This is just as ignorant, because I can't remember specifics without googling and I haven't. But you get into problems when the natural resources (oil, water) are disproportionately controlled by one or another ethnic group.
Anyway, ISIS specifically isn't making an ethnic pitch, aren't they literally attempting to establish the Muslim-world-wide Caliphate?
No it's not obviously a terrible idea. It's going to happen anyway in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan, because, against all the odds, the government there has got the Turks on board. They may well add Syrian Kurdistan in due course. Peshmurga are the most effective military in the region (except presumably the Israeli, Turkish and Iranian armies, who are sitting this one out.)
Isis, OTH probably won't be able to hold onto their "caliphate" for long; it will most likely collapse internally. What happens next there is unpredictable, but it's unlikely that a stable new state will emerge, because without Isis there's no obvious candidate to run it.
What happens next there is unpredictable, but it's unlikely that a stable new state will emerge, because without Isis there's no obvious candidate to run it.
Would it help if we bombed it?
No. (Short Answers to Simple Questions)
"al-Baghdadi" would probably love you to bomb it, it would prolong his life expectancy for years.
At the risk of sounding like Bob reading Benedict Cumberbatch Anderson, nations are mostly just imagined communities, right? And one of the problems with those nations is that very few of their residents imagine them to exist in a way that's useful (that's a pretty squidgy word, but I think you know what I mean). Put another way, those nations were, to an extent greater even than is the norm, imposed on their residents by outsiders, and thus they're quite likely to disintegrate. The fact that outsiders of various stripes -- and maybe some residents as well -- hope they'll remain stable, for both good and bad reasons, doesn't seem to help very much and might actually hurt quite a bit.
On the one hand yes the ME is full of colonial boundaries that are perhaps arbitrary and absurd. On the other, the sanctity of borders is a pretty good principle when the mechanism of change is warfare.
8. Nevertheless, there comes a point where the war is happening anyway and changing the borders (Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, East Pakistan) is the most effective way to resolve the war.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years or so the borders of Syria and Iraq look very much like they did 5 years ago, minus Kurdistan, simply because there is no credible political alternative leadership in the regions which might otherwise secede.
If Heebie wants to bomb somewhere I suggest Riyadh.
No one ever expects me to bomb them!
I mean, me personally. Me as an American, probably people have their guard up.
I agree with 11.
(But I think it's easy to decide as if we'll redraw borders, but truth is that other people will.)
You personally? Try P/er/ry's residence.
I'm in pretty much daily contact with an Iraqi client, a ways north of Baghdad. He tells me that the focus on ISIS is mostly media hype, and that what's actually happening is that the Sunni tribes are sick of the national government, and are looking for local autonomy. This doesn't sound to me like a mandate to redraw national boundaries, but I guess we'll see how it plays out.
Do the Sunni tribes really think they are the majority group in Iraq? I read that somewhere and I can remember where.
On the one hand yes the ME is full of colonial boundaries that are perhaps arbitrary and absurd
Isn't this also true of, basically, everywhere in the world? Except for a few nations that don't have any land borders (Iceland, NZ, Australia, Madagascar, that sort of thing) pretty much every country has at least some borders that were set arbitrarily and, arguably, absurdly by one colonising or at least external imperial power or another.
21. Or by victors in wars, like Paraguay and Bolivia. But often these things get a pass after a couple of hundred years if nothing happens to exacerbate tensions in the mean time. Unfortunately the history of the middle east is one exacerbating factor after another.
Baghdad, like Brussels, is a problem with partition plans.
Not to mention the Shia areas in eastern Saudia.
22: How stable were the Ottoman province borders before pre-Sykes-Picot? Even through the Mamluk period? Often regional political identity survives their transition through different states. Look at the history of Bohemia, or the counties of Ireland, or indeed the United States. I thought one of the critiques of Sykes-Picot Iraq was jamming together three Ottoman Vilayets under one more centrally run Iraqi state.
I've been thinking more or less the same thoughts you have, heebs. Except in my case I haven't been nearly so tentative in ascribing the ideas to my own ignorance, even though I am no better informed than you are.
So, male confidence in opinionating for the win.
25. I don't know enough about the history of the carve up, but under the original agreement northern Iraq was allocated to the French sphere and central and southern Iraq to the British. If borders had been drawn along those lines it might have been better in the long run or it might not, who knows? I have no clue why they changed it. Lloyd George didn't know my father so his reasoning is a mystery to me.
I think Lloyd George was following the cookie monster theory of empire design.
"C is for Counterinsurgency, that's good enough for me"?
I was thinking the theory was 'weed, whites, and wine,' but then remembered that was Lowell George.
Biden proposed a strong regionalism plan in 2006. Here it is reviewed in Politico last month.
Sorry, that's not politico, that's a silly blog post. Here's the Politico review.
The tl;dr:
- could lead to ethnic cleansing
- in 2006 it didn't poll well with Iraqis
- dividing up infrastructure is tricky
Since the first is already happening and the second may have changed, might be worth working on the third. Of course any workable federation would require new leadership, which is proving tricky.
30: +1 for the Little Feat reference.
34 -- I was thinking there should be a way to work the Unholy Four, John Wayne, and and Dorothy Lamour into a discussion of Iraqi partition, but I'm not smart enough to find it.
2: It's going to happen anyway in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan, because, against all the odds, the government there has got the Turks on board
They do ??! I didn't know that. I was figuring that one of the biggest obstacles/threats to establishment of an independent Iraqi Kurdistan was the potential destabilization to Turkey. So ... Turkey's on board with Kurdish independence .. as long as a new Kurdistan promises not to make overtures to Kurds in southern Turkey?
There's a new Kurdistan/Turkey oil pipeline that's made Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan much closer. Also suposedly Erdogan wants Turkish Kurds to vote for him.
21 is totally true, but for some reason the absurdity of borders thing seems to come up in discussions of the ME and Africa in particular.
27: If you haven't read A Peace to End All Peace I'd highly recommend it, though I forget what it says about this specific issue. It's a great account of just how ridiculous and arbitrary Sykes-Picot was in general.
for some reason the absurdity of borders thing seems to come up in discussions of the ME and Africa in particular.
Well, that's where most of the wars are these days.
If only Sir Alec Guiness from Lawrence of Arabia had made a better king.
And I know you are waiting for me and Benedict Anderson to opine on the Caliphate, although y'all would be better off reading Juan Cole. Anyway, Benny was a Southeast Asian-South America guy.
yes, the Kurds are gonna get a country.
Shia Iraq, Basra-Najaf-Baghdad, really doesn't give a fuck about Sunni Iraq, oh Mosul-Fallujah-Tikrit, except for the shrines, water, infrastructure. Hydropower. That's a pretty big "except" but Maliki/Shia only sent the bottom of his army to hold Sunnistan, and really slighted them of gov't money.
Sunnistan is not viable...unless. Well, most everybody wants Assad gone, although that ain't working out well, and Israel and almost everybody would like Hezbollah gone, so the survivability path for Sunnistan/Neo-Caliphate looks due westerly to me. Tough fucking fight, and unlikely without a lot of outside help.
Of course there is the pipeline, or several, from Qatar to Turkey or wherever that could make Europe independent of Russian gas, but even if that runs through Sunnistan, doesn't look like a big moneymaker.
I would be interested in a traffic analysis. Anbar is one brutal desert, so the traditional trade path looks to be Basra/Baghdad-Mosul-Damascus. And also a war zone.
Wiki: "Throughout most of the period of Ottoman rule (1533-1918) the territory of present-day Iraq was a battle zone between the rival regional empires and tribal alliances."
And then I poured myself a scotch and soda and slowly became convinced I had had a stroke or something because it tasted nothing like scotch and "something terrible has happened" is always easier to believe than "I picked up the wrong bottle and this is a rum and soda." Rum and soda is not a very good drink.
You can avoid that problem by not keeping rum in the house.
Or soda. Frankly, I don't see much use for either.
I would perish without soda. Rum, well, it's nice once in a while. Also you need it for bananas foster. I should have had a creme de banana and soda. That would have been less gross.
I wish there were an alternative to the SodaStream that didn't involve the grossness of the SodaStream.
40: and those were the areas where the borders were most arbitrarily drawn on the map for the benefit of foreign powers. They look the way most US state borders do: drawn by a person looking at a map, with little regard to social or geographical boundaries and not forged by war.
(Admittedly, some of them are just "we had to draw a pine through the middle of an uninhabited desert." Fair enough.)
Maybe I could get a used SodaStream? Would that be ok?
Not without becoming a stranger to myself.
I barely ever use mine because I feel the bubbles imparted by a SodaStream are...flabby. Perhaps you could borrow it.
I read a menu today that described Vichy Catalan mineral water as the "most intense water in the world" and "mind blowing."
Sounds pretty metal (paradoxically). I assume you had it, along with an entire steer.
I opted for a beer instead, because weakness.
Are any alcoholic beverages approved by the paleo diet?
I think you can forage for fermented fruit.
Kumiss, maybe? Fermented mare's milk. No grain involved. And surely someone could invent a cocktail called a Mila Kumiss.
Pastoralism postdates agriculture, yo.
Kumiss occurred to me (not by name) after I retired.
Honey wine?
Soda syphons are not gross like the SodaStream, but they produce little soda and that expensively.
60: kumiss does not presuppose pastoralism; even were one a hunter-gatherer, one could sneak up on a wild horse and milk it speedily by stealth before it knew what was happening. The lack of pottery to ferment it in might be a problem.
On which subject, Lewis Dartnell's "The Knowledge" is a terrific book and you ought to read it. Shorter and much more engrossing than Piketty.
kumiss does not presuppose pastoralism; even were one a hunter-gatherer, one could sneak up on a wild horse and milk it speedily by stealth before it knew what was happening. The lack of pottery to ferment it in might be a problem.
Nah, pottery doesn't necessarily postdate agriculture. I still find the first part implausible, though.
I still find the first part implausible, though.
Try it yourself on a passing moose.
49: the problem is where the cartridges are manufactured. I think there might be other cartridge brands, though?
66
"The Knowledge" was a fun read (as fun as any post-apocalyptic piece can be). What I didn't like about it in spite of that was the Golden Age SF-like jumping from really detailed small survival tricks (opening cans) to handwavium like "... you can also use this technique to recreate industrial-level organic chemistry." The further you get in the book the more of that there is.
Don't take the preceding as a pan; there's tons of good and potentially useful information in it, even accounting for his somewhat restrictive initial conditions (an apocalypse that kills most people but leaves all or most of the physical plant intact).
My favorite ah-ha moment in it was about how the developed world contains hundreds of millions of usable small generators: the alternators in cars.
Think of it as a discursive Boy Scout Manual for the Ebola Pandemic.
69: It would probably be better to try a musk ox.
Teo, did you ever go to Meadowcroft?
No, but I would like to some day. It was on the list of potential sites to visit when I did my big road trip, but it didn't make the final list because it's pretty expensive and has weird hours that didn't match up well with my schedule.
They don't let you dig at the rocks, but they do have an atlatl you can try. I bought the guy's book and am trying to decide whether to read it in a hurry or put it on the list after Les Capital.
Anyway, they really only let you see the dig site for an hour. They try to earn their money with lots of exhibits on more recent history and, for some reason, harness racing. The harness racing exhibit did have a framed newspaper with a headline reading, "The Gay Wizard of York."
You'd sold me on the Meadowcroft meetup way before 76.last, but I appreciate the extra details.
I googled it. Apparently, it's a Saturday Evening Post article.
71, it took a while before I realized "The Knowledge" isn't a Neal Stephenson book.