Tag: Syria
Stevenson’s army, January 3
Columbia Journalism Review has a good collection of commentary on the US assassination of General Suleimani,which I’ll paste below.
Two other points: It’s fortunate that the US military blocked VIP travel to Iraq and Syria starting Dec 16 and supposedly lasting until Jan 15. I’ll be surprised if they allow it any time soon.
Even Turkey delayed sending its troops to Libya until the parliament had authorized it.
In addition to the items linked to below, see this by Heather Hurlburt and this by Dan Byman.
The killing of Qassem Suleimani and the road to war with Iran
By Jon Allsop
In the early hours of the morning, local time, state media in Iraq reported that Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence official, had been killed in a drone strike at Baghdad’s international airport, along with figures tied to Iran-backed Iraqi militias. In the United States, where it was Thursday night, the news quickly spread, albeit with key details missing; cable news shows and one broadcast network, CBS, cut into their programming with portentous reports that something serious had happened. An hour or so later, the US government confirmed that its military had killed Suleimani at the direction of the president. Trump remained strangely quiet, though he did tweet a picture of an American flag. In response, Iranian officials tweeted their country’s flag, and threats of revenge. Such is the road to war in 2020.
Some context: Suleimani was greatly influential in Iran and widely revered by his countrymen. As head of the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, he was responsible for Iran’s prodigious maneuvering throughout the Middle East. According to a former operative of the Central Intelligence Agency who spoke to Dexter Filkins in 2013 for The New Yorker, “Suleimani is the single most powerful operative in the Middle East.” In recent years, Suleimani was influential in buttressing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, and other efforts that cost lives—including those of US troops—in countries from Iraq to Lebanon. According to the New York Times, Trump’s plan to kill Suleimani was initiated last week, after the administration accused an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia of killing an American contractor in an attack on an Iraqi military base. The militia denied involvement; the US bombed some of the militia’s bases anyway. Afterward, when militia members sieged the US embassy in Baghdad (staffers were trapped inside; none were hurt), American officials blamed Suleimani for being the instigator.
Presidents Obama and Bush never took shots to kill Suleimani, fearing war with Iran. Trump went ahead and did it. Does that mean we’re now at war with Iran? Experts’ initial reactions, it seems, have fallen on a spectrum—from let’s keep things in perspective to war is now inevitable to we’re already there. (In The Atlantic, Andrew Exum, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy under Obama, wrote that the killing of Suleimani “doesn’t mean war, it will not lead to war, and it doesn’t risk war. None of that. It is war.”) Two points of consensus emerged: that we are in uncharted territory and that whatever happens next will not be good. “No ‘hot take’ makes any sense now,” Rasha Al Aqeedi of Irfaa Sawtak, a site associated with the US-funded Middle East Broadcasting Networks, wrote. “None of us who work on Iraq closely ever anticipated a scenario without him.”
Nevertheless, hot takes abounded—on Twitter, where everybody suddenly seemed to be an expert on Iran, and in the news. (In particular, a CNBC piece—“America just took out the world’s no. 1 bad guy”—took a lot of heatonline.) Cable shows invited guests with close ties to the military-industrial complex: Fox News hosted Bush stalwarts Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer; MSNBC interviewed Brett McGurk, a diplomat involved in Iraq policy during the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations; CNN had on Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist who was a vocal proponent of the Iraq war. For many progressive commentators, it was all a bit too 2003 for comfort. “Cable news is hard-wired to support war,” Carlos Maza, formerly of Vox, tweeted. “It relies heavily on ex-military, ex-national security people for commentary, and routinely marginalizes anti-war voices.”
Much has changed since the early 2000s, including Boot’s perspective. He has recanted his support for the Iraq war and warned that war with Iran would be worse. Still, as I wrote last year amid escalating tensions between the US and Iran, much mainstream coverage of the countries’ relationship has been too quick to paint Iran as the menacing, unilateral aggressor, and has parroted US government talking points without applying due skepticism.
Last night, as reporters scrambled to fill in the details of Suleimani’s killing, news outlets turned repeatedly to press releases, including the Pentagon’s assurance that the strike on Suleimani “was aimed at deterring future attack plans.” As the Post’s Josh Rogin tweeted, “By the Pentagon’s own logic, if Iran retaliates, the strike mission failed its key goal. Remember that.” That’s sound advice. Already, Iran is promising “harsh retaliation.”
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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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The end is nigh 2019
Except for my 401k, the teens have not been a great decade. We’ve watched the Arab spring turn into the Arab civil wars, Russia reassert itself annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine, China increase its overt and covert challenges to the US, and North Korea defy American efforts to limit or eliminate its nuclear and missile programs. The US has initiated trade wars, withdrawn from international commitments (including the Paris climate change accord as well as the Iran nuclear deal and the intermediate nuclear forces agreement), and abandoned its support for democracy and rule of law, not only but importantly in Israel and Palestine.
Several of these developments could worsen in 2020. The Iran/US tit-for-tat is more likely to escalate than de-escalate. Some Arab civil wars like Yemen and Syria are burning out, but others are spreading beyond the Arab world, with Turkey intervening in Syria and Libya, Russia and Egypt in Libya, and Iran in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Russia is not advancing in Ukraine, but it seems disinclined to withdraw via the Minsk II agreement that would re-establish Ukraine’s control over its southeastern border with Russia and allow a significant degree of autonomy for Luhansk and Donetsk. China and the US have reached a limited and partial agreement on trade, but no more comprehensive accord is in sight. North Korea is bound to test more missiles, if not nuclear weapons.
US mistakes are especially concerning. The withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal has freed Iran to begin to violate its provisions, accelerating the date at which Tehran will have all the technology it needs to make nuclear weapons. Global warming is accelerating and the arms race with Russia is quickening. NATO is not brain dead, but US leadership of the alliance is more in doubt than ever before due to the President’s inability to recognize the real advantages a multilateral partnership gives to American power projection. American abandonment of even the pretense of evenhandedness in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians has opened the door to extremist Jewish ambitions to annex the West Bank.
Only 11 months remain before the next US presidential election. It will focus mainly on domestic issues like the economy, health care, religion, and race. But there can be no doubt the United States is less well positioned internationally than it was in January 2017, when President Trump took office. The rest of the world increasingly regards the U.S. as a menace to peace and security, not its guarantor. Excessive reliance on military force and erratic decisionmaking have reduced American influence. Even the relatively strong economy, which has continued to grow at the pace established in the Obama administration and thereby reduced unemployment to historic lows, has not propped up American prestige, because of Trump’s trade wars. Enthusiasm for America is at a nadir in most of the world.
We can hope for better and toast the prospects this evening. But there is little reason to believe the United States is going to recover until it gets new leadership, not only in the White House but also in the Senate, where the new year will see some semblance of a “trial” of President Trump on self-evident impeachment charges. He tried to extort Ukraine into investigating a political rival for his personal benefit using US government resources and has withheld cooperation with the resulting investigation. But few if any Republican Senators seem ready to acknowledge the facts. I might hope Chief Justice Roberts will refuse to preside over a sham procedure and insist on testimony, but he has given no hint of that yet.
America is a great country. It has survived many mistakes. But whether it can get through the next year without doing itself irreversible harm is in doubt. It could “acquit” and re-elect a president most of the world regards as more of a threat to peace and security than Vladimir Putin. Or it could, against the odds, redeem itself and its role in the world with a conviction, a good election free of international interference, and inauguration of someone the world and most its citizens can respect. Take your choice, America.
And happy New Year!
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Stevenson’s army, December 28-31
I was traveling over the weekend, so managed to miss some first-rate recommendations by Charlie Stevenson:
December 31
Forward: Protesters storm US embassy in Baghdad — in response to US airstrikes, as reported by WaPo and NYT stories.
– Likely changes in congressional representation after 2020 census.
– Chinese impact in Djibouti.
– Navy tries again to decommission carrier Truman and cut an air wing.
Backward: Sarah Binder reflects on Congress in 2019.
– FP lists top ten stories.
See you next year….
December 30
– NYT has long piece with previously unreported details of administration fights over Ukraine aid. OMB began working in June to halt aid; Trump met in late August with Pompeo, Esper & Bolton and rejected their unanimous advice to release aid.
-WaPo reveals backchannel of Giuliani & Cong. Pete Sessions negotiating with Maduro.
–US struck forces linked to Iran in Iraq & Syria in response to attacks in Kirkuk that wounded Americans. Here’s Reuters background.
– NYT explains al shabab’s strengths.
– Armed Services chairmen vow smaller NDAA next year. It was amazing to me how many foreign policy and non-defense matters were shoehorned into the bill. But, then, few other bills were debated in the Senate.
December 29
– NYT has long article documenting Trump administration’s demotion and disregard of scientific expertise.
-Newly released documents show how banker David Rockefeller maneuvered to help the shah of Iran.
-Hard to dispute:article calls Sen. McConnell the “most consequential US politician of the past decade.”
December 28
– NYT says Russia is ahead in hypersonic weapons.
– Congress is more assertive against Trump on foreign policy.
– Huawei is making nice in Europe and winning.
– Fed study says Trump tariffs backfired.
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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Stevenson’s army, December 11
What’s in the 3,488 page[ ! ]NDAA? Besides the key domestic section of parental leave for federal workers, there’s security stuff. The HASC summary. The Defense News summary.
What’s in the final USMCA? WSJ lists winners and losers. Politico shows how Pelosi ran the negotiations.
Part 3 of the Post’s Afghanistan papers — wasted aid.
NYT says US commanders aren’t sure how to respond to Russian and Turkish acts in Syria.
Dan Drezner laments the end of WTO and the economic order that came with it.
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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Turkey sandwich: between NATO and Russia
On Wednesday December 4, the Middle East Institute and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation held their 10th Annual Conference on Turkey. The conference brought together policymakers and experts to discuss the challenges Turkey faces domestically and its relations with the Middle East and the West. The conference consisted of three panel discussions. The third panel was entitled Turkey between NATO and Russia. The panelists consisted of Ivan Safranchuk, Associate Research Scholar & Lecturer, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, Aydin Selcen, Columnist, GazeteDuvar & DuvarEnglish, General (ret.) Joseph Votel, Distinguished Senior Fellow on National Security, MEI, and Jim Zanotti, Specialist, Middle Eastern Affairs, Congressional Research Service. The panel was moderated by Barbara Slavin, Director of Future of Iran Initiative, Atlantic Council. Here are the key takeaways from the panel.
- Turkey’s Future in NATO
Recent actions by Turkey in Syria against the Kurds and the purchase of S400 anti-aircraft batteries from Russia exemplify how far formally shared values and interests between Turkey and NATO have diverged. Votel said he is unsure if the West can look at Turkey as a reliable NATO ally anymore. They are working against the coalition’s efforts in Syria and their overall military and political support in NATO has waned in recent years.
As for the purchase of S400s, Votel argued the Turks are looking to free of themselves of dependence on the West for weaponry. Russia wants to sell the air defense system to Turkey in order to drive a wedge between NATO allies. If they are successful, Russia could slowly undermine the Alliance and decrease its capabilities and global reach. Turkey is slowly shifting from a friend to a “frenemy.”
The US has historically led the Alliance too address problems, but Washington is no longer playing that role. NATO needs to discuss the options for future Turkish involvement in the organization. However, Selcen stated that NATO does not have set mechanisms to kick a member out. Additionally, he argued that Turkey’s geographic strategic importance raises its value to remain a part of the organization. NATO will have to pursue other measures.
- Turkish – Russian Relations
The developing relationship between Turkey and Russia is not a recent phenomenon. It started in the 1990s. Anger towards the US is a partial explanation for increased relations between the two countries, but it does not fully explain it.
Safranchuk argued that before the explosion of globalization, Russia and Turkey had to sacrifice part of traditions and culture in order to develop their economies via modernization, which depended on their relationships with Europe. In order to become more powerful, Moscow and Ankara had to become more Western. Otherwise they faced stagnant growth but could maintain their cultural traditions. Now Russia and Turkey can be powerful without Europe and they, along with China, would like to help each other to be successful.
Selcen agreed and stated that Erdogan is emulating Putin’s style of governing by shifting to more authoritarian rule. Despite historical and current grievances, Turkey and Russia continue to grow closer. On the purchase of the S400s, Selcen explained that the Turkish air defense was based on the strength of its air force to deter attacks, but now it has grown weaker and they must pursue a proper air defense system. However, the S400 batteries can only offer certain protective bubbles around Ankara or the presidential palace.
- Turkey’s Objectives in Syria
Turkey is in its consolidation phase in Syria. Votel notes it may not have gotten everything it wanted, but Ankara continues to fortify the territory in Syria it gained during the past several years. There continues to be violence between the Turkish military and Turkish-backed armed groups, and the one hand, and the Kurds on the other, but the expansion of Turkish control in northeast Syria has stopped for now.
Selcen said that Turkey has had a feeling of encirclement since the end of World War I. Ankara is pursuing an assertive foreign policy in Syria to establish its position there, but Selcen thinks there are better and cheaper ways to pursue foreign policy goals and secure border security. There is increasing friction between Russia and Turkey in Syria because of their divergent goals, but Safranchuk stated that Russia is not opposed to Erdogan securing Kurdish areas. Moscow sees the necessity to secure national borders and national security.
- Washington and Ankara
Congress and the White House have differing opinions on Turkey, particularly following the October offensive against Syrian Kurds. Zanotti said that it is too early to tell if Congress has definitively turned away from Turkey. There is still fence sitting by a number of Republican Senators on legislation to impose CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) sanctions in response to the S400 arms deal with Russia. It took Congress 8 months to pass CAATSA against China after they purchased Russian military platforms and it has only been 4 months since Turkey began receiving the defense batteries. The arms deal is set to finalize in March 2020, so the Republican majority Senate may be allowing things to play out as other strategies are attempted to dissuade Ankara from mobilizing the Russian defense system.
Anti-American sentiments have increased throughout Turkey and cut across the entire political spectrum. US-Turkey relations are arguably at their nadir and a desire to push away from the West is evident throughout the population. Selcen stated that traditional diplomacy does not exist between Washington and Ankara anymore. Relations rely on President Trump’s and President Erdogan’s interactions. A phase of “diplomacy without diplomats” has begun. According to Selcen, the Turkish Foreign Ministry has been sidelined in important decision making. He thinks this approach is working for now but is unsure if it will continue to do so in the future.
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