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Thread: The harm before the storm: Army battles to expel resurgent al-Qa’ida from Iraq
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An update on the situation in Iraq

The Iraqi army is planning to storm the city of Fallujah 40 miles west of Baghdad that has been taken over by fighters from al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which is part of the umbrella organisation, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). They have torn down Iraqi national flags and raised the black al-Qa'ida flag over captured police stations, set fire to military vehicles on the road to Baghdad and captured 75 government soldiers.

The Iraqi government's control in overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province, which covers much of western Iraq, is in the balance.

Al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which was seen as largely defeated three years ago, has staged a dramatic resurgence thanks to Isis, seizing significant parts of northern and eastern Syria. Some of the fighters now holding central Fallujah are reported to be Syrians who have come across the 373-mile long border. The wars in Syria and Iraq are increasingly turning into a single conflict.

The decline in the Iraqi government's position began in December as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stepped up the pressure on Sunni protesters in Anbar who have been demonstrating for a year against persecution. The government is under pressure from its supporters to stem a wave of devastating bombing attacks by a rejuvenated Isis in 2013 that killed 8,000 civilians and 1,000 police and army. A further 15 people were killed in Baghdad on Sunday.

Mr Maliki was eager to show political and military strength by a more assertive policy in Anbar and other Sunni-majority provinces in the lead up to the parliamentary elections in April, when he hopes to win a third term. Little has gone well for Mr Maliki in the last two weeks, however. On 21 December, an Isis ambush in Anbar killed 24 Iraqi army officers and tension increased a week later when the government arrested a powerful Sunni MP, Ahmed al-Alwani, whose brother was killed by security forces.

On 30 December, the long-standing encampment of Sunni protesters in Ramadi was closed but the following day Mr Maliki reversed course in the face of an outcry from Sunni leaders and withdrew the army from the cities of Anbar, notably Ramadi and Fallujah. These were occupied by Isis fighters, though they have not been able to hold Ramadi in the face of counter-attack by government-allied tribal militiamen.

A problem for the government is that Mr Maliki is engaged in a three-cornered struggle in which he faces, as well as Isis, Sunni tribal leaders who were part of the Sahwa (Awakening) movement which turned on al-Qa’ida with support from the US army in 2006. These Sunni notables have supported the protest movement, but Mr Maliki has made few concessions to the Sunnis, whom many Shias see as ultimately aiming to over-turn the post-Saddam Hussein political settlement that gave power for the first time to Iraq's Shia majority allied to the Kurds.

The government's intransigence has led a peaceful protest movement to mutate into armed resistance led by al-Qa'ida in Iraq. The latter, badly battered in 2010, has enjoyed a swift resurgence launching devastating bombings mostly targeting Shia civilians. The response to the Sunni protests and the return of al-Qa'ida has been a self-defeating mix of harshness and conciliation.

Mr Maliki promised reforms but in April his forces stormed a protest camp in Hawija, south-west of Kirkuk, killing 53 people. Sunni people in and around Kirkuk, who had previously looked to Mr Maliki as an ally against the Kurds, demanded that Iraqi army units be withdrawn from their areas. Politically, the rise of Isis, with its hatred of the Shia as heretics deserving death, is not against Mr Maliki’s interests since it solidifies the Shia vote behind him. The threat of al-Qa'ida also brings more US support in the shape of helicopters, Hellfire missiles and intelligence.

The Iraqi government may be deeply unpopular in Sunni areas but this does not mean that al-Qa'ida is liked. When it was last at the peak of its power in 2006, its violence and bigotry made it even more unpopular among Sunni than the Americans. Sheikh Abdul Malik al-Saadi, an influential Sunni cleric in Iraq previously known for counselling moderation, now says that Mr Maliki has "brought Iraq nothing but war, poverty and sectarianism. Oh people of Anbar, especially the sheikhs of Anbar, defend yourselves and your people!"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...xpel-resurgent-alqaida-from-iraq-9040155.html

 
Greetings and peace be with you Junon;

I have always felt the last Iraqi war was a great injustice, Britain and America should not have intervened, we have destabilised Iraq, possibly in a greater way than Saddam did, we have made a peaceful solution very difficult to achieve.

In the spirit of praying for justice for all people

Eric
 
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Its a sunni uprising (many sunni tribes) because of maliki's actions to treat sunni's badly, put them in prisons and even kill them.
 
Eric H said:
Greetings and peace be with you Junon;

I have always felt the last Iraqi war was a great injustice, Britain and America should not have intervened, we have destabilised Iraq, possibly in a greater way than Saddam did, we have made a peaceful solution very difficult to achieve.

In the spirit of praying for justice for all people

Eric
Click to expand...

I remember I was really unhappy that US went to Iraq, and I think if US didn't went into Iraq, there won't be so many fights etc. Saddam is not doing anything bad at the time and Iraq is stable.

Also please don't use "we", it is a bunch of politicians, not the US/UK people.
 
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Salaam

Looks like the American cowboy is riding into town, again. . . . . .

Obama authorises US air strikes to help Iraqis besieged on mountain by Isis

‘We need to act, and act now’ says US president, as military carries out aid drops to Iraqis forced to flee by Islamist group

Barack Obama has authorised targeted air strikes against Islamic militants in Iraq, as the US military began an airborne operation to bring relief to thousands of minority Iraqis driven to a grim, mountain-top refuge.

Describing the threats against stranded Yezidi refugees as holding the potential for “genocide”, the president said he had authorised limited air strikes to help Iraqi forces, to assist in the fight to break the siege and protect the civilians trapped there.

“When we face a situation like we do on that mountain, with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale and we have a mandate to help - in this case a request from the Iraqi government - and when we have unique capabilities to act to avoid a massacre, I believe the United States cannot turn a blind eye,” the president said in a late-night statement from the White House.

“Earlier this week, one Iraqi said no-one is coming to help. Well, today America is coming to help,” he said.

The delivery of humanitarian relief, in the form of air drops by US jets, took place after a day of intense debate at the White House over how to respond to an Isis army that has caused mass civilian displacement as it moves closer to the previously stable Kurdistan region of Iraq.

The air drops represented the first aerial mission over Iraq since 2011 for a purpose beyond conducting surveillance on Isis, providing long-scheduled military sales or transporting the extra hundreds of US special operations “advisers” that Obama ordered into Iraq to help Baghdad confront the threat from Isis. They marked the start of the deepest American engagement in Iraq since US troops withdrew in late 2011 after nearly a decade of war.

The US military was already helping the Iraqi government co-ordinate air drops of vital supplies to at least 40,000 Iraqis, mostly from the Yazidi minority, trapped on top of Mount Sinjar in the northwest of Iraq after death threats from the Islamists who have overrun much of the region.

Qaraqosh, Iraq’s largest Christian city, was left all but abandoned as the jihadist group Islamic State (Isis) advanced through minority communities in the country’s north-west and towards the Kurdish stronghold of Irbil. Late on Thursday night the UN security council condemned the attacks and urged international support for the Iraqi government.

Obama said “targeted air strikes” could soon be used to protect American personnel in Irbil, and could also be used to protect Baghdad if it came under pressure. He claimed the steps were a necessary response to a deteriorating humanitarian situation, in which there were “chilling reports” of mass executions and the enslavement of Yezidi women.

“In recent days Yezidi women, men and children from the region of Sinjar have fled for their lives,” he said. “Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands are now hiding high up the mountain with little but the clothes on their backs, they are without food, they are without water. People are starving, children are dying of thirst. Meanwhile Isis forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the Yeziddi people, which would constitute genocide.”

UN officials say an estimated 200,000 new refugees are seeking sanctuary in the Kurdish north from Islamic extremists who have pursued them since the weekend. Qaraqosh, south-east of Mosul and home to around 50,000 Christians, was the latest to fall, with most residents fleeing before dawn on Thursday as convoys of extremists drew near.

Other Christian towns near Mosul, including Tel Askof, Tel Keif and Qaramless, have also largely been emptied. Those who remained behind were reportedly given the same stark choice given to other minorities, including Yazidis: flee, convert to Islam or be killed.

Iraqi troops have concentrated on defending Baghdad and the Shia south, leaving the defence of minorities in the north to the Kurdish peshmurga. However, even the much vaunted Kurdish forces were no match for the heavy weapons wielded by the jihadists as they advanced in recent days.

Without any protection, Yazidis, Christians and Turkmen are being uprooted from communities they have lived in for millennia and the geo-social fabric of Iraq is being rapidly shredded.

The Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk, Joseph Thomas, described the situation in northern Iraq as “catastrophic, a crisis beyond imagination”. He demanded urgent intervention to save what remained of the area’s Christian heritage.

Kurdish officials on Thursday demanded more help in catering for refugees. The Kurdish administered areas have seen staggering numbers cross their notional border since the original Isis onslaught two months ago. In the first week alone, some 500,000 people are thought to have fled towards Irbil.

The capital of the Kurdish north is already home to a new Chaldean Christian community, which fled Baghdad in the wake of an Isis-led massacre inside a cathedral in October 2010. Many fleeing Christians have headed for the Ainkawa neighbourhood, which is home to Baghdad’s Christian exiles.

The past 11 years of war and insurrection since the US invasion have led to most of Iraq’s Christians fleeing. Numbers have plummeted starkly from an estimated one million before 2003 to around 150,000 now. A large number of those who remain are now displaced.

Isis has threatened to redraw the unitary borders that were carved out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire. The group’s rampant insurgency and the inability of state actors to stop it has rendered the frontier between Iraq and Syria evermore irrelevant.

In the absence of central government authority, Shia militias are taking dominant roles, amplifying sectarian enmity between Islam’s two most dominant sects.

Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, no longer has the authority to unite the country’s disparate sects. Maliki, a Shia Muslim, had disenfranchised much of the country’s Sunni community over the past three years, some of whom have turned to Isis as a means of reasserting themselves.

After digging in for the past two months, Maliki now faces a desperate battle to form a government, with his key backer Iran understood to have told him that it no longer supports his bid to lead the country for a third term.

Massoud Barazani, a Kurdish leader, has said he is moving towards holding a referendum that could pave the way for an independence bid, a move that could spell the end of Iraq, and unsettle surrounding countries, including Syria, Turkey and Iran.

The UN security council warned that the Isis attacks could constitute crimes against humanity and that those responsible should be held accountable. “The members of the security council also urge all parties to stop human rights violations and abuses and ensure humanitarian access and facilitate the delivery of assistance to those fleeing the violence,” said Britain’s UN ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, reading from a statement after an emergency consultation requested by France.

White House officials made clear the more aggressive US posture was prompted by rapid Isil advances on Irbil on Wednesday but insisted in a conference call with reporters that Obama did not anticipate a “sustained campaign” against what they called a “sophisticated military force”.

There are already constant US air patrols over Irbil but the US has no plans to evacuate diplomats or military advisers in the city – believing it can keep any further advances at bay with air power alone.

As of Thursday night there had been no offensive air missions. The humanitarian mission involved C17 and C130 cargo planes dropping 5,300 gallons of water and 8,000 ready meals (MREs) intended to provide short-term assistance to 8,000 of the “many thousands” of refugees thought to be trapped on the mountain.

US officials confirmed they were expecting a new Iraqi prime minister to be appointed by Sunday, suggesting the White House believes its precondition for greater political unity in Iraq before military intervention can take place may be within sight.

The White House says it has been consulting with the US Congress over its intervention but does not believe it needs authorisation for military action and merely plans to file a report under the war powers act if air strikes go ahead. Obama’s authorisation for the Pentagon to carry out attacks is “geographically restricted to Iraq” and does not include Syria.

A Lockheed Martin factory in the US that manufactures Hellfire air-to-ground missiles has been operating seven days a week to provide weapons destined for Iraqi government and Kurdish forces under pre-existing support arrangements.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/08/obama-authorises-iraq-air-strikes-against-isis
 
Salaam

Another comment piece

The Cruel Jest of American “Humanitarian Aid” to Iraq

The United States of America has no claim on the language of “humanitarian aid” to Iraq after what it did to that country. It is rather as though Washington should send Meals Ready to Eat to the good people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One is happy that the US has dropped food aid for the Yezidis trapped on a mountain after they escaped the so-called “Islamic State” of self-styled “caliph” Ibrahim. But the US press either has a short memory or is being disingenuous when they talk about a humanitarian mission in Iraq!

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent 8-year military Occupation of that country caused over one million Iraqis to be displaced abroad, especially to Syria and Jordan, but some of them got to Sweden and a few to the US itself.

Further about 4 million Iraqis were displaced internally. Baghdad underwent an ethnic cleansing of its Sunni Arabs, with the proportion likely falling from 45 percent of the city to 15 percent or so of the city. The “Islamic State” push on the capital in concert with other Sunni Arabs is an attempt to recover what was taken from them by the Bush administration. Likewise, the Sunni Turkmen of Tel Afar under the Americans were ethnically cleansed and the town became largely Shiite. Turkmen Shiites are among the northern ethnic groups now menaced by IS.

The US was the proximate cause of a civil war in 2006-2007 in which at some points as many as 3,000 people were being killed each month.

How many Iraqis died because of the US invasion, i.e. the extra mortality rate, is hard to estimate. But likely it was at least 300,000 persons. Typically wounded in war are three times as many as the killed, so that would give us nearly 1 million wounded. Most of the 300,000 who died were men, many of them with families, and in Iraq there were few or no insurance policies. That left 300,000 or so widows and likely 1.5 million orphans.

“Humanitarian mission” may sound good to American ears. But there is no way a few food drops can make up for what the US did to Iraq.

http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-cruel-jest-of-american-humanitarian-aid-to-iraq/
 
[h=2]A lasting presence for IS in Iraq and Syria: interview with Romain Caillet[/h]
On 29 June, after the spectacular takeover of Mosul and other Iraqi cities, the Islamic State (IS) declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. How can the sudden rise to power of IS be explained? What is the future of the caliphate, and of the region as a whole? Romain Caillet provides an assessment. Interview.
About the authors
Christelle Gence is a journalist working for SaphirNews, the first online publication on Muslim issues in France and part of the Saphir Média group.
Romain Caillet (@RomainCaillet) is a historian specialising in contemporary Salafism and currently working as a researcher and consultant on Islamist issues. His research has also focused on the Syrian civil war, and specifically on jihadi groups in the conflict. Romain has lived for the past several years in Beirut and previously lived in Cairo for three years and in Amman for two years.
Christelle Gence conducted the following interview with Romain Caillet in French, originally published on 15 July 2014 by SaphirNews under the title L’Etat islamique va s’installer durablement en Iraq et en Syrie. Due to the dynamic nature of the situation in Iraq, the author later added some paragraphs in August.
Saphirnews: How do you explain the rise of the Islamic State in recent weeks,particularly since the capture of Mosul?
Romain Caillet: The Islamic State (IS) – initially the Islamic State in Iraq, then the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and now the Islamic State – has been a state within a state in Iraq for years. It has the support of the majority of Iraq's Sunnis, who feel marginalised by the Shiite regime of Nuri al-Maliki, which they see as sectarian. There was some evidence to suggest that Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, was a fiefdom of IS, so it was no surprise to see them take Mosul.
S. What does this indicate about the situation in Iraq?
RC. The collapse of the regime of Nuri al-Maliki, which allowed IS to take many cities, not only in the region of Nineveh, but also in the regions of al-Anbar, Kirkuk, and Diyala, shows two things: the failure of al-Maliki to govern Iraq on the one hand, and the total failure of the Americans to remove the Sunni Arab elite from Iraq’s governance and army. We see the results of this today. Despite the billions of dollars sunk into Iraq, the Americans have been unable to form either a government with the Shiite community or a new army – a strategy that has resulted in the marginalisation of the Sunni community.

S. You say that the majority of Sunnis support IS?
RC. The overwhelming majority of Sunnis supported insurgency against the al-Maliki regime. It turns out that this insurgency is led by IS. Maybe it will not last, maybe people will eventually refuse literalist applications of sharia by IS or find them too authoritarian. However, virtually all Sunnis today support this insurrection. Without an air force, helicopters or any real heavy weapons, and with the means that they do have, IS would have been unable to take all these cities if they did not have the broad support of the population.
It is particularly significant that during a speech on 12 July, one month after the takeover of Mosul, ‘Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, formerly close to Saddam Hussain and current leader of the Iraqi Baathists, paid tribute to IS, characterising its fighters as heroic knights at the forefront of the battle. Never has an Arab nationalist spoken of a jihadi group in such glowing terms, which demonstrates IS’s popularity amongst Sunnis regardless of their ideological affiliation. Following an ultimatum from IS to either convert to Islam or accept the status of dhimmi or non-Muslim citizen (entailing the payment of jizya, a special tax, and accepting an inferior status to Muslims), the Christians of Mosul left in droves on 18 July. This mass exodus has been condemned by the Baathists. However, this development still does not imply a rupture with the Islamic State, since it is the exodus of the Christians that is being condemned; the condemnation at no point explicitly mentions the Islamic State itself.
S. Where does IS derive its means? Who pays for it?
RC. They are self funded. Before taking the oil wells in the region of Mosul, they levied about $100 million per year in tax (extortion, revolutionary tax). Then, there are also the [resources from] the operating oil wells in Syria and Iraq, and the taking of western hostages. IS has virtually no foreign support. Just reading its literature, it’s clear that its worst enemies are Saudi Arabia and the Gulf regimes, which they vilify regularly. Remember as well that most rebel brigades fighting IS in Syria today are financed, armed, and sometimes trained by the Gulf regimes.
S. Why are IS and Saudi Arabia worst enemies?
RC. One of the most famous works in the contemporary jihadist corpus is a treatise entitled, The Shameful Actions Manifest in the Saudi State's Disbelief. The author of this book, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian sheikh of Palestinian origin, outlines three elements justifying the takfir or exclusion of this state from the sphere of Islam, namely: its military alliance with the United States (especially since the Gulf War); Saudi participation in international institutions (as Saudi Arabia is a founding member of the UN); and finally, the increasing use of more systematic positive law in the Saudi court system.
S. For now, IS is accepted by the Sunni population. What could reverse this state of affairs?
RC. The Al-Jazeera journalists were surprised to see people cheering on IS in Mosul; they could not believe their eyes. The allegiance of the tribes in the Syrian Euphrates valley is more volatile [The recent revolt by the Shu’aytat clan, which took hold in a dozen villages between Mayadin and Bukamal in the Deir Ezzor region, confirms the volatility of Syrian tribal allegiances. The revolt seems to have been triggered by IS’s ban the evening before on tobacco and the water pipe for the entire Deir Ezzor region]. But for now, IS is massively supported by the Sunni population of Mosul, which prefers IS to al-Maliki’s Shiite regime.

S. So could IS settle permanently in Iraq?
RC. Yes, I think IS will settle permanently. Sunnis know that IS is their only hope of becoming masters again. They certainly have a demographic disadvantage in Iraq (where they are a minority), but ISIS’s goal is to merge these territories with Syria to reverse this demographic relationship and have a Sunni state straddling Iraq and Syria. Perhaps eventually, more moderate people than those of IS will take their place. But I think the Middle East as we know it is finished; the regional boundaries from the Sykes-Picot agreement (signed in 1916 between France and Britain to define the borders of the Middle East) no longer exist.
The idea that the borders will disappear is not new. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, already expressed this idea when the revolution started in Syria in 2011. Robert Fisk reformulated it in an article for The Independent a few weeks ago, when IS bulldozed a wall of sand that served as a border between Iraq and Syria.

S. Will IS manage to establish itself in a lasting way in Syria?
RC. Certainly. Currently, they occupy more than 90 pecent of the area of Deir Ezzor (in eastern Syria). Generally, the Euphrates valley, where the population is culturally very similar to Iraqi Sunnis, is clearly under the control of IS. So there is a historical coherence in a state like that. In Syria, the Euphrates valley is inhabited by tribes that were forcibly settled when the borders were only faintly outlined, and these nomadic tribes were straddling territories in Iraq and Syria. I did interviews with people who are not close to IS, but feel they belong to a tribe, who feel more Bedouin than Syrian. They have always felt closer to Iraqis than to the Syrians of Damascus or the coast – and that’s without even touching upon the religious question. Beyond that, they also share a common culture.
So, does IS have the option of establishing itself further beyond the valley of the Euphrates? I do not know. To the west of Aleppo and in the region of Idlib, where people very much feel themselves to be Syrians, and not at all close to the Iraqis, there is a wholesale rejection of IS.

S. What are Nuri al-Maliki’s responsibilities in the current situation?
RC. He has practiced sectarian policies marginalising Sunnis. He also led many to believe that the fight against IS is a fight between Shia and Sunni. He even said that ISIS was the army of Yazid [who killed Hussein, the son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet during the battle of Karbala in 680], which was shocking even if Yazid is not a positive reference in the Sunni tradition. Nuri al-Maliki systematically refers in his speeches to the Shiite memory and the fight against the Umayyads. This has antagonised the Sunni Arabs, who were the elites of Saddam Hussein’s regime. For decades, they were used to being dominant, but then found themselves in a humiliating situation which they reject. This is rather different to the case of the Sunni Syrians who were subject to 40 years of Alawite power, which explains the resignation of many vis-à-vis the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In contrast, until 2003, the Sunni Arabs in Iraq were the undisputed masters of the country.

Since then, all observers agree that the Sunni community has been marginalised. Until 2003, the army and the intelligence services were held by Sunnis, and all these people were overnight excluded from power, leaving many with a desire for revenge. They had skills, and many joined the ranks of IS. For the first time in history, a jihadist group has leaders at its helm who are former high-ranking officers and former officials of the intelligence services. This organisation has real strategists at its helm. This is key. These are not mere religious [extremists] who have been radicalised and want to blow themselves up. These are professionals of war, intelligence and strategy.

S. Is western intervention feasible?
RC. Western intervention could stop them. But in the current configuration, the west can not intervene in Iraq because all Sunnis are with IS at the moment. If the west intervened in a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, it would be accused of taking sides.
On the other hand, Syria is more complex than being simply a war between Shiites and Sunnis. Since western countries have refused to intervene against the [Alawite] regime of Bashar al-Assad, if the west intervenes in Iraq against the Islamic State which is Sunni, then, Sunnis in the region will view this move as systematically intervening against Sunni interests and always favouring the Shiites. The west would also be accused of playing Tehran’s game, disqualifying the west in the eyes of Iraqi Sunnis, and radicalising Syrian Sunnis. Generally speaking, the Muslim world would have the impression that the west supports Iranian expansionism.

Just as the United States’ unconditional support of Israel feeds anti-American sentiment, the west’s unconditional support for Iranian expansionism would feed Sunni resentment well beyond the case of Iraq.
In Iraq, the overflow of the Islamic State's offensive towards Kurdistan, an area of importance to Washington and other Western countries, has forced the US to intervene militarily, striking the positions of jihadists near Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where many American and European companies are established. Moreover, in Erbil, only the jihadists oppose the Kurdish forces, making things simpler for the US than in the rest of Iraq, particularly in the Sunni Arab areas.
In those areas, the Americans would like to obtain a political solution by bringing together certain actors of the insurgency into a national unity government, which would initially involve the departure of Nuri al-Maliki, and then open up to independent Sunni tribes and different Islamist actors. Will these actors accept abandoning their alliance with IS in favour of the promise of a new place in Iraqi institutions? While the emergence of a new sahwa or awakening movement in Iraq is a case not to be ignored, key stakeholders feel they have been abandoned by the Americans. After being used to fight the jihadists in 2007, these stakeholders were put under the tutelage of al-Maliki without any political autonomy when the Americans left Iraq in 2011.
S. Who then could intervene?
RC. As soon as the population is no longer on IS’s side, there could be an intervention by the Kurds, assisted by other anti-IS forces within the Sunni community. This could take many forms: through perhaps considerable western support to the Iraqi government involving continuous aerial bombing; or simply Sunni forces revolting against IS with support from the Kurds. However, in both cases, intervention would require that the Sunni population is no longer on the side of IS, and I do not know if that will happen.
https://opendemocracy.net/arab-awak...aq-and-syria-interview-w#.U-uejqJh_KY.twitter


Note: I am neutral, i myself am confused about what is truly going on, nor do i follow the media (Alhamdulillah). Just posted this interview because i found it interesting to read, but then again this could also be far from the truth. May Allah guide us to the truth and see through the amount of deceptions we are facing. Ameen




































 
Salaam

Another comment piece

Another war in Iraq won’t fix the disaster of the last

The Yazidis need aid, but military intervention by states that destroyed Iraq will deepen the crisis now tearing it apart

They couldn’t keep away. Barely two years after US forces were withdrawn from Iraq, they’re back in action. Barack Obama has now become the fourth US president in a row to launch military action in Iraq.

We’re now into the sixth day of US air attacks on the self-styled Islamic State, formerly known as Isis – the sectarian fundamentalists who have taken over vast tracts of Sunni Iraq and are carrying out vicious ethnic cleansing against minorities in the north.

The media and political drumbeat is growing louder for Britain to move from humanitarian aid drops to join the military campaign. France has announced it will be arming Iraqi Kurdish forces. There are already 800 US troops back on Iraqi territory.

Without a trace of irony, Colonel Tim Collins, who famously claimed on the eve of the 2003 invasion that British troops were occupying Iraq to “liberate” it, yesterday led the call for yet another military intervention.

If ever there was a case for another Anglo-American bombing campaign, some say, this must surely be it. Graphic reports of the suffering of tens of thousands of Yazidi refugees on Mount Sinjar and the horrific violence that has driven the Christians of Qaraqosh from their homes have aroused global sympathy.

The victims of this sectarian onslaught need urgent humanitarian aid and refuge. But the idea that the states that invaded and largely destroyed Iraq at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives should claim the cause of humanitarianism for yet another military intervention in Iraq beggars belief.

If the aim were solely to provide air cover for the evacuation of Yazidis from Sinjar, there are several regional powers that could deliver it. The Iraqi government itself could be given the means to do the job – something its US sponsors have denied it until now. In fact, the force that has done most so far to rescue Yazidis has been the Kurdish PKK, regarded as a terrorist organisation by the US, EU and Turkey.

But after decades of lawless unilateralism, any armed intervention for genuine humanitarian protection clearly has to be authorised by the United Nations to have any credibility. As the Labour MP Diane Abbott put it, that’s what the UN is for – and authorisation could be quickly agreed by the security council.

But of course it’s not just about the Yazidis or the Christians. As Obama has made clear, they’re something of a side issue compared with the defence of the increasingly autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan – long a key US and unofficial Israeli ally – and American interests in its oil boom capital Irbil, in particular.

The US is back in Iraq for the long haul, the president signalled, spelling out that his aim is to prevent IS establishing “some sort of caliphate through Syria and Iraq” – which is exactly what the group regards itself as having done.

The danger of the US, Britain and others being drawn again into the morass of a disintegrating state they themselves took apart is obvious. IS, then known as al-Qaida in Iraq, itself effectively arrived in the country in 2003 on the backs of US and British tanks.

The idea that the states responsible for at least 500,000 deaths, 4 million refugees, mass torture and ethnic cleansing in Iraq over the past decade should now present themselves as having a “responsibility to protect” Iraqis verges on satire.

The majority of Iraq’s million-strong Christian community was in fact forced out of the country under US-British occupation. The state sectarianism that triggered the Sunni revolt and rise of IS in Iraq – the ultimate blowback – was built into the political structures set up by George Bush.

Britain and the US – which didn’t want to “take sides” when Egypt’s coup leaders carried out one of the largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in history last summer – are the last countries on Earth to bring humanitarian relief to Iraq.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t have a responsibility to provide aid. But the record of western humanitarian intervention over the past two decades isn’t a happy one. In 1991, no-fly zones in Iraq allowed massacres of Shia rebels in the south and only functioned with thousands of troops on the ground in Kurdistan, followed by 12 years of bombing raids.

In 1999, Nato’s air campaign in Kosovo, also without UN authorisation, triggered a massive increase in the ethnic cleansing it was meant to halt. In Libya, in 2011, Nato’s intervention ratcheted up the death toll by a factor of about 10 and gave cover for rampant ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate killing. Its legacy today is complete state breakdown and civil war.

It might be said that the latest US bombing campaign in Iraq has greater legitimacy because the Iraqi government appealed for support. But it did so back in June, after which Obama stayed his hand until the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, could be replaced with someone more acceptable to the US.

At the same time, US arms are now being supplied directly to Kurdish forces, independently of the central government, fuelling the disintegration of the Iraqi state. And IS – whose sectarian ideology is in reality only a more violent version of the Saudi regime’s, the west’s most important ally in the Arab world – is consolidating its hold on western Iraq and eastern Syria, where it is in effect allied with the US and its friends.

Its rise is a tragedy for both peoples. But another round of US and British military intervention would only strengthen IS and boost its credibility – as well as increase the risk of terror attacks at home. The likelihood is that it can only be overcome by a functioning state in both Iraq and Syria. That in turn demands a decisive break with the sectarian and ethnic politics bequeathed by a decade of war and intervention.

The urge to play the role of self-appointed global policeman retains its grip on the western world, but experience shows that will do nothing to rescue the people of Iraq. Far more important would be agreement between the regional powers, including Turkey and Iran, on a settlement to allow Iraq to escape from its existential crisis.

Selective humanitarian intervention without UN and regional authorisation is simply a tool of power politics, not solidarity. To imagine that the solution to the disastrous legacy of one intervention is to launch yet another is delusional folly.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/13/war-in-iraq-yazidis-aid-military-intervention
 
Salaam

More analysis.

An article has been published under the Prime Minister's name in the 'Sunday Telegraph' on the current crisis in Iraq.

You can find it here :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11038121/David-Cameron-Isil-poses-a-direct-and-deadly-threat-to-Britain.html

Here I attempt to analyze that article.

My comments are in bold and marked with an asterisk *:

'This poisonous extremism is a direct threat to Britain'

Stability. Security. The peace of mind that comes from being able to get a decent job and provide for your family, in a country that you feel has a good future ahead of it and that treats people fairly.

*Note the Blairite tone, verbless sentences, if sentences they can be called, in an outdated red-top newspaper style from the 1980s.

In a nutshell, that is what people in Britain want – and what the Government I lead is dedicated to building.

Britain – our economy, our security, our future – must come first. After a deep and damaging recession, and our involvement in long and difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hardly surprising that so many people say to me when seeing the tragedies unfolding on their television screens: “Yes, let’s help with aid, but let’s not get any more involved.”

I agree that we should avoid sending armies to fight or occupy.

*Does he? See if he sticks to this later on, after most readers will have peeled off, reassured that British troops (apparently) won’t be sent back to Iraq.

But we need to recognise that the brighter future we long for requires a long-term plan for our security as well as for our economy.

*Is this in fact true? Surely we only increase or safeguard our security if our actions do not make new enemies, and do not needlessly expose our soldiers to death or injury? He is making the case for intervention before he has explained precisely why it is justified in this place.

True security will only be achieved if we use all our resources – aid, diplomacy, our military prowess – to help bring about a more stable world. Today, when every nation is so immediately interconnected, we cannot turn a blind eye and assume that there will not be a cost for us if we do.

*What ‘military prowess’ ? Is the Prime Minister unaware of the enormous cuts he himself has made in the Army and the Navy? 'To the bone' is inadequate to describe them. He has cut deep *into* the bone. Does he not realise that many of the most experienced officers and NCOs have left as a result, and that plans to make up the gap with reserves have run into serious trouble?

The creation of an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and extending into Syria is not a problem miles away from home.

*Actually it may well be such a problem, or at least one we have managed to cope with before. The word ‘extremist’ is notoriously subjective, but many people would regard the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (and of some of the Gulf States too) as being 'extremist’ by the standards of 21st-century western law-governed democracies. A case could be made for classifying the People’s Republic of China as ‘extremist’ , and I personally think the word could be applied to Turkey’s new President Erdogan. Well, Mr Cameron and his colleagues cannot keep away from Peking, and Prince Charles is often in the Gulf. We seem to have found a modus vivendi with Pakistan. Are we as fussy as we claim to be? We have in the past had to come to accommodations with all kinds of people we much disliked, but didn’t have the power to remove, notably the Russian Bolsheviks. Oil-producing countries need customers, and oil-consuming countries need sellers. In the past they have tended to overcome strong dislike.


Nor is it a problem that should be defined by a war 10 years ago.

* This is one of the key points of the article. What it means is ‘because the 2003 Iraq war (which the Tories supported) was a catastrophe, there’s no reason to think that this one will be. Well, the pretext is different – atrocities rather than WMD. But action to prevent atrocities can be limited to that, which is why Mr Cameron is trying to widen the issue to national security.

It is our concern here and now. Because if we do not act to stem the onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement, it will only grow stronger until it can target us on the streets of Britain.

*This is highly questionable. Much the same thing was said for years, to justify our pointless engagement in Afghanistan. Why precisely should the Islamic State want to target the streets of Britain? I'm not saying it won't, just that 'd like to know why it should. Please show your working.

We already know that it has the murderous intent. Indeed, the first Isil-inspired terrorist acts on the continent of Europe have already taken place.

*Could you, or anybody, please say which acts these were?

Our first priority has of course been to deal with the acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq. We should be proud of the role that our brave armed services and aid workers have played in the international effort. British citizens have risked their lives to get 80 tons of vital supplies to the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar. It is right that we use our aid programme to respond rapidly to a situation like this: Britain has given £13 million to support the aid effort. We also helped to plan a detailed international rescue operation and we remain ready and flexible to respond to the ongoing challenges in or around Dahuk, where more than 450,000 people have increased the population by 50 per cent.

* Excellent. Who could object? But, as we now see, humanitarian relief is somehow not enough.

But a humanitarian response alone is not enough. We also need a broader political, diplomatic and security response.

*Why, exactly? This seems to me to an unsupported assertion.

For that, we must understand the true nature of the threat we face. We should be clear: this is not the “War on Terror”, nor is it a war of religions. It is a struggle for decency, tolerance and moderation in our modern world. It is a battle against a poisonous ideology that is condemned by all faiths and by all faith leaders, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim.

*In what important way does this differ from the “War on Terror” or a war of religions, except that these ideas are discredited and he does not want to be associated with them?

What is a battle against an ideology? How do you do that? Also, if this ideology is condemned by all faiths (including the one the ISIS militants follow with such zeal and passion), then why do they continue to behave as they do?

Of course there is conflict between Shias and Sunnis, but that is the wrong way to see what is really happening. What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

*Interesting. Who precisely are these ‘fanatics living far from the battlefield’?

So this threat cannot simply be removed by airstrikes alone. We need a tough, intelligent and patient long-term approach that can defeat the terrorist threat at source.

First, we need a firm security response, whether that is military action to go after the terrorists,

*So military action is, after all, being considered. See above.

international co-operation on intelligence and counter-terrorism or uncompromising action against terrorists at home. On Friday we agreed with our European partners that we will provide equipment directly to the Kurdish forces; we are now identifying what we might supply, from body armour to specialist counter-explosive equipment.

*What about actual weapons? And what about allowing Kurdistan to sell its oil on the world market, which it is presently banned from doing? Could it be that we are coy or reluctant because we are afraid of what will happen if we allow Kurdistan to become fully independent of Baghdad? Not surprising if so. An armed and oil-rich Kurdistan would cause major destabilisation of the whole region. Iran and what is left of Iraq would be very reluctant to allow such a thing, and Turkey’s attitude cannot be predicted. Yet it is hard to see how such a thing can now be avoided.


We have also secured a United Nations Security Council resolution to disrupt the flows of finance to Isil, sanction those who are seeking to recruit for it and encourage countries to do all they can to prevent foreign fighters joining the extremist cause.

Here in Britain we have recently introduced stronger powers through our Immigration Act to deprive naturalised Britons of their citizenship if they are suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. We have taken down 28,000 pieces of terrorist-related material from the web, including 46 Isil-related videos. And I have also discussed the police response to this growing threat of extremism with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. The position is clear. If people are walking around with Isil flags or trying to recruit people to their terrorist cause, they will be arrested and their materials will be seized. We are a tolerant people, but no tolerance should allow the room for this sort of poisonous extremism in our country.

*This is just flailing with gestures, and quite possibly a general threat to civil liberties as well. Laws of this kind are either ineffectual and hard to enforce because they are too vague, or a danger to everyone because they have to contain catch-all clauses which give the police and the courts huge power over the individual.

Alongside a tough security response, there must also be an intelligent political response. We know that terrorist organisations thrive where there is political instability and weak or dysfunctional political institutions. So we must support the building blocks of democracy – the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, the rights of minorities, free media and association and a proper place in society for the army. None of these things can be imposed by the West.

*Well, isn’t it odd, in that case, that we have just collaborated with the Ayatollahs in Teheran, in overthrowing Iraq’s democratically-elected Prime Minister? As for the ‘building blocks of democracy’ where, pray are they now in Libya, the country Mr Cameron so breezily ‘liberated’ a few years ago? And where are they in Egypt, whose hard-faced and repressive military junta we support? I could go on. Surely it is time that this idealist guff was dropped?


Every country must make its own way. But we can and must play a valuable role in supporting them to do that.

*Or we can make a terrible mess, by intervening without understanding or knowledge, and with an exaggerated idea of our skill and power.

Isil militants have exploited the absence of a unified and representative government in Baghdad. So we strongly welcome the opportunity of a new start with Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi. I spoke to him earlier this week and assured him that we will support any attempts to forge a genuinely inclusive government that can unite all Iraqi communities – Sunnis, Shias and Kurds – against the common enemy of Isil, which threatens the way of life of them all.

The international community will rally around this new government. But Iraq’s neighbours in the region are equally vital. So we must work with countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the UAE, Egypt and Turkey against these extremist forces, and perhaps even with Iran, which could choose this moment to engage with the international community against this shared threat. I want Britain to play a leading role in this diplomatic effort. So we will be appointing a Special Representative to the Kurdistan Regional Government and using the Nato summit in Wales and the United Nations General Assembly in New York to help rally support across the international community.

*Why no mention of Syria? Syria is a vital part of the battlefield against ISIS, and if Syria fell to ISIS the whole politics of the Mediterranean and the Levant would indeed to be transformed. Apart form anything else, ISIS would then have a border with Israel, and incredibly dangerous point of friction.

ISIS is to a great extent our fault. It grew out of the destabilisation of Syria, which Western countries began as long ago as 2011 for reasons best known to themselves, and which was then reinforced by Gulf-supported foreign fighters overwhelmingly made up of Sunni fanatics. The idea that there is a ‘moderate’ rebel force in Syria is a fantasy. Even where the non-Wahhabi rebels disagree with ISIS, they are too weak to resist it, and must do what it says and hand over their weapons to it on demand.

Finally, while being tough and intelligent, we must also be patient and resolute. We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology, which I believe we will be fighting for the rest of my political lifetime.

*This prediction is particularly disturbing. Why should this country be committed to a war which our own Premier says cannot be ended in his lifetime

We face in Isil a new threat that is single-minded, determined and unflinching in pursuit of its objectives. Already it controls not just thousands of minds, but thousands of square miles of territory, sweeping aside much of the boundary between Iraq and Syria to carve out its so-called caliphate. It makes no secret of its expansionist aims. Even today it has the ancient city of Aleppo firmly within its sights. And it boasts of its designs on Jordan and Lebanon, and right up to the Turkish border. If it succeeds, we would be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a Nato member.

This is a clear danger to Europe and to our security. It is a daunting challenge. But it is not an invincible one, as long as we are now ready and able to summon up the political will to defend our own values and way of life with the same determination, courage and tenacity as we have faced danger before in our history. That is how much is at stake here: we have no choice but to rise to the challenge.

Hitchens’s first rule of political rhetoric is as follows: Whenever a politician says there is no choice or no alternative, he or she means that there is a choice or an alternative, but that they hope nobody will notice. The alternative at the moment is resolute humanitarian action to save the persecuted, combined with extreme and patient caution over deeper involvement. And by patient I don't mean an unending war against an idea we don't like. The more that Mr Cameron talks of our ‘values and way of life’, whatever he means by that, the faster the rest of us should count our spoons. General, foggy dangers of this kind are a) beyond the power of governments to combat or overcome and b) risk a state of permament idealist war in which there is never any objective point at which victory (or defeat) can be declared.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
 
Salaam

An interview.

Albert: Some pundits are commenting that the current chaos in Iraq is a result of U.S. forces having left that country too soon. How do you address that argument?

Chomsky: Virtually without exception, the US sledgehammer has severely harmed Iraqi society, going back 50 years to when direct US intervention began with support for a military coup. In the 1980s, Washington strongly supported Saddam’s invasion of Iran, which was highly destructive for both countries. A peculiarly sadistic kind of “dual containment.” US admiration for Saddam was so strong that when the war ended, President Bush I even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the US for advanced training in nuclear weapons production, and in April 1990, sent a high-level senatorial delegation, headed by future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, to convey his warm regards to his friend Saddam and to assure him that he should disregard hostile comments that appear in the US press. The transcript is available, and is pretty astonishing, which I suppose is why it’s hardly known.

A few months later, Saddam made his first error: disregarding or perhaps misunderstanding orders, and invading Kuwait. Saddam quickly understood his error and sought to find some way to withdraw without being crushed by US attack. Bush was having none of that. As Chief-of-Staff Colin Powell explained in internal discussion, if the US lets Saddam withdraw, he’ll leave a puppet regime, and the Arab states will all be happy. In short, he would do just what the US had done in Panama a few months earlier, except that Latin Americans were very far from happy.

The US then launched a devastating war, destroying much of Iraq, far beyond anything that had to do with driving Saddam from Kuwait – which quite probably could have been achieved through negotiations, though the media were careful to suppress the negotiating options, which were unwelcome to Washington. After the grand triumph, accomplished by such devices as burying poor Iraqi recruits into the sands with bulldozers, Bush was able to triumphantly declare that “What We Say Goes,” and the world had better understand it.

Then came Clinton’s sanctions, which devastated the civilian society further. It had a “humanitarian” component: the Oil for Food program. This program was administered (under UN auspices) by highly regarded international diplomats, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck. Both resigned in protest, describing the sanctions as “genocidal.” Von Sponeck’s very important book on the topic, A Different Kind of War, is under an effective ban in the US (and UK). The sanctions devastated the civilian society, strengthened the dictator, compelled the population to rely on his distribution system for survival, and probably saved him from the fate of a long string of other US-supported monsters who were overthrown from within: Somoza, Marcos, Duvalier, Mobutu, Suharto, and other pleasant characters – more recently Mubarak and others.

Then came the US-UK invasion, which destroyed much of what was left, and also created a Sunni-Shiite conflict that is now tearing Iraq to shreds and has spread the poison throughout the region. The army that was armed and trained by the US for a decade collapsed when faced with a few thousand insurgents and their local support. Saddam was doubtless a monster, much like others supported by the US when they were useful. But under his rule the society not only functioned, but was advancing considerably, well beyond others in the Arab world.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion of Marine Commandant David Shoup in 1966, referring to the US war in Vietnam: “I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty bloody dollar crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own design and want, that they fight and work for.”

Albert: The mainstream media make ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in Iraq seem pretty horrendous, with mass executions taking place. How do you assess these claims?

I think they are pretty accurate.

Albert: What is your view of various actual or proposed U.S. policies in Iraq: sending military trainers, providing arms to the Iraqi government, pressuring the Iraqi government to broaden its base, using drones or air power to support the Iraqi government, and sending in U.S. ground forces?

Iraqis often describe the US invasion as reminiscent of the horrendous Mongol invasions of the 13th century – and with reason. Like many others around the world, the country itself is largely a creation of European imperialism, its boundaries drawn to grant Britain (not Turkey) control of the oil fields in the north, and to block easy access to the Persian Gulf (the reason for establishing the British-run principality of Kuwait). But for better or worse, an Iraqi nationality was forged, and most Arab Iraqis seem to want to keep the country together (the Kurds are a different story). It’s now in really desperate straits. Without some kind of internal political settlement, however tentative and patched together, it’s hard to think of any constructive policy, particularly by those who have wielded the sledgehammer to such destructive effect for many years.

Albert: Obama has announced that he is seeking $500 million in military aid and training for vetted oppositionists in Syria. What is your view of this?

Syria is lurching towards catastrophe. The likely outcome is some kind of partition: a region run by Assad, a Kurdish breakaway region with some degree of autonomy, perhaps linking ultimately to Iraqi Kurdistan, and a region run by warring militias, perhaps with ISIS establishing some measure of control. It’s hard to see how US military involvement can make the horrendous disaster any better, to put it mildly.

If the US (and Israel) had had any real interest in supporting the opposition to Assad, there were some simple measures they could have taken. For example, if Israel had just mobilized forces in the Golan Heights (Syrian territory, annexed by Israel in violation of Security Council orders), Assad would have been compelled to deploy forces to the border, relieving pressure on the rebels. There’s no indication that such thoughts were ever considered.

Israel seems to have no objection to Arabs slaughtering one another. It weakens any regional opposition to Israel’s criminal expansionism in the occupied territories, and also contributes to the treasured image of “a villa in the jungle.” The US probably also has regarded the Assad regime as about the best it could anticipate.

ZCommunications » Iraq
 
Salaam

More analysis

Damascene Conversions - Isis, Assad And The Bombing Of Iraq

This time last year, Western corporate media were focused on a single, grave threat to human life and civilised values. An endless stream of atrocity claims – some real, some fabricated with 'evidence' posted on YouTube - depicted President Assad of Syria as the latest incarnation of Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, Gaddafi: namely, the Official Enemy to be targeted for destruction.

Once again, 'quality' media generated a sense of inevitability – this Enemy was also so monstrous that the US-UK alliance had to 'intervene', to 'act'. It later transpired that the plan was to 'completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had'.

The massacre claims were part of a rolling propaganda barrage intended to clear a path through public opposition to an attack. It was a close copy of the 1991 Gulf War media campaign described by the late historian Howard Zinn:

'The American population was bombarded the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, waged here in the US while the Gulf War was waged over there.' (Zinn, Power, History and Warfare, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, p.12)

This summer, the Assad atrocity stories splashed across newspaper front pages and TV broadcasts for so long have mysteriously dried up. If the BBC website looked like this last year, it now looks like this, this and this. The Independent published an article with a title that would have been unthinkable even a few months ago:

'Putin may have been right about Syria all along - Many cautioned against the earlier insistence of the Obama administration that Assad must go'

Has the man universally loathed and reviled by corporate commentators undergone an appropriately Damascene conversion? A more prosaic explanation was supplied by the Financial Times:

'US and allies must join Assad to defeat Isis [Islamic State], warns British MP' (Sam Jones, Financial Times, August 21, 2014)

The MP in question, Sir Malcolm Rifkind - chairman of parliament's intelligence and security committee, and a former foreign secretary - declared:

'"[Isis] need to be eliminated and we should not be squeamish about how we do it... Sometimes you have to develop relationships with people who are extremely nasty in order to get rid of people who are even nastier."'

One year ago, Rifkind called for a 'military strike' on Syria of 'a significant kind':

'If we don't make that effort to punish and deter, then these actions will indeed continue.'

Richard Dannatt, former head of the British army, observed last month:

'The old saying "my enemy's enemy is my friend" has begun to have some resonance with our relationship in Iran and I think it is going to have to have some resonance with our relationship with Assad.'

Again, unthinkable in the recent past, when Media Lens was smeared as 'pro-Assad' for challenging obviously suspect, warmongering claims.

Fighters hailed by the media last year as heroic 'rebels' opposing Assad's army are now decidedly 'jihadists'. In 2012, the New York Times reported:

'Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists...'.

Assad, it seems, is yesterday's 'bad guy' - Isis is the new 'threat'. On this, almost every media commentator appears to agree. A Guardian leader of August 11, commented:

'President Obama had no real alternative to the air strikes he ordered last week against Islamic State (Isis) forces... Quite apart from the threat to the future of Iraq as a whole, the US and Britain have a humanitarian duty to the endangered minorities, and a debt of honour to the Kurds.'

It is pretty remarkable that journalists are still able to believe (presumably dismissing Gaza as a blip) that US-UK foreign policy is guided by notions of 'duty' and 'honour'. The UK's leading 'liberal-left' newspaper is apparently not appalled by the prospect that the killers of half a million children through sanctions and in excess of one million people as a result of the 2003 invasion are once again affecting to 'help' Iraq. Why, because the editors can perceive 'ignorance and incompetence' in Western actions but not self-interested criminality. Thus, for the Guardian, 'America is right to intervene.'

The editors offered the vaguest of nods in the direction of one of the great bloodbaths of modern times:

'After all that has passed in recent years, hesitation about any kind of intervention in the Middle East is entirely understandable. But the desperate plight of the Iraqi minorities and the potentially very serious threat to the Kurds surely warrants a fundamental reconsideration.'

Alternatively, 'all that has passed in recent years' might provoke 'a fundamental reconsideration' of the idea that the US-UK alliance is guided by concern for the plight of Iraqi minorities.

As Steve Coll wrote in The New Yorker last month:

'ExxonMobil and Chevron are among the many oil and gas firms large and small drilling in Kurdistan under contracts that compensate the companies for their political risk-taking with unusually favorable terms.'

Coll added sardonically:

'It's not about oil. After you've written that on the blackboard five hundred times, watch Rachel Maddow's documentary "Why We Did It" for a highly sophisticated yet pointed journalistic take on how the world oil economy has figured from the start as a silent partner in the Iraq fiasco.'

The conclusion:

'Obama's defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal - as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example - are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company...'

'We Tried To Set The Middle East To Rights'

Like the rest of the corporate press, the Guardian view of the world is heavily influenced by structural factors – internal corporate needs conditioned by external political and corporate pressures. On August 15, another Guardian leader commented:

'[R]arely in modern history can military force have been exerted over such an extended period to such little purpose. We tried to set the Middle East to rights, but succeeded only in deepening its divisions and intensifying the violence we had hoped to curb.'

'We' – US-UK state-corporate-military-media power – 'tried to set the Middle East to rights'. For the people, we are to presume, not Big Oil, the 'silent partner in the Iraq fiasco'. However:

'We have been burnt before, we should not be burnt again.'

The great lesson to take from our devastation of an entire country – 'we' suffered.

A further Guardian leader on August 18 opined:

'The situation in Iraq is very threatening. But Britain is only one of many countries under threat.'

According to the FBI and Homeland Security, even the US is not at risk from Isis even after the recent airstrikes. Associated Press reported:

'The FBI and Homeland Security Department say there are no specific or credible terror threats to the U.S. homeland from the Islamic State militant group.'

Richard Barrett, who ran counterterrorism operations for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, argues that the latest Western war in Iraq 'does rather play to the [jihadist] narrative that these bad regimes are being supported by outside powers and, therefore, if you get too close to overthrowing them, the outside powers will come and beat you up'. The people who were 'going to fight Assad or [former Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al] Maliki are now seeing a broader enemy' in the form of the US and UK governments. Barrett adds:

'The argument that they could also achieve the same [result] by [conducting] terrorist attacks in Western countries becomes stronger [though] not necessarily inevitable... Their justification will be: "If it hadn't been for air strikes we would be fine, establishing our caliphate [in Iraq].. Why did you mess with us? Now we'll mess with you."'

Barrett suggests that military action should always be a last resort and is not the 'tool that is going to solve the [Isis] problem. Look at Libya, look at Afghanistan, look at Iraq in 2003. It's just reaching for a hammer because it is a hammer and it's to hand'.

The potential for the imagined threat to become real was emphasised by the brutal murder of journalist James Foley captured on an Isis video. A Guardian leader of August 21 observed:

'The video is one of a number of developments that have sharpened our understanding of the risks inherent in a new military campaign in the region, even if limited and carefully conducted – that is, as limited and carefully conducted as an undertaking aimed at blowing up things and people can ever be.'

Presumably the Guardian has inside knowledge indicating that the campaign is 'limited and carefully conducted'. But even the Guardian's own logic suggested Isis would become a threat to the West only when 'we' attack them:

'Bluntly put: if we target them, they will target us.'

So Isis are not in fact 'our' enemy until 'we' make them 'our' enemy! But of course it is 'our' job to sort them out:

'We should not be alone in a contest with Isis. Regional powers should take on a greater role, perhaps even military, but certainly a more coherent diplomatic role.'

At the Guardian's dissident extreme, Owen Jones wrote on August 20:

'Nobody is pretending that Isis is going to be defeated by a few rousing renditions of Kumbaya.'

So we can take for granted that the focus should be on defeating the new enemy identified by Western elites:

'Surely only then can the Iraqi military hope to defeat these sectarian murderers.'

But then should we not also aspire 'to defeat' the notoriously vicious and unaccountable Iraqi military? And Jones quoted veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn to the effect that 'Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies are the "foster parents" of Isis'. So should we not also be focusing on the need 'to defeat' Saudi Arabia and Qatar? And how about the US and UK governments who supply the weapons and other support empowering these tyrannies?

But even dissident 'mainstream' journalists conform to propaganda demanding that Official Enemies be targeted for 'defeat'. Favoured allies, and of course the West, are treated quite differently. The public is to believe that the sheer evil of the Enemy means that negotiation, compromise and accommodation are out of the question – war is often presented as the only option. Why? Because it allows the West to play its trump card, high-tech violence; to get what it wants on its own terms. When negotiation, later is mysteriously found to be possible even with the likes of Gaddafi (2004) and Assad (2014), few ask why it was once declared out of the question.

Jones concluded:

'Because Isis has proved so successful in spreading terror, it will be difficult to have a rational debate about how to defeat them.'

Because Western governments are so successful in spreading terror, it will be difficult for journalists like Jones to have a rational debate focused on something other than defeating the enemy du jour.


Modern Enlightenment Culture

A leader in The Times commented:

'Modern enlightenment culture [sic] finds it hard to grasp the notion of radical evil. When theocratic fanatics destroyed the Twin Towers on 9/11 and bombed the Spanish train network in 2004 and the London Underground on 7/7, the instinct of many western commentators was to wonder what Europe and America had done to provoke such hatred. The correct answer was "nothing".' (Leading article, 'Beating the barbarians,' The Times, August 12, 2014)

Modern enlightenment culture also finds it hard to grasp the notion that it has itself committed crimes of awesome violence.

The Times lamented the failure of 'a decade of efforts to build democracy in Iraq' – a level of wilful blindness that would have stunned the philosophes. Inevitably, The Times supported yet another war as the only enlightened option:

'A coherent strategy of striking jihadist targets, arming the peshmerga and supporting a new, inclusive Iraqi administration could salvage stability in Iraq. Anything less hands victory to barbarians.'

In 2005, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that between autumn 2003 and late autumn 2004, the US 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped '500,000 tons of ordnance [on Iraq], and that is two million, 500-pound bombs'. Perhaps these latest US bombs will do better.

The Times echoed the Guardian on Isis:

'The organisation is a threat to the peoples of the region, to the stability of the Middle East and to Britain directly.' (Leading article, 'State of Violence,' The Times, August 18, 2014)

David Aaronovitch has been playing his usual role of demoniser-in-chief, with his familiar calls for war to prevent - what else? - 'effective genocide', this time in Iraq (Gaza being someone else's problem). As usual, the Nazis are the obvious comparison:

'Isis are very like the SS in occupied eastern Europe. There is the same idea of a mystical destiny that doesn't just permit killing, but demands it... In service of that vision, the pits had to be filled with bodies.' (Aaronovitch, 'Isis will just keep killing - until we stop them,' The Times, August 11, 2014)

And:

'Just like the SS, Isis men will kill more and more... stopping only when they are utterly defeated and every executioner - even if he is such a gentle boy from Purley - is dead or tried.'

Therapists describe a phenomenon called 'projection' – the 'enemy' acts as a screen on which the analysand projects precisely the qualities he or she is unwilling to face in him or herself. Thus, since 1945, the West has endlessly left pits 'filled with bodies' driven by the mystical 'manifest destiny' of 'American exceptionalism'. Aaronovitch himself summed up the thinking on August 14:

'Something broke in western policy when Ed Miliband won the vote preventing action in Syria after the chemical attacks this time last year... The message was clear to everyone and is the worst you can ever send - that the cops have left town.' (Aaronovitch, 'Only military action will defeat the jihadis,' The Times, August 14, 2014)

'We' are 'the cops'. Who voted 'us' Globocop? No-one, 'we' seized the role by right of military might. And so we find that the claim can again be exactly reversed. Are we really playing the role of 'cops'? Well, cops are not supposed to illegally invade countries, overthrow governments, flatten cities, steal resources, commit mass torture. What kind of people do that? Villains, criminals, terrorists.

To look hard in the mirror of the Official Enemy is to see the truth of who 'we' really are.

http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2014/773-damascene-conversions.html
 
Salaam

Bombing Syria

The U.S. today began bombing targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.

That means that Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by the 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate – after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.

The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).

It was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad’s enemies while politely informing his regime of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters it that it be at war, always and forever.

Six weeks of bombing hasn’t budged ISIS in Iraq, but it has caused ISIS recruitment to soar. That’s all predictable: the U.S. has known for years that what fuels and strengthens anti-American sentiment (and thus anti-American extremism) is exactly what they keep doing: aggression in that region. If you know that, then they know that. At this point, it’s more rational to say they do all of this not despite triggering those outcomes, but because of it. Continuously creating and strengthening enemies is a feature, not a bug, as it is what then justifies the ongoing greasing of the profitable and power-vesting machine of Endless War.

If there is anyone who actually believes that the point of all of this is a moral crusade to vanquish the evil-doers of ISIS (as the U.S. fights alongside its close Saudi friends), please read Professor As’ad AbuKhalil’s explanation today of how Syria is a multi-tiered proxy war. As the disastrous Libya “intervention” should conclusively and permanently demonstrate, the U.S. does not bomb countries for humanitarian objectives. Humanitarianism is the pretense, not the purpose.

http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/bombing-syria/
 
Salaam

Another comment piece

Back to the Future in Iraq

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech at Riverside Church in New York City titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In it, he went after the war of that moment and the money that the U.S. was pouring into it as symptoms of a societal disaster. President Lyndon Johnson’s poverty program was being “broken and eviscerated,” King said from the pulpit of that church, “as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war… We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” Twice more in that ringing speech he spoke of “the madness of Vietnam” and called for it to cease.

Don’t think of that as just a preacher’s metaphor. There was a genuine madness on the loose — and not just in the “free-fire zones” of Vietnam but in policy circles here in the United States, in the frustration of top military and civilian officials who felt gripped by an eerie helplessness as they widened a terrible war on the ground and in the air. They were, it seemed, incapable of imagining any other path than escalation in the face of disaster and possible defeat. Even in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when there was a brief attempt to paint that lost war in a more heroic hue (“a noble cause,” the president called it), that sense of madness, or at least of resulting mental illness, lingered. It remained embedded in a phrase then regularly applied to Americans who were less than willing to once again head aggressively into the world. They were suffering from, it was said, “Vietnam syndrome.”

Today, almost 25 years into what someday might simply be called America’s Iraq War (whose third iteration we’ve recently entered), you can feel that a similar “madness” has Washington by the throat. Just as King noted of the Vietnam era, since 9/11 American domestic programs and agencies have been starved while money poured into the coffers of the Pentagon and an increasingly bloated national security state. The results have been obvious. In the face of the spreading Ebola virus in West Africa, for instance, the president can no longer turn to civilian agencies or organizations for help, but has to call on the U.S. military in an “Ebola surge” — even our language has been militarized — although its forces are not known for their skills, successes, or spendthrift ways when it comes to civilian “humanitarian” or nation-building operations.

We’ve already entered the period when strategy, such as it is, falls away, and our leaders feel strangely helpless before the drip, drip, drip of failure and the unbearable urge for further escalation. At this point, in fact, the hysteria in Washington over the Islamic State seems a pitch or two higher than anything experienced in the Vietnam years. A fiercely sectarian force in the Middle East has captured the moment and riveted attention, even though its limits in a region full of potential enemies seem obvious and its “existential threat” to the U.S. consists of the possibility that some stray American jihadi might indeed try to harm a few of us. Call it emotional escalation in a Washington that seems remarkably unhinged.

It took Osama bin Laden $400,000 to $500,000, 19 hijackers, and much planning to produce the fallen towers of 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria in this country that launched the disastrous, never-ending Global War on Terror. It took the leaders of the Islamic State maybe a few hundred bucks and two grim videos, featuring three men on a featureless plain in Syria, to create utter, blind hysteria here. Think of this as confirmation of Karl Marx’s famous comment that the first time is tragedy, but the second is farce.

One clear sign of the farcical nature of our moment is the inability to use almost any common word or phrase in an uncontested way if you put “Iraq” or “Islamic State” or “Syria” in the same sentence. Remember when the worst Washington could come up with in contested words was the meaning of “is” in Bill Clinton’s infamous statement about his relationship with a White House intern? Linguistically speaking, those were the glory days, the utopian days of official Washington.

Just consider three commonplace terms of the moment: “war,” “boots on the ground,” and “combat.” A single question links them all: Are we or aren’t we? And to that, in each case, Washington has no acceptable answer. On war, the secretary of state said no, we weren’t; the White House and Pentagon press offices announced that yes, we were; and the president fudged. He called it “targeted action” and spoke of America’s “unique capability to mobilize against an organization like ISIL,” but God save us, what it wasn’t and wouldn’t be was a “ground war.”

Only with Congress did a certain clarity prevail. Nothing it did really mattered. Whatever Congress decided or refused to decide when it came to going to war would be fine and dandy, because the White House was going to do “it” anyway. “It,” of course, was the Clintonesque “is” of present-day Middle Eastern policy. Who knew what it was, but here was what it wasn’t and would never be: “boots on the ground.” Admittedly, the president has already dispatched 1,600 booted troops to Iraq’s ground (with more to come), but they evidently didn’t qualify as boots on the ground because, whatever they were doing, they would not be going into “combat” (which is evidently the only place where military boots officially hit the ground). The president has been utterly clear on this. There would be no American “combat mission” in Iraq. Unfortunately, “combat” turns out to be another of those dicey terms, since those non-boots had barely landed in Iraq when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey started to raise the possibility that some of them, armed, might one day be forward deployed with Iraqi troops as advisers and spotters for U.S. air power in future battles for Iraq’s northern cities. This, the White House now seems intent on defining as not being a “combat mission.”

And we’re only weeks into an ongoing operation that could last years. Imagine the pretzeling of the language by then. Perhaps it might be easiest if everyone — Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, and Washington’s pundits — simply agreed that the United States is at “war-ish” in Iraq, with boots on the ground-ish in potentially combat-ish situations.

http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/back-to-the-future-in-iraq/
 
Salaam

SYRIA: THE EXPANSION OF THE WAR ON TERROR

(London, UK) The start of a war in Syria and Iraq marks the latest chapter in the War on Terror-without-end that began after 9-11. And like the wars that came before it, we are likely to see similar consequences. Asim Qureshi, Research Director of CAGE [1], said:

1. “Bombing Syria and Iraq will unleash more hatred and violence against the West. This has already begun with an IS spokesperson yesterday calling on IS supporters to target Western countries [2], a number of beheadings over the last several weeks, and the continued detention of Briton Alan Henning.

Western foreign policy has been the premier underlying grievance in violence against the West: the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan led to bloodshed on the streets of Britain and America, while it gave rise to groups such as IS; the bombing of Syria and Iraq will only make things worse.”

2. “The freedom of all citizens is at risk: A speech by Australia's Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, in which he said that the ‘delicate balance between freedom and security’ [3] may have to shift 'for some time to come' provides a deep insight into what is to come from Western governments: a hawkish foreign policy is often accompanied by a hawkish domestic policy. The bombings of Iraq and Syria will give governments a pretext for trampling on civil liberties and further entrenching the security state, something that has already taken place since the beginning of the War on Terror.

CAGE has already shown how domestic counter-terrorism policy is playing an increasingly important role in the marginalisation of British Muslims [4] - domestic policies are not only being intensified with great impact on the Muslim community, but will also strip long-held freedoms away from all British citizens.”

3. “CAGE continues to call for an end to the War on Terror, a counter-productive campaign of violence that has violated the rights of countless individuals and the norms of international law. Nearly 13 years since the invasion of Afghanistan, the West still continues to open up new fronts in what has become a vicious cycle of violence and suffering.”

http://www.cageuk.org/article/syria-expansion-war-terror
 
Salaam

Sorry to inflict this on you all, Obama at the UN

Obama sends Russia a cold war blast and seeks distance from ‘war on terror’

Analysis: president’s speech at UN general assembly aims to strike delicate balance and rally world to tackle Isis extremism

Barack Obama sought to strike a delicate balance at the UN general assembly on Wednesday. He had come to New York to rally the world for a new struggle against Islamic extremism – but at the same time he had to reassure his global audience it was not about to witness a replay of George W Bush’s “war on terror”.

Moreover, the president had to achieve that feat at a time when the Security Council is at its most divided for over a decade, with deep rifts between the West and Russia over Ukraine and Syria. The tone of Obama’s remarks addressed towards Moscow were as stern as anything heard from an American president since well before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In an echo of the language of the cold war, he portrayed Russia as the very antithesis of everything America stood for, and invited the world to choose between the two very models they represented.

However, most of the speech was devoted to the new challenges to world order presented by the Isis extremists in Syria and Iraq. He portrayed “the cancer of violent extremism that has ravaged so many parts of the Muslim world” as the most important challenge facing the world as it was “the one issue that risks a cycle of conflict that could derail progress” on all the other challenges facing the international community.

While acknowledging that terrorism was nothing new, the president suggested that the movement’s extreme brutality coupled with its mastery of tools of globalisation such as social media made the group a particularly potent threat.

“With access to technology that allows small groups to do great harm, they have embraced a nightmarish vision that would divide the world into adherents and infidels – killing as many innocent civilians as possible; and employing the most brutal methods to intimidate people within their communities,” he said.

Speaking hours after news broke that the US-led air campaign against the group had been extended from Iraq into Syria, he vowed that the Isis militants (for which he used the acronym Isil) would be degraded and then destroyed.

“We will use our military might in a campaign of air strikes to roll back Isil. We will train and equip forces fighting against these terrorists on the ground. We will work to cut off their financing, and to stop the flow of fighters into and out of the region,” he said. “Today, I ask the world to join in this effort. Those who have joined Isil should leave the battlefield while they can.”

In the tenor of his remarks, Obama made it clear he was aware that his address risked sounding like an echo of UN speeches made over 10 years ago by President George W Bush – an era marked by widespread distrust of the US and its motives. It is an impression deepened by the widespread doubts voiced over the legal underpinning of the campaign in Syria. But Obama tried to distance his campaign against extremism from his predecessor’s “war on terror”.

“I have made it clear that America will not base our entire foreign policy on reacting to terrorism,” Obama pledged. With the Bush legacy clearly in mind, he promised: “America will be a respectful and constructive partner. We will neither tolerate terrorist safe havens, nor act as an occupying power.”

Acknowledging that “no external power can bring about a transformation of hearts and minds”, the president said that the rejection of sectarianism and extremism was a “generational task” for the people of the Middle East. He emphasised that Washington was now seeking as wide a coalition as possible to combat the influence of Isis, starting in the Islamic world. “It is the task of all great religions to accommodate devout faith with a modern, multicultural world,” he says, calling for the battle of ideas to be taken online.

“That means contesting the space that terrorists occupy – including the Internet and social media. Their propaganda has coerced young people to travel abroad to fight their wars, and turned students into suicide bombers. We must offer an alternative vision,” he said, and he praised the #notinmyname campaign launched by young British Muslims.

Obama addressed head-on the deep divide between the West and Russia that has threatened to paralyse the work of the UN Security Council. He laid out the details of Moscow’s intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine saying its actions in Ukraine represented a threat to the international order established after the second world war and symbolised by the UN.

“This is a vision of the world in which might makes right – a world in which one nation’s borders can be redrawn by another, and civilised people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed,” Obama said. “America stands for something different. We believe that right makes might – that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones; that people should be able to choose their own future.”

Obama stressed that the US was willing to cooperate with Moscow on the pressing global challenges of the day, such as climate change and the spread of the Ebola virus, but only “if Russia changes course.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/24/barack-obama-un-speech-warn-russia-fight-isis-analysis
 
Salaam

Bombing will make ISIS problem worse say MPs, trade unionists, campaigners, writers, filmmakers, actors

Bombing will make the ISIS problem worse

Along with most British people, we opposed an attack on Iraq in 2003. The brutal reality of the invasion and occupation confirmed our worst fears. At least half a million died and the country was devastated.

Now, less than three years after US troops were pulled out, the US is bombing again. The British government is considering joining military action, not just in Iraq but in Syria too.

All the experience of the varied military action taken by the west in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya shows that such interventions kill innocents, destroy infrastructure and fragment societies, and in the process spread bitterness and violence.

While we all reject the politics and methods of Isis, we have to recognise that it is in part a product of the last disastrous intervention, which helped foster sectarianism and regional division. It has also been funded and aided by some of the west’s allies, especially Saudi Arabia.

More bombing, let alone boots on the ground, will only exacerbate the situation. We urge the government to rule out any further military action in Iraq or Syria.

http://stopwar.org.uk/news/bombing-will-make-the-isis-problem-worse
 
Salaam

Ten reasons why the British parliament should vote no to bombing Iraq

On Friday 26 September, David Cameron will ask MPs to vote in favour of joining the US bombing campaign in Iraq and take the UK into yet another Middle East war.

Ten reasons why MPs should vote no

1) The West's last operation in Iraq ended just three years ago. For those with a short memory it didn't go well. More than half a million people died, millions fled the country and Iraq's infrastructure was devastated. The operation generated deep resentment against the West.

2) The current chaos in Iraq - including the rise of the reactionary Isis - is largely the result of the eight years of that occupation. On top of the trauma of the assault, sectarian division was built into the operation. Elections were organised along communal lines and the authorities used sectarianism to undermine resistance. By 2006, Baghdad had been turned from an integrated, modern city into a patchwork of ruined communal ghetoes.The open discrimination of the Western-backed Maliki government detonated a Sunni insurgency last year that helped fuel the rise of Isis in Iraq.

3) Bombing always kills and terrorises civilians. Recent coalition bombing raids on Raqqa in Syria have brought death and panic to its residents. One civilian there told western reporters 'I would not wish them on my worst enemy'.

4) All three of Britain's major military interventions in the last thirteen years have been disasters. In 2001 we were told an invasion of Afghanistan would rout the Taliban. Thirteen years and tens of thousands of deaths later the Taliban have grown in strength and the country is broken. The bombing of Libya in 2011 was justified as essential to stop a massacre by Gaddafi. After it began an estimated 30,000 were killed in a terrifying cycle of violence. The country is now a failed state with no real government.

5) The coalition that has been put together for the bombing of Syria - apparently in an effort to give the attacks legitimacy - comprises some of the most ruthless and benighted regimes in the region. Human Rights Watch reports that nineteen people were beheaded in Saudi Aarbia in August. Qatar and UAE have notorious human rights' records that include the use of forced labour. All three have funded violent Jihadi groups in the region.

6) Bombing raids will increase hatred of the west. One of the wider results of the 'War on Terror' has been to spread Al- Quaida and other terrorist groups across whole regions of the world. In 2001 there were relatively small numbers of such militants, centred mainly on Pakistan. Now there are groups across the middle east, central Asia and Africa.

7) The timing is cynical. David Cameron has recalled parliament to debate an attack on Iraq just two days before the start of the last Tory Conference before the general election. This at a time when he is engaged in pushing a right wing, nationalist agenda for party political purposes.

8) Mission creep is almost inevitable. There are already more than a thousand US military active in Iraq and senior US military figures are arguing they should now be openly involved in fighting. In Britain a growing number of voices from Tony Blair to Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb are recommending British boots on the ground.

9) The attack will cost money much needed for other things. One Tomahawk cruise missile costs £850,000, enough to pay the annual salary of 28 NHS nurses. The US has already fired about 50 of these missiles at Isis targets in Syria. It is estimated Britain spent between £500 million and one billion pounds bombing Libya in 2011. This was roughly the same as the savings made by ending the education maintenance allowance (EMA); or three times the amount saved by scrapping the disability living allowance.

10) The vote will have a global impact. On Friday, MPs have a chance to make a real difference on matters of peace and war. The US wants Britain on board to prove it is not isolated. When MPs blocked Cameron's last push for airstrikes, on Syria a year ago, they stopped Obama launching attacks too. A no vote could help reverse the drift towards another full scale western war in the middle east.


Ten reasons why the British parliament should vote no to bombing Iraq - Stop the War Coalition
 
Salaam

Looks like we've been brainwashed into another war

How Obama and Cameron set themselves up for a punch in the mouth from ISIS

As the UK prepares for another war in Iraq, David Cameron has no more idea of what he is getting into in this war than Tony Blair did in 2003, says Patrick Cockburn.

On 26 September 2014, MPs in the UK parliament voted 524 to 43 in favour of taking Britain into another Iraq war.

BRITAIN IS SET to join the air campaign against Isis in Iraq, but, going by David Cameron’s speech to the UN General Assembly, the Government has no more idea of what it is getting into in this war than Tony Blair did in 2003.

Mr Cameron says that there should be “no rushing to join a conflict without a clear plan”, but he should keep in mind the warning of the American boxer Mike Tyson that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.

The Prime Minister says that lessons have been learned from British military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan but it is telling that he did not mention intervention in Libya for which he himself was responsible.

In fact, there is a much closer parallel between Britain joining an air war in Libya in 2011 than Mr Blair’s earlier misadventures which Mr Cameron was happy to highlight.

In Libya, what was sold to the public as a humanitarian bid by Nato forces to protect the people of Benghazi from Muammar Gaddafi, rapidly escalated into a successful effort to overthrow the Libyan leader. The result three years on is that Libya is in permanent chaos with predatory militias reducing their country to ruins as they fight each other for power.

Whatever the original intentions of Britain and the US, their armed intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 has been to produce devastating conflicts that have not ended.

It has become common over the years to describe Iraq as a quagmire for foreign powers and it is no less so today than when President Bush and Mr Blair launched their invasion 11 years ago.

Mr Cameron draws comfort from the fact that the UN Security Council has received “a clear request from the Iraqi government to support it in its military action” against Isis. But this is a government who lost five divisions, a third of its army of 350,000 soldiers, when attacked by 1,300 Isis fighters in Mosul in June. Its three most senior generals jumped into a helicopter and fled to the Kurdish Iraqi capital Arbil, abandoning their men. It was one of the most disgraceful routs in history.

Mr Cameron blames all this on the mis-government of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose sectarian and kleptocratic rule has just ended. But it is doubtful if much has changed since Mr Maliki was replaced by the more personable Haider al-Abadi, whose government is still dominated by Shia religious parties. Mr Cameron’s stated belief that he is supporting the creation of a government that is inclusive of Sunni, Shia, Kurds and Christians is a pipe dream.

It is important to stress that there is little sign that US air strikes in Iraq, which Britain is planning to supplement, will be able to turn the tide against Isis. There have been 194 US air strikes in Iraq since 8 August but the militants are still advancing six weeks after the first bombs and missiles exploded.

In a little reported battle at Saqlawiya, 40 miles west of Baghdad, last Sunday, Isis fighters besieged and overran an Iraqi army base and then ambushed the retreating soldiers. An officer who escaped was quoted as saying that “of an estimated 1,000 soldiers in Saqlawiya, only about 200 managed to flee”.

Surviving Iraqi soldiers blame their military leaders for failing to supply them with ammunition, food and water while Isis claims to have destroyed or captured five tanks and 41 Humvees. The message here is that if the US, Britain and their allies intend to prop up a weak Iraqi government and army, it is misleading to pretend that this can be done without a much more significant level of intervention.

In 2003, Mr Bush and Mr Blair claimed to be fighting only Saddam Hussein and his regime and were astonished to find themselves fighting the whole Sunni community in Iraq. This could very easily happen again in both Iraq and Syria.

Many Sunni in Mosul and Raqqa, Isis’s Syrian capital, do not like Isis. They are alienated by its violence and primaeval social norms such as treating women as chattels. But they are even more frightened of resurgent Iraqi or Syrian armies accompanied by murderous pro-government militias subduing their areas with the assistance of allied air strikes. The Sunni will have no option but to fight or flee.

The US is hoping that it can split the Sunni community away from Isis in a repeat of what happened in 2007 when many Sunni tribes and neighbourhoods took up arms against al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). But this is less likely to happen this time round because Isis is stronger than its predecessor and takes precautions against a stab in the back. Mr Cameron cited the example of the al-Sheitaat tribe in Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, who rose up against Isis only for their rebellion to be crushed and 700 of their tribesmen to be executed.

Mr Cameron produced a laundry list of four measures that will make the present intervention in Iraq different from past failures. They are a ragbag of suggestions, high on moral tone but short on specificity and give the impression that Tony Blair may have been looking over the shoulder of Mr Cameron’s speech writer.

For instance, we should defeat “the ideology of extremism that is the root cause of terrorism”, but there is nothing concrete about the origins of this narrow and bigoted ideology which condemns Shia as heretics and apostates, treats women as second-class citizens and maligns Christians and Jews.

In fact, the belief system of Isis is little different from Wahhabism, the variant of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia. Supported by Saudi wealth, Wahhabism has gained an ever-increasing influence over mainstream Sunni Islam in the last 50 years. Politicians like Mr Cameron are much happier condemning school governors in Birmingham for religious extremism than they are complaining to the Saudi ambassador in London about the virulent sectarianism of Saudi school books.

The US and British alliance with Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Jordan – all Sunni monarchies – creates other problems. It is hypocritical for Mr Cameron to pretend that US and UK intervention are in support of democratic, accountable and inclusive governments when he is in a coalition with the last theocratic absolute monarchies on earth.

But the most short-sighted and self-defeating part of Mr Cameron’s justification for British intervention is to do with the war in Syria. He still claims he wants to change the government of Syria, a policy in which there is “a political transition and an end to Assad’s brutality”. He adds the shop-worn observation that “our enemies’ enemy is not our friend. It is another enemy.”

Since Mr Assad controls almost all the larger Syrian cities, he is not going to leave power. What Cameron is in practice proposing is a recipe for a continuing war and it is this that will make it impossible to defeat the jihadi militants, for Isis is the child of war.

Its leaders have been fighting for much of their lives and are good at it. They and their followers interact with the rest of the world through violence. And so long as the wars in Syria and Iraq continue, then many in their Sunni Arab communities will fear the enemies of Isis even more than Isis.

What the plans of President Obama and Mr Cameron lack is a diplomatic plan to bring the war between the non-Isis parties in Syria to an end. The two sides fear and hate each other too much for any political solution, but it may be possible for the foreign backers of the two sides to pressure them into agreeing a ceasefire. Neither is in a position to win against each other, but both are threatened by Isis, which inflicted stinging defeats on both Assad and anti-Assad forces in the summer.

Britain should press for such a truce even if it is only engaged militarily in Iraq, because it is the outcome of the war in Syria that will determine what happens in Iraq. It was the Syrian war beginning in 2011 that reignited Iraq’s civil war and not the misdeeds of Mr Maliki.

If Isis is to be combated effectively, then the US, Britain and their allies need to establish a closer relationship with those who are actually fighting Isis, which currently include the Syrian Army, the Syrian Kurds, Hezbollah of Lebanon, Iranian-backed militias and Iran itself. The necessity for this is being made tragically clear in the Syria Kurdish enclave of Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border, where Isis fighters have already driven 200,000 Kurds into Turkey.

If Mr Obama and Mr Cameron genuinely intend to rely on plans to combat Isis that they have just outlined, then they are, as Mike Tyson would have predicted, setting themselves and their countries up for a punch in the mouth.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/how-obama-and-cameron-are-setting-themselves-up-for-a-punch-in-the-mouth-from-isis
 
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Salaam

Another comment piece

Dragged into a war by clowns who can't even run a railway

Wars cause far more atrocities than they prevent. In fact, wars make atrocities normal and easy. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. It is a simple rule, and not hard to follow.

The only mercy in war, as all soldiers know, is a swift victory by one side or the other. Yet our subservient, feeble Parliament on Friday obediently shut its eyes tight and launched itself yet again off the cliff of war. It did so even though – in a brief moment of truth – the Prime Minister admitted that such a war will be a very long one, and has no visible end.

The arguments used in favour of this decision – in a mostly unpacked House of Commons – were pathetic beyond belief. Most of them sounded as if their users had got them out of a cornflakes packet, or been given them by Downing Street, which is much the same.

Wild and unverifiable claims were made that Islamic State plans attacks on us here in our islands. If so, such attacks are far more likely now than they were before we decided to bomb them. So, if your main worry is such attacks, you should be against British involvement.

The same cheap and alarmist argument was made year after year to justify what everyone now knows was our futile and costly presence in Afghanistan. Why should the Afghans need to come here to kill British people when we sent our best to Helmand, to be blown up and shot for reasons that have never been explained?

Beyond that, it was all fake compassion. Those who favour this action claim to care about massacres and persecution. But in fact they want to be seen to care. Bombs won’t save anyone. Weeks of bombing have already failed to tip the balance in Iraq, whose useless, demoralised army continues to run away.

A year ago, we were on the brink of aiding the people we now want to bomb, and busily encouraging the groups which have now become Islamic State. Now they are our hated foes. Which side are we actually on? Do we know? Do we have any idea what we are doing?

The answer is that we don’t. That is why, in a scandal so vast it is hardly ever mentioned, the Chilcot report on the 2003 Iraq War has still not been published. Who can doubt that it has been suppressed because it reveals that our Government is dim and ill-informed?

As this country now has hardly any soldiers, warships, military aircraft or bombs, Friday’s warmongers resorted to the only weapon they have in plentiful supply – adjectives (‘vicious, barbaric’, etc etc). Well, I have better adjectives. Those who presume to rule us are ignorant and incompetent and learn nothing from their own mistakes. How dare these people, who can barely manage to keep their own country in one piece, presume to correct the woes of the world?

Beforethey’re allowed to play out their bathtub bombing fantasies, oughtn’t they to be asked to show they can manage such dull things as schools (no discipline), border control (vanished), crime (so out of control that the truth has to be hidden), transport (need I say?) and hospitals (hopelessly overloaded and increasingly dangerous)?

None of them will now even mention their crass intervention in Libya, which turned that country into a swamp of misery and unleashed upon Europe an uncontrollable wave of desperate economic migrants who are now arriving in Southern England in shockingly large numbers.

We have for years happily done business with Saudi Arabia, often sending our Royal family there. It is hard to see why we should now be so worried about the establishment of another fiercely intolerant Sunni Muslim oil state, repressive, horrible to women and given to cutting people’s heads off in public. Since we proudly tout our 1998 surrender to the IRA as a wonderful and praiseworthy peace deal, it is hard to see why we are now so hoity-toity about doing business with terror, or paying ransom.

We gave the whole of Northern Ireland to the IRA, to ransom the City of London and to protect our frightened political class from bombs. Why can we not pay (as other NATO members do) to release innocent hostages? We conceded the principle of ransom years ago. Talk about swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat.

How is it that we have allowed our country to be governed by people so ignorant of history and geography, so unable to learn from their mistakes and so immune to facts and logic?

Can we do anything about it? I fear not.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/