IRAN IN THE SHADOWS: DESPITE A HOPEFUL ELECTION, IRAQ’S ARMY STYMIED BY MILITANT SUNNI ISLAMISTS

We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to:  Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station  H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com

Why Iraq Is Moving Closer to Full-Scale Sectarian War: Kimberly Kagan, Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2014—  Initial reports of high turnout and relative security during Iraq’s parliamentary elections have buoyed optimism that things might not be so bad there after all.

Iraq’s Elections May Accelerate its Descent: Washington Post, May 1, 2014 — Iraq’s best days in the past decade have been its elections, and somewhat surprisingly, Wednesday was one of them.

Fledgling Iraqi Military Is Outmatched on Battlefield: Matt Bradley & Ali A. Nabhan, Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2014 — Even as an al Qaeda-linked militant group celebrated a major victory in Western Iraq last month, militants from the same jihadist group launched another operation clear across the country.

Getting Rid of National Borders in the Middle East Won’t End Sectarian Warfare: Lee Smith, Tablet, Apr. 30, 2014— If you didn’t know any better, you might think that democracy was flowering all over the Middle East.

On Topic Links

While We Weren’t Looking, Hope Sprung in Iraq: Amir Taheri, New York Post, May 3, 2014

Iraq-Afghanistan Veterans Give Obama Poor Grades: Adam O’Neal, Real Clear Politics, Mar. 30, 2014

Why do the Troops Think So Little of Obama?: Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, Mar. 31, 2014

Iraqi Election Could Lead to Partition: Mustafa al-Kadhimi, Al-Monitor, Apr. 30, 2014

ISIS Shifts Tactics in Fallujah: Mushreq Abbas, Al-Monitor, Apr. 26, 2014

WHY IRAQ IS MOVING CLOSER TO

FULL-SCALE SECTARIAN WAR                                      

Kimberly Kagan

Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2014

Initial reports of high turnout and relative security during Iraq’s parliamentary elections have buoyed optimism that things might not be so bad there after all. Unfortunately, a smooth election and even the formation of a new government are not likely to reverse the negative security trends that are bringing Iraq ever closer to full-scale sectarian war.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) has established havens in Anbar, Diyala, and southern Baghdad in many of the locations from which al-Qaeda in Iraq, its ancestor, threatened the capital in 2006. ISIS drove the Iraqi Security Forces from Fallujah in January. The Iraqi army has operated from the city’s outskirts but lacks the urban warfare capability to clear its interiors. It is shelling the city. Nearly 73,000 Iraqi families from Anbar have fled their homes, according to United Nations figures on internally displaced persons.

ISIS has been advancing on Baghdad since January. The gunmen who have controlled the Fallujah dam have twice flooded areas between Fallujah and Baghdad. ISIS destroyed an oil pipeline near the Tigris in ways that contaminated the capital’s water supply. Shi’a militias have mobilized to counter the growing threat from ISIS and to serve the political parties with which they are affiliated. Militias have engaged in retaliatory executions and sectarian killings in several provinces. Some militias have forcibly displaced residents of Sunni villages; they have razed Sunni homes in Diyala province. Sunni families in remote areas have fled their villages en masse.

Cooperative relationships exist between Shi’a militias and the Iraqi Security Forces. These conditions do not bode well for any Iraqi government. Should Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki win a third term, he would do so having lost a province to terrorists and having entrusted terrain to militias. Meanwhile, competitors for power have organized militias with which to engage Mr. Maliki and one another.

The Iraqi people have shown their extraordinary resiliency in the face of danger. Iraqis voted in large numbers despite terrorist and militia violence in 2006 and 2010. But American troops were in Iraq then to ensure that the millions of Iraqis could overcome their terrorist foes. Without American support, it is far from clear that the terrorists won’t win this time.

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IRAQ’S ELECTIONS MAY ACCELERATE ITS DESCENT              

Washington Post, May 1, 2014

Iraq’s best days in the past decade have been its elections, and somewhat surprisingly, Wednesday was one of them. Though the country is sliding into civil war — the United Nations reported that 750 people were killed by political violence in April — about 12 million people went to the polls to vote in the first parliamentary elections held without the presence of U.S. troops. The turnout, a reported 58 percent, was higher than in most U.S. presidential elections. Iraqis remain eager to practice democracy, even if their rulers are not.

Unfortunately, the voting appears more likely to accelerate than arrest Iraq’s descent into the mass bloodshed and disintegration that has overtaken neighboring Syria. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki , in office eight years, appears confident that his Shiite party will win a plurality of votes, allowing him to continue what has been an increasingly authoritarian and sectarian rule. With heavy backing from Iran, Iraq’s strongman hopes to corral dissident Shiite parties and perhaps Kurds into a new coalition, though that process could take months. Even if he fails, Mr. Maliki’s opponents may lack the muscle to remove him from office.

The Baghdad government and its U.S.-trained Army, meanwhile, are losing control over much of the country. Mr. Maliki built support among Shiites before the election by launching a military campaign against Sunni tribes in Anbar province; the result was the takeover of Fallujah by al-Qaeda and waves of bombings against Shiites in Baghdad. Without U.S. support, the army appears to lack the means to recapture Fallujah and other Sunni-populated areas, though Mr. Maliki, like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, has resorted to using Iranian-backed Shiite militias. The prosperous, autonomous Kurdistan region, with its own oil reserves, has become a de facto independent state.

At least some of this trouble could have been avoided had the Obama administration managed Iraq better. Eager to withdraw all U.S. forces during his first term, Mr. Obama backed Mr. Maliki following the 2010 election even after it became clear his coalition had been brokered by Iran. Just as the absence of U.S. military advisers and trainers has contributed to the Iraqi army’s loss of effectiveness, the absence of U.S. political brokers — generals as well as diplomats — has accelerated the sectarian crumbling of the American-built democratic system.

Most Americans may share Mr. Obama’s readiness to dismiss this mess. But Iraq’s failure will do more than reverse the gains won by the hundreds of thousands of Americans who served there over nine years. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are close to consolidating control of a wide swath of territory extending across western Iraq and northern Syria. U.S. intelligence chiefs have told Congress that the extremists, who have attracted thousands of recruits from around the Middle East and Europe, aspire to launch attacks against the U.S. homeland. The Obama administration may hope that a new Iraqi government can eliminate this threat; the odds are that it will not.

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FLEDGLING IRAQI MILITARY

IS OUTMATCHED ON BATTLEFIELD                                                     

Matt Bradley & Ali A. Nabhan                                                          

Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2014

Even as an al Qaeda-linked militant group celebrated a major victory in Western Iraq last month, militants from the same jihadist group launched another operation clear across the country. In coordinated predawn attacks, gunmen blew up two bridges in a village outside the eastern town of Qara Tepe. They detonated a fuel tanker at a police base close to nearby Injana, shot 12 soldiers and incinerated their bodies. By afternoon, militants had attacked four other police and army checkpoints.

Instead of bolstering their ranks, some police and military checkpoints simply packed up and left. Lacking protection, hundreds of villagers fled their homes for larger towns. "The security forces are weak, and they are putting the responsibility for their weakness on us," says Aziz Latif, a farmer who fled the village of New Sari Tepe after it was attacked on March 21. "They are not professional."

More than two years after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, as the country prepares for its first post-occupation parliamentary elections on Wednesday, its demoralized, underequipped military is losing the fight against Islamist militants, who are better armed, better trained, and better motivated, according to Iraqi and American generals, politicians and analysts. "You can see how terrorism is eating our flesh. We're almost helpless," says Staff General Mohammed Khalaf Saied Al Dulaimi, commander of 12th division of the Iraqi army based in the northern city of Kirkuk. "We're facing a good, well-trained enemy. The attacks in this area were huge." The insurgents are able to launch surprise raids, seize urban ground and hold their positions for days, weeks or even months, even far beyond their strongholds in the west. The growing disorder and violence threaten to open the country to interference by its neighbors and dash what little hope remains that ordinary Iraqis might benefit from their oil wealth.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said he and the Iraqi army have the upper hand in the fight against terrorism. His spokesman said in an email that militant groups are "surrounded in certain areas, but the process of ending such battles does not happen easily." Wednesday's vote is expected to extend Mr. Maliki's divisive eight-year tenure, which has alienated some of Iraq's already disparate ethnic and sectarian groups.

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, a militant group that grew out of al Qaeda but has broken with it, has declared voting stations and voters as targets, particularly in Baghdad. ISIS, which is expanding, has already staked out positions on the capital's outskirts. "I see them gunning for Baghdad," says Jessica Lewis, research director for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War and a former U.S. military intelligence officer. Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, has proved unable to resolve the gridlock among the country's three main political blocs: Arab Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. With his army unprepared to handle the fallout, foreign diplomats, politicians and analysts say Mr. Maliki is governing over a state that is failing in slow motion. "Partnership failed in Baghdad," says Fouad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdistan's regional president, Massoud Barzani. "After the election, if we cannot work together as three groups—Sunnis, Shias and Kurds—then Iraq is headed toward collapse."

Parliament hasn't met for nearly a month because of walkouts over a budget dispute between Mr. Maliki's allies and the Kurdish north. Iraq's Sunni minority, meanwhile, is accusing Mr. Maliki's military of ethnic cleansing under the guise of the fight against terrorism—a claim that has fueled Sunni calls for an autonomous region. As stresses build, Mr. Maliki appears to be expanding his own writ as part of his push for a third term. Last month, he threatened to use a pliant judiciary to declare the gridlocked parliament constitutionally illegitimate. That would grant him sole authority to control the country's nearly $150 billion budget by presidential decree.

The latest violence began in late December when Mr. Maliki ordered security forces to disperse an anti-Maliki protest camp in Ramadi that he claimed was an incubator for al Qaeda. The raid was akin to batting a hornet's nest. Thousands of well-armed Islamist militants rose up in early January in the surrounding province of Anbar and seized Ramadi, the provincial capital, and Fallujah, a restive city less than an hour from Baghdad. ISIS's massive, sophisticated weapons arsenal suggested that the group had been importing weapons from Syria, says Gen. Dulaimi. The militants displayed the kind of battle acumen lacking in Iraq's troops. Many ISIS fighters have returned battle-hardened from the conflict in neighboring Syria. "The security forces were surprised that the militants were better equipped than the security forces themselves," says Gen. Dulaimi. "Our soldiers don't have anything more than AK-47s."

Iraq is still reeling from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority's decision in May 2003 to disband ousted President Saddam Hussein's army. The military had long acted as an adhesive bonding together young Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. The move created a bitter underclass of well-trained young Iraqi men. Now, the leadership of the militias is populated by veteran generals from that disbanded army. Despite nearly a decade of training from U.S. troops, the Iraqi army remains, by comparison, poorly equipped and far less motivated, say Iraqi politicians, Gen. Dulaimi and Hisham Hashemi, an Iraqi researcher on armed groups who is in regular touch with militants in Anbar…

Gen. Dulaimi blames Iraq's losses on the U.S. Had Washington delivered Apache helicopters Baghdad has been requesting for several years, the army could have quickly ended the skirmish in which he was caught up, he says. Iraq's few armed helicopters aren't even outfitted with directed missiles—an anachronism in a modern fighting force, he says. Requests for ammunition and sophisticated air power have gone unanswered, he says. Thirty-six F-16 jet fighters ordered in 2011 and last year—Iraq has no jet fighters in its tiny air fleet—have yet to be delivered, in part because of congressional objections to supporting the Maliki regime…

American soldiers who helped train the Iraqi military say that Iraqis abandoned the organizational and educational infrastructure U.S. forces had hoped would perpetuate a professional military. "The whole concept of developing a professionalized security force just stopped right there with the [end of the] U.S. presence," says Lieutenant General Robert Caslen, who was the chief of the U.S. military's Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq, which is in charge of training troops, from September 2011 until May 2013.

Gen. Caslen and his predecessors helped build and run an Iraqi military academy to feed trained personnel into Iraq's officer corps. On a visit about a year after U.S. troops left in December 2011, Gen. Caslen says, the academy was all but vacant…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –Ed.]

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GETTING RID OF NATIONAL BORDERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

WON’T END SECTARIAN WARFARE                        

Lee Smith

Tablet, Apr. 30, 2014

If you didn’t know any better, you might think that democracy was flowering all over the Middle East. Syria has a presidential election scheduled in June; today, Lebanon’s Parliament will have a second round of voting to choose a new president, while Iraqis are heading to the polls to choose a parliament that will in turn be responsible for selecting a prime minister. But in reality, all three countries are in danger of coming apart at the seams. Syria is in the midst of a protracted and vicious civil war that has, in turn, added to Lebanon’s own instability. Iraq, now free of American influence, has gone from being an authoritarian state under Saddam Hussein’s nominally secular control to an authoritarian state under the auspices of Nouri al-Maliki, who will almost certainly be given a third term as premier, having cemented his control by pursuing openly sectarian policies favoring Shiites and targeting Sunni Muslims.

Thus, Maliki has enlisted Iraq in the larger regional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites being fought in Syria and, increasingly, in Lebanon, where Iran and its proxies are squared off against Saudi Arabia and its own allies. More than three years after the Arab Spring, Arabs throughout the Middle East are now plainly more beholden to their confessional sects or tribes than they are to the larger, national polities they inhabit—that is, to their states. The obvious question, then, is whether the Arab state system, established nearly a century ago in a secret deal between the British and the French, is falling apart. Have the borders imposed on the Arabic-speaking Middle East in 1916 by the French diplomat François George-Picot and his British counterpart Mark Sykes amid the demolition of the Ottoman Empire by World War I outlived their usefulness?

The mythology surrounding the Sykes-Picot lines is rich. The essential case against them is that they are artificial boundaries that served, and continue to serve, the interests of the Great Powers but are consequently bad for the actual people whose citizenship, and identity, is supposed to be contingent on them. Indeed, many argue that the Sykes-Picot agreement is the primary cause of Middle Easterners’ woes. Frontiers randomly separating parcels of land, families, tribes, and most important, it now seems, confessional sects have not only divided the Arabs and kept them politically weak, but set them murderously at each other’s throats. That’s the assessment offered by a number of regional experts as well as journalists. It’s a narrative premised on a number of dubious assumptions—primarily, that the Arabs were once long ago in the misty past a nation united. The legend of Arab nationalism holds that it was only foreign conquerors and occupiers who neutralized the Arabs by dividing them, starting with the Mongols in their 1258 invasion of Baghdad.

The reality of course is somewhat different. Shiite and Sunni jurists and clerics have conducted a long-running rhetorical war against each other, characterized by slurs and pamphleteering, that is evidence of sectarian conflict that long predates the Mongols, let alone the British or the Americans. Indeed, tribal warfare in the region predates the advent of Islam, the spread of which was partly encouraged to put an end to tribal conflict by uniting the Arabic-speaking tribes, from the Arabian peninsula to the Fertile Crescent, under the banner of a tribe designated not by its blood but its faith in one God, Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.

But just because tribe or faith often resonate more plangently than secular citizenship for Middle Easterners doesn’t mean that states, or their borders, don’t matter any more. Indeed, it is because many of these states have relied on tribal and religious affiliation to build legitimacy that national identities today register, sometimes deeply. For instance, one of the titles of the king of Saudi Arabia is guardian of the two Holy Shrines, which, by asserting sovereignty over Mecca and Medina, ties the modern kingdom to the origins of Islam. Syrian borders may have been drawn by the European powers, but Syria, what Arabs call Bilad al-Sham, or “country of the north,” is also revered as the capital of the first Arab empire, the Umayyad caliphate of 661 to 750, and hence the historical heartland of Sunni Arabism. Conversely, Baghdad, long a rival of Damascus, was the seat of the Abbasid empire, from 750 to 1258, and that history in turn confers legitimacy on modern Iraq.

Indeed, even those jihadists who would seem to be least invested in the Arab state system have a stake in preserving the borders drawn by the despicable infidels. Sunni extremist groups in Syria, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, may be content for the time being to have wrested some cantons from the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his allied forces. However, the war they are waging against what in their opinion is a heretical regime is not simply for the purpose of imposing sharia law in selected hamlets in the Syrian desert. What they want is Sykes-Picot Syria—that is to say, Syria as we know it today, with Damascus as the capital.

This is true even of the one regional nation-state that has done most to upset the Westphalian order: the Islamic Republic of Iran. The wars Tehran fights are typically waged through clandestine means and most often through terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, its long arm in Lebanon. But the reality is that the Islamic Resistance is incapable of functioning without Lebanese institutions. Not only does Hezbollah help itself to parts of the country’s budget through various schemes and ministries its members and allies hold. It has also infiltrated the Lebanese Armed Forces—which it tasks with performing delicate functions, like arresting and firing on Sunnis, for which the party of God wants plausible deniability.

But what Hezbollah can’t possibly live without—and, accordingly, what matters to its patron state Iran—are Lebanon’s borders and the status they confer in international forums. Imagine if Hezbollah, governing its own little statelet on the eastern Mediterranean, fired a barrage of rockets on Israel: The Israeli Air Force would turn Hezbollahstan into a parking lot in a matter of minutes. What prevents Israel from doing so now is the rest of Lebanon—the more than 3 million people who are effectively captives of Hezbollah. Borders aren’t moving. Rather, populations are moving to accommodate borders. We all know about the exodus of Arab refugees from Israel in 1948 and 1967, as well as the often forced emigration of Jews from Arab lands to Israel in the years after the Jewish state was established—but Christians have been in flight from Lebanon since that country’s 15-year-long civil war, from 1975 to 1990, and the subsequent Syrian occupation, from 1990 to 2005, one of the aims of which was to disempower the Christian community. In Iraq, Assyrian Christians fled in large numbers after the fall of Saddam, largely to Syria, and then on to the West.

But the Christians’ trail of tears pales in comparison to the departure of Sunnis from Syria. Conservative estimates show that there are more than half a million refugees now in Turkey and Jordan and nearly a million more in Lebanon, which is still home to another 450,000 Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967. It’s not difficult to imagine how this crisis may come to shape the region. Take Lebanon: With roughly one-third of Lebanon’s population now made up of Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom are Sunnis, the country’s sectarian balance between Shiites, Christians and Sunnis is now tipped in favor of the Sunnis, perhaps irrevocably. That in turn may force Hezbollah to move in the other direction, from what is certain to be a Sunni-majority Lebanon to a Syria or Iraq ruled by Shiites. Even if, or when, Assad falls, the Syrian conflict hasn’t erased borders. What it’s done is destroy homes and families—and confessional communities with longstanding and in some cases ancient ties to the lands they’re now leaving. The real Middle East crisis isn’t about the failure of democracy in its nation-states, but the private disasters its citizens are facing.

While We Weren’t Looking, Hope Sprung in Iraq: Amir Taheri, New York Post, May 3, 2014—In one of those ironies of history, with President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in disarray, some relatively good pieces of news are coming from places that Obama turned his back on.

Iraq-Afghanistan Veterans Give Obama Poor Grades: Adam O’Neal, Real Clear Politics, Mar. 30, 2014 —Just 32 percent of military veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, according to a new poll from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Why do the Troops Think So Little of Obama?: Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, Mar. 31, 2014—In the flood of polling we see every week there is occasionally some eye-popping nugget of data that washes up on the political landscape.

Iraqi Election Could Lead to Partition: Mustafa al-Kadhimi, Al-Monitor, Apr. 30, 2014—Today, with the country locked in a fateful election, the parties to Iraq's conflict are using the issue of partition to threaten their opponents — and the electorate.

ISIS Shifts Tactics in Fallujah: Mushreq Abbas, Al-Monitor, Apr. 26, 2014—Three months after the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) decided to avoid public appearances and maintain a low profile in Fallujah, the group put on a military parade in the center of the city to showcase its strength. The move signaled the start of an armed conflict to control the city.

Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research/ L'institut Canadien de recherches sur le Judaïsme, www.isranet.org

Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284 ; ber@isranet.wpsitie.com