Here’s an entertaining and fact-and-interesting-speculation-filled post by Gary Brecher, The War Nerd about ISIS.

He’s got experience in the region and credibly asserts something that I inexpertly suspected ever since ISIS released videos of their first beheading of a westerner: that they are a bunch of morons.

I mean, really, what do you expect? Public opinion in the West was, and still is divided between those who want to intervene and those who want to stay out of it. But chopping someone’s head off on YouTube pretty much guarantees that the needle moves. And in the West it moves against you.

Of course it’s great at-home marketing. People who want to see the West embarrassed are delighted! Look at what these guys can do! Look at how impotent the West is! Yay Jihadists! Let’s go join them and chop off some heads! And rape some infidel women while we’re at it!

But in the West the video has a different effect. People convinced of the value of intervention become more convinced. People who are against intervention feel the ground on which they stand become less solid. Most important, people who are undecided decide. A few decide that you are dangerous and must be avoided. Most decide that you are dangerous and must be stopped. Too bad for you.

Then the writing is on the wall, and the back room politics start to work against you. Your important allies, the ones who have been secretly funding you, start to have second thoughts. They’re not backing a winner. They’re backing idiots.

And as the money dries up, so does whatever fighting capability you had. And your ability to raise more money. Because an Army without money is doomed, no matter how many wanna- be’s join their cause.

And then your grand narrative starts to unravel. You stop being the great hope of the Islamists: the carriers of the flag around which they will rally and restore historical greatness. Instead you become the latest and least credible of a long-line of might-have-been losers. Remember when Saddam was the great hope? Remember when Osama was?  Where are they now?

Brecher’s an entertaining writer, and his analysis of what’s going on behind the scenes seems to conform to the latest facts I’ve been able to collect.  “War Nerd” is a kind of cool handle.

Interesting background article for goings-on in Ferguson

How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty

Here is an interesting Washington Post article on the subject.

ISIS or ISIL? The debate over what to call Iraq’s terror group.

BY ISHAAN THAROOR June 18, 2014

If you’re following the ongoing crisis in Iraq, you’ve probably encountered the conflicting acronyms used for the jihadist group storming through the country. The Washington Post has been referring to the organization as ISIS, shorthand for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This is how most news organizations that operate in English began identifying the outfit when it emerged as a dangerous fighting force two years ago, launching terror strikes and carving out territory amid the Syrian civil war.

But the acronym that’s now deployed by many agencies as well as the United Nations and the U.S. State Department — and President Obama — is ISIL, for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Here’s how the Associated Press justified switching its acronym style from ISIS to ISIL.

In Arabic, the group is known as Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham, or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The term “al-Sham” refers to a region stretching from southern Turkey through Syria to Egypt (also including Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan). The group’s stated goal is to restore an Islamic state, or caliphate, in this entire area.

The standard English term for this broad territory is “the Levant.” Therefore, AP’s translation of the group’s name is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.

But in a smart blog post, Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan stresses the distinction between “al-Sham” and “Bilad al-Sham”; the former is often used to signify Syria or Damascus, the latter the wider Levant. He also makes this astute point about the usage of the term “the Levant,” which is slightly dated:

If we concede again that “al-Sham” means not only Syria, then there is a name for that: Greater Syria. When we use the older term “Levant”, that should be used alongside the older name “Mesopotamia” for Iraq. When you use modern “Iraq”, use the modern term “Greater Syria” — in that case, it’s the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (still ISIS).

In any case, neither ISIS nor ISIL are as accurate as “DAIISH,” the Arabic shorthand for the group that no one in the English-language press seems to use. ISIS has become part of the English-language media’s common parlance and has something of a ring to it — it’s like the ancient Near Eastern goddess. So switching to ISIL is, if nothing else, a bit jarring.

Most of the time, we deploy acronyms that preserve the wording of non-English languages. Many English-language readers following South Asian politics will know the upstart Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party as the PTI, not the Movement for Justice (which is what Washington Post style dictates). The main ruling party in Algeria is almost always referred to as the FLN — for Front de Libération Nationale — and not by what would be its English equivalent, the NLF. And there are myriad more examples.
In the larger battlefield of copy style controversies, the distinction between ISIS or ISIL is not so great.

In other circumstances, such decisions carry genuine political freight: For decades, many news outlets have kept using Burma to identify the former British colony in Southeast Asia rather than Myanmar, the name for the nation that was put into place by a junta that was long an international pariah. In recent years, as the country’s slow transition to democracy has taken effect, we’ve seen more institutions making the switch. Post style dictates Burma, with a nod to how the country is also known as Myanmar.

This post has been updated from the original. (HT @lizsly)