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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Trying to understand the foreign policy debate

At least seven times in Friday night's debate, Senator John McCain accused Senator Barack Obama of failing to understand an important dimension of national security policy. Let's review:

First, Iraq:

Senator Obama doesn't understand [1] the difference between a tactic and a strategy...There is social, economic progress, and a strategy, a strategy of going into an area, clearing and holding, and the people of the country then become allied with you. They inform on the bad guys. And peace comes to the country, and prosperity. That's what's happening in Iraq, and it wasn't a tactic.

...if we adopted Senator Obama's set date for withdrawal, then that will have a calamitous effect in Afghanistan and American national security interests in the region. Senator Obama doesn't seem to understand [2] there is a connected (sic) between the two...

Senator Obama still doesn't quite understand [3] -- or doesn't get it -- that if we fail in Iraq, it encourages al Qaeda. They would establish a base in Iraq...

What to make of all this?

Obviously, "the surge" is part of America's counterinsurgency approach in Iraq. Obama has long argued for a new US grand strategy; focusing on tactics within Iraq is not a sufficient way to discuss the national security problems of the US:

Senator McCain wants to talk of our tactics in Iraq; I want to focus on a new strategy for Iraq and the wider world.

If you read the July 15 speech I just linked, Obama clearly sees a relationship between Iraq and Afghanistan. In the debate, Obama noted that "al Qaeda and the Taliban have safe havens in Pakistan." Furthermore, "we took our eye off Afghanistan, we took our eye off the folks who perpetrated 9/11...we are having enormous problems in Afghanistan because of that decision" [to attack Iraq].

Obama should have directly dismissed the notion that al Qaeda would establish a base in Iraq if the US pulled out. Why would Sunni or Shia tolerate that? How would it be more threatening than the current safe haven in Pakistan? Previously, Obama has discussed a withdrawal strategy for Iraq that would retain capabilities for attacking the "remnants" of al Qaeda.

Afghanistan:

Senator Obama calls for more troops, but what he doesn't understand, [4] it's got to be a new strategy, the same strategy that he condemned in Iraq.

Obama, as noted, is calling for a new strategic prioritization of Afghanistan over Iraq. The July 15 speech:

"[T]he second goal of my new strategy will be taking the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

That address outlined a lot of specific measures to change US tactics in Afghanistan and Pakistan; "the surge" would not obviously be inconsistent with them.

Iran:

What Senator Obama doesn't seem to understand [5] that if without precondition you sit down across the table from someone who has called Israel a "stinking corpse," and wants to destroy that country and wipe it off the map, you legitimize those comments.

Obama pretty clearly explained what he meant by meeting without preconditions.

Now, understand what this means "without preconditions." It doesn't mean that you invite them over for tea one day. What it means is that we don't do what we've been doing, which is to say, "Until you agree to do exactly what we say, we won't have direct contacts with you."

There's a difference between preconditions and preparation. Of course we've got to do preparations, starting with low-level diplomatic talks, and it may not work, because Iran is a rogue regime.

Negotiation experts frequently point out that preconditions threaten to preclude negotiation -- and often fail the test of reciprocity. Moreover, the preconditions set by parties are often the precise goals of the diplomacy.

Imagine if Iran said that it wouldn't meet with the US unless America renounced the threat to use force. That precondition actually makes a lot of sense to many, but the current administration persistently says that "all options are on the table." It likely thinks that the threat to use force is part of its leverage in negotiations -- even if it would violate Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Wouldn't Iran legitimize US illegality by meeting with the US without preconditions?

Next, Russia:

He doesn't understand [6] that Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia. And Russia has now become a nation fueled by petro-dollars that is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government.

From the August 9, Obama statement:

"Over the last two days, Russia has escalated the crisis in Georgia through it's clear and continued violation of Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity. On Friday, August 8, Russian military forces invaded Georgia. I condemn Russia's aggressive actions and reiterate my call for an immediate ceasefire. Russia must stop its bombing campaign, cease flights of Russian aircraft in Georgian airspace, and withdraw its ground forces from Georgia."

As for Putin's petro-dollar state, Obama used this as an opportunity to contrast his plan for energy independence -- built primarily on the promotion of alternative energy -- with McCain's many votes against alternative energy and his long-time support for oil interests. Over at the Duck of Minerva, Dan Nexon points out that Russia is now calling for a return to cooperative relations with the US and the international community!

Finally, Pakistan:

I don't think that Senator Obama understands [7] that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power. Everybody who was around then, and had been there, and knew about it knew that it was a failed state.

These sentences immediately followed Obama's blistering attack of the status quo:

the problem, John, with the strategy that's been pursued was that, for 10 years, we coddled Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, "Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he's our dictator."

And as a consequence, we lost legitimacy in Pakistan. We spent $10 billion. And in the meantime, they weren't going after al Qaeda

The State Department's Richard Armitage caused a bit of a hullabaloo in early 2001 when he told Indian reporters that Pakistan might be viewed as a "rogue state." There's a great deal of difference between a rogue state and a failed state. Given its 1998 nuclear tests and its position on Kashmire, Pakistan was closer to a rogue than a failure when Musharraf's military coup toppled a democratically elected government in October 1999.

The State Failure Task Force phase 3 report from 2000 did not include Pakistan on its list of "Near-Total Failures of State Authority, 1955-1998" (the complete list is on p. 79). The report found times in Pakistan's past (1983 and before) when it was in serious trouble, but Pakistan was categorized as a "partial democracy" in the report.

If anything, the evidence suggests that Musharraf presided over Pakistan as it was moving toward failure.

As I said on Friday, I think it is pretty clear that Obama understands foreign policy. McCain perhaps fails to understand what foreign policy analysts mean by "grand strategy" and "failed state."


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Did "the Surge" really fail?

Did the surge save Iraq? A lot of security and foreign policy experts have attempted to answer that question -- and they provide an assortment of answers.

A unique team of scholars from UCLA has published their latest research that directly challenges the standard political narrative about the effectiveness of "the surge" in Iraq:

By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year's U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. "By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left."

Professor Agnew, the president of the American Association of Geographers, the leading professional organization in geography, specifically targets claims made by General Petraeus (and his supproters) about the efficacy of the military strategy:

"The surge really seems to have been a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted," Agnew said...

In addition to casting doubt on the efficacy of the surge in general, the study calls into question the success of a specific strategy of the surge, namely separating neighborhoods of rival sectarian groups by erecting concrete blast walls between them. The differences in light signatures had already started to appear by the time American troops began erecting the walls under General David Petraeus's direction, the researchers found.

"The U.S. military was sealing off neighborhoods that were no longer really active ribbons of violence, largely because the Shiites were victorious in killing large numbers of Sunnis or driving them out of the city all together," Agnew said. "The large portion of the refugees from Iraq who went during this period to Jordan and Syria are from these neighborhoods."

Incidentally, data presented last fall by the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, headed by General James L. Jones, would seem to confirm the geographers' conclusions.

As I argued last year, the authors find that ethnic cleansing -- as well as internal displacement -- seems to explain the reduction in violence in Baghdad:

The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge.

Baghdad's decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period.

By contrast, the night-light signature in the notoriously impoverished, Shiite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as it did in the American-dominated Green Zone. Light actually increased in Shiite-dominated New Baghdad, the researchers found.

Until just before the surge, the night-light signature of Baghdad had been steadily increasing overall, they report in "Baghdad Nights: Evaluating the U.S. Military 'Surge' Using Night Light Signatures."

"If the surge had truly 'worked,' we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods," said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. "Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing."

Incidentally, the study authors apparently controlled for Baghdad's weak electrical power grid.


Hat tip: Mark Thoma.

Here's the academic citation for the Agnew article: Agnew J, Gillespie T W, Gonzalez J, Min B, 2008, "Baghdad nights: evaluating the US military ‘surge’ using nighttime light signatures" Environment and Planning A 40(10) 2285 – 2295


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Crocker and Petraeus: Good news on Iraq?

This AP piece from Robert Burns and Robert Reid likely explains why the Bush administration and al-Maliki government of Iraq have essentially agreed to a timetable for US troop withdrawal:

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the AP on Thursday that the insurgency as a whole has withered to the point where it is no longer a threat to Iraq's future.

"Very clearly, the insurgency is in no position to overthrow the government or, really, even to challenge it," Crocker said. "It's actually almost in no position to try to confront it. By and large, what's left of the insurgency is just trying to hang on."

In a July 19 interview with AP, General David Petraeus strongly implied that even al Qaeda is moving its Iraq operation elsewhere -- namely to Pakistan and Afghanistan:

"We do think that there is some assessment ongoing as to the continued viability of al-Qaida's fight in Iraq."

"They're not going to abandon Iraq. They're not going to write it off. None of that. But what they certainly may do is start to provide some of those resources that would have come to Iraq to Pakistan, possibly Afghanistan."

"There is some intelligence that has picked this up. It's not solid gold intelligence."

So, the good news is not altogether good.


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al-Maliki endorses Obama's position on Iraq

Today, the German publication SPIEGEL released the transcript of its interesting interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In that exchange, al-Maliki clearly embraced Barack Obama's withdrawal plan for Iraq.

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.

The full story here, full interview here (and continued here).

Needless to say, the Obama foreign policy advisors are pleased.

Hat tip: Ilan Goldenberg. See also Matt Yglesias.


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Quacks

Today, at the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "Fish out of water?" about the Bush administration's latest moves towards the so-called "axis of evil" states -- Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

On July 9, I posted "An 'act of war'" about the U.S. reaction to Iran's recent missiles tests.

July 3, I posted "The hazards of burning oil," which includes a fairly humorous video about an oil tanker spill in Australia.

Have a good weekend.


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Hot Duck

I've just posted a lengthy piece on "The role of al Qaeda of Iraq" on Duck of Minerva.


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More Duck

Since the Duck of Minerva receives about four times as many reader hits per day as this blog does, then I'm going to be posting most international relations material there.

Today, I posted "Bush on WW 3" concerning his latest statements about the Iranian nuclear program.

Monday, October 15, I blogged "UNAMI Report on Iraq: Dire, Grave Crises." The post discusses the 11th report on the human rights situation in Iraq issued by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

I'll continue posting here on a variety of topics, including politics, especially as the presidential race unfolds. Discussions of film, baseball, local Louisville matters and many other topics will be found on this blog as well.


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Coalition: less and less willing

October 9, William Kole of AP reported about the continued unraveling of the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. PM Gordon Brown announced that the UK is withdrawing most of its remaining forces from Iraq:

At its height, in the months after Saddam Hussein was toppled, the multinational force numbered about 300,000 soldiers from 38 countries - 250,000 from the United States, about 40,000 from Britain and the rest ranging from 2,000 Australians to 70 Albanians.

By January of this year, though, the combined non-U.S. contingent had dwindled to just over 14,000. As of Tuesday, it stood at 20 nations and roughly 11,400 soldiers.

It's in for more unraveling: Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday that Britain will halve its remaining force of 5,000 next spring, and another official said there were no guarantees any British troops would remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2008.

Denmark pulled out most of its forced in August. Latvia and Lithuania left over the summer.

Georgia has announced, like the UK, a major reduction in its force presence -- from 2000 now to 300 next summer.

I've frequently noted the withering away of the coalition.


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"Taken with a pinch of salt"

Patrick Mercer, special security adviser to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was quoted by The Guardian today:

'There is increasing concern about the apparent evidence that America is preparing about Iranian military involvement.'
Mercer, who last month accepted a post as an adviser to the Brown government, said: 'All that I heard when I was in Iran was British authorities saying "be careful about what you hear from America". I'm not saying for one moment that it is necessarily wrong, but it's got to be taken with a pinch of salt. Is it American rhetoric, propaganda or fact?'

The Guardian story also reports on the activities of a new neocon group called Freedom Watch (established in March), which recently starting running TV ads emphasizing the "threat" from Iran.

The group has close links with the White House: its president, Bradley Blakeman, is a former deputy assistant to Bush. Among its founders is Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping centre magnate who helped to finance the 2000 Florida recount campaign that gave Bush his first presidency. Another is former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

A few weeks ago, Freedom Watch spent $15 million running ads in support of the US strategy in Iraq.


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Al Qaeda in Iraq

Andrew Tilghman, who was an Iraq correspondent for the Stars and Stripes newspaper in 2005 and 2006, has published an excellent overview on the myth of Al Qaeda in Iraq. His piece appears in the October 2007 edition of The Washington Monthly.

Basically, Tilghman argues that AQI is "neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed." Size first:

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

What about lethality?

According to the Bush administration's narrative, AQI commits the lion's share of the spectacular acts of violence in Iraq that provoke civil conflict between Sunni and Shia. The Samara mosque bombing is the ultimate example:

it remains unclear whether the original Samara bombing was itself the work of AQI. The group never took credit for the attack, as it has many other high-profile incidents. The man who the military believe orchestrated the bombing, an Iraqi named Haitham al-Badri, was both a Samara native and a former high-ranking government official under Saddam Hussein. (His right-hand man, Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi, was also a former military intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's army.) Key features of the bombing did not conform to the profile of an AQI attack. For example, the bombers did not target civilians, or even kill the Shiite Iraqi army soldiers guarding the mosque, both of which are trademark tactics of AQI. The planners also employed sophisticated explosive devices, suggesting formal military training common among former regime officers, rather than the more bluntly destructive tactics typical of AQI. Finally, Samara was the heart of Saddam's power base, where former regime fighters keep tight control over the insurgency. Frank "Greg" Ford, a retired counterintelligence agent for the Army Reserves, who worked with the Army in Samara before the 2006 bombing, says that the evidence points away from AQI and toward a different conclusion: "The Baathists directed that attack," says Ford.

Read the entire article, it is is well worth it.


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Threatdown: al Qaeda of Iraq

As I pointed out on Saturday, the President wants you to believe that al Qaeda of Iraq is a serious threat to US security. Not all the generals in Iraq agree. This is from a press briefing with Lt. General Odierno in Iraq on July 19:

LT. GEN. ODIERNO: What I know is there is clearly a relationship between al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan or wherever they are. I -- al Qaeda in Iraq, I think, is struggling as -- with its mission here in Iraq, and currently I think it'd be very difficult for them to export any violence outside of Iraq.

The Lt. General is worried that Iraq could become a safe haven training area, which would then eventually create terror risks for the homeland.


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