ISIS is running rampant in Fallujah.
The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights announced Tuesday that a man identified as Abu Anas al-Libi had killed more than 150 women and girls in Iraq’s Fallujah, some of whom were pregnant.
They were murdered for refusing to accept ISIS’s policy of “sexual jihad”, which is apparently a demand that they submit to providing sex services to fighters for Islam. So on the one hand, their version of Islam is insisting on honor and protecting their women, and on the other, demanding that they submit to rape. And they get to kill them for not making either choice. It’s so confusing.
Another thing that’s confusing…Fallujah? Iraq? Didn’t a lot of Americans fight in Fallujah? Weren’t we told that our mission was accomplished over there? Didn’t the media claim that we’d won that war? Or was that another of Brian Williams’ annoying confabulations?
Saddam was evil. People in Fallujah miss Saddam. Both statements can be true. Invading because “he’s evil!” presupposes that the invasion will make things better rather than worse, which has been true approximately never.
Ophelia, you just don’t get it. It is an honor to a woman for a man to want her, catcall her, have sex with her with or without her permission. These women are being paid a compliment!
I think I’m going to be sick now.
Sorry, PZ. Had a brain cramp, thought I was reading Ophelia.
It’s pretty obvious in retrospect now that pulling out of Iraq was a mistake. It had bipartisan support — everyone is sick of the war by now — but more support on our side, and we need to admit that.
If a group like ISIS had existed twelve years ago, before we’d exhausted ourselves with two prolonged wars, we would have been sending in tanks and ground troops against it within weeks of the first beheading. The war-weariness that is causing us to drag our feet now is one more result of the Iraq invasion that history will lay at GWB’s feet.
But I have a sick feeling that we’re going to have to go back in, because nobody else seems to be willing to. A real caliphate is practically a worse-possible-case scenario for us in global terms. Plus — we pretty much bear 99% of the guilt for creating this mess.
brucegee1962 you admit that we are responsible for creating this mess which I agree with. But your proposed solution is exactly what created this mess in the first place, namely our national meddling in the affairs of the Middle East. Even ISIS is in part a product of our meddling in Syria. The war weariness, I hope, is that realization our national brand of foreign intervention simply creates more fires than it is capable of ever extinguishing.
To admit our fault as well as our inability to to fix our mistakes doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. That is probably of little comfort to those suffering though.
In theory, Iraq and USA could ask Iran for help -they have quite a lot of armoured battallions and well-trained troops to go with them. The Iranian government hates the Sunni ISIS as much as anybody else.
Of course, this is not going to happen, because losing prestige by making friends with Iran is more unthinkable than a kaliphate.
— — — — —
A smaller tragedy, but still nauseating:
“Conservatives celebrate death of ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller, aid worker and ‘anti-Israel b*tch’ ” http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/conservatives-celebrate-death-of-anti-israel-btch-aid-worker-kayla-mueller/
@4.
ISIS wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Crusades launched by the US and its allies. Bin Laden succeeded in goading the US into bombing Muslim countries and radicalizing a generation of Muslims in the Middle East and Persia. ISIS is doing the same and once again the US and its allies are playing right into the hands of these Islamists.
The best thing to do is to stay out of these conflicts and allow their society to progress and modernize without Western pressure through bombing campaigns and supplying weapons. Europe went through similar growing pains during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. It was a struggle between traditionalists and modernists. Islam is going through similar growing pains right now.
Here is a good article he wrote on the subject.
http://gwynnedyer.com/tag/isis/
The mistake was going there.
@7
When I say he. I mean Gwynne Dyer. He’s a war historian turned journalist who has a good perspective in this subject IMO.
I think that’s the most gobsmackingly stupid sentence I’ve read this year.
Maybe we need to add all of these women to Cheney’s long list of sins. In a way, he and W started this.
“In a way?”
More proof that the “we only keep women locked up and control their sexuality for their own good/honor” claims are bullshit. It’s all about using violence or the threat of it to degrade, shame and oppress women.
How are we supposed to fight that with bombs? It’s happening everywhere. In some places it is just more obvious and heinous than others. Shit, look at our own military. If they’ll rape their own comrades, I have no doubt they rape “combatants”. We recently burned a boy alive with a drone. We anally raped prisoners of war. If the US is going to fight terrorists, we’re going to need to be alot less like them.
Fighting the patriarchy with tools of the patriarchy probably won’t ever work. It only changes the management.
On one hand, Serbian nationalists said that they needed to fight against Bosniacs otherwise these eeeeeeeeevil Muslims would rape their wives and daughters to death; on the other, they built rape factories. Plus ça change…
***
The mistake was going here under false pretenses, with an inept dynast with daddy issues as leader, after displaying open contempt to pretty much every US allies, then trying to replace Saddam with a puppet regime, then when THAT failed allowing the revanchist Maliki administration to run unchecked: the invasion itself was merely the first of a very, very, very long list of blunders.
We’re being ‘perception managed’ again and we’re falling for it hook line and sinker, like always.
“Weren’t we told that our mission was accomplished over there?”
-It was (on Bush’s watch).
Yes, but…what they mean is that they insist on honor and protecting their own, personal women…while demanding that women belonging to other men—men not members of their in-group—submit to rape…and consider it an honor.
It really comes down—once again—to “It’s okay when we do it!”
Exceptionalism is just one of the many things that come packaged with the tribalism that tends to crop up here, there, and everywhere.
:(
–
What a clusterfuck. The Iraq expedition has been a disaster. An undeniable disaster.
That news story PZ linked at the top of the OP?
The one from which that first quote comes?
It’s from businessinsider.com The link again, for those who missed it and want the full context in story is right here.
And before I go any further, the behaviors described are clearly horrific and morally repugnant. So when I talk about the writing about the tragedy rather than the tragedy itself, it should be obvious that I am in no way defending IS or their behaviors. Rather the opposite, really.
Now that I can’t possibly be accused of taking anything out of context or defending the indefensible, can I just say,
Seriously? In paragraph 2 when we get the first description of what happened, you have to write this:
Some of whom were what? Pregnant? That’s relevant how?
Fuck you for every whiff of victim blaming I had to inhale after you scented your story with the idea that the murders of some of the women and girls are more tragic or less deserved than others.
Oh, but that’s not even the worst of it, you douchegabbing, sulfurous asps. No, you have to go on to enlighten your readers about the context saying,
I could take on the first half of that, but I think proof of your horrid misogyny is both summed up adequately and already overwhelmingly nauseating by simply one last look at the phrase:
May your entire website disappear beyond the horizon of acceptability into a place of foulness so overwhelmingly dense not even your most respectable ideas can ever escape again.
Invading was a crime rather than a blunder. The point of the invasion was never to benefit the people of Iraq, but to secure military bases and control of the Iraqi oil industry. The chief blunder was thinking it was going to be easy; the remaining crimes (of which the devastation of Falluja was one of the worst) and blunders followed from those.
That guy’s not really imitating guitarists’ styles so much as playing their EXACT songs modulated over a common chord progression. He’s good, but it’s not as clever as musicians that can genuinely compose in someone else’s style (e.g. Weird Al parodying The Pixies’s in “First World Problems.”
And Hendrix was good and important, but he’s really not that hard to imitate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uHNsoGopOo
His being easy to imitate is part of what made him so influential. Lots of other guitarists picked up his tricks and incorporated them into their own sound.
Ah, the technique of the Big Lie: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The “mission” was supposed to be (although it never was) a stable, democratic Iraq, able to survive on its own, and to serve as an example throughout the Middle East. If that had been accomplished “on Bush’s watch”, then American troops would have been withdrawn “on Bush’s watch”, and everything would have been just dandy ever since.
@brucegee
First, there was a status of forces agreement and the Iraqis wanted us out. Forcing the issue and keeping troops in rather than leaving on schedule would have been a mistake near as large as invading in the first place.
Secondly, a new caliphate is an ISIS pipe dream not anything that will actually happen. They are hemmed in on all sides and haven’t made any real gains on the ground in months and have lost important ground in that time. They are a horror show where they hold sway and in neighboring areas, but a state they are not, much less a burgeoning caliphate. Fall for that line and you are either playing into their hands or into the hands of the neocon hawks that got us into this mess in the first place.
Translated brucegee: “gee, that war really fucked things up over there. Better bring ’em some more, see if that helps.”
Crip Dyke, #19
I didn’t pick up on the implication of the pregnant part, so thanks for pointing that out.
The “controversial practice” made me sick. They wouldn’t call the beheading of male prisoner soldiers controversial. Women, of course, are still to be considered at least somewhat like property so the best they could do is call it controversial.
As for this “practice”, it’s not about honor of women as we hear when they talk about domestic life. The honor nonsense is about one’s sister, daughter, wife. I don’t know the exact case of these 150 women, but this is most likely to do with the concept of ma malakat aimanukum, which translates to that which your right hand possesses, or in other words slaves or female prisoners of war. Having sex with (raping of course) women who are your slaves is permitted by the Quran, and Islamists like ISIS would definitely take full advantage of that part.
Enopoletus Harding @16:
I’m probably going to regret asking, but what do you think the mission in Iraq was?
I’m starting to understand the thought process behind isolationist philosophies.
Why does anyone think the US can fix this?
Why would doing more of the same thing that caused the problem fix the problem?
It is possible that it was a mistake to go to Iraq (and it was a mistake of epic, historical proportions) and yet it was also a mistake to leave. After you’re massively bleeding from a self-inflicted wound, you can’t just take your hand off the spurting blood and pretend like nothing happened.
Make no mistake, an ISIS state will be our worst nightmare — it will epitomize everything we went over there to prevent in the first place. It will make Iran and North Korea look like our best chums in comparison, while Saudi Arabia and Egypt will seem like paragons of womens’ rights. It will act as a major exporter of global terrorism, it will undermine any efforts towards peace in Palestine and Syria, and it will inflame all the worst aspects of Islam.
The alternatives to invading are to either try to bully the Saudis, Jordanians, and/or Iranians to do it for us — which would be quite a trick if Obama can pull it off, for which they would probably demand enormous payoffs — or to stand back and hope that they fall apart out of their own incompetence, which given the speed with which they’ve advanced so far seems like a long shot.
No argument that all these atrocities should be laid at Cheney’s feet, though. What a colossal blunder he created.
I’m starting to understand the thought process behind the Prime Directive.
Of course it was, but here’s the thing: there’s evil, there’s stupid, and then there’s cartoonishly stupidly evil, and the iraqi clusterfuck most definitely belongs to the third category.
Maybe, but that would not have necessarily made it a good idea.
What would the chances be for intervention of that sort to result in a group even worse that ISIS arising?
Also, if it were not for those two prolonged wars and their ancillary consequences, how likely would a group like ISIS have arisen at all?
You also cannot just keep your hand there indefinitely.
Sometimes the original self-inflicted wound is so bad, there is no remediation for it afterwards.
Our worst nightmare? Not by a LONG SHOT. (And who do mean by “we”?)
It’s close to the worst nightmare for the people living there, but for us, if it came right down to it, we still have the option of leaving it as it. It will make us look stupid, irresponsible and incompetent to the rest of the world, but ISIS’s capacity to actually significantly harm us here in the first world is quite limited, only slightly greater than Ghenghis Khan’s capacity to significantly harm the Mayans.
Looking bad is never the “worst” nightmare for anyone.
Other than Bush and his banner, I don’t remember anyone asserting that “we won”.
CaitieCat #24
Bombs of Love
brucegee @29:
It’s “possible”?
No, it damn well was a mistake to go to war with another country. Especially under the false pretenses presented by the Bush administration.
The very presence of USAmerican forces in the Middle East destabilized the region even worse than it was, and you think staying there would have magically made things better?
I haven’t the slightest idea what to do about all this.
@Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden #19
regarding that phrase ” the controversial practice of women serving as consorts to jihadist fighters”…. CONSORTS?… I think they mean sex slaves. Disgusting.
@brucegee1962 #29:
But we (and painfully I have to say ‘we’, thanks to the hubris of Tony Blair and the faceshitting cowardice of far too many New Labour MPs) didn’t go over there to prevent an Islamist caliphate. We invaded Iraq for its strategic location: a country ideally positioned where US bases could threaten its neighbours — especially Iran — and one with a land border with a NATO country, through which armed forces could easily be resupplied. Control of the oil, after years of sanctions blocking much of Iraq’s oil exports, would also help swing the decision.
Or perhaps you meant Afghanistan, not Iraq. The Taliban were bad but in 2001 they still faced a major threat from the Northern Alliance (the reason why two Arab suicide bombers assassinated the Alliance’s leader just before 9/11, most probably in an action taken by al-Qaeda on behalf of the Taliban in exchange for retaining a safe base of operations — especially since al-Qaeda knew what was likely to come). Terrorists don’t have the capability of seriously harming a stable nation-state, not unless they can goad that state into an overreaction. Bush certainly provided the overreaction, and compounded his mistake by later opening up a second front on a flimsy pretext.
So, I don’t think there was any ‘prevent’ about it.
….fuck me, he hasn’t been banned here?
brucegee1961 @ 4
You mean like the Taliban? Who were in power in Afghanistan for decades without the US doing using military force to oppose them, even though they were subjecting women to many of the same horrors, and nurturing terrorists? Yet we only invaded Afghanistan when Bush couldn’t avoid it any more, and he pivoted money and material to his narcissistic conquering of Iraq as soon as he could, creating an even bigger mess.
Amphiox already pointed out that this is bullshit. Nobody in the US will be bothered by ISIS existing except to maybe feel bad. And we did not invade Iraq to prevent ISIS from existing, we invaded Iraq to enrich Dick Cheney and his oil company buddies and so George could one up his father. Nothing more.
@brucegee1962 #4:
Sorry, but I call bullshit on that idea. The U.S. rarely uses military force for humanitarian reasons, and certainly not on the scale of the Iraq or Afghanistan War.
The Taliban in Afghanistan were doing horrible things in the 1990s and we didn’t invade then; only after the deaths of thousands of Americans did it suddenly become important to spread freedom and democracy. It certainly may make us feel better about our bombing and invading of the country after reading about women being attacked with acid or underage boys being used as bacha bazi, but it doesn’t actually make us moral crusaders, especially when such crimes having basically zero to do with us being there.
Iraq is even more horrifying, because rather than simply ignoring the human rights abuses, we actually continued to contribute to them, as in the 1990s with sanctions and periodic bombing attacks; or in the 1980s when we were sharing chemical and biological weapons technology, even if Saddam was to use them against civilians.
And if public beheadings are the gold standard of invasion-worthy human rights abuses, then why not Saudi Arabia? Bottom line, the U.S. looks out for its own interests, not the humanity and safety of people suffering under dictators, theocrats, or militant groups.
George W. Bush’s wars – see, now Viet Nam don’t look half as bad conpared to the cluster fuck he started.
Reality alert: IS aren’t shy about their desires for genocide, rape and enslavement. Their reasons are rooted in their religious fundamentalism, the millennia old divide between Shia and Sunna, and the Sykes–Picot Agreement that forced different (and often hostile) ethnicities to live in a single country, often ruled by leaders representing an ethnic minority. They don’t view Bush nor his invasion of Iraq as a major reason for their actions.
This was a reality alert. You may return to your scheduled discussion about US politics.
AlexanderZ, it is Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ancillary consequences that resulted that created the conditions on the ground that has enabled ISIS to succeed. Their leaders may not have been primarily motivated by the US wars, but it was the US wars that enabled them to become powerful enough to actually put their goals into effect.
It is in this sense that the wars are responsible for ISIS.
That’s not what anyone is saying. The invasion and subsequent actions – particularly the devastation of Falluja, stirring of sectarian tensions and dismantling of the Iraqi army – gave them the opportunity to establish themselves.
Amphiox #46
No, the conditions are the extreme hatred of one ethnicity of another, being forced to share a country with each other and being ruled by a dictatorship that clearly favored (and was based on support of) one ethnicity over the others. These are the reasons that guided the genocides in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing that accompanied the partition of India and Pakistan, similar clashes all over the former Soviet Union (especially in the Caucasus), and the civil war in Syria before IS became the main anti-government force. It’s everywhere, and I don’t see any evidence that Iraqis are any different.
Bush and his allies did commit many crimes, and are responsible for many more. But when it comes to the Iraqi civil war, the US invasion acted only as a catalyst by removing the entrenched ruler – something that would have happened anyway since Saddam wasn’t immortal. You want to argue for restraint in US military adventures? Good! US clearly needs to be more restrained and its crimes are great. But please, don’t use an ongoing genocide as your soap box.
Creating and propping up a puppet state, then going through with the farce of training and equipping an army for that puppet state, without consideration that said puppet state had no legitimacy in the eyes of the people and that soldiers recruited from among those people would have no willingness to fight for and risk dying for this government to which they have no reason to g loyal to, so that when actually faced with a combat situation, instead of fighting they simply dropped those expensive fancy weapons we gave them and ran away, leaving all that fancy and potent equipment for ISIS to capture and use for themselves, was totally not a foreseeable event.
Particularly when it has already happened, in the same place, before, and we (ie the U.S. And allies) were actually there to witness it first hand, in the first Gulf War, when vast proportions of the regular non Republican Guard Iraqi army surrendered rather than fight and die for Saddam’s regime.
Wrong.
You completely, and I suspect, willfully, misunderstand what is meant by “conditions FOR SUCCESS”. None of the above helps the chances for IS to BE SUCCESSFUL. It merely motivates their desire to act.
And yet these same factors and that same desire had already been there for decades if not centuries before the U.S. wars, and for all that time, no IS. Their leaders were there all the time, preaching their agenda, but where and when and how did they get their money? Their weapons? Their recruits? When and where and why did the pre-existing forces that previously held them in check, like the state apparatuses of Iraq and Syria, cease to be able to suppress them anymore?
Those are the practical RESOURCES that enabled the to BE SUCCESSFUL, and it was the U.S. Wars that created the conditions that made those resources available for IS to exploit.
Without the consequences of the U.S. Wars, IS would be a bunch of fringe elements without access to temporal power, and little ability to translate their hateful dreams into physical reality.
That’s what we’re fuckin’ saying?!
Without a catalyst, reagents can sit in inert inactivity for a billion years, and nothing will happen.
He who adds the catalyst is the one responsible for causing the reaction to occur.
Yety oddly enough, Baghdad before the invasion was a mixed Sunni-Shia city, there were many mixed-sect marriages, and many Iraqis did not know which sect their friends and neighbours belonged to. That’s not to say there were no religious tensions, and the regime was heavily Sunni (but also included Christians, most of whom have now been driven out), but it’s quite clear that the invasion vastly exacerbated them. You know, if you have a potentially explosive mixture that needs a catalyst to set it off, then applying that catalyst would normally be considered the cause of the explosion.
There is no such thing as “only” a catalyst.
All biological enzymes are “only” catalysts, too. If you go into a biology seminar and try to claim that the availability of DNA polymerase is not an important condition for DNA replication because it is “only” the catalyst for the reaction, you’d be rightfully laughed out of the room.
busterggi @44:
Maybe that’s just amnesia, or historical myopia. Coupla minor points;
US intervention – the gift that keeps on giving.
The banner that was presented on the aircraft carrier was correct. The mission was for Bush to land safely on that carrier. (he flew in on a fighter jet)
As for the Iraq invasion and other malfeasance (ie Guantanomo Bay) committed by the Bush regime, it was pure evil with broad motivation by the economic war machine.
Other than hoping for the best of all these victims in the Middle East, I have no ideas or solutions. It’s like watching a 14+ year continual train wreck.
Grewgills @ 23;
Agreed. The Neocons are clearly already lining up to paint ISIS as the next bogeyman that justifies vast military budgets and expeditionary foreign wars of questionable legality. The sadisitic visciousness and cruelty ISIS is infamous for makes them so perfect as a Right wing propaganda tool that it is almost surprising that they don’t seem to recognise the fact themselves.
Hopefully ISIS will implode under a combination of the weight of its own delusional leadership and its strategic incompetence as expressed by its tendency toward vast over extension and fighting on all fronts at the same time. Terroist groups are famously poor at holding territory or establishing viable state structures by force rather than negotiation after hostilities cease, and I see no reason why ISIS will prove any more able than their various fellow travellers in this regard. Their refusal to compromise at all on anything will most likely prove to be their undoing.
The implosion of this would-be caliphate really is the best outcome we can hope for right now, because any attempt to ‘fix’ this mess, which is largely of our own making, with yet more Western military force can only make things even worse by radicalising yet more young muslims and leaving the victims of ISIS in a situation where they also have to worry about the violence and bigotry of their supposed ‘saviours’, especially since a good proportion of any such forces would doubtless be made up of
mercenaries‘private military corporations’ that have already earned an entirely deserved reputation for brutality and indiscriminate violence in the region.We have already tried to fix Iraq with force, and it was an unqualified disaster with a horrendous toll in lives lost, most of them innocent civilians. We simply can’t afford to make the same mistakes again.
Its implosion is a foregone conclusion, despotates being inherently unsustainable to begin with. The real question is, “how long will it take to collapse“: the longer it lasts, the more people it can kill, and the more demagogues can sabotage western democratic institutions by portraying themselves as heroic bogeymen slayers.
@Gregory Greenwood #57:
Agreed. I’ll quote my earlier comment to this end: “Terrorists don’t have the capability of seriously harming a stable nation-state, not unless they can goad that state into an overreaction.” Even if ISIS falls before any other ME state (and I do think that it will, one way or another) it will still leave enough true believers behind to carry the torch. Sooner or later, a group of them will do something to kick off the next intervention by the ‘coalition of the willing’. Each time an atrocity triggers a thoughtless response, the rest of us will get burned. We get picked away at, bit by bit. Don’t believe me? Then just look at the before and after state of our “freedoms”, under the aegis of the NSA and GCHQ.
Gregory Greenwood #57:
The sadisitic visciousness and cruelty right wing warmongers are infamous for makes them so perfect as an ISIS propaganda tool that it is almost surprising that they don’t seem to recognise the fact themselves.
When both sides’ best-case is a permanent state of war, the statement applies equally well in either direction. Maybe they do recognize the fact, and it suits them fine.
Amphiox
“Willfully”? Am I suddenly Bush in disguise? One of his cronies? A long time war-in-Iraq supporter?
That little cheap shot aside,
Yes and no. Under the Turks there was a Millet system that diffused these tensions by providing an autonomy to each ethnoreligious group. After modern Iraq was established there really were tensions, which eventually led to the rise of Saddam. That was a time of Pan-Arabic ideology when Arabs tried to imagine that they’re all one big nation. That ideology quickly failed and led to the rise of current religious separatists. Combine that with Saddam’s less than egalitarian approach to other ethnicities (namely, his genocidal tendencies) and you get a ticking bomb that would have gone whenever Saddam showed sufficient weakness.
Really? And that’s also true for Syria, that wasn’t invaded by US? Or for Lebanon well before the Israeli-Syrian invasion? Or for almost any other Muslim country that has been experiencing an insurgency for the last decade or two? How about other parts of the world? Tell me about how the US destabilized Rwanda.
Good thing a human being is not a molecule.
P.S.
I would appreciate if you addressed your comments to either the comment number and/or the poster. It be easier for me.
Nick Gotts #47,53
And yet Lynna #11 and Azkyroth #12 seem to draw a direct line from Bush and Chaney to Jihad al-Nikah.
Yes, just like Yugoslavians of different ethnicities and religions used to live side by side peacefully, and Jews and Germans had happy marriages. It’s almost as if human beings are complex creatures instead of single-minded automatons.
I agree with you. That catalyst is usually the weakening of a central government – something (forgive me for repeating myself) that would have happened anyway after Saddam’s death. Claiming that strong of a link between US and the murder of these women, a link PZ feels so strongly about that he dedicated almost half of his post to US, is irresponsible and looks like the use of a terrible crime to settle an internal score.
Amphiox and Nick Gotts
I understand where you’re coming from. I’m also outraged about Bush et al crimes.
What I’m angry about is PZ’s use of this crime. The city of Fallujah was conquered by IS a year and one month ago. The US army operations ended there (i.e. the control over the city was given to the Iraqi government) in 2006. If PZ wants to comment about the US invasion he can do that any time, if he sees a clear connection between the two he can put a bit of effort and explain it. Instead he throws some flippant and lazy remarks about a subject which he knows fairly little about. Not for the first time, mind you.
@Giliell: The mistake was to support a bloodthirsty dictator in the first place.
This is not only the US fault. Europe and many other countries have their hands soaked in blood over Iraq.
There is hell on Earth, and it’s Falluja among other places.
Holy fuck this breaks me.
But that is not what PZ is doing at all. You are quite obviously willfully, yes, willfully, clutching at straws just to find offense.
As if this has anything whatsoever to do with the point. As if the ancillary consequences of the US invasion, and, indeed, US meddling, suddenly ceased the moment US army operstions ended. And yes, sometimes it takes a decade or more for the longterm consequences of ill-thought military action to reach fruition.
This is such a simple and obvious thing to understand that your persistent obtuseness can, again, be only considered willful.
Yes. Because the instability in Syria was a DIRECT result of the ancillary fallout of US actions in Iraq. As if the consequences of ill-thought military actions magically stop at borders. As if the totality of US actions relating to the invasion and occupation of Iraq did not include covert and not-so-covert actions directed at and within Syria
This is so basic that your continued obtuseness on this point can only be considered willful.
Perhaps you should have thought of that before deciding to introduce that metaphor into the conversation.
And you know this, how? You have magical access to an alternate dimension where Saddam was not overthrown by the US invasion and died a natural death? And saw that IS arose in that dimension after his death as well?
Sorry, I’ll go back and provide some little dots with numbers next to them for you to trace along.
It’s like the joke from Nazi times:
It has been decided to simplify the justice system. From now on there’ll be just three laws anymore:
1) Whoever does anything or fails to do anything is punished.
2) The punishment is decided by the Healthy Sentiment of the People™.
3) The Healthy Sentiment of the People™ is set by the governor.
It was funny because it was true.
*epic headdesking*
Now 150 % more fair & balanced!!!
Yep.
Stop the mind-reading.
…It was part of the Arab Spring, which the US invasion of Iraq actually delayed for a decade.
brucegee1962:
You also can’t fix the problem by stabbing yourself a few more times.
Amphiox @ # 34: It will make us look stupid, irresponsible and incompetent to the rest of the world…
Hasn’t that been the default state – on a good day – for over a generation and counting?
First of all, the US doesn’t give a shit what the rest of the world thinks, and I’m not even sure it’s a bad thing.
Second, the US has the primacy over stupidity and arrogance only to the extent of their power.
I lived in a few quite different countries, and all, ALL of them have their share of stupidity, arrogance and outright evil, and the damage they do is directly proportional to their power.
The US is not a little special snowflake, just the biggest bully.
And the EU should take a long look at what WE do and whom WE support.
@tsig, #28:
There is a direct analogy between the belief that the U.S. is the best and most important nation in the world (and therefore everything is either a problem for the U.S. to solve or an opportunity for the U.S. to seize) and the belief that there is a god. Both ideas are absolutely ridiculous when examined against a backdrop of even incomplete historical knowledge, and both are perpetuated through a program of brainwashing children. (That’s why arguing about “under god” in the Pledge of Allegiance has always been a fool’s errand — we really ought to be arguing against saying the Pledge of Allegiance at all, because it is part of the program of inculcating a mindless and unexamined state of faux-patriotism into children. It doesn’t matter that the kids don’t mean the words, it’s a problem that the whole practice goes unquestioned and unchallenged by the children.)
Just as it doesn’t matter if people are harmed in the pursuit of the will of god ( Deus vult and all that), it doesn’t matter if the U.S. harms people in the course of “spreading democracy”. And, of course, the people who believe not only are incapable of asking whether what is being spread is really “democracy” in any meaningful sense, but also incapable of even debating whether “spreading democracy” is really a good idea. This is odd, because the people who gave the U.S. democracy certainly considered that it required a rigorous intellectual defense.
Once you accept this idea, which isn’t merely American Exceptionalism although that’s a large part of it, then the claims of Bush (the elder) that the U.S. should be the world’s policeman are perfectly sensible, and any trouble in the world becomes something the U.S. must interfere with. Unfortunately, there is essentially nobody in Washington D.C. who does not believe — Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and all the Democratic Party functionaries are just as certain of the central role of the U.S. as any Republican. This helps to explain why Russia and China cause such confusion among pundits and the ruling class — no matter how hard they pretend, American power simply can’t act at will around those two nations. America’s encroachment into the Ukraine isn’t exactly like Canute ordering the tide, because the tide wasn’t human and wouldn’t react, but it bears certain similarities.
Well, there’s the other half of the question. To those in charge of the U.S., Iraq is only a problem because it didn’t go as planned. The actual outcome is, however, an acceptable one. It forms an excuse to continue to spend money on All Things Military, and to keep whipping the citizenry into a frenzy over Those Scary Muslims. Naturally, throwing more troops — or bombers, or drones, or whatever — at The Geographical Region Formerly Known As Iraq isn’t going to solve any problems. It merely makes a convenient excuse for the money to keep flowing into the pockets of the well-connected, an excuse which the public will happily accept and internalize and defend, as brucegee1962 has conveniently demonstrated above.
The fact that the U.S. military has been deployed at least once a decade since the end of World War II, but never once faced a foe who actually threatened America is never mentioned, because it might lead people to suggest spending less on the military. Similarly, the fact that most of our enemies, from Russia to Iran to ISIS, either became our enemies because of our own foolish, belligerent foreign policy or else only came into existence because of our interference is a fact which gets shouted down at all costs, lest we learn from history and stop mindlessly supporting each new campaign.
Well, on the plus side, the US carbon emissions fucked up the local climate and agriculture, which in turn did speed up the arrival of the Arab Spring.
It’s practically the opposite, because Cnut (according to the legend) did this in order to demonstrate the limits of kingly power, and shame his flattering councillors. The first record of the story is from over a century after Cnut’s death, so it is probably apocryphal. According to my link, you’re not the first to link the story to western intervention in Ukraine.
@Nick Gotts, #72:
Actually, intent is not the point — I knew about that already, and don’t care. (In fact, I know, as you would if you had read the article you linked to, that the original versions of the story did not specify that Canute trying to shame his courtiers, making the intent of the anecdote much more ambiguous.) The point of the story as a metaphor is that Canute gave an order which would not be obeyed because he had no authority and no means of conveying the order in a meaningful way, which is essentially the case when the U.S. tries to interfere with China and Russia.
@ #70, #72
Oh yes, those poor lil’ Russia endangered by the gall of USA to nudge Ukraine out of its sphere of influence. It’s not like people living there has anything to say about where they want to belong, or something like that.
See, right there you’d want to be suspicious. ISIS loves taking film of themselves doing the most horrible things to men, women, and children, and posting them on the internet for all to see. That’s the reason any of you have even heard of them. Saudi Arabia is much more circumspect about it’s torture and murder of everyone who disagrees with the King, and the people who were doing the same basic stuff in Chechnya for a decade or so were the nominal victims in western media because they kept it reasonably quiet (other than murdering whole schools full of children in front of the Russian media).
Anyway, for ISIS to do something which would offend the west, but keep it secret from everyone except the government who wants assistance from the west, that is possibly not true at all. Like the Kuwaiti government talking about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators back in the 90’s, or basically anything said by any state at a time of war for the last few centuries. WMDs. Defeating the Taliban. Training up the Iraqi army to provide security after the US leaves Iraq. Everything, it seems to turn out to be a lie. So this, could be one too.
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What they really need is communism. Drop a bunch of little red books in place of the bombs. Not pleasant either, but they’d be a nice trading partner in about 50 years time, lots of infrastructure projects, free healthcare and education. Unfortunately the US is involved, and the government there likes it’s high-altitude bombing runs. How sad, never mind.
@ The Vicar #70
While I agree that U. S. military adventures in the Middle East are worse than futile, it does not follow that opposing similar Russian adventures amounts to the same thing as going to war against the IS. Not sure you meant to say exactly that, but the point I would like to make is that there are often unfortunate choices between greater and lesser evils in the world, and the situation in the Ukraine is an example.
American motives vis-a-vis Ukraine certainly are not selfless, but a (sort of) independent Ukraine is surely preferable to one run by creatures of Putin’s Russia. In Ukraine a positive outcome of U. S./European military involvement is at least possible, which is clearly is not the case in Iraq.
The biggest risk to the U. S. in confronting Russia’s expansionism is not the making of endless new enemies as America is doing in Iraq. It is rather the re-awakening of nuclear threats between super powers, which may be the refuge of the ever more pressed Putin as his tottering kleptocracy threatens to collapse upon him. The failure of his cause celebre in the Ukraine would be unbearable politically for him at home. If things start to go badly for his pawns there, rattling the nuclear saber may be the next move he uses to keep Russian eyes diverted from the increasingly difficult conditions the average citizen must endure.
@37, Tony! The Queer Shoop
http://www.theonion.com/articles/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mideast-regio,11534/
That was more than a decade ago, and I remember reading about each and every step the US took in a state of openmouthed astonishment and horror.
groups as extreme as IS have a much easier chance of growing and expanding their influence with the kind of instability we see in Iraq and the civil war in Syria. That the US has intensified the instability and power vacuum is by the invasion and all the policies initiatives as the result seems obvious. I would also add that our policies generally have not contributed to any positive way in much of the world ever. With the exception of the Marshall Plan I see nothing any where like promoting democracy or democratic ideals. Maybe I do not know enough about history.
I only see naked nationalism .
uncle frogy
Absolutely. To the best of my knowledge, only dictatures and the US have a pledge of allegiance. The image that always comes to mind is 6-year-old Yemeni schoolgirls on TV saluting the flag outside the school and chanting about such things as al-Thawra, “the Revolution”.
Even if you don’t accept this idea, you can still come to the same conclusion. Here goes: If anyone is to be the world’s policeman, that can only be the US in this day and age. The UN would have a lot more legitimacy, but it neither has the army nor the ability to make decisions that it would need to take over this job. So, the question is: can the world do without a policeman? If not, that’s the US, end of story, whether anyone likes it or not.
America’s what?
Gregory Greenwood
Look what actually scares all of these groups? What do the Taliban, Boko Haram, al Shebab etc… have in common with ISIS?
They are all afraid that their kids are becoming “Westernised”, that their kids are adopting western modes of thought and dress and finding their traditional values less and less valuable.
They are afraid that they are losing their authority over the next generation, and that as Muslims integrate into Western society as a whole, that society’s values are becoming more and more prevalent.
The vast majority of people killed by Islamist attacks are Muslim.
They know they can’t beat America in a war, so they aren’t trying to do that. They are trying to build a situation where people remember America not as their heroic rescuers, but the people who blew up their niece’s wedding, the people who ran over their uncle’s taxi because he was collecting firewood.
This is why America playing world police is actually the worst possible thing America could do – because America to a large extent represents Western values and when it plays world police it seems to end up representing those values as torture and “collateral damage” AKA mass murder.
This is also why the ticking time bomb scenario fails on a practical as opposed to moral level – the bomb goes off, it isn’t the fault of the people who refused to torture someone. It is the fault of the terrorists who set the bomb. Somebody gets tortured? That is the fault of the torturer.
You kill Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda still exists and now you have ISIS. Now you have two groups setting those time bombs.
Further the Islamists are trying to define Muslims as the enemy in Western countries. The hatred of Muslims isn’t something they’re against, it is one of the tools they have at their disposal to further maintain their ideology. Look at the Chapel Hill murders – that’s what groups like ISIS want more of in order to inflame the passions of the people back home.
So what is the solution? Stop playing world police, put down the truncheon and start working on being the sort of country people want to emulate. ISIS’ fear is that the next generation of Muslims admire rather than fear you, so be admirable rather than fearsome.
Get your act together on wage inequality, ask your Muslim neighbours favours and have them ask favours of you in return. Heck invite them over for a BBQ – it isn’t that difficult to make sure it is all Halaal. Instead of reaching for your guns, reach for your roses.
And yes, keep publishing those pictures of Mohammed, keep criticising the religious ideas, make it clear that the right to disagree is paramount and that everyone is included. Let defiance ring in your words, but kindness ring in your actions.
Your best weapon is not drones or missiles, it isn’t some fancy new jet or even nukes, it is in your ability to be excellent to one another. War does not make you their enemy, it makes you their weapon.