parts.
The Blog Dahlia
@Cervantes:
This is how you ‘relax’ when traveling the world. No wonder, it explains an awful lot.
Paul in KY
Cromwell actually did do some good things. He finally, completely broke any advocacy (on the behalf of the king/queen) for rule by divine anointing, etc.’
After Cromwell, all English monarchs agreed that they were constitutional in authority & were more figureheads than actual ‘rulers’.
Paul in KY
With a happening ideology as that, they shouldn’t be too hard to stop.
Paul in KY
I am disturbed that you aren’t calling them ‘ISIL’ with the “L’ as standing for Levant. The ‘S’ or ‘al-Sham ‘ is their term & encompasses a much bigger area than ‘Levant’.
Bottom line, it pisses them off when you call them ISIL.
Paul in KY
@srv: Cut it down to 500 pages?
Paul in KY
@mclaren: With Hunger Games!
Chris
Jeepers. The things you miss when you go to sleep… This blog is “the American ‘left?'”
Actually, that sounds about right. Nobody agrees on anything, all that comes out of it is words that 99% of the country will never hear, it makes Will Rogers’ Democratic Party look orderly and powerful, but somehow it still gets tarred as a unitary conspiracy.
And not only that, we’ve signed a concordat with Obama? Cole, I finally understand why you’re a cat owner. No criminal mastermind should ever be without one, much less one with ambitions to top Molotov and Ribbentrop.
At least I can rest easy in the knowledge that Mclaren has finally exposed it all. The whole world now knows the truth. There will be glorious revolution, then the sweeping away of the decadent capitalist structures, then the dictatorship of the proletariat, then that will fade away in favor of a stateless and classless true communist society. And then cookies.
Cervantes
@The Blog Dahlia:
As I said, among the many things you don’t know we can surely include details of other commenters’ lives off line.
The Blog Dahlia
@Cervantes:
Jesus, son, the stick up your ass has a stick up its ass.
Stop being the dateless fat kid on the high school debate club for once. The blog can get by for a day without its self-appointed hall monitor. Pinky swear, it’s true.
The Blog Dahlia
@Chris:
You’ve been reading your Marx. Not many people know about the cookies. The original version of Das Capital even had a really great couple of recipes in the appendix.
Cervantes
@The Blog Dahlia:
See here for the only kind of response you are likely to understand.
Pogonip
@kc: I don’t assume he’s an expert on ISIS. I assume that, compared to me and most other Americans, he’s an expert on Islam.
The Blog Dahlia
@Cervantes:
You like pickles too? That’s fucking wonderful. That literally makes my day.