Literary Corner: The area—the land—the area

Noon, 1947, Lee Krasner, via Wikiart.

Sonnet: On the Poet Attempting to Explain Why He Scolded the Intelligence Community For Disagreeing With Him on Syria Before Deciding That They Agreed With Him After All, Which Everybody Knows They Didn't

by Donald J. Trump

It wasn't so much a report. It was the questions
and answers as the report was submitted
and they were asked questions and answers.
We've done an incredible job with Syria.

When I took over Syria it was infested
with ISIS. It was all over the place.
And now you have very little ISIS and
you have the caliphate almost knocked out.

We will be announcing in the not too distant future
100 percent of the caliphate which is the area—
the land—the area—100. We're at
99 percent right now, we'll be at 100.
When I took it over it was a disaster.
I think we've done a great job with that.

Divide and what?

Updated 9/29/2014

Saturday's freeing of the 49 Turkish hostages held by ISIS may have been by a military rescue operation according to the Turkish government, or maybe by the serene clemency of his caliphic majesty Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi according to the caliphic Twitter account, says a  remarkable piece by Metin Turcan in Al-Monitor that gives me what feels like a better sense of what's going on politically inside ISIS-occupied Mosul:

Two major factors may have been at play. The first was the changing balance of power in Mosul: According to Turkish intelligence sources, US airstrikes seriously degraded IS communications between key centers in Mosul, Fallujah, Raqqa and Tikrit it controls. IS withdrew most of its Mosul forces to inland areas. US airstrikes were instrumental in changing the power structure of Mosul by strengthening the role of the Army of Naqshbandi and the Council of Mosul Tribes. Both favored the release of the hostages. The second major factor was the severe reaction from the Sunni world after IS released visuals of the beheadings it carried out of three Westerners. As such, IS' release of the Turkish hostages signifies a change in IS strategy and signifies a move to win over Sunni public opinion.

The takeaways are:

ISIS: Take a deep breath

House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world's first university, founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid toward the end of the 8th century. Can't find a credit or even a date (13th century?) for this beautiful piece.

What I think were the most important ISIS stories of the past week were not the terrifying or exciting ones, and they have not been getting the press attention they deserve. Both were at Juan Cole's place, and both examined points of view with which we are not so familiar in America, from the higher realms of the Iranian political establishment, and from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The first, on Friday, was Professor Cole's piecing together of evidence that Iran and the US are now allies in the battle against the self-described Caliphate—I mean, not just having a common enemy but actively working together; the US providing "extremely close" air support to the Iran-backed Shi'ite militias in Amerli, the US and Iranian air forces apparently informing each other of their strike plans so they don't accidentally bomb each other, and Ayatollah Khamenei having officially put his imprimatur on US-Iran military cooperation (Slate has picked up on this too), among other things.