THE LIMIT OF THINGS: THE MAD AND SADISTIC HARMFUL IDIOTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST – IRAQ AND LEBANON.

f i r s t d r a f t


(NOTE ABOUT LEBANON--rough and hastily written.:

So sorry that Lebanon will be the second part. The harmful idiots are carrying their wars to that country. Likely to give cover to Israeli schemes regarding Gaza; likely as a stick meant for Syria that any retaliation in Lebanon for the Mughniyah assassination -- especially if the harmful idiots-financed and once Israeli-trained Lebanese Forces were involved in that assassination -- will obtain an American violent reaction.

It’s unclear whether the harmful idiots can afford to open a new front in Lebanon, merging US Marines with UNIFIL troops -- NATO troops, really. Syria can flood Lebanon with Palestinian fighters to assist Hizbollah in Lebanon; Iran should be expected to ignite fires in Iraq in response. Hence the “mad” and “hysterical” description in the headline.

The harmful idiots may be playing for war in the Middle East -- more limited than one with Iran -- in the hope of diverting the attention away from the ongoing and soon-to-worsen economic crisis at home which should bring into the White House Barrack Obama or a changed and chastised Hillary Clinton -- to assure the election of John McCain. The lower interest rates are not helping much, and likely should worsen things. And pumping money into the banks should avoid an abject economic disaster, but will not avoid a recession. And both, especiall the lowering of itnerest rates, are meant to give McCain the best break available. The Israelis are helping the harmful idiots in their limited-war-away-from-Iran scheme. The Israelis worry about Obama, that he would withraw US troops from Iraq. Syria and Iran likely would need Russian assurances -- in weapons' supplies -- before they decide to go all the way.

Too, by taking the war to Syria, the harmful idiots are hoping to take it away from the Persian Gulf, where oil supplies would be threatened and the current recession would turn into a global depression. Finally, and likely most immediately, the US naval presence off the coast of Lebanon may be meant to provide an anti-missile cover to Israel should the latter re-invade Gaza. If Israel invades, Hizbollah would be expected to retaliate by firing missiles into Israel. Supporting this scenario is the state of emergency which Israel has declared in its northern part.)


DEFINITIONS:

Mad: Lacking restraint or reason. Angry, resentful. Deranged by violent sensations, emotions, or ideas. Affected by rabies; rabid.

Sadistic personality disorder: a pervasive pattern of cruel, demeaning, and aggressive behavior.

PART I: IN IRAQ

In a recent article in The Washington Post, Lt. Col. Ricardo Love in Iraq commented, “[The sahwas] think we can make the government of Iraq do anything. We tell them we don’t control the government. But they think we are the mighty power.” (Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit R. Paley, “Sunni Forces Losing Patience With U.S., “ washingtonpost.com, Feb. 28. 2008; A 01.)

My first thought:

if you don’t control the government, and now you’re losing control of the sahwas, what is it you control in Iraq?

IRAQ: PLUGGING HOLES

As this newsletter repeatedly has asserted in the past: the very invasion of Iraq was disaster itself; what came after was more-or-less to be expected.

After years of occupation, embarrassment, a few massacres, sadistic practices reflecting in part personality disorders at the top, visits by upper-echelon harmful idiots, and the expenditure of (eventually) trillions of dollars -- What is it we really have in Iraq? Other than 140,000 (whatever the number) sitting ducks, that is? What is it we control?

Stop the charade: the Shia state belongs to Iran. When the harmful idiots negotiate with it, they are negotiating with Iran. Which is fine; but please don’t insult our intelligence.


THE SAHWAS

The sahwas’ allegiance to the harmful idiots is opportunistic and uncertain.

The sahwas were the result not of the surge or of the Pentagon’s willingness to talk, though that was a necessary ingredient. The sahwas were the result of a realization, which followed the initial outburst of Arab Sunni armed resistance, by the network of Baathists and former army officers. The realization: When once they had been engaged in armed resistance against the Americans, they had been shooting themselves in the foot. As the “emir” of the Islamic Army put it recently in an interview to an anti-Syrian publication: When resisting the Americans, we were doing Iran’s bidding.

In retrospect, the surge had been a symbolic gesture, an assurance to the Gulf oil Arabs (the GCC), following Cheney’s May 2007 visit there, that the harmful idiots would correct their mistake. That the harmful idiots would shed the Israel-anchored “theories” of the American Jewish Right and its Arab and Arab-American allies who owed their careers to that ethnic right-wing.


Also in retrospect, Cheney’s visit had been followed by blackmail: Saudi King Abdallah stated at the Arab summit in Riyadh that the US occupation of Iraq was illegitimate. The harmful idiots scrammed as a result. Hence in good part the intensification of the rapprochement with the Iraqi Sunni; hence the spread of the sahwas.

Jordan's role.

Jordan played a role in their formation. But that doesn’t mean that Jordan is so helpful. Jordan’s government is a beggar government and will do anything for a buck. Helping us dig in deeper in Iraq by creating the sahwas is hardly a favor. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk so they can set up a police checkpoint and shake the friend down.

But as the Post’s article above reveals the sahwas can’t wait forever. Yeah, you say, so? You’re right. Sadly for them, they have nowhere to go. They had formed in the hope of seeing the Americans butt head with Iran, in war, and the Shia start the long-hoped for intra-Shia civil war. Jordan has so assured them. Jordan has told them that the harmful idiots would put to work their stellar ideas of counter-insurgency and return them to power. Or to more power than they have now. Hope does spring eternal, doesn’t it, especially when riding on silly (if not harmfully idiotic) counterinsurgency manuals. (If our armed forces need a manual to handle a country, we and that country are in deep trouble.)

Neither war with Iran nor a full scale intra-Shia civil war have materialized. And things don’t look any more hopeful for the Sunni now than they did when they had made peace with US troops. They can’t go back to blowing up US troops since that would only help Iran’s Shia agents. They can blow up innocent Shia in the hope that Iran’s Iraqi Shia state and the Shia militias would retaliate against Sunni civilians. In the hope of rallying the Arab governments. In the hope of collecting money from these governments. In the hope of getting nowhere.

The useless Arab governments.

These Arab governments to which the Arab Sunni of Iraq are appealing can’t help anyone. Their armies are fiction of the imagination. Their people see them as traitors who nurse a wish of a return (yet deeper return) to feudal times; they’ve tied these reactionary hopes to Israel and the ability of that reactionary state to galvanize the country of the harmful idiots to subjugate any Arab and Muslim who wants a fairer redistribution of wealth in their miserable countries. At any rate, none of these Arab countries has a competent army or is seeking strategic parity with either Iran or Israel. They’re useless even to their American masters.

The problems for the sahwas and the Arab Sunni are nearly insurmountable:

1. When they stopped their armed resistance against the occupier they as a consequence lost their tight and intricate organization. (Recall the times when their intelligence was so good that our troops would launch a raid on a village only to find that its people had left it moments before, with coffee urns still warm.) They became the sheep that Arab governments nurse in their own people --eat, shit, and accept whatever pittance corrupt princes and fat merchants throw at you. True, armed resistance against the occupiers played into Iran’s hands; but not resisting has disintegrated them as a powerful force which had an effect that was way more potent that the number of their population would indicate.

2. Logically the Arab Sunni should be drawing an alliance with Muqtadha as-Sadr -- an Arab Islamist alliance. But Iran should stand in the way. Iran isn’t about accepting the formation of a new Iraqi Arab nationalism, albeit Islamic. (This should one day be the element that will break the Syrian-Iranian alliance; unless Iran accepts the formation of the above-described nationalism and both Syria and Iran are able to commit it as a force allied to them in their quest for strategic parity with Israel.)

3. The harmful idiots, via Jordan, using former Baathists on the payroll of the harmful idiots, should explode a car bomb now and then against Shia civilians, or blow up a Shia religious site, to scuttle the formation of any such (Sadr-Arab Sunni) nationalist alliance.


So, for the foreseeable future, The sahwas have nowhere to go. Nor do we.

ALL DRESSED UP AND NOWHERE TO GO

What are we really doing in Iraq? We don’t control the Shia state. Iran does. If anything, any time US troops engage the so-called al-Qaeda (the scarecrow) , the harmful idiots help firm up Iran’s control over Iraq. That is true even if we assess that Iran is assisting al-Qaeda ; even if we assess that Iran aims to use (or is using) al-Qaeda against the sahwas as a harmful idiots’ pet project. All of this really doesn’t matter. When we move against al-Qaeda, in the end, we are strengthening the pro-Iran Shia state -- and Iran’s control over Iraq. (This is especially true since al-Qaeda in Iraq is hugely and predominately Iraqi, anyway.) (Analysts on the payroll don't dare say this stuff. Do you wonder why I've turned down jobs? Remember: the best analysis on Vietnam came from relatively independent professors at state universities; not from a Samuel Huntington at Harvard.)

What are we doing in Iraq?

We’re now screwing the Kurds. Nothing new. The harmful idiots screw allies all the time. (Except the apple of their eye.) But fear not: the Kurdish leadership is so opportunistic that it’ll recuperate. Soon, Talabani will have his people post Ataturk’s portraits across Iraqi Kurdistan. The man is shameless. But all of this doesn’t matter. What matters is that the harmful idiots shall lose the passion that the Peshmergas once had brought with them. These had been instrumental in assisting the harmful idiots in killing and subjugating the Arab Sunni. Why? Because even the Peshmergas know that Turkey wouldn’t kill their brothers and sisters in the PKK without US and Israeli permission.

Not to mention that Turkey isn’t going to withdraw from northern Iraq; it’ll act as if it is; but it won’t. It just said it did, likely under pressure from Robert Gates. (Gates is concerned about losing the support of the Peshmergas–see below.) Still, Turkey isn’t about to make the biggest mistake of its post-WW II existence: to allow a Kurdistan to form, with oil revenues from Kirkuk. It’ll work with Talabani; it’ll work with Barazani’s son , and it’ll dig in deeper economically in Kurdistan; but it’ll not (really) withdraw. It’ll keep the military presence alive by forming Kurdish paramilitaries a la sahwas and supervising them. Or something like this. And it’ll keep the military threat alive and pending at all times. It’ll rule Iraqi Kurdistan only a tad softer than it rules its Kurdish people. But it’ll do it indirectly. As I write, I’m confident Turkey is searching for the ways.

In essence, therefore, we should expect the Peshmergas to “accept” that their ranks be infiltrated by Kurdish Islamists now that they have witnessed the American-Israeli alliance stand behind Turkey. They will spread the word. The harmful idiots’s ownership of the Kurds has now lost its elan.

The picture therefore is bleaker than it appears:

– We don’t control the Shia state; Iran does.

–The Sunnis resent the hell out of us, but are helpless and their young should be on their way back into the laps of al-Qaeda, especially that money shouldn’t be an issue. Not with dollar gluts. (Not that their return to al-Qaeda would help them much. But experience is showing them that neither can the harmful idiots.)

– And the Kurds, at the level of the public and the Peshmergas, should be directing their sympathy and assistance to their own Islamists, now that the harmful idiots and their Israelis have stabbed them in the back..


FIGHTING TERRORISM AND AL-QAEDA

Why are we there?

To fight terrorism? Have we fallen prey to our own rhetoric? (Get some inspiration by finding a book about the Assassins; please avoid any book written by a Jewish Right personality, since that book should contain an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias, if not outright hate.) Consider this: A recent poll in the UAE revealed that of a total of 5, 631,000 population, only 15.4% were natives. The Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia contributed a total of 75% of the foreign residents; Arabs 13.8%, and so on. Do you see what I see? The harmful idiots want to squeeze Iran, using the UAE and other GCC countries. But these are so porous that Iran, if squeezed beyond a certain point, can make life hell for them. And what are they squeezing Iran about, anyway? A nuclear weapon? Like that’s going to change anything for Iran or anyone else. India did it; Pakistan too; Israel has hundreds of it; Israel, too, has German subs which can be equipped with missiles carrying nuclear warheads, assuring it a second strike capability. The harmful idiots have been after Iran since 1979, way before the harmful idiots and the Israelis had made the nuclear issue an issue . What have the harmful idiots achieved after nearly 30 years? More instability in the region, more refugees, orphans, and more potential for terrorism. The harmful idiots in their endless and hysterical screams to gain full control of the entire region of the Middle East have become its number one contributor in the creation of orphans.

But even if we assume the best results, favoring the harmful idiots, do you think for a moment that politics and terrorism will come to a stop? That the disfavored will cease their struggles? Are we accepting advice yet again from the Israelis on these issues? Are we going to build concentric circles of walls around us, as they do? Ghetto-ise ourselves as they do?

Are we now listening to the Saudis, as if these know what they’re doing? They don’t. (I’ll try to re-address their pathetic foreign policy more systematically in a future post.) Just be mindful that the Saudis, lacking (de facto) in armed forces, are useless. They’ve screwed themselves when they allowed the harmful idiots to use their country to invade Iraq; they screwed themselves yet again when they pacified the Iraqi Sunni with money without demanding that the harmful idiots withdraw to Kuwait and Qatar. And they’re screwing themselves again by going after Syria, a fellow Arab country. Here they’re feigning ignorance of basic balance of power principles which say that Syria will not regain its Joulan, and no Palestinian state will form, without Arab strategic parity with Israel. Money and secret payments do not a strategy make.

Are we listening to the Jordanians? These are after a buck, so their advice should be taken with a grain of salt.

Who’s giving us advice these days? Sarkozi? Ha! The French can’t protect my cat, let alone protect the Gulf. True, talking big and loud earns you defense contracts, especially when your new president is an asset of the Israeli-American strategic alliance, which alliance has winked at the Gulf Arabs to give him contracts. But the French are no better than the British when it comes to defending anyone. Their troops, as the British, would be dreaming of a Persian meal to wolf down when taken hostage. Umm. Umm.

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Next: Part II: In Lebanon.