Saudi Arabia Switches to Plan B for IS and Syria

From my ever interesting and amusing twitter feed @chinahand, with some minor edits:

China Matters crystal ball tells me: 

1) Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is switching from jihadi strategy to great power negotiations in response to IS fiasco

2) KSA is saying, "OK, we'll help clean up our IS mess, but Assad's gotta go. Syria's a natural pickup for the Sunni side and belongs in KSA's sphere of influence.” 

3) KSA's half-assed jihadi anarchy strategy for Syrian regime change has failed. Time for Plan B.

4) As long as Assad getting billions in financial support, military assistance from Iran, he's not going anywhere. If Iran cuts off aid to Assad, he'll be out on the first plane to Moscow or wherever.

 5) So I believe KSA is offering Iran peaceful coexistence in ME in return for dumping Assad

6) and US agreed to put Assad on table as part of Iran nuke deal. So after IS contained, US wants Iran to support "political transition".

7) and US/KSA/Iran all sing "kumbaya". Especially since KSA believes it will be able to shoulder aside whatever hapless transitional govt is installed in Syria and get their own people in. 

8) If this scenario plays out, would expect Israel to get nervous as KSA/Isr/US anti-Iran bloc crumbles. Will certainly demand any new government in Syria be acceptable to Israel (probably why it's now backing JAN). Wonder if it will try to upset applecart w/ quick JAN regime change dash to Damascus to pre-empt deal w/ Iran for transition.

Comment from Moon of Alabama:

Interesting idea - but don't think that's the way supreme leader does business -too dirty a deal

Back to chinahand

@MoonofA agree. Iran the only grownups in the room. But might consider modulating support for Assad in return for rapprochement w/ US, coexistence w/ KSA, commitment to Syria reconstruction. 

But I wonder if Israel would move first to queer the deal in any case.

Then KSA could just shrug its shoulders and say, Hey too bad our deal with Iran didn’t work out. Conspiratorial onion can be peeled:

KSA playing nice, Israel doing the dirty, Assad gone, Iran angry and re-isolated, US left holding its d*ck as seems to be usual case in ME.

If, as I’ve previously speculated, Saudi Arabia formed a protective alliance with Israel to shield KSA from America’s righteous post-9/11 wrath (and keep the notorious 28 pages bottled up), letting Israel take the more conspicuous role in the anti-Assad tag team would be expected.

At the same time, it’s not an Arab Spring, but there might a Theocratic Autumn and a change in Saudi-Iranian relations, supporting the idea that the Kingdom has decided to put its Wahabbi-Troskyite permanent global revolution against the Shi’a on hold in order to pursue some regional power horse-trading with Iran--especially since the US attempt at rapprochement with Iran seems to be gaining some momentum, in part thanks to the accurate perception that Iran is serious about doing something about IS, while Saudi Arabia is not.

Now, therefore, is not the time to bluster about the Iranian menace to Washington.  Time for some united-front happy talk instead, and demonstrate to the United States that Saudi Arabia is capable of anti-IS vigor equivalent to what's coming out of Tehran.

In addition to a rather unprecedented meeting of the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers, Saudi Arabia was distinctly passive in its response to a takeover of the capital of Yemen by a Shi’a force, the Houthis.

But coexisting with Iran apparently does not mean tolerating Iran’s key ally/client Bashar al-Assad.  It looks like Saudi Arabia has not changed its objectives, merely the means of pursuing them.

As to the issue of what does Saudi Arabia care more about, getting rid of Assad or reining in IS, the jury seems to be in.  A Wall Street Journal backgrounder tells us that KSA and its minions in the Gulf decided to promise the United States the moon with regard to anti-IS support…as long as the US promised not to abandon the anti-Assad crusade.

It "took months of behind-the-scenes work by the U.S. and Arab leaders, who agreed on the need to cooperate against Islamic State, but not how or when. The process gave the Saudis leverage to extract a fresh U.S. commitment to beef up training for rebels fighting Mr. Assad, whose demise the Saudis still see as a top priority."

The Saudis also agreed to foot most of the bill for the “Third Force” of 5000 fighters that is supposed to be trained and led, I imagine, at rather close quarters by the United States, and offer the prospect of a capable, controlled force that will further US objectives in Syria, especially if/when the US follows through and coordinates its operations inside Syria with close US air support.

Hat tip, by the way, to Zero Hedge for stumping up for a WSJ subscription and summarizing the key points for the beleaguered anti-imperialist forces.

Prince Bandar was in on the meeting with Secretary Kerry, another indication that Saudi Arabia has not abandoned its indefatigable campaign to evict Assad from Damascus even as the proxies for its previous anti-Assad gambit wreak so much havoc in the Middle East that the US feels compelled to step in and step up.

One might speculate that IS was a devilishly clever scheme by Prince Bandar to force the United States to return to Riyadh and bargain for KSA support in return for trying to put a leash on IS.

But I am of the school that Prince Bandar performed his usual reverse Midas touch of turning chicken salad into chicken sh*t, and the Kingdom is scrambling to make the best of his murderous incompetence.

The Meaning of Ilham Tohti’s Life Sentence

Ilham Tohti, an economist and professor in Urumqi, is an advocate of Uyghur rights in Xinjiang.  He certainly did not deserve the life sentence he just received from the PRC for “advocating separatism”, not only because he was a distinctly non-violent working in the system type of guy, but also because he doesn’t advocate Xinjiang separatism.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Which, in the topsy-turvy world of PRC justice, is probably the reason why he got his life sentence.

The drift of Ilham Tohti’s views—and the reason for the draconian sentence—are quite evident in interviews that Ian Johnson collected and compiled into an article for the New York Review of Books on the occasion of the court’s decision.

Johnson characterizes his interlocutors as public intellectuals which, as far as the PRC’s view of them is concerned, is rather misleading.

They are pro-democracy activists and dissidents: Woeser (Tibetan rights activist, Charter 08 signer), Wang Lixiong (Woser’s husband; activist on Xinjiang as well as Tibetan issues; Charter 08 signer; previously imprisoned by PRC government), Teng Biao  (Open Constitution Initiative; advocate for Cheng Guangcheng, the blind legal rights activist currently in the U.S.; previously imprisoned by PRC government), and Hu Jia  (rights activist; previously imprisoned by PRC government).

The key observations are not necessarily the musings on the benign nature of Ilham’s advocacy or the goonishness of the PRC regime either in Beijing or Xinjiang.  They occur almost as asides:

Wang Lixiong: I met him in 2008. Friends introduced us because they knew we had strong interests in ethnic issues in China.

Woeser: I went and visited his wife and she said the students were so good.

Teng Biao: [H]e is my close friend.

Hu Jia: Before I went to jail I’d heard of him and he’d heard of me but it was only after I got out that we knew each other. It’s now almost been three years since I got out of this prison [Hu spoke italicized words in English in the original conversation]. My wife took me there to his home to get to know him. I feel lucky to have known him.

In describing Ilham, Teng Biao refers in passing to what was probably the real reason for the draconian sentence:

Ilham was so influential among Uighur people and he is an important bridge between Uighur and Han people. He’s like Woeser in Tibetan circles.

As does Hu Jia: 

[H]e was the only Uighur with such a strong voice inside China. Just like Woeser is for Tibetans, Ilham was for Uighurs. There was no one close to him.

The title of Johnson’s piece—“They Don’t Want Moderate Uyghurs”—is so obviously rebutted by the body of the text that I wonder if he is not completely ingenuous and is, instead, intentionally trolling.  The intent of PRC policy in Xinjiang today is to drive a wedge as brutally and completely as possible between moderate Uyghurs—those with serious qualms about abandoning a tradition of relatively casual Islamic observance—and those Uyghurs inclined toward militancy with an Islamic tinge.

The real message of Ilham’s sentence is that “China Does Not Want Pan-Ethnic Democracy Activists in Xinjiang Forming Links with High Profile Tibetan and Han Dissidents to Advance a Shared Democracy, Ethnic Protection, and Legal Rights Agenda Nationwide”.

I believe that the PRC is coming to the conclusion that Uyghur disaffection is an intractable but manageable problem as long as it’s bottled up in Xinjiang.  The “cuddly Islamist” ship has sailed, unfortunately, for the Uyghurs, and there will be little meaningful Han or international opposition to whatever nastiness the PRC deploys inside Xinjiang to deal with Uyghurs who choose to express their disaffection through assertive Muslim religious practice, let alone violent protests or terrorist attacks on Han interlopers and collaborating Uyghurs.

What the PRC does worry about is Xinjiang secular activism finding common cause with democracy and rights activism in Tibetan and Han areas, with a slogan like “Democracy and Human Rights for All Chinese, Han, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and (those other minorities; I guess coming up with an acceptable catchall description for the welter of nationalities in south China will be a bit of a challenge for the democracy movement).”

Then there’s the specter of coordinated student protests in Beijing, Urumqi, and Lhasa; hamfisted PRC oppression in minority areas inflaming the anger of activists and sympathizers nationwide and not just in the westlands; the West piling on with expressions of support for the democratic movement sweeping the country; und so veiter.

The PRC makes it its business to keep dissent and dissatisfaction local.  When an incident flares up, its local roots are addressed, some local officials get reprimanded or sacked in the requisite Judge Bao exercise, and the central government preens itself on its role as indispensable dispenser of justice. 

[Further some exchanges on Twitter, it could also be said that "They don't want any 'moderate' Uyghur activists" i.e. the PRC is poised to proceed with a draconian crackdown on Uyghur social, religious, and political expression and it is not going to permit independently-inclined secular Uyghur 'public intellectuals' such as Ilham Tohti to acquire prestige and leverage by seeking to interpose themselves between the CCP and its Uyghur subjects.  As I see the PRC strategy, it believes it can suppress moderate activism while cultivating passively moderate Uyghurs.  It didn't need to give Ilham Tohti a life sentence to further these objectives.  Indeed, the expectation was that he would get six to twelve years.  So I think the severe sentence was in response to Ilham Tohti's national prestige and burgeoning international reputation, rather than his standing within the liberal-minded Uyghur community.    CH, 9/23/14]

On the other hand, any effort to build a movement whose legitimacy might challenge that of the PRC regime on a national level gets the hammer dropped on it with dispatch.  Initiatives to build broad-based human rights, legal rights, labor, peasant, or democracy movements that bridge communities and assume a shared, national interest opposed to the CCP are generally dealt with quite harshly.

All politics is local, the CCP might say, and they better stay that way.

It looks like Ilham Tohti might have drawn the conclusion that the best way to protect the rights, culture, and dignity of the Uyghurs was not to indulge in local activism centered on dangerous and impractical dreams of independence that risked Islamic radicalization of the movement and a growing recourse to violence; instead, he sought salvation for his people by democratizing China, and making the government more responsive to the human and legal rights of the Uyghur people.

But in the PRC context, his very determination to repudiate Xinjiang separatism probably appeared to be a promise to take his cause nationwide out of Xinjiang, into Tibet and the Han heartland.

Considering the China-wide collection of democratic activists with which he associated—and the explosive promise/threat of trans-ethnic and trans-regional nationwide synergies in the democratic movement he represented-- it is perhaps not surprising that he received a life sentence.  In something of a backhanded act of flattery, it puts him on par with Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who received his life sentence for attempting to ignite a national democratic movement. [Correction: Liu received an 11-year sentence in 2009.]

It’s also a clear threat to any dissidents or activists with a national vision who might presume to question the CCP’s determination to act with a completely free hand in Xinjiang or Tibet.

Catch 22: Did Yossarian…and Heller…Suffer From PTSD?

Response to art is not immutable.  It changes over time in response to the changing mental and environmental context of the viewer.  Case in point, my reaction to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

When I was young, the shorthand for Yossarian was “too cool for school”, the wiseguy who saw through the flagwaving charade straight to the heart of the futility of war and the idiocy of military bureaucracy.

That framing works very well for the context of the Second World War and the Vietnam War, when the war effort pulled in draftees who perhaps were too skeptical or too maladjusted to buy the military message and instead became sand in the gears of the military machine.

Fast forward to the post-Vietnam volunteer army and a generation of young men and women who self-select to throw themselves into the military machine and lubricate it with their blood, sweat, and tears, add over a decade of nonstop US military action and millions of broken  lives, and Yossarian and his dysfunction seem to hold a different significance.

Yossarian starts to look like he’s suffering from PTSD, his coping mechanisms progressively overwhelmed until a shaggy-dog last chapter offers him an unlikely escape.

Consider this passage, describing Yossarian’s reaction to his pilot’s low-altitude hijinks during a training flight:

“Yossarian was petrified.  The new bombardier beside him sat demurely with a bewitched grin and kept whistling ‘Whee!’ and Yossarian wanted to reach out and crush his idiotic face with one hand…’Go up, go up, go up!’ he shouted frantically…Yossarian, blazing with rage and almost sobbing for revenge, hurled himself down the crawlway…to stand trembling behind…the pilot’s seat.  He looked desperately about for a gun…There was no gun.  There was no hunting knife, either, and no other weapon with which he could bludgeon or stab, and Yossarian …slid both hands around around [the pilot’s] bare throat and squeezed. …’Go up,’ Yossarian ordered unmistakably through his teeth in a low, menacing voice. ‘Or I’ll kill you’…[As the plane climbed [Yossarian] was not angry any more.  He was ashamed.  ‘Boy,’ [said the pilot], ‘you sure must be in pretty bad shape.  You ought to go home.’  ‘They won’t let me,’ Yossarian answered with averted eyes, and crept away…hanging his head with guilt and remorse…” [pp 342-343 of the 1989 Special Edition].

Is Catch-22 simply a dark farce about a military bureaucracy designed to find a way to get around a puzzling conundrum—how to send to their deaths people who don’t want to die?  Or is it more complicated and personal—and dark--description of the terrible things that war and fear can do to a person, but viewed through the distancing lens of farce?

Heller, in the best tradition of “greatest generation/good war” insouciance distanced himself from inferences that Yossarian’s experiences reflected any of his own psychological trauma.

He self-deprecatingly referred to his experience in a bomber wing based on Corsica as a bunch of “milk runs” and said that Catch-22 drew inspiration from his indignation at the rush to war in Korea and the stultifying conformity of 1950s America.   Defending his book at the Air Force Academy in 1986, Heller said “”it’s been called an anti-war book, but it’s certainly not an anti-World War II book.  The whole sensibility of the book is not about fighting in World War II but about the war between individuals and this inhuman, bureaucratic authority.” 

I’m old school enough to give a lot of weight to authorial authority, but consider these nuggets gleaned from Tracy Daugherty’s 2011 Heller biography, Just One Catch (Daugherty’s page numbers in brackets).

After a traumatic mission, during which flak penetrated Heller’s plane, wounding the gunner, and three other bombers went down, “The war had changed for Heller…He wanted to go home.” [88]

After he concluded his military service in Europe, Heller elected to take a ship home instead of fly.  “I was so terrified on my last few missions, I made a vow that if I ever got out of [the] war alive, I would never go up in a plane again.” [12]

Heller’s base pay at Goodfellow, a training wing in the US he joined after Europe, “would have been half again as high if he had agreed to the required four hours of flight time a month but...he told the military doctor that the memory of gasoline inside a plane was sickening to him.  At the time, Heller believed he was merely lying to the doctor…but the more he talked to the medic, he said, the more he realized the lie ‘turned out to be true’. “[12]

“[Heller] claimed he…was officially discharged…under the new point system [calculating elibigility for discharge]…At rough glance, the total appears to fall short of the required minimum…the base historian at Goodfellow Field expressed surprise that Heller was released before the end of the hostilities with Japan.  This odd timing, combined with the fact that Heller came home without flying his required seventy missions overseas, logging no flying time [after returning to the United States], invited speculation that he received medical dispensation for an early release.  He told a doctor…he couldn’t fly any more; at San Angelo [in Europe] he was clearly one of a number of men pegged as suffering from combat fatigue.” [101-2]

In 1956, as part of a job transition to McCall’s, Heller took a battery of psychological tests.  “In the color-card tests, he pictured blood and amputated limbs. ‘[I was…catapulted into a state of confusion and silence,’ he recalled. In discussions with one of the professors, he mentioned he was working on a novel.  Oh, what’s it about? The man asked.  “That question still makes me squirm,” Joe wrote nearly forty years later. ‘[I]t was only then, in trying to talk about the novel coherently, that I realized…how extensively I was focusing on the grim details of human mortality, on disease, accidents, grotesque mutilations.’” [200]

[In 1961, as Catch 22 prepped for publication and Heller still worked at McCall’s, he journeyed to the Bahamas by boat to give a presentation at the sales convention in Nassau] “Joe still didn’t fly.” [215]

In 1962, with Catch-22 finally published: “Joe went to London.  This was his first time in many years on a plane, and it took several drinks to calm him down.”  [254]

Daugherty perhaps thankfully refrains from putting Heller on the Procrustean psychoauthorial bed available to literary biographers, but I’ll conclude with his description of an off-putting Heller appearance before a group of students at Yale as he was prepping his play, “We Bombed in New Haven”.

“Joe…said little about the craft of writing, presenting himself instead as a ‘born promotion man.’…one student said ‘He comes on like a real Madison Avenue fat cat…’Either that guy is wearing a mask or he didn’t write that book,’ said another young undergrad. (When apprised of this comment, George Mandel [a close friend of Heller’s] said, ‘Of course he’s masked.  He’d be an open wound otherwise.’)” [290]

War is, as they say, hell.  Maybe there’s a special hell for when you feel you’re supposed to be there, but you really don’t want to be there and don’t know how to leave.