Total number of comments: 1542 (since 2013-04-13 18:28:29)
Juan Cole
is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
Website: http://juancole.com
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2000 US spec ops troops can't hold a fourth of Syria very long. The Kurds in the northeast are going to get severe pressure from Turkey. Trump will likely pull out. The deal to be had is a more federal Syria that the Syrian Kurds rejoin. It may well be the deal that occurs. And then presto Syria borders back.
Given the JCPOA, I do not believe there would be international support for any such strike. Russia would not go to bat for Iran, but there would be consequences for the US. Israel doesn't have that capability and could not get overflight rights from Turkey or Iraq.
No, he isn't with the Israeli right wing. More of a centrist in the terms of Israeli politics, maybe even center-left.
It isn't fair to say that Mr. Friedman does not know the region well. He has a graduate degree from St. Anthony's Oxford in Middle East studies and covered the region on the ground (while in some danger), and has met with and reported on most of its movers and shakers. He has been bravely critical of the annexation of the West Bank and favors a Palestinian state. I just have some philosophical differences with him, that's all.
The Saudi proxy, Army of Islam, has been pretty decisively defeated.
someone sent me this by email
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Actually Apple does not have access to your encrypted data and therefore cannot share it wih the government, which is what Comey minded.
Because if the US government had pushed for consumer privacy and strong encryption it would have made it more difficult for anyone to hack anything.
The MEK was decertified as a terrorist organization in 2012; the tale is no doubt extremely sordid.
And if they're including the Saudi-backed Army of Islam, late of Douma, the adjective is risible.
Polling suggests that between 66% and 80% of the British public opposed the strikes on Syria. It likely could not have gotten through parliament.
The US never effectively halted military aid to Egypt. That aid is sent in early summer.
After Sisi's June 2013 coup, US law required a cut-off of aid to any military dictatorship. Sisi took off his uniform, staged a phony election in spring 2014, and was a civilian president in time to receive the annual aid in summer 2014. It was all smoke and mirrors.
I don't have the slightest idea what this means but it certainly is entertaining.
Not against protests. Been to a few myself. But Parkland students have not changed one national law, and unless we have a whole different Congress, there is no prospect of them doing so.
It is increasingly looking as though sarin was involved (chlorine would probably have dispersed before killing so many). Only the regime has sarin.
The Saudis want to monopolize Wahhabism and are saying that the Qataris don't deserve to claim Abd al-Wahhab's legacy inasmuch as they have fallen into the Muslim Brotherhood heresy.
I walked around San Jose and found it quite pleasant and certainly wouldn't hesitate to go back any day of the year. But apparently your diesel problem is about to be addressed, big time.
Pakistani high politics is a game of the elite, roughly the top 5%. Within that elite Shia are disproportionately powerful. You can't avoid social science conclusions just because people are bigots. That ordinary Shiites in Karachi are slaughtered with impunity is actually not incompatible with the first statement. It is the rural landowning Punjabi Shia such as the pir of Jhang family that are politically powerful, not the Urdu-speaking workers and shopkeepers down south.
Parliament has already voted to stiff the Saudis; the powerful Shia minority won't have it.
Yemen.
Yes because the American intervention in Iraq turned that country into a paradise.
No.
There isn't good historical evidence that Abu Bakr, Omar, Uthman and Ali called themselves caliphs. The inscriptions that survive say 'commander of the faithful.'
If they replace coal with nat gas, they are reducing emissions by half, which isn't bad as a stop-gap measure. In the hierarchy of carbon fundamentalism, coal is the first devil that must be exorcised.
Hi, Mark. If you are an engineer in the field I am glad to bow to your expertise.
What you are saying is not however in the literature. At 66 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour, nuclear (including construction) is more carbon intensive than wind or solar. It is however substantially less carbon intensive than all fossil fuels. Hydroelectric is estimated at 13 grams CO2 per kilowatt hour.
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/climate-change/nuclear-power-greenhouse-gases
I don't think denominating oil prices in other than dollars had anything to do with the US attack on Iraq.
Yes, it was meant as a positive.
The Houthis are Arabs, and Zaydi Shiism is actually fairly close to Sunnism. They did not come to power with significant help from Iran and they are a Yemeni movement. This Iran condemnation you bring up is a canard. And by the way lots of Sunni countries declined Saudi pressure to get involved, including Pakistan.
Yes, but it can't be called a civil war any more, really. A low intensity provincial conflict maybe. And each pocket that falls further weakens the rebels. Fall of east Aleppo freed up forces for assault on E. Ghouta. Fall of E. Ghouta will free up forces for further assault on Idlib (against which there has been a creeping regime campaign).
I don't actually think that the Pakistani Pushtuns still bulk large in Afghan consciousness. There is a big political split, with most of the Pakistani ones supporting a secular nationalist party. Afghanistan does not have a majority ethnicity and the Pushtuns should make their peace with sharing with Hazaras, Uzbeks, Tajiks.
Hi, Louis. You aren't a careful reader of texts and/or haven't been reading my blog. I don't deny that class resentments played a role. However, the emergence of Salafis as the vanguard of the revolution did doom it afterwards.
Also, the phrase 'I know this won't be published' usually causes a comment not to be published because it is a passive-aggressive form of trolling.
Professor Cole has blogged regime atrocities extensively.
studies have shown that social media algorithms favored political extremes over time and herded people toward Alex Jones.
It already is.
Your "$300" per kilowatt hour battery pack estimate is out of date already. As Asit Biswas and Cecilia Tortajada write in a Conversation column syndicated here today https://www.juancole.com/2018/03/electric-gasoline-dinosaurs.html,
Future technology always seems more difficult than it is, because breakthroughs haven't yet been made. Engineers used to write me similar messages in 2005 that renewables would never be able to compete with the concentrated energy in fossil fuels and that solar was 7 times more expensive than hydrocarbons. And last fall in Chile a concentrated solar bid was let for less than 3 cents a kilowatt hour; coal is 5 cents a kilowatt hour. It has only been 12 years. What we do know is that the more R&D money is thrown at these issues and the bigger the consumer market, the faster technology changes, and now that China is in big time along with states like California, things will change faster than we can imagine.
China's proposed alternative to SWIFT never panned out.
Your friend appears never to have been at Picadilly Circus or Leicester Square
thanks Don but we can't post long passages from copyright material
Very few states in modern times have balkanized in the long run, and keeping opposition cantons going when they are losing is very difficult to do or to justify. People also kept predicting that Iraq would permanently lose Mosul or Kirkuk, and Baghdad already has them both back. Damascus will be weaker than before, but it will likely over time reassert itself.
Yes, excellent if you want to go to Chicago, not so much for Novi and Farmington or the airport.
Find me a train to commute on in Michigan and I'll jump on it.
thanks so much, Frank!
When everyone stands on principle and demands it.
I'd prefer that the US not be in Syria. However, Raqqa under ISIL attacked NATO members on several occasions, and self-defense is allowed by the UN Charter. That the US effort to roll up ISIL is illegal in international law is not at all apparent and I very much doubt that a legal challenge to it in any international tribunal would succeed.
I think most Syrian weapons are from Russia, which is among the Big Five for arms sales. Why it always gets a pass from the Left, even though it is now a far right ultra-nationalist hyper-capitalist crony state is completely beyond me.
Concerns about war tactics that target civilians or recklessly disregard their welfare are not PR campaigns. After the opposition has been crushed and the Baath secret police safely reinstalled, of course there is social peace, and the death of politics. Al-Assad has in fact gone on arresting dissidents and had 10,000 tortured to death in jail and then had pictures taken of their corpses.
Hi, Alec. Yes, the US army in South Vietnam thought exactly as you do. It was invited in by the government and many believed that it was necessary to destroy the village to save it, sir!
Many Syrian rebels are just ordinary Sunnis and specifically to target their schoolchildren and the hospitals where they are treated and to cut the civilian population off from food, which have been the al-Assad regime's tactics and those of its Russian backer, are serial war crimes, which amount to crimes against humanity.
Human Rights Watch has chronicled these crimes here:
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/syria
And Amnesty International:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/syria-relentless-bombing-of-civilians-in-eastern-ghouta-amounts-to-war-crimes/
Some of us care about human rights more than we do about political consistency. It is all right to be on the same side as Russia if Russia's case is just. It is all right to be on the same side as the (increasingly tattered) US State Department if their case is just. It is the facts that matter and those facts can be known.
He used the Turkish prime minister as the translator, and has no idea how is words were transmitted to Erdogan, whose English is not fluent.
crushing the rebels is different from committing genocide against civilians
Al-Assad's military shrank from 300,000 to 35,000. I'd say he lost support of the military. You mean he didn't lose the support of his brother Maher.
The drone was tracking the Syrian fundamentalists rebels in Quneitra supported by Israel, and whose sphere of control Israel is attempting to strengthen and expand.
A regime is a government. Regimes are typically tightly organized, like the Baath Party in Syria or the Communist Party in North Korea. Saudi Arabia has not at least until recently had a regime. Your hang up on the term is imposing on it meanings it does not have. It is true that regimes are less legitimate than elected governments.
It has nothing to do with Islam per se, any more than the Spanish Inquisition was dictated by the Gospels.
It is possible that megafauna extinction in North America is comet-related and in the rest of the world human-related.
they did. they were ignored
You need glasses if you don't think I mentioned the US.
But your point is anyway incorrect, since the US was not saying it would train or arm anyone in Afrin. The Turks are attacking where the supposed threat wasn't.
the US hopes to use Syrian Kurds to block Iran
Thanks Faheem. No, I don't know much Russian. I was depending on BBC Monitoring.
Chinese R & D in solar is among their few innovative sectors, and you are being unfair to them in that regard. It isn't important whether PV is slightly more expensive than wind but that both are far less expensive than fossil fuels if you take into account externalities (and increasingly even if you don't). Not sure why you think Chinese engineers can't build wind turbines. The technological challenges are far less than with PV.
You didn't live through the catastrophe that befell people's mortgage equity in the Detroit area, I see. As for staffing the Self Defense Forces in Japan, given N. Korea's threats I think that is important.
depends on which Syrians you ask. Those in East Aleppo happy with the regime back are happy. Tens of thousands ran away to Idlib to avoid al-Assad's goons.
I think a lot of Syrians see their local militias as preferable to the goons of the Baath state.
Israel is not a leader in solar and produces little electricity that way. There was a minor vogue for residential water heating by solar decades ago that petered out.
The ban was already law. It affects primary schools across the board. Khamenei is in control of enforcement. This was just tightening the screws. But, by the way, Khamenei as leader can issue directives that have the force of law.
Calling support for Syrian rebels 'terrorism' is just propaganda, and would implicate France and the US as well. Anyway that isn't what people mean in the West when they charge Saudi Arabia with terrorism. They think the royal family is al-Qaeda, which is ridiculous.
Congress controls sanctions, not Obama
The Qur'an does not mention covering the head.
Can't thank you enough for very informed comments! Happy New Year!
thanks a million, Lillian!
The problem is your use of "tons." Lebanon has 4 million citizens and 25,000 Hizbullah fighters. That would be equivalent to a massive army of 2 million US fighters under arms with training, medium and heavy weaponry, and line of command, twice as large as the US military. Doesn't exist.
Militias and cartels are symptom of weak government. Egypt in the Nile Valley has none
They can vote for president.
thanks, Scott!
You have not actually said anything
thx so much!
they can resent it all they want, but their tanks were no good.
This is crackpotism. US supplied aircraft and tanks were important to even the victory at El Alamein.
http://www.historynet.com/the-leading-edge-americans-at-el-alamein.htm
“ The Sherman tanks and self-propelled guns that U.S. Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall had promised to British prime minister Winston Churchill were finally arriving, giving Allied tankers something like parity against German panzers. Overhead, 100 American-made fighters and medium bombers had joined the assault on Axis troops, airfields, and communication lines.“
Yes, well, the Salafi Jihadis do also bear blame.
A) we have very little genetic material from any of our ancestors. (B Henry VIII was Edward IV’s grandson unless you know something I don’t
Agreed. However those so steeped are now running the country.
The comment of someone who does not understand genetic history. Prince Harry has 1 million ancestors in the time of Edward IV. None of them related to Edward IV? Let’s try this: James Stuart was his descendant, which is why he succeeded Edward IV’s great granddaughter Elizabeth I. And Princess Diana was descended from the Stuarts
http://www.unofficialroyalty.com/columnists/the-laird-othistle/the-spencers-royal-stuart-ancestors/
Eh voila Prince Harry gets back to Alphonso who sired children with Zayda of Seville. And that’s just one line out of a million.
both are authoritarian
there are books about the Hizmet movement; your public library can get them for you. You don't have to depend on one web site.
If you are going to be in the building more than 7 years, you are losing a lot of money by not putting solar panels on it.
The picture is actually of the operating solar concentrating plant in Ouarzazat Morocco
There were plenty of opportunities for Damascus to take on Daesh in the course of other nearby campaigns, and it systematically declined them in order to have Daesh become the face of the rebels.
There was no Hizbullah proper before '84 or so, but several smaller radical groups, especially Islamic Amal of Abbas Mousawi. The radicals were mainly cultivated by Iraqi Da'wa, though Iran played a growing role over time. See Richard Norton's work.
Iraqi Da'wa was probably as or more important in formation of Hizbullah as Iran. It was the Israeli occupation from 1982 that radicalized Lebanese Shiites, and Hizbullah was more effective in defending the South.
thanks so much & will do!
I am sorry, but this is simply not true. Mulla Omar never made such an offer. A council of Afghan ulama urged this step, but they are not Taliban and had no power.
Al-Qaeda was Brigade 55 of the Taliban. They weren't guests.
The Taliban never offered to turn over Bin Laden, who was related by marriage to Mulla Omar.
you don't arrest the prime minister of another country primarily for economic reasons
The problem with your original comment is that it does not address proportions. Almost all Lebanese say Hizbullah should keep its arms for now. Some say that they should keep them forever. 56% of Shiites say this. A majority of Catholics say this. Even 12% of Maronites say this. But only 7% of Sunnis say this. So sure, you can say there are Sunnis who support Hizbullah strongly. But 93% of them don't support them to the hilt, and moreover, the percentage of Sunnis who do is the absolute smallest among all the confessions. So it is possible, you see, to make some judgments.
http://monthlymagazine.com/article-desc_1838_information-internationals-opinion-poll--information-international-polls-the-lebanese-on-current-issues
You on the other hand have worked yourself into a position where Sunnis in Lebanon are pro-Hizbullah and Christians don't have an alliance with it.
Personally I give petroleum 20 years max.
Allahu `Azim, which is synonymous with Allahu Akbar. Since the translations were done after the rise of Islam there is anxiety of influence...
population wise
There are 20,000 Safaitic Aramaic and Arabic inscriptions by the ancient Arabs, and few have been studied.
The revisionist historians are not dismissive of all ancient texts. They trust those that can be securely dated. So they would trust the Greek chronicle of Theophylact Simocatta, finished 630 in Constantinople. But the stories about Muhammad in 630 come from Ibn Ishaq and later authors, from 760 forward and they don't trust something 130 to 300 years after the fact.
Most scholars have questioned the existence of a Hejazi Christian society.
This is why I apologized for putting up something abstruse. Some scholars reject the later Abbasid sources about early Islam and want proof of virtually everything they assert, which isn't of course forthcoming. To my knowledge there are now only two Arabic inscriptions using al-Ilah or Allah, both Christian and both 6th century. There are many Aramaic/ Nabatean such inscriptions but they trail off two hundred years before the prophet's birth.
The long arm of the Monroe Doctrine still operates in DC
The US wouldn't want Russia in Venezuela
There was a street uprising in Mosul, much bigger than Tahrir Square in Cairo.
They ran away and left behind billions in US military equipment for ISIL. One of the greatest military fiascoes in history. In part, the Mosul citizenry massed and attacked them. In part, the enlisted men from Hilla knew their officers had screwed them by taking money for ghost deployments and leaving half the force in Hilla and Basra. They were damned if they were going to die for that.
I don't think Arab Iraqis have anything against Kurdish Iraqis per se. It is all politics.
Tillerson and the State Department are plenty smart. Tillerson is *ignorant* in ways that shock me given his broad experience of the world. As for State, I'm sure they're mortified and demoralized. Hang in there, folks!
there was no reason for US to hook up with YPG until ISIL took al-Raqqa, so the whole problematic is recent. In the Cold War, PKK and YPG would have been coded as evil communists in Washington.
Anan, your unscholarly talking point about a 1400 year civil war among Muslims is not welcome in these pages. Please argue more narrowly to the point.
Oh, I think the number of atheists in northeast Syria is low. Ideology is something else.
Both by political behavior and according to polling only a tiny number of Muslims thought well of ISIL, and some of those who did were not well informed about it.
Apparently, some form of Nazism.
The West has its own struggle between decent people and the Mercer/Breitbart extremists.
Putin has done more for the cause of Muslim extremism than most.
anarchists can be left or right
SAA until recently largely ignored ISIL except at Palmyra. Hanging on in Deir al-Zor was minor until this summer-fall
Russians did almost nothing against ISIL -- the concentrated on al-Qaeda/ Nusra & were crucial there.
Kirkuk as an issue is different from Kurdistan as an issue. The Constitution already has a mechanism for resolving it, and it wasn't by Peshmerga just seizing it.
Presidents have helped resolve such conflicts many times in the past. No evidence this one a) knew the issues or b) even tried.
Russia is not particularly hooked in with the Kurds. China will back Baghdad to the hilt and disapproves of small ethnic separatist movements.
Skin color is created by the *window* between embro need for vitamin D via UV rays and genetic damage done to embryo by UV rays. Other factors can be in play but this window is a major one.
there is a hyperlink
UV rays are not ghe same as lattitude; but of course there are other factors
John Kerry
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/art-in-iran-ix-safavid
This discussion is by now sufficiently off topic that I'm closing it. However, you lost that one and your explanation of why does not hold water. That you're still fighting for the long-disappeared 'South Vietnam' explains why you're so into our current lost causes.
Yeah we only gave 500,000 troops and trillions of dollars and nearly 60,000 KIA. Vietnamese nationalism was stronger. I lived through it.
Anan, you're welcome to your opinion but I had to take out some ad hominems which should be avoided.
Large numbers of Vietnamese-Americans are actually from the Chinese-Viet middle and business classes.
significant numbers of ARVN personnel appear to have been double agents who believed in a united Vietnam.
Let's try to bring this one to a close, guys. Comments are for informed response articles not for running debates about loosely related issues.
I don't think probably horse breeders got any pay-offs from Henry Ford.
It is not ignorance. The Koch brothers suborned the democratically elected representatives on the GOP side in Florida to make sure they can keep farting out billions of tons of heat trapping gases and get paid to do it.
The Taliban are deeply unpopular with most non-Pushtuns. A lot of Pushtuns, 44% of the population, have a sneaking admiration for them and under some situations prefer them to corrupt officials from Tajik Kabul. Kabul has little authority in Qandahar, Helmand, etc. and almost no troop in the ANA are from there.
Awarded best comment ever prize by IC editorial board!
thanks!
The rich are too small a group to win elections so they seek other constituencies-- anti-federal government rural folk and Evangelical Christians who see abortion as a form of genocide. Rich women can fly elsewhere for their abortions, so kowtowing to the Evangelicals on this issue costs the rich almost nothing.
6% are atheists and 28% are agnostics
https://www.juancole.com/2014/01/recognizing-israel-saying.html
All the Iraqi Kurds I know want independence.
Many thanks, Alan!
The Taliban now hold more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since 2001. In places like Kunduz the Afghanistan National Army has proved unable or unwilling to stand against Taliban offenses without US handholding. Social statistics don't matter, national will matters.
That's right-- the people who had electricity had their own inverter or power wall
No, it is the appropriation of the term Salafi by people not originally connected to the liberal movement. I am not aware that al-Banna called himself a Salafi. Muslim Brothers were distinct from Salafis until the 1990s when some proportion of the movement so designated themselves, and then split off.
The word Salafi has two meanings. 1) is late 19th and early 20th century liberal Sunni reformers-- Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and (a little more conservative) Rashid Rida. Abduh allowed bank interest and sharing meals with Christians and was against veiling.
2) is late twentieth century Sunni fundamentalists who adopt Saudi Wahhabi practices into their Sunnism in places like Egypt. The two kinds of "Salafi" could not be more different.
We can call them Muwahhidun or Unitarians. The name does not matter.
An essential tenet of Sunnism is that you have to belong to one of the 4 madhhabs or legal rites. Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab rejected that. Another is that you have to accept other Sunnis as Muslims if they say they are, even if they lead a dissolute lifestyle. Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab rejected this. Not Sunni.
I don't deny that Wahhabis have become accepted by many as a kind of Sunni in the past 40 years or so, but that has to do with the influence of oil money. But this is a relatively new wrinkle in history. Rashid Rida, no liberal, did not see them as Sunnis in the 1920s.
Yes, I am saying that the assertion that they are actually Hanbalis and a form of Sunni is recent, and is political. They have not always considered themselves Sunnis. Read ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In the Gulf you hear people talking about Wahhabis vs. Sunnis.