Iraq, ISIS, Iran and Instagram

Not the actual ISIS problem

The latest news from Iraq is very bad. A militia group called ISIS, which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, is now in control of two major Iraqi cities in the north -- Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's hometown) and Mosul (Iraq's second largest city). These urban centers, incidentally, are located very near major Iraqi oil infrastructure, though not the major oil fields in the south.

The group vows that Baghdad is their next target.

ISIS is the successor group to al Qaeda of Iraq and is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who:

took over the leadership of Islamic State of Iraq after its founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a targeted strike by a US Air Force F16 jet north of Baghdad in June 2006. Zarqawi had earned a reputation as the most brutal of al-Qaeda's emirs, promoting a strategy of mass suicide bombings and highly publicised beheadings, videoed and posted online, and Baghdadi seems to have taken up the methodology with enthusiasm.

How brutal is ISIS? Well, for starters, the group claims to have executed 1700 Shia soldiers in Iraq. Photographic and video evidence of their executions are readily found on the web. 

Incidentally, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, of course, accounted for the current situation back in April 2003:

"It's untidy, and freedom's untidy," he said, jabbing his hand in the air. "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."

Meanwhile, the American embassy in Baghdad remains open, with 1000s of Americans in Baghdad or consulates in Basra and Irbil. Only a few hundred U.S. military personnel remain in Iraq, though there are an unknown number of civilian contractors protecting State Department employees. Reportedly, Americans who have been involved in ongoing training missions are leaving an airbase near Balad. And Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for the U.S. to shutter its enormous Baghdad embassy before it suffers "another Benghazi."

International relations colleagues Dan Drezner and Marc Lynch are discussing a number of policy options for the United States. None are particularly good. The U.S. certainly does not want to send ground troops in great numbers. Air strikes could begin tomorrow, literally, but the Air Force wants basing rights that Iraq previously refused to grant and many experts are concerned about the lack of viable targets. 

Drezner called his piece "Thinking the unthinkable in Iraq" as it outlines the possibility of the U.S. working with Iran to stop ISIS. Iran is motivated, nearby, and potentially willing to act. For an idea of the problem with this picture, imagine this headline: "Iranian forces save U.S. Embassy in Baghdad." As Drezner notes, many U.S. allies and their DC supporters consider Iran a much bigger threat than ISIS.

What would happen if ISIS captured Baghdad? Some journalists are already comparing the situation to Saigon 1975 and predicting that this fall's elections could be framed around the question, "Who lost Iraq?"

That's the wrong question, of course. I've argued for more than 10 years that the U.S. should never have attacked Iraq in the first place.


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Around the web

Sorry for the silence lately. We traveled for Thanksgiving and I'm really making a push on the book project since the current sabbatical ends in four weeks.

Meanwhile, over at Duck of Minerva, you can read my post from November 30 on "Comprehending Gingrich." Does he have a Belgian pro-colonial worldview?

November 7 on the Duck, I posted "Hans Beinholtz: Europe For Sale." That post is basically a funny Stephen Colbert video about the Euro-crisis.

At the e-IR Climate Politics: IR and the Environment blog, I posted "The US is Not a Climate Outlaw?" on November 21. It is part 2 about my October talk at Cardiff University in Wales.


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Jasmine Revolt: Cascade Effects?

Photo credit: Flickr page on HINDRAF Rally in Kuala Lumpur by Shamshahrin Shamsudin

Thanks to my sabbatical, I had time this week to attend an interesting panel of a relatively small workshop sponsored locally by the Center for Asian Democracy: "The Jasmine Revolution and the 'Bamboo' Firewall: The impact of the Internet and new social media on political change in East Asia." My colleague Jason Abbott (CAD Director) explains a bit more about it on his blog -- and promises a more complete recap next week.

The panel I attended featured three interesting papers on "The New Media in Southeast Asia: Spotlight on Malaysia."

Asha Rathina Pandi (University of Hawaii, Manoa)
“‘Makkal Sakthi’ (People’s Power): Blogs, civil society and the 2007 Hindraf protest rally in Malaysia”

Meredith Weiss (SUNY – Albany)
“Parsing the Power of ‘New Media’ in Malaysia”

Thomas Pepinsky (Cornell University)
“Tak Nak Mereform: Contemporary Malaysian Politics in Historical Perspective”

Chair/Discussant -- Jason Abbott (University of Louisville)

As a student of international relations, it was somewhat unusual for me to attend a panel clearly constituted by comparativists talking almost exclusively about domestic economic, political and social variables. Indeed, during the Q&A, a fellow workshop participant asked the question that was most on my mind -- how did the Malaysian events the speakers described during their talks tie into the Jasmine Revolt?

One respondent pointed out the different ethnic mix in Malaysia and agreed with an audience member that only Bahrain is somewhat similar in the Middle East context.

I would have liked a lot more followup, to explore potential international and/or transnational dimensions. Did local activists learn from protesters in North Africa and the Middle East? Were new communications media employed globally, or were they primarily used on a local level, as emphasized in the talks? Were there any contagion effects of the other rebellions? Are states of East Asia (this panel focused on Malaysia) feeling any international pressure from bigger powers, international institutions, or transnational NGOs to embrace democratic norms?

Unfortunately, this particular panel did not really address those sorts of questions and I did not have time to attend the Roundtable scheduled to follow this session.

In short, the presentations were good, but not sufficiently IR for my tastes.


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Syria, R2P, & the Obama Doctrine

Photo credit: Maggie Osama at the Syrian embassy in Cairo.

Given the brutal crackdown against anti-regime demonstrators in Syria, many analysts concerned about human rights are calling for external intervention. If the world had the responsibility to protect innocents in Libya, they argue, then the same logic applies for Syria. Thousands have already died as people stand up to their government.

However, as many other analysts have noted, nation-states view R2P (as it is known) as an ideal that must be considered on a case-by-case basis -- in the context of the just war doctrine and in conjunction with the views of relevant regional organizations.

Yes, such selectivity potentially weakens the norm's deterrent power, but it is more pragmatic and reflective of international politics as it is actually practiced. One major problem limiting new application of R2P is a lingering suspicion that this framing is used by western powers to justify broader intervention -- for regime change in Libya, for example.

As I have argued previously, US policy (doctrine?) during Barack Obama's presidency arguably reflects something like pragmatic cosmopolitanism. The US will apply its resources to avoid catastrophe when the benefits outweigh costs and the action has multilateral support.

Even if the UN Security Council, which can obviously act only with at least tacit support of the US, could cobble together the material resources to move more forcefully against the Syrian regime, it is not clear that such action would meet these standards for intervention. The US would want to see support from Russia, Turkey, India and perhaps China. And all these nations would need to be convinced that more coercive action would be narrowly targeted and likely to succeed.


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Pragmatic cosmopolitanism?

Now that the US has intervened in Libya, many political analysts have speculated about an "Obama Doctrine." Last night on MSNBC's "Hardball," Andrea Mitchell identifed a doctrine in response to host Chris Matthews' question:

MATTHEWS: Is there a doctrine? In the first segment of the show tonight, we had McDonough on trying to find out if there is a doctrine. Is there a vision—what did G.W.‘s father call it, a vision thing? Is there a vision thing here?

MITCHELL: Well, I think there is a vision. It‘s emerging, and I think people have questioned whether there‘s a strategy.

The president tried to outline that in answers to our own Savannah Guthrie last night at the news conference in El Salvador. And basically what he says is, when you have a catastrophe that you can avert and the benefits outweigh the costs, and you have international or multilateral support, go for it...

You cannot stand idly by. That‘s what I would call the Obama doctrine.

MATTHEWS: It has conditions, too. We have to have friends who will join us, and we have to have an enemy who we can go after.

MITCHELL: Exactly.

Video here.

On Twitter earlier today (yes, I've just started tweeting), I labeled this "pragmatic cosmopolitianism."

There have been prior efforts to describe an Obama Doctrine, such as the one offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel, which focused on the President's major speeches of 2009 (arguably leading to the Nobel Prize):

support for diplomacy and the UN; commitment to a nuclear-free world; a belief that democracy is strengthened not through US intervention but when people win for themselves their rights and liberties; and engagement and cooperation with, rather than antagonism toward, the Muslim world.

In March 2008, Spencer Ackerman outlined something similar:

Ackerman describes how Obama and his advisors support a "human dignity" agenda that would -- contra the current policy approach -- seek to "fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen."

I think "pragmatic cosmopolitanism" still works to describe all these ideas.


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Hot Duck

Today, on the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "Libya: R2P or Regime Change?" R2P means responsibility to protect, a framing of the authorized intervention that is too rarely used by American media.

On Thursday, I posted "Nuclear Disarmament: Looking Back at Reykjavik." Nearly 25 years ago, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev both offered proposals to disarm offensive nuclear arsenals within 10 years. Declassified documents reveal that this aim was prevented by U.S. desire to research and potentially deploy anti-ballistic missile.



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Deliberative politics

The four people who read my coauthored book, Democratizing Global Politics, know that Nayef Samhat and I are proponents of "deliberative democracy."

Benjamin Barber (he blogs!) and (Lord!) Anthony Giddens are two prominent scholars who have influenced our work. Barber is known best for his writings about "strong democracy" and Giddens for his theory of structuration.

In any case, I was kind of surprised to read that these eminent political theorists were in the news -- because they were recently in Libya, debating political theory with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. For good measure, David Frost was there to moderate the discussion.

Gaddafi claims that Libya is ruled by "direct democracy," but the scholars called for a more open public sphere -- Gaddafi needs to allow a free press, free expression, and viable political opposition, for example.

Those are not exactly novel ideas, but this was a public debate with Gaddafi -- apparently for TV!

Plus, you've gotta see this photo.

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Terrorism: State sponsor update

For more than 25 years, the State Department has been required to list all state sponsors of terrorism because such a designation precludes the US from providing foreign aid and exporting arms. Here's the latest list:

Country and Designation Date

Cuba, March 1, 1982
Iran, January 19, 1984
Libya, December 29, 1979
North Korea, January 20, 1988
Sudan, August 12, 1993
Syria, December 29, 1979

On October 20, 2004, Iraq was formally removed from this list. Since May 2003, the President had made terror-related sanctions inapplicable to Iraq, under authority granted by Congress.

Iraq, of course, was previously removed from this list in February 1982, when the Reagan administration wanted to provide aid and trade credits during its war with Iraq, and was re-designated only after its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. During that period, experts say that Iraq continued to sponsor terrorism.

In 2005, the State Department stopped publishing its annual report Patterns of Global Terrorism, claiming that the new National Counterterrorism Center will be publishing most of the same data. The NCTC's first report, however, is simply a chronology of 2004 incidents of terrorism.

After a bit of digging, I found the latest information about state-sponsorship of terrorism on the State Department's webpage. On April 27, 2005, Philip Zelikow, Counselor of the Department, and John Brennan, interim Director of NCTC, briefed the assembled media "on the State Department Country Reports on Terrorism, and the statistical reports...prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center."

Country Reports on Terrorism is apparently the new State document that will replace the old Patterns annual report. The new report has a section on State Sponsors:

These countries provide a critical foundation for terrorist groups. Without state sponsors, terrorist groups would have a much more difficult time obtaining the funds, weapons, materials, and secure areas they require to plan and conduct operations. Most worrisome is that these countries also have the capabilities to manufacture weapons of mass destruction and other destabilizing technologies that could fall into the hands of terrorists.

We've heard all that before. US grievances about state sponsorship apparently haven't changed much.

However, State is claiming some US victories in the "war on terror." This is from Zelikow in the April briefing:

2004 was also marked by progress in decreasing the threat from states that sponsor terrorism – state-sponsored terrorism. Iraq's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism was formally rescinded in October 2004. Though they are still on the list, Libya and Sudan took significant steps to cooperate in the global war on terrorism.

Libya cooperated in the elimination of its WMD programs and resolved some old terror attacks by turning over suspects and paying reparations. Syria has taken some anti-al Qaeda measures, worked to close its open border with Iraq, and, oh by the way, "has not been implicated directly in an act of terrorism since 1986."

Before getting too excited by that last sentence, keep in mind that the 2000 report, released in April 2001 (about 20 weeks before the 9/11 attacks), concluded that "The [Iraqi] regime has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait." Within two years, the US invaded Iraq, citing its sponsorship of terrorism.

Iran is now the state of greatest concern:

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2004. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security were involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals.

Iran continued to be unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida members it detained in 2003. Iran has refused to identify publicly these senior members in its custody on “security grounds.” Iran has also resisted numerous calls to transfer custody of its al-Qa’ida detainees to their countries of origin or third countries for interrogation and/or trial.

The cited examples of state sponsorship all involve Iranian support for anti-Israeli terrorists, though the document references "reports" that Iraq may be sponsoring insurgent activity in Iraq.

On the bright side, NCTC's Brennan recognizes that focusing on state sponsorship of terror is a dated approach. The statute requiring the gathering of all this information references "international terrorism," but that's a misleading phrase as Brennan explained in the April briefing:

These criteria dated to a period of focus on state-sponsored terrorism in the early 1980s and not the transnational phenomena we confront now...."International" is also defined in the statute as "involving the citizens or territory of more than one country." And as I'll show you on the next chart, this definition, while appropriate for state-sponsored terrorism, is simply not as useful for the current trans-national threat we now face.

Maybe Brennan will be able to convince the Bush administration!

World's Worst Dictators

Last Sunday, Parade magazine released its latest annual list of the world's 10 worst dictators.

Don't laugh, as reported in the Times of India, it was "compiled by writer David Wallechinsky in consultation with Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders - human rights groups that 'have not hesitated to expose the policies of dictatorships of both the left and the right.'"

1. Kim Jong Il of North Korea
2. Omar al-Bashmir of Sudan
3. Than Shwe of Burma
4. Hu Jintao of China
5. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
6. Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya
7. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan
8. Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan
9. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
10. Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea

As pointed out by AlterNet, this is an interesting list because it brings these issues into the mainstream. After all, Parade has a "huge circulation of 35 million weekly with 77 million readers." Note: not everyone on the left is excited by this annual list.

How do these dictators figure into American foreign policy?

In a recent op-ed from The Australian, Texas A&M Professor Michael Desch pointed out that China is America's top trading partner and "the countries that have been among the US's closest allies in the global war on terrorism have been authoritarian regimes such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Pakistan."

The President mentioned a couple of those states in the State of the Union address a few weeks ago:

The government of Saudi Arabia can demonstrate its leadership in the region by expanding the role of its people in determining their future. And the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.

He sure told them, eh? I'll bet the dictators in those allied states can barely sleep at night.

Bush said nothing about Pakistan, other than to praise them for helping to win the war on terror. China wasn't mentioned, save indirectly as a source of assistance in the ongoing effort to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.

Be Careful Who Your Friends Are

Both the President and Vice President have been touting Libya's decision to give up WMD as a success in their "war on terrorism."

However, the Washington Times has a story today titled, "Iraq Minister: Libya backing terrorists" from the UPI that may make John Kerry mention Libya:

Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan accused Libya Friday of backing insurgencies against the Iraqi government by former followers of Saddam Hussein....

Shaalan said the Iraqi government has documents proving Libya is backing the remnants of the ousted Baath regime, including al-Sabawi Ibrahim, Saddam's half-brother, and Mohammed Younes, a former member of the Baath party's military council.

"Libya is financing those two men to help them carry out their terrorist operations in Iraq," he said.

Interesting, eh?

Abu Aardvark provided the link.

I'm off to Pittsburgh for the Workshop on Preemptive and Preventive War.

Arms Control?

Today, I did a lot of shopping and am too tired to blog much.

For a good take on the Libya deal, go read Abu Aardvark. The Aardvark and I tend to agree about the importance of the nonproliferation regime (i.e., arms control).

First, this is definitely a positive development, one which would help to strengthen multilateral arms control as a way of providing for international security. Libya has long been identified as one of the states which has resisted such transparency, and has often described the international regime against the proliferation of WMD as a conspiracy by the powerful to keep the weak weak. Its acceptance, even rhetorically, of the legitimacy of the prohibition is a positive step to be rewarded and built upon.

Second, that said, it isn't an enormously big deal, in that Libya has not posed any real threat for a long time.

It's a big stretch to argue that the Iraq war or the arrest of Saddam somehow pushed Qaddafi into this deal.

Libya has been seeking international rehabilitation for a number of years, desperate to get rid of the UN sanctions, and has been aggressively pursuing it via the Lockerbie investigation for several years. This fairly obviously means that the new Libyan approach can not be a result of the Iraq war, since the new approach predates that war (and the Bush administration).

So, final score: good news for multilateral arms control, a positive step towards integrating a 'rogue' regime back into international society, but not really evidence in favor of the Iraq war. Compare the British spin to the American spin, and you'll see what I mean.

Let's be clear: what Bush has accomplished here is to get Libya to accept exactly the kind of robust international inspections which his administration roundly denounced as useless in Iraq - while leaving Qaddafi in power, after insisting in Iraq that only a regime change could possibly guarantee security. In other words, this 'success' in Libya is a direct repudiation of everything which the Bush team argued for in Iraq, and a vindication of his multilateralist arms control critics.

I couldn't have made these points much better myself -- so I won't try.