The trail ends. Gravel rut peters out at ridge's feet. Wind gnaws at cigarette, blowing life into cherry-red tip. Finish it, suck away, let breath eat flame. Grind it into dust and dirt. Kill the myth. Now breathe in the cold-dark; ice-eddies cutting nostrils and cracking lips. Peer up the mountain, between the pines, into the black. Witness the dim whirl of man-fire-man-fire, and maybe reflections of flame on something else. The rituals dance just out of reach. Climb, mount that first ledge. Damp stone glimmers in places; reflects moon and star. Below and blind to the fire, hugging the dead rock, climbing. Hit the table-rock set high into the mountain, scrub and pine whipping in early dawn wind. Nestled in the trees, open to the sky. Light the last cig, inhale and think. No fire, but tinder and kindling. Build an ember-home, gather rocks and twigs and branches. Knife and knee do the trick. Lay cigarette into needle-house. Behold a white-clad woman, far above and still ascending. The wind dies. The flame catches.
She rises, even now to the summit. And on and on, she will haunt you forever.
Rocket soars up out of the ground; a Saturn V but on a fantastic scale. Vision tracks with it. Follows it up past an aluminum grain silo with Cyrillic markings into an impossibly blue sky. More than one moon. Look around and gold fields of wheat lay over hills that roll into infinity. Children--are they mine?--play with kites. The grain hides them but not the fiber-optics that stretch skyward. Shockwave sweeps the kids away but leaves the grain untouched. I weep for them and turn away and the air takes me. The rocket is a heron with red-tipped wings and eyes that shine like starlight.
They wake me. Keening air runs over half-buried shack; carcass that Nature's jackals picked clean. Gray-blue wind snakes in from outside and tugs the sheet off. Cold then heat. Hear the stones again. See a sunset half a world away. Sky's blood-fire cauterizes wound between earth and myself. I become whole for an instant. Soul-embers pierce skin and fiber and meat and bone, and then more. Drink in the honey-wine, Gods-blood running from hand outstretched from stone and stream and old millhouse in woods pockmarked with unmelted snow blanketed in Dawn's dying fog. Feels like sword in the gut as it goes down but the pain is ecstasy. Sweat and tears like sun-melted glacier and dirt under fingernails like flecks of gold. Find myself under the skein, shack-carcass left behind. Fingers of juniper brush the horizon as sun comes up out of the butte and warmth intimates vitality and dog shifts against my head. Not died but something greater. Born, alive, from dead womb in dead land.
dreaming of the Hebrides on the steppes of the Paiute
My forebears settled this place back when it was just frontier. Grandmother's side left Herefordshire on the banks of the Severn and came here to the banks of the Shenandoah. You wouldn't know it now but the trees of the Valley were old then; 'least those that weren't ashed by the natives. Now from the highway it's scrub and billboards; skin healing round debris from wounding blade.
Back then--the 1740s, if the family saga holds true--the Valley was still the Red Silk Road of the East, alternatively bringing Cherokee traders and Iroquois war parties from the Carolinas to the Susquehanna and back. It would bring my people through Pennsylvania, down the cow-paths to Staunton, then out to Chattanooga and North Georgia where they joined with Ulstermen and Flemings.
I used to go hunting and camping further down by Front Royal and Winchester as a kid, in the passes that opened Valley to Piedmont and Potomac. Riding east on 66 in the back of Dad's 4Runner among the duffel bags and bow cases and Tikkas, back to that Gray-and-Black that lies like scar tissue on Washington's periphery--those were times when I felt like I was going to die, like all my life I had been held underwater, drowning, and now thrust beneath the concrete waves again--like I could only breathe in early morning hills before Sun burned Mist.
I have wondered what my ancestors thought when they came to this place, from cod-bewitched fishing villages on the Skaggerak and market towns in the Marches and daels among the Uplands. Was this an alien land to them or did they feel it too? I am inclined to say they did; every salt-caked path I have wandered in the Hebrides and every overlook I have set upon in Sognefjorden gave my brother and I that same shock, like our fathers back to Askr placed their hands on our shoulders and gazed out beside us.
Thisiskillingus. There will always be a place for cities, as cells to chain and harness Faust, batteries to propel us tothefrontier. But we cannot live in the prison blocks; only fitfully sleep the night as we check our phones and glance at the CZ on the nightstand, waiting for what we all know is the end of this path.
----
We left the apartment today at 0430, maybe two hours of sleep between passing out from drink and when we woke for showers.
Jeans and boots and a wool sweater.
Phone--front left
Knife, chapstick, keys--front right
Wallet--back right
Copenhagen Wintergreen--back left
Water, granola, beer, and dog (the neighbor's) already in the hatch as I come down the steps. Normally we take my 4Runner--the battlewagon, I have them calling it--on trips, but today it's the roomie's ST, a storm-gray four-pot with a stick and summer tires so unsuited to the frost that it's almost a safety hazard.
We chase the wind upvalley, into the hills. Early do the spirits flee their haunts, but we're there to witness them. The Ford's chassis keeps it planted in the left lane as the 18-wheelers fly back to our right. Soon we stop for gas and cigs, and I drive until we hit Skyline.
Roomie takes the wheel again and propels us around apexes with windows down so fast that I want to howl at Luna alongside dog. Neighbor laughs when I tell her this and we jam to Hendrix. Get out at the overlooks every once in a while and piss and take cellphone pics of the vistas and maybe smoke. Decide to save the beer for home--as I write this. We get to one point, maybe a little further than halfway, just walk for a while. Neighbor and dog go off and play fetch. She looks cute when she does, olive parka and riding boots and the whole shebang. Roomie says as much. He and I cross Skyline and climb to the peak--more a worn knob--and dip Cope in a clearing beside the summit. I try to whittle something--anything--but don't know how.
Here I want to erect great stones like those on Mull to remind our descendants that we knew, too, just as our forebears did for us. Ignore the sky-scrapers, here are those that scrape the soul. I say as much; Roomie nods and peers at Luna from under bare maple branches. He knows too. We don't speak for a while, just ride the nicotine rush. Eventually the neighbor has to come and get us. We don't really want to leave and neither does dog now that it's found us, here in the trees under the moon set in the dawn sky. Nobody says much and we head back to the ST. Make it home without incident. It's the first warm day of the year in Virginia. Maybe 55 degrees when we pull in. Neighbor hugs us and heads off to friends; Roomie and I crack some cervazas on the deck, chill and talk history and cars. He goes off and plays Xbox, I go off and write this.
I am sane again, maybe for the first time in months.
The Syrian war--not the war in Syria, but the war about Syria; that one which is fought in Foggy Bottom and Langley and the Lubyanka--is waged with the primary policy objective being the prevention of escalation. Both Washington and Moscow (with Ankara being a third player to be touched on later) ultimately place more value on the cessation of hostilities than on achievement of any specific policy objectives. This Syrian war is more comparable to a game of nuclear chicken than an out-and-out conflict, wherein moves on the game board are primarily about managing perceptions of irrationality and will-to-kill rather than out-and-out attacks on enemy assets. This projected appearance of volatility, i.e. the pretense of insanity and apparent willingness of one side to escalate to unconscionable levels, is intended to limit policy options for opposing decision-makers. Now, any analyst or decision-maker worth his salt is aware of this dynamic. USG's apparent unwillingness to act accordingly is probably more a result of their entanglements (Pentagon-backed Kurdish militiamen fighting CIA-backed Arab rebels over land that NATO ally Turkey is evidently willing to go to war over) than outright stupidity--though you could very easily make the case that USG is stupid enough to have let events bind their hands like this.
War thus becomes a game of intentional analysis, wherein deducing the enemy's designs upon your assets takes a front seat to the actual movement or utilization of assets. Determining the intent and strength of will on the part of your opponent takes higher priority than determining capability, simply because all sides in the conflict have the capability to wreak unimaginable damage upon the world order, let alone Syria itself. Capability is set at ∞ for all actors. Willingness to escalate is the variable that matters. Turkey has played this angle most effectively out of all the actors, though one wonders whether this is because they manage perceptions better than the others, or if their demonstrated willingness to escalate is a result of actual irrationality. This may be the single most important question of the war; and certainly is for the YPG. Russia is playing the game the way it should be played--the deployment of advanced air defense systems and wings of fighters throughout Syrian government territory reinforces the image of willingness to escalate while simultaneously providing concrete defense for all assets in-country, if and when this becomes a shooting war. Their moves on the game board are an abstract letter to Turkey, and pro-opposition countries in general: "You cannot escalate. Regardless of your intentions, we have concretely limited your capabilities." A hypothetical Turkish no-fly zone over North Aleppo will be by immediate downings of Turkish aircraft by Sukhois and ground units. Putin is not simply calling Erdogan's bluff--he is saying the reflexive response of RF forces in Syria will be to completely upend the game board if Ankara escalates. Analyzing USG's strategy--or lack thereof--is probably going to take another post. - a fyrdsman
On 17 February, a VBIED--by all evidence a suicide one--exploded alongside the Turkish equivalent of a DoD commuter bus in the literal heart of Ankara, the notoriously security-obsessed capital of that most Byzantine and conspiratorial of states, Turkey. Media has settled on about 28 dead and dozens hospitalized as of 18 February. According to a graphic from the pro-AKP Daily Sabah, the Turkish Parliament building and several military staff sites lay within a 300-meter radius of the blast. Try superimposing that radius on a major Western capital. Scary shit.
Also really, really hard shit. This most likely was not some random act of martyrdom by a Kurdish patriotard or full-time Caliphate enthusiast. Turkish law enforcement, and more recently their intelligence (should I even distinguish the two, after July 2015?) have had Islamist groups honeycombed with assets for years to prevent just these sorts of attacks, and to wield terror cells as state-held weapons in their own right. Even the Ergenekon and Gulenist trials say as much. And the Kurds have demonstrated little willingness or ability to carry out these sorts of attacks, though there have been cases.
The one faction with the capability (stellar tradecraft, influence with Islamists, plus knowledge and control of most variables present in the given theater of operations), willingness (their trademark organizational sociopathy), and reason (see below) to carry out this attack are the Turkish security services. Nothing else makes a lick of sense.
Now, yea, this sounds like some Truther shit and it kinda is, but Turkey is the one place where it's commonly accepted that false flag ops are run by the state, often through a third party (Islamists) and occasionally directed at a fourth party (the Kurds).
No militant group on their own can run a successful op like this in the literal and metaphorical heart of the Turkish security state. It's a country at war, and it's a country governed by Putin's Sunni Islamist spirit brother who rules like Hitler in Downfall,looks like he downs methaqualone, and generally speaks like he just did a line of coke on the lectern before the cameras came on.
The relatively simultaneous attack on a Turkish center in Stockholm indicates a level of planning, coordination, and tradecraft that Kurdish militant organizations lack. Both populations have sizable communities in the city, but only one of them has a formal intelligence agency that can coordinate assets across continents. With Turkish intelligence's penchant for false-flag attacks on civilian soft targets, and the fluid situation in North Aleppo...
Given all this, I put forward a tentative hypothesis:
The Turkish security apparatus enabled an Islamist cell--possibly ISIS--to bomb a bus of soldiers and civilian employees in central Ankara to provide justification for further intervention in northern Syria for reasons of national security.
It's all circumstantial, yea. I won't disagree. But it doesn't add up otherwise.
***********
Turkey--Erdogan, really--must intervene, certainly more decisively than in the past. Assad's February offensive has shaken the opposition to their cores, while the Kurds and the Russians are more openly aligned by the day. Any hope for a solution to Syria that is optimal for Turkey will be dead by summer if the country does not conclusively intervene. This intervention is likely to come in the form of
1) Heightened support for Arab rebels in the North Aleppo pocket, most likely in the form of war materiel
2) Turkish intelligence and special forces providing assistance for Turkmen fighters (and possibly FSA) in Idlib
Projecting forward through the spring, I assess that we will see a significant buildup of Turkish assets in rebel territory--and immediately across the border in Turkey--that will dwarf the infrastructure currently in place to support anti-Assad fighters. This may take a form similar to the Russian Federation's intervention in Ukraine, where special forces, small armored/artillery/technical support detachments, and contingents of "volunteers" quickly became the backbone of the rebel fighting force.
Turkey has additionally demonstrated both the capability and willingness to carry out extended cross-border bombardment of YPG and government forces to both prevent advances within Syrian territory (in Aleppo), as well as to keep select rebel-held border crossings open (in Idlib and Latakia). An escalation by Turkey as described above may also result in far more widespread cross-border fire on the part of the Turkish Army to support rebel forces up and down the line.
- a fyrdsman
*Everything after this is a combination of spit-balling and me being too tired to pump out those sweet sweet hyperlinks.
