Muslim civil war continues as ISIS strikes Iran

From Tehran, the capital of Iran, comes a reminder that Islam is not monolithic. As with the other Religions of the Book -- Christianity and Judaism -- there are a number of divisions and even more subdivisions, each one claiming that they and only they have the True Faith. The main groups Sunni extremists, including ISIS, despise Shia-majority Iran. Iran has also come under attack in the past by Arab insurgents. The two biggest Muslim groups are the Sunnis and the Shias. (Westerners used to call Shias "Shi'ites", but had a tendency to mispronounce the word.) They hate each other.

Wahabism, the sect that dominates Saudi Arabia, is an extreme form of Sunni Islam, which is itself more extreme than the Shia version. Sunni extremists, including ISIS, despise Iran, which is mostly Shia. There's also an ethnic divide, as the Iranians aren't Arabs, but a different ethnic group which we used to call "Persian". Anyway, whether through fear or having other things to do -- blowing up Christians -- ISIS hasn't attacked Iran... until today.

Today, ISIS has claimed responsibility for a deadly pair of attacks on Iran's parliament and... wait for it... the shrine of the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Tehran attacks began mid-morning, local time, when assailants armed with AK-47s stormed Iran's parliament building, where a session was in progress. One of the attackers blew himself up inside. The siege lasted until mid-afternoon. Not counting the jihadis, 12 innocent Muslims were killed and 42 wounded. This is the first ISIS attack on Iran itself. Until now, when not hunting "infidels" in the streets of London, Paris, Berlin etc., ISIS has been fighting Iranian-backed forces in Syria and Iraq.

In addition to being lethal, the attack on the shrine of Khomeini is symbolically stunning. As Iran's first Supreme Leader, Khomeini is a towering figure in the country and was its revolutionary leader in the 1979 ouster of the shah.

And here's a little detail for clueless Western security forces to keep in mind. Iranian Deputy Interior Minister Mohammad Hossein Zolfaghari told Iran's state TV the "apparently male" attackers wore women's attire. Just yesterday Walt told you about the (perhaps) demented Arab woman who rampaged through a Canadian Tire store in Toronto, attacking innocent bystanders with a golf club (really) and a knife which she had hidden under her Islamic attire. Her face was obscured by a niqab, which she was still wearing when she appeared in court yesterday afternoon.

Dear readers, the Muslim civil war is being fought in the Middle East, but the Islamic extremists' mission to conquer the world (or at least the worthwhile parts of it) and exterminate the "infidels" (meaning US) knows no boundaries. I don't recommend nuking Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia or Iraq. I think we should let them fight it out until there's just one left and then throw that guy down a deep well. But I do think we should defend ourselves and our Western Christian (?) civilization in our own lands. And the best defence is a good offence!

Question of the day: Where is Santiago Matamoros (St. James, slayer of Moors) now that we need him?

Walt's plan for the war in the Middle East

During the US election campaign, Hellery Clinton responded to challenges on what she was going to do to win the war against the Islamic terrorists -- the ones she wouldn't call by name -- by saying that she had a plan, which included the capture of Mosul, which would fall in a matter of days. Donald Trump said that even if the anti-ISIS "coalition" succeeded in liberating Mosul, they'd find the IS leaders long gone, precisely because La Clinton had given them plenty of notice, plus details of President 0's plans to "degrade" the soldiers of the Prophet.

As I pointed out a few days ago, in "Meanwhile, in the Middle East...", predictions of the capture of Mosul turned out to be premature. Latest reports are that the Kurds, advancing from the area they control in northern Iraq, are stalled at the gates of the city. The alleged Iraqi National Army, coming up from the south, has been unable to prevent ISIS fighters from breaking out to the west and south, heading for Syria. Enough of the terrorists remain in Mosul to make its fall uncertain at best.

Meanwhile, the eyes and ears of the world have turned toward Syria, where ISIS has retaken the ancient city of Palmyra, which it lost some nine months ago. Turns out this great victory for the "coalition" was, errr, of a temporary nature. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, "we" learned that occupying and securing a given area is rather more difficult than taking it in the first place. I can almost hear the cries of "They're baaaack!"

If you believe the propaganda dished out every day by the lamestream media, the retaking of Palmyra by ISIS isn't that big a deal. What is a big deal is the fall of Aleppo -- once Syria's biggest city -- not to ISIS but to [SHOCK! HORROR!] the forces of the evil, devilish, inhuman Bashir al-Assad! With more than a little help in the form of airstrikes by the Russians, Syrian government forces have entered and taken control of 99% of the eastern part of Aleppo, which had been held by rebel militias for years. MORE SHOCK! MORE HORROR!

The chattering classes and spokesthingies for liberal democracy are engaging in an orgy of handwringing, pissing and moaning that almost defies description. Here's a sample, written by someone called Terry Glavin [Who he? Ed.] in today's Emotional Post. "J’accuse! May Allah look down in his mercy upon Aleppo — no help is coming from us. This is what we have become. This is the depravity to which we have all sunk. Aleppo has fallen and so has humanity. We are disgraced."

Walt doesn't see it quite that way. There have been some civilian casualties in the battle for Aleppo, to be sure, including women and children. Hundreds, not thousands, have been killed, but those numbers pale in comparison to the numbers executed -- not killed in fighting, but executed -- by ISIS. So why is it the "end of civilization" when Syrian government forces do the killing, but not when atrocities are committed by the Sunni Muslim rebels and the Islamic extremists of ISIS? Answers on the back of a postage stamp, please, to the usual address.

As of this morning, the Assad government controls most of western Syria, which is the only part of the country worth having. The Kurds have most of their homeland in northern Iraq. ISIS holds their capital, Raqqa, as well as Mosul (still) and Palmyra (again). The alleged Iraqi government has a tenuous hold on Baghdad, but not much else. Their ill-trained and timorous army is (sometimes) fighting it out with ISIS for eastern Syria and south-central Iraq. I'll go out on a limb here and predict that there will be no significant change of any kind in the year to come. Lifetime pct .985.

What, then, should the USA, soon to be under new management, do about the Middle East? I've given it a lot of thought [All this week? Ed.] and can come up with no better plan than to bug out and let the Muslims duke it out amongst themselves. That, in essence, is what Ron Paul has been saying for years. The Syrian armed forces, with the help of the Russians, will keep pushing eastward, while the Kurds, helped by the Iranians, will keep pushing down from the north. Let them destroy the Sunnis (ISIS plus assorted rebel militias) if they can, and good luck to them. We’ve got no skin in that game.

Further reading: "Some Perspectives on the War on Terror: Anyway you look at it, it's a failure", by Philip Giraldi, in The Unz Review, 20/12/16.

Who really "founded" ISIS?

The Donald made headlines last week by saying that Barack Hussein Obama founded ISIS, and his one-time Secretary of State, Hellery Clinton, was its co-founder. He said he meant it. Then he said he was speaking sarcastically, "but not too sarcastically". Perhaps that was going a bit far, but one can certainly make a good case that the IS "caliphate" has benefitted greatly from President 0's weak [non-existent? Ed.] foreign policy, and the ineptitude and general mismanagement of his administration in general, and Ms Clinton in particular.

Who knows why they've bungled the Middle East file so badly? Maybe the Prez really is a Muslim, as many people believe. Still, it's a bit much to give him credit for "founding" ISIS. At the beginning of the Obama-Clinton years, ISIS (or "ISIL", as they keep calling it) didn't really exist. All we had to worry about, the first eight years of this century, was Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But it cannot be denied that ISIS sprang from Al-Qaeda, and from the mess the Paranoid States of America created in Iraq.

Who was responsible for the Iraq debacle? It wasn't Mr Obama, but a Republican. No, not Dubya -- except in the sense that he, as Supreme Commander, must bear the ultimate reponsibility -- but one his appointees, named and shamed by Gwynne Dyer in After Iraq (St. Martin's Press, New York, 2007). That would be... wait for it... Lewis Paul Bremer III, a former Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates. (Yes, that Kissinger.) Mr Bremer was appointed by President Bush II as Presidential Envoy to Iraq on 9 May 2003. His appointment declared him subject to the "authority, direction and control" of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He led the American occupation of Iraq from 11 May 11 2003 until 28 June 2004. Here's what Gwynne Dyer says, with Walt's emphasis.

[Bremer] disbanded the entire Iraqi army and police force and banned all senior Ba'ath Party members -- and anybody in the top three management layers of government ministries, government-run corporations, universities and hospitals who was a Party member at all -- from future government employment. Bremer paid no need to arguments that, until his arrival, conversations had been underway with Iraqi generals for the reconstitution of the army, purged of its Saddam loyalists, and that in all the former ruling parties of post-Communist states in the early 1990s the majority of the "senior" members had been innocent professionals who had been compelled to join in order to do their jobs.

So far as it can be discerned these were Bremer's own decisions, not imposed on him by the White House, and they had catastrophic effects. With a couple of decrees he effectively gutted the Iraqi state apparatus and abolished the only other national institutions, the army and police, that at least in theory rose above mere sectarian, ethnic, and local concerns. He also abruptly three half a million people, most of them with weapons training, serious organizational abilities, or both, onto the street in the most humiliating way.

The Sunni insurgency began at once, led initially by ex-army officers and Ba'ath officials and public justified by incidents like the killings [by US soldiers of unarmed demonstrators] at Fallujah. These "dead-enders", as they were explained away in Washington, were soon joined in the insurgency by homegrown Islamist extremists who had previously been terrorized into submission by Saddam's regime, and by some foreign Islamists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, who made themselves useful by offering to carry out suicide attacks.

By the autumn of 2004, only a year and a half after the invasion, the US authorities wwere recording between two thousand and three thousand insurgent attacks per month. The shocking pictures taken by the American torturers at Abu Ghraib had a big impact elsewhere in the Muslim world, but in Iraq they caused no particular upsurge in the violence: most people had already chosen their side.

Walt doesn't always agree with Gwynne Dyer's politics, but reads his columns in the international (non-American) media regularly, and often quotes him here. Mr Dyer earned a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London, served in three navies and holds acade3mic appointments at the Royal Military Academy (Sandhurst) and Oxford University. I think he knows what he's talking about.

In the Introduction to After Iraq, Mr Dyer argues -- as Ron Paul has for lo these many years -- that the USA has no skin in what is essentially a Muslim civil war, and should get out of the Middle East immediately, before things get any worse. (Maybe things couldn't get any worse. Mr Dyer was writing in 2007, before ISIS swept across Iraq and Syria.) Here's what he says.

What should the rest of the world do about this? Nothing. Just stand back and let it happen. Outsiders to the region have no solutions left to peddle any more (nor any credibility even if they did have solutions), and they no longer have the power or the will to impose their ideas. For the first time in a century, the region is going to choose its future for itself -- and it may, of course, make a dreadful mess of it. Even then, outsiders should not intervene, because foreign intervention generally makes things worse -- but also because it's none of their business.

Further reading: "Just How Much Should Paul Bremer Be Blamed for the Rise of the Islamic State?", in Foreign Policy in Focus, 18/3/16.

The Middle East is NOT "another Vietnam"; it's WORSE!

I have been misunderstood. Apparently some "readers" glance at the headline and just skim the text, often getting the wrong message from the few words that stick in their alleged minds. When, in commenting on the jihadists' attacks on Paris, I wrote [WHO wrote? Ed.] "How about we fight back?!", my suggestion was NOT that the French nor the US nor anyone else step up the air strikes in Syria and "bomb them back to the Stone Age". (copied right, Curtis LeMay).

All I said was that it was suicidal stupidity to be admitting to our countries 1000s upon 1000s of "undocumented aliens" because of the wave of weepy hypocrisy stirred up by the professional handwringers in the human rights industry ("We do well by doing good!") and the lamestream media. See "Paris jihadist attacks result of suicidal stupidity" (WWW 13/11/15)

In previous posts -- for instance "ISIS atrocities worse than ever; Canada ends mission" -- I'd thought I'd made clear my view that what the USA and its allies should do is stop interfering in the Muslim civil war. Get the hell out of the Middle East / get out of the Middle East hell... and let the Sunnis and Shias duke it out until, like the gingham dog and the calico cat, they eat each other up!

In "Why American must (not?) save the world from ISIS", I suggested that American military and political leaders persist in intervening in fights in which the USA has no gingham dog (or calico cat) because of a failure to learn the lessons of history in general and the Vietnam war in particular. What seems to have been misunderstood is that I don't believe that the Bush-Obama war is analogous to the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war, except insofar as America is fighting a losing battle far from home for the wrong reasons.

A better understanding of what the Vietnam war was really about will be gained by reading Two Cities: Hanoi and Saigon (Jonathan Cape, 1992) and A Bright Shining Lie (Random House 1988), both by Neil Sheehan, one of those chiefly responsible for obtaining the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Sheehan views Vietnam as essentially an anti-colonial war, a war fought by the Vietnamese for their independence.

Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia, comprised French Indochina, a part of the French empire until it was overrun by the Japanese in World War II. When the Japanese were defeated, the British, who had occupied the region, unaccountably handed it back to the French. Some Vietnamese, mostly in the south, were happy to serve their colonial masters once again. Others, mostly but not only in the north, started a guerilla war against the French.

They -- the Viet Minh -- became Communists almost by accident because the only outside powers that supported them were the USSR and its satellites (not including Marxist China). They weren't concerned with ideology so much as with getting the French to go home. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the Americans supplanted the French, to prevent the spread of Communism, prevent the other countries of southeast Asia from falling like dominoes, and so on -- the wrong reasons.

In Two Cities, Neil Sheehan says that for the first year or two after the Americans installed the puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh actually expected that once they counted the cost -- in money and lives -- of propping up the South Vietnamese regime, they would pull out. He was wrong, because for the Americans, unlike the Vietnamese, the battle was ideological, not practical. Johnson and Nixon really believed (one hopes) that they could defeat Communism by winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. They were wrong.

The war being fought in Syria and Iraq (and Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, etc etc) is not ideological. At least, it is not a clash between political ideologies. It's not about democracy versus Communism. There isn't a single democratic government in the entire Middle East. Never has been. There are only autocracies, either secular or religious. A religious autocracy can be described as a theocracy, which describes the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan when the Taliban ruled. A theocracy is what ISIS wants to establish in its "new caliphate". And that's what the war is all about.

The followers of the Prophet Mohammed are fighting each other to decide which are the better Muslims, and which version of Islam shall prevail. It's Sunni Muslims versus Shia Muslims, with non-believers and infidels (that would be us) stuck in the middle. We -- the "Christian" West -- have no business in the Middle East.

There's no way for us, as outsiders, to win what is essentially a religious civil war. If you disagree, please tell me what a victory for "our side" would look like. If we "degrade and ultimately defeat" ISIS, will Basher Assad remain in power in Syria? Is that a win for "us"? Or will there be a power vacuum, as there is already in Iraq, thanks to America's lack of an exit strategy? Or will the entire region continue to be fought over by gangs of barbaous warlords, as is the case in Afghanistan? Could any of those outcomes be described as "victory"? I rest my case... for today...

ISIS atrocities worse than ever; Canada ends mission

While Christian ["post-Christian", surely! Ed.] nations paused on the 11th to mourn and show respect for those who died to keep the world free from tyranny, racism [etc etc. Ed.], the Islamic extremists of ISIS pursued their jihad against Christians, Jews and all non-believers, including other Muslims.

In Lebanon, two suicide bombers blew themselves into Islamic smithereens, taking with them some four dozen other Muslims in a mainly Shi'ite quarter of Beirut. And in the Afghani province of Zabul, IS fighters beheaded seven ethnic Hazaras, who happen to be Shi'ites as well. The followers of the Prophet used razor wire to cut off the heads of four men, two women, and a child!

In Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, carrying coffins containing the bodies of the victims. Al Jazeera reports that the protesters, including women and men from Afghanistan's different ethnic groups - Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara - marched on the presidential tent ["palace", surely. Ed.] to urge the government to take action against rising violence against Afghan civilians.

Of course the Afghan government is pretty much powerless to do anything to or about ISIS or the Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or any of the bearded beheaders and bomb-throwers who infest not just their sandpit but the entire Middle East. That's why the US-led coalition is there, right? Because someone -- step forward President O -- thinks "we" bear some kind of responsibility for the wretched people of the armpit of the world.

Walt thinks the only responsibility America bears is that of having invaded the Middle East in the first place, during the reign of Bush I, thus exacerbating the instability and sectarian violence from which that region has always suffered and always will suffer, no matter what "we" do. Walt says it's time to go home and leave the Muslims to beheading and otherwise butchering each other. And may Allah have mercy on them.

UPDATE: Canada's new Liberal government (starring Justin Trudeau, now on screens across the Great Not-so-white North) has ordered its Defence Minister -- as Sikh! -- to end the combat mission in Iraq and Syria ASAP. Will the American forces miss their Canuck counterparts? Probably not as much as the Canucks would like to think. But at least they won't be pour any more dollars into the desert sands.

Quit pretending, Mr. Obama! The problem IS with radical Islam!

Every now and then -- quite often, actually -- someone makes a point so well that there's nothing I can do except republish it. To put it in my own words, or even add any editorial comment, is pointless. Such is the case with an op-ed piece by Thomas L. Friedman in today's New York Times.

In "Say It Like It Is", Mr. Friedman asks why President Obarmy and his flak-catchers can't bring themselves to call the terrorists who shot up Charlie Hebdo, a school in Parkistan, an entire village in Nigeria, and so on (to be continued) what they are -- radical Islamists. Here are some excerpts.

When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq. We’ve entered the theater of the absurd.

President Obama knows better. I am all for restraint on the issue, and would never hold every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few. But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community. It is coming mostly, but not exclusively, from angry young men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle East and Europe.

If Western interventions help foster violent Islamic reactions, we should reduce them. To the extent that Muslim immigrants in European countries feel marginalized, they and their hosts should worker harder on absorption. But both efforts will only take you so far.

Something else is also at work, and it needs to be discussed. It is the struggle within Arab and Pakistani Sunni Islam over whether and how to embrace modernity, pluralism and women’s rights. That struggle drives, and is driven by, the dysfunctionality of so many Arab states and Pakistan.

It has left these societies with too many young men who have never held a job or a girl’s hand, who then seek to overcome their humiliation at being left behind, and to find identity, by “purifying” their worlds of other Muslims who are not sufficiently pious and of Westerners whom they perceive to be putting Muslims down. But you don’t see this in the two giant Muslim communities in Indonesia or India.

Only Sunni Arabs and Pakistanis can get inside their narrative and remediate it. But reformers can only do that if they have a free, secure political space. If we’re not going to help create space for that internal dialogue, let’s just be quiet. Don’t say stupid stuff.

Walt particularly likes the first sentence of the third excerpted paragraph. That's what I've been saying right from the inception of WWW. That's what Ron Paul has been saying, again and again and again. We have no business meddling in the Middle East! If the Sunni Muslims want to fight it out with the Shi'ites to see who's holier... let `em. It's not worth a cent of our treasure or a drop of our blood.

Further reading on WWW: "Western leaders finally admit Muslims are waging jihad against us"

Short video worth watching: The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority - Ben Shapiro (who may just have an axe to grind) presents the numbers that expose the lie that the PC media (and the Prez) keep repeating.

Mission accomplished... NOT! Iraq explodes again

Looks like the cradle of civilization is becoming even less civilized -- or more uncivilized -- this week, as the world lurches ever close to the Armageddon.

Walt refers to the looming disaster in Iraq, and suggests you have a look at the map of the "cradle" in "The Coffin of Civilization", posted here back in September of 2012. See the part of the "Fertile Crescent" labelled "Assyria"? That's modern-day Syria. "Akkad" roughly corresponds to Iraq. Here's a modern map, showing today's porous borders. Consult your programme while Walt explains who's killing whom.

The yellow stain of violent Islamic extremism starts in north-eastern Syria where jihadist rebels are fighting the forces of "Basher" Assad's government, then spreads east into northern Iraq, where the majority Kurds -- also Muslims -- have been agitating for ages to establish an independent state. In fact they already have a government of sorts in the three Iraqi states shown in olive grey.

The insurgents coming in from Syria represent a new "organization", even worse than al-Qaeda, which they call "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant". The abbreviation would seem to be "ISIL", but they have taken to using "ISIS", maybe because... well, who knows... Islam is not the monolithic religion many westerners think it is. Muslims like fighting with each other even better than waging war on infidels. [Maybe it's because we infidels are better fighters? Ed.] The ISIS jihadists are Sunni Muslims, and regard the Shia Muslims (the majority in Iraq) as, errr, also infidels.

The Kurds, as you can imagine, are encouraging the Sunni thugs to make their whey [Geddit? Kurds and whey? Ed.] quickly south to Tikrit and Baghdad, where the Shites [Ed., please check spelling] are, and leave "Kurdistan" to the Kurds. As of today, ISIS are in control of Mosul and Tikrit and are moving closer to Baghdad. Iraqi government troops are stripping off their uniforms and laying down their arms as fast as Egyptians fleeing from advancing Israelis.

Cue the inevitable "Something must be done!" from Western leaders, the Disunited Nations, etc etc. But what?! How about sending US troops in to restore order. Considering what a great job the American-led "coalition" did last time, maybe not! Even President Hussein Obama has learned (Walt thinks) that going in is one thing, getting out quite another. Won't be doing that again!

But cheer up. Iran is ready to step into the breach! President Hassan Rouhani has denied reports that three units of Iran's crack Presidential Guards have already been sent to Baghdad to bolster Iraqi government forces' defences. But, he said, Iran stands ready to intervene if things get worse. And they are sending a dozen tanks fitted with special transmissions -- four speeds in reverse and one forward... in case the Sunnis attack from the rear.

Iran has close ties with the Shia-dominated Iraqi leadership which came to power after the Americans toppled of President Saddam Hussein, whose power base was the country's Sunni minority. That little exercise cost over $1,000,000,000,000 -- that's a trillion -- and over 4000 American lives. But it was worth it, right? Errr, maybe not.

Note from Ed.: I'm reminded of the old Iraqi lovesong: I Want a Gal Just Like the Old Bag Dad Had.