Turkish Buffer Zone in Northeast Syria Takes Shape

Turkey and the United States announced over the weekend that a joint operations center for overseeing the new buffer zone in northeastern Syria, or "safe zone" as Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan prefers, is opened for business. As Selcan Hacaoglu reports for Bloomberg,

Turkey sees its deal with the U.S. to carve out a narrow security zone in northern Syria as just the beginning, two Turkish officials said, with Ankara determined to purge Kurdish fighters from a much larger section of the border region.

After weeks of difficult negotiations, the NATO allies agreed this month to jointly patrol an area stretching 125 kilometers (78 miles) between the Syrian towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, and up to 15 kilometers deep, according to the officials, who have direct knowledge of the talks but asked not to be identified in line with regulations barring them from talking to the media.

While the agreement should allow Turkey’s military to move into northeast Syria without firing a shot, the country could unleash a unilateral incursion if the zone isn’t deepened and extended by as much as several hundred kilometers at a later date, they said.

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on the Turkish plans.

Turkey has deployed 10 brigades along its frontier between the Euphrates River and the Iraqi border to confront an estimated 15,000 members of the Kurdish YPG, the officials added.

A joint Turkish-U.S. headquarters designed to oversee a buffer zone in northern Syria became “fully operational” on Saturday, state-run Anadolu Agency reported, citing Defense Minister Hulusi Akar. A first helicopter flight over the zone, which will be off-limits to U.S.-backed YPG forces, was planned for Saturday.

It looks like Turkey is getting much of what it wants. The Kurdish YPG must abandon its fortified positions, hand over its heavy weapons to the U.S. and leave the area:

The Turkish-U.S. agreement foresees the immediate withdrawal of YPG fighters from the buffer zone, with the U.S. collecting heavy weapons it had supplied to the group, the officials said. Fortified Kurdish positions and tunnels were to be destroyed, they said. Turkey wants members of the YPG’s political wing, called the PYD, to leave the area as well.

[snip]

The deal allows for Turkish armed drones to start surveillance flights over the zone but the U.S. hasn’t yet agreed to overflights by Turkish warplanes, the officials said. The U.S. also opposes Turkey’s proposal to move Ankara-backed rebels of the Free Syrian Army to the area, but did agree that refugees living in Turkey could return, they said.

Joint military patrols are expected to start within a month and Turkey will set up four bases ahead of the creation a local security force, the officials said.

Turkish demands to be able to deploy as many troops as it considers necessary to enforce security were rebuffed, with the U.S. agreeing only to the deployment of two Turkish soldiers for every American soldier, they added.

Turkey has stepped up attacks on the Kurdistan Workers Party; at the same time, Turkish alignment with Al Qaeda in Idlib has been exposed and is going poorly.

The Kurds are sophisticated actors. They will either resist a campaign of ethnic cleansing approved by the United States; or the U.S. has provided assurances that the safe zone is a ruse. It's hard to imagine the latter.

U.S.-Russia Deal on Syria Takes Shape

Anne Barnard, back in Beirut after her sojourn in Baghdad, reports on a flurry of Russian-led negotiations on the war in Syria, "New Diplomacy Seen on U.S.-Russian Efforts to End Syrian Civil War":

Russia has played the most prominent public role so far in the new diplomacy. Some analysts say that the discussion reflects a softening of the Obama administration’s long-held position that “Assad must go,” and a fear, shared with Russia, that the Islamic State could be the primary beneficiary if Mr. Assad’s government continues to weaken, as they expect, or even to collapse entirely, which they view as less likely but increasingly possible.

The Syrian government has been jarred by a series of defeats on the battlefield and difficulty recruiting for its forces, even among members of Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect. Having lost large sections of the country to the Islamic State and various rebel forces, it is concentrating its remaining military strength in the capital, Damascus, and other crucial cities in western Syria.

Mr. Assad’s opponents, too, have reason to reassess strategy; American efforts to build a proxy force in Syria have largely failed, insurgent groups have their own attrition problems, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey face political and security blowback at home.

As the military situation continues to deteriorate, the major powers are growing increasingly nervous. Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a vociferous critic of Mr. Assad, said the United States was letting Russia take the lead because “they don’t want to own this.” If anything, Mr. Hokayem added, “it’s the United States that has moved closer to Russia’s position” that Mr. Assad could be part of the transitional government that is the stated goal of any negotiations.

Regional news outlets have attributed the outburst of diplomatic activity to the aftermath of the tentative nuclear deal with Iran, which has “has thrown a great stone into the region’s waters,” as the Jordanian newspaper Al Ghad put it. The pan-Arab daily Rai al-Youm went so far as to declare that “a political resolution is taking shape with notable speed.” 

But analysts in the region, across the political spectrum, strongly caution that no breakthroughs can be expected soon. Fundamental disconnects remain, and in the diplomatic dance, each side claims that its adversaries are coming around to its point of view.

I put in bold the last paragraph because these diplomatic flurries on Syria are periodic, and they follow the same general pattern. The U.S. is said to realize that only ISIS will benefit from a collapse of the Baathist Syrian state, while Russia is said to accept that Assad might have to vacate the seat of government. Then the war continues.

What seems to be different now is that Turkey, in blowback from the war in Syria, has shredded its ceasefire with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and is now engaged in a civil war of its own.

An excellent article by Rukmini Callimachi ("Inside Syria: Kurds Roll Back ISIS, but Alliances Are Strained") that appeared on Monday clearly shows that the Marxist Kurds working in concert with U.S. air power have figured out how to beat the Salafist jihadis. Fearing that the Syrian Kurd People's Protection Units (YPG) would completely roll back ISIS and control the territory along the Turkish border from Aleppo to the border with Iraq, Turkey cut a deal with the U.S. to enter the war against ISIS. What this really was was a declaration of war against the PKK.

What also appears to be different this go-round is the realization that any additional setbacks for the Syrian government will translate into more refugees fleeing to Europe. Barnard acknowledges this when she says, "What is nonetheless taking place internationally is a shift in tone, a sense of movement below the surface. That alone is notable in a context of divides that can seem unbridgeable, after four and a half years of fighting that has killed at least a quarter-million people and driven the worst refugee crisis in a generation."

Based on a reading of the Saudi press, Barnard provides the contours of what a deal on Syria might look like:

The pro-government newspaper Al Watan noted that at last week’s three-way meeting in Qatar, Secretary of State John Kerry did not repeat the American demand that Mr. Assad step aside. He declared only that the Syrian leader had “lost his legitimacy.” 

And even the Saudi newspaper Al Watan — no connection to the Syrian one — used a notable phrase, saying that while Mr. Assad’s government was to blame for Syria’s troubles, a solution could come “ either by reforming it, or by removing it immediately, or in stages.” 

Such shifts have driven an emerging theory about the outlines of an eventual compromise — albeit one that could take years to achieve. 

The gist is that a new government would be formed including elements of the current government — perhaps including Mr. Assad for a finite period — and moderate Syrian opposition figures. The army would absorb some insurgents from relatively moderate groups. Alawites and majority Sunnis would both be represented.

Then, as the Syrian analyst Ibrahim Hamidi put it in the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, “the government and army will have the necessary political legitimacy and sectarian representation to ‘unite against terrorism.’ ”

That scenario fits in with a plan that Iran put forward amid last week’s flurry of meetings, calling for an immediate cease-fire, the formation of a national unity government, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the rights of all Syria’s ethnic and religious groups, and internationally supervised elections.

Does this stop the fighting? Highly doubtful. As we see in the case of Afghanistan where the Taliban leadership is cosseted in Quetta by the Pakistani state, fighting will rage on year in and year out. But what such a deal would likely accomplish is the prevention of Damascus' fall and the resulting massive increase in an already massive influx of refugees to Europe. Something worth bargaining over.

Public Relations Windfall for the Kurdistan Workers Party

The Gray Lady had surprisingly little to offer over the weekend about the fate of Kobani, the Kurdish-majority town near the Turkish border under siege by Islamic State. Last week news about the important battle for Kobani pivoted between impending doom for the YPG fighters -- the Syrian Kurdish self-defense force aligned with the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) -- and hosannas for deadly U.S. airstrikes on ISIS mechanized armor.

When you get such large contradictory swings in reporting it usually means that something significant is underway. This was the state of affairs in the Donbass prior to the "ceasefire." The Gray Lady was reporting that any day Donetsk and Luhansk would fall; then came the rebel counter-assault that sent the junta fleeing.

Kirk Semple and Tim Arango have a story, "Kurdish Rebels Assail Turkish Inaction on ISIS as Peril to Peace Talks." this morning that gets "the newspaper of record" caught up on the Kobani action at the outset of new week.

The scoop the story offers is an interview with PKK founder Cemil Bayik who promises a resumption of PKK's guerrilla war against Turkey if president Erdogan allows Kobani to be massacred by ISIS fighters:

P.K.K. commanders say their halting, nine-year-old peace process with the Turkish government and, indeed, the future of the region, will turn on the battle for Kobani and on Turkey’s response. If Turkey does not help the embattled Kurdish forces in Kobani, the commanders say, they will break off peace talks and resume their guerrilla war within Turkey, plunging yet another country in the region into armed conflict. 

“Negotiations cannot go on in an environment where they want to create a massacre in Kobani,” Cemil Bayik, a founder and leader of the P.K.K., said in a recent interview in a secret location in this area of the Qandil range. “We cannot bargain for settlement on the blood of Kobani.” 

“We will mobilize the guerrillas,” he vowed. 

Despite increased pressure from the United States and pleas from outgunned Kurdish fighters in Kobani, Turkey has refused to deploy its military against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or to open the border to allow reinforcements, weapons and supplies to reach the town.

Retired U.S. General John Allen, the official Obama put in charge of coordinating the multi-nation response to Islamic State, after two days of meetings in Ankara (one wonders what bargains were actually made) managed to secure basing rights from Turkey. U.S. fighter-bombers will once again fly from Incirlik.

Turkey's public opposition to attacking ISIS and preventing Kurdish efforts to reinforce Kobani has had the effect of unifying Kurds:

Kobani became one battle for everybody,” said Hiwa Osman, a Kurdish political analyst who was an adviser to Jalal Talabani, the former Iraqi president. “This is a matter between good versus evil. For Turkey to be on the other side, by omission, positions all the Kurds in one camp. And this camp will not be friendly to Turkey.”

In addition to unifying the Kurds, the battle for Kobani has been a public relations windfall for the Kurdistan Workers Party. Unlike the pesh merga, constantly celebrated in the Western press for their prowess as fighters, the YPG has actually proved to be a fierce opponent of ISIS:

While Mr. Erdogan’s standing has plunged among Kurds, the Kurdish fighters’ reputation has soared. In the Kurdistan region, the P.K.K. has enjoyed remarkably broad public support in recent months in light of its battlefield successes against the Islamic State militants. 

In the initial months of the Islamic State assault on northern Iraq, the P.K.K.’s performance stood in contrast to that of the Iraqi military, which wilted in the face of the Islamic State sweep, and of the pesh merga, Iraqi Kurdistan’s army, which suffered demoralizing setbacks before regaining its footing with the support of American airstrikes. 

P.K.K. units are widely credited with engineering the rescue of thousands of Yazidis who were trapped on Mount Sinjar and facing annihilation. P.K.K. fighters established an evacuation corridor from the summit of the mountain, where the Yazidis had languished for days. The P.K.K. also rushed to the aid of the pesh merga after Islamic State fighters threatened the Kurdish capital, Erbil, by overrunning Makhmur, a nearby Kurdish town. 

“Had we not intervened, there would’ve been a great massacre,” Mr. Bayik said. The Kurdish government, he said, “would’ve lost face.” 

Many Kurds have called on the United States and the European Union to reassess their classification of the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization — a rebuke of Mr. Erdogan and Turkey. 

“Officially they are on the terrorist list,” Brig. Gen. Helgurd Hikmet Mela Ali, a spokesman for the pesh merga, said in a recent interview. “But if you want my personal opinion, not official: It’s clear now and it’s very obvious who the terrorists are. ISIS or P.K.K.?” 

After the counterattack that recaptured Makhmur, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan regional government, whose political party has had a bitter relationship with the P.K.K., rewarded its fighters with a visit. 

“We have the same destiny,” Mr. Barzani told the guerrillas.

The limitation to the U.S.-Turkey-KSA strategy of using jihadis as proxies is that eventually the conflict expands and the jihadis have to be beaten down. Support for ISIS can no longer be easily maintained. Popular indigenous responses, like the YPG, rise up. The Turks and Saudis cannot just snuff out such resistance because, as riots in Turkey last week showed, the public will resist.

Turkish Support for ISIS Makes the Front Page + NFL Weeks Four & Five: Cowboys Riding High

It is all out in the open now. The only thing that prevents an interpretation of events in Iraq and Syria along the lines of the left-of-center perspective -- that Islamic State is a creation and ally of Gulf Arab Sheikhdoms and Turkey (with an assist from U.S. intelligence agencies) designed to fracture the Shiite axis of Syria-Iran-Hezbollah -- from cohering into the settled, dominant narrative is willful ignorance.

A boundary has been crossed, I believe, with today's story by Mark Landler, Anne Barnard and Eric Schmitt about the imminent fall of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, "Turkish Inaction on ISIS Advance Dismays the U.S." The reporters come right out and say what has been said for a long time in the Left media (and was said just yesterday on Counterpunch by Patrick Cockburn): Turkey prefers a Kurdish and Assad defeat to the defeat of Islamic State.

While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares. 

But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.

Mr. Erdogan has also resisted pleas to send his troops across the border in the absence of a no-fly zone to ward off the Syrian Air Force.

Even as it stepped up airstrikes against the militants Tuesday, the Obama administration was frustrated by what it regards as Turkey’s excuses for not doing more militarily. Officials note, for example, that the American-led coalition, with its heavy rotation of flights and airstrikes, has effectively imposed a no-fly zone over northern Syria already, so Mr. Erdogan’s demand for such a zone rings hollow. 

“There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” a senior administration official said. “After all the fulminating about Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe, they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe. 

“This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border,” said the official, who spoke anonymously to avoid publicly criticizing an ally.
Secretary of State John Kerry has had multiple phone calls in the last 72 hours with Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, to try to resolve the border crisis, American officials said. 

For Mr. Obama, a split with Turkey would jeopardize his efforts to hold together a coalition of Sunni Muslim countries to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. While Turkey is not the only country that might put the ouster of Mr. Assad ahead of defeating the radical Sunnis of the Islamic State, the White House has strongly argued that the immediate threat is from the militants. 

But if Turkey remains a holdout, it could cause other fissures in the coalition. It is not only a NATO ally but the main transit route for foreigners seeking to enlist in the ranks of the Islamic State.

So everything is pretty much out in the open. Turkey, a country that for years has been the gateway for jihadis on their way to battlefronts in Syria, has blocked Kurds from rushing to defend Kobani. The Turkish military sits by and watches ISIS shell the city. This led to an outbreak of protests by Kurds in Turkey yesterday. Erdogan, according to Landler et al. is trying to exact concessions from both the U.S. and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party,

Analysts say the Kurds of Kobani are being held hostage as Mr. Erdogan seeks to wrest concessions not only from Washington but also from Kurdish leaders, his longtime domestic foes. 

The aim, said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is to weaken Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in peace talks with the Turkish government. 

Turkey also wants the Kurdish fighters to denounce Mr. Assad and openly join the Syrian insurgents fighting him. But the fighters and local political leaders accepted control of Kurdish areas when Mr. Assad’s forces withdrew earlier in the Syrian war, and have focused more on self-rule and protecting their territory than on fighting the government. In some places they have fought alongside government troops. 

The impasse leaves Kobani isolated. Some refugees are literally pressed against the fence, unwilling to cross because they cannot take their livestock, and sometimes blocked by the Turkish authorities, who have also stopped Syrian and Turkish Kurds from crossing into Syria to fight the Islamic State. 

Tear gas wafted near the border on Tuesday, as Kurdish men packed the streets of the town of Suruc to protest Turkish policy; demonstrations broke out in several cities across Turkey. In Diyarbakir, at least 10 people were killed and more than 20 were injured in clashes between sympathizers of a pro-Kurdish party and a group known for its Islamic affiliations, while the authorities ordered schools to close in several southeastern cities, the Haberturk news channel reported. 

On one small stretch of the border near Kobani, a fleeing Syrian Kurd, Omar Alloush, said a Turkish soldier had looked on as an Islamic State fighter addressed Syrian Kurds across the border fence, telling them they were welcome to return as long as they abided by the group’s extreme interpretation of Islam. 

“We will never trust those people,” Mr. Alloush, a member of a Kurdish political party in Kobani, said by telephone. 

Yet another hillside spectator, Avni Altindag, a Kurd from Suruc, said the Islamic State was stronger than a few air raids. 

He pointed to the men watching the smoke rising over Kobani, who were chanting for the People’s Protection Committees, a Kurdish group known as Y.P.G. that is battling the Islamic State in the town’s streets. “They used to come with high expectations of strikes against ISIS, but all are disappointed,” he said. 

Mr. Altindag blamed Turkey. “They don’t want to help what they say is their enemy,” he said. “This is why it is in Turkey’s favor that Kobani falls to ISIS.”

One would think that now that the ISIS ruse has been exposed -- that it is clear that U.S. allies are actually allies first of ISIS (see Biden's Harvard Kennedy School speech) -- that Obama would drop his efforts to placate the Saudis and Turks by toppling Assad's government. But indications are that he is sticking to the disastrous policy that brought us to the chaos we are experiencing today. Yesterday, at the end of a story by Karam Shoumali and Anne Barnard, "Slaughter Is Feared as ISIS Nears Turkish Border," there were four paragraphs that support the notion that sporadic U.S. airstrikes of ISIS positions in northern and eastern Syria are a smokescreen for its regime change operations in Syria:

Elsewhere across Syria, insurgents struck on two fronts against government forces. 

North of Aleppo, insurgent groups including the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and the American-backed Harakat Hazm fought government forces that recently seized the town of Handarat. Fighters from Hazm, which has been supplied with American-made TOW antitank weapons, have destroyed government tanks in recent days, rebels say. Rebel spokesmen on Monday said they were pushing hard to take back the town of Handarat and had captured foreigners, including Afghans and Lebanese, fighting on the government side. 

In an unusual battle near the border with the Golan Heights in southern Syria, another United States-backed group, the Omari Brigades of the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, took a government air defense base on the hilltop of Tel al-Harrah and posted a video of several fighters with what they said was Russian-made government air defense equipment. 

A covert United States effort to equip and train relatively moderate insurgents there has had few major successes. More aid has been promised to groups deemed moderate by American officials as part of the campaign against the Islamic State. But it was unclear whether the recent victory was because of new equipment or organization, or if it benefited from recent victories in the area by the Nusra Front.

Islamic State's siege of Kobani began in earnest the middle of last month, about the time I put up the flyer (below) in my cubicle at work:

I went online this morning to see if I could find any news about yesterday's march. It turns out that the flyer must have been changed once it had been sent out -- I received it in the mail from Workers World -- because it is actually today. The destination of the march is a World Business Forum event at Radio City Music Hall.

A powerful capitalist distraction for the working masses in the United States is the National Football League. The story of the last two weeks -- NFL Week Four and Week Five -- has been the rise of the perennially hapless Cowboys of Dallas. Week Four the Cowboys destroyed the Saints on Sunday night; Week Five, they held on in OT to beat their Lone Star rivals, the visiting Texans. Though they had the better of Houston most of the game, the Texans came back on the legs of Arian Foster. In the overtime period, Romo threw up a blind Hail Mary that Dez Bryant somehow came up with. The completion set up the game-winning field goal.

So Dallas is not only playing well, but the Cowboys are also lucky. You don't want to rely on luck to win games, but I find luck is a good indicator of a team's potency. To make a Super Bowl run, a team not only has to be dominant but lucky. The Seahawks were excellent last year, but they were also lucky.

The strengths of Dallas -- I got to see both the Week Four and Week Five Games -- are in its big, young offensive line and its DeMarco Murray powered ground game. Romo has been bridled and lucky so far. He is coming off back surgery, and he's not playing as petulantly as he has in the past; he is not constantly dropping back to pass and throwing picks.

Another bright spot has been the play of the Dallas defense, which strikes me as more consistent this season and less prone to giving up the big play.

We'll find out what Dallas is made of when they come into town to play Seattle on Sunday. The Seahawks enjoy a great homefield advantage. And while their pass rush has not been as successful as last year, the run defense has been stellar.

My sense is that the Cowboys will find a way to self-destruct. Murray is injury prone, and so too is Romo of late. The Seahawks will come into Sunday's game more focused after being penalized more than a dozen times (erasing three touchdowns by Harvin!) on a spotty Monday night victory over the free-falling Redskins.

Cold War 2.0/GWOT 2.0: The Obama Legacy

Twenty years from now, for those of us who will still be around, when we look back on the Obama presidency the major events of his administration -- the Great Recession, Obamacare, the budget battles with the House GOP -- will all be overshadowed by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's reboot of the Cold War with a capitalist Russia and his reboot of Bush II's Global War on Terror.

Tonight Obama addresses the nation about the kind of commitment his administration is willing to make to eradicate Islamic State, a jihadi group more extreme than Al Qaeda that Obama had dismissed until recently as a "JV" team and whose rise to power in northern Syria and Iraq was the direct result of policies the United States pursued to achieve the ouster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

All indications are that the commitment is going to be a lengthy and costly one, and that it will include airstrikes in Syria. Tim Arango provides a helpful overview, "Longtime Rivals Look to Team Up to Confront ISIS," of the jigsaw puzzle of issues brought on by the Arab Spring and the conservative reaction to it.

Arango tries to pluck out the hopeful pieces, like the U.S. working with Iran to beat back ISIS, but the overall message is that war is going to be a staple of the Greater Middle East for a long time. You have Qatar and Turkey at war with the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and Egypt; you have Sunni battling Shia; you have Turkey paranoid about PKK attacks from a generously armed Kurdistan; you have jihadis attacking jihadis attacking the Syrian Arab Army; you have jihadis -- Nusra, ISIS, even the "moderate" Free Syrian Army -- working together to attack the Lebanese Army which is underwritten by Saudi Arabia, a country that also funds the Salafi terror groups.

Into this maelstrom jets the Hogarthian U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with his faithful slave Michael Gordon. Court scribe Gordon has a helpful article in today's paper, "John Kerry Arrives in Iraq for Talks on Joint Strategy Against ISIS," in that it makes perfectly clear the future the Obama administration envisions for Iraq, which is less a unitary state and more a Confederate States of the Tigris and Euphrates.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the formation of a government the other day but because all the sticky issues -- those pertaining to the Kurds: oil rights, boundaries, budgetary allotments; and those pertaining to the Sunnis who want to lead the ministries of defense and interior -- have been tabled for a later date.

That is why Kerry is in Baghdad. He comes with a proposal for federalizing Iraq. (What the U.S. is seeking to prevent in Ukraine by launching Cold War 2.0, it is trying to apply to Iraq by launching GWOT 2.0, a kind of schizophrenia that only makes sense according to the rules of the Great Game.)

One major initiative to roll back ISIS’ gains in Iraq, American officials said, is the establishment of national guard units that would be recruited locally and given the main security responsibilities in their home areas.ontinue reading the main story

Continue reading the main story

In an echo of the Sunni Awakening, in which Iraqi tribes made common cause with American forces to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq, some of the national guard units would be drawn from local tribes. But unlike the Awakening, the soldiers would formally be part of Iraq’s security structure and would be trained on Iraqi military bases. Reporting to local governors, they would also receive salaries and pensions from the government.

The plan is intended to rebuild the fighting capability that the Iraqi government lost after much of its army faded away in the face of ISIS’ onslaught.

The decentralization of security responsibilities is also intended to ease sectarian tensions by giving Sunnis more control over their own affairs and reduce the need for the largely Shiite army to be deployed on their territory.

It would also replace the ad hoc arrangements regarding paying Awakening members that eventually led to its demise. 

“The people of Anbar will take on ISIL,” the State Department official added, using an alternative name for ISIS. “The people of Nineveh will take on ISIL in Nineveh, and they will have assistance from the national army when they need it.” 

“One thing Abadi has said repeatedly,” the official added, “is that he is not going to use “military units from the south and go into areas in the north and west” to fight ISIS. 

But the plan still requires assistance from the United States or other nations in training and advising the Iraqi military that would back up the local forces. And it requires a major effort to enlist Sunnis in the new national guard units, persuade them to pledge loyalty to the Iraqi government and equip and train them so they would be a credible fighting force. 

“So the core principle in Iraq of what comes after ISIL is now pretty well laid out,” said the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity under the State Department’s protocol for briefing reporters. “It’s going to be a very difficult, long road to get there.”

“It’s going to be a very difficult, long road to get there.” -- No kidding. In the American proposal, backed no doubt by the Saudis, Iraq will become a series of Bantustans topped by a powerful unitary Kuridstan in the north. Maybe Iraqis are tired enough of war that they will accept the fool's gold the U.S. is offering. But I doubt it. The Sadrists are strong nationalists. This means there is more chaos coming.

But don't expect any leadership from a feckless U.S. Congress. All indications are Congress will avoid any new vote on an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF). This is a great quote reported yesterday by Jonathan Weisman, Mark Landler and Jeremy Peters, "As Obama Makes Case, Congress Is Divided on Campaign Against Militants":

Democratic leaders in the Senate and Republican leaders in the House want to avoid a public vote to authorize force, fearing the unknown political consequences eight weeks before the midterm elections on Nov. 4. 

“A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later,’ ” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who supports having an authorization vote. “It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”

We're about to relaunch decades-long commitments to warfare, the Imperial Presidency completely triumphant, and Congress is too scared to even schedule a vote. This is not what democracy looks like.

Patrick Cockburn on Syria

A must-read article that appears on the Counterpunch web site this weekend is Patrick Cockburn's "How Syria Became a More Dangerous Quagmire Than Iraq." Cockburn, a veteran Middle East correspondent, provides an even-handed, no-bullshit assessment of the Syrian civil war. To give you a flavor of the analysis provided, check out the following paragraph:

The feeling that the future of whole states is in doubt is growing across the Middle East – for the first time since Britain and France carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. ‘It is the end of Sykes-Picot,’ I was told repeatedly in Iraq; the reference was to the agreement of 1916 which divided up the spoils between Britain and France and was the basis for later treaties. Some are jubilant at the collapse of the old order, notably the thirty million Kurds who were left without a state of their own after the Ottoman collapse and are now spread across Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. They feel their moment has come: they are close to independence in Iraq and are striking a deal with the Turkish government for political rights and civil equality. In March, the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK declared an end to their thirty-year war with the Turkish government and started withdrawing into the mountains of northern Iraq. The 2.5 million Kurds in northern Syria, 10 per cent of the population, have assumed control of their towns and villages and are likely to demand a high degree of autonomy from any postwar Syrian government.

Cockburn doesn't see a way out of the current violent stalemate.

Terror Bombing of Turkish Border Town + IRS Audits Tea Party 501(c)(4)'s

Last week began with Israel's bombing of a Syrian military installation outside Damascus; it ended with a terror bombing in the Turkish town of Reyhanli on Saturday. Forty-six people were killed and over 100 were injured. Kareem Fahim and Sebnem Arsu report today in "Arrests and Calls for Calm in Turkey" that the Turkish government arrested nine people who are part of a Marxist group with links to Syrian intelligence. Syria denied any involvement. Turkey is currently in peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers Party. It is unclear who is really to blame. But what is clear is that chaos in Syria is destabilizing the Middle East. Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey -- all were in the news last week in relation to the Syrian civil war. The refugee crisis will only grow worse as the savage fighting continues; hopefully, meaningful U.S.-Russian brokered peace talks will begin soon.

Another story that developed over the weekend is the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status. Jonathan Weisman and Matthew Wald have an informative story, "I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize On," this morning. And while it is unfortunate that this will surely lead to a lot of column inches and television time being blotted out by conservatives doing what they love so much to do -- feigning outrage and playing the victim -- I don't think it aids the GOP in the long run. Reading the blog that Thomas Edsall writes for the New York Times, one knows that there is a serious struggle underway within Republican Party. It's the Establishment, embodied by Karl Rove, versus the Tea Party. Recently Rove has had momentum going his way; a group he is linked with secured the contract to manage the GOP voter list. But now the Tea Party will enjoy a boost. And the battle for the Republican Party will rage on. The problem for liberals is that they have nothing -- other than Obama, and his political force is rapidly evaporating. There is a progressive majority in this country that has no party.

Here is a reader, RQH of Wheat Ridge, Colorado, commenting on the Weisman and Wald story (I think it's on the mark):

The Tea Party is depicted by its followers as a spontaneous gathering of like-minded citizens who want to reduce the size of the federal government and drastically cut taxes for all, especially the super-wealthy. At the Tea Party core are the Koch brothers whose father organized the John Birch Society. Knowing that, , it should be evident why the IRS would question the validity of their tax-exemption claim. Remember the recommendation of the Watergate source: "Follow the money!"