kustomkarkommando posted:

But first we must build a couple of five-star hotels and massively ambitious sprawling business complexes that will take years to finish.

Priorities!

Torpor posted:

That is not entirely accurate...
http://www.kurdistaninvestment.org/docs/licensed_projects.pdf

kustomkarkommando posted:

Once you pop you can not stop

quote:

“[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet”

Omi-Polari posted:

Shbobdb posted:

That is a pretty awesome analysis. Hits at the anomie that seems to be a function of Western society. I like it. Radical Islam as a Romantic movement.

Torpor posted:

That entire list is a a mix of "oh that is a smart investment" and

unfortunately a lot more than good investments.

New York Times posted:

Mr. Barzani, who owns the Korek cellphone company as well as one of the biggest shopping malls in Erbil, bemoaned the more than 600-mile border that Kurdistan must defend now...

"We know how to fight in the mountains,” Mr. Barzani said, sipping a Starbucks Frappuccino. “But this is the desert, and it’s so hot."

kustomkarkommando posted:

vaguely related quote that always cracks me up

Torpor posted:

That is not entirely accurate...
http://www.kurdistaninvestment.org/docs/licensed_projects.pdf



Kurdistan needs a emote that is a cross between and

SedanChair posted:

I feel like America keeps loving over the people who want to be like them the most. We did it to Castro, we did it to Ho Chi Minh, etc.

SedanChair posted:

I feel like America keeps loving over the people who want to be like them the most. We did it to Castro, we did it to Ho Chi Minh, etc.

Shbobdb posted:

That is a pretty awesome analysis. Hits at the anomie that seems to be a function of Western society. I like it. Radical Islam as a Romantic movement.

ascendance posted:

And Fascism was a Romantic movement too.

Torpor posted:

"the plan" should consist of effectively assisting local allies on the ground. Doing things like answering phone calls helps; also training troops, providing equipment, providing ACTUAL BOMB DETECTORS, etc. It doesn't even have to be fancy poo poo.

The US is throwing MRAPs at US police agencies for basically free; why didn't we give them to the Iraqi's who are actually having problems with IEDs? Give them things like helmets. The Kurds in particular appear to have poo poo equipment, and I'm not even talking artillery and tanks.

For instance, on NPR, the kurds are apparently suffering a lot of casualties from IEDs; that type of thing is demoralizing. MRAP would be pretty handy, not to mention body armor and helmets.

The Kurds in Syria have basically fancy pajamas and AK47s with apparently Ork made vehicles. Things like helmets and body armor would be good things. Hell, proper footwear would probably be a step up.

There is an entire unit in the US Army dedicated to supporting allies, actually probably several. At any rate they are not being used. Maybe they will be used after the election?

Effective assistance would also consist of diplomatically attempting to heal or bridge rifts between ethnic factions. I think, to an extent, this actually happening but not really publicized. It is also contingent upon answering phones, which is something the US is not good at.

I think the US can actually use assistance to the Kurds in the region to moderate stances and potentially heal rifts between themselves and the Turks. For instance going to the PYD and telling them to go to the bargaining table with other factions in Syrian Kurdistan and they will get tanks, would be an effective use of this method.

I feel like the bombing campaign is like a band aid. The actual police and soldiers on the ground need to be well trained and have decent morale. I've never been a soldier but I imagine having protection against bullets and IEDs would be a big help.

I'm not sure how I feel about the FSA and other opposition groups, they seem to be a fractured mess.

I think the current plan is more focused on the diplomacy but not so much on military support sufficient to stabilize our allies in the face of IS attacks. The fact that the operation had no operation name until like last week is indicative of the US not really knowing what to do. If the white house thinks a bombing campaign is necessary, it should probably send enough aircraft to conduct an actual bombing campaign.

SedanChair posted:

It's not as though Obama will endanger his party by taking meaningful action, but they could be hitting ISIS harder from the air and really pushing for support in Congress.

Torpor posted:

It is not as though the US doesn't literally have thousands of vehicles literally rusting in the desert: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.2030947,-120.1438894,1300m/data=!3m1!1e3

I am sure something there might come in handy if you were fighting a war.

Edit: holy poo poo that is a lot of M1s. That is probably several armored divisions worth of tanks.


DoubleEdit: there is also a gigantic field in Tucson with hundreds and hundreds of plans that have a 0% chance of being actually used by the US, but could probably outfit the world's largest obsolete airforce. Except it doesn't matter if the air force is obsolete when IS has no air force.

CommieGIR posted:

They don't have to send anything, we've had aircraft staged out there for years. Nothing new is coming in, its stuff we've already had there.

ascendance posted:

Thing is, we like the Kurds because they are plucky underdogs, who seem to like all the things we like - secularism, pluralism, free enterprise, equal rights for women, etc.

Thing is, our regional allies - Turkey and the Saudis - can't really stand them. Even Israel wants to keep Daash around as a bugbear in the Iran/Syria/Hezbollah axis.

Which is why the Kurds have poo poo gear.

Edit: Also, the Kurds are mostly a bunch of ex-Commies who have apparently become anarchists, as seen in an article posted earlier. I'm sure if Daash weren't threatening to blow the poo poo out of us, the Realists at the State Department would love to cut a deal with them.

tekz posted:

The Kurds have everything from islamists (consider how many kurdish recruits ISIS has) to hardline leftists and are basically your average american patriot's worst nightmare. Also poo poo like honor killings and backwards tribalism is pretty rife among rural kurds. Female genital mutilation is still widely practiced, although obviously not by urban and educated kurds, and the Communists stamp it out where they have control.

I really don't know how this idealized fantasy poo poo gets peddled because this group of sand warriors is at war with people the west doesn't like. Was this how the mujahideen got romanticized in the 80s?

tekz posted:

I really don't know how this idealized fantasy poo poo gets peddled because this group of sand warriors is at war with people the west doesn't like. Was this how the mujahideen got romanticized in the 80s?

Torpor posted:

Who said anything about idealized? Pretty much any group in the world, and in particular in that region has some or all of those things. The KRG is literally one of the few groups in the area that seems to have some sort of organization, the PYD seems to be doing an okay job, even though their ideology is kind of insane.

Oh yeah and they aren't going anywhere so we had better figure out how to deal with them. The best way to deal with them is to engage with them. That is like diplomacy 201.

Libluini posted:

Man that guy couldn't have done more damage with this interview if he tried. That reads like some weird caricature written up by an American right-winger to portrait Muslims as inherently evil.

Atomizer posted:

Yeah, the FGM & honor killings are the not-so-good aspects of some of the Kurds. On the other hand, have you seen what ISIS does in comparison?!? Seriously though, the Kurds aren't perfect, but neither is anyone else, let alone us. Kurds at least seem to be open minded, so there's an opportunity for diplomacy and with some humanitarian assistance I think we could convince them not to chop off their daughters' clits.

quote:

Kurdish fighters in Iraq IS executing prisoners and revenge have at least one Arab village razed. That says a Kurdish commander in a report that Nieuwsuur broadcasts tonight. Human rights organization Human Rights Watch demands investigation.

Nieuwsuur reporter Jan Eikelboom filmed Kurdish fighters who are fighting IS at the front in Iraq. He attended, among others, the Dutch Kurd Serdar Dosky . He is the leader of the Kurdistan People's Defence Forces, a volunteer army.

At a time when Dosky thought the camera was off, he told Eikelenboom that his prisoner of war fighters and wounded prisoners executed immediately. Dosky IS known that wounded fighters be shot. "A bullet costs about 50 cents. A second bullet and you're from. We just want no prisoners."

Anger Serdar Dosky said in response that it is a terrible misunderstanding. He speaks of a "joke". "These kinds of statements we do out of anger over the actions of IS," he says.

He denies that there ever prisoner of war made by his battle group, "was a few months ago IS on the winning side and we did not even have a chance to make prisoners, terrorists fight to the death Even now, so we have never been able to make a prisoner of war.. ., we have never done this. "

Revenge Nieuwsuur also visited the Arab town of Barzan. There is nothing left. Kurds are the homes of thousands of residents razed to the ground, saying Kurdish commanders. The Kurds wanted to take revenge for the residents of the village, in turn, would have been killed. Kurdish fighters brutally

Human Rights Watch is shocked by the images of Nieuwsuur and demanded an investigation. Tirana Hassan, HRW human rights observer in Iraq, said: "Any form of collective punishment that no legitimate military purpose and civilians disproportionately affects such as the massive destruction of homes, is a violation of the law of war."

She wants the Peshmerga doing research. "That army, the village is now in your hands. Moreover, the government of Kurdistan should ensure that their fighters adhere to the laws of war."

Human Rights Watch condemned before the Iraqi army and IS-combatants for committing war crimes.

SP-board The Kurdish warrior Serdar Dosky lived ten years in the Netherlands in 2005 and returned back to Kurdistan. In the Netherlands, he was active for the SP, where he was for some time a member of the national board. In 2004 he was on the ballot for the European Parliament.

After terror group IS early June Mosul, Iraq's second city, had conquered Dosky was asked for the Kurdistan People's Defence Forces. This should support the Kurdish forces, the Peshmerga, where necessary.

tekz posted:

Kurd cleansing of an arab village, reported by the Dutch government press.

Here's a lovely machine translation:

Torpor posted:

That entire list is a a mix of "oh that is a smart investment" and

unfortunately a lot more than good investments.

Margaret Thatcher posted:

This translation reads like the Kurdish fighters were the ones doing the executing?

icantfindaname posted:

The people posting about how the Kurds are the Good Guy western secular socialists are in for one nasty shock, huh?

Cat Mattress posted:

This nasty shock is then generally followed by "they're all bad guys, so nuke them all, turn the entire desert into glass" which is not really very constructive.

Kurds are still comparatively much better than Daesh, but they're not angels of virtue. And neither are they a monolithic army where every unit has similar level of control and training. Expect more war crimes.

Omi-Polari posted:

Some rambling thoughts after reading that interview.

When we're talking about Western recruits who join ISIS, everyone wants to know why they do it. Why would they leave all these opportunities afforded to them in the developed world, and go off to become suicide bombers? And it gets more complicated because a lot of them are not crazy or living in poverty, they don't have objectively bad lives considering the circumstances. So enter in theories about how their religion made them do it, or America was too mean, etc.

But I remember hanging out with my Pentecostal friends years ago, who were some deeply alienated people and who became attracted to conspiracy theories. Bear with me here. But there's also economists talking about how the idea of an "ownership society" -- where human development is underwritten by property ownership -- is declining among young people, who have both found it increasingly out of reach and less relevant because of the internet. What helps is that the promise of an ownership society is a myth anyways. Too much chasing the dream of ownership (particularly homes) and you can actually go broke. At best, you end up in a suburb owning a bunch of stuff, but you're surrounded by a big void. You get depressed. This was demonstrated in the 1990s with some popular movies about social alienation like American Beauty and Fight Club. So gently caress that, we're into possessing and sharing "experiences" now. Well, ISIS is promising one hell of an experience.

There's this great Orwell review of Mein Kampf where he really grasped some of this way back. The Nazi comparisons to ISIS can be a bit strained, but see for yourself:

There's this one ISIS video that really stood out to me. There was some young foreign fighter (I think he might have been American) who they filmed charging a Syrian army position Rambo-style, getting himself killed by a rocket-propelled grenade in the process. And the point of the video was to demonstrate his sacrifice and use that as a recruiting tool. Now Western militaries still imbue self-sacrifice with meaning, like dying while saving one's comrades. And American military propaganda is heavy on why enlisting will give purpose to your life. But this seemed much more like a deliberate attempt to get himself killed in battle, and that was something to be celebrated on its own terms.

Shageletic posted:

Carl Jung used to refer to Hitler as the loudspeaker making audible the inaudible parts of the German soul. In other words, Hitler provided (to some, enough) a great narrative that those disenchanted by rationality and progress can glom onto, and connect with some primordial need to join a whole that eliminates their individuality. There is a need easily seen in young men to give themselves to something, and its a huge weakness in western society that we don't give a positive outlet to that.

EDIT: Fanatical Islam is the most virulent alternative to cosmopolitanism and secularism that currently exists today, its no surprise that the resentful privileged flock to it in an attempt at achieving greatness.

ReV VAdAUL posted:

It's the killing hope problem, any kind of decent society can be brought down by Western Capital and will be brought down because a dictatorship will be more profitable. So you're left with lovely corrupt dictatorships, failed progressive movements and viciously regressive movements that are so extreme and violent they're resilient to the forces that brought down the progressive movements.

computer parts posted:

That seems like an odd reading of history. The Middle East was more secular in the 1970s, but that's only because it was a bunch of secular dictators propped up by Western interests.

The idea of being "secular" in the Middle East is often code for "supports the West", which is obviously not in a lot of the people's best interests. Compare with how "Communism" and its variants are treated in Eastern Europe - as a reminder of Russian hegemony and treated primarily as a conservative line of thought.

ReV VAdAUL posted:

The Arab spring was my point of reference not the 70s. Any movement for progress was crushed or co-opted. Egypt got lots of fancy new hardware after crushing democracy, Libyan rebels were used to open up the country for Western exploitation, Bahraini protests were crushed by a US ally and so on. The only options in the region are us backed dictatorships or regressive dictatorships that can withstand efforts to undermine them.

computer parts posted:

That's a dumb reference point though. The area's still in a period of transition from the 1970s (like the US, but to a more extreme degree because of the lack of economic wealth).

ReV VAdAUL posted:

So why is using the most recent major point of transition for the region dumb? We have clear evidence in multiple cases that attempts at positive reform towards democracy will be co-opted or crushed. IS however have achieved considerable success and shown a level of resilience greater than their progressive rivals.

computer parts posted:

Because it's not a point of transition. To be a major point of transition it has to have sticking potential.

There are points in history that are legitimate transition points, and there are points in history that fail but are built upon in upcoming decades. The Arab Spring was the latter case, as was the Spring of Nations.

Cat Mattress posted:

This nasty shock is then generally followed by "they're all bad guys, so nuke them all, turn the entire desert into glass" which is not really very constructive.

Kurds are still comparatively much better than Daesh, but they're not angels of virtue. And neither are they a monolithic army where every unit has similar level of control and training. Expect more war crimes.

Cippalippus posted:

Fascism, at least Italian Fascism, wasn't romantic at all. Futurism is almost the exact opposite, in fact.

icantfindaname posted:

I dunno I'm pretty sure Ho Chi Minh and Castro would both have been very happy to be American aligned tinpot dictators. We missed a good opportunity to snatch a few satellites from the USSR, sure

ascendance posted:

Given the kinds of statements made on this forum, by people who have minimal stake in the conflict (especially recently in the Canadian politics thread), is it any surprise that the Kurds, who have actually have had kin murdered and raped by Daash, might not be taking prisoners?