Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  In April this year, Isis announced its presence in Yemen by posting a video showing four government soldiers being beheaded and another 10 executed.

  Compared to al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap), Isis is a latecomer in Yemen but both groups flourish as Sunni-Shia hostility increases so they can present themselves as the protectors of the Sunni community. Where Shia victims are unavailable, as in Libya, then Isis groups have ritually murdered Christian migrant workers from Egypt and Ethiopia.

  The killing of Shia is not just an expression of hatred. An aim is to stir up the Shia into retaliating in kind, carrying out mass murders of Sunni in Baghdad in 2006 and 2007 so they were reduced to a few enclaves, mostly in the west of the city. The aim of provoking the Shia is that the Sunni are left with no alternative but to turn to Isis or al-Qa’ida clones as defenders. The same calculation may now work in Yemen.

  Because Isis publicises its atrocities in order to spread fear, it masks the fact that al-Qa’ida affiliates such as Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria or Aqap in Yemen are just as dangerous.

  Their basic agenda is very similar to that of the self-declared caliphate, with al-Nusra carrying out the enforced conversion of Druze and the massacre of those who resist. This attempted rebranding of extreme but non-Isis Sunni jihadis is opportunistic and often directed at making them more palatable as proxies for Sunni states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

  There has long been disagreement about the real strength of Isis and its ability to expand. Overall, the argument that Isis is more powerful than it looks has been borne out by events such as the capture of Mosul on 10 June 2014 and of Ramadi on 17 May this year. These Isis victories caught the world by surprise and were important in enabling it to claim success was divinely inspired.

  In reality, there are two crucial components to Isis expansion: the strength of the organisation itself, and, equally important, the spectacular weaknesses of its opponents. It is this weakness which has repeatedly exceeded expectations, leading not just to the Iraqi army taking flight at Mosul and Ramadi and the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga disintegrating at equal speed last August. It is the feebleness of resistance that has determined the outcome.

  The same pattern is repeated across the Muslim world. Some countries, such as Somalia, have had no effective government since the overthrow of Siad Barre in 1991; but, after a disastrous US intervention in the 1990s, foreign powers sought to contain rather than eliminate the threat. Somalia was written off as a bolt-hole for al-Qa’ida gunmen and pirates.

  But "failed states" are more dangerous than they look because when central governments collapse, they create a vacuum easily filled by groups like Isis. Foreign military intervention has repeatedly been complicit in creating these conditions - in Iraq in 2003, but also in Libya in 2011 and in Yemen this year, where a Saudi-led air campaign has been targeting the Yemeni army, the one institution that held the country together.

  What might be called the "Somalianisation" of countries is becoming frequent and people in the rest of the world are learning that a "failed state" should be an object of fear rather than pity. The beliefs of Isis are rightly seen as an offshoot of Saudi Wahhabism, both ideologies degrading the status of women, imposing fundamentalist Islamic norms and regarding Shia and Christians as heretics or pagans. But they are not identical. What IS believes and enforces is a sort of neo-Wahhabism, distinct from that variant of Islam, which is prevalent in Saudi Arabia. In practice, the Saudi state does not try, as Isis does, to murder its two million-strong Shia minority, though it may discriminate against them.

  A more accurate accusation against Saudi Arabia is that over the past half century it has used its great wealth to bring Sunni Islam under the intolerant influence of Wahhabism, thus deepening religious antagonisms.

  Violence and a determination to expand its rule has brought Isis many enemies, but their disunity, rivalries and mutual suspicions are great. The US and Iran both fight militants in Iraq and Syria, but do not want the other to emerge as the predominant foreign power.

  Meanwhile, the US is hampered in fighting Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra and similar groups by a determination to do so without alienating Sunni states to which it is allied, and on whose support American power in the Middle East depends.

  This has been the pattern since 9/11, when Washington wanted to punish the perpetrators, but carefully avoided linking the attack to Saudi Arabia, home country of Osama bin Laden, 15 out of the 19 hijackers, and of the donors funding the operation. Isis is under pressure, but not enough to crush it or prevent its further expansion.

  Sunday, 13 September 2015

  ARE DRONE EXECUTIONS WORKING?

  The lack of public response to the British government ordering the assassination by pilotless drones of two British citizens, Reyaad Khan and Rahul Amin, is alarming but scarcely surprising. The two IS members were killed outside Raqqa in Syria because they were allegedly planning attacks in Britain, though the nature of the threat they posed remains a secret. Their deaths were never going to shock many people in Britain, given IS's ghastly record for carrying out ritual murders, rapes and massacres. But the drone attack should cause real alarm because it is an extraordinary extension of the powers of government to be able to execute its own citizens with no explanation, except that the killing was for the public good and against an unnamed but horrendous threat, the nature of which is known only to the government itself. Keep in mind that the ability to execute its own citizens has been a mark of tyrannical government from Rome in the days of the Caesars to Moscow during the Great Purge in the 1930s. Where evidence for an existential threat is lacking, it can be exaggerated or manufactured, as notoriously happened in 2003 over Iraqi WMD. Avoiding a descriptive word such as "assassination" and the use instead of phrases such as "targeted killings" shows that governments are themselves a little edgy about the rightness of what they are doing.

  Even so, drone warfare has become highly attractive to political leaders in the US, Britain and the rest of the world. They like it above all because it shows them doing something easily explained and apparently effective against evildoers of whom their own people are frightened. The use of drones means that there will be no American or British soldiers coming back in coffins, so even if the attacks fail there will be no political price to pay domestically.

  In addition, though this justification is a bit discredited these days, the drone strikes can be sold as being of such pin-point accuracy against terrorist leaders that civilian casualties are negligible. The use of drones has all the advantages for politicians of going to war, in terms of rallying public support behind them, but without the costs and uncertainty of real conflict.

  The problem is that experience has shown again and again that drone warfare does not work and generally increases the terrorist threat rather than reducing it. The drone strikes become a highly publicised melodrama that substitutes for a real and effective policy. For instance, in September 2011, in Yemen, a US drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was one of the leaders of Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The Obama administration, which has conducted some 500 drone strikes, presented this killing as a high point in its counter-terrorist campaign. But four years later AQAP is spreading through Yemen, capturing the port city of Mukalla, and stronger than it has ever been. It has done so by taking advantage of the chaos that followed the Saudi military intervention in Yemen in March, which is backed by the US. If Washington is embarrassed by its demonstrable failure in Yemen, it is showing no sign of it, presumably calculating that the rest of the world is paying little attention to the calamitous war there.

  Drone strikes and the killing of selected individuals by US special forces have been directed at different times against supposed "king pins" or more junior commanders. The original concept appears to have been pioneered by the Israelis in Gaza, a small besieged enclave where targeted individuals could be easily located and eliminated. Elsewhere, drones were sold by their advocates as a
"magic bullet" whereby war could be conducted on the cheap.

  Like many simple solutions to complex problems, their shortcomings are easy to describe but difficult to prove - often because the military commanders who owe their promotion to advocating new weapons or strategies have no wish to have their effectiveness accurately tested.

  When such measurements do take place, the results are often highly disconcerting and contradict upbeat propaganda claims. A fascinating concrete example of this is given by my brother Andrew Cockburn in his recently published book, Kill Chain: Drones and the Rise of High-Tech Assassins, in a chapter describing the US campaign in Iraq to eliminate "High Value Individuals" held responsible for the IEDs that inflicted heavy casualties on US troops. No less than 70,000 of these had been put in place by insurgents by 2007. The counter-measure adopted by the US Army was to target and kill leaders of "the IED networks", and many were assassinated or otherwise disposed of.

  For once there was a rigorous study of what had been achieved, which was carried out by Rex Rivolo, who worked for the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Pentagon's think tank. Visiting frontline military units with Colonel Jim Hickey, who had led the final, successful, hunt for Saddam Hussein, Rivolo asked about the effect of killing high value individuals (HVIs) on the number of IEDs being used against US troops. Without exception, the soldiers said that the campaign to kill those responsible was counter-effective. One soldier said: "Once you knock them off, a day later you have a new guy who's smarter, younger, more aggressive and is out for revenge." Rivolo conducted a study on 200 cases where high value targets had been killed or captured between June and October 2007. He looked at the neighbourhood of the local leader who had been eliminated, in order to see if the number of IEDs had gone up or down in the 30 days after his death or arrest. According to the book, it turned out that "hitting HVIs did not reduce attacks and save American lives. It increased them. Each killing had quickly prompted mayhem. Within 3 kilometres of the target's base of operations, attacks over the following 30 days shot up by 40 per cent."

  The miscalculation by the US Army was political as well as military. It assumed that there were a finite number of insurgents, though by 2007 they must have known they were fighting the six million strong Sunni community in Iraq. Leaders and local commanders could be replaced and they usually were within 24 hours, and, by a Darwinian process of natural selection, the replacements were better able to survive than their predecessors. The main reason why IS so militarily expert and successful today is that its commanders are survivors of a dozen years of intense warfare and attempts to kill them.

  Of course, drone attacks and assassination teams are nothing like as accurate - or draw on such impeccable intelligence - as they claim, and a significant proportion of those killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen have been civilians. Such mistakes have repeatedly occurred and are usually met with official mendacity, evasion and, on occasion, shame-faced admission and payment of meagre compensation. I once reported the bombing of an Afghan village by US planes that had left craters 20ft deep which a US spokesman said might have been caused by grenades thrown by Taliban fighters.

  Sunday, 20 September 2015

  NATIONAL LOYALTY IS IN RUINS IN IRAQ AND SYRIA

  Little has been done to end the four-year civil war that is destroying Iraq and Syria and which has caused the biggest mass flight of people ever seen in the Middle East. More than half of the 23 million Syrian population have fled their homes, of which four million are refugees outside Syria. There is a growing exodus from Iraq, with three million people displaced, many of whom today see that the war is not ending and that they can never again hope to live safely in their own country.

  The Iraq-Syrian war is the cause of the European Union's refugee crisis and it is going to get worse. There is a bloody stalemate in Iraq, with the country divided by military frontlines more heavily defended than the frontiers of the state. The Sunni Arabs are suffering particularly badly because they are being forced to leave the previously mixed provinces around Baghdad, where they are suspected of sympathising with IS. They are unlikely to be able to return. Others flee provinces such as Anbar, Nineveh and Salahuddin to escape the fighting. There are accusations of ethnic or sectarian cleansing by Shia militias against Sunni or by the Syrian Kurds against Arabs in areas under Kurdish control. IS pumps up communal hatred by its daily bombings of civilian targets. But at this stage in the war every community is so terrified of its traditional enemies that its members will run away rather than risk an uncertain fate under occupation. The Syrian Kurdish authorities are worried about whole districts becoming deserted as their inhabitants leave for the EU. IS acted similarly last year, giving absent home-owners 10 days to return or lose their property.

  The war in Syria and Iraq has now gone on about as long as the First World War in Europe a century ago. Calamity though it is, efforts to end the conflict other than by military victory have been episodic and ineffective. Western powers such as the US, UK and France, along with regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, grossly miscalculated in 2011, believing that President Bashar al-Assad would fall as swiftly as Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. They were not unduly concerned when this mistake became obvious, because they were convinced that the war in Syria could be contained, and failed to see that it would destabilise the precarious peace in Iraq.

  Even as barbaric sectarian war tore apart Iraq and Syria, Western powers showed a curious detachment and lack of urgency when it came to restoring peace. It is still too early to say if this lackadaisical attitude has been changed by the arrival of desperate refugees battering at the gates of the EU. Previously, it was revealing that US Secretary of State John Kerry had devoted much more time to a patently doomed attempt to get Palestinian-Israeli negotiations under way than he had to ending the Iraq-Syrian war.

  This insouciance is surprising until one takes on board that it is in keeping with Western attitudes to the transformation of the political landscape in the wider Middle East and North Africa since the end of the Cold War. There are now no less than nine ethnic, sectarian or separatist civil wars being waged in the vast area between Pakistan and Nigeria. Some conflicts are well known, such as the war in Afghanistan or the bloody raids of Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria, but who notices that 1.5 million people have been displaced in South Sudan since fighting resumed there in 2013, or that Khartoum has become a city state with only feeble control over much of the rest of Sudan? This implosion of so many states could not have happened during the Cold War because the US or Soviet Union knew that such instability would offer an opportunity to the other superpower. Washington or Moscow would prop up ailing regimes and those regimes could barter their allegiance in order to achieve a degree of self-determination. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Western powers no longer see their vital interests as being affected by the collapse of countries such as Libya or Iraq. It is noticeable that anarchy in these two countries has little effect on the price of oil, though both countries are important producers.

  Another sinister development during this era of "globalisation" and neo-liberal, free-market economics has had explosive consequences. Nationalism, national self-determination and national control of natural resources has been at a discount. But the nation state played a positive role in bringing peace and security to this region, even when it took the form of secular dictatorships.

  As loyalty to these states disintegrates, it is being replaced by more primitive but powerful ethnic and sectarian allegiances. For instance, there are few people who will fight and die for Iraq, but many who will do so for the Kurdish, Shia or Sunni communities.

  Free-market economics in these countries has given ideological justification for governments abandoning efforts to guarantee some sort of economic security for the population. Where power and wealth is monopolised by the ruling elite, all capitalism becomes crony capitalism and state machinery a means for officials to make money.

 
In Syria before 2011, for instance, central Damascus had become a delightful place to live, with wonderful restaurants and shops, but at the same time, in north-east Syria, there was a catastrophic three-year drought which the government did nothing to alleviate and which drove three million Syrians to flee to shanty towns on the outskirts of the larger cities.

  Many of these places subsequently became hard-core rebel strongholds that are now shattered by government bombing and shelling. Take another disastrous example of unthinking adherence to freemarket capitalism in countries with no rule of law, rampant corruption and a dysfunctional state. In June 2014, just after the capture of Mosul by IS, I asked a recently retired Iraqi Army four-star general what was wrong with the army, and why it had disintegrated when attacked by a much inferior force. "Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!" he replied emphatically, explaining that he blamed the way in which the Americans had created the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi Army.

  To encourage free-market capitalism the Americans had laid down that all food and other non-military supplies for the army should be contracted out to private business. This had the effect of making it in the interests of every colonel, who was being paid to feed a unit of 600 soldiers, to reduce the real number of men to 150 and pocket the money to feed, clothe and equip the other 450 who did not exist. The Iraqi government admitted later the existence of 50,000 such "ghost" soldiers, but the real figure was probably much higher.

  An end to Cold War superpower rivalry, globalisation and free-market economics were all portrayed as benign modernising forces over the past quarter century. But, in practice, the decline of nationalism and the national state has been replaced by nothing better and has opened the door to monstrous but fanatical movements such as IS.