Obama’s Errant Nuclear Policy (Ezekiel 17)

Why Obama’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Commitments Fell Short

Miles A. Pomper Monday, Feb. 8, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama’s commitment to preventing and rolling back the spread of nuclear weapons was clear from the first days of his administration, when he pledged in Prague in April 2009 “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” The historic vow shattered precedent, seized international attention and helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize later that year. Yet as he prepares to leave office seven years later, it appears that with the exception of a fledgling nuclear deal with Iran, Obama will leave an arms control legacy that is arguably little better than that of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.
Indeed, in many ways, Obama’s presidency has served as an object lesson in the limits of a U.S. president’s ability to shape a global nuclear order amid competing tugs from foreign competitors and allies, domestic politics and bureaucratic factions. In the past several years, forces abroad—Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea—and at home—congressional Republicans, elements in the Defense and Energy Departments—have all challenged Obama’s vision to the point where his successor is now likely to be pressured to give nuclear weapons a renewed role in U.S. national security policy.
Obama’s Prague speech was born of both strategic and tactical considerations. Strategically, 9/11 and a perception of U.S. conventional dominance over global rivals had generated a strain of thinking that saw the elimination of nuclear weapons as not only a global good, but a means of bolstering U.S. national security. Nuclear weapons, the argument went, gave rogue states like Iran and North Korea, weaker conventional powers like Russia and China, and terrorists a means of leveling the playing the field with mighty U.S. conventional forces.
Those new power dynamics had led a group of four leading Cold Warriors—former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—to sound the call for the global elimination of nuclear weapons. Obama first made this cause his own during the 2008 presidential campaign.
But the Prague speech had a more practical and tactical aspect, as well. Splits between the European Union and the U.S. in particular and the Bush administration and other important global actors more generally had prevented Washington from winning support for imposing punishing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program. Left essentially unchecked, Iran was proceeding with enriching enough uranium to provide the essential fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Placing efforts to restrict Iranian nuclear developments within a more appealing global vision for the elimination of all nuclear weapons helped Obama win European support for sanctions that pushed Iran into serious negotiations in 2012. In the long term, the success of the nuclear deal is likely to depend on whether Obama’s implicit bet pays off: That Iran will change sufficiently in the next decade that by the time many of the deal’s strictures expire, Tehran won’t feel compelled to race for a bomb.

Obama’s presidency has served as an object lesson in the limits of a U.S. president’s ability to shape a global nuclear order.

Still, the Prague speech was about more than Iran. Obama also sought to use it to advance other nuclear nonproliferation and arms control goals.
In an attempt to slow an escalating arms race between India and Pakistan, he pushed to move forward on two international treaties that had been negotiated by the Clinton administration but had met opposition either at home or abroad. The first was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), banning all nuclear weapons tests and providing for verification measures to determine if such tests had occurred. In 1999, the Senate had defeated legislation ratifying it. The second was a treaty prohibiting the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons; Pakistan had become the major obstacle to beginning negotiations.
But today, neither the Senate nor Pakistan has budged in their opposition to the pacts. In fact, during Obama’s time in office, North Korea, which has not ratified the CTBT, has conducted three nuclear tests, following its first one in 2006. And Pakistan and India have increased their fissile material production.
One of Obama’s major policy innovations, presaged by his commitment in the Prague speech to launch an international effort to secure all fissile materials in four years, was a series of Nuclear Security Summits. At these meetings, he has brought together around 50 world leaders every two years to make further progress on efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism, which the Bush administration either began or sharply boosted after 9/11. The summits have succeeded in bringing high-level focus to the issue; in advancing the enactment of some important nuclear security treaties; and in clearing some countries and facilities of dangerous materials in civilian hands.
Yet with the last such summit set for this spring, Obama will leave behind a nuclear security regime that still has far too many holes. He failed to enact stronger measures to prevent sabotage of nuclear facilities, including cyberattacks. He also failed to provide sufficient security over the civil sector’s large volumes of highly enriched uranium, plutonium and radioactive sources useful for “dirty bombs,” as well as fissile materials under military supervision.
What’s standing in Obama’s way? A tendency for other countries—especially Russia, the world’s largest possessor of nuclear materials—to discount the danger of nuclear terrorism and/or resent U.S. attempts to lead on the issue. After Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Moscow bowed out of a longstanding and highly successful bilateral nuclear security effort with the U.S. and has refused to attend this year’s Nuclear Security Summit.
Putin’s recalcitrance has tarnished another one of Obama’s achievements: the negotiation and 2010 approval of the new START treaty, which locked in U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals at the lowest levels in decades, after steep but unpublicized cuts in both country’s arsenals during the Bush administration. Touted as a moment to “reset” relations, the deal was supposed to be the first in a series of pacts that aimed to drive U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles toward zero.
Yet Russia, increasingly worried about U.S conventional and missile defense capabilities, had little interest in further nuclear cuts alone. In 2013 Moscow rebuffed an Obama initiative for a further one-third cut in arsenals, even before the standoff over Ukraine and allegations that Moscow violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty had soured the prospects for fresh talks.
To win Senate approval of the new START treaty, moreover, Obama had to swallow a poison pill: the promise of major investments in U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery systems. With China and Russia modernizing their nuclear and conventional weapons and eroding American military dominance, Washington has been pressed to upgrade its entire nuclear arsenal. That includes gravity bombs, air-launched cruise missiles and strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from submarines and silos—all at an estimated cost of $1 trillion over the next 30 years.
In his Prague speech, Obama acknowledged that his goal of a world without nuclear weapons “will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime.” But now the question for Obama’s successor is not how much more to cut America’s nuclear arsenal. Instead, it’s exactly how far he or she should go in building new nuclear weapons or upgrading old ones.
Miles Pomper is a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington, D.C.

Antichrist’s Army Takes Over Fragmented Iraq (Revelation 13)

No Authority: Shiite Militarization in a Fragmented Iraq

Ramzy Mardini Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2015

Over the course of its armed struggle with the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Iraq has devolved into a state captured by militias and foreign powers. The instability caused by a revived insurgency that took over Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul in June 2014 has facilitated the emergence of new armed actors and deepened the influence of older ones. The level of security engagement Baghdad receives from the West, including cooperation with the 60-nation coalition against the Islamic State, has not strengthened Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s position. His government remains fragile and fragmented, unable to consolidate power and exercise authority over militias that have become necessary in its fight against the Islamic State. In addition, the prime minister is constrained by the inertia of the political system and the vested interests of powerful actors from his own Shiite sect that are averse to reform. Today, his position grows more uncertain as an intra-Shiite Arab power struggle threatens to upend his tenure.

Iraq’s Hodgepodge Government

In early November, Abadi’s efforts to implement a reform agenda that intended to tackle a corrupt and dysfunctional political system were decisively defeated in a unanimous vote in Parliament. From then on, his reform initiatives, which were announced in the summer of 2015 in response to mass demonstrations in Baghdad and southern Iraq, will require Parliament’s approval. This limits any unilateral power the prime minister has to shape Iraq going forward. Opposition to his proposed reforms exposed his vulnerability, which is now visible not only to the public but also to his political rivals. Indeed, despite waging a war focused on reclaiming lost territory on Iraq’s periphery, Baghdad is now preoccupied with a dangerous power struggle within the political establishment that Iran had worked for years to cultivate.

For Abadi, it is not the military threat posed by the Islamic State, per se, that looms over his premiership. Instead, the real threat to his leadership, and perhaps to U.S. interests to maintain an allied government in Baghdad, is an intra-Shiite contest for political authority. This competition is occurring within a fragmented government led by a prime minister who depends for his political survival on the very same forces threatening that survival. Indeed, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose autocratic and sectarian leadership the West blames for Iraq’s ills, has leveraged his prior relationships with pro-Iran Shiite militias and managed to make a potential comeback to threaten his successor. Abadi also faces challenges to his authority from other Shiite figures aligned with Iran, who, at best, effectively limit his power, and, at worst, could attempt to unseat him.
This intra-Shiite power struggle is rooted in Shiite militias’ ascent toward becoming the state’s primary security force. Their remobilization into a force comprising over 50 entities has occurred in the context of a revived Sunni insurgency, the unraveling of the state’s formal security institutions and the transition of power from Maliki to Abadi. While the mix of these factors has informed the current crisis in Baghdad, the main culprit is the ill-conceived framework that has characterized Iraq’s post-Saddam political system.

Strong nonstate forces alone do not explain the weak central government in Baghdad, which is plagued by its very political arrangement: consociational democracy. The logic of consociational political systems—or comprehensive power-sharing governments—is grounded in conflict prevention. Within deeply divided societies, particularly those with significant ethnic and religious diversity, such arrangements aim to solidify consensus-driven politics to avoid relapse toward civil war. In Iraq, no party represented in Parliament is excluded from the governing coalition or the executive government. By giving all components of society a share and stake in the state, it becomes more costly for any party to opt out of the political process.

Unfortunately, this power-sharing system, which the U.S. backs and helped install, has proven to be of little value toward stability, unity or democratic development in Iraq. By any standard, the complex arrangement has, rather than representing a functional governing coalition, created a hodgepodge government. Because the parties lack uniformity, the system has been too incoherent and indecisive to confront Iraq’s daunting state-building and nation-building challenges. Its decision-making process was based on a broad consensus model, whereby resolutions were diluted to the lowest common denominator, requiring agreement among all major factions in order for an initiative to proceed. Indeed, the more individual actors added to a collective body, the more diverse and incoherent its interests and constituencies become.

Rather than guaranteeing consensus or facilitating a progressive dialogue in Parliament, the inclusion of all major political factions into the executive government has institutionalized the fault lines of political contestation. Thus far, national elections in post-Saddam Iraq have done little to bring a legitimate central government that acts on behalf of the electorate. Instead, they have elevated and strengthened localized centers of power, which, despite being part of the government, often undermine the prime minister and keep him weak and dependent. This creates strong incentives for any prime minister to attempt to consolidate power or risk losing the capacity to govern autonomously, held hostage by other powerful actors within the coalition. The weak central government in Baghdad is plagued by its very political arrangement: consociational democracy.In effect, the structure of the political system the U.S. helped to put in place has fueled an unstable cycle of contentious politics in Iraq, prone to crises that increase the potential for armed conflict. The transition of power from Maliki to Abadi was bound to be unstable, especially during a time of civil war. Unfortunately, the U.S. incorrectly assumed that authority in Iraq was vested in the office of the prime minister, not with the personalities and the patronage networks the holder of that office, as well as rival political actors, wield.

Abadi’s Weak Hand

Since forming his government in September 2014, Abadi has struggled to shape and advance his initiatives and policies, either regarding military strategy against the Islamic State or political and economic reforms. Unlike when Maliki occupied the premiership, Abadi’s role as prime minister is relatively weak, constrained by his position within his own party and the parliamentary coalition, both of which are led by his predecessor. Abadi’s inability to push through the so-called national guard initiative—a major Sunni demand that aims to establish locally recruited and legal armed forces at the provincial level—convinced the Sunni political class early on that he was a paralyzed premier without the power to deliver on their demands.

However, mass demonstrations emerged last summer on the streets of Baghdad and southern Iraq, with participants protesting rampant corruption and the lack of basic services, notably power shortages during a devastating heat wave. Recognizing Iraqis’ growing dissatisfaction and frustration, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered religious figure within Shiite Islam, signaled the need for the new government to implement reforms to fight corruption. But instead of carefully adapting his efforts and recognizing his political vulnerability, Abadi unwisely chose to utilize his newfound clout to undermine his rivals. In August 2015, he announced that he would abolish Iraq’s three vice presidencies, thereby cutting off a critical source of patronage power and immunity for the current holders of the office.

In order to save face and avoid being perceived as opposed to fighting corruption by undermining Sistani’s position, Iraq’s political class expressed public support for Abadi’s agenda. However, in private, they were concerned, and many wondered who it was backing Abadi to give him the confidence and bravado to ignore his constraints and cut against the grain of Iraqi politics. After all, his reform package came as a surprise, since he announced it without consulting a single coalition partner. But over time, the answer became clear: Abadi was not acting on behalf of a foreign power, but taking advantage of the situation to empower himself vis-a-vis his rivals. That led his rivals, who are typically divided among themselves, to unify against the prime minister’s misplaced confidence.
Instead of generating authority from his political position, Abadi largely borrowed his legitimacy from Najaf, Iraq’s Shiite religious establishment. Iraq is, more or less, a soft theocracy: Although political decision-making may not be concentrated in the hands of clerics, there are direct and indirect consequences of attaining or exercising power without their tacit support. Maliki was forced to leave office not only because he had lost Najaf’s support, but because his missteps were so grave that they prompted the clerical leadership to intervene politically to prevent him from securing a third term. Similarly, it was only Sistani’s public blessing that gave Abadi the political clout necessary to announce an ambitious reform package that directly clashed with the interests of his rivals. But Sistani’s endorsement, though powerful, cannot by itself empower Abadi to overcome the inertia inherent to the system, an inertia rooted in the deep-seated interests of Iraq’s political class.
The prime minster’s dilemma is defined by his practical weakness and political vulnerability. He neither has the credibility to make concessions nor the capability to carry out his will. Indeed, despite being head of government, Abadi is far from holding a monopoly over executive authority. Whenever he has tried to exercise authority out of line with the interests of his Shiite backers, his initiatives were not implemented. That is because Abadi did not come to power out of any legitimacy he had previously accumulated. He had no real constituency on the ground, did not lead any party or coalition, and most importantly missed the strategic opportunities required to broker necessary alliances with other political leaders.

As was the case when Maliki came to power in 2006, Abadi was awarded the premiership as a compromise choice among Shiite powerbrokers. He was chosen not because of any eagerness to see him become the new prime minister, but simply to replace the previous one. But unlike Abadi, Maliki had the presence of the U.S. military to serve as a safety net and pave his way toward consolidating and centralizing power at the expense of his rivals.

In 2008, knowing well that the American military would bail him out, Maliki took unilateral action—against U.S. advice—to militarily confront the firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Jaysh al-Mahdi militia. The Washington establishment subsequently hailed Maliki’s bold actions to tackle his own sect’s militias, painting him as an Iraqi nationalist. But this attribution mistook the structural incentives shaped by Maliki’s political environment for a personal sense of duty. The military offensive against the most feared and powerful Shiite militia was never about nationalism. It was about survival and consolidating authority against other centers of power. Maliki wasn’t building a nation; he was building a regime.

Unequipped with Maliki’s U.S. security blanket, Abadi has attempted to consolidate power through reform. In other words, he has masked his goal to consolidate power behind the idealist cosmetics of fighting corruption, in so doing generating a degree of political and international support from the West. Abadi’s purge of many Iraqi security officials in late 2014 was not as much about “fighting corruption” and “nepotism,” as he suggested at the time, as it was about building a regime loyal to him rather than to Maliki. Indeed, despite the fact that both individuals come from the same Shiite Islamist party, the new premier was never going to let his predecessor’s security architecture remain intact. To do so would jeopardize his political survival.

Shiite Militias and Cyclic Strategy

As the government battles the Islamic State, another threat has emerged in Iraq: Shiite militarization. The re-emergence of Shiite militias is a product of the Iraqi armed forces’ dismal performance against Sunni insurgents in 2013 and early 2014. That experience, combined with the effectiveness of Shiite militias—most notably Hezbollah—fighting in Syria’s civil war on behalf of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, led Maliki to believe that countering Sunni militants in Iraq would similarly require employing Shiite militias. Today, a symbiotic relationship has formed between the irregular combatants, whereby the existence of Sunni insurgents perpetuates the need for Shiite militias and vice versa.

When the U.S. military had completed its withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, Iran-backed Shiite militias began turning toward politics to maintain their organizational survival. But as the civil war in Syria evolved into a sectarian and regional proxy war, its convergence with Iraq’s insurgency grew, thereby creating a venue for Shiite militias to enhance their membership, renew their militarized cause and fill their coffers. Indeed, even before Mosul fell to the Islamic State in June 2014, Iraq’s Shiite militias had already fought in Syria against Sunni insurgents.

However, once Mosul fell amid mass desertion by multiple divisions of Iraq’s army, a radically new strategic environment emerged for militia formation in Iraq. Indeed, despite the Iraqi armed forces’ overall poor performance in battling insurgents, it was their unraveling that created an institutional void in the state security apparatus. With the need for heightened security, Sistani issued an unprecedented fatwa calling for Iraqis to volunteer and defend the state. Tens of thousands of Shiite Iraqis would soon be recruited, enhancing the power of well-established Iran-backed militias such as the Badr Organization, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah, but also leading to the emergence of new ones.

Unlike the Islamic State, which is deemed an outright enemy of the state, Iraq’s Shiite militias have never fit neatly into any category. In their current iteration, they are an extension of the Iraqi state. From their formal representation in Parliament to their direct relations with foreign governments, the new institutional demand for security has functionally integrated Shiite militias into the Iraqi security apparatus, to the point that U.S. military assistance empowers them as well. Indeed, Mohammed al-Ghabban, a senior member of the Badr Organization, Iraq’s most powerful militia, is also the minister of the interior.

In general, militias form within weak states facing insurgent threats. But as the state builds its capacity to reassert its sovereignty and monopoly over force, the question emerges of how to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate these unofficial forces into an official framework. During the counterinsurgency years under the U.S. military occupation, Shiite militias were integrated into Iraq’s armed forces. Once integrated, however, they failed to transcend their own informal networks, corruption and sectarianism, which in turn infested the country’s security apparatus.

The re-emergence of militias is remaking the character and arrangement of Iraq’s security institutions and beyond. Political leaders and parties are leveraging the mobilization of militias in an attempt to translate hard power into electoral outcomes in hopes of shifting the political landscape in their favor. This structural incentive could lead to armed electoral politics, which is not unprecedented in post-Saddam Iraq, notably by the armed counterparts of Shiite political parties in 2005-2007. In addition, when the Islamic State is eventually neutralized in Iraq, militias could establish their own political entities to ensure their survival.

While these scenarios would destabilize Iraqi politics, the relationship between Sunni insurgency and Shiite militarization, both of which diminish state sovereignty, is particularly dangerous. The former aims to chip away at the state from the outside, but the growth of the latter is rotting it from within. In this dual, mutually reinforcing process, Abadi will likely continue losing authority over the security sector and remain a weak partner for the United States.

Today, there are well over 50 militias in Iraq under an umbrella organization—Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization—that, in theory, is supposed to report to the prime minister. But in practice, the real authority does not appear to be with Abadi, but rather with the leaders of that organization, who are closely aligned with Iran. In fact, the military campaign against the Islamic State in Tikrit that took place in March commenced without the involvement, or even the knowledge, of either the minister of defense or the prime minister.

Despite the fact that it controls roughly a third of Iraq’s territory, the Islamic State is not the major threat to Abadi’s regime. Rather, it is those closest to his political base. If concentric circles were used to depict the various threats that Iraq’s leader faces, the innermost would be his own party, while subsequent ones would include a diverse array of Shiite powerbrokers. The Islamic State would be the outermost circle—for Abadi, a distant threat. However, he is keen to defeat the Islamic State under his supervision and at the hands of armed forces under his control because it would buy him political prestige and power.

Contestation Under Abadi

Since Maliki was forced to relinquish the premiership in 2014, power and authority have become diffused across Iraq. Various players, both internal and external, are now exercising unchecked control over the use of force. This could potentially create conditions leading to a wider, armed contestation among the country’s political factions. The growing inability to monopolize the legitimate use of violence is the primary criteria for a failed state. Thus, Abadi’s state is much less of an autonomous regime than Maliki’s was, and is more accurately characterized as an arena of contestation among various forces.

Even beyond the many actors exercising power over the use of force, the elements of authority and legitimacy among the political classes of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis are becoming fragmented. Not too many years ago, a simplified schemata of political authority in Iraq would more or less have included two Kurds: Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani; four Sunnis: Tariq al-Hashimi, Osama al-Nujaifi, Saleh al-Mutlaq and Rafi al-Issawi; and three Shiites: Ammar al-Hakim, Nouri al-Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr. Today, there are far more players emerging within each ethno-sectarian community, complicating any U.S. engagement strategy in Iraq. A mixture of failing older political forces and rising new ones has devolved and redistributed power, fueling intra-sectarian contestation in the reconfiguration of political order.

The U.S. decision to reboot its security relationship with Iraq had multiple objectives: to help strengthen an allied government that was growing more fragile, to cultivate influence in Iraq at the expense of Iran, and to give Iraq the resources to counter the Islamic State. However, this diplomatic and military assistance has occurred as the Iraqi government faces an authority crisis. This means that Washington cannot effectively utilize coercive diplomacy and pressure toward Baghdad, making it unable to control either where its arms end up or the objective for which they are used.

It is uncertain if a consolidated government can emerge in Baghdad, either under Abadi or any future leadership. The Iraqi state is unraveling, having lost its monopoly over force and its grip on centralized authority. However, Washington continues to misdiagnose the Islamic State as the source rather than symptom of Iraq’s deeper ills. This fixation on defeating the militant organization has led to shortsighted policies with dangerous consequences. Today, U.S. policymakers are threatening to bypass Iraq’s government and directly arm the Kurds and Sunni Arabs. Although this is driven by frustration with the politics in Baghdad, it is a policy that lacks strategic consideration and foresight. If pursued, its backers must accept the risk that arming these groups could exacerbate the fragmentation of Iraq, undermine the government’s authority and further strengthen the logic sustaining militias.

Ramzy Mardini is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. He can be followed on Twitter at @RamzyMardini.

India Points to the Real Issue with Pakistan (Daniel 8)

 
India Rejects Pakistan Peace Plan, Calls for Revival of Terrorism Talks
By DAVID BRUNNSTROM / REUTERS | October 2, 2015

WASHINGTON — India on Thursday rejected a four-point peace plan for Kashmir proposed by Pakistan but said talks among officials of both countries on terrorism that collapsed in August should be revived.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced his proposal at the annual United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, saying the two nuclear-armed countries should formalize a cease-fire in Kashmir and take steps to demilitarize the divided region.

India issued a swift rebuttal, accusing Pakistan of claiming to be the primary victim of terrorism while “in truth, it is actually a victim of its own policy of breeding and sponsoring terrorists.”
On Thursday, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj told the General Assembly that India remained open to dialogue, “but talks and terror cannot go together.”

“We don’t need four points, we need just one: Give up terrorism and let us sit down and talk,” she said.

Swaraj said the talks between national security advisers on all issues related to terrorism should be held, as well as an early meeting of senior military officials to address the situation on the border.
“If the response is serious and credible, India is prepared to address all outstanding issues through a bilateral dialogue,” she said.

Planned talks between national security advisers from India and Pakistan were canceled in August hours before they were due to start, dashing hopes the two might tackle the violence that many fear could one day spark a nuclear showdown.

In the talks, India had wanted only to discuss terrorism-related issues. Pakistan sought a wider agenda, including the status of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since becoming independent countries in 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part.

Sharif, elected in 2013, promised to improve relations with India. But since then domestic troubles have forced him to cede more control over foreign and security policy to Pakistan’s more hawkish military.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken a hard line with Pakistan, insisting he is unwilling to discuss other issues unless Pakistan admits its role in terror attacks in India.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs made it clear that Sharif’s proposal was a non-starter. “To de-militarize Kashmir is not the answer,” ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said in a tweet. “To de-terrorize Pakistan is.”

India Points to the Real Issue with Pakistan (Daniel 8)

 
India Rejects Pakistan Peace Plan, Calls for Revival of Terrorism Talks

By DAVID BRUNNSTROM / REUTERS | October 2, 2015

WASHINGTON — India on Thursday rejected a four-point peace plan for Kashmir proposed by Pakistan but said talks among officials of both countries on terrorism that collapsed in August should be revived.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced his proposal at the annual United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, saying the two nuclear-armed countries should formalize a cease-fire in Kashmir and take steps to demilitarize the divided region.

India issued a swift rebuttal, accusing Pakistan of claiming to be the primary victim of terrorism while “in truth, it is actually a victim of its own policy of breeding and sponsoring terrorists.”
On Thursday, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj told the General Assembly that India remained open to dialogue, “but talks and terror cannot go together.”

“We don’t need four points, we need just one: Give up terrorism and let us sit down and talk,” she said.

Swaraj said the talks between national security advisers on all issues related to terrorism should be held, as well as an early meeting of senior military officials to address the situation on the border.
“If the response is serious and credible, India is prepared to address all outstanding issues through a bilateral dialogue,” she said.

Planned talks between national security advisers from India and Pakistan were canceled in August hours before they were due to start, dashing hopes the two might tackle the violence that many fear could one day spark a nuclear showdown.

In the talks, India had wanted only to discuss terrorism-related issues. Pakistan sought a wider agenda, including the status of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since becoming independent countries in 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part.

Sharif, elected in 2013, promised to improve relations with India. But since then domestic troubles have forced him to cede more control over foreign and security policy to Pakistan’s more hawkish military.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken a hard line with Pakistan, insisting he is unwilling to discuss other issues unless Pakistan admits its role in terror attacks in India.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs made it clear that Sharif’s proposal was a non-starter. “To de-militarize Kashmir is not the answer,” ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said in a tweet. “To de-terrorize Pakistan is.”

Hopefully Obama Didn’t Make The Deal To Justify His Nobel Peace Prize

Iran deal is not worthy of Nobel recognition

By Jeff Jacoby
GLOBE COLUMNIST JULY 19, 2015

MOMENTS AFTER IT was announced that the United States and its allies had reached a nuclear deal with Iran, the drums began beating for a Nobel Peace Prize. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, tweeted happily:

I think the work of the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament this year just got much easier.
On Wednesday, a director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an influential think tank with ties to the Nobel organization, recommended that the 2016 prize be awarded to Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

The Vienna deal is a capitulation to one of the worst regimes on earth. Far from requiring the Iranians to dismantle their illicit nuclear program, the accord leaves almost all of it intact. In exchange for little more than a promise to delay its development of nuclear warheads, Tehran is rewarded with $150 billion in sanctions relief and, within a few years, the lifting of the UN embargo on conventional weapons and missile sales. The Islamic Republic is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, yet nothing in the agreement requires any change in its notorious behavior. And despite the regime’s long record of treaty violations and deceit, the deal enables it to stall for almost a month before complying with a demand for access by inspectors — hardly the “anytime, anywhere, 24/7” inspections that the Obama administration had claimed it would insist on.

The White House wanted to sign a deal; Iran’s rulers wanted to ensure their path to the bomb and nuclear legitimacy. Both got what they wanted. The consequences will be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, more Iranian terrorism and subversion, and a greater likelihood of war.

A Nobel Peace Prize — for that?

It wouldn’t be the first time.

The Obama/Kerry willingness to concede anything for a nuclear deal with Iran has been likened to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938. Then, too, shameless capitulation was hailed as a triumph of peacemaking and diplomacy. Chamberlain was cheered as a hero in the press and on the street, and he won a resounding vote of confidence in Parliament. He was widely nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, including by a dozen members of the Swedish parliament. Who knows — he might have received it, had Hitler waited just a little longer before invading Czechoslovakia.

All too often the Nobel Committee has seen fit to bestow its prestigious honor on men who negotiated “peace” accords that ended up undermining peace. In 1973, the prize was awarded to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, lead negotiators of the Paris Peace Accords that purported to end the Vietnam War. In reality, the accords paved the way for US withdrawal, effectively abandoning South Vietnam to defeat and brutal occupation by the communist North.

The Locarno Treaties of 1925, now largely forgotten, settled Germany’s borders with Western Europe, and were extravagantly portrayed as guaranteeing that Germany would never again violate the peace. “France and Germany Ban War Forever,” cheered The New York Times, and the Nobel Committee, intoxicated with the “spirit of Locarno,” awarded peace prizes to the French, British, and German foreign ministers who negotiated the deal. Yet the treaties deliberately left Germany’s eastern borders open to “revision.” In essence, one Polish leader remarked bitterly, “Germany was officially asked to attack the east, in return for peace in the west.” The promised peace was a mere bubble. The war Locarno facilitated would prove all too bloodily real.

The Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords — presented in 1994 to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres — was another blunder that looks even worse in retrospect. A peace prize for Arafat, an arch-terrorist and hatemonger who devoted his life to the destruction of peace? It was as contemptible a choice as the Nobel Committee has ever made. Of course, there’s always next year.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby.

The Power Of The Antichrist’s Men (Rev 13:18)

Assessing Shi’ite Militias in Iraq

 

Michael Rubin | @mrubin1971 06.23.2015 – 3:15 PM 

 

The rise of the Shi‘ite militias has complicated if not undercut American policy from the 2003 occupation of Iraq to the present. Shortly before U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq, then-National Security Council official Zalmay Khalilzad and State Department official Ryan Crocker (both future ambassadors to Iraq) met with Iran’s UN Ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif (now foreign minister) in Geneva. Zarif promised non-interference: there would be no direct Iranian intervention, nor would Iran allow the militias which its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) trained to interfere.

 

Zarif, of course, either lied or was powerless to prevent the IRGC from acting autonomously (it is ironic, therefore, that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are so willing to trust Zarif despite his previous refusal to uphold diplomatic agreements). Even Iranian journalists remarked about how quickly the IRGC inserted itself and militias like the Badr Corps into Iraq. Meanwhile, for all the chatter about why Washington policymakers erred by working with Iraqi politicians who had spent some time in exile, the most powerful insider, firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, sought power by leveraging a militia equally anti-American, violent toward other Iraqis, and engaged in criminal enterprise.

During the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. forces just as often found themselves in conflict with Shi‘ite militias as with Sunni insurgents. Hassan Kazemi Qomi, a Qods Force operative who worked as Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, oversaw the smuggling into Iraq of explosively-formed projectiles used to kill hundreds of Americans. Then, in 2007, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, an Iranian-sponsored militia, kidnaped five American soldiers, and then tortured and executed them. They and Kata’ib Hezbollah still undermine rule-of-law and government authority in Iraq.

In the wake of the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh)and the collapse of several units of the Iraqi army, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called for volunteers to help defend Iraqi Shi‘ites (and non-Shi’ite Iraqis) and protect both the shrine cities and the capital from ISIS’ advance. The resulting Popular Mobilization Forces (al–Hashd al-Shaabi) are often treated almost cartoonishly among many Western commentators. They describe them as uniformly Shi‘ite (they are not, even if Shi’ites make up the vast majority) and Iranian proxies (certainly, Iranian officials would like to co-opt them and perhaps do some but most are at heart Iraqi nationalists). Contrary to some reports, there was no widespread abuse, looting, or burning of homes in Tikrit when the volunteers defeated ISIS.

At any rate, if the goal is to fight and defeat ISIS and if Iraqis cannot rely on outside powers to help with any consistency, then they would be foolish to sit around and wait to conduct full military training, nor do many ordinary Iraqis have any wish to make a three-year commitment to the Iraqi army. The training program announced by President Obama for Syrians to fight ISIS has gone nowhere, but perhaps that was the point, and so the Hashd has become an Iraqi solution to an Iraqi problem. Does that mean the United States, Iraqis, or others should be sanguine about the Hashd? No. They are a short-term solution which will pose a long-term threat to Iraq, as many will expect a reward or patronage position for their service.

Norman Cigar, perhaps the most skilled and precise linguist and military analyst of the Middle East (whose work I have previously cited here) is out with a new publication through the United States Army War College Press entitled “Iraqi Shi’a Warlords and Their Militias,” which is a free .pdf here. It’s probably the most complete, nuanced, and realistic take to date on both the various militias and the issues raised by their existence, especially in the post-ISIS order. He addresses key questions such as how the militias are mobilized, and the breakdown between those used to fight versus those deemed unfit and perhaps instead relegated to guard duty. He breaks down the numbers in each militia and, for all the talk about leveraging tribes, he discusses how various tribes delivered volunteers for the militias. He also addresses training, equipping, maintaining, and feeding the militias, the logistical elements seldom discussed.

Looking to the future, Cigar is realistic. Iraqis will continue to embrace the militias unless there is a significant foreign military force that can supplant them to counter the Islamic State challenge. Americans like to condemn the militias, but at the same time there is no appetite in the White House or Congress for a significant military deployment back into Iraq. That means the militias are here to stay. The Kurds provide no substitute. Not only is Cigar realistic about the capabilities of the Peshmerga, but he also recognizes the political limitations given Kurdish disunity and disinterest in combatting ISIS in territories in which the Kurds have no interest. Then the question turns into how the militia reality might impact future organization. Will, he ponders, the militias be folded into an organization much like Iran’s Basij? Indeed, for better or worse, this might be the model that most Iraqis are familiar. And if, alternately, there is demobilization, how will that occur?

A decade ago, no one foresaw the rise of the Islamic State or, conversely, of the Hashd. And while the Islamic State needn’t be a fact-of-life if the United States and regional powers were serious about defeating it, the Hashd are now here to stay. Simply condemning them all as Iranian agents is neither accurate nor productive. Rather, it’s time to confront the new reality and craft policies to accommodate or perhaps alter it. Either way, Cigar’s monograph is unique, essential, and a great place to start.

Who Is The Antichrist? (Rev 13:17)

 
Muqtada al- Sadr

Muqtada al- Sadr Biography

Military Leader (c. 1974–)

NAME
Muqtada al- Sadr

OCCUPATION
Military Leader

BIRTH DATE
c. 1974

PLACE OF BIRTH
Al-Najaf, Iraq

Muqtada al-Sadr led the Shi’ite militia known as the Mahdi Army, which committed acts of retribution against Sunnis in Iraq during the U.S. occupation.

Synopsis

Born c.1974, Muqtada al-Sadr was the son of Grand Ayatolla Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Sadr began to organize the Iraqi Shi’ite majority, forming a militia called the Mahdi Army to police the “Sadr City” neighborhood of Baghdad and enact retribution on Sunni Muslims. Sadr’s militia also engaged coalition troops, calling for their complete removal.

Cite This Page

APA Style
Muqtada al- Sadr. (2015). The Biography.com website. Retrieved 01:45, Jun 14, 2015, from http://www.biography.com/people/muqtada-al-sadr-507305.

Harvard Style
Muqtada al- Sadr. [Internet]. 2015. The Biography.com website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/muqtada-al-sadr-507305 [Accessed 14 Jun 2015].

MLA Style
“Muqtada al- Sadr.” Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2015. Web. 14 June 2015.

The antichrist and his men (Revelation 13:18)

Moqtada al-Sadr and the self-delusion of Europeans and Arabs

by Bernardo Cervellera

Interview with Saywan Barzani, European representative of the Kurdistan regional government.
Paris (AsiaNews) – Europe and the Arab world have turned Moqtada al-Sadr into some kind of resistance hero. For most Iraqis, even Shiites, he is just someone “unstable” for whom one may feel sorry but someone who must be stopped.

Saywan Barzani, European representative of the Kurdistan regional government, accuses the West and the Arab world of ulterior motives when they portray Moqtada al-Sadr in a positive light. In his opinion, Iraq has become a convenient backdrop in which Western countries “settle scores” because of knee-jerk hatred of the US, economic competition, and political divisions. Not even Italy is spared. When Saddam was in power Italy sold him weapons. Today the Italian left is “against the new Iraq because it wants to defeat Berlusconi”. On the other hand, Arabs are just afraid the new Iraq might actually become a rich democratic country.

According to the latest report Moqtada al Sadr surrendered the Imam Ali shrine to local Shiite religious leaders with the blessing of grand ayatollah al-Sistani, who is in London for heart treatment. Given al-Sadr’s record of changing positions it is not clear whether he will comply with the government’s repeated demands that his militia disarm.

What are Moqtada al-Sadr’s intentions and what support does he have among Iraqis?

Moqtada al-Sadr’s father –the ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr– was known throughout the country but was murdered by Saddam’s agents. He represented an Islamist trend within the Shia world that is in favour of a more political Islam. Unlike him the young son has little charisma. His speeches are often too convoluted to understand. He belongs to a generation –the twenty-something– that wants to imitate Hezbollah. These people are underprivileged, lost, and without points of reference, not resistance fighters.

Everyone in Najaf is against them: the population, the Council of ayatollahs, and most marjah, those with highest authority on religion and law in Shiism. And most of these people have actually left the city so as not to be associated with these bandits, who clearly have foreign backing.

From a political and a military point of view, even from a psychological point of view, they are Saddam’s children. In schools students did not get too many books but underwent military training. From morning till night people sang the glory of Saddam and prepared for future wars. Arabic poetry extolled the virtues of violence and war: kill! Cut someone’s head off! School text books were drafted to disseminate a culture of death and violence

For 30 years people endured this type. Inevitably, it left enormous psychological scars. This is why al-Sadr’s men are not normal; they need treatment.

Iraq has many obstacles to overcome but the resistance these men claim to offer is not what it needs. These people are unstable and penniless patsies, sometimes drug addicts.
 
It seems clear that Mr al-Sadr wants to be another ayatollah Nasrallah, head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement. It is also clear that he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps. Unfortunately, his father’s shoes are too big him.
 
The new government laid down conditions and proposed solutions several times, but al-Sadr seems to waver between accepting and not accepting . . .

As I said mental illness is a widespread problem in Iraq and Mr al-Sadr is part of it. If one listens carefully to his speeches, one can see how . . . unhinged he is. His father was murdered; he grew in a hate-filled environment . . .

Najaf seems to have become the testing ground of the new Iraq. What will happen?

Najaf is the capital of Shia Islam. Ali’s tomb is there, revered by 100 million Shiites. What the city needs is security. What it does not need are paramilitary groups. Because of them people left the city. Unfortunately, many Shiite politicians are afraid to bite the bullet but they should. The Mahdi army must be disbanded

Imagine! Al-Sadr’s madness is such that he claims the army is not his, but that of the real Mahdi, the hidden imam who will soon reappear. However, the hidden imam is supposed to have given him stewardship over it. We truly live in strange times!

If one listens to what he says and looks at what he does, one can see an impulsive boy, not a grown man. By contrast Arab media tend to portray him as a resistance leader fighting the Americans.

Why do you think so much attention is given to Moqtada al-Sadr’s “resistance” in the West?

There are three reasons for Europe’s stance. First of all, there is a knee-jerk anti-Americanism that makes people think that whatever the US does must be wrong. Secondly, there is jealousy. Saddam’s regime was very lucrative to Europe and his demise, sadly for the countries that backed him, ended juicy contracts worth billions. Finally, there is the position of Europe’s Left. In a country like Italy for example, the Left opposes Italian involvement in building the new Iraq in a bid to defeat [incumbent conservative Prime Minister] Berlusconi. Iraq has become a surrogate for everyone’s desire to settle scores with the US. And this is done on the backs of the people of Iraq.

For 30 years no one cared: Kurds were victims of genocide; 1.3 millions people disappeared mostly buried in desert sands; more than 2 million died in the regime’s wars. But the West made money in such wars: land mines “Made in Italy” buried across Kurdistan, chemical arms sold by Germany, bombers from France . . . and no one saying anything. But of course arms sales were good for the balance sheets.

Now that Iraqis are trying to build a small democratic state, everyone is against. Our Arab neighbours, who are mostly one-man dictatorships, find our process of democratisation too close for comfort.

Have relations with neighbouring Arab countries and some Western countries improved since the fall of Saddam?

Nothing has changed! Our neighbours remain suspicious of our democratic system. In the Middle East the press is not free but in Iraq there are now 400 newspapers. We have dozens of television stations and political parties. Salaries have risen in some cases up to US$ 400 (it used to be around 2-14 dollars under Saddam). Our neighbours don’t like it because it is different from how they live: permanent state of emergency, poverty, dictatorship, meekness.

Most suicide bombers come from the surrounding countries as do most of the bombs that blow up in our cities. God willing the Iraqi government has taken over security functions and is better able to protect our borders.

European public opinion is swayed by the media. When a bomb goes off in one of Baghdad’s 89 neighbourhoods the others are largely unaware of what happened. In Iraqi Kurdistan things are quite. Most Iraqi cities are quite. Moreover, one would be hard pressed to read or hear about the country’s economic and political progress. All the media are interested in are some bomb going off here and there, what Moqtada al-Sadr says, what some Baathist criminal does, nothing about what the other 24 million Iraqis do.

What the media reported, especially what they did not report, played a role in Saddam Hussein’s regime, a regime responsible for the death of 3.5 million people, the most bloodthirsty regime in the world. Now all they can report is complaints about the US presence.

No one wants an American occupation, but for us Iraqis the truly violent occupation was that by Saddam Hussein. Just because he was Iraqi did not make his rule more bearable.

Now that we can rebuild our country, the mass media seem to be bent on denigrating our efforts. One only needs to look at what is written and said in Europe.

Antichrist’s Men Take Baiji (Rev 13:18)

  

Officials: Iraqi forces in control of Baiji city

By Hamdi Alkhshali, CNN
Updated 8:43 AM ET, Sun June 7, 2015

(CNN)Iraqi forces with the support of the U.S. are now in control of Baiji city, military and militia sources told CNN on Sunday.

“Forces have cleansed and are in control completely of government complex, city center, Fatah mosque (main mosque) and surrounding neighborhoods,” said Brig. Gen. Tahseen Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Iraqi defense ministry.

He credited the U. S. with “a significant role supporting” Iraqi ground forces in the assault. He did not provide specifics on what kind of support the forces received.

“We can announce that Baiji city is completely liberated and the Iraqi flag was raised over the governor building,” said Muhammed al-Eqabi, a spokesman for the Hash al-Shaabi Shia militia.
ISIS forces, who had seized the city, fled back toward Mosul and were under air attack while retreating, according to Ibrahim.

ISIS forces had left booby traps throughout the city, he said, and there are still small pockets of resistance.

Last month, ISIS fighters successfully moved into several refinery areas in the city, keeping Iraqi forces from getting supplies.

Antichrist’s Men Advance On Ramadi (Rev 13:18)

   
Shiite Fighters Advance on ISIS Millitants in Ramadi, Iraq

May 24, 2015 11:12 AM
Reuters

Shi’ite Muslim militiamen and Iraqi army forces launched a counter-offensive against the so-called Islamic State insurgents near Ramadi on Saturday, a militia spokesman said, aiming to reverse potentially devastating gains by the fake jihadi militants.

The fall of Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital, to the so-called Islamic State on May 17 could be a shattering blow to Baghdad’s weak central government. The fake jihadis now control most of Anbar and could threaten the western approaches to Baghdad, or even surge south into Iraq’s Shi’ite heartland.

Anbar provincial council member Azzal Obaid said hundreds of Shi’ite fighters, who had assembled last week at the Habbaniya air base, moved into Khalidiya on Saturday and were nearing Siddiqiya and Madiq, towns in contested territory near Ramadi.

Two police officers later said that the pro-government forces, which they said included locally allied Sunni tribesmen, had advanced past those towns to within one kilometer of Husaiba al-Sharqiya, an ISIS-run town 7 kilometers (4 miles) east of the Ramadi city limits.

One officer said the Shi’ite-led forces exchanged fire with ISIS but there was no immediate word on casualties.

Jaffar Husseini, spokesman for Shi’ite paramilitary group Kataib Hezbollah, said more than 2,000 reinforcements had joined the pro-government advance and they had managed to secure Khalidiya and the road linking it to Habbaniya.

“Today will witness the launch of some tactical operations that pave the way to the eventual liberation of Ramadi,” he told Reuters by telephone.

At the same time, ISIS units have been pushing toward Fallujah to try to absorb more territory between it and Ramadi that would bring them closer to Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, around 80 km (50 miles) to the east.

ISIS has controlled Fallujah for more than a year.

Ramadi’s loss is the most serious setback for Iraqi forces in almost a year and has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the U.S. strategy of air strikes to help Baghdad roll back ISIS, which now holds a third each of Iraq and adjacent Syria.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a Shi’ite, sent Shi’ite paramilitary groups out to Anbar to try to retake Ramadi despite the risk of inflaming tensions with the province’s aggrieved, predominantly Sunni population.

But he had little choice given the poor morale and cohesion within government security forces.

A U.N. spokesman said on Friday that some 55,000 people have fled Ramadi since it was stormed by ISIS earlier this month, with most taking refuge in other parts of Anbar, a vast desert province that borders on Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

In Syria, ISIS fighters raised their flag over an ancient citadel in the historic city of Palmyra, pictures posted online overnight by the group’s supporters showed.

The militants seized Palmyra, known as Tadmur in Arabic and strategically significant with nearby natural gas fields and roads leading southwest to Damascus, on Wednesday after days of heavy fighting with the Syrian army.

“Tadmur citadel under the control of the caliphate,” read a caption on one picture posted on social media sites. In another, a smiling fighter is shown carrying the group’s black flag and standing on one of the citadel’s walls.

It was not possible to verify the images’ authenticity.

U.S.-led coalition forces have conducted a further 22 air strikes on ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria since Friday, including near Ramadi and Palmyra, the U.S. military said.

Palmyra is home to a UNESCO World Heritage site, and Syria’s antiquities chief has said the insurgents would destroy its 2,000-year-old ruins, including well-preserved Roman temples, colonnades and a theater, if they took control of them. While hundreds of statues have been taken to safe locations, there are fears for larger monuments that cannot be moved.

The so-called Islamic State destroyed ancient monuments and antiquities they see as idolatrous in areas of Iraq they captured last year.

Supporters have also posted videos they say show the group’s fighters going room to room in government buildings in Palmyra searching for government troops and pulling down pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father.

Some activists have said more than 200 Syrian soldiers died in the battle for the city in the center of Syria.

The Failed Iraqi National Guard (Rev 13:18)

 
The Foreign Policy Essay: Harnessing Militia Power—Lessons of the Iraqi National Guard

Ariel I. Ahram and Frederic Wehrey
May 24, 2015

Editor’s Note: National governments seem to be failing throughout the Middle East. The United States, unfortunately, does not usually have the luxury of waiting until a strong government returns, and building a strong state is often beyond what the United States is able or willing to do. One option to fight terrorists and otherwise fill the governance void is to work more with local militias. Ariel I. Ahram of Virginia Tech and Frederic Wehrey of Carnegie draw on the U.S. experience in Iraq and offer lessons for what to do—and what to avoid—when going down this road.

***

Faced with the breakdown of national armies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Arab states have increasingly turned toward alliances with armed militias to ensure security. Popular, anti-government protests and insurgencies for the most part precipitated the breakdown of regime military institutions, yet pre-existing internal ethnic, clan, and ideological cleavages helped to hasten the breakdown. The beleaguered state security forces have now entered into a variety of alliances—tacit or active—with militias they deem sympathetic to their interests, often organized on the basis of entrenched ethno-sectarian or tribal identities. Such militia forces supplement and at times even stand in for the weak or absent army and police as providers of local security.

On the one hand, militia forces have in certain circumstances proven effective at counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. On the other hand, they have also committed atrocities against civilians that hamper long-term efforts to build trust and stability. Their greatest risk is that, by eroding the central government’s monopolization on force, they jeopardize the territorial cohesion of the state.

In Iraq, the rise of powerful communal militias has paralleled the growth of the threat from the Islamic State. This has presented the United States with a quandary: how to combat the Islamic State by mobilizing local Sunnis while at the same time safeguarding the broader integrity of the Iraqi state and its security institutions. The national guard concept, which successive Iraqi governments have tried in the past, was seen as one way to do this. A national guard force would retain the militias’ local knowledge and roots, both unique tools necessary for a successful counterinsurgency against the Islamic State. At the same time, the guard would (at least in theory) be subject to increased oversight and control by the central government.

Other fractured Arab states, most notably Libya, have tried to implement a national guard model as a way to harness militia power, but this too has failed. Variations of hybrid, provincially-organized military forces exist in Yemen and Syria. While each case is different, the failure of national guards bears certain similarities. Examining the Iraqi case in particular can highlight the potential utility of national guards but also the parallel political and institutional reforms that are necessary to make the concept work.

False Analogies and False Starts in Iraq

The idea of creating a national guard in Iraq has been a centerpiece of U.S. engagement since the dramatic advance of the Islamic State on Tikrit and Mosul in 2014. President Obama specifically mentioned U.S. support for a national guard as a means to help Iraqi Sunnis “secure their own freedom” from the Islamic State. Much of U.S. thinking about the Iraqi National Guard (ING) was guided by the example of the Sunni Awakening of 2006 and 2007, when the United States actively recruited and “flipped” Sunni tribes that had supported the al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency. In return for guarantees of autonomy and military, financial, and political backing, the Sunni tribes were able to turn the tables on the insurgent fighters and impose a measure of peace and stability. The 2014 initiative essentially sought to reproduce this arrangement. The idea was that given proper incentives, the Sunni tribes would again fight the radical Islamists who threatened their supremacy. Over the long term, such national guard forces could be integrated formally as auxiliary troops in a federal structure, comparable in many ways to the U.S. National Guard.

Yet the Awakening analogy failed on a number of levels. The Shi’i-dominated Iraqi central government had never been enthusiastic about empowering Sunni tribes in the first place. With the dismantling of the Iraqi army in 2003, security had effectively devolved to party, tribal, and sectarian militias. Many Iraqis wondered why the United States would seek to create new militias, especially ones recently tied to al-Qaeda and other terrorists. As Iraq scholar Adeed Dawisha described, the gains in security came “not because of the state, but in spite of it.”

As the U.S. began withdrawing from Iraq in 2009 and 2010, then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki quickly moved to dismantle the Awakening-associated militias. Only a handful of former militia fighters received their promised positions in the police, army, or civil services. Some former militia leaders were arrested on seemingly politically-motivated charges of terrorism or subversion. Efforts to enact a Sunni-dominated super-region comparable to the federal status of the Kurdish Regional Government in the north were rebuffed, despite the provisions of Iraq’s constitution that allowed for the creation of such an entity. Politically marginalized, some Sunnis returned to their alliance with the radical mujahideen.

The election of the new prime minister Haydar al-Abadi in 2014 raised the promise of renewed Sunni-Shi’i reconciliation. Abadi expressed support for the national guard initiative and forwarded a bill to parliament in 2014. Thousands of volunteers came forward from the Sunni tribes in the west and U.S. and Iraqi officials met with tribal leaders to help solidify support. The United States began to enlist support from Iraq’s Sunni neighbors to provide training and support for the ING.

Yet resistance within Abadi’s own political coalition stymied these efforts. The National Guard bill foundered in parliamentary committee, with open questions about the extent of control vested in provincial governors and the chain of command subordinating the ING to the ministries of interior, defense, or the prime minister himself. Officers of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) regarded the militias as unfit for duty and as rivals for budget and resources. Iraq’s constitution specifically prohibited the formation of militias outside the framework of the armed forces (with an exception of the peshmerga forces of the Kurdish Regional Government). Moreover, there was concern that once the Sunnis were authorized to organize a militia, other ethno-sectarian communities, such as Christians or Turkomen, might try to follow suit out of fear of falling under the mercy of their more powerful neighbors. The ING, then, could undercut any pretense of the Iraqi state possessing a monopoly over the use of force.

At base, though, many of Iraq’s Shi’i leaders simply believed that they didn’t need Sunni support. With the ING initiative stalled in parliament, the Shi’i factions have actively cultivated Shi’i militias as part of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi). The origins of the PMF can be traced to a statement by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s senior Shi’i cleric, which explicitly called on the faithful to take up arms to defend Iraq in the face of the Islamic State onslaught in 2014. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Badr Organization, and other political factions quickly took the opportunity to reconstitute or expand their private armies.

Backed by Iran’s expeditionary al-Qods Force, PMF militias played a prominent role in the spring 2015 offensive against the Islamic State in Tikrit. By spring 2015, PMF counted around 60,000 men under arms. Still, the performance of these militias has been less than stellar. In the spring 2015 offensive on Tikrit, PMF forces failed repeatedly to dislodge Islamic State resistance, despite enjoying superiority in numbers. U.S. air support proved critical to allowing the offensive to proceed. Some PMF units quit the fight instead of working under American air cover. Others were involved in a campaign of terror against Sunnis, looting, kidnapping, and killing those suspected of collaborating with the Islamic State.

Awakening Again?

The prospects for the mobilization of Iraq’s Sunnis are not dead—yet. A handful of Sunni tribes joined the PMF during the Tikrit offensive. In Anbar, likely the next front in the campaign against the Islamic State, U.S. and Iraqi officials have cultivated ties with local Sunni tribes and organized some 8,000 men into Sunni PMF units. Some tribes have made their service conditional on guarantees of greater autonomy and the removal of Shi’i militia forces. Yet the intake for training programs remains slow and drop-out rates high. On the one hand, tribes continue to resent the central government. On the other hand, they fear retribution should the Islamic State return.

Abadi’s visit to Washington in April 2015 focused on expanding and enhancing security cooperation with the United States. The United States has insisted that the PMF be brought more fully under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces and that PMF units reflect the demographics of the provinces and districts in which they operate. This would mean that in ethnically-mixed areas, such as in Nineveh or Babil, each ethnic group would have its own militia proportional to its size in the locality. The Iraq Train and Equip Program (ITEP) is slowly coming online, funneling American money and weapons to various local militia forces as well as ISF.

Cooperating with the United States has been a delicate balancing act for Abadi. While Kurdish and Sunni leaders see U.S. military support as a means to their own ends, Abadi’s own Shi’i political camp—as well as his allies in Tehran—are far more wary. When the U.S. Congress passed a bill in May 2015 effectively mandating the Defense Department to bypass Baghdad and provide support for Sunni and Kurdish fighters directly, Abadi protested that this constituted a grave violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

Still, reliance on the ragtag PMF alone is not sustainable in the long term. Operating far from home and with limited training, these overwhelmingly Shi’i forces cannot be expected to become an army of occupation in Sunni areas like Tikrit or Fallujah. Ultimately, local partners will be necessary to build and maintain peace and stability. The national guard, then, may well re-emerge as a more sustainable structure for administrative and security devolution.

Lessons Learned From Failure

While analysts and policymakers naturally focus on cases of success, there are important lessons to be learned from Iraq’s failures. For countries like Iraq where central armies have more or less broken down and a bevy of militias has emerged in its stead, as in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, the national guard could represent a path to reconstituting fragile state authority.

But for this to happen, several broad principles need to be heeded:

National guards cannot simply be conceived as short-term, improvised solutions to immediate security crises. Rather, the creation of national guards is part of the impetus of security-sector reform (SSR) and post-conflict demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) of armed groups.

National guards must overcome the legacies of past authoritarian experiences where pro-government militias were often seen as mere thugs for the regime, not a disciplined professional fighting force. In particular, the older officer class of regular forces may see them as competitors. To build trust among the population and other military institutions, national guards should be accompanied by revisions to chain of command establishing clear relationships of authority between the guards, the police, the army, and other security agencies, and subordinating all security services to civilian authorities.
National guard initiatives must also be accompanied by moves toward political power-sharing arrangements. The success of national guards ultimately depends not just on their short-term tactical effectiveness but on the degree of local buy-in. Constitutions can provide a structure for bolstering confidence between a central government and subnational militia forces. Since militia membership and cohesion is often based on geographic linkages—to town, municipality or province—national guards may well be a part of federalist power devolution, especially in countries with overlapping ethno-sectarian and regional cleavages.

Western governments can assist in setting up and training national guards, but they must ensure that proper political and institutional reforms are also undertaken. In many cases, Western states provide models for how decentralized, federally-organized military forces can complement national armies and local police. The United States, for instance, has a great deal of experience with its own federalized national guard structure and can draw on this example in its train-and-equip programs. There are other potentially useful models as well, including the British Territorial Army, a part-time, volunteer force that was integrated into the British Army in the early twentieth century; the Danish Home Guard, which incorporated anti-Nazi resistance militias into a national command structure after World War II; or the Italian Carabineri, which is often discussed as a potential model for dealing with Libya’s unique security challenges.

Outside assistance to national guards must avoid exacerbating existing communal and political fault lines. Helping peripheral and minority groups set up their own armed forces can, on one hand, embolden these groups to resist the central government and, on the other hand, spur resentment from the central government and fear of future disloyalty or rebellion. These concerns become even more acute when national guards are seen as proxies for outside powers. With this in mind, the U.S. and outside powers should calibrate their assistance to both regionally-based national guards and central government forces to ensure rough parity between the two. This could entail making funding, equipment and training for the central security services contingent on a proportional commitment to strengthen the guards.

National guards are political institutions, not just military instruments. They can have far-ranging consequences for political stability and cohesion. While no panacea for the challenge of building effective states, they can play an important role in addressing security concerns and moving toward more meaningful power sharing.

Big mistake: Isis challenges the antichrist

Antichrist Calls Upon His Men

Iraq: Al-Baghdadi challenges Moqtada al-Sadr
International

May 21, 2015

A recorded audio message alleged to be the voice of Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State who also doubles as the leader of ISIS has been released. The message appreciated the efforts and the courage of the militants that took over the city of Ramadi and announced that the group’s next objective is the Iraqi capital and the important historical Shia city of Karbala despite Moqtada al-Sadr’s warnings that the latter is a no-go area.

Al-Baghdadi seems to refrain from publishing videos and has only delivered audio messages since claims of his death and injuries were reported in March.

The victory of ISIS in Ramadi could be short-lived as armed groups, mostly Shias, continue to gather around the city with state security forces for a counter offensive. Pushing them out could be a major battle because Iraqi forces left behind their weapons and vehicles when they were fleeing.

After the victory of ISIS in Ramadi, The Head of the Sadrist Movement Moqtada al-Sadr warned the extremist group not to wage their war in the cities of Karbala and Najaf because of the Shia holy shrines. He stressed that “the land of Iraq is the land of the holy sites (and) any believer must be loyal to Iraq and defend from such barbaric terrorist attacks.” ISIS is threatening to destroy the holy sites and shrines in the cities that it takes over but Sadr said “let the one who said it know that we will fill Iraq’s land with their rotting bodies if tried to desecrate any sacred place of this Holy Land.”

On Tuesday, a statement from the Baghdad Security Committee claimed that 95% of the Hashd al-Shaabi militia remains positioned in the capital, a force of up to 60,000 fighters.

Antichrist Threatens Islamic State (Rev 13)

)

Sadr threatens Islamic State
By Rudaw 7 hours ago

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Following the release of a propaganda video by the Islamic State saying it would capture the sacred Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala and bomb Shiite shrines inside the two cities, one of the most influential Shiite religious and political figures in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, has threatened the Islamic State in kind.

“If you touch our sacred shrines and cities, we will make Iraq full of your grimy bodies,” Sadr said in a statement.

“Those who claim they would attack our cities, they must expect a very tough battle,” he added.

Sadr called on Iraqi forces to take his statements seriously and to protect Shiite holy places from ISIS militants. Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army often battled with US forces between 2003 and 2011.

Hashd al-Shaabi Shiite militants have formed a force of an estimated 1,500 in Karbala and Najaf to protect the cities from ISIS.

On May 15 ISIS seized control of Ramadi, sending Iraqi forces racing out of the city in a major loss despite the support of US-led airstrikes targeting the extremists.

Antichrist Threatens Islamic State (Rev 13)

Sadr threatens Islamic State

By Rudaw 7 hours ago

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Following the release of a propaganda video by the Islamic State saying it would capture the sacred Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala and bomb Shiite shrines inside the two cities, one of the most influential Shiite religious and political figures in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, has threatened the Islamic State in kind.

“If you touch our sacred shrines and cities, we will make Iraq full of your grimy bodies,” Sadr said in a statement.

“Those who claim they would attack our cities, they must expect a very tough battle,” he added.
Sadr called on Iraqi forces to take his statements seriously and to protect Shiite holy places from ISIS militants. Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army often battled with US forces between 2003 and 2011.

Hashd al-Shaabi Shiite militants have formed a force of an estimated 1,500 in Karbala and Najaf to protect the cities from ISIS.

On May 15 ISIS seized control of Ramadi, sending Iraqi forces racing out of the city in a major loss despite the support of US-led airstrikes targeting the extremists.

Antichrist’s Men Fight ISIS Advance (Rev 13)

Shiite militias helping Iraq repel extremists’ advance

By ADAM SCHRECK, Associated Press

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has called for Iranian-allied Shiite militiamen to help drive Islamic State extremists from Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s vast Sunni-dominated Anbar province.
Sunday’s fall of the city 70 miles (115 kilometers) west of Baghdad was the biggest blow in the fight against the group since it overran much of the north and west of Iraq last summer.

A look at the militias:

WHO ARE THE MILITIAMEN?

There are a number of different Shiite militias active in Iraq, and they make up the bulk of the so-called Popular Mobilization Units called up to resist the IS group last year. They include Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the “League of the Righteous,” and the Badr Brigades, which is led by former Transportation Minister Hadi al-Amiri. Other militias include the Hezbollah Brigades, which is separate from Lebanon’s Hezbollah group but also has ties to Iran, and the Peace Brigades, which is loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Shiite militias played a key role in driving IS extremists from the northern city of Tikrit and other areas, raising hopes they can prove effective in Anbar too.

WHAT IS IRAN’S ROLE?

The militias each have ties to Iran, the Shiite powerhouse across Iraq’s border. The Islamic Republic has built an increasingly close relationship with Iraq’s Shiite-dominated leadership after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Sunni strongman Saddam Hussein, and Tehran’s support for the militias are a way to enhance its power in the country. The threat posed by the IS group has only enhanced Iran’s role, raising alarm in Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-led Gulf states. Tehran has deployed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, and other military advisers to Iraq to help coordinate the fight. The force Soleimani leads is a special unit of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard that is responsible for external operations.

WHY USE THE MILITIAS?

The militias bring additional firepower and much-needed fighting spirit to the battle. The U.S. spent billions of dollars training and equipping the Iraqi military between 2003 and 2011. But the army and police remain hobbled by spotty levels of professionalism, deep-seated corruption and low morale, particularly after their stunning collapse amid the IS onslaught in June 2014. The loss of Ramadi was reminiscent of last year’s rout, with Iraqi forces abandoning their posts and American-supplied equipment despite the help of U.S. airstrikes as the jihadists made a final push to take the city.

WILL THE MILITIAS’ INVOLVEMENT MAKE THINGS WORSE?

This is a big risk. Several of the militias fighting the IS group took part in retaliatory sectarian killings that roiled Iraq after the 2003 invasion. That bloodshed, which at its peak in 2006 and 2007 threatened to push Iraq to the brink of civil war, left deep scars in Iraqi society. Many Sunni Iraqis, even if they don’t side with the IS group, bristle at the rising influence of the militias and fear retribution from them. Rights activists and residents have blamed militias for looting, vandalism and other crimes in Sunni communities that they have helped retake from the IS group. Al-Abadi has vowed to safeguard Iraqis living in areas liberated from the militant group, pledging last month that their property and rights would be respected.

WHAT ABOUT THE SUNNIS?

Sunni tribal fighters, backed by U.S. troops, were instrumental in turning the tide against the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida that IS evolved from in the years before the 2011 U.S. military withdrawal. Many still oppose the group — IS fighters have been going door-to-door in Ramadi searching for police and pro-government Sunni fighters as it tries to solidify control with deadly purges. But distrust against Iraq’s Shiite-led government also runs deep. Many Sunnis feel marginalized and resent Baghdad’s reluctance to better arm the tribesmen, although sentiments may be changing. The Cabinet said Tuesday it would give them weapons in coordination with the local government.
___

Associated Press writer Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad contributed reporting.
Read more at http://www.wral.com/shiite-militias-helping-iraq-repel-extremists-advance/14655444/#s9GEYdvoZ8xAAyMF.99

Iraqi Horn Takes Ramadi (Dan 8:5)

  
ISIS takes Ramadi as reinforcements surge into city

By Hamdi Alkhshali and Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
Updated 5:02 PM ET, Sun May 17, 2015

(CNN)The key Iraqi city of Ramadi fell to ISIS on Sunday after government security forces pulled out of a military base on the west side of the city, the mayor and a high-ranking security official said.
The ISIS advances came after militants detonated a series of morning car bomb blasts, Mayor Dalaf al-Kubaisy and a high-ranking Iraqi security official said. The explosions forced Iraqi security forces and tribal fighters to retreat to the city’s east, they said.

Clashes have raged in the beleaguered capital of Anbar province for months as Iraqi and allied forces battle ISIS militants for control of the strategically located city, which is just 110 km (70 miles) west of Baghdad.

Ramadi, the largest city in western Iraq, is just a few miles from an Iraqi army headquarters that ISIS blew up in March.

ISIS took over parts of the city in the first half of last year, placing it at the heart of a deadly tug of war ever since.

And officials said Sunday that the fight for the city is far from over.

Even as ISIS took control, pockets of resistance remain inside the city, said Muhannad Haimour, a spokesman for the Anbar governor.

While ISIS declared victory and claimed full control of the city, the Iraqi Federal Police vowed to stamp out ISIS in the region. In a statement, police said Brig. Gen. Raid Shakir Joudat was on the way “commanding a huge force consisting of various weapons to cleanse Anbar province from terrorist gangs.”

State TV: Iraqi forces on the way

Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, is also preparing to send in reinforcements, according to a statement read on Iraq’s state-run Iraqiya TV Sunday.

He’s ordered the al-Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary force to prepare for deployment against ISIS militants in Anbar province. It will be joined by Iraqi security forces and Sunni tribal volunteers. The decision to mobilize the paramiltary force, which is Iranian-backed and predominantly Shiite, follows a request for help from the Anbar provincial governor, provincial council, tribal leaders and religious clerics.

On Thursday, ISIS pushed into Ramadi, using armored bulldozers and at least 10 suicide bombings to burst through gates and blast through walls, according to a security source who has since left the city.

Dozens of militants followed them into the city center and ISIS raised its trademark black flag over the provincial government building.

On Friday, the United States announced that it was “expediting” weapon shipments to Iraq because of the current fighting in Ramadi.

What are the implications of an ISIS takeover?

Whether or not Ramadi will stay in the hands of ISIS remains to be seen, analysts said Sunday.

Some U.S. officials have tried recently to downplay the significance of Ramadi, saying they are not focused on the city.

But retired Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, said the situation in Ramadi is a significant sign that forces fighting ISIS need to take a different tack.

“Ramadi’s a bad news story, period,” he said. “It’s not going well. The military units we’ve trained in the Iraqi army are basically laying down their guns and running.”

But the significance of the city falling may have less to do with the militant group, and more to do with the strength of Iraqi forces, CNN counterterrorism analyst Philip Mudd said.

“This is not about ISIS. This is about whether the Iraqi military has the capability, and more importantly, the will to face up with ISIS,” he said. “They’ve had some successes, the military has. This is a setback. It’s going to take years to figure out who will prevail.”

CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh, Jim Sciutto, Fredricka Whitfield, Barbara Starr, Ralph Ellis, Pat St. Claire and Jason Hanna contributed to this report.