Trump’s alleged Russia ties, praise for strongmen, positive statements about Assad until days before the attack, and expressed disdain for world opinion set the bar so low that he got credit just for upholding an international norm against chemical weapons, and showing he was prepared to go up against Moscow. The use of sarin gas underlines how desperate his situation is. Internal conflict in Saudi Arabia is also a risk: a recent incident where a drone flew into the royal compound in Riyadh triggered a coup scare and highlighted nervousness within the Saudi royal family about opposition towards Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reforms. Local governments weaponised police to kill or expel political opponents. In essence, he argues, three new factors are driving the latest set of developments. Afghanistan is also an increasingly important market for Chinese goods. It also highlighted president Barack Obama’s self-inflicted vulnerability over the deal, which he approved personally as an executive agreement rather than submitting it to the US Senate for formal ratification as a treaty. A cynic might say that one reason the war has dragged on so long is that most sides have been achieving their objectives by letting it continue. This approach, if it does emerge, would be a classic instance of offshore balancing, where an offshore power counters a rival by backing opposing coalitions in a region of strategic competition, supporting local allies indirectly (with weapons, money, advisers intelligence or diplomatic cover) to prevent any one rival dominating the region. The new approach may signal the re-emergence of Washington’s former strategy of working through regional coalitions to counter rivals in the Middle East, thereby enabling US military disengagement from the post-9/11 wars. Maritime powers (including Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the US for much of its history until 1945) historically used offshore balancing to counter land-based rivals while lowering their own costs and avoiding decisive commitment. In other words, I traveled by air. These tend to be small, secretive and far more violent than the militias or mass movements. Five Republican members of Congress from Ohio voted Wednesday evening to reject an Electoral College certification, an action taken hours after ⦠He also was a special adviser for counterinsurgency to former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. After 2003, the Iraq war mired Americans in a full-scale military occupation. Britain continues to lumber towards the Brexit cliff, its unfortunate and ill-starred prime minister marked down as “dead girl walking”. Assad’s reliance on artillery and aircraft underlines his lack of ground assets: despite Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah support, his forces have their hands full consolidating control over Aleppo, trying to relieve the isolated city of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, and fighting on the southern front against other rebel groups. The pandemic — and the grievances inspired by heavy-handed responses to it — have brought these tensions to a head. , A Short History Of The Rise And Fall Of The West, Better read than dead – books and reading, Down Under – Australian history and politics, Foggy ruins of time – from history’s pages, Losing Earth – Tarkeeth and other matters environmental, My country, ’tis of thee – on matters American, Race riots spread after death of unarmed black man, A cowboy key – how the west was sung – In That Howling Infinite, That was the year that was – a year of living dangerously – In That Howling Infinite, That was the year that was – a year of living dangerously. This brings us back to our original question: what’s different now? Whether you think that’s good or bad probably depends on your view of America’s role in the world, and the longstanding propensity of US leaders to use unilateral military force. One of the strategy’s key attractions would be that it might restore a critical strategic distinction: the difference between hugely expensive (and largely unsuccessful) efforts to dominate a region directly, and the far cheaper and more achievable goal of merely preventing a rival doing so. ; a fiftieth anniversary tribute to Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, Recalling the Mersey Poets; and musical settings to two of our poems, the aforementioned Oh, Jerusalem, and E Lucevan Le Stelle. Here is his latest piece for The Australian on this subject. Obviously, when you launch a gas attack using a fighter jet flown by a two-star general from the same prominent family as the provincial governor, you’re telegraphing that this is a pretty serious priority. A former Australian infantry officer with a doctorate in anthropology, Kilcullen has made quite a name for himself in recent years. Washington would operate with allied support where possible, but strike unilaterally if needed. Armed groups have formed across the political spectrum, worsening divisions the coronavirus has exposed in American society. His administration also voted for a UN resolution lifting sanctions on Iran before congress had properly begun its review of the agreement. Ancient statues were dynamited as pagan idols. The key to understanding the strike, though, lies in a question that’s been somewhat overlooked: why did Bashar al-Assad’s regime need to use the nerve agent in the first place? As of mid-April, apart from tiny regime enclaves at Fua and Kefraya, Idlib is almost totally controlled by a jihadist coalition led by al-Qa’ida’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, still widely known by its former name, the Nusra Front. Given widespread combat experience from the war on terror, this reservoir of military potential sets the US apart from any other Western democracy. For a President who spoke blithely on the campaign trail about Japan and South Korea acquiring their own nuclear weapons to deal with Pyongyang, this represents a big step forward. As a Christmas treat, we reblogged English music chronicler Thom Hickey’s lovely look at the old English carol The Holly and the Ivy, And finally, for the last post of this eventful year, we selected five christmas Songs to keep the cold winter away. It was a maximalist approach that had adverse consequences in terms of lives lost, funds wasted, credibility eroded and loss of freedom of action (particularly after 9/11, as the US became bogged down in self-inflicted wars of occupation). But, offshore balancing requires a cool nerves, a steady hand and deft footwork. They also made significant gains into the al-Ghab plain, Syria’s breadbasket, an area essential to the regime’s ability to feed Syria’s pro-government population. Another possible opportunity is eastern Europe, where Washington may continue arming Ukraine, and support the Baltics and Scandinavia to balance Russia while stepping back from permanent NATO commitments (or making them more conditional on European defence spending.). Having lost 98 per cent of its territory in Iraq and Syria, the group is looking for greener pastures in Africa, The Philippines, and particularly Afghanistan. And the women come out to cut up what remains, But the face of global conflict is ever-changing. He contends that war today often resides in liminal strategies, or strategies that âRide the edge of detection in order to achieve political and military goals without triggering a response.â These criticisms, too, are overblown. David Kilcullen is the author of the highly acclaimed The Accidental Guerrilla and Counterinsurgency. In April 2014, a dispute over grazing rights in Nevada triggered an armed stand-off between militia and federal agencies including the Bureau of Land Management and the FBI. Sure, we all know that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel – but we are not supposed to shout it out loud in case it unleashed all manner of mayhem on the easily irritated Muslim street. Fear of other groups, encroachment of those groups into one’s territory and collapse of confidence in government’s ability to impartially keep the peace are the key factors that provoke communal violence. But the focus on hate is a misunderstanding of what drives violence in internal conflicts. Membership surged after the 2008 financial crisis, then accelerated as thugs from both political extremes fought each other with baseball bats, bicycle chains and pepper spray in the streets of Washington, DC, Seattle, Portland and Detroit. The group’s leader, until recently known by his nom de guerre “Norman Spear”, was unmasked in January as Rinaldo Nazzaro, a New Jersey native based in St Petersburg, Russia, from where he directed cells in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. Inevitably, we dust down Rudyard Kipling’s well worn rhyme: When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, Home of the hateful, fearful and heavily armed. Rhetorical questions just keep coming. Other recent signs include statements by Trump to the effect that he seeks to withdraw from Syria while sponsoring an Arab coalition to prevent the re-emergence of Islamic State. Our continuing forest fight saw us return to Tolkien’s Tarkeeth, focusing this time around on fires that recalled Robert Plant’s lyrics in Ramble On: In the darkest depths of Mordor. âOn the one hand they can be engaging in what they consider to be absolute war and we are blithely unaware of that - so that by the time we realise we ⦠and here are Those were the years that were : read our past reviews here: 2016 2015. Kilcullen is, as ever, well worth reading. If violence does spread, it will not be a re-run of the American Civil War. On the international and the domestic front, it appeared as if we were condemned to an infernal and exasperating ‘Groundhog Day’. Washington’s original war aims — destroy al-Qa’ida’s Afghan base in retaliation for 9/11 and overthrow the Taliban as punishment for protecting Osama bin Laden’s outfit — had already been achieved by mid-December 2001, less than eight weeks after the war began. Likewise, independent-minded UN ambassador Nikki Haley will need to collaborate more closely with the State Department and the White House than she has done to date. And then there were the British history buffs who reminded the world that Afghanistan was indeed the graveyard of empires, so well illustrated in the famous painting of the last stand of the 44th Foot on the bleak hillside of Gandamak during the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842. More fundamentally, the goal of destroying Islamic State may not actually be the higher strategic priority, at least not in Syria. Kilcullen notes that a body of opinion in the US intelligence community, and also, within Israeli intelligence, holds that the threat from Iran has been overstated, that Iran’s ability to dominate the so-called “land bridge” from Afghanistan to the Golan Heights is overblown, and that no regime in Tehran would be suicidal enough to consider a nuclear strike on Israel, Saudi Arabia or any of its other regional rivals. But the callousness of McVeigh’s attack made most militias condemn him, and — by tarnishing the self-perceived righteousness of their anti-government cause — undermined the movement he hoped to inspire. But his nonchalance belies the seriousness of America’s turmoil. Already confronted with the Russian ascendency in the east, and the prospects of the Ukrainian – Donetsk conflict firing up in the near future, the EU’s next big challenge is likely to be reacquainting itself with its original raisin d’etre – the European Project that sought to put an end to a century of European wars – and addressing the potential expulsion of parvenu, opportunistic member states who fail to uphold the union’s democratic values. Class inequities, which track closely with racial disparities here, have prompted socialist groups — notably Antifa but also traditionally nonviolent Trotskyist and anarchist networks — to arm themselves for an incipient revolutionary moment. David Kilcullen, The Australian, 30th May 2020. Others asked what were the long term goals, and what was the exit strategy. All this may be evidence of an emerging post-deal strategy, whereby the US works through Israel and Arab partners in the region to weaken and contain Iran. In Minneapolis, the killing by white police officers of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, brought thousands of protesters on to the streets for several nights of rioting, with multiple buildings and cars burned and shopping malls and restaurants looted. For political reasons, Israeli and Arab components would operate separately, but Washington would co-ordinate with each and support both to prevent the re-emergence of Islamic State while containing and undermining Iran, Hezbollah and Russia (with the emphasis very much on Iran). It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty whether significant violence will occur this year. The little county where I live — only a half-million people, in a part-urban, part-wilderness area of the Rocky Mountains — has a death toll higher than Australia and New Zealand combined. While I am not as cynical about this as my hypothetical observer, I am very sceptical about the prospects for peace anytime soon. The failure to act after Ghouta so appalled some members of Obama’s cabinet that Democratic “Syria hawks” (including former secretary of state John Kerry) came out in support of last week’s Shayrat strike. David Kilcullen is a former lieutenant-colonel in the Australian Army and was a senior adviser to US general David Petraeus in 2007-08, when he helped to design the Iraq war coalition troop surge. Despite media portrayals of its leaders as racially motivated, in fact the sovereign citizen ideology is neither left nor right in a traditional sense — it might better be described as a form of militant libertarianism with roots in the self-reliant cowboy culture of the old west. Whilst a American force that once reached 140,000 soldiers America could not wipe out the Taliban, a mere 13,000 troops bolstering the Afghan army today, seems capable keeping the Taliban more or less in check. The job market, strong until mid-March, has fallen off a cliff. Realising a new approach to Beijing following the Integrated Review will require policymakers to acknowledge the significant historical baggage that comes with policy design in this area. We are living through such weeks now. See also, a prior post featuring David Kilcullen: One, Two, Three, What Are We Fighting For? At least one person has been killed in the riots and the Minnesota National Guard is expected to join the police in attempting to restore order. Lenin called moments like this a “revolutionary situation”. A week later demonstrators, some carrying AK-47 rifles, swarmed into the state capital in Lansing, Michigan, to confront politicians. Rather, given the multiplicity of groups involved, their geographical overlap and loose structure, we can expect something much more diffuse. There is no public evidence of any relationship between Nazzaro and Russian intelligence, though his presence in Russia triggered speculation in the media and within The Base itself. He is the author of Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror (Black Inc). And fear of the coronavirus, alongside the demonstrable inability of government to keep people safe, is driving today’s growth in armed militancy”. There was Laugh Out Loud – The Funniest Books Ever. If anything, Israel’s willingness to directly engage Iranian and Iranian-backed forces in Syria has only increased after since Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal. After more than 17 years, Afghanistan is the longest war in American history, with over two thousand soldiers dead and some twenty three thousand wounded. https://howlinginfinite.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/51-days-at-waco.pdf, Between the idea US President Donald Trump’s missile strike against Syria’s Shayrat air base last week, responding to the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun in northern Idlib province, garnered cautious praise across the political spectrum. Young people, from east and west Africa flee poverty, unemployment, and civil war, to wind up in Calais or in pop-up slave markets in free but failed Libya. The bomber, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, claimed to be enraged by government overreactions at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco, Texas (1993), which between them saw law enforcement kill 78 civilians including 26 children. Whilst the Taliban appear to control the arid, countryside But 10,000 Afghan police and soldiers, 3,400 civilians and an unknown number of insurgents died in 2017 alone. On Australia’s part, after peaking during 2010-11 with reconstruction and stabilization forces in Oruzgan province and a special operations task group that achieved widespread respect for its professionalism, our commitment now stands at about 300 personnel. Click on the picture below to read the New York Times’ commentary on the negotiations. There will be the wars of the ISIS succession as regional rivals compete with each other for dominance. Israel decided to retain its advanced fighter aircraft in-country rather than send them to a scheduled exercise in Alaska last month and this week it raised military forces to their highest alert level, called up air defence and intelligence reservists, and opened air-raid and missile shelters for Israelis living within range of the Syrian border. But symbolic as it was, the Shayrat missile strike may also open the door to new thinking on Syria — and after six years, half a million dead, dozens of cities destroyed and millions displaced, that can only be a good thing. The sacking of secretary of state Rex Tillerson and national security adviser HR McMaster in March has removed competing power centres in US foreign policy, while former CIA director Mike Pompeo (Tillerson’s replacement as Secretary of State), and Defence Secretary James Mattis appear more than capable of executing an offshore balancing strategy. More worrying, on left and right, are underground groups including so-called “accelerationists”. As I write, there are 1.7 million coronavirus cases in the US and more than 100,000 deaths. Laddas ned direkt Vid val av prioriterat leveranssätt. And yet, the non-compulsory vote produced a turnout much greater than the U.K. and US elections and the Brexit referendum, and in the end, over sixty percent of registered voters said Yes. 283 kr. by David Kilcullen Oxford University Press, 352 pp. This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. Poetry offerings included the reblog of Liverpudlian Gerry Cordon’s selection of poetry on the theme of “undefeated despair”: In the dark times, will there also be singing? Författare: David Kilcullen. David Kilcullen, counter-insurgency expert and former soldier, diplomat, and policy adviser for the Australian and U.S. governments. Co-operation between Saudi and Israeli forces (even tacit) would be highly controversial within Saudi Arabia and could prompt sharply increased internal unrest. Why we’ve never stopped loving the Beatles; the mystery behind The Strange Death of Sam Cooke; Otis Redding – an unfinished life, and The Shock of the Old – the Glory Days of Prog Rock. This then was the backdrop to In That Howling Infinite’s 2017 – an electic collection covering politics, history, music, poetry, books, and dispatches from the Shire. Assad’s regime, far from being blind to international condemnation, understands the severe political consequences of using chemical weapons, and only does so when its back is against the wall. And Afghanistan, at war with itself for 40 years, would be condemned to continuing conflict and carnage. Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains European politicians condemned the decision and began working on ways to keep Iran in the deal, while in the US former secretary of state John Kerry engaged in last-minute direct negotiations with Iranian leaders. Yet, whilst Marine Le Pen and Gert Wilders came up short in the French and Dutch elections, and centrists Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel hold the moderate middle, atavistic, autocratic and proto-fascist parties have risen to prominence and influence in formerly unfree Eastern Europe, driven by fear of a non-existent flood of refugees from the Middle East and Africa (these are headed for the more pleasant economic climes of Germany, Britain and Scandinavia), and perhaps, their historically authoritarian DNA. We can also make some judgments about where and when violence might break out and what form it might take. Decisive action, combining the measured use of force with a strong diplomatic push, could have forced Assad — given the dire pressure he was under — into genuine peace talks. David Kilcullen, The Australian, 16th February 2019. So, time will tell, but at this point, colour me sceptical but not entirely cynical about prospects for peace in Afghanistan. Australia has suffered 41 fatalities, with more than half killed in 2010 and 2011 at the peak of our commitment. But again, the key question is why Assad’s forces felt the need to use the nerve agent in the first place. As a result, Taliban leaders wisely decided their best course was to withhold most of their combat troops in Pakistan, do enough to stay in the public eye in Afghanistan, and wait for withdrawal, which duly took place right on schedule. In essence, three new factors are driving the latest set of developments. But while he seems entirely serious about settling (as he calls it) with the Taliban, his attitude is sharply at odds with that of the US foreign policy establishment, the Defense Department (where secretary James Mattis resigned in protest over the Afghan and Syrian withdrawals), the Democratic opposition, and even his own Republican Party in congress, which passed a bipartisan resolution calling on him to maintain forces in Afghanistan and Syria. And finally to lighter fare. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. But neither Bolton nor Haley are likely to oppose the strategy if it appears to be succeeding. His piece is a cracker – a must-read for political junkies and all who are fascinated and frightened by the absurdities of recent US politics. Beset by devilish twins of Trump and Brexit, a European Union written-off as a dysfunctional, divided bureaucratic juggernaut, appears to have found hidden reserves of unity and purpose, playing hardball with Britain, dismissing the claims of Catalonia and Kurdistan, rebuking an isolationist America, and seeing-off resurgent extreme right-wing parties that threaten to fracture it with their nationalist and anti-immigration agendas. It’s unclear whether Trump knows any of this history; Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt argued last month on Foreign Policy’s website that he probably does not. That was the year that was – a year of living dangerously. Politicians of all parties, blinkered by short-termism, and devoid of vision, insist on fiddling whilst the antipodean Rome burns. The rise of militias and armed protesters across the US is sometimes seen as a fringe right-wing issue, but it is much broader. Whilst in Sydney, we made two visits to the cinema (tow more than average) to enjoy the big-screen experience of the prequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien and the long-awaited sequel to our all-time favourite film Blade Runner. David Kilcullen served as a Lt. in the Australian Army, he served in counter-insurgency operations around the world. Strategist David Kilcullen carries this argument to its next logical step. Winning the war is, of course, a real objective for coalition capitals as it is for Washington — but it’s a secondary one. Don’t look now, but all this seems to be pushing the Trump presidency back toward something resembling relatively mainstream US policy in the tradition of presidents Bush, Clinton and Reagan. Ahead of time, McVeigh’s attack was far harder to foresee and its specifics impossible to predict. 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