The Caliph of Nothing



Everyone has heard to old saying: the more things change, the more they get worse: here’s to trolling through the incredible Economic Undertow archives, May 2d, 2011:

Body Buried At Sea After Raid in Pakistan

 

(New York Times) The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at the Ground Zero site, waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.!” In New York City, crowds sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Throughout downtown Washington, drivers honked horns deep into the night.

“For over two decades, Bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement televised around the world. “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

Fast forward to 2019, nobody is cheering:

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS Leader Known for His Brutality Durability, Is Dead at 48.

President Trump announced the death of al-Baghdadi, who transformed the Islamic State into a global terrorist network that conquered territory the size of Britain and directed horrific attacks in the West.

Top Secret US Army photograph of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi taken the instant before he blew himself up with a hand grenade like the mad dog he was!

A great day for capitalism, right? Baghdadi has conveniently reduced himself into pieces too small to identify. Nobody has to bother with dumping his granulated butt into the ocean, or identifying him in a post-mortem or lying about it, afterward.

Oops, wrong about that:

Baghdadi’s remains have been buried at sea, officials say

Barbara Starr (CNN)

The remains of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have been buried at sea, according to two US defense officials.

On Sunday, White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he expected the US to follow the same protocol as al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who was killed in a 2011 raid in Pakistan by US Navy SEALs and buried at sea.

Appearing on MTP, O’Brien said Baghdadi’s “body will be disposed of properly.” Asked if the US would follow the same protocol as bin Laden, O’Brien said, “I would expect that to be the case.”

Good grief! What was it Marx wrote? “Historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice: the first time as farce, the second time as an even more stupendous farce.” This looks to veer into a weeping Jordan Internet meme. Without evidence, how does anyone know if it’s Baghdadi or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Osama bin-Laden or some random joker off the street? We can’t know; we have to take the word of the same thieves who endlessly lie to everyone about everything. It’s a kind of dumbshow that people keep falling for. Step One, create cartoon villain. Step Two, make villain disappear as if by magic. Step Three, create a replacement villain. It’s like an episode of South Park.

2011:

The same government that has been telling anyone who would listen that the recession is dead tells us now that Elvis the Pop Art caricature-of-evil, the ‘Caliph of Terror’ is also deceased.

Right on cue, normally cynical New Yorkers swallow this self- serving nonsense like candy, “waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, ‘U.S.A., U.S.A.!’”. This has to be bullish for commodities, with Brent crude marked @ $126 (!) per barrel. Osama is conveniently dead just when the president is busy converting the repulsive Donald Trump, a hairpiece in search of a dead cat to have sex with into a respectable GOP presidential candidate.

Trump would be a president able to endow the truly departed Ferdinand Marcos with ‘class’.

As with Zarqawi and bin-Laden, al-Baghdadi turns up dead when it is spectacularly convenient. In 2011, president Obama had just lost the House of Representatives to the Republicans. He was seen as being weak on terrorism. The ‘Arab Spring’ had just begun: the Obama presidency was in need of a boost. Whoops! Here comes Dead Osama like a party bus.

In 2019, the farcical Trump is looking forward to being removed from office with prosecutors up and down the East Coast lining up to take shots at him. Unable to find Alabama or Colorado on a map or win an election without help from Ukrainian gangsters, the hairpiece in search of teenage girls desperately needs a public distraction.

What of Baghdadi? There never appeared enough to him to found a country, even with his presumed Islamic bona fides. Baghdadi’s strategic dilemma emerged during his moment of triumph in 2014: the chance to keep pursuing defeated Iraqis vs. the need for more manpower to gain by brute force the territory outside his narrow Sunni Muslim base in northern Syria and Iraq. Forgoing the necessary forces would risk an unequal battle Islamic State might lose. Gaining more manpower would require time and cost the group momentum. The time would be used by the Iraqi government to regroup and obtain US air support; it would become stronger more quickly than any non-state such as Baghdadi’s. In Syria, the same manpower constraints would limit Baghdadi’s group to territory already conceded by the Assad government due to their own manpower problems. It was the choice to attract the thousands of additional fighters which led to the founding of the caliphate.

This presented its own dilemmas. Baghdadi’s sole means of support would be Turkey rather than Turkey AND a bunch of other Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia. Turkey could- and did offer logistics and intelligence; it provided a pathway for fighters and a market for stolen goods. However, any overt material or military support would be out of the question. Turkey was an American ally which had to at the very least, be able to deny supporting terror gangs (other than those approved by Washington). There were also strings attached. Turkey expected ISIS to pursue Turkish priorities rather than its own: to gain oil resources and destroy the Kurds in areas outside the reach of Ankara. After fighting the battles, Turkey would take any prizes from ISIS, which was expendable. In a sense, Baghdadi’s ambitions were in a race with the Turks’: could ISIS become strong enough, quickly enough to put its own agenda ahead of its parent, to sever ties then survive? By announcing his caliphate, Baghdadi was declaring some degree of independence from its primary source of support.

The Saudis could offer far more in the way of funds and material and do so overtly without caring about the Americans. US was in many ways a Saudi client that shared Riyadh’s interests, not the other way around. On the surface, the two Sunni Muslim enterprises appeared to be natural allies, each striving to be more fundamental than the other; both of them sharing enmity for Iran and its Middle Eastern puppets. Yet, Baghdadi’s caliphate was seen in Riyadh as a direct challenge to the religious authority of the House of Saud. Baghdadi was denounced as a heretic, his caliphate as blasphemy. Saudi- and other support would flow to so-called ‘moderate’ jihadis operating in Syria, gangs who knew their place such as al-Qaeda, Nusra Front, etc … all with CIA blessing.

Confronted with these various dilemmas, Baghdadi wound up doing little bits of everything at the same time. His caliphate attracted thousands of international jihadi wannabes, many of whom were useful only as suicide bombers (or cooks and bookkeepers it turns out). The rest were criminals looking to pillage or for a chance at murder and mayhem. None of these were the stuff of a new nation or even a decent army. Baghdadi carried on his offensive, but did so in all directions. For a short period in 2014 it looked as if ISIS would sweep away the Iraqi government, chase them and their Iranian partners all the way to Basra. The capital’s defenders were the depleted survivors of units that had been routed out of Mosul in disarray. The only addition to the government side was a call up of Shia militias under Muqtada al-Sadr and Ali al-Sistani. Though this group was great in numbers, they amounted to little more than a poorly armed mob; untrained, unsupported, with nothing in the way of heavy weapons. In the summer of 2014, ISIS controlled the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi to the west. A feint from these places, even with small forces toward the Shia holy cities of Karballa and Najaf would have drawn off the Sistani-Sadr forces from the capital and left the road to the Persian Gulf — and Iraq’s massive oil reserves — more or less completely open.

After Mosul, the Iraqi government was in chaos, the US was arguing whether to support Maliki or not, to bring in air- or ground assets or to wait and see. Meanwhile, the Iraqi Kurds had quietly taken over Kirkuk and its neighboring oil fields. If time and place were to offer the ISIS the opportunity for success, this was it. Instead of daring to strike hard into the vacuum like a latter-day Rommel, Baghdadi, who never led any of his operations from the front, dithered and his moment passed. In Iraq, Baghdadi placed Baiji, a dusty refinery town with no strategic value under siege. He likewise invested Dier Ezzor, a medium-sized town several hundred miles away from anywhere important in Syria. He turned his forces away from Baghdad and attacked the harmless Yazidis then assaulted the Kurds in Kobani, where he suffered his fatal defeat. His loss of Manbij, also to the Kurds, cut his supply lines from Turkey. Ultimately, he frittered his command along with almost of those in it. As a leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a disaster wrapped in a catastrophe.

Bin-Laden worked for the Americans in Afghanistan against the Soviets before he turned on his masters and made himself the poster child for Islamic militancy. After years of repeated failure on its own terms, it is hard to see how useful Islamic militancy is going to be going forward; it has nothing creative to offer, it is just another kind of violent mafia. Baghdadi spent four years in an Iraqi prison camp run by the Americans, the particulars of both his internment and his release are murky. That he had business with the Turkish regime is clear but as for his working for Uncle Sam, it is impossible to say. Who he really was as a human person is unknown.

Industrial culture is good at offering narrative myths as loss-leaders; a stringing together of simple, easy to remember falsities. It’s called marketing, it’s a multi-billion dollar business. Industry is helpless with character which cannot be bought or sold, which requires something more than lies. Agents of modernity like Baghdadi and the other mass killers here and abroad are the angels of our self-created media paradise, they are types, not men, lines drawn around nothing in particular, voids programmed to follow some inscrutable internal gravity, to roll wherever and knock things over without care or purpose. Baghdadi was a ‘Man For Our Times’, the Caliph of Nothing, another over-priced consumer product, something to be used once or twice then thrown away; perhaps the best of modernity’s offerings: monsters and non-men. What are the worst? We probably won’t like finding out.

More on ISIS and Iraq, here: Sharia For Sale

17 thoughts on “The Caliph of Nothing

  1. Bachs_bitch

    “Baghdadi was a ‘Man For Our Times’, the Caliph of Nothing, another over-priced consumer product, something to be used once or twice then thrown away; perhaps the best of modernity’s offerings: monsters and non-men. What are the worst?”

    The global industrial economy will gradually stop accommodating the jobs and privileges required to maintain the consumption-oriented pampered middle-class lifestyles of white folk and their third-world emulators. From there it’s a one-way ticket to fascist autarkies modeled after your favourite German romantic composers and/or role-playing games.

  2. ellenanderson

    We had some good conversations back then didn’t we? I remember asking you whether you thought the industrial revolution was a mistake. Now I cringe at the stupidity of that question on so many levels. Small scale, though widespread organic agriculture and decentralized production are probably the only technologies and social arrangements that can support humans. The transition will be / is ghastly but that is what we are starting to go through right now.
    Things might be simpler than they seem. What is complicated is trying to figure out how to keep the current mess going. It is keeping itself going for the moment while we continue to live more or less comfortable lives.
    I guess asking about timing is just another silly question.
    Best,
    Ellen/akaLynn

  3. ellenanderson

    And speaking of German composers, pick a part in Bach B Minor Mass and sing it through daily to clear your mind. Restrict access to the romantics to just around the cocktail hour (s) when it is fine to sob openly
    E

  4. ellenanderson

    I grew up near Cleveland during the all the time that George Szell was conductor of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. One of my relatives had a box each season and we were there often. I heard this piece long ago.
    I also witnessed the death of Lake Erie after the “greatest generation” returned from WWII. By that time my older relatives – veterans of the Great War – had settled into their hammocks by the lake gasping for breath while the white bass washed ashore. None of the wonders of the late 20th century impressed me after those experiences. I can’t imagine supporting any politician who isn’t radially anti-war and pro de-growth. Once everyone has experienced his/her own dead fish moment there will be agreement but by then I suppose it will too late.
    So what do you think of this? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/toledo-ohio-just-granted-lake-erie-same-legal-rights-people-180971603/
    Don’t know whether to laugh or keep crying. Is it legal rights we are lacking or something else?

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      People are trying to invent gestures that let us get what we want while allowing the illusion of proper stewardship. Sorry if I’m too cynical.

  5. Front Range Mike

    It’s great to see you writing again Steve. I always enjoy reading your take on what’s happening.

    For the longest time I, like many, kept wondering when the collapse was going to happen. All I can say these days is that collapse is fully underway and everyone seems to be scrambling to make sure none of it gets on them. Just looking around everything feels like the day after an out of control party where many are still buzzed, but the sober ones are wondering how the neighborhood got burned down and nobody noticed. Everyone seems angry, especially driving on the streets. Everyone seems stressed about money. Most everyone I know is trying to figure out how to cut back and sell their piles of crap they’ve accumulated over the years to get out of debt. Nobody seems to have enough time for anything worthwhile. We’re all just hustling to stay in place…looking for some kind of lottery ticket to simplify the whole mess or a zombie apocalypse to make it all just go away.

    I honestly do wonder if my assessment is colored by turning 58 this year and being completely and totally ground down by the every day grind of trying to make money to keep my own lifeboat afloat for my wife, son, myself and our critters. But in thinking about it, perhaps my own weariness with it all is just a reflection of the weariness of this whole system being worn out. Maybe that is what I am sensing through the cracks? Anyway, thanks for the recent posts. Again, I always appreciate your perspective.

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      I appreciate it, thanks.

      I needed to take a bit of time away from the nonsense to recharge the batteries. Moving words around is hard work like laying bricks. Some of the bricks want to stand on end or flip over, it’s easy to become frustrated.

      Meanwhile, things have been unraveling for awhile. Not so bad here in the US but in other countries particularly in South America and in Asia things don’t look good at all. All of this, of course, right under the bosses’ noses.

      1. Bachs_bitch

        @Steve, I don’t post many comments but thank you for continuing the blog. I found your stuff in 2015 and you’re the only internet person who influenced my worldview. I know that compliment sounds a tad generic in an age of twitch streams and youtube debates but I mean it. Your critique of industrial civilisation deserves a much wider audience.

  6. ellenanderson

    RE Steve’s comment about “gestures that let us get what we want while allowing the illusion of proper stewardship. Sorry if I’m too cynical.”

    You can’t really be too cynical when it comes to the corporate GreenWashers(tm) who propose all sorts of solutions that should work while allowing them to keep driving their carz.
    My guess is that the community legal rights lawyers are entirely praiseworthy, like the innocence project lawyers. I personally subscribe to the newsletter of the Deep Green Resistance News Network. I recommend it to you and your readers. Here is what they had to say about the legal approach to change.
    “To rely on the law alone is to concede to a never-ending tug of war—an endless battle which the ruling class wages using billions in lobbying dollars. But institutions are not monolithic. Ideological power struggles within them can change the material conditions for resistance taking place within the broader culture. And there is some promise in all of these legal strategies. For example, the Rights of Nature approach has the possibility to instill a new, fundamental respect for the integrity of the natural world throughout certain populations. The climate necessity defense approach has promise for protecting activists who engage in non-violent direct action (which we should note has been thus far entirely ineffective in stopping the murder of the planet). Therefore, the promise these new legal approaches represent is primarily cultural. In military terminology, these are shaping actions, not decisive ones…”

    1. ellenanderson

      @Front Range Mike “Most everyone I know is trying to figure out how to cut back and sell their piles of crap they’ve accumulated over the years to get out of debt.”
      If all US citizens were to concentrate on getting out of debt and accumulating less that would be an incredibly subversive act.
      But I get it – when it comes to buying hay and food for the kids and the critters I am always going to be tempted to pull out the old credit card.

      1. Front Range Mike

        Yeah, when the water heater goes out the day after you just put new tires on one of the cars, etc… the credit card becomes vital to avoid living under a bridge next month. From reading Morris Berman and other I have found that our socio-economic system has always been pretty brutal, but it’s becoming even more so every day anymore.

        It’s also becoming tougher to live on the fringes or in the gray economy. Old style boarding houses, cobbled together camper communities and similar living arrangements have pretty much disappeared over the years. We now have a scenario owhere you can either afford the expensive rents and mortages, or live in the homeless tent city. Those homeless enclaves often are under constant threat of getting cleared out by the local law enforcement types too.

        I also agree about getting out of debt being subversive. We saw what, a million women march on DC after Trump got into office and what do women have to show for it? Two pro-corporate, anti-women’s rights supreme court appointees and how many similar federal judges? Maybe if those million women blocked the streets and stopped the gears of commerce for a day or three, I’m willing to get they’d have much more to show for their efforts. Or, they might be dead or heavily punished. The disciples of the system have no sense of humor when it comes to protecting their precious.

  7. Ken Barrows

    I join the chorus in welcoming you back. Any thoughts on how the shift away from bunker fuel on January 1, 2020 is going to affect oil (particularly diesel) markets?

Comments are closed.