The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

For the Record: Tracey on War

Via Wonkette.

I guess that qualifies me, as somebody who's been pretty loudly opposed to every US war since well before Tracey was born, to decide who gets to be taken seriously and who doesn't, and I'd like to say if watching the Ukraine story has suddenly made you understand... pic.twitter.com/vwN09muzB2

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2022

What I don't get is people like Tracey who've been pretending to be anti-war all this time and it turns out they're just anti-American.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2022

I completely forgot Tracey was complaining about unfairness to Russia way back five years ago, that time Maxine Waters beat him up.

Here's the full @MaxineWaters @mtracey interview. Sensitive viewers, you are warned. pic.twitter.com/gyU2pw6FdD

— Tommy moderna-vaX-Topher (@tommyxtopher) June 3, 2017

Pulling Out

Al-Nouri Mosque, Mosul, under reconstruction with UNESCO funding in 2020, via Archinect.

Ex-Proconsul Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Mesopotamia, would like you to know that he's a champ at nation-building, through the Wall Street Journal. I'm dubious.

The US press allowed Obama to pull out troops from Iraq in 2010. Ooh did they give him shit about it when ISIS showed up and smashed the Iraqi army in 2014. But in retrospect the pullout was the most effective "nation-building" thing the US did.

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 21, 2021

Of course the young Iraqi government had to call for a return of the US-led coalition to rescue them, but that's not the point. They also got plenty of help from Iran. 

The Persian Wars

Screen capture from The Persian Wars, via Ancient History Lover/YouTube.

OK so that was a pretty exciting war that had us glued to the TV last night, but it clearly didn't change the basic outcome, that Iran had already won on 3 January, with the US killing of two Iranians, Qassem Soleimani and one other whose name I'm not finding, and five members of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces including deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and his son-in-law Mohammed Reza al-Jaberi, the group's public relations officer: with that, the casualty list included

• Iran: 1 American dead and no Iraqis (per latest report)
• US: 2 Iranians dead, 27 Iraqis

Also

Iran informed Iraqi leadership about an attack on their country. The US did not inform them or Congress but several guess at Mar-a-lago were informed about it https://t.co/ONok5TkoZu

— President “I Caught the Swamp, I Caught Them All” (@realworldrj) January 8, 2020

It's attention to these details that makes Iran the winner.

Hey la hey la my Friedman's back

Opinion

Trump Offs Iran’s Most Pathetic  Statesman- Terrorist

Suleimani thought he was an empire builder, but turned out to be a grave digger instead, and it was his own grave, har har.

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• Jan. 3, 2020

“Suck on this,” said Abubakr, passing me a Wadi al Taym nightshade reefer in the cold hills outside Beirut, but I had a deadline to meet, maybe the deadline I'd been waiting a lifetime for, to comment on, to illuminate, to swoon over the process that will lead one day to the renaming of Azadi Square in Tehran as Donald Square, as God is my witness.

West of Eden: The War is Over, You Read It Here First

Baghdad, Saturday, funeral procession for the Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed in the same bombing as the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images via Axios.

Starting to feel a lot calmer about the prospects of a US-Iran was to be fought on Iraqi soil, or anyplace else, not least thanks to Donald's belligerent tweets on the subject, offering some new light on what he might think of the distinction between "warning" and "threat" but otherwise displaying pure impotence:

....hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

....targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

Sure, Jan. Who exactly has targeted how many sites over the New Year holiday, and how did they come up with that interestingly symbolic number?

For the Record: Soleimani

Tomb of the great 14th-century poet Hafez in the city of Shiraz, famous until the Islamic Revolution for its wine. Photo by Ondřej Žváček, via Wikipedia.

It may not look as if my plan for Trump not to start a war with Iran is working out so far. I'm not so sure what I want to say about it, but there are a bunch of kind of short-breathed ideas I can pass on.

The first thing I thought of that other people didn't seem to be thinking about was the market movement that followed the killing of Qassem Soleimani:

Bet somebody who knows somebody did a big short today https://t.co/TYFsc53ZAD

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 3, 2020

More plausibly a group. Profits on some of these lurches (usually Trump talking the market up) can mount up toward $2 billion https://t.co/rLdmODxA75

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 3, 2020

So what did they tell their brokers? whoever went long on oil futures made a nice little bundle. https://t.co/IL1h1qHce5

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 4, 2020

And then I was answering questions:

Literary Corner: Threats

Q: How can you tell whether Trump is at a church service or partying with Jeffrey Epstein? A: He doesn't bite his lower lip in church.

New Year Greeting

by Donald J. Trump

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq is,
& has been for hours, SAFE!
Many of our great Warfighters,
together with the most lethal
military equipment in the world,
was immediately rushed to the site.
Thank you to the President &
Prime Minister of Iraq for their
rapid response upon request....

....Iran will be held fully responsible
for lives lost, or damage incurred,
at any of our facilities. They will pay
a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning,
it is a Threat. Happy New Year!

Isn't that great, not a Warning but a Threat? I wonder if Trump knows how the words are used in English.

Your close friend Jong-un is still laughing over how you threatened him with "fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen" and ended up giving him everything he wanted with nothing in return for the US.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 1, 2020

Well, Ari lied, anyhow

Baghdad, 2003. via a valuable article at Strategic Culture.

It's the 16th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and Ari Fleischer, the artist formerly known as the most dishonest presidential press secretary in American history (until Sarah Huckabee Sanders ran away with the title), couldn't restrain himself from weighing in:

The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed "Bush lied. People died." This accusation itself is a lie. It's time to put it to rest.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) March 20, 2019

Immediately I'm suffused with the same old helpless rage and can't think about anything else. Ari goes on, of course, for a dozen and more tweets, explaining that when "the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD" they all made a mistake, but that's not the same as lying—not mentioning, naturally, that the intelligence services of Egypt and France certainly didn't convince their governments from there that a war was necessary:

So we don't have to fight them here

Palace of Justice, Damascus, March 15, photo by an anonymous stringer for AFP/Getty images, via Chicago Tribune.

Nobody should ever have to undergo the kind of horror Britain has been undergoing with the Westminster Bridge attack of March 22 (killing four and injuring 50), the Manchester bombing of the Ariana Grande concert May 22 (killing 22, many children, and injuring 116), and last night's London Bridge incident (killing seven and injuring some dozens, 21 critically).

Nor should it happen in Baghdad, where over the same period 23 were killed and 45 wounded by a car bomb in the suburb of Hayy al'A'amei on March 20, and a suicide truck bomber killed 17 and injured at least 60 at a police checkpoint in the southern part of the city March 29; seven people were killed and 12 injured in three bombings, one in a fish market in Yusufiya, one in a construction site, on April 5, and two more killed and 11 injured by bombings on April 6 and 7,  and a suicide car attack on a traffic police compound in the center of the city killed five and injured six on April 28; one killed and two wounded in separate incidents of May 3, two killed and three wounded in bombings in western Baghdad on May 6, one killed and three wounded by a bomb in southwestern Baghdad on May 9, and another killed on May 10, an employee of the education ministry, four killed and ten injured by a booby-trapped vehicle in Al-Sho'la on May 11, one killed and five wounded by a booby-trapped car near a bridge on Al-Rubaie Street on May 14, one killed and two wounded by an explosion in the north of the city on May 16, two killed and eight wounded in two shopping-district incidents including one at the market in al-Nasr wal Salam region in Abu Ghraib district of May 18, one killed and three injured in a blast near a market on May 19, 35 killed and 45 injured in four suicide attacks around the city on May 19, and three more injured on May 22, also near the market in al-Nasr wal Salam, and then on May 30, four days after the fasting month of Ramadan began, at least 30 killed and 40 wounded by a car that blew up outside the al-Faqma ice cream parlor.

Emperor Trump: Generals may get a little tired of this

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Proclaiming Claudius Emperor, 1867. Wikimedia Commons.

Foreign Policy reports on new insights into the views of the Trump transition, as seen at the department of Defense:

A Pentagon memo outlining the incoming Trump administration’s top “defense priorities” identifies defeating the Islamic State, eliminating budget caps, developing a new cybersecurity strategy, and finding greater efficiencies as the president-elect’s primary concerns. But the memo, obtained by Foreign Policy, does not include any mention of Russia, which has been identified by senior military officials as the No. 1 threat to the United States.

It doesn't mention Iran either, for whatever that's worth; the only named countries in the memo are North Korea and China (plus ISIS or ISIL—both stylings are used, irritatingly).

This isn't equivalent to Obama's view in 2012, in opposition to candidate Willard Mitt Romney, that Russia was not the most serious military threat to US interests, if only because the DoD agreed with Obama, and it was a moment (near the end of the presidency of Dmitri Medvedev) of really warming Russian-US relations, important cooperation on the Syria and Iran issues, and no signs of Russian designs on foreign territory since the Georgian war of 2008, for which the Georgian government seemed (to the USG) to be to blame.

West of Eden: Lede, exhumed

The Fallujah caravanserai, ca. 1914. Via Wikipedia.

Maybe I just wasn't reading carefully enough, but when the Iraqi government forces were reconquering the Anbar city of Fallujah from Da'esh, culminating over the weekend, I never saw the news that interested me most until I got to Professor Cole's wrapup of the operation: namely, who those government forces were, and whether they included any Sunni soldiers, which it turns out they did, in the form of tribal levies from the

clans of the Dulaym in al-Anbar Province who opposed Daesh just as many of them had opposed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the predecessor of Daesh that was organized to fight the US military occupation of the country. Tribes are kinship units in rural Iraq, and while they are religiously conservative they typically are not fundamentalists, and they dislike Daesh for condemning their Muslim traditionalism in favor of a hyper-fundamentalism.

They also included Shi'ite militias including some, such as the Badr Corps, that are directly backed by Iran, and Cole seems to think that the actual Iraqi regular army, a mess, was probably the least useful element. There are allegations of bad behavior among the militias, that they have been razing buildings in the city to punish the Sunni residents. But the fact that the Sunni tribal levies participated and played an important part is a really good sign that Prime Minister al-Abadi may finally be beginning to work effectively towards integration, and that Obama's policy of handing out US assistance in a way that encourages it is finally starting to pay off. Cole is dubious, but not hopeless:

Go home, McCain, you're drunk. Or ready to retire.

Toughest opponent John McCain has ever faced in a Senate race, Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick. Tougher and smarter.

In other news, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) blamed President Obama for the killing of 49 innocent clubgoers in Orlando:

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, Al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq. So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies.”

He later corrected himself:

“I misspoke,” McCain said in a press release. “I did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obama’s national security decisions, not the president himself.”

He's still completely wrong, of course, as he always is about every subject he addresses.

West of Eden: Green Zone

Tent in the background. Photo by Karim Kadim/AP via Salt Lake Tribune.

Meanwhile, as Tom Friedman was moping in Sulaimaniya waiting for the lithium to kick in, something was, believe it or not, happening in Baghdad, though generally unreported as far as Dr. Google noticed by my usual sources at the New York Times and the Guardian and NPR (I heard about it on BBC), getting going in a big way last Friday, when

Thousands of supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held what they billed as a “joint” Sunni-Shi'ite prayer service Friday outside the main entrances to the government-controlled “Green Zone.”  Sadr has given Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi a Saturday deadline to carry out governmental “reform” and install a new Cabinet composed of technocrats instead of political loyalists. (Voice of America)

Yes, it's the Orson Welles–resembling "renegade cleric", in the Homeric (Simpson?) epithet beloved of the US press of ten or twelve years ago, and the mass Sunni-Shi'a cooperation without which there will be no change for the better in Iraq (as I've been saying for a while now), in a huge effort to force the Abadi government to purge itself. When Abadi failed to meet his deadline on Saturday, Muqtada made his way into the Green Zone, with the assistance of the security forces, to begin a sit-in, ensconced in a tent:

Friedmanic Depression

Image via YouPouch.

Just days, it seems, after thrilling the world with his conviction that the Obama administration could make a crucial difference in the Middle East by funding, um, tertiary education and whatnot in Iraqi Kurdistan (devastated by the collapse of oil prices), land of advanced democracy and place where Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Archmustache of Dreamland, is quite often invited to share his wisdom, Tom himself, filing another column from Iraq, suddenly seems deeply down in the dumps, in part, apparently, because he's just learned how complicated the Kurds are:

If you think there is a simple answer to this problem, you ought to come out here for a week. Just trying to figure out the differences among the Kurdish parties and militias in Syria and Iraq — the Y.P.G., P.Y.D., P.U.K., K.D.P. and P.K.K. — took me a day.

Did he really only find out about that this week? Oh dear.

More death

Funeral in Iskandariyah on Saturday. Photo by Haidar Hamdani for AFP/Getty Images, via New York Magazine.

Between the horror last week in Brussels, in Europe, and this week in Lahore, among Christian kids in a public playground (which struck me too as very poignantly awful though I don't like the implicit message that the Christianity of the victims makes it somehow worse; because it's not just an attack on Christians but on the ethnic-religious pluralism that has somehow survived in Pakistan, the "Land of the Pure", over the 70 years since Partition), most of us missed out on yet another thing, in Iraq of all places, where at least 41 non-Christian non-Europeans were killed, 17 of them boys aged 10 to 16, at an amateur soccer match in the mixed Sunni-Shi'a town of Iskanderiyah south of Baghdad, and 105 wounded, by another teenage boy killing himself on behalf of the Da'esh, another blow against integration and against even the most uncomplicated and inoffensive forms of happiness.

Chas Danner at New York Magazine (see the picture credit above) adds:

The Associated Press notes that analysts and members of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition believe attacks of this type may proliferate, both inside Iraq and abroad, as the militant group continues to lose ground to Iraqi forces in the country’s North and West.

These awful incidents really are the consequence of the defeat of the Da'esh, its gradual devolution from ideas of statehood to elementary nihilist gangsterism, and I can't say the government forces and its Western backers should stop defeating them, so I don't know quite what to say.

Something just made me Google the Wannsee Conference, detailing the steps of a "final solution" to the "Jewish question" for the assembled ministers of the Reich, held in January 1942 just after a decisive turnaround moment in the progress of the war, when the Soviet forces finally began to counterattack the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and the US joined the allies following Pearl Harbor, and a bad harvest had left Germany short of food; as if the Holocaust were a direct consequence of those events that would assure Germany's defeat, which would obviously be a ridiculous oversimplification of what happened, and no sane person would make it a parallel to what's going on in Iraq and Syria anyway.

Maybe the point of remembering it is just to remember that it's always important, and to remember thereby that attention, as we say, must be paid. If it's the only thing we have to bring to the situation, then we have to bring it.

Even sensible Sunnis

Karl Dane in Roscoe Arbuckle's The Red Mill (1927).

Well, David Brooks seems to think Hillary Clinton might be a better president than Donald Trump, at least from the foreign policy/national security standpoint. Hard to argue with that.

Though maybe I'm just getting lulled into sleep by those elaborate repetitions—he's increasingly turning into a kind of Philip Glass of political prose:

While other candidates are content to issue vague calls to get tough on terror, Clinton offered a multilayered but coherent framework... For example, instead of just issuing a generic call to get tough on the terrorists, she pointed to the reality that ISIS will be toppled only if there is an uprising by fellow Sunnis. 

Oops, what was that? Did you hear that thumping sound, honey? Did he just say she wants them to do like Warsaw in World War II? No, wait, he's thinking less of an uprising than a crossrising:

West of Eden: Give a soldier a flower

Tahrir Square, August 7, photo by Khalid Mohammed/AP.

Scenes from Baghdad over the past week, h/t Nancy Le Tourneau for pointing to them. It seems there is some real mass politics taking place in the Iraqi capital and the mainly Shi'ite cities to the south, with huge demonstrations protesting corruption and the failure of government to provide essential services, in particular the electricity supply (in the global-warming hottest year in history), which is apparently still failing all the time the way it did ten years ago at the height of the war. The Times just picked the story up (from Reuters) today.

"We want separation of religion& politics" In today protest, even mullahs ask for secularism! #IraqProtest #IraqWins pic.twitter.com/HQcuXRN495

— Layla (ع) (@mesoscorpio) August 21, 2015

Return of the Stupid Shit Caucus (like they went somewhere?)

Agnes Ayres and Rudolph Valentino in George Melford's The Sheik (1921).

Verbatim David Brooks, "When ISIS rapists win", August 28 2015:

President Obama has said that ISIS stands for nothing but savagery. That’s clearly incorrect.

Aw, Mom, do I have to?

OK, OK, incorrect in what sense? What are you, Politifact? By what metric would you determine the truth or falsity of that statement?

And by the way when did Obama say it? You put a link there as if to lead us to your source, but it just leads to the Times Obama Navigator page, and a search button whose closest result is your column today.

FBI director James Comey has called the Da'esh forces "savages", White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has said that their killings show they "stand for nothing" tout court. Secretary of State John Kerry called the killing of Stephen Sotloff "an act of of medieval savagery by a coward hiding behind a mask."  At the United Nations last September, Obama must have been referencing the Da'esh indirectly as the contrast when he told young Muslims, "You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder." But that's as close as it comes.

He has used "barbaric" in association with a "nothing but" account:

Losers

Louis Wohlheim in Sam Taylor's Tempest (1928). Via MoviesSilently.

Here's world-famous military historian David Brooks with his analysis of the agreement between Iran and the P5 + 1 powers, as a defeat for the allies on a par with the worst US defeats of the past half century:

The purpose of war, military or economic, is to get your enemy to do something it would rather not do. Over the past several years the United States and other Western powers have engaged in an economic, clandestine and political war against Iran to force it to give up its nuclear program....

There have now been three big U.S. strategic defeats over the past several decades: Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran.

Well, now, for starters, I think we can recognize that definition, as coming from Major-General von Clausewitz: war is "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will", and I think we need to note very clearly that this applies to the aggressor, not to those who oppose an aggressor. And I can assure Mr. Brooks that if the governments of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China had understood that they were supposed to be carrying on a Clausewitzian war against Iran they would have objected very strongly and let it be known, because it's, um, illegal, according to chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.