Tag: Lebanon
It’s already war, announced or not
The equation looks like a simple one: the US assassinated Quds force commander Soleimani as he left Baghdad airport, and Iran responded with a missile attack on an Iraqi base housing US forces. Now de-escalation is said to have taken hold. Tit-for-tat, yes, but not really war.
It’s not that simple, or that limited. In addition to the drone attack on Soleimani, the US apparently tried the same day to kill another Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander in Yemen, and a couple of days later Iranian forces in eastern Syria were under aerial attack. Washington has also increased sanctions on Iran. Tehran meanwhile has focused on trying to get the Iraqi parliament and government to evict the Americans as well as on unilaterally lifting all the constraints on their nuclear activities under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or nuclear deal).
This is a multi-front contest, complicated further today by the revelation that the IRGC shot down a Ukrainian airliner shortly after it took off from Tehran airport. That has generated explicitly anti-regime protests inside Iran and a brutal crackdown, which is just what the Trump administration would have ordered up if it could. The discomfort of your enemy in moments of crisis is always welcome.
There are lots of things that haven’t happened yet, so far as we know. It is unclear whether the threshold of one thousand battle deaths arbitrarily required by scholars to classify a conflict as a war has been reached. If we went back to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, that number might be breached in total US and Iranian casualties. We could still see more assassinations in both directions, cyber attacks, more attacks on Gulf oil shipping and facilities, protests and crackdowns in Lebanon and Iraq as well as Iran, attacks in Yemen, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia, and attacks on or by Israel. We might also eventually see more salvos of cruise or ballistic missiles in one direction and the other.
It is already war, declared or not. President Trump knows the American people don’t support war against Iran and he won’t try to convince them otherwise. He intends simply to proceed, announcing only the good news (from the American perspective) and citing non-existent intelligence, like the plans for attacks on four embassies that no one in the intelligence community has confirmed. Maximum pressure, initiated with sanctions, now includes “kinetic” measures ordered by the President with no authorization from Congress to use military force.
Iranian maximum resistance will not be limited either. Iran will use its proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen to pressure America’s friends and allies even as it tries to keep the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese on board the nuclear deal, or what remains of it. Iran can also hit American assets again, not only in Iraq but also elsewhere in the Middle East and even in Latin America as well as inside the US. President Trump wanted to restore deterrence with the Soleimani assassination; there is no reason to believe he has succeeded.
The House Democrats effort to restrain the President will fail. Even if the “concurrent resolution” passes in the Senate, it will be non-binding. The President will veto any binding measure. So we are stuck with a war few Americans or Iranians want conducted by a President who doesn’t care and a Supreme Leader who doesn’t either. Each is concerned with preserving his own hold on power. We need better sense to prevail in both countries, before the de-escalation lull ends and disaster come ever closer.
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Escalation dominance
No American should mourn Qassem Suleimani, but his death at the hands of the US requires careful consideration of the consequences. By killing the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, the US has jumped many rungs of the escalation ladder in its confrontation with Iran, which had already heated up with US attacks on Iraqi militia forces earlier in the week. The Administration is betting that Tehran will recognize that the US is so dominant that it can gain little by responding. Washington is also signaling that it is prepared to withdraw its forces from Iraq, since that is a possible, perhaps likely, political consequence.
The first proposition is dubious. Iran prides itself on resistance to the US and has the capability to do serious harm to American interests in the Middle East and beyond. While it may be difficult for Tehran to kill an American military commander, it is not unthinkable. Nor is such a mirror image attack the only possibility. Iran and its proxies have killed many Americans in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Tehran has capabilities that extend throughout the Middle East and into Europe, Latin America, and even the American heartland.
Ultimately US military power is vastly greater than Iran’s, which is piddling by comparison. But the US public is far from ready for a war with Iran in which we might lose thousands if not tens of thousands of troops and civilians, not to mention ships and planes. When it comes to breaking the will to fight, Iran is likely to be able to absorb far more punishment than the US. As many as half a million Iranians died in the eight-year Iran/Iraq war. Fewer than 7000 Americans have been killed since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The killing of Iraqi Kataib Hizbollah commander al-Muhandis along with Suleimani puts the Iraqi government in a particularly difficult spot. No doubt there are lots of Iraqis who won’t mourn al-Muhandis in private, as he left a swathe of death and destruction, especially but not only among Sunnis. He had impeccable terrorist credentials from his time in Kuwait in the 1980s, but he was also credited by many Iraqis with helping to fight off and defeat the Islamic State after 2015. Besides, deadly American military action without Iraqi consent on Iraqi soil against Iraqi citizens can please few Iraqi politicians in public.
US withdrawal from Iraq, if that is what Iraqi politics are going to demand, would be a big prize for Iran, which seeks client states there and in Syria that will give it strategic depth and on-the-ground access to its Hizbollah proxies in Lebanon as well as proximity to the Israeli border. Like the US, Iran seeks to confront its adversaries outside its borders rather than inside. US withdrawal would enable it to do that and consolidate its projection of power all the way to the Mediterranean.
So President Trump has thrown the dice, betting that Iran will break and that Iraq won’t throw the Americans out. It may be churlish, but true, to mention that he got elected on pledges to avoid new conflicts in the Middle East. Not to mention that war with Iran is nowhere in the current Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force. It might almost make you think the President is trying to distract attention from the Senate’s impending impeachment trial. It wouldn’t be the first time he has taken a big risk for little apparent gain. Nor would it be the first time he put his personal electoral interests ahead of the nation’s security.
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Stevenson’s army, December 4
– Julia Joffe paints a devastating picture of State under Trump — 52% of ambassadors are political.
– Dennis Jett piles on with more details about the political appointees.
– But in Congress there’s a new Diplomacy Caucus.
– CFR finds Americans ignorant about many foreign policy matters.
– Maybe Israel was behind long delay in giving Lebanon aid.
– Dexter Filkins looks at PM Modi and changing India.
-Optional reading: House Intell Committee report.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Trump and anti-regime protests worldwide
Notable protests against ruling regimes are occurring these days in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and Hong Kong. Recent months have seen similar protests in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Sudan. These are not your garden variety protests for more jobs or better wages, against police abuse and corruption, or in favor of improvements in education and health care. They are “regime change” protests: cases in which citizens have concluded that the social contract between themselves and their government no longer serves their interests. Rather than asking for reform, the protesters are asking for fundamental changes in the way they are governed.
Most of these protests are against regimes the US doesn’t much like. Washington is happy to see the Islamic Republic targeted not just inside Iran but also–despite good relations with Baghdad and Beirut–in Iraq, where Iranian consulates have been burned, and Lebanon, where Hizbollah is suffering criticism. The Bolivian president demonstrators chased from power, Evo Morales, was no friend of the US. Washington would like the same thing to happen to Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In Sudan the Americans helped broker the agreement that deposed President Omar al-Bashir, whom the International Criminal Court indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur.
Hong Kong is a case of its own. There the protests are in favor of preserving the justice system’s autonomy and expanding democratic representation. President Trump, engaged in a massive tariff war with China, has been hesitant to criticize Beijing for fear of the cost to his trade agenda. But Congress compelled him to sign a bill providing for the possibility of sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials responsible for repression of protests. The bill passed both Houses with veto-proof majorities. It will be difficult, however, to convince Trump to use the authority provided, unless he feels it will help in some way his trade agenda.
With that exception, the protests seem good to President Trump. But take another look.
These protests are without exception in favor of more liberal democracy and rule of law, not less. In Iran, demonstrators want the fall of a regime that is an anocracy: it mixes democratic forms like elections and a parliament with a dictatorship of the Supreme Leader, backed by security forces loyal to him and not the elected President. In Lebanon and Iraq, the protests have targeted systems that share power on the basis of ethnicity rather than equal rights. Bolivian President Morales’ cardinal sin was tampering with election results, Venezuelan President Maduro has resisted yielding power to a constitutionally elected successor, and Sudanese President al-Bashir was a dictator ousted by the military but in response to popular demand.
Looked at this way, the protests are all antithetical to Trump’s ambitions inside the US:
- he seeks less participation in US elections, not more, and re-election not with the popular vote but with the vote in the Electoral College;
- he is refusing to cooperate with Congress’ constitutionally authorized impeachment proceedings;
- he has sought to enhance presidential power, not limit it;
- he has appealed to his base in blatantly ethnic, white nationalist terms; and
- he is seeking to insulate the US military from accountability and to make it beholden exclusively to him.
The goals of the regime-change demonstrators worldwide point precisely in the opposite directions.
Bottom line: the world the demonstrators want is not Trump’s world. It is the liberal democratic world ruled by law that he is seeking to destroy. You know whom I am rooting for.
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A bad barometer reading
On June 26 the Atlantic Council held a panel to discuss the release of opinion poll data collected by the Arab Barometer about the state of the economy, migration, governmental performance, corruption, and other topics in the Middle East. Survey data was collected in Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. Presentation of data was followed by a panel discussion that included Mark Tessler, professor of political science at University of Michigan, Kathrin Thomas, Research Associate at the Arab Barometer, Abbas Khadim, director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council, and Faysal Itani, Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council. Vivian Salam, reporter at the Wall Street Journal, moderated.
There is little optimism about the economy improving in the Levant. In Jordan, 70% of respondents cite the economy as a primary concern. In all three countries, (Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon) more than 85% percent of respondents perceived the governments of their respective states to be corrupt.
Survey data also noted a slight upwards trend in desire to emigrate from the Levant region. An uptick in a desire to emigrate can be explained by the “brain drain” phenomenon in which highly educated youths seek to leave their home countries due to lack of high-level employment opportunity. Respondents indicated that “economic reasons”, “political reasons” and “security reasons” were the primary drivers for the choice to emigrate.
The survey catalogued a slight increase in support for women’s rights and prominence in politics and business. 60% of respondents would support a female head of state, with Lebanon the most supportive of the notion at a rate of 77%. Despite this, 66% of respondents in the Levant said that men inherently make better political leaders than women.
Since 2016 there has been a decline in the belief that the Middle East and North Africa would benefit from stronger relations with the United States. Survey data revealed that people in the Levant widely believe that Iraq is a proxy of Iran, despite the fact that the Shia in Iraq have not sided with Iran.
Itani notes that the economic anxiety present in the region, specifically in Lebanon, is a reminder to Western policy makers that issues of chief importance to the West (Hezbollah, etc), do not necessarily take precedence in the region. The expectation of poor economic performance will have implications for future investment and growth. Itani attributes Lebanese decrease in willingness to strengthen ties with Washington to US policy in region, specifically US dealings with Israel and the change in American leadership in 2016.
Khadim spoke more specifically to the Iraqi data. Surveys confirm sentiments Iraqis usually express only through social media or encrypted messengers. There is a divergence of opinions held regarding the United States government and US citizens. Iraqis view American citizens more favorably than the American government, which Khadim says can open avenues in the realm of public diplomacy and good faith action between the two countries. On the Iraq-Iran relationship, he says GCC media have ascribed an affinity between Iraq and Iran that does not necessarily exist. Iran does have influence over certain discrete groups in Iraq, but that influence is not as widespread as many believe.
Tessler and Thomas, the administrators of the data collection, focused on the ways in which the data can be used to determine if there are links between different variables. Specifically, they expect a link between corruption perceptions and education levels as well as support of Iran depending on religion. While they had not yet conducted the analysis on these variables, they expect to confirm Khadim’s assertion that support for Iran in Iraq is contained to certain demographics and is not a widespread sentiment. Tessler further notes that the trend of declining support for strengthening relations with a United States dates to 2006.
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