He is not telling me, and it is risky to attempt to predict the actions of individuals, but Trump has a long history of picking up hundred dollar bills lying on the pavement that everyone else refuses to pick up.
And for the defeat of Isis, the hundred dollar bill lying on the pavement is:
Islamic State’s claim to be the Caliphate rests on it being a state, on it controlling territory, a capital, a uniformed army with proper chain of command, and wealth. If you are hiding in a cave on a mountainside, you cannot be the Caliph. So, to kill Islamic State, make it stop being a state. As yet another mere terrorist organization, has less appeal.
So cut a deal with Putin and Assad for a joint attack on the capital of Islamic State. Follow Assad’s brutal example by leafleting the place telling everyone to flee or die. Give them the opportunity to flee. Then kill everyone who has not fled. Level the capital to the ground. Utterly flatten everything. What the bombs leave standing roll over with mine clearing tanks followed by bulldozer tanks. Rebuild under the control of Sunnis who are in Assad’s pocket. Make sure any Sunnis not in his pocket are dead or fled, preferably dead. Repopulate with cooperative Sunnis so that your genocide does not look too much like genocide.
Islamic State will probably still be around as a terrorist organization, but they are, or recently were, committed to realist version of Islam. If they are not a state any more, will not call themselves “Islamic State”, will not claim their leader is the rightful Caliph, merely the future Caliph.
He is keeping the plan secret, because he needs to cut a deal and it will make it hard to bargain if he is precommitted to getting the deal.
Of course the left is going to scream genocide, but their humanitarian intervention in Syria was predicated on Alawites being genocided and Christians being expelled to Lebanon, and their humanitarian intervention in the Congo predictably resulted in many, probably most, Tutsi women in the Congo being vaginally impaled with objects as large as themselves. The left murdered about a hundred and seventy million people during the twentieth century, and we should just stop taking their pious cries of moral superiority seriously.
Leftists are weak people, are noisy women and weak men, who identify with power and cruelty, and thus identify with mass murderers and torturers like Che Guevera, Aristide, and Zapata. They loved the Khmer Rouge until the Khmer Rouge lost power by murdering each other until there were not enough competent Khmer Rouge left to uphold the regime. They loved the Khmer Rouge as long as the Khmer Rouge were successfully engaging in mass murder and mass torture, and hated them when, and only when, they lost, hated them not for mass murder and mass torture, but for weakness. As small boys identify with men who drive monster trucks, leftists identify with those who murder and torture. Hence the tendency of teenage boys to be radical leftists, and to cease being radical leftists when they reach their full growth and realize they need to be careful about getting into fights lest they kill someone with their bare hands.
So why are people reluctant to pick up this hundred dollar bill?
Because of an ideological left wing progressive belief in the potency of guerrilla warfare. In practice, guerrillas only succeed to the extent that they are backed by an outside power – usually the State Department. The Vietnam war with in part a proxy war between Russia and America with North and South Vietnam as proxies, but in larger part a proxy war between the State Department’s blue empire of the consulates, and the Pentagon’s red empire of the bases, as was increasingly obvious towards the end. Islamic state is largely a creation of the State Department, a part of their efforts to overthrown various Arab regimes, in particular Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Once they go back from State to State warfare down to guerrilla warfare and lose State Department backing, they will be insignificant.
Exactly the same as Nixon’s secret plan to defeat the Viet Cong by bombing the territory of the state that supported them. A plan that ultimately succeeded, until Nixon’s victory was undone by a coup at home.
The Islamic State had a good run, inspiring tens of thousands of jihadis to go and die there. How foolishly we tried to prevent “Canadians”, “Minnesotans”, “Belgians” etc. from answering the call to jihad!
Exactly so.
Is a nation a hotel? It is just insane to call these people Americans.
We need to realize that nations are nations and outsider are outsiders.
Each nation should pursue its own interests, while being mindful of keeping the peace with other nations.
The left project is to abolish nations, and make them mere hotels.
People have been saying “if you defeat Trump in some underhanded way, the next guy won’t be so nice” but actually Trump is the reaction to the underhanded defeat of Nixon – and Trump has lots of former Nixon guys around who know it.
Could you expand on that or suggest some further reading? I don’t know that much about the Nixon administration, but I don’t think of them as having been particularly counter-Cathedral, and I thought the Watergate bust was more or less fair and square.
Sorry, but this was a stupid post, Jim. As western influence retreats from the Middle East, the Middle East devolves back to what it’s always been for 1,000 years: Sunni vs. Shiite religious war. Leveling ISIS will only embolden Shiites against the Sunnis, and the Shiites are no better than ISIS (but they are smarter for keeping their torture and murders off camera, even as they develop nuclear weapons).
The solution Trump should pursue is one of the following: (1) either U.S. voluntary withdrawal from the region entirely, (2) prop up pro-American strongmen ONLY (Assad is not such a creature; El Sisi and the King of Jordan are probably the only two that qualify), or (3) wage a Christianity inspired holy war against the entire Muslim region using convert or die tactics.
Thanks, Mordecai.
You are of course correct. But Trump, like Reagan, needs to throw some small country against the wall and splatter them good in order to make Americans feel better about themselves, and they don’t come much smaller than Islamic State.
The actual reason you throw random small countries against the wall is to make your own leftists respect you – for the reasons you state in the post.
The world would rather prefer, and kindly requests, your fighting your civil wars inside your country, if at all possible.
Thanks in advance.
>(3) wage a Christianity inspired holy war against the entire Muslim region using convert or die tactics.
Which would naturally include skypes too of course, yes?
Your plan is good, but what I want to see is the sands of the Middle East glowing in the dark and shimmering like fine crystal in the daylight.
Why? What has the Middle East ever done to you?
Spawned Islam. At some point, Christendom has to say, “Enough is enough.”
The Shadowed Knight
North Africa is rightful Roman clay. Arabs to Arabia, Jews to the grave.
“Follow Assad’s brutal example by leafleting the place telling everyone to flee or die. Give them the opportunity to flee. Then kill everyone who has not fled. Level the capital to the ground. Utterly flatten everything.”
You can’t get the U.S. military to take part in such a plan, because the U.S. military is trained to follow the Law of War as it has existed since the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects…even industrial targets…are not allowed anymore, and this is true even if the enemy does not respect the law, and you can’t use “reprisals for enemy violations” as an excuse for it either. (Collateral damage is allowed if it’s “proportional” to the value of the military or dual-use target being struck; but whole cities don’t count.)
As an example — in the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, Croatian general Ante Gotovina was convicted of war crimes for an order to “place [several towns] under fire” (by artillery). The case turned on the interpretation of that order…if it was an order to strike specific military targets within those towns, that would have been no problem; but if it was an order to strike the entire towns, then it was a war crime. The trial court found the latter.
(The appeals court reversed the conviction because the trial court used some cockeyed evidence in reaching that decision…they decided that any shell that landed more than 200 meters from a military target was necessarily aimed at civilian parts of town, but the evidence before them did not establish this. The Military Law Review had two really good articles on this: Walter Huffman’s “Margin of Error” and Gary Solis’ “The Gotovina Acquittal: A Sound Appellate Course Correction.” But the Gotovina decisions did not overturn the basic ruling: that if you attack whole cities nowadays you are violating the modern Law of War. The only issue was whether Gotovina had actually done so.)
Putin and Assad don’t give a damn about the Law of War and might well do something like that, but the U.S. military would disobey orders to attack civilians or civilian objects on purpose, and that includes orders to attack entire cities. An order to do this is so clearly a violation of the modern Law of War that U.S. commanders and their troops would be duty bound to disobey it, and would do so; and no court-martial would convict them of unlawful disobedience. Trump will be well informed on this by the time he takes office if he isn’t already.
“But we did it in WWII and Sherman’s march to the sea!” is no answer; things have changed since then. “But that’s the way to win wars!” is an astute statement; there’s a strong argument that the law of war has gone too far. The fact that the U.S. hasn’t decisively defeated a big enemy since agreeing to the new rules is part of that argument. But until the law does change…and that would require international dealmaking on a heroic scale…the rules are what they are, and the U.S. military from bottom to top is trained to obey them.
Arguably, the modern law empowers guerilla war and terrorism beyond their natural strengths, since you can’t take hostages or commit reprisals against civilian communities you know are supporting the enemy. But whether that strategy would be a good one in our current wars or not, flattening whole towns or cities on purpose isn’t allowed anymore.
Looking the other way while Putin flattens Raqqa is allowed though.
In practice only defeated enemies of the state department get charged with violating the modern laws of war.
To the extent that this law is obeyed, and I doubt that obedience is as great as you claim, it creates moral hazard. Thus, for example our proxies in Aleppo hold the civilian population hostage against their will, while at the same time bombarding civilians on the other side of Aleppo, which seems to be standard behavior for state department proxies, who expect that the other side will be pressured to adhere to the modern laws of war, while they themselves are, strange to report, subject to no similar pressure.
I also recall predictions that Australian marines would refuse to use violence against refugee boats on the high seas in international waters. These predictions proved incorrect. Australia then preached to several South East Asian nations that had previously felt such actions to be illegal, that such actions were and should be legal, and persuaded them to apply similar measures, resulting in unified and cooperative military action to quell the eastern movement of refugees.
Yes. A soldier is a soldier, a professional soldier even more so. He signs up to wield legitimized lethal force against the declared enemies of the state. He signs up to crush those enemies under his advance. He signs up for conquest: loot and booty.
The only reason our soldiers at the present time don’t behave like soldiers is because they are held on a very short leash by leash-holders who don’t like them very much. A lawyer in every unit, “I don’t want to be court marshaled”, etc.
Cut the leash and firing squad the leash-holders, and let the soldier have his loot and booty again.
No fighting man’s wick should remain undipped.
Exactly so. Every regiment should be accompanied by a train of camp followers.
“To the extent that this law is obeyed, and I doubt that obedience is as great as you claim, it creates moral hazard.”
Certainly. Leaving the wars to be fought by others who don’t obey them…or drone-striking people instead of capturing them to avoid human rights issues with their captivity…these temptations undoubtedly exist.
It also brings wars that don’t end decisively. John Derbyshire’s “They, the People” lays it out very nicely I think:
“The more thoroughly you lay waste a nation—level its cities, slaughter its people, its noncombatant people—the more conclusive your victory will be, the higher the level of “attitude adjustment†in the enemy population. If you want to turn a psychotic aggressor nation into a well-mannered commercial one—if you want to beat swords into plowshares, and infantry training manuals into business cards—your best bet is to go for high levels of national destruction.”
But the laws are the laws. We could use some better ones (the “Lieber Code” of the Civil War comes to mind; it put some limits on warmaking, but it understood that victory came first). But until we get better ones, don’t bank on Trump or any other U.S. leader ordering cities to be levelled, nor on his orders being obeyed if he tries it.
The military is above the law, or rather the military is prior to law. Always has been, always will be.
And even if the military was under the law, these laws are applied selectively and hypocritically, with the result that they lack moral authority. These laws are the blue empire seeking to cripple the red empire, but when the blue empire itself makes war, it does not observe these laws.
Indeed, organized men with guns determine what “The Law” is.
Would air-dropping Samantha Powers by parachute past the Forward Edge of the Battle area (FEBA) constitute a war crime?
And would it be a war crime against whom?
My secret plan to defeat ISIS:
Stop sending them money and arms. Stop bombing their enemies for them. Stop hampering Russia’s attempts to fight them.
Anyone who took the (((laws of war))) seriously as late as the 2000s has presumably seen Hillary laughing about having Gaddafi sodomized to death by terrorists and Assad condemned for making his own bombs instead of buying them from Lockheed-Martin.
And will soon see the pictures of the hangings of women who worked at Auschwitz and hear about the collective punishment of millions of German civilians after WWII, and that the Holocaust was a hoax.
There were laws of war in Europe during the years between the crusades against those horribly ignorant pagans and the age of bullshit known as the Reformation. Outside of the combat between Aryan principalities to keep the swords sharp, the only war crime is to lose.
> the only war crime is to lose.
Ive come to the same conclusion. If mustard gas is deemed a war crime it is because the strongest party has deemed it so in order to gain moral high ground over the weaker parties. If the strongest party finds itself in a situation where mustard gas is the only alternative to losing its position as the strongest party, it will use mustard gas. One would be naive to expect otherwise.
All I need to know about the middle east, I learned on 911!
Keep in mind Jim, in the middle east, your friends today will almost certainly be your enemies tomorrow. And I agree with the boys saying that anything that violates the Geneva Convention – or, in any way, gives the Left a say in military affairs – is doomed to failure. Americans will balk at killing civvies, both left and right. I don’t think even Trump could sell that.
Really? Americans seemed perfectly okay with mistreating and killing German civilians. Give a dog a bad name and you can hang him by it. These are backwards goatfucking terrorists who haven’t invented toilet paper fuck their cousins and don’t eat pork because cannibalism is pretty much the only normal taboo they have. Under their barbaric legal code, everything is punished by chopping up the criminal, and they make all their ugly women wear bags over their heads.
P-Mint, if Pearl Harbour happened today, one third of all Americans would be saying that Uncle Sam deserved it, and another third would sit on the fence wondering if they were right. The nation you have today is not the one you had in WW2.
As for me, I don’t give a hoot about Syria or ISIS. I’m worried about Iran.
Yeah, what’s the reaction to muzzie attacks? Initially, people rallied around the flag, and changed their Facebook pictures to the French flag. Then the fake news starts building a narrative that Whites deserve to have these things done due to racism, and eventually people accept it because that’s how to signal virtue. They tell themselves that, sure, occasionally muzzies, or Google people, are violent, but that’s an understandable response to the systematic violence against them from the KKK which totally exists.
Look at what they signal about.
Endless hate crime hoaxes and rallies against hate. They’re sure it exists because the fake news tells them it does and it’s compatible with the worldview they’ve been brought up in in the government schools.
Skype people get to be our greatest ally, despite never sending troops to our stupid wars, because after being lollercoastered they’re stuck in a tiny country surrounded by enemies, and need endless military aid instead.
The fake news and educational apparatus must be destroyed. And while we can blame Skype subversion for fake news, education was done by Christians.
Iran poses approximately zero threat to you.
For the record, it was Defense (Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) that was obsessed with regime change in Baghdad–while Colin Powell’s State Department and the CIA urged caution, diplomacy, and restraint.
US wars are some yuge business. You get the oil from Iraq, your country gets bankrupt so you can blame the niggers and the safety net for it, the world starts being black and white because, you know, torturing innocents is OK and it somehow makes the white race more moral, more democratic and esentially superior to muzzies, and… you know, there are no downsides ever for the right people.
That’s why Trump’s secret plan for the Middle East is doing whatever it takes to get even richer and more powerful. That’s been his secret plan for everything in life. No one changes after 30.
Getting the oil from Iraq would distract from the reason we went in, simply to fuck with and torture the Iraqis for a while thus destroying the moral capital of the empire, and would also help pay for the war, which was supposed to piss away enough money that there wouldn’t be any left fo dem programs.
So we’ll hate him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s our silent guardian, our goofy big-eared knight.
You seem to have misunderstood me. I was arguing that the US elites already got the oil from Iraq some years ago, and that all US wars arel about money (for the elites like Trump) and *their* power.
I was also arguing that Trump’s plan has always been to do what’s best for him, not for the US people. Trump will do with the Middle East what he did with his taxes: the best alternativa for him, which happens to usually be the worst alternative for the US (median) citizen.
Time will tell. The moment has come when every non-US country is looking at China for leadership. The Chinese have two things for them: they don’t loot other countries through military invasions, and they don’t pretend to be democratic.
Okay, the petrodollar is the only sense in which the US controls the oil in Iraq. Which makes you an anti-Semitic national socialist goldbug.
There’s nothing Trump can do in the middle east but pull out. GWB put us on a path to losing the empire and running out of money fo dem programs with his irresponsible tax cuts and military privatization and Obama did nothing to make the empire great again.
As to CN, a lot of countries are looking towards RU, both in RU’s sphere of influence and PH from CN’s logical sphere of influence because PH sees what CN did to Tibet (does dolly llama have a cctld?)
The US and the US elites are not the same thing, a fact to difficult to understand if you assume White elites and Whites are the same thing, have the same objectives or socially intermingle. They don’t.
The US people do not control the oil in Iraq. The US elites do, thanks to the invasion planned and directed by US elites, and paid for by ordinary citizens.
“Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil market,” oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera. “But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973.”
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/12/2011122813134071641.html
Would have been nice if the US actually invaded countries to steal their oil. Both because oil-free countries would’ve been safe, and because oil-rich countries wouldn’t have had free money with which to do stupid and/or evil things.
Britain invaded them to secure Britain’s oil (“their” is a weird descriptor for something they neither found nor extracted nor used) already, and the US worked hard to make Britain leave, and then made a point of not replacing Britain.
The independent Middle East is a US government programme and won’t long outlive the ending of US government support.
This reminds me of the joke
American prospectors were surprised to discover some sort of an Arab state over their oil field.
The US doesn’t invade countries to steal their oil. The US invades countries on the orders of the US elite so that the US elite can steal their oil. That’s a very different ting.
If the US is stealing peoples’ oil why does none of that oil end up in the US?
People who think that the US invades countries to steal their things has far too high an opinion of the sanity and competence of the people running the US.
Because the US doesn’t invade countries to steal their oil. The US invades countries on the orders of the US elite so that the US elite can steal their oil. That’s a very different ting. Iraqi oil ends up in the US elite’s pockets.
The people running the US are not crazy; they are doing what’s best for them and their kind. It just happens that their kind (“White elites”) is not your kind (“Whites”).
Whether the oil belongs to the US government or to individual rich Americans, it should end up in the United States, which it has not.
I am an elite and was on track to become a politician or some state functionary, or more or less whatever I chose. I jumped off that path some time back, but got a good insight into these people in the meantime. Jim is right that they are religious fanatics who believe their own pieties and will follow them off a cliff. You are not right with your strangely reassuring conspiracy theories.
“Whether the oil belongs to the US government or to individual rich Americans, it should end up in the United States, which it has not.”
No, that’s a non-sequitur, I am afraid. The money from the Iraqi oil ends up in Wall Street bonuses, Big Oil lobbies, Shell, Exxon and Co. That doesn’t mean the oil ends up in the US, but the oil money does go into the US elite’s pockets.
If there are some foreign companies in Iraq, that’s because the US elite allows it so that the US elite can make other good businesses in China and Russia (you know, all those jobs gone there). Iraq is a US protectorate at all effects, and the Iraqi oil money goes wherever the US elites want it to go. Just ask yourself: who in the US has benefitted from the Iraqi war?
The purpose of the Iraq Wars was not to steal their oil, but to keep it off the market so everyone else’s oil would be worth more.
Iraq’s oil was off the market before the war, and is on the market after the war. So not sure about that.
Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi government. It is a state monopoly industry. Money from the Iraqi oil is mostly squandered paying off Iraqi clients of the Iraqi government in Iraq. The Iraqi government is pro-Iranian, not pro-American.
You believe the left wing critique of the neoconservatives. If the neoconservatives were what the left thought they were, they would not be nearly so bad.
On what evidence do you base this statement?
Just ask yourself: who in the US has benefitted from the Iraqi war? The list of beneficiaries is all the evidence you need.
Nobody?
As for the oil, see here
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1948787,00.html
And here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/world/middleeast/china-reaps-biggest-benefits-of-iraq-oil-boom.html
And also here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Iraq#Service_contracts_licensing_results
I used to buy the oil theory, but Iraq handily disproved it.
If you were at the head of an unnameable world power whose power derived largely from a balance of power, your greatest concern would be preventing a unipolar world. If the world were to be dominated by one force alone, nothing would be able to put down that one force if that one force were to go rogue. It would therefore be in your interest to do everything in your power to subvert and weaken a unipolar power, were one to arise by sheer force of arms or simply the collapse of its opposing power or powers.
It is therefore extremely interesting to me that both the mass-immivasion of America and the mass-deindustrialization of America both began very shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“I used to buy the oil theory, but Iraq handily disproved it.”
If the US had ever been interested in stealing foreigners’ stuff, the US would have taken ownership of the British Empire, rather than dismantling it.
Nothing in the US’s history is consistent with it being an acquisitive, imperial power. It believes in empire the way Kipling portrayed empire in “The White Man’s Burden”, except that where Kipling implicitly saw this burden coupled with a position of high status and power, the US reads the poem literally.
I don’t believe that democracy produces anything but corruption. To win in a democracy, ironically, requires seeing the world as something other than the democratic ideal.
A.J.P.
Your article reminds me of the mongols. Who would aside from comely women and skilled workers butcher every living thing in a city that opposed them.
You overlook that cities that did not oppose them got low taxes, secure property rights, and law and order.
Which ones? IIRC surrendering: sacked in a relatively orderly manner and the the most valuable people such as artisans and good-looking girls enslaved. But your city would be otherwise mostly intact. Resist: city mostly destroyed, a few enslaved, the rest killed.