Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Some Mid-East stuff .. Sunni-Shiite unity meeting seeks to defuse tensions in Iraq
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/sunni-shiite-unity-meeting-seeks-to-defuse-iraqi-tensions-as-militants-close-in-on-refinery/2014/06/18/6d3328e2-f6cd-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html

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UPDATES: Iraq crisis: Isis planning to attack Britain, says Cameron - live

• Iraq asks US to conduct air strikes on Isis
• David Cameron: Isis planning to attack Britain
• Iran president Rouhani pledges Iran will protect Iraq's holy sites
• Isis attacks Iraq's biggest oil refinery in Baiji with mortars
[ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103447155 ]
• Four top generals sacked by Iraq PM over loss of Mosul
• Baghdad residents stockpile food as fighting reaches Baquba

Latest

21.50 General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave no direct reply when asked at a Congressional hearing whether Washington would agree to the request from Iraq for air strikes to support their bid to counter Sunni rebels.

Baghdad said it wanted US air assistance as the insurgents, led by fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), battled their way into the biggest oil refinery in Iraq and the president of neighbouring Iran raised the prospect of intervening in a sectarian war that threatens to sweep across Middle East frontiers.

"We have a request from the Iraqi government for air power,” Dempsey told a Senate hearing in Washington. Asked whether the United States should honour that request, he said: “It is in our national security interest to counter ISIL wherever we find them.”

[...]

20.05

Interesting article by Shireen Hunter, visiting professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, who argues that the real fault for the Iraq crisis lies more with Sunni intransigency against the majority Shia government rather than the sectarian policies of the Malki administration: The Real Causes of Iraq’s Problems .. http://www.lobelog.com/2014-06-the-real-causes-of-iraqs-problems .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10908057/Iraq-crisis-Isis-launch-overnight-attack-on-Iraqs-biggest-oil-refinery-live.html

"The most significant factor behind Iraq’s problems has been the inability of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and its Sunni neighbors to come to terms with a government in which the Shias, by virtue of their considerable majority in Iraq’s population, hold the leading role. This inability was displayed early on, when Iraq’s Sunnis refused to take part in Iraq’s first parliamentary elections, and resorted to insurgency almost immediately after the US invasion and fall of Saddam Hussein. All along, the goal of Iraqi Sunnis has been to prove that the Shias are not capable of governing Iraq. Indeed, Iraq’s Sunni deputy prime minister, Osama al Najafi, recently verbalized this view. The Sunnis see political leadership and governance to be their birthright and resent the Shia interlopers."

.. thinking of the GOP there are slight shades of the US Congress there .. slight shades ..

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this one is ginormous

Wahhabism vs. Wahhabism: Qatar Challenges Saudi Arabia .. the end bit ..

Conclusion

Qatar’s foreign policy and soft power strategy effectively puts it at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia. Whether the Saudi-Qatari rivalry will contribute to spark changes in the kingdom or reinforce monarchial autocracy in the region is likely to be as much decided in Qatar itself as by the political rivalry between the two elsewhere in the region. Saudi-backed Qatari conservatives have questioned the emir’s right to rule by decree, organized online boycotts of state-run companies, and led by the crown prince, forced Qatar University to replace English with Arabic as the main language of instruction.

Qatar’s embrace of the Brotherhood, positioning it at the cutting edge of change across the region in addition to its soft power diplomacy, offers opportunities for Saudi Arabia to counter what it perceives as a dangerous policy that the emirate has exploited in Egypt and Syria. Fault lines in Egypt have deepened with the toppling of President Morsi, weakened Qatar’s regional influence and made its Brotherhood allies in other Arab nations in the throes of change reluctant to assume sole government responsibility. Jordan’s Brotherhood-related Islamic Action Front (IAF) officially boycotted parliamentary elections in January 2013 because of alleged gerrymandering. Privately, the IAF, with an eye on Egypt, is believed to have shied away from getting too big a share of the pie for their taste. Mounting opposition to the Brotherhood’s ruling Tunisian affiliate, Ennahada, and the assassination in 2013 of two prominent opposition politician prompted the Islamists to negotiate their replacement by a government of technocrats.

Similarly, Qatar’s victory of the right to host the World Cup may have opened the Pandora’s Box of demographic change that could reverberate throughout the Gulf, a region populated by states whose nationals often constitute minorities in their own countries. Under increasing pressure from international trade unions which have the clout to make true on a threat to boycott the 2022 World Cup, the status of foreign nationals could become a monkey wrench.

Resolution of the dispute with the unions raises the specter of foreigners gaining greater rights and having a greater stake in countries that have sought to protect national identity and the rights of local nationals by ensuring that foreigners do not sprout roots. That effort, so far, goes as far as soccer clubs opting for near empty stadiums because there are not enough locals to fill them rather than offering the population at large something that even remotely could give them a sense of belonging.

As a result, Qatar’s foreign, sports and culture policy seems forward looking despite Saudi-backed conservative opposition at home and at first glance appears to put the tiny Gulf state in a category of its own. Yet, the challenge it poses to Saudi Arabia is increasingly proving to be a challenge to itself.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=61189

.. two bits from the one before ..

"Things were looking bleak for Sunni Islamists all over the Middle East…until the Spring of 2003, when a couple of guys named Bush and Cheney
gave them new life by invading Iraq, crushing Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Iraqi state, and pushing millions of Iraqi Sunni into armed insurgency."

the end

"ISIS now controls most of Anbar as well as a huge chunk of eastern and central Syria. It’s a de facto Sunni state, straddling the Syria/Iraq border between Kurdish and Shia territory.

And that’s as far as it will go. ISIS has done well to take back its natural constituency, the Sunni center of Iraq. It will push against the Shia to the south, but they’ll fight much better on their own turf. And if it has any sense, it won’t even try to push against the Persh Merga. I used to see the Pesh Merga every day, and they ain’t nobody to mess with.

So out of all this chaos and blood comes something like a vindication of the laws of physics, as expressed in ethnic turf wars. But with one modification of those laws: Some things really don’t abhor a vacuum, especially transnational ethnic militias. They love a vacuum more than Alice did on the Brady Bunch."

.. some drones, i guess .. the QUDS will have to stay out of the way .. just heard the Iraqi army has regained control of the Baiji oil refinery,
guess that would have been some of the Bushed Americans went to as their first mission in Iraq some 11 years ago .. hope the army has ..