Author Archives: News Sources

Responding to failure: Reorganizing U.S. policies in the Middle East

In a recent speech, Chas W. Freeman said: I want to speak with you today about the Middle East. This is the region where Africa, Asia, and Europe come together. It is also the part of the world where we have been most compellingly reminded that some struggles cannot be won, but there are no struggles that cannot be lost.

It is often said that human beings learn little useful from success but can learn a great deal from defeat. If so, the Middle East now offers a remarkably rich menu of foreign-policy failures for Americans to study.

• Our four-decade-long diplomatic effort to bring peace to the Holy Land sputtered to an ignominious conclusion a year ago.

• Our unconditional political, economic, and military backing of Israel has earned us the enmity of Israel’s enemies even as it has enabled egregiously contemptuous expressions of ingratitude and disrespect for us from Israel itself.

• Our attempts to contain the Iranian revolution have instead empowered it.

• Our military campaigns to pacify the region have destabilized it, dismantled its states, and ignited ferocious wars of religion among its peoples.

• Our efforts to democratize Arab societies have helped to produce anarchy, terrorism, dictatorship, or an indecisive juxtaposition of all three.

• In Iraq, Libya, and Syria we have shown that war does not decide who’s right so much as determine who’s left.

• Our campaign against terrorism with global reach has multiplied our enemies and continuously expanded their areas of operation.

• Our opposition to nuclear proliferation did not prevent Israel from clandestinely developing nuclear weapons and related delivery systems and may not preclude Iran and others from following suit.

• At the global level, our policies in the Middle East have damaged our prestige, weakened our alliances, and gained us a reputation for militaristic fecklessness in the conduct of our foreign affairs. They have also distracted us from challenges elsewhere of equal or greater importance to our national interests.

That’s quite a record.

One can only measure success or failure by reference to what one is trying achieve. So, in practice, what have U.S. objectives been? Are these objectives still valid? If we’ve failed to advance them, what went wrong? What must we do now to have a better chance of success? [Continue reading…]

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Greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth

ClimateProgress: Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions flatlined globally in 2014, while the world economy grew. The International Energy Agency reports that this marks “the first time in 40 years in which there was a halt or reduction in emissions of the greenhouse gas that was not tied to an economic downturn.”

The IEA attributes this remarkable occurrence to “changing patterns of energy consumption in China and OECD countries.” As we reported last month, China cut its coal consumption 2.9 percent in 2014, the first drop this century. China is aggressively embracing energy efficiency, expanding clean energy, and shuttering the dirtiest power plants to meet its planned 2020 (or sooner) peak in coal use. As a result, Chinese CO2 emissions dropped 1 percent in 2014 even as their economy grew by 7.4 percent.

At the same time, the Financial Times points out “In the past five years, OECD countries’ economies grew nearly 7 percent while their emissions fell 4 percent, the IEA has found.” A big part of that is the United States, where fuel economy standards have reversed oil consumption trends — and renewable energy, efficiency, and natural gas have cut U.S. coal consumption.

All this “provides much-needed momentum to negotiators preparing to forge a global climate deal in Paris in December,” explained IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol, who was just named the next IEA Executive Director. “For the first time, greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth.” [Continue reading…]

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How armed intruders stormed their way into a South African nuclear plant

The Center for Public Integrity reports: Shortly after midnight on a cold Thursday morning, four armed men sliced through the chain-link fence surrounding this storage site for nuclear explosives on the banks of the Crocodile River, west of the administrative capital, Pretoria.

The raiders slipped under an array of high-voltage wires in the fence, then shut off the electricity and some alarms, stormed the Emergency Operations Center at the 118-acre complex, held a gun to the head of one of the employees there and shot another.

Around the same time, a second group of intruders breached another section of the fence. But both teams wound up fleeing after they unexpectedly stumbled on a fireman at the emergency center who fought them and asked a colleague to summon help.

Whatever the raiders were after that night in November 2007, they didn’t get it. All they left with was a cellphone from one of their victims, which they quickly discarded. Ever since, the government of South Africa has dismissed the incident as a routine burglary by inept thieves who tried but failed to steal computers or civilian nuclear technology.

Many U.S. officials in Washington reached a different view — more closely matching the conclusions of an unpublicized, independent investigation ordered by the chief of the state corporation that manages Pelindaba. That probe produced an alarming report that has never been released — or even acknowledged — in South Africa but was obtained by foreign intelligence agencies and described to the Center for Public Integrity by multiple people familiar with its contents. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu views upcoming election as a conspiracy against him

Lisa Goldman writes: Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent Facebook status, posted on Friday in Hebrew, is distinctly odd. It makes him sound like a rambling paranoid who’s off his meds, and local reporters have definitely noticed, with various Israeli journalists exchanging comments in Hebrew and English on social media platforms. In response to popular demand, I’ve translated the status into English.

A couple of explanatory notes: Noni Mozes is the publisher of Yedioth Ahoronoth, a veteran publication that for many years had the biggest share of newspaper readers until Sheldon Adelson launched Israel Hayom about five years ago, which is distributed for free. Israel Hayom is a serious newspaper, but its news and analysis follows an unswervingly pro-Netanyahu editorial line. For this reason it is often referred to as the “Bibiton,” which is a portmanteau of Netanyahu’s popular nickname and “iton,” the Hebrew word for newspaper.

According to the final pre-election polls, with results posted on Friday, Likud is down to 20, an all-time low in the polls this election season, while the Zionist Union (led by Tzipi Livni and Isaac “Buji” Herzog) is at 24. Netanyahu is now under tremendous pressure. He runs the risk of losing the election for Likud. And his party seems to be blaming him for running a disastrous campaign, including the heavily criticized speech to Congress that ended up generating a backlash in Israel.

The translated status: [Continue reading…]

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CIA cash ended up in coffers of Al Qaeda

The New York Times reports: In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.

They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.

Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.

“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. exaggerates ISIS casualties

Eli Lake and Josh Rogin write: The war against the Islamic State has killed thousands of fighters and even some mid-level battlefield commanders, but the organization’s senior leadership and nerve center remain largely untouched, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

These officials and other experts tracking the terror group tell us that the Islamic State’s Shura and Sharia councils, the advisory bodies that help inform the major decisions of the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remain intact, notwithstanding one close call in November for Baghdadi. Although airstrikes and military campaigns have killed several regional administrators and designated “governors,” the Islamic State has quickly replaced them and maintains its command-and-control capabilities.

This assessment of progress against the Islamic State differs sharply from public statements by top Obama administration officials as recently as last month, including Secretary of State John Kerry and retired General John Allen, the president’s special coordinator for the coalition against the Islamic State. In February, Allen said that half the group’s leaders in Iraq had been killed.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference also in February, Kerry expanded that claim to account for the group’s leadership in Syria as well.

“We’ve disrupted their command structure, undermined its propaganda, taken out half of their senior leadership, squeezed its financing, damaged its supply networks, dispersed its personnel, and forced them to think twice before they move in an open convoy,” Kerry said.

Kerry and Allen haven’t since repeated that claim about the group’s senior leadership. U.S. military officials tell us no consensus intelligence estimate supports the claim that half the Islamic State’s leadership has been eliminated. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Kurds say ISIS used chlorine gas against them

Reuters: Iraqi Kurdish authorities said on Saturday they had evidence that Islamic State had used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against their peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq in January.

The Security Council of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region said in a statement to Reuters that the peshmerga had taken soil and clothing samples after an Islamic State car bombing attempt on Jan. 23.

It said laboratory analysis showed “the samples contained levels of chlorine that suggested the substance was used in weaponized form.” The Kurdish allegation could not be independently confirmed.

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The United States and Saudi Arabia: Marriage of convenience on the rocks?

In a recent speech, Chas W. Freeman said: Saudi Arabia has done it again! On January 23, it dismayed foreign pundits by failing to sink into the anarchy they speculated might follow the death of its king, ‘Abdullah. Instead, the Kingdom carried off yet another flawless passing of the leadership baton. What’s more, the succession process indicated who the next two or three kings are likely to be. And the new king, Salman bin ‘Abdulaziz Al-Sa’ud, acted promptly and decisively to seize the reins of government and reorganize it.

This rightly attracted global attention. The world has a big stake in Saudi stability. Forget the cartoons about it! The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not a gas station full of oppressed, black-garbed women in the middle of a camel ranch. It is the heartland and focal point of Islam, the faith of at least one in four human beings alive today. It lies athwart transport routes between Asia, Europe, and Africa. The Kingdom is the custodian of a fourth or more of the world’s oil reserves. Rumors that it is no longer relevant to oil markets have just been unambiguously refuted. (Ask any fracker in North Dakota about that!) Saudi Arabia is at the center of a growing concentration of global capital. Its puritanical religious doctrines inspire its — and our — most dangerous enemies.

In short, what happens in Saudi Arabia and between it and its neighbors matters greatly to Americans, American allies and friends, and American adversaries. But Saudi Arabia is little known, even less understood, and frequently caricatured. This is not surprising. The Kingdom is the only society on the planet not to have been penetrated by Western colonialism. No European armies breached its borders; no missionaries; no merchants. Its capital, Riyadh, was long off limits to infidels, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina remain so today. It is said that hubris is the only reliably renewable resource of Western civilization, but when we Westerners finally came to Saudi Arabia, we came not as the vindicators of our presumed cultural superiority, but as hired help.

As a result, some say that Saudis secretly see the world’s peoples as divided into two basic categories: (1) fellow Saudis, and (2) potential employees. Be that as it may, foreigners — Western, Asian, or Arab — who have lived in Saudi Arabia all see it as a very strange society, one that is not easy to understand and that professes values at odds with those of non-Saudis. Some come to love it. Many don’t. [Continue reading…]

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Koch Industries refuses to comply with U.S. senators’ climate investigation

The Guardian reports: The Koch brothers’ conglomerate Koch Industries has refused to comply with an investigation by three Senate Democrats into whether the company has funded groups or researchers who deny or cast doubt on climate change.

In response to a request from senators Barbara Boxer, Edward Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse for information about Koch Industries’ support for scientific research, Koch general counsel Mark Holden invoked the company’s first amendment rights.

“The activity efforts about which you inquire, and Koch’s involvement, if any, in them, are at the core of the fundamental liberties protected by the first amendment to the United States constitution,” Holden wrote the senators in a letter dated 5 March and posted online by Koch Industries this week.

“I did not see any explanation or justification for an official Senate committee inquiry into activities protected by the first amendment,” he wrote, concluding, “we decline to participate in this endeavor and object to your apparent efforts to infringe upon and potentially stifle fundamental first amendment activities.”

Asked by the Guardian to elaborate on how the first amendment protects such funding and whether Koch Industries would pursue legal action to prevent disclosing information, Holden said: “Our letter speaks for itself.”

In his letter to the senators, Holden suggested that such funding represents part of “Koch’s right to participate in the debate of important public policy issues and its right of free association.”

On 25 February, the three Democratic senators – each a ranking member of committees that oversee environmental affairs – sent letters to 100 fossil fuel companies and thinktanks “to determine whether they are funding scientific studies designed to confuse the public and avoid taking action to cut carbon pollution, and whether the funded scientists fail to disclose the sources of their funding in scientific publications or in testimony to legislators.” [Continue reading…]

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CIA chief says social media ‘greatly amplifies’ terror threat

Reuters: Social media and other technology are making it increasingly difficult to combat militants who are using such modern resources to share information and conduct operations, the head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said on Friday.

CIA Director John Brennan, in a speech in New York, said such communications heighten the challenge of dealing with diffuse threats and attacks across the world from groups like Islamic State, known also as ISIL, and others.

“New technologies can help groups like ISIL coordinate operations, attract new recruits, disseminate propaganda, and inspire sympathizers across the globe to act in their name,” Brennan said, using an acronym for the militant group that has taken hold in Syria and Iraq.

“The overall threat of terrorism is greatly amplified by today’s interconnected world, where an incident in one corner of the globe can instantly spark a reaction thousands of miles away; and where a lone extremist can go online and learn how to carry out an attack without ever leaving home,” Brennan said.

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Syria’s beleaguered opposition-in-exile is about to collapse

Global Post reports: Four years after Syria’s revolution began, its political opposition-in-exile has little to show for it.

Half-heartedly propped up by foreign governments, the Turkey-based Interim Government is going broke, and on the brink of collapse.

Khaled, a senior opposition official, is tired and depressed. We meet at a Gaziantep restaurant, in one of its three shiny malls popular for out of office meetings. It’s just down the road from the government building, which faces frequent security alerts.

He speaks frankly, seemingly relieved to get his frustrations off his chest. In his mid-30s, he’s the antithesis of the old guard that has taken the reigns of the political opposition, and is sick of pretending.

“We’re fake. We’re a lie — an illusion. We’re not a real government,” he sighs.

“Ministers think that just because someone opens a door for them that they are real… but we have zero legitimacy. We do not represent the people and don’t provide enough services.”

The illusion is convincing — the Turkey-based government has around 500 employees in addition to its teams in Syria. It produces sleek reports, holds press conferences in fancy hotels and capacity-building workshops at seaside resorts. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s advances create alarm in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf

Ian Black writes: The commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have been working overtime recently, flaunting their achievements across the Middle East and flexing muscles as international negotiations over the country’s nuclear programme enter their critical and perhaps final phase.

On Wednesday it was the turn of Major-General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the IRGC’s most senior officer. “The Islamic revolution is advancing with good speed, its example being the ever-increasing export of the revolution,” he declared. “Not only Palestine and Lebanon acknowledge the influential role of the Islamic Republic but so do the people of Iraq and Syria. They appreciate the nation of Iran.”

Last month a similarly boastful message was delivered by General Qassem Suleimani, who leads the IRGC’s elite Quds force — and who is regularly photographed leading the fightback of Iraqi Shia miltias against the Sunni jihadis of the Islamic State (Isis) as well as against western and Arab-backed rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad in southern Syria. “Imperialists and Zionists have admitted defeat at the hands of the Islamic Republic and the resistance movement,” Suleimani said.

Iran’s advances are fuelling alarm in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, where Tehran has been a strategic rival since the days of the Shah, and which now, it is said with dismay, in effect controls four Arab capitals – Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut and in the last month Sana’a in Yemen – which is uncomfortably close to home. [Continue reading…]

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Signs of Iraqi national unity begin to tone down the sectarian character of the fight against ISIS

The New York Times reports: Iraqi government forces and allied militias continued on Friday to battle Islamic State militants who defended their remaining positions in the city of Tikrit with snipers and roadside bombs.

As officials called for unity against the militant group, which swept into much of Iraq’s north and west last year, and declared that the fight was an Iraqi national objective, rather than a Shiite or Iranian one, new factions showed their readiness to join the conflict, albeit in relatively small numbers.

That signaled not only a broadening of the Iraqi fight against the Islamic State, but also probably an expansion of the maneuvering by rival groups to share a measure of credit for an expected victory and to position themselves to take part in the even more crucial battle farther north for Mosul, the self-declared capital of the Islamic State.

Around 700 fighters loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr arrived to take part in the operation south of Tikrit, joining a force of more than 30,000 pro-government fighters, two-thirds of them members of a mainly Shiite militia known as popular mobilization forces.

And in the southern city of Basra on Thursday, a new Sunni militia organized by the religious establishment declared it was joining the popular mobilization effort, officials said.

Kurdish pesh merga and Sunni tribal fighters were continuing on Friday to advance on Islamic State territory from the northern city of Kirkuk, military officials said, on a front that would also be important in the battle for Mosul.

Mr. Sadr’s loyalists had sat out recent battles after he said he was “freezing” their participation, in part because of allegations of atrocities committed by Shiite militias in Diyala and Anbar Provinces after driving out Islamic State militants.

But last week, the cleric called on his militias, known as the Peace Brigades, to prepare to mobilize for possible participation in a campaign to take back Mosul. He declared that they had a better reputation than other militias and that their participation would tone down the sectarian flavor of the fight. [Continue reading…]

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Pro-government forces tighten their control over Tikrit

The Washington Post reports: Iraqi troops clashed with Islamic State militants in the northern city of Tikrit on Friday, as pro-government forces tightened their grip on the extremist stronghold, officials said. But tensions flared between security forces and locals in the area, adding to fears of intensified strains in this deeply polarized country.

Pro-government troops — the bulk of whom are Iranian-backed Shiite paramilitaries — took over most of Tikrit this week following a mammoth offensive, officials said. The assault marked the first major push by largely Shiite forces into Iraq’s Sunni heartland, where the jihadists had seized large areas. The fall of Tikrit is a substantial blow to the extremists, whose raison d’etre is capturing land to build an Islamic caliphate.

Officials said Friday that the battle in Tikrit would likely extend into next week, as security forces searched for militants and dismantled improvised explosives planted by the jihadists. Security officials had set no time frame for the return of civilians to Tikrit or surrounding areas, even where Shiite militias were firmly in control, officials said. Already there were reports of arbitrary arrests of residents who had not fled the fighting. [Continue reading…]

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250 Iraqi Sunnis join Iranian-backed Shiite militia to battle ISIS

AFP reports: Wearing a camouflage uniform with militia patches and a green headband, Nawar Mohammed is the image of an Iraqi Shiite fighter except for one detail: he is Sunni.

Mohammed is one of some 250 Sunni residents of Al-Alam who joined Asaib Ahl al-Haq, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia with a fearsome reputation for kidnappings and killings targeting their community, to battle the Islamic State group after it seized their town.

It would once have been all but unthinkable for a member of Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority to join a Shiite militia, but opposition to IS, which overran large areas north and west of Baghdad last June, is transcending deep-seated sectarian divisions.

“The whole world is surprised by this — it’s the first time in the history of Asaib that they formed a Sunni unit,” said Mohammed, standing with a Kalashnikov assault rifle hanging at his side.

“Asaib trained us, and we became part of Asaib,” he said.

“Asaib, Sunni or Shiite, there is no difference — these circumstances united Iraq,” Mohammed said. “God willing, there will not be any more sectarianism.”

The formation of the unit, which some call “Asaib al-Alam,” is a positive sign and its fighters seem genuine when praising Asaib Ahl al-Haq. [Continue reading…]

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CIA director suggests Iraq functions as interlocutor in U.S.-Iran fight against ISIS

The Guardian reports: The director of the CIA came the closest of any US official so far to acknowledging cooperation between the US and Iran in their current war against the Islamic State in Iraq.

Asked during a Council on Foreign Relations appearance on Friday afternoon if the US was formally coordinating its airstrikes in Iraq with Iranian forces and proxies on the ground, CIA director John Brennan did not bat away the notion, as Obama administration officials typically do.

Instead, Brennan suggested that such coordination is laundered through the Iraqi government, Washington and Tehran’s mutual partner – something widely suspected as the Iraqi military and Shia militias attempt to claw back the city of Tikrit from Isis.

“There’s an alignment of some interests between ourselves and Iran, clearly, in terms of what Isil [Isis] has done there,” Brennan told moderator Charlie Rose. [Continue reading…]

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The NSA’s secret malware domains

Wired reports: The names suggest a parade of a C-list websites. There was NewJunk4U.com and Monster-Ads.net, CoffeeHausBlog.com and SuddenPlot.com. But, these sad-sounding domains actually were artful creations of the National Security Agency: They were fronts for distributing and controlling government malware around the world.

Those domains and 109 others came to light last month as part of the “Equation Group” report from anti-virus vendor Kaspersky. Researchers at Kaspersky identified 300 such domains, and published 113 of them.

The NSA’s malware domains always have been a closely guarded secret—it’s the kind of direct, actionable information that can expose even old cyber espionage operations. Now the agency is in an awkward position: What should it do with these domains now that their covers have been blown? The domains were chosen to look legitimate, which means the US government is effectively cyber squatting on a sizable portfolio of names like newjunk4u.com and businessdealsblog.com that are no longer useful for espionage, but potentially valuable for business. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS still on the attack, despite internal strife and heavy losses

The New York Times reports: The Islamic State is facing growing dissension among its rank-and-file fighters and struggling to govern towns and villages it has seized, but the militant Sunni group is still managing to launch attacks and expand its ideological reach outside of Iraq and Syria, senior American officials said.

In the seven months since allied warplanes in the American-led air campaign began bombing select Islamic State targets, the Sunni militancy, while marginally weaker, is holding its own, senior defense and intelligence officials said.

Pentagon officials expressed only cautious optimism on Thursday after the Islamic State lost much of the central Iraqi city of Tikrit following more than a week of fierce fighting, warning that it would be as difficult for Iraqi forces to hold the city as it was to liberate it. And even as the militants had a last stand in Tikrit, Islamic State fighters were mounting one of the fiercest assaults in months in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

But in recent months tensions have become apparent inside the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh. The troubles stem from new military and financial pressures and from the growing pains of a largely decentralized organization trying to hold together what it views as a nascent state while integrating thousands of foreign fighters with Iraqi and Syrian militants. [Continue reading…]

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