Category Archives: Wars of the Middle East

What did we learn from the Report of the 9/11 Commission? I

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By the end of the 20th century the CIA was “an organization capable of attracting extraordinarily motivated people, but institutionally averse to risk, with its capacity for covert action atrophied, predisposed to restrict the distribution of information, having difficulty assimilating new types of personnel, and accustomed to presenting descriptive reportage of the latest intelligence.” (p. 137.)

How had this situation come into being?

First, “although covert actions represent a very small fraction of the [CIA’s] entire budget, these operations have at times been controversial and over time have dominated the public’s perception of the CIA.” (p. 126.) Furthermore, whenever covert actions turned into highly public exploding cigars, the Presidents who ordered them have left CIA officers to carry the can. The CIA became very reluctant to engage in them. (p. 132.) Eisenhower’s initiation of and JFK’s approval of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs scheme offered an important early example of this behavior. Allen Dulles lost his job as head of CIA and Dick Bissell got fired. It would not be the last time. The Global War on Terror involved “extraordinary rendition,” “secret prisons,” and torture, all under presidential order. Now there is a public shaming of the CIA officers who acted on those orders.

Second, Counter-Intelligence chief James J. Angleton’s long obsession with a Soviet “mole” in the CIA, then the Aldrich Ames case in 1994, left the Agency security conscious almost to the point of paralysis. The CIA disliked everything that it heard about the then-new Internet communications and it established almost impossible barriers to the recruitment of agents who could be used against foreign terrorist groups. (pp. 134-135.)

Third, intelligence agency budgets were sharply reduced from 1990 to 1996, then kept flat from 1996 to 2000. Policy-makers insisted upon ever more-robust technological capabilities in intelligence gathering, without providing additional funds to procure them, so intelligence agencies cannibalized both human intelligence and analysis to get the money. (p. 136.)

In the Clandestine Service the budget cuts of the Nineties meant the loss of many experienced officers and the closure of facilities abroad. The CIA adapted to this by relying heavily upon foreign intelligence service liaison, and by “surging” (running around putting out brushfires instead of covering regions with experts).

After the end of the Cold War, the Directorate of Intelligence’s “university culture with its version of books and articles was giving way to the culture of the newsroom.” (p. 133.) That is, analysts began churning out descriptive reports on more subjects based on a shallower understanding than had been previous reports.

People recognized that a problem existed at CIA. In 1997 George Tenet was appointed DCI with the mission of rebuilding the agency. In 1998 and 1999 two panels (the second chaired by Donald Rumsfeld) that evaluated the CIA warned of “the dispersal of effort on too many priorities, the declining attention to the craft of strategic analysis, and security rules that prevented adequate sharing of information.” (p. 134.)   Tenet obtained expanded budgets for all aspects of the CIA. (pp. 512-513.) In 1998 Tenet persuaded both Congress and the Clinton administration to begin rebuilding the Clandestine Service, but the 5-7 years of training needed to bring a new officer up to full speed meant that it would be 2005 or 2006 before the first recruits were of any real use to anyone. (p. 133.)

Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

Zarqawi.

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Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (30 October 1966-7 June 2006) was born in Zarqa, Jordan. He sprang from a Bedouin family which had settled down in Jordan’s one factory town. Something went wrong early in life. He drank a lot and had a great deal of “contact” with the police. At some point, he got religion and shaped up his life. A passport photo shows him clean-shaven, with a white shirt and tie—and a sad, mean look. At some point, he took the alias “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” which means “the father of Musab” and “From Zarka.”

In 1989 he followed the well-worn Young Islamist pathway to Afghanistan. Here he met Osama bin Laden, may have received basic military training in one of the numerous camps, and wrote some stuff for an Islamist newsletter. By 1992 he was back in Jordan conspiring to overthrow the monarchy, for which he did five years in prison (1994-1999). In prison he came under the influence of the Jordanian Islamist writer Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. No sooner did he get out than he tried to blow up a tourist hotel in Amman (1999). This didn’t work out any better than his earlier plot. From 1999 to 2002 he moved to Afghanistan (where OBL fronted him $200,000 to start a Jordanian franchise of Al Qaeda and the Americans almost killed him in a bombing), then went to Iraq by way of Iran. He may have been recovering from an injury in Baghdad for a while. In summer 2002 he moved into northern Iraq, where he joined an Islamist group that was waging jihad by cutting pictures of women off ads.

More serious work tugged at him. He helped plot the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan (October 2002); organized the bombing of the UN’s HQ in Baghdad (August 2003); organized attacks on Shi’ite shrines in Karbala and Baghdad (March 2004); planned a huge abortive chemical weapons attack on the offices of the prime minister and the intelligence service of Jordan and on the American embassy (April 2004); beheaded a captured American civilian (May 2004), then posted the film on the internet; sent terrorists on an abortive attack on a NATO meeting in Turkey (June 2004); beheaded another captured American civilian (September 2004), then posted the film on the internet; organized the bombing of three hotels in Amman (November 2005); and organized the attack on the Al Askari mosque in Samarra (February 2006). These attacks are only the most spectacular of his operations.

Having been organizing in Iraq from before the Second Gulf War, he had the weapons and explosive, the local contacts, the hideouts, and the local knowledge for insurgent war. What he needed were fighters. These began to flow to him in the form of the many Islamist foreign fighters who entered the country from 2003 on. The newcomers lacked local contacts, so Zarqawi became their controller. He probably organized many of the hundreds of suicide bombings that battered Iraq from 2003 to 2006.

Zarqawi had been on American and Jordanian “Most Wanted” lists since early 2002. In January 2003, the CIA had proposed killing Zarqawi at a camp they had identified in Kurdistan. The proposal was rejected, possibly out of fear that an attack would release toxic clouds from chemicals stored in the camp. Once the US invaded Iraq, Special Forces groups hunted Zarqawi with mounting intensity. Several of these raids came close to capturing him, but always fell short. (One time they found eggs cooking, but not yet burning, on the stove of his empty hide-out.) However, the raids did capture some of his associates. One of these was interrogated—humanely—by an Air Force interrogator who uses the pseudonym “Matthew Alexander.” Zarqawi had a great many hiding places, but “Alexander” learned the location of one in a village near Baqubah. It took six weeks of watching before he came in sight. On the night of 7 June 2006, two precision guided bombs destroyed the house, Zarqawi, and his wife and child–Musab.

Ammo.

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            C.J. Chivers came to reporting for the New York Times by an unusual rout. He graduated from Cornell in 1987, then went in the Marines as an officer. He served in the First Gulf War, then in peace-keeping operations in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots. He left the Marines as a captain in 1994. Graduate school in journalism at Columbia followed. His first reporting job came with the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. He worked there from 1995 to 1999. In 1999 he moved to the Times, where he had the police beat until 2001. Thereafter he became a foreign correspondent covering the wars with radical Islam. He’s covered the Americans war in Afghanistan, the Russian war with Chechnya, and the American war in Iraq. Lately, he’s been covering the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

As a former Marine, Chivers knows more than does the usual reporter about military weapons. As a war correspondent in the Greater Islamic Area, he’s run into a lot of AK-47s. These qualifications give his reporting a certain cast. He can make firearms themselves tell an interesting story about the conflicts in which they are used. For example, he wrote The Gun (2010), a history of the AK-47. (See: The Gun That Made the Nineties Roar; The Arms Barometer).

Recently, he published a story about the ammunition that has been recovered on the battlefields where troops have engaged ISIS. It turns out that ISIS captures much of its ammunition from defeated foes. Indeed, it appears to select target for attack to some degree or in some cases by the prospect of capturing important stocks of weapons. It isn’t hard to do because a lot of the opponents of ISIS don’t put up much of a fight. Sometimes, anti-Assad groups of Syrians rebels or the Syrian troops they are supposed to be fighting just sell to ISIS the arms that they have been given by foreign patrons.

About 80 percent of the ammunition examined came from the Soviet Union before its collapse, post-Soviet Russia, the United States, China, or from Serbia (the perpetual bad-boy of international morality). A lot of the ISIS ammo came out of captured Syrian warehouses—or off dead Syrian troops. The Soviet Union/Putinia were long-terms sponsors of Syria, so about 18-19 percent of the ammo was manufactured in some version of whatever we’re calling Russia this week. Most of this was produced between 1970 and 1990. So, did the Russkies stop selling to the Syrians from 1990 on? Or was more recently supplied ammo stored in warehouses closer to the center of power? Or was this AK-47 ammunition purchased by the US government from an American re-seller of ammo to fit the AK-47 and other Russian weapons and then given to either Iraqi security forces before they were supplied with American M-16s or to Syrian “moderates”? About 26 percent was manufactured in China during the 1980s, but it is impossible to tell when it was shipped to Syria. About 18 percent of it was manufactured in the United States during the 2000s, so this is ammo supplied to the Iraq security forces after the American invasion of Iraq. Probably, most of this ammo came into the possession of ISIS after the collapse of the Iraqi army in Spring-Summer 2014.[1]

The story by Chivers complicates the Obama administration’s idea of building up “moderate” alternatives to ISIS. For one thing, why is it necessary to train and arm “moderate” fighters when the solution that occurred to ISIS was to go get the weapons that they needed by brute force? Why didn’t “moderates” seize the arms they needed from Syrian forces? Fpr another thing, “moderates” appear to have sold some of the weapons that they have received to ISIS to avoid trouble. Won’t they do that with any new weapons that they receive?

[1] C.J. Chivers, “ISIS’ Ammunition Is Shown to Have Origins in U.S. and China,” NYT, 6 October 2014.

Bomb ’em till the mullahs bounce.

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Iran has spent thirty years and $100 billion pursuing atomic weapons. Iran is deeply hostile to the West in general and to the United States and its allies in particular. So, that’s a problem. What to do?

Either we attack Iran’s nuclear resources to forestall the development of weapons or we accept Iran as a nuclear power and then seek to contain it. The choice will be shaped by how outsiders, the Americans in particular, perceive the Iranian leadership. If it is a rational, dispassionate leadership pursuing national security, rather than expanded power, then containment might well work. If it is an irrational, hatred-driven leadership seeking to expand Iranian power by toppling the established regional order, then an attack may be the only solution.             Kenneth Pollack[1] has concluded that Iran is driven either by “the Iranian leadership’s pathological perceptions of the United States or its own aggressive ambitions.” Nevertheless, he favors containment over the short to mid-term. Over the longer term, he argues, it would be better to engineer a change of regime through keeping the economic sanctions on Iran, reducing the diplomatic support it receives from Russia and China, and supporting dissidents within the country. Anybody, he thinks, would be better than the current rulers, both for America and for the Iranians themselves.

Matthew Kroenig[2] shares the conviction of Pollack and every other informed observer that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, not a peaceful nuclear program. He bolsters the standard arguments by noting that Iran is also developing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), the standard delivery vehicle for nuclear warheads. Kroenig derides the “containment” of a nuclear Iraq.  If the United States won’t fight a pre-nuclear Iran today, why would it risk fighting a nuclear Iran in the future? He also doubts the Pollack’s dream of regime change will become a reality. He sees the government in Tehran as too deeply entrenched and too ruthless in crushing its opponents, as it did with the so-called “Green Revolution” in 2009.[3]

 

Either containment or attack will leave the future uncertain. Might a “contained” nuclear Iran later tip toward expansionism when conditions become favorable? Would a successful attack stop Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in its tracks for all time or would it just lead Iran to renew the effort after the dust had settled? Destroying a few key sites would still leave the country with scientists, engineers, and oil revenues—the real building blocks of a nuclear effort.

A creeping, largely unspoken fear is that the religious fundamentalists in Tehran share a basic mind-set with the religious fundamentalist suicide bombers of Al Qaeda and ISIS: death is to be welcomed in the service of a higher cause. It makes it hard to believe that Mutual Assured Destruction would dissuade Iran from waging nuclear war.

Finally, can the United States coerce Iran while seeking its support against ISIS? Or will the United States have to send troops to Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS if it wants to coerce Iran?

If the United States agonizes too long, will Israel attack to degrade, even if it cannot destroy, the Iranian nuclear program?

[1] Kenneth Pollack, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

[2] Matthew Kroenig, A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

[3] The defeat of both the “Green Revolution” in Iran and the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt suggest the staying power of authoritarian governments in the Middle East.

Shi’a pets.

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The Prophet Muhammad died in 632 AD. Who should succeed him as “caliph,” the leader of the Faithful? Should the succession be “elective” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s chief followers? If so, then the leading candidate was Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law and a powerful prop of Islam. Or should the succession be “hereditary” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s sons-in-law so that the blood of the Prophet would run in the veins of future caliphs? If so, the leading candidate was Ali, the favored son-in-law. The majority supported the “elective” solution: Abu Bakr became the caliph. Ali and his followers sulked and schemed. Eventually Ali seized power as the fourth caliph, only to be assassinated. Since the debate over the succession, Islam has been split between a majority which sprang out of the supporters of Abu Bakr, the Sunni, and a minority that sprang from the “party of Ali,” the Shi’a[t Ali].[1] Eventually, the caliphate passed to the Ottoman sultan. The majority of Ottoman subjects were Sunni Muslims, with Shi’ites a minority located in what would become Syria and what would become Iraq. The great majority of Shi’ites were found in Persia/Iran.

Events in the 1980s turned up the flame under this conflict. The Iranian Revolution led to the creation of a revolutionary theocratic republic. Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran led to a long war in which other Sunni states supported Iraq. Iran largely created the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon.

At the start of the Twenty-First Century, Syria under the Assad dictatorship offered a mirror-image to Iraq under the Hussein dictatorship. In the former, a Shi’a minority ruled a Sunni majority in the latter, a Sunni minority ruled s Shi’a majority.[2] The overthrow of these regimes then opened the door for the oppressed minorities to seek revenge.[3] Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, the Assad government has seen half the country secede from its control. In Iraq, the Maliki government got right to business as soon as they had waved good-bye to the all-too-willing Americans in 2011.

Both sides in the Syrian civil war have found supporters among their co-religionists abroad. Shi’ite Iran and the Shi’ite government of Iraq have aided the Shi’ite Assad government. Sunni Qatar, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Sunni foreign fighters have supported the Sunni Islamists who are doing most of the heavy lifting against the Assad government in Syria and who have attacked the Shi’ite government in Iraq.[4] (See: “A Dog in This Fight?”)

“The Sunni-Shi’ite War,” The Week, 1 November 2013, p. 9.

[1] Wait. They’re fighting a gory war over something that happened 1400 years ago? Well, not exactly. During the 1400 years the two sects developed different religious practices which divide them. They also developed a history of conflict, oppression, and resistance linked to these two different faith traditions. So, they’re fighting a gory war over stuff that began 1400 years ago and continued—in widely varying degrees of intensity—down to the present. It probably isn’t helpful to try to analogize it to history-based conflicts in Western culture, like Protestant versus Catholic in Northern Ireland or the struggle for African-American civil rights.

[2] Do minorities create dictatorships as a defensive response to past or potential threats from the majority? That’s a political science question, rather than a historical question.

[3] While effete Italians assert that “revenge is a dish best tasted cold,” Arabs appear to prefer take-out.

[4] Is it possible to compare the Syrian Civil War to the Spanish Civil War? Or aren’t young Muslims entitled to a romantic commitment to an idealistic cause that subsequently turns out to be soiled by Great Power scheming?

 

Your mind is in the Qatar.

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Qatar is about the size of Connecticut, but has a lot more going for it than insurance companies and casinos on Indian Reservations. Once an impoverished sandlot that lived from the pearl fisheries, Qatar now earns an immense amount of money from the sale of natural gas.

The ruling sheikh, Hamad bin Khalifah Al Thani (1952- ,r. 1995-2013) set out to make Qatar “important” to other people. On the one hand, he wants Qatar to be important to Americans in case the neighbors–either Saudi Arabia or Iran—took it into their minds to do his country some nastiness. What Iraq had tried to do to Kuwait in 1990, some other power might do to Qatar. He got the Americans to build a local command center for Central Command (which runs American military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia) at Doha. He enhanced the importance of Qatar for the world energy market by building a huge natural gas condensing plant to facilitate exports and earnings.

On the other hand, the sheikh wanted to be a player in the Middle East. In 1996 he created the “Al Jazeera” news network to promote an Islamist message. Beginning in 2011, Qatar has been financing upheaval in the Middle East. It has funded both the “Arab Spring” uprisings (which Westerners like to think of as “liberal” and “modernizing”) and Islamist groups (which Westerners think of as “illiberal” and “anti-modern”). Money flowed to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, to Hamas, and to the Al Nusra Front fighting the Assad government in Syria.

Blaming Qatar for pursuing a two-faced policy by seeking close ties to America while funding Islamists groups misses the point. The Middle East is torn in its attitudes toward “modernization” and “Westernization.” Islamism is one face of that controversy. The rise of Islamism threatens the established order in the Middle East. People with an interest in history will note the radical difference between American policy in Europe after the Second World War and contemporary American policy. Then, the Americans had a better solution than its opponents and they were in favor of dramatic change to solve problems. Now, the United States doesn’t appear to have any positive alternative to offer and isn’t comfortable with change.

Qatar falls into a larger pattern. Qatar’s ruler may believe that you can’t get anywhere by pandering to the Americans. You’ll just end up living in Los Angeles and selling rugs at craft fairs. The military government in Egypt and the moderate Islamist government in Turkey also have both bridled at American policy of late. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates combined to bomb rebels in Libya without bothering to inform the United States first. Turkey refuses to have its army fight ISIS until the Americans agree to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.

Qatar also seeks to influence American opinion through “Al Jazeera America” and donations to the Brookings Institution. For American conservatives, this is an illegitimate international influence on American policy. For them, it falls into the same category as Islamist illegals entering the US through our porous border with Mexico. There is another way of looking at it, however. American journalism no longer invests many resources in foreign reporting. American journalists rarely have the language skills or the cultural competence to get outside of a restricted safe zone, either physically or intellectually. (It’s hard to understand the exaggerated importance assigned to the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square otherwise.) Qatar seeks to enrich the information and perspectives offered to American to help them better understand events in the Middle East. Maybe people should spend more time watching an alternative news source? You don’t have to believe what you see and hear. It’s a free country.

“The tiny nation that roared,” The Week, 27 September 2013, p. 9.

The heirs of Mustapha Kemal

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Turkey has been an emphatically “secular” country since its foundation. Mustapha Kemal “Ataturk” (“Father of the Turks”) wanted a secular state, not one of those messed up backward Arab countries. He prohibited the wearing of the fez for men and veils for women. He granted women equal rights with men (including the outlawing of polygamy). He insisted upon the separation of Church and State. This included banning the “sharia” (Islamic religious law).   Kemal was a general and the army he created has been the guardian of Turkish identity since its foundation. The army has overthrown governments from time to time when they strayed too far from honest or secular government. Explicitly religious parties have been banned from time to time.

A bunch of the religious politicians migrated from the banned parties to the Justice and Development Party, which was formally not a religious party. (Wink, wink.) In 2002 the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a majority in the parliament and formed a government under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Hostility soon mounted between the AKP and the army. In 2007 the generals were alarmed by the direction being taken by the AKP. They made a veiled threat of a coup. Many Turks took offense at the threat and voted for the AKP in the next election, increasing its majority. In 2008 the army tried to get the Constitutional Court to declare the AKP illegal on the grounds that it was trying to impose the “sharia” on the country. The Court rejected this charge. The AKP government then launched a hunt for conspirators among the ranks of present and—especially—retired officers. From 2008 to 2010 hundreds of officers were arrested and many were charged with conspiring to commit terrorist offenses. At the same time journalists, professors, and human-rights activists also were targeted. The government alleged a plot to provoke Islamists into violence, then to use that as a justification for a new military government in place of the AKP. The government leaked a huge file of documents to the press. The army’s response is that all the government has found are the records of contingency planning for an Islamist revolt.

“The struggle for Turkey’s soul,” The Week, 26 March 2010, p. 15.

The quarrel between the secularist military and the democratically-elected AKP has important implications. First, Turkey has been trying to get into the European Union. The Europeans are deeply concerned about Muslim immigration and Muslim fundamentalism. What Frenchman wants to see Notre Dame turned into a mosque? So the prospect of a fundamentalist government in Turkey does nothing for the country’s prospects of admission into the European Union.

Second, the United States sees Turkey as an important regional power in an area of American concern. The Greeks are nice, but the Turks are tough. The Turks offer a model of what other Muslim countries might become if they would just get their ten pounds in a five pound bag. Turkey borders on the Kurdish part of Iraq and contains its own large Kurdish population. The possibility of Kurdish nationalism messing up conditions in both Iraq and Turkey is very real. Turkey was the one Muslim state that was reasonably pro-Israel. American officials dread that “one man, one vote” in an Islamist Turkey might take place only one time, leaving the country in the hands of a pro-fundamentalist, pro-Iranian, and anti-American government.

Third, ISIS is on the southern border. So the Army will protect the Republic, right?

The Weight of the Past in Iraq

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The Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. The Sunni minority, which had traditionally dominated Iraq, didn’t like the invasion or the empowerment of the Shi’a majority, so they fought a guerrilla war against the Americans. Then Al Qaeda in Iraq joined in as allies of the Sunni. Then, Al Qaeda in Iraq sought to foster a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites in order to a) make the American position in Iraq unsustainable, and b) punish the Shi’ites for being “in error” about religious truth. Death squads and suicide bombings and car bombings and deaths-by-power-drills abounded.

Then Al Qaeda in Iraq tried to force their Sunni allies to submit to “sharia” (Islamic religious law). The Sunni Iraqis living in Anbar Province didn’t much like this. In 2006 many tribal leaders began to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq, forming “Awakening Councils.” They sought a truce with and help from the Americans. The Americans responded positively, then General David Petraeus made this a central part of his “surge” strategy in 2007. Awakening Councils spread from Anbar Province into the other areas with large numbers of Sunnis. With the US paying $300 a month and providing equipment to each “volunteer,” there were soon about 80,000 Sunni militia men fighting against Al Qaeda rather than against the Americans. Al Qaeda in Iraq took a savage pounding, while the Sunni component of the insurgency all but disappeared.

American politicians and even many in the media are prone to down-play the role of the “Awakening Councils” in the ending of the insurgency. Instead, they laud “the Surge” of American troops into Iraq. As is so often the case with American political discourse, the reality was different. In 2009 there were about 30 million Iraqis. About 20 million were Shi’ite Arabs; about 5-6 million were Sunni Kurds; and about 5 million were Sunni Arabs. US Army counter-insurgency doctrine held that 20 soldiers per 1,000 people were needed to defeat an insurgency. The US would need 100,000 troops, just to deal with the Sunni Arab part of the country, with many more troops required to garrison the Shi’ite parts. Thus, the “Awakening Councils” and their fighters made possible a radical shift in the balance of forces.

What did the future hold for the “Awakening Councils”? One problem is that the Sunnis have multiple hostilities. Al Qaeda had risen to the top of the list in 2007-2008, but next on the list were the Shi’ites and then the US itself. To take one example, the leader of a Baghdad neighborhood “Awakening Council” was a former officer of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. In 2008, he saw the Iraqi government as a pawn of Iran. Another problem was that the Americans hoped to see the councils and their militias integrated into the police and military of the new Iraq. The Shi’ites always opposed this and wanted the militias disbanded as soon as possible. They foresaw a civil war following the American withdrawal. Finally, in the absence of a single strong leader among the Sunnis, the various Awakening Councils fell fall into conflict with one another as they struggled for turf, weapons, American aid, and control of the local economy.

Thus, by early 2008 it was possible to foresee ugly developments. It all depended upon what the Shi’ites did with power once the Americans departed. Now we know.

Putting the pieces back together again isn’t going to be easy. Islam allows “taqiyya” (dissembling) to avoid persecution. Long oppressed by the Sunni minority, the Shi’ites are regarded as habitual dissemblers. How to build trust once again?

“The Sunni Awakening,” The Week, 1 February 2008, p. 9.

Obama versus Putin.

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Russian-American relations broke down during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. At the beginning of his first term, President Obama hoped that there might be a chance for improved relations with Russia. His national security advisor, Thomas Donilon, and his chief adviser on Russia, Michael McFaul, both believed that the opportunity existed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates were doubtful. However the latter two took the view that it was worth a shot. What’s the worst that could happen?

In April 2009 President Obama met Dimitri Medvedev for the first time at the London G20 conference. The two hit it off, or at least Mr. Obama saw a sympathetic figure in Mr. Medvedev. Both were young lawyers who saw themselves as pragmatists rather than ideologues. According to Peter Baker, “Mr. Obama resolved to do what he could to build up Mr. Medvedev in hopes that he would eventually emerge as the real power.” The Americans pitched the Russians the idea of a new nuclear weapons reduction agreement. The two sides made progress on this topic during the following weeks. The two countries agreed that Russia would allow America to air-lift men and supplies to Afghanistan through Russian airspace. The United States also won Russian agreement for tougher sanctions against Iran, while the Americans facilitated Russian entry into the World Trade Organization.

In March 2011 the United States wanted to join in the air campaign against Libya. This would require a vote by the UN Security Council. Medvedev agreed not to block the vote. Very soon, it became apparent that President Obama had expanded the humanitarian mandate from the UN into a regime-change mission directed at bombing Colonel Ghadaffi out of power. According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, “The Russians felt that they had been played for suckers on Libya. They felt that there had been a bait and switch.” Putin became incensed. Putin himself saw the Libyan intervention as the latest instance of a strand in American foreign policy that ran from Kosovo in the Clinton administration to Iraq in the Bush administration. Not the least of his concerns sprang from the evidence that overturning regimes in Muslim countries led to the triumph of Islamic radicals like the ones Russia has been fighting in Chechnya. Moreover, the Russians have not interfered with the airlift to Afghanistan nor have the reneged on the nuclear arms agreements. Apparently, they feel that a promise is a promise.

By September 2011 it had become apparent that Putin would be returning to the presidency in Spring 2012. American officials speculated on what impact this would have on Russo-American relations. The State Department was not optimistic.

In May 2012, Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency of Russia. President Obama sent his national security advisor, Thomas Donilon, to explore relations with the Russian strong-man. Obama may have hoped for a cordial relationship, but Putin did not welcome the initiative. For one thing, Putin blamed Secretary of State Clinton for encouraging the mass street demonstrations that attended his re-election. For another thing, “In Mr. Putin’s view, the United States wanted only to meddle in places where it had no business, fomenting revolutions to install governments friendly to Washington.” An American diplomat recalled that “Putin was very dug in on this idea that we will never have another Libya.” “When are you going to start bombing Syria?” Putin demanded.

Putin took up the matter with President Obama himself at another meeting in Mexico in June 2012. Obama argued that the two countries should co-operate to achieve a negotiated settlement in Syria. [NB: Implicit in this was the idea that Assad would have to go.] Putin refused to agree. A bunch of tit-for-tat harassment followed. The White House came up with a plan for a second “reset”: they would take up a number of suggestions made by the Russians earlier on as the agenda for trying to improve the relationship. The list of things to be addressed were further cuts in nuclear forces, a data-sharing plan to relieve some of the Russian anxiety over American missile defense, and expanded American trade and investment.

After Obama won re-election in November 2012, he sent Donilon to see Putin once again. In June 2013 Obama and Putin met at another G8 conference in Northern Ireland. Putin declined to take up any of the American proposals for a new “reset.” Putin did agree to meet separately with Obama during a conference in St. Petersburg. However, when Obama made a speech in Berlin suggesting a new round of Russo-American nuclear cuts, the Russians did not respond. Soon afterward, they agreed to shelter Edward Snowden, the NSA “leaker” then in flight from American law. Already wondering if the meeting with Putin would be worth having, Obama reacted to the asylum decision by cancelling the meeting. Obama publically belittled Putin as the “bored kid in the back of the classroom.”[1] Later on, during the Ukraine crisis of early 2014, Obama would describe Russia as “just a regional power.”

There are several questions worth considering. First, Vladimir Putin is as Josef Joffe has said, “a nasty son-of-a-bitch.” However, is he just a megalomaniac? Or does Putin have real reasons for obstructing American action in Syria and Ukraine? Looking at the results of President Obama’s foreign policy in Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, is it possible that there are many other powerful people at the head of unpopular governments who think that Putin may have a point?

Second, is international relations the same thing as a Chicago Parks and Recreation basketball court? Is trash-talking an opponent a useful way of resolving a conflict or gaining an advantage?

[1] Peter Baker, “U.S. Feels Chill in Its Relations with Russians,” NYT, 3 September 2013, pp. A1, A8.

 

The Kurdish Serbia.

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Arab historians like Ibn Khaldun noted the tension between the simple, tough, and often war-like people of the mountains and deserts, on the one hand, and the refined, soft, and often feckless people of the towns and plains, on the other hand.[1] It’s not bad as an organizing principle, but in fact the silk slipper was often on the other foot. The Kurds offer a good example of this truth. Their hopes for a nation of their own were frustrated by the nationalism of other peoples. After the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the Sunni Muslim, non-Arab Kurds found themselves divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. All of these governments repressed the Kurds. Iraq draws most of the attention for this, but all the governments did it.

Saddam Hussein found the Iraqi Kurds disloyal during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989), so he used poison gas to slaughter some and then had many of the male survivors shot. The Americans encouraged and then betrayed a Kurdish revolt at the time of the First Iraq War (1990-1991). To show remorse, the Americans then fostered a semi-autonomous Kurdish area in Iraq through a no-fly zone and humanitarian aid. This potential nation cooked along better than the rest of Iraq for a dozen years.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 greatly stimulated Kurdish separatism. Elections in 2005 made the Kurds the second largest group in Iraq’s parliament. More adept at bargaining than their Arab compatriots, the Kurds wrestled-away ever greater degrees of autonomy from Baghdad. The American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 allowed the Shi’ite government to run amok at the expense of the Sunni Arabs. Again, the Kurds were better able to defend themselves. They built an oil pipeline to Turkey to gain a greater degree of economic freedom from the central government. The crISIS of 2014 then provided the Kurds with yet another opportunity to loosen the bonds between themselves and the failing Iraq state. Kurdish troops took advantage of the collapse of the Iraqi army in the north to expand their territory to include the city of Kirkuk. Similarly, the Kurds of Syria have looked to their fellow Kurds in Iraq and Turkey for aid against ISIS. Regardless of how the crISIS ends, it will be hard for Baghdad to corral the Kurds. The shattering of Syria and Iraq could lead to an enlarged Kurdistan on its way to statehood.

This will have long-term consequences. For one thing, it will be harder to hold Iraq together if it is merely a federation of mutually-hostile Shi’ite Arabs and Sunni Arabs. Kurdistan’s wresting-away of much of Iraq’s oil will leave Baghdad with fewer resources with which to buy-off opponents. For another thing, the majority of Kurds live inside Turkey. The Turks have fought a long struggle to repress separatism among the Kurds. For the moment, they seem willing to have the Iraqi Kurds serve as a bulwark against ISIS. However, an independent Kurdistan will again come to be a magnet for Turkish Kurds. This will threaten Turkish territorial integrity. The Turks might be well-advised to concede this demand ahead of time. They’re not likely to do so. The artist formerly known as Yugoslavia grew out of the Serbian desire to gather all the South Slavs in one state. The Austro-Hungarian Empire might have been well advised to concede this demand ahead of time.   Vienna preferred war.

“The other Iraq,” The Week, 25 July 2014, p. 9.

[1] European Orientalist art of the 19th Century adopted the same perspective as a way of introducing some adventure and soft-core pornography into the lives of highly inhibited European bourgeois gentlemen. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=Orientalist+art&client=firefox-a&hs=i1a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Hg0oVPhByoHKBKe4gKAL&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1150&bih=657