The dangers in the Middle East as a whole
One dire prognostication that might come true:
The fall of Mosul and the advance of ISIS””the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida offshoot””toward Baghdad last week prompted headlines warning that Islamist militants aim to redraw the map of the Middle East and establish a new state: a modern-day Islamic Caliphate spanning parts of Syria and Iraq.
They are well on their way…
…[I]t now seems the Middle East created by Sykes-Picot is going to collapse because of what National Review Online’s Mario Loyola last week called the Obama administration’s “criminal negligence” in Iraq. If so, then we should at least pause to consider what it is that we’re allowing to slip away, and why it has held together for so long.
Read the whole thing, and see what you think.
There’s some pretty muddled thinking in the linked argument.
1) The Arabs ARE too inferior to compete with the West.
The reasons are in your face obvious:
Islam
Islam
Islam
Islam mandates Big Man government. Democracy is an apostasy.
2) Throwing three tomcats into a bag and tying a knot is not a gay marriage.
Kurdistan has only been able to make any economic gains after it achieved de facto independence from Baghdad.
Sunnistan will also be able to make its way forward — once the fanatics are de-throned.
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I predicted that the Syrian-Iraqi border was toast over eight months ago — at the Long War Journal.
Being a nobody, no-one paid any notice.
Likewise I predicted the Arab Spring (not my term of art) months before even Spengler.
It was locked in by Federal Reserve interest rate policy. (that and corn to ethanol)
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Leftist America is killing the world with good intentions.
Which gets us back to the original argument. (cited)
Even at this late date the Arabs are discussed as an abstraction. They’re expected to mirror American domestic norms.
Such can never be the case.
Islam
Islam
Islam
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The best way forward is to wind down the economic rents achieved by oil mining.
No-one is going to elevate Araby up into modernity within a human time scale. It just can’t happen. The best they can do is fake it. (Dubai)
Did you hear that they built it — and no-one came? (Burj Dubai/Kalifa) It’s a loser.
(Somewhat off topic: the occupancy rates for Chinese skyscrapers is shockingly low, too. That has not stopped that particular building mania.)
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If Barry allows the Gulf to burn all of our economic rivals will be screwed. Red China, Japan, Korea, Europe all need Gulf oil.
The only thing keeping America in the picture (oil markets wise) is the collapse in Mexican and Venezuelan oil production.
With any luck Araby will burn through all of its financial assets during the sectarian Persian-Arab war.
Barry can kill more souls than Stalin or Adolf just by being the Leftist that he is.
He’s already imploded America’s cultural empire.
Japan and Korea are destined to follow Nationalist China into the atomic club.
(Taiwan has taken a page from the Israelis — and never test detonated (her) atomics, either. Any Red Chinese antics could cost them 100 heartland cities — in a heartbeat.)
Being a nobody, no-one paid any notice.
If they did notice, you would have been on an ATF flight over the Atlantic, mysterious disappeared.
There are benefits to being ignored, especially in the last 6 years.
The Caliphate of Isis will probably last a couple of years before “internal contradictions” and unceasing brutality make it vulnerable to outside destruction.
As for that, everyone agrees on the desirability of staying out of Iraq this time. I wonder if that includes the period after ISIS starts to conduct terror operations in the US, or much more likely, an attack on Iraq’s oil terminals?
Anyone who thinks this signals the end of American military involvement in the middle east is not paying attention.
I posted recently that I thought Iraq should be partitioned, and why: only ethnically unified states will inspire loyalty to fight. Also in the back of my mind was the idea of how Iraq was a slapdash affair from British colonial times.
Now, one of my chief worries has been removed:
http://minx.cc:1080/?post=349891
One other thing that’s made me pause:
ISIS is far smaller than the factions it’s taking on, I think.
The numbers don’t add up to me, even with them “recruiting” out of the prisons.
They might get their asses whooped in short order, if their enemies ever get their act together.
ISIL uses fear and ruthlessness as a tactical asset. Their unit spirit is thus higher than Sunnis (who know Maliki is going to stab them in the back, their own Hussein), and their training will be better than the Shia “volunteers” coming up from Basra.
It’s hard to look at that picture of him without sensing the razor sharp mind churning away, formulating his next 10 moves on the political chessboard as his opponents try to out guess him. You can almost sense the electricity in the room around him, the intensity of his concentration almost too luminous for the camera, which he clearly has no idea has captured him in a moment of the deepest and purest thought.
Some of his deepest thoughts:
“Do I tee off at 1, or hang out with Michelle at the salon?”
“Should I reserve Maui, or Oahu for next week’s vacay?”
“Where did I leave my House of Cards season 1 CDs?”
” why do my feet stink whenever I eat broccoli??”
“I can’t wait until I retire, this job is really boring”
I think the article is spot-on, Obama gave away Iraq and has been handing over the entire Middle East to our enemies while castrating Israel and putting them in a very bad position. I didn’t realize that he had not visited Malaki much since coming into office and has been so negligent. It is criminal, though not technically, but it really is just horrid, world changingly rotten foreign policy. This could and probably will reverberate for generations — particularly if Iran gets the bomb. Then, ISIS wants the bomb… I don’t doubt that if they actually achieve their goal of this Islamic Caliphate, that they would strike us — one way or another, over here. Not as a well coordinated army, but terrorists. Just one or two well placed terrorist attacks worse than 9/11. Maybe even a nuclear device snuck in, but I really hope not.
Meanwhile the people I know really believe that American power causes all the evils of the world. They are pretty fringe, but not fringe enough in their politics – apparently, the President basically believes the same thing. I remember when I realized that it was mostly the opposite: a weak USA is a chaotic, violent world. Future generations may have to fight this one, but that may not be so far in the future. That war…
I am not certain of course, exactly how it will turn out, but the article seems right on track.