So, Jennifer Rubin and Cliff May think that the Islamic State is both Islamic and a state. They think the president was wrong or naive to say otherwise. The questions to ask here and simple and have nothing to do with the literal truth of the president’s assertion.
The questions are: why is it important to Rubin and Lee that the Islamic State be considered an Islamic state, and why is it important to the president that it not be considered an Islamic state?
Once you arrive at the answers you will immediately realize that the president was showing his intelligence and Rubin and May are showing their bigotry.
I have met Cliff May. He is a reprehensible little toad.
You’re being generous.
So Jennifer Rubin and Cliff May want to admit the Islamic State to the UN and negotiate with terrorists. Sweet. Now can we detain McCain and Graham indefinitely for providing “material aid to terrorists”?
At what point does partisanship cross the line to diplomatic sabotage that deteriorates national security? Or are Rubin and May speaking for their Saudi masters?
I’m failing to see why offering them a UN General Assembly seat is a terrible idea.
They can get in line. At the end. No cutting in line permitted. (Maybe an exception will be made for Scotland, but only because they did it the right way through a peaceful referendum and have sort of existed as a national entity for many centuries. And speak English (sort of) and are Christian.) Behind Palestine that may or may not be ahead of Kurdistan and the Federal State of Novorossiya. The line moves very slowly and is measured in decades not hours. That’s intended to discourage applicants and encourage them to seek a different resolution for their conflicts, hopefully disappearing altogether as a definable entity.
Behind Palestine then. Isn’t it interesting that the ‘coalition’ against the Daish seems vaporous while the most intractable enemies will settle their differences for the sake of genocide on the Kurds. That would certainly set the cat among the Middle East pigeons.
Incidentally, Erdogan just gave us the finger again over the Daish. Erdogan is freely, openly trading with these people; surely our policy makers know this. Follow the money. In these next crucial weeks and months the Daish will need lots of it and it can only come from selling oil.
Let history consider the real cost of Putin’s annexation of the Crimea is Erdogan’s increasing intransigence and adventurism. We need this little weasel now even more and must endure his autocratic ambitions; he has found ways to bend Turkey’s NATO membership way out of shape.
Not sure I get or agree with the all points you’ve made. And they may be too far above anything I know or could possibly sort out for myself after further study.
I was just making a tiny point in noting the irony of two people that have long denied the validity of Palestinian statehood rushing to confer statehood on a gang of armed thugs that profess to be fundamentalist Muslims.
Agreement optional, as always. YMMV By the way, out of context “armed thugs that profess to be fundamentalist Muslims” could equally describe the Daish or the House of Saud. On that note, I strongly urge an interesting read:
Part I is almost required reading, historically. Google “Ikhwan.” We are getting some real arm-waving from back channels of British intelligence warning us off this fight. The Brits don’t just know this territory, they created it.
Thinking that Erdogan is the geopolitical weasel in all this is a personal aside but seems to fit his ambitions and modus operandi; google “deep state.” And thanks for playing.
‘Deep state’ weaseling with Islamist overtones. On the subject of Turkey’s 2014 record “mystery funds:”
Unpack that for a minute. $15 billion dollars from the Gulf on the grounds of Turkey’s “historic mission.” Do Western readers wonder what that means? These are shifty Emirs hedging their bets on who is really restoring the Caliphate; or at least the Ottoman Empire. Somehow I don’t think this is mentioned in the NATO charter.
The most sophisticated player in all this has long seemed to me to be the KSA. Export their young religious crazies, give them a bit of money to wreak havoc somewhere else (preferably someplace that furthers KSA financial and/or regional interests), and then sit back at let someone else take them down.
OBL didn’t care about the US; his goal was to be the new Emir of Arabia. It’s the mirage or spell young Arab men fall for or under. To KSA, IS is but a band of mercenaries to take out Assad and reduce the Shia hold on Iraq. Once the “mission is accomplished” “moderate” Sunnis step into the power vacuum and take out the mercenaries, preferably with the US/NATO/Israeli war machines.
In real time, my read of KSA’s position on GWB’s proposed excellent adventure was that they didn’t like it. Although the easily anticipated increase in oil price would have been tempting. They may have miscalculated the difficulty of installing a Sunni friendly replacement for Saddam and/or the strength of the Shia militia. Or underestimated the US decimation of the Baathist faction. Whatever, they may not have been pleased to have a Shia controlled government on their border. Then it was time to begin exporting/funding new crazies to clean up some of the mess. (According to Sy Hersh, they had been installed in Lebanon prior to 2007 waiting for the signal to proceed.)
Not to be overlooked is that Qatar was also funding a faction in Syria. Have the KSA and Qatar rebels joined forces? Are either or both now financially independent of their original patrons? Was it anticipated that they would link up with Sunnis in Iraq? Too many questions for me.
Haven’t a clue as to how many factions Erdogan is playing with or to what purpose. Too many “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and too much oil in the mix to sort out.
Did you read the Saudi historical bit?
My emphasis. These were the original jihadis of Lawrence of Arabia fame. If you squint you can see them ghostlike rising behind the Toyota pick-ups with 14.5mm machine gun pedestal mounts they prefer these days.
The reason this is so terrifying to the Saudis is this is their origin story and they know how it can end.
Jordan is a useful and convenient small buffer kingdom. A friend, or at least not an enemy, to all inside and outside the region.
What’s not yet clear to me is if KSA and by extension the US has dumped the dump Assad agenda. Or at a minimum put it in suspension for another day because they honestly do fear IS. Is it possible that Erdogan would go it alone and continue supporting IS and regime change in Syria? Can’t see how that would be in his interests. But wouldn’t toying with IS work for all parties except IS?
The Israelis claim we’re mending some fences:
Usual caveats apply with Debka but there it is. Also this, “Israel backs away from anti-Assad policy, blocks Islamists on Golan” from the same source. Grain of salt, but still… Very interesting. YMMV
We seem to be about to find out.
I’m not trying to be defeatist about the wannabe Caliphate but it seems to me the fix is already in; if they can sell their oil and buy their fuel and groceries then we might as well just move to the end game and treat with them. It’s not like we haven’t been buying oil for decades from Wahabist executioners with a weakness for Medieval re-enactment.
It seems to me that when the smoke and dust of our Iraqi failure cleared the Sunni-Shiite chasm widened. By empowering Shiite Iraq we created a crisis among Sunnis in the region. Now we have Erdogan and the Saudis as the two opposing poles of Sunni regional leadership; both up to their eyeballs in Syria and Sunni radical militias.
My reading is that Erdogan’s NATO membership trumps the Saudi ‘special relationship’ in terms of what the West condones or conspires to conceal in regards to their respective behaviours and ambitions. But it is no secret that they have both been actively supporting the people who are energetically and vociferously trying to kill us and destroy our culture.
At the moment I think Erdogan has pulled a fast one on the Saudis and swooped in to do a deal with the Daish just as the Saudis realised their creature was likely to turn on them. Maybe that was even his idea.
Remember when it seemed a good idea to be bombing Iran? Wow, that was like so yesterday.
With you except for this:
They don’t want us or “our culture” (whatever that may mean) in their countries or neighborhoods. If it were China or Japan invading/occupying and exporting their culture to the ME, these Muslims would feel the same about China or Japan. They need the west and east to buy their oil and in turn they’ll buy our tech and luxury goods. Otherwise, keep out.
They were using our culture for leverage. The Wahabist ideal bears no more relation to reality in this century than does the Confederacy in this country. Yet there it is. It is the anti-colonialism of the 19th and 20th century with a gloss of religious fundamentalism and a strategy of attention seeking.
And they did kill us and continue, more or less, to do so.
What do you mean by
The 9/11 bit, basically. Though in a broader sense the Beirut bombing is probably a deeper insight into the morality and aspirations of the fundamentalist movement in aggregate, though that was apparently a Shia effort.
Eighteen years between those two attacks. Only one on US soil. How many attacks were made by the US on Muslim countries in the intervening years? How many did the US kill?
Have to consider 9/11 a one-off and also have to consider that the primary objective may have been destruction of property and not the number of Americans killed. The timing of the attacks required that they be done during the day as the pilots weren’t instrument rated and the early morning flights would give airline employees and other passengers less time to become suspicious. Had they been an hour later, those buildings would have been more fully occupied and the death toll much higher.
Not keeping score, Marie. Dozens. Point is the extremism of the most violent fractions of the jihadist movement are tacitly enabled by our “allies” because we have an insatiable appetite for oil. Sucks to be us.
You’re failing to see the snark of anti-UN conservatives wanting the UN to do anything with respect to Daish.
And just elevating a bunch of pirates to the status of a state just to criticize the Kenyan Muslim Socialist.
I think its both Islamic and a State, but I understand why you can’t admit that so obviously I don’t think the president was wrong to refer to it in the way he did.
Do you think the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is democratic, or a republic?
Are Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum considered not Christians? Is DPRK somehow not a state polity?
I could argue Cruz and Santorum are not Christians, because of their revolting values and cynicism, which would disgust both Jesus and Paul (who didn’t in my view agree about much). That’s why some of us call them Christianists–they’re idolators, worshiping the religion instead of practicing it. But they insist on calling themselves Christians so the hell with it. I guess we could say the same kind of thing about the Caliphate. I imagine their Islam is pretty crude theologically and not acceptable to most educated Muslims, but arguing about whether they are or are not Muslims is not an interesting way of dealing with the issue. (Unlike Alawites or the Nizari Ismailis.)
DPRK is obviously a state, with borders and a capital and all sorts of institutions and foreign relations. You can say the Caliphate is an incipient state or has aspirations to statehood, but for now it’s just a pretentious Mafia.
Rubin wants to call it a state because she wants it to be scarier:
Like all Republicans she’s a terrorist, that is someone who uses fear to further political aims.
It is certainly not a state. They have no borders, are recognized by no other state, have no governing documents (that I know of, anyway) and neither collect taxes or provide services (again, that I know of). They may have ambitions of statehood, but just claiming to be a state does not make them so.
As to whether the are Islamic or not, that’s tougher. Saying that any religious group is not what they claim to be is always strange. Are Mormons Christian? Are Twelver Shiites Muslim? There is no way to answer these questions because there is no final authority. In this case, the IS cadres are probably Islamic by any reasonable definition of the word, but there are very, very good reasons to define them otherwise.
In any case, for bigots like this to say that the IS is Islamic is really a backdoor way of defining Islam in terms of groups like the IS, and thus justifying their pro-Israeli views that Islam is categorically a violent enemy group which must be made war with.
I support the President’s formulation.
They absolutely collect taxes, but so does the Mafia. Thanks for noting Rubin’s Likudnik motivations for trying to spread the idea that their Islam is normal Islam, that’s a key point.
“Are Mormons Christian? Are Twelver Shiites Muslim? There is no way to answer these questions because there is no final authority.”
The final authority on most questions is nothing other than definition, evidence, rational judgment. As for authority, even if there is no final authority, there is predominance of positions among knowledgeable sources.
Same here. Depending on the definition of Christian or Muslim, they either are or are not. The most important thing is going over the evidence, which for a question like this would be mostly doctrinal, but also historical, etc., which is also what makes sources knowledgeable.
No one considers ISIS a state except themselves and a few other jihadi groups.
“Same here. Depending on the definition of Christian or Muslim, they either are or are not”
Ah, that’s the rub. Defining what is or is not Christian, etc, is a topic that has filled volumes of text and countless hours of conversation over the millennia.
The use of language to define what is or is not an acceptable definition of a certain faith is always a political act. That’s what Obama is doing here. Pointing out to all the bickering Arab states and Iran that it is within ALL of their interests to get along on this one thing.
Interestingly, it occurs to me that Obama, so long pilloried as a crypto-Muslim, has in a sense taken a seat on the Ummah. The thing is, it is in fact in our common interest as people of any or no faith, all around the world, to define any group that commits ethnic cleansing as anathema. If Obama has gotten all of these regional actors to come together just to accept that, it can only be a good thing.
FATWAH ON THE SO-CALLED “ISLAMIC STATE”
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/09/173312-british-muslim-leaders-denounce-isis-heretics-muslims-religio
us-duty-oppose/
As to what kind of Islam the ISIS practices, a contemporary Muslim scholar classifies them as:
“Radical jihādist Salafīs: Encompassing radical theological and political positions, this ‘strand’ of Salafism includes militant organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIS. While I have differentiated between these last two categories, many would correctly point out that they are a continuum, without a clear dividing line separating them. It is worthy of mention, here, that though they may espouse some strain of the Salafī methodology in their theological positions, they are typically condemned by all other Salafīs on account of their militancy. Additionally, these groups emphasize issues that most others Salafīs don’t (such as their version of jihād) and ignore issues that mainstream Salafīs would discuss. (For the record, it should be noted that these groups originated from a union of splintered sub groups of the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Salafism in the early 1980s – hence, technically, they are not of ‘pure’ Salafī origin).”
http://muslimmatters.org/2014/04/22/on-salafi-islam-dr-yasir-qadhi/2/
As much as a Mafia-controlled neighborhood is a Catholic city-state.
“…why is it important to Rubin and Lee…”
Because of COURSE it’s a “state”. How ever else are we going to figure out where to build our next “Geen Zone”?
Of course these Likudnik types have never stopped pushing the “terrorist are mainstream-Muslims” line. Just read the Koran! But all one has to do is read the Rube’s column to see that more wide-ranging war is what she is openly advocating (and salivating over, frankly. Someone rang Pavlov’s bell…)
Interestingly, she makes clear she is talking about Repubs pandering to the “Repub base” with all this return to fear & warmongering. There doesn’t seem to be too much thought given to what the non-braindead might think, so Repubs might take her advice with a grain of salt. Yes, indeed, American special forces into Syria, some sort of “troop presence” back to Iraq! Good luck with this, Sen. McBoob-Lindseypoo.
But the fear-baiting and the warmongering on display here are simply awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, we are now like the frog in the pot, the water’s just gonna keep warming up. As we’ve often commented here, once the hapless New Rome is “in”, it can’t get out without a massive effort to achieve “victory”, never defined these days, of course. If we don’t immediately go in Big, we escalate to Big. Quarter-efforts begat Half-efforts, etc etc., until we have “no choice” but commit ground forces, otherwise shame and humiliation and “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!”
When the two DC factions are arguing over what to call the enemy, it ain’t a good sign for the strategy or plan or whatever we’re calling whatever we’re about to do. So much for patriotic support of the mission and the noble, all powerful CinC (genuflect here), eh, Repubs? Truth-telling is already in short supply, and one has to scour the recesses of the internets to see glimpses of how in hell we really got into this mess, who is really responsible and who is likely to do anything (or nothing) to try to combat this latest “existential” enemy–none of which is to be heard on the mindless blatting of the corporate media. But the JRubes and Foxites always know it all!
The putative caliphate will begin its road to statehood as soon as it’s recognized by Saudi Arabia.
I think that Bandar Bush got canned when the Saudi royal family realized this and figured out that they weren’t the intended caliphs.
Talk about a bunch of billionaires between Iraq and a hard place.
Always difficult to know if Bandar has been pushed aside or reassigned to a covert position less visible to western powers.
Figure out who leaked this inflammatory titbit last year and you have your answer:
“Dramatic turn,” indeed. I thought it was Putin at the time but now, not so sure.
Well….look what happened to Ukraine shortly after that meeting.
Your first impulse based on the report in the Telegraph would seem to be correct. But who released it may be less important than when it was first reported on in Russia. The Telegraph report is from 8/27. The al-Monitor is from 8/22, five days earlier. How fast was al-Monitor in getting and reporting it?
We don’t know, I’m guessing they had no reason to hesitate. You can bet the Telegraph checked it out before publication. Anyone could have leaked it to al-Monitor; they are the perfect dumping ground for that kind of stuff, I read them all the time these days. Bit of a Shi’ite slant sometimes, it seems, but always credible reporting from regional sources.
Not questioning the validity of the reported conversation — no denials were issued by the parties to it.
It was widely reported a week after the 7/31/13 Putin-Bandar meeting in Moscow that KSA had offered to buy Russian arms if Russia backed off its support for Assad. Alalam may have been the first to report the deal offer on 8/7/13. No comment to the report issued by Moscow but was reportedly considering the offer. RT reported it on the eighth citing AFP as the source. No comment from Moscow or Riyahd, but the RT report is interesting:
RT also included that some were skeptical about the accuracy of the report. Looks to me as if these “leaks” were coming from KSA and western sources and designed to discredit Putin. Although Putin’s alleged “no deal” response was likely from the Kremlin. The inclusion of Bandar threatening no Geneva conference if no deal is curious. I’m guessing that Moscow wasn’t the source for it. Mark Ames seems to agree with my assessment of the source, but seems not to have been curious about the source of the transcript leak or when it was leaked. Citing the same two sources that you did. Would like to know when and where the first report appeared.
.
From memory …
Evil prince Bandar also mentioned another benefit to Putin, there would be no (suicide) bombings at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Before showing Bandar the door, Putin guaranteed Bandar a Saudi city would be wiped off the earth in response. End of meeting. Not long thereafter, Prince Bandar once again lost his position in the House of Saud.
It would be most interesting to look closely at the House of Saud, it appears to be disintegrating due to family conflicts.
That information was learned from the transcript of the July 31 meeting that we’ve been discussing. And I’d like to know when and where it was first published.
Also note the Bandar and Putin had a second meeting last December, but don’t think the content of that discussion was released.
As to the internal stresses, etc. of the House of Saud, who knows?
That Mark AMes piece is ironic reading today:
The fools.
Projection?
Also stumbled on another weird bit. Someone claimed to have hacked the Britam Defence server and posted emails alleged to have been written by the CEO and another senior employee discussing a false flag chemical weapons attack in Syria. The emails were dated December 2012 and posted online later that month or early January 2013. Someone at Reddit fairly quickly figured out that they were fake. The Daily Mail published them as real, but in April retracted that report and admitted that they paid compensation to the subject individuals for the slander.