The Chessboard Shifts to Kurdistan

Now that Mosul has been declared liberated, marking the end of the caliphate in Iraq, the refrain in the prestige press seems to be "Not so fast."

This stands to reason. ISIS was always in line with U.S. policy goals in Iraq and Syria (the acronym remember stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).

Even prior to the amazing spontaneous emergence of the caliphate in Mosul pressure was being put on then Iraqi premier Nouri al-Maliki to grant some form of autonomy to the Sunni heartland. The United States wanted to see a Sunnistan with its own military.

Former Obama foreign policy elite Tony Blinken was back at it the other day in "The Islamic State Is Not Dead Yet":

Even more challenging is what comes next. Twenty-five million Sunni Muslims live between Baghdad and Damascus. They have been alienated from their governments.

Unless they can be convinced that their state will protect and not persecute them, an Islamic State 2.0 will find plenty of new recruits and supporters.

Iraq offers the best prospects for success. But left to their own devices, its leaders are more likely to perpetuate the conditions that gave rise to violent extremism. And Iraq’s neighbors will line up behind whichever sect they support, reinforcing a zero-sum mentality in Iraq itself.

That’s where American diplomacy comes in.

The United States can’t dictate outcomes to a sovereign Iraq. But it can support, incentivize and mobilize those willing to move Iraq in the right direction.

This starts with backing what Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, calls functioning federalism — giving Iraqis at the provincial level the responsibility and resources to provide for their own security, services and schools and to govern their day-to-day lives.

That’s the best way to convince Sunnis that their future is within Iraq and not with a new Islamic State. Iraq’s Sunnis used to oppose federalism in favor of a strong central government; increasingly, they embrace it.

Iraq’s constitution provides for decentralization, but it has yet to be put into effect. Some within the Shia community, goaded on by Iran, will insist on retaining the spoils of majoritarian rule, preserving a dominant Baghdad to lord it over the Sunnis.

Bringing functioning federalism to life begins with effectively implementing a law that governs Iraq’s militia, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Shiite P.M.F. units must be placed under state control, kept out of politics and away from Sunni areas.

Sunni P.M.F. units mobilized into the fight against the Islamic State need to stay on the state payroll and assume responsibility for securing their own territory. Baghdad also must make sure that investment and major infrastructure projects don’t bypass Sunni regions.

So the song from before the caliphate remains the same after the caliphate. Doesn't that smell fishy to you?

Tim Arango adds some much needed detail in "Iraq Celebrates Victory Over ISIS in Mosul, but Risks Remain." He quotes Maliki who predicts more turbulence ahead:

“Syria and Iraq are closely connected,” Mr. Maliki said in an interview this year. “If the situation in Syria is unstable, Iraq will be unstable.”

When asked about the future of Iraq after the Islamic State, Mr. Maliki said: “The state cannot control the situation. The coming phase will be bad.”

The coming bad phase, absent more jihadist-U.S. false flags, will be initiated by the Kurdish independence referendum scheduled for September. When the vote comes in as an overwhelming Yes, Iraq will be forced to negotiate. Part of the negotiations will include Sunnistan because if the Kurds get their own state, even if only as a federal administrative unit of the nation of Iraq, the Sunnis will want a similar deal.

The wild card here is Turkey. How will Turkey respond?

War in the Middle East: It is Going to Get Even Bigger

NBC broke away from the pregame of its Sunday Night Football telecast long enough for Obama to say nothing new from the Oval Office about international and domestic terrorism, gun ownership and the war in Syria. I suppose this is a good thing. I was half expecting the president, whose legacy (long after the Affordable Care Act has been scrapped) will be to have relaunched a not so Cold War with Russia and overseen the disintegration of the Middle East, to use the Sunday national television platform to blame Putin for last week's husband-&-wife terrorism attack in San Bernardino.

Thankfully, Cold Warrior Obama restrained himself. What the viewers out in TV Land got was more of the same, particularly as it relates to the war in Syria:

Well, here's what I want you to know. The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us. Our success won't depend on tough talk or abandoning our values or giving into fear. That's what groups like ISIL are hoping for. Instead, we will prevail by being strong and smart. Resilient and relentless. And by drawing upon every aspect of American power. Here's how. 

First, our military will continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in any country where it is necessary. 

In Iraq and Syria, air strikes are taking out ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil tankers, infrastructure. Since attacks in Paris, our closest allies including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have ramped up their contributions to our military campaign which will help us accelerate our effort to destroy ISIL. 

Second, we will continue to provide training and equipment to tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian forces fighting ISIL on the ground so that we take away their safe havens. In both countries, we're deploying special operations forces who can accelerate that offensive. We've stepped up this effort since the attacks in Paris and will continue to invest more in approaches that are working on the ground. 

Third, we're working with friends and allies to stop ISIL's operations to disrupt plots, cut off their financing, and prevent them from recruiting more fighters. Since the attacks in Paris, we've surged intelligence sharing with our European allies. We're working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria and we are cooperating with Muslim majority countries and with our Muslim communities here at home to counter the vicious ideology that ISIL promotes online. 

Fourth, with American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process and timeline to pursue cease-fires and a political resolution to the Syrian war. Doing so will allow the Syrian people and every country, including our allies but also countries like Russia, to focus on the common goal of destroying ISIL. A group that threatens us all. This is our strategy to destroy ISIL. It is designed and supported by our military commanders and counterterrorism experts together with 65 countries that have joined an American-led coalition. We constantly examine our strategy to determine within additional steps are needed to get the job done. That's why I've ordered the departments of State and Homeland Security to review the visa waiver program under which the female terrorist in San Bernardino originally came to this country.

The issue of ISIS funding itself from sales of black-market oil, Obama's first point, was brightly illuminated last week. A must-read story, "ISIS Oil," by Vijay Prashad appeared in CounterPunch. In it Prashad argues quite plainly that Turkey is working with ISIS to move oil by tanker truck from fields around Mosul in Iraq to the Turkish port of Ceyhan where it is shipped to Malta and then transshipped to buyers in Israel:

On December 2, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Defense Anatoly Antonov made a strong statement about Turkish complicity with ISIS. The charge sheet is long and detailed. It mentions many aspects, but the most incendiary is the accusation about “ISIS oil.”

ISIS controls Iraqi oil fields near Mosul. They have been making millions of dollars each day by selling oil from these fields. How does ISIS get the oil from the fields in Mosul to the market?

What ISIS has done is to use the old networks that have smuggled oil from the Kurdish Regional Government without any consideration given to Baghdad’s sovereignty over that oil. This had been a point of contention for decades, since the Kurdish region began to exercise autonomous control of the north. Kurdish oil was sold to smugglers who would cart them in tankers across the border into Turkey. In Turkey the trucks would run the length of the country to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. From Ceyhan, which is a port run by the Turkish government, the oil is purchased by transporters whose ships go to Malta, where the oil is transshipped to destinations such as Ashdod (Israel). This has long been a bone of contention between the Iraqi government, the Kurdish Regional Government and the Turkish government. It was documented by Tolga Tanış in his book Potus ve Beyefendi (2015). Tanis accuses Berat Albayrak, son-in-law of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of involvement in this illegal scheme. ISIS has merely replaced the Kurdish Regional Government in the new arrangement.

***

That the Russians have made these allegations will only increase tensions between Ankara and Moscow. Indeed, on December 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that retaliation for the downed jet has not yet come. The tempo of threats has risen.

Stunningly Ceyhan Port is a few hours drive from the Incirlik Air Base, from where the US jets have been hitting targets in Syria. It is literally under the noses of the US planes that the ISIS oil has been transported. For the fourteen months that the US has been hitting ISIS targets, it has avoided striking at the oil tankers. US officials say that they did not strike ISIS oil tankers for fear of “collateral damage.” In fact, when the US did hit the oil tankers last month, they did so after warning the drivers by leaflets. This was a very noble gesture, but also out of character. The US generally does not warn its targets. It only began to hit the oil tankers after Russian jets struck them. Did the US begin its strike on the tankers so as not to be shown up by the Russians? When I put this question to a US state department official, she demurred. She said that the US was merely building up intelligence on the tanker routes and it was now prepared to hit the convoys. That it came after the Russian bombings of the tankers, she said, is mere coincidence.

***

. . . The Turkish government’s demand for a “buffer zone” is of interest to the Europeans. They believe it is for refugees. But it could just as well be to protect the tankers from the Russian bombing raids. It is precisely what makes Corbyn’s demand so important – to hold a through investigation of the ISIS oil pipeline. Such an inquiry must ask the following questions:

1) Who is carting the oil from Mosul to the Turkish border? Who owns those trucks? 

2) Who is carting the oil from the Turkish border to Ceyhan? Who owns those trucks? 

3) How does ISIS oil go through Ceyhan, a port owned by the Turkish government? 

4) Who owns the ships that cart the ISIS oil out of Turkey and to ports afield? 

5) What banks handle the transaction between the sale of ISIS oil and the foreign buyers? Should they also be implicated in the smuggling of ISIS oil? 

An investigation along these lines is overdue. It is not enough to accept or dismiss the Russian accusations. These should be used as an opportunity to clarity the actual pipelines for ISIS funding. Bombing the Omar fields in Syria – as the UK has done today – might not be sufficient. It might dust over the evidence of much greater complicity in ISIS oil.

The gist of Prashad's account was confirmed on Friday when Turkey moved additional troops and artillery to a training base outside of Mosul. As noted on the Moon of Alabama blog yesterday, "Erdogan Moves to Annexes [sic] Mosul":

On Friday a column of some 1,200 Turkish soldiers with some 20 tanks and heavy artillery moved into a camp near Mosul. The camp was one of four small training areas where Turkey was training Kurds and some Sunni-Arab Iraqis to fight the Islamic State. The small camps in the northern Kurdish area have been there since the 1990s. They were first established to fight the PKK. Later their Turkish presence was justified as ceasefire monitors after an agreement ended the inner Kurdish war between the KDP forces loyal to the Barzani clan and the PUK forces of the Talabani clan. The bases were actually used to monitor movement of the PKK forces which fight for Kurdish independence in Turkey.

The base near Mosul is new and it was claimed to be just a small weapons training base. But tanks and artillery have a very different quality than some basic AK-47 training. Turkey says it will increase the numbers in these camps to over 2000 soldiers.

Should Mosul be cleared of the Islamic State the Turkish heavy weapons will make it possible for Turkey to claim the city unless the Iraqi government will use all its power to fight that claim. Should the city stay in the hands of the Islamic State Turkey will make a deal with it and act as its protector. It will benefit from the oil around Mosul which will be transferred through north Iraq to Turkey and from there sold on the world markets. In short: This is an effort to seize Iraq's northern oil fields.

This story is backed up by The New York Times' Tim Arango, "Iraqi Officials Angered by Influx of Turkish Troops":

ISTANBUL — Turkey has sent more troops, along with armored vehicles and tanks, to northern Iraq to support a longstanding mission to train Kurdish and Sunni Arab forces in the fight against the Islamic State, touching off an uproar in Baghdad, where officials called the move a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

The troop movements on the outskirts of Mosul apparently came in recent days and were done in coordination with the autonomous Kurdish government in northern Iraq, but not with the central government in Baghdad. They prompted the Iraqi foreign ministry to summon the Turkish ambassador in protest on Saturday and demand that the forces withdraw from Iraq.

In a statement, the foreign ministry called the Turkish troop movements a hostile act and said they had been made “without the knowledge of the Iraqi central government,” adding, “This is considered a violation and a breach of the sovereignty of the country.” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and President Fuad Masum also voiced objections.

Days earlier, Mr. Abadi, who came to power last year with the strong support of the United States, made a similarly tough statement in reaction to the United States’ plans to deploy Special Operations forces to Iraq to conduct raids against Islamic State targets. He wrote on Facebook, “Iraq doesn’t need foreign ground troops,” and added, “This will be considered an act of aggression.” 

The reactions of the Iraqi authorities to the growing military role of the United States and Turkey inside Iraq highlighted Mr. Abadi’s weakness as he seeks to balance his relationships with the West and Iran, which backs powerful militias in Iraq. Some of the leaders of those militias are popular on the Iraqi street and have sought to undermine Mr. Abadi, saying they will fight any foreign troops on Iraqi soil. 

In an interview on Saturday, Hakim al-Zamili, the head of Parliament’s security committee and a Shiite militia leader, said the Iraqi military, if necessary, should strike the Turkish positions in the north.

What we have here is a world war in the Middle East, something that should have been obvious when Turkey shot down the Russian Sukhoi the day before Thanksgiving. Pepe Escobar in "How Russia is Smashing the Turkish Game in Syria" describes a "4+1 alliance" -- Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria, along with Hezbollah -- against NATO and the GCC.

Reading Arango's story one is certainly reminded of June 2014 when Mosul fell to ISIS and the Iraqi Kurds took Kirkuk in what was clearly a case of coordination. At the time, the U.S. position was that Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was to blame and had to go, which he did. Now there is a whisper campaign underway to do the same to his replacement, Haider al-Abadi. Note the conclusion to Arango's story:

Baghdad has been aware of Turkey’s presence but chose to publicly challenge it only now — underscoring, analysts say, the increasing pressure Mr. Abadi is facing from Iran and its proxies, including Iraq’s former prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. In a report published last month, Ayham Kamel, the director for the Middle East and North Africa at the political risk firm Eurasia Group, predicted that Mr. Abadi would likely be ousted sometime next year.

In the case of the United States, American officials say they negotiated with Mr. Abadi about the new deployments of Special Forces and believe his recent comments in defense of Iraqi sovereignty were made for domestic political reasons. 

Still, Mr. Abadi’s increasingly weak position in the face of Iranian pressure complicates matters for the United States as it considers increasing its military presence in Iraq to fight the Islamic State. 

While the deal reached by the West and Iran to curb Iran’s nuclear program raised hopes that Washington and Tehran could more closely coordinate campaigns against the Islamic State in Iraq, that now appears unlikely. The heads of powerful Iranian-backed militias have said they are willing to fight any new American troops in Iraq, as they did during the long American occupation after 2003. 

Rather than the United States’ and Iran’s becoming partners in the fight against the Islamic State, Iran’s presence in Iraq is seen as a constraint on the American military’s role there. 

Kirk H. Sowell, an analyst based in Amman, Jordan, and editor of the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics, wrote in an email, “The sending of ground forces to Iraq in any appreciable numbers would almost certainly open a new front in the war, with U.S. troops fighting Shia militias instead of Islamic State.”

This is what we are looking at in Iraq and Syria -- more war, much more war -- not less. Even if ceasefires are negotiated in New York next week as peace talks on Syria reconvene, there is zero indication that the U.S. has changed its position. It is still fronting for its Islamist allies.

Take the example of Russia's claim that Turkey is trading ISIS oil. According to Neil MacFarquhar's "Russia and Turkey Hurl Insults as Feud Deepens":

Although the United States has expressed frustration with the Turks for not doing more to control a roughly 100-mile stretch of border that faces territory controlled by the Islamic State, Washington has rejected the accusation that Ankara is acting in league with the militants.

What is bizarre about this is even Hillary Clinton in the last Democratic debate acknowledged that Turkey was up to no good. It has been widely reported in The New York Times that oil moves from the caliphate into Turkey, and the jihadists and weapons move from Turkey to the caliphate.

Centcom Investigation into Cooking Intelligence on ISIS has Potential to Bring Down the U.S. Warfare State

The cooking of intelligence coming out of Centcom has the potential to be a bombshell so huge it will destroy the current foundation of the perpetual warfare state, what used to be referred to as the Global War on Terror. Of course Obama is in full cover-up mode, as Michael Shear reports in "Obama Orders Inquiry Into Intelligence on ISIS":

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — President Obama said on Sunday that he had ordered his senior defense officials to find out whether intelligence reports had been altered to reflect a more optimistic assessment of the American military campaign against the Islamic State. 

Speaking at a news conference in Malaysia at the end of a 10-day overseas trip, Mr. Obama said he expected the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate allegations that significant changes were made to reports from analysts at the United States Central Command, known as Centcom.

“I don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on in Centcom,” Mr. Obama said. “What I do know is my expectation — which is the highest fidelity to facts, data, the truth.”

Mr. Obama was responding to a report in The New York Times on Sunday that described the internal Pentagon investigation. Some analysts in the Defense Department say their supervisors revised their conclusions about some of the military’s failures before finalizing the reports.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon has expanded its investigation into the allegations and has seized a large trove of emails and documents as it examines the claims. The president said altering reports to make them more optimistic would be contrary to his wishes.

If the inspector general of the Department of Defense is already conducting an investigation, Obama's statement that he is ordering his senior people to get to the bottom of it is meaningless, hollow grandstanding.

What is obvious is that ISIS has been studiously ignored by the Obama administration from the outset. All one need do is go back and read the coverage from the days when ISIS took Mosul at the end of spring last year. The U.S. man in Baghdad at the time, Brett McGurt (elevated to a new position recently, Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL), spent more time hectoring Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki to relinquish power than he did dealing with the rise of the caliphate, an enormous launch pad for jihadist terrorist attacks on the West.

The cover story at the time was that al-Maliki had to go in order to build trust with Iraqi Sunni who supposedly were fueling the ISIS conflagration. So al-Maliki went and ISIS gobbled up even more territory.

It is a favorite canard of the West that the jihadist efflorescence in Iraq and Syria is homegrown. It is not. It is a foreign import that is attributable to many of the key members of the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, a classic subterfuge where an enemy is created and supported in order to destabilize an area and then penetrate it with your superior military force.

As for the potential godhead bombshell that is the Pentagon inspector general's investigation, here is what Matt Apuzzo, Mark Mazzetti and Michael Schmidt had to say yesterday in "Pentagon Expands Inquiry Into Intelligence on ISIS Surge":

The attacks in Paris last week were a deadly demonstration that the Islamic State, once a group of militants focused on seizing territory in Iraq and Syria, has broadened its focus to attack the West. The electronic files seized in the Pentagon investigation tell the story of the group’s rise, as seen through the eyes of Centcom, which oversees military operations across the Middle East.

The exact content of those documents is unclear and may not become public because so much of the information is classified. But military officials have told Congress that some of those emails and documents may have been deleted before they had to be turned over to investigators, according to a senior congressional official, who requested anonymity to speak about the ongoing inquiry. Current and former officials have separately made similar claims, on condition of anonymity, to The New York Times. Although lawmakers are demanding answers about those claims, it is not clear that the inspector general has been able to verify them. A spokeswoman for the inspector general declined to comment.

Staff members at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are also poring over years of Centcom intelligence reports and comparing them to assessments from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others. The committee is not just examining reports about Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State, but also about Afghanistan and other areas under Centcom’s purview. The insurrection inside Centcom is an important chapter in the story of how the United States responded to the growing threat from the Islamic State. This past summer, a group of Centcom analysts took concerns about their superiors to the inspector general, saying they had evidence that senior officials had changed intelligence assessments to overstate the progress of American airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

***

That investigation was prompted by complaints this past summer from Centcom’s longtime Iraq experts, led by Gregory Hooker, the senior Iraq analyst. In some ways, the team’s criticisms mirror those of a decade ago, when Mr. Hooker wrote a research paper saying the Bush administration, over many analysts’ objections, advocated a small force in Iraq and spent little time planning for what would follow the invasion. 

Lawmakers originally said that the Centcom investigation would be completed in weeks. But Pentagon investigators have found the work painstaking and it could span months. In addition to determining whether changes were made to intelligence reports — and if so, who ordered them — the investigators, like the staff members of the House intelligence committee, are studying reports from other intelligence agencies produced at the time to determine what was actually occurring in Iraq and Syria when the reports were written.

The creation of multiple investigations in Congress, one in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and one in the House Armed Services Committee, is not necessarily a good sign. It means that the issue of doctoring intelligence for war purposes will be obscured as the fog machinery of the duopoly is cranked into high gear.

What did those deleted emails say? Certainly investigators have the technology to retrieve them. The issue is whether they really want to. My guess is that there is some rather frank "sports talk" about how the Turks and the Saudis are running ISIS, and how the U.S. was lending a hand.

Why else purposely inflate the effectiveness of airstrikes against ISIS? The only benign explanation I can think of is that senior Pentagon brass didn't want their boss in the Oval Office to feel any heat to ratchet up a response to a formidable adversary.

But on closer inspection this excuse makes no sense, particularly after ISIS took Palmyra and Ramadi this past May, because eventually the "facts on the ground" will out and a reckoning must be had.

The only explanation that makes any sense is that the intelligence was rewritten because the objectives of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are the same as the U.S. and its main allies in the region -- to weaken Iran and the governments aligned with Iran. The U.S. wants to be seen as fighting effectively against Islamic terrorism, at the same time it is using Wahhabi jihadists to achieve its geopolitical goals. It is the classic Ring of Gyges scenario that spurs Socrates on his discourse about the Good in Plato's Republic, as well as much of the action in Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the idea that the optimal position for a man is to have the reputation for moral rectitude but also to be equipped with a special ring that makes him invisible so he can steal and desecrate at will.

This is what the U.S. and its allies are trying to pull off, a Ring of Gyges scenario. Hopefully, enough truth will come out of the Centcom investigation that the invisible will be made visible. I am not too optimistic though. The Unites States is a warfare nation. Anything so big that it could threaten a nation's essence will be assiduously and ruthlessly crushed.

****

I am out of town for the holiday. Look for a post this Friday.

After Paris: A Few Hopeful Signs but Overall Business as Usual

There are indications this morning that the Friday assault on Paris by Islamic State hit teams that murdered 129 might actually prompt a shift by the West. Ever since Mosul fell at the end of spring 2014, the West, led by the United States, has been engaged in largely cosmetic attacks on ISIS as the jihadist offshoot of Al Qaeda pursued goals identical to the West, namely, regime change in Iraq and Syria. The collapse of the Iraqi Army was used to oust Nouri al-Maliki, but Bashar al-Assad has not proven so easy to dislodge.

Beginning early last month with Russia's active militarily involvement against the potpourri of jihadist groups operating in Syria, many with the direct support of Western intelligence services and GCC funding, the war in Syria began to shift. Islamic State struck back by blowing up a Russian charter jet in the Sinai two weeks ago, followed by a suicide bombing in a Beirut neighborhood, capped off by the assault on Paris on Friday.

Indications that this ISIS assault on a Western capital city has elicited a move away from the cosmetic to the substantive in the war against the caliphate are contained in two stories this morning: "France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks," by Alissa Rubin and Anne Barnard, and "U.S. Warplanes Strike ISIS Oil Trucks in Syria," by Michael Gordon.

First, Michael Gordon's story. Many commentators have pointed out that if the U.S. were truly serious about knocking out the caliphate it would go after its black-market oil pipeline. As Pepe Escobar argued ten-days ago in "What's the Big Deal Between the Russians and the Saudis?":

Meanwhile, fomenting all sorts of wild speculation, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh still manages to collect as much as $50 million a month from selling crude from oilfields it controls across “Syraq”, according to the best Iraq-based estimates. 

The fact that this mini-oil caliphate is able to bring in equipment and technical experts from “abroad” to keep its energy sector running beggars belief. “Abroad” in this context means essentially Turkey – engineers plus equipment for extraction, refinement, transport and energy production. 

One of the reasons this is happening is that the US-led Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO) – which includes Saudi Arabia and Turkey – is actually bombing the Syrian state energy infrastructure, not the mini oil-Caliphate domains. So we have the proverbial “international actors” in the region de facto aiding ISIS/ISIL/Daesh to sell crude to smugglers for as low as $10 a barrel.

Or as John Newsinger points out in a footnote to his "Wars Past and Wars to Come" in the latest Monthly Review:

The U.S. fight against Islamic State is compromised by the covert support that America’s allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, continue to provide for that regime. When considering IS it is worth adopting the old adage of following the money. Who is helping produce, sell and distribute the Islamic State’s oil? It is certain that Western intelligence agencies know the answer to this question, but obviously those assisting IS are too important to be named, let alone be sanctioned for their actions.

Now, according to Gordon, the U.S. has finally decided to target the Islamic State's oil:

ISTANBUL — Intensifying pressure on the Islamic State, United States warplanes for the first time attacked hundreds of trucks on Monday that the extremist group has been using to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria, American officials said.

According to an initial assessment, 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area in eastern Syria that is controlled by the Islamic State.
The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey. 

Plans for the strike were developed well before the terrorist attacks in and around Paris on Friday, officials familiar with the operation said, part of a broader operation to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to generate revenue to support its military operations and govern its territory. 

American officials have long been frustrated by ability of ISIS to generate tens of million of dollars a month by producing and exporting oil.

To disrupt that source of revenue, American officials said last week that the United States had sharply stepped up its airstrikes against infrastructure that allows ISIS to pump oil in Syria. 

Until Monday, the United States had refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact. 

The new campaign is called Tidal Wave II. It is named after the World War II effort to counter Nazi Germany by striking Romania’s oil industry. Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, who in September assumed command of the international coalition’s campaign in Iraq and Syria, suggested the name. 

To reduce the risk of harming civilians, two F-15 warplanes dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles, and strafing runs were conducted to reinforce the message.

Don't believe the window-dressing about concern for civilian casualties. Just ask the survivors from the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. The U.S. and its allies obviously wanted to maintain the viability of the caliphate as a way to pressure the governments of Iraq and Syria.

My concern is that these airstrikes on the oil-tanker trucks are going to be a PR one-off, evidence of good faith for the voters back home who are paying attention. Kerry's statement coming out of the negotiations in Geneva stick to the "It's All Assad's Fault" script, which is the same one that got us ISIS to begin with. According to Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Attacks in Paris Add Urgency to Talks on Ending Syria War":

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov sparred openly over the fate of Mr. Assad, a central question in any final agreement. 

The United States, along with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, believes Mr. Assad must go as part of any final settlement, and Mr. Kerry described him on Saturday as an enabler of the Islamic State and a “magnet” for foreign fighters who are spreading terror through the region and beyond. 

“This war won’t end — this war can’t end — as long as Bashar al-Assad is there,” he said. [Clear statement that there will be more terror attacks like Friday's in Paris.] 

But Russia has been a strong Assad supporter, and Mr. Lavrov argued that the conflict in Syria goes far beyond him, noting that past crises in Iraq and Libya only worsened with the ouster of their leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi. 

“I cannot agree, therefore, with the logic that Assad is the cause for everything,” Mr. Lavrov said to Mr. Kerry, seated with him in a hotel ballroom for the news conference. “The Paris attacks have shown, alongside with ISIS claiming responsibility for it, that it doesn’t matter if you are for Assad or against him; ISIS is your enemy, so it’s not about Assad.” 

Also left unresolved was the critical question of which groups would be considered terrorist organizations and which legitimate members of the opposition would be included in the political transition talks, an issue that the diplomats agreed to work on in the days ahead.

Not good. Yet in the Rubin and Barnard story about French airstrikes on the caliphate's capital of Raqqa, there is some hopeful news that the West is finally getting serious:

There is a growing focus on both reducing the Islamic State’s territory and its financing, said French government officials and experts. 

“We need to push the organization away from its territories,” said Jean Charles Brisard, a terrorism expert, who worked in the French government and now is the chairman for the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based research group. 

“Most of its resources are from the territory, so we have to push it away from its resources in Syria and Iraq and that means going in on the ground with a regional power,” he said.

The United States currently has soldiers on the ground in Iraq working with Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to dislodge the Islamic State. France has not yet said whether it will adopt a similar course. 

On Sunday, Mr. Hollande met his predecessor and rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, at the Élysée Palace. Afterward, Mr. Sarkozy urged decisive action against the Islamic State — a position Mr. Hollande has also taken. 

“We need everybody in order to exterminate Daesh,” Mr. Sarkozy told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

We'll see. A danger here is this "going in on the ground with a regional power" could be the green light that Erdogan has been looking for all along -- a buffer zone in northern Syria. Erdogan is going to get his billions and his special session in Brussels for Turkey. He has been playing his cards like a poker shark.

So despite hints here and there of a shift, it looks like business as usual. It is going to take a shift in Europe away from the United States and closer to Russia and China to bring about real change. That is not going to happen unless there is a cracking of the European Union. Something that "business as usual" is rapidly bringing about. Look for Marine Le Pen in 2017.

Abadi No Quisling: Tough Times Ahead for Uncle Sam's Iraq Project

The idea all along has been to partition Iraq. That was clear as soon as ISIS took Mosul last June and the Kurds, in what could be termed a collaboration, took Kirkuk.

The U.S. response to black-clad jihadis massacring over 1,000 conscripts near Tikrit, you will recall, was laid back. The primary concern of the Obama administration was not to prevent further genocide; rather, it was to make sure that Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, relinquish control of the government, something that was difficult to imagine since al-Maliki's State of Law Coalition was by far the top vote-getter in last April's election.

But with ISIS on a warpath to Baghdad and the United States reticent to provide assistance (the corrupt Bob Menendez from his leadership perch on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee promised to block weapons transfers to Iraq as long as al-Maliki remained prime minister), the State Department's man in Mesopotamia, Brett McGurk, was able to engineer a soft coup. Maliki was replaced by a candidate, Haider al-Abadi,  from Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party. Abadi, educated in England, was deemed suitably pro-Western in outlook, and, more importantly, he appeared to accept U.S. diktats regarding a de facto partition of Iraq -- more autonomy for the regions with a national guard system set up whereby the sects would be formally and institutionally militarized, as well as the ministries of defense and interior being awarded to Sunnis.

Then something happened. ISIS jumped the rails and went after areas under Kurdish control. The Yazidis were massacred on Mount Sinjar and Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, was threatened, not to mention there was the potential for ISIS to blow Mosul Dam and create a humanitarian catastrophe.

All of this got the U.S. off the sidelines, dispatching warplanes for numerous bombing runs. ISIS responded with well-publicized snuff films of American reporters James Foley and Steve Sotloff. This hardened U.S. opposition to Islamic State, which prior to August 2014 was not very pronounced; one might call it a studied ignorance.

But since the end of last summer, a combination of U.S. air power working in concert with Kurdish and Iranian-backed Shiite militias has halted the Islamic State offensive, with the exception of Sunni-dominated Anbar Province.

Now the anti-ISIS alliance appears to be fraying, as longtime Syria hand Anne Barnard reports in "Iraqi Campaign to Drive ISIS From Tikrit Reveals Tensions With U.S.":

Since the Islamic State swept into Iraq in June, Iran and the United States, longtime enemies that both support the Iraqi government, have maintained an uneasy de facto alliance against the group, with the United States-led coalition unleashing airstrikes, and Shiite militias aligned with Iran fighting alongside army and Kurdish forces on the ground. There have also been growing reports of Iranian forces’ directly joining the fight within Iraq. 

The Americans’ discomfort has grown as Mr. Abadi’s government has been unable to mobilize significant Sunni forces to join the fight, something that American officials consider crucial to breaking the Islamic State’s hold on many heavily Sunni areas.

For their part, Iraqi officials increasingly complain that American support has not been as robust as Iran’s. Many Iraqis resent what they see as American squeamishness about the militias, which by all accounts have been crucial to holding back the Islamic State after regular army units fled its assault. 

“Americans consider us a militia that does not represent the government, while we are defending the country and helping the government,” said Mueen al-Kadhimy, a leader in the Badr Organization, a prominent militia. “We are the people of Iraq.”

The Tikrit offensive could prove to be a first step toward driving back the Islamic State, or it could deepen longstanding sectarian and political divides that the militants have exploited to win support from some Iraqi Sunnis and acquiescence from others. The group has also used brutal intimidation tactics against Sunnis who reject it or support the government in Baghdad.

But at the same time, Shiite militias have been accused of reprisals against the Sunni population, many of whom regard them with suspicion and fear.

The Tikrit operation is the Iraqis’ first attempt to seize the area since June, when Islamic State militants massacred more than 1,000 Iraqi Shiite soldiers as they fled a nearby military base, Camp Speicher. There have been fears that Shiite militia members from the same areas many of the soldiers hailed from could take revenge on local Sunnis if they enter Tikrit, and some militia leaders have openly called the assault a revenge operation.

“There’s a risk there,” said one senior American military official, expressing concern that the Iraqi operations might not pay sufficient attention to the risks of civilian casualties from indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire.

But the American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing battle, acknowledged that if the Iraqis and their Iranian advisers maintained strict controls on their targeting and the operation resulted in “fewer ISIS fighters and chasing them from Tikrit, that’s not unhelpful.”

Clearly the U.S. is sitting out the Tikrit operation not at the behest of its military planners who see the advantage of an offensive tying Islamic State fighters down (as they were tied down and dealt a significant defeat in Kobani). The U.S. military is sitting out the Tikrit offensive because U.S. political leadership, which answers to the Saudis and the Israelis, cannot abide any Shiite victory.

The U.S. goal all along -- to appease Tel Aviv and Riyadh -- has been to keep Iraq fractured. If Iraq can be united under Shiite leadership with Iranian assistance this will be the U.S. plan stood on its head. The quisling Abadi will turn out to be a true Iraqi patriot.

MH17 Crash Site Canard + Maliki on His Way Out, So U.S. Moves the Goal Posts

Yatsenyuk submits his resignation as the junta prime minister of Ukraine, clearing the way for new parliamentary elections this fall. Europe is set to announce today a list of targets for a new round of sanctions against Russia. And the Western media monopoly persists in the canard, even when stories it publishes prove the exact opposite, that there is a Russian-backed conspiracy to tamper with evidence and block access to the Malaysia Airlines crash site in eastern Ukraine. Let's start there, with Sabrina Tavernise and Thomas Erdbrink and the misleading headline "Ukraine Disaster in Search of an Investigation":

There were a few new faces at the site on Thursday. Three Australian investigators worked in the field, joining three Malaysians. Before departing Thursday, the Malaysians said that they were surprised at the amount of access they had to the site and that they felt safe, Mr. Bociurkiw [a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] said. 

There have been widespread reports of looting, but Mr. Bociurkiw said his monitoring group, which has now spent more time at the site than any other, had not seen any. The Malaysians said they had seen valuables in the fields untouched, he noted, including a bottle of duty-free perfume, auto parts, backpacks full of belongings, a watch and some jewelry.

The Dutch Safety Bureau said in a statement that an initial examination showed that both of Flight 17’s so-called black boxes had been damaged, but that their memory chips were intact. The bureau added that there was “no evidence or indications of manipulation” of either the cockpit voice recorder or the flight data recorder, and that the data from both had been downloaded by experts from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch in Farnborough, England.

Given the high-volume mendacity of the junta, one wonders what the condition of the black box would have been if it had fallen into the hands of Kiev instead of the DPR. What is important to note is the prevalence across a wide range of stories -- stories coming out of Kiev and Brussels and D.C. -- of the bald lie that the Novorossiyan militia is somehow restricting access to the site and impeding the collection of evidence. This is such a bald lie, supported by not a single shred of evidence, that it leads me to believe that it is being used to 1) justify a Western military footprint in Donetsk, and 2) dismiss any evidence that emerges which shows the junta was to blame. That is why the crash-site story is being kept alive, even as Tavernise makes clear there is no story there. It is strange to see the prestige press engaged in conspiracy theories. In this case though there are no inconvenient facts exposed or complex theories limned; it is all bald lies and misleading headlines.

Speaking of bald lies, the goal posts are now being moved on the "It's All Maliki's Fault" canard. You'll recall from last month that as soon as Islamic State launched its blitzkrieg that captured Mosul the messaging across all sectors of the Western media and government was that the success of the ultra-jihadis was due to the Iraqi prime minister's authoritarianism driving normal Sunnis into the ranks of the Salafis. Therefore Maliki had to go.

Well, come to find out, now that it appears that Maliki is on his way out, he really isn't the problem after all. The Kurds selected their choice for president yesterday, clearing the way for the Shia to select their candidate for prime minister and seating a new government. According to Tim Arango and Suadad al-Salhy in "Iraq Picks New President to Confront Militant Threat":

The Parliament voted to approve Fouad Massoum, 76, a Kurdish politician and former guerrilla fighter against Saddam Hussein’s regime, as the country’s new president. He replaces Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who had been president since 2005 and was seen as a rare unifying figure among Iraq’s many factions but has been largely absent from the political scene since suffering a stroke in late 2012.

“Everyone likes him,” Abbas al-Bayati, a Shiite lawmaker, said of Mr. Massoum. “He is a moderate man and was agreed to by everyone.”

A week before, Parliament elected Salim al-Jubouri, a moderate Sunni Islamist, to the position of speaker, which was the first step in forming a new government after national elections in April. Under an informal political bargain forged after the toppling of Mr. Hussein in 2003, the Iraqi presidency is held by a Kurd, the speaker of Parliament is a Sunni Arab and the position of prime minister, the most powerful post, goes to a Shiite. 

The next political step, the selection of a new prime minister, will be more fraught. That process will determine the future of Mr. Maliki, who has been in power since 2006 but who has become an increasingly polarizing figure as the insurgency has grown and sectarian violence has intensified to a level not seen since 2006 and 2007.

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Mr. Maliki has insisted that he will seek a third term, but he faces an array of opponents and has lost support from abroad. American officials, who believe he has become too divisive to lead the nation out of its current crisis, have been working behind the scenes to push Iraq’s leaders to select someone else. And Iran, which exerts enormous influence here, has signaled it would like to see new leadership. 

Last week, several Iranian officials, including Ali Shamkhani, a top national security official, visited the holy city of Najaf, in southern Iraq, and conveyed to religious leaders that Iran would prefer that Mr. Maliki be replaced, according to a senior Shiite lawmaker in Baghdad. 

But even if Mr. Maliki were replaced, there is little sense that the Iraqi political class would be able to establish a new political bargain that could bring peace. “There’s no glue to hold whatever grandiose governing coalition that emerges together,” said Ramzy Mardini, an Iraq expert and fellow at the Atlantic Council. He added, “the idea that if Maliki should leave and then we’d be on the path of reconciliation and compromise is wishful thinking.”

Lo and behold! Once the Iranians line up with Great Satan and agree that Maliki should be ushered off the main stage in order to get down to business of smashing the caliphate rising and piecing Iraq back together the story is changed. Now it is not Maliki's fault but the inherent politically instability of Iraq. Brett McGurk was back in front of Congress arguing for a friendly neighbor policy towards Islamic State:

In testimony before the House on Wednesday, Brett McGurk, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran and Iraq, portrayed an increasingly decentralized Iraqi government as the most likely way forward. “There is a recognition in Iraq that from the center out you’re never going to fully control all of these areas, and particularly given the capacity of ISIL,” he said, using an alternative acronym for ISIS.

Combine that with yesterday's soft focus almost loving portrayal of Islamic State's stewardship of Raqqa that appeared on the front page of the Gray Lady and it is not hard to make out the handwriting on the wall. The caliphate, backed by the United States and its client Gulf Sheikhdoms, is the answer the people of the Middle East are being given to the question raised by the Arab Spring.

Loya Jirga + NFL Week 12

The loya jirga begins tomorrow in Afghanistan. It will decide whether to approve the Status of Forces Protection Agreement (SOFA) close to being hammered out by the government of Hamid Karzai and the United States. According to a report today by Rod Nordland, "Afghans Demand That U.S. Admit Military Errors," everything is settled, even the contentious issues of immunity from Afghan law for U.S. forces and the continuation of the counterterrorism practice of raiding private homes. The only item pending is a letter of apology from Obama for military blunders:

With one day remaining to finalize the wording of the security agreement before the loya jirga meets, [Aimal Faizi, Karzai's spokesman] said that was the remaining issue in talks, carried out in their last phase by Mr. Karzai with the American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, and the American military commander, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. 

“The rest, everything is solved,” Mr. Faizi said.

It will be interesting to see the size of the U.S. military footprint once the loya jirga, whose participants are handpicked by Karzai, signs off on the SOFA. Iraq refused the customary U.S. demand for immunity during its SOFA negotiations, which led to a complete withdrawal of American forces. At the end of last month al-Maliki made an official visit to Obama to ask for drones and Apache helicopters to combat an Al Qaeda insurgency raging in Iraq. There is no doubt that without a substantial military commitment by Obama Karzai will be fleeing Kabul in a matter of months, if that, after U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan next year.

The Afghan loya jirga starts tomorrow, but so too does Week 12 of the National Football League season with the 8-2 Saints traveling to Atlanta to take on the hapless 2-8 Falcons. Surveying the big games nothing really pops out. The hometown Seahawks have a bye week. Next Monday night they will host New Orleans in a possible playoff preview. Seattle looked impressive in the second half against the Vikings. The Seahawks continue to underwhelm at home in the first half. The defense looks lackluster, though, to its credit, they completely dominated Adrian Peterson from start to finish. The remaining five games will tell Seahawks fans a lot about how far their team is going to go towards the Lombardy Trophy. The schedule is: Saints at home, 49ers away, Giants away, Cardinals home, Rams home. Each game is a potential loss. Besides the obvious challenge offered by conference powers New Orleans and San Francisco, New York is surging, as is Arizona, and St. Louis almost beat us at home last year. So Pete Carroll needs to get his team better prepared coming out of the bye than it was last year when they dropped a game they should have won in Miami. In that game the run defense and pass rush were piss poor.

Two Week 12 games promise to be interesting. The Cowboys travel to New Jersey to take on the Giants. The Giants have won four in a row after losing their first six games. The Cowboys have been banged up on defense. Without having watched a complete game of New York's this season, I'm taking the Giants over Dallas.

The other game that is worth watching is the Sunday night match-up between the Patriots and the Broncos. Much as I loathe to do it, I've got to take New England at home. Yes, Denver looked impressive at home against the Chiefs, but I'm convinced that Belichik as an underdog at home with Brady at QB in the premiere televisual event of the week is a safe bet. (Belichik often performs poorly as a favorite; but as an underdog, he is money in the bank.) Take the Patriots.

War Returns to Iraq

An important unfolding story that Tim Arango has been covering is the burgeoning armed sectarian conflict in Iraq. It might have already reached the point of no return. The strife seems to be related to the civil war in neighboring Syria. Iraq's Sunnis see what's happening next door and they are saying now is the time to take up arms against the Shiites. The al-Maliki goverment revoked the broadcast licenses of Al Jazeera and other television channels on Sunday. The move is an obvious shot across the bow of wealthy Gulf states who are the paymasters behind the Sunni uprising.

Patrick Cockburn on Iraq Ten Years After

For a good rundown on current politics in Iraq check out Patrick Cockburn's article, "Death and Dollars in the New Iraq: The Shia and the Kurds 10 Years After the Invasion," posted on the Counterpunch website this weekend. Some highlights: Iran is ready to wash its hands of Maliki (at least by the 2014 parliamentary elections); Muqtada al-Sadr is still a power, shrewdly positioning the Sadrists and defending a unified Iraq; and Kurdistan is booming but might overplay its hand if it chooses to piss off Baghdad by going ahead with an oil pipeline to Turkey that is already under construction.

I recently sold all the stock I had in the Turkish Investment Fund (TKF). I held onto it for over five years. I bought in originally because I thought eventually Turkey, a great nation, the seat of the old Ottoman Empire, would be admitted to the eurozone; also, I thought that Turkey would absorb most of the trade with Iraq as it went through de-Baathification. I sold because I don't think the eurozone is going to survive; plus, I think Iran and Iraq are headed for some tough times as Syria continues to unravel. Syria's collapse is something that goes unmentioned in Cockburn's piece.