The Border Between Iraq and Syria Has Now Been Effectively Erased

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

22 June 14

ith the alleged fall to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria of Qa’im on Saturday, and of Talafar a few days ago, the border between Iraq and Syria has now been effectively erased. A new country exists, stretching from the outskirts of Baghdad all the way to Aleppo. In history, it uncannily resembles the state ruled by Imad ad-Din Zangi (AD 1085 – 1146), a Turkish notable who came to power in 1128 after a Shiite Assassin killed his father. His realms lay between the Abbasid Caliphate on the one hand and the Atabegs of Damascus on the other. Like ISIS, he was not able to take and keep Homs. He also was not able to take Palestine away from the Crusaders, despite a brief alliance for that purpose with Buri of Damascus. ISIS also so far lacks Baghdad or Damascus but like Zangi does have much in between.

The historian Ibn al-`Adim wrote of `Imad al-Din Zangi:

“The atebeg was violent, powerful, awe-inspiring and liable to attack suddenly… When he rode, the troops use to walk behind him as if they were between two threads, out of fear they would trample over crops, and nobody out of fear dared to trample on a single stem (of them) nor march his horse on them… If anyone transgressed, he was crucified. He (Zengi) used to say: ‘It does not happen that there is more than on tyrant (meaning himself) at one time.’” By Ibn al-‘Adim (Source: Ibn al-‘Adim, Zubda, vol. 2, p. 471)”

This is a notional map (don’t hold me to its exact details) of Zangi’s domain at its greatest extent.

ISIS now holds almost all of Ninevah and al-Anbar Provinces, and has a strong position in Salahuddin Province just north of Baghdad. (The Zangid state was a launching pad for Saladin Ayyubi, in Arabic Salahuddin, for whom this province is named). It also has a position in Diyala Province, which stretches between Baghdad and the Iranian border to its east. Diyala is the most mixed of the military fronts, having many Shiites and Kurds (in the north around Khaniqin).

The first thing that occurred to me on the fall of Qa’im is that Iran no longer has its land bridge to Lebanon. I suppose it could get much of the way there through Kurdish territory, but ISIS could ambush the convoys when they came into Arab Syria. Since Iran has expended a good deal of treasure and blood to keep Bashar al-Assad in power so as to maintain that land bridge, it surely will not easily accept being blocked by ISIS. Without Iranian shipments of rockets and other munitions, Lebanon’s Hizbullah would rapidly decline in importance, and south Lebanon would be open again to potential Israeli occupation. I’d say, we can expect a Shiite counter-strike to maintain the truck routes to Damascus.

The fighting in the past few days has been on the demographic fault lines between Sunni Arab communities, Kurdish ones, and Shiite ones. The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government appears to have held most of Samarra just north of Baghdad, which is largely Sunni Arab but has a Shiite minority and a very important Shiite shrine. The government is trying to push back in Tikrit, just to the north of Samarra, but it hasn’t dislodged ISIS from it. The government also has a position in Ramadi to the west of Baghdad in al-Anbar province.

On Saturday, both sides reported heavy fighting in northwest Diyala Province, where government troops and police attempted to push back ISIS, which controls most of this Sunni Arab region in conjunction with tribal allies. Its control does not extend to the Kurdish villages to the east, which are in the hands of the Peshmerga Kurdish paramilitary. The army and police of the central government have some footholds in Diyala as well, given Shiite populations in the south of the province and in its capital, Baquba, all around which ISIS is fighting. Four police were killed or wounded fighting ISIS guerrillas in Hamrain, 55 km to the east of Baqubah on Sunday morning.

The Arabic press reports that things were more complicated elsewhere. ISIS was able to take al-Qa’im district, but some 3,000 Sunni tribesmen allied with government troops to try to keep them from acquiring Haditha District in al-Anbar. (There’s a movie about Western troops fighting for Haditha). In Ruwah District, government troops ran away, leaving it to ISIS, according to Kitabat.com.

Syrian jets bombed eastern positions of ISIS near the Iraqi border, perhaps signalling a likely alliance of Damascus and Baghdad to put the Sunni radical genie back in the bottle.

Also, in Hawija near Kirkuk, fighting is being reported between ISIS fundamentalists and the Sufi “Men of the Naqshbandi” order. They are apparently fighting over gasoline trucks from the contested refinery town of Baiji.

The borders of Iraq were settled by Sir Percy Cox, who had been a British diplomat in Iran before WW I and administered Basra after the British Indian Army took it in late 1914. He met with Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud of Najd at Uqair to set the southern borders. Ibn Saud claimed some of what is now southern Iraq, and the emir of Kuwait claimed what is now Saudi territory. Cox made the final decisions on behalf of the British Empire, which then ruled Iraq:

From the memoirs of Cox’s aide, Major Harold Dickson (H.R.P. Dickson, “Kuwait and Her Neighbors”, London: Allen and Unwin, 1956):

“On the sixth day Sir Percy entered the lists. He told both sides that, at the rate they were going, nothing would be settled for a year. At a private meeting at which only he, Ibn Sa’ud and I were present, he lost all patience over what he called the childish attitude of Ibn Sa’ud in his tribal boundary idea. Sir Percy’s Arabic was not too good, so I did the translating.

It was astonishing to see the Sultan of Nejd being reprimanded like a naughty schoolboy by H.M. High Commissioner, and being told sharply that he, Sir Percy Cox, would himself decide on the type and general line of the frontier. This ended the impasse. Ibn Sa’ud almost broke down, and pathetically remarked that Sir Percy was his father and brother, who had made him and raised him from nothing to the position he held, and that he would surrender half his kingdom, nay the whole, if Sir Percy ordered. Having put Ibn Sa’ud in his place, Cox was ready to hand down the law.

As far as I can remember, Ibn Sa’ud took little further part in the frontier discussions, leaving it to Sir Percy to decide for him this vexed question. At a general meeting of the conference, Sir Percy took a red pencil and very carefully drew in on the map of Arabia a boundary line from the Persian Gulf to Jabal ‘Anaizan, close to the Transjordan frontier. This gave Iraq a large area of her territory claimed by Nejd. Obviously, to placate Ibn Sa’ud, he ruthlessly deprived Kuwait of nearly two-thirds of her territory and gave it to Nejd…”

While Cox’s southern borders have stood (despite a severe challenge by Saddam Hussein in 1990-91), the northern border he drew with French Syria has now collapsed.

Coming Soon: An Unholy Alliance Between the GOP and Silicon Valley

By Peter Lawrence Kane, Salon

22 June 14

When the dust finally clears from the Tea Party insurgency, the tech industry could become the Republicans' new BFF

s conventional wisdom and a bevy of polling indicate, Republicans are poised to do well in the midterms in November. But the 2016 electoral math does not favor the GOP – and it only gets worse from there. People can quibble with the presumed inevitability of a President Hillary Clinton, but if the Republicans keep losing, they’ll eventually be forced to moderate some of their positions, even if the opposite seems true at the moment. Already, they’re reconciling themselves to nationwide same-sex marriage.

Twelve years in the desert sent the Democrats rushing straight into Bill Clinton’s arms, a fairly enormous transformation from McGovern in ’72. Likewise, there’s no reason why the GOP wouldn’t reevaluate a losing strategy — especially if they lose to another Clinton. Out of phase with an increasingly diverse and secular America, the Republicans are eventually going to have to cut the crazies loose. And the best replacement to fill a Tea Party-shaped hole in the conservative coalition is the tech industry, whose place in the Democratic fold is starting to grow uncomfortably awkward.

Although located in one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic regions in the country, Silicon Valley is the Republican Party’s natural ally. Such an axis could even lead to a wholesale reconfiguration of the American political landscape. While the suggestion that the Republicans will shake free of their most retrograde ideas sounds far-fetched, the party has performed dramatic 180s before: As recently as 1976, the GOP was explicitly pro-choice, and the only African-American senator was a Republican. If mounting electoral losses drive the Republicans to ignore the haters, American politics might shift into a battleground of progressives versus libertarian centrists. Tea Party dead-enders will be full of sound and fury, but legislating nothing.

Currently, the Republican Party — dying in California and virtually extinct in most of the northeast — is an unwieldy alliance of heartland true believers and their cynical coastal bankrollers. (Yes, for all the Tea Party’s folksy appeals to sepia-toned Real America, it’s Wall Street that puts up the money.) New York magazine’s Kevin Roose recently identified an incipient convergence of established banks and financial startups, a fusion that is only likely to solidify. Banks know they have to look west to innovate, and tech companies require infusions of capital, making it a natural pairing. “All these [financial startups] are kind of waiting for Visa to pick them up,” one analyst is quoted as saying.

As the tech sector matures, it’s shedding the “Don’t Be Evil” charade and gleefully embracing a lucrative synthesis of corporate and state power, all the while advocating for changes in immigration law that allow more foreign-born software engineers and satisfy their well-reported itch to suppress salaries. In other words, Silicon Valley’s trajectory fits seamlessly with the rest of Republican-leaning corporate America. Libertarian or not, its vaunted innovation just so happens to service the national security state, whose preservation is another vital component of Republican ideology.

That same libertarianism is ascendant within the party, personified by Rand Paul. For all of its inherent contradictions, it resonates with young people far more than the Fox News hate machine, which is calibrated toward a viewership whose median age is 68. Tech-savviness is crucial to reaching voters under 35, and the Republicans are going to have to do better than those “Scott G.” ads, in which a bespectacled Republican hipster pumps single-origin petroleum while being so over regulations. But an alliance with the tech industry might go a long way to bridging the generation gap. (And it’s currently a gap on both ends, as anyone in Silicon Valley who’s over 33 and looking for work can tell you.)

Major political upheavals of this kind tend to start in California before spreading elsewhere. A solidly Republican state as recently as the early 1990s, the Democrats now command supermajorities in both the State Senate and State Assembly, and might even pick up a seat in the House this November. The California GOP, meanwhile, has been reduced to a rump party with pockets of strength in inland Southern California and the Central Valley. Unable to win statewide office since Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, even Orange County is slipping away from them. Although the Democrats may be reaching a political zenith in the state, there is a potential cleavage — and it runs right up I-880 in Santa Clara County.

In the 17th Congressional District, tech cheerleader and Democrat Ro Khanna is the face of Silicon Valley’s electoral hopes and dreams. A Stanford professor and former deputy assistant secretary for commerce, Khanna wrote a book spelling out how America’s industrial preeminence rests on doing everything Silicon Valley wants, earning praise from Tesla’s Elon Musk and Intel’s Paul Otellini. His primary challenge against Democratic stalwart Mike Honda was a proxy battle between the young technologists and the liberal old guard, and Honda won 49-27 (although the two will face off again in November). If Khanna is rebuffed, it will be in spite of endorsements from major Bay Area papers and a lot of financial support from tech executives, although not without some controversy. The race is an echo of the 2012 battle in the neighboring 15th District, where 32-year-old Eric Swalwell unseated 20-term liberal lion Pete Stark, shifting the district in a pro-business direction. Khanna, a tech insider if ever there was one, is clearly being groomed for a long career as the Valley’s chief Congressional advocate.

The marriage of corporate-leaning Democrats and pro-immigration libertarians who aren’t hostile to abortion rights or same-sex marriage might be the only path toward viability for the California GOP. The money is already moving in that direction: Although rank-and-file employees at Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other large tech firms skew heavily Democratic, the industry’s corporate PACs donated considerably more to Republicans in 2012 than in 2008. Newly minted billionaires definitely skew conservative, up to and including things like a libertarian utopia in the form of flotsam, or the proposal to divide California into six states as an end-run around progressives.

Moreover, on the issues, there isn’t all that much ideological daylight between Ro Khanna and Neel Kashkari, the surprisingly moderate Republican sacrificial lamb who’s running against Gov. Jerry Brown. The fact that in the June 4 primary, Kashkari edged out Tim Donnelly, a latter-day John Bircher who thinks Jerry Brown is a “Marxist,” proves that the xenophobic GOP id can be restrained, even as the techno-utopians dream their dreams of everlasting corporate dominion.

Of course, this entire scenario depends on the Republicans not just taming, but actually expunging, what is now their dominant faction. Charles Pierce at Esquire grimly observed that the GOP’s “lizard brain” might actually be content to keep losing the presidency indefinitely. As long as the wacko birds have a gerrymandered lock on the House, where they can gum things up and purge lifers like Eric Cantor without consequences for their majority, they’ll be satisfied. But the demographics won’t sustain that in the long term, and a string of losses will eventually create its own psychological burden for the party, along with a stream of articles with titles like “Is the Republican Party finished?”

By that time, Silicon Valley may have its fist sticking out, ready for a bump.