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Pan-Islamic merged mega thread

The biggest blundering I have witnessed is the panty-wearing crowd of cowards who would sit back and let ISIL throw men off roofs, put kids in cages on the top of buildings they are using, and enslave women.

Or, the long-winded 'fans of yester-year', who are fixated on 'how things were' and offer no way forward for 'how things are'.

Or, 'masters of history', such as the author of that article.  Men who study the history other men make, and claim to have done something significant, to understand 'how these things work', although most of their time in uniform was at age 14 at the local McDonalds.

I say "go fuck yourself" to all the armchair experts who have 'studied the problem', criticize the current efforts of any and all, from the safety of their den after supper and the news without offering the 'magic DS solution' to fix things. 

Sometimes you can't put out the fire, its out of control but you can contain it and do whatever you can to make sure your home doesn't go up next.  Perfect solution?  Nope, but this isn't a perfect world.  Sometime I might help my neighbor if his house is on fire, and damn straight part of that reason is so mine doesn't go up too.

Seems like my signature block is a fitting end to this post and my thoughts on the comments of this 'expert'.  :2c:
 
Syria and Iraq may never return, but what will the post war shape of the region look like? One possible answer (a Sunni "center" pusing against Shiite edges on the East and West)is presented here, although given the multiplicity of groups, ethnicities and access to resources it isn't likely to be a series of clean boundary lines:

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-destruction-of-the-iraqi-and-syrian-states/

The Destruction of the Iraqi and Syrian States
By Kamran Bokhari
Feb. 18, 2016

Both countries have disintegrated to the point that their governments no longer have control.

While the international community seeks to find a solution to the conflicts raging in the Middle East, Syria and Iraq have – for all practical purposes – effectively dissolved as nation-states. These two countries – conceived after the implosion of the Ottoman Empire following World War I – are not simply casualties of the rise of the Islamic State and its self-proclaimed caliphate. Rather, they have collapsed under the weight of a complex and interlocking set of dynamics involving transnational jihadism, geopolitical sectarian struggles and the meltdown of autocracy in the Arab world. Even if the Islamic State is defeated and Turkey and Iran – the two major Muslim powers with the greatest stake in Syria and Iraq – are able to reach an understanding, the Levantine-Mesopotamian land mass will still be divided between multiple Sunni emirates, Kurdish enclaves and Shiite dominions.

Defending the Integrity of Nation-States

Over the past several weeks, the media has highlighted four developments with regards to Syria and Iraq: 1) Rebels have lost significant ground to Syrian regime forces backed by Russian air support, especially in the strategic Aleppo area near the Turkish border; 2) The United States and Russia engaged in negotiations toward a cessation of hostilities in Syria; 3) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, on the prodding of the United States, said they would send forces to Syria to fight the Islamic State and; 4) The Islamic State lost control over the city of Ramadi to the Iraqi government.

Taken together, these events would seem to suggest that considerable progress is being made by the Iraqi and Syrian governments – supported, respectively, by the American-led coalition and Russia – in restoring the territorial integrity of both states. Certainly, the world powers are dealing with the cross-border conflicts on the basis of the idea that national boundaries must be respected. Regimes may come and go but the nation-state is a fixed sacrosanct entity that cannot be altered. Indeed, in 1991, the United States led a 29-nation military coalition (the largest since World War II), which restored the sovereignty of Kuwait after it was forcibly annexed by Baathist Iraq, with the intent of making it Iraq’s 19th province.

Today, IS controls large tracts of territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq and has effectively erased the borders established by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Again, the international community is invoking the principle of inviolability of borders drawn up by European colonial powers a century ago. More important, the expectation is that IS will eventually be defeated, a new republic will emerge in Syria as a result of a negotiated settlement between the regime and rebels and the Sunnis of Iraq will rejoin the post-Baathist republic. In other words, once the dust of war settles, Syria and Iraq will yet again be sovereign states.

From a normative point of view, a return to the status quo prior to the wars in Iraq and Syria is what the international community must be working toward. If the world accepts the dissolution of the Syrian-Iraqi border, then that would set a precedent for other fault lines that run through the international system. Not pushing back against transnational currents would lead to greater anarchy around the world. Therefore, there is no choice for the United States and other global and regional players but to try to reverse the course of the region and defend the integrity of nation-states.

That said, there is a great need to be mindful of the massive variance between what global powers want and what they can achieve. The conditions on the ground – shaped by the imperatives of multiple state and non-state actors as well as the constraints of extra-regional powers, including the United States – are as such that it is unlikely that Syria and Iraq can be put back together. These two countries may continue to exist on paper but the areas that they will actually control will be much smaller. In order to understand why the maps of Syria and Iraq will not be going back to the way they were before the conflicts erupted, let us consider both countries separately.

Iraq: A Broken State

We begin with Iraq, where the U.S. move to effect regime change in 2003 led to the toppling of the Baathist regime led by former President Saddam Hussein. Washington spent eight years and $2 trillion in a military intervention that sought to replace an autocratic polity with a democratic one. The result was a fragile Shiite-dominated state whose authority is largely limited to Baghdad and the south, while an Erbil-based autonomous Kurdish region in the north has been trying to enhance its territory and self-rule capabilities. The Sunni regions in the central and western parts of the country had never really been brought into the new order but since the summer of 2014 the situation has gone from bad to worse.

The Islamic State re-emerged in the Sunni areas with its seizure in June 2014 of the country’s second largest city, Mosul, and its declaration of the caliphate. It is true that since that time, Iraqi and Kurdish security forces have prevented IS from further expanding and have even taken back significant areas. However, the fact of the matter is that neither the Shia nor the Kurds are willing to make the political compromises with the Sunnis or with each other needed to ensure that IS will be defeated. The bottom line is that Iraq is a state broken along triangular fault lines and is dominated by three different entities.

That said, there is still an international consensus that the resolution to the conflict in Iraq lies in the Sunnis being brought back into the fold of the post-Baathist republic built by the Americans, as well as having Baghdad and Erbil work out their differences.

Syria: Fractured Beyond Repair

In sharp contrast to Iraq, the problem in Syria is that there is no political system that the various warring sides can be brought back into. The regime of Bashar al-Assad is at the heart of the dispute, and if there is to be a settlement to the war radiating out of Syria then a new political dispensation will have to emerge out of a power-sharing arrangement between the regime and the rebels. But the situation is far more complex than a classic civil war between two sides.

The Syrian rebel landscape is highly fragmented with countless groups, most of whom are Salafist-jihadists with different agendas controlling territories in different parts of the country. In the northeast, we have Kurdish separatists. But the largest obstacle to uniting the country is the fact that IS, with its transnational agenda, controls a big chunk of territory in the provinces of Raqqa and Deir el-Zour in the east, which is organically linked to its holdings in western Iraq. The country is fractured into different pieces. What is more significant is that despite the recent gains made by the regime, it is not in a position to retake lands from any of the other opposing sides and thus what we have is a precarious balance where all sides are weak.

There is also no outside power that can easily impose order and patch the various parts back together again. The United States has been hoping that the regional players will take the lead in dealing with the situation in Syria. But the regional powers themselves are divided. The most glaring divide is the sectarian one between the Saudi-led Arab Sunni camp, which backs the Syrian rebels, and the Iranian-led Shiite camp, which hopes to strengthen the Assad regime. Even on the Sunni side, Saudi Arabia faces competition from Turkey, which is pursuing its own interests in Syria.

Being the strongest power in the region, Turkey has the capability to play the biggest role in Syria. However, it has to overcome a number of hurdles before it can project power on its southern flank. It must first deal with the Syrian Kurds who hold territory right on the Turkish-Syrian border and are deeply linked to Turkey’s own Kurdish separatists. Russian support for the Assad regime and the Syrian Kurds further complicates matters for Turkey, which is trying to manage the chaos south of its border.

In fact, for the Turks to effectively pursue their goal of regime change in Damascus, they have to deal with Kurdish separatism in Syria, which directly impacts Turkish domestic security. In the event that they are able to suppress Syria’s Kurds, they will then have to turn to the Islamic State, which will have benefited from a weakening of the Kurds. Getting Turkey’s Syrian rebel allies to fight IS will not be easy given that the Turks do not have a monopoly on influence over the rebels. Saudi Arabia also has some clout over rebel groups. IS may be weakened but it is unlikely to be eliminated as a stakeholder.

In addition, a weakened IS does not mean that a more coherent rebel configuration will materialize. New groups may emerge from old ones. While the rebels will continue to hold different territories in the eastern half of the country, the Assad regime can be expected to remain fortified in the western half. While the Turks become increasingly engaged in rebel-held territories, they will have to eventually confront the Assad regime, which also means dealing with their traditional rivals, the Iranians.

A Return to the Levant and Mesopotamia

Five hundred years ago, the Turks during the Ottoman era occupied the territory that is now known as Syria and Iraq. This allowed them to largely limit the Safavid Empire, which ruled over what is today Iran, to its Persian core. Fast forward half a millennium, the situation is almost the reverse. It is the Iranians who have greater presence in both Syria and Iraq and are thus blocking the Turkish path into the Arab world. The Iranians are not about to allow the erosion of their influence in the Levant. In other words, the Turks will at some point have to confront the Iranians. Regardless of how this new Turkish-Iranian competition plays out, it will not lead to the restoration of the Syrian nation-state.

In fact, it will worsen the fracturing in neighboring Iraq. Turkish-allied Syrian rebels can be expected to align with their counterparts in Iraq to weaken both the Islamic State and confront the Iranian-supported Shiite government in Baghdad. The leadership of Iraqi Sunnis may not be in the hands of IS but that does not translate into the Iraqi government expanding its writ into the Sunni areas. The Sunnis on both sides of the border – even if the so-called caliphate is somehow dismantled – will not go their separate ways. On the contrary, they have an imperative to work together to fight their respective Shiite enemies.

The Iraqi Sunnis have the Shia to their east, while the Syrian Sunnis have to deal with the Alawites to the west. Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis will undoubtedly use each other as strategic depth to confront their respective foes. At the same time, the Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis cannot be treated as monoliths. Even within their respective realms, different groups can be expected to be in control of different areas. IS may be a temporary construct but it is one that is built on a sectarian logic overlaid by geography, which is far more permanent.
 
Conclusion

These tensions were suppressed for decades by the post-colonial states of Syria and Iraq, which kept these ethnic and sectarian forces at bay. Regime change in Baghdad, followed by the efforts to undo its unintended consequences in Damascus, has led to the dismantling of these two neighboring states dominated by rival wings of the Baath Party. What remains is a landmass stretching from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea divided between different warlord-type forces. The Kurds control a good chunk of the northeastern part of this area, though their situation is very vulnerable given the lack of natural boundaries of defense and the fact that they are taking advantage of chaos. The Sunnis control the central parts of this territory while the Shia are in possession of the areas along the far eastern and western parts. 

This is the new emerging map of what used to be called Syria and Iraq, which Turkey and Iran will be competing over for the foreseeable future.
 
An update on IS-linked groups in Southeast Asia:

As if the recent 1MDB scanndal wasn't enough for this Malaysian PM...

CNN

Malaysia says ISIS plot to kidnap Prime Minister was foiled

By Euan McKirdy, CNN

Updated 0608 GMT (1408 HKT) March 9, 2016

(CNN)Malaysian authorities foiled an ISIS plot to kidnap Prime Minister Najib Razak, along with two other ranking officials, the country's deputy prime minister told Parliament on Tuesday.

The operation also uncovered plans to initiate multiple attacks in various parts of the country, including the capital, Kuala Lumpur, just over a year ago.

"On Jan. 30, 2015, a total of 13 people with ties to Daesh had planned to kidnap the leaders, including the prime minister, home minister and defense minister," Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi -- who is also the home minister and one of the targets -- told the country's parliament Tuesday. Daesh is another name for the terror group.

(...SNIPPED)
 
Vietnam-era OV10s proving their value in CAS for the US again:

Daily Beast via MSN.com

America’s Antique Planes Battling ISIS
The Daily Beast

David Axe
1 day ago


War was just an experiment for two of the U.S. military’s oldest and most unusual warplanes. A pair of OV-10 Broncos—small, Vietnam War-vintage, propeller-driven attack planes—recently spent three months flying top cover for ground troops battling ISIS militants in the Middle East.

The OV-10s’ deployment is one of the latest examples of a remarkable phenomenon. The United States—and, to a lesser extent, Russia—has seized the opportunity afforded it by the aerial free-for-all over Iraq and Syria and other war zones to conduct live combat trials with new and upgraded warplanes, testing out the aircraft in potentially deadly conditions before committing to expensive manufacturing programs.

(...SNIPPED)
 
Remarkable claim by German media that a list of over 22,000 ISIS "applicants" has been recovered.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/isis-list-germany/473184/

The Islamic State’s Orientation Questionnaire
German media said they have a list of 22,000 names of foreign ISIS fighters, gleaned from questionnaires the terrorist organization asks new recruits to fill out.
J. Weston Phippen
Mar 10, 2016

Name, education, references, and a preference of fighting over suicide operations are some of the 23 questions being asked of ISIS recruits, according to news reports.

German news organizations, including the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung and NDR and WDR, the public broadcasters, said they obtained thousands of documents that include a list of 22,000 names of potential ISIS recruits.

NBC News and Britain’s Sky News also said they received similar lists, secreted to them on a USB drive by a former ISIS recruit named Abu Hamed who said he stole it from the head of ISIS’s internal security police. 

The documents, if authenticated, are likely to provide Western intelligence agencies the closest look at Western recruits to the terrorist organization, their motivations, their connection to others in the group, and ISIS’s sympathizers. News of the documents also comes a week after The New York Times reported that U.S. Special Operations forces had captured a “significant” ISIS operative in Iraq and were interrogating him at a temporary detention facility in the city of Erbil.

German authorities have looked at the list and, Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, called it “very likely to be real documents.” Thomas de Maiziére, the German interior minister, confirmed the authenticity of the documents, The Guardian reported, and said the list would help explain “the underlying structures of this terrorist organization.” All the documents have been turned over to authorities.

The BBC reported the documents seem to have come from late 2013 or early 2014. They look like initial recruitment forms, and show not only names of recruits, but ask 23 questions that cover things like who recommended them, if they have any previous combat experience, how they traveled out of their home countries, and their mother’s maiden name, as well as their blood type. Sky News also reported that many of the telephone numbers listed still worked, some of them belonging to family, but also “a significant number … used by the jihadis themselves.”

Some of the names on the list, like that of Abdel Bary, a young British rapper turned jihadist, shows up on the list. Bary is presumed alive, but authorities don’t know where he is. Others are fighters known already to be dead, or who are standing trial, like Kermin Marc B and Abdelkarim B, who are standing trial in Germany, the BBC reported.

Among the names on the list were at least 16 Britons, six Canadians, and four Americans. German authorities say that, in all, more than 800 of its citizens have left to fight for ISIS. Part of the difficulty of prosecuting these people though, is that once they return, it’s hard to prove they fought for the organization. The list will likely help with that.

An independent Syrian website called Zaman al-Wasl published copies of the questionnaires Tuesday. It also said it had exclusively received the personal information of 1,736 ISIS fighters.

These recruits came from 40 countries: A quarter were Saudi, and the list also included Tunisians, Moroccans, and Egyptians. When a potential recruit crosses into ISIS territory, Zaman al-Wasl reported, the border administration wants to know everything about that person, “even what he wants to be in ISIS, a fighter or a suicide bomber.”
 
Turkey's response to the 2nd horrific car bombing in their capital in a couple of months:

Source: Associated Press

Turkey carries out airstrikes after deadly bombing in Ankara
By Suzan Fraser (Associated Press) | Updated March 14, 2016 - 11:31pm

ANKARA — Turkey lashed out at Kurdish targets on Monday, bombing military positions in northern Iraq and rounding up dozens of militants across Turkey, after a suicide car bombing in the heart of the capital drew the country even deeper into the complex Syrian conflict.

There was no claim of responsibility for the attack on bus stops that killed 37 people in Ankara on Sunday, but a senior government official said the two attackers — a man and a woman — were suspected of links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

(...SNIPPED)
 
The latest air loss in the Saudi-led air campaign over Yemen:

Defense News

UAE Mirage Fighter Jet Crashes Over Yemen
Awad Mustafa, Defense News 9:37 a.m. EDT March 14, 2016


DUBAI — A United Arab Emirates fighter jet has crashed in the southern port city of Aden during a combat operation in the early morning hours of Monday, killing two pilots.

A statement from the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen confirmed that the fighter jet was one of the French-made Dassault Mirage 2000-9s participating in the operations.

The UAE operates alongside the Mirage 2000-9s F-16 block 60s in their Operation Restoring Hope missions over Yemen as well as other logistical and transport aircraft.


"The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces announced today that a fighter jet taking part in the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia ... in Yemen was missing," a statement on the official WAM news agency said Monday afternoon, without giving further details.

(...SNIPPED)
 
A horrifying possibility: the pan Islamic civil wars will not stop for any reason until demographic exhaustion (i.e. a 30% casualty rate) is achieved. This artricle suggests that many of the historical condition to meet this threshold are already in place:

http://atimes.com/2016/03/the-30-solution-when-war-without-end-ends-spengler/
Part 1
The 30% solution — when war without end ends: Spengler
By David P. Goldman on March 13, 2016 in AT Top Writers, David P. Goldman, Middle East

During the Cold War, the assumption that nations are rational actors dominated foreign policy research, and with good reason: the United States and the Soviet Union pursued their rivalry by rational means. Mathematical simulation provided baseline scenarios for conflict management. Today, the emergence of militant Islam as a major (and perhaps the most important) strategic threat to the United States challenges the old assumption of rationality. Where this assumption prevails, as in the effort to bring Iran into the strategic architecture of Western Asia, it is deeply controversial.

Cold War planners had the benefit of an extensive body of academic work and a consensus that embraced the majority of practitioners. Today, academic research into the prospective behavior of actors with limited rationality is rare. Policymakers are forced back to guesswork about practical issues, for example, the prospect of supporting “moderate” Islamists against less-moderate Islamists. Public debate over pressing issues is highly colored by ideological rhetoric.

Analyzing irrational impulses in the context of real-world events is an inherently contradictory exercise. Paranoid schizophrenics may act with great rationality in the service of an irrational delusion. Distinguishing an irrational impulse from the rational means placed at its service requires highly subjective judgments. When an irrational impulse is combined with irrational leadership (for example, Adolf Hitler’s personal conduct of the war in the Eastern Front), we encounter yet another order of complexity. I have argued that Franz Rosenzweig’s Existentialist sociology of religion provides indispensable insights into this phenomena.[ii]

Nonetheless, the foreign policy failures of the United States and its coalition partners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere during the past fifteen years have taught us that rationality is overrated. We observe behavior on the part of combatants that appears suicidal. Here some historical examples provide a helpful starting point. We encounter in many of the great conflicts of the past elements of irrationality, including overtly suicidal actions, which provide insights into the kind of conflicts that have emerged during the past two decades and are likely to continue through the rest of the present century. A fresh look at great conflicts of the past should provide a corrective to our past preoccupation with rationality.

Nations do not fight to the death, but they frequently fight until their pool of prospective fighters has reached a point of practical exhaustion. In most cases, this involves reaching the 30% mark where casualties are concerned.

Wars of this character demarcate many turning points in world history. They include the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and, at least in some respects, the two World Wars of the 20th century. The 30% solution appears yet again in Germany’s casualty figures during the Second World War. Germany lost 5,330,000 of 17,718,714 men aged 15-44 years, or again 30% of the total.

There are disturbing similarities in these wars to the present situation in Western Asia.

There is no simple common characterization that applies to all the wars of demographic exhaustion, but there surely are common elements to be found in all or most of them. These include the belief that the alternative to pursuing the war would be national ruin, as well as the belief of ordinary soldiers that the war will lead to their social and economic advancement for ordinary soldiers (the “field marshal’s baton in the rucksack”).  These were existential wars rather than wars of choice in the minds of the major combatants. Wide historical surveys risk selecting data that fits broad patterns, to be sure, but the parallelisms are sufficiently compelling to make the effort worthwhile.

What we know of these wars challenges the usual way in which we think about rationality in politics. With hindsight, the decision to initiate and continue hostilities on this scale seems an act of madness. In most cases, moreover, the greatest number of casualties occurred after hope of ultimate victory had diminished or disappeared. The principal actors, to be sure, evinced a certain kind of rationality, albeit of a perverse order: They believed that failure to fight and win would undermine their national raison d’etre. In fact, their fear of national decline was not entirely misplaced.

In many cases the consequence of war was a catastrophic decline marked by falling birth rates and declining population, wealth and power after the cessation of hostilities. The population of Greece declined sharply after the Peloponnesian War. After the Napoleonic Wars, France entered a long period of demographic stagnation and relative decline. The American South suffered a long and terrible economic setback. And Germany came out of the 20th century in aggravated demographic decline.
 
The belief among combatants in wars of exhaustion that nothing less than national survival was at stake was not wholly irrational, although in some cases the cause of national decline appears more psychological than objective. The Greek city-states after Alexander appear to have lost their will to live; France, after dominating Europe for a century and half, entered a long period of demoralization after Napoleon’s defeat. Germany has regained economic power and international standing, but fails to reproduce.

We may conjecture that a combination of objective economic stress and a subjective crisis of national identity join to create conditions for a perfect storm. In that case combatants are motivated to fight to the death, and a very large proportion of them have had the opportunity to do so. The proportion we observe most often is 30% of the military-age male population, as in the Napoleonic Wars, the South in the American Civil War, and Germany in the Second World War. Casualty rates in the ancient world were considerably higher, in part because the pool of military-age citizens was not typically needed for manual labor.

Detecting such patterns has great practical importance, because perfect storm conditions are possible, indeed difficult to avoid, in the contemporary world—notably in the Sunni-Shia conflict in Western Asia. The intra-Muslim conflict, to be sure, remains scattered among geographically-contained civil wars and proxy conflicts, but it has the potential to erupt into a much larger war of exhaustion. The combination of economic stress and the cultural challenges to traditional life in the Muslim world is explosive, and might give rise to civilization wars on the scale of the past.

Before attempting to identify common patterns among these great wars, a summary of the scale of the conflicts is in order.

Athens in the Peloponnesian War

The Casualties: Athens lost half its adult male population in the course of the war. According to Barry L. Strauss, “Hoplite numbers were cut by 50% or more between 431 and 394, from 22,000 to c. 9,250. There were c. 15,000 thetes in …it is difficult to imagine more than 5,000-7,000 thetes in 394. Hence, the adult male citizen population of Athens after the Peloponnesian War was 14,000-16,250. It had been over 40,000 in 434, so the cost of the Peloponnesian War to Athens in citizen population was some 60%.[iii]
 
The Causes: The expansion of the Athenian Empire, in the conventional reading, led Sparta to believe that Athens had grown too powerful. Tribute from Athens’ colonies paid for half of the city’s food supply and made it possible for Athenian democracy to support a large part of its population with imports. The economy shifted away from a base among small-holding farmers to slaveholders and subsidized soldiers.[iv] Aristophanes, a traditionalist, railed against the changes in Athenian society. One of his stage characters in The Wasps declares, “We have now a thousand towns that pay us tribute; let them command each of these to feed twenty Athenians; then twenty thousand of our citizens would be eating nothing but hare, would drink nothing but the purest of milk, and always crowned with garlands.”

Thucydides argued that the Athenian mob’s desire for subsidies motivated the disastrous Sicily Campaign of 413-415 B.C.E. Athens voted to attack Syracuse “on a slight pretext, which looked reasonable, [but] was in fact aiming at conquering the whole of Sicily …The general masses and the average soldier himself saw the prospect of getting pay for the time being and of adding to the empire so as to secure permanent paid employment in the future.”[v]

The consequences: Thirty-three years after the Spartan (and Persian) victory over Athens in 404 B.C.E., Thebes defeated Sparta and liberated its helot population. Macedon conquered Athens and Thebes in 338 B.C.E., and Greece began a rapid demographic decline. Aristotle blamed Sparta’s defeat at the hands of Thebes on its declining population (“the city could not support one shock, and was ruined for want of men”[vi]). Modern archaeologists note “the disappearance in the [eastern Peloponnese], by about 250 B.C.E., of the dense pattern of rural sites, and of the intensive agriculture that implies.” This rural depopulation was associated with “a growing divide between a small class of wealthy individuals and an increasingly impoverished free lower class of citizens, declining in numbers relative to slaves and immigrants.”[vii]

The 2nd-century Greek general Polybius later complained, “In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us … For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number.”[viii]

The Peloponnesian War is of special interest to policy-making today because a certain interpretation of the war has been advanced to justify America’s efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East. Two recent histories of the war, by Donald Kagan[ix] and Victor Davis Hanson[x], were prominently associated with the policies of the late George W. Bush administration. Prof. Hanson went so far as to claim that Athens’ efforts to export its democratic political system helped bring about the conflict with oligarchical Sparta. This interpretation requires us to reject the account of Thucydides, who blames the rapacity of the Athenian democrats and the mob they alimented for the campaign against Syracuse, a fellow democracy.

Hanson and Kagan treat the Syracuse disaster as an unfortunate mistake rather than view it with Thucydides as a tragic outcome of Athens’ inherent character flaws. Hanson blames the disaster on the malign influence of Alcibiades, and Kagan blames the Athenian general Nicias. I think it soundest to follow Thucydides. Scholars with an ideological stake in notion that democracy is a universal political salve find themselves defending the indefensible when a democracy does it. Perhaps the closest analogy to Athens’ drive for empire is the Confederate dream of a Caribbean slave empire before the American Civil War—a depredation on the part of another democracy. More on this is found below.

France in the Napoleonic Wars

The Casualties: After Waterloo France probably was demographically exhausted. France suffered between 1.4-1.7 military deaths as well as a very large number of civilians, out of a total population of 29 million. As noted, the population aged 20 to 40 comprised two-fifths of the total population (a characteristic number for pre-industrial societies. Assuming gender parity, men of military age would have comprised about one-fifth of the population. The total military manpower pool of Napoleonic France was less than six million men, so civilian and military casualties together exceeded 30% of the total number.

The Causes: From a modern vantage point it seems odd to think of Napoleon’s conquests as an existential rather than an elective war. The founding of the French state, though, was bound up with a quasi-religious belief in France’s divine mission. As Aldous Huxley wrote of Cardinal Richelieu, “In working for France, he was doing God’s external will. Gesta Dei per Francos was an axiom, from which it followed that France was divine, and those who worked for French greatness were God’s instruments, and that the means they employed could not but be in accord with God’s will.”[xi] Frances’ war aims “had been rationalized into a religious principle by means of the old crusading faith in the divine mission of France and the divine right of kings,”[xii]

Religious wars had consumed France during the sixteenth century. In 1618, Bohemia’s rebellion against Austria began the Thirty Years War. France determined to challenge Austria and Spain for pride of place in Christendom. Richelieu subsidized the Protestant side, paying Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus to intervene against Austria. The first half of the Thirty Years War was fought between Protestants and French proxies; the second half (starting with the French intervention of 1635) was fought largely between Austria and Spain.

In Spain, France found an antagonist whose ambitions mirrored her own. As the political theorist Juan de Salazar wrote in 1619, “The Spanish were elected to realize the New Testament just as Israel had been elected to realize the Old Testament. The miracles with which Providence had favored Spanish policy confirmed this analogy of the Spanish people to the Jewish people, so that ‘the similarity of events in all epochs, and the singular fashion in which God has maintained the election and governance of the Spanish people, declare it to be his chosen people by law of grace, just as the other was his elect in the times of Scripture … From this it is proper to conclude from actual circumstances as well as sacred Scripture that the Spanish monarchy will endure for many centuries and will be the last monarchy.’”[xiii]

Salazar evinced “a not uncommon attitude at court and among part of the Castilian elite.”[xiv]  France emerged from the Thirty Years War as the dominant land power in Europe, while Spain began its long national decline.

Europe’s population rose from 110 million to 190 million during the 18th century, in part due to gains in the productivity of agriculture; the French population rose from 19 million to 28 million, of which two-fifths were between the ages of 20 and 40. Unemployment rose sharply during the economic crisis of 1785-1794, and provided the raw material for the Revolution’s mass conscription.[xv] During the Thirty Years War, the Imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein created mass mercenary armies that lived off the land, transforming warfare while starving the civilian population. Napoleon did Wallenstein one better, employing mass citizen armies to conquer France’s neighbors, thereby attracting a multinational horde to his banner.

Napoleon famously (if perhaps apocryphally) said that one can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. Like Wallenstein, Napoleon became the most powerful man in Europe by undermining traditional society and summoning the young men freed by the dissolution of civil society.  Schiller well depicted Wallenstein in his 1799 dramatic trilogy as the creature of his army as much as his creator. Napoleon could recruit soldiers with a field marshal’s baton in their rucksacks without offering them new worlds to conquer.

So powerful was the ambition of ordinary soldiers under Napoleon that he retained his popularity despite the Russian blunder. After the retreat from Russia he was able to recruit an army of 350,000 by 1813. This time his German satrapies revolted, and defeated him at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1814 the European powers exiled him to Elba, yet he returned to France a year later and quickly raised 200,000 more soldiers. After Waterloo France’s demographic resources probably were too drained to support another mass army.
 
The Consequences: After Europe’s population explosion in the 19th century, the Great Demographic Transition began in France, where fertility fell sharply relative to the rest of Europe. As Gregory Macris observed, “France, once the most populous nation in Western Europe, saw its population growth inexplicably slow in the early 1800s. Awareness of population decline in the halls of government and in the popular press led to strategic heartburn. The leadership class fretted over potential threats from the faster-growing Germans and pondered ‘the end of France as a nation.’[xvi]

Attempts to explain French demographic decline in terms of economics, urbanization or other objective indicators do not provide adequate answers. The most recent research by the French national demographics institute asserts that the reasons were psychological rather than objective. In a March 2012 study, Gilles Pison of the French National Institute of Demographic Studies wrote:

In the mid-18th century, women in both [France and Germany] had 5 or 6 children on average. But by the end of the century, the practice of birth control was spreading in France, and fertility fell from 5.4 children per women in the 1750s to 4.4 in the 1800s and 3.4 in the 1850s. In Germany, on the other hand, it was not until the late 19th century that German women, in turn, started to limit their family size. This timing differential is often attributed to the early spread of Enlightenment ideas across France, or to the lifting of religious constraints.[xvii]

Contemporary observes in the middle of the 19th century compared France’s decline to that of Greece after the Peloponnesian War. A British historian remarked in 1857 that the infertility “observed with regard to the oligarchies of Sparta and Rome had its effect even on the more extended citizenship of Athens, and it even affected, in our times, the two hundred thousand electors who formed the oligarchy of France during the reign of Louis Philippe.”[xviii]

The collapse of the French conceit of national election led to a long national demoralization and the eclipse of France as the dominant European power. With hindsight, one can argue that Napoleon’s wars were existential after all.

 
Part 2

The American Confederacy

The Casualties:  Gary Gallagher summarized the South’s losses as follows: “The Confederacy mobilized between 750,000 and 850,000 men, a figure representing 75 to 85% of its available draft-age white military population (only the presence of slaves to keep the economy running permitted such an astonishing mobilization. At least 258,000 of them perished during the war…and those wounded in combat totaled nearly 200,000. Deaths thus ran to about one in three of all men in uniform.” In all, the South lost close to 30% of its military-age men, the same proportion as France during the Napoleonic Wars.[xix]

The Causes: If Napoleon’s soldiers carried a field marshal’s baton in their rucksacks, the Confederates carried an overseer’s whip. Southerners had been fighting for slave territory in Texas, Kansas and other disputed territories for a generation. They continued to fight for the chance to acquire slaves. Lincoln’s election portended the end of the expansion of slave territories, without which the Southern economic system would strangle in a decade or two. Jefferson Davis offered to acquiesce to Lincoln’s election if only Lincoln would sanction the conquest of Cuba as a slave territory. The definitive history of Southern ambitions is found in Robert E. May’s 1973 book, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire (1973). He writes, for example:

The Memphis Daily Appeal, December 30, 1860, wrote that a slave “empire” would arise “from San Diego, on the Pacific Ocean, thence southward, along the shore line of Mexico and Central America, at low tide, to the Isthmus of Panama; thence South—still South!—along the western shore line of New Granada and Ecuador, to where the southern boundary of the latter strikes the ocean; thence east over the Andes to the head springs of the Amazon; thence down the mightiest of inland seas, through the teeming bosom of the broadest and richest delta in the world, to the Atlantic Ocean.” [xx]

For those who do not believe that democracies start wars, the Confederacy is a stumbling block. Like Pericles’ Athens, it democratically decided to conduct an imperial war of enslavement with the enthusiastic support of its lower classes. Like Napoleon’s soldiers, the Confederates fought with bravery and abandon until the point of demographic exhaustion. It is interesting to observe that the bloodiest battles (Cold Harbor, Chickamauga, the Wilderness) all took place after the South’s chance for victory had fallen markedly due to the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July 1863. The rate of casualties increased sharply in the second half of 1863 and the first half of 1864, as the South responded to its losses by fighting all the more desperately.

The consequences: In the American South, per capita income was higher than the Midwest’s in 1840, but fell to half that of the Midwest by 1880. By 1950, it was still only 70% of that of the Midwest.[xxi]

The Middle East today

The Causes: Several important countries in the Middle East are subject to perfect storm of demographics and economics. The population cohort aged 15 to 24 years in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran jumped from 15 million in 1995 to about 30 million in 2010. This bulge population has poor prospects. Youth unemployment, according to the World Bank, stands at 30% in Iran and 35% in Iraq. The concept hardly applies to Syria, whose economy is in ruins after five years of a civil war that has displaced perhaps 10 million Syrians out of a population of 22 million. Never, perhaps, has such a large military-age population encountered such poor future prospects in a war zone dominated by non-state extremist actors.
 
The prospects for economic stabilization of the region’s main actors are poor. The official unemployment rate is 11%, but only 37% of the population is considered economically active, an extremely low ratio given the concentration of Iran’s population in working-age brackets. Social indicators point to deteriorating conditions of life are alarming. The number of marriages has fallen by 20% since 2012. “In Iran, the customary marriage age range is 20-34 for men and 15-29 for women … 46% of men and 48% of women in those age ranges remain unmarried,” according to a June 2, 2015 report in AL-Monitor.[xxii]

Economic problems explain part of the falling marriage rate, but the corrosion of traditional values also is a factor. Iranian researchers estimated late in 2015 that one out of eight Iranian women was infected by chlamydia, a common venereal disease that frequently causes infertility.[xxiii]

When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, the average Iranian woman had seven children; today the total fertility rate has fallen to just 1.6 children, the sharpest drop in demographic history. Iran still has a young population, but it has no children to succeed them. By mid-century Iran will have a higher proportion of elderly dependents than Europe, an impossible and unprecedented burden for a poor country.

At $30 a barrel, moreover, Iran’s oil and gas revenues are less than $30 billion a year, by my calculations, and less than half of the country’s $64 billion budget for fiscal year 2014.[xxiv] Iran’s sudden aging will be followed by Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia. Iran is the most literate Muslim country, thanks in large part to an ambitious literacy campaign introduced by the Shah in the early 1970s. Literacy is the best predictor of fertility in the Muslim world: Muslim women who attend high school and university marry late or not at all and have fewer children.[xxv]

Between 2005 and 2020, Iran’s population aged 15 to 24, that is, its pool of potential army recruits, will have fallen by nearly half. Meanwhile Pakistan’s military-age population will rise by nearly 50%. In 2000, Iran had half the military-age men of its eastern Sunni neighbor; by 2020 it will have one-fourth as many. Iran’s bulge generation of youth born in the 1980s is likely to be its last, and its window for asserting Shiite power in the region will close within a decade.

More important, 45% of Iran’s population will be over the age of 65 years by 2050, according to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects constant fertility scenario. No poor country has ever carried such a burden of dependent elderly, because poor countries invariably have a disproportionate number of young people. Iran is the first country to get old before it got rich, and the economic consequences will be catastrophic. This is a danger of which Iran’s leaders are keenly aware.

Saudi Arabia has the opposite problem: it has a high fertility rate and a growing cohort of young people, and may lack the financial resources to meet their expectations. At present oil prices, Saudi Arabia will exhaust its monetary reserves within five years, according a 2015 report by the International Monetary fund.[xxvi]

There are no official data on poverty in Saudi Arabia, but one Saudi newspaper used social service data to estimate that 6 million of the kingdom’s 20 million inhabitants are poor, some desperately so. After the 2011 “Arab Spring” disturbances, Riyadh increased social spending by $37 billion–or $6,000 for every poor person in the kingdom–in order to preempt the spread of discontent to its own territory.

Saudi Arabia now spends $48.5 billion on defense, according to IHS, and plans to increase the total to $63 billion by 2020. The monarchy has to match Iran’s coming conventional military buildup after the P5+1 nuclear agreement to maintain credibility. If oil prices remain low Saudi Arabia will have to sharply reduce subsidies, opening the risk of social instability.
 
Turkey faces yet another sort of demographic challenge. It fought a four-decade war with its Kurdish separates that killed perhaps 40,000 people. The problem is that Turkey is gradually becoming Kurdish. The Kurds have 3.3 children per female versus only 1.8 for ethnic Turks, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimates, which means that within a generation, half the recruits to the Turkish army will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. Turkey’s intervention in the Syrian civil war is motivated in large measure by its fear that the Kurds will succeed in creating an independent self-governing zone on their border, and link up with the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq.

Demographics, economics and ideology in Asia Minor, the Levant and Mesopotamia combine to create the conditions for a perfect storm. Political analysis of the region tends to focus on the ideological and religious rivalries among Iranian Shi’ism, Sunni Wahhabism and Turkish neo-Ottoman aspirations. To this must be added the demographic and economic challenges that face oil monocultures in an adverse financial environment in the midst of a treacherous demographic transition.

That challenges conventional ways of assessing the options open to rational actors. Game theory considers the behavior of individuals with well-defined interests; it does not consider situations in which one or more of the players (for example) suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. Iran may decide that its existential interest require it to expand its Shi’ite empire now, before its rapid aging deprives it of manpower and financial resources. Saudi Arabia may decide that its ability to control its own restive population requires pre-emptive action against its Shia opponents. Turkey may decide that the threat of territorial amputation requires pre-emptive action against the Kurds.

30% solution here again?

To a great extent, all of this is happening now, through proxy wars: Saudi Arabia and Turkey are engaged in a proxy war with Iran in Syria and to some extent elsewhere in the region. Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops are heavily engaged in Syria, and Saudi Arabia has threatened to introduce its own troops in the country. The problem is that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all face fundamental economic and demographic challenges to internal stability that will get worse within a horizon of five to ten years.

American planners have sought to stabilize the region through proxies (supporting “moderate Islamists” in Syria against the Assad regime, encouraging the Iranians to join the regional security architecture, and so forth). Conditions for a perfect storm on the scale of past wars of exhaustion already prevail, and the likelihood of another war of exhaustion on the scale of the Napoleonic Wars or the Thirty Years War is much higher than foreign policy analysts seem to appreciate. The result may be the 30% solution we have seen so many times in history, and the appropriate American response may be not to extinguish the fire, but to maintain a controlled burn.

See for example Heaven on Earth: Variety of Millenarian Experience, by Richard Landes (Oxford 2011); Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism, by Anna Geifman (Praeger 2010); and How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), by the present author (Regnery 2011).

[ii] David Goldman, op. cit.

[iii] Athens After the Peloponnesian War: Class, Faction and Policy, by Barry S. Strauss (Routledge 2014), p 81

[iv] Maritime Trades in the Ancient Greek World, by Charles M. Reed (Cambridge University Press 2003) p. 16.

[v] Rex Warner’s translation in the Penguin edition, pp. 372, 382.

[vi] Aristotle, Politics (trans. William Ellis); The Floating Press (2009), p. 99.

[vii] Michael H. Jameson et. Al., A Greek Countryside: the southern Argolid from prehistory to the present day (Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 396.

[viii] Polybius, Histories Volume II translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburg (London: MacMillan 1889), p. 511.

[ix] Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (Penguin, 2003).

[x] Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other, Random House 2005.

[xi] Aldous Huxley, The Grey Eminence (Vintage, 2005), p. 185

[xii] Huxley, p. 133

[xiii] Quoted in Luis Suárez Fernández and José Andrés Gallego, La crisis de la hegemonía española, siglo XVII (Ediciones Rialp, 1986), p. 12

[xiv] Spain: A Unique History, by Stanley G. Payne (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), p. 106

[xv] Political Demograpy, Demographic Engineering, by Myron Weiner and Michael S. Teitelbaum (Berghan: Oxford, 2001) pp. 20-21.

[xvi] https://www.usnwc.edu/Lucent/OpenPdf.aspx?id=128&title=Perspective. For more background

[xvii] Giles Pison, “France and Germany: a history of criss-crossing demographic curves,” in Population and Societies, Mulletin Mensuel d’Information de l’Institut National d’études Démographiques, n. 487 (March 2012).

[xviii] George Finlay, Greece under the Romans (London: Blackwell 1857), p. 68.

[xix] The Confederate War, by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard, 1997), pp. 28-29.

[xx] The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861, by Robert E. May (Louisiana State University Press, 1973), p. 164.

[xxi] Richard Easterlin, “Regional Income Trends, 1840-1950,” in, ed. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman (New York: Harper % Row, 1971), p. 40.

[xxii] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/06/iran-birth-rate-marriage-decline-divorce.html

[xxiii] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26343285

[xxiv] http://atimes.com/2016/01/no-prosperity-for-iran-after-nuclear-deal/

[xxv] See Goldman, p. 12.

[xxvi] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/reo/2015/mcd/eng/pdf/mreo1015ch4.pdf
 
Thucydides said:
A horrifying possibility: the pan Islamic civil wars will not stop for any reason until demographic exhaustion (i.e. a 30% casualty rate) is achieved. This artricle suggests that many of the historical condition to meet this threshold are already in place:

http://atimes.com/2016/03/the-30-solution-when-war-without-end-ends-spengler/
Part 1


It's a good article and I broadly agree with David Goldman (Spengler), including the concluding bit about all America (and the whole US led West) can (should?) try to do is to maintain a "controlled burn." But my question is (assuming we can maintain the "controlled burn"): what's the problem? So they fight to exhaustion, à la the Thirty Years War. I believe Europe was a much improved place in 1648, far, far better than it had been in 1618. Sometimes long, bloody, brutal wars, that come at HUGE costs to the people involved, are good things.
 
I have to agree.  The thought of 30%+ of their fighting age males killing each other off seems to be a win-win situation to me.
 
Another Kurdish autonomous region (aside from the one in Northern Iraq), to the annoyance of Turkey:

Canadian Press

Syria's Kurds declare de-facto federal region in north
[The Canadian Press]
Zeina Karam, The Associated Press
The Canadian Press
March 17, 2016

BEIRUT - Syria's Kurds on Thursday declared a de-facto federal region in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Syria, drawing sharp condemnation from both the Damascus government and its opponents who decried the unilateral move as unconstitutional and setting a dangerous precedent.

The declaration further complicates the situation on the ground in Syria even as peace talks press ahead in Geneva. The main Syrian Kurdish party has been excluded from those talks — perhaps an indication of why the Kurds chose this particular moment for their move.

In Syria's civil war, Kurdish fighters have emerged as the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State group and are backed militarily by the United States. More recently, Russia has backed them politically.

(...SNIPPED)
 
Instapundit's history lesson on how we got to this point in time (lots of video and embedded links; go to original article for everything):

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/229685/

March 22, 2016
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: No Doubt About It — We’re Back in a Ground War in Iraq.

Without much fanfare, Obama has dramatically reversed his Iraq policy — sending thousands of troops back in the country after he declared the war over, engaging in ground combat despite initially promising that his strategy “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Well, they’re on foreign soil, and they’re fighting.

It would have been easier — and would have cost far fewer lives — if we had just stayed. But Obama had to have a campaign issue.

And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.



In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:

BOB WOODWARD: Bush Didn’t Lie About WMD, And Obama Sure Screwed Up Iraq In 2011.



[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.

Plus:



Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:



Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.

We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.

Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:


As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.



Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?

Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:



Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.

Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.

And who can forget this?


FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012



Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.

Related: Obama’s Betrayal Of The Iraqis.

Plus: Maybe that Iraq withdrawal was a bad thing in hindsight. Obama’s actions, if not his words, suggest that even he may think so.
 
An interesting world map attached, showing one think tank's assessment of ISIL's efforts - note that North America is in white, meaning they see this area as an ISIL "Far Abroad Ring", where the aims are to "Defend and Expand - Attack and Polarize".  That bit in yellow intrigued me.

Source
 

Attachments

  • ISIS Global Strategy March 2016-page-001-smaller.jpg
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ueo said:
Or move to Canada.

And avoid Iraq:

https://www.statista.com/chart/4094/number-of-persons-killed-by-terrorist-attacks-in-iraq-afghanistan-pakistan-et-al/

 
Canadian guy (dual citizenship?) one of three dinged for being Hezbollah in UAE (where Hezbollah's considered a terrorist organization):
Three men charged with setting up an affiliate of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah group in the UAE were sentenced to six months in prison to be followed by deportation, the Federal Supreme Court ruled on Monday.

The men, Canadian Lebanese Suhail Naif Gareeb, 62; Lebanese Asa’d Ameen Qansouh, 66; and Ahmad Ebrahim Qansouh, 30, were found guilty of setting up an office of the militant group in the UAE and carrying out commercial, economic and political activities without licences, the court presided over by judge Falah Al Hajeri ruled.

The General Prosecutor earlier told the court that the three men established and managed an international group belonging to Lebanon-based Hezbollah without official permission or licences ...
 
Perhaps the Saudis might respond to this by simply getting munitions from alternate suppliers?

Defense News

Senators Want Legislation To Limit US Bomb Sales to Saudi Arabia
Joe Gould, Defense News 4:35 p.m. EDT April 12, 2016

WASHINGTON — US Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said he is proposing a bill to limit US munition sales to Saudi Arabia in protest for its conduct of the war in Yemen.

Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he is troubled by civilian deaths in the Saudi-led bombing campaign and would like to see restrictions placed on US sales of air-to-ground bombs. Though he said support for the measure might be slim, he sees "a growing discomfort [in Congress] about the growing level of arms sales to the Mideast, and a lot more people willing to ask questions than there were just a few years ago."

The legislation, which would be focused on future sales of air-to-ground munitions to Saudi Arabia, is co-sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
(...SNIPPED)
 
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