Category: Middle East Page 19 of 22

The Syrian Civil War

On June 18, 2013

To put it simply, Assad is most likely going to win this. Hizbollah has clearly turned the facts on the ground for him, and Syrian public opinion appears to have decisively turned against the rebels. 10% support is too low, it can keep them going low-grade, but it’s not sufficient to win it. This is why you hear calls for a no-fly zone, and for bombing (not because of the very dubious chemical weapon use claim.)

At this point, if the West wants the rebels to win, it’s going to have to use direct military force.

Hizbollah may, today, on a man for man basis, have the best soldiers in the world. They don’t have as much heavy equipment as many militaries, but they are skilled, seasoned and they have very high morale. They believe in what they’re doing in a way that virtually no other military does.

Brief comments on the Syrian civil war

By Ian Welsh

On May 31, 2013

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I haven’t written much about this because I don’t know enough. I think it’s worth noting, at this point, that the full commitment of Hezbollah seems to have swung the war in Assad’s favor. I am not surprised by Hezbollah’s involvement. Had the rebels won, Hezbollah’s supply lines to Iran would have been cut. Russia seems to agree that Assad now has the upper hand.

Assad’s not a good man, he routinely engages in very nasty torture, and I have no mandate for him or his regime. But those opposing him seem to be a very dodgy bunch as well.

What is happening in Syria is another cost of Mubarak. Assad cannot step down, he knows he will not be allowed to go into exile in the South of France, but will be tried. So he fights, as did Qaddafi. Unlike Qaddafi, I suspect he’s going to “win”.

Realpolitik at its worst. There are only interests.

The Hidden Army: Hezbollah Teaches the World How to Fight

By Ian Welsh

On February 25, 2013

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Surveillance State notes something very, very important:

Hezbollah and Israel have been at war for some time. In an effort to stop Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters from communicating, Israel has in the past jammed the cell phone towers in the Hezbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon. Eager to make sure that didn’t happen again, Hezbollah has covertly built out a fiber-optic network throughout the areas it controls.

He then goes on to note that the last crisis between Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah was over the government trying to shut down that fiber-optic network. Hezbollah regarded that as an act of war:

(Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah) said the government’s decision to shut down Hezbollah’s fiber-optic communications network was tantamount to a declaration of war. For the (central) government, the network represented an intolerable example of Hezbollah’s efforts to set up an Iranian- and Syrian-backed state within Lebanon. Hezbollah justifies the network, which carried its communications during a 2006 war with Israel, as a vital security asset.

The interesting thing is that during the 2006 war, Hezbollah won the information war. Their communications remained secure, but Israeli soldiers carrying cell phones made calls which Hezbollah tracked. Even if they couldn’t listen in, being able to triangulate where some Israeli soldier is making a call from gives some very interesting, and useful, information.

Americans, Israelis and the West in general are used to assuming they’ll win the surveillance, electronic and information war. But Hezbollah defeated or drew Israel in all three. A network of tunnels, pre-prepared camouflage positions for missile launchers and the use of civilian clothes when troops were traveling made aerial surveillance and satellites virtually useless. The Israelis were never able to shut down the majority of Hezbollah’s missile launchers, any more than they’ve been able to find those of the Palestinians.

Hezbollah’s army is a secret one. It’s like an old fashioned spy agency.

It doesn’t exist.

If you’re enrolled in it, you don’t tell anyone. The war was rife with stories of soldiers being killed, and their families finding out for the first time that they were even in Hezbollah’s army. This, of course, is to make it impossible to use assassination, mostly aerial assassination, to take out key leaders.

Hezbollah is an almost perfect Darwinian organization. Israel uses informants and assassination? Great – we’ll keep even our membership secret. Israel uses air power? We’ll dig tunnels and set up aeriel blinds for our missile launchers. Israel doesn’t like taking heavy infantry casualties – fine then, we’ll set up overlapping bunkers which simply cannot be cleared without taking losses.

Hezbollah has created the new model army, and a new model state. Call it the Hidden Army. An army that blends in with the population, that moves only when it cannot be seen, that sets up in the expectation of surveillance. An army that knows all the high tech games, and spent the time to figure out how to nullify them. It sounds like a guerilla army, and it is, but it’s also much more: it’s an army capable of engaging in strategic warfare and an army capable of engaging in full on attrition defense warfare against Israeli main battle forces. It’s hard to overstate how impressive this is.

It’s an unrecognized State with a hidden army. Oh, the UN says there’s a Lebanese government with authority over Hezbollah. But everyone knows that the real government in southern Lebanon is Hezbollah. They pick up the garbage, they give out the pensions, heck, they have their own phone network. Crazy. When the Lebanese “government” picks a fight with Hezbollah, Hezbollah wins.

We are going to see many more of these unrecognized governments, with their hidden armies. Why? Because they work, and they work very well, both at providing government services to a population, and at frustrating much larger, more powerful and expensive conventional armies. As official governments fail, less recognized ones will pick up the pieces. And they will look to Lebanon to see how to do it, survive, and even win.

(Kicking this one to the front again – Feb 25, 2013 – originally reposted in 2009.)

(Another reprint. This one got some hostile reaction from people who missed the point. Hezbollah might be the most interesting and successful neo-state in the world. Anyone who isn’t studying it is a fool. )

The Gaza Reminder

By Ian Welsh

On November 19, 2012

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is about the value of human life.

When I was a child, my father once threw some Christian evangalists off our property.

They had said, “everyone who doesn’t believe in Christ will go to hell.”

Now my father had a temper, but the way his voice dropped to a whisper, and the step he took towards them screamed incipient violence and they virtually ran.

I didn’t ask why, but he told me.

“I lived in Bangladesh, Malaysia and other Muslim countries for years. Anyone who tells me that the good people I knew are going to burn in hell, can go to hell. I’ll have nothing to do with any God who does that or people who believe that.”

I always remembered that. Truth be told my father was slightly racist himself, he was of that generation. But he was ashamed of it, he knew better, and he fought it. What he understood was something simple: every human life has the same value. Any moral system which places one life above the other is not ethical, it is evil.

We in the developed world, and in America and Israel in particular, don’t believe that. We don’t even, any more, give it lip service. And we especially don’t believe that a Muslim life is worth the same as an American life, or an Israeli life, or well, pretty much any non-Muslim life. When Madeline Albright can say that half a million dead Iraqi children is a price worth paying for the sanctions, even before 9/11, we’ve become inhumane.

Osama bin Laden once asked, rhetorically, if Muslim blood was red, and if Muslim children were worthy of life as much as American children.

Israel is doomed. The generation of young American Jews do not have the loyalty to Israel, no matter what it does, that older American Jews, as a group, have. The world is coming to see Israel as an apartheid state, which is what it is. The demographics are against it, and at some point America will cut Israel off, and Israel’s economy is not sustainable without the US.

And more to the point, somewhere, alive today, is the person who believes that losing Jerusalem is an acceptable price for wiping out Tel Aviv. That person has been created by Israeli policy, by Western policy and by Saudi policy. Israel is a small country. It will not exist in 50 years. It may be destroyed in an apocalyptic terror attack, it may be destroyed in military action, it may be destroyed by demographics, it may fall apart economically. Its military advantage is already going away. Hezbollah took away Israel’s armor advantage, straight up defeating them in their last invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli air force was unable to substantially dent Hezbollah’s missile force, despite complete air supremacy. If Hezbollah had had the good missiles, it could have wreaked much more damage.

Right now Hamas has rockets. They look like something out of the 15th century. They are pathetic. It won’t stay that way forever.

All this before we get to the fact that Israel’s military is incompetent. They are no longer the Israeli military of 68, they are an occupation military, and occupation militaries are only good at fighting weaklings, they always become corrupt, brutal and weak themselves.

Israel faces a stark choice: the two-state solution is no longer viable, there is not enough water and arable land, and too much population. It can no longer work. Israel can either become a secular single state, giving a vote and rights to everyone, it can ethnically cleanse out all Palestinians and become a pariah state, or it can cease to exist (option 2 and 3 may both occur). Its end, moral or physical, may occur through terror, demographics, war, economic collapse, military decline or more likely, some combination, but it is as close to any historical process comes to inevitability.

Israel is acting like a monster, killing vastly disproportionate numbers of Palestinians. But the grave it is digging, in the not so long run, isn’t that of the Palestinians, it is its own.

W.H. Auden once wrote the line that applies to Israel, and to the Palestinians, for that matter: Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.

I can find no joy in this, no happiness, but it is what it is. If Israelis, not Israel the religious-ethnic state, want to avoid catastrophic destruction, their only solution is simple: stop doing evil, and start doing good.

People will dismiss that as naive, but it is the hardest of hard headed pragmatism, and as such, is advice unlikely to be taken.

Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.

Mubarak gone, military takes charge

By Ian Welsh

On February 11, 2011

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Good news, probably. We’ll see if they rein in the secret police and the various corrupt police stations which run semi-autonomously and engage in much of the rape and torture.

Notice that this happened when the people marched on the presidential palace, and not before.

Endgame here is probably an Attaturk Turkish style democracy, where the military acts as the final guarantor. Note also that the military has a lot of business interests in Egypt, and were enraged by Mubarak’s ne0liberal policies, like selling off banks, which damaged them significantly.

Congratulations to the protestors, who seem to have been organized in large part by Egyptian labor. This is a victory, however it turns out in the longer run.

The Egyptian Bottom Line

By Ian Welsh

On February 3, 2011

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Let’s be real clear, people, what do you think will happen to the protesters if Mubarak’s regime (whether he’s specifically in charge or not) remains in power?

Can you say arrests and torture?

Sure you can.

Those are the stakes. They can win, or they can get tortured. When you enter the lion’s den, you better be willing to kill the damn thing, or at best, you’re getting mauled.

What should Obama do? I don’t much care, honestly, so long as he doesn’t actually support the regime.

It’s really up to Egyptians. Either they have what it takes to finish the job (I’d suggest Mubarak needs a Ceauşescu moment), or they don’t. If they don’t, those who protested can expect to have a lot of intimate time with Mubarak’s thugs in which to mull over their inability to drive the spear home.

In between screams, of course. Contrary to what you might think, I’ve found those lingering moments between screams is a good time to realize how you fucked up.

Update: Jesus wept, save me from Obama’s brand of “help”:

The Obama administration is discussing with Egyptian officials a proposal for President Hosni Mubarak to resign immediately, turning over power to a transitional government headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman with the support of the Egyptian military, administration officials and Arab diplomats said Thursday.

Oh yes, a “transitional” government with Mubarak’s chief torturer in charge. Obama’s a lot like Bush in this respect, as in many others, you really, really, really don’t want his “help”.

It’s time for Egyptians

By Ian Welsh

On February 3, 2011

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to storm Mubarak’s mansion. It’s him, or them and he’s made it clear that he’d rather it was them. And if the protests fail, a lot of them, including the women, are going to spend a lot of time being tortured.

Some Points About Egypt

By Ian Welsh

On January 29, 2011

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1) the timing for Davos of both revolutions is… interesting. One might think a message is being sent.

2) the Iranians have been putting money into the rural areas of Egypt. Specifically into clinics. Since the Egyptians are American clients, they can’t break drug patent laws, the Iranians are happy to do so. Poor folks are happy for the children to live.

3) The Muslim Brotherhood is, in fact, the strongest opposition party.

4) Egypt has real hard currency problems. Essentially all hard currency flows into the currency then right back out and the vast majority is used to buy weapons.

5) Egypt can’t feed its own population and the devaluation that is going on is hurting them badly.

6) Think of both revolutions as part of the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Notice who is winning. Notice the price jump in oil. Remember that this benefits Iran more than Saudi Arabia—Iran needs a much higher price for oil than SA does to keep its society on a more or less even keel (The Sauds have even noted that the best way to crush Iran is to reduce the price of oil). Remember that high oil prices really hurt everyone who isn’t an oil state and that once you get around $110/barrel or so it is likely to lead to a huge spike and another crash out.

7) The army and the Muslim Brotherhood seem rather unlikely to allow a western style secular democracy. And I wonder how much money the army is willing to give up so people can, y’know, eat. A lot of the day laboring classes in Egypt basically spend ALL their daily money on food.

8 ) This is the end of the Gaza blockade in any meaningful fashion unless the Israelis want to fully reoccupy it, which I doubt they do.

9) Egypt has been strongly in the US camp now for a long time. The ordinary people really haven’t gotten much out of it, have they?

10) The oilarchies spend much more money on a per capita basis on internal repression and subsidies than Egypt could ever afford to. Assume that Saudi Arabia, for example, spends about 20% of GDP on military and security services combined. The small oil states are very generous to their “citizens”, while using “guest workers” for most of the actual work.

11) Revolutions happen when people can’t reliably get enough food. If they can revolt, they revolt. If they can’t, there are famines. The green revolution is reaching its limits and the deliberate policy of turning nations into food dependencies so European and American farmers could make money is reaping bitter fruit. So-called non core inflation (food and energy) is what matters most, not least. Who cares if a toaster is cheap when you don’t have enough to eat, or you can’t stay warm, or the fuel to cook your food is too expensive?