It's very hard to read the entrails in the Middle East. Grim, who knows stuff, disentangles them.
...Yesterday a surprise offensive led to the fall of Aleppo, Syria's largest city. The most important question to ask yourself when trying to understand the various wars in the Middle East is, "Whose proxies are these?" The struggle for dominance and control in the region is led by different factions, and if a surprise offensive happens it means that one of them has provided clandestine support at sufficient scale to enable a breakout. ...
Grim then dis-assembles a typically obtuse NYT article. (Remember that the NYT is the official FBI spox. Not CIA; that's the WaPo.) In graf 9, the NYT finally comes clean on WhoDunIt.
...Oh. They're Turkish and Muslim Brotherhood forces. Erdogan, who has been aligned with and backed the Muslim Brotherhood across the region, is making a play to take advantage of the recent crippling of Hezbollah by Israel to strengthen his power versus Iran. This is part of the long-running Sunni-Shia competition to dominate the Middle East, and Erdogan's personal quest to restore Turkey to the leadership position of the Islamic world. The Ottoman Turks held that position (and the title of 'caliph' of the 'caliphate,' which the Brotherhood exists to try and restore) for centuries; and while the oil and gas wealth of the Gulf states gives them power and independence from the traditional Sunni leadership in Egypt and Turkey, it's a goal of Erdogan's to reclaim that place....
Side-note: please, please, please: observe that there is a religious background here. Yes, it's 'territory' and 'influence,' but deep in the background is the theological split in Mohammedanism.
...Iran is the leading challenger to that traditional Sunni leadership, and it has had a good run for decades now following our deposing of Saddam and their consequent establishment of a 'Shia crescent' stretching from the gulf across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Levant and the Mediterranean. They use this to supply Hezbollah, and then Hamas and the Houthis. Their Houthi proxies at the mouth of the Red Sea have given them an ability to threaten shipping throughout the Middle East. ...
Russia supports Iran, who supports Hezbollah. Russia also assists the Houthis. When Israel took action against Hezbolla, Turkey moved.
...Most likely Erdogan started moving the clandestine support for this play about the time Israel and Hezbollah started their clash, realizing he'd be able to expand and consolidate his zone of control in Syria in the wake of that. He has several times threatened Israel over the war in Gaza as part of asserting that claim for leadership of the Islamic world, but as you can see, he's functionally on Israel's side -- even if he's actually only on his own. His actions damage the Iran/Russia/Assad axis, and therefore are bad for Israel's enemies. Whatever he may say out loud, what he's doing advances their interests: accidentally, but actually....
There. Clear enough?
Of course not, Jake: it's the Middle East.
I guess I've been doing this long enough that I've lost sight of how confusing it appears from the outside.
ReplyDelete"Remember that the NYT is the official FBI spox. Not CIA; that's the WaPo."
Well, the NYT carries water for the Agency sometimes too. Mark Mazzetti was working on a book about the Agency when he did his hit pieces on Dewey Clarridge, to try to discredit the work he was doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To get the access you want to write that book, one suspects you need to play ball. Do a favor or two. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/world/23clarridge.html
Now the question I haven't seen anyone ask is about where the Agency is on the Muslim Brotherhood right now. They had a longstanding relationship through the Cold War, which is not a conspiracy theory but documented in declassified documents. They thought political Islam would be a powerful counter to atheist Communism in the Islamic parts of the world, and so there was an effort to get together with the Brotherhood to resist the Red Menace.
https://ian-johnson.com/a-mosque-in-munich/
There appears to have been an end to that relationship after the Cold War, maybe throughout the 1990s; obviously after 9/11, we weren't in a good mood about political Islam. However, the Obama administration reputedly tried to repair the relationship during the Arab Spring era; you can see them removing Islamist groups from the State Department terror lists in order to work with them e.g. in Libya around the fall of Muammar Kaddáfí. Obama also supported Morsi in Egypt, who was formally and officially a Brotherhood guy.
I haven't heard anything about whether 'we' are working with these "rebels" in Syria. It's an open question. Maybe. The enemy of my enemy is an opportunity.
Umnnhhhh......
ReplyDelete“Sometimes, unfortunately, things have to be changed in a rather ugly way,” said Mr. Clarridge, his New England accent becoming more pronounced the angrier he became. “We’ll intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national security interests to intervene.”
“Get used to it, world,” he said. “We’re not going to put up with nonsense.”
Thus spake Clarridge, who decides what are America's "national interests" (not VITAL national interests) and how things will 'be changed.'
Not so sure that his hat is white.
Heh. I knew Dewey. He was definitely the kind of CIA operator you would not care for. He was an interventionist and a key figure in Iran-Contra. He once mined the harbors of Communist Nicaragua with rigged-up IEDs on his own authority after a night of drinking Scotch. Whatever color his hat was, he was a real cowboy.
ReplyDeleteI liked him. But my point wasn’t that he was virtuous, just that the NYT was willing to carry the CIA’s water when they wanted to try to wrest control of his independent network or shut it down. They didn’t like the competition or the fact that he had infiltrated places they couldn’t.