person:mark perry

Mattis’s Last Stand Is Iran – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/28/mattiss-last-stand-is-iran

As the U.S. defense secretary drifts further from President Donald Trump’s inner circle, his mission gets clearer: preventing war with Tehran.

Long point de vue de Mark Perry (The Pentagon’s Wars). Après avoir décrit l’état d’usure et de fatigue des différentes forces armées états-uniennes, puis décrit en détail une attaque en règle de l’Iran,…

At the end of the air campaign, Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities would be in ruins. But the worry for senior military war planners is that the end of the U.S. campaign would not mark the end of the war, but its beginning. Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and a former professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program (and one of the Army’s most sophisticated strategic thinkers), argued that a conflict with Iran would not be confined to a U.S. attack — or Iran’s immediate response. Tehran, he said, would not surrender. “We should not go into a war with Iran thinking that they will capitulate,” he argued. “Al Qaeda did not capitulate; the Taliban did not capitulate. Enemies don’t capitulate. And Iran won’t capitulate.” Nor, Dubik speculated, would the kind of air campaign likely envisioned by U.S. military planners necessarily lead to the collapse of the Tehran government — a notion seconded by Farley. “There is very little reason to suppose that anything other than an Iraq-style war would lead to regime change in Iran,” Farley said. “Even in a very extensive campaign, and absent the use of ground troops in a major invasion, the Iranian regime would survive.” That is to say that, while Iran’s military would be devastated by a U.S. attack, the results of such a campaign would only deepen and expand the conflict.

“Shaping and executing an exit strategy after an attack is likely the most difficult task we will face,” [John Allen] Gay [the co-author of the 2013 book War with Iran] said. “While an overwhelming airstrike may end the war for us, it will not end it for Iran. Our conventional capabilities overawe theirs, but their unconventional capabilities favor them. Assassinations, terror attacks, the use of Hezbollah against Israel, and other options will likely be used by them over an extended period of time. All of this has to be factored in: Even if we destroy their nuclear capabilities, we will have to ask whether it will be worth it.”
[…]
In truth, the unease over any future conflict goes much deeper — and is seeded by what one senior and influential military officer called “an underlying anxiety that after 17 years of sprinkling the Middle East with corpses, the U.S. is not any closer to a victory over terrorism now than it was on September 12.”

#sprinkle_the_Middle_East_with_corpses
#parsemer_le_Moyen-Orient_de_cadavres …

Looking for Hashish in Cairo ? Talk to the Police - By Mark Perry | Foreign Policy
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/23/the_hidden_power_of_egypt_s_drug_running_cops+?page=full

Le trafic de drogue dans le Sinaï, qui existe depuis l’ère Moubarak et que Morsi avait eu le malheur d’essayer de juguler, est assuré par le pléthorique corps des forces de sécurité égyptiennes, les « respectables » militaires recevant leur part des bénéfices au passage.

... while American journalists may be confused about what’s happening in the Sinai, a handful of senior officers in the U.S. military have been monitoring the trouble closely. One of them, who serves as an intelligence officer in the Pentagon, told me last week that Sinai troubles are fueled not only by disaffected “Bedouin tribes” but also by “Sinai CSF [Central Security Forces] commanders” intent on guarding the drug and smuggling routes that they continue to control nearly 30 years after Rushdie’s attempted crackdown. “What’s happening in Sinai is serious, and it’s convenient to call it terrorism,” this senior officer says. “But the reality is that’s there’s a little bit more to it. What Sinai shows is that the so-called deep state might not be as deep as we think.”

Now, nearly two months after the coup that unseated President Mohamed Morsy, the power of Egypt’s “deep state” — the intricate web of entrenched business interests, high-profile plutocratic families, and a nearly immovable bureaucracy — is more in evidence than ever. At the heart of this deep state is the Egyptian military, as well as the estimated 350,000 -member CSF, a paramilitary organization established in 1969 to provide domestic security — and crush anti-government dissent. Recruited from Egypt’s large underclass of impoverished and illiterate youths, the CSF is the source of tens of millions of dollars in off-the-record profits from the sale of drugs and guns, a percentage of which it shares with its allies in the more staid, and respected, Egyptian military. 

“None of this is all that shocking to me, or to most Egyptians,” says Robert Springborg, an Egypt expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “I’ve heard stories about the CSF all the way back into the 1970s. Do they control the drug trade? It’s almost a rhetorical question — it’s a veritable tradition with them.” Nor, Springborg says, is it a surprise that the security services control the smuggling routes into and out of Sinai: “This is their turf, it’s where they operate. Smuggling is a big business for them.”

The same testimony was given in a report to European Union officials by a U.S.-based private intelligence company with ties to the Egyptian military, but with this caveat: “The Israelis have to take some responsibility for this,” one of the firm’s senior consultants said. “The Sinai is flooded with contraband, with a lot of it hooked into the trade with Israeli mafia families. And a lot of that comes right out of CSF pipelines.”

(...)
 
(...) After an August 2012 attack that left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead, Morsy did just that: He replaced Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim (a holdover from the Mubarak days), sacked his military-approved chief of staff, appointed a new head of the military’s elite Republican Guard, forced the retirement of Egypt’s intelligence czar, dismissed the governor of North Sinai, secured Israel’s approval to deploy thousands of Egyptian soldiers to the Sinai border area, and launched air raids on “suspected terrorist strongholds” in the region.

Israel responded positively to Morsy’s moves: (...) Morsy also insisted that the leadership of Hamas more capably patrol its side of the border area separating Egypt from Gaza, bring smuggling under control, and move against Gaza’s network of criminal gangs. 

(...)

“I look at what has happened in Egypt over the last two months,” the senior security executive from the U.S. political intelligence firm concludes, “and I see a tragedy. I think that Morsy really tried to change things, really tried to reform the system, to overhaul it. That included the deeply entrenched CSF.” The official pauses for only a moment. “Maybe that was the problem ,” he says.

Back in Cairo , meanwhile, Ibrahim has pledged that he will restore the kind of security seen in the days of Mubarak. That’s bad news for Morsy’s supporters, but it’s probably good news for Cairo drug kingpins, who now have an opportunity to name the CSF-supplied hashish “Bye Bye Morsy.”