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The Islamic state

phildwyer said:
When such people are asked about their motives, they invariably say that they are motivated by Western aggression. I see no reason to disbelieve them.
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Not very dialectical is it?

The point is not to point out that mystification exists. Even a liberal can do that. The point is to offer a coherent, organic and holistic explanation as to why, taking into account opposed and unified contradictions.
 
The thing is that, i actually agree about the dangers of fetishising groups like the YPG,i saw a video one of their supporters produced which purported to show them interrogating an ISIS gighter but actually seemed to me to be pointing guns on and yelling at some very scared young guy, who for all we (and they) knew may have been forced to fight or not Daesh at all. i agree with not portraying Daesh in a 'cartoon like' manner, for a start it is what they want and for another thing adds absolutely nothing to our understanding of such groups, just like the cartoon version of the nazis as people strutting round in lederhosen and ranting about jews and thats it adds absolutely nothing to an understanding of them. I hope thats come across in my posts here tho im afraid im prone to daft, knee jerk 'hang em all' reactions at times.

But what chance do we have of a reasoned discussion when we have someone thats pretending to be an isis apologist and accusing other posters of racism for the lols. Ffs sort it out, you're better than this.
 
phildwyer said:
These people wouldn't recognize the dialectic if it bit them in the bum. Which it very well might. And now I'm off for a swim.
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My point was that it isn't dialectical to take the rantings of some philistine democratic guignol seriously. Saying you're against western imperialism is as helpful as saying capitalism kind of sucks. Meaning that it is an utterly useless explanation that doesn't penetrate the essence of things.

As frogwoman said above, to reduce everything to western imperialism is a kind of orientaalism in reverse, as Sadiq Jalal-Azm put it in his criticisms of Said. Whenever we hear about this western imperialism shtick it's always the petty-bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois postcolonial academics. You seem to be an expert on mystification but you can't see the contradictory class positions of these people.

We rarely (if ever) hear the voices of the w/c and peasants from that part of the world. Why do I need to listen to the rantings of someone who's going against my class interests?
 
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http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/august-28th-2015/isis-has-just-ripped-a-communitys-heart-out/

ISIS has just ripped a community's heart out

Until Fr Jacques’ abduction Dayr Mar Elian had remained the heart of the town, comforting the local population and becoming home to hundreds of mainly Muslim internal refugees. It was a beacon of inter-faith co-operation, with Fr Jacques and the local sheikh standing side by side to prevent the town splintering along sectarian lines.

Last week ISIS broke the heart of a whole town and only time will tell if it can ever be mended. A friend from Qaryatayn who has managed to escape to Europe sent me a text on Friday that says it all: “My heart keeps crying ‘Mar Elian’.”
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:( :mad:
 
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-27/oil-is-islamic-state-s-lifeblood.

Oil is the answer. Already Islamic State has sold oil from the fields it controls on the black market to willing buyers in Kurdish areas and in Turkey. Efforts to crack down on these sales will continue. But the product is fungible and almost untraceable.

A refinery is less important than fields -- but a reopened Baiji would help Islamic State’s efforts if and when it establishes itself with regularized borders. Whatever oil fields it manages to hold will be a source of cash. And refined oil sells for more than unrefined oil. A refinery would also be useful if Islamic State wanted to become energy independent, a plausible goal if it is cut off from neighbors.

For now, Islamic State wants to keep Baiji away from the Iraqi government, which needs the refinery for its own purposes of state legitimacy. But Baiji stands for the militants’ goal of self-funded statehood..
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-anwar-al-awlaki.html?_r=1

Really interesting piece here about anwar awlaki, the ideological inspiration behind a lot of what al q and isis believe, who was killed in a drone strike a couple years ago

The article argues that far from being a good thing the fact he was killed made a martyr out of him among the likes of ISIS and that there was far more mileage to be got from say besmirching his reputation (he frequently went to prostitutes etc)
 
editor said:
If you're hell bent on kicking off cross thread beef and Pickman's model is going to respond in kind and disrupt threads even further, then I'm going to put you both on forced ignore.

So stop now please. Both of you. The topic is more important than your squabbling.
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i don't know what you mean about my replying in kind, unlessyou mean calling someone a useless cunt for their failure to substantiate their claims about my politics is the same as falsely accusing someone of racist behaviour. back in february mango5 said dwyer would be banned if he again posted on this thread after another occasion on which he toldlies about me. if i've posted lies about dwyer on this thread i'd like to know where they are.
 
https://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/air-war-vs-islamic-state-myth-and-reality

Air war vs ISIS: myth and reality

In the new air war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the media environment is very different world. There is virtually no reporting in the western press of what is actually happening on the ground. Information is sometimes forthcoming, though, in some of the military journals, and here a couple of interesting recent indications of the impact of the air-war can be found.

The first is a report in Air Force Times where members of B-1 bomber crews of the 9th bomb squadron were interviewed (see "Inside the B-1 crew that pounded ISIS with 1,800 bombs", Air Force Times, 23 August 2015). Its context is the battle for the Kurdish town of Kobane in northern Syria in late 2014. This was not central to the war against IS, but was more widely reported when the Kurds finally forced IS to withdraw. A few TV reports of the aftermath were broadcast, with some evidence that the town had been seriously damaged in the attacks. Air Force Times fills in the details, not least that a third of all the bombs dropped in Iraq and Syria in the first five months of the war (August 2014-January 2015) were dropped on Kobane by the B-1 bombers, killing 1,000 people.
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Also:
https://opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/blowback-iraq-war-to-islamic-state


“The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it. Because of Obama’s troop withdrawal, and his general refusal to exercise American power, Iraq collapsed, ISIS rose, and the Middle East fell apart. ‘We had it won, thanks to the surge,’ Senator John McCain declared last September.”

A key dynamic

But there is a wider problem with the neo-conservative outlook on Iraq. It lies in the intense shadow war fought by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and its Task Force 145 in 2004-07 and aimed at the heart of the most extreme Sunni insurgents (see "Islamic State: power of belief", 6 November 2014). This initially may have appeared to hugely damage the whole insurgency, making it then possible for the surge to be effective. But it had a terrible consequence, in that it led to thousands of those detained being locked up in Camp Bucca where many were further radicalised - and frequently took on the mantle of the extreme Islamist outlook of what became Islamic State.
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frogwoman said:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/air-war-vs-islamic-state-myth-and-reality

Air war vs ISIS: myth and reality



Also:
https://opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/blowback-iraq-war-to-islamic-state
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they could of course have learned the lessons of frongoch, where the irish volunteersand irish citizen army were interned after the easter rising... see e.g.fron-goch camp 1916 and the birth of the ira by lyn ebeneezer (sean o'mahoney's 'frongoch: university of revolution' much harder to obtain).
 
frogwoman said:
That the air war is working?,
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Hard to say. In the short term it's bound to degrade the PKK's capacity to launch terror attacks, which is no bad thing. In the long term however, it will alienate the body of Kurdish opinion which will need to be detached from armed struggle if any long-term settlement is to be achieved. Erdogan is presumably thinking about the next election--most of his foreign policy is playing to the domestic audience at the moment.
 
phildwyer said:
Hard to say. In the short term it's bound to degrade the PKK's capacity to launch terror attacks, which is no bad thing. In the long term however, it will undoubtedly alienate the body of Kurdish opinion which will need to be detached from armed struggle if any long-term settlement is to be achieved. Erdogan is presumably thinking about the next election--most of his foreign policy is playing to the domestic audience at the moment.
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Did you read it? Its about the US air war on isis, a subject which i thought you'd be interested in given your other posts.
 
frogwoman said:
Did you read it? Its about the US air war on isis, a subject which i thought you'd be interested in given your other posts.
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As I said, Turkey isn't seriously pursuing an air war against ISIS. They're using it as a cover for bombing the PKK. The US air war against ISIS should be evaluated in the same way as that campaign, it's just as counter-productive. There may be some short-term gains, but they'll come at the price of ensuring perpetual conflict in the long term.

These two quotes pretty much sum up both sides' attitudes to the bombing:

"An airforce major says: “To be part of something, to go out and stomp those guys out, it was completely overwhelming and exciting”. An Islamic State source quoted by CNN comments: “They targeted everything. They even attacked motorcycles; they have not left a building standing, but God willing we will return and we will have our revenge multiplied.”

https://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/air-war-vs-islamic-state-myth-and-reality
 
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