those of a certain age have seen this before

[don]

U.S. Soldiers, Back in Iraq, Find Security Forces in Disrepair

By ROD NORDLANDAPRIL 14, 2015


CAMP TAJI, Iraq — Lt. Col. John Schwemmer is here for his sixth Iraqdeployment. Maj. James Modlin is on his fourth. Sgt. Maj. Thomas Foos? “It’s so many, I would rather not say. Sir.”

These soldiers are among 300 from the 5-73 Squadron of the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army, about half of them trainers, the rest support and force protection. Stationed at this old Iraqi military base 20 miles north of Baghdad, they are as close as it gets to American boots on the ground in Iraq.

Back now for the first time since the United States left in 2011, none of them thought they would be here again, let alone return to find the Iraqi Army they had once trained in such disrepair.


Colonel Schwemmer said he was stunned at the state in which he found the Iraqi soldiers when he arrived here. “It’s pretty incredible,” he said. “I was kind of surprised. What training did they have after we left?”

Apparently, not much. The current, woeful state of the Iraqi military raises the question not so much of whether the Americans left too soon, but whether a new round of deployments for training will have any more effect than the last.


Iraq’s army looked good on paper when the Americans left, after one of the biggest training missions carried out under wartime conditions. But after that, senior Iraqi officers began buying their own commissions, paying for them out of the supply, food and payroll money of their troops. Corruption ran up and down the ranks; desertion was rife.

(sounds like they may have had ARVN advisors as well)

The army did little more than staff checkpoints. Then, last year, four divisions collapsed overnight in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq under the determined assault of Islamic State fighters numbering in the hundreds or at most the low thousands, and the extremists’ advance came as far as this base.

An army that once counted 280,000 active-duty personnel, one of the largest in the world, is now believed by some experts to have as few as four to seven fully active divisions — as little as 50,000 troops by some estimates. The director of media operations for Iraq’s Ministry of Defense, Qais al-Rubaiae, said, however, that even by the most conservative estimates, the army now had at least 141,000 soldiers in 15 divisions.

Most of the American soldiers were intimately involved in training Iraqi forces before, too. “When I left in 2009,” Major Modlin said, “they had it, they really did. I don’t know what happened after that.”

“We used to say that every deployment was different,” Major Modlin said. “But we quickly found out that this time was completely different from any other time. The Iraqis know that this time we’re not going to do it for them, and they appreciate that.”

The 300 American soldiers here, with a smaller number of United States Marines at Al Asad air base in Anbar Province, are the only American soldiers deployed outside Baghdad. But as the military sees it, they do not count as “boots on the ground” since their role is purely to train, advise and assist, as part of a 3,000-person deployment authorized in November by President Obama.

In fact, Master Sgt. Mike Lavigne, a military spokesman (one tour in Iraq and three in Afghanistan), does not like that term at all. “We do not have a single boot on the ground,” he said. “Really, not one.”

Even in a training role, however, this venerable Iraqi military base puts American soldiers very close to what passes for a front line in the conflict with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. From time to time, the extremists lob mortar rounds from their hiding places east of the base, just across the Tigris River.

There is little chance they will hit anything. The base is huge, and their aim is as bad as it was in Al Qaeda’s day, when the Americans were last here — and used it as a major training base. Nonetheless, no one goes around without body armor on.

History might repeat as farce - but the twist?


Blackwater’s Legacy Goes Beyond Public View

By JAMES RISEN and MATTHEW ROSENBERGAPRIL 14, 2015


He moved his family to Abu Dhabi in 2010, where one former colleague told The New York Times that Mr. Prince “needed a break from America.”

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a former member of the Navy SEALs and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune, has spent the last few years searching for new missions, new fields of fire and new customers.


He has worked in Abu Dhabi and now focuses his efforts on Africa, with ties to the Chinese government, which is eager for access to some of the continent’s natural resources. Mr. Prince’s current firm, Frontier Services Group, provides what it describes as “expeditionary logistics” for mining, oil and natural gas operations in Africa, and has the backing of Citic Group, a large state-owned Chinese investment company.

The private security industry that Mr. Prince helped bring to worldwide attention has fallen from public view since the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two conflicts sped the maturation of security firms from bit players on the edge of global conflicts to multinational companies that guard oil fields in Libya, analyze intelligence for United States forces in Afghanistan, help fight insurgents in parts of Africa and train American-backed militaries in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“This industry is now truly global,” said Sean McFate, author of “The Modern Mercenary,” a book on the private security industry. “That’s the legacy of Blackwater — they didn’t really make the business, but they’ve symbolized it. They’ve become the hood ornaments for an industry that was for centuries pretty much illegal, and now it’s pretty much re-emerged.”


Even determining how many private security contractors are employed by the United States government is nearly impossible because the contracts are often opaque, subcontractors do much of the work on the ground and some of the business is classified. State Department officials refused on Tuesday to provide statistics on how many contractors it uses today.

The United States Central Command, which is in charge of military forces in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, reported in January that 54,700 private contractors worked for the Defense Department in its areas of responsibility.

In Afghanistan alone, where about 9,800 American troops are deployed, the Pentagon is paying for almost 40,000 private contractors, more than a third of whom are American, according to the Centcom report.

Perhaps we all have our special Blackwater moments. Seeing hired mercenaries protecting a US ambassador and not the US military, and their immediate presence in a US city following a natural disaster - Katrina.
Selfy moments - before selfies . . .

[lakedaemonian]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

Colonel Schwemmer said he was stunned at the state in which he found the Iraqi soldiers when he arrived here. “It’s pretty incredible,” he said. “I was kind of surprised. What training did they have after we left?”

Apparently, not much. The current, woeful state of the Iraqi military raises the question not so much of whether the Americans left too soon, but whether a new round of deployments for training will have any more effect than the last.

Maybe a better way to word it would be "will the effort have any lasting effect?"

http://www.rubincenter.org/2013/03/w...o-round-holes/

Outside of the petro-dollar recycling, it can be quite difficult to pound square Arab pegs into round western military doctrinal holes.

Different problems require different solutions.

More "T E Lawrence" culturally, topographically, socially, and economically sustainable security solutions, less conventional copying.

Iraq’s army looked good on paper when the Americans left, after one of the biggest training missions carried out under wartime conditions.

Most of the American soldiers were intimately involved in training Iraqi forces before, too. “When I left in 2009,” Major Modlin said, “they had it, they really did. I don’t know what happened after that.”

And that's a big part of the problem. Failure to recognize WHY it was unsustainable.

Would Arab cultural and business idiosyncrasies survive in Iowa 5 minutes after GCC trainers and money let a kebab factory build project? Of course not, because it doesn't work with the locals.

It's as incongruent and lacking in persistence as if aliens came down, spent 6 months teaching us their language, and left.

“This industry is now truly global,” said Sean McFate, author of “The Modern Mercenary,” a book on the private security industry. “That’s the legacy of Blackwater — they didn’t really make the business, but they’ve symbolized it. They’ve become the hood ornaments for an industry that was for centuries pretty much illegal, and now it’s pretty much re-emerged.”

I reckon that's BS, and it seriously brings into questions the author's credibility.

It doesn't take more than 5 minutes on Google to research the very long history of mercenary armies throughout ancient as well as modern history.

It's not a question of supporting or opposing it, it's a question of historical fact.

Perhaps we all have our special Blackwater moments. Seeing hired mercenaries protecting a US ambassador and not the US military, and their immediate presence in a US city following a natural disaster - Katrina.
Selfy moments - before selfies . . .

What folks tend to forget or fail to even initially understand is that job for say VIP close protection(as per Ambassador security above) largely consists of short periods of intense activity.

You only pay for the short periods of intense activity, rather than paying a full time government employee to sit around 95% of the time.

[GRG55]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

U.S. Soldiers, Back in Iraq, Find Security Forces in Disrepair

By ROD NORDLANDAPRIL 14, 2015


CAMP TAJI, Iraq — Lt. Col. John Schwemmer is here for his sixth Iraqdeployment. Maj. James Modlin is on his fourth. Sgt. Maj. Thomas Foos? “It’s so many, I would rather not say. Sir.”

These soldiers are among 300 from the 5-73 Squadron of the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army, about half of them trainers, the rest support and force protection. Stationed at this old Iraqi military base 20 miles north of Baghdad, they are as close as it gets to American boots on the ground in Iraq.

Back now for the first time since the United States left in 2011, none of them thought they would be here again, let alone return to find the Iraqi Army they had once trained in such disrepair.


Colonel Schwemmer said he was stunned at the state in which he found the Iraqi soldiers when he arrived here. “It’s pretty incredible,” he said. “I was kind of surprised. What training did they have after we left?”

Apparently, not much. The current, woeful state of the Iraqi military raises the question not so much of whether the Americans left too soon, but whether a new round of deployments for training will have any more effect than the last.


Iraq’s army looked good on paper when the Americans left, after one of the biggest training missions carried out under wartime conditions. But after that, senior Iraqi officers began buying their own commissions, paying for them out of the supply, food and payroll money of their troops. Corruption ran up and down the ranks; desertion was rife.

(sounds like they may have had ARVN advisors as well)

The army did little more than staff checkpoints. Then, last year, four divisions collapsed overnight in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq under the determined assault of Islamic State fighters numbering in the hundreds or at most the low thousands, and the extremists’ advance came as far as this base.

An army that once counted 280,000 active-duty personnel, one of the largest in the world, is now believed by some experts to have as few as four to seven fully active divisions — as little as 50,000 troops by some estimates. The director of media operations for Iraq’s Ministry of Defense, Qais al-Rubaiae, said, however, that even by the most conservative estimates, the army now had at least 141,000 soldiers in 15 divisions.

...

Seriously, this is the Middle East. What were they expecting? And why are they surprised?

Iraq's army has always looked good on paper. But it couldn't press home an advantage at any time in a decade fighting next door Iran which was in a state of disarray immediately after the 1979 revolution. Despite that debacle, Saddam's Army continued to be feared throughout the region but exercised no discipline after storming Kuwait. And we all know what happened next.

Foreign military advisors and private mercenaries are simply another form of necessary hired help in that region...somewhat upscale from the guest worker drivers, nannies and Indian accountants in the family offices. The western power military bases and defense industry arms sales to the nationals are the quid pro quo.

[gwynedd1]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

I have said it before and I will say it again. WWII was a disaster for American foreign policy. Defeating nation states like Germany and Japan seems to have given us the idea that a line drawn around a group of tribes is going to work in the same way. We have had this sort of misunderstanding before. Its in our own history.

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-i...battles-4.html

It would be like making a deal with The Province of Brandenburg several hundred years ago and expecting it to be held to account in Bavaria. It is difficult to make peace with confederate tribes.....

Its quite useful in dispelling many prevailing myths like North Americans taking land from Mexico. Mexico never had Comanche country other than one of those UN style border drawings. So Mexico invited the creation of a Krajina like buffer state alla the Austrian empire. All hell broke loose when Mexico tried to centralize its authority. Hmm, I wonder if any lesson can be had from that too?


Americans should write this down on the chalk board a 100 times:

It is difficult to make peace with confederate tribes
It is difficult to make peace with confederate tribes
It is difficult to make peace with confederate tribes

[flintlock]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

Seriously, this is the Middle East. What were they expecting? And why are they surprised?

This sums up my thoughts also

[flintlock]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

Its quite useful in dispelling many prevailing myths like North Americans taking land from Mexico.

It's refreshing to see that some people still understand something besides the revisionist version of history. Mexico actually invited the Gringos into their northern provinces because they couldn't or wouldn't administer it themselves. They offered huge land grants and other incentives. Of course once they had things under control, things changed.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

It's refreshing to see that some people still understand something besides the revisionist version of history. Mexico actually invited the Gringos into their northern provinces because they couldn't or wouldn't administer it themselves. They offered huge land grants and other incentives. Of course once they had things under control, things changed.

I was just at the Alamo over the weekend. It clearly stated what you and Gwyned posted above.

I also thought it was ironic that the Mexicans encouraged immigration then years later were astonished that only 1 out of 10 people living in "Tejas" was Mexican and the rest were immigrants. Mostly Americans from the frontier and Western European immigrants.

Those boys at the Alamo died for nothing as most of the battles took place much further north where the power/population was concentrated. The Alamo was just an outpost that apparently most of the "separatists" or "revolutionaries" didn't care much for, including Sam Houston.

Why are we surprised that a group like ISIS exists? To the Mexicans at the time the Texans were ISIS. To the British in the 1700s the Americans were ISIS or "insert any other revolutionary force" here.

The British called the Americans terrorists against the monarchy the same as we call Palestinians or ISIS separatists.

Who knows, perhaps in a hundred years, ISIS may be recorded in Islamic history as revolutionaries.

Treason is a matter of dates.

[don]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

Before the 2003 war Iraq, under the authoritarian dictatorship of Saddam and his predecessor, had the highest level of education in the Middle East. When you point this out you’re accused of being a Saddam apologist, but Baghdad University in the 1980s had more female professors than Princeton did in 2009; there were crèches to make it easier for women to teach at schools and universities. In Baghdad and Mosul – currently occupied by Islamic State – there were libraries dating back centuries. The Mosul library was functioning in the eighth century, and had manuscripts from ancient Greece in its vaults. The Baghdad library, as we know, was looted after the occupation, and what’s going on now in the libraries of Mosul is no surprise, with thousands of books and manuscripts destroyed.

Everything that has happened in Iraq is a consequence of that disastrous war, which assumed genocidal proportions. The numbers who died are disputed, because the Coalition of the Willing doesn’t count up the civilian casualties in the country it’s occupying. Why should it bother? But others have estimated that up to a million Iraqis were killed, mainly civilians. The puppet government installed by the Occupation confirmed these figures obliquely in 2006 by officially admitting that there were five million orphans in Iraq. The occupation of Iraq is one of the most destructive acts in modern history. Even though Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, the social and political structure of the Japanese state was maintained; although the Germans and Italians were defeated in the Second World War, most of their military structures, intelligence structures, police structures and judicial structures were kept in place, because there was another enemy already in the offing – communism. But Iraq was treated as no other country has been treated before. The reason people don’t quite see this is that once the occupation began all the correspondents came back home. You can count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand: Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, one or two others. Iraq’s social infrastructure still isn’t working, years after the occupation ended; it’s been wrecked. The country has been demodernised. The West has destroyed Iraq’s education services and medical services; it handed over power to a group of clerical Shia parties which immediately embarked on bloodbaths of revenge. Several hundred university professors were killed. If this isn’t disorder, what is?

In the case of Afghanistan, everyone knows what was actually behind this grand attempt, as the US and Britain put it, to ‘modernise’ the country. Cherie Blair and Laura Bush said it was a war for women’s liberation. If it had been, it would have been the first in history. We now know what it really was: a crude war of revenge which failed because the occupation strengthened those it sought to destroy. The war didn’t just devastate Afghanistan and what infrastructure it had, but destabilised Pakistan too, which has nuclear weapons, and is now also in a very dangerous state.

These two wars haven’t done anyone any good, but they have succeeded in dividing the Muslim and Arab world. The US decision to hand over power to clerical Shia parties deepened the Sunni-Shia divide: there was ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, which used to be a mixed city in a country where intermarriage between Sunni and Shia was common. The Americans acted as if all Sunnis were Saddam supporters, yet many Sunnis suffered arbitrary jail sentences under him.

The creation of this divide has ended Arab nationalism for a long time to come. The battles now are to do with which side the US backs in which conflict. In Iraq, it backs the Shia.


The demonisation of Iran is deeply unjust, because without the tacit support of the Iranians the Americans could not have taken Iraq. And the Iraqi resistance against the occupation was only making headway until the Iranians told the Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who’d been collaborating with Sunni opponents of the regime, to call it off. He was taken to Tehran and given a ‘holiday’ there for a year. Without Iranian support in both Iraq and Afghanistan it would have been very difficult for the United States to sustain its occupations. Iran was thanked with sanctions, further demonisation, double standards – Israel can have nuclear weapons, you can’t. The Middle East is now in a total mess: the central, most important power is Israel, expanding away; the Palestinians have been defeated and will remain defeated for a very long time to come; all the principal Arab countries are wrecked, first Iraq, now Syria; Egypt, with a brutal military dictatorship in power, is torturing and killing as if the Arab Spring had never happened – and for the military leaders it hasn’t.

As for Israel, the blind support it gets from the US is an old story. And to question it, nowadays, is to be labelled an anti-Semite. The danger with this strategy is that if you say to a generation which had no experience of the Holocaust outside of movies that to attack Israel is anti-Semitic, the reply will be: so what? ‘Call us anti-Semitic if you want,’ young people will say. ‘If that means opposing you, we are.’ So it hasn’t helped anyone. It’s inconceivable that any Israeli government is going to grant the Palestinians a state. As the late Edward Said warned us, the Oslo Accords were a Palestinian Treaty of Versailles. Actually, they are much worse than that.

So the disintegration of the Middle East that began after the First World War continues. Whether Iraq will be divided into three countries, whether Syria will be divided into two or three countries, we don’t know. But it would hardly be surprising if all the states in the region, barring Egypt, which is too large to dismantle, ended up as bantustans, or principalities, on the model of Qatar and the other Gulf States, funded and kept going by the Saudis, on the one hand, and the Iranians, on the other.

All the hopes raised by the Arab Spring went under, and it’s important to understand why. Too many of those who participated didn’t see – for generational reasons, largely – that in order to hit home you have to have some form of political movement. It wasn’t surprising that the Muslim Brotherhood, which had taken part in the protests in Egypt at a late stage, took power: it was the only real political party in Egypt. But then the Brotherhood played straight into the hands of the military by behaving like Mubarak – by offering deals to the security services, offering deals to the Israelis – so people began to wonder what the point was of having them in power. The military was thus able to mobilise support and get rid of the Brotherhood. All this has demoralised an entire generation in the Middle East.

Tariq Ali

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.

This map is showcased and presented as the brainchild of retired Lieutenant-Colonel (U.S. Army) Ralph Peters, who believes the redesigned borders contained in the map will fundamentally solve the problems of the contemporary Middle East.

The map of the “New Middle East” was a key element in the retired Lieutenant-Colonel’s book, Never Quit the Fight, which was released to the public onJuly 10, 2006. This map of a redrawn Middle East was also published, under the title of Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look, in the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal with commentary from Ralph Peters.5

It should be noted that Lieutenant-Colonel Peters was last posted to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the U.S. Defence Department, and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost authors with numerous essays on strategy for military journals and U.S. foreign policy.

[don]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

Europe and beyond (from the above TA piece)

What is the situation in Europe? The first point to be made is that there isn’t a single country in the European Union that enjoys proper sovereignty. After the end of the Cold War and reunification, Germany has become the strongest and strategically the most important state in Europe but even it doesn’t have total sovereignty: the United States is still dominant on many levels, especially as far as the military is concerned. Britain became a semi-vassal state after the Second World War. The last British prime ministers to act as if Britain was a sovereign state were Harold Wilson, who refused to send British troops to Vietnam, and Edward Heath, who refused to allow British bases to be used to bomb the Middle East. Since then Britain has invariably done the Americans’ bidding even though large parts of the British establishment are against it. There was a great deal of anger in the Foreign Office during the Iraq War because it felt there was no need for Britain to be involved. In 2003, when the war was underway, I was invited to give a lecture in Damascus; I got a phone call from the British embassy there asking me to come to lunch. I thought this was odd. When I arrived I was greeted by the ambassador, who said: ‘Just to reassure you, we won’t just be eating, we’ll be talking politics.’ At the lunch, he said: ‘Now it’s time for questions – I’ll start off. Tariq Ali, I read the piece you wrote in the Guardian arguing that Tony Blair should be charged for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. Do you mind explaining why?’ I spent about ten minutes explaining, to the bemusement of the Syrian guests. At the end the ambassador said: ‘Well, I agree totally with that – I don’t know about the rest of you.’ After the guests had left, I said: ‘That was very courageous of you.’ And the MI6 man who was at the lunch said: ‘Yeah, he can do that, because he’s retiring in December.’ But a similar thing happened at the embassy in Vienna, where I gave a press conference attacking the Iraq war in the British ambassador’s living room. These people aren’t fools – they knew exactly what they were doing. And they acted as they did as a result of the humiliation they felt at having a government which, even though the Americans had said they could manage without the UK, insisted on joining in anyway.

The Germans know they don’t have sovereignty, but when you raise it with them they shrug. Many of them don’t want it, because they are over-concerned with their past, with the notion that Germans are almost genetically predisposed to like fighting wars – a ludicrous view, which some people who should know better have expressed again in marking the anniversaries of the First World War. The fact is that – politically and ideologically and militarily, even economically – the European Union is under the thumb of the global imperial power. When the Euro elite was offering a pitiful sum of money to the Greeks, Timothy Geithner, then US secretary of the treasury, had to intervene, and tell the EU to increase its rescue fund to €500 billion. They hummed and hawed, but finally did what the Americans wanted. All the hopes that had been raised, from the time the European idea was first mooted, of a continent independent of the other major powers charting its own way in the world, disappeared once the Cold War ended. Just when you felt it might be able to achieve that goal, Europe instead became a continent devoted to the interests of bankers – a Europe of money, a place without a social vision, leaving the neoliberal order unchallenged.

The Greeks are being punished not so much for the debt as for their failure to make the reforms demanded by the EU. The right-wing government Syriza defeated only managed to push through three of the 14 reforms the EU insisted on. They couldn’t do more because what they did push through helped create a situation in Greece which has some similarities with Iraq: demodernisation; totally unnecessary privatisations, linked to political corruption; the immiseration of ordinary people. So the Greeks elected a government that offered to change things, and then they were told that it couldn’t. The EU is frightened of a domino effect: if the Greeks are rewarded for electing Syriza other countries might elect similar governments, so Greece must be crushed. The Greeks can’t be kicked out of the European Union – that isn’t permitted by the constitution – or out of the Eurozone, but life can be made so difficult for them that they have to leave the euro and set up a Greek euro, or a euro drachma, so that the country keeps going. But were that to happen conditions would, at least temporarily, get even worse – which is why the Greeks have no choice but to resist it. The danger now is that, in this volatile atmosphere, people could shift very rapidly to the right, to the Golden Dawn, an explicitly fascist party. That is the scale of the problem, and for the Euro elite to behave as it’s doing – as the extreme centre, in other words – is short-sighted and foolish.

And then there’s the rise of China. There’s no doubt that enormous gains have been made by capitalism in China; the Chinese and American economies are remarkably interdependent. When a veteran of the labour movement in the States recently asked me what had happened to the American working class the answer was plain: the American working class is in China now. But it’s also the case that China isn’t even remotely close to replacing the US. All the figures now produced by economists show that, where it counts, the Chinese are still way behind. If you look at national shares of world millionaire households in 2012: the United States, 42.5 per cent; Japan, 10.6 per cent; China, 9.4 per cent; Britain, 3.7 per cent; Switzerland, 2.9 per cent; Germany, 2.7 per cent; Taiwan, 2.3 per cent; Italy, 2 per cent; France, 1.9 per cent. So in terms of economic strength the United States is still doing well. In many crucial markets – pharmaceuticals, aerospace, computer software, medical equipment – the US is dominant; the Chinese are nowhere. The figures in 2010 showed that three-quarters of China’s top two hundred exporting companies – and these are Chinese statistics – are foreign-owned. There is a great deal of foreign investment in China, often from neighbouring countries like Taiwan. Foxconn, which produces computers for Apple in China, is a Taiwanese company.

The notion that the Chinese are suddenly going to rise to power and replace the United States is baloney. It’s implausible militarily; it’s implausible economically; and politically, ideologically, it’s obvious that it’s not the case. When the British Empire began its decline, decades before it collapsed, people knew what was happening. Both Lenin and Trotsky realised that the British were going down. There’s a wonderful speech of Trotsky’s, delivered in 1924 at the Communist International, where, in inimitable fashion, he made the following pronouncement about the English bourgeoisie:

Their character has been moulded in the course of centuries. Class self-esteem has entered into their blood and marrow, their nerves and bones. It will be much harder to knock the self-confidence of world rulers out of them. But the American will knock it out just the same, when he gets seriously down to business. In vain does the British bourgeois console himself that he will serve as a guide for the inexperienced American. Yes, there will be a transitional period. But the crux of the matter does not lie in the habits of diplomatic leadership but in actual power, existing capital and industry. And the United States, if we take its economy, from oats to big battleships of the latest type, occupies the first place. They produce all the living necessities to the extent of one-half to two-thirds of what is produced by all mankind.

If we were to change the text, and instead of the ‘English bourgeois character’ say the ‘American bourgeois character has been moulded in the course of centuries … but the Chinese will knock it out just the same,’ it wouldn’t make sense.

* * *

Where are we going to end up at the end of this century? Where is China going to be? Is Western democracy going to flourish? One thing that has become clear over the last decades is that nothing happens unless people want it to happen; and if people want it to happen, they start moving. You would have thought that the Europeans would have learned some lessons from the crash that created this recent recession, and would have acted, but they didn’t: they just put sticking plaster on the wounds and hoped that the blood would be stemmed. So where should we look for a solution? One of the more creative thinkers today is the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who makes it clear that an alternative structure for the European Union is desperately needed and that it will necessitate more democracy at every stage – at a provincial and city level as well as a national and European level. There needs to be a concerted effort to find an alternative to the neoliberal system. We have seen the beginnings of such an attempt in Greece and in Spain, and it could spread.

Many people in Eastern Europe feel nostalgia for the societies that existed before the fall of the Soviet Union. The communist regimes that governed the Soviet bloc after the arrival of Khrushchev could be described as social dictatorships: essentially weak regimes with an authoritarian political structure, but an economic structure that offered people more or less the same as Swedish or British social democracy. In a poll taken in January, 82 per cent of respondents in the old East Germany said that life was better before unification. When they were asked to give reasons, they said that there was more sense of community, more facilities, money wasn’t the dominant thing, cultural life was better and they weren’t treated, as they are now, like second-class citizens. The attitude of West Germans to those from the East quickly became a serious problem – so serious that, in the second year after reunification, Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor and not a great radical, told the Social Democratic Party conference that the way East Germans were being treated was completely wrong. He said East German culture should no longer be ignored; if he had to choose the three greatest German writers, he said, he would pick Goethe, Heine and Brecht. The audience gasped when he said Brecht. The prejudice against the East is deeply ingrained. The reason the Germans were so shocked by the Snowden revelations is that it was suddenly clear they were living under permanent surveillance, when one of the big ideological campaigns in West Germany had to do with the evils of the Stasi, who, it was said, spied on everyone all the time. Well, the Stasi didn’t have the technical capacity for ubiquitous spying – on the scale of surveillance, the United States is far ahead of West Germany’s old enemy.

Not only do the former East Germans prefer the old political system, they also come at the top of the atheism charts: 52.1 per cent of them don’t believe in God; the Czech Republic is second with 39.9 per cent; secular France is down at 23.3 per cent (secularism in France really means anything that’s not Islamic). If you look at the other side, the country with the highest proportion of believers is the Philippines at 83.6 per cent; followed by Chile, 79.4 per cent; Israel, 65.5 per cent; Poland, 62 per cent; the US, 60.6 per cent; compared to which Ireland is a bastion of moderation at only 43.2 per cent. If the pollsters had visited the Islamic world and asked these questions they might have been surprised at the answers given in Turkey, for instance, or even in Indonesia. Religious belief is not confined to any single part of the globe.

It’s a mixed and confused world. But its problems don’t change – they just take new forms. In Sparta in the third century BCE, a fissure developed between the ruling elite and ordinary people following the Peloponnesian Wars, and those who were ruled demanded change because the gap between rich and poor had become so huge it couldn’t be tolerated. A succession of radical monarchs, Agis IV, Cleomenes III and Nabis, created a structure to help revive the state. Nobles were sent into exile; the magistrates’ dictatorship was abolished; slaves were given their freedom; all citizens were allowed to vote; and land confiscated from the rich was distributed to the poor (something the ECB wouldn’t tolerate today). The early Roman Republic, threatened by this example, sent its legions under Titus Quinctius Flamininus to crush Sparta. According to Livy, this was the response from Nabis, the king of Sparta, and when you read these words you feel the cold anger and the dignity:

Do not demand that Sparta conform to your own laws and institutions … You select your cavalry and infantry by their property qualifications and desire that a few should excel in wealth and the common people be subject to them. Our law-giver did not want the state to be in the hands of a few, whom you call the Senate, nor that any one class should have supremacy in the state. He believed that by equality of fortune and dignity there would be many to bear arms for their country.

Tariq Ali’s latest book is The Extreme Centre: a Warning.
This essay originally appeared in the London Review of Books.

[don]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

and of the US:

Three decades ago, with the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the South American dictatorships, many hoped that the much talked about ‘peace dividend’ promised by Bush senior and Thatcher would actually materialise. No such luck. Instead, we have experienced continuous wars, upheavals, intolerance and fundamentalisms of every sort – religious, ethnic and imperial. The exposure of the Western world’s surveillance networks has heightened the feeling that democratic institutions aren’t functioning as they should, that, like it or not, we are living in the twilight period of democracy itself.

The twilight began in the early 1990s with the implosion of the former Soviet Union and the takeover of Russia, Central Asia and much of Eastern Europe by visionless former Communist Party bureaucrats, many of whom rapidly became billionaires. The oligarchs who bought up some of the most expensive property in the world, including in London, may once have been members of the Communist Party, but they were also opportunists with no commitment to anything other than power and lining their own pockets. The vacuum created by the collapse of the party system has been filled by different things in different parts of the world, among them religion – and not just Islam. The statistics on the growth of religion in the Western world are dramatic – just look at France. And we have also seen the rise of a global empire of unprecedented power. The United States is now unchallengeable militarily and it dominates global politics, even the politics of the countries it treats as its enemies.

If you compare the recent demonisation of Putin to the way Yeltsin was treated at a time when he was committing many more shocking atrocities – destroying the entire city of Grozny, for example – you see that what is at stake is not principle, but the interests of the world’s predominant power. There hasn’t been such an empire before, and it’s unlikely that there will be one again. The United States is the site of the most remarkable economic development of recent times, the emergence on the West Coast of the IT revolution. Yet despite these advances in capitalist technology, the political structure of the United States has barely changed for a hundred and fifty years. It may be militarily, economically and even culturally in command – its soft power dominates the world – but there is as yet no sign of political change from within. Can this contradiction last?

There is ongoing debate around the world on the question of whether the American empire is in decline. And there is a vast literature of declinism, all arguing that this decline has begun and is irreversible. I see this as wishful thinking. The American empire has had setbacks – which empire doesn’t? It had setbacks in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: many thought the defeat it suffered in Vietnam in 1975 was definitive. It wasn’t, and the United States hasn’t suffered another setback on that scale since. But unless we know and understand how this empire functions globally, it’s very difficult to propose any set of strategies to combat or contain it – or, as the realist theorists like the late Chalmers Johnson and John Mearsheimer demand, to make the United States dismantle its bases, get out of the rest of the world, and operate at a global level only if it is actually threatened as a country. Many realists in the United States argue that such a withdrawal is necessary, but they are arguing from a position of weakness in the sense that setbacks which they regard as irreversible aren’t. There are very few reversals from which imperial states can’t recover. Some of the declinist arguments are simplistic – that, for example, all empires have eventually collapsed. This is of course true, but there are contingent reasons for those collapses, and at the present moment the United States remains unassailable: it exerts its soft power all over the world, including in the heartlands of its economic rivals; its hard power is still dominant, enabling it to occupy countries it sees as its enemies; and its ideological power is still overwhelming in Europe and beyond.

The US has, however, suffered setbacks on a semi-continental scale in South America. And these setbacks have been political and ideological rather than economic. The chain of electoral victories for left political parties in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia showed that there was a possible alternative within capitalism. None of these governments, though, is challenging the capitalist system, and this is equally true of the radical parties that have recently emerged in Europe. Neither Syriza in Greece nor Podemos in Spain is mounting a systemic challenge; the reforms being proposed are better compared to the policies pushed through by Attlee in Britain after 1945. Like the leftist parties in South America, they have essentially social democratic programmes, combined with mass mobilisation.

But social democratic reforms have become intolerable for the neoliberal economic system imposed by global capital. If you argue, as those in power do (if not explicitly, implicitly), that it’s necessary to have a political structure in which no challenge to the system is permitted, then we’re living in dangerous times. Elevating terrorism into a threat that is held to be the equivalent of the communist threat of old is bizarre. The use of the very word ‘terrorism’, the bills pushed through Parliament and Congress to stop people speaking up, the vetting of people invited to give talks at universities, the idea that outside speakers have to be asked what they are going to say before they are allowed into the country: all these seem minor things, but they are emblematic of the age in which we live. And the ease with which it’s all accepted is frightening. If what we’re being told is that change isn’t possible, that the only conceivable system is the present one, we’re going to be in trouble. Ultimately, it won’t be accepted. And if you prevent people from speaking or thinking or developing political alternatives, it won’t just be Marx’s work that is relegated to the graveyard. Karl Polanyi, the most gifted of the social democratic theorists, has suffered the same fate.

We have seen the development of a form of government I call the extreme centre, which currently rules over large tracts of Europe and includes left, centre left, centre right and centre parties. A whole swathe of the electorate, young people in particular, feels that voting makes no difference at all, given the political parties we have. The extreme centre wages wars, either on its own account or on behalf of the United States; it backs austerity measures; it defends surveillance as absolutely necessary to defeat terrorism, without ever asking why this terrorism is happening – to question this is almost to be a terrorist oneself. Why do the terrorists do it? Are they unhinged? Is it something that emerges from deep inside their religion? These questions are counterproductive and useless. If you ask whether American imperial policy or British or French foreign policy is in any way responsible, you’re attacked. But of course the intelligence agencies and security services know perfectly well that the reason for people going crazy – and it is a form of craziness – is that they are driven not by religion but by what they see. Hussain Osman, one of the men who failed to bomb the London Underground on 21 July 2005, was arrested in Rome a week later. ‘More than praying we discussed work, politics, the war in Iraq,’ he told the Italian interrogators. ‘We always had new films of the war in Iraq … those in which you could see Iraqi women and children who had been killed by US and UK soldiers.’ Eliza Manningham-Buller, who resigned as head of MI5 in 2007, said: ‘Our involvement in Iraq has radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people.’

[gwynedd1]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

It's refreshing to see that some people still understand something besides the revisionist version of history. Mexico actually invited the Gringos into their northern provinces because they couldn't or wouldn't administer it themselves. They offered huge land grants and other incentives. Of course once they had things under control, things changed.

If I may, 'tiss the era of provisionist versions of history.

[gwynedd1]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

I was just at the Alamo over the weekend. It clearly stated what you and Gwyned posted above.

I also thought it was ironic that the Mexicans encouraged immigration then years later were astonished that only 1 out of 10 people living in "Tejas" was Mexican and the rest were immigrants. Mostly Americans from the frontier and Western European immigrants.

Those boys at the Alamo died for nothing as most of the battles took place much further north where the power/population was concentrated. The Alamo was just an outpost that apparently most of the "separatists" or "revolutionaries" didn't care much for, including Sam Houston.

Why are we surprised that a group like ISIS exists? To the Mexicans at the time the Texans were ISIS. To the British in the 1700s the Americans were ISIS or "insert any other revolutionary force" here.

The British called the Americans terrorists against the monarchy the same as we call Palestinians or ISIS separatists.

Who knows, perhaps in a hundred years, ISIS may be recorded in Islamic history as revolutionaries.

Treason is a matter of dates.

Ah, now you are talking prisonist versions of history.

[don]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

‘The Fall of the Ottomans,’ by Eugene Rogan

By BRUCE CLARKAPRIL 16, 2015


In November 1914, the world’s only great Muslim empire was drawn into a life-or-death struggle against three historically Christian powers — Britain, France and Russia. All parties made frantic calculations about the likely intertwining of religion and strategy. The playing out, and surprise overturning, of these calculations informs every page of Eugene Rogan’s intricately worked but very readable account of the Ottoman theocracy’s demise.

As Rogan explains in “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East,” the Christian nations of the Triple Entente had millions of Muslim subjects, who might in their view be open to seduction by the Ottoman sultan, especially if he seemed to be prevailing in the war. The Ottomans, for their part, were in alliance with two other European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Paradoxically, the Teutons urged the sultan to use his role as caliph and proclaim an Islamic holy war. One factor was that, as a newcomer to the imperial game, Germany had relatively few Muslim subjects and less to lose if the card of jihad were played. The Ottomans, meanwhile, feared the influence of foes, especially Russia, over their own Christian subjects — including the Greeks and Armenians, who formed a substantial and economically important minority in both the empire’s capital and the Anatolian heartland.

In the end, nothing went as expected, because global conflict overturns all predictions. But the very existence of those religion-based calculations had consequences, many of them tragic. Rogan’s narrative shifts from the Aegean to the Caucasus to Arabia as he traces those consequences, and shows how they led, ultimately, to the Ottoman Empire’s defeat and collapse.

Defeat and collapse are not the same thing, and Rogan, a history lecturer at Oxford University and the author of “The Arabs,” carefully distinguishes them. The defeat that the empire suffered in 1918 was not total, and left some of the sultan’s *forces intact. One of his adversaries, Russia, was by then engulfed by revolution and had bowed out of the war, letting Turkish forces recoup lost ground. The final collapse of the Ottoman order was *neither an instant result of the 1918 armistice, nor, on Rogan’s reading, an inevitable one. But for a power whose strong point was military excellence rather than commercial or technological prowess, the defeat was painful enough.

In the Ottomans’ confrontation with Britain, there were several early *surprises. Instead of the sultan winning over London’s Muslim subjects, it was the British who profited by breaking the Turks’ hold over certain Muslims, especially the descendants of the Prophet who controlled Arabia. With fair success, and some spectacular setbacks, Britain also managed to deploy its own colonial troops, whether Hindu or Muslim, against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia.

But when the Ottomans defended their Anatolian heartland, they showed an iron will that the British underestimated. In the disastrous British-led assault on the Dardanelles straits, and the subsequent landing at Gallipoli, it was not the Ottoman imperium that began crumbling but the British one, as Australian, New Zealand and Irish soldiers became embittered by the incompetence of the power they served.

Using personal histories to leaven what might otherwise have been a heavy diet of places, names and dates, Rogan neatly links the Turks’ costly success at the Dardanelles with the dreadful events that unfolded about 1,000 miles away, on the eastern edge of present-day Turkey. In this, the centenary year of the horrors suffered by the Ottoman Armenians, many readers will turn immediately to those events to see how Rogan negotiates the contesting versions.

It is not in question that from April 1915 onward, Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire died horribly in enormous numbers. The American administration, which for diplomatic reasons still balks at using the word genocide, accepts that as many as 1.5 million perished. It is on record that in May 1915, a law was passed calling for the “relocation” of the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia; nor does anybody seriously question that this became a death march whose victims were killed by their guards, attacked by others or perished from exhaustion and starvation.

But there is a more contentious charge, and in a few succinct lines, Rogan affirms it. He agrees that in addition to ordering a vast, brutal internal deportation, the Committee of Union of Progress, the shadowy institution that was directing the Ottoman war effort, issued unwritten orders for the mass murder of the deportees.

Secret, oral orders are hard to prove or disprove, but Rogan accepts the case for their existence made by the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam. This book uses words like “annihilation” and “massacre” more often than “genocide” but does not avoid the g-word. As he explains in a footnote, Rogan employs the term genocide in support of the “courageous efforts” of Turkish historians and writers to “force an honest reckoning with Turkey’s past.”

At the same time, the book makes many of the arguments that qualified defenders of the Ottoman record point to: for example, that in winter 1914 and spring 1915, there was fierce fighting in eastern Anatolia between Turks and Armenians; sometimes the Armenians fought alone, and sometimes with Russian help. In Istanbul, at the same time, Turkish officialdom’s fear of an “enemy within” was running high because local Armenians were suspected of favoring Britain’s plans to advance on the city.

All that provides some psychological background to the drive against the Armenian population. So too does the huge Turkish loss of life, from cold and disease as well as bullets, during and after the Russian victory at Sarakamis in December 1914. But Rogan does not for a moment suggest that this amounts to a moral justification of the horrors the Armenians endured. To stress, as some Turkish versions of the story do, that this was a period involving tragic suffering on all sides is valid as far as it goes, but it is not an adequate statement. It is to Rogan’s credit that he acknowledges this.

Still, a moral assessment of the treatment of the Armenians is not the main purpose of this book, which promises a more Ottoman-centric vision of a conflict that is often described through the eyes of British generals and strategists. That promise is only partly fulfilled. In what is a manageably sized book, Rogan feels he must spend several pages on the motives of the Ottomans’ adversaries, especially Britain; that limits the space he can devote to bringing the Ottoman side of the story to life.

Some gripping sections describe the *British-led advance on Jerusalem in late 1917, leading to the holy city’s capture in time for Christmas. This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it well, making clear both the stiffness of the Turkish defense and the ingenuity of Britain’s *tactics.

The book explains how, with the experience of an imperial power at its height, the British used dynastic rivalries to rally the Muslims of Arabia and the Levant against their Turkish overlords. In doing so they established the principle that in the 20th century, ethnicity and nationalism (in this case, Arab nationalism) would often trump religious bonds, even in lands where faith was zealous. Only in the early 21st century is that trend being reversed, as competing versions of Islamism vow to tear down the borders that were drawn a century ago.

THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS
The Great War in the Middle East
By Eugene Rogan
Illustrated. 485 pp. Basic Books. $32.



‘Operation Nemesis,’ by Eric Bogosian

By JOSEPH KANONAPRIL 16, 2015


On March 15, 1921, a 25-year-old Armenian in Berlin, Soghomon Tehlirian, shot and killed Mehmet Talat Pasha, who had been the Ottoman minister of the interior during World War I. After the Ottomans’ collapse, Talat had fled into secret exile and was now plotting a return to power with the other Young Turks (or, formally, the Committee for Union and Progress) who had led Turkey into its disastrous wartime alliance with Germany. To Tehlirian, however, Talat was something infinitely worse than simply one of the leaders of a defeated empire. He was a member of the central committee, with a key role in authorizing the Armenian genocide, the series of deportations and massacres in 1915-16 that under the fog of war had murdered much of Tehlirian’s family and some one and a half million other Armenians.

In the sensational trial that followed the assassination, Tehlirian, apparently a lonely misfit seeking to avenge his mother’s death (he said he had seen her beheaded), played David to Talat’s Goliath. And as the world (and the German jury) learned more about the horrors of *the period, Tehlirian began to seem not so much a murderer (though he freely admitted killing Talat) as an agent for justice. Talat, after all, had been tried in absentia for war crimes and sentenced to death. Tehlirian was avenging not just his family but an entire people. After a stunning verdict to acquit was reached, The New York Times ran a headline that read “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”

When the actor and playwright Eric Bogosian came across Tehlirian’s story he initially thought it would make a good film, and he decided to devote a few months to writing the screenplay. His dramatic instincts were right: The assassination and trial, the core of “Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide,” make absorbing reading. But the few months stretched into seven years of research and writing as Bogosian discovered that Tehlirian was only part of a larger story — not about a hapless loner seeking to avenge his mother (whom he had not seen decapitated) but about a trained member of a group called Operation Nemesis, a band of assassins whose agenda was to draw attention to the Armenian genocide. (As part of the plan, Tehlirian had been ordered to stay with Talat’s body after the shooting to ensure an arrest and public trial.)

Operation Nemesis’ parent organization was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, one of the radical societies formed in the late 19th century to fight Ottoman oppression. It was violent from the start, staging a spectacular bank raid in 1896, an attempt on the sultan’s life in 1905 and similar operations. But it was only after the Armenians watched the Turkish perpetrators of the massacres slip away unpunished following the conclusion of World War I that the decision was made to form a secret organization of assassins.

Founded in Boston in July 1920, and named Nemesis, the group managed in three years to track down and kill seven high-level targets. It employed at least 10 armed assassins and numerous lookouts, spies and diplomatic supporters, as well as contacts in Paris, Geneva and (yes) Watertown, Mass., where it established its headquarters. Many of the assassins were never brought to trial (although one luckless gunman in Tiflis was captured by the Soviet secret police and shipped to Siberia). Their exploits were applauded by most Armenians at the time and make for exciting reading even now. The crimes they were avenging were horrific, their targets hardly sympathetic, and anyone might feel a certain gruesome satisfaction in watching vigilante justice in action. (Imagine a similar group picking off Hitler, Himmler, et al.)

But how effective was Nemesis? Certainly in 1921 it caught the attention of the world (or at least the world’s newspapers), but the Armenian cause, and its dreamed-of homeland, was soon left behind and then lost in the realpolitik of the Near East; cynical Soviet expansion; and the nation-building of Ataturk, whose cult of Turkishness had no place for public embarrassments like ethnic cleansing. As Hitler was once supposed to have said, preparing for his own blood bath, “Who remembers the Armenians?” Even in a region notorious for its long memories, Nemesis became a largely forgotten force.

Its legacy, however, can be said to have lasted much longer, and is now a permanent feature of the political landscape. The Nemesis operators didn’t see themselves as terrorists. They were consumed by the need to remember their dead and to have the world remember. But the pattern is now painfully familiar — the personal tragedy (a family killed), the bottomless sense of being aggrieved, the recruitment into a new “family,” the expatriate fund-raisers, the eye-for-an-eye ethos that promises no end but only more death. We could be in Belfast in the late 20th century or Gaza in the 21st.

Operation Nemesis was closed down after 1922, but its example has lingered, often among people so removed in time from the original events that they have been operating in the neverland of collective memory. As recently as the 1970s and ’80s, another underground group, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (Asala), furious because the Turkish government still refused to accept the term “genocide” to describe the events of 1915-16, dedicated itself to the assassination of Turkish diplomats and politicians. It succeeded in assassinating 36 (including family members) in France, Canada, Iran, even the United States, before it discontinued its operations in the 1990s. An Asala bomb at Orly airport in 1983 killed eight and injured another 55, most of whom had no connection either to Turkey or Armenia. Bogosian tells us that the group received “training and inspiration” from the Palestine Liberation Organization, and later forged ties to Abu Nidal, a ruthless Palestinian terrorist. We are a long way from “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”

To his great credit, Bogosian recog*nizes this and refuses to portray Tehlirian or any of the other members of his group as heroes. He’s aware of the gravitas of his story and the need to set it in context. But the Armenian experience is so unwieldy and multifaceted that he has a job just wrestling it all into some coherent shape. He assumes (rightly) that most of his readers won’t know Turkish, much less Armenian history, so he provides a brief overview. But historical narration isn’t his strong suit. A section on the Armenian genocide’s parallels with the Holocaust seems unnecessary after we’ve been told about the roundups and the cattle cars and the camps. He likes to chase down intriguing loose ends (was British intelligence complicit in fingering Talat?), but then he can’t resist off-the-point excursions (like his discussion of the rise of nativism in 1920s America).

Still, where it matters most he delivers: in his gripping action accounts of Nemesis at work, and in the sober assessment of its terrible aftermath. In an opinion piece that followed its “Had To” headline, The Times called the verdict on Tehlirian “a queer view of moral rightness [that] opens the way to other assassinations less easily excusable than his or not excusable at all.” And so it did.

OPERATION NEMESIS
The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide
By Eric Bogosian
Illustrated. 375 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.

Photo

[gwynedd1]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

"the 20th century, ethnicity and nationalism (in this case, Arab nationalism) would often trump religious bonds, even in lands where faith was zealous."

I am more or less in agreement with this in particular. The West and the United States vastly overestimates ideology as the driving force of regime instability. This is why my position on Ukraine is vastly different than the typical position of the West. Ukraine was viable only as a province of an empire. Otherwise, as we can see, the ethnic tension is too much. I have the same opinion of the Soviets. As I looked deeper into it it was as much of an anti-Russian coup as anything related to ideology. Russian proletariats and all the ethic minorities took out Russian culture middle class and up. Its reminiscent of the Republican party being predominately white European and then everyone else being a Democrat along with the less well off Urban whites. Fortunately the US has achieved more of a melting pot instead of ethnic enclaves, and the regime change can be expressed at the ballot ( where people can choose to have the same color of politician to oppress them), unlike the Russian empire. However its clear we have a poor understanding of real ethnic tension. Strange considering the black white divide we have here. We call it racism as if it is something else, but its not nearly so much about hatred as in the preference for both peoples to prefer the company of their own.

[don]

Re: those of a certain age have seen this before

From the Allied liberation of Ethiopia in 1941 until late 1943, the Italians mobilized guerrillas to fight in the former Africa Orientale Italiana. They were organized into mobile guerrilla ‘bandes’ or detachments and were armed with Italian and captured British weapons. Often they received the support of local tribesmen who were traditionally hostile to the Ethiopian Empire, such as Eritreans, Somalis, and Galla tribes from southern Ethiopia.

After an initial period of organization, the bande launched increasingly bold attacks against Commonwealth and Ethiopian forces throughout most of 1942. The growing activity of these guerrillas, encouraged by the new Axis counteroffensive in Libya and the invasion of Egypt (May-July 1942), caused enough trouble that the British were forced to send reinforcements from Kenya. They even managed to incite the Azebo-Galla tribesmen of Southern Ethiopia to rebel against the Ethiopian rulers. The uprising began in 1942 and lasted until early 1943 since the Ethiopians needed British support to suppress it. However, their greatest success took place in Eritrea and Somalia, which were colonial territories belonging to Italy prior to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-1936, and in the Somali-speaking Ogaden.