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What a mess. I think some of us suggested a dozen years ago that invading Iraq was not a smart thing to do.

I went on 7 anti-war marches including the big one. At the time, road management CCTV cameras were available live on on the web for many streets on the route of the London march. On the day, every single camera went down 'for maintenance'. We are a surveillance nation, but the surveillance is of us by the state, not the other way round.

I do wonder how much longer all these wars can be blamed on 'terrorist' organisations. When tens or hundreds of thousands of presumably sane men join an organisation to fight with a high probability of being killed, you have to wonder what drives them. Partly a totalitarian religion which offers unrealistic promises of paradise in the afterlife, but there must be a large element of 'life can't get any worse, at least these people claim to be on our side'.

Nothing left to lose in conjunction with a religiously-supercharged rage at the knowledge that our governments consider their blood to be cheaper than ours.

PS_RalphW wrote:I went on 7 anti-war marches including the big one. At the time, road management CCTV cameras were available live on on the web for many streets on the route of the London march. On the day, every single camera went down 'for maintenance'. We are a surveillance nation, but the surveillance is of us by the state, not the other way round.

I do wonder how much longer all these wars can be blamed on 'terrorist' organisations. When tens or hundreds of thousands of presumably sane men join an organisation to fight with a high probability of being killed, you have to wonder what drives them. Partly a totalitarian religion which offers unrealistic promises of paradise in the afterlife, but there must be a large element of 'life can't get any worse, at least these people claim to be on our side'.

People who feel they have little or nothing to lose are very dangerous, that's for sure.

Too true. The answer has to be to ensure they have something to lose, rather than fight them so they lose whatever they have.

The Syrian civil war is a pretty clear case of a large number of people losing everything they had through drought and poor governance, asking for help, having help denied, and so turning to guns and religion as the twin last resorts.

biffvernon wrote:Too true. The answer has to be to ensure they have something to lose, rather than fight them so they lose whatever they have.

The Syrian civil war is a pretty clear case of a large number of people losing everything they had through drought and poor governance, asking for help, having help denied, and so turning to guns and religion as the twin last resorts.

I don’t agree Biff. Or, at least, only partially.

It seems to me that, for all of our exacerbations, that part of the world is facing something akin to a 30 years war between the Shi'ites and Sunnis that has been centuries in the brewing and maybe it all just needs to play itself out. To that extent, maybe the best those countries can hope for, at least in the medium term, is a strong-man dictator who can force peace, of a kind, on the people, no matter what the short term cost. Whilst pretty hellish in itself, the alternative Pandora’s box that Western forces have unleashed on that part of the world with our various military adventures over the last 100 years would seem to be more hellish still.

It is hard as an outsider to get a clear picture of what is going on.

Shi'ite/Sunni wars are at least a thousand years old. They are surfacing now because people are hitting resource constraints and fighting over what is left. Nothing new in that. For at least the last century most of the region has had local leaders imposed or sustained by Western political and oil interests, and local resentments suppressed as they were in Yugoslavia by strong state and generally rising living standards.

Now the cap is coming off as a mixture of oil running out and increased drought has propelled the region into being the poster child of the post peak world.

The local Syrian war was inevitable, as millions of refugees from Iraq had already swelled the population to above what the environment could feed. The wealthy could buy imported food, the poor can't.

Now Syrian refugees are themselves spreading through the region and raising local tensions with the increased strain on resources.

Rinse and repeat.

PS_RalphW wrote:I do wonder how much longer all these wars can be blamed on 'terrorist' organisations.

Terrorist has to be a contender for the most misused word of the 21st century so far... up there with 'sustainable'.

clv101 wrote:

PS_RalphW wrote:I do wonder how much longer all these wars can be blamed on 'terrorist' organisations.

Terrorist has to be a contender for the most misused word of the 21st century so far... up there with 'sustainable'.

Excellent shot. A dead center bulls eye.

Oh, and I'll just state the obvious, since it hasn’t yet been mentioned in this thread (probably because it's so obvious), in terms of immediate origins, it's mostly about the oil

stevecook172001 wrote:Oh, and I'll just state the obvious, since it hasn’t yet been mentioned in this thread (probably because it's so obvious), in terms of immediate origins, it's mostly about the oil

It's good to be reminded once in a while, lest we get bogged down. Everything - good, bad or something else - comes down to energy.

Kirkuk has fallen to the Kurds.

Or more precisely, the Shia army ran away without a fight, again.

This is the army capitulating, very little fighting is actually going on. Iraq is now 3 countries. Probably the best result for the people from day one, although the worst for Western oil interests.

Very strong reminder of the fall of Siagon. I am just old enough to remember that from the news reports of the day.

Oil up over $111, highest for about 4 months.

I have seen 3 big military helicopters over my village in 2 days, flying low and fast. This is unusual, suggests to me training for a mission in the very near future.

This is arguably the most dismal failure of (American) foreign policy in modern history. Their genuine enemy in 2002/2003 was Al-Qaeda, who had taken down the twin towers. But George W Bush, in his infinite wisdom, decided that he'd use 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq, claiming that there was an Al-Qaeda presence in that country, as well as a stockpile of WMDs, neither of which actually existed. The real motives were firstly a belief that a US-friendly puppet regime in Iraq would be able to boost oil exports from that country (thus breaking the power of OPEC and bringing back the days of cheap oil) and secondly to throw US weight around in a demonstration that "we're the Daddy and nobody messes with us", or something along those lines. 12 years later what have they achieved? 5000 dead US/coalition soldiers, somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 dead Iraqis, no more oil being exported than under Saddam and now a large part of the country under the control of Al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists.

Well done George. What a genius you are.

UndercoverElephant wrote:Well done George. What a genius you are.

Yes, the man who waved at Stevie Wonder.

From my limited understanding, Al Qaeda became a bit of a joke at one point, being limited to a handful of extremists with virtually zero support. Their origin lay in American (Carter?) funding of the Mujahedin, one of the 'strategies' in the endless US/Russian antagonism.