Tag Archives: Saddam Hussein

Testimony of Abu Ahmad: An Islamic State Defector

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 2, 2014

A purported defector from the Islamic State, known only as “Abu Ahmad,” released testimony online on 5 April 2014 via the Syrian opposition news site al-Durar al-Shamiya under the heading, “The Concealed Truths About al-Baghdadi’s State”. Abu Ahmad describes himself as “one of the mujahideen in Khorasan [Afghanistan-Pakistan] and Iraq, and now in al-Sham [Syria],” and it is quite clear that Abu Ahmad has defected to al-Qaeda. On 25 September 2014, an English version of this testimony was posted on the Fund for Fallen Allies website. It has been reposted below—with some editions to transliteration and syntax—to avoid it being lost. Continue reading →

Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 9, 2014

Released on December 21, 2007, twenty-eight years to the month after the Soviet Union launched Operation STORM 333, decapitating the Afghan government and plunging the country into a decade-long war, Charlie Wilson’s War tells a story centred on Representative Charles Wilson of Texas (Tom Hanks), a conservative Democrat, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Right-wing Christian socialite in Houston who has taken the Afghans to her bosom because of her hatred for communism, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a blue-collar case officer at the CIA who is the epitome of the adage that one can get anything done in Washington so long as one does not care who gets the credit. Between them they cajole Congress into moving its appropriations from $5 million to $500 million, which will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Saudis, to help the Afghan resistance combat the Red Army’s occupation of their country. Continue reading →

The Anti-Interventionists Got What They Wanted in Syria and Iraq: Are They Happy Now?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 1, 2014

BBC map of ISIS’/Islamic State’s operational area

As we enter the fortieth month of Syria’s ordeal, and with the renegade Zarqawi’ite network in Iraq finally declaring that its virtual ministries are being uploaded into a fully restored Caliphate extending from Raqqa to Tikrit, the most depressing thought of all is that it did not have to be this way. Continue reading →

Is Jordan Next To Fall To ISIS?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 29, 2014

Jordan’s King Abdullah: The West’s closest Arab ally—but for how long?

It has been a rough fortnight for Jordan. After the fall of Mosul, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) announced an “unofficial” branch in Jordan and the Iraqi government surrendered its only legal border-crossing on the 110-mile frontier to tribal insurgents—opposed to ISIS, so far as can be told, but not without the danger they will be overwhelmed as has previously happened in areas like Fallujah, where the dam initially fell to local insurgents (albeit Ba’athists) and ISIS then pushed them out. Jordan has beefed up its border-defences but this has not stopped the speculation on whether Jordan, the “jewel in the ISIS crown,” will be the next domino to fall to the takfiris.

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Nouri al-Maliki Is Pushing Iraq Into The Abyss

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 10, 2014

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki

Whatever one thinks about the decision in 2003 to finish the war Saddam Hussein started by annexing Kuwait, serious people should be able to agree that the way the country was abandoned by the United States—first politically after 2009 and then militarily—was deeply irresponsible, not least because of the motives of this decision. Continue reading →

Obama Doubles-Down On His Foreign Policy At West Point

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 28, 2014

President Obama Delivers Commencement Address At West Point

It was to be expected that this would be a bad speech. Attacked from all sides President Barack Obama was going to have to push back and that was always going to make the speech defensive. As usual, the President ploughed bravely into a battalion of straw men: positing extremes then selecting a cool middle way. But it was so much worse than that. The tone was not the problem; the content was. Continue reading →

Film Review: Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013)

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 18, 2014

Let us stipulate that getting a thing like this correct is basically impossible: there will never be enough time in three hours—the most a film hoping for commercial success can last—to adequately cover in proper detail and nuance the facts of such an inherently complicated and contested period in history. And if effort is made to go even some of the way to doing a proper job on this score, it only underlines all the things that were left out and alienates the section of the audience that has no interest in the history and wants an entertaining movie. Caveats in place …

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Removing Assad Is The Only Way To Disarm His Regime Of Its WMD

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 3, 2014

These rows of murdered children are just some of the 1,400 people massacred with sarin on the morning of Aug. 21, 2013 by the Assad regime

President Obama said on April 28, in Manila: “we’re getting chemical weapons out of Syria without having initiated a strike.” This was by way of defending not launching airstrikes to punish the Assad regime after the massive gas attack near Damascus last August. Put aside the clear evidence that the regime has simply switched the using chlorine gas. This seemed dubious on its own terms. Under the deal orchestrated by the Russians, Assad became a partner in disarmament; as soon as that process comes to an end, the Western interest in keeping Assad’s regime in place is eliminated. And so it proved.
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The Tragedy of Tony Blair

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 24, 2014

Tony Blair at Bloomberg on April 23

There’s a case to be made that Tony Blair is the most important figure in the development of the concept of “humanitarian intervention” since the end of the Cold War. When adumbrating his doctrine at the Chicago Economics Club in April 1999, Blair made very clear that this was no wild-eyed utopianism. Continue reading →

Book Review: Cruelty and Silence (1993) by Kanan Makiya

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 7, 2014

 

Kanan Makiya, an Arab author who writes of the decline of the Arab world as a story where Arabs have the primary agency, can be disorienting to read in the modern context. The first part of Cruelty and Silence deals with the cruelty of the Arab world in general and the Saddam Hussein regime in particular, Continue reading →