Thoughts on the clusterfuck

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Throw an ink pot at the Rorschach blot, that’s what I say.

Given most of the commentary is armchair analysis more Freudian than any other type, why not, in the phrase so pertinently used after Brevik’s attack was initially attributed to Islamic extremism, be a guesser guessing.

I should note that if my reader is of the opinion that Syria is a spontaneous national uprising without foreign intervention, and that this applies to Arab spring more generally, none of what follows will make sense and you are free (and likely) to label me a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Here are some guesses I guess.

Origins

If the UN had stopped at the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 none of this would have happened. That’s my guess.

The first gulf war rarely appears in commentary, which tends to take the Twin Towers attack ten years later as the first mover.

That aside, during the second Iraq war, sabres were frequently rattled at Syria for letting fighters and munitions, from Iran and elsewhere over the border.

Religion

There are anthropologists who conceive culture as a tool for transmitting skills that allow you to adapt to the local environment, so humans can live in diverse habitat without having to evolve physically.

Iraq has now had a generation grow up in illiterate, medieval conditions; sanitation and power having never been fully restored since the first invasion.

NYRB is the best (only) place I’ve come across for elucidating the theological ructions within Islam, which some suggest compare with the Reformationi. I’d guess that Western intervention did something to bias this debate. Not least in destroying two of the few ostensibly secular states where the discussion could be had.

A belief system full of war and destruction is compatible with a life time full of war and destruction I guessii.

Moral systems need to bend over backwards in war and religious interpretations normally define the in-group, not the motivation.

False flags and proxies

The concept of the false flag has become popular.

I guess the West has lost its political appetite and possibly the necessary military superiority (very effective kit has been sold in the region for several decades) to win a ground war. The venerable tradition of urban guerilla warfare triumphed in Iraq despite two invasions.

So now that the internet provides direct access to public opinion and indigenous “activists”, and there is an administrative disposition towards out-sourcing in the West, proxies are the ground force of choice. There have been shifts of allegiance by various groups trained and armed by various sides.

So who is working under what flag seems to be complex and changeable. The flag might be real, the flag might false, it might just have changed, it might be a flag that some turn a blind eye to now and then, it might be real but made, bought and paid for somewhere else.

Which brings us to the proxy of all proxies, the meta-proxy. ISIS.

ISIS

I don’t know where ISIS gets its bullets and shells and mortars, but my guess is, from everywhereiii.

All that heavy weaponry the US sent to Iraq, they got that, what the US sent to Syria, they got that too. I can’t really hazard a guess as to how much of this was meant to happen, but a lot of people suggested the second batch would end up in the their hands and it has.

Arms from the Turks, to shoot Kurds, they got that, donations from Qatar, they got those. Munitions from the Saudi’s, less certain but it looks that way.

It seems a good guess that any state that doesn’t want an extension of American or Russian power in the region sees ISIS as a good proxy (except Iran)iv.

And I guess if you follow the pattern of mercenary wars, a la Italy in 1500s, the side that’s winning picks up soldiers.

States of chaos

States

It’s looked like geo-political chess (pull out a map) to take out the Persians because those uppetty titans of classical civilisation keeping taking their oil back. And states have long memories. I guess.

Syria is Iran’s conduit to the Med, to Lebanon and Hizbollah and thereby Israel.

What will be left of Syria after this is anyone’s guess and there are suggestions the best way forward is to redraw the mapv.

But it seems that Arabs and the Persians and for that matter the Russians too, aren’t so keen. The fashion of regime change not finding favour with incumbent regimes. Why is anyone’s guess. So I guess those incumbent regimes will throw as much sand as they can find in the works. They have sand.

There is a maxim that you cannot achieve peace in a territory without co-operation of bordering states. Without all sides changing their demands, this co-operation will not be forthcoming.

Chaos

So is chaos in Iraq and Syria the result of an American plan or an American incompetence, or plan that went wrong that they role with? The theory states that it is easier to extract resources from territories where there is no functioning state, no power that you have to negotiate with. You don’t need a monopoly on violence, just force to defend assets.

I guess if you had the long term stability of a state in mind, you wouldn’t disband the national army, but Rumsfeld didvi. And you might not design a constitution that called for regular periods of ethnically divided political deadlock. But I guess with their reverence for law and constitution, the US must have experts in the subject.

It’s been medieval in Iraq since 1991, but oil production has just hit a record highvii.

Ways with Kurds

The world’s largest stateless ethnic group they say. Which probably depends on how you lense various peoples in India, China and Central Africa and their respective States (35 million Kurds). But they say this, and my politics A-Level textbooks did twenty five years ago. So I guess it’s been on the agenda for a while.

So far, the Kurds have got a chunk out of Iraq, they’ve got a sliver out of Syria, but to make a functional state you unfortunately probably need a chunk of Turkey (and I guess they might want a slice of Iran).

Turkey is a NATO member, so any destabilisation and proxy war in Turkey on “spring” lines, might end up with an Article 4 invocation and we’d all have to pile in and bomb our own proxies, which would be a Kafkaesque clusterfuck of historic proportions.

Another problem is that Erdogan has been ruthless with foreign sponsored elements in the public sphere for several years.

The PKK are also a gang of commies, which means the US don’t send them kit. It would also mean that they’d probably want to nationalise the oil.

So I guess there could be a really internecine Kurdish civil war in the making between an American client in Iraq, and another, everybody else client in the PKK. But let’s hope not.

Given the Kurds are the largest stateless group of the world’s most oil rich region and live in places under-developed, excluded and with a long history of guerilla warfare, much of it has not been properly prospected for oil.

So I guess Kurdistan, when it does exist, will have huge untapped reserves, as already demonstrated in Iraqi Kurdistan. I guess it would make a lovely insecure, landlocked, corporate client state.

But for it to exist the Turks have to agree to setting up an autonomous province which they know will secede, I guess the US guessed they might take a chunk of Syria in exchange and that the US might have guessed wrong.

Paris

If you really wanted a soft target for suicide bombers and AK wielding jihadis, there would have been demos of French public protest proportions just a couple of weeks away at the climate talks. I guess it’s lucky they didn’t wait.

We are told the mastermind was also behind the attack on the train where the unfortunate jihadi found himself on the same carriage as three holidaying US soldiers, ex or serving. Of all the gin joints…

And we’re also told the French received information from a foreign intelligence service that the mastermind was still in Paris. The foreign intelligence service was even kind enough to give them his address. But I guess the horse had bolted by then.

It looks like someone knows things the French don’t. But that’s just guessing.

So ISIS dunnit. Did the Turks let them through because the French are funding the PKK? Did Big Oil buy them a ticket to foul public protest at the climate talks? Did the US pass information on too late? Syrians with fake Syrian passports? Just questions to flag up.

French in the war

What it does do is ratchet up France’s involvement in the Clusterfuck.

The French get on with the Russians and can co-ordinate militarily with them. This may help

I wouldn’t like to guess what’s in store if they choose the PKK as their proxy.

Solutions

There is a general reluctance in popular commentary to recognise the military limitations of NATO and it’s individual members.

There is also reluctance to recognise an increasing multi-polarity in the world.

Without these various poles co-ordinating order cannot be reimposed.

My guess is that unless the Americans back down in their demands for regime change, they will get no co-operation in the region.

In which case it’s a long-term, economy vs. economy, grind the whole place to dust type of attritional scenario.

The region will be in a mess for generations.

So there are two ways out.

The first is a military solution, prior to which everyone [that is US, Saudi, Iran, Russia, France, Turkey, Israel, UK, Qatar, everyone with jets] has sat down, carved up the pie and shared it out. With all sides co-ordinating ISIS could be squashed in a year or two. But my guess is that an asteroid strike is more likely.

The second is that everyone leaves ISIS alone and their theology gradually moderates for more civilised climes, which is plausible over the fifty to seventy years that it will take them to get literate, de-traumatised and stable. But that’s bat shit too.

So the third, which is an attritional continuation of mayhem, offers no way out for the people of Syria, but seems most likely. I guess it might take twenty years to carve a chunk out of Turkey and Iran.

But this is not a war that the US has to win in order to further its interests, it just has to prolong it.

For a guess at how long it will take to put humpty dumpty back together, you could look at African states that were the venue for foreign sponsored civil-wars in the cold war e.g Angola, etc..

The only other hope, and perhaps the best over the time period this will take to stablise, is that someone makes a leap in energy generation technology, be it toruses or Tewariviii and oil becomes strategically irrelevant, everyone loses interest, packs up and goes home.

But in the meantime, the main end pursued by all players is to keep the end out of sight. This one will run and run.

 

Notes

iiA man of good fighting age in Iraq 17-24, would have spent his entire life in conditions of civil war at this point.

iv If every foreign power with an interest in the clusterfuck has made successful attempts to infiltrate ISIS, which I guess they have, how much of ISIS’ military and strategic capacity is actually coming from foreign special forces under cover? I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess.

vIraq is already more or less in three pieces, Kurdish, Gulf emirate, and a mess

vi Rumsfled and Cheney do have previous in America’s biggest documented political scandal, Watergate, so we know we have two eggs of nefarious disposition in the foundations.

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