Well, everyone has assured us that he is, for the past…what is it now, three years? So I guess they’re all correct, and we didn’t just start War on Terror Round 3. Thank God.
Quite effectively if what is published about him is even half-accurate. It is unfortunately a bit difficult these days untangling real info from potential hagiography of an arguably powerful political figure. But dismissing for the nonce stories of his heroic wounds gained an the front lines and the like, both reports and circumstantial evidence points to him having been a pretty effective field commander and tactical organizer/planner. He seems to have been Iran’s conventional warfare international troubleshooter - he’s given a lot of credit for multiple successful Syrian and Iraqi campaigns against assorted insurgents groups.
None of which made him a prince of a person. My namesake was an excellent general, while not being within spitting distance of being an excellent human being. Ability and morality have no real linkage and I was just commenting on the former.
Iraq is partially Shiite and is at the heart of a Muslim Civil War between its Shiite members led by Iran and its Sunni members led by Saudi Arabia. It makes strategic sense in the ME to deny Iran its desire to lead the Islamic World.
Quite true. But one can absolutely say the same thing about the Iraq/United States relationship ;). Iraq is a political minefield.
If Pakistan gets directly involved, that’s how you know everything’s about to go to hell.
No, you cant. Iran has a much deeper, more violent and more Imperial relationship with Iraq. Iran sees Iraq as a pawn in a larger struggle and has no intention of leaving. There is little similar about the Iraq/USA relationship and the Iraq/Iran relationship.
They wont. They cant. They have their hands full with India and Kashmir.
For those interested in the Sunni/Shia conflict, Frontline released an amazing doc exploring the history and intensity of this conflict.
Thanks I finally looked it up, Shiites outnumber Sunni 2:1
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
The Iraq/Iran relationship is not as simple as ‘Allies’. There are large factions in Iraq that absolutely want the Iranian influence ended and Iran militias booted out of the country. Other factions are closely tied to Iran and welcome them.
That is exactly the same re: Iraq and the United States. Exactly.
That is not saying that American intentions towards and views of Iraq are identical to Iran’s. They are not - the U.S. not being a neighbor with a very long and complicated relationship with Iraq guarantees that. But I didn’t argue that they were. I just agreed with Sam( in so many words )that Iraq has both pro-American and pro-Iranian factions, which it does.
And the pro-Iranian faction in Iraq is probably the numerically and politically more powerful of the two. Probably, though you won’t catch me betting any money on that. But even if that is true it is more than balanced out by the fact that the United States is vastly more powerful than Iran. So Iraq as I’ve noted is in a very, very touchy space. They’ve got a lot to lose and no really good options.
Why the ever loving fuck would we get involved?
Yep, it certainly is the kind of act that almost requires a response. The mind kind of boggles at what the response would be, though. They can’t really hit an equivalent commander, not practically. They can perform a bunch of other inflammatory operations that could be seen as a response, though.
Here’s to hoping that they pick something that doesn’t escalate the situation further. I don’t have high hopes for restraint on our side.
Current OSINT buzz is that the the Hizboallah leader was the target and the US did not know that Sulamani was travelling with him. Hence the rather muted and delayed announcement.
I believe that I’m the only person on the board who believes that the President has been compromised. The others believe that he tried to cheat the election and is just sufficiently stupid to give the game away when it comes to national security.
The alternative to him being compromised is that we’re on the entry point into a potentially nuclear war at a time when we’ve demolished the top five layers of the Department of Homeland Security, lost the National Security Counsel, are four temporary appointees into the head of the Department of State anti-proliferation bureau, and the Pentagon has been releasing a bunch of letters in the last few weeks saying that all the people at the top leaving is just a cyclical event so please ignore the man behind the curtain over there.
Which is to say, the person running the nuclear war is the guy stupid enough to commit a crime on a phone while twelve people - one of whom everyone knew was a Liberal leak - listened, used a sharpie to try and falsify a weather map, and is genuinely the person on the other side of the phone in this unedited, uncommentated clip.
Personally, I’d say that I’m more stress-free on my side of the issue so you might want to consider getting out the prayer mat and hoping that the nutter conspiracy theorist is the one in the right.
Well damnit, it is edited and commentated. It started correct.
But I’ll leave the link standing as-is rather than finding a correct version.
Some people thought the same thing about at least the last two Presidents. If you noticed, it didn’t happen.
Interesting if true. I was a bit surprised by this news. If Trump has any redeeming quality, it is a reluctance to start wars. Of course there are other people in the Trump administration who are a lot smarter than he is and who do want war.
Even if Suleimani’s death wasn’t intended, I can’t see the Iranians believing it. Retaliation and escalation seek likely with highly unpredictable outcomes both in Iraq/Iran and for the general election.
Despite the massive shock of Trump’s election, the 2010s were a rather placid decade for the US with neither a recession nor a significant war. Already the new decade is looking a lot more volatile.
Trying to understand middle eastern politics in terms of western politics is doomed. It just doesn’t work that way, and trying to apply ideas of how the US relates to any of this in terms internal conflicts similarly doomed.
One of the big problems is that those things we call countries in the Middle East are recent inventions imposed from the outside, in a large part by the English after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after WW1. Drawing nice straight lines on maps to carve up control of areas taking no notice of pre-exiting communities, ethic groups, or what were effectively individual countries that had existed for thousands of years. Of course this didn’t end well.
Persia, now Iran, was a dominant empire that spread across much of the land, and at one point included the good bits of what is now Saudi Arabia. This however was before Islam existed. Things go back that far. Islam was imposed on the Persians by the Arabians, during which time the Arabians tried to snuff out the Persian language and other culture. Memories are long, and the current enmity between Iran and much of the rest of the Middles East goes back to times when Europe was a forest and the Americas may well have been on another planet.
Iraq is only 100 years old and is make up of three separate components of the Ottoman Empire. Welding these three together was never going to end well.
It isn’t just problems with Iraq. The current mess in Libya is just the same story playing out. Libya is less than 70 years old, and exists mostly as accidents of history as the spoils of war after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, welding together 2 separate countries and ethnicities. It isn’t hard to guess what the two sides of the current Libyan conflict are. India versus Pakistan is of course the poster child for this problem.
Minimally, any way of trying to understand what is playing out must recognise that the borders we in the West draw on maps have only some influence over what is playing out on the ground. Often they are one of the key causes of the conflict. Every time a new border is imposed on the land and a new ruler placed over it (usually propped up by the West), there is simply yet another player in the power games, not fewer. There are historical interests that go back millennia, and the upstart interests created by the West. What we get shown in the West are the conflicts drawn in terms of those upstart interests, and recent definitions of countries. This is naive at best. Where the West gets it badly wrong is in thinking that these new country definitions are the only divisions that matter. Or using local conflicts as a proxy for other interests. Iran versus the the rest is as much about Persian versus Arab, and has existed for about 3 times as long as the USA has. Sunni versus Shiite is part of this conflict, but not the whole story either.
The Ottoman Empire may be gone, but its heart - Turkey - still wields influence, and it still holds onto parts of the historical empire, albeit bits that were carved by by another Brit with a pencil and a ruler. They play to their own interests, and this gets us the same set of unresolvable conflicts. Kurdistan, Macedonia, etc.
This isn’t a one side versus the other problem, which how the West mostly seems to play it. There are multiple competing interests and unreconcilable problems.
There will undoubtedly be reprisals. They are likely to be severe, unexpected and will result in a maximum number of deaths.
Suleimani was a violent terrorist and skilled tactician. He is the leader who came up with the idea of small, heavily armed speed boats attacking larger frigates and quickly disabling them. It is likely the responses that come now will be similar - unexpected, unconventional and resulting in high numbers of casualties. Most likely these will be focused on targets in the Middle East but American targets in Europe are likely to be hit as well. There is a definite possibility of sleeper cells already being in place in the U.S. that could be called into play.
If anyone deserved death, this guy would definitely be on the list. However, it will probably prove to not have been the smart move at this point in time.
^
The less a white dude knows about the region the more confident they are in their “analysis” and the posts.
Never fails.