Caliphate / ISIS

Wikipedia on caliphates
Should the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria" be dignified with the term "Caliphate"?
That is not a decision for me to make,
it can only be made by Muslims throughout the world.

In the meantime, here are some thoughts from various people about the 2014-declared "Caliphate".

2014-08-11-Scheuer-u-s-uk-re-intervention-in-iraq-getting-it-lethally-wrong-twice

U.S.-UK re-intervention in Iraq: Getting it lethally wrong twice
by Michael Scheuer
non-intervention.com, 2014-08-11

“A country without a memory is a country of madmen.”
George Santayana, 1906

[I could have placed this article in a number of posts;
it covers a lot of ground.
I reprint it in full here;
elsewhere I have reproduced some of Dr. Scheuer's 2008 thoughts on the situation in Iraq,
but have been wondering what his current thoughts are.
Here he gives a fairly extensive presentation of those, as of 2014-08-11.

As to my opinion,
I heartily concur with Scheuer that America's original error was
knocking Saddam Hussein off his throne back in 2003,
failing to realize that while
Saddam Hussein might not have been the ideal ruler for Iraq from a lot of viewpoints,
that there could be far worse,
and that America really lacked the power to impose as ruler of Iraq
a person of its liking.
But that error was made in 2003; the dice were cast.
Now?
America really has no good options that I can see;
only choosing a least bad one.]


[1]
The truly amazing thing about America’s interventionist elite is that
they never, ever learn from their always egregious errors and half-baked plans.
President Obama’s decision to re-intervene militarily in Iraq
to “protect” the Azidi and Christian minorities
will do nothing more than delay their doom.
Neither he nor the British prime minister —
old me-too Cameron, the U.S. lap dog —
have the slightest intention of defeating the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and its allies,
which would require the aerial slaughter and boots-on-the ground demolishing of the mujahedin
and that portion of the population that supports them.
Both men are too sensitive, sophisticated, and well-educated
to engage in such blue-collar nonsense as “winning a war”
and so they will do a little military diddling
and make sure the now-doomed Azidis and Christians
go to their graves with full bellies.

[2]
What has not seemed to cross the mind of American and British interventionists is that
Iraq’s Azidis and Christians are in their present terminal fix
because the United States and the UK
started the unnecessary Western invasion of Iraq,
removed Saddam Hussain’s effective if brutal government,
and installed a Shia tyranny.
Under Saddam, the Azidis and the Christians had, to be sure, a tough row to hoe,
but Saddam’s security forces kept their torment to a moderate level.
We removed Saddam and all bets were off.
The Shias now merrily kill Sunnis, and vice versa,
and they both murder Iraq’s now unprotected —
thanks to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair —
religious minorities.

[3]
To a greater or lesser extent, the same thing is occurring in
Afghanistan (Targets: Shia and Sufis);
Pakistan (Targets: Shia, Sufis, and Christians);
Syria (Target: Christians) and
Egypt (Target: Coptic Christians).
In each of these countries the religious minorities
are suffering to a greater extent than previously
because of U.S.-led interventions which were undertaken
either without any intention of
utterly defeating the Sunni Islamist malefactors — as in Afghanistan —
or with what seems to be
a near-complete ignorance of the country’s internal political dynamics,
as in Syria, Pakistan, and Egypt.
As always, America’s bipartisan interventionists
proved to be military dilettantes and historically unlearned —
not knowing Mubarak did what he could to protect Egypt’s Copts —
thereby ensuring disaster for those they claimed to be helping.

[4]
In Iraq, Obama’s feckless intervention will do three things.
First, it may slow the advance of ISI forces
as they try to avoid exposing key assets to U.S. air strikes
and lie low until the U.S. and Britain again depart.
Second, it will increase the anti-minority rancor of the ISI fighters
due to the sharp but not crippling losses they will suffer from U.S. airstrikes.
When Obama and his fellow bipartisan interventionists call it quits —
say, if there are American casualties —
the mujahedin will conduct
a pretty thorough cleansing of the country’s minority sects.
Third, Obama and the interventionists are positioning the United States
to again appear to the Muslim world
as being militarily impotent and lacking in courage.
This will cause Muslims all over the planet to again reflect that
Allah must be genuinely pleased with
the work of the ISI, Al-Qaeda, and myriad other Sunni Islamist insurgent groups
if they can consistently defeat
the strongest and most technologically proficient Western militaries.
After all, Muslim believers are sure that victory in jihad can only come from Allah,
and no victory would come if He was not pleased with the Islamist combatants fighting in His name.

[5]
If this was not bad enough, there also is a chance for worse.
What if U.S.-UK military intervention barely slows the progress of the ISI fighters,
the minorities continue to get murdered at the same or higher pace,
and all of this is covered by the media for the public
in both countries and the rest of the world.
In such a situation, Obama’s action in Iraq will be seen for what it is:
another in a long-series of U.S.-led interventions in the Muslim world
that has given added strength and momentum to the Islamist movement —
remember Libya and U.S. support for the military coup in Egypt?
At that point, Obama, with mid-term elections 90 days off,
will recognize how foolish, inexperienced, and weak he looks
as a leader and for tactical political reasons —
don’t give the national security issue back to the Republicans —
and his own wounded ego may well decide
to expand rather than end his intervention in Iraq.

[6]
In danger politically and again exposed as an incompetent, Obama might well intensify the air bombardment and begin arming what he will tell Americans are the democracy-loving “good Iraqis,” the Kurds and Shia.
The increased air war would be a loser from the word go,
as the only time in history that air power won anything
was when two B-29s dropped nuclear bombs on Japan.
[My personal opinion is that that is not true.
The war of aerial terror that U.K. Bomber Command and U.S. Eighth Air Force
waged against Hitler's Germany,
vividly documented in The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945,
had a great effect on both the German civilian population
and German productive capacity.
It surely, in my opinion, had an effect.]
And the Kurds and Shia have no record of doing anything effective against the ISI
except whining for more and better U.S./Western weaponry
and then abandoning it to the enemy on the battlefield or in arsenals
as soon as contact is made with ISI units.
There is no reason to think this would not happen again,
only this time — if Obama arms them —
ISI will reap a harvest of much better weaponry
than it has previously picked up from the good Iraqis
as they flee battle.

[7]
Then what? Well, there are only two options.
In the first, Obama could deploy the U.S. ground forces he and Bush have wrecked
through over deployment and their refusal to win wars,
and which Obama has cut to the bone in terms of budget and manpower.
In such a move, Obama, his party, and the Republican interventionists
would again send U.S. soldiers and Marines to war as targets rather than killers;
we would soon hear from Obama and his pliant generals the claim that
“there is no military solution in Iraq”;
and shortly after that Obama would announce our re-departure from Iraq,
marking the third U.S. surrender to the Islamist movement in less than a decade.
This is the bipartisan interventionists’ much tried and always successful method of
bankrupting the United States, killing America’s soldier-children, and
growing the international Islamist movement to unprecedented size and geographical reach.

[8]
The second option is to immediately stop throwing young lives and good money after bad.
It is too bad that the Azidis and Christians in Iraq are going to be butchered,
but their approaching demise was set in motion by the unnecessary war
the Bush administration and the pro-Israel neoconservatives started in Iraq in 2003,
and by Obama’s decision to surrender to the Iraqi Islamists
by giving a date-certain for U.S. withdrawal-without-victory from Iraq.
Surely enough American lives, limbs, and money have been wasted in Iraq already.
Why waste more of each in a certain-to-fail re-intervention
designed to make the humiliated U.S. bipartisan interventionists
feel better about themselves for having tried to save the Iraqi minorities
they have so blithely consigned to death over the past decade?

2014-09-09-Scheuer-obama-vs-islamic-state-here-comes-more-debt-more-death-and-another-lost-war

Obama-vs-Islamic State:
Here comes more debt, more death, and another lost war
by Michael Scheuer
non-intervention.com, 2014-09-09

2014-09-19-Taylor-isis-does-president-obama-understand-what-hes-getting-us-into

ISIS: Does President Obama Understand What He’s Getting Us Into?
By John Taylor
www.unz.com, 2014-09-19

...

Obama’s televised [2014-09-10] speech
outlining American “strategy” against the Islamic State
was not reassuring in the least

and ought to make us wonder whether the President understands
the scope of the struggle he is getting us into.
For Obama the Islamic State may be “a terrorist group, pure and simple,”
but it is clearly much more than that
having political as well as religious underpinnings.
How else could a few thousand fighters
control six or seven million people and vast swaths of Iraq and Syria?
Despite what the Administration would have us believe,
the Islamic State is an insurgency
with popular backing from the Sunni inhabitants of Syria and northern Iraq.
The Sunnis there are going to resist
the re-imposition of non-Sunni rule from Damascus or Baghdad.
Is this a struggle we really want to be involved in?

...

In Syria the Sunni population supports the Islamic State because they have been excluded from political power since the 1920s. The French colonial administration, installed as the Mandatory power by the League of Nations, fearing the power of the Sunnis, who then as now constituting a majority of Syrians, recruited the Syrian army and police from Alawite and Druze minorities. Since the departure of the French, Alawite military officers have held the supreme power in Syria. In Iraq, the Sunnis were the ruling class until Uncle Sam removed Saddam in 2003 and elections brought a Shia government to power who have been determined to marginalize Iraq’s Sunni population.

It is more than a little ironic, therefore, that by supporting Sunni insurgents fighting the Assad regime in Syria and by bringing Shia rule to Iraq, American intervention has been instrumental in creating the Islamic State and the mess Obama now seeks to remediate.

The President’s strategy for mobilizing political and military support within the region to defeat the Islamic State is wholly unconvincing and completely unrealistic. Although the American trained Iraqi Army vastly outnumbers IS fighters, the army abandoned the Sunni areas in northern and central Iraq without a fight, threw away their arms and legged it south to Baghdad and beyond. Subsequent Iraqi Army attempts to recapture Tikrit, just up the Tigris from Baghdad, ended in complete failure. The record of Kurdish forces versus the Islamic State’s insurgents is little better. Without the insertion of American ground forces, whose deployment to Iraq looks politically unacceptable, at least for the moment, it is hard to imagine how the IS insurgency will be defeated.

Even more unrealistic are US plans to build up the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as a counter weight to the IS. The FSA is Sunni and has the same objective as the Islamic State, ousting the Assad regime in Damascus. Although the Assad government is determinedly secular, its senior officials are Alawites, an off shoot of Shia Islam, making the government in Damascus an important target of the Sunni insurgency. The FSA and the IS are actually allies. American aid to the FSA in the past has unquestionable contributed to the success of the Islamic State and continued aid will likely continue to do so.

The Assad regime is a natural US ally, not an adversary, in the battle with the IS. And of all the forces in the region resisting the IS only the Syrian army has had any success. Another natural American ally is Iran which is overwhelmingly Shia and closely allied with the governments in Baghdad and Damascus. Iran also has significant military capacity and a long border with the Islamic State in northeastern Iraq. Both Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel. As a result, because the United States has chosen to make Israel’s enemies America’s enemies, domestic political considerations make it impossible for the US to ally itself with either Iran or Syria, as useful and sensible as those alliances would be.

Perhaps the most unrealistic and bizarre of all are the Obama Administration’s plans to make Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey allies in the fight against the IS. The Turks have supported the Sunni insurgency against the Assad regime from the beginning. Turkey is a Sunni nation, with a moderate Islamic government. Could the Turkish government be convinced to abandon the Sunni insurgency in Syria? Doubtful. There are reports that the Turkish government has already told Uncle Sam that Turkish airfields will not be available to attack IS forces.

As for the conservatives Sunni Arab states in the Arabian Peninsula, their inhabitants have provided private financial support to the nascent Islamic State, channeled through Kuwait, for years. Their governments, with encouragement from the United States, are hostile to Iran. How could the Obama Administration imagine that these nations, who citizens regard all Shias with distain at best and fear Iran, would suddenly reverse course and help save Iran’s most important ally, the Shia government in Baghdad, from a Sunni insurgency?

Given the US’s wretched track record in the Middle East, including support for Israel’s recent massacre of innocents in Gaza, why would anyone here or abroad imagine yet another American military intervention would succeed when pervious invasions, raids, bombing campaigns, occupations and economic sanctions have utterly failed?

The coming battle with Islamic State insurgents showcases American political immaturity, is emotionally driven and lacks a coherent political and military strategy. It is also unnecessary.

How the U.S. enabled the Caliphate

The following is from Michael Scheuer’s 2008 book,
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq.
The the comments [in this typeface and the (added) emphasis
are by the author of this blog.

---

[4.1.4]
[U.S.] Intelligence officers who had been working
against Sunni extremism since the early 1990s
understood [in the early 2000s] that
the looming Iraq war was

certain to destroy
two of our most important and reliable de facto allies
in that anti-Islamist struggle, Iraq and Syria.

And they were the best kind of allies,
in that Washington did not have to arm, coerce, bribe, or cajole them
into acting in the most murderous manner against most Islamists.
While our purportedly dear and loyal friends
in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates
cared little about what Islamist militants did
in the world beyond the Arabian Peninsula—
letting aid and would-be fighters flow to them,
and funding the education of young Muslims worldwide in the jihadists’ creed—
Saddam’s Iraq and Hafez and then Bashir al-Assad’s Syria
were on a permanent war footing against them.

[4.1.5]
This is not to say that Saddam and the al-Assads were good guys—far from it.
Yes, it is true that both Baghdad and Damascus
did fund and train some Palestinian terrorists, secular and Islamic,
who then attacked Israel.
And Saddam did make cash payments
to the families of successful Palestinian suicide bombers.
Yes, Syria facilitated the flow of Iranian arms to Lebanese Hezbollah,
which in turn used them to drive the Israel Defense Forces out of southern Lebanon.
And yes, both regimes were willing to allow some Sunni extremists
from groups like al-Qaeda, the Egyptian Gama’at al-Islamiyah,
and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad
to transit their territories, at times in a leisurely fashion.
But what is even truer is that these Syrian and Iraqi actions
primarily were meant to hurt Israel, not the United States,
and that both the Baghdad and Damascus regimes viewed the Islamists
as a significant threat to their hold on power.
Neither state allowed Islamist groups bent on attacking the United States
to establish permanent training camps or safe havens on their territory,
and their security services dealt summarily with
Islamists who overstayed their welcome or
became involved in inappropriate activities while visiting.
Each state tended to deal even more harshly with its domestic Islamist militants.
In short,

Saddam’s Iraq and al-Assad’s Syria
were inherently helping the United States
by standing as very effective bulwarks against
any easy and secure westward movement
of the Sunni jihad’s main base in South Asia
toward the Levant, Israel, and Europe.

[4.1.6]
Although it is not often mentioned,
Saddam’s Iraq also stood as a bulwark protecting Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula from al-Qaeda insurgents.
One of bin Laden’s worst nightmares has always been
a Turkey that succeeds on its present course:
an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim state with the potential for proving that
Islam is compatible with a semblance of Western democratic institutions.
And of course,
Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states on the Arabian Peninsula
have been al-Qaeda’s principal targets
because Riyadh allowed U.S. and Western forces to deploy there starting in 1991
and because Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates
have helped Washington maintain and, as needed, expand
the U.S. military presence in the region since that year.
As long as Saddam ruled Iraq, al-Qaeda and its allies had to content themselves
with infiltrating Turkey from Europe and Iran,
and the Arabian Peninsula through its ports and airports.
Such infiltration could occur only in small numbers,
giving local security regimes a sporting chance to suppress the activity.
Without Saddam’s effective police state,
Islamist infiltration into Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula
stands a far better chance of larger and more regular success.

[4.1.7]
Thus, after 9/11, as U.S. forces launched the war against al-Qaeda,
Iraq and to a somewhat lesser extent Syria stood in two ways
as extremely important assets for Washington.
In the short term the two countries were unwilling
to host al-Qaeda fighters evacuating Afghanistan,
thereby preventing an even greater westward dispersal than occurred.
In the medium-to-long term,
the existence and strength of the two regimes denied what bin Laden most needed
to expand al-Qaeda’s organizational and paramilitary operations
into the Levant, Turkey, and states of the Arabian Peninsula; that is,
contiguous safe haven.
[As the Viet Cong had in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in an earlier war.]
Bin Laden and his fighters had learned the insurgent trade
during the Afghan’s jihad against the Soviets.
One of the major lessons bin Laden took from that war was
the vital importance of contiguous safe haven
for the survival, durability, succoring, and growth of the Afghan insurgency.
The ability of the Afghan mujahedin and their Arab allies
to establish facilities in Pakistan for refugees,
to care for their wounded,
and to train, rest, and store weapons and ordinance ensured that
no matter how sever a drubbing they received
at the hands of the Red Army and their Afghan Communist allies,
the insurgents would never face a situation
where they would have to fight to the death.
Relatively safe areas inside Pakistan meant that
Islamist fighters coming from outside South Asia
were often able to relocate their families
in the general vicinity of the war zone and visit them from time to time.
The impression that the Pakistani safe haven made on bin Laden’s thinking is clear.
On several occasions he publicly described
his inability to send a substantial number of fighters to Bosnia
because there was no Pakistan-like entity in the Balkans;
al-Qaeda could not stage out of or escape to Catholic Croatia or Orthodox Serbia.
Likewise, bin Laden has railed against Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon
for refusing to allow non-Palestinian mujahedin
to use their territory as a safe haven from which to attack Israel.
[One can easily see why:
Just imagine how the IDF would deal with
any neighboring state that allowed al-Qaeda to use it
as a base for operations against Israel.]

[4.1.8]
So even as U.S. and NATO military and intelligence services
continued to pursue and bomb al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the spring of 2003,
bin Laden could see that the pending U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
was going to present new opportunities for al-Qaeda and its allies
to project force westward and into the Arabian Peninsula.
After temporarily closing the Afghan window,
Allah was, in effect, preparing to open the Iraqi door.
The Bush[-43] administration’s invasion of Iraq, therefore,
yielded positive consequences for al-Qaeda from its first day,
and while these consequences may have been unintended by Washington,
they could certainly have been predicted.
[As of course they were,
but not by people likely to get the attention of the media/political “elite”.]
Absent the brutal but effective bulwark of Saddam’s regime,
al-Qaeda and the Islamists had an open field for acquiring contiguous safe haven
on the borders of the Levant, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran and with it
the ability to project power toward all points of the compass.

By destroying the regime of
America’s de facto ally in Baghdad
and weakening the helpful regime in Syria,
Washington facilitated
the relocation of the center of the Sunni jihad
from Afghanistan to Iraq,
in the middle of the Arab heartland,
a thousand kilometers westward.

The Bush[-43] administration’s Cold War trait of
preferring to fight and defeat nation-states
immeasurable strengthened
the much more dangerous transnational threat
posed by the Sunni Islamists.

...

---

Section 8.1
What is in Pandora’s Box?

...

[8.1.5]
The most dangerous aspect of the division between
the domestic focus of Americans and
the international fixation of their elite,
however, lies in the elite’s easy willingness
to sacrifice the lives of the former’s sons and daughters
in wars meant to install freedom and democracy in the Islamic world.
These men and women have consciously made the decision that
they will steadily spend the lives of our children
to bring democracy, women’s rights, parliamentary government, human rights,
and secularism
to those who want no part of any of them in the Westernized form that is offered.
And even if they did want them,
it is no part of the U.S. government’s responsibility or constitutional writ
to spend the lives and treasure of Americans to satisfy the desires of foreigners.

[8.1.6]
What we are seeing today [in 2008] in Afghanistan
is a perfect example of
the willingness of U.S. leaders to spend the lives of America’s young
for patently unobtainable goals
...
The U.S. mission in Afghanistan
was to kill Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
and as many of their lieutenants, foot soldiers, and Mullah Omar’s Taliban
as possible.
Out mission was strictly military in nature,
accomplishable given the immense power of the U.S. military,
and needing to be done quickly and in a way that would leave behind
enough smoldering physical wreckage and high enough piles of corpses to

1. make future Afghan regimes think twice about hosting America’s enemies and
2. leave the clear idea in the minds of all Muslims
   that they can think and say what they will of the United States,
   but the cost of actually killing or helping to kill Americans is horrendous.

[I differ from Dr. Scheuer on this point.
It seems to me that,
while surely al-Qaeda's attack on the U.S. on 9/11 demanded a punitive response,
that that response should be proportional to the harm al-Qaeda caused America.]

[8.1.7]
This limited and doable task was ever given a thought, however,
as our bipartisan governing elite blithely ignored
the absolute need for a thorough, north-to-south military flaying
of our Islamist enemies in Afghanistan
and instead undertook a project to build an America-like democracy
in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the deserts of Khandahar.
Instead of our soldiers and Marines fighting, being maimed, and dying
to eliminate the threat to America,
they are doing so to make sure Afghans can vote—
whether they want to or not, or even understand what they are doing—
and so that a defined portion of the Afghan parliament
is reserved for female Afghan parliamentarians.
In other words, the lives of our military-children are being sacrificed
so that U.S. leaders can blat and preen in international conferences
about the pride they take in bringing democracy and freedom
to Afghanistan’s unwashed Muslim masses.
In the era of the all-volunteer military, of course,
precious few U.S. leaders have any children serving in the military.
[I suspect the same holds true for those members of the media
who have been egging on America's foreign wars]
It is at least a point of curiosity to wonder how today’s gold-star mothers
can bear to have lost a son or daughter
to sate the democracy-mongering of the U.S. governing elite.
Knowing, in years past, that a son or daughter perished to help protect America
from the genuine national security threats posed by Nazism, Japanese [aggression], or Bolshevism
would have been difficult enough.
It would take an odd mindset indeed
for any parent to be able to take comfort in knowing their child was killed
so Mrs. Muhammad can vote, vamp, and abort.

[8.1.8]
Iraq is another case of the U.S. governing elite
embarking on a look-how-great-we-are exercise
designed to bring secular democracy to Muslims,
the blood-and-treasure to be paid, as always,
by Americans whose leaders care not a whit about protecting them or their children.
[I take exception with Dr. Scheuer here.
I think our leaders do care about protecting America and Americans;
the problem is that they care even more about

1. doing nothing that would interfere with
   Israel’s relentless grab of Palestinian territory and
2. protecting Israel and its citizens from
   the natural Muslim attempt to retaliate for that land grab.

]
As noted in [paragraphs 4.1.4 ff.],
Saddam Hussein and Bashir al-Assad
were strong, ruthless, and reliable de facto U.S. allies
in the war against Sunni Islamist militancy.
They were the cork in the bottle’s neck
that prevented the easy westward flow of Islamist fighters from South Asia
to the Levant, Turkey, Europe, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Neither regime needed convincing, arms, or funding from the United States
to resist and persecute the Islamists;
as is almost always the case regimes that are scared to death for their survival—
as were those of Saddam and al-Assad—
make the best allies.
Faced with the chance to use this cost-free bulwark,
the Bush-43 administration and Congress destroyed it
in the name of trying to outdo Woodrow Wilson [28]
[who asked the U.S. Congress to declare war on Germany in April 1917
in order to make "the world safe for democracy"] ....
Unsatisfied with simply annihilating al-Qaeda,
the one foe who could attack in the United States,
the Bush team [egged on by many in the media]
embarked on a second, democracy-crusading mission
that showed them to be ignorant not only of the Muslim world
but of how long it has taken to develop
a functioning, equitable republican society in their own country.
...