News Comment 2/7
Suddenly a flurry of reports, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States seeing intervention in Syria as an impending reality. I wonder who they would end up fighting, ISIS sure, but the SAA? RuAF? Could this be the countdown to the full-blown meltdown I’ve been waiting on since I was born? This is it, right? The new confrontation, our cold war turning hotter all the time, hot as the trail of flaming jet-fuel that doomed Su-24 left in the skies over Latakia in November.
When Iraq started in 2003 I went into school every morning shaking my head after spending the drive over listening to NPR, shock-and-awed up through the final tank battles outside of Baghdad, the expected counteroffensives failing to emerge. Red dust and blood and the fear, it’s hard to remember just how bad it was in those years. I was in high school through the first stages of the war and I can remember taking a pause during Latin to watch grainy videos of the Blackwater contractors in Fallujah, their bodies burnt black, limbs snapped into awful, crablike configurations, strung from the trusses over crowds of smiling, armed men.
I thought about it all the time, while it was happening, and even if that thinking was clouded by adolescent high-drama and seesawing depression the core intuition has held true – things got worse.
It’s a fool’s exercise. It always has been. If Americans had the knowledge and the honesty they’d admit that every intervention we’ve made since the occupation of Japan has ended in disaster. Our military adventures couldn’t have sown the seeds of future chaos more efficiently if they’d been been designed to. I see the litany of stupidities that make up our recent history and I don’t know what to think. I’ve only confirmed what that long dead version of myself was able to intuit, and that’s a scary thought for me now, watching the wars headed towards full boil and seeing only darkness beyond.
The hivemind on Reddit informs me that it was the regime offensive on Aleppo that really switched things into high gear. They’ve cut the line of supply for the first time. It’s just a matter of time now. Similar encirclements have been hinted at in the ruined Damascene suburbs of Darayya (from which an intrepid Russian media company has recently put out some truly surrealist aerial war-porn). Meanwhile Putin’s been slap-happily annihilating any and all traffic crossing the border from Turkey, further infuriating Erdogan. If we do get a Gavrilo Princip moment in all of this my bet is that we get it from Turkey, something out from left-field but a century or more in the making.
Don’t ever forget that oil is down to thirty a gallon now and the boomtowns of the Dakotas are emptying out, destitute and meth-addled. When oil gets down that low the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs get nervous. Quite nervous, actually. They’re looking at Iran coming off-sanction. They’re seeing Assad holding on, actually turning it around, T-90s and fresh Grads to play with under endless Russian air support. I’m terrified that Erdogan and the Saudis are banking on the US getting pulled in when they jump, trusting in Putin’s fear of our might to protect them in a land incursion. Might get a shock. I think we may be more toothless in all of this than our allies would like to understand. I really could see a situation where Turkey and the Gulf going in kicks off the total bloodbath we’ve been fearing for decades. This is how history moves, in sudden inexplicable jerking fits of motion conducted for reasons and in the context of things that you just won’t ever comprehend.
I’ll end on a video, lest we forget what we’re speaking on. A squad of SAA troops, young men conscripted from the cities and coastal areas still loyal to Assad and somewhat insulated from the full barbarity of the fighting, cut down in an ambush over broken land in an open field. Jaish al-Islam reporting fifty killed, at least twenty-two visible on the video, according to those amateurs online who’ve tasked themselves with the accounting of such things. Towards the end a man sits up, hit already. You can see his head move softly side to side, his left hand spastically rising up and down. He seems to relax, pulls his hand to his lap, faces back across the field the way he came, and just sits there until a DshKa cuts over him with a burst and he collapses on his back.
This happened, within forty-eight hours of this posting – you’re seeing people end, and you could watch it and over and over again and never understand.