Category Archives: Counter-insurgency war

The Count 1.

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As best I understand it, before ISIS launched its Summer 2014 attack into western Iraq, it engaged in a long campaign of bombings in the heartland of Iraq. These spread terror and distrust of the government. As best I understand it, the defeat of Boko Haram on the battlefield led to a campaign of bombings in Nigeria and Cameroon. These spurred mass flight and a economic paralysis. So, bombings can be harbingers of victory or of defeat. It’s too bad that they aren’t more clear in their meanings. Still, I thought that I would watch this “variable”—as social scientist call it. See if anything becomes clear to me.

Hilla, Iraq is about 60 miles south of Baghdad on the Tigris River. It’s near the site of ancient Babylon, a vital center of Mesopotamian civilization that is unfamiliar to generations of American college students. From about 1000 AD on it was a sleepy farm town and administrative center. In the early 20th Century, an interesting episode in environmental history led to the construction of a dam to insure the proper irrigation of local farmlands.[1]

Saddam Hussein was hard on both the ancient and modern faces of Hilla. He had workmen knock down a bunch of the Babylonian ruins in order to build one of his palaces. After the war in Kuwait in 1991, a rebellion broke out around Hilla. Government troops killed several thousand people and buried them in a mass grave.

On 1 April 2003, there was a good-sized fight at Hilla between American armored forces and an infantry battalion of the Republican Guard. Then the insurgency began. One feature of that insurgency appeared in the efforts by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to foment a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. Hilla is a predominantly Shi’ite city, so it came in for its share of trouble. In February 2005, a suicide bombing killed 125 people waiting for treatment outside a medical clinic; in May 2005, two suicide bombers killed 31 and wounded 108 Shia police; in September 2005, a car bomb killed 10 and wounded 30; in January 2007, suicide bombers killed 73 and wounded 160; in February 2007, a pair of suicide bombers killed 45 and wounded 150; in March 2007, two car bombs killed 114 and wounded 147; in May 2010, a multiple car bomb attacks killed 45 and wounded 145. Then things calmed down as the “Sunni Awakening” and the “Surge:” took hold.

At a security check-point near Hilla, on 6 March 2016, a gasoline tanker waited for approval to move ahead in the middle of a crowd of vehicles and pedestrians.[2] When guards waved at the driver to halt, the truck lurched ahead and then exploded. At least 33 people were killed outright and 115 were wounded. (Almost 30 of the wounded subsequently died.) A witness said that the explosion 350 feet away from the blast felt like “an earthquake.” The witness is 54 years old. That means that he was born in 1962. He has lived through the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988); the American air campaign associated with the 1991 war over Kuwait; the American invasion (2003) and all that followed from it (2003-2007).

The key point here is that there are a lot of people outside “the West” who have heard explosions before and know what to do. “I immediately lay on the ground and saw flames all over the checkpoint.” After a while he got up to go check on friends in shops closer to the check-point. “One of them was beheaded and others were killed.” A 32 year-old school teacher who had been waiting to pass the checkpoint to get to work described it as “a very hard scene.”

What is it like to know what a suicide bombing sounds like? What about knowing that the bombings come in pairs, usually the second happening after people rush from cover to help the victims of the first bombing?

[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindiya_Barrage

[2] Omar al-Jawoshy, “Truck Bomb Kills at Least 33 At Checkpoint in Central Iraq,” NYT, 7 March 2016.

A Geographer Reads the Newspaper 4.

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Africa was one of the battlefields in the Cold War. The United States supported—to a degree— the Congolese dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko (aka Joseph Mobutu) while the Cold War went on. It’s not like they had much choice, regardless of what spy novels tell us about the supposed powers of the CIA world-hydra. Once the Cold War ended, all bets were off. In the late 1990s, Mobutu was staggering after 30 years of tyranny and plunder. Rebels waged war against the government from remote sanctuaries in the vast country. All sorts of tribal quarrels were barely held in check. Then, in 1994, the Rwandan genocide on Congo’s eastern border killed 800,000 Tutsis and led to the flight of a million Hutu “genocidaires” and their kin to the Congo. While the Ugandan-backed Tutsis took power in Rwanda, the Hutus took effective control of the refugee camps that were supposedly run by international agencies. Not content to leave bad enough alone, the Hutus transformed these into bases for guerrilla raids into Rwanda. In 1996, the Rwandan Tutsis joined forces with some of the local Congolese rebels (some of them Congolese Tutsis) to wage their own war in Eastern Congo against the Hutus. Massacres of Hutus—not just of soldiers—attended every Tutsi incursion, then and later.

This triggered the final collapse of the Mobutu dictatorship. Supported at first by Rwanda, a former-rebel-turned-schemer-in-exile named Laurent Kabila took over as president. Rather than replacing one strong-man with another, this created a vacuum of power. Civil war broke out with multiple participants. Kabila disappointed the Rwandans just as much as he disappointed many others. In 1998, Rwanda again invaded the Congo. Kabila saved himself from overthrow by drawing in help from neighboring Angola and Zimbabwe. This stalled the Rwandans at the price of expanding the number of interested participants in an already gory war. Then Kabila was assassinated and replaced by his even more ineffectual son. Again civil war broke out. Again, Rwanda intervened.[1] Often these interventions seem to have been driven by the quest to control the mines of eastern Congo: gold, diamonds, uranium, nickel, copper. Over the years, huge amounts of precious minerals have been transferred to Rwanda.[2]

The war continues in fits and starts much as it has done for twenty years now. It has been a particularly brutal war. Small bands of armed men, rather than great armies, do battle far from Western eyes. Massacres of civilians abound, and millions haven driven into hiding in the bush. Starvation and disease are as much killers as are the gun men. By 2009, the best estimates held that 4-5 million people had died. Then things began to calm down. Uganda and Rwanda, long partners in crime, fell out with one another over the division of the spoils. Rwanda sought to patch-up relations with Congo. This brought a period of relative peace to eastern Congo.

You might think that this catastrophe would attract a lot of attention. It hasn’t. There are a couple of excellent histories.[3] There is one novel that focuses narrowly, but effectively, on the corrupt relationship between business and government in what amounts to a profit free-fire zone.[4] Told through the voice of an Anglo-Congolese translator, the story boils down to a plot by a well-connected American businessman to launch a fake coup in eastern Congo so that his mercenaries can scoop up a vast store of precious metals. “The horror. The horror.”

[1] Paul Kagame, the Rwandan “president,” is a much caressed pet of the United States.

[2] This may be one explanation for the apparent modernity of government offices in what is still a poor country.

[3] Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwanda Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford University Press, 2009); Jason K. Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (Public Affairs, 2011).

[4] John le Carre, The Mission Song (Little, Brown and Co., 2006).

The end of Sykes-Picot 1.

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The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret agreement made between France and Britain during the First World War. It laid the foundation for the states of the modern Middle East.[1] The Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire were carved up into British and French spheres of influence. Soon thereafter, these spheres were re-labeled League of Nations “Mandates” out of deference to the self-righteous scold, Woodrow Wilson. Later, the British area got independence as Jordan, Iraq, and Israel; while the French area got independence as Syria and Lebanon. Events triggered by the American invasion of Iraq (2003) have now called into question the survival of some of these states.

First in line for the chopping block is Syria.[2] The Russians intervened to save their client Assad from defeat at the hands of his American-associated enemies. President Obama warned that the Russians were headed into another quagmire like Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way so far. War in eastern Syria might be just such a quagmire. Vladimir Putin might just decide that half a loaf is better than none and also better than trying to get the whole loaf. That half a loaf is likely to include Aleppo. An Assadist state in western Syria seems an increasingly likely outcome.

There doesn’t seem to be any plan yet to settle the fighting in Western Syria so that everyone can turn their guns on ISIS. Also, it’s pretty hard to imagine the former foes in the civil war just deciding to let bygones be bygones. How would they co-operate with one another? It isn’t clear that the Russians have any interest in a longer war in eastern Syria. In any joint struggle against ISIS the Assad government would have the upper hand over the non-ISIS forces provided that the Russians continued to provide air support. Government territorial gains and the accumulation of captured arms would further shift the balance in favor of the government. All sides must be pretty war-weary at this point. Again, half a loaf is better than none.

The Syrian Kurds represent another problem. Fighting ISIS when lots of Sunni Arabs would not has won them the favor and military assistance of the United States. However, Kurdish nationalism, rather than a principled opposition to ISIS, has motivated the Kurdish fight. Both the Sunni Arabs and the Turks recognize this reality. An autonomous or independent Kurdistan poses a serious threat to Turkey. The Turks—rightly—do not accept a distinction between Kurdish groups fighting in Syria or Iraq and Kurdish groups fighting inside Turkey. The recent suicide bombing of a military convoy in Ankara just turned up the heat in this conflict.[3] The United States has been trying to square this circle (just as it tried to reconcile Saudi Arabian and Iranian conflicts in the Iranian nuclear deal). The Russians have no such problem. The Turks shot down a Russian jet on a thin excuse. Putin will be happy to encourage the Kurds. The Syrian Kurds objectively allied themselves with the Russians and the Assad regime in recent attacks on Sunni Arab rebel forces. This may reduce American leverage on the Kurds.

For the moment, this part of the Sykes-Picot Agreement seems headed toward an Assad state in western Syria, a Kurdish state in northern Syria, and the ISIS Caliphate in eastern Syria. That’s unlikely to be the final word on the issue.

Then there is Iraq and Lebanon.

[1] To the extent that a place where ISIS can flourish can be called “modern.” This isn’t a permanent condition. Any culture can go through a bad patch. Mark Mazower called his history of 20th Century Europe The Dark Continent.

[2] Jaroslav Trofimov, “Prospect of Syria’s Partition Looms Despite Cease-Fire,” WSJ, 4 March 2016.

[3] “How they see us: Fighting against Turkey’s interests,”, The Week, 4 March 2016, p. 17.

The Shores of Tripoli: An Attempt at Perspective.

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What were some of the consequences of American action? First, there were the weapons. Over the years, Qaddafi had stockpiled conventional weapons. The victorious groups looted this arsenal. Some they used to increase the violence in the Libyan civil war that still rages. Some may have flowed toward ISIS in Syria. Many flowed to Islamist groups in the Sahel and West Africa. Second, there was the collapse of order in Libya and the rise of factions with ties to organized crime. This, in turn, opened a gateway for paying passengers who wished to cross the Mediterranean in search of a better life in Europe.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that for a long time many of the Sahelian and West African countries are or have been on the verge of becoming “failed states”. People have been eager to flee for years. The collapse of Libya opened a pathway for migrants. It did not create the underlying conditions that make people want to leave. This has great importance for the future of Islamist movements in the region.

Some of the proponents for action in Libya in 2011 now suggest a stark dichotomy: “a blood bath in Benghazi and keeping Qaddafi in power, or what is happening now.”[1] Were these the only choices? How can democracy be created in a country that has no experience with democracy or politics? Can it be done over the short-term by toppling a tyrant, creating political parties, and holding elections under international supervision the first few times? Is it a long-term project that can span several generations of political education under outside control? One Human Rights Watch official has remarked that there have been international peace-keeping forces in Bosnia for twenty years. Bosnia figured as one of the “lessons of history” in Secretary Clinton’s decision to favor intervention in Libya. America’s foreign policy in the early 20th Century may offer useful “lessons of history.” In Panama, the United States rigged-up a coup, then put in power a puppet government, and then stayed for a hundred years while the Panamanians developed a viable democracy. In Mexico, Woodrow Wilson set out to “teach the Mexicans to elect good men.” Then he went home. The League of Nations “Mandates” system provided a cover for European imperialism, but it offers a model for less predatory governments.

The whole episode suggests some of the psychological vulnerabilities of Hillary Clinton. She decided to support intervention after a single meeting with rebel leaders (men in suits) who assured her that they represented the whole country and that they had a plan for building a democratic Libya. Apparently, she just took their word for it. The experience of Iraq, where similar figures had sold the Bush II administration a pig in a poke made no impression on her. This suggests that she is credulous. Her arguments for intervention and for arming the rebels—if we don’t do it, then somebody else will—suggest that she is reactive and imitative. In private discussions with her advisors, she often cited her husband’s advice.[2] This suggests that she is unsure and indecisive. According to one aide, Clinton’s “theory on [Vladimir] Putin is, this is a person with some passions—if you get him going [talking] on those passions, your capacity to try to deal with him is improved.” This suggests that she has a shallow understanding. Did she get him talking about Anna Politkovskaya?  If elected, a President Hillary Clinton will have to deal with a powerful foreign leader about whom she understands nothing.

The real burden of decision not to sustain American involvement in Libya rests with President Obama. Secretary Clinton merely adopted the policy he seemed to favor. President Obama has acknowledged his error, while contending that the initial intervention had been the right choice. In contrast, Secretary of Clinton appears to have learned nothing at all from this particular “lesson of history.” She told The Atlantic that “’Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Maybe not, but it’ll do.

[1] Gerard Araud, then French ambassador to the United Nations and currently French ambassador to the United States, quoted in Becker and Shane, “Clinton,…” .

[2] “That’s what Bill said, too.”—Dennis Ross, quoted in Becker and Shane, “Clinton…” So, who will be president if Hillary Clinton wins in 2016? Just asking.

The Shores of Tripoli 4.

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Still, serious problems loomed. For one thing, the post-Qaddafi government guarded its independence. They rejected any international security force. For another thing, a gap opened between the men in suits–the Westernized exiles who had fronted the revolution with the Western powers–and the men with guns—the Libyans who had done what fighting there had been. The men in suits had no influence in the country, while the men with guns dominated the scene. Worse, the men with guns divided between Islamists and secularists. Each faction of fighters just recruited its own group of men in suits to front for them with the Western powers. This put a veneer of Western politics on something very different. Secretary Clinton, to the extent that she still thought about Libya, saw the men in suits as the natural leaders. In fact, brutal factional struggles had already begun among the men with guns.

A third problem appeared in the failure of the gun buy-back program. The State Department had hoped to work through the interim government. The absence of a real government made this impossible. Militias arming for civil war didn’t see the logic of selling their weapons. The Islamist groups continued to receive weapons from Qatar and the non-Islamist groups from the United Arab Emirates. To the extent that the program worked at all, it was by turning the militias into middle-men in a much larger regional arms market. They bought stuff cheap outside Libya, imported the weapons, and re-sold them to the Americans at a mark-up. Other weapons they may just have sold outside Libya. For example, an estimated 20,000 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles just vanished. Qaddafi’s weapons have turned up in Tunisia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Egypt, Gaza, and Syria. By Fall 2012, American intelligence analysts were deeply alarmed by the spread of these weapons.

In January 2012, Jibril was out as temporary prime minister, and was replaced by a former engineering professor from the University of Alabama. The professor, perhaps inured to the faculty politics of American universities, warned of the danger of civil war if the opposing factions were not disarmed and pacified with various concessions.[1] Soon, everyone wanted elections. This continued the farce that the men in suits controlled events. In fact, as the American ambassador warned in February 2012, the projected July 2012 elections would be under militia control. As it happened, the victors in the election were factions fronted by men in suits with whom Secretary Clinton was familiar. Jibriil was back in office.

The most pressing problem facing the government lay in the militias. At the very least, the government needed a reliable army of its own to help it face down the militias. On the one hand, it made sense to find a way to integrate the fighters in the militias into a peacetime society. Instead of embracing a plan to give the fighters government jobs or aid in starting small businesses or getting some education, the government merely agreed to put the militia commanders on retainer. On the other hand, the different regions—represented by their individual men with guns—struggled for predominance in the constitution that remained to be written. Violence accelerated.

Secretary Clinton’s instinct to push people around began to run into serious opposition after Libya. She proposed putting pressure on Qatar to halt the flow of arms to Libya. Both the Middle East experts at the State Department and the Defense Department argued against putting the American relationship with Qatar at risk. President Obama supported Clinton’s opponents.

Soon after the July 2012, Libya began to descend into even worse violence. The Islamist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi in September 2011 was merely the most eye-catching—for Americans—incident. The country itself began to fragment into a Western region (with a government supported by Qatar and Turkey) and an Eastern region (with a government supported by Egypt and the United Arab emirates). The break-down of government opened the way for many migrants to try to reach Europe by sea.

[1] See the recent controversy over funding STEM education versus the traditional liberal arts.

The Shores of Tripoli 3.

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In May 2011, Secretary Clinton met some rebel leaders in Rome. Their fight against the Qaddafi regime had stalled. They wanted more weapons to tip the balance. On behalf of the United States, she declined to help. The Obama administration worried that American-supplied arms would end up in the hands of Islamist extremists. (They had reason to worry. In June 2011, one load of arms from the French had fallen into the hands of a former inmate in a CIA “black site” prison.) The rebels went looking elsewhere. By Summer 2011, both Qatar[1] and the United Arab Emirates had emerged as major weapons suppliers to the rebels. Among those rebels were a number of Islamist groups, like those centered on the town of Misurata Cert.[2] As with her warning to the administration that France and Britain would go ahead with attacks on Libya without American participation, Secretary Clinton argued that the US had to participate if it was not to be left behind. Secretary Clinton persuaded President Obama to launch a covert program to arm the “moderate” rebels centered in Benghazi. On 15 July 2011, the United States recognized the rebels’ “Transitional National Council” as the legitimate government of Libya.

In August 2011, Qaddafi’s power-base had begun to collapse. Professional diplomats, like Jeffrey Feltman, were deeply alarmed at what had developed. Qatar continued to support Islamist groups as they maneuvered for power in post-Qaddafi Libya. Mohammed Jibril, the Libyan rebel leader with whom Secretary Clinton had been so impressed in March 2011, flew back and forth between Libya and Qatar to transmit orders. Jibril seemed totally unconcerned about disarming the foreign-armed militias that had—under cover of American air power—“defeated” Qaddafi.[3]

By October 2011, Qaddafi was dead. Secretary Clinton’s myrmidons celebrated her triumph. In an important step that reflected unhappy experience in post-Saddam Iraq, the State Department launched a $40 million program to “secure” (i.e. buy back from the militias) the huge stocks of weapons plundered from Qaddafi’s arsenals. In another important step, Secretary Clinton arranged for the release to the interim government of billions of dollars of Qaddafi’s “frozen” assets held outside the country.

Soon thereafter, Secretary Clinton disengaged from the Libyan issue. Partly, her tenure at the State Department began to wind down (and her preparations for another run at the White House in 2016 began to ramp up). More importantly, the Syrian front in the “Arab Spring” had blown up. Secretary Clinton switched her focus from intervening in Libya to overthrow Qaddafi to intervening in Syria to overthrow Assad. She urged President Obama to arm and train Syrian rebels.

President Obama resolutely refused to become embroiled in Libya as the Bush II administration had become embroiled in Iraq. He wanted the Europeans to take responsibility for Libya, but both France and Britain were pre-occupied with domestic issuers. He also rejected Clinton’s plan to arm Syrian rebels. Secretary Clinton had chosen adherence to President Obama’s wishes at the beginning of the crisis. She declined to change course afterward.

[1] See: “Your mind’s in the Qatar.”

[2] HA! Is art history joke.

[3] Scott Shane and Jo Becker, “After Revolt, a New Libya ‘With Very Little Time Left’,” NYT, 29 February 2016.

The Shores of Tripoli 2.

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In an approach that would be repeated in Syria at the time of the chemical weapons “red line” incident, the President first decided for intervention and then asked his military advisers what was possible. As would be the case later, he didn’t like what he heard. The eastern Libyan city of Benghazi formed the heart of the resistance to Qaddafi. His troops were advancing on the city, driving people before them. A no-fly zone wouldn’t do any good because Qaddafi possessed a huge advantage in conventional arms. Qaddafi “would have lined up the tanks and just gone after folks,” in the later words of then then-CIA director David Petraeus. This forced the President to seek a mandate from the UN for more than a mere no-fly zone.

The big rock in the middle of the road here was the Russians. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin opposed to American interventionism.[1] At first, the Russians opposed even a no-fly zone. Clinton consulted with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. She assured Lavrov that the US didn’t want another war in the Middle East. “Doesn’t mean that you won’t get one,” he replied laconically. Still, for reasons that the NYT story artfully elides,[2] the Russians agreed not to veto a UN resolution allowing “all necessary means” to protect civilians. The resolution carried on 17 March 2011.

On 19 March 2011 Secretary Clinton was in Paris to co-ordinate strategy with French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron.[3] Here Sarkozy blind-sided her by saying that French jets were already airborne for strikes, but that he would recall them if she wanted. Although this meant that the Americans would not control the pace of the initial campaign, Clinton declined to ask for the recall of the attacks.[4]

President Obama claimed that he had no intention of engaging in regime-change. On 22 March 2011, Secretary Clinton publically stated that the purpose of the mission did not include tossing Qaddafi out on his ear. The president ordered the Defense Department to prevent any massacres, and then to pass the task to the French and the British after ten days. Within three days, American forces had suppressed Libyan air defenses and halted the advance on Benghazi. However, the anti-Qaddafi uprising then spread to other areas. These uprisings were rooted in tribal or regional or religious identities long suppressed by Qaddafi. Their success might tear the country apart over the long run. The debate among national security officials turned to questions that might well have been considered before intervention. Was the “protection” mission to extend throughout Libya? Could Libyans be protected without evicting Qaddafi? What kind of government would replace him?

Events moved ahead of debate. By April 2011, the US had deployed drones to strike Qaddafi loyalist targets and inserted CIA officers to provide rebel commanders with combat intelligence. Increasingly, it became apparent that the Qaddafi regime would be destroyed, regardless of what the mandate from the UN authorized. Even so, the rebel offensive couldn’t move beyond Brega, on the coast road to Tripoli, where Qaddafi’s initial offensive had stalled months before.

In Washington, the scales began to fall from the eyes of the interventionists. Many in Congress were angry with President Obama’s contention that the War Powers Act did not apply because Americans were killing foreigners, but no Americans were being killed by foreigners. The Russians claimed that they had not approved regime change. The Arab League said the same.

[1] There is a report that Putin suffered a stroke in the womb before he was born. His obsession with physical attainments, from his judo matches to his riding a horse bareback to his hunting tigers are expressions of a heroic will to master his environment. It shows up in his politics and diplomacy. Or lack of diplomacy.

[2] See: “Obama versus Putin.”

[3] Why was the Secretary of State, rather than the Secretary of Defense, coordinating military plans with allies?

[4] Did she vote for the attack on Iraq in 2003 because she didn’t want to be labeled a “dove” when she ran for President in 2008? It’s always difficult reading the crystal ball, but Obama won as a “dove” in 2008.

The Shores of Tripoli 1.

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In Spring 2011, came the “Arab Spring”: Tunisia, then Egypt, and then Libya.[1] Unlike the Tunisian or Egyptian leaders, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi threatened to drown the rebellion in blood rather than yield power. Already in February 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looked forward to more trouble: “imagine how difficult [the transition of power] will be in Libya.”[2] By March 2011, the British, the French, and the Arab League—none of whom had real military power—wanted the US to intervene against Qaddafi. President Barack Obama, who had risen to prominence on the basis of his opposition to the 2003 attack on Iraq, was suspicious of the adventure. Compounding the difficulties, the government had little useful information about Qaddafi’s intentions. One State Department official told the NYT that they were captives of news reports to find out what was happening.[3]

Against this backdrop, a contest of policies raged inside the American administration. Voices of caution (notably Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) had warned against tossing overboard Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak just to gratify the young people in Tahrir Square. Now Vice President Joe Biden, Gates, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon argued that the Bush II administration had “taken its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan by invading Iraq in 2003. Intervention in Libya would have the same effect when the Obama administration struggled to extricate itself from those two long-running conflicts. Some in the intelligence community worried about what would happen if Qaddafi lost power.

Against them were younger aides—not identified by the NYT—who made a moral and sentimental appeal: “Mr. President, you’ve got to be on the right side of history.” This exerted real power on President Obama, who favored a forward policy in responding to the “Arab Spring.” Still, it would be hard to go against the opinion of the adults in the room once again. On 15 March 2011, Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, told the French ambassador that “you are not going to drag us into your shitty war.”

Abruptly, Secretary Clinton chose to join the side of the interventionists. Her motivations remain opaque. On the one hand, several of her former aides insist upon the “lessons of history.” President Bill Clinton had rejected intervention in Rwanda, to everyone’s regret; he had intervened against Serbia in the 1990s. Secretary Clinton did not want to stand idly by while another blood bath took place. On the other hand, she was very anxious to gain entry to the president’s inner circle of advisers.[4] Did she allow this desire to shape her policy?

On 14 March 2011, Secretary Clinton, who had voted for the attack on Iraq, met with the leader of one of the Libyan factions. “They gave us what we wanted to hear,” reported one of Clinton’s aids. “And you do want to believe.” Later that day, one French diplomat found her “tough” and “bullish” in favor of intervention. On 15 March 2011, even as Susan Rice made her blunt remarks to the French ambassador, Secretary Clinton warned the President and his other national security advisers that the French and the British were going to launch airstrikes on their own to create a no-fly zone. If things went wrong, the US would have to fish them out of the drink.[5] Clinton’s advocacy for action seemed to tip the balance, or at least to give President Obama the backing he needed to go against expert advice.

[1] Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Clinton, ‘Smart Power,’ and a Dictator’s Fall,” NYT, 28 February 2016.

[2] Scott Shane and Jo Becker, “After Revolt, a New Libya ‘With Very Little Time Left’,” NYT, 29 February 2016.

[3] Those accounts inflated the death toll, claiming thousands had been killed where Human Rights Watch would later count 350. However, the real issue is the suggestion that neither the US nor—astonishingly—the French had important intelligence assets in Libya. Even the French vastly under-estimated the amount of weapons that Qaddafi had accumulated. See Shane and Becker, “After Revolt,…”

[4] The NYT story tells of one 2009 episode in which she learned from the radio that there was a cabinet meeting scheduled for that day. “Can I go?” she asked aides.

[5] Apparently one “lesson of history” that Secretary Clinton did not learn was that President Eisenhower had let the French and British get out of their own mess in Suez in 1956.

The Great Game–latest round.

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“What do Russians want?”—Sigmund Freud.

One theory holds that the pursuit of foreign policy gains is driven by domestic concerns.[1] Russian actions in Syria and Ukraine are intended to distract Russians from their current economic hard times by reviving Russian parity with the United States. However, even though Russia remains burdened by economic sanctions imposed over the Ukraine and constantly assailed by Western leaders, Putin has called for new parliamentary elections in April 2016. That doesn’t look like a worried man. More likely, Putin’s chief concerns are international rather than domestic.

Vladimir Putin habitually gloms together a range of international events as evidence of the malign effects of American interventionism: Iraq (2003), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Libya (2013). Georgia and Ukraine may seem like a bad case of emotional sunburn, but it’s hard to argue with the examples of Iraq and Libya. As Putin made clear to New York Times reporter Peter Baker some years ago, he wants the Americans to stop it.[2] Apparently, Syria is the place where he intends to make his point.

Russia is trying to show that it is a better ally and worse foe than is the United States. In essence, the Russians want Assad to stay in place until they agree that he should go and that he be replaced by a regime friendly to Russia. At the moment, the Russians are willing to fight and the Americans are not, so Putin is likely to get his way.

The Russian intervention in Syria has been modest: 50 aircraft; 6,000 troops to service and protect the planes; and about $3 million a day. With that backing, however, Assad’s forces have expanded their territory at the expense of their foes. The anti-Assad forces approved of by the West often fight cheek-by-jowl with the anti-Assad forces disapproved of by the West (the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front). The Russians don’t seem much inclined to fine distinctions and the most-recent cease-fire agreement allows for attacks on both ISIS and the Nusra Front. The current fear in Washington seems to be that the Russians will continue their attacks on a broad swathe of anti-Assad forces after the cease-fire nominally goes into effect. If past performance is any guide, the US will not do anything more than protest as its nominal clients are killed.

However, now Assad’s troops are close to encircling the rebel city of Aleppo. If they can cut the main supply routes into the city before the cease-fire begins, then the cease-fire will allow a siege to run forward undisturbed. Any attempt by Assad’s opponents to break out of or break in to Aleppo would constitute a violation of the cease fire. Seen in that light, Putin’s insistence that he will honor the cease-fire may be “sincere.” The fall of Aleppo might put the last nail in the coffin of the non-ISIS part of the insurgency.

That still would leave ISIS. Would the Russians back a Syrian effort to reconquer the eastern part of the country from the Caliphate? If they did, what sorts of questions might that raise for other countries? The United States would have to decide if it would co-operate with such an attack. After having complained that the Russians have not been attacking ISIS, it might be embarrassing to refuse to join an attack on ISIS. If the Syrians did attack eastward, would they navigate around the Syrian territories held by Kurds? Leaving the Kurds in place would pose a problem for Turkey’s President Erdogan, who has been after Assad’s head for years. “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!”[3]

[1] Neil MacFarquhar, “Russia Wins Policy Points. Now What?” NYT, 24 February 2016.

[2] See: “Obama versus Putin.” https://waroftheworldblog.com/2014/09/28/obama-versus-putin/

[3] Joel, 3: 14.

Africa Adio.

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A while ago, you wouldn’t have thought that Sub-Saharan Africa would become a hot-bed of Islamism. In culture, it was African, rather than Arab; in religion it was Sufi, rather than Wahhabist.[1] Sufi leaders—many of them not particularly well-educated and perhaps similar to the village priest of the European Middle Ages or the mountain reverend of the Appalachians–preached accommodation with formally secular governments and co-existence with Christians. People sought the consolation of religion mainly when they grew older.

However, the situation has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. As was the case before with post-liberation Arab states, Sub-Saharan governments have failed to deliver higher living standards or respectable authority. Meanwhile, since the 1970s, oil-rich Saudi Arabia has sponsored conservative Sunni evangelists throughout the Muslim world. Sub-Saharan Africa was no exception. Thousands of eager young theology students from the region have studied in Saudi “universities.” Modern telecommunications allowed for the rapid spread Wahhabist preaching.[2] As a result, in recent years vast numbers of the Muslims of Sub-Saharan Africa have switched affiliation to Wahabbism.[3] More mosques are attended by larger congregation of younger people.[4] Many of those mosques have been built with Saudi money.

Then the American overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 opened one pathway between the ISIS caliphate and Sub-Saharan Africa, just as it opened a pathway in the opposite direction for migrants driven by poverty between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean sea-route to Europe. The migration to Europe and the rise of Boko Haram are two sides of one coin.

As a result, pro-Western governments have been operating in an increasingly difficult environment. Boko Haram turned to armed struggle in northern Nigeria in 2009. In 2013, an Islamist movement partnered with an indigenous Tuareg rebellion in Mali.[5] French troops beat back that threat. When the president of Niger openly sympathized with the victims of the Islamist attack on “Charlie Hebdo” in early 2015, mobs burned down forty Christian churches and the French cultural center. Additional British, French, and American special forces soon joined the fight, while the US set up bases for observation drones in Cameroon and Niger. On the other hand, ISIS seems to have increased its support for the Islamists, both remotely through the Internet and directly through dispatching advisors. Driven off the battlefield, Boko Haram resorted to terrorism. In January 2016, Islamists terrorists killed 86 people in Dalori, Nigeria, 32 people in Bodo, Cameroon, and 30 people in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.[6] In early February Boko Haram suicide bomber killed 58 at a refugee camp in Dikwa, Nigeria.

Yes, these bastards need killing. However, mowing the lawn isn’t going to solve the problem over the long term. It will take sustained economic development and good government.

[1] Basically, esoteric (focused on individual communion with Allah and loosey-goosey about assimilating elements of traditional African religion), rather than exoteric (focused on the strict observance of rites).

[2] In a different context, the American-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki offers a good example. See: “Just like imam used to make.”

[3] See Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2003).

[4] Would it force the analogy to see the supporters of Bernie Sanders and of Donald Trump in the same light? Angry or idealistic people who see the system as rigged against them is one common feature. That isn’t meant to denigrate either the young Islamists or the supporters of the American candidates denounced as “populists” in the mainstream American media. Nor is it an endorsement of their policies.

[5] See: “Sahel of a Good Song.”

[6] Yaroslav Trofimov, “Jihad Comes to Africa,” WSJ, 6-7 February 2016.