Why hasn't Syria regime collapsed yet?

So there's protests. And the army fires on protesters. Why hasn't the army deserted? Why does the army follow orders? Why are the secret police and security services still able to identify many of the leaders and arrest or kill them?

The answer is that the situation in Syria is not a situation of "regime bad, protesters good" like in Egypt. Ethnic and religious minorities make up approximately 1/4th of the Syrian population and make up probably 90% of the core Army units and security units being used to put down the rebellion by the Sunni majority. What we are seeing, in essence, is a civil war between the Sunni majority and a collection of ethnic minorities -- the most important of which is the Alawi sect to which President Assad and most of his top staff belong.

So why is this important? It's important because the Alawi in particular were horrifically discriminated against by the Sunni the last time the Sunni ran the country, forced to run to the hills to live as brigands and outlaws in parts of Syria that the Sunni didn't want, treated worse than blacks during Jim Crow in the United States with lynchings and with any property they managed to accumulate that was desirable taken from them via legal or illegal means, with multiple attempts at forced conversions of Alawi and so on and so forth. This was also the behavior of the Sunni majority against the *other* minorities in Syria -- the Christians, the Druze, and so forth. And these minorities are concerned that if the Sunni majority takes over power again due to this pro-democracy movement, the result will be genocide of their ethnic minorities -- over three million people dead.

In other words, do not expect the Syrian regime to simply roll over and die. Because they are literally fighting for their lives, in their own eyes, because if the Sunni majority was brutal to them *before* the minorities managed to seize power in Syria... well. They can't be expecting the Sunni majority to treat them better *after* their brutal dictatorship over the Sunni, right?

-- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin

Is anti-semitism inherent in the Middle East?

My answer is "no".

Historically, anti-semitism was not an issue in the Muslim world. When the European barbarians invaded Palestine in 1099 and conquered Jerusalem, they found not only a large Muslim population, but also a thriving Jewish population. Which, of course, they slaughtered to the last man. If you are looking for the root causes of anti-semitism in the Middle East, you have to look to the Zionist movement and the frictions between Jewish settlers and Muslim settlers in Palestine in the period of British rule.

Let's start with 1900. At the turn of the 20th century the percentage of practicing Jews had fell to under 10% of the population of Palestine, mostly because it was advantageous from a tax point of view to convert to Islam under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, not because of any pograms against Jews. It is ironic, in the context of the current problems between Palestinians and Israelis, that most of the Palestinians in actuality are ethnically identical to the Israelis who they are fighting -- i.e., they're both ethnically Jewish, it's just that one group converted to Islam, while the other one did not. (Note: This is a *drastic* simplification of the situation but for the purposes of this discussion sufficient).

In any event, the Ottoman Empire fell during WWI and Britain got the Palestinian and Jordanian mandate. Now, first you must remember how Ottoman land management occurred. The Ottoman Empire was the last feudal state, i.e., a state based upon conquest and plunder. One of the things plundered was the land. The owners of the land were stripped of their ownership, and the ownership was transferred to Ottoman Turks instead. Who, as the Empire wound down, gravitated to Istanbul. The former owners of the land then ended up working as tenant farmers for absentee landlords and paying a percentage of their crops as rent to said landlords.

Anyhow, the British made the decision to respect the Turkish land titles rather than redistribute the lands to the people who had been working the lands as tenant farmers for generations. And the Zionist movement had access to capital, while the tenant farmers did not necessarily have such access. What ended up happening was that Jews moved in and bought up lands from the absentee Turkish landlords who needed money far more than they needed some land in what was now a foreign country. As far as the new Jewish owners were concerned, it was simply commerce. The historical question of how those lands ended up titled to those absentee Turkish landlords did not concern them. Where the people went who were evicted off the lands by British courts and escorted off the lands by British law officers was not a concern either, they probably figured that the displaced farmers would just find some other place to go, some other land to rent, the Middle East is a large place after all. The problem is that when you create a large landless unemployed minority, you create a population that is ripe for exploitation by ideologues. And some of those ideologues, as usual, found it advantageous to use anti-Semitism as their tool to get popular support.

Now, I am entering into a sensitive area here, because the above explanation may appear to be blaming the Zionist Movement for causing frictions with the Palestinians that eventually exploded into the current situation. Indeed there was, and has historically been since the beginning, a striking lack of consideration for the sensitivities of those pushed off of their traditional lands as a result of either the pre-1948 activities of the Zionist Movement or the expulsion of a large segment of the Muslim population in the time frame immediately following the foundation of the state of Israel. There was no thought to their fate and no thought to helping them find a new home elsewhere in the region, either by the new Jewish immigrants or by British officials or by any of the post-independence nations in the region. If someone, anyone, over the past seventy years had taken in the displaced population and given them citizenship in some state, any state, there would be no "Palestinian problem". Rather, after a few generations as a full citizen of some other country it would be like the situation of Irish-Americans, who might have a propensity to visit Irish pubs and drink beer on St. Patrick's Day but otherwise are culturally indistinguishable from any other American and no more prone to blowing up the occasional London subway station than any other American.

However, it can be said that there was little leeway for the new Jewish immigrants to do much beyond what they did. It was more a case of, "we're being persecuted in Europe, we need this land as a refuge, we will do what it takes to obtain this land, and people who already have this land are simply out of luck." All available resources were being used to relocate Jews to Palestine, there simply wasn't anything left over for addressing the fate of the tenant farmers who formerly farmed their new lands, even if the mindset had been there (which arguably it was not -- my conversations with ardent Zionists tend to end with a statement from them along the lines of, "we are the most persecuted people ever, people less persecuted than we have historically been simply have no reason to complain about anything bad that happens to them" -- an attitude not conducive to any sort of diplomacy or smoothing of ruffled feathers). The location of most of Europe's Jews in 1947 should be instructive there -- most of the surviving European Jews in 1947 were in exactly the same concentration camps that Hitler had placed them in, except renamed to "relocation camps" and with the guns facing outward to protect them from Europeans who wished to finish the job Hitler had started rather than inwards.

But back to our story... so anyhow, the point, the point... ah yes. A large population of displaced people. Ideologues like the various Arab dictators in the surrounding states who find it useful to use this large population of displaced people as pretty much slave labor and as a way of distracting their own population from the failures of these dictators. People like Yasir Arafat, who invented the concept of a "Palestinian" and made corrupt deals with said dictators to make sure that his new-found "people" didn't get citizenship and thus assimilated out from under him, then, when that scam started running dry, managed to make a corrupt deal with Israel to set him up a Bantustan-style apartheid state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip in exchange for "peace" that any sensible person could have seen wouldn't happen because if there was peace, then the corruption of the Arafat regime and its utter lack of empathy for the plight of the population it supposedly ruled would come to the forefront. All of these people found it handy to fan the flames of anti-semitism in the Middle East, and the new European immigrants to Israel didn't help the situation either, refusing to learn the language of the nations that surrounded them and having utterly no interest in engaging with non-Jews in any way. (The percentage of Jewish-faith Israelis who speak Arabic is still astoundingly low, considering that Israel itself still has a large population of Arab citizens). As a result, Israel is now the most dangerous country in the world in which to be a Jew. While violence against Jews in other parts of the world has become almost unknown, it is an almost daily occurrence in Israel.

So now we go back to the question of whether there is any inherent reason for anti-semitism in the Middle East. I would say that any relatively affluent largely-European population pushing a largely-Arab population off of the land of historic Palestine would have been similarly demonized by the surrounding states. That is, that it isn't anything about being Jews that is the root cause of the frictions between Israel and its neighbors, there would be anti-Christianism (is that a word?) if it had been Christians who had instead seen the opportunity of buying cheap lands from absentee Turkish landlords and bought up the place. In short, what we are seeing in the Middle East today may be being expressed as anti-semitism. But what it is, in the end, is whatever happens when a more successful culture collides with a less successful culture -- the people in the former get demonized by the latter.

And there ends my history lesson, and the end of my explanation of why I believe anti-semitism is not inherent in the Middle East.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Counterinsurgency is un-American

That is the basic conclusion of a number of recent postings by Ranger over at Ranger Against War: that counterinsurgency as practiced by the U.S. Army and Marines is un-American, because it is the imposition by force of a government upon another people.

Then comes the rebuttal, "if the choice is between a failed state and a counter-insurgency, don't we have to do counter-insurgency?" But that ignores the fact that every failed state we've encountered thus far has originated because we went in and kicked over the ant hill that was the previous government. In other words, we are talking about whether an egg should be poached or fried, when the question is, should we be eating an egg at all? President George H.W. Bush had the correct posture on this question: "Don't eat the egg." I.e., don't kick over the state. He destroyed Iraq's ability to project power beyond its borders and neutralized Iraq's threat to its neighbors, but did not topple Saddam Hussein, because he realized that it simply was not necessary. Saddam minus his nuclear weapons program and military machine posed no threat to anybody, and could be allowed to fester until the day he died or was deposed by someone else within Iraq.

But even if we do for some reason need to kick over a state, the second notion is that a failed state poses some existential threat to the United States of America. It does not. Bad actors located in a failed state are capable of occasional acts of terrorism of the nature of Sept. 11, 2001, but those acts are incapable of toppling or even gravely harming the United States. More Americans die in auto accidents each month than have been killed by acts of terrorism against the American people during the whole existence of the United States of America. So even if we did kick over the ant hill because we had no choice but to do so, there is no need to send U.S. military forces in as an occupation force afterwards.

The fact of the matter is that there is only one threat to the modern organized state, and that is military forces projected against it by other modern organized states. Imperial Japan in 1941 had such military forces. Nazi Germany in 1939 had such military forces. A failed state such as Afghanistan does not. That is the basis of my biggest disagreement with John Robb, who has asserted that "5th generational warfare" originating from failed states presents an existential threat to modern nation-states. Robb points to the successes of Hizballah in Lebanon, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Iraqi resistance movements in defeating the armed forces of invading outsiders. What he fails to point out is that these organizations are successful because they are defending. They control the ground and can carefully prepare it. They control the time at which they will confront the opposing force. They blend in with the populace at times they are not confronting the opposing force, because they are the populace. Hizballah can succeed against the IDF in Lebanon because the IDF is operating upon their territory. But Hizballah has been singularly unsuccessful at any attempts to invade Israel, because Hizballah fighters stand out from the general Israeli population and are swiftly located, fixed, and destroyed by superior conventional military forces.

And as it is with Israel, so it is with the United States. The notion that the Iraqis are going to "follow us home" if we withdraw from Iraq is ludicrous. First, there is the question of how they would get here. There is a big pond between us and them. Doh! Secondly, even if they did manage to get here, they would be isolated, easily identified, and easily destroyed by U.S. police forces, which have weapons and tactics to deal with anything other than an all-out army group, and if there is an all-out army group involved then the National Guard is capable of taking that out.

In short, the U.S. needs only a small Rumsfeldian conventional military in order to take out any current or future existential threat to the United States. Counter-insurgency operations are counter-productive, not something that the U.S. is good at, and to be done successfully would require a level of forces that the U.S. is not capable of sustaining for long periods of time. The Rumsfeld "thunder run" military was quite effective in two wars with Iraq at the task of destroying existential threats to the United States or neighboring states of Iraq. Via air power and superior mobility, our military demonstrated that it could immobilize and defeat in detail any military threat posed by any existing state no matter what state we are talking about. In the meantime, failed states and terrorism pose no existential threat to the United States, and while they need to be dealt with in as assertive a manner as possible, occupation of and counter-insurgencies within these nation-states a) doesn't work, and b) is simply and bluntly un-American.

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin

Our friends the Pakistanis

Pakistani bomb scientist says government made him do it, recants his "confession" that he and he alone sold nuclear weapons secrets and bomb-making equipment to North Korea, Iran, and Libya.

Anybody who thought that a single rogue scientist could ship bomb-making equipment was looney toonz to begin with, so this isn't surprising. But it's just another example of how our "friends" in southwest Asia are our "friends" in pretty much the same way that a rattlesnake is.

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin

The real threat to Israel today

Jews were 5% of the population of Palestine in 1900. Most of the Jewish population of Palestine had either been slaughtered by the Crusaders (the streets of Jerusalem ran with Jewish blood when the European Crusaders sacked Jerusalem and slaughtered every Jewish male and sent the women and children into slavery), or had converted to Islam during the long centuries of mostly-peaceful Islamic occupation. Today Jews are 80% of the population of Israel (the exact ratio is classified, that is a best guess). If there is some Arab plan to "push the Jews into the sea", it seems to have had the exact opposite effect -- i.e., it seems that it's the Arabs, not the Jews, who got "pushed into the sea" or at least to some place other than the area of the former British mandate of Palestine.

Indeed, Israel is officially at peace with its neighbors other than Syria, and Syria has its own internal problems that mean that the days of it being a threat to Israel are long ago and far away. Syria will probably sign a peace treaty with Israel within the next few years. I mean, there is literally isn't any reason for them to not do so -- their leader is an opthamologist, not a warrior, and the Syrian military is equipped to put down Islamist insurrections, not invade other nations. There is literally no external threat to the existence of Israel today.

But there is a big threat to Israel today, and it has nothing to do with Arabs. The modern-day founders of Israel were basically practical people. They were scientists and philosophers and dreamers, but they had any sort of ivory tower wishy-washiness burned away by the flames of the Holocaust. They did what they had to do to create a sanctuary state for Jews given the fact that no other nation was willing to serve as such during the run-up to Hitler's "Final Solution", and they generally were in touch with reality even if they did re-write the history books to write reality out of the founding of the State of Israel (in particular, the ethnic cleansing necessary to form the state of Israel). The problem is that they're all dead, or at best on their last legs. And the modern generation seems more interested in ideological purity than in maintaining a successful state.

In short, the real threat to Israel today is the Israelis themselves, who have fallen to bickering, intellectual masturbation, and political paralysis amidst a climate of economic collapse and the flight of much of Israel's best and brightest to other nations where they perceive a better future to be awaiting. I work with more Israelis here in the Silicon Valley today than I work with in Israel, despite the fact that I work intimately with an Israeli company that produces a fundamental component of our product. The fact of the matter is that practically every Israeli policy position and political action of the past thirty years has turned out to be a disaster. Israel's pursuit of the PLO into Lebanon set off a chain event of disaster that reverberates to this day. Yitzhak Rabin's corrupt deal with Yassir Arafat to set up a Bantustan "Palestinian Authority" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (which were granted to Israel as part of their peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan) proved only that a two-state solution in the area of the former British mandate of Palestine is simply impossible because there just isn't enough land there to assure the security of Israel. The invasion of Lebanon, where the IDF was fought to a standstill by Hezballah's village reservists (Hezballah's active fighters were retained on the Beirut side of the Litani River which Hezballah had designated as their defensive line to stop the Israeli push, they had no idea that their village reservists would actually stop the IDF dead in their tracks -- literally, in some cases) was just another in a string of disasterous decisions made by Israeli leaders convinced that, given overwhelming military superiority and no real military threat to their nation's existence, military force could solve political problems.

Hmm, that last sentence sounds like some American politicians. As in, rhymes with "push". Or rhymes with "same"...

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin