There’s a whole bunch of insidious goings-ons in the Middle East, probably due to Salman and Kushner striking a deal where the US would back Sunni Islam against Shia, in exchange for help securing Israel.
Any predictions?
Personally, I’m feeling like Kushner is actually doing a better job of bringing about mass deaths and war than Trump is with North Korea.
In the latter, it’s just a couple of blowhards (with nukes) yelling empty threats at one another, so they they can both show off to their people that they’re the strong one. Both have probably realized by this point that nothing is going to happen beyond that (I hope).
But in the former, we’ve got a silent tidal wave that’s gathering and heading towards Iran, and pretty well the only two choices that seems to leave Iran and their allies with is to give in and allow peace to come to the region (until people stop paying attention) or go for a pre-emptive strike.
To-date, terrorism against the West has been pretty half-hearted (except 9/11). I could see a more organized, militarily planned version where the attackers aren’t just trying to get themselves killed, but actually go in and start causing major issues.
And while they probably can’t bring the nukes to bear unless someone tries to invade them, there are other targets in the area. The American populace is probably pretty apathetic to Iraq and anything that happens there. The Kurds don’t have any fans in the area, and could probably be rounded up and murdered en masse pretty safely, if Iran thinks that Trump won’t send troops in and instead will pull the rest of everyone back.
By all that’s holy, I thought you were going to say he’d handed costumes and props to a group of stage actors rehearsing the Oh-The-Futility-Of-War lines he’d written.
The Kurds have been pretty stalwart allies in the region; as such, I’d like to say there’s no way the U.S. would leave them flapping in the wind should some Sunni/Shia regime decide “they have to go,” in a Final Solution kind of way.
Kushner and this administraion seem to approach peace in the Middle East as something that happens after the war is over, if this is their priority:
“Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, said Sunday that Trump is “close” to making a decision on Jerusalem but is “still looking at a lot of facts.” Israel captured the eastern part of the city from Jordan in 1967 in the Six-Day War, later annexing it in a move considered illegal by the United Nations.
Palestinian officials have warned that recognition of the city as Israel’s capital will end U.S.-brokered peace efforts, which they have already complained appear biased toward Israel. Calling it Israel’s “undivided” capital would mark an even more dramatic step, effectively recognizing Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem.”
This could, and probably will, backfire spectacularly. It also is pretty indicative of how utterly weak the State Department is at the moment - it’s almost as though it doesn’t exist. Typical of Trump’s “I’ve got the smartest people” mentality. Trump probably looks at this as no big deal because he’s fixated on Iran. Even implying that Jerusalem is an exclusively Jewish center of power could end up giving Iran more political influence in the region. And let’s not forget that Russia would love nothing more than to see this happen. This is just one example that leads me to conclude that when the Trumpster fire is finally out of office - whenever that is - the US is going to be a significantly weaker country…but we’ll still have nukes.
Yeah, but a lot of people can die in a short amount of time with modern technology.
I suspect that the recent Wall Street Journal article about “aides” using Melania to communicate with Trump, circumventing Kelly and the NSC, was actually about Kushner. He’s been personally working this whole deal between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the US President, without involving the State Department, the NSC, the DoD, or anyone else.
I’m not confident that the DoD has been kept apprised of all of this, so it could be that our troops are completely in the wrong place to respond in any useful way for some weeks or months if Iran decides to start taking hostages and going on a blood crusade.
The Kurds have been valuable in being a stable part of Iraq and also in helping the US eliminate ISIS in Iraq. But I don’t think this administration appreciates their significance at all
Maybe it’s just stupid fantasy, but I’ve thought the U.S. should push for a strong independent Kurdistan, possibly taking land from Turkey and Iran as well as Iraq. This could be a powerful counterweight to the Russia-Syria-Shia axis.
OK, maybe forcing Turkey and Iran to cede territory would be impossible, but even an autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq, supported by the West, would be a good step.
Septimus’ pipe-dream? Or major missed opportunity?
In a sane world America and Iran would be friends.
Rojava is a libertarian socialist society. After their usefulness against ISIS has ended, I expect the West or its allies will try to destroy or subvert them for that reason alone. Hopefully those poor bastards are planning for that.
But, with an unopposed USAF supporting us, me and a couple of my cycling buddies could take over most cities on the planet. Amed with sharp sticks and fruit knife.
Are you saying that having “peace come to the region” is itself a provocation of Iran? So that anyone who tries to bring peace to the region is therefore guilty of provoking Iran and responsible for “bringing about mass deaths and war”?
This seems pretty novel, and certainly at odds with the position of all US administrations since the onset of this conflict.
The problem with this is that Turkey and Iran would immediately attack since an independent Kurdistan would lead the Kurdish within their borders to rebel. An independent Kurdistan would be a great idea but can only happen with the permission of Turkey and Iran and there is no foreseeable way to get them to agree.
I’ll admit to being somewhat vague on the long-term aims of pretty much everyone in the Middle East and I am trying to catch up in a hurry (posting this thread is one method of trying to solicit more information).
My current understanding would be that Iran has a pretty solid defense set in and can make it more costly for anyone to invade them than is worth it.
On the other hand, that’s still principally talking about a 1:1 war. If all of Sunni decided to unite against Iran, they could probably be taken out or forced to start changing their behavior and beliefs. However, Iran has done a good job of keeping the rest of the Middle East disunited and in conflict, so that they’re all too busy to really focus on Iran and Iran can influence more power in the region than they would be able to otherwise.
Long term, I think that they are hoping to be able to slowly convert the region to Shia and extend their power base. They may already be succeeding at getting Turkey to move onto their side.
So long as the rest of the Middle East is disunited, Iran has a long-term strategy to win. If it becomes united, then suddenly they’ve lost for good. So either they will need to accept the loss (which people don’t like to do - particularly not when nothing bad has actually happened to them), or they’ll rapidly act to prevent unity from happening, using whatever means they can think of.
All of what I said above aside, since I really don’t know the state of affairs, I do know that an outright Holy War between two factions (e.g., the 30 Years War) can be quite bloody. ISIS may have seemed bad, but ultimately I think they were largely limited to rifles, rocket launchers, etc. so far as their weaponry was concerned. If we start talking about nation states duking it out, then that would be a far more bloody affair than ISIS ever was.
Similarly, I’ve heard that a cause of WWI was that Otto Von Bismarck was such a good negotiator and the power of Germany was such that he was able to keep the peace between a large number of factions across Europe who hated each other, for many decades. Once he died and his successors failed to continue to follow his footsteps, you ended up with an assassination of a minor figure triggering the greatest war known to history until that time. The US has now been playing the part of Otto Von Bismarck in the Middle East for several decades, and we’re stepping back from that role.
And, as I have noted, there’s a pretty straightforward strategy for Iran to follow that isn’t full out war in the Middle East. They can simply go in and start killing the Kurds or amping up global terrorism by several factors and they can be relatively confident that the ninnies in the USA will force the US to call off the deal to provide aid that allowed Israel and the Saudi factions to join up. If they’re just as happy to kill Kurds, Americans, and etc., and it gets them their way, then why not do so?
Actually, I might suggest that we’re not only stepping back from our role in keeping the peace, but instead actually going in and prodding the hornet’s nest.
I am not nearly so sanguine that the personal animus being exchanged between the human circus peanut currently occupying the White House four days a week and the Cabbage Patch Doll running the autocratic regime in North Korea are not going to contrive to goad one another into open warfare. Trump, in particular, seemed dedidated to undermining any efforts toward a diplomatic solution and Kim can’t and won’t back down for fear of being seen as weak by his inner circle. And Trump is on record repeatedly as advocating both direct use and proliferation of nuclear weapons outside of a deterrence or propotional response scenario. But hey, we had fair warning: ”Nuclear is just, the power, the devastation, is very important to me.”
This sounds like another in a progression of dangerously ill-conceived interventions in Middle East politics in which the United States, acting with unilateral authority, decides to “build a reality” that nobody affected will be okay with, resulting in bloodshed and warfare on a massive scale and the ultimate devastation of the very people it is intended to protect. A far better step would be to apply diplomatic pressure for Iran and Turkey (and Iraq and Syria) to recognize autonomous governance for Kurdish regions and moving toward an indpendent state. Of course, this will be neither easy nor result in a quick change that the Trump adminstation can claim credit for; in fact, it would probably take a concerted diplomatic effort over a couple of decades just as the Palestine National Authority did, and will still not fully resolve long-standing ethnic conflicts in the region. But trying to force these nations to ceding territory, and then expending the money and personnel to assure security for a hypothecial Kurdistan in perpetuity is fully assured to result in blowback and open conflict, and harm other diplomatic efforts with both nations by the US and allies who may even object to this particular plan.
Also, while the Kurdish people may be stalwart allies of the United States, it is to their credit that they still have patience to hold that faith after they were encouraged to rise up in revolt both in the mid-‘Seventies and in 1991 after the Gulf War, only to find themselves eventually abandoned by the US to their fates when it became inconvenient to back them.
