Q: are we not MENA? A: we are the rolling middle east, north africa and other geopolitical hot spots thread 2016!

EXPERIENCE

Bombs dropped by fighter jets are pulverizing Yemen’s architectural history, possibly in violation of international humanitarian law.

A few years earlier, as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton made weapons transfer to the Saudi government a “top priority,” according to her closest military aide.

And now, newly released emails show that her aides kept her well-informed of the approval process for a 2011 sale worth $29.4 billion to Boeing of up to 84 advanced F-15SA fighters, along with upgrades to the Saudi’s pre-existing fleet of 70 F-15 aircraft, and munitions, spare parts, training, maintenance, and logistics.

The deal was finalized on Christmas Eve 2011. Afterwards, Jake Sullivan, then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and now a senior policy adviser on her presidential campaign, sent her a celebratory e-mail string topped with the chipper message: “FYI – good news.”

The email string was part of a new batch of emails from Clinton’s private server, made public on Friday evening as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

One American official, whose name is redacted in the emails, said he had just received confirmation that Prince Salman, now the King of Saudi Arabia but at the time the senior Saudi liaison approving weapons deal, had “signed the F-15SA LOA today” and would send scanned documents the following day.

“Not a bad Christmas present,” he added.

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/22/saudi-christmas-present/

Brits selling to Saudi Arabia too, but not as much as the US is.

Britain sold more weapons to Saudi Arabia than to any other country. Saudi Arabia is also the biggest US arms market and buys more American arms than British, the report shows.

...

“A coalition of Arab states is putting mainly US- and European-sourced advanced arms into use in Yemen,” said Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher with Sipri’s arms and military expenditure programme. “Despite low oil prices, large deliveries of arms to the Middle East are scheduled to continue as part of contracts signed in the past five years.”

The report says Saudi Arabia is the world’s second largest weapons importer after India.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/22/saudi-arabia-surge-arms-imports-middle-east

Brits selling to Saudi Arabia too, but not as much as the US is.

If they had as many weapons to sell as the US they would be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/world/middleeast/un-finds-deliberate-destruction-of-hospitals-in-syria.html

Horrible, and sadly, not surprising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqeqAQ1ILI

this is incredible to me in the worst way http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/26/all-adult-males-in-one-iranian-village-executed-for-drug-offences-official-says

Iran remains a prolific executioner, second only to China.

China has fewer executions per capita.

Iran is widely suspected of using drugs convictions to punish people associated or thought to be associated with the Baloch insurgency so it's probably as least as likely that would have been the motivation behind executing large numbers of people from certain villages. It is also possible that it's hyperbole designed to reinforce the public perception of links between Baloch separatists and the smuggling of drugs from Afghanistan / Pakistan.

Iran apparently uses the same grounds with homosexuality convictions

Clinton and Libya

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as-two-week-truce-in-syria-goes-into-effect-guns-fall-silent/2016/02/27/1adccaaa-dc16-11e5-8210-f0bd8de915f6_story.html

Its mostly worked for one day so far!

There were no planes in the skies of the much-bombed city of Aleppo for the first time in days, and residents there ventured into the streets with newfound confidence, said Ameen al-
Halabi, an activist living in a rebel-held neighborhood.

Iran election: Reformists win all 30 Tehran seats

That's the good news.

Meanwhile in Syria, after one day of the truce, Russian planes began bombing again.

Truce is in the eye of the bombardier.

Condemning an apparent airstrike in Yemen that reportedly killed at least 32 civilians in a market northeast of Sana'a on Saturday, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for a prompt and impartial investigation into the incident, which saw a death toll that was among the highest from a single bombing in recent months.

According to a statement issued by his spokesperson, the Secretary-General is concerned about the continuing intense airstrikes and ground fighting in Yemen despite his repeated calls for a cessation of hostilities.

To that end, he strongly condemned the apparent airstrike on 27 February that hit Khaleq market, in Nahem District in the Yemeni capita, Sana'a, killing at least 32 civilians and injuring at least 41 civilians. The death toll is among the highest from a single bombing since September 2015...

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsId=53331#.VtSOevkrJhF

A rather critical take on US policy in Syria by Jeff Sachs:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ending-syrian-civil-war-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2016-02

Sachs asserts: It is sometimes claimed that the US did not act vigorously at this point. Obama’s political foes generally attack him for having taken too little action, not too much. But the US did in fact act to topple Assad, albeit mostly covertly and through allies, especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey (though neither country needed much prodding to intervene). The CIA and Saudi Arabia covertly coordinated their actions.

...The public should appreciate the dirty nature of the CIA-led fight. The US and its allies flooded Syria with Sunni jihadists, just as the US had flooded Afghanistan in the 1980s with Sunni jihadists (the Mujahideen) that later became Al Qaeda. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the US have regularly backed some of the most violent jihadist groups in a cynical miscalculation that these proxies would do their dirty work and then somehow be pushed aside.

Was the CIA really that actively involved? I know what they have done over the years in the past, but they seem more bumbling these days

The Saudis also seemed more preoccupied with Yemen

that's Seymour Hersch's claim. i don't think it's well substantiated

The U.S. is apparently going to release the government estimates of the number of people killed in drone strikes since 2009, though it will exclude Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They can add at least 150 today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35748986

Some of those 150 the other day were hit by manned aircraft

Mr Davis said the strike, by both drones and manned aircraft, took place on Saturday and targeted Raso Camp, a training facility about 120 miles (195km) north of the capital, Mogadishu.

wonder if the estimated number of civilians killed will still amount to "single digits", as brennan and feinstein have said?

xp: they seem more bumbling these days

The CIA have bumbled since the very beginning. My sense from reading Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2008) is that the inexperienced ideologues with limited language skills that occupy lower rungs of the covert ops division have always been the organization's Achilles heel. One reason there's a now national "division of labor" between the U.S., which does satellite reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and provides money, and regional proxies, which use U.S. resources to their own ends.

But don't the lower ring employees act at the direction of those on top?

so this is the big read of the day:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/

only read a little bit but already interesting stuff so far:

The current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who is the most dispositionally interventionist among Obama’s senior advisers, had argued early for arming Syria’s rebels. Power, who during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U.S. presidents for their failures to prevent genocide. The book, A Problem From Hell, published in 2002, drew Obama to Power while he was in the U.S. Senate, though the two were not an obvious ideological match. Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.

But what sealed Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent the country’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security team—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Biden’s national-security adviser—lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed.

omg that golda line

This posted already?
http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/1.708132

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas turned down a U.S. peace initiative presented to him during a West Bank meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, a Palestinian newspaper reported on Thursday.

The report in the Jerusalem-based Al-Quds cited a “source familiar with the details” from Wednesday’s meeting in Ramallah, the seat of the PA.
The new American initiative to restart peace talks included designating East Jerusalem as the capital of the future Palestinian state, halting settlement construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state and giving up the demand for a Palestinian right of return.

As our rabbi posted, "If this is not an acceptable point to begin negotiations then what is?"

well hello there
http://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-league-declares-hezbollah-a-terrorist-organization/

Hillary ( ...) lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (...) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed.

These may be facts and in the correct chronological order, but this gives them the appearance of post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

which part is not related? as i remember it gaddafi made his comments about killing the rebels in benghazi like rats, which prompted parts of the administration (including hillary + samantha powers) to advocate for a no-fly zone, there was not massacre but we don't know if there would've been one without the no-fly zone, and gaddafi was captured and executed probably due to the fact that the rebels no longer had to worry about being aerially bombed.

As chains of causation go that one is as reliable as, for example:

"Goring lobbied hard to allow the Luftwaffe to accomplish the conquest of Britain. The German bombs fell but London did not. Britain became the staging area for D Day and Hitler died in his bunker in Berlin."

iow, it is too reductive and implies a straight line, where in fact there were thousands of intervening factors between the 'cause' and the outcome.

ok i understand why yr example is too reductive to explain the relationship between goring lobbying for the luftwaffe to attack britian and hitler dying in a bunker bc it ignores the red army. but the no-fly zone certainly made it possible for the rebels to kill gaddafi so is there a specific step or point you feel they're leaving out here? like i understand the general critique but i don't understand the specific detail that requires it.

what do you feel that chronology is missing that without which it is a flawed description of the sequence of events? what is the important information or context that it's leaving out?

heavy bombardment of qdf's military by US/euro navies iirc. i mean a "no-fly zone" is never just that. i remember some quibbling leftists pointing out that the targets weren't just air and anti-air forces but really anything they could reach

Gave David Cameron his (Tony Blair) moment in the sun though, strutting around Benghazi like the conquering hero.

i don't know what that means to the argument you are having, just saying

xp

yeah, i mean the quote says explicitly "American bombs fell" so they included that bit

It appears I have failed to make my point clear. I'll try again, but I must use more words. The reductive narrative of events in chronological order quoted above implies the following:

A) Because Hillary lobbied for intervention, we intervened.
B) Because we intervened bombs fell
C) Because bombs fell Benghazi was spared AND Qaddafi was captured and executed.
C) Therefore, because Hillary lobbied for intervention Qaddafi was captured and executed.

My point is that the relationship between Hillary lobbying and Qaddafi's capture is far too tenuous to be causal and a far more accurate formulation would be that Hillary lobbied and as it happened to fall out Qaddafi was captured and executed. This is more accurate, because literally tens of thousands of individuals taking several million directly contributory actions intervened between Hillary's actions and Qaddafi's capture. Most importantly, Obama was the actor whose action was crucial, not Hillary, and we do not know how Hillary's lobbying affected his decision other than by observing that the action he took aligned with the action she advocated.

we know that obama was resistant to doing it and clinton/powers had to convince him. you're correct in your assertion that many things could have resulted out of the engagement besides gaddafi's capture. i am surprised at the suggestion that the article's author thought that once clinton intervened gaddafi's fall was inevitable. only in hindsight do we see that among other things, hillary's lobbying helped set into motion a chain of events that culminated [not inevitably] in gaddafi's death.

i mean the whole point of that section iirc is that despite a carefully planned libya intervention obama was still completely caught off-guard by the chaos that engulfed the country. i remember that among other things they said that they didn't realize tribal identities were as plentiful + strong as they turned out to be. so i don't think the author trying to argue that we can easily predict future events from current actions.

Interesting comment from Lavrov today that Russian negotiation means Assad now formally recognises legitimacy of US air strikes, effectively making them legal.

Jesus. Another car bomb in Ankara, another 27 dead.

The Turkish press has a gagging order on reporting it but there are rumours the death toll could be over 100.

AQIM kill 16+ in attack on beach resort in Ivory Coast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35798502

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/putin-announces-russia-will-pull-most-of-its-military-from-syria/2016/03/14/abd2a9d9-5e8c-4521-8b4b-960a8e6c96d4_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-high_syria%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

President Vladimir Putin announced Monday that Russia would begin withdrawing its military from Syria, potentially winding down nearly six months of airstrikes that have bolstered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and dealt a grave blow to Syrian rebels.

Putin said late Monday that Russia would withdraw the “main part” of the military deployment to Syria, starting Tuesday.

From the Guardian:

Given that Russia-backed separatists launched one of their biggest offensives in Ukraine in February 2015, just as Putin joined other world leaders in negotiating a ceasefire, there will undoubtedly be scepticism over whether the announcement of the end of the Syrian mission can be taken at face value. However, Russia’s overarching goal of securing a lead seat at the table over the fate of Syria has clearly been achieved, and a withdrawal will prevent the inevitable “mission creep” that appeared to be on the cards.

“Essentially, they’ve achieved their goals: they’ve stabilised the regime, turned momentum round on the battlefield so the regime has the upper hand, and now we’ve got a ceasefire and political talks,” said Mark Galeotti, professor of global affairs at New York University and currently based in Moscow.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/14/vladimir-putin-orders-withdrawal-russian-troops-syria

leaving after military deployment? as an american I don't understand this concept.

xp

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/world/africa/al-qaedas-african-offshoot-makes-a-lethal-comeback.html?ribbon-ad-idx=11&rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=article

The violence by an array of terrorist groups in Africa may itself be indicative of growing competition. One American military counterterrorism official said that Boko Haram, the extremist group that has terrorized northern Nigeria for years, might be trying to increase its body count to uphold the bloody standard of the Islamic State, to which it has pledged allegiance. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in turn, seems to be trying to keep up with the bloodshed.

Each of the militant groups competes for essentially the same things: recruits, credibility and cash, all of which are scarce.

Strikes on soft targets such as hotels are not particularly complicated operations, and are far easier and cheaper to pull off than controlling large swaths of land.

Even so, terrorist groups still need a source of money to help them hide out. The status of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s finances is unclear. While it has reaped sizable ransoms for the release of hostages, its kidnappings of a Swiss missionary and an Australian doctor and his wife, who were taken the same day as the Splendid Hotel attack, could indicate a need for more cash.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/17/ankara-car-bomb-kurdish-militants-claim-responsibility-attacks

TAK have claimed responsibility for the recent Ankara bombing, which probably won't stop repercussions against the PKK.