November 17, 2015--ISIS's Oil

I haven't been paying enough attention to how ISIS funds itself.

Mainly by stealing Iraqi oil I am embarrassed to admit I recently leaned. To the tune of at least $50 million a month's worth. About half-a-billion a year.

The oil comes from wells in northern Iraq, territory that ISIS now controls, and then is trucked overland into Syria and, after that, who knows.

But it has been working well for ISIS and up to now has not been interdicted by Syrian rebels, Western powers, or--and here's my rub--the United States.

One would think that with drones, satellite technology, and smart weapons easily deployed by fighter planes safely plying the skies looking for targets of opportunity, that given the go-ahead by allied forces' commanders in chief--particularly ours--it wouldn't require more than a few days to take out the oil trucks that go back and forth, east and west, through wide-open desert, at 45 miles per hour, without a place to hide.

Why then didn't we begin to bomb these facilities and trucks until two or three days ago? Why for years have we allowed this illicit commerce to take place in plain sight? Commerce that generates enough money to fund much of ISIS's evil business?

As best as I can learn the United States and it allies (such as they are) didn't want to do any permanent damage to Iraq's petroleum infrastructure. We have had the belief that ISIS would quickly be rolled up and things in the Iraqi oil fields would return to "normal." Very much in quotes.

Also, there was concern about killing civilians, mainly the drivers.

But now it appears that we feel battling ISIS will take a long time and concluding that drivers of these rigs are hardly civilians, we have turned attention to destroying the tanker trucks.

There appear to be 1,000 of them. One thousand! All easily spotted on Google Earth and of course, in even greater detail, through whatever the U.S. has in its surveillance arsenal.

In just a few days of bombing and strafing runs, according to reports in the New York Times, we have destroyed up to a quarter of them. Perhaps 250. In another few days most will have been blown up and it will no longer be easy for ISIS to remain in the oil business.

This previous hands-off approach to the ISIS oil trade also was based on the assertion that ISIS was effectively "contained" in Iraq and Syria, as claimed incredibly by President Obama just days before the uncontained attacks in Beirut and Paris.

All sorts of gears are being shifted as the result of these massive intelligence failures.

While I am ranting, I have two more questions for the Obama administration. An administration that has been ignoring reality as it attempts to "polish" its legacy. With only 15 months left in office, Obama wants to repaint reality--to claim that he ended two wars begun by George W. Bush and thus has no intention of getting in a new one against ISIS. This in spite of the fact that we are in reality half-heartedly fighting a war against ISIS.

But since we are in a version of war with ISIS why not fight smarter? Two things might help--

First, why not take down all jihadist Websites? The ones ISIS uses to promote itself and recruit young people from the Western democracies? And the ones they used to communicate among themselves, including using them to coordinate terrorist activities.

And why don't we through cyber-warfare tools disable the tanks and armored vehicles ISIS has stolen from Iraqi security forces? Vehicles and weapon systems that we manufactured and turned over to Iraqi soldiers which in turn were captured and are now being used against us by ISIS fighters?

I was just reading in Wired magazine how it is relatively easy to hack into people's Fords and Toyotas, to in effect disable them. So why not do the same thing to our Humvees and tanks that are now (see below) in ISIS's hands? I assume they are just as hackable.

If they aren't we should immediately reconfigure any weapons we sell or give to allies which inevitably get into the hands of very bad guys. As in Afghanistan where we covertly supplied the Mujahideen with weapons to use when fighting off Soviet invaders which in turn were used against us after the Mujahideen morphed into the Taliban.

I am wondering if anyone in our government and military is paying attention to these obvious things.

If not, it will be to our everlasting regret.

June 16, 2014--The Middle East? Hands Off

As President Obama feels the pressure to provide military assistance to the collapsing regime in Iraq, he and we should step back and review the last 2,500 years of history. Just a few pertinent highlights!

The major lesson is that no outside power, from Alexander the Great of Macedonia to the French and British imperialists, from the Soviet Union and now the United States, no one has been able to impose their will on the region.

All interventions, all attempts to subjugate proud and defiant peoples have failed. And worse--have reverberated back disastrously on the invaders, colonizers, and occupiers.

After 330 BC Alexander never recovered; the British and French colonial powers after the First World War never recovered; the Soviet Union collapsed and never recovered; and the United States lost treasure, power, and influence in the region and I suspect will also not recover.

So what to do now?

The right answer is nothing.

We should get out of the way and allow the people living there figure out their own futures, very much including their own borders.

If we could impose a sane and just plan of our own that would endure, I would consider supporting it. But the long reach of history teaches that any attempt to do so is doomed to fail and, worse, will only make things worse.

Look at the current situation in Iraq. The Sunni jihadists have already overrun a third of the country, a country that was arbitrarily constructed at the end of WW I. From the videos showing ISIS's triumphant advance, while the so-called Iraqi army discards its uniforms and attempts to blend in with the benighted civilian population, we see the invaders already in possession of American military equipment that also was abandoned by the Iraqi army.

This was evocative of the experience in Afghanistan where the U.S., still entangled in the Cold War, armed the Mujahideen who were fighting the invading Soviets and, after defeating them (which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union), morphed into the Taliban which proceeded to overthrow the Afghan government and then turned its weapons, the ones we supplied, on us when we invaded at the end of 2001. And does anyone doubt that as soon as we finish leaving Afghanistan the Taliban will once again take over?

Sounds like current-day Iraq to me.

Seven years ago, presidential candidate Joe Biden was ridiculed when he said that Iraq should be allowed to devolve into three countries--Shiite in the south, Sunni in the middle, and Turkistan in the north.

He was right.

In fact, he could have advocated similar things for the rest of the region, from at least Tunisia in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east.

Few of the countries in that geographic span have cultural borders--Iran (formerly Persia) and Egypt are perhaps the exceptions--but rather ones drawn for them by various conquerers and occupiers.

For centuries, for their own strategic and economic purposes, dominant Western powers have attempted to contain and control the essentially tribal people who live in this vast region. Since the end of the Second World War, country-by-country this has been unraveling. And at an accelerated pace for the past four or five years. Recall the Arab Spring of 2010.

The emergence of jihadist and terrorist groups--ISIS is just the most recent example--feels especially threatening to our national interest. But it may be more dangerous to attempt to continue to contain these aspirations and energies than let to them play out.

The genie of various forms of liberation cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. It is much too late for that.

It may be less risky to step back and allow these contesting forces to work things out. We may not like this idea or the potential outcomes; but, in reality, do we realistically have the ability and resources to impose an alternative scenario?

Do we see ourselves intervening on the side of the Shia-dominated government in Iraq allied with Iran's Revolutionary Guard? As unlikely, even as preposterous as this may sound, it is being seriously discussed.

Frightening as that prospect is--very much including the blow to our national ego--it represents another reason to back off. If there is to be fighting, and of course there is and will be, at least it will be focused within the region, internecine, and less directed toward us. That could be truly in our national interest.