Syria

A quick note about Arab culture: the father and the eldest son are the leaders of the clan, everyone else is just the flock. When the king dies, the eldest son is the new undisputed leader, that's just how it goes. But in the House of Assad in Syria there was a detour: the current Assad in charge, Bashaar al-Assad, is the little brother. He wasn't meant to be king, he didn't think he would be king, no one trained him to be king. King Little Bro did not instantly command the fealty of his people. Instead the citizenry splintered and began preparing for what was next (egged on by the bellicose Americans and Israelis). Syria then steadily drifted into a mix of revolution, civil war, invasion and chaos while the Assad regime continues to linger like last night's fish dinner. The citizenry of Syria is made up of a host of small ethnic groups none of whom ever truly trusted the others. The unrest drove millions of Syrians out, mostly into Europe where they did not find sweet relief.

Is Obama to blame? Though many want to say yes (solely because they assume the President of the United States to be at fault for all things), I will say no. Syria is one of those rare pockets of the world that has never been in the American sphere of influence. Throughout the the 20th century Syria was under the sway of Russians (slash Soviets), while in the 19th century it was the British and/or the French and for centuries before that it one of the more significant Ottoman centers. Damascus is an ancient city and the road to it is, as well. But for the Americans it has been an elusive place, either a Cold War stronghold of our enemies (Russia, et al) or a prickly neighbor of our allies (Turkey and Israel). We haven't sold guns there or fought wars there or bought oil there or sold blue jeans there, we don't have allies in Syria. So when the place falls apart and everyone expects POTUS to jump into the breach, that is an unrealistic expectation. Obama looked at his options in Syria and realized he had none. There are no good guys, no one to root for, no one to support. There are only waves and waves of unhappy minorities chipping away at each other (not unlike the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s). 

What was Obama supposed to do? Militarily remove Assad? (Good lord, what a terrible idea!) Fling bombs at Assad's supporters? (What would be the point of that?) Develop networks of anti-Assad factions? (We've done some of that, but I bet it ain't easy work or of much reward)  The problem with this kind of factional warfare is that no one is ever on anyone's side, there are no allies only people you shoot at and people you don't waste your bullets on. 

What is the outcome the Americans want in Syria? Again, we've never had any influence in Syria, so why would we want (or expect) any outcome? As an American, I don't care who runs Syria. I have never cared and I don't really see why I would start now. And I certainly don't see why anyone in Syria would care what I (as an American) think. The Israelis are wary of an Iranian-backed Shia-friendly leadership and the Turks aren't too keen on that either, so that is the de facto American policy as well. 

My assumption is the Russians have long since banked on Assad's demise and have their next choice waiting in the wings. Perhaps Iran does too, maybe the French and the Brits as well. I'm sure the Israelis are familiar with the factions and may even have one or two that they'd be willing to deal with. Maybe China does, too (they've loaded troops into the Syrian maelstrom just like everyone else). I have no idea who any of their rooting interests lie with, I don't know any of the players. Everyone else has a dog in this fight but I can't for the life of me figure out who the Americans are rooting for. It seemed like we were backing the Syrian Kurds but though we've traditionally been sympathetic to the Iraqi Kurds, it appears Russia has claimed their support (and their oil fields in the east) instead.

Somewhere along the way, Daesh (you may know them as ISIL, ISIS or Islamic State), appeared and threw in their lot. The pissed off Iraqi Sunnis weren't strong enough to lope towards Baghdad so instead they were hoping to find Sunni comrades in Syria and take Damascus for themselves. For a while they become a cause celebre in the Arab world, drawing the ire of USA and Iran, Turkey and Russia equally. But personally I never saw anything that would make me think there was any military savvy in the Daesh camp. Their only weapon is fame and the ability to recruit worldwide through digital social networks. Daesh has now largely been defeated (Iraq just declared victory against them in the last few days) but realistically they weren't defeated, they just melted back into the towns and cities where they came from. Perhaps they will stay gone, perhaps they can be rejuvenated at a moment's notice. One puzzling detail about Syria these days: now that Daesh is gone, the world is generally acting like Syrian conflict has been resolved but Daesh was just one of the myriad of agitators in Syria. Were they the largest one? (No) Were they the most dangerous one? (No) Were they the most important or the most dynamic or the most impactful? (No) So why does everyone think that the Syrian Civil War is resolved?

Increasingly Iran and Saudi Arabia are flexing on each other and they're making everyone choose sides. In 2015 the President of the United States went to Iran and showered them with a fresh infusion of cash thanks to a historic 'peace' treaty; in 2017 the President of the United States went to Saudi Arabia to deliver a fresh infusion of weapons to the Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques. Heretofore the Saudis and Iranians have pumped their new toys into Yemen but that has become a frustrating fight for both and nothing but a pointless humanitarian disaster to the rest of the world community. Syria is the economic engine that keeps the war machine rolling.

Syria is the powderkeg that has unleashed all the tensions. George Bush invaded Iraq after 9/11 for the purpose (I believe) of creating a super battlefield where the Americans could duke it out with their counterparts across the Arab world...but nobody showed. The chaos that ensued after the American invasion was largely Iraqi Shia groups elbowing each other for power. Al-Qaeda influence in Iraq was driven out by the Iraqis and no one else volunteered for the fight. So where does the battle go? Iraq is not the battlefield, Syria is the battlefield. Syria has a multitude of ethnic groups, none of whom are really powerful enough to rule. Assad's Alawites were, I think, a fluke of larger tide of world history: old man Assad was in the right place at the right time and he didn't fuck it up...until he accidentally left it all to the younger son. The instability of Syria goes back to that transition of power, the place has been rickety ever since with no end in sight and a million trillion outsiders flooding in to keep it going.

While Russia leads the Syrian Constitutional Convention, an attempt to approximate the interests of all the various groups of Syria with Russia's chosen leader on top, Syria is poised to be the skirmishing ground of Iran and Saudi Arabia, with Turkey and Israel making periodic jabs. The newfound alliance of Russia, Turkey and Iran will face some rough times going forward as their interests begin to diverge. And what of the refugees? Will the UN stand up for the right to return? Does the EU get a seat at the new Syrian Constitutional Convention? Some commentators will bemoan the lack of American presence but I think President Trump is eager to be somewhere else (gotta admit: Trump does his best work when he's complaining about the places he's not allowed to go).

Obama's innovation on Syria was to pretend like he was working with Russia. Russia's interest in Syria transcends Assad, if he falls I don't think that puts them out of Syria. So while the Russians are ostensibly propping up Assad, I think they can un-prop him at a moment's notice. And when the time comes to declare a winner, the Russians will be there to act like that's what they wanted the whole time. So while coordinating with Russia against Daesh was always a pretty weird idea, I give Obama props for weaseling his way into Russia's business. And, again, Obama didn't have any good choices anyway, so much like the Sacramento Kings front office, any decision he made was likely to fail, circumstances are just not in POTUS's favor. In the end, Obama effectively removed the USA from the Middle East and left Russia holding the bag, a situation Trump seems eager to continue.

Perpetual instability used to be the goal of American policy in the Middle East. W Bush tried to alter American policy in the Arab World by aggressively choosing sides (he chose Iran, not that anyone noticed at the time). Obama shifted it back by removing the troops meant to hold the military gains made in Iraq. Trump seems eager to go back even further to a time before the American Revolution, when these Asian nations all fought each other but we only heard about it years later. We have come back around to the Samuel Huntington thesis of all cultures at war with all other cultures as globalism throws them together, though this time it seems like we've removed ourselves (and don't be surprised if China is the one who appears victorious in the end). 

I expect the resolution of all this action to be the powers that be figuring out what the Western world knows: people are worth a lot more money when you keep them living a life of improvement than when you run them into battle with each other. Living people produce a helluva lot more GDP than rotting corpses. Humanity is gradually becoming aware of this. The beauty of market forces is it produces technological innovation in service of peace rather than war. When the warriors embrace building nations rather than destroying them, when they choose to encourage life rather than ruin it, then the world will be a peaceful place, where battles are fought on PlayStations or Twitter rather than desert graveyards. Could take a while but I suspect that's where this is all leading.

Saudi Arabia

Over the past week in Saudi Arabia a dozen princes and a few various gajillionaires (and undoubtedly hundreds of lesser-known citizens) were arrested for the nebulous crime of corruption. Among the arrests was the head of the Saudi National Guard, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, the nephew of King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz al Saud. Having already ousted the head of the Saudi Land Forces, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (another nephew), this past summer, the entire military and police apparatus of the Saudi state falls to the king's son, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. There are vague reports suggesting a coup was in place and that these maneuvers staved off a revolution, but claiming victimhood while being the aggressor is just what bullies do. With the vanquishing of the last of the previous king's sons, the path to the throne of Saudi Arabia has been laid for MBS.

MBS has already issued a decree (called Vision 2030) to make Saudi Islam more kindly and gentle, allowing for more women's rights and cultural activities, and swearing off Jihadi violence, all in recognition that as fossil fuels wane (*), the Kingdom's entire economy and society will soon be in flux. The Kingdom needs to change, to modernize and MBS is set up to be the man to try. It seems to me, though, that the recent arrests will create something like a gov't in waiting, a revolutionary force ready to snap into action should MBS make any fatal mistakes. So though MBS shored up his grip on power at home, he will likely have a pack of vultures hovering over him for the foreseeable future, to say nothing of the foreign enemies he is now preparing to go out and face.

As the Saudi purges were taking place, the Yemenis assassinated another Saudi prince and launched a ballistic missile at Riyadh's airport (shot down with an American Patriot missile). MBS has been the Saudi point man on the war on Yemen and while I think the Saudis are ready to be done with it, the missile launch (of Iranian origin?) and the high profile assassination will undoubtedly keep the Saudis in Yemen for a while.

Amidst all this activity, the Saudis were able to force Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri to resign (and remain in house arrest in Riyadh...?), which is meant to undercut the Iranian-backed Hezbollah faction in Lebanon. I don't understand how this is the effect, Hariri and Hezbollah were not natural allies, but I assume the Iranians understand the game has changed in the Levant.

Likewise, earlier this year the Saudis (along with Egypt, the UAE and Kuwait) blockaded Qatar, home to al-Jazeera and the 2018 World Cup (which the Americans won't be attending...), a straight-up bully maneuver. Again, I don't understand the purpose of this, it seems to me it pushes the Qataris into the orbit of Iran (and possibly Turkey), which doesn't necessarily seem like a good thing for the Saudis.

A grand confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been brewing for decades. The Persian Shia and the Wahhabi Saud have nowhere to go but at each other. The Iranians resent the wealth and influence the Saudis have accumulated by sucking up to the West, the Saudis reject the notion that Iran is a great empire of people. The Shia-Sunni divide is less philosophical at this point than logistical: for hundreds of years Shia have allied with Shia, Sunni allied with Sunni, the grand networks of the Muslim world are long since built out and in place.

But it looked for a while that the Saudis were backing away from the fight. With the Kingdom's economic stagnation due to flat oil prices (an effect they themselves created, I think, to forestall Iran's economic growth in the face of their 2015 deal with the Obama White House) and their new touchy-feely young Crown Prince, it seemed like they were turning their attention elsewhere. But considering the massive arms shipment President Trump (following through on an arrangement with  Obama) sent to Saudi Arabia earlier this year, the Saudi detente with the Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad, the deepening relationship with Israel, diplomatic interaction with Russia (including a missile defense system--to go alongside the American Patriot missiles I presume) and now this complete restructuring of the military and political forces in Riyadh, it seems like the Saudi war machine is gearing up.

Traditionally the West's natural ally in the Middle East was Iran: the Persian Shia are the most like us and the least like everyone else in that region. They relied on Western support for centuries until the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. Since then Iran has disdained the West, forcing the Europeans and Americans to cozy up to the Saudi regime instead. I've long thought this was gradually flipping back and that the key to American foreign policy was recognizing that the Iranians are the good guys and the Saudis are the bad guys.

I've long thought that the Saudis were the enemy. When one compiles a list of nations with repressive cultures and broken economies where the citizenry are devoid of economic opportunity, social mobility or self-expression, Saudi Arabia goes right near the top. The regime is richer than God and utterly without regard for their own people. The people of Saudi Arabia are basically the property of the royal family in the way the trees and the dirt of the land are. Iran, on the other hand, is a vibrant democracy (well, sorta...) where women are allowed to participate (well, sorta...), where the people are allowed to come and go freely and interact with the outside world (well, sorta...) and where the oil riches are plowed back into a civic structure rather than diverted to some royal family's coffers.

Now we've come to a new milestone in Saudi Arabia's history. Don't get me wrong: palace coups and subtle back-stabbings are long how the Saudi royal family (most all royal families really) has handled their business. But the fact that this is so public, so obvious, and such a seemingly desperate maneuver is all together new. And the fact that it coincided with an attack on their capital and an enemy assassination of one of the still favored princes is eye-opening. (Indeed, why isn't this bigger news in the USA? Because Americans don't care about the rest of the world, I suppose)

Some will see this as a weakening of the American position in the Middle East. I think getting out of the Middle East is probably a good idea. When Obama removed the bulk of the American troops from Iraq in 2010 and began working with Russia in Syria, that signaled our shift out of the greater Middle East. After 9/11, we cleared out Iran's enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq with forces that we removed from Saudi Arabia. We went from protecting the Kingdom to strengthening the Kingdom's adversaries (and why not? 9/11 was carried out by Saudi hijackers with Saudi coordination and Saudi funding, not Iranians with Iranian coordination and Iranian funding). Then we invited in Vladimir Putin to take our place as the major meddling foreign power in the region. It didn't seem like a good idea at the time but at this point I'm embracing it. And I think the sudden dissolution of the Saud Kingdom is probably a step in the right direction--indeed, it suddenly seems like the culmination of George Bush's strategy in 2001.

My pause is the effect this will have on the global economy. Since going off the gold standard in the early 1970s the underlying basis of the American economy is oil. As long as there is oil in the world pumping up out of the ground and flowing into markets around the globe, the American economy has its bedrock. This is why American presidents have been so willing to sacrifice much blood and hardware for the preservation of ocean shipping and propping up dictators. But our interest is merely that it flows, not who owns it or who uses it (**); but as long as Iran and Saudi Arabia and Russia are interested in pumping up the oil and selling it around the world, that's all that needs to happen. If our enemies will keep doing that, then what interests do we have left in the Arab world? We have established the oil economy infrastructure, as long it keeps running--and our enemies are motivated to keep it running--then why do we need to be there? (Other questions, like, as the world's energy needs cycle away from oil, how does this effect the value of the US dollar?, will be answered over time, whether or not there is war in the Middle East)

So how does the coming war play out? Well, part of MBS's plan for the future of the Saudi economy means bulking up industrial production and expanding the work force to becoming a consumer class (standard feature in the West, kinda brand new in the Arab world). Undoubtedly that industrial production will be military materiel probably to be sold to Sunnis throughout the Arab world to fight the Shia. This is all together new for the Saudi regime and the Saudi people, are they prepared for this kind of massive cultural shift? We've seen in America the leveling force of social media, how will the Saudi population take to more openness? Will the Saudi economy prosper? The bulk of the industrialization will undoubtedly be military in nature, will the Saudis make war or just the materiel?

The larger area is still in flux. Lebanon is suddenly in need of a new prime minister, Syria may be on the cusp of a Putin-led Constitutional Convention, Yemen is on the verge of a humanitarian disaster, Iraq is still figuring out how to react to Kurdish separatism (and is there room for the Saudis to maneuver in Kurdistan?), Egypt is still in a serious identity crisis, Qatar is still blockaded, Turkey is going through its own recent set of purges, and the recent merger of Hamas and the PLA has yet to fully take shape.

And what of the Americans? I've long believed in supporting the Iraqi Kurds (Syrian Kurds, too) but otherwise I'm cool with standing back and letting the area re-shape itself. Trump's blustery talk, I suspect, is just talk and he may well see the wisdom of not putting Americans into the coming fray. Imagine that: a major global war without American marines. And if Iran comes out the victor...well, you know Americans love a winner.


(*) The concept of "Peak Oil" I think is generally misunderstood. The phrase doesn't indicate the end of supply of oil but rather the end of demand for oil We've already discovered that renewable energies (wind, water, solar, biofuel) are increasingly efficient for more local needs (making the average consumer less dependent on the grid) while nuclear is cleaner, faster, cheaper, etc., for large scale industrial or emergency production. Ideally the recent move toward cleaner natural gas (and corn) will guide us to the necessary mix of renewable and nuclear that will obviate the need for oil or coal or timber soon.
(**) The oil market itself is the basis of the American economy. Who actually owns the oil or uses the oil is not of interest to me. It may be of interest to politicians, plutocrats and business men but that is of secondary interest to the USA itself. And they are not my concerns, so I don't give a fuck about the businessmen that won't get rich off the oil they don't control.

From Hef's America to Trump's America

Hugh Hefner, magnate of the Playboy Empire and envy of single men all over the world, passed away recently. Generally celebrity deaths bring an 'Oh! That guy died?' and then I move on about my day (RIP Tom Petty). But I grew up on Hef's work and I dug into the post-mortem reportage more than usual. I was not surprised at the handful of condemnations of Hefner's life and I guess I wasn't surprised either to find very few defenses of him; truth is he lived too long for anyone to feel the need to sing his praises. To use a football metaphor: he outkicked his coverage.

Rather than bringing me closer to women or the world of sexual fulfillment, growing up on Playboy gave me false expectations of what that world was actually going to be. You see, I read Playboy. I didn't just stalk pictures of hot naked chicks--though I certainly did plenty of that. I dug into the words, the ethos and I look back and see that they did a lot to form who I am today. I did not understand as a boy the consumerism at work, that the hot naked chicks were a piece of the on-the-go lifestyle of an aspirational young professional man, that the women were meant to go right alongside the cars, clothes, and home stereo equipment that were meant to fill a sensible man's home and heart. No, I thought the words were guides to how to get the women, which turns out not to be the case at all. I thought hot naked chicks were going to be into Thelonius Monk albums and the comedy stylings of Mort Sahl, that they would be into passionate discussions on Constitutional law and college football. Not so much. Turns out hot naked chicks don't tend to want to talk about Saul Bellow novels. Oh well. It all still very much enlightened me to my own deeper sexual desires of...well, no desire...and my appreciation of a world of art and commerce. I dig Thelonius Monk and Mort Sahl even if my female contemporaries have no interest in that at all (indeed, I still prefer Monk and Mort to my female contemporaries).

I long thought it was kinda strange that when Hefner burst onto the scene in 1954, Playboy was considered the far edge of prurience. But by the time I deeply encountered Hef's work (circa 1984), Playboy hadn't changed one iota--and was the tamest thing around! Hefner went from most dangerous to least dangerous without taking a single step.

What was the transition? And how much of that transition came from Hef himself?

Hefner was influential in the early 1960's in desegregating night clubs, bringing black and white entertainers and audiences together in the same space. In the 1970's he put a lot of money into the defense fund of Roe v. Wade and encouraged birth control options and availability. Sex and sexual desire became topics that could be discussed in polite society. He encouraged a world where people could explore their own desires rather than giving in to the social expectation of marriage and family. From 1954 to 1984 brought an immense amount of social change throughout America and though I would suggest Hefner was more the effect than the cause, he was a beacon for people (women as well as men) who wanted to have their own enjoyment of success. And the post-Playboy years had a lot to do with expanding the range of acceptable images in polite society, as seen in the shift of American cinema in the 1970s: nudity, sex, insanely graphic violence, adult situations, people of color, foreign languages, etc, all under the guise of a ratings system that quantified its family friendliness.

Let me make clear: the vast sweeping social changes of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s are, I believe, a result of the post-war economic forces that demanded that, say, women and African-Americans participate in the work force. The cultural changes are a result (I believe) of the larger economic forces that demanded full participation in the economy. As people get more money, they want more freedom, so divorce become an easier process, higher education become readily available to more people, entertainment and news options expanded to wider audiences. Hefner didn't do any of that by himself but he was a face of change. He was a face of individual liberty rather than the social order and culture demands individual leaders to personify the opportunities and desires of the larger populace.

Though Hefner was a little bit older, the audience he spoke to were the Baby Boomers: those Americans born between 1945-1960, who grew up in a society that was rapidly changing. That generation of folks grew up with new technologies, expanding social interactions and were raised by parents who came of age during the Great Depression. The Great Depression generation knew the value of a dollar because they learned about money when a penny still bought stuff. That generation treated their children with a preciousness hardly seen in the history of parentage. The Baby Boomers grew up insanely wealthy and with the expectation that wealth would only expand. And they were selfish and egoistic--and rewarded for that selfishness!--like no other generation of humans before. Hefner championed the individuality but how does one separate out the egoism?

He championed the protest, he championed the social changes, and he championed the economic growth too. These are all separate and distinct paradigms but the culture that came from them is a soup of the good and the bad. And Hefner made a life's work out of mixing the good and bad together. As the Baby Boomers were continually rewarded despite their petulance, they grew to believe that the petulance itself was the source of the change. Hef taught them tolerance but he also taught them indulgence.

By the time of his death Hefner lived in a world where Donald Trump (the Baby Boomerist of them all) was charged with countering the inchoate demands of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, groups that don't seem to want anything but change itself, groups that want abstract concepts rather than actual things. A world where its hard to tell the knights from the windmills. Hefner may have seen it as sign that all is well that the President of the United States has become merely a self-indulgent blogger rather than a power broker. Oh well, at least the President is an avowed heterosexual.

Aw, hell: Hef gave up on this world years ago. He cashed in on playing a parody of himself for the last few decades--and why not? He still lived a comfortable life. But make no mistake, this man invented the Playboy Jazz Festival and championed the work of John Coltrane and Miles Davis and made music criticism one of the bedrocks of his ethos; but by the time I came along in the mid-1980s, Playboy readers were electing the likes Phil Collins and Hall and Oates to the music Hall of Fame. *smh* Hef must've been crushed to realize that his readers, the folks he put so much time and energy into educating about the good life were listening to god damn Phil Collins! The move from Coltrane to Phil Collins mirrors the move from FDR to Trump. How sad Hef must've been surveying the world he wrought.

Its easy to say that the emperor has no clothes and his empire doesn't either, but I think its time to flip that cliche: the emperor has nothing but clothes. A well-tailored suit but no heart, brain or spine within it. Don't blame Hefner, he wanted everyone to be naked.

North Korea

Growing up in the Cold War 1980s, my generation was steeped in the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction: the balance between world powers was that each side could obliterate the other thus it was the continual avoidance of suicide that motivated nations. When I went to bed at night the street light outside my window created a mushroom cloud shaped shaft of light in my otherwise dark room. Yes, I was properly terrified as a boy.

As I've gotten older and read up more on the subject, full-on nuclear war (imagined to be the Americans and the Russians flinging all of their missiles at each other all at once) was never really gonna happen. When you realize how long it takes to fuel the missiles, make the reactions to satellite input, make all the necessary notifications within the gov't, get the air force and navy readied for response, and just how many bombs and missiles were in play, etc., it would've taken several hours for this all to take place and one assumes that during that time someone would've had the sense to find a non-suicide solution (thank god, Ozzy Osbourne was never in charge!). Indeed, upon reflection all-out nuclear war doesn't really even seem possible--even by accident!

However, as I get older and more well-read, the concept of Limited Nuclear War seems very possible. Perhaps even likely. It only takes one bomb properly placed and then a measured response. And it could happen in the blink of an eye by actors with nothing to gain but chaos.

So as my terror of Mutually Assured Destruction has waned, my fear of Limited Nuclear War has stepped into the anxiety void. In the days of missile defense, we hope that this threat has been neutralized if not eliminated. But even if missile defense works perfectly (which I suspect it will not) you still end up with this nightmare scenario: a nuclear missile gets launched, the missile gets shot down, crisis is averted, nobody dies...but a whole planet wakes up the next day and says, 'Wait....What the fuck just happened?' The world would be a changed place, no?

Over the last month or so that scenario creeps ever closer. North Korea has tested numerous missiles in the last 30 days and exploded their largest nuclear weapon yet. Kim Jong Un (AKA 'North Korea') has threatened to test his next long range missile by tipping it with a nuclear warhead and flinging it at Guam. Theoretically, the Americans will be able to shoot it down before it threatens lives or infrastructure....right? So far the Americans (and the Japanese) have declined to show off any of their anti-missile capabilities, perhaps we don't have any, perhaps we simply don't want to show what we can do.

Obviously the Americans make everything about themselves, so we fear an attack on Los Angeles or Honolulu. But the real target is Tokyo. Us Americans are young, we're new at all this foreign policy stuff but the rest of the world is ancient, they've been doing it for centuries. And the animosity between Japan and....well, virtually all Asian nations...cannot be minimized. In the first half of the 20th century, Japan dominated the Asian Pacific from Australia to the Bering Strait, brutally attacking the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even marched through the Korean peninsula into China (the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 is marked by some historians as the true start of WWII). Animosity toward historical Japan and the modern-day economic powerhouse (eh, sorta) is at play just as much as pissing off the Americans (though at bottom pissing off USA and pissing off Japan are pretty much the same thing).

What's the next move? President Trump has chided the South Koreans for 'appeasement', but what does that mean? What would it mean to appease the Un regime? Da fuck does that dude want?

Invading through the Korean peninsula is the traditional manner of attacking China, so creating a buffer state on the east side of the Yalu River has been China's defense against the rest of the world for decades. In the years after Mao's ascendancy North Korea was bred to be a cat's paw to scare away potential interlopers. Many say China has the power to shut North Korea down but I would suggest that's not as easy as it looks at this point. I suspect the Chinese are truly irritated by Kim at this point but don't really know how to pull them back.

China's failing here is ignoring the Kim regime. Clearly they have let the danger rise, perhaps even encouraged it. But to what end? China wants the buffer, they don't really want much more. China likes the Korean situation just the way it is: a rubber stopper firmly placed in China's one weakness. The fact that the North Koreans are frustrated in their aims to control the entire Korean peninsula is actually probably a delight to the Chinese: the rubber stopper itself has another rubber stopper on the opposite side to keep it firmly in place. The Americans/Japanese/South Koreans frustrated on one side, the North Koreans frustrated on the other, the Chinese happy that its enemies are played off against each other. The Chinese mistake is they have forgotten about evolution: by letting the North Korean nuclear program steadily advance, the Chinese are stuck with a well-armed madman right next door. How is that a good thing? (*)

There's a detail in the reportage on North Korea that I think has been not been well considered: if the Kim regime can hit Tokyo with a nuclear tipped missile then it can hit Beijing with a nuclear tipped missile. The danger for China is not that North Korea sucks them into a war they don't really want to fight, it is that they are held hostage by their own attack dog. They bred the dog to attack the west but the dog can just as easily turn on its master. And rather than ransom USA, the 20th century superpower, why not ransom China, the 21st century super power (and the center of the universe in much of Asian mysticism)? China has way more power over Kim Jong Un than USA does, wouldn't the weaponry be better pointed West than East? To my mind, this is the one opening USA and its allies have. I kinda thought that Donald Trump was (strangely enough) the one guy that might have success dealing with North Korea.

But the Trump presidency has led only back to the aforementioned scenario of shooting down the threatening missile. It appears it is on its way...

China would have to recognize that Kim has gone too far. China has no interest in war so close to its border, no interest in the North Korean refugees that would flood in, no interest in completely losing the Korean peninsula to infidels. China likes the status quo of a divided Korean peninsula (much like USA likes the status quo of independent Taiwan). But if this Guam business goes down, USA would have to step up and flatten the Kim regime. China should be as eager to avoid all of this as much USA. And yet Xi Jinping seems more interested in purging his military than getting it ready for Americans on the doorstep.

So where is all this coming from? Well, Kim Jong Un has been bred to be bellicose since birth and he's got the keys of the kingdom (much earlier than anyone anticipated), this is what he was built to do by father and grandfather. But China should be able to mitigate that, if forces within North Korea itself could not.

I think its Vladimir Putin. I think Putin is in pure chaos mode: Trump in the White House, Islamic Jihad at a fever pitch, Saudi and Iran are talking about banging, India and China are talking about banging, the Israelis are itching for a fight and the internet is bringing it all together. North Korea is the perfect cherry on top for the forces of weirdness. I think Putin has a bug in Kim's ear, I think he's telling the kid to keep firing because the Japanese will wet themselves, the Americans will bluster around like idiots and the Chinese won't do anything to stop it.

Yeah, all this stuff is real. But don't mistake North Korea for the main course, its just the hordoerve (god, why invent such a hard word to spell?). War with North Korea would just be the first step of much longer war. From the Sinai to the Korean Peninsula, Asia is shedding its skin. The prospects of a very big, civilization-size war is looming. There's no mutually assured anything at the moment. If USA is lucky we'll be able to sit this one out (but how likely is that?).


(*) Another ill-considered detail in all of this is South Korea's position vis-a-vis nuclear powered North Korea. The long range goal of the South Koreans is to reunite the Korean peninsula under their rule. Perhaps they might like having nuclear weapons. Perhaps they like the idea of absorbing the North's nuclear arsenal and being able to threaten China and Japan. So have the South Koreans ever really tried to stop the ongoing weapons development of the North? Or the Americans? It doesn't look like it to me.

Iraq

In prosecuting the War on Terror following 9/11, a necessary step for the Americans was to remove the 50,000 USA troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. Their presence was one of the motivating factors of Osama bin Laden in his attempt to take the Kingdom for himself. This is a detail that has not been well remembered: 9/11 was about bin Laden's attempt to overthrow the Saudi gov't, it had little to do with America itself. Bin Laden's larger goal was to install himself as the Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques (another title for the King of Saudi Arabia) and watch over the crumbling of the Western powers. Thwarting American intervention in the Arab world generally (and in Saudi Arabia particularly) was a necessary component of bin Laden's larger mission. The USA's relationship to the Saudi royal family had been deteriorating for decades, removing the troops from Saudi Arabia was at once a move to mollify militant Arabs and to continue to minimize ties to the Saudis. (*)

But USA completely leaving the region was not gonna happen especially with imminent military actions being contemplated. Rather than remove troops from the Middle East entirely, the plan was to move them into Iraq and push Saddam Hussein out of power. The strategic geography of Iraq is USA's ultimate goal and ridding the world of Saddam Hussein (and his murderous thug sons) was just a bonus. The proximity to oil has less to do with USA's interest in oil as in everyone else's interest in it, the WMD's were always just an empty pretext, the connection to al-Qaeda was never really necessary just a thought experiment for the masses to ponder. All that other political shmazz that went into the war were just words, not deeds. This is not merely cynical foreign policy. That land is being fought over by the Americans, all manner of Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, and a panoply of Arabs. People have been fighting over that land for thousands of years but at this moment of history, everyone is fighting over it. American Presidents must contend with the Arab World (what others may call the Middle East) as a cornerstone of foreign policy for decades to come.

Placing the troops in Iraq was meant to be a permanent state of affairs that would give the American military a centralized location from which to strike Iran, Saudi Arabia and/or Syria. All that needed to be done was pushing Saddam out of power. If you will recall, though the global community did not generally favor USA's invasion of Iraq, no one stood up for Saddam himself. No one objected to the Americans on the grounds that Saddam deserved to stay in power (not even Syria). Saddam was a 'market dominant minority' (not a perfect use of that term but its apt so I'm sticking with it): because Sunnis make up a minority of the Iraqi population, a Sunni executive is pretty much destined to be an iron-fisted tyrant in order to keep a constant clamp on his many enemies. Iraq is made up of a large Shia population (roughly 60%) and Kurds (roughly 20%) and Sunnis (20%). For Saddam to maintain power, he had to be ruthless toward anything that would threaten his rule. (Worth noting that Arabs in particular do not like instability, they would prefer an iron-fisted tyrant to anarchy, which is why put-upon minorities in the Arab world invariably reach for terror: they don't have the strength to dominate but they willing occasionally to disrupt)

When USA invaded Iraq in 2003 with the express purpose of removing Saddam, it was taking a lid off the roiling sectarian conflicts that Saddam fought hard to keep in check for three decades. The sects and their conflicts go back hundreds of years and Saddam had no interest in uniting these groups, who undoubtedly would've united against him, rather he just wanted to dominate them because that is basically what had always happened. These groups never came together because there was never a unifying force, only a suppressing force. USA removed the suppression under the hopes of being able to unify them under a multi-cultural constitutional republic. 

The Americans assumed that once we vanquished Saddam and the Sunnis from Baghdad, the Shia would be eager for our support and guidance; the Americans could then craft a multi-cultural constitution that would give equal (or at least proportional) power to the three main Iraqi groups. But the Shia were stronger than the Americans realized and never trusted the Americans anyway, so once Saddam was gone, the Shia were quick to jump into the power vacuum, squeeze out the Kurds and the Sunnis and begin the efforts to remove the Americans. However, there are sects within the sects and the Shia were divided between pro-Iranian groups and anti-Iranian groups (within that subdivision is a further subdivision of those sympathetic to the Kurds and those not sympathetic to the Kurds). 

With the Sunnis having been pushed out of Baghdad and the Kurds unable to gain a political foothold, it was the pro-Iran Shia fighting off the anti-Iran Shia in the years after the American invasion that formed most of what we would consider the Constitutional construction phase. Iran's influence cannot be understated and once Nouri al-Maliki rises to power, he doesn't fight for democracy, rather he fights to maintain his own stranglehold on the political process. This alienates the Kurds and the Sunnis and heightens the divisions within the Shia community.

In the instability of the outlying regions comes al-Qaeda, who infiltrate the Anbhar Province hoping to find recruits from pro-Saddam Sunnis. Initially they are successful. But the local Sunnis eventually turn on al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda wasn't pro-Iraq, it was anti-American. Sidenote: in the 1980s when USSR invaded Afghanistan, it led to a migration of righteous Arabs eager to fight off the foreign invaders. But the Afghan people didn't particularly welcome this influx of foreign fighters because those fighters had an agenda that didn't match the local wants and needs. (One of those foreign fighters (ironically dubbed 'Afghan Arabs' though they were not Afghan) was Osama bin Laden, who cut his teeth as a mercenary warlord fighting the Soviets in the Reagan-Bush years) Likewise, al-Qaeda in Iraq found a foothold early with promises of help but alienated the locals by fighting a war that didn't match what the people of Anbhar wanted. This led to Sunnis reaching out to the Americans for support. So the Americans went from fighting the Sunnis to fighting with the Sunnis against al-Qaeda and then on to supporting the Sunnis with the political conflicts with the Shia. Even for the Americans the game changed over and over again.

And of course it wasn't even that smooth: other fringe terrorists (better called 'anarchic' elements) sought to upset the transition by attacking the infrastructure (electrical systems, oil/gas supplies, roads, etc) thus keeping the new leaders (whether American or Shia or multicultural) from establishing any kind of effective leadership. Ironically, this terrorist activity kept the Americans around that much longer: USA couldn't leave while the place was imploding, even if USA couldn't keep the place from imploding. Though the new Shia power structure was eager to get rid of the Americans, even they acknowledged that only American military support could provide the necessary physical safety in which to create a new state. The turning point for the Americans was when the Sunnia turned against al-Qaeda and sought American support. This gave USA a new raison d'etre (at least temporarily). 

Once President Obama removed the last of the American troops, it left the Sunnis unprotected, which led to the emergence of the militant elements in the Sunni community. What was originally the Sunni Awakening (or Anbhar Awakening) fighting against al-Qaeda insurgents (remember: al-Qaeda is non-Iraqi and thus local Iraqis were motivated to push them out), morphed into a 'South will rise again' mentality in the Sunnis who wanted to re-affirm Saddam's Iraq. Capturing Baghdad and restoring the Baath rule is increasingly unlikely, so the mission became to create some new Sunni stronghold that would cross into Syria (and perhaps Turkey, Jordan and Iran). This is called Da'ash (or Islamic State or ISIS or ISIL). Da'ash has pushed towards Syria rather than Baghdad (though Baghdad is still on their long range agenda) and has pushed against the Kurds in hopes of securing the lucrative Kirkuk oilfields.

As for the Shia, they have their own internal conflicts that have kept them for being the true leaders of Iraq. They can't agree on a Constitution or a polity. Some Shia support Iran, some do not; some are more sympathetic to the Kurds, some are fearful of them. Some want a strong relationship with USA, some (most I would guess) do not. Meanwhile, until they incorporate the hinterlands beyond Baghdad and those populations, the Shia don't really run much of anything. And it appears that at the top, they are just as corrupt as Saddam was. And likely to be just as brutal to their Shia brethren as Saddam was. 

In the spring of 2010 came the election that could've united Iraq but the Obama administration ignored it choosing to back an Iraqi strongman instead. Maliki was the closest to being that strongman so they threw American weight behind him forsaking the Sunnis in the West, the Kurds in the north and the anti-Iran Shia in Baghdad. Joe Biden's plan has always been to partition Iraq into a Kurdish zone (presumably incorporating Kirkuk), a Shia zone (incorporating Baghdad) and a Sunni zone in Anbhar. But in the election of 2010 the multi-cultural Iraqiya party could have emerged as the leaders of the new Parliament. This was the true possibility of a multi-cultural Iraq.

But the Obama administration (under the tutelage of Biden) turned its back on that result, fearful that it would lead to more warfare. It may well have led to more warfare but that is that war that should've been fought! That is the conflict that USA could've thrown its military and moral resolve into that could've united Iraq as a people behind the notion of multicultural democracy. That conflict would've featured a righteous fight for democracy and plurality from the Iraqi people themselves. It may have been brutal and ugly but it would've led to a true outcome: either democratic principles that USA espouses or a true Saddam-style strongman that would've put the lid back on what George Bush unleashed.

Instead with USA handing power over to Maliki, we are left with neither democracy nor a strong leader with only minimal decrease in violence. Peaceful enough to avoid the slaughterbench of history, violent enough for no one to feel safe or steady. No one's in charge and it still leads to bombings. And still the fight simmers on with Da'ash seeking to fill the void.

The Kurds seem to be edging toward independence and while I am openly rooting for an independent Kurdish state, I am skeptical that actual borders would ever be drawn; but their assertion for independence should yield some autonomy.

Baghdad is still a political quagmire--and that is something of a success! The point is to push the violent factional tendencies into politics, a game that is more soul-sucking but less life-threatening. The general population is perhaps now starting to feel that life is better without Saddam. The Shia are suitably internally conflicted, the Kurds are coming into their own, but for the Sunnis the post-Saddam years left them with little faith in politics.

Which all leads to Syria...


(* This is all because the Americans left Mecca undefended. I still suggest USA will in time reconcile with Iran and they will return to being our main ally in the region rather than our main enemy.  And the slow motion deterioration with continue with Saudi Arabia. And what happens to the two holy mosques? (Kinda sounds like Dungeons & Dragons, no?))