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ISIS Overruns Palmyra
Brindisi is visibly part of the world the Romans built. You walk outside and stumble over the terminal columns of the Appian way. They’re not a big deal. They’ve always been here, the way the Adriatic has always been here. They survived the Goths, the Saracines, the Longobards, the Normans, the Swabians. They were here when the Austrians ran the city. They were here when the Bourbons ran it. They made it through catastrophic earthquakes in 1456 and 1743. The city was bombed massively during the First and the Second World Wars. The columns are still here.
There’s a monument to Mussolini in Brindisi. It’s ridiculous, of course. You see it and laugh at it. No one looks at what the Romans left and laughs. In the story of human history, Mussolini meant nothing compared to them.
There’s a child in this apartment who takes all of it for granted. All this stuff is here because the Romans were here. They built everything, and after that, there were other people.
On the other side of the Mediterranean, ISIS has taken Palmyra. We know what they will do.
Published in General
Honestly, I’m at the point of zero tolerance with Obama voters. It’s not normally my way, but if I ever engage with one of them, I fear I may not be able to restrain myself from deriding and humiliating them.
It’s truly a Charleton Heston moment:
There is always genocide somewhere. There is always destruction and desecration. Millions of people have been butchered in my brief lifetime.
ISIS does seem to be particularly sadistic and well organized, but I’m not sure that explains everyone’s surprise at the President’s limited response. America is always sitting out a genocide or two.
Claire & All,
Qaddafi was no longer a problem to us. In fact he was an intelligence resource. The idiocy of the adolescent mentality that smashed into Libya was incredible. Here is one of the prime fools who seems to have learned absolutely nothing with years to reconsider.
https://youtu.be/mlz3-OzcExI
This is what America should have stayed away from. ISIS and the real Jihadists are the problem we need to concentrate on.
Regards,
Jim
Very much in keeping with how wars were traditionally conducted. Inhabitants of the West have acquired some very strange ideas about how war, true war, is fought. The complete despoliation and enslavement of the vanquished by the victor has a long track record in the annuls of human history, ISIS is getting back to our roots.
While the loss of these precious historical artifacts is indeed a grievous wound we should not forget that this is perhaps the least of their crimes against humanity. These barbarians openly run sex slave auctions in their capital. They have according to report even banned their sex slaves from wearing head scarves because too many have chosen to use them to hang themselves.
There is no bottom to their depravity, and it seems that while our President pats himself on the back for all his successes against them nothing we have done has really stopped them. They loose in one part of Iraq they gain another in Syria. At best we have slowed their expansion, which I guess is better than nothing. Though I can’t imagine it gives much comfort to the poor people of Palmyra.
Well you have a point to the extent that genocide and like atrocities are part of the human condition.
On the other hand, America precipitated this latest round of atrocities by creating a power vacuum in Iraq when she bugged out. And as I pointed out in #25, this was foreseeable.
We tend to use the term “iconoclastic” as approbation for innovative phenomena. However, the word’s history is that of exactly this activity: the destruction of images considered ungodly. Christianity has seen two major epochs of iconoclasm, in the Eastern Roman Empire starting in about the sixth century and during the sixteenth-century Reformation, mostly in Calvinist-dominated areas (Switzerland, the Netherlands [in particular], Scotland, Huguenot France, etc.).
The Muslim battle against “idolatry” under which this destruction is justified (much as for the Reformers) has waxed and waned over the centuries. ISIS, as good fanatics, have taken their Salafi/Wahhabi ideals (the former means something analogous to “apostolic” in Christian terms) and are prosecuting that Old Time Religion with particular glee at destroying items from the age of Jahiliyya or “pagan ignorance” which is irredeemably wicked. Though they’ve blown up plenty of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim shrines, too, lest people “associate” holiness with them when holiness is the sole property of God. (The Saudis, as Wahhabis, have done exactly this to almost all the major shrines in Mecca & Medina outside the hajj proper, not incidentally.)
This is only one of their crimes against humanity, but it isn’t the least. The point of this kind of destruction is to exterminate civilization in such a way that it can never be rebuilt. In a way that can never be undone.
Americans are arguing about who set the fire and whose responsibility it is to put it out. But the fire is spreading, no matter who set it. There are only two countries that could conceivably destroy them, and they clearly have to be destroyed. They can’t be contained. One is the United States, and the other’s Iran. If Americans won’t intervene, the wider region will put its hopes in Iran.
Realistically, do you really think the U.S. is going to do anything meaningful about ISIS under this president?
Or that a newly elected Republican is going to start off his first term by rushing off to war in the Middle East?
So…Hillary maybe?
ISIS is, as far as America is concerned, somebody else’s problem.
Okay, maybe not the least of their crimes, but everyone is reporting on this now and getting all worked up. I guess this is the latest news and all, but I think the their depraved slavery enterprise should get far more press time and public outrage than their destruction of ancient artifacts and sites.
An optimist, eh?
My guess is that half put their eggs in Iran’s basket and half put their eggs in the anti-Iran basket (Saudi Arabia). And then the baskets will weave a tangled web that catches Russia somehow (because they like a good scrap) and soon we have all of Europe involved (which I think adds up to 8 soldiers). And lots of people die for many years before the United States gets involved and things wrap up because everyone is tired.
And then we have meetings with lots of talk about peace.
Then everyone takes some time to regroup and elect some insane people and then the real war starts.
But that’s just a guess.
Re Claire: “… The begining and end of history is them”. And. “The point of this kind of destruction is to exterminate civilization in such a way that it can never be rebuilt. In a way that can never be undone.”
If Claire is right (or even mostly right) then there is no negotiated outcome, no political resolution possible, no containment possible. There is no head-in-the-sand ‘they’re not an existential threat.’ There is only they eventually destroy us ( along with most everything else ) or we destroy them…and the sooner the better.
Really? You believe Iran can actually destroy them? I don’t know about that, and I think given the choice between Iran and ISIS the Arabs might just choose ISIS. I can’t recall hearing any of the Sunnis being all that happy about Iran’s work in Iraq or Syria.
As for our ability to destroy them I think that is obvious, but I don’t see anyone all that keen on assembling the troops going in and tearing down this makeshift Caliphate. Rather we seem to be trying to “play it smart” by getting the various locals to do the fighting with minimal exertion on our part. This seems to be having rather mixed results. I guess in the long run we will probably win give the vast disparity in resources between ISIS and ourselves but until then I guess the fires will just have to keep burning.
Claire,
Thank you for your fire analogy as this is exactly the correct diagnosis for what has been going on and going wrong. I don’t agree with you on “the wider region”. The wider region knows full well that Iran loves to use Jihadist insurgencies to attack its neighbors. ISIS is a gift to Iran. If the U.S. continues to live in its fantasy world about making a deal with Iran then “the wider region” won’t be able to stop Iran or ISIS. The Saudi Coalition certainly knows this. The only one who appears to be playing both sides is Erdogan. I wish someone would give him a copy of this Martin Niemoller quote from the run up to the Holocaust.
For Erdogan it should read, first they came for the Israelis, then they came for the Saudis, then they came for the Egyptians, and then they came for me. Turkey is a secular Muslim state and no matter what his rhetoric the Jihadists sooner or later will get around to killing him.
Iran will never destroy ISIS anymore than Iran will wait 10 years to attain the bomb. They won’t even tell John Kerry what he wants to hear. I am sorry but the Obama Arab Spring fantasy is coming to its terrible conclusion. The Jihadist State is Jihadist.
Regards,
Jim
Unfortunately slavery is not as uncommon as we would like.
Wrt the destruction of ancient things – in addition to the fact that these are precious pieces of inheritance that can never be replaced (like when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas), what frightens me is the attitude that drives their destruction – a war with, or refusal to accept, history as it happened.
This never turns out well, because it’s to some degree psychotic.
Iran may or may not be able to, but it will go down trying.
ISIS has demonstrated how it deals with what comprises Iran’s essence – a Shia polity, a Shia majority – it kills Shias and destroys their holy places. And it’s right next door – not a continent away.
Iran unambiguously has more skin in the game than the West does. And Iran does not have the option of withdrawal.
This adds up to a no other option commitment that Arab states opposed to ISIS can count on.
Can the West really destroy them without creating more of them at the same time? I see no evidence that we know how to do this.
(I don’t know if Iran knows how to do this yet either. I do think they’re more motivated to figure it out fast.)
I do think that this is something the US and Iran can, and should, work on together.
Zafar,
This is Jihad taken literally. Total War against the whole world. It is the definition of psychotic. There has always been an alternate interpretation of Jihad in Islam. One which interprets the same passages in the Koran as a personal struggle internally. If someone follows the alternate they can be an ally. If they do not and insist upon the literal interpretation of the verses then they are everyone’s enemy.
Regards,
Jim
There is a map on page 1 of today’s WSJ showing the areas of expanded reach of ISIS after the recent two victories. Accompanying this is an article entailing the complications of gaining Sunni support for ousting ISIS in the Sunni dominated province of Anbar, when it appears it will require Sunni cooperation with Shiite militias.
I’m reduced to wondering what the Middle East and Iraq will look like if the Anbar Sunnis decide — as a quote from one Sunni tribal elder suggests — that they would be more willing to accept Sunni domination à la ISIS rather than Shiite domination. It suggests to me a partitioning of Iraq, with Anbar and some additional territory becoming something like The Caliphate State of Islam or something.
The problem with those guys is that they would never stop to negotiate. It seems like they are for a permanent state of war with their adversaries.
The punch line of history is that their destruction will leave nothing behind for us to remember them by. I believe there are other periods in history that we find it hard to understand what went on during a certain period, and this makes me think that during those periods, there was some nomadic military force that came in and destroyed all the people and almost all of the artifacts. If they left any artifacts from previous times, they didn’t make any of their own. That might be why we find it so difficult to tell the story of a people who were essentially destroyers but had nothing of their own to leave behind after the destruction.
Yes, please don’t become distracted by my enemies on the conservative side of the aisle telling you about the failings of my foreign policy inaction. You really need to be distracted by the real threat to civilization which is climate change. And it’s killing us today! Don’t worry about ISIS! If we don’t get this climate change under control, it’s going to kill ISIS too.
Wait a second, I didn’t mean to imply we have a strategy to use climate change to kill ISIS. Or that we that we have a strategy to save ourselves from death by climate change today so that ISIS can kill us tomorrow…
It’s so stinkin’ absurd, I can’t help myself. I actually picture Obama back in the Oval afterward sitting on the floor cross-legged and passing a doobie with his staff while they laugh their posteriors off over his joke. “And then you know what I told the Coast Guard graduates??….”
I consider this the most generous interpretation of Obama’s comments. If he takes himself seriously, then the most warped and unserious man on the planet also holds the world’s most powerful office. It’s too terrifying to contemplate.
P.S. I bet Obama’s friends were really yucking it up when the Army cadets were forced to walk a mile in red pumps, too.
Democrats hate our military.
What about Russia? Putin’s army seems fairly capable, and clearly he’s not afraid to use it. Putin backed Assad and blocked UN sanctions on Syria, would he be willing to intervene if ISIS threatened to overrun Damascus?
He’ll support Assad and Tehran with weapons. I don’t think we’ll be seeing more than a few discreet Russian boots on the ground. The Shi’a militia will do the dirty work.
So is that good or bad? I put on my realpolitik hat and think couldn’t we quietly cut a deal with Putin and agree to drop our demand that Assad step down? Could a Russian-armed Syria plus a US-supplied Iraq supported by American airpower crush ISIS between them without American boots on the ground?
Then I put on my idealist hat and cringe, both at the idea of letting Assad remain in power and at the idea of any kind of deal with the likes of Putin. But at this point the idea of a functional pro-Western democracy in Syria seems delusional, and our only options are:
Which is least bad?
A lot of people assume, and it seems plausible to me, that Assad quit Palmyra precisely to deflect attention away from his crimes and neutralize Western opposition to his regime and Iranian intervention. In other words, the fall of Palmyra was cynically engendered by Assad himself. This is in French, but you can put it through Google translate and it comes out quite intelligible. It’s plausible to me.
I believe US airpower, by itself, would be more than sufficient to deliver a blow to ISIS big enough that people would cease to believe the following two things–which are now widespread and incredibly dangerous perceptions, throughout the region and in fact the world:
1) We’re supporting ISIS; or
2) ISIS can survive the worst aerial assault the most modern military in the world is capable of raining on it, which is evidence of a divine plan.
We may not be able to figure out how to put Syria back again, and we may not have a good plan for tomorrow. But we could disabuse quite a number of people of those beliefs completely by the end of the day. It’s certainly obvious to me why we should. And we aren’t doing it.
You can’t dismiss the huge number of people who now believe 1) or 2) above as insane–because that’s exactly how it looks. People in this region do know and remember what the United States is capable of doing with air power when it chooses, and know that either we’re not doing it, or that ISIS is miraculously surviving it. How would you explain that?
Worst is ISIS defeating Assad and acquiring the very advanced and lethal military equipment he has, including chemical weapons, and that’s a no-brainer.
Hmm… This is a new insight for me. It’s plausible to me too.
I guess we should be glad Assad doesn’t have oil fields to set aflame or vast tank-farms of oil he can begin emptying into the Mediterranean sea.
It is great that certain governments in the Middle East are allied with the U.S. (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Israel.) We should treat them well.
But provided that a Middle Eastern government isn’t a criminal regime I don’t think we should care very much whether it is a “functional pro-Western democracy”. Egypt, for example, has been an authoritarian pit my entire life and the U.S. was copacetic with that.
As a practical matter, Arab culture appear to struggle with the “functional democracy” thing. The functional democracies in the Middle East (Israel and Turkey) are dominated by non-Arabs.
Also, “functional pro-Western Arab democracy” appears to be a contradiction in terms. Based on results, it appears that Arab voters generally vote for the Islamist parties. For what it’s worth, Iraq hasn’t yet voted the Muslim Brotherhood into power as Egypt recently did.
I do not think that the options you posed are the only ones the U.S. has. NB: After six years of Smart Diplomacy (which from the outside appears to be indistinguishable from idiotic foreign policy) we have nothing but crappy options left— that is, options with a high risk of not working out to our satisfaction.
But we cannot reject our current lousy options and send the waiter back to fetch us some decent ones. That ship has sailed.
I agree with Clare, we cannot know if we can keep Syria intact. I don’t know how much we should care whether Syria survives intact. Do we really care about preserving where the Sykes–Picot Agreement drew the borders? Because great power logic prefers to prevent local hegemons from emerging I think that means—should Syria break up—that we should try to arranging borders for a balance of power.
An objective should be denying Iran a Syrian proxy. Which denies Hezbollah—an Iranian proxy that had denied Lebanon customary sovereignty over her own land—a host on Lebanon’s border.
I understand that all of the significant anti-ISIS factions in Syria are Islamist. (Yet more benefits of Smart Diplomacy!) Tough. We pick the least bad ones and support them. Maybe they will still be standing after ISIS and Assad are finished and can form new
governmentsregimes. And maybe we will retain some marginal influence with them after they come to power. BTW, how did that work out for us in Iran and Libya?We’re at the point where there will be no good outcomes. All we can do is try to prevent the worse case outcomes.
I missed this conversation last week, as I’m busy writing my dissertation on another archaeological site in Syria. I did, however, want to make a few comments:
I visited Palmyra within days of arriving in Syria for the first time in 1997. It really is an amazing archaeological site, with extensive 1st through 3rd cent. AD Roman ruins, as well as the Fakhr-al-Din al-Maani Castle (a 13th cent. AD Mamluk fortress) on a nearby hill overlooking the Roman site. At the time I visited, the castle had one older gentleman guarding the gate to get in. After paying him, one was free to roam all over the castle, including climbing up onto and jumping around on the battlements with no railings to prevent one from falling off. It was the perfect place to take photos of the Roman ruins and watch the sunset over the Syrian desert.
The modern town of Tadmor is adjacent to the Palmyra ruins and is also the location of the notorious Tadmor political prison, which, not surprisingly, ISIS just blew up. On an old hard drive I used to have a list of names of Syrian citizens who were thought to have been disappeared to Tadmor prison following the uprising in the 1980’s. As a symbol of the horrors of the Assad regime, it had few equals. It’s one structure I have little problem with ISIS blowing up.