(Please listen to this twenty-two minute interview with Clare M. Lopez. She highlights Iran’s central involvement and the benefits it receives. — DM)
Archive for the ‘Iraq’ category
Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, Islam and Iran
October 10, 2014U.S. airstrike in Mosul underscores military questions ahead in dealing with Iraqi cities
October 9, 2014U.S. airstrike in Mosul underscores military questions ahead in dealing with Iraqi cities, Washington Post, Dan Lamothem October 9, 2014
(Will the IDF be asked for advice on limiting civilian casualties as it did, successfully, in Gaza? Probably not. Soliciting and following it would be politically inconvenient. — DM)
Militants from the Islamic State parade down a main street in Mosul, Iraq, in June in a Humvee they commandeered from Iraqi troops. (AP Photo, File)
[T]he planning, along with the U.S. launching its first airstrike inside Mosul on Wednesday, raises questions about how the United States and its partners will be able to assist in an urban military campaign if their mission is restricted to an air campaign and advising Iraqi forces.
***************
Shortly after retired U.S. Gen. John Allen arrived in Baghdad as the new U.S. envoy to the coalition against the Islamic State, he made it perfectly clear what part of the plan against the Islamic State militant group included: taking back Mosul.
The city, Iraq’s second most populous, fell to Islamist fighters in June, as they captured broad sections of the country’s north. Mosul has remained under their control since, with religious shrines destroyed, women forced into marriage and human rights activists and others murdered after publicly disagreeing with the Islamic State.
Plans to retake Mosul already are underway. Kurdish militia troops are preparing for a complex battle to retake the city, according to a Los Angeles Times report. And Allen said Iraqi forces will launch operations to retake Mosul within the next year. [Emphasis added. — DM]
“It’s not a single battle,” he said, according to the New York Times. “It’s a campaign.”]
But the planning, along with the U.S. launching its first airstrike inside Mosul on Wednesday, raises questions about how the United States and its partners will be able to assist in an urban military campaign if their mission is restricted to an air campaign and advising Iraqi forces.
The U.S. has launched hundreds of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in the last two months against the Islamic State, but until Wednesday they all had been carried out outside population centers. The primary targets have been militant training camps and groups of fighters who have massed in vehicles or on foot, making them obvious marks for U.S. aircraft.
As the U.S. and its partners intensified their airstrikes against the militant group in recent days, they hit a variety of targets around many of Iraq’s other major cities, including Baghdad, Irbil, Fallujah and Ramadi. Some of the strikes have been designed to keep militants out of areas they do not control, but Fallujah fell to the Islamic State months ago, and Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, remains heavily contested.
Officials in Anbar told the Wall Street Journal this week that they are concerned the entire province could fall in coming days. They also raised concerns that too much attention has been devoted to Kobane, a Syrian town on the Turkish border that is under assault by the Islamic State and also is in danger of falling.
Special Report: How Syria policy stalled under the ‘analyst in chief’
October 9, 2014Special Report: How Syria policy stalled under the ‘analyst in chief, Reuters, David Rohde and Warren Strobel, October 9, 2014
(Fireman: “Chief! The firehouse is on fire. Can we hose it down” Fire Chief: “Let’s analyze this. First we need to requisition a new fire hose. The old one has holes at both ends.” Fireman: “But it needs them. Water goes in one end and out the other.” Fire Chief. “So get one closed at both ends. It will work better. Trust me on this. Wait a minute. We need to decide what color hose to requisition. We’ll need a committee for that.” Et tu, Reuters?– DM)
President Obama speaks on the phone from the Oval Office, September 10, 2014. CREDIT: REUTERS/KEVIN LAMARQUE
Decisions small as well as large are made at the White House, often with scant influence from the Pentagon and State Department and their much larger teams of analysts and advisers. Senior Cabinet officials spend long hours in meetings debating tactics, not long-term strategy, the officials said.
**********************
Throughout 2012, as signs mounted that militants in Syria were growing stronger, the debate in the White House followed a pattern. In meeting after meeting, as officials from agencies outside the executive residence advocated arming pro-Western rebels or other forms of action, President Barack Obama’s closest White House aides bluntly delivered the president’s verdict: no.
“It became clear from the people very close to the president that he had deep, deep reservations about intervening in Syria,” said Julianne Smith, who served as deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. “And the likelihood of altering those views was low, very low.”
This summer, events overwhelmed the status quo. In June, the radical group Islamic State, after seizing wide swaths of Syria, conquered Iraq’s second largest city and threatened Baghdad as the Iraqi army collapsed. The insurgents beheaded two American journalists, increasing U.S. public support for military action. Finally, U.S. intelligence agencies detected foreign jihadists who they believe had moved to Syria to plot attacks against the United States and Europe.
The radicals had undermined the administration’s argument it had successfully ended the war in Iraq and were threatening Obama’s record of defending the homeland. The jihadists, said Smith, “turned the debate on its head.”
On September 18, Obama reversed his three-and-a-half-year opposition to military action in Syria and ordered open-ended airstrikes against militants. It wasn’t his first U-turn on Syria. In August 2012, Obama had warned President Bashar Assad that using chemical weapons was a “red line” Syria dare not cross; when evidence emerged that Damascus had gassed the rebels and civilians, Obama opted not to respond with force.
The bombing campaign, which could last for years, is a major course correction for a president with a famously cautious foreign policy.
Obama’s handling of Syria – the early about-face, the repetitive debates, the turnabout in September – is emblematic, say current and former top U.S. officials, of his highly centralized, deliberative and often reactive foreign policy.
They say Obama and his inner circle made three fundamental mistakes. The withdrawal of all American troops from neighboring Iraq and the lack of a major effort to arm Syria’s moderate rebels, they say, gave Islamic State leeway to spread. Internal debates focused on the costs of U.S. intervention in Syria, while downplaying the risks of not intervening. And the White House underestimated the damage to U.S. credibility caused by Obama’s making public threats to Assad and then failing to enforce them.
“REAL CHOKEPOINT”
This week, former Defense Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta joined Hillary Clinton and a growing list of former cabinet members and aides who said Obama made major mistakes in the Middle East. Panetta singled out the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.
“It was clear to me – and many others,” Panetta wrote in his memoir, “Worthy Battles,” “that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability then barely holding Iraq together.”
Such arguments were rejected at the time inside the White House, where the foreign policy machine has grown dramatically in power under Obama and cabinet members and their departments have felt marginalized.
The National Security Council staff, which coordinates U.S. defense, diplomatic and intelligence policy from inside the White House, has nearly doubled in size on his watch. It has gone from about 50 under George H.W. Bush to 100 under Bill Clinton, 200 under George W. Bush and about 370 under Obama.
Decisions small as well as large are made at the White House, often with scant influence from the Pentagon and State Department and their much larger teams of analysts and advisers. Senior Cabinet officials spend long hours in meetings debating tactics, not long-term strategy, the officials said.
Robert S. Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Damascus, recalled long meetings to debate small issues, such as which Syrian opposition members he could meet with and whether it was okay to give cell phones, media training and management classes to a local Syrian government council controlled by the opposition.
Sometimes, this more centralized White House system becomes overwhelmed.
“There’s a real choke point,” said Michele Flournoy, who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the No. 3 Pentagon civilian, in Obama’s first term. “There’s only so much bandwidth and there’s only so much they can handle at one time. So, things start to slow down.”
Flournoy and other former officials who criticize the administration’s approach concede that the most important decisions – using military force – must ultimately be the president’s call. They argue, though, that intensified White House control has resulted in the United States being behind the curve, whether in trying to counter Russian propaganda about the Ukraine crisis or battle online recruitment by jihadists.
Syria, where the estimated death toll has topped 190,000, is cited as a prime example.
By the fall of 2012, covertly arming Syria’s rebels had been accepted by Obama’s top three national security Cabinet members – Clinton, Panetta and CIA chief David Petraeus – as the best way to slow radicalism in Syria. The president and his inner circle first rejected the advice, then mounted a small scale program to arm the rebels, and now, two years later, after Islamic State has seized swaths of Syria and Iraq, embrace the approach.
Obama’s aides say tight White House coordination is a must in an era when the United States faces threats like terrorism, which requires harnessing the capabilities of the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence community, the State Department and other agencies. It’s the president’s duty to take ultimate responsibility for matters of war and peace, they say.
“Other than, of course, the men and women in uniform” and other officials deployed abroad, said Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, “only the president of the United States is assuming the risk of the cost of action.”
WHITE HOUSE CONTROL
This account of Obama’s national security decision-making is based on interviews with more than 30 current and former U.S. government officials, who have served both Democratic and Republican administrations going back to President Richard Nixon.
In some ways, Obama’s closer control and the frequent marginalization of the State and Defense departments continues a trend begun under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
But under Obama, the centralization has gone further. It was the White House, not the Pentagon, that decided to send two additional Special Operations troops to Yemen. The White House, not the State Department, now oversees many details of U.S. embassy security – a reaction to Republican attacks over the lethal 2012 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. A decision to extend $10 million in nonlethal aid to Ukraine also required White House vetting and approval.
On weightier issues, major decisions sometimes catch senior Cabinet officers unawares. One former senior U.S. official said Obama’s 2011 decision to abandon difficult troop negotiations with Baghdad and remove the last U.S. soldiers from Iraq surprised the Pentagon and was known only by the president and a small circle of aides.
The president, initially perceived as one of the greatest communicators of his generation, is now viewed as having done a poor job of defining and defending his foreign policy, polls indicate. A majority of Americans – 54 % – disapprove of Obama’s foreign policy performance, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling, one of the lowest ratings of his presidency.
Rhodes, one of Obama’s longest-serving national security aides, says a series of complex world crises, not policy mistakes, has driven down the president’s approval numbers. More broadly, he says, Obama has been right to be deliberative in the wake of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“What he’s always said is that if there’s a threat against us, we will act,” Rhodes said. “But when it comes to shaping events in cultures that are foreign to the United States we have to have some degree of realism.”
Obama has had notable national security successes. His record of protecting U.S. territory from attack remains largely unblemished. Current and former officials praise his policy on nuclear talks with Iran as clear and consistent. He is building a coalition against Islamic State that includes Arab nations participating in airstrikes with the United States, Britain,France and others.
And while past presidents faced grave dangers, most notably the possibility of Cold War Armageddon, for Obama the world is very different. The decisions he must make on using U.S. military force have multiplied. This reality, supporters say, is overlooked by detractors.
Obama has launched a humanitarian military intervention in Libya; overseen counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; moved to end his predecessor’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; wrestled with lethal threats to U.S. hostages and diplomatic posts; and sent the American military to West Africa to help tackle the Ebola virus and search for kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls.
“ANALYST IN CHIEF”
Current and former officials say the globalized world of Twitter and 24-7 news creates an expectation at home and abroad that the United States will quickly take a position on any foreign policy issue. The demand for instant American positions – and American leadership – can be overwhelming.
“One of the biggest problems in Washington,” said retired General James Jones, who was Obama’s national security advisor from 2009 to 2010, “is to find the time to think strategically, not tactically. You’d wake up and there would be a new crisis and you’d be scrambling to deal with them.”
Six years of grinding partisan warfare over foreign policy (and much else) have left Obama increasingly fatalistic about his critics.
While on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard in late August, he was widely criticized for golfing after making a condolence call to the family of murdered American journalist James Foley. Minutes after declaring Foley’s murderer – Islamic State – a “cancer” that had “no place in the 21st century,” Obama teed off with a campaign contributor, an old friend and a former NBA star.
Obama later told aides the criticism was inevitable. No matter what I do, he said, my enemies will attack me.
Far from being disengaged or indecisive on foreign affairs, as he is sometimes portrayed, Obama drives decision-making, say current and former officials.
Obama prepares thoroughly for meetings, has an encyclopedic memory and methodically dissects problems, former officials who have been with him in meetings say. The former law professor dominates foreign policy sessions, from small Oval Office gatherings to formal National Security Council meetings he chairs. Obama promoted open NSC debate, asked for dissenting opinions from cabinet members and called on junior officials who traditionally don’t speak at such meetings, they said.
Some aides complained that alternative views on some subjects, such as Syria, had little impact on the thinking of the president and his inner circle. Despite the open debate, meetings involving even Cabinet secretaries were little more than “formal formalities,” with decisions made by Obama and a handful of White House aides, one former senior U.S. official said.
Obama “considers himself to be analyst in chief, in addition to Commander in Chief,” on certain issues, according to Fred Hof, a former State Department envoy on Syria. “He comes to a lot of the very fundamental judgments on his own, based on his own instincts, based on his own knowledge, based on his own biases, if you will.”
The president’s supporters say his approach is based on principle, not bias. He ran on a platform of winding down the Iraq War and made his views crystal-clear on military action in the Middle East. Obama believed that the human and financial costs of large-scale interventions weren’t worth the limited outcomes they produced. He held that U.S. force could not change the internal dynamics of countries in the region.
THE SYRIA DEBATE
In August 2011, Obama issued a 620-word statement on Syria that his aides hoped would put him on the right side of history. After weeks of pressure from Congress, Syrian-Americans and allies in the Middle East and Europe, he called for Assad to “step aside.”
“It is time for the Syrian people to determine their own destiny,” Obama said.
Ford, ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014, said he supported the statement, but now regrets it because Washington didn’t back up the words with action. He said the Syria case reflects a pattern in the administration of issuing public statements without developing a clear policy.
When Assad refused to relinquish power, it became clear that the administration and its allies lacked a plan – or the political will – to forcibly remove him. American and European credibility in the region suffered.
Taking the removal of Assad into their own hands, Turkey and other Arab states overtly backed – or turned a blind eye to – the emergence of jihadist groups in Syria. American officials warned the countries that it would be impossible to control the militants, according to former U.S. officials. The Turks, according to one former official, replied that with Washington itself sitting on the sidelines, they had no choice but to back certain anti-Assad radicals.
As jihadists gained strength in the Syrian opposition in 2012, members of Obama’s first-term cabinet began to support covert U.S. action in Syria.
In the summer of 2012, three senior advisors outside the White House – Clinton, Panetta and Petraeus – proposed that the CIA train and equip the relatively moderate Syrian rebels operating as the Free Syrian Army.
At about that time, Ford said, the Free Syrian Army was warning – and U.S. officials confirmed independently – that militant groups were luring away fighters with cash. The more Western-friendly rebels had few funds to counter with.
In December 2012, Obama rejected the proposal.
Eight months later, in August 2013, U.S. intelligence concluded that Assad had used poison gas against rebels and civilians in a Damascus suburb, defying Obama’s public warning against chemical attacks. For a week, Obama appeared on the verge of launching airstrikes. After a walk with Chief of Staff and longtime aide Denis McDonough on the White House grounds, Obama changed course without consulting his national security Cabinet members and announced he would seek Congress’ approval, which never materialized. Instead, Washington and Moscow agreed on a deal to remove Syria’s chemical arms.
The missile strike reversal was widely cited by officials interviewed as the clearest example of Obama not engaging in a full Cabinet-level debate before making a strategic decision.
State Department officials warned for years that extremists would benefit from a power vacuum in Syria. “We were saying this area is going to be controlled by extremists and they’ll link up with Iraq,” said Ford. Obama made the wrong decision, Ford concludes. “It’s clear, in retrospect, that they needed more help then to counter the extremism.”
Another former official involved in Syria policy defended Obama. He said that in the early years of the Syrian conflict, with the long Iraq War fresh in their minds, Obama’s senior lieutenants struggled to find any vital national interest that would merit American intervention. Warnings of terrorism were discussed, this official said. But the White House responded that there were “more efficient and cheaper ways of dealing with the threat than intervening in Syria.”
Smith, the former NSC aide, said the Obama years hold a lesson.
“The instinct is to centralize decision-making with the hope of exerting more control,” she said. “But that often limits the U.S. government’s agility and effectiveness at a time when those two traits are most needed.”
ISIS on verge of seizing “complete control” in Anbar: tribal official
October 9, 2014ISIS on verge of seizing “complete control” in Anbar: tribal official, Asharq al-Awsat, Hamza Mustafa, October 9, 2014
(According to Wikipedia, “The paper was founded with the approval of the Saudi royal family and government ministers, and is noted for its support of the Saudi government.[2] The newspaper is owned by Faisal bin Salman, a member of the Saudi royal family.[3]“– DM)
A man looks at a vehicle belonging to the Iraqi security forces in the Anbar province town of Hit, Iraq, on October 6, 2014. (Reuters)
It was Anbar’s police force that was protecting citizens from ISIS, he said, adding that military forces were actively hindering efforts to combat the extremist group. “Unfortunately, the military has become a source of assistance for ISIS because for the most part ISIS is able to attack and defeat the military, taking control of their arms and equipment,” said Ibrahim.
**********************
Baghdad, Asharq Al-Awsat—Iraq’s restive western province of Anbar is on the verge of completely falling into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) unless urgent action is taken to address military failures, the Anbar Tribal Council warned on Wednesday.
The Anbar Tribal Council, the senior-most Sunni tribal organization in the province, is backing central government attempts to combat ISIS but has complained to Baghdad about the appointment of Lt. Gen. Rashid Fleih as head of the Anbar Military Command, calling for him to be replaced. In comments to Asharq Al-Awsat, Anbar Tribal Council member Faris Ibrahim said “[Fleidh] is unable to do anything.”
“The security situation in Anbar Province is going from bad to worse due to a lack of support, as well as the almost complete absence of security and military leadership. The military leadership is unable to devise new plans to address ISIS advances on the ground,” Ibrahim added.
“ISIS has strongly advanced in a number of areas in the province following the formation of the international alliance, as part of attempts to impose their position on the ground as a fait accompli.”
The Anbar Tribal Council member alleged that ISIS is also setting up sleeper cells in the province with the objective of entrenching its position and securing even more territory.
More than 500,000 residents of Anbar province have been displaced by fighting between Iraqi forces and ISIS since the conflict began in December 2013. Despite Iraqi military efforts and the formation of an international alliance to combat the terrorist group, ISIS has continued to advance in Iraq. ISIS forces most recently took over the town of Hit last week, leading to attempts by Shi’ite volunteer fighters backed by Iraqi military forces to recapture the western town.
“It is strange that while ISIS is developing its presence and capabilities on the ground in Anbar, military and security leadership are not doing anything new to address this. As a result of this, most parts of Anbar province are now completely in ISIS’s hands, including Ramadi city center,” Ibrahim told Asharq Al-Awsat.
It was Anbar’s police force that was protecting citizens from ISIS, he said, adding that military forces were actively hindering efforts to combat the extremist group. “Unfortunately, the military has become a source of assistance for ISIS because for the most part ISIS is able to attack and defeat the military, taking control of their arms and equipment,” said Ibrahim.
International efforts to combat ISIS in Iraq have focused on central and northern parts of the country, where ISIS is actively advancing. The terrorist group had initially advanced into Iraq from Syria through the western province, which had been the center of a Sunni-led protest movement against former Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s government over its perceived sectarian bias.
The government put together by the new premier, Haider Al-Abadi, has received a cautious welcome from Iraq’s Sunnis. However, the Anbar Tribal Council has called for Baghdad and the anti-ISIS international alliance to do more for Anbar.
Faris Ibrahim called on Baghdad to do more to tackle ISIS in Anbar, saying it was a critical front in the overall struggle, yet remained overlooked.
He said: “These operations have not reached the required level. It is strange that Anbar province has been completely forgotten over the past three months with the focus being on Mosul and the northern provinces. However, everybody knows that Anbar is the main incubator of ISIS and it is expanding to Iraq’s other regions from here . . . Therefore ignoring Anbar has led to disaster, as we are seeing today.”
The truth about diversity
October 8, 2014The truth about diversity, Israel Hayom, Clifford D. May, October 8, 2014
(Please see also a satirical post by Mike at Make an Effort, in which he proposes a Middle East solution. Here’s an excerpt:
Here in the United States we have an abundance of Well Trained, Amazingly Equipped and Overly Funded Diversity Trainers. (It’s worth noting that many of these same people are cross-trained in Sexual Harassment Education and Gender Sensitivity Issues. All Added Value as far as my Proposal is concerned.)
I cannot believe it would take much to initiate a Mission composed of the Majority of these ‘Special Operators’ to head over to Syria and Iraq to impose Mandatory Diversity Training. We can even make sure they wear comfortable shoes so they don’t challenge the President’s ‘No Boots on the Ground’ edict.
It may well be the best idea yet. It’s short; please read the entire thing.- DM)
Freedom may not be everyone’s cup of tea.
*****************
In theory, we Americans are great proponents of diversity. In practice, how many of us stop to seriously consider the meaning of the word? If peoples really are diverse — if we differ not just about clothes and cuisine but over ideas, values, interests, morality, and human rights — that implies there is no “international community,” certainly not one that embraces “international norms.” For years, we’ve told ourselves the world is a “global village.” Turns out it may be more like the “several remote nations” to which Gulliver traveled.
Multiculturalists of the Left are most likely to misconstrue diversity. But there also are those on the Right who believe all human hearts yearn for freedom. By now, I think, it’s become apparent: Freedom may not be everyone’s cup of tea.
The Iranians who took to the streets chanting “Death to the dictators” in 2009: I am convinced they did — and still do — want freedom, which, at a minimum, would mean liberation from theocracy, limiting the power of the billionaire mullahs, as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and the Basij thugs who have oppressed ordinary Iranians since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Those protesting in Hong Kong now are risking life and limb to prevent Beijing Communist Party bosses from encroaching on their freedoms. Under the 1984 declaration that paved the way for the British colony to be turned over to China, Hong Kong was promised “a high degree of autonomy” for the half century following the transfer of sovereignty in 1997. The idea was not that when 2047 rolled around the people of Hong Kong would accept dictatorship with bovine passivity. Rather, it was assumed that by then dictators would have been relegated to the dustbin of history. At this point, that seems rather a long shot.
In a diverse world, there will be those who believe in peaceful coexistence and those who believe in what Franklin Roosevelt called “philosophies … based on conquest and the subjugation of other people”; those who believe that liberal democracy is the best form of governmental organization and those who prefer authoritarianism or totalitarianism; those who regard the intentional killing of other people’s children for political purposes as wrong, and those who kill other people’s children for political purposes, as well as moral relativists who say: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
Addressing the U.N. General Assembly last month, President Barack Obama asserted that “the future belongs to those who build, not those who destroy.” First: That’s a hope, not a fact. Second: The hundreds of young Muslim men (and some women) flocking to the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq see no contradiction between the two.
As they destroy ancient Christian, Yazidi, Kurdish and “apostate” Muslim communities, they also intend to build a caliphate for the 21st century, an empire in the image of what they imagine Muhammad founded in the seventh century, what my colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht calls “a new conquest society.” Obama may not think that’s a useful thing to construct but, in a diverse world, he can hardly expect everyone to concur.
Similarly, Hamas wants to build “an Islamic state in Palestine, all of Palestine” as Hamas Political Bureau member Mahmoud al-Zahar said last week. That would, obviously, require the destruction of Israel, a goal to which Hamas has always been openly and unequivocally committed.
Some of the Americans and Europeans who hold up signs reading “Free Palestine” ignore that. Others are just not troubled by it. Many turn a blind eye to this, too: Wherever Islamic militants rule, freedom is limited to a choice between submission and death. In Gaza, as in Islamic State, as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, no one gets up on a soap box in the public square, speaks his mind, criticizes those in power, and then goes home for a quiet dinner with the family. In a diverse world, some people are tolerant; others jail or slaughter those who displease them.
There is diversity among Islamists. For example, Hamas, al-Qaida and Iran don’t recognize the legitimacy of Islamic State. Over the weekend, however, the Pakistani Taliban declared its allegiance to Caliph Ibrahim, as the entity’s ruler, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, now calls himself. That must have come as a disappointment to al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri, who is al-Baghdadi’s rival (but not his enemy — there’s a difference).
There are Russians who value freedom. President Vladimir Putin is not among them. Then-president George W. Bush was mistaken when he looked into Putin’s eyes and thought he saw an aspiring democrat, just as Obama was wrong to think he could “reset” relations with Russia based on mutual respect and a shared commitment to peace and international law.
If the polls are to be believed, more than eight out of 10 Russians support Putin. An analysis by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty leads to the conclusion that most Russians value national pride and power over freedom and democracy. That’s diversity for you.
Within the U.S., diversity is most loudly trumpeted on our campuses — ironic because a scholar with unfashionable ideas has about as much chance of getting tenure as of winning the lottery. People forget that tenure was supposed to protect intellectual diversity, not abolish it.
And while many Americans continue to treasure freedom, others are more concerned with equality of outcome. There is a tension between the two because when individuals with dissimilar backgrounds, habits and talents compete in a free market they inevitably wind up in different places. But that’s not the kind of diversity most of those who claim to be championing diversity are willing to defend.
U.S. officials: ISIS will capture Kobani, but it’s not a big concern to us
October 8, 2014U.S. officials: ISIS will capture Kobani, but it’s not a big concern to us, CNN, Holly Yan and Elise Labott, October 8, 2014
(Please see video at the link. Turkey is not interested in helping the Kurds in Kobani, including the Kurdish fighters who are getting overwhelmed. Is keeping Turkey happy part of the Obama Administration war “strategy?”– DM)
As Time.com put it, “If the ISIS militants take control of Kobani, they will have a huge strategic corridor along the Turkish border, linking with the terrorist group’s positions in Aleppo to the west and Raqqa to the east.”
And Staffan de Mistura, U.N. special envoy for Syria, warned of the horrors ISIS could carry out against the people of Kobani — horrors it has carried out elsewhere. “The international community needs to defend them,” he said. “The international community cannot sustain another city falling under ISIS.”
********************
The key Syrian border city of Kobani will soon fall to the Islamist terror group ISIS, several senior U.S. administration officials said.
They downplayed the importance of it, saying Kobani is not a major U.S. concern.
But a look at the city shows why it would mark an important strategic victory for the Islamic mlitant group. ISIS would control a complete swath of land between its self-declared capital of Raqqa, Syria, and Turkey — a stretch of more than 100 kilometers (62 miles).
As Time.com put it, “If the ISIS militants take control of Kobani, they will have a huge strategic corridor along the Turkish border, linking with the terrorist group’s positions in Aleppo to the west and Raqqa to the east.”
And Staffan de Mistura, U.N. special envoy for Syria, warned of the horrors ISIS could carry out against the people of Kobani — horrors it has carried out elsewhere. “The international community needs to defend them,” he said. “The international community cannot sustain another city falling under ISIS.”
Coalition batters ISIS positions with airstrikes
A U.S.-led coalition has been pounding ISIS positions in the region with airstrikes for a few weeks.
The latest strikes, late Tuesday into Wednesday, included nine in Syria, the U.S. military said. Six were in the Kobani area, destroying an ISIS armored personnel carrier, four armed vehicles and two artillery pieces, U.S. Central Command said. U.S. and coalition forces also conducted five airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, the military said.
The primary goal of the aerial campaign is not to save Syrian cities and towns, the U.S. officials said. Rather, the aim is to go after ISIS’ senior leadership, oil refineries and other infrastructure that would curb the terror group’s ability to operate — particularly in Iraq.
Saving Iraq is a more strategic goal for several reasons, the officials said. First, the United States has a relationship with the Iraqi government. By contrast, the Obama administration wants Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down.
Another reason: The United States has partners on the ground in Iraq, including Iraqi forces and Kurdish fighters known as Peshmerga.
Local fighters apparently made some headway Wednesday morning, when some ISIS militants in Kobani were pushed back to the city’s perimeter, Kurdish official Idriss Nassan said.
The battles have been bloody. More than 400 people have been killed in the fight for Kobani since mid-September, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The opposition group said it has documented the deaths of 219 ISIS jihadists, 163 members of the Kurdish militia and 20 civilians.
Map: Kobani (Ayn al-Arab)
U.S. plan against ISIS: Iraq first, then Syria
The United States’ goal is to first beat back ISIS in Iraq, then eliminate some of its leadership and resources in Syria, the U.S. administration officials said.
If all goes as planned, by the time officials turn their attention to Syria, some of the Syrian opposition will be trained well enough to tackle ISIS in earnest.
Washington has been making efforts to arm and train moderate Syrian opposition forces who are locked in a fight against both ISIS and the al-Assad regime.
Training Syrian rebels could take quite a long time.
“It could take years, actually,” retired Gen. John Allen said last week. “Expectations need to be managed.”
The United States also wants Turkey to do more, the officials said. The administration is urging Turkey to at least fire artillery at ISIS targets across the border.
But the Turkish reluctance, the officials say, is wrapped up in the complex relationship with their own Kurds and the idea that they don’t want to help any of the Kurds in any way.
Hundreds of strikes, millions of dollars
The United States and its allies have made at least 271 airstrikes in Iraq and 116 in Syria.
The cost? More than $62 million for just the munitions alone.
The effect? Negligible, some say, particularly in Iraq.
One by one, the cities have fallen to ISIS like dominoes: Hit, Albu Aytha, Kubaisya, Saqlawia and Sejal.
And standing on the western outskirts of Baghdad, ISIS is now within sight.
“That’s DAIISH right over there,” said Iraqi Brig. Gen. Ali Abdel Hussain Kazim, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
The militants’ proximity to the capital is cause for concern. If the terror group manages to infiltrate and launch attacks in Baghdad or its green zone, the results could be disastrous.
Kazim said ISIS has not been able to move from eastern Anbar province to Baghdad. But another brigadier general said that’s not even the biggest threat.
The real danger to the Iraqi capital, Brig. Gen. Mohamed al-Askari said, is from ISIS sympathizers in the city.
“They are a gang,” he said. “They deploy among civilians. They disappear into the civilian population and camouflage themselves.”
Is it a ‘war’? An ‘armed conflict’? Why words matter in the U.S. fight vs. the Islamic State.
October 8, 2014Is it a ‘war’? An ‘armed conflict’? Why words matter in the U.S. fight vs. the Islamic State, Washington Post, Karen DeYoung, October 7, 2014
(The teachings of “international law” are amorphous; meanings depend largely on who interprets it and why. See also Humpty Dumpty: “”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” — DM)
When is a war not a war? Does it matter, when a bomb is dropped or a missile launched, whether it’s called “counterterrorism,” or “armed conflict,” or “hostilities”?
Actually, it does — especially to a president who has said he wants to keep American military action within the bounds of U.S. and international law, and to administration officials who have spent countless hours in recent weeks parsing the language used to describe operations in Syria.
It matters to the American people, who have said in surveys that they favor airstrikes against Islamic State militants in both Syria and Iraq but aren’t much interested in fighting another Middle East ground war. It also matters to Congress, which has not authorized a war since World War II but may decide to approve this specific “use of military force.”
For civilians on the ground, the likelihood of being hit by a U.S. airstrike may be different under President Obama’s narrow guidelines for non-war counterterrorism than under broader international rules governing “armed conflict.” And European allies, several of which have joined U.S. air operations in Iraq, remain uncertain of the international legal justification for military action in Syria.
The administration’s definition of what it is doing has continued to evolve in recent weeks. As government lawyers struggle to provide the president with maximum flexibility under both domestic and international law, the results at times have seemed both inconsistent and confusing.
When Obama announced on Sept. 10 that he had authorized offensive U.S. military action, he emphasized the potential threat the Islamic State posed to the U.S. homeland and said his objective was to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the group. Neither the president nor White House briefers who provided additional context for his remarks mentioned a request by the government of Iraq to conduct airstrikes in Syria.
Yet that request is now cited as a key international legal underpinning for the strikes that began on Sept. 22. It is not clear when it was initially made. On Sept. 23, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power referred to an Iraqi letter sent to the U.N. secretary general three days earlier reporting an appeal to the United States to “lead international efforts to strike ISIL sites and military strongholds in Syria in order to end the continuing attacks on Iraq.”
Power cited the U.N. Charter’s recognition of the legitimacy of using force for both individual and collective self-defense. She did not mention the objective of destroying the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS.
The day after Obama’s nationwide address, CNN asked Secretary of State John F. Kerry whether the United States was at war with the Islamic State. That was the “wrong terminology,” Kerry said. “What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counterterrorism operation.”
Three days later, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Kerry called such semantic debates “a waste of time.” But, he said, “If people need a place to land . . . yes, we’re at war with ISIL.”
Obama, who has said in the past that the United States is “at war with al-Qaeda,” seemed to disagree when asked the war question about the Islamic State on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sept. 28.
“This is not America against ISIL,” he said. “This is America leading the international community to assist a country [Iraq] with whom we have a security partnership with, to make sure that they are able to take care of their business.”
When reporters asked the Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, on Tuesday whether the U.S. military was “at war with ISIL,” his response was succinct. “Yes, yes,” Kirby said.
Administration lawyers, seeking outside advice, have discussed the Iraq and Syria operations with a number of former officials. “We have encouraged them . . . to clarify publicly their legal theories under both domestic and international law,” said a participant in some of those closed-door discussions who would only discuss a private meeting on the condition of anonymity.
‘Armed conflict’ vs. ‘war’
International law, which uses the words “armed conflict” instead of “war,” applies whether states are fighting each other or against “non-state actors,” such as terrorist groups, although terrorists by definition do not follow the rules.
The law recognizes the possibility of civilian casualties. But governments cannot intentionally target civilians, and any action putting civilians at risk must be proportionate to the importance of the military objective.
In guidelines for lethal counterterrorism action he outlined last year, Obama imposed the narrower standard of “near certainty” that there would be no civilian casualties. But “that was then and this is now,” said John B. Bellinger III, State Department legal counsel in the George W. Bush administration. “I mean that seriously. When they were coming up with all those rules a year ago, they thought the terrorist threat was heading in one direction. Now it seems to be a completely different direction.”
Amid reports of civilian casualties from U.S. strikes in Syria — which the Pentagon said it had not confirmed — administration officials said the “near certainty” standard applied only “outside areas of active hostilities,” based on “among other things, the scope and intensity of the fighting,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity about legal conclusions.
“We consider Iraq and Syria to be ‘areas of active hostilities,’ based on what we are seeing on the ground right now,” the official said. “This is not the same as a determination that an armed conflict is taking place in the country at issue.” Nevertheless, the official said, the administration has chosen to comply with laws applicable to armed conflict where possible civilian casualties are concerned.
But “in international law, there is only one concept — an armed conflict, or not,” said one former senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the administration’s quandary. The United States, the former official said, now recognizes something in between — a new category of “a hot battlefield, or an area of active hostilities.”
The administration has also said its actions are a legal response to the threat because Syria is “unwilling or unable” to fight the Islamic State itself. Naz Modirzadeh, founding director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, called that concept an example of “folk international law.”
Established law, she wrote Thursday on the Lawfare blog, includes no such distinction for violations of sovereignty.
The role of Congress
Under the Vietnam-era War Powers Resolution, the president must notify Congress whenever he sends U.S. forces into “hostilities” and must withdraw them after 60 days unless lawmakers agree.
Obama observed the requirement when launching U.S. military operations in Libya in the spring of 2011 but then adopted what critics called an elastic definition in deciding that the situation did not constitute “hostilities” that put U.S. military personnel at risk, and thus was not subject to the deadline.
In Iraq and Syria, Obama sent the notifications but has said he does not need congressional approval, because U.S. actions are separately justified by the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda and its associates.
Last year, Obama proposed narrowing, and ultimately repealing, the al-Qaeda measure as outdated in an era in which that organization’s core leadership had been “decimated” and new, independent terrorist threats were emerging. Although he pledged to consult Congress on new authorizations for new threats, and some legislation was proposed, nothing had happened by the time the Islamic State took over vast territory in both Syria and Iraq.
The Islamic State and al-Qaeda have mutually and publicly rejected any association with each other. But the administration has said the once-rejected AUMF is valid, because the Islamic State is rooted in an al-Qaeda-linked group born in Iraq a decade ago.
Surrender in the War of Ideas
October 7, 2014Surrender in the War of Ideas, Washington Free Beacon, Bill Gertz, October 7, 2014
(The U.S. Constitution, ignored by the Obama Administration whenever convenient, has very little to do with the matter. In any event, Obama has repeatedly claimed that the Islamic State is not Islamic, thus erroneously interpreting and supporting what he apparently considers to be Islamic religious doctrine. — DM)
Constitutional religious clause prevents Obama administration from countering Islamic State ideology.
Islamic State militants pass a checkpoint bearing the group’s trademark black flag in the village of Maryam Begg in Kirkuk, 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq / AP
Obama stated in a speech on Sept. 10 that ISIL is “not Islamic” despite the group’s use of a fundamental Islamic precept of jihad, or holy war, in expanding its reach and imposing anti-democratic, hardline Islamic sharia law in areas it now controls.
Analysts and statements by the president and other administration spokesmen also indicate the administration may not clearly understand ISIL ideology, a required first step in developing a counter to it.
The Obama administration, under pressure from domestic Muslim advocacy organizations, has adopted a politically correct approach toward Islam and terrorism that has resulted in removing mentions of Islam from its current policies and programs. Instead, counterterrorism programs and policies are carried out under the less-specific rubric of “countering violent extremism” (CVE).
******************
The Obama administration is failing to wage ideological war against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) terrorists over fears that attacking its religious philosophy will violate the constitutional divide between church and state, according to an in-depth inquiry by the Washington Free Beacon.
Instead, the task of countering what President Obama called the “warped ideology” of ISIL is being farmed out to foreign states and Muslim communities that often share some of the same goals as the groups the administration calls violent extremists. This approach allows the administration to avoid identifying links between terrorism and Islam.
“While the government has tried to counter terrorist propaganda, it cannot directly address the warped religious interpretations of groups like ISIL because of the constitutional separation of church and state,” said Quintan Wiktorowicz, a former White House counterterrorism strategist for the Obama administration.
“U.S. officials are prohibited from engaging in debates about Islam, and as a result will need to rely on partners in the Muslim world for this part of the ideological struggle,” he said in an email interview.
Is ISIL Islamic?
Obama announced last month for the first time that his new counterterrorism strategy includes programs aimed at countering ISIL’s ideology. But a review of administration efforts shows very little—if anything—is being done to defeat or destroy the terrorist group’s religious ideology in a war of ideas.
At the United Nations on Sept. 24, the president asked the world body to come up with a plan over the next year designed to counter ISIL and al Qaeda’s ideology. He said ending religious wars through an ideological campaign in the Middle East will be “generational” and led by those who live in the region. No external power, the president insisted, can change “hearts and minds,” and as a result the United States would support others in the unspecified program of “counter extremist ideology.”
The administration’s so-called soft power approach to countering Islamist terrorism also appeared to have difficulty with clearly defining the religious doctrine behind the ideology of the resurgent al Qaeda offshoot now rampaging its way across Iraq and Syria.
Obama stated in a speech on Sept. 10 that ISIL is “not Islamic” despite the group’s use of a fundamental Islamic precept of jihad, or holy war, in expanding its reach and imposing anti-democratic, hardline Islamic sharia law in areas it now controls.
Analysts and statements by the president and other administration spokesmen also indicate the administration may not clearly understand ISIL ideology, a required first step in developing a counter to it.
Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism specialist, said the major problem for the administration in countering ISIL ideology is that most senior officials hold “post-modern” and “secular” views.
“As a result, they have almost no ability to understand the drivers of violent terrorists which are religious,” said Gorka, the Horner chairman of military theory at the Marine Corps University.
“When you don’t take religion seriously, it’s almost impossible for you to comprehend the philosophy of a suicide bomber, or someone who cuts off the heads of people in the name of jihad,” Gorka said.
Senior State Department officials have expressed the view that ideology plays no role in Islamist terror and is spawned instead by “local grievances” such as poverty or other economic and social privation, Gorka said. “That is utterly fallacious. If that were true, half of India would be terrorists,” he said.
The latest issue of the ISIL English-language magazine Dabiq reveals some of the group’s ideology, using references to Islamic practices of jihad and sharia law. “The Islamic State has long maintained an initiative that sees it waging jihad alongside a dawah [proselytizing campaign] that actively tends to the needs of its people,” the magazine said, adding that the group “fights to defend the Muslims, liberate their lands, and bring an end to tawaghit[the evil corrupt system].”
The magazine also sought to legitimize its mass executions, beheadings, and other atrocities as religiously justified responses to all opponents who refuse to submit to its ideology.
The president stated in his Sept. 10 speech announcing the anti-ISIL strategy that the group is “not Islamic” because it kills Muslims and innocents, something he asserted no religion condones, and a claim disputed by many experts on Islam.
“I’ve studied Islam and I did not find a very peaceful religion,” said a current senior U.S. counterterrorism specialist who disagrees with the administration’s approach of not directly addressing the Islamic nature of terrorism in counter-ideology efforts.
Wictorowicz, the former counterterrorism strategist, defended the State Department approach. “Having spoken to them at length about this, their position is that Islam, as a religion, is not the issue,” he said. “It is particular interpretations of Islam that are, in part, driving support for violence.”
Not fighting a war of ideas
The Obama administration, under pressure from domestic Muslim advocacy organizations, has adopted a politically correct approach toward Islam and terrorism that has resulted in removing mentions of Islam from its current policies and programs. Instead, counterterrorism programs and policies are carried out under the less-specific rubric of “countering violent extremism” (CVE).
Discussing Islam also has been placed off limits in many government and intelligence community counterterrorism programs as a result of pressure groups and Muslim advisers who insist such topics would violate constitutional separation of church and state issues.
That pressure has inhibited the U.S. government from addressing Islamist ideology in a significant way, critics say. Instead, the government has been forced to indirectly counter claims by terrorists, such as the false notion that the United States and the West are at war with Islam. It used public diplomacy programs and global “messaging” campaigns whose effectiveness has been questionable, to try and counter such claims.
James Glassman, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, said “absolutely,” that the administration is hampered by concerns over First Amendment constitutional religious issues from conducting aggressive counter-ideology efforts against groups such as al Qaeda and ISIL.
“There is reticence, especially at State, to criticize a noxious political ideology based on a religion,” said Glassman, now with the American Enterprise Institute.
Glassman said from the start, Obama has played down the war of ideas in the struggle against terrorism.
During the transition from the Bush to Obama administration, “I was told by the Obama operatives assigned to State that the term ‘war of ideas’ was not to be used,” Glassman said.
“The war of ideas had been my focus at State, but the administration had no interest in continuing the work we were doing,” he said. “Ideology provides the environment and the justification for the activities of al Qaeda and ISIL. It must be dealt with—just as we dealt with communism from 1945 to 1990. It’s a long battle.”
“The way around the problem is leadership,” Glassman said. “The president needs to make clear—as President Bush did immediately after 9/11—that the terrorists have constructed a phony ideology and that they are trying to take over an entire religion.”
Obama appears to be in the early stages of doing that “but it is very late in the game and he needs to devote resources, not just words, to the war of ideas,” Glassman said.
Looking for allies
Obama told the United Nations in a speech to the General Assembly Sept. 24 that “extremist ideology” has spread despite more than a decade of military and intelligence efforts to kill al Qaeda leaders. Groups such as ISIL and al Qaeda have “perverted one of the world’s great religions,” he said.
The world, and specifically “Muslim communities,” the president said, must now take steps to “explicitly, forcefully, and consistently reject the ideology of al Qaeda and ISIL.”
However, most of the Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, so far have not denounced the ISIL ideology and do not appear to be engaged in counter-ideological campaigns designed to discredit the motivating force behind the group.
The president elaborated in the U.N. speech on his administration’s approach to countering ISIL’s message, but not its Islamist ideology. He called for a “new compact” among civilized peoples to stop the “corruption of young minds by violent ideology.”
He called for cutting off funding and contesting terrorists’ use of social media to recruit and propagandize. Additionally, he called upon religious leaders of all faiths to join together and propagate the Christian concept of “do unto thy neighbor as you would have done unto you.”
“The ideology of ISIL or al Qaeda or Boko Haram will wilt and die if it is consistently exposed, confronted, and refuted in the light of day,” Obama said.
Wiktorowicz said he agrees more needs to be done. “Not enough resources are being devoted to the counter-ideology component of the administration’s strategy,” he said. “The long war is the war against violent ideologies and there hasn’t been the resource investment since 9/11. As a result of this and other factors, we’re seeing the reincarnation of al Qaeda as ISIL in Iraq and Syria.”
Wiktorowicz also said the administration is working with partners in the Muslim world “who can push back against the ideology.”
“The Salafi jihadists, however, have assassinated and intimidated Islamic scholars and others who have spoken out against violence, increasing the danger for the brave individuals involved in the counter-ideological struggle,” he said.
A hashtag campaign
To date, the allied campaign against ISIL is limited to U.S.-led missile, drone, and air strikes against vehicles and command posts of the group in territories it controls in Iraq and Syria. The bombing has slowed but not reversed territorial gains by the group.
The Obama strategy as outlined last month will involve four elements: Air strikes; support for local forces on the ground; counterterrorism efforts to prevent ISIL attacks; and humanitarian assistance to deal with the mass of refugees fleeing ISIL control.
Under the counterterrorism program, the president declared: “Working with our partners, we will redouble our efforts to cut off its funding; improve our intelligence; strengthen our defenses; counter its warped ideology; and stem the flow of foreign fighters into and out of the Middle East.”
Asked for specifics on what the White House is doing to counter ISIL ideology, White House and National Security Council spokesmen declined to discuss the matter. Ned Price, an NSC spokesman, provided a recent White House “fact sheet” that contains no reference to counter-ideology efforts.
Price said White House counterterrorism coordinator Lisa Monaco was “too busy” to discuss the counter-ideology campaign.
The fact sheet mentions various steps being taken, including the adoption of a “whole-of-government-approach,” cutting off funds to ISIL, and preventing foreigners from joining the group. An international group called the Global Counterterrorism Forum and other, non-government organizations also are said to be focusing on unspecified efforts to prevent foreign fighters from joining ISIL.
At the State Department, a State-led interagency Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications is engaged in “messaging” on social media and elsewhere. But those efforts appear limited to a counter-terror Twitter feed with few followers and limited reach.
A glimpse into the center’s activity was disclosed in February by a Saudi national who said he was paid to use Twitter in an online campaign to discredit Syrian jihadists.
The Saudi said he was unemployed when he was approached with an offer of money to attend a U.S. workshop with instructors who schooled him on the covert campaign against both al Qaeda and rival ISIL in Syria. The goal was to use Twitter to link both groups to Iran and its Lebanese surrogate, Hezbollah, he said.
The training included the use of hashtags designed to expand the reach of tweets to the largest number of people, particularly women. Instructions were relayed to the Saudi from a special iPhone application downloaded from the State Department web site.
State Department spokesmen ignored repeated emails seeking comment on the counter-ideology campaign, and the department’s public affairs office blocked the Free Beacon from speaking to officials in the center, without explanation.
Ideology as the center of gravity
At the Pentagon, spokesman Adm. John Kirby told reporters two days after the president’s speech that a “purely military solution” would not be enough to destroy ISIL.
“It also is going to take the ultimate destruction of their ideology,” Kirby said.
Ideological destruction, Kirby said, will be done through “good governance” in Iraq and in Syria. “And in a responsive political process so that the people that are falling sway to this radical ideology are no longer drawn to it,” he said. “That’s really the long-term answer.”
Because ISIL is not a formal military organization but a terrorist group, its center of gravity, in military terms, is the group’s ideology, Kirby said, adding that one non-military goal is delegitimizing ISIL while using U.S. and allied forces to destroy its ability to conduct attacks and control territory in the region.
Kirby did not elaborate and referred questions to the Central Command, the military command in charge of military operations against ISIL.
Lt. Col. Steven Wollman, a Central Command spokesman, said the command’s counter ideology efforts against ISIL are focused on exposing al Qaeda and ISIL “fallacies, particularly their incongruity with Islam and their penchant for violence, crime, and terror.”
“We demonstrate that despite their claims of creating a Caliphate for the good of the Muslim world their sole method is violence and only violence which has no positive short term or long term impact on the population,” Wollman said in a statement to the Free Beacon.
“To do so we highlight their total disregard for basic human needs and desires such as education, medical care, a free press, use of tobacco, and an expectation of freedom of choice.”
Additionally, the command said ISIL’s use of extreme violence such as beheadings, mass executions, and rape are “totally out of line of any Islamic teachings,” an aspect highlighted to local and regional audiences.
Terrorist groups also are using all forms of communication, including social media to recruit, fundraise, and spread violent ideology, Wollman said.
“It would be inappropriate to disclose all the specifics of what we are currently doing to counter the al Qaeda and ISIL fallacies campaign, but I can tell you that this command’s information operations activities are focused on foreign audiences across the region,” Wollman said, adding that message dissemination includes website, social media, print media, radio, and television in local languages.
“We align our efforts with other U.S. government agencies, and often are in direct support of U.S. ambassadors and with the knowledge of our partnered nations,” he said.
Additionally, “all of this is conducted by, with, and through our partner nations, often with our partner’s face on the message,” Wollman said.
“We also conduct training on how to combat extremist ideologies with our regional partner nations, as part of Foreign Internal Defense, Security Force Assistance, Building Partner Capacity, and other State Department-led activities.”
‘We won that battle already’
The administration’s point man for propaganda and so-called “soft power,” Rick Stengel, a former Time magazine reporter who is now undersecretary for public diplomacy, said in a recent speech that the administration is not trying to wage a war of ideas against ISIL.
“I would say that there is no battle of ideas with ISIL,” Stengel said. “ISIL is bereft of ideas, they’re bankrupt of ideas. It’s not an organization that is animated by ideas. It’s a criminal, savage, barbaric organization—I feel like we won that battle already.”
However, ISIL and its supporters are using social media effectively both to promote their Islamic-centered ideology and to recruit both foreign and regional fighters to their cause.
Twitter and Facebook have cracked down on ISIL supporters since the new counterterrorism campaign began last month. But the group has found ways to circumvent the crackdown, through innovative ways of creating new social media accounts.
In fact, the group has been so successful online that U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have been able to use information publicly available on the Internet to track and identify ISIL targets for bombing. In response, ISIL supporters on Twitter and Facebook have launched a campaign to limit the information about the group online to undermine the bombing strikes.
ISIL also uses social media to link to recruitment videos and publications that, according to U.S. officials, have gained wide circulation.
All the videos and publications highlight the group’s adherence to Islamic principles.
Syrian Rebels Seize Russian Spy Station Near Israeli Border
October 7, 2014Syrian Rebels Seize Russian Spy Station Near Israeli Border, Daily Beast, Josh Rogin, October 7, 2014
YouTube
The FSA found photos and lists of senior Russian intelligence and military officials who visited the facility, pictures of Russian personnel running the base, and maps showing the location of Israeli military units. Israeli news reports earlier this year said the Russian government had upgraded an advanced surveillance and intelligence gathering station in that area which could snoop on Israel, large parts of Jordan, and western Iraq, potentially to warn Iran in advance of an Israeli strike. Initial reports said documents from the facility suggested the Russian equipment was used to spy on Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
***************
When the Free Syrian Army pushed Assad’s soldiers out of a town south of Damascus, the last thing they expected to find was a Russian spy post, a few miles from the Golan Heights.
Syrian rebels have overtaken a joint Russian-Syrian secret facility that they claim was a covert intelligence collection base. Opposition fighters say the post was used to snoop in on the communications of opposition groups — and perhaps even the nearby Israelis.Free Syrian Army officials, U.S. officials, and independent experts told The Daily Beast that the evidence of Russian involvement in the facility, just a few miles from Syria’s border with Israel, if verified, would show a level of Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war that was not previously known.
Free Syrian Army officials posted several videos on YouTube showing both the outside and the inside of the facility, which the FSA captured over the weekend during a battle near Al Harah, south of Damascus, next to the Golan Heights.
The videos and accompanying photos show insignias representing a branch of Syrian intelligence and the Russian Osnaz GRU radio electronic intelligence agency. The FSA found photos and lists of senior Russian intelligence and military officials who visited the facility, pictures of Russian personnel running the base, and maps showing the location of Israeli military units. Israeli news reports earlier this year said the Russian government had upgraded an advanced surveillance and intelligence gathering station in that area which could snoop on Israel, large parts of Jordan, and western Iraq, potentially to warn Iran in advance of an Israeli strike. Initial reports said documents from the facility suggested the Russian equipment was used to spy on Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
U.S. defense officials told The Daily Beast the photos of the Russian insignia first shared on blogs were legitimate. But that evidence, at the same time, may not necessarily mean the facility captured by the opposition was controlled by Russia’s military; it could just mean that Russians were working there, as advisors or partners to Syrian troops.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s military and intelligence services at New York University said the term “Osnaz” on the insignia just meant a special unit of any kind. “It’s the kind of unit that the Russians would have had there because Syria is not the easiest area to operate in, they are an element of the radio-technical intelligence boys who do this.”
Firas Al Hawrani, the official spokesman for the FSA in southern Syria, told The Daily Beast Monday that FSA forces had seen about 15 Russian personnel operating in the Al Harah area before the FSA took the facility, but they left before the area fell out of regime control.
“The Russians who were at the Al Harah mountain, the regime took them to Damascus by plane two weeks ago,” he said.
Galeotti said these Russian advisers would specifically be working on intercepting radio communications of opposition figures. “They would be running an operation for detailed radio technical intelligence, we are not talking about intercepting telemetry and aircraft,” he said. “This is for eavesdropping on rebel radio communications. Cell communications are easier identified through other means. And this is also for identifying the presence of these units, which leads directly into targeting.”
Russia has been one of Syria’s most important allies for years. The port of Tartus is Russia’s only naval base on the Mediterranean, for example. And since the civil war in the country broke out in 2011, Russia has provided the country with advisers and billions of dollars’ worth of heavy military equipment. Galeotti said Syria’s security services are good as “traditional secret police skills,” such as interrogation and bugging telephones. The facility taken over by the Syrian opposition, however, suggests the Russians gave the regime “a whole new capability,” Galeotti said. “A lot of the Syrians are very clumsy. Some of the more precise attacks in the last year have suggested a new sophistication.”
Sen. John McCain told The Daily Beast Monday that the apparent Russian involvement in the base, which was also reportedly tasked with collecting signals intelligence and communications of rebel groups, showed of the depth of Moscow’s collusion with Damascus in the Syrian civil war.
“If what they’ve recovered is true and I have no reason to believe it’s not, it really is very indicative of the significant involvement of Russia in this conflict,” he said. “It shows significant coordination, establishment of a facility they could use for coordination and intelligence capabilities including intercepts. It’s a pretty sophisticated operation there that they’ve uncovered.”
Meanwhile, in Northern Syria, ISIS continued a major assault on the city of Kobani near the Turkish border as Kurdish and tribal forces tried to repel them. Dr. Najmaldin Karim, the governor of Kirkuk, was in Washington last week asking U.S. officials to expand the airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria and to increase aid to the Kurdish forces in both countries.
Not only is ISIS advancing in Northern Syria, they are digging in their positions in several Iraqi cities, including Mosul and Ramadi, Karim told The Daily Beast in an interview. Gen. John Allen, whom President Obama appointed to coordinate the international coalition against ISIS, said in Baghdad that the drive to free key cities like Mosul may take as long as a year.
“A lot of the front lines are basically frozen,” said Karim. “The worst thing would be for the United States, the region, and for Iraq, would be if the situation stays like this and festers. These guys have been there since June. If it goes further, it becomes a way of life. It will become like Somalia.”
Turkey, the Kurds and Iraq: The Prize and Peril of Kirkuk
October 7, 2014Turkey, the Kurds and Iraq: The Prize and Peril of Kirkuk, Stratfor, Reva Bhalla, October 7, 2014
Turkey cannot be comfortable with the idea that Kirkuk is in the hands of the Iraqi Kurds unless Ankara is assured exclusive rights over that energy [oil] and the ability to extinguish any oil-fueled ambitions of Kurdish independence.
***************
In June 1919, aboard an Allied warship en route to Paris, sat Damat Ferid Pasha, the Grand Vizier of a crumbling Ottoman Empire. The elderly statesman, donning an iconic red fez and boasting an impeccably groomed mustache, held in his hands a memorandum that he was to present to the Allied powers at the Quai d’Orsay. The negotiations on postwar reparations started five months earlier, but the Ottoman delegation was prepared to make the most of its tardy invitation to the talks. As he journeyed across the Mediterranean that summer toward the French shore, Damat Ferid mentally rehearsed the list of demands he would make to the Allied powers during his last-ditch effort to hold the empire together.
He began with a message, not of reproach, but of inculpability: “Gentlemen, I should not be bold enough to come before this High Assembly if I thought that the Ottoman people had incurred any responsibility in the war that has ravaged Europe and Asia with fire and sword.” His speech was followed by an even more defiant memorandum, denouncing any attempt to redistribute Ottoman land to the Kurds, Greeks and Armenians, asserting: “In Asia, the Turkish lands are bounded on the south by the provinces of Mosul and Diyarbakir, as well as a part of Aleppo as far as the Mediterranean.” When Damat Ferid’s demands were presented in Paris, the Allies were in awe of the gall displayed by the Ottoman delegation. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George regarded the presentation as a “good joke,” while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson said he had never seen anything more “stupid.” They flatly rejected Damat Ferid’s apparently misguided appeal — declaring that the Turks were unfit to rule over other races, regardless of their common Muslim identity — and told him and his delegation to leave. The Western powers then proceeded, through their own bickering, to divide the post-Ottoman spoils.
Under far different circumstances today, Ankara is again boldly appealing to the West to follow its lead in shaping policy in Turkey’s volatile Muslim backyard. And again, Western powers are looking at Turkey with incredulity, waiting for Ankara to assume responsibility for the region by tackling the immediate threat of the Islamic State with whatever resources necessary, rather than pursuing a seemingly reckless strategy of toppling the Syrian government. Turkey’s behavior can be perplexing and frustrating to Western leaders, but the country’s combination of reticence in action and audacity in rhetoric can be traced back to many of the same issues that confronted Istanbul in 1919, beginning with the struggle over the territory of Mosul.
The Turkish Fight for Mosul
Under the Ottoman Empire, the Mosul vilayet stretched from Zakho in southeastern Anatolia down along the Tigris River through Dohuk, Arbil, Alqosh, Kirkuk, Tuz Khormato and Sulaimaniyah before butting up against the western slopes of the Zagros Mountains, which shape the border with Iran. This stretch of land, bridging the dry Arab steppes and the fertile mountain valleys in Iraqi Kurdistan, has been a locus of violence long before the Islamic State arrived. The area has been home to an evolving mix of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyro-Chaldeans and Jews, while Turkish and Persian factions and the occasional Western power, whether operating under a flag or a corporate logo, continue to work in vain to eke out a demographic makeup that suits their interests.
At the time of the British negotiation with the Ottomans over the fate of the Mosul region, British officers touring the area wrote extensively about the ubiquity of the Turkish language, noting that “Turkish is spoken all along the high road in all localities of any importance.” This fact formed part of Turkey’s argument that the land should remain under Turkish sovereignty. Even after the 1923 signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, in which Turkey renounced its rights to Ottoman lands, the Turkish government still held out a claim to the Mosul region, fearful that the Brits would use Kurdish separatism to further weaken the Turkish state. Invoking the popular Wilsonian principle of self-determination, the Turkish government asserted to the League of Nations that most of the Kurds and Arabs inhabiting the area preferred to be part of Turkey anyway. The British countered by asserting that their interviews with locals revealed a prevailing preference to become part of the new British-ruled Kingdom of Iraq.
The Turks, in no shape to bargain with London and mired in a deep internal debate over whether Turkey should forego these lands and focus instead on the benefits of a downsized republic, lost the argument and were forced to renounce their claims to the Mosul territory in 1925. As far as the Brits and the French were concerned, the largely Kurdish territory would serve as a vital buffer space to prevent the Turks from eventually extending their reach from Asia Minor to territories in Mesopotamia, Syria and Armenia. But the fear of Turkish expansion was not the only factor informing the European strategy to keep northern Iraq out of Turkish hands.
The Oil Factor
Since the days of Herodotus and Nebuchadnezzar, there have been stories of eternal flames arising from the earth of Baba Gurgur near the town of Kirkuk. German explorer and cartographer Carsten Niebuhr wrote in the 18th century: “A place called Baba Gurgur is above all remarkable because the earth is so hot that eggs and meat can be boiled here.” The flames were in fact produced by the natural gas and naphtha seeping through cracks in the rocks, betraying the vast quantities of crude oil lying beneath the surface. London wasted little time in calling on geologists from Venezuela, Mexico, Romania and Indochina to study the land and recommend sites for drilling. On Oct. 14, 1927, the fate of Kirkuk was sealed: A gusher rising 43 meters (around 140 feet) erupted from the earth, dousing the surrounding land with some 95,000 barrels of crude oil for 10 days before the well could be capped. With oil now part of the equation, the political situation in Kirkuk became all the more flammable.
The British mostly imported Sunni Arab tribesmen to work the oil fields, gradually reducing the Kurdish majority and weakening the influence of the Turkmen minority in the area. The Arabization project was given new energy when the Arab Baath Socialist Party came to power through a military coup in 1968. Arabic names were given to businesses, neighborhoods, schools and streets, while laws were adjusted to pressure Kurds to leave Kirkuk and transfer ownership of their homes and lands to Arabs. Eviction tactics turned ghastly in 1988 under Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign, during which chemical weapons were employed against the Kurdish population. The Iraqi government continued with heavy-handed tactics to Arabize the territory until the collapse of the Baathist regime in 2003. Naturally, revenge was a primary goal as Kurdish factions worked quickly to repopulate the region with Kurds and drive the Arabs out.
Even as Kirkuk, its oil-rich fields and a belt of disputed territories stretching between Diyala and Nineveh provinces have remained officially under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi central government in Baghdad, the Kurdish leadership has sought to redraw the boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan. After the Iraqi Kurdish region gained de facto autonomy with the creation of a no-fly zone in 1991 and then formally coalesced into the Kurdistan Regional Government after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Kurdish influence gradually expanded in the disputed areas. Kurdish representation increased through multi-ethnic political councils, facilitated by the security protection these communities received from the Kurdish peshmerga and by the promise of energy revenues, while Baghdad remained mired in its own problems. Formally annexing Kirkuk and parts of Nineveh and Diyala, part of the larger Kurdish strategy, would come in due time. Indeed, the expectation that legalities of the annexation process would soon be completed convinced a handful of foreign energy firms to sign contracts with the Kurdish authorities — as opposed to Baghdad — enabling the disputed territories to finally begin realizing the region’s energy potential.
Then the unexpected happened: In June, the collapse of the Iraqi army in the north under the duress of the Islamic State left the Kirkuk fields wide open, allowing the Kurdish peshmerga to finally and fully occupy them. Though the Kurds now sit nervously on the prize, Baghdad, Iran, local Arabs and Turkmen and the Islamic State are eyeing these fields with a predatory gaze. At the same time, a motley force of Iran-backed Shiite militias, Kurdish militants and Sunni tribesmen are trying to flush the Islamic State out of the region in order to return to settling the question of where to draw the line on Kurdish autonomy. The Sunnis will undoubtedly demand a stake in the oil fields that the Kurds now control as repayment for turning on the Islamic State, guaranteeing a Kurdish-Sunni confrontation that Baghdad will surely exploit.
The Turkish Dilemma
The modern Turkish government is looking at Iraq and Syria in a way similar to how Damat Ferid did almost a century ago when he sought in Paris to maintain Turkish sovereignty over the region. From Ankara’s point of view, the extension of a Turkish sphere of influence into neighboring Muslim lands is the antidote to weakening Iraqi and Syrian states. Even if Turkey no longer has direct control over these lands, it hopes to at least indirectly re-establish its will through select partners, whether a group of moderate Islamist forces in Syria or, in northern Iraq, a combination of Turkmen and Sunni factions, along with a Kurdish faction such as Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party. The United States may currently be focused on the Islamic State, but Turkey is looking years ahead at the mess that will likely remain. This is why Turkey is placing conditions on its involvement in the battle against the Islamic State: It is trying to convince the United States and its Sunni Arab coalition partners that it will inevitably be the power administering this region. Therefore, according to Ankara, all players must conform to its priorities, beginning with replacing Syria’s Iran-backed Alawite government with a Sunni administration that will look first to Ankara for guidance.
However, the Turkish vision of the region simply does not fit the current reality and is earning Ankara more rebuke than respect from its neighbors and the West. The Kurds, in particular, will continue to form the Achilles’ heel of Turkish policymaking.
In Syria, where the Islamic State is closing in on the city of Kobani on Turkey’s border, Ankara is faced with the unsavory possibility that it will be drawn into a ground fight with a well-equipped insurgent force. Moreover, Turkey would be fighting on the same side as a variety of Kurdish separatists, including members of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara has every interest in neutralizing.
Turkey faces the same dilemma in Iraq, where it may unwittingly back Kurdish separatists in its fight against the Islamic State. Just as critical, Turkey cannot be comfortable with the idea that Kirkuk is in the hands of the Iraqi Kurds unless Ankara is assured exclusive rights over that energy and the ability to extinguish any oil-fueled ambitions of Kurdish independence. But Turkey has competition. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is not willing to make itself beholden to Turkey, as did Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, while financial pressures continue to climb. Instead, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is staying close to Iran and showing a preference to work with Baghdad. Meanwhile, local Arab and Turkmen resistance to Kurdish rule is rising, a factor that Baghdad and Iran will surely exploit as they work to dilute Kurdish authority by courting local officials in Kirkuk and Nineveh with promises of energy rights and autonomy.
This is the crowded battleground that Turkey knows well. A long and elaborate game of “keep away” will be played to prevent the Kurds from consolidating control over oil-rich territory in the Kurdish-Arab borderland, while the competition between Turkey and Iran will emerge into full view. For Turkey to compete effectively in this space, it will need to come to terms with the reality that Ankara will not defy its history by resolving the Kurdish conundrum, nor will it be able to hide within its borders and avoid foreign entanglements.
“Turkey, the Kurds and Iraq: The Prize and Peril of Kirkuk is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments