The Rebellion in Iraq Continues

The Western mainstream media has been so captive of the anti-Iranian narrative regarding the month-plus protests in Iraq that it is hard to find any news about the protesters' formidable Iraqi advocates, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr. Reuters reports today in "Iraqi forces kill three protesters, cleric warns of crisis" that 

Iraq’s top Shi’ite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on Friday for politicians to hurry up in reforming electoral laws because the changes would be the only way to resolve weeks of deadly unrest.

“We affirm the importance of speeding up the passing of the electoral law and the electoral commission law because this represents the country moving past the big crisis,” his representative said during a sermon in the holy city of Kerbala.

Sistani, who rarely weighs in on politics except in times of crisis, holds massive influence over public opinion in Shi’ite-majority Iraq. He also repeated his view that the protesters had legitimate demands and should not be met with violence.

Alissa Rubin had an excellent story the other day (see "‘Our Patience Is Over’: Why Iraqis Are Protesting") about Sadr City's important role in the Baghdad protests. She mentions that

Most Sadr City residents, like many people in southern Iraq, are followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a nationalist and populist Shiite cleric and leader whose family long resisted the authority of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

[snip] 

Sadr City today remains armed and ready to defend its own.

The Sadr Organization, of which Abu Tiba is a member, and which has ties to Mr. al-Sadr’s militia, is helping to coordinate the protests from the neighborhood. Its members are thick on the ground at the protests, controlling strategic positions.

 At the outset of the protests, in the beginning of October, al-Sadr and al-Sistani were regularly mentioned as being on the side of the protesters. Then this fact largely disappeared from the coverage. If you were pro-Iranian, the protests were dismissed as another Western plot; if you were pro-American, an anti-Iranian rebellion. But in reality it is a real people-power uprising, a promising reemergence of the Arab Spring.

Sistani Says No to Kurdish Independence

The spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite population, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has weighed in on Masoud Barzani's quixotic independence gambit for Iraqi Kurdistan. As reported this afternoon in the Washington Post by Mustafa Salim, Aaso Ameen Schwan and Tamer El-Ghobashy, "Iraq bans flights to Kurdish region as rift grows over independence bid":

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s tough reaction to the Kurdish ballot received a boost from the country’s highest Shiite religious authority, the influential Ayatollah Ali Sistani. In a sign of the growing anxiety in Iraq’s power centers over the vote, Sistani’s representative used his weekly Friday sermon to criticize the referendum as destabilizing to both Arabs and Kurds, arguing that it invites international meddling in Iraq’s affairs.

“I call on the government to consider the Kurds’ constitutional rights in their measures,” Sistani’s representative said, sounding a conciliatory tone. At the same time, Sistani rejected any challenge to Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Sistani has not appeared in public in several years, but he wields considerable influence in Iraq’s politics. An edict he issued in 2014 urging Shiites to take up arms in defense of Baghdad and southern Iraq during an Islamic State onslaught is largely credited with mustering a force strong enough to stem the extremist group’s blitz in the country.

As far as I can tell, Ayatollah Sistani's political instincts are close to infallible. If he says no to Kurdish independence, chances are an independent Iraqi Kurdistan is not going to happen.

Obama Impugns Menendez's Virtue + U.S. Mendacity on Iran's Nuclear Program + KSA Spotlighted for Flogging Blogger + Dying Oceans

A juicy morsel this morning from Michael Shear, "Obama and Senator Robert Menendez Spar on How to Handle Iran," about a mano-a-mano face-off between the feckless POTUS Obama and the ultra-corrupt AIPAC shill Bob Menendez. It took place yesterday during a Senate Democrat Issues Conference at the Baltimore Hilton. According to Shear,

[Obama's] exchange with Mr. Menendez occurred near the end of a question-and-answer session after Senator Angus King of Maine — an independent who caucuses with the Democrats — asked for an update to the nuclear talks.

According to one of the senators and another person who was present, the president urged lawmakers to stop pursuing sanctions, saying such a move would undermine his authority and could derail the talks. Mr. Obama also said that such a provocative action could lead international observers to blame the Americans, rather than the Iranians, if the talks collapsed before the June 30 deadline.

The president said he understood the pressures that senators face from donors and others, but he urged the lawmakers to take the long view rather than make a move for short-term political gain, according to the senator. Mr. Menendez, who was seated at a table in front of the podium, stood up and said he took “personal offense.” 

Mr. Menendez told the president that he had worked for more than 20 years to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and had always been focused on the long-term implications. Mr. Menendez also warned the president that sanctions could not be imposed quickly if Congress waited to act and the talks failed, according to two people who were present.

There you have it, assuming the account is accurate: POTUS acknowledging that Iranian sanctions are donor driven, and in response, Bob Menendez, a prime recipient of AIPAC largesse and a co-sponsor of legislation calling for additional sanctions against Iran, bolts upright and claims his integrity has been impugned.

For a helpful summary of U.S. perfidy in regards to Iran's nuclear program take a moment to read Gareth Porter's "Four Ways the West Got the Iran Nuclear Issue Wrong." From the outset the idea that Iran has been secretly pursuing nuclear weapons has been a canard:

The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.

Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired. 

But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it.

Porter goes on to list several obvious and egregious U.S. intelligence blunders. But the principal argument for the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program is the Grand Ayatollah's fatwa:

The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.

That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.

The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has landed some unwelcome attention over its flogging of a blogger, Raif Badawi. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, yesterday called for a halt. Nicholas Kristof devoted a column, "An Islamic Reformer, Lashed," to it the other day, placing Badawi's flogging in the proper context of KSA's support for Islamic fundamentalism, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and Free Speech. It is hard for the United States to make a stink over human rights and press freedom in nations it regards as adversaries (Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela et al.) when a principal ally, if not the principal ally, is caning a blogger 50 lashes every Friday until 1000 lashes have been meted out (19 more Fridays, the end of May).

Fariborz Saremi has a piece, "Iran’s Changing Role," about the Islamic Republic's improved status among Gulf Cooperation Council member states relative to KSA and Bahrain:

Political and economic relations between the smaller Gulf states and Iran are rather diverse: Kuwait and Iran, for example have had positive relations since 1991 and are currently expanding their economic ties. Oman and Qatar have a long history of fairly good relations towards Iran. While the UAE has had a troublesome relation with Iran in the past, in particular due to the three island dispute, their relationship is currently improving. All this indicates that Saudi Arabia might not be able to hold its own house together when it comes to confrontation with a regional power like Iran. Many GCC states welcomed the election of President Rouhani but remain skeptical about the depth of change in Tehran especially the overall influence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Before signing off, let's quote at length from Carl Zimmer's "Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says" about a big, new study published yesterday in Science, "Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean":

There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.

Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide, partly as a result of climate-change-driven warming.

Some fish are migrating to cooler waters already. Black sea bass, once most common off the coast of Virginia, have moved up to New Jersey. Less fortunate species may not be able to find new ranges. At the same time, carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic.

“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Dr. Pinsky said. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”

Fragile ecosystems like mangroves are being replaced by fish farms, which are projected to provide most of the fish we consume within 20 years. Bottom trawlers scraping large nets across the sea floor have already affected 20 million square miles of ocean, turning parts of the continental shelf to rubble. Whales may no longer be widely hunted, the analysis noted, but they are now colliding more often as the number of container ships rises.

Mining operations, too, are poised to transform the ocean. Contracts for seabed mining now cover 460,000 square miles underwater, the researchers found, up from zero in 2000. Seabed mining has the potential to tear up unique ecosystems and introduce pollution into the deep sea.

The oceans are so vast that their ecosystems may seem impervious to change. But Dr. McClenachan warned that the fossil record shows that global disasters have wrecked the seas before. “Marine species are not immune to extinction on a large scale,” she said.

Until now, the seas largely have been spared the carnage visited on terrestrial species, the new analysis also found.

The fossil record indicates that a number of large animal species became extinct as humans arrived on continents and islands. For example, the moa, a giant bird that once lived on New Zealand, was wiped out by arriving Polynesians in the 1300s, probably within a century.

But it was only after 1800, with the Industrial Revolution, that extinctions on land really accelerated.

Humans began to alter the habitat that wildlife depended on, wiping out forests for timber, plowing under prairie for farmland, and laying down roads and railroads across continents.

Species began going extinct at a much faster pace. Over the past five centuries, researchers have recorded 514 animal extinctions on land. But the authors of the new study found that documented extinctions are far rarer in the ocean.

Before 1500, a few species of seabirds are known to have vanished. Since then, scientists have documented only 15 ocean extinctions, including animals such as the Caribbean monk seal and the Steller’s sea cow.

While these figures are likely underestimates, Dr. McCauley said that the difference was nonetheless revealing.

“Fundamentally, we’re a terrestrial predator,” he said. “It’s hard for an ape to drive something in the ocean extinct.”

Iraq's Parliamentary Standoff + Avakov Parades in Slovyansk

Yesterday an announcement was made that the Iraqi Council of Representatives would not meet for another five weeks, delaying the formation of a new government until August. After an outcry from Iraq's allies and its religious establishment a new statement was made. Parliament will convene this Sunday. According to the Alissa Rubin and Suadad al-Salhy, reporting in "Iraqi Parliament Wobbles Over Forming Government," the "Maliki Must Go" motto is a facade masking Sunni and Kurdish backroom demands -- Kirkuk for the Kurds and control of the defense ministry for the Sunnis -- that if acquiesced to by the Shiite majority will amount to the de facto partition of Iraq:

“The session was postponed until Aug. 12 because of the disagreement and the conflict between the blocs,” said Aboud al-Essawi, a member of Mr. Maliki’s predominantly Shiite State of Law party, referring to other political parties.

The Sunnis said they were ready to proceed, but wanted the Shiites to make the first move. “We are still saying that we are ready to present our candidate for speaker whenever the National Alliance presents its candidate for prime minister, and it can be anyone else but not Maliki,” said Dafar al-Ani, a spokesman for the main Sunni bloc, referring to a coalition of Shiite parties.

“The National Alliance asked for more time to make their final decision,” he added.

Beneath the blame game are real differences in what is acceptable to different groups. For instance, a large number of Shiites now want to remove Mr. Maliki, but his party won the most parliamentary seats, so he cannot be summarily kicked aside. And there are differences of opinion about who might be an acceptable successor, first to all the Shiite blocs, but then also to the Sunnis and the Kurds.

Mr. Maliki says that removing him just as Iraq is trying to reconstitute its demoralized army would undermine those in the fight. While that might seem a convenient argument to prolong his time in power, at least some lawmakers appear to agree.

Even a senior leader in the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a Shiite party that now opposes Mr. Maliki, said that “replacing Maliki now could be seen as a victory for the terrorists, and it also could adversely reflect the security leadership’s morale because if Maliki is not there anymore, they could be dismissed or accused of corruption.”

The Sunnis are demanding an amnesty for the tens of thousands of Sunni imprisoned — unjustly, they say, in most cases — by the Maliki government and a bigger say in how the country is run, including its security services. While some Shiites might be willing to give that to them, others are adamantly opposed.

The Kurds believe they have an absolute right to include Kirkuk and some surrounding disputed villages in the autonomous Kurdish region, but neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites want to cede that ground, especially since the Kurds have made it plain that their ultimate goal is independence.

While each group has defensible reasons for its views, taken together they amount to stasis.

I think Maliki is gone. The only way that he stays is if the Shiite National Alliance bloc agrees to all the demands of the Sunnis and Kurds. Then all the fulminating about the menace, the corruption of Maliki will disappear overnight and he will be touted as a singularly necessary statesman. But majority of the Shiites that constitute the National Alliance are not going to go for this. The next largest Shiite political formation to Maliki's State of Law coalition is the Sadrist Al-Ahrar Bloc whose raison d'etre is dump Maliki. Then there is the clerical establishment's willingness to part ways with the prime minister. Granted, Sistani has not come right out and said "Maliki must go," but this is only because the Grand Ayatollah does not believe it is his role to publicly dictate the official composition of parliamentary government.

My understanding last week was that the National Alliance had its PM lined up, and it wasn't Maliki. Realizing this and not wanting the Shiites to succeed so quickly in forming a new government the Kurds and Sunnis walked out. Now the Kurds and Sunnis want the Shiites to "show" their candidate for prime minister before they "show" their candidates for speaker (Sunnis) and president (Kurds). The Shiites are loath to do this because once they name Maliki's replacement, if the Sunnis and Kurds continue to delay, Maliki will be the lamest of lame ducks; his authority will be gone, and his ability to actively prosecute the war against Islamic State will be nil.

Absent complete capitulation by the National Alliance to Sunni and Kurdish demands, expect the stasis to continue.

Some words about Ukraine this morning. David Herszenhorn writes from Kiev, "Ukraine Rebels Are Retreating for Last Stand," about Strelkov's forces, retreating from Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, blowing up bridges leading to Donetsk and erecting barricades around that city as well as Luhansk. The junta military is establishing a blockade.

Two things. First, a passage reaffirming the position that Russia has already won the conflict, if one believes, as I do, that this conflict has always been about Germany's economic alignment with Russia. The United States wants to block that, wants to keep the European Union under the sway exclusively of the military North Atlantic alliance. The U.S has failed.

Negotiations have faltered since Mr. Poroshenko called off the cease-fire, saying it was playing into the rebels’ hands. An abridged session in Kiev on Sunday involved representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but Mr. Lavrov described it as pointless without the participation of militants, who he noted could not travel to the capital “for obvious reasons.” 

Echoing Mr. Lavrov, the German government on Monday issued an urgent plea, calling for a rapid, unconditional and mutual cessation of hostilities, and said it was urgent to organize talks that included the separatists. However, in a television interview, the deputy chief of staff of Mr. Poroshenko’s administration, Valeriy Chaly, said Ukraine would follow its own course.

Finally, I am very critical of the Gray Lady and the reporters who labor for her. Yes, these reporters are careerists; but even when they are scribbling the party line, they often find ways to subvert the official narrative. Occasionally, they are even brilliant, as is Herszenhorn at the end of his story when he describes the Goebbelsian junta interior minister Arsen Avakov taking a victory lap in a shattered, terrorized, bomb-strewn Slovyansk:

On Monday afternoon in Slovyansk, Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, stood under a statue of Lenin, promising to bring the “terrorists” to justice and restore basic services to the city by the end of the day.

Residents greeted him with questions about reconstruction and compensation for damage as a light mist coated the central square. Some shed tears at the mere mention of running water.

“What kind of future is there for Ukraine?” one elderly woman in a blue plastic poncho asked the minister.

“A beautiful one,” Mr. Avakov said, flashing a smile.

But beauty was nowhere to be found in Slovyansk, where broken glass, severed electrical cables and a wasteland of unexploded mortar shells define the landscape. Control came at the expense of untold destruction.

Outside a gold-domed church on the northern edge of the square, Ukrainian soldiers distributed water from the back of a truck. While thirsty residents accepted the aid, their attitudes toward the new armed arrivals were decidedly mixed.

Sveta Zinovyeva, 17, spent the end of her school year holed up in a basement with her family. She said she had read romance novels to distract from the “horrible fear.”

Obama Dithers, Sistani Acts, the Gray Lady Blames Maliki

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued the call to arms. According to "Iraqi Shiite Cleric Issues Call to Arms," by Alissa Rubin, Suadad al-Salhy and Alan Cowell:

In a statement during Friday prayers from the representative of the most senior Shiite cleric in the country, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, said it was “the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon, to hold it to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.” 

The representative of Mr. Sistani, Sheikh Abdul Mehdi al-Karbalaie, speaking in Karbala, one of Iraq’s holiest cities for Shiites, said the numbers of fighters and volunteers “must fill the gaps within the security forces,” but he cautioned they should not do more that, stopping short of calling for a general armed response to the rebellion led by the Sunni jihadi group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

He emphasized that all Iraqis, not only Shias should join the fight, underscoring that everyone needed to pull together or the country could fall into sectarian warfare. However, it seemed unlikely that many Sunnis would be moved to do so, especially in an atmosphere of deepening distrust between the sects. And many Sunnis feel squeezed as well because they have little sympathy for the extremist militants from ISIS. 

The call came as the militants had fanned out to the east, at least temporarily seizing two towns near the Iranian border, Saadiyah and Jalawla. But, several hours after the capture of the towns, security officials in Baghdad said that government troops, backed by Kurdish forces, had counterattacked, forcing the insurgents to withdraw in a rare victory.

The capture of the towns of Saadiyah and Jalawla came a day after Kurdish forces further north seized on the accelerating rout of government troops to take over the oil city of Kirkuk, long contested between Iraqi Kurds and the country’s Arab leaders in Baghdad.

If Syria is any indication, expect the Shiite militias to triumph over the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadis. ISIS is by and large a mercenary force, albeit a very successful one. The Shias have proven to be more motivated. Their holy places are under assault.

Sistani is stepping up while the Obama administration dithers. The position of the United States is a difficult one. Publicly, the USG is opposed to terror groups like ISIS, Obama said as much in his West Point commencement address; plus, the U.S. created the current state of Iraq out of the ashes of its 2003 invasion. So we must be mindful here of Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" pre-invasion warning to W. But in private, the U.S. is not opposed to the actions of ISIS. ISIS operates with the support of Saudi Arabia. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel, our two most important allies in the Middle East, are obsessed with Iran and preoccupied by fears of Iranian regional hegemony. ISIS is a cat's-paw.

The U.S. is a pay-to-play political system that the Israelis and Saudis have wired for a long time. The problem for U.S. leaders is how to get a population that has been indoctrinated for decades to fear and hate jihadi terrorists to suddenly accept them as allies. The answer? Go back to the tried and true personal demonization playbook (see Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, Putin, Assad for prior lessons). Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is now the target.

According to a lengthy Gray Lady editorial, "Iraq in Peril: Prime Minister Maliki Panics as Insurgents Gain," it is all Maliki's fault. He ruled like an autocrat and kept the Sunnis from power.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is said to be in a panic. It is hard to be surprised by that, because more than anyone he is to blame for the catastrophe. Mr. Maliki has been central to the political disorder that has poisoned Iraq, as he wielded authoritarian power in favor of the Shiite majority at the expense of the minority Sunnis, stoked sectarian conflict and enabled a climate in which militants could gain traction. 

Never mind that Maliki was a U.S. favorite during the occupation. Also, never mind that it was the profligate funding and assistance of all things jihadi by the the Gulf Sheikhdoms and Turkey in their failed crusade to crack Syria that led to ISIS control of Anbar, which allowed the current march-on-Baghdad offensive. Nothing is as important as Maliki's refusal to dole out patronage to Sunnis. The Gray Lady took the exact same position when Fallujah fell under the black flag earlier. It is not credible, unless of course it is code for "Give the Sheikhs what they want."

David Brooks chimes in with "The Big Burn," reiterating the blame Maliki theme. But Brooks holds Obama to account for pulling out U.S. troops too soon. See, according to Brooks, the Iraqi Army was almost ready when Obama pulled the plug on the U.S. occupation. Yes, that's right. If U.S. soldiers and trainers would have been allowed to stay a little longer, we might not be debating what to do about ISIS in Mosul now. Brooks' prescription going forward? Federalization of Iraq. Federalization is not to be trusted to Russian-speaking residents of eastern Ukraine, but bin Laden worshipers erecting a caliphate in Iraq and Syria have made Brooks see the light.