Where you have a substantial Islamic minority, the only stable solution is for Islam to rule or to be violently and brutally crushed. Nothing in between works, despite over a thousand years of governments, peoples, cultures, and religions trying to find something in between, and endlessly failing. Where you have several different substantial Islamic factions in a single country, the only solution is a brutal dictatorship to keep the Islamics in line. That, or genocide. It is the nature of Islam to make war till it conquers or is very thoroughly conquered. Very thoroughly conquered.
Aleppo is about to fall. The fall of Aleppo will be the defeat of the “moderate” (“Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave”) opposition.
The difference between the “moderate” opposition and Islamic State is not their position on Christians and Alawites. They both intend to kill every Alawite everywhere. It is their position on the royal families of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The “moderate” opposition supports and is supported by royalty. Islamic State is republican and intends to overthrow the royal families. Thus the defeat of the “moderates” is likely to cut off royal aid for the overthrow of Alawite rule in Syria.
The “moderates” are at present transferring large amounts of American and Saudi military aid to Islamic State, with a wink and a nod from the State Department, making the war in Syria a major profit center for Islamic State. With the defeat of the “moderates” Syria becomes a cost sink, so Islamic State (which needs to make war pay) will retreat, likely under cover of some face saving formula that pretends Islamic state is not defeated, pretends that Sunnis are not being ruled by Alawites, and pretends the State Department has not suffered a humiliating defeat.
The Pentagon, the red empire, the empire of the bases, supports the royal families of the Middle East. The State Department, the blue state, the empire of the consulates, opposes the royal families of the Middle East.
Putin will be reluctant to humiliate America by rubbing it in the way America was humiliated in Vietnam, since that is likely to destabilize the world, and will therefore try to maintain some pretense of Sunni autonomy. On the other hand, the American government is getting aggro, responding to its defeat in Syria by pushing for war with China, much as Hitler, when up to his neck in alligators, declared war on America.
Thus while Putin would likely favor some compromise that allows the State Department to save face by pretending it is still destabilizing Syria, the US, to judge by its behavior towards China, is not in the mood for saving face, but rather, believing that history is on its side, wants victory and to be seen to be victorious, where victory means at minimum maintaining Syria a chaotic bloody hell hole, with the final objective of expelling the Christian minority and exterminating the Alawite minority, thus making possible a “Democratic” Syria. Democracy requires a Syria with a single religion, Sunni, and a single ethnicity, Arab, and the State Department has repeatedly demonstrated that it so loves democracy that it is willing for other people to pay the price.
There is a significant risk that the State Department will regard peace, stability, and order in Syria as an intolerable affront, and will do something drastic to ensure that history proceeds as it is supposed to.
The American government is now spiritually in the same position as the Soviet government used to be. It believes it is destined to rule the world, being the voice of truth, light, and history, while it buggers its economy and its technology stagnates, undermining its power to rule the world.
I entirely agree with your take on the situation in Syria. If the so called “moderates” would have taken Damascus, there would have been a slaughter of every Druze, Alawite and Christian in Syria. America has been in bed with psychopathic Saudi/Sunni fundamentalists since the Soviets were in Afghanistan (thanks Charlie Wilson). This article should be in NY Times.
“Red”, if they’re reddish, they’re really pink. My red is the dark maroon of heart’s blood. Let the far-away bases atrophy off. Defend the base next door.
A.J.P.
>There is a significant risk that the State Department will regard peace, stability, and order in Syria as an intolerable affront, and will do something drastic to ensure that history proceeds as it is supposed to.
I’ve noticed this in the news. The Pentagon is standing down operations while the CIA is flooding the area with as many high tech weapons as possible. Seems really stupid to mess with the Russians so openly in this manner. If that’s their first response, I wonder what desperate will look like?
The Red Empire (Pentagon) is fine with peace and stability in Syria. The Blue State (CIA) is outraged that history is headed in the wrong direction. “No justice, no peace!”
WTF is wrong with American leaders? Get new ones and chase the current lot with pitch forks.
That would require free and fair elections, something we have not had for quite a while
ok, I’ll bite. What would you consider free and fair elections?
I’m doubtful that America will take this lying down. The overthrow of Assad was planned for a long time before the revolution against him actually started, and that revolution was not instigated, militarized and supported with funding and supplies by America and its allies for these past 4 years for no reason. I really wonder about how far America is willing to go in order to achieve what it wants to achieve in that country, but whatever happens, if Russia gets its way there, it’ll be a major embarrassment for America. And of course, as is well-known, the American gov’t is largely run by affirmative action lackeys, homos, feminists and control-freaks. These are precisely the kinds of people who one would expect to irrationally overreact to a setback like the one they will likely face in Syria at the hands of Russia and the embarrassment that they will suffer as a result of it. These people are obsessed with their public image and will go to absurd lengths to protect it from being blemished, especially by someone like Putin, who is especially resented by the affirmative action lackeys for being white, by the homos for not being a hetero, by the lesbians for not being a lesbian and by the control-freaks for being independent. So, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that they might start a hot war in order to compensate in some way for their failures.
I meant, “for not being a homo”
Nearly all the neocons and many high ranking public figures (many in the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom) are agitating for some sort of action against the Russians in both Ukraina and Syria and against the Chinese in the South China Sea. All sorts of US/NATO military posturing is underway or planned. We are closer to war today than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.
I just can’t see significant direct support to the Salafis being ramped up. Even the prog media has had to report on the mass rapes and slavery.
Whenever progressives arm and fund some absolutely horrifying group, they like to have a cutout or two between themselves and the people they are arming and funding. Which is why Syria and Putin need to take out the “moderates”.
They need the cutouts not so much to fool other people, as so that they can fool themselves.
Everything that happens in the Middle East is fucked. Even the Chosen People can’t shoot straight any more.
I find your faith in Putin disturbing. Just because he’s a prick with balls doesn’t make him a miracle worker. The Russians usually screw up their foreign adventures as badly as we do — if not worse.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Obama has set the bar extremely low. If you are supportive of ordinary law and order as regular folks conceive of it, you are head and shoulders above this administration.
Putin’s support for Anerican style law and order (if any — I see little indication) is irrelevant to his chances of stabilizing Syria.
Backing the side that has form in the maintenance of actual stability is a damn good start, but it’s no guarantee of success.
Putin’s not a miracle worker. Just because he’s not on the Cathedral’s side doesn’t make him one.
Are we still calling it The Cathedral btw?
Assad could actually have handled things if America wasn’t arming the decivilizers and encouraging rebels with the promise that America would make things happen these past four years. Qwaddhaffy in Libya could totally have put down the rebellion if Obama didn’t work so hard at tearing down what order they had. Indeed in was Obama’s actions in Libya that gave succor to rebels in Syria.
This is an example of why it is such a disaster that our leaders do not deeply appreciate HBD. If they did, they would understand that if certain countries achieve law and order they are doing pretty good. They would not try to hold Syria to the standards of Lake Wobegon.
Yes, Syria needs Assad.
And when Assad has trouble, needs barrel bombs.
Russia in fact is better positioned than we are to help things. They understand law and order reasonably well.
We on the other hand have our minds so full of wishful untruths that little room remains for accurate perceptions to seep through.
Victorian Britain fully absorbed the truth of HBD and cultural differences at all levels of society. They didn’t have 80% of their population informally enlisted in the task of truth suppression. Armed with this knowledge they were able to successfully bring rule of law to many of these very lands: India, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen… Just think of it. And with tiny contingents, too!
Russia’s goals are far more modest and they have cool toys that the Victorians could only dream of. They’ll get some stuff done.
Note also, that it is in the very recent past that the Soviet Union achieved hard control over its many Muslim lands. Even more Recently, Russia has had to control the Chechens, who are probably the most ungovernable people on Earth.
>Russia … understand law and order reasonably well.
Yeah. I guess that’s why small and medium business is booming in Russia, and the chechens are so quiet and well-behaved outside Chechnya. /sarc
Chechens are in fact relatively quiet these days to the extent that they are under direct Russian control. It is when they leave Russia, then they become big problems.
» I guess that’s why small and medium business is booming in Russia
Russia’s unemployment rate is 5.3%, but as a result of EU sanctions and falling fossil fuels prices, their economy isn’t doing as well this year as it was last year.
The US’s unemployment rate is 5.1%. USA! USA! USA!
peppermint: these sort of unemployment figures are meaningless. What’s the labor force participation rate? How many are on disability payments? Etc.
jim: Chechens do as they please in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and their tribal code which used to curb the worst excesses is disintegrating. If things seem quiet, it’s more because the Russians know better than to mess with them. Also Surkov is half-chechen. Meanwhile Kadyrov publicly and stridently gainsays Putin on Islam, and thousands of young Chechen fighters do Allah’s work in the same IS that Putin pretends to combat in Syria.
Not seeing it.
The Russians are using something similar to the American strategy at the beginning of the Afghan war: air support+special forces (someone has to be spotting for those planes)+proxy ground troops (regime+Iranians.) Also some conventional ground forces.
But this is not very different than what Iran has been using in the East against IS, without too much to show for it.
Given the amount of conventional Russian troops that it took to conquer Chechnya in 1999-2000, and the amount of time it took them to calm the place down to some reasonable level, I doubt that they had it in them to defeat IS. They might split the place in 2 with them, but I wouldn’t make a virtue of necessity.
The more Sunnis they conquer, the more resources they will have to dedicate to pacification and counter guerrilla fighting, so the harder it will be for them to keep moving East.
Given the enthusiasm the Syrian Sunnis have shown for war (check out the list of their armed groups on Wiki,) I think that they will not roll over because Russians are putting air and artillery on them, and that Assad and the government will have their work cut out holding anything they take.
Everything would seem to depend on what Assad is trying to accomplish here. It seems unlikely that Assad would try and literally reconquer every single inch of territory that he lost since the war started. More likely is that he will try and reconquer only those parts which are the most economically useful, which is basically the same as saying those areas in which a sizable enough part of the population is supportive of him. With Russia and Iran’s help, Assad can certainly create an Alawite-Christian-upper class Sunni rump state/Russian protectorate, while at the same time washing his hands of the territories currently in the hands of ISIS/al Qaeda/etc.
If Assad successfully takes what is of economic value, not much in it for Islamic State. Islamic State has to make war pay.
There is some economic analysis to be done here, treating IS as a startup.
IS has its initial investment and capital flows.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/607782/Islamic-State-ISIS-economy-caliphate-Syrian-refugees-Europe
http://fortune.com/2015/09/27/isis-money-problem/
Initial funds, after the takeover of Mosul, were somewhere around $1 billion.
Costs include maintaining infrastructure, largely doable through corvee labor, paying fighters and civil employees, and medical supplies.
Estimates of IS fighters and employees range from 200k, by the Kurds, to 100k, by IS itself, to 30k by the CIA. Say, 50K full time fighters and employees, supplemented by volunteers. Each one gets let’s say $500 per month, $6k per year. That’s a $300 million in payroll per year.
Since IS has a ton of captured weaponry from the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as whatever the US-sponsored “moderate Islamists” turned over to it, and their forces are largely light infantry using civilian transport, I don’t see huge outlays there. Figure a total outlay of $400 million per year. Keep in mind that as IS falls back on inner lines, expenses will drop.
Revenue sources include:
1) Taxing the population. IS has about 8 million people under its direct rule, plus has shadow governments operating in Sunni areas that are not officially under its control. $50 per year raised per person covers total annual operating expenses. The population base might shrink, as Assad/Russia/Iran/the Iraqi government make gains. But even then, a shadow administration should be able to raise revenue. Most people would gladly pay $50 per year per family member, or the equivalent for a business, to keep bad things from happening to them.
2) International fundraising efforts. IS represents the political and religious aspirations of large portions of the Sunni world. Muslims have historically been quite willing to support this kind of thing, and there are quite a few rich ones.
3) Remittances. Millions of refugees from the Muslim world are flowing into Europe, and they will be sending cash back home. It works for Mexico. Keep in mind that the refugees will not be effectively policed by the Euros, opening an opportunity for arbitration, administration and tax collection by IS.
4) Oil and gas revenue. Looking at maps, it would seem that large parts of Syria’s natural gas and oil resources and pipelines either are in IS-land or run across territory vulnerable to disruption by IS, and this will remain the case even if Assad takes back Damascus and Aleppo. Also quite a bit in Iraq: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/Syria_Oil_Map.gif
http://blogs.platts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/iraq-map21.jpg
5) Pulling resources from Assad’s state. Once they push out East, the Alawites will need to supply their troops and administration. They also will need to generate revenue somehow to pay for the cost of administering Sunnis. All of the infrastructure involved will be vulnerable to disruption with a high return-on-investment, which means that IS will extort from them.
Asymmetric warfare is a Cathedral myth. They believe in it when convenient to believe in it. When it becomes inconvenient, as when dealing with Tutsi in the Congo or Boers in the Boer war, they no longer believe in it.
I do not think it is a Cathedral myth. IS took Mosul and Anbar with several hundred fighters. MEND is still going strong. The Egyptian military has not really established effective control over the Sinai, despite having a large and well-equipped conventional army. Etc. etc.
Its invulnerability is a Cathedral myth, of course. If you have a dedicated and disciplined military with political will and a cohesive administrative apparatus, defeating asymmetric opponents is quite doable. I do not see such a military and apparatus in Syria.
killing dune coons is easy, you just need to not be pozzed
Thanks, I wish we had had the Chans with us in Iraq, it would have made a big difference.
Israel kills them as quickly as they think the jewsmedia can spin it. The spin is that Israel isn’t allowed to do genocide because they are the people of the shoah, but that they’re merely policing terrorism.
The US wasn’t trying to kill sand niggers and take the oil, the objective was to force the ragheads to play multiethnic democracy, like a little girl having a tea party with her dolls, where they eat each other for tea cookies.
No, Peppermint, it is the other way around. A Jewish settler kills a knife wielding Muslim, it is news around the world, while large scale killings in the rest of the world do not make the news. Jews hardly kill any Muslims, compared to Muslims killing Muslims.
The problem is not that they are sneakily committing genocide. The problem is that they damn well should commit genocide, but do not because they have drunk the progressive koolaide, and swallow it down with more sincerity and less hypocrisy than Christian progressives.
This is typical of converts. Converts fail to get the joke, swallow their new religion whole without the little hypocrisies and large hypocrisies that made the religion livable and practical.
This was particularly noticeable with female emancipation. In law and official reality, all restraints on female misbehavior came down with the emancipation of women in the early nineteenth century, but we did not really emancipate women until the late twentieth century, whereupon disaster immediately ensued.
>Israel kills them as quickly as they think the jewsmedia can spin it.
What are you talking about, dummy?
A big week here is when five Arabs throwing firebombs and rocks or stabbing people get shot dead. And they throw firebombs and rocks every day, multiple times a day.
In Iraq 2003-2008, a dozen insurgents got killed across the country on a typical day. Between SOF raids, firefights with patrols, insurgent ambushes and return fire, vehicle checkpoint shootouts, etc. There were also occasional big ops like Knights’ Charge, where several hundred Mahdi Army guys got killed, or the 2007 Battle of Najaf, where a more or less regular raid turned into a giant fight with insane and heavily armed Shi’a cultists that resulted in 400 of them dying, etc., etc. This all barely made a blip on the news.
“Jim”,
They’re not converts, they’re cryptos. They go Left because the left is more open to new ideas, in the same way that the Alt. Right is open to new ideas, excepting that the Alt. Right is suppressed. But the establishment Right, unlike the eblishment Left, is Less open to new ideas and has a tendency toward conformity.
So, aliens will gravitate towards Leftism because they can Get Away With More in those social circles…
Best regards,
A.J.P.
I don’t think so. Progressive Jews are intermarrying, and they are more sincerely progressive, not less sincerely progressive. Indeed the big problem with Jews is that they abandon the unprincipled exceptions, accept progressive doctrines without accepting the large and small hypocrisies that preserved sanity.
If they were crypto Jews rather than Conversos, would not be nearly as harmful.
Spain had a relatively sane official religion, so their big problem was crypto Jews pretending to be Conversos. We have a seriously insane official religion, so our big problem is actual conversos.
What will be left after the Cathedral eats everything and it all comes out the other side? I would imagine that people revert back to their ethnicities, hence crypto.
It’s too hard to imagine either Arabs or Askenazis, Sephardics and mestizos reverting to the rediscovered religion around them when the Cathedral gives up the ghost. They’d find their ancestral religions, ie. the ones that they have today, and not become Pauline Christians nor heathen-style pagans.
So, crypto it is. Unless perhaps you believe somehow the ethnic minorities would get “cleansed” in the way that homo sapiens did to neanderthalensis?
A.J.P.
Jews will assimilate or move to Israel. The process is under way right now and will only get faster.
Difficult to say what will happen to Mestizos and Indios. In Mexico, the old gods walk again, but this has not happened in the US, perhaps because there is a strong desire to assimilate to whiteness and white values, as for example the straight shooting George Zimmerman. (One shot directly through the heart) If the old Gods do not follow Mexicans to the US, then Indios and Mestizos in the US are likely to accept the official religion, whatever it may be. And if the new official religion becomes pretty much the reverse of what it is now, they will all adopt the new one and scarcely notice the change.
Blacks will do what blacks do, and will create, are creating, a variant of Christianity that is fine with them acting black. Black Christianity will be strikingly and conspicuously black, and will develop, is developing, a suspicious similarity to Islam.
>What will be left after the Cathedral eats everything and it all comes out the other side?
The fact that you have to ask that question shows how clueless you are.
The better assimilated someone is into the Modern Structure, the less odds that they will have any children.
Children they do have are typically completely alienated from anything like family or tradition.
For Jews particularly, becoming a Converso is associated with a high risk of sterility and/or any children they do have being non-Jews.
For most people, this is a death ride.
High risk of sterility, because conversion is done without assimilating the protective hypocrisy that those born to the regnant religion have inherited from their parents. The Dark Enlightenment calls this “Not getting the joke”, and “ending the unprincipled exception”. The trouble with Jewish progressives is that they don’t get the joke, they drink the koolaide, they attack unprincipled exceptions.
Thus, for example, “equal but separate”. Suppose fifty percent of the city is black, and the government has separate black and white water fountains and public toilets. Suppose the government applies the same amount of money to installing and mantaining black and white water fountains and public toilets. That is equal but separate.
But, strangely, one hundred percent of the black water fountains will be out of order to due to casual vandalism, and one hundred percent of the black toilets have their floors covered three inches deep in human shit. The Converso denounces this as white racism and “separate and unequal”
In Australia, the Australian government has discovered it is just not practical to attempt to provided full blooded aboriginals with human type housing. Somehow Jews have failed to notice this, perhaps because all such housing is provided far away from regular humans, but when they do discover it, their reaction will be predictable.
Looking at birth rates among Cathedral natives going back 100-150 years, I don’t think there was much protective hypocrisy there.
One of the reasons they hated and feared Catholic immigrants and their institutions so much, instituting public schooling and the separation of church and state as national policy, was that the Catholics had high birthrates.
You can hear lots of Puritan screeching about how they would soon be swamped.
Their ideology has led to sterility for a long, long time.
Around 1780 or so we saw increasing brutal and direct methods applied to impose chastity and monogamy on women, and restrain hypergamy. Then, somehow, early in the nineteenth century, we saw the reverse, an ideology that women were naturally pure and chaste, and therefore no coercion was needed to impose the marriage contract on women, only on men. This ideology was affirmed ever more strongly, in the face of conspicuous and spectacular evidence to the contrary, notably the numerous adulteries of Queen Caroline. This ideology in due course resulted in, around the middle of the nineteenth century, in the modern one way marriage contract, binding only on the man, not on the woman.
It also led to the numerous societies to “rescue” fallen women, by removing all the adverse consequences of falling, which led to the modern welfare state.
But in practice, all the way to the early nineteen sixties, the old type eighteenth century marriage contract of the 1780s, where the woman was required to honor and obey, was in practice maintained in fact though not law by the selective application of hypocrisy and unprincipled exceptions. If public whippings of misbehaving women no longer happened, it was nonetheless understood that sometimes a private spanking was necessary and appropriate. And in my youth, all men knew the real nature of women, even though it was not the sort of thing a polite person said out loud in plain words.
“Jim”,
One must still call them cryptos rather than ebullient, newly-converted, true believers because they do make unprincipled exceptions when put into positions of civil government, notably for themselves and theirs.
So, the Talmudic Jew earmarks contributions for the Jewish State (J.S.) and the Italian or Irish papist “Catholic” or Trentian (derived from their latest and most visible pagan permutation) will rush to roll out the welcome mat if the Vatican pontiff should come to town. This scarcely needs mentioned but the red-skinned Mexican administrator will often make mention of La Raza before turning around to say “One race, the human race”.
The only pretense of conversion is when one looks through the Cathedral’s religion of Political Correctness.
Best regards,
A.J.P.
No-one should take the above examples as meaning that the Cathdral does not exist, nor does not come from countries dominated by white ethnics and American Indians. While the browns don’t have the capability for Political Correctness in the same way as whites and white ethnics do, they have become a force for demotism as they advocate for their group’s short-term interests.
But the Cathedral is especially bad in countries deeply influenced by the Vatican but then the existence of Protestant Christians, for example the Hugenot movement in France, would not hold significance and Frenchmen would not be practising it as an alternative, yet it is now possible to see a profound one in Radix Journal’s own Mr Roman Bernard. In the country of Hungary, a Protestant Christian in the position of Prime Minister rises to face the Cathedral’s mandate of a racially degraded Europe.
And, so we see individuals challenging the Cathedral in various places and so these religious minorities and the effect their presence does matter indeed. This is a reason for established churches, too, because a country shouldn’t allow its course to be decided by those smaller groups and, instead, should live or die as a nation. But which church to be established?
you *do* know that the reason La Raza exists is that “the latin american race” is a lie, right?
When your sock-puppets are looking like this https://blog.reaction.la/culture/republican-party-funds-the-sale-of-baby-meat/#comment-1138518 , “Peppermint Papist”, you have no room to say anything…At all.
A.J.P.
ajp, no one needs to use sockpuppets to insult you, you dishonor your family with your whaargarbl on your own.
but let me flesh out my assertion from my latest scheißpfost. There is no Latin American race. There are Whites, indians, niggers, and mudbloods.
It matters because when I got to college I wondered if I should date a White with a Latin American name, under the assumption that there was a Latin American race. I ended up dating a first-degree mischling rat-faced kike, because everyone knows that Jews are Whites with a different religion.
La Raza is “one race, the human race”. La Raza is the same as Greek Palestinians with Greek names whose nominal religion is Orthodox Christianity claiming to be Arabs, or Arabs, Persians, and Indians asserted to be Asians.
“Peppermint Papist”,
Do you remember that time Mr Land called you out for “hooliganism” on his “Outside In” blog?
It was great fun for those of us watching…With popcorn at the ready!
Best regards,
A.J.P.
I’m always surprised by how little we hear in the Western media about Jordan’s role in the region. It’s almost as if they don’t exist, which is odd, given their proximity to Syria, and that every other state invested in the war is given due consideration.
I wonder if Jordan’s intervention, one way or another, might be the crucial action that ultimately decides which way this conflict eventually ends?
Jordan is a well run Arab nation ruled by a Monarch and it doesn’t have oil wealth. Commercially it’s dominated by a small Christian minority. The Monarch snuffed out the Arab Spring before it go going. It’s about the last country the media would want to profile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_Middle_East#Jordan
Jordan’s military ran an air campaign with SF on the ground right over its border with IS, which was pretty effective.
Jordan doesn’t have anything to gain, but a lot to lose by a massive intervention. On the other hand, it’s an American client-state, and its intelligence apparatus works very closely with/for the American one, so I am sure is being tasked in support of American ops on the ground.
Just as Jordan has been historically used (is still being used) to train/equip the Palestinian paramilitary/police forces by the Americans, it has been used to train/equip America’s proxy Syrian insurgents.
The Jordanian government is riding not just one but two tigers: the Americans and its own Palestinian Arab majority population.
It seems to me that Syria is a sandbox for the Russian army to play in. They basically conduct a training exercise with live ammo. The cruise missiles, for instance, were totally unnecessary, but the Caspian fleet wanted to play too. The public (domestic and international) gets to watch a display of Russian military power; the “international community” can’t openly defend the enemy. What more could you ask for?
It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.
You get diminishing returns as you advance and the enemy falls back on inner lines, plus it becomes obvious that your Alawi allies are not very competent and get less competent as they advance. The temptation to add some more of your own troops increases, just to get some competent people on the ground that can be relied on. But those troops need to be supplied, and you can’t trust the local proxies to supply them, so you add logistics, which then get attacked, and you need to add more combat troops to protect the logistics, etc.
Something similar happened in the beginning of the Afghan war, from before the Soviets got officially involved. They had special ops and intel in Afghanistan for years prior, supporting their proxies. The proxies couldn’t hold their shit together. The Soviets launched an invasion, which went off without a hitch. And then the problems started.
The “proxy” seems more competent this time around. If the Russians can make the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey stand back, Assad should be able to take care of himself.
There is not much similarity between the Afghan intervention and the Syrian intervention.
There is a large similarity between the left wing interpretation of these interventions.
What happened in Afghanistan was yet another leftist singularity.
Afghanistan was ruled by Kings. And everyone knows that Kings are obsolete, so, progressives can and should take over.
King overthrown by leftist, Prince Daoud, who starts emancipating women “modernizing” (which is to say fucking up) the economy, and supporting the Soviet Union. Declares a republic.
And of course, the leftist Prince Daoud is overthrown by the even more leftist Taraki in a military coup, who proceeds to murder the entire royal family and to further emancipate women and to further fuck up the economy.
The economy collapses and the people revolt. Taraki calls for Soviet assistance. The Soviets intervene and immediately overthrow him for insufficient leftism, installing a quisling regime that is even more leftist.
Despite ruling through a violently unpopular and incompetent quisling regime utterly hated by the vast majority of Afghans, Soviets win with no big problems – except that Ronald Reagan notices the Soviet Union is suffering logistic exhaustion due to its buggered economy and involvement in too many wars, and proceeds with the a policy of bleeding the Soviets all over the world in the numerous small wars that somehow seem to have dropped down leftism’s memory hole.
Reagan’s policy was not to win in Afghanistan, but to lose everywhere while costing the Soviet Union more than it could afford, to give them all the Pyrrhic victories that they were willing to take.
To this end, the revolutionaries in Afghanistan merely had to keep on existing rather than to win, which of course they could do as long as continually supplied by US arms and money.
Similarly, trouble makers in Syria can and will keep on making trouble as long as they get arms and money to do so – but they cannot exercise any substantial power. This will cost the Russians money indefinitely, but they, unlike the old Soviet Union, have not engaged in imperial overreach.
It was not that Afghanistan bled the Soviets white, it was Afghanistan plus a bunch of other wars, near wars, and expensive dependent puppets, plus their own ideology was screwing up their own economy.
The Soviet Union never had any difficulty winning asymmetric war. They had trouble paying for winning asymmetric wars.
Reagan’s policy was to apply America’s economic strength against the Soviet Union’s economic weakness. The Soviet Afghan war can only be understood as a part, a small part, of that policy and program.
The Soviets were not defeated in Afghanistan by the mujahideen. They withdrew while still in near total control of Afghanistan. They were defeated in the Soviet Union by Reagan.
>King overthrown by leftist, Prince Daoud, who starts emancipating women “modernizing†(which is to say fucking up) the economy, and supporting the Soviet Union. Declares a republic.
Zahir Shah, the King of Afghanistan overthrown by Daoud, was the one who introduced women’s rights, a constitution, elections, etc.
Afghans remember his reign, when Helmand was called Little America, as a golden age.
During this time, Afghanistan was milking both the Soviets and the US for aid of all kinds.
>The economy collapses and the people revolt. Taraki calls for Soviet assistance. The Soviets intervene and immediately overthrow him for insufficient leftism, installing a quisling regime that is even more leftist.
The Soviets were in Afghanistan long before the official invasion. For instance, a Spetsnaz team was wiped out the prior year, and the 1979 Herat uprising saw a bunch of Soviet “advisers” killed. Similarly, Russian troops have been in Syria doing advising and intel gathering for a long time. A joint SIGINT base run by the Syrians and OSNAZ was overrun by rebels a year ago, for instance.
The quislings installed by the Soviets in Afghanistan were not more leftist than Taraki’s regime, but they were more competent. Najibullah’s regime, for instance, could have held out against the muj indefinitely, but Russia cut off his oil supplies under American pressure.
>To this end, the revolutionaries in Afghanistan merely had to keep on existing rather than to win, which of course they could do as long as continually supplied by US arms and money.
To win, all an insurgency has to do is to continue existing and imposing unsustainable costs upon the enemy.
> This will cost the Russians money indefinitely, but they, unlike the old Soviet Union, have not engaged in imperial overreach.
Yet. Of course, the USSR took a long time to engage in imperial overreach.
>The Soviet Union never had any difficulty winning asymmetric war. They had trouble paying for winning asymmetric wars.
This is like the joke that falling is not a problem, LANDING is the problem.
>The Soviets were not defeated in Afghanistan by the mujahideen. They withdrew while still in near total control of Afghanistan.
Sure. They had near total control of all the parts of Afghanistan upon which a Soviet soldier happened to be standing.
When you have control of a country, you don’t have to launch a two-month long operation with three divisions+ worth of troops to keep your garrison from being starved out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Magistral
You also don’t have to launch 9 major operations over 5 years to try to establish control over key terrain in the middle of your country which sits next to your main supply route, signing ceasefire treaties with the rebels between offensives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjshir_offensives
>They were defeated in the Soviet Union by Reagan.
Most of the Panjshir offensives happened before American aid was ramped up. The Soviet effort was fucked from the get-go, it just took a while for them to catch on. It was too easy to impose unacceptable costs on them. The muj didn’t have to win a single battle to make holding the place untenable.
Yes, in Afghanistan as in Russia, leftist singularity starts with a reformist king, and the reforms logically and necessarily lead in due course to the murder of the entire royal family. Similarly King Louis the sixteenth.
Leftist King Zahir Shah overthrown by someone further left, (prince Daoud) who is overthrown by someone even further left (Taraki) who murders the entire royal family, who is in turn overthrown by someone even further left.
Happens all the time, inherent in the nature of leftism.
An alternative description of this event is that the Mujahideen laid siege to one small city, hoping to gain control of a single city of Afghanistan for propaganda reasons, and the Soviets reopened the roads to that city inflicting huge casualties on the besieging force and capturing huge amounts of American supplied heavy weapons in the process.
The Mujahideen furtively infiltrated a lot of heavy weapons to cover the roads leading to the city, and when the Soviets became aware of this, they came and took the Mujahideen’s heavy weapons away.
>An alternative description of this event is that the Mujahideen laid siege to one small city, hoping to gain control of a single city of Afghanistan for propaganda reasons, and the Soviets reopened the roads to that city inflicting huge casualties on the besieging force and capturing huge amounts of American supplied heavy weapons in the process.
Yeah, if I were a Soviet propagandist trying to put a nice face on obvious failure to control main supply routes in the occupied country, and to explain why our major air base in the East (8000 foot runway) was besieged for four years, I would definitely use this description.
But the Soviets were able to control supply routes. Mujahideen could sneak up heavy weapons to cover the supply routes only for as long as they kept them concealed by not actually using them. Once they actually started using them, got flattened and the Soviets took their heavy weapons away.
For this to be some kind of defeat for the Soviets, or significant denial of Soviet control of Afghanistan, the Mujahideen would need to be actually able to block a road somewhere in Afghanistan for long enough to matter without getting squashed like bugs.
The left talks up the success of the Mujahideen in order to deny the success of Reaganism.
The Afghans did not succeed in asymmetric warfare against the British Empire – they were rescued from the British military by the British politicians, and they did not succeed in asymmetric warfare against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union went broke, due in part to Reagan outspending it, and in part due to self inflicted wounds.
Khost was under siege for 5 years. That’s not control of MSRs. When it takes you two months and three divisions to lift a siege (and you can’t keep those three divisions there, by the way,) that’s not “control” or “flattening.”
The Soviet Afghan war vets with whom I’ve talked universally spoke of their opponents with great respect. They took the muj much more seriously than you do.
Can you even imagine what an operation involving three divisions is?
It’s the entire theater operational reserve.
It’s massive.
The fact that the Soviets had to go to this extent shows you how little control they had.
The fact that they won decisively and overwhelmingly and captured loads of US supplied loot shows how much control they had. The Mujahideen threw everything they had into besieging a city, Russians threw everything they had into killing the besiegers. Russians won.
This is like hearing about how the US was defeated by gooks with less funding from commie stooges like Nick “horrorism” Land.
Do B’s Russian friends think they lost?
“The Russian army had to fight. That means the hajjis won.”
By the way, that green eyed hajji girl? If I didn’t know any better, she’s be white enough for me, which was, of course, the point of plastering her photograph on Time Magazine.
And my Vietnamese friends confidently tell me the Vietnam War was a civil war between northern hill people and southern swamp people.
Sure, Pravda. The great success of the Russians in controlling the country is evidenced by the fact that eight years into it, there were big chunks of it which they couldn’t go into in less than corps-strength. Similarly, if it ever comes to the point that USG has to use the 17th airborne corps to fight its way down I-95 to Florida to keep Miami from falling, this will be a sign of its firm grasp on the country, especially if it kills 300 rednecks in 2 months.
The point of guerrilla warfare is not that you can successfully take on the enemy’s main operational reserve, but that you 1) control every place the enemy does not have large units (most of the country,) 2) make keeping those units operating prohibitively expensive in the long run.
It is not apparent that “there were big chunks of it which they couldn’t go into in less than corps-strength”. In that Afghanistan did not instantly fall when the Russians left, it is clear that the Mujahideen did not control any of Afghanistan – they were only able to sneak around by night and make trouble provided that no strolling cop saw them first.
The puppets continued in power after the puppet masters had fallen.
The government of Nabijullah outlasted the Soviet Union and was not defeated by the Mujahideen, but by loss of faith in communism.
Operation Magistral was a corps-sized op. If the Soviets could have done it with less, they would have.
The Panjshir offensives grew to division-size. Then the Soviets made a deal with Massoud and left the place to him.
By the time the Soviets pulled out, half of Afghanistan was not under control by Najibullah’s government. Within 2 years, the government was holding 10% of the country (which included Kabul.)
Total Soviet commitment to Afghanistan was one hundred and fifteen thousand troops, which is not a lot of troops for a country the size of the Soviet Union – about three percent of the Soviet Army.
It was not that they could not afford to subdue Afghanistan. It was that they could not afford Afghanistan plus everything else.
It’s an irrelevant distinction. There’s always “everything else.”
They for sure couldn’t afford to control the place if it took them 30000 troops to unblock Khost. How many muj do you think were laying siege to Khost? Couldn’t have been that many, since they did it for four years and had to be fed and paid the whole time.
It is a relevant distinction in that Afghanistan was no biggie. The Soviet Union was not defeated by the Mujahideen, but by Reaganism, in that Reagan made sure there was a big pile of everything, the Mujahideen being one small part of that big pile.
The Soviet Union could and did control Afghanistan with three percent of its military power. What it could not afford was three percent in Afghanistan, and a percent here, and a percent there, and a percent in the other place.
>It is a relevant distinction in that Afghanistan was no biggie.
There were about 100K young men in Afghanistan at any given time. Figuring 9 months per average rotation, that’s a million Russians who went through. The USSR had 290 million inhabitants, so 145 million men. Eyeballing this thing http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF124/cf124.f6.3.gif maybe 20% came of draft age around the time of the conflict, so 29 million. So maybe 1 in 30 military aged males went. That’s quite a bit.
>The Soviet Union was not defeated by the Mujahideen, but by Reaganism, in that Reagan made sure there was a big pile of everything, the Mujahideen being one small part of that big pile.
The nature of having a global empire or even a large country is that there is a big pile of everything. Russia right now also has a big pile of everything.
>The Soviet Union could and did control Afghanistan with three percent of its military power. What it could not afford was three percent in Afghanistan, and a percent here, and a percent there, and a percent in the other place.
The Soviet Union had 3% of its military manpower in Afghanistan, with which it sort of controlled the major cities (Herat and Kandahar, for instance, were always partially under resistance control) and sort of controlled the main roads. That was it.
The effort took up a lot more than 3% of its land forces’ maneuver units, though, and a lot more than 3% of the military budget, and way, way more than 3% of the military budget available for discretionary spending. Most military expenditure is not elastic in the short term-you’ve got nuclear missiles to maintain, bombers and fighters to fly, with all the associated infrastructure, the antiaircraft defense establishment, the submarine fleet, etc. You can’t just scrap a bunch of that stuff at the drop of a hat, especially not to fund what’s supposed to be a limited and short-term invasion to prop up a proxy government.
When you start looking at what the USSR actually had available to play with when all the stuff that had to be funded was funded, Afghanistan was a huge deal.
Quite a bit in that a several such burdens simultaneously can be a problem. Not quite a bit in that one such burden is likely to be a problem.
The Russians have settled the Chechens, the Ukrainians are packing it in. What is their big pile?
The Russians do not have an empire any more. They can afford one and a bit small wars. And that is what they are doing.
“Russia right now also has a big pile of everything.”
The Syrian intervention serves as a very effective response to the “between sanctions and getting bogged down in Ukraine, Russia is on her last legs” crowd. Look, not only can we bomb for more than a few days before our ammo runs out, we can fire 26 cruise missiles just for the fun of it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if after that same crowd sings “Russia is getting bogged down in Syria, on last legs” for a while, they decide to intervene in Iraq as well. After being properly invited, of course.
Right on, more open-ended commitments to dysfunctional client-states should be the ticket.
I mean, what with oil prices at this record high and everything, and sure to stay there.
Yes, sorry, I forgot the oil prices. “Between sanctions, record low oil prices, and getting bogged down in Ukraine, Russia is on her last legs.”
“Right on, more open-ended commitments to dysfunctional client-states should be the ticket.”
Peacock signaling. We’re so fit we can afford this completely unnecessary and costly display.
Russia is not bogged down in Ukraine. War in Ukraine appears to be winding up.
“Similarly, trouble makers in Syria can and will keep on making trouble as long as they get arms and money to do so – but they cannot exercise any substantial power. This will cost the Russians money indefinitely, but they, unlike the old Soviet Union, have not engaged in imperial overreach.”
This assumes that Russia wants to control the whole of Syria and not carve out an Alawite state, build a wall along the border and let Sunnis rule the desert.
1) The desert is where the oil and natural gas are. Who needs Syria without oil and natural gas?
2) The Alawi heartland does not include Damascus and Aleppo. Any meaningful intervention must include the reconquest of those two cities. They lie about 200 kilometers inland from Latakia and Tartus, with big mountain ranges full of Sunnis on the way. Ruh-roh.
“Who needs Syria without oil and natural gas?”
– Russia doesn’t need oil and gas.
– Alawites would probably prefer being alive in a Syria without oil and gas than dead in a Syria with said.
That’s of course a hypothetical. We don’t yet know Russia’s goals; this is just a hypothesis I’ve seen thrown around. Here, for example,
https://pando.com/2015/10/19/bombed-stupid/1edbbfc93db42f1f2c30886a55b043ca44309e64/
but the article has expired.
Russia does, however, want to keep its subterranean navel base
If you’re gonna have a dependent state, it had better be self financing. You’re gonna need that oil and gas. And you definitely can’t just leave it for IS.
The scale of the current intervention suggests that Russia does not just want to protect the Alawi enclaves.
Here is a link to the War Nerd’s article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20151020005227/https://pando.com/2015/10/19/bombed-stupid/1edbbfc93db42f1f2c30886a55b043ca44309e64/
According to War Nerd, the Russians will be satisfied carving a rump state with defensible borders for their Alawi clients, and stop there.
I agree that this is the smart thing to do, but I don’t think it will happen.
For one, the hydrocarbons would be left in the hands of IS, for export to Turkey under this scenario. The best the Russians could do is to run a campaign hitting the wells, to deny their enemies these resources. But I don’t think they’ll resist the temptation. An Alawi rump state would rely entirely on Russian foreign aid for its existence, and the prospect of making it self-sufficient would be too much to resist.
For another, this kind of arrangement is good for Russia but bad for Iran, the junior investor in the deal. Iran needs a Syria that provides overland routes to its dependents Hezbollah. It also needs to secure its Iraqi client against the Sunnis, and this won’t happen as long as there’s an extensive Sunni Islamist state/patchwork on its Western border.
The Sunnis in Syria are losing their civilian base because they cannot keep piped water and grid power up.
If you cannot keep piped water and grid power, you are probably going to fuck up logistics and maintenance as well – plus, without civilians, you cannot afford logistics and maintenance.
In which case you cannot pump the oil.
In which case, might as well give up on syria and let the Alawites run things. Of course Islamic State will not want to admit to giving up, and the Americans will likely provide some face saving formula, but that the lights are out outside of Alawite ruled areas tells me who will win.
I bet the oil will keep flowing with Turkish expertise if nothing else.
BTW, a few months ago you were highly complimentary of IS while I called them monkeys (I haven’t changed my assessment, btw.) What happened?
“I agree that this is the smart thing to do, but I don’t think it will happen.”
The first part, without “stop there”, is very likely to happen because it’s a necessary first step for any further developments.
Then, Iraq cuts out IS’s southern supply route with Iran’s help, and the Kurds cut out IS’s northern supply route under the protection of Russia’s no fly zone which stops Turkey’s air.
Easy as pie. 🙂
Imperialism, done right, is profitable. You send in superior humans and take the inferior subhuman’s land, oil, and women away from them. I hope Putin has the balls to do imperialism right.
I fantasize that Putin will grab the oilfields (in Assad’s name of course, and then sell him a weapon’s and oil development contract paying most of the revenue to Russia and some Putin oligarchs).
Government, however, is not good at doing anything for a profit. Colonialism was successful because Charles the Second gave a for profit limited liability joint stock corporation the power to make war and peace, and it used that power to make a profit. If he had tried to do it himself, probably would have lost money.
Putin needs to find a Clive, and let Clive take Syria.
https://www.rt.com/news/319499-russia-airplanes-bridge-euphrates/
Works too, I suppose.
ISIS (Israeli Secret Insurgency Staff) are still towelheaded monkeys, animated by their natural equilibrium ideology of plunder and rape. Their ideology towards women is more sensible than the Judaeo-Christian ideology of the West, so much so that here have been embarrassing defections, including Hillary Clinton, who is currently calling for open war with Russia to save her precious rape apes.
Plunder and rape tends to result in failure to obtain long term benefit from your conquests. Observe the lights going out where ISIS rules. The colonial model, where they took resources at swordpoint and then imposed law and order so that they could develop those resources, is better for everyone in the long run.
Trouble set in when the colonialists started to rationalize that they were there to do the natives a favor. Once they stopped robbing and raping, they also found that somehow they stopped developing, stopped maintaining law and order. The best job was done neither by imperialist do gooders, nor by ISIS style plunder and rape, but by the piratical colonialists who came to seize under utilized and consequently under defended resources, and put those resources to more effective utilization – Clive style plunder and rape.
They are incapable of imposing real order because their appeal to their best fighters rests on continued full spectrum disorder. They can’t grow their own fighters, and need to import from outside.
I doubt the Kurds will cut off IS oil/gas flow to the North. The Kurds are not in this for Iraq, which they hate, nor for Iran, which they also dislike (but work with) and definitely not for Russia. The Kurds are in this for the Kurds. The way this sort of thing works is that you tax oil/gas/other transit through your area. Notice how buses run regularly between Damascus, the Alawi areas and IS-land.
Yeah, Russia in theory could set up a colony, but will not set one up in practice. If grandma had balls she would have been grandpa. Russia will continue doing the mirror image of what the US is doing, maybe slightly more so. Note the latest developments:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/10/24/world/middleeast/ap-ml-syria.html?_r=0
And Aleppo still hasn’t fallen.
The Russian saying is that you can’t make a bullet out of shit. You can’t make good fighters out Arabs, especially not the Alawis.
Me personally, as long as they’re all killing each other, I’m cool with it. Hezbollah, IS, Assad, Iran, Al Nusra, the Free Syrian Army…it’s like bad vs. evil.
A short while ago the US airforce bombed Aleppo’s power generators, which is a pretty good indication the US thinks they are about to fall into competent hands.
http://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/russia-receives-authorization-to-strike-daesh-inside-iraq/454089
There we go.
Look at the map.
Dollars to donuts 80% of Russian ordnance will be expended within 200 km of Tartus.
It’s about 600 km to Mosul.
The main problem the Russians will face is not even logistics but targeting.
You can bomb blind, hit infrastructure, but if you want to kill the enemy, you need to either have good SIGINT or good HUMINT (preferably guys on the ground with lasers.) I doubt Russia has either one in mass beyond the front lines in the West. Are they going to hit random trucks in the desert?
B, you are usually fairly good, but here you’re just grasping at straws.
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/27/middleeast/iraq-russia-iran-syria-intelligence-deal/
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/iraq-syria-russia-iran-isil-151014061134849.html
[repost of awaiting moderation, with only one link]
B, you are usually fairly good, but here you’re just grasping at straws.
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/27/middleeast/iraq-russia-iran-syria-intelligence-deal/
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