The Conflict with the Shia Comes Into Sharper Focus: Yemen and Iraq

The problem for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms is that their Wahhabite proxies, Islamic State and Al Qaeda, don't have an air force. Thus, when confronted by a seasoned, motivated fighting force like the Houthis in Yemen who have been rolling through the country at will mopping up any forces remaining loyal to the pro-Saudi president Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council can't rely on their usual weapon of choice, Salafi terror.

Hence, we have today's headline, "Saudi Jets Strike Yemen in Bid to Halt Houthis," by David Kirkpatrick. The Yemeni air force is reported to have been destroyed and the Saudis have massed 150,000 troops on their border with Yemen. The United States, while denying that it is flying sorties, is providing public relations flak and is coordinating the air campaign. Here is the roll call of nations attacking Yemen:

The United States and most of the Arab nations moved quickly to support the Saudi-led operation in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia has called Operation Decisive Storm. 

The White House said in a statement that the United States would provide “logistical and intelligence support” to the Saudi-led military operations. “While U.S. forces are not taking direct military action in Yemen in support of this effort, we are establishing a joint planning cell with Saudi Arabia to coordinate U.S. military and intelligence support,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in a statement.

“The United States strongly condemns ongoing military actions taken by the Houthis against the elected government of Yemen,” she said.

“We strongly urge the Houthis to halt immediately their destabilizing military actions and return to negotiations as part of the political dialogue,” she said, adding, “The violent takeover of Yemen by an armed faction is unacceptable and a legitimate political transition – long sought by the Yemeni people – can be accomplished only through political negotiations and a consensus agreement among all of the parties.”

Four other Persian Gulf monarchies, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, joined the Saudi operation, as well as the allied Arab kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco.

Egyptian state news media reported that Cairo was also providing undefined political and military support. The Egyptian government was consulting with Saudi Arabia about the possibility of providing forces in the naval or air support or ground troops as well, the state news media reported.

Of the Persian Gulf states, only Oman declined to participate. Two other less expected nations outside the immediate region — Pakistan and Sudan — took part as well, according to the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya network.

Al Arabiya reported that in addition to 100 fighter jets, Saudi Arabia had deployed 150,000 soldiers and other naval units. But the operation has so far consisted only of an aerial campaign.

I must admit I am bit surprised that the Saudis are taking such an above-board role in the conflict; it is not the Kingdom's style. Yemen is no Bahrain. The Saudis as well as the Egyptians have been bloodied there in the past. But one thing we have come to expect from the House of Saud is that they categorically accept no victory for the Shia. One commentator on The New York Times web site sagely noted that the Saudis were not roused to similar martial action when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula controlled large swaths of territory in Yemen. Ah, yes, but the Houthis are Zaydi, a Shiite sect.

This is not going to end well. The Houthis cannot be easily broken. The one potential positive is that war will come home to al Saud. The Houthis will be able to inflict damage on Saudi ground troops if they are ever committed to Yemen.

Part of the problem in the world today is that war doesn't come home to centers of aggression like Washington D.C. and Riyadh. Thus the war planners can plot away free of charge implementing their schemes of slaughter and destruction. This has to change.

Before signing off this morning I recommend you take the time to read Rod Nordland and Peter Baker's frontpager, "Opening New Iraq Front, U.S. Strikes ISIS in Tikrit." After doing so, it is impossible to deny that the "war" against Islamic State is merely a foil for the larger U.S.-GCC-Israeli conflict with Iran.

Obama yesterday apparently decided to grant a request for airstrikes made last week by Iraqi prime minister Abadi. The issue is that about 1,000 Islamic State fighters have holed up in parts of Tikrit preventing the 30,000 Iraqi troops (most of whom are Shiite militia) from exercising complete control of the city.

One wonders if Obama's decision to get U.S. air power off the sidelines was linked to assistance of the Saudi-led assault on Yemen. The discussion being, "If you let me help Abadi take Tikrit, I'll run the air traffic for your bombing runs on the Houthis."

In any event, there were conditions exacted from Abadi to get the airstrikes on the jihadis in Tikrit:

Mr. Abadi asked the ambassador Stuart E. Jones and Brett McGurk, the deputy special envoy for the battle with the Islamic State, for American help with the Tikrit offensive last week. The American side insisted that it could help only if operations were coordinated by a joint center with the American military in Baghdad and if there were clear targets.

The Americans wanted to work with Iraqi forces they had helped train and insisted on “deconflicting” with the Iranian-backed militias so they would not bomb them by mistake, American officials said. The Shiite militias have generally been on the east side of the Tigris River, the officials said, so it should be possible to avoid any errors.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke with Mr. Abadi by telephone, and Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of Central Command, developed a plan for strikes and concluded that the Iraqis had met the Americans’ condition, the officials said. Although Mr. Obama does not personally sign off on most airstrikes in the fight with the Islamic State, he was brought this decision for approval because it represented a more complicated shift in policy. [A more complicated shift in policy, to attack ISIS?]

American officials seemed heartened that Mr. Abadi had made a point of calling the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey last weekend to reassure them that once the Islamic State is rooted out of Tikrit, the Sunni city would be returned to the control of its Sunni police, not dominated by Shiite forces.

There you have it. Abadi, in order to get the air strikes, had to kowtow to Islamic State's sponsors to guarantee Sunni control of Tikrit post-ISIS.

The Abadi supplication is being spun as a U.S. victory, that Abadi clearly chose the United States over Iran, sending Iranian Quds Force chief Qassim Suleimani packing back to Tehran:

Mr. Obama approved the airstrikes after a request from Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on the condition that Iranian-backed Shiite militias move aside to allow a larger role for Iraqi government counterterrorism forces that have worked most closely with United States troops, American officials said. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who has been advising forces around Tikrit, was reported on Sunday to have left the area.

The United States has struggled to maintain influence in Iraq, even as Iran has helped direct the war on the ground against the Islamic State. But as the struggles to take Tikrit mounted, with a small band of Islamic State militants holding out against a combined Iraqi force of more than 30,000 for weeks, American officials saw a chance not only to turn the momentum against the Islamic State but to gain an edge against the Iranians.

If the Americans did not engage, they feared becoming marginalized by Tehran in a country where they had spilled much blood in the last decade, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

American officials now hope that an American-assisted victory by Mr. Abadi and his forces will politically bolster him and counter the view of Iranian officials, and many Iraqi Shiites, that Iran is Iraq’s vital ally. “Taking back Tikrit is important, but it gives us an opportunity to have our half of the operation win this one,” one American official said. “It’s somewhat of a gamble.”

The administration also hopes that a Tikrit victory with American air power will ensure that it is their coalition with Mr. Abadi’s forces, and not the faction led by Mr. Suleimani, that then proceeds to try to recapture the larger and more pivotal city of Mosul.

Islamic State is not the chief concern. There it is for all to see right there on the Gray Lady's front page -- a direct quote from an "America official." (Brett McGurk?) With this present war against Islamic State, and the last several years since the Arab Spring, we are seeing what will be a decades-long struggle -- a world war -- against the Shia. It will remake the West and likely destroy whatever vestiges of formal democracy remain there.

Islamic State a Spook-Run Operation

One of the principal canards about Islamic State peddled in the Western press is that the caliphate is an indigenous formation growing out of grievances that Sunnis have with the Shiite-majority government of Iraq and the Alawites of Syria. But besides the high profile of the Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, where is there any evidence that ISIS is a homegrown movement? In fact, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that ISIS is exogenous to Iraq and Syria, attracting foreign fighters, thanks to a sophisticated online presence, to enter the caliphate through Turkey.

Patrick Cockburn has recently published a number of stories for The Independent describing life inside Islamic State. (The stories have been re-posted on the CounterPunch website.) Cockburn
interviews members of the growing Sunni diaspora in Iraqi Kurdistan, people, mostly from Anbar Province, who have fled the ISIS occupation of their towns and cities.

Cockburn's "The One-Day Siege: ISIS’s Conquest of Hit" is a good example:

It was on 4 October last year that Isis captured the small city of Hit, seizing complete control in the space of just a few hours. For the city’s 100,000 mostly Sunni residents the takeover by the self-proclaimed Islamic State has brought changes that some support, but others deeply resent. 

Among those living in Hit when Isis rolled in was Faisal, a 35-year-old government employee who is married with two children, and a keen observer of all that has befallen the agricultural centre and former transport hub over the past five months. 

He recently fled to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, where he described to me the rule of Isis and its impact on Hit, starting with the day the city was captured.

Faisal goes on to describe a religious police state where there is little money to pay for food, little communication with the outside world, and no work except for the jihadis -- all overseen by foreign fighters and imams:

The internet has not worked in Anbar Province for the last eight months, compelling people to use satellite internet connections that are monitored by Isis. More recently the group offered a limited internet service, though this is only available in internet offices and other locations monitored by the jihadist group. There is no internet access from private homes, while in the public locations, Faisal says, “Isis can spy on computers so they can see what you are surfing and to whom you are talking”.

Predictably, Isis focuses on religion and spreading its variant of Islam. Faisal says: “Many preachers (imams) were replaced by foreign preachers from the Arab world, mostly Saudis, Tunisians and Libyans, as well as Afghans. Some new imams are appointed temporarily just for Friday speech and prayer, while others are permanent appointments. Isis removed some of the old preachers who have left for Baghdad or KRG (the Kurdish-controlled region). These are often Sufis, whose beliefs are rejected by Isis.”

There are many other signs of Isis imposing its cultural agenda in Hit. Faisal says that “at the entrance to every main street and bazaar, there are Isis groups holding black dresses that cover the whole body including the face and head. If a woman does not have one, she must buy one [for about £8] and the money goes to the Isis treasury.”

Are people joining Isis in Hit? Faisal says they do, often for economic reasons. “I know many people in my neighbourhood in Hit who joined Isis,” he says. “They are paid little money, about 175,000 dinars (£80), but they say that the salary is enough because they also enjoy many privileges, including free fuel, cooking gas, sugar, tea, bread, and many other foodstuffs and services.

“Isis still has a strong financial basis. It confiscates the houses of the people who were previously employed in the police, courts, and security forces. These houses, and any furniture in them, are confiscated by the Sharia (legal or religious) court, where the judges are Libyan and Tunisian, though the other staff are locals. The ruling authority in Hit is headed by the military governor, the religious (legal) governor, the security governor and finally the administrative governor.”

Faisal’s account of life in Hit is confirmed by eyewitnesses from other parts of the Islamic State. Isis at first benefited from widespread popular relief that the Iraqi Army was gone, but there is deepening resentment against the enforcement of outlandish rules on personal behaviour that is contrary to local religious and social traditions. These include women being forced to wear the niqab (covering their faces), obligatory attendance at prayers and the destruction of mosques, such as the Younis mosque in Mosul, deemed by Isis to be un-Islamic shrines.

There is also the fear of conscription of young men to fight for the Islamic State, an obligation that is increasingly difficult to avoid and is leading many families to try to leave Isis-controlled territory, which is not easy to do.

But despite resentment by many at its takeover of mosques and schools, Isis is able to use these to propagate its views and to make converts – something that may strengthen the forces of the Islamic State. Conscription does not seem to have diluted the fanaticism of Isis fighters, or their willingness to take heavy casualties, according to Kurdish commanders who have come under attack by Isis units in recent months.

Local eyewitnesses confirm that the unpopularity of Isis is not universal. Sameer, a Kurdish shopkeeper in Mosul, told The Independent last November that “in spite of the coalition air strikes every night and every morning, Isis increases in terms of the number of its men and the territory they occupy”.

Since then, Isis has retreated from much of the Sinjar area west of Mosul, but Ali Hussein Mustafa, a 21-year-old university student who left Mosul last month, says that “many Isis men were much better than the fighters of the Iraqi Army in dealing with people and helping them”.

He says this better behaviour was not invariable and criticised Isis fighters at some checkpoints who harassed or swore at women whose face was not hidden. He added, however, that many people had now concluded that “Isis rule is no better, and maybe worse, than what they endured before [when the US or Iraqi government was in charge of Mosul from 2003 to 2014]”.

It should be said that Patrick Cockburn has always stuck to the "ISIS is an indigenous response to Shiite misrule of al-Maliki" argument, putting the leftist journalist in line with the U.S. State Department. But recently he published a story, "Is the Defeat of ISIS in Iraq Inevitable?," that sort of softened his pro-Sunni "It's all Maliki's fault" slant:

As Isis’s columns advanced last year, its fighters carried out massacres to spread fear just as Saddam Hussein had done against the Kurds and Shia a quarter of a century earlier. When the government’s Badush prison, near Mosul, was captured by Isis, its fighters slaughtered 670 Shia prisoners. At Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, 800 Shia cadets were lined up in front of trenches and machine-gunned. Pictures of the scene resemble those of atrocities carried out by the German army in Russia in 1941. In August, when Isis fighters stormed into Kurdish-held regions, they targeted the Yazidis as “pagans” to be murdered, raped and enslaved.

To me it seems obvious that ISIS is a spook-run operation, meaning a government intelligence bureau is either at the control board or actively assisting a small leadership group in directing the caliphate. Popular movements are messy and enthusiastic, always either falling short or spilling over stated objectives in a public way. ISIS is nothing of the sort. It is opaque and mercenary; its messaging strictly controlled. No, this is definitely a top-down production.

When ISIS suffered a defeat recently in Tikrit at the hands of the Iraqi Army and Shiite militias working in concert with Kurdish pesh merga there was a prompt asymmetrical response: the terror attack targeting tourists at a museum in Tunisia and the suicide bombings at two Zaydi Shiite mosques in Sana. This reminded me of the old Rumsfeld neocon logic of "When you have a problem one way to solve it is to make it bigger."

Scott Shane had a story, a good one, that was featured prominently on The New York Times website for most of the weekend. In "From Minneapolis to ISIS: An American’s Path to Jihad," it is clear that the young Somali men from Minneapolis were able to hook up with ISIS recruiters at a mosque in Bloomington. Answer the question of who paid for their plane tickets and we'll be a little clearer how the ISIS network operates and who funds it.

And it will turn out that ISIS is no different than Al Qaeda, an organization funded and supported by the Gulf Sheikhdoms.

GOP Plans To Run the World from Congress + Good News Out of Tikrit

Hillary should thank her lucky stars that her Tuesday press conference, where she defended the use of her personal email account to conduct official USG business while she was Secretary of State, coincided with an open letter to Iran penned by junior Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of  Arkansas, that threatened to abolish any agreement reached by the Obama administration on that country's nuclear program. The Cotton letter, signed by 46 other Republicans in the Senate, created a social and mainstream media firestorm, which effectively bumped the Hillary email imbroglio from the top spot in the cultural consciousness. With Kerry appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there was plentiful soundbite video of Team Obama vs. GOP presidential aspirants.

The permanent circus of partisan conflict has spread from government funding measures and Obamacare to the conduct of foreign policy. Republicans are feeling their oats. Wading into foreign affairs to undercut ongoing White House diplomacy is the GOP's way of saying, "We're not going to lose Congress in the foreseeable future. We might not win the presidency. But we don't have to. We'll run everything from the House and Senate."

One silver lining here is that Obama's ISIS AUMF request appears to be dead in the water. And the good news out of Iraq is that Islamic State has been all but defeated in Tikrit without the assistance of U.S. air power. Anne Barnard reports this morning in "Iraqi Forces Claim Western Areas of Tikrit From ISIS":

BAGHDAD — Iraqi government forces and allied militias took control of the western neighborhoods of Tikrit on Thursday, military officials said, leaving only one area, including a palace complex once used by Saddam Hussein, in the hands of Islamic State militants. 

Military officials said they were confident of declaring victory within a few days in Tikrit, a central objective in rolling back the militants and the government’s largest operation against the Islamic State since it swept into much of the country’s north and west in June. 

Top Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, visited troops near the front lines on Tuesday night and Wednesday. They called for security forces to facilitate the return of displaced civilians from Tikrit and surrounding areas. 

Bringing civilians back without revenge attacks or continuing conflict will be the next test for Iraq’s government if it holds its gains and completes the operation in Tikrit. The government mustered a 30,000-strong force, the bulk of it fighters from Shiite militias, in an effort to retake the city.

Note the last paragraph. This is the talking point for why the U.S. sat out the Tikrit offensive. The presence of Shiite militia backed by Iran risks the sectarian cohesion of the Iraqi state. Never mind that Islamic State fighters have been slaughtering Christians, Yazidis and Shiites and desecrating antiquities, as well as raping, crucifying and immolating. Let's play up rumors of Shiite atrocities.

And this is what reliable, pro-USG scribe Anne Barnard does farther down in her story:

Iraqi officials said they would investigate reports of atrocities, filmed and posted in recent months on social media, and committed by armed men in uniforms with the insignia of a special forces unit and other regular government forces. 

The images have been circulating on social media, and they were compiled and presented to Iraqi and United States officials by ABC News. The images raised the question of whether Iraqi forces may have run afoul of a measure that requires the United States government to cut off aid to foreign militaries that commit human rights abuses.

One video shows what appears to be a 12-year-old boy being shot to death in the street after being accused of working with the Islamic State. Another shows two civilians being shot after insisting they were not involved with the militant group; fighters then riddle their bodies with bullets. Another apparently shows a civilian being beheaded, and other images show a head propped on the front bumper of a military vehicle that appears to be an American-made Humvee.

Iraqi officials have showed footage to the BBC that they said proved that the Islamic State was using chlorine gas in roadside bombs. The images show orange clouds rising from the bombs as Iraqi ordnance disposal teams detonate them. Chlorine, while not as dangerous as substances like sarin, banned by international treaty, can cause coughing and burning eyes and in close quarters can be fatal.

What is going on is the U.S. is getting pressure from its GCC allies to cut off its support of Iraq. The last paragraph about ISIS using chlorine bombs is illuminating. I'm sure Barnard and/or her editors included it to maintain a semblance of balance.

Soon, if the reconstituted military of Iraq continues its battlefield successes against Islamic State, we shall see the jihadi ratline from Turkey in full flower once again. ISIS is a GCC/Western cat's paw. The target has always been the Shiite Crescent.

Officials Walk Back Talk of U.S.-Iraq Split While Hope for P5+1 Agreement Dims

Two stories today both confirm the importance of Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq's efforts to defeat Islamic State at the same time quoting Iraqi and U.S. officials denying that there is any rift between the two countries.

First, Helene Cooper, reporting from Washington D.C., writes in "U.S. Strategy in Iraq Increasingly Relies on Iran" that

“The only way in which the Obama administration can credibly stick with its strategy is by implicitly assuming that the Iranians will carry most of the weight and win the battles on the ground,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former special adviser to Mr. Obama who is now dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too — the U.S. strategy in Iraq has been successful so far largely because of Iran.”

***

Landon Shroder, an intelligence analyst for corporations in Iraq who was in Baghdad last summer when Mosul fell, countered that the worry that Iran will gain influence in Iraq ignores the reality that Iran’s Shiite government is already a key Iraqi ally.

“By this stage, everybody who observed what happened in Iraq with the Islamic State should know that the main influencer in Iraq is Iran,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “That’s an unpopular perception in the United States, after spending so much money and lives lost in the conflict, but it’s reality.”

Mr. Shroder said that at the moment, the only force with the ability to bring Kurdish troops, the Iraqi Army and the Shiite militias together to fight the Islamic State is Iran.

Rafid Jaboori, the spokesman for Mr. Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister, said in an interview Wednesday that Iraq had urged the United States and Iran not to play out their bilateral conflict in Iraq’s battle against the Islamic State.

“So far in general there was no clash within the two,” Mr. Jaboori said.

He drew a comparison to World War II. “Countries with different ideologies, different priorities, different systems of government, cooperated to defeat the Nazis,” he said. “It’s foreseeable that we see countries which might not get along very well in terms of their bilateral relations working to help Iraq to defeat this threat.”

Then, Anne Barnard in "Iraqis Want Lead Role in Driving ISIS From Mosul":

But as the battle continued in Tikrit, American officials, as well as some of their Iraqi counterparts, insisted that the countries’ relationship was healthy and that close military collaboration would continue against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or by the Arabic acronym Daesh.

Even though United States warplanes are not participating in the Tikrit battle, as they have in others, the Iraqi government still welcomes continued international assistance, said Ali al-Alaaq, a close aide to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. 

“Today in Salahuddin, we were hoping that the Americans could participate in the battle against ISIS, but we have launched against ISIS alone,” he said. “We are expecting that the support will be continued, especially since we are facing a very important task in Mosul and other cities in Iraq.” 

American officials, too, tried to play down signs of strain between the United States and Iraq. 

“The United States is proud of its partnership with Iraqi forces, which has made huge impacts in weakening Daesh, and we are looking forward to more coordination with the Iraqi forces,” the United States ambassador to Iraq, Stuart E. Jones, said after meeting with Adnan al-Zurufi, the governor of Najaf, in southern Iraq. He appeared to be reassuring Iraqi officials that the United States did not oppose the use of Shiite militias known as popular mobilization forces. They have played a crucial role in the ground fight since many regular army units disintegrated as ISIS seized much of northern and western Iraq in June.

“Our direct coordination is with the Iraqi security forces, and we count on the security forces to coordinate with the popular mobilization forces and other forces that are cooperating in the fight against Daesh,” Mr. Jones said.

The problem for the Obama administration is that it has to deal with Israel's Likudniks and the sheikhs of the Gulf Cooperation Council.  Both groups are dead set against anything that smacks of a victory for Iran, including a deal on its nuclear program emerging from the P5+1 talks in Switzerland.

Michael Gordon's opaque "John Kerry Flies to Saudi Arabia to Discuss Iran Nuclear Talks" is clear enough for the reader to discern that the make or break aspect of the negotiations center on how long uranium processing restrictions should remain in effect. Ten years? Fifteen years?

Obama administration officials have said that a central goal of accord would be to preclude Iran from being able to develop enough nuclear material for a bomb within a year, should it decide to repudiate the agreement. American officials have said the breakout restrictions should last at least 10 years. Mr. Kerry, who took no questions from reporters in his appearance here, said the United States would be interested only in the “right deal.”

“Time is of the essence,” he said, “and important decisions need to be made.”

American officials have not said how long the agreement with Iran might be in effect. One possibility that has been discussed is an accord that lasts 15 years, with restrictions on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium relaxed during the final years.

This will be the petard Obama and Kerry will be hoisted upon. No sunset date will be long enough for the venal pay-to-play Congress and its Saudi and Israeli paymasters. Obama can rescind some of the Iranian sanctions himself, but he needs Congressional approval to relax all of them.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's signaling his willingness to push legislation requiring Congressional approval for any agreement that results from the P5+1 talks prior to their March 24 deadline points to the eventual necessity of an Obama veto.

If the P5+1 talks fail we will have to wait and see if there is a spillover effect on U.S.-Iranian cooperation in the war against ISIS. Failure to reach an agreement will create an even messier mess in a region that is already cracked and reeling.

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.

Islamic State's Funding and the Battle for Mosul

Iraq launched a military operation on Monday to rout Islamic State from Tikrit (Omar al-Jawoshy and Tim Arango, "Iraqi Offensive to Retake Tikrit From ISIS Begins"), and today The New York Times features a timely unsigned editorial, "To Hurt ISIS, Squeeze the Cash Flow." The editorial is a gloss of a recent Financial Action Task Force (FATF) report, "Financing of the Terrorist Organisation Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)." FATF is an international organization set up by the G-7 to monitor and deal with money laundering. The Gulf Cooperation Council is a member.

The report, after a quick scan, seems to be extremely light on the historic funding streams of ISIS; it assumes an ISIS post-June of 2014 and its capture of Mosul -- in other words, after al-Baghdadi declared ISIS to be the Islamic State -- as the steady state. This is fundamentally misleading. How did ISIS grow so quickly after it took Fallujah in January 2014 that it could effortlessly capture Mosul, one of Iraq's largest cities, five months later? The oil revenue and looting of banks that followed the fall of Mosul became an explanation -- I am not kidding you -- for how ISIS funded its far flung potent military campaigns. To my mind, the early non-interference of the Kurds as they moved to take Kirkuk and the melting away of Iraqi Army commanding officers in Mosul indicated high-level coordination.

Now there appears to be a shift underway. Iraq's prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, originally pegged to succeed Nuri al-Maliki because of Abadi's pro-Western, more-Sunni-inclusive sensibilities, is ready to lead the assault on Islamic State. The campaign to recapture Mosul, when it was first announced, was to take place during Christmas of this year. Now that has been moved up to this spring. This is causing some consternation in the U.S. According to al-Jawoshy and Arango,

In a speech Monday to Parliament, Mr. Abadi echoed the words of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, saying that the residents of Tikrit were either with Iraq or with the Islamic State.

“There is no neutrality in the battle against ISIS,” Mr. Abadi said. “If someone is being neutral with ISIS, then he is one of them.”

From a military perspective, capturing Tikrit is seen as an important precursor to an operation to retake Mosul, which lies farther north. Success in Tikrit could push up the timetable for a Mosul campaign, while failure would most likely mean more delays.

The American military, though, appears divided on the question of when the Iraqi military — which collapsed last summer in the face of the Islamic State onslaught — would be ready for a wide-scale offensive on Mosul, or in Anbar Province in the west of the country, which is also in the militants’ hands. Some American officials have backed off earlier estimates that it could happen as early as April.

Even a victory in Tikrit could be costly, given the prominent role of Shiite militias, which are feared by the Sunni population. And reports that the militias have carried out sectarian abuses in some areas have complicated efforts to persuade Sunnis to work with the government.

The United States, in returning to a military role in Iraq, has pushed for reconciliation between Iraq’s Shiite-led government and the country’s Sunni minority, but there has been little apparent progress. The United States has also insisted that Iraq establish Sunni fighting units to retake and hold Sunni areas, and it warned against using Shiite forces to invade those areas.

Yet it has been almost exclusively Shiite fighters that have protected Baghdad since the Islamic State offensive last summer, and it has been Iranian-directed militias that have secured some of the most significant gains on the battlefield, often fighting with the support of American airpower.

Further, the fight against the Islamic State has brought the United States and Iran into an awkward alliance in Iraq. While the United States’ effort has been most apparent in its airstrike campaign, Iran has taken the most prominent role on the ground, not just with the militias but with Iranian generals sometimes directing the fighting. 

On Monday, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian spymaster who once directed the militias’ deadly campaign against American forces in Iraq, was on the ground near Tikrit, according to a prominent Iraqi militia leader and the Iranian Fars news agency.

What we are seeing, and have been seeing since last summer, is a third Iraq war since its invasion of Kuwait. And just as the last war left Iran in a more powerful strategic position after Saddam Hussein was ousted and a pro-Iranian, Shiite-majority government installed, so too this one is moving in the same direction.

The goal all along of the West and the Gulf Cooperation Council has been regime change in Iran. But Iran and it proxies and allies have proven to be formidable opponents on the battlefield.

So the fighting will continue, with the U.S. position -- working with Iran to fight ISIS at the same time working with the GCC to fight Iran -- becoming more obvious and untenable.

U.S. Proclaims War of Extinction Against ISIS But Assad is Still the Target

From the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales the United States has announced a war of extinction against Islamic State. This is from Helene Cooper's "U.S. and Allies Form Coalition With Intent to Destroy ISIS":

“There is no containment policy for ISIL,” Secretary of State John Kerry said at the beginning of the meeting, using an alternate acronym for ISIS. “They’re an ambitious, avowed, genocidal, territorial-grabbing, caliphate-desiring quasi state with an irregular army, and leaving them in some capacity intact anywhere would leave a cancer in place that will ultimately come back to haunt us.”

But he and other officials present made clear that at the moment, any ground combat troops would come from either Iraqi security forces and Kurdish pesh merga fighters on the ground in Iraq, or from moderate Syrian rebels opposed to the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “Obviously I think that’s a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said.

There is a fundamental contradiction in the NATO announcement. In Syria, the U.S. and its coalition of willing nations still maintain the fiction that a moderate opposition exists to battle the jihadis. This is of course the direct opposite of everything we know. Time and again the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the favored fighting force of the United States in its war against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, has cooperated with ISIS and with Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda Syria affiliate. In fact, as recently as the beginning of last month, FSA worked with Nusra and ISIS to capture a border town in Lebanon and murder Lebanese Army soldiers and attack civilians.

This is a win for the neocons and the Gulf Sheikhdoms who cobbled together Islamic State in the first place. FSA has lost all credibility; now it is getting a new lease on life, and the Saudis will be able to continue to do what they have done all along -- fund Sunni zealots:

United States officials said they also expected Saudi Arabia to provide money and aid for moderate Syrian rebel groups. Yousef al-Otaiba, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States, said in a statement earlier this week that the United Arab Emirates stood ready to join the fight against ISIS. “No one has more at stake than the U.A.E. and other moderate countries in the region that have rejected the regressive Islamist creed and embraced a different, forward-looking path,” the ambassador said. The Emirati government, he said, is “ready to join the international community in an urgent, coordinated and sustained effort to confront a threat that will, if unchecked, have global ramifications for decades to come.”

Enlisting the Sunni neighbors of Syria and Iraq is crucial, experts said, because airstrikes alone will not be enough to push back ISIS. The Obama administration is also seeking to pursue a sequential strategy that begins with gathering intelligence, and is followed by targeted airstrikes, more robust and better-coordinated support for moderate rebels, and finally, a political reconciliation process. 

Administration officials said that building support for moderate rebels in Syria was particularly critical. Earlier this summer, President Obama set aside $500 million to train and support vetted members of the moderate opposition to Mr. Assad of Syria; officials say they expect that Congress will approve that request to the Pentagon at the beginning of October.

But even if that money is approved, American officials will still have a tough road ahead to strengthen the Free Syrian Army, the moderates of choice for the United States. “This is going to take months,” one Defense Department official said on Friday.

So we're seeing all the canards redeployed: the moderate Sunni fighting force to be funded by the U.S. and the Gulf monarchies (in other words, the status quo); the necessity to include Sunni power brokers in the equation (status quo). There is even a reappearance of the mother of all canards -- that Assad is synonymous with poison gas. This is from spooky Rick Gladstone, "Syria May Have Hidden Chemical Arms, U.S. Says":

The United States expressed concern on Thursday that Syria’s government might be harboring undeclared chemical weapons, hidden from the internationally led operation to purge them over the past year, and that Islamist militant extremists now ensconced in that country could possibly seize control of them. 

The assertions by Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations and current president of the Security Council, were made after the Council received a private briefing on the Syria chemical weapons disarmament effort from Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations official appointed last year to coordinate it. Under Ms. Kaag, 96 percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile, including all of the most lethal materials, have been destroyed. 

But Ms. Kaag told reporters after the briefing that Syria had yet to address what she described as “some discrepancies or questions” about whether it had accounted for all of the chemical weapons in its arsenal. She also said Syria had yet to destroy seven hangars and five tunnels used for mixing and storing the weapons — which is required under the chemical weapons treaty that Syria has signed. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based group that collaborated with the United Nations in overseeing the Syrian chemical disarmament, is now responsible for ensuring that Syria honors its promise.

This is old news. The fact that it is being given a headline now is just part of the repackaging roll out of the Syrian "moderate opposition" fable. All have to be reminded that the Syrian government is an enemy not an ally against the caliphate. And the preferred method of demonizing Syria has always been to assert that the Assad regime is addicted to poison gas.

Apologists for Obama as multi-dimensional chess player will say that he has to make these moves to keep the Zionist neocons and the Gulf shiekhdoms on board. It was obvious that these two camps were opposed to airstrikes on the caliphate's seat of power in Raqqa province because it would redound to the benefit of the Syrian government. But now that the Saudis and Israelis are on board, Obama will do what he did in Amerli when U.S. forces operated in concert with the Iranian-back Iraqi Shiite militias and the Pentagon will actually work with Syria.

I hope this is true, but it is wishful thinking. A key indicator of bloated, out-of-touch power is the inability to change course, to keep applying the same formula over and over again regardless of outcome. This is what we are seeing in the Middle East because the Gulf monarchies and Israel are frightened that their regional hegemony is slipping. Ten to 20 years from now things should look very different. This can certainly be discerned in Tel Aviv and Riyadh. And that is what we are engaged in here -- the regional powers are trying to maintain control by redirecting the arc of history, to roll back the Arab Spring with salafis and saturation bombing. It is a radical undertaking.

But I think it is too late. Tim Arango had an excellent story yesterday, "Escaping Death in Northern Iraq," about a guy, Ali Hussein Kadhim, a recent recruit to the Iraqi Army when ISIS stormed Tikrit and massacred 1,700 Shiite soldiers. Kadhim escaped by playing dead and then hiding out along Tigris River before making his way to Kurdistan.

The point of Arango's article is not just Kadhim's harrowing tale of escape from death but how U.S. mandates of power sharing between Sunni and Shiite are unrealistic at this point:

The conquests of ISIS have reawakened a sense among Iraq’s Shiite majority that they are facing a threat to their very existence from Sunnis — and nothing highlights this in as dramatic a fashion as images of industrial-scale killings of Shiites in Mr. Hussein’s hometown, with the participation of the dead dictator’s tribesmen. 

In recent days the images and stories emerging from this massacre have begun receiving wide play on Iraqi state television, whose programming has also long included shows detailing the abuses of Mr. Hussein. 

Many here wonder how long the Shiites will restrain themselves from taking widespread revenge against Sunnis, and plunging the country into the sort of neighbor-killing-neighbor conflict of a few years ago.

In other countries that have confronted a brutal past, like South Africa and Bosnia, reconciliation has meant a painful process of apology and forgiveness that Iraq has never seriously pursued. 

Amer al-Khuzaie, Mr. Maliki’s adviser on reconciliation, visited South Africa last year to see if he could learn about how that country’s experience might apply to Iraq. As he toured the prison on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated, he asked the tour guide how many prisoners were executed during Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment. 

“He told me 125,” Mr. Khuzaie recalled. “This is an incomparable situation between us and South Africa,” he said, referring to the trauma under Mr. Hussein. “We would have a thousand in one day.”

He added: “The culture of Iraqis does not go for forgiveness. We come from the desert; our culture is for revenge.”

Here in Diwaniya, in a region of fertile farmland where several of the soldiers killed in Tikrit were from, the collective memory is still scarred by the trauma of a Shiite uprising against Mr. Hussein’s rule in 1991 that was encouraged by American officials. But the United States then stood by as Mr. Hussein’s security forces slaughtered tens of thousands of people. 

That explains why Shiites in the Iraqi south never trusted the Americans when they invaded in 2003, even though the invasion upended the political order of Sunni domination and placed the Shiites in power. It explains, too, why many Shiites have greeted the recent American military intervention in Iraq with suspicion. 

It was not massacres against Shiites, like the one in Tikrit, that prompted American action, they say, but only because the Kurds in the north, and Yazidis, an ancient Iraqi religious minority, came under threat. 

“They might want the scenario in 1991 to happen again, when they let the Iraqi people die under the injustice of Saddam’s regime,” said Ali al-Rubaie, a representative of the Shiite religious establishment in the holy city of Najaf.