Handwringing about the tribal nature of Arabs

Materialist posting time. Poke holes in my likely flawed analysis please:

Kurds - just want to grill, but it’s thanksgiving so that means grilling turkey

Turkey - protector and defender of the Turkmen, hates the Kurds

Iran - can’t do shit about it now, will focus on Iraq & seek some kind of detente with the caliphate.

Iraq - will drive closer to Iran in fear of the caliphate

The Caliphate - won big but learned from last time and will probably seek to consolidate. Will want to focus on northern Iraq but will be reactive for a time until they consolidate their big gains. They have a grudge against Russia here but the cia has a bounty against their leader while also supplying arms so let’s face it, these players are businessmen and will cut a deal with Russia.

Shias / Alawites / seculars / remnant Ba’athists - lost big and will just try to survive, goal one will be an autonomous Latakia. An autonomous Latakia is directly in the interests of everyone except the caliphate since the caliphate immediately becomes a threat to everyone else, and not directly against the interests of the caliphate so I expect an autonomous Latakia that is essentially a Russian protectorate.

Lebanon (excluding Hezbollah): can’t do shit even for itself right now, will ally with Latakia & Russia and balance-of-power Israel against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah: will have to bend the knee and accept the caliphate as a neighbor, will loosely ally with Lebanon and Latakia.

Russia: will cut any deal possible that preserves their naval base, likely taking the form of a Syrian confederation that preserves an autonomous Latakia and they’ll wash their hands of the rest of the place. Interestingly well placed to balance Turkey against Israel, and play a broker between the caliphate and Iran. Most interesting takeaway here is that Lebanon is pushed towards Russia, and Turkey and Russia need to align their interests (= Kurds get fucked, as is tradition.)

Russia well positioned to be the closest thing to a power broker in this game of thrones imo. Despite having clearly taken a side, their side clearly lost, and their interests are clear and directly understood so bygones will be bygones.

Israel: can’t conceivably occupy a major Syrian population center if they can’t pacify Gaza. The more land they seize, the more likely the caliphate targets them instead of Iraq. I expect a restrained land grab to create a buffer zone, nothing more.

USA: fucking wild card. It’s certainly possible the caliphate don’t deal with Russia, which is a key assumption that negates everything so that is probably want the USA wants.

EU: irrelevant

US wunderwaffe - there are four of them, five if Denmark disarms, and you’ve got a month until electronic warfare catches up to them.

Russian wunderwaffe - reused some Soviet rocket designs and you’ll need entirely new technology to be able to stop them.

Reuters - Oct 2024 - How fentanyl traffickers are exploiting a U.S. trade law to kill Americans

IN JANUARY 2023, U.S. federal agents raided the home of a Tucson maintenance worker who had a side hustle hauling packages across the border to Mexico.

They estimate that over the previous two years, the gray-bearded courier had ferried about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel. That’s 15,432 pounds, sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills – enough to kill every living soul in the United States several times over. The chemicals had traveled by air from China to Los Angeles, were flown or ground-shipped to Tucson, then driven the last miles to Mexico by the freelance delivery driver.

U.S. lawmakers inadvertently turbocharged this problem as part of the 2016 legislation by loosening a regulation known as de minimis. Individual parcels of clothing, gadgets and other merchandise valued at up to $800 – one of the highest such limits in the world – now enter the country duty-free and with minimal paperwork and inspections. Fully 90% of all shipments now enter the country this way

America’s ports of entry are now so jammed with these packages, most of them from China, that just a tiny fraction of the nearly 4 million de minimis parcels arriving on U.S. shores daily are inspected by U.S. Customs. Security officials say that has made it easy for Mexican traffickers to sneak in small boxes of fentanyl ingredients from China disguised as mundane household items. Even modest amounts of these chemicals, known as precursors, can produce vast numbers of pills.

Traffickers then route these precursors south to Mexico

We are planning to restore deference by raiding lemmy.world/c/hasbara at a point of our choosing (probably in 2 months after you’ve kind of started forgetting about this)

IDF soldier told that sexual abuse is wrong?

Apparently it ran aground.

Also, apparently it’s the only oil tanker the US has in the region so they currently can’t supply fuel to their fleet there.

WSWS - 84 years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky

Responsible Statecraft - When Will The War In Ukraine End?

There has long been a growing recognition in private among Western experts and officials that it is in reality impossible for Ukraine to recover its lost territories through victory on the battlefield. However this has not so far led — even strictly in private — to suggestions that Ukraine and the West might propose terms that the Russian people (let alone the government) could accept as a basis for negotiations.

In the meantime, the evidence suggests that it is Russia, not Ukraine, that is strengthening its military position for eventual negotiations; and it is not at all clear that Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia would significantly change this trend.

There is no reason therefore to think that time is on Ukraine’s side in this conflict, and that it makes sense to delay the start of negotiations. That however does not mean that all the cards are in Russia’s hands, and all the Kremlin has to do is wait for Ukrainian collapse. The economy has performed far better than the West hoped, but the Russian Central Bank itself is warning of serious problems next year. As for the situation on the battlefield, while Ukrainian soldiers are exhausted, that also appears true of many Russian troops.

… As Russian establishment interlocutors acknowledged to me, Russia probably does not have the troops to capture major Ukrainian cities, unless President Putin launches an intensified wave of conscription — something he is clearly unwilling to do.

This means that if given a clear choice between what they could regard as a reasonable peace and a continuation of war to complete victory, it seems probable that a majority of Russians would opt for peace; and that it would therefore be very difficult for Putin to continue the war, if to do so meant the conscription of many more Russian sons and husbands. Such a compromise peace would be very far from what the Ukrainian and Western governments hope. It would also be very far from what Putin hoped for when he launched this war in February 2022.

Foreign Policy - Ukraine Needs a New Storyline

But as important as the messaging, Ukraine also had a clear—if simple—theory for how it would win the war. First, it stopped the Russian offensive in Kyiv. Next it broke Russian forces around Kharkiv and retook Kherson. Finally, as Western-made arms poured into the country, a final counteroffensive in the spring of 2023 would at the very least push Russia back closer to its borders, if not finish the war entirely.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, the latter step never materialized, not least because months of Western hesitation to deliver critical weapons such as tanks and aircraft gave Russia the time it needed to complete extensive fortifications along the front. When the 2023 counteroffensive petered out, Kyiv lost more than troops and equipment. It also lost a compelling argument for how it intends to win.

Arguably, the accusation that the Russia-Ukraine war was stalemated was never entirely accurate [lol. lmao]. While much of the Western media attention focused on the stagnant front lines, Ukraine notched a series of less headline-grabbing but arguably equally important achievements, including pushing Russia’s once vaunted Black Sea fleet out of its Crimean ports and the western Black Sea—a significant feat for country without a navy. Moreover, the lack of Ukrainian military progress was at least partially due to monthslong holdups in U.S. and European aid deliveries, as well as strict red lines limiting the use of any Western weapon to attack airfields, bases, and other military assets on Russian territory.

While practically every one of the dozens of Ukrainians whom I interviewed—at different levels of seniority, both inside and outside of government—recognized the need for victory and the existential stakes at hand, few were able to articulate just how Ukraine would come out victorious.

In this respect, the Kursk counteroffensive arrived not a moment too soon.

While the counteroffensive came as a surprise to many—including officials in the U.S. Defense Department—the push into Kursk makes perfect sense. Ukraine, after all, needed to do something big. It needed to show that while the Russian military may be vast, it is still uneven and, in places, brittle.

Inferring from Ukraine’s actions, the country’s new, if still unstated, strategic tagline seems to have three relatively well-defined parts: survive, strike, and seize. The first—survive—focuses on withstanding Russia’s punishing assaults against Ukrainian energy infrastructure and halting Russia’s slowly advancing offensive in the Donbas. The second—strike—seems to revolve around hitting military and industrial targets deeper inside Russia, not only in order to wear down Russian military capabilities, but also to increase the economic and political costs of the war for the Putin regime.

The third and final part—seize—is where Kursk fits in. This action emphasizes capturing Russian territory along the border, presumably both as a buffer to protect Ukrainian territory from Russian aggression and as a potential bargaining chip further down the road.

Ultimately, all three elements are necessary but likely not sufficient [lol. lmao.] in constructing a new theory of victory for Ukraine. While the survive, strike, and seize elements of Kyiv’s nascent strategy will undoubtedly ramp up the pressure on Moscow, they probably will not, by themselves, allow Ukraine to retake its lost territory. Indeed, Russia has continued to advance in eastern Ukraine, despite the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk. Nor will future strikes and seizures dramatically ramp up domestic pressure on Putin to the point where he will end the conflict. Most Ukrainian analysts whom I interviewed admitted that most Russians—particularly those who actually have influence in Putin’s autocracy—simply don’t care enough about Kursk to force Putin to abandon his war aims.

Thus, the question that remains is what the next and final element of Ukraine’s theory of victory might be, if it exists at all. Essentially, Ukraine has two basic choices—supplant or settle.

But with U.S. elections on the horizon and growing challenges around the world competing for scarce attention and resources, Ukraine’s leadership owes its partners and allies—as well as its own public—its theory of how it will win.

The authors thesis is fundamentally contradictory.

The author argues that Ukraine’s theory of victory is to survive and seize bargaining chips, but also that these seizures of strategically unimportant areas obviously don’t affect the war in a meaningful military sense.

And so the author concludes by admitting Ukraine has no theory of victory.

Even in the best case scenario that Ukraine can horse trade Kursk for a bit of territory, Ukraine has fundamentally lost the war.

The question not being addressed is post-war neutrality. It seems the deep state are now fully engaged in preserving a rump Ukraine that is NATO-aligned and hostile to Russia so we’ve entered the true negotiations here of drawing permanent spheres of influence.

By Raphael S. Cohen, the director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program at the Rand Corporation’s Project Air Force.

Zelenskyy lacks a legal mandate, lacks a simple majority in parliament, half his government ministers have quit or been fired, more firings are on the table, fired the head of the Air Force, recently replaced the head of the military, ordered a senseless and strategically meaningless offensive into Kursk, the Donbas line is in a state of ongoing collapse, Germany has cut funding, he’s fighting with Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are hostile, the US election is 50:50 and further US aid likely minimal even in the best case…

Zelenskyy is starting to look very alone.

Interesting point from Simplicius (chud with decent military analysis) about the collapse of the Donbas front

But my contention is that, if and when we start seeing multiple Ukrainian fronts collapsing at the same time, that will be the final siren song notifying us that the ‘snowball effect’ has truly begun and that Russian manpower is now overwhelmingly superior as a generality. That’s because as a last desperation move, Ukraine would be forced to pull forces from other fronts just to plug holes to keep from being entirely overrun and surrounded. The fact they’re not necessarily doing this yet likely means there are still some reserves available. When those reserves run out, it can create a cascading effect where reserves are pulled from other fronts, and then those fronts subsequently begin collapsing just as fast as the Pokrovsk one. Only then can we say that the AFU’s final stanza has begun.

We are not yet seeing a general collapse which means Ukraine must have some ability to manage unit rotations and some reserves left. Wait for two or more ongoing collapses before calling it curtains.