Showing posts with label Kurd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kurd. Show all posts
Saturday, October 26, 2019
A Future For the Trump International Hotel
News services report that the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. is up for sale. Given this property's notoriety, as the venue for alleged Constitutionally-violative emoluments paid to President Trump, its future as a hotel could be in doubt. Who would pay full market price for a hotel with a clouded reputation? Anyone who did might come under investigation for giving President Trump an alleged Constitutionally violate emolument--or worse. The penalties for bribery of a federal official are stiff. So the Trump International isn't likely to command a high price.
But not all is lost. Many commercial buildings are being converted to multiple use. What once were malls, office buildings and other single use buildings find new lives as real estate jacks-of-all-trades. Multiple use doesn't solve the emoluments/bribery problem--there could still be issues if the buyer really meant to buy political capital and not just a building. But the identity of the buyer might resolve these concerns. Consider the following.
Organize a crowd funded investment trust, with members of the progressive movement as trustees, that would be funded by rage donations. The trust would buy the hotel and convert it to multiple use. The building could have a fitness studio--called Colin K's--where members would practice kneeling to the national anthem. It could have a restaurant that served steak with anything except ketchup. It could have a film studio, where actors appearing to be coarse, lecherous older men with orange hair would be filmed in videos with much younger women called "Naked and Afraid in the Business World." It could have an immigrant orientation center, where classes in English as a second language would be offered, a family re-unification center called Encontremos Los Desapareciditos ("Find the Disappeared Little Ones") would operate, and immigrants would be given clear, clean spring water to drink. It could have a travel agency that would arrange travel to Cuba and to countries that President Trump had in mind when he referred to "shithole countries." It could have a Kurdish Liaison Office (the functional equivalent of an informal Kurdish embassy). And last, but certainly not least, it could have an Amazon physical store, which would be a success because it would no doubt be a Trump-free zone.
Monday, October 5, 2015
Everyone's a Loser in Syria
With Russia's entry into the bag of dog doo that is Syria, the chattering classes are all astir over who's up, who's down, who's winning and who's losing. Russia is the usual nominee for winner. But what exactly has Russia won? It can't win the war. Between ISIS, the Kurds and various other rebel groups, most of Syria is no longer in the hands of the Assad regime. Russia can't afford to commit the tens of thousands of ground troops, equipment and air power that would be needed to retake and hold all this ground, and the Assad regime's army appears too depleted to mount the major offensives that would be needed. All Russia can do is prop up an Assad rump regime in western Syria that would be under constant attack. That would mean an indefinite commitment to a war with no end in sight and no possibility of a Russian victory.
Russia's puppet in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, isn't a winner; he has only avoided becoming a big loser. His diminished army can't reconquer what he's lost in Syria. Russian air strikes will allow him to bolster his lines and tighten up his defenses. But a few dozen Russian air craft don't begin to provide enough air power to support an offensive that could retake all of Syria. At the same time, Assad's authority is diminished. Now, he will have to do whatever Putin tells him to do, and like it, as well.
The Iranians, who apparently negotiated an alliance of sorts with Russia, have had their weakness revealed. For all their bluster and unacknowledged efforts to build nuclear weapons, they don't have the strength to prop up a two-bit dictator in a small nation. They had to call in first, their Hezbollah allies, and then Russia. Maybe the Iranians are claiming a propaganda victory. But they just ceded power to Vlad the Invader, and it's generally a bad idea to give power to an aggressive despot. Has the Islamic Iranian government forgotten that one reason Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi allied himself so closely with the United States was because the Russians wanted to take over Iran after World War II?
The Shiite dominated government of Iraq has cozied up to Russia and allowed Russian military planes to fly over Iraqi air space in order to reach Syria. Maybe it had no choice; its Iranian handlers could have told it to cuddle up to Putin. But, reality is you can't be an ally of America and an ally of Russia. If the Iraqis snuggle up to Putin too much, America may not provide as much military equipment or intelligence to Iraq as it once did. It may see less value in supporting a Shiite government in Baghdad and perhaps more value in supporting the Kurds.
The Sunni rebel groups--ranging from ISIS to the various metastasizes of al Qaeda to the tiny and shrinking handful of moderate rebels supported by the United States--are ships out of luck. They can't win, not with Russian military assets located in and protecting western Syria. They will be battered by Russian air power, and will have to hunker down.
Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies have quietly been supporting various of Assad's opponents, hoping to unseat him and install a Sunni-friendly government. That ain't happening now, not with Russian soldiers in Latakia.
The Kurds have enjoyed notable success in Syria, carving out safe havens for themselves and others who aren't Sunni or Shiite crazies. But Russian air power will likely preclude further Kurdish gains. The Kurds will have to concentrate on holding what they have.
Turkey has been fighting Russia for centuries. Now, with Russian military aircraft in Syria, the Russians just flanked Turkey and can hit it from two sides. Not that Putin has expressed any unfriendly intentions toward Turkey, but given the centuries of war between these two nations, nothing needs to be said.
Israel has been fighting various Russian allies almost since its inception. Never, however, have Russian military assets been so closely positioned to Israel. Had Iran been so brazen as to station military aircraft in Latakia, Israel's more advanced air force would have swarmed in the next morning before dawn and walloped the warm living yogurt out of the Iranians. But Israel cannot attack Russian forces. It can only watch, and hope that Syria proves to be a hopeless morass for Russia.
And last, but not least, the United States has seen its modest influence in Syria diminish even more. By propping up Assad, Putin precludes any possibility of an American victory. Not that it matters since, at this point, America isn't even really engaged in Syria. The Obama administration issues a steady stream of press releases about Syria, but it's doing little more than talking. Since it's not engaged in Syria, it doesn't have the leverage to get the Russians out. Hopes that Russia will join hands with the U.S. in attacking ISIS are delusional. ISIS has weakened America's position in the Middle East. Why would Putin want to weaken ISIS, which is doing the dirty work for him? All he needs to do is prop up Assad, his puppet in Syria, while ISIS and America batter away at each other, neither able to conclusively defeat the other.
In the end, the absence of anyone strong enough to impose peace and order in Syria means that the country will be de facto partitioned. That's what happened to Yugoslavia. It's what's happening now in Iraq. The flood of refugees into Europe will continue. The truth is everyone is a loser in Syria.
Russia's puppet in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, isn't a winner; he has only avoided becoming a big loser. His diminished army can't reconquer what he's lost in Syria. Russian air strikes will allow him to bolster his lines and tighten up his defenses. But a few dozen Russian air craft don't begin to provide enough air power to support an offensive that could retake all of Syria. At the same time, Assad's authority is diminished. Now, he will have to do whatever Putin tells him to do, and like it, as well.
The Iranians, who apparently negotiated an alliance of sorts with Russia, have had their weakness revealed. For all their bluster and unacknowledged efforts to build nuclear weapons, they don't have the strength to prop up a two-bit dictator in a small nation. They had to call in first, their Hezbollah allies, and then Russia. Maybe the Iranians are claiming a propaganda victory. But they just ceded power to Vlad the Invader, and it's generally a bad idea to give power to an aggressive despot. Has the Islamic Iranian government forgotten that one reason Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi allied himself so closely with the United States was because the Russians wanted to take over Iran after World War II?
The Shiite dominated government of Iraq has cozied up to Russia and allowed Russian military planes to fly over Iraqi air space in order to reach Syria. Maybe it had no choice; its Iranian handlers could have told it to cuddle up to Putin. But, reality is you can't be an ally of America and an ally of Russia. If the Iraqis snuggle up to Putin too much, America may not provide as much military equipment or intelligence to Iraq as it once did. It may see less value in supporting a Shiite government in Baghdad and perhaps more value in supporting the Kurds.
The Sunni rebel groups--ranging from ISIS to the various metastasizes of al Qaeda to the tiny and shrinking handful of moderate rebels supported by the United States--are ships out of luck. They can't win, not with Russian military assets located in and protecting western Syria. They will be battered by Russian air power, and will have to hunker down.
Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies have quietly been supporting various of Assad's opponents, hoping to unseat him and install a Sunni-friendly government. That ain't happening now, not with Russian soldiers in Latakia.
The Kurds have enjoyed notable success in Syria, carving out safe havens for themselves and others who aren't Sunni or Shiite crazies. But Russian air power will likely preclude further Kurdish gains. The Kurds will have to concentrate on holding what they have.
Turkey has been fighting Russia for centuries. Now, with Russian military aircraft in Syria, the Russians just flanked Turkey and can hit it from two sides. Not that Putin has expressed any unfriendly intentions toward Turkey, but given the centuries of war between these two nations, nothing needs to be said.
Israel has been fighting various Russian allies almost since its inception. Never, however, have Russian military assets been so closely positioned to Israel. Had Iran been so brazen as to station military aircraft in Latakia, Israel's more advanced air force would have swarmed in the next morning before dawn and walloped the warm living yogurt out of the Iranians. But Israel cannot attack Russian forces. It can only watch, and hope that Syria proves to be a hopeless morass for Russia.
And last, but not least, the United States has seen its modest influence in Syria diminish even more. By propping up Assad, Putin precludes any possibility of an American victory. Not that it matters since, at this point, America isn't even really engaged in Syria. The Obama administration issues a steady stream of press releases about Syria, but it's doing little more than talking. Since it's not engaged in Syria, it doesn't have the leverage to get the Russians out. Hopes that Russia will join hands with the U.S. in attacking ISIS are delusional. ISIS has weakened America's position in the Middle East. Why would Putin want to weaken ISIS, which is doing the dirty work for him? All he needs to do is prop up Assad, his puppet in Syria, while ISIS and America batter away at each other, neither able to conclusively defeat the other.
In the end, the absence of anyone strong enough to impose peace and order in Syria means that the country will be de facto partitioned. That's what happened to Yugoslavia. It's what's happening now in Iraq. The flood of refugees into Europe will continue. The truth is everyone is a loser in Syria.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Partition Iraq
Joe Biden, while a Senator, got it right. Iraq should be partitioned. Not that prescriptive advice like this really matters any more because the partitioning has already happened and there really isn't any way to undo it.
ISIS, the Sunni extremists, already control northwestern Iraq, along with a good chunk of northeastern Syria. No one will be able to dislodge them. The Iraqi government's army is too busy surrendering territory and weapons to retake lost ground. The Assad regime in Syria no longer has the ability to defeat a force as powerful as ISIS. And the U.S. isn't sending in ground troops, without which you can't take or hold territory.
The Kurds have carved out a homeland for themselves, anchored by the city of Kirkuk, and they won't give it up, not after centuries of subjugation. Certainly, the Iraqi army can't retake the Kurdish territory, and the Kurdish paramilitary Pesh Merga appears more formidable than ISIS.
The Shiites in Iraq hold the southern and southeastern portions of the country, which contains most of Iraq's oil wealth. Why fight for the less valuable land farther north when they already hold the jackpot?
Trying to keep Iraq together is guaranteed to produce unmanageable friction and endless warfare. The Iranians now have their claws into the Baghdad government, and won't give that up. America's Sunni allies on the Arabian Peninsula--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc.--have many secret supporters of ISIS, who will be royally p.o.'d if the Shiite government in Baghdad is able, with American assistance, to repress Sunni tribes in Iraq. The Kurds have quietly allied themselves with Israel and sometimes with America, and pissing them off could weaken America's influence in the region.
America's power in the region might increase if Iraq were partitioned. Even though once betrayed by the CIA, the Kurds would still ally themselves with the U.S., and offer American personnel a centrally located place from which to operate. The Shiite Baghdad government might want to maintain friendly ties with America in order to counterbalance the Iranians. Yes, the Baghdad government has cozied up to Iran. But the Iranians are Persian, and the people in Baghdad are Arabs. Iraq and Iran fought a bitter war with over a million dead in the 1980s, and the Baghdad government won't want its territory to become a province of a new Persian empire.
As for the Sunni area now controlled by ISIS, the U.S. could do what it did during the 2007 surge: buy off the indigenous Iraqi Sunni tribes. That's how the U.S. defeated al-Qaeda once before, and it's a way to undermine ISIS now. The whack jobs that control ISIS impose an extremely harsh form of Islam--even al-Qaeda gave ISIS the boot because it thought ISIS unduly brutal (imagine that!). The indigenous Sunni tribes in Iraq tend toward moderation, and won't be happy with the beheadings, stonings, non-medical amputations, and other barbarism that ISIS will inflict. It's a safe assumption that U.S. Special Forces personnel and CIA agents have already started slipping into ISIS controlled areas. Money talks, and thoughtfully large sums of money placed in the hands of the right Sunni chieftains might well lead to an ousting of ISIS. The Sunnis might well want to carve out their own independent state, and the U.S. shouldn't get in the way. A stable, moderate Sunni state in northern Iraq is far less likely than an ISIS caliphate to serve as an incubator of Islamic extremists who would target the U.S. Especially if American aid flows generously to such a nation. And America's allies in the Arabian peninsula might look favorably upon such a sanctuary for their religious brethren.
Partitioning has flaws, but not as many as the alternatives. Yugoslavia no longer exists, but its constituent parts have learned with assistance from NATO how to refrain from ethnic cleansing. The borders of the Near East (Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Egypt) are the result of partitioning. Yes, there's a lot of tension and some low level warfare in the Near East. But the utter chaos of today's Iraq isn't present. And South Asia is functional, if not entirely peaceful.
Re-uniting Iraq will involve combat and civilian deaths, probably a lot of them. All of America's elites, war hawks, chicken hawks, experts, pundits, and bombasts don't have an effective way to put Iraq back together again, not unless hundreds of thousands of American troops are reintroduced to re-fight the ground war. And that ain't happening. It's better to leverage the new status quo, which we can't change anyway, to our advantage.
ISIS, the Sunni extremists, already control northwestern Iraq, along with a good chunk of northeastern Syria. No one will be able to dislodge them. The Iraqi government's army is too busy surrendering territory and weapons to retake lost ground. The Assad regime in Syria no longer has the ability to defeat a force as powerful as ISIS. And the U.S. isn't sending in ground troops, without which you can't take or hold territory.
The Kurds have carved out a homeland for themselves, anchored by the city of Kirkuk, and they won't give it up, not after centuries of subjugation. Certainly, the Iraqi army can't retake the Kurdish territory, and the Kurdish paramilitary Pesh Merga appears more formidable than ISIS.
The Shiites in Iraq hold the southern and southeastern portions of the country, which contains most of Iraq's oil wealth. Why fight for the less valuable land farther north when they already hold the jackpot?
Trying to keep Iraq together is guaranteed to produce unmanageable friction and endless warfare. The Iranians now have their claws into the Baghdad government, and won't give that up. America's Sunni allies on the Arabian Peninsula--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc.--have many secret supporters of ISIS, who will be royally p.o.'d if the Shiite government in Baghdad is able, with American assistance, to repress Sunni tribes in Iraq. The Kurds have quietly allied themselves with Israel and sometimes with America, and pissing them off could weaken America's influence in the region.
America's power in the region might increase if Iraq were partitioned. Even though once betrayed by the CIA, the Kurds would still ally themselves with the U.S., and offer American personnel a centrally located place from which to operate. The Shiite Baghdad government might want to maintain friendly ties with America in order to counterbalance the Iranians. Yes, the Baghdad government has cozied up to Iran. But the Iranians are Persian, and the people in Baghdad are Arabs. Iraq and Iran fought a bitter war with over a million dead in the 1980s, and the Baghdad government won't want its territory to become a province of a new Persian empire.
As for the Sunni area now controlled by ISIS, the U.S. could do what it did during the 2007 surge: buy off the indigenous Iraqi Sunni tribes. That's how the U.S. defeated al-Qaeda once before, and it's a way to undermine ISIS now. The whack jobs that control ISIS impose an extremely harsh form of Islam--even al-Qaeda gave ISIS the boot because it thought ISIS unduly brutal (imagine that!). The indigenous Sunni tribes in Iraq tend toward moderation, and won't be happy with the beheadings, stonings, non-medical amputations, and other barbarism that ISIS will inflict. It's a safe assumption that U.S. Special Forces personnel and CIA agents have already started slipping into ISIS controlled areas. Money talks, and thoughtfully large sums of money placed in the hands of the right Sunni chieftains might well lead to an ousting of ISIS. The Sunnis might well want to carve out their own independent state, and the U.S. shouldn't get in the way. A stable, moderate Sunni state in northern Iraq is far less likely than an ISIS caliphate to serve as an incubator of Islamic extremists who would target the U.S. Especially if American aid flows generously to such a nation. And America's allies in the Arabian peninsula might look favorably upon such a sanctuary for their religious brethren.
Partitioning has flaws, but not as many as the alternatives. Yugoslavia no longer exists, but its constituent parts have learned with assistance from NATO how to refrain from ethnic cleansing. The borders of the Near East (Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Egypt) are the result of partitioning. Yes, there's a lot of tension and some low level warfare in the Near East. But the utter chaos of today's Iraq isn't present. And South Asia is functional, if not entirely peaceful.
Re-uniting Iraq will involve combat and civilian deaths, probably a lot of them. All of America's elites, war hawks, chicken hawks, experts, pundits, and bombasts don't have an effective way to put Iraq back together again, not unless hundreds of thousands of American troops are reintroduced to re-fight the ground war. And that ain't happening. It's better to leverage the new status quo, which we can't change anyway, to our advantage.
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