U.S. and Asaib Ahl al-Haq Allies Against ISIS: Great Satan Shows Multiple Personalities

Something shifted in U.S. policy vis-a-vis Islamic State at the beginning of August. That is when ISIS took Mosul Dam from the pesh merga and it looked like the capital of Kurdistan, Erbil, was in danger of being overrun. ISIS was also targeting the Yazidis, scattering their communities and creating a humanitarian crisis on Mount Sinjar.

It was then that the United States shifted from basically ignoring Islamic State to suddenly sounding the alarm. The extent of this shift is on full display today in the frontpage article by Tim Arango and Azam Ahmed, "U.S. and Iran Unlikely Allies in Iraq Battle." U.S. air power operating in concert with Kurdish pesh merga, Iraqi Army and, most importantly, Iraqi Shiite jihadi militia broke the siege of Shiite Turkmen villages clustered around Amerli. The Shiite militias included Sadrists, Badr Ogranization and Asaib Ahl al-Haq:

The Obama administration has tried to avoid being seen as taking sides in a sectarian war, because the Shiite militias are especially feared by Iraq’s Sunnis.

But for the weekend at least, the realities on the ground appeared to override any concerns of effectively supporting the militias.

ISIS has been rampaging through Iraq, beheading prisoners, carrying out massacres of Shiites and expelling hundreds of thousands of residents. The Shiite militias have been accused of some recent abuses against Sunnis, but so far have avoided large-scale revenge killings.

Among the militias fighting for Amerli are Asaib Ahl al-Haq, considered the most fearsome of Iraq’s Shiite militias, and a group linked to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, one of the Americans’ most unyielding enemies during the occupation. Those groups are supported by Iran. 

Asaib, a militia that was a particularly fierce opponent of the United States as it was winding down its military role in Iraq, was said to have taken on the most prominent role in the fighting for Amerli, in Salahuddin Province.

“I would like to thank the jihadists from Asaib Ahl al-Haq, as they are sacrificing their lives to save Amerli,” said Mahdi Taqi, a member of the provincial council in Salahuddin. 

Naeem al-Aboudi, the spokesman for Asaib, said, “today is a great happiness and victory for all Iraqis. Iraqi security forces, volunteers and resistance brigades have proved their ability to defeat ISIS.”

And what makes this ironic and signals a sea change in U.S. policy in Iraq, Syria and Iran is Asaib Ahl al-Haq is sponsored by Iran's Quds Force, an American bête noire akin to Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad or Hezbollah.

The U.S. is denying coordination with the Iraqi Shiite militias, but, make no mistake, coordination is occurring. How it works is that the U.S. communicates through the pesh merga and the Iraqi Army who then communicate to the Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Sadrists and Badr Organization:

As night fell Sunday, the fighting was still raging in Qaryat Salam, a village to the north of Amerli. At a makeshift forward base, set up amid half-constructed homes and the hulk of a new soccer stadium, Kurdish pesh merga forces fired a barrage of artillery, mortars and rockets. A line of trucks roared into the area, their headlights smeared with mud to dull the brightness. An assortment of Kurdish fighters, Iraqi Army soldiers and Shiite militia members, who seemed to be working together in a highly coordinated way, passed by. 

Several Iranian military advisers were also seen, according to a pesh merga fighter. 

“We are cooperating with the pesh merga and other military forces,” said Abd Kadum al-Mousaw, a militia fighter. “From each force there is a commander who is a member of a higher committee that makes decisions.” 

Pesh merga commanders said they had cleared about half of the village, but were facing stiff resistance from the militants, “who were fighting like madmen.”

Of course this has set off some hand-wringing in the Deep State, which, hitched as it is to Israel and Saudi Arabia, is addicted to Iran hatred. What better way to note this than have the disgraced former DCIA David Petraeus bleat the conventional wisdom?

David Petraeus, a former top American military commander in Iraq who led the United States troop surge in 2007, months ago warned against such possibilities as the Obama administration, reeling from the fall of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, weighed military action against ISIS. 

“This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias or a Shia-on-Sunni Arab fight,” he said at a security conference in London in June. “It has to be a fight of all of Iraq against extremists, who do happen to be Sunni Arabs.”

There is a tendency on the anti-imperialist left to see a grand intelligence at the Deep State control board. What the U.S. turnabout on Islamic State shows is that there is not a monolithic master plan at work here.

In Iraq USG is working with a Quds Force proxy, while in Libya it is working with Sunni salafis backed by Qatar and Turkey in a proxy war against Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt. Then in Syria USG is working with the Saudis -- the Syrian National Coalition is a joint Saudi-U.S. front group.

It is not multi-dimensional chess being played by Great Satan; it is chaos.

Michael Brown: Race-Based Peonage Exposed

The shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown at the beginning of the month has revealed much that is shameful about how we live our lives here within the United States of America. All were witness to the St. Louis County peace officers' militarized, attack-oriented response to the spontaneous protests that erupted following the shooting. And all have had to come to terms with the inherent racism of a system that allows for a black-majority city like Ferguson to be policed by a nearly all-white law enforcement agency.

What I have found encouraging is that there has been very little defense in the mainstream media of our rotten, racist, militarized status quo. The evidence is too overwhelming to refute. People can be bamboozled about what goes on overseas, but it becomes more difficult to convince people of something that goes against their direct daily experience: in this case, that the police are angels of light and good order and there is no racial bias to found in our public places. Fox News, the few times I caught a glimpse of it, made some passes at playing "blame the victim," but it rang hollow. You could feel the skittishness emanating from the executive suites. You don't want to be perceived as lily white in a global marketplace that is multiracial; it is bad for business. If a television network goes too far in fomenting race hatred, an advertising boycott campaign can't be far behind.

A particularly illuminating story by Campbell Robertson and Joseph Goldstein, "In Aftermath of Missouri Protests, Skepticism About the Prospects for Change," appeared in the newspaper yesterday; it provides an accessible nuts and bolts explanation about how institutional racism works:

MAPLEWOOD, Mo. — On Monday night, just a few hours after Michael Brown was laid to rest, an amiable judge sat in the City Council chambers here and weighed in on the traffic violations and petty crimes, one by one, of more than a hundred people. At least two-thirds of those waiting were black, roughly a reverse racial image of the demographics of Maplewood itself. 

The scene was banal compared to the tear gas and outrage over the last two weeks in Ferguson, 13 miles away. But it is in courts like this that the daily frustrations that led in 

Young black men, who in many towns in St. Louis County are pulled over at a rate greater than whites, routinely find themselves in the patchwork of municipal courts here, without lawyers and unable to pay the fines levied for their traffic violations. Many end up being passed from jail to jail around the county until they can pay their fines and in some cases other administrative fees, a revenue source on which some towns are growing increasingly reliant.

“It angers people, because it seems like they’re just messing with you,” said Cameron Lester, a 22-year-old college student who knew Mr. Brown, and days earlier was protesting his death. He described how an unpaid $75 ticket once turned into days behind bars in two different police stations and hundreds of dollars in fees. He was skeptical about change. 

“Will it make a difference?” he asked. “Same thing as Trayvon Martin. Where’s that now?”part to the turmoil in Ferguson begin to fester.  

What Roberston and Goldstein describe is our present-day system of peonage, the way in which white supremacy was enforced in the South after the Civil War. Newly freed blacks were rounded up as "vagrants" and forced into involuntary servitude or contract labor. Southern states enshrined this in laws known as the "Black Codes."

As Robertson and Goldenstein explain the current version of the Black Codes begins with "driving while black." After a traffic citation is written, a no-show at court turns into an arrest warrant and additional penalties and fees:

That there is racial disparity in police stops is borne out by official numbers. 

In Maplewood, according to a 2013 report by the state attorney general, black motorists were searched or arrested during stops at more than twice the rate of whites. Yet searches of whites and blacks were almost equally likely to turn up contraband. Messages for the police chief in Maplewood were not returned. 

In the city of Hazelwood, blacks were twice as likely as whites to be searched during a police stop, and nearly three times as likely to be arrested, while searches of whites were about one and a half times as likely to yield contraband. 

City officials, pointing out that there is extensive training to avoid racial profiling, said these numbers cannot be interpreted without context.

“If our stops may reflect a higher percentage of people, perhaps that reflects the percentage of people who are coming through Hazelwood,” said Gregg Hall, the city’s police chief. 

Many of the towns have come to rely on court fines; in St. Ann, which has a population of around 13,000 and a 27-person jail, court fines and fees make up well over a third of the general fund revenues.

Matt Conley, the St. Ann city administrator, said that a rise in the number of tickets there came from a crackdown on speeding because of frequent accidents. 

“Nobody is forcing people to go out there and speed and commit traffic issues,” he said, adding that radar cameras cannot detect race. 

When a person fails to appear and pay, here as in many other places, a warrant is issued and that person’s license is suspended. In the hodgepodge of cities that make up St. Louis County, some drivers may have multiple warrants. In Ferguson, more than one and a half warrants have been issued for every resident. And as the warrants stack up, so do the fines: Not showing up to pay a $90 taillight violation means a failure-to-appear warrant with its own fee of $100 or more; each successive failure-to-appear warrant adds to that; and if there is a stop, there are incarceration fees and towing fees.

In the end, said Brendan Roediger, an assistant professor at St. Louis University Law School, a person who had trouble coming up with $90 might owe a jurisdiction well over a thousand dollars.

“The police aren’t actually pulling people over to find contraband,” he said. “They’re pulling people over to see if they have warrants. And they always do. If you run a system that ultimately makes every black person in your town have a warrant, then racial profiling does work.”

State Senator Jamilah Nasheed, who represents part of the city of St. Louis, said the racial disparity in traffic stops, the unwillingness of cities to consider ability to pay and the fact that small city budgets are increasingly reliant on court fines show how officials have learned to “sustain their municipalities by pulling young black men over.”

This is race-based peonage plain and simple, a system where involuntary servitude is used to maintain the local power structure:

Making the rounds,” the “muni-shuffle,” the “jail hop”: Talk to a young black man in northern St. Louis County and he knows what this is. When someone is stopped on a warrant in any of the municipalities in north St. Louis County, he knows he is going to jail everywhere he has a warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket. Whether the full amount of the fine — often in addition to hundreds of dollars in fees — is still due after a few days in jail is up to the judge. 

“You sit in jail for a week and you get out and you still owe it,” said Brandon Ghoston, 33, who works at a car dealership and has done the rounds himself. 

His brother, Nikos Chatman, who paints airplanes at the St. Louis Downtown Airport, has a ritual: “If I know I have warrants in five or six different places, and I get pulled over, the first thing I do is light a cigarette because I know I’m gone, I’m going to do the rounds.” 

“I’m 30 years old and I’ve never been locked up for anything but a traffic ticket,” Mr. Chatman added. “I’ve been locked up a lot of times.”

How to change a system that has been around basically for 150 years -- since the end of the Civil War? The prevalent line is always "Get out and vote." But winning elections, hard as that is, is not even half the struggle. Once the right people have been elected to office, you have to keep the voting public engaged in the change process; you have to keep the elected official(s) engaged; and you have to combat the push-back from the entrenched status quo, the abiding "deep state" of things.

As long as we have this simplistic, Cracker Jack cartoon vision of civic engagement -- "Vote the bums out! -- nothing will change.

"Deep Politics" Revealed

A must-read story that appears in today's New York Times is "Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi" by Ben Hubbard and David Kirkpatrick. The power outages, gasoline shortages and high crime due to absent police that marked Mohamed Morsi's presidency have miraculously disappeared in one week's time. It turns out that Tamarod, the youth movement that gathered over 20 million anti-Morsi signatures that culminated in the June 30 protest that preceded the coup, was critically underwritten by billionaire businessman Naguib Sawiris. According to Hubbard and Kirkpatrick,

Mr. Sawiris, one of Egypt’s richest men and a titan of the old establishment, said Wednesday that he had supported an upstart group called “tamarrod,” Arabic for “rebellion,” that led a petition drive seeking Mr. Morsi’s ouster. He donated use of the nationwide offices and infrastructure of the political party he built, the Free Egyptians. He provided publicity through his popular television network and his major interest in Egypt’s largest private newspaper. He even commissioned the production of a popular music video that played heavily on his network. 

“Tamarrod did not even know it was me!” he said. “I am not ashamed of it.” 

He said he had publicly predicted that ousting Mr. Morsi would bolster Egypt’s sputtering economy because it would bring in billions of dollars in aid from oil-rich monarchies afraid that the Islamist movement might spread to their shores. By Wednesday, a total of $12 billion had flowed in from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. “That will take us for 12 months with no problem,” Mr. Sawiris said.

I was always a little skeptical, having done a fair amount of signature gathering in my day, about the ability of Tamarod to orchestrate a huge petition drive solely on a volunteer, grass-roots basis. Refreshingly, in relationship to what is transpiring in Egypt, I have seen mentioned in the last couple of days the "deep state." (Peter Dale Scott might be finally getting his due.) Thomas Friedman mentioned it in yesterday's column, "Egypt at the Brink":

The Brotherhood posits that “Islam is the answer.” The military favors a return to the deep state of old. But more religion alone is not the answer for Egypt today and while the military-dominated deep state may provide law and order and keep Islamists down, it can’t provide the kind of fresh thinking and educational, entrepreneurial, social and legal reforms needed to empower and unleash Egypt’s considerable human talent and brainpower.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous referred to it yesterday on Democracy Now! And then this morning, Hubbard and Kirkpatrick:

When Mr. Mubarak was removed after nearly 30 years in office in 2011, the bureaucracy he built stayed largely in place. Many business leaders, also a pillar of the old government, retained their wealth and influence. 

Despite coming to power through the freest elections in Egyptian history, Mr. Morsi was unable to extend his authority over the sprawling state apparatus, and his allies complained that what they called the “deep state” was undermining their efforts at governing. 

While he failed to broaden his appeal and build any kind of national consensus, he also faced an active campaign by those hostile to his leadership, including some of the wealthiest and most powerful pillars of the Mubarak era.

This is "deep politics," how the state really operates. I remember in the aftermath of the WTO protests how the police force pulled back and disappeared from my neighborhood, Capitol Hill, which was protester terra firma and a main source of resistance to the police and national guard crackdown.

It now appears that the Egyptian military does indeed plan to pursue a pre-Arab Spring approach to governing. It's rounding up and arresting Muslim Brotherhood leadership and continuing to detain protesters from the Monday morning massacre in Nasr City. David Kirkpatrick has the story, "Egypt’s Government Broadens Its Accusations Against Islamists."

The New York Times has a solid unsigned editorial which highlights the issues at play: the ongoing military crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and the flawed, hasty transition process announced on Tuesday and how both will likely result in civil war. At this point, the way things are shaping up, with the military -- bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, U.A.E. and Kuwait -- seemingly committed to rolling back the Arab Spring, the choice appears to be violence or obeisance.

The Plan: Erase Arab Spring

The way it works is that things happen. Events take place. We read about them online or in the newspaper. Sometimes we are told that there is a pattern unfolding, but usually the news is presented without much rhyme or reason. Holders of great wealth and the large governments that bolster such interests prefer that the "deep politics" stay buried.

Reading this morning two stories in the New York Times national edition -- Robert F. Worth's "Egypt is Arena for Influence of Arab Rivals" and David Kirkpatrick's "Egypt Leaders’ Transition Plan Meets With Swift Criticism" -- it's pretty obvious what the plan is: Return to the days before the Arab Spring.

A lot is being made recently about the sudden decline in influence of the Qataris, who backed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and took the lead in organizing jihadists to fight in Syria, and the return of Saudi Arabia as the dominant regional player. I think this is a sidebar.

The Arab Spring is about more than monarchical Gulf states jockeying for influence and the electoral prowess of long-repressed Islamist organizations; it's about the aspirations of the young for gainful employment and a seat at the table where decisions are made. None of these aspirations are being met nor will they be. Take a look at the new Egyptian prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi. He's a neoliberal economist. This is from David Kirkpatrick's story:

The new prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, is a prominent economist who served as finance minister under an earlier interim government. A founding member of the Social Democratic Party, he has criticized former President Hosni Mubarak and Mr. Morsi as failing to move fast enough to open up the economy, reform Egypt’s bloated and unaffordable subsidy programs and provide for the poor. 

Mr. Beblawi, 77, is ideally suited to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund over a package of changes tied to a pending $4.8 billion loan, a deal that seemed out of reach after Mr. Morsi’s ouster but is still considered essential to save the economy. With a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, Mr. Beblawi has written three books on Middle East economics, worked as a senior official of the United Nations and advised the Arab Monetary Fund. He resigned after four months as finance minister under the previous military-led transitional government — after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster — after soldiers shot dozens of mostly Coptic Christian demonstrators and the generals blamed them for scaring their troops. 

Before the current crackdown, Mr. Beblawi had also welcomed the overthrow of Mr. Mubarak as providing an opportunity for Islamists to enter the democratic process. “The positive thing that resulted from this was that it gave a chance for the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam, which have always been persecuted and wrongfully treated for a long time,” he said in an interview published last month in an English language-newspaper here.

So this is the narrative we're being fed now: "Arab Spring meant that it was time to let political Islam have a shot at governance. We gave it a year, several if you factor in the transition. Now it's time to go back to the way things were." This is what the leaders in Jeddah and Tel Aviv and D.C. and Brussels are banking on. And it seems to me to be awfully weak. Certainly they must know that this is not going to fly with the masses. But I suppose that their calculation is that the only popular forces organized enough to pose a problem are the Islamist parties. (The holy warriors of Al Qaeda are in the pocket of the GCC member states, so no problem there.) The youthful masses who want economic justice and clean government but lack organization can be dealt with by force. Crackdown hard and they'll shut up and fall into line. This is the plan apparently. And I don't think it's a wise one.

If you want to send an email to Congress and the President, telling them to obey the law and call a coup a coup and cut aid to Egypt, you can go to the Just Foreign Policy web site.