U.S. ADMINISTRATION PING PONG POLICY

Bill Van Auken

Washington’s pursuit of policies from one conflict to the next that are seemingly at odds with one another has provoked mounting expressions of concern from major US think tanks and editorial boards—not to mention nominal allies in Europe—over “strategic incoherence.”

To describe as glaring the contradictions that riddle US foreign policy in the Middle East does not do them justice.
In Yemen, the Obama administration has announced its full backing, with the provision of logistical assistance, arms (including cluster bombs) and targeting intelligence, to an intervention spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, the other Sunni oil monarchies and the Egyptian regime of Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
This coalition of dictatorships and crowned tyrants is waging a war against the most impoverished country in the Arab world. Their aim in bombing cities and killing civilians is to contain the influence of Iran, which has provided support to the Zaydi Shiite Houthi rebels who overthrew President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a puppet installed by Washington and Riyadh.
In Iraq, US warplanes have been bombing Tikrit, the hometown of the ousted and murdered Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, which is now controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This operation is providing air support to a besieging force comprised overwhelmingly of Shiite militias operating with Iranian support and advisors.
While the Pentagon had conditioned the air strikes on the withdrawal of these militias, some of which had resisted the eight-year US occupation of Iraq, it is widely acknowledged that this was strictly for the sake of appearances. The Shiite forces remain the principal fighting force on the ground.
Meanwhile, across the border in Syria, Washington is pursuing a policy seemingly at odds with itself, on the one hand pledging to arm and train militias seeking to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose closest ally is Iran, and, on the other, carrying out air strikes against both ISIS and the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, which together are the principal armed opponents of the Assad regime.
At the same time, negotiations led by US Secretary of State John Kerry in Switzerland are going down to the wire in a bid to secure an agreement with Iran that would curtail its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting (or partial lifting) of punishing economic sanctions imposed by Washington and its European allies. Failure to achieve such a deal could spell a turn toward more direct US military aggression against Iran. Success could well prove to be a tactical preparation for the same thing.
It is now 12 years since the Bush administration launched its war against Iraq. At the time, it claimed that its war of aggression was being waged to eliminate “weapons of mass destruction” and the threat posed by ties between the government of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Both claims were lies. There were neither weapons nor any connections, outside of mutual hostility, between the secular regime in Baghdad and the Islamist group.
At the same time, Bush portrayed the US intervention as a liberating mission that would bring “democracy” to Iraq and beyond. “The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution,” he proclaimed in the early stages of the US military occupation.
That the US invasion was a “watershed event” no one can deny. It ushered in a period of wholesale carnage that claimed over 1 million Iraqi lives, destroyed the country’s economic and social infrastructure, and provoked bitter sectarian struggles between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds as part of a deliberate policy of divide and rule.
For Iraq, the war was a catastrophe. For the US, it proved to be a debacle. Costing the lives of 4,500 American soldiers, injuring tens of thousands more, and consuming trillions of dollars in military expenditures, it succeeded only in creating the social and political conditions for ISIS (an offshoot of Al Qaeda) to overrun more than one third of the country—a country that had had no serious Islamist presence prior to the 2003 invasion.
The war in Iraq profoundly destabilized the entire region, a process that was accelerated by Washington’s launching of proxy wars in both Libya and Syria, backing Islamist militias linked to Al Qaeda in an effort to bring down the secular regimes of Gaddafi and Assad and replace them with American puppets. These efforts likewise turned into bloody debacles, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and ravaging both societies.
There is nothing left of the pretexts used by the Bush administration to justify war 12 years ago. The Obama administration cannot credibly claim that its aggressive operations in the Middle East—linked as they are to Islamists and other sectarian militias, as well as to autocrats and military dictators—are part of a global “war on terrorism” or a crusade for democracy.
The White House makes little or no attempt to explain these operations to the American people, much less win their support for them. In the case of Washington’s backing for the war in Yemen, the sum total of its explanation consists of a “readout” of a phone conversation between Obama and King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, in which the US president affirmed his “strong friendship” with the despotic monarchy, his “support” for its intervention, and his “commitment to Saudi Arabia’s security.”
Behind the reckless, ad hoc and seemingly disconnected policies pursued by US imperialism in the Middle East, there remains one constant: the aggressive pursuit of US hegemony over the Middle East and its vast energy reserves.
The strategy elaborated from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 onward, that Washington could freely employ its unrivaled military power to pursue its global interests, has only become more entrenched as American capitalism’s relative economic weight and influence have continued to decline.
The result of this policy can be seen in the involvement of virtually every country of the Middle East in one or another war and the palpable threat that these conflicts will coalesce into a region-wide conflagration that could, in turn, provoke World War III.

Defining and understanding the religious philosophy of jihādī-salafism and the ideology of Boko Haram

BY ABDULBASIT KASSIMI

Journal abstract

This article examines the deep epistemological and theological roots of the religious philosophy of jihādī-Salafism and its role in the construction of the ideology of Boko Haram. To achieve this, four aspects are considered: first, the core theological doctrines of jihādī-Salafism on the subject of takfīr and ḥukm bi-ghayri mā anzala Allāh; second, the sacred texts and Islamic scriptures that have been adroitly exploited to support the jihādī-Salafīs’ idealization, theological legitimization and meta-justification for divinely sanctioned jihād; third, the ideologues of jihādī-Salafism, and how their readings of Islamic history and theology have provided a stamp of approval for the legitimization of jihād against the political rulers in the Muslim world; and fourth, an explanation of why the jihādī-Salafīs diverge from the interpretation of the quietist Salafīs despite their unified common understanding about following the model of the Prophet and his companions. These four aspects serve as a matrix that helps to explain the enduring relationship between the religious philosophy of jihādī-Salafism and the ideology of Boko Haram. In what follows, this article shows that the theological doctrines of jihādī-Salafism and the cultural framing of the historical tradition of tajdid in northern Nigeria – specifically the distinctive trans-generational discourses, Islamic traditions and jihādī legacy established by the eighteenth-century Islamic reformer Shehu Uthman Dan Fodio – have played a greater role in Boko Haram’s legitimization of jihād than has hitherto been acknowledged.

What Syria and Ukraine reveal about Putin and Russia’s military

By Jack Caravelli


The 2014 annexation of Crimea and the ongoing civil war in Syria, while major political crises, also are replete with insights about the current state of the Russian military.

First, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s disdain for Barack Obama is palpable. If the Russian president continues to judge that Obama has no stomach for the fight, it is not implausible that Russia might challenge the West again elsewhere, possibly in the Baltic.

Conducting military operations on a third front would be a major challenge for Russian forces. Nonetheless, it also could trigger a new crisis as consequential as events in Syria, bringing a possible direct clash between NATO and Russian forces.

At a time when both the United States and its most powerful NATO ally, Great Britain, are suffering severe budgetary declines and diminished capabilities while saddled with timid political leadership, the Russian military is riding the crest of a wave changing the political dynamics in areas critical to U.S. national security.
Four lessons about the current state of the Russian military can be gleaned from its recent performance in Ukraine and Syria.

1) The conflicts illustrate that Russian President Vladimir Putin views his military as an instrument of state power.

War is both an extension and consequence of politics. Putin understands this.

Largely unsaddled by and often disdainful of domestic public opinion, the Russian president has moved aggressively to advance Russian interests in Ukraine and Syria by unleashing his military in both conflicts.
Putin realizes that political goals often are best advanced when backed by military prowess. The Russian military has been called to serve as an instrument of state power.

In contrast, and with the exception of a small deployment of fighter aircraft to Turkey, U.S. President Barack Obama has largely sidelined the U.S. military during both crises, deciding in the words of Mideast expert Dennis Ross, that “he (Obama) was not going to get involved in someone else’s civil war.”

2) The Russian military has reversed a decades-long decline.

Beginning with the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and extending about twenty years, the Russian military suffered sharp declines in funding, morale and overall military capability.
Putin vowed in several political campaigns, including the 2012 presidential election, to restore the military — long revered in Russia — and has carried out that promise with expanded funding and strong political support.

Those investments are paying dividends. In Ukraine, Russian military forces and those supported by them — the so-called “little green men” — conducted military operations with precision, used advanced small arms equipment, and demonstrated improved command, control and communications, a problem that plagued their August 2008 operations against Georgia.

Nonetheless, the decline has not been fully reversed. Russian aircraft conducting front line operations include fighters that are at least 25 years old although they are still potent in the face of very little opposition from air or ground.

At the same time, Russia also is deploying a new generation of fighter aircraft, the SU-34 Fullback fighter bomber.

3) The military fights as it practices.

The Soviet and now Russian military has a long tradition of carrying out numerous peacetime military exercises which serve as a proving ground for the strategies and tactics it is likely to use in wartime.
Advanced militaries around the globe carry out similar training but senior Russian military commanders probably devote more time and attention to training than any other military force.

Russian commanders also are students of warfare and closely watch how other militaries operate and perform. A large body of military writings, for example, analyzed how the U.S. military operated during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign in the Middle East and used combined arms combat such as mixing ground and air capabilities against enemy forces.

In Syria, Russia has shown a capability to carry out combined arms combat, using Syrian-based fighters aircraft as well as cruise missiles from four naval warships in the Caspian Sea to strike Syrian targets.

4) Russian commanders will learn the lessons from Ukraine and Syria but their political masters may come to dangerous conclusions.

Russian commanders doubtless are monitoring the performance of the men and equipment they have deployed to Ukraine and Syria.

These “real world” lessons will aid in improving future performance. More worrying is that senior military commanders as well as their political superiors may conclude that their military is capable of defeating other regional fighting forces.

In both conflicts the Russian military has had scant opposition so any overall assessment of its capabilities must be viewed through that prism.

What Syria and Ukraine reveal about Putin and Russia’s military

By Jack Caravelli


The 2014 annexation of Crimea and the ongoing civil war in Syria, while major political crises, also are replete with insights about the current state of the Russian military.

First, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s disdain for Barack Obama is palpable. If the Russian president continues to judge that Obama has no stomach for the fight, it is not implausible that Russia might challenge the West again elsewhere, possibly in the Baltic.

Conducting military operations on a third front would be a major challenge for Russian forces. Nonetheless, it also could trigger a new crisis as consequential as events in Syria, bringing a possible direct clash between NATO and Russian forces.

At a time when both the United States and its most powerful NATO ally, Great Britain, are suffering severe budgetary declines and diminished capabilities while saddled with timid political leadership, the Russian military is riding the crest of a wave changing the political dynamics in areas critical to U.S. national security.
Four lessons about the current state of the Russian military can be gleaned from its recent performance in Ukraine and Syria.

1) The conflicts illustrate that Russian President Vladimir Putin views his military as an instrument of state power.

War is both an extension and consequence of politics. Putin understands this.
Largely unsaddled by and often disdainful of domestic public opinion, the Russian president has moved aggressively to advance Russian interests in Ukraine and Syria by unleashing his military in both conflicts.
Putin realizes that political goals often are best advanced when backed by military prowess. The Russian military has been called to serve as an instrument of state power.
In contrast, and with the exception of a small deployment of fighter aircraft to Turkey, U.S. President Barack Obama has largely sidelined the U.S. military during both crises, deciding in the words of Mideast expert Dennis Ross, that “he (Obama) was not going to get involved in someone else’s civil war.”

2) The Russian military has reversed a decades-long decline.

Beginning with the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and extending about twenty years, the Russian military suffered sharp declines in funding, morale and overall military capability.
Putin vowed in several political campaigns, including the 2012 presidential election, to restore the military — long revered in Russia — and has carried out that promise with expanded funding and strong political support.
Those investments are paying dividends. In Ukraine, Russian military forces and those supported by them — the so-called “little green men” — conducted military operations with precision, used advanced small arms equipment, and demonstrated improved command, control and communications, a problem that plagued their August 2008 operations against Georgia.
Nonetheless, the decline has not been fully reversed. Russian aircraft conducting front line operations include fighters that are at least 25 years old although they are still potent in the face of very little opposition from air or ground.
At the same time, Russia also is deploying a new generation of fighter aircraft, the SU-34 Fullback fighter bomber.

3) The military fights as it practices.

The Soviet and now Russian military has a long tradition of carrying out numerous peacetime military exercises which serve as a proving ground for the strategies and tactics it is likely to use in wartime.
Advanced militaries around the globe carry out similar training but senior Russian military commanders probably devote more time and attention to training than any other military force.
Russian commanders also are students of warfare and closely watch how other militaries operate and perform. A large body of military writings, for example, analyzed how the U.S. military operated during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign in the Middle East and used combined arms combat such as mixing ground and air capabilities against enemy forces.
In Syria, Russia has shown a capability to carry out combined arms combat, using Syrian-based fighters aircraft as well as cruise missiles from four naval warships in the Caspian Sea to strike Syrian targets.

4) Russian commanders will learn the lessons from Ukraine and Syria but their political masters may come to dangerous conclusions.
Russian commanders doubtless are monitoring the performance of the men and equipment they have deployed to Ukraine and Syria.
These “real world” lessons will aid in improving future performance. More worrying is that senior military commanders as well as their political superiors may conclude that their military is capable of defeating other regional fighting forces.
In both conflicts the Russian military has had scant opposition so any overall assessment of its capabilities must be viewed through that prism.

Turkey's Unwillingness to Take on ISIS Has Come Back to Haunt It

Behlül Özkan Become a fan \Assistant professor at Marmara University
HuffPost


Civil strife and jihadism which have torn apart states like Libya, Iraq and Syria have now begun to menace Turkey as well. The AKP's disastrous Syria policy of the past four years has come back to haunt its creators.

No part of the country, not even Ankara, is felt to be safe anymore.

In 2011, as the first revolt broke out in Syria, Davutoğlu and Erdoğan assumed that Assad's regime would be overthrown within months, despite the misgivings of then-President Gül, AKP cabinet ministers and members of Turkey's opposition parties. However, this armed uprising, under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood (which the AKP saw as its ideological ally) soon fell apart, leaving a void to be filled by radical groups including the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front.

Ankara's continued support for these groups has created an impasse in Syria and also led to friction with the U.S., especially after reports surfaced that Syria-bound jihadists had received many tons of weapons delivered via trucks belonging to MİT. (In a May 2013 White House meeting with Erdoğan, Davutoğlu and MİT Director Hakan Fidan, President Obama openly confronted Fidan on this issue, saying, "We know what you're doing with the radicals in Syria.") As a result, the U.S. repeatedly denied Turkey's requests for military intervention in Syria as well as a no-fly zone and safe haven in the north of the country. Washington still has bitter memories of the 2012 attack on its consulate in Benghazi and the killing of its consul after helping to overthrow Qaddafi; fearing a similar outcome in a post-Assad Syria, it has chosen to avoid directly intervening in that conflict.

In 2014, the balance of power in Syria was further transformed when ISIS took control of a vast area stretching from the northern outskirts of Baghdad all the way to Aleppo. Despite these alarming territorial gains, the AKP has continued to insist that its highest priority is defeating Assad, not the Islamic State, which it views as a symptom rather than the underlying disease. This calculation is no doubt influenced by the fact that ISIS is waging war on the PYD, the Syrian branch of the PKK, against which Turkey has fought a bloody 30-year counterinsurgency campaign.

The Turkish authorities have even turned a blind eye to ISIS activities within Turkey on numerous occasions.
Over the past few years, the ISIS-Turkey saga has taken some extremely bizarre turns. Officially listed by Turkey as a terrorist organization, ISIS kidnapped 49 people from the Turkish consulate in Mosul (including the consul and other diplomats) in June of 2014. After three months of negotiations, Ankara succeeded in having the hostages freed, although the details of these transactions remain sketchy at best. Erdoğan merely stated that "diplomatic negotiations took place," while Davutoğlu explained that "elements which ISIS ... would not want to upset" had been a factor in the hostages' release. It remains is still unclear how the state carried out "diplomatic negotiations" with a terrorist organization or who exactly it was that ISIS "would not want to upset."

The Turkish authorities have even turned a blind eye to ISIS activities within Turkey on numerous occasions. Two years in a row, in 2014 and 2015, hundreds of ISIS sympathizers gathered in Istanbul to perform their prayers for the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan; on neither occasion did the police intervene. ISIS militants wounded in Syria have been treated in hospitals in Turkey. Though Turkey's health minister has declared it a humanitarian duty to care for all patients, terrorists or not, it remains unknown what happened to these militants following their treatment. The international media has run stories of ISIS's recruitment centers in an Ankara shantytown and in other Turkish cities and of the hundreds of people bused to Syria in order to join the Islamic State.

And now ISIS is alleged to have carried out the single largest terror attack in Turkish history, right in the heart of Ankara. I say "alleged" because ISIS (which is notorious for filming its acts of violence and uploading them onto social media) has not claimed responsibility for any of the attacks it is said to have carried out in Turkey. These include a bombing of the Kurdish/progressive HDP election rally in Diyarbakır this past June, in which four people died; and another one the following month in Suruç, on Turkey's border with Syria, with a death toll of 33. The targets in both the Suruç and the Ankara bombings were leftist/secular groups campaigning for peace and for closer ties between Turks and Kurds. Turkey's police are known for their overzealousness in monitoring gatherings by such groups; however, they took no security precautions prior to the Ankara rally, which had been announced days earlier and was attended by thousands from all over the country. Both Davutoğlu and Minister of Internal Affairs Selami Altınok have since denied that any negligence took place.

The civil strife and jihadism that have torn apart states like Libya, Iraq and Syria have now begun to menace Turkey as well.

Following each attack, the AKP has made a point of referring to ISIS, the PKK and the DHKP-C in the same breath, as if all three groups were equally likely culprits. The DHKP-C is a marginal leftist armed group without any popular support; as for the PKK, the AKP had been conducting peace talks with its leader Öcalan for two years prior to Suruç. As it well known by now, the PKK's Syrian branch, the PYD, has been ISIS's most redoubtable opponent in Syria and has received support from the U.S. and other Western countries. It is striking that the Ankara bombing occurred just a day before a planned PKK ceasefire; could it be that ISIS hoped to derail this ceasefire in order to prevent a large-scale PKK attack on its own forces in Syria?

All these mysteries and unanswered questions have left many Turkish citizens with a profound sense of distrust in their own government. The general feeling is that the AKP's Syria policy -- in particular, its unwillingness to take on ISIS -- is endangering Turkey's democratic, secular order. No part of the country, not even Ankara, is felt to be safe anymore.

Notably, no government representatives have attended the funerals of the bombing victims, perhaps out of fear of growing societal outrage against the AKP. Even after such a dire attack, at a time when all political parties should stand united, Prime Minister Davutoğlu has been unable to meet with his political opponents in Parliament. Turkey heads towards its elections next month amidst grave security risks and intense social polarization. In such a toxic atmosphere, the upcoming elections seem to promise little in the way of hope.

REPORT: Saudi Arabia increasing weapon supplies to Syrian rebels following Russian airstrikes

Tom Fernandez
Saudi Arabia has stepped up its weapon supplies to three different rebel groups in Syria following Russian airstrikes, a government official told the BBC. It comes after Moscow launched its Air Force anti-terror operation at the request of Assad’s government.
Rebel groups fighting the Syrian Army will receive an increase in modern, high-powered weaponry, including guided anti-tank weapons, a “well-placed” Saudi official told the BBC on condition of anonymity.
He said the recipients include Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and the Southern Front. The official stressed that Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL) and the al-Nusra Front would not be receiving any weapons.

The official did not rule out the possibility of supplying surface-to-air missiles to the rebels, which many in the West fear would fall into the hands of ISIS militants and be used to shoot down warplanes of the US-led coalition or civilian aircraft.

Meanwhile, a separate Gulf Arab official has expressed fear that Russia’s military intervention in Syria will prompt a new jihad, or holy war.

The official told journalists that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was warned by Arab diplomats during last week’s UN General Assembly that Moscow’s actions in Syria were creating “Frankenstein’s monster,” which will draw in jihadists aiming to “liberate” Syria of Russians, Iranians, and Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon.

However, the official admitted that neither the West nor Gulf Arab states have a strategy for resolving the bloody conflict, which has been taking place for more than four years and has led to the deaths of over 250,000 people.

“All the targets are being thoroughly studied, using the data from space and radio-electronic intelligence, drone footages, the information received from radio intercepts. We are also using data from Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi intelligence, including undercover sources,” Kartapolov said, adding that each bombing is carried out after a review of all available information and a “computer simulation of the future attack.”


Since the military campaign was launched, mainstream media has “launched a powerful anti-Russian campaign,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday. She added that the ministry is “open to contacts of military experts” and is ready to look into any potential concerns.


Meanwhile, the White House has called the Russian airstrikes “indiscriminate military operations against the Syrian opposition,” adding that the campaign will prolong Syria’s conflict. Moscow offered on Tuesday to resume talks with Washington to avoid any misunderstandings concerning its airstrike operations, as well as ways to avoid conflicts between US and Russian warplanes over Syria.