by Martin van Creveld

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Much the most important of the numerous militias that are trying to unseat Assad is IS, also known as Daesh. Truth to say, Arabs have never been exactly famous for the gentle way they fight their wars. Daesh, however, prides itself on being even worse than most. That is why, writing on this site, I have called it “The Monster.” Why any kind of regime, Arab, Muslim, Israeli, or Western should support Daesh and its fellow Sunni militias is a riddle that does not have a solution. Unless, of course, that solution is simply called stupidity.

To repeat, Assad is not a nice guy. He and his Alawite cronies have plenty of blood on their hands and are going to have lots more. Nevertheless, his ties to Hezbollah and Iran notwithstanding, on the whole he and his regime have been stabilizing factors in the Middle East. Should Assad fall, then the consequences may well be unimaginable. The first to suffer will be Syria’s Alawites or, at any rate, those of them who have not yet fled. Having sustained the regime for so long, they are going to face genocide on a scale that may make that committed by the Turks on the Armenians a century ago blanche. The same applies to other minorities such as the Druze and the Shiites. But Daesh does not want to rule just Syria. It wants Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Yemen as well. Whether or not it succeeds, in the short and medium run that means destabilization, terrorism, guerrilla, and civil war. In Iraq and Yemen, all this has already happened. Do we really want the same to happen in other countries too?

In the face of all this, it is high time for countries, leaders, and people to reconsider and stop ringing the bells for Assad’s funeral. Rather than trying to hasten his fall, they should finally agree to take for what he is: namely, the devil we know.

Or else.

http://www.martin-van-creveld.com/?p=318

... well, the second volume, anyway, where Robert Asprey begins to systematically demolish the Vietnam mess. I have the 1975 edition, but I understand from Amazon he's updated it a couple of times since then. It's not too big a stretch to say that a good 75% of what I know about guerilla warfare I learned from him.

Personally, I think we should ignore the whole mess. Let 'em go to hell in their own way, and deal with the winners. It's not like IS is so terribly worse than Saudi Arabia.

-- Mal

It's all about not looking bad at this point, which is pretty funny in an evil sort of way. Which, yeah, is a lot like Vietnam.

One of the reasons we lose all these wars is they are political wars, founded in the egos and careers of politicians, not in any real national interest or security issues. You can argue about whether it's to keep the MIC funded or to win elections of to pursue the careers of military bigshots, all play a part, but the root of it is that there is nobody in the system who gives a rip about the real issues we have, everybody wants to ignore those, at least until they get out of office.

I think the most constructive thing we could do there is care for the refugees, do a good job of it. We will get bombed for it, but we are going to get bombed anyway, we might as well do some good, and it will be a hell of a lot cheaper than fancy weapons that are irrelevant to fighting something like ISIS and Special OPs which only make more enemies.

At this point, the interests of the ruling class and the rest of us are so far apart, that even a politician of more-or-less good will is stuck between two stools. And let's face it, we've lost what, a whopping 4-5000 people of our own pursuing whatever chimera it is, and that is a trivial amount unless you happen to know one of the 4-5000. The hundreds of thousands (millions?) of others don't matter a spent piss. And of course those 4-5000 we've lost are mostly from the trash social groups, anyway, so I doubt anyone (except their friends) cares about them anyway. Yeah, I'm a cynical and bitter bastard.

But at this point, even cynicism is confused. What possible benefit to the ruling class can this continued involvement in centuries-old conflict have, except the one of adding to the amount of profit made on expendable ordnance, which we'd probably spend anyway? It has got to be a matter of saving face, I agree. To quote a character from one of Lois McMaster Bujold's books, they want to cover their bleeding asses with the flag of victory. As with "Mission Accomplished," one of the good things about a war with no definite objectives is that you can declare a win at any time. And the rubes will fall for it with dispiriting regularity. As for the people on the ground, they don't want to accept that all their sacrifices, their training and ability, went for nothing, so they'll make noises about betrayal and military prowess as if they were what mattered in this kind of conflict. I don't think we'll ever quite absorb that these wars are not about body count. Because body count is easy, and defining clear objectives is not.

And hey, we just droned the tenth or so major leader of the bad guys, right? So we must be winning!

-- Mal

Which is why we switched to preferring mercs after Vietnam, employees and consumers is what we are now, not citizens and soldiers. And they are starting to go after the militaries pensions too.

... is that chaos in the Middle East may be beneficial to our rulers. Why? Having more-or-less achieved the coveted "energy independence" thanks to fracking, a stable Mideast is not so important, and if we can keep them beating up on each other, they are less of a competitive threat. This goes against the thesis propounded in The Grand Illusion and other books that commerce and business seek stability and are so intertwined that international conflict is bad for the bottom line. It is possible that some people still believe this, although I think it is a thesis that has been pretty well exploded by history.

-- Mal

Much of the time it appears to me that it is their little internal disputes that drive much of the disfunction, domestically and in foreign affairs, as we should expect in a decadent empire.

But the theory that chaos is the objective is fairly popular right now, that we could not be so stupid as to do it over and over unintentionally is the argument, however I think we could be and are so stupid; and I have the advantage of being born, raised, and very well educated here. I have been struck since adolescence by the chasm between the better parts of US culture, science, and literature and the instransigent and violent buffoonery of the old know-nothing slave-holding mentality that still thrives here too, and continues to infest our politics.