Funding for al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and ISI may have come from rich Gulfies, including rich Saudis; there is no, zero nada evidence that the Saudi royal family funded the latter. Daesh has attacked Saudi targets and killed Saudi security personnel.
Illegal immigration is not black and white. The US deports something like 400,000 people a year; that's an enormous operation-- 4 million every decade. It is not as if the agencies are sitting on their hands. But for children brought by parents, whose whole life and identity was formed here, there should be a path to citizenship. And even for adults who have subsequently made a contribution. At the moment they have a choice of hiding or self-deporting. There needs to be something in the middle, as even Jeb Bush acknowledges.
Israel expelled the Palestinians, not Lebanon. Why should Lebanese workers suffer from competition from refugees? Why hasn't Israel paid reparations (it would be in the trillions)? 60 or 70% of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugee families expelled by Israel. They are now Occupied by the Israelis, who control their sea, air and land crossings. Not only can't they work in Israel, they can't even find jobs in Gaza because the Israelis have blockaded the civilian population. At one point they were rationing their calories. Lebanon's policies toward the Palestinian refugees could be better; they are a million times better than Israeli policies toward those in Gaza.
As for Kanafani, people executed without due process are typically referred to as having been murdered.
they had stockpiled fair amounts of 19.75% enriched uranium. As for 3.5% enriched not being dangerous, it is what would be used in a dirty bomb, which security experts are deeply concerned about - and also what is released in a plant meltdown, since it is what fuels the plant.
The opposition agreed to the referendum and there were no significant protests against it. 80% of eligible voters went to the polls. It was a very popular referendum. People wanted it to be a step toward new presidential and parliamentary elections, but in and of itself it was a legitimate vote with wide popular support.
It isn't just a university calculation that affects corruption, it is a personal one. It is important that individual careers and reputations of miscreants are affected by this crime, as an object lesson.
No one held that life begins at conception until recently, including the Christian churches, and it is a made up doctrine to control women. You're welcome of course to your beliefs but you are a minority and shouldn't want to legislate for the rest of us.
but it isn't commensurate; the home made high school science experiment rockets mostly land uselessly in the desert and have caused a tiny fraction of the deaths and damage of Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Moreover Israelis are not trapped in a large outdoor prison.
Thanks so much! Have amended in the light of your comments.
However, the Sanaa I palimpsest is clearly by far the more valuable and newsworthy, being apparently on the order of 60%-70% of the Qur'anic text, not just 18 pages. It is also mostly not illegible as you imply. Moreover, there may well be other very early Qur'ans in the Sanaa collection which have not been radiocarbon dated, and it is a voluminous collection, not 18 pages.
Hi, Tony. Full of admiration for Canada, but my discussion was of the P5 +1 negotiations with Iran, and I was saying that not only did Britain, France and Germany participate vigorously in that process but they are also military allies who have sacrificed for the alliance. It wasn't a general discussion of US allies in Afghanistan.
The British spent more on trying and failing to control the Pushtun tribes in the Northwest Frontier after the Third Afghan War than they spent on the war itself. They never had more than the land on which their garrisons stood.
Actually African-Americans are woefully underrepresented in South Carolinian politics and the white politicians are making it more difficult for them to vote and get health care.
Daesh benefits from the support or complacency of the Sunni population in a place like Ramadi. Baghdad is by now mostly Shiite and I doubt Daesh has much of a way to take it. The Shiite troops and militias also fight better on home turf.
gee David, I guess I don't think interpreting texts is a glib activity that can be done without nuance or context. I quoted that passage to the readers. The question is what 'supporters' means there, in 2012. It didn't mean the USA with regard to supporting the al-Qaeda affiliates and offshoots.
The Saudis did not create ISIL and the Saudis are not backing it or al-Qaeda/ Support Front. They back the Islamic Front. Iraqi Ex-Baath officers created ISIL.
Assad massacred Sunni protesters. Erdogan did his best to have a good relationship with Assad, but small town Sunnis are his constituency and Assad crossed a red line.
Yes, and a lot of Afghans were happy to see the Taliban take Kabul in 1996 because the Mujahidin reduced it to rubble fighting among themselves. In 2004, 5% of Afghans in polling reported thinking well of Taliban.
Jabhat al-Nusra is among the few groups actually to hold a lot of territory on its own, and I very much doubt that Idlib or Jisr al-Shughur would have fallen without it. You can't slap a name like Fath al-Sham on a group that is primarily victorious owing to al-Qaeda and hide the fact that it is al-Qaeda. Ahrar al-Sham's connections to al-Qaeda go beyond one guy, now dead.
What do you think these guys will do to the Alawis once they get hold of them? The Christians who fell under them were already brutalized. Or the Kurdish Marxists? These Salafi Jihadis (and yes, that is what Fath al-Sham is) are a small minority of Syrian Sunnis, and are ideological extremists, but with Saudi and Turkish funding they are taking over. Many of them are mass murderers, just like the regime they are fighting.
Scott, I respect your work, but your reply contains logical fallacies. That Neocons are also afraid of the Salafi Jihadis is irrelevant; they and I are also both afraid of tsunamis.
We don't know who is going to win the war, but that consideration is irrelevant to the characterization of the people who just took most of Idlib province. They are Salafi Jihadis and some of them are outright al-Qaeda, which means all of them are allied with al-Qaeda.
Jabhat al-Nusra is a lead group in Fath al-Sham, and Ahrar al-Sham, another lead group, has firm al-Qaeda connections. the rest are Salafi Jihadis not much different from al-Qaeda. Can't entirely understand why you would want to downplay this, but around here we calls 'em as we sees 'em
Manufacturing in and of itself doesn't produce CO2. It is the electricity generation that does, which drives the manufacturing machines. Of course, steel production is carbon intensive, but scientists and engineers think it, too, could be produced in a low carbon fashion.
Awlaqi suit was dismissed because court found Awlaqi's father did not have standing. V clever of USG to demand that those killed must themselves sue or there is no case.
a) Spain's Abengoa pioneered molten salt batteries for solar plants that lets them go on generating electricity six or seven hours after sundown. Other types of batteries are rapidly falling in price, so solar can soon do it all. b) Wind often blows quite hard at night along the Atlantic and it therefore complements solar. And b), yes, hydro and nuclear can fill the gap.
Of course the solution has to be global. But a) it matters whether we stop at a 4 degree F. increase or do double or triple that and b) it helps to shut up the denialists if there are in fact major, industrialized low- or net zero carbon countries.
Nuclear is problematic. But it isn't nearly as problematic as carbon emissions. Environmentalists are going to have to make some tough choices for about 10 years, after which I predict solar will be so cheap that nuclear can't survive. Personally I think Germany made a poor choice to phase out nuclear abruptly and replace some of it with coal!
China never paid any attention to US 3rd party sanction threats. They can be bucked & that is what will happen everywhere. They can be challenged legally, at WTO etc if governments wish
There is a different between not liking the citizenship you have and not having any citizenship at all. Kurds are Turks, Iraqis, etc. They have passports, travel freely, and defend their property rights in their national courts. Palestinians have none of that. You don't understand the horror of genuine statelessness.
No, other countries try to interfere in US foreign policy goals all the time. They mostly aren't considered our allies and we don't pay them billions a year for the privilege.
Oh, the radical movements are "Muslim." But I would argue that because of the peculiar way "Islam" is used in Arabic to refer to ideal aspects of the religion, whether they are "Islamic" is a theological judgment not appropriate to academics or even pundits.
If you count indirectly caused deaths (e.g. interdiction of chlorine for water purification, creating power vacuum in which deadly militias flourished, etc.), it would be at least a million.
Karim Khan Zand of the Shiraz statelet took Basra in 1775 or so as I remember. Aside from the Herat campaign of early 1850s, which Iranians maintain was just to reassert themselves in a long-held area of Khurasan, that was the last time.
Oh, come on. The US did nothing in Syria for years, in fact prevented medium weapons from going in to rebels. Anti-imperialism is meaningless if it is a one note johnny.
Your assumption that things would have calmed down in Libya without an intervention is incorrect. Syria shows what that would have looked like, and, yes, it is worse.
Don, you're writing to a historian of Qajar Iran. Imperialism deeply constrained and affected Iran in this period, economically and in other ways. You don't seem aware that the British actually attacked Iran in the Nasiri period. Iranians entered modernity being pushed around and shaped by outsiders in ways that simply were not true of Britain or the US.
Iran was partitioned by Russia and Britain in 1907 and forbidden to do things like build a railroad. It was deeply disadvantaged developmentally by this 'informal empire.'
the argument that late comers are owed massive carbon emissions is akin to arguing that inmates arriving recently on death row should be allowed to have longer ropes.
He is a crackpot, and debating crackpots point by point is the biggest waste of time most academics could imagine. Carl Sagan once took some time to do the calculations that refute Velikovsky, and complained bitterly about never getting those hours back.
In fact, you could argue that the spaghetti logic of crackpots is a labyrinth intended to lose all rational people somewhere in there, so the minotaur of malevolent forces like Big Oil can get at them and suffocate them.
Ali, it wasn't just a referendum. It was one with 80% participation. Even Tawakul Karman approved of it and polling showed Yemenis were happy about it, as a step along the way to genuine presidential elections.
You are already spending thousands of dollars on buying cars, and then paying for gasoline on top of that. And you are paying thousands of dollars for electricity for your home over time. My way lets you save money and reduce carbon and use existing infrastructure. Your way requires Stalin-like mass deportations.
I appreciate your kind words, but please don't pigeon-hole me; I know a lot about energy markets and how they change precisely from studying the Middle East for 40 years.
Driving less is good. But most people in US can't get to work any other way, so you're being a little unrealistic. Most of them will buy a car in the next 10 years. Let it be green.
Firing unguided rockets toward civilian populations is a war crime. Identifying the precise individual responsible for any particular strike that caused damage or killed someone (a handful of victims) might be a challenge. The court can only try individuals, not governments or parties. The number of articles in the Rome Statute being violated by the Israeli leadership is rather longer than that violated by Hamas.
Hi, Tom - when I send out appeals on social media, I do say that. and thanks for reinforcing it. If all regular readers set in small amounts, the appeal would suddenly be over.
This blog entry doesn't laud anyone. It is analysis. Western pundits are implying that people like Sisi are not doing enough against Muslim extremism. Which if you know anything about Sisi, is ridiculous-- he has gone way beyond that to marginalize even just adherents of political Islam who are not violent.
There is a difference between asking the Catholic Church to take responsibility for actions of its own hierarchy in shielding pedophile priests, and asking all Christians (yes) to own and apologize for priest pedophilia.
Those are the kinds of people who have all along been recruited by al-Qaeda. The pillars of the community are not terrorists. That these guys were hooked into a network and likely put up to this seems to me fairly clear from their bios. And then there is this:
Bin Laden blamed lots of things, including high infant mortality during the US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s (500,000 dead) and at one point the 1982 Israeli destruction of Beirut.
They announced that they are al-Qaeda and told a bystander that they represented AQAP in Yemen. They had come back from fighting in Syria where they very likely were Jabhat al-Nusra, i.e. al-Qaeda. You can believe this was random if you like, but it has al-Qaeda's fingerprints all over it.
Out of 5-6 million Muslims, a few hundred went to fight in Syria; note that the French gov't wanted Bashar overthrown, too. This is not a counter argument
Bashar has polished off at least 40,000 of his own subjects and has tortured thousands to death. It is silly to compare Obama to him-- you just discredit yourself. As for the rest, your position is the Realist one; it is cold, dude.
No, I was counting its actual subjects, and think they are vastly over-estimated. I don't think there is much support for them in the rest of the Middle East. They'd be beaten up on sight in Egypt.
Egyptian public works workers appear to have been paid salaries and provided with beer; large scale urban slave labor doesn't appear to be their thing. No evidence of Jewish slaves in the archeological record.
There is no archeological evidence for the reign of Ramses II that there were enslaved Jews in Egypt at all, much less of slave revolts or the Red Sea closing on the pharaoh. Nor were there probably at that time "Jews" as opposed to Canaanites with a special emphasis on a particular deity among others. The bible does not say anything about the pyramids (the famous ones much predate Ramses II and the rise of Judaism as a religion). Israeli leader Menachem Begin asserted in speeches that Jews built the pyramids.
Lebanon's Hizbullah does not operate in Iraq for the most part. You have to be careful, because there is a Shiite Iraqi group also called Hizbullah. It just means Party of God.
I've talked to lots of vets who were in Iraq. They never controlled things in the alleyways or at least not very long. Most of them did not even know the language or whether a religious building was Sunni or Shiite.
Mark, the US actually invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 and 8 years later did not leave it in a better condition. The idea that US intervention in Syria could have made a significant difference is daft. These wars are fought in alleyways at a micro level that befuddle superpowers.
It is part of Ninewah province, which the Iraq nationalists won't relinquish easily. I'm just saying that there will be trouble about this, and maximalist Kurdish plans for expansion look to me Milosevich-like. He just wanted Serbia to expand to cover all the Serbs, too, and was willing to kill anyone who objected.
There are likely 800,000 Turkmen, who are enough for an autonomous region if they want one; nationalism is constructed, and the Turks certainly claim them. I don't think most Turkmen would agree with your ventriloquism of them as happy under Kurdish rule.
Funding for al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and ISI may have come from rich Gulfies, including rich Saudis; there is no, zero nada evidence that the Saudi royal family funded the latter. Daesh has attacked Saudi targets and killed Saudi security personnel.
Illegal immigration is not black and white. The US deports something like 400,000 people a year; that's an enormous operation-- 4 million every decade. It is not as if the agencies are sitting on their hands. But for children brought by parents, whose whole life and identity was formed here, there should be a path to citizenship. And even for adults who have subsequently made a contribution. At the moment they have a choice of hiding or self-deporting. There needs to be something in the middle, as even Jeb Bush acknowledges.
Israel expelled the Palestinians, not Lebanon. Why should Lebanese workers suffer from competition from refugees? Why hasn't Israel paid reparations (it would be in the trillions)? 60 or 70% of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugee families expelled by Israel. They are now Occupied by the Israelis, who control their sea, air and land crossings. Not only can't they work in Israel, they can't even find jobs in Gaza because the Israelis have blockaded the civilian population. At one point they were rationing their calories. Lebanon's policies toward the Palestinian refugees could be better; they are a million times better than Israeli policies toward those in Gaza.
As for Kanafani, people executed without due process are typically referred to as having been murdered.
I simply underlined that each genocide is different; the Rwandan one was not, as you say, industrialized the way the Nazi one was.
Now *that* is an Informed Comment! Thanks so much Ambassador Mack.
they had stockpiled fair amounts of 19.75% enriched uranium. As for 3.5% enriched not being dangerous, it is what would be used in a dirty bomb, which security experts are deeply concerned about - and also what is released in a plant meltdown, since it is what fuels the plant.
The opposition agreed to the referendum and there were no significant protests against it. 80% of eligible voters went to the polls. It was a very popular referendum. People wanted it to be a step toward new presidential and parliamentary elections, but in and of itself it was a legitimate vote with wide popular support.
I think there was some psychological torture- pointing an unloaded gun and pulling the trigger, e.g.
It's a little over 10% more than a third; I would say that is ballpark.
It isn't just a university calculation that affects corruption, it is a personal one. It is important that individual careers and reputations of miscreants are affected by this crime, as an object lesson.
No one held that life begins at conception until recently, including the Christian churches, and it is a made up doctrine to control women. You're welcome of course to your beliefs but you are a minority and shouldn't want to legislate for the rest of us.
The historiography shows that the Japanese were so alarmed by the approach of Russia that they were in fact on the verge of surrendering.
Me, I have an electric car fueled by my solar panels.
Our sanctions, we could keep. But the rest of the world won't go along, and we're not that important.
I presume most of us have such roots; I'd be very proud if this were proven.
Am not a consultant to the CIA, though would be happy if they'd listen to me.
but it isn't commensurate; the home made high school science experiment rockets mostly land uselessly in the desert and have caused a tiny fraction of the deaths and damage of Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Moreover Israelis are not trapped in a large outdoor prison.
Thanks. Have revised in the light of your comments.
Thanks so much! Have amended in the light of your comments.
However, the Sanaa I palimpsest is clearly by far the more valuable and newsworthy, being apparently on the order of 60%-70% of the Qur'anic text, not just 18 pages. It is also mostly not illegible as you imply. Moreover, there may well be other very early Qur'ans in the Sanaa collection which have not been radiocarbon dated, and it is a voluminous collection, not 18 pages.
Do you have a cite for Tuebingen?
Hi, Tony. Full of admiration for Canada, but my discussion was of the P5 +1 negotiations with Iran, and I was saying that not only did Britain, France and Germany participate vigorously in that process but they are also military allies who have sacrificed for the alliance. It wasn't a general discussion of US allies in Afghanistan.
The British spent more on trying and failing to control the Pushtun tribes in the Northwest Frontier after the Third Afghan War than they spent on the war itself. They never had more than the land on which their garrisons stood.
It wasn't technically legal, Mark. They had to notify Congress and did not.
No, on the contrary. Far more contemporary Egyptian actors are fully cosmopolitan today!
The point is that he had lots of other roles, including appealing leading men, and was not typecast as an Arab terrorist.
Actually African-Americans are woefully underrepresented in South Carolinian politics and the white politicians are making it more difficult for them to vote and get health care.
birth rates fall with urbanization. US Roman Catholics have more abortions than Protestants.
In Australia they do it the other way around, a $10 fine for not voting. Works great.
google spells it Tal al-Abyad-- just east of Kobane
link to google.com
yeah, slip of the keyboard. Sorry!
It was a reference to organized crime
Geez, pro-Saddam propaganda has a long life.
Saddam killed thousands of people for holding the wrong political views, including many, many Shiites.
the Iraqi constitution authorizes a parliamentary system with a powerful prime minister; the president is symbolic.
You'll have to ask Sheldon Adelson.
they're keeping last 5 years!
Achaemenids conquered most of known world from Egypt to Indus Valley.
Daesh benefits from the support or complacency of the Sunni population in a place like Ramadi. Baghdad is by now mostly Shiite and I doubt Daesh has much of a way to take it. The Shiite troops and militias also fight better on home turf.
gee David, I guess I don't think interpreting texts is a glib activity that can be done without nuance or context. I quoted that passage to the readers. The question is what 'supporters' means there, in 2012. It didn't mean the USA with regard to supporting the al-Qaeda affiliates and offshoots.
It doesn't say Western countries were supporting al-Qaeda or ISIL.
The Saudis did not create ISIL and the Saudis are not backing it or al-Qaeda/ Support Front. They back the Islamic Front. Iraqi Ex-Baath officers created ISIL.
Thx
Western diplomats who have met him say that the Salman Alzheimers story is incorrect
Fuel costs are higher in Hawaii
You stop the killing by helping some side win. Which?
Assad massacred Sunni protesters. Erdogan did his best to have a good relationship with Assad, but small town Sunnis are his constituency and Assad crossed a red line.
Read the earliest Sira, Ibn Hisham's redaction of Ibn Ishaq.
Clan loyalties ran deep in Mecca and Abu Talib refused to have his own nephew mistreated by other septs.
US funding for Syrian rebels was miniscule.
It is a war crime because they lack guidance systems and are sent toward civilian population centers, systematically harming noncombatants.
Completely unfair. Ordered EPA to close down coal, which is 1.5 bn of our 5.5 bn annual CO2 emissions
Yes, and a lot of Afghans were happy to see the Taliban take Kabul in 1996 because the Mujahidin reduced it to rubble fighting among themselves. In 2004, 5% of Afghans in polling reported thinking well of Taliban.
Jabhat al-Nusra is among the few groups actually to hold a lot of territory on its own, and I very much doubt that Idlib or Jisr al-Shughur would have fallen without it. You can't slap a name like Fath al-Sham on a group that is primarily victorious owing to al-Qaeda and hide the fact that it is al-Qaeda. Ahrar al-Sham's connections to al-Qaeda go beyond one guy, now dead.
What do you think these guys will do to the Alawis once they get hold of them? The Christians who fell under them were already brutalized. Or the Kurdish Marxists? These Salafi Jihadis (and yes, that is what Fath al-Sham is) are a small minority of Syrian Sunnis, and are ideological extremists, but with Saudi and Turkish funding they are taking over. Many of them are mass murderers, just like the regime they are fighting.
Scott, I respect your work, but your reply contains logical fallacies. That Neocons are also afraid of the Salafi Jihadis is irrelevant; they and I are also both afraid of tsunamis.
We don't know who is going to win the war, but that consideration is irrelevant to the characterization of the people who just took most of Idlib province. They are Salafi Jihadis and some of them are outright al-Qaeda, which means all of them are allied with al-Qaeda.
Jabhat al-Nusra is a lead group in Fath al-Sham, and Ahrar al-Sham, another lead group, has firm al-Qaeda connections. the rest are Salafi Jihadis not much different from al-Qaeda. Can't entirely understand why you would want to downplay this, but around here we calls 'em as we sees 'em
Hi, Deborah.
Manufacturing in and of itself doesn't produce CO2. It is the electricity generation that does, which drives the manufacturing machines. Of course, steel production is carbon intensive, but scientists and engineers think it, too, could be produced in a low carbon fashion.
Awlaqi suit was dismissed because court found Awlaqi's father did not have standing. V clever of USG to demand that those killed must themselves sue or there is no case.
you need to look into Gaddafi more
just stop subsidizing extraction processes - wind and solar are actually cheaper
Beats me.
Spain is also represented in the G-20 via the European Union.
a) Spain's Abengoa pioneered molten salt batteries for solar plants that lets them go on generating electricity six or seven hours after sundown. Other types of batteries are rapidly falling in price, so solar can soon do it all. b) Wind often blows quite hard at night along the Atlantic and it therefore complements solar. And b), yes, hydro and nuclear can fill the gap.
Of course the solution has to be global. But a) it matters whether we stop at a 4 degree F. increase or do double or triple that and b) it helps to shut up the denialists if there are in fact major, industrialized low- or net zero carbon countries.
Nuclear is problematic. But it isn't nearly as problematic as carbon emissions. Environmentalists are going to have to make some tough choices for about 10 years, after which I predict solar will be so cheap that nuclear can't survive. Personally I think Germany made a poor choice to phase out nuclear abruptly and replace some of it with coal!
Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga & whole Costa del Sol at extreme risk.
I have written about Sweden. But my point is that Spain and France are G-20 states with big populations and big GDPs.
China never paid any attention to US 3rd party sanction threats. They can be bucked & that is what will happen everywhere. They can be challenged legally, at WTO etc if governments wish
Mostly Bedouins fight them
The events described are in the 1990s
it says suspected
most Houthi arms were captured from the Yemeni army depots
Yes, of course, old white men in the imperial capitals get to decide if Palestinians are kicked out of their homes. Just so.
The UNGA is not an executive body. The UN Security Council never formally approved the partition plan.
no, religious conflict is extra on top of everything else an politicizing religion causes it. Was not talking about secular societies
There is a different between not liking the citizenship you have and not having any citizenship at all. Kurds are Turks, Iraqis, etc. They have passports, travel freely, and defend their property rights in their national courts. Palestinians have none of that. You don't understand the horror of genuine statelessness.
No, other countries try to interfere in US foreign policy goals all the time. They mostly aren't considered our allies and we don't pay them billions a year for the privilege.
Thanks, Frank! Yes, Saladin was a Kurd, but Saddam used him for Arab nationalist purposes!
They are human beings and Iraqi compatriots; that should be enough.
Actually he could have said "anti insan alladhi,' you are a person who, though the pronoun would be feminine.
Allawi is not the leader of the largest parliamentary bloc; that was 2010. Haydar al-Abadi is.
Oh, the radical movements are "Muslim." But I would argue that because of the peculiar way "Islam" is used in Arabic to refer to ideal aspects of the religion, whether they are "Islamic" is a theological judgment not appropriate to academics or even pundits.
Oh, I read all of Wallace years ago (I was a religion major) and see your point.
what an interesting perspective, Casual!
If you count indirectly caused deaths (e.g. interdiction of chlorine for water purification, creating power vacuum in which deadly militias flourished, etc.), it would be at least a million.
It isn't a US operation.
thanks, Tony!
that's not ISIL, that's al-Qaeda!
Karim Khan Zand of the Shiraz statelet took Basra in 1775 or so as I remember. Aside from the Herat campaign of early 1850s, which Iranians maintain was just to reassert themselves in a long-held area of Khurasan, that was the last time.
and it was all lies - Zarqawi was being hunted by Iraq
You can't stop an urban back alley ethnic cleansing campaign with a few US troops.
You can give one military force an advantage over another with close air support, as with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, 2001-2
that was pretty much it; I don't agree.
he's just Ibrahim from Samarra, nothing special about him. Like calling a KKK leader Mr. Grand Wizard.
Oh, come on. The US did nothing in Syria for years, in fact prevented medium weapons from going in to rebels. Anti-imperialism is meaningless if it is a one note johnny.
Your assumption that things would have calmed down in Libya without an intervention is incorrect. Syria shows what that would have looked like, and, yes, it is worse.
It wasn't an intervention, it was a revolution. Revolutions are messy.
It turned out better than Syria, where there wasn't a significant intervention.
It doesn't require garrisoning an entire country to provide better security to a known target event.
Nevertheless, current US mass media obsess about 'lone wolf' terrorism specifically with regard to Muslims.
oops. thx & fixed
Iran has never voiced any concern about the Pakistani bomb.
Iran does not want a bomb and no country under UN inspection has ever developed one.
The translators render the word 'slave' in Hebrew and Greek into 'servant' for modern audiences. It says slave.
thanks so much for this alternative view of things, Yasser!
Iran had owned Herat for centuries; it wasn't expanding into its own territory!
Don, you're writing to a historian of Qajar Iran. Imperialism deeply constrained and affected Iran in this period, economically and in other ways. You don't seem aware that the British actually attacked Iran in the Nasiri period. Iranians entered modernity being pushed around and shaped by outsiders in ways that simply were not true of Britain or the US.
Iran was partitioned by Russia and Britain in 1907 and forbidden to do things like build a railroad. It was deeply disadvantaged developmentally by this 'informal empire.'
the argument that late comers are owed massive carbon emissions is akin to arguing that inmates arriving recently on death row should be allowed to have longer ropes.
He is a crackpot, and debating crackpots point by point is the biggest waste of time most academics could imagine. Carl Sagan once took some time to do the calculations that refute Velikovsky, and complained bitterly about never getting those hours back.
In fact, you could argue that the spaghetti logic of crackpots is a labyrinth intended to lose all rational people somewhere in there, so the minotaur of malevolent forces like Big Oil can get at them and suffocate them.
No.
there is no evidence of significant ISIS in Yemen.
The real list is Houthis, national army & Southern Movement, with AQAP as a relatively minor factor.
Ali, it wasn't just a referendum. It was one with 80% participation. Even Tawakul Karman approved of it and polling showed Yemenis were happy about it, as a step along the way to genuine presidential elections.
desperate for money
nothing
You are already spending thousands of dollars on buying cars, and then paying for gasoline on top of that. And you are paying thousands of dollars for electricity for your home over time. My way lets you save money and reduce carbon and use existing infrastructure. Your way requires Stalin-like mass deportations.
I appreciate your kind words, but please don't pigeon-hole me; I know a lot about energy markets and how they change precisely from studying the Middle East for 40 years.
link to singularityhub.com
that is so great, Bill! You guys are the future!
Yep!
Driving less is good. But most people in US can't get to work any other way, so you're being a little unrealistic. Most of them will buy a car in the next 10 years. Let it be green.
Firing unguided rockets toward civilian populations is a war crime. Identifying the precise individual responsible for any particular strike that caused damage or killed someone (a handful of victims) might be a challenge. The court can only try individuals, not governments or parties. The number of articles in the Rome Statute being violated by the Israeli leadership is rather longer than that violated by Hamas.
that isn't likely
Hi, Tom - when I send out appeals on social media, I do say that. and thanks for reinforcing it. If all regular readers set in small amounts, the appeal would suddenly be over.
Foot soldiers often have a mix of allegiances even within a cell; the Kouashis were AQAP
Saudi Arabia was among the first vigorously to denounce the Paris attacks.
This blog entry doesn't laud anyone. It is analysis. Western pundits are implying that people like Sisi are not doing enough against Muslim extremism. Which if you know anything about Sisi, is ridiculous-- he has gone way beyond that to marginalize even just adherents of political Islam who are not violent.
If Muslims make those demands of Jews, they are wrong to do so.
There is a difference between asking the Catholic Church to take responsibility for actions of its own hierarchy in shielding pedophile priests, and asking all Christians (yes) to own and apologize for priest pedophilia.
I looked it up on being challenged. It is meaning number 2 in the dictionaries.
Those are the kinds of people who have all along been recruited by al-Qaeda. The pillars of the community are not terrorists. That these guys were hooked into a network and likely put up to this seems to me fairly clear from their bios. And then there is this:
link to timesofindia.indiatimes.com
they ran a recruitment ring for al-Qaeda in Iraq and one was convicted for it. Does that sound like a lone wolf to you?
Bin Laden blamed lots of things, including high infant mortality during the US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s (500,000 dead) and at one point the 1982 Israeli destruction of Beirut.
They announced that they are al-Qaeda and told a bystander that they represented AQAP in Yemen. They had come back from fighting in Syria where they very likely were Jabhat al-Nusra, i.e. al-Qaeda. You can believe this was random if you like, but it has al-Qaeda's fingerprints all over it.
yes, but typically they are condemning as outsiders, not apologizing for Christendom.
Out of 5-6 million Muslims, a few hundred went to fight in Syria; note that the French gov't wanted Bashar overthrown, too. This is not a counter argument
They said the were al-Qaeda - likely Jabhat al-Nusra
they also attacked intellectuals in Iraq as a way of polarizing things; intellectuals have fans.
thanks for pointing out the slip
Ceasing emissions would put an upward ceiling on the total increase in average temperature.
I can't think which country a) agrees with US about screwing over the Palestinians and b) has 'sway' over ICC.
easily replaced by Qatar.
the US is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and has absolutely no sway over the ICC.
When there is revolution & war, weapons are bought & get spread around. Would have also happened with no intervention
Bashar has polished off at least 40,000 of his own subjects and has tortured thousands to death. It is silly to compare Obama to him-- you just discredit yourself. As for the rest, your position is the Realist one; it is cold, dude.
Because the alternative-- devolving into Syria with 200,000 dead-- was worse.
An ICC judgment would result in sanctions on Israel of some importance.
It was an echo of the Monroe Doctrine.
No, I was counting its actual subjects, and think they are vastly over-estimated. I don't think there is much support for them in the rest of the Middle East. They'd be beaten up on sight in Egypt.
Damming of Euphrates is a problem; but there has been severe drought in addition; read the links.
Egyptian public works workers appear to have been paid salaries and provided with beer; large scale urban slave labor doesn't appear to be their thing. No evidence of Jewish slaves in the archeological record.
There is no archeological evidence for the reign of Ramses II that there were enslaved Jews in Egypt at all, much less of slave revolts or the Red Sea closing on the pharaoh. Nor were there probably at that time "Jews" as opposed to Canaanites with a special emphasis on a particular deity among others. The bible does not say anything about the pyramids (the famous ones much predate Ramses II and the rise of Judaism as a religion). Israeli leader Menachem Begin asserted in speeches that Jews built the pyramids.
Lebanon's Hizbullah does not operate in Iraq for the most part. You have to be careful, because there is a Shiite Iraqi group also called Hizbullah. It just means Party of God.
I've talked to lots of vets who were in Iraq. They never controlled things in the alleyways or at least not very long. Most of them did not even know the language or whether a religious building was Sunni or Shiite.
Mark, the US actually invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 and 8 years later did not leave it in a better condition. The idea that US intervention in Syria could have made a significant difference is daft. These wars are fought in alleyways at a micro level that befuddle superpowers.
not even their citizens, just colonial subjects
It is part of Ninewah province, which the Iraq nationalists won't relinquish easily. I'm just saying that there will be trouble about this, and maximalist Kurdish plans for expansion look to me Milosevich-like. He just wanted Serbia to expand to cover all the Serbs, too, and was willing to kill anyone who objected.
There are likely 800,000 Turkmen, who are enough for an autonomous region if they want one; nationalism is constructed, and the Turks certainly claim them. I don't think most Turkmen would agree with your ventriloquism of them as happy under Kurdish rule.
thx Richard. But I don't think this will be acceptable to Iraq nationalists, who don't count territory by ethnicity. Does Turkey get Talafar?