Thomas Wictor

Every now and then, I read something about how this or that nation is the world’s biggest importer or exporter of arms.

So what?

Groups that track arms sales never explain the context. Who’s buying the weapons, and for what reason? Arms in and of themselves don’t matter. It’s the people who own them who we should worry about.

Arms and the Middle East

During the two years that the P5 +1 nations negotiated the sham Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, people thought they were being really clever by asking me this question.

“Israel has nuclear weapons. Why don’t you oppose that?”

Let me make it simple for you. Here are two people.

From which person would you prefer to hear the sentence “I own a gun”—the woman or the man?

All buyers of weapons are not equal. Opposing the purchase of weapons is like opposing the rising of the sun. It’s a moronic waste of time. Nation states need weapons. Helen Clark—prime minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008—removed combat capability from the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

All fighter aircraft were retired, and all fighter squadrons disbanded. Here’s what happened in New Zealand on September 17, 2005.

A man who stole a light plane and threatened to fly it into New Zealand’s tallest building is in a stable condition in hospital after crashing it into Auckland Harbour last night.

Auckland Police said the man was believed to be the only occupant of the plane, which crashed 50 metres offshore in Auckland’s eastern suburbs about 9.50pm (7.50pm AEST).

The pilot, said to be a middle-aged man, was rescued from the water by two passers-by and taken to hospital under police guard.

Radio New Zealand quoted witnesses as saying a police helicopter which shadowed the plane as it flew dangerously low over the central business district had forced the pilot to ditch in the sea.

Police did not confirm this.

Because New Zealand no longer has fighter aircraft, a police helicopter was used in a way that put the lives of everybody at risk. The cops could’ve been killed, and the wreckage of the two falling aircraft could’ve killed dozens on the ground.

Helen hates arms

After she wreaked total havoc on New Zealand, Helen Clark joined the United Nations. She can always be counted on to oppose any use of weapons to help people in need.

Helen Clark, who was a Labour prime minister of New Zealand for nine years, stressed it was madness “if anyone seriously thinks there’s a long term solution to Syrian crisis by military means… it has to be negotiated.”

Speaking at the Women of the Year lecture in London, Clark, now the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme which is the third most senior UN position, said she had firm hopes of peaceful dialogue this week as parties meet in Geneva. But she backed the original decision to invite Iran.

“Iran lends a lot of influence to the government of Syria. Iran must be there,” Clark said.

Clark is crippled by idées fixe. She believes that talking is always better than fighting. Because of people like her, over 250,000 have been killed in Syria since 2011.

Let’s look at the history of negotiated ends to conflicts.

The fighting of World War I stopped on November 11, 1918; the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919. It placed massive restrictions on Germany’s power to rearm—and the Germans got around every single clause in the treaty. Germany’s army was limited to 100,000 men. The Germans made each of those soldiers an officer, and “athletic clubs” were used to train millions of what became the enlisted men of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.

Secret training schools for tanks, fighter aircraft, and chemical warfare were set up in the Soviet Union. More pilots were trained on gliders. Although flamethrowers were banned, the Germans continued to manufacture them as “insecticide sprayers.”

By 1936 the German armed forces were powerful enough that Hitler was able to violate the Treaty of Versailles and Locarno Treaties by sending troops into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Nobody did anything, and three years later, the most destructive war in human history began.

North and South Korea signed an armistice in 1954. They’ve had major clashes ever since, including the North Koreans carrying out a pretext for invasion that came within minutes of succeeding. Now North Korea is a nuclear power run by an obese, alcoholic, cheese-addicted psychopath.

The 1991 Gulf War ended with a negotiated ceasefire. Then Saddam Hussein massacred at least 250,000 Shi’ites and Kurds, forcing the US, the UK, and France to create No Fly Zones over northern and southern Iraq for the next twelve years. Saddam began training tens of thousands of jihadists, and he reconstituted much of his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs through dual-use facilities. A second war against Iraq was launched on March 20, 2003.

Saudi Arabia and arms

Here’s what’s going on in Saudi Arabia.

In recent years in part because of concerns about Iran, Saudi Arabia has gone on a weapons buying binge. The kingdom ordered about $65 billion worth last year — making it the world’s top arms importer — and is in the middle of the largest US arms deal in history — $60 million in new fighter jets and helicopters. The Saudis are also buying more US Patriot missile batteries.

Not only have the Saudis bought arms, they’ve opened training schools for unconventional warfare. More special-operations units were created, and now they’ve been sent to Syria. I think.

The Turks have warned that they won’t tolerate Kurds from east of the Euphrates River to cross over into the west. It’s confusing because Kurds already live in the west. For example, the Sheik Maqsoud neighborhood of Aleppo is Kurdish.

Turkey has graciously allowed the Kurds of Aleppo to defend themselves against the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s representatives in Syria. However, if any Kurds cross from east of the Euphrates over into the west, the Turks will respond with military action.

Turkey and the US have said that all the Syrian Democratic Forces (QSD) west of the Euphrates are Arab. This is true. They’re all olive-skinned men.

Although the situation is very confusing, that’s by design. As a result, much of what you’re reading is inaccurate.

The New Syrian Army is different from the Syrian Arab Coalition. There’s not much information about the New Syrian Army; the group announced its formation on November 8, 2015. It put out a slick (and LONG) video that shows them with American arms.

I think this is another Arab League deception operation.

The New Syrian Army consists mostly of former Assad regime soldiers who fled the battlefield or defected, eventually getting smuggled out of Syria and into Turkey to receive military training…

However, the program to fund and train the New Syrian Army is also plagued with problems. American trainers are said to feel that the entire endeavor is a half-baked idea destined for failure. Reportedly, many of the former Syrian military personnel who show up in Turkey have no idea that they are even being recruited for an American sponsored militia until they get off the bus.

Assad’s Syrian Arab Army is one of the worst fighting forces on the planet. Nobody who is serious about winning would waste their time trying to un-@#$% these men.

Also, the New Syrian Army is very small, numbering only in the hundreds.

U.S.-backed Arab militias began a new offensive against the Islamic State in eastern Syria this week, a bid to flush the extremists out of a key transit zone for fighters, weapons and oil, according to defected military officers leading the Arab group.

The attack on Tanaf, near the border town of Abu Kamal, was the latest sign that the U.S.-led international coalition has decided to focus on the oil-rich Syrian-Iraqi border area, where Arab tribes are highly motivated to fight to regain the cities and towns they lost to the Islamic State last year.

The Arab offensive against Tanaf, which began Monday, is led by a new umbrella group that calls itself the New Syrian Army, which operates as part of the Authenticity and Development Front, a moderate Islamist grouping that claims 2,200 fighters operating in different parts of Syria. The offensive appears to involve no Kurdish forces.

I can’t pin down where this alleged offensive took place. Abu Kamal is also called Al-Bukamal, and the BBC says that Tanaf or al-Tanf is known as Al-Waleed in Iraq. Well, Abu Kamal is on the left in the map below, and Tanf or Al-Waleed is on the right.

They’re nowhere near each other. Supposedly the New Syrian Army soldiers were landed in four American helicopters, but I don’t believe that.

The Syrian opposition force to be recruited by the U.S. military and its coalition partners will be trained to defend territory, rather than to seize it back from the Islamic State, according to senior U.S. and allied officials, some of whom are concerned that the approach is flawed.

Although moderate Syrian fighters are deemed essential to defeating the Islamic State under the Obama administration’s strategy, officials do not believe the newly assembled units will be capable of capturing key towns from militants without the help of forward-deployed U.S. combat teams, which President Barack Obama has so far ruled out. The Syrian rebel force will be tasked instead with trying to prevent the Islamic State from extending its reach beyond the large stretches of territory it already controls.

“We have a big disconnect within our strategy. We need a credible, moderate Syrian force, but we have not been willing to commit what it takes to build that force,” said a senior U.S. official involved in Syria and Iraq operations who, like others cited in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the training program.

Obama’s unwillingness to deploy ground combat forces is rooted in concern that American troops would be drawn into a long, bloody war in the Middle East.

That’s the President Obama I’ve come to know! We’ll train them, but we’ll doom the whole enterprise before it’s even started.

The US first mentioned the Syrian Arab Coalition on September 16, 2015. These 3000 to 5000 fighters were said to have shown impressive battlefield skills. There’s no evidence of that. However, we began giving them arms the day after they announced that they were part of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Lightning-fast vetting. Why? Because they’re Arab professional special operators using the name “Syrian Arab Coalition.” That’s the only thing that makes sense in this carnival.

Now, the Syrian Arab Coalition is fighting in northern Syria, and they’re doing a hell of a job. They’re in the process of mounting an offensive on Manjib, a vital Islamic State stronghold.

Taking Manjib will cut off the Islamic State “capital” of Raqqa.

These Sunni Arabs are ostensibly militia. Former members of the Syrian Arab Army have so much blood on their hands that they’re useless in trying to win over the Syrian population. The Free Syrian Army has shown that. Therefore I think the New Syrian Army is (was?) just kabuki.

Genuine progress is being made, however. These operators are so skilled that they can fire single shots with the PKM machine gun, a fully automatic weapon that has only one mode: rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

An interesting photo taken on the eastern end of Tishereen Dam.

Kurds in northern Syria speak Kurmanji. They’re a tall, light-skinned, mountain people; the men have an average height of 5’10” (178 cm).

Saudi Arabian men have an average height of 5’6.5″ (169 cm).

Short, olive-skinned, masked warriors are doing some serious killing in Syria. You can, in fact, kill your way out of a problem. All you need is people who are grounded in reality and understand cost-benefit analyses.