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And next, Syria?

Dandred said:
It was smelly, but can you dissect it for the less well informed? I'm just lost to who is arming ISIS.
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Not sure why you and Coolfonz have fixated on this 'but who's arming them?" aspect of IS. That part of the world is awash with weapons and munitions from pretty much every country and manufacturer you could imagine, there's not really need for anyone to actually be arming Daesh currently with shipments, there's plenty of weapons there, and they continually capture more. Anyone trying to make a point by looking at what the country of origin is of the weapons they're using is just wrong footed.
 
Casually Red said:
This is quite an illuminating piece from RT as regards the source of these Syrian war casualty claims, the oft quoted Syrian Observatory for human rights . Which is used as an impeccable source by CNN , BBC etc. by virtually every major western news outlet in fact .
The " observatory " though seems to be little more than a geezer in a 2 bedroom semi in Coventry , who hates Assad .




Well done RT for pointing this out . I'm quite surprised its actually taken this long mind . That geezer , in a 2 bedroom semi in coventry , has been the primary quoted western news source for 4 bloody years now . And nobody's even batted a eyelid .

Needless to say the geezer refuses to answer any questions on where he gets the sources for his claims , because " people are trying to kill him ".
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No one has mentioned any of this before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/w...ehind-the-casualty-figures-in-syria.html?_r=0 (2013)
UK activist lifting the lid on secret Syria - BBC News (2012)
A festering 'SOHR': Does the word “journalism” still apply to the Guardian? (2012)
The man tracking Syria’s war deaths — from Britain (2012)
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/per...-The-Syrian-Observatory-for-Human-Rights.html (2014)
200,000 dead? Why Syria’s rising death toll is so divisive (2014)

Well done RT the only ones with their eyes open.
 
Idris2002 said:
Feck ye, I was going to post that.

Achcar's pretty much OK, right? I've not read anything by him apart from an analysis of late 90s US military spending he did for the NLR.
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Generally yes, wobbled over Libya and intervention. (And over participating in the SWP's marxism event around the time of the rape allegations). Oddly enough, his defence of NATO intervention in Libya is now being used by those who opposed him then and who now support russian state intervention in Syria today.
 
LynnDoyleCooper said:
Not sure why you and Coolfonz have fixated on this 'but who's arming them?" aspect of IS. That part of the world is awash with weapons and munitions from pretty much every country and manufacturer you could imagine, there's not really need for anyone to actually be arming Daesh currently with shipments, there's plenty of weapons there, and they continually capture more. Anyone trying to make a point by looking at what the country of origin is of the weapons they're using is just wrong footed.
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I'm not fixating I can assure you. Idly wondering more like. As two major powers, the US and Russia are now directly involved, ditto the EU, I was wondering if you would see Russian planes downed by US missiles or visa versa, or any combination of the above.

Petrodollars: this is bollocks. Oil is de facto priced in dollars. You can price it any way you like but it will be converted to dollars. (Rob Newman is a very nice chap though.)

If you had production based in the Eurozone, sold to other eurozone members (this does happen in small amounts) you can avoid dollar price effect, but its the global nature of the dollar that means oil is priced in dollars, whatever currency you start off with...
 
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Diamond said:
It's not that difficult

Russians have fought jihadis for longer than the West. They are a traditional enemy. Because of the nature of those conflicts many of those who chose jihad were Russian.

Russia has just entered into the major jihadi space in the world.

That might, just might, not be a very good idea.
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Correct. Tolstoy (among many others) had quite a lot to say about Russian colonialist adventures in the Muslim world. And they've been after Istanbul forever. There's an old song about it that might bear revival:

We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too,
We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.
 
LynnDoyleCooper said:
Not sure why you and Coolfonz have fixated on this 'but who's arming them?" aspect of IS. That part of the world is awash with weapons and munitions from pretty much every country and manufacturer you could imagine, there's not really need for anyone to actually be arming Daesh currently with shipments, there's plenty of weapons there, and they continually capture more. Anyone trying to make a point by looking at what the country of origin is of the weapons they're using is just wrong footed.
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Indeed, in a bizarre cyberpunkish twist of retro-futurism, Syrian rebels have melded WWII Sturmgewehr 44s with modern remote firing systems.
 
LynnDoyleCooper said:
...Anyone trying to make a point by looking at what the country of origin is of the weapons they're using is just wrong footed.
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i'm pretty sure i read in one of the interminable briefing sheets i had for Iraq in about 2004/5 that the Iraqi government had, between the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war and the 2003 invasion, bought (whether 'properly' or using unlicenced production centres in Iraq) the best part of 12 million rifles of various AK stripes, and that less than half of them had ever been issued.

awash barely touches it...
 
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Excellent angry piece:

Anti-Imperialism 2.0: Selective Sympathies, Dubious Friends

The vulgar reductionism that passes in some quarters for anti-imperialism (but looks a lot like simple abandonment of people deemed impure by those in imperialist countries), which sees every struggle as reducible to “aligned with America or not,” with no particular thought given to the fact that one country is not exactly the same as another, is what’s fashionable now that radical analysis is expressed in 140 characters or less. It’s a gift to imperialists – at least they care – while an insult to those whose existence the Western left finds it convenient to erase, the better to tar those left to the mercies of a foreign regime as undeserving of a second’s sympathy.
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Since the killing is sponsored by one imperial power and not another, though, silence is the duty of the Western revolutionary, which is a shame for the revolutionaries in Syria whose existence we in the West are duly bound to deny. While the groups fighting the U.S. empire in Iraq were treated with some nuance – not every Muslim with a gun and a beard is a terrorist – rhetorically attacking the U.S. empire requires embracing the vulgar Islamophobia of the far right and its portrayal of every Islamist as an Islamic State-style jihadist.
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The tragedy that is Syria today is compounded by the silence of those who, were it a different imperial power aiding the Assad regime, would be holding candle-light vigils and declaring their intent to speak truth to power on behalf of the powerless, perhaps not changing a whole lot but at least – and this isn’t nothing – adding another voice speaking truth to the historical record and increasing the political cost of butchery, guarding against that butcher’s acceptance back into the “international community” and providing some semblance of comfort to those who now feel totally forgotten by the world. Being aware of imperialists’ interests and skeptical of the rhetoric deployed against their enemies needn’t manifest itself as whistling and turning one’s head at the crimes of capitalists aligned with a competing power. Borders shouldn’t stop the radicals who don’t even believe in such arbitrary geopolitical divides from extending both material and verbal support across them. States kill enough things; solidarity shouldn’t be one of them.
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Coolfonz said:
I'm not fixating I can assure you. Idly wondering more like. As two major powers, the US and Russia are now directly involved, ditto the EU, I was wondering if you would see Russian planes downed by US missiles or visa versa, or any combination of the above.
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AFAIK no surface-to-air missiles have (or are likely to be) supplied to that area. For exactly those reasons. Whether this might change over time I guess we'll see.
 
LynnDoyleCooper said:
AFAIK no surface-to-air missiles have (or are likely to be) supplied to that area. For exactly those reasons. Whether this might change over time I guess we'll see.
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CQnx7WEVEAAIHvv.png


The WSJ article is paywall but for me it kind of begs the question 'why haven't they received manpads from somewhere already?' I suspect at least part of the answer lies in there being some behind-the-scenes agreement between the US and the Gulf states to ensure that this hasn't happened and it's not like Gulf state actors wouldn't have been able to procure them. Reasons as to why this should be the case this should be fairly obvious.
 
teqniq said:


CQnx7WEVEAAIHvv.png


The WSJ article is paywall but for me it kind of begs the question 'why haven't they received manpads from somewhere already?' I suspect at least part of the answer lies in there being some behind-the-scenes agreement between the US and the Gulf states to ensure that this hasn't happened and it's not like Gulf state actors wouldn't have been able to procure them. Reasons as to why this should be the case this should be fairly obvious.
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The US back in 2012 made it clear that no manpads were to go to the revolutionaries. This allowed the barrel bombing of civilian and opposition areas to to take place and the wider militarisation of the uprising to take place.Both to the regimes benefit. This was before ISIS and so on.
 
LynnDoyleCooper said:
AFAIK no surface-to-air missiles have (or are likely to be) supplied to that area. For exactly those reasons. Whether this might change over time I guess we'll see.
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Syrian air defenses possess a large range of (vehicle) mobile Russian SAM hardware including Buk and S300 variants.
 
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butchersapron said:
The US back in 2012 made it clear that no manpads were to go to the revolutionaries. This allowed the barrel bombing of civilian and opposition areas to to take place and the wider militarisation of the uprising to take place.Both to the regimes benefit. This was before ISIS and so on.
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Ah right thanks. I must have missed/forgotten about that.
 
No denying there's SAMs there in the area, was just pointing out that I think none have been supplied by other State's to non-State groups recently. Although yes, it's bit of a vague line to draw between those and more recent ones if they'd been supplied.
 
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