Retrospective Wisdom about Foreign Policy

Sometimes, reading the headlines, you get the impression that the people leading US foreign policy are nitwits. This is usually not true. They often say inane things in public because they think the political situation requires it, but when we eventually get access to their private memos it turns out they knew all along that their public statements were probably wrong. A good example is the notes Henry Kissinger wrote after a trip to Vietnam in 1965, in which he was scornful of all claims of US success and dubious about any eventual victory.

So it's interesting to read about the memos the Bush administration's National Security Council left for the incoming Obama team in 2009. (NY Times) From what has been made public, these seem to have been genuinely thoughtful and intelligent attempts to sum up the problems the new administration would face.

Most interesting to me are the strenuous warnings about Russian ambitions in Ukraine:

The memo on Russia concludes that Mr. Bush’s “strategy of personal diplomacy met with early success” but acknowledged that ties had soured, especially after Russia’s invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008. The memo presciently warned about Russia’s future ambitions.

“Russia attempts to challenge the territorial integrity of Ukraine, particularly in Crimea, which is 59 percent ethnically Russian and is home to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, must be prevented,” the memo warned five years before Russian forces would seize Crimea and 13 years before they would invade the rest of the country. The memo added that “Russia will exploit Europe’s dependence on Russian energy” and use political means “to drive wedges between the United States and Europe.”

On Iraq:

Iraq was central to the Bush administration’s foreign policy and still a festering problem as he was leaving office, but his surge of additional troops and a change in strategy in 2006 had helped bring down civilian deaths by nearly 90 percent. Those moves also paved the way for agreements that Mr. Bush sealed with Iraq to withdraw all American troops by the end of 2011, a time frame that Mr. Obama essentially adopted.

The Iraq memo, written by Brett McGurk, who went on to work for Mr. Obama, President Donald J. Trump and President Biden, offered no recapitulation of how the war was initiated on false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, but it did acknowledge how badly the war had gone until the surge.

“The surge strategy reset negative trends and set the conditions for longer-term stability,” the memo said. “The coming 18 months, however, may be the most strategically significant in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein,” it added, putting that in boldface. Referring to Al Qaeda of Iraq, it said, “AQI is down but not out and a series of elections will define Iraq’s future.”

The memo warned the Obama team that the situation could still unravel again: “There is no magic formula in Iraq. While our policy is now on a more stable and sustainable course, we should expect shocks to the system that will require a flexible and pragmatic approach at least through government formation in the first quarter of 2010.”

On Afghanistan:

The Bush team drew similar conclusions about Afghanistan. “Rarely, if ever, were the resources accorded to Afghanistan commensurate with the goals espoused,” Ms. O’Sullivan and two colleagues wrote in a postscript for that memo. “Policymakers overestimated the ability of the United States to produce an outcome” and “underestimated the impact of variables beyond U.S. control.”

This makes me wonder: people like me are always asking for honesty from politicians, with the feeling that the voters can handle the truth. And even if they can't in some situations, honesty from leaders will lead to a healthier democracy in the long run.

But is that true? I realize that I am setting myself against people who know a whole lot more about both foreign policy and domestic politics than I ever will. Is there a case to be made for predicting success even when you expect failure, so as to keep up morale among people executing the policy?

Iraq after the ISIS War

Interesting comment from Tom Friedman:

It was quite logical that after ISIS emerged in Iraq and Syria in 2014 that the U.S. would take on the mission of helping to destroy ISIS in Iraq.

Washington felt guilty having removed all combat troops from Iraq before it was really stabilized and ISIS had brutally murdered American journalists. But rather than do it all ourselves, we partnered with the Iraqi Army and amplified its power and ground forces with our advisers and air power.

That approach led not only to the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, it also produced some unanticipated positive effects in Iraqi politics. The ISIS war became a kind of national war of liberation for Iraqis that brought moderate Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds closer together — and gave them dignity that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had unintentionally stolen. And this paved the way for more stable and sustainable power-sharing among Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites in Iraq.

Iraq today remains a very frail democracy — with huge challenges in employment, energy, corruption and governing. But “Iraq today is a different country,” noted Linda Robinson in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Winning the Peace in Iraq: Don’t Give Up on Baghdad’s Fragile Democracy. “Few Americans understand the remarkable success” that has been achieved in bringing Iraq back from the depth of the ISIS war.

This doesn’t mean that the original Iraq invasion was worth it or that we would do it again. But it does mean we found the right way to help Iraqis help themselves. It is now up to them to make the most of it.

I wrote in 2015 after the Battle of Tikrit that I hoped winning this war would have good effects in Iraq, and so it seems to have been. Nothing unifies people like a common enemy.

Life Returns to Mosul

Much of the old city remains a shattered wasteland, but the rest of Mosul is returning to normal with zest:

Less than a year ago, Mosul emerged from the nearly nine-month battle to retake it from the Islamic State group.

Now, in many parts of the city, life is returning and the feeling of security is palpable. New businesses are open and people stay out late into the evening for the first time in years. There is a sense among people here that at last Mosul is unshackled from criminal gangs and hard-core Islamic factions. . . .

Just a few minutes’ drive away, Mosul University is also bringing life and energy back to the war-ravaged city.

The young minds needed to rebuild a country so fractured and destroyed are coming back in force to attend classes at the prestigious institution, which was heavily damaged during the fighting.

Some of the first students to graduate since the defeat of ISIS celebrated wildly recently at a reception hall in eastern Mosul. With extended families in attendance, each graduate was paraded through the party under a shower of exploding glitter and booming Iraqi pop music.

One thing I love about our species is the way we bounce back after tragedies that might destroy us.

The Lost City of Irisagrig

The ancient Sumerian city of Irisagrig is known from mentions in documents excavated from other cities, but archaeologists don't know where it is. Somebody does, though:

Hundreds of 4,000 year old tablets that were looted in Iraq and bought by the U.S. company Hobby Lobby seem to hail from a mysterious Sumerian city whose whereabouts are unknown, a U.S. law enforcement agency just announced.

The tablets are part of a cache of thousands of looted artifacts purchased by Hobby Lobby and seized by the U.S. government. They are now set to be returned to Iraq.

Of the 450 cuneiform tablets in that haul, many came from an ancient city called Irisagrig, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements said in a statement. Many of these tablets date from between 2100 B.C. and 1600 B.C., the statement said. Most of them are legal or administrative texts– meaning that they contain records such as contracts and inventories of goods that made it easier for private citizens and the city’s government to run their affairs – while a few contain a form of magical spells called incantations, the statement said.

I love stories like this, and I can't wait for some intrepid investigator to trace the artifacts back to their source. That's how Arthur Evans found Knossos, among many other such discoveries.

How the Caliphate was Run

Fabulous Times story by Rukmini Callimachi about how he and a team of helpers entered Mosul while the rubble was still smoldering to look for documents left by the Islamic State. Much material had been destroyed, either intentionally or during the fighting, but they did eventually find many real documents left by the Caliphate's bureaucracy. Putting these together with interviews, they discovered that after taking over Mosul's administration Islamic State commanders purged everyone not male Sunni Muslim but ordered all the rest to get back to work or else. Some things ran just as before. Some things ran better, especially trash collection, since the city was patrolled by armed men quick to arrest sanitation workers for slacking.

“Although they were not recognized as a state or a country,” said one shopkeeper, Ahmed Ramzi Salim, “they acted like one.”

One new thing was the comprehensive seizing of land owned by non-Sunnis and its redistribution to Sunni farmers:

Folder after folder, 273 in all, identified plots of land owned by farmers who belonged to one of the faiths banned by the group. Each yellow sleeve contained the handwritten request of a Sunni applying to confiscate the property.

Doing so involved a step-by-step process, beginning with a report by a surveyor, who mapped the plot, noted important topographical features and researched the property’s ownership. Once it was determined that the land was owned by one of the targeted groups, it was classified as property of the Islamic State. Then a contract was drawn up spelling out that the tenant could neither sublet the land nor modify it without the group’s permission.

Callimachi eventually tracked down the man whose signature was on all of these transfers, Mahmoud Ismael Salim, "Supervisor of Land," and he turned out to be a mild-mannered bureaucrat with a combover who shuddered as he said he was forced to do it under threat of death:

On busy days, a line snaked around his office building, made up of Sunni farmers, many of them resentful of their treatment at the hands of a Shia-led Iraqi government. In the same compound where we found the stacks of yellow folders, Mr. Salim received men he knew, whose children had played with his. They came to steal the land of other men they all knew — whose children had also grown up alongside theirs.

With the stroke of his pen, farmers lost their ancestors’ cropland, their sons were robbed of their inheritance and the wealth of entire families, built up over generations, was wiped out.

“These are relationships we built over decades, from the time of my father, and my father’s father,” Mr. Salim said, pleading for understanding. “These were my brothers, but we were forced to do it.”

So sad, so predictable. I highly recommend the whole piece.

Incidentally the Times must have spent more than a million dollars on this one story, sending a team of people to Iraq five times and providing them with protection, then arranging for a committee of experts to review the documents for authenticity and help analyze them. I feel like one simple thing we can all do to keep  civilization going is to subscribe to at least one of the major newspapers and do our part to pay for this kind of work.

Iraq Declares Victory over the Islamic State

Yesterday Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi went on television to make this announcement:

Dear Iraqis, your land has been completely liberated, and your towns and villages have been returned to the homeland. The dream of liberation became a reality. . . . Our forces fully control the Iraqi-Syrian border, and thus we can announce the end of the war against Daesh.

Of course there are still thousands of radical soldiers on the loose, so terrorism will continue. But considering that the Islamic State once controlled a third of the country, this counts as a victory for civilization.

Victory in Mosul

Today's best news is from Iraq, where the government has announced victory over the Islamic State in Mosul.

Dressed in a military uniform, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived here in Mosul on Sunday to congratulate Iraq’s armed forces on its victory over the Islamic State and mark the formal end of a bloody campaign that lasted nearly nine months, left much of Iraq’s second-largest city in ruins, killed thousands of people and displaced nearly a million more.

While Iraqi troops were still mopping up the last pockets of resistance and Iraqi forces could be facing suicide bombers and guerrilla attacks for weeks, the military began to savor its win in the shattered alleyways of the old city, where the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, put up a fierce last stand.

Hanging over the declaration of victory is the reality of the hard road ahead. The security forces in Mosul still face dangers, including ISIS sleeper cells and suicide bombers. And they must clear houses rigged with explosive booby-traps so civilians can return and services can be restored. Nor is the broader fight over: Other cities and towns in Iraq remain under the militants’ control.

I am personally very impressed by this victory because I was worried that it might not happen. I found it easy to imagine government forces bogged down indefinitely in the suburbs, unwilling to take the casualties necessary to reach the Old City, blaming each other for the impasse. That this did not happen says something important about the Iraqi army and, by extension, the Iraqi nation. A country whose army can fight and win such a long, difficult campaign is not about to be swept away by a small fanatical movement.

Moderate, mainstream sort of people often fear fanatics too much. Every once in a while a movement appears with the strength and cleverness to take advantage of a chaotic situation and seize power. More often, fanatics marginalize themselves and fall to infighting and are easily beaten by the forces of any competent state. If post-Saddam Iraq is now a competent state, that will be a huge boon for the stability of the region.

The Arab Spring, Failed Hopes, and Self Doubt

The Arab Spring, a great movement for democracy, human rights, and hope, has crashed and burned. Outside Tunisia it has led only to some combination of civil war and renewed repression. Algerian writer and activist Kamel Daoud wrote a moving essay about these events for a French newspaper that has now been translated and published in the Times. It makes me wonder.

Daoud admits that the dreams of the protesters and the rebels are dead or dying, but he does not attribute this to any sort of natural disease. He believes that those dreams were murdered. They were murdered by dictators like Assad with their airplanes and poison gas, by cynical foreign governments, by lies. The liars claim that attempts to establish Arab democracy only empower radicals like the Islamic state and lead to chaos and foreign intervention:

For President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the Arab springs were “devastating conspiracies.” According to a private Egyptian television channel, even ‘‘The Simpsons’’ contained proof of untoward foreign designs in Syria. The political chaos in Libya has fanned distrust as well.

The foreign-intervention theory is used as a weapon against local dissenters. In 2016 Bouteflika, ailing and immobilized, announced that he would seek yet another term, after having the Constitution amended so that he could stay in office for the rest of his life. When his opponents countered his proposals by invoking democratic values, government media accused them of being traitors, Western agents or Zionists.

The case of Syria — subject to alliances with Iran or Russia and playing against Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the United States — gives weight to such propaganda. It seems to demonstrate that any demand for democracy eventually translates into chaos, and chaos invites the return of colonialism. The same goes for Libya. Better then to submit to one’s dictators than compromise oneself with foreigners.

I want to agree with Daoud that the dream of Arab democracy remains alive, and that things might have gone differently. But I am not sure. I am not much of a believer in luck or genius. I think most of what happens in history is driven by vast, long-term forces that we only partially understand and can rarely control. It seems to me that people who point out what happened in Libya when the dictator was overthrown are onto something. The situation did not degenerate into chaos for no reason at all; it degenerated because Libyans are deeply divided among themselves by region, tribe, class, attitudes toward Europe, and their interpretations of Islam, so much so that once the heavy hand of dictatorship was removed the situation spontaneously combusted. Can democracy flourish in such circumstances? Assad has held onto power in Syria not just because he has airplanes and poison gas, but because he has the support of many Syrians. Foreign powers meddle in Arab conflicts not just for their own nefarious purposes but because various Arab factions are always begging them to.

Consider events in Iraq and Egypt. In Iraq the US removed the dictator and his whole apparatus, and so far the result has been corruption, conflict, terrorism, the rise of the Islamic state, a devastating civil war, and the effective secession of Kurdistan. Consider the still smoldering ruins of Mosul, once one of the Arab world's great cities, as collateral damage from this experiment. In Egypt democracy was established and an election held, but the winner was from the Muslim Brotherhood. The secular, western-oriented people who began the protests and launched the revolution recoiled in horror from what their countrymen had chosen and allied with the military to overthrow the Morsi government and return Egypt to dictatorship. The hard, rational part of my brain says this all proves that most of the Arab world is simply not suitable for democracy.

But even as I reach that conclusion I doubt it. Americans always used to say that Latin America was unsuitable for democracy and pointed to the numerous failures, but right now most of the region is democratic, and some of those democratic nations are thriving. Am I just being smug and indifferent when I write off the dreams of Daoud and millions of others? Is my resignation just an excuse for the west's clumsy combination of military meddling and moral indifference? For my refusal to endorse spending American dollars and soldiers overthrowing Assad? I don't know.

I would never tell Daoud or an other citizen of a dictatorship to give up hope; hope is a precious thing in any circumstances. But I am not myself optimistic that things will get better in the Middle East any time soon.

Bassetki: Looted Statue and Ancient City

Back in 2003, looters took advantage of the chaos that followed the American conquest of Baghdad to carry off thousands of valuable objects from the Iraqi national museum. Among them was the "Bassetki Statue," a cast-copper figure showing the legs and lower torso of a naked man found in the 1960s near the village of Bassetki. This is a massive thing, weighting 150 kilograms (330 pounds).

Not much to look at, but it has an inscription on the base in old Akkadian that makes it an important historical source as well as a work of art:

The inscription deals with the Akkadian ruler Naram-Sin (2254–2218 BCE), grandson and third successor of Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Akkadian Empire. It recounts that, after Naram-Sin crushed a large-scale revolt against his rule, the inhabitants of the city of Akkad asked the gods to make Naram-Sin the god of their city, and that they built a temple for him in the middle of the city.

Like many of those looted objects, this statue was eventually recovered and returned to the museum. American MPs found it coated in axle grease and submerged in a cesspool behind the house of some suspected artifact dealers.

But why was the statue found at Bassetki, a small Kurdish village with no known ancient site? Puzzled, some German archaeologists from the University of Tübingen decided to investigate. They have just revealed that in digs this Autumn they found an ancient city to go with the famous artifact. Digging down through ten or so feet of recent alluvium and debris in (to judge from this picture) radically unsafe trenches that in the U.S. could get you sent to jail, they found extensive Bronze Age remains:

As a result, they were able to preempt the construction work on a highway on this land. The former significance of the settlement can be seen from the finds discovered during the excavation work. The city already had a wall running around the upper part of the town from approximately 2700 BC onwards in order to protect its residents from invaders. Large stone structures were erected there in about 1800 BC. The researchers also found fragments of Assyrian cuneiform tablets dating from about 1300 BC, which suggested the existence of a temple dedicated to the Mesopotamian weather god Adad on this site. There was a lower town about one kilometer long outside the city center. Using geomagnetic resistance measurements, the archaeologists discovered indications of an extensive road network, various residential districts, grand houses and a kind of palatial building dating from the Bronze Age. The residents buried their dead at a cemetery outside the city. The settlement was connected to the neighboring regions of Mesopotamia and Anatolia via an overland roadway dating from about 1800 BC.

Which is a lot to find out in two months of digging. So kudos to them to learning a lot in a hurry, even if they did use trenches that might collapse and kill people. These same archaeologists have spent the past few years wandering around Iraq and Syria trying to document threatened archaeological sites before somebody blows them up – "we fight ISIS as archaeologists", says their leader, Professor Doktor Peter Pfälzner – so maybe life in a war zone has made them careless of little things like the risk of getting buried in their own trenches.

A Plea to Leave ISIS Alone, for Now

Ramzy Mardini warns that driving the Islamic State out of Mosul will only unleash civil war, because opposition to the Islamic State is the only thing holding northern Iraq's various ethnic and religious factions together:

In parts of Iraq recaptured from the militants where I’ve traveled, signs of any central authority are nonexistent. Instead, what has emerged from the conflict is a complex patchwork of ethnic, tribal and religious militias that claim fief over particular territories.

This was the case in liberated parts of Sinjar, where the massacre of Yazidis, a religious minority, perpetrated by the Islamic State with local Sunni collaborators compelled the United States to intervene militarily in 2014. Now the remaining Yazidi community is divided and militarized, with each militia backed by a different Kurdish faction, and each Kurdish faction in turn backed by a different regional power. . . . “ISIS changed everything,” one Yazidi man told me. “We can never trust Arabs again.”

Among the forces marshalling for the attack on Mosul, Mardini says, are

Sunni Arab tribal militias looking to expand control over territory ahead of the next provincial elections; Shiite Turkmen militias aiming to cleanse Sunni Turkmens from the area; Shiite Arab militias seeking a bigger say in government; and Kurdish groups wishing to consolidate control over disputed territories. Behind all these is a prime minister who needs a victory to strengthen his weak hand in Baghdad. And behind him are Turkey and Iran, both maneuvering their armed proxies to extend their influence.

It does seem like a real mess. But on the other hand I think the war is stoking these conflicts, and I don't see how they will ever settle down while the fighting against the Islamic State continues. Plus, reports coming out of Mosul suggest that as military tensions mount the Islamic State administration is becoming ever bloodier and more vicious, and it would be hard for anyone to decide to leave a million people in that situation indefinitely while the rest of Iraq sorts out its problems.

The End of the Caliphate

Various signals coming from the Islamic State indicate that it is preparing for the loss of all its cities and most of its territory, converting itself back into a rootless terrorist network:

A remarkable editorial last month in al-Naba, the Islamic State's weekly Arabic newsletter, offered a gloomy assessment of the caliphate's prospects, acknowledging the possibility that all its territorial holdings could ultimately be lost. Just two years ago, jihadist leaders heralded the start of a glorious new epoch in the world's history with the establishment of their Islamic "caliphate," which at the time encompassed most of eastern Syria and a vast swath of northern and western Iraq, a combined territory roughly the size of Great Britain.

The editorial, titled, "The Crusaders' Illusions in the Age of the Caliphate," sought to rally the group's followers by insisting that the Islamic State would continue to survive, even if all its cities fell to the advancing "crusaders" - the separate Western- and Russian-backed forces arrayed against them.

"The crusaders and their apostate clients are under the illusion that . . . they will be able to eliminate all of the Islamic State's provinces at once, such that it will be completely wiped out and no trace of it will be left," the article states. In reality, the group's foes "will not be able to eliminate it by destroying one of its cities or besieging another of them, or by killing a soldier, an emir or an imam," it says. . . .

The editorial asserts that the "whole world . . . has changed" with the creation of a theocratic enclave that has "shown all of mankind what the true Islamic state is like."

"If they want to achieve true victory - they will not, God willing - they will have to wait a long time: until an entire generation of Muslims that was witness to the establishment of the Islamic State and the return of the caliphate . . . is wiped out."

Recent advances by the Iraqi government and Syrian Kurds have cost ISIS 12 percent of their territory, and it seems the Iraqis are on the verge of a major effort to retake Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control.

But of course even the loss of all its cities will not end the Daesh's ability to make trouble. Most experts have interpreted the recent spate of terrorist bombings around the world as a shift in strategy from holding territory back to terrorism. As one Islamic State operative told a western journalist,

We do have, every day, people reaching out and telling us they want to come to the caliphate. But we tell them to stay in their countries and rather wait to do something there.

Terrorism is bad, of course, but not so bad as having ISIS armies on the march, enslaving women and carrying out genocide. So I would be happy to trade the elimination of the Islamic State for a short-term increase in bombings.

The Nth Battle of Fallujah

Vox:

The battle to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah has begun: 20,000 Iraqi soldiers, backed by US air power and advisers, are attempting to expel some 800 to 1,000 ISIS fighters.

This is now the third time since 2003 that US and Iraqi forces have fought to retake Fallujah (building on an even longer British tradition of retaking Fallujah.) . . .

Yet the price of the battles of Fallujah has been very high for all involved. The second battle of Fallujah in 2004 was the bloodiest of the 2003 to 2011 Iraq War. The US lost nearly 100 soldiers there in retaking the city in 2004. The insurgents lost as many as 1,500.

The city has been reduced to rubble several times, and virtually all of the city’s occupants— about 350,000 people — have been forced to flee their homes over and over again. Many more people will die in the next battle, as ISIS defends the city fiercely and leaves behind a sea of booby-traps.

Still, the US and its allies have won all of their previous battles for Fallujah. And although the US will only be playing a supporting role this time around, it should be successful as well. The US military is an incredibly effective learning organization and every time it retakes the city of Fallujah, it gets better at it.

So the good news is that we have become very skilled at retaking Fallujah and are likely to succeed once again. The bad news is that also that we have become very skilled at retaking Fallujah.

More News from Mosul

The British military has announced that over the past three weeks their special forces have kidnapped three "mid level" Islamic State commanders in helicopter-born raids around Mosul:

A senior source said to the Mirror: "There are a wide range of activities taking place around Mosul which allow our commanders to shape the dispositions of enemy forces prior to any engagement. Seizing enemy commanders has always been a key driver in changing the way your opponent thinks, it will unsettle them and may force them to make mistakes.

"From our point of view killing the enemy is not always the answer. If we can get a commander to change sides, as we did in Afghanistan, this can have major influence on people inside Mosul and save lives."

As with other public statements about Mosul that we discussed here before, I think there is an agenda to this announcement. The general British policy is to never comment on the activities of the Special Air Service, as they call their elite commandos. So this is no routine news briefing. I suppose they are trying to send a message, or perhaps two: they want Islamic State commanders to sweat and constantly scan the skies, and they want people in Mosul to know that their oppressors are not invulnerable.

Could it be true that the unwieldy alliance getting ready to attack Mosul – the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, Shiite militias with Iranian advisers, the US Air Force, American, French, and British special forces – is carrying out a sophisticated plan to destabilize the Islamic State so the city will fall quickly? If so, that would be truly remarkable. I rather doubt it, though.

Protesters in Baghdad Demand Government by Experts

Fascinating events in Baghdad over the weekend:

Protesters stormed Iraq’s parliament Saturday in a dramatic culmination of months of demonstrations, casting uncertainty over the tenure of the country’s prime minister and the foundations of the political system laid in place after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Security forces declared a state of emergency in the Iraqi capital after demonstrators climbed over blast walls and broke through cordons to enter Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, also home to ministries and the U.S. embassy. Many were followers of Iraq’s powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has been urging his supporters onto the streets.

Lawmakers fled the building in panic, with some berated and struck as they left. Others were trapped in the basement for hours, too afraid to face the crowds who complain that the country’s political class is racked by corruption.

And what is it, exactly, that the former firebrand al-Sadr and his followers want?

Street protests began last summer, when tens of thousands demonstrated against corruption and a lack of services. They were reinvigorated when Sadr put his weight behind them earlier this year, calling for Iraq’s government to be replaced by technocrats.

Under immense pressure, Abadi has tried to reshuffle his cabinet and meet the demonstrators’ demands. But he has been hampered by a deeply divided parliament, and sessions have descended into chaos as lawmakers have thrown water bottles and punches at one another.

So what al-Sadr wants is what self-proclaimed "centrists" in the US always say they want, an end to partisan squabbling and a technocratic government focused on concrete results.

Maybe we could lend them Michael Bloomberg; I hear he's restless in retirement and might want to get back into politics.

When the Islamic State is defeated, things may get worse

Today's cheerful reminder from Tom Friedman:

Let’s go back to the future of Iraq. “The problem in Iraq is not ISIS,” Najmaldin Karim, the wise governor of Kirkuk Province, which is partly occupied by ISIS, remarked to me. “ISIS is the symptom of mismanagement and sectarianism.” So even if ISIS is evicted from its stronghold in Mosul, he noted, if the infighting and mismanagement in Baghdad and sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis are not diffused, “the situation in Iraq could be even worse after” ISIS is toppled.

Why? Because there will just be another huge scramble among Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmens, Shiite militias, Turkey and Iran over who controls these territories now held by ISIS. There is simply no consensus here on how power will be shared in the Sunni areas that ISIS has seized. So if one day you hear that we’ve eliminated the ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and lowered the ISIS flag over Mosul, hold your applause.

This is why I think Obama is right not to make a major American commitment to defeat the Islamic State with another blitzkrieg armored advance on Raqqa, no matter how many people they kill in Europe and America. As things stand, that would only lead to more chaos, and to more intense fighting among all the other factions. We would be spending tens of billions of dollars and losing hundreds of lives to achieve nothing.

I am not sure if it is even possible to find a diplomatic, political solution to the mess in Syria and Iraq, but I believe that achieving a stable political climate is the only way to control terrorism. Shock and awe will not suffice.

Retaking Mosul?

Not sure what to make of this:

The U.S.-led coalition’s effort to recapture the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has begun, according to the top U.S. envoy in the fight against the extremists.

“It’s already started,” Brett McGurk said on Wednesday at a speech at the American University of Iraq in the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimani. “It’s a slow, steady squeeze.”

The coalition is conducting almost daily air strikes against ISIS personnel and infrastructure in the city. Iraqi forces are stationed just kilometers from the militants’ stronghold and the Kurdish Peshmerga have recaptured territory from the group north of the city.

McGurk’s statement suggests the coalition does not plan to bring about the collapse of ISIS in the city by a rapid and large mobilization of troops. The current plans seem to involve patiently encircling the group and cutting it off from the outside world before a major invasion. “The formula is working,” McGurk said. “It’s slow, but it’s working.”

Colonel Steve Warren, the U.S.-led coalition spokesman, also recently mentioned how the campaign to retake Mosul. “Preparations to take Mosul are happening now,” he tweeted on Tuesday, “including precision air strikes by coalition forces.”

Seems like an odd sort of offensive. How are they going to “squeeze” the Islamic State soldiers in the city without starving the inhabitants? or is this announcement just a political move, designed to reassure some people and threaten others?

When did the U.S. military start announcing its campaigns over Twitter?

And here's a weird detail:

Those strikes have started targeted ISIS’s financial infrastructure and cash reserves, and U.S. officials estimate they’ve destroyed “millions” of dollars.

So we're bombing the mattresses where they hide their cash?

No New Ideas for Fighting the Islamic State

Many people have noticed that while the leading Republicans love to criticize the Obama administration's policies in Syria and Iraq, they actually agree with him. From an article on Ted Cruz:

Given that Cruz believes America has “receded from the world stage” and is “increasingly viewed as irrelevant” under the Obama administration, which has pursued “a photo-op foreign policy of a bomb here and a missile there” rather than trying to defeat ISIS, you might expect that Cruz is promising a dramatically more aggressive policy to defeat the group. But the Cruz plan for taking on ISIS doesn’t differ dramatically from the airstrikes plus proxy war strategy the Obama administration is already pursuing to decidedly mixed effect.

As I noted at the time, Rand Paul explained this last year, writing in response to a belligerent Op-Ed from Rick Perry:

In fact, some of Perry’s solutions for the current chaos in Iraq aren’t much different from what I’ve proposed, something he fails to mention. His solutions also aren’t much different from President Barack Obama’s, something he also fails to mention. Because interestingly enough, there aren’t that many good choices right now in dealing with this situation in Iraq.

The only people who actually have different recommendations are Trump, who suggested we ally with Assad and the Russians, and Lindsay Graham, who wants to send in a large American ground force. Everyone else is advocating slight variations of what we are already doing.

Meanwhile in the Islamic State

The mass graves around Sinjar in northern Iraq, six of which have been discovered so far, hold the bodies of Yazidis massacred by the IS while they held the city. One of the graves holds 123 bodies. They made no effort to hide the graves, but they did surround them with explosive booby traps.

The War against the Islamic State from the French Perspective

Olivier Roy:

As President François Hollande of France has declared, the country is at war with the Islamic State. France considers the Islamist group, also known as ISIS, to be its greatest enemy today. It fights it on the front lines alongside the Americans in the Middle East, and as the sole Western nation in the Sahel. It has committed to this battle, first started in Mali in 2013, a share of its armed forces much greater than has the United States.

On Friday night, France paid the price for this. Messages expressing solidarity have since poured in from all over the Western world. Yet France stands oddly alone: Until now, no other state has treated ISIS as the greatest strategic threat to the world today.

Roy recapitulates the indifference toward the Islamic State of regional powers:

Bashar al-Assad’s main adversary is the Syrian opposition — now also the main target of Russia, which supports him. Mr. Assad would indeed benefit from there being nothing between him and ISIS: That would allow him to cast himself as the last bastion against Islamist terrorism, and to reclaim in the eyes of the West the legitimacy he lost by so violently repressing his own people.

The Turkish government is very clear: Its main enemy is Kurdish separatism. . . .

The Kurds, be they Syrian or Iraqi, seek not to crush ISIS so much as to defend their newfound borders. They hope the Arab world will become more divided than ever. . . . For the Kurds of Iraq, the main danger is seeing a strong central government emerge in Baghdad, for it could challenge the de facto independence of Iraqi Kurdistan today. ISIS stands in the way of the creation of any such power.

The Shiites of Iraq, no matter what pressure they face from America, do not seem ready to die to reclaim Falluja. They will defend sectarian borders, and will never let Baghdad fall. But they are in no hurry to bring the Sunni minority back into Iraq’s political mainstream; if they did, they would have to share power with it.

For the Saudis, the main enemy isn’t ISIS, which represents a form of Sunni radicalism they have always supported. So they do nothing against it, their main enemy being Iran.

The Iranians, for their part, want to contain ISIS but not necessarily to destroy it: Its very existence prevents the return of the kind of Arab Sunni coalition that gave them such trouble during their war with Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Then there is Israel, which can only be pleased to see Hezbollah fighting Arabs, Syria collapsing, Iran mired in an uncertain war and everyone forgetting the Palestinian cause.

In short, no regional player is willing to send out its forces, bayonets at the ready, to reclaim land from ISIS. And wars are not won without infantry.

But Roy also explains that the Islamic State has few other options for expansion. Only within Syria and Iraq can it post as the defender of Sunni Arabs, the main source of its legitimacy and support.

Which leads me to think again that the simplest solution would involve redrawing national borders, breaking up both Iraq and Syria to create two new states, one for Kurds and one for Sunni Arabs, its capital perhaps at Mosul. Both western diplomats and Middle Eastern governments have long resisted this option as opening a Pandora's Box of border questions, but without changes in borders it is going to be very, very difficult to find any resolution to these conflicts.

The Price of Intervention

The Islamic State is not a rootless terroristic entity like al Qaeda, with vague dreams of future revolution. It is a functioning government that controls territory, collects taxes, and makes war on its enemies. Like France. One of the terrorists attacking the Bataclan nightclub shouted, according to witnesses,

Now you will pay for what you are doing in Syria!

The Daesh did not target France because they "hate its values," a stupid phrase that showed up again in the last Republican debate. They targeted France because French planes are bombing them in Syria. This is a war between states, not a random event.

I think it is important to emphasize this because neither in France nor in the U.S. has the nature of the Middle Eastern conflict really been explained to the voters. According to The Times, some Parisians last night were asking, "Why us, again?" This strikes me as a good indication of the disconnect between what our governments are doing and what people are thinking about. The Islamic State would probably not be interested in killing French people if France were not waging war against them. Our own undeclared war against the Islamic State is exposing us to the same risk of terrorist attacks that France faces, although in practical terms it is of course much harder for the Daesh to attack across the Atlantic.

Since just about everybody hates the Islamic State, with its appalling record of massacres, rapes, slave markets, mass extortion, and so on, how do they survive? They survive because defeating them is not anyone's first priority. The Obama administration has tried to organize an anti-Islamic State coalition, but really nobody's heart is in this fight. The Saudis and the Gulf states are supposed to be part of this coalition, but they have moved all their planes south to attack Shiites in Yemen; to keep even nominal Saudi support against the IS, we have to support that horrific campaign, which is killing a lot more civilians than soldiers or Iranian agents. The Turks are also supposed to be our allies in this fight, but they also worry a lot more about Iran, and more about the Kurds than either. When the Turks finally sent some planes to Syria they attacked, not the IS, but Kurds that the US has supplied with weapons. The Israeli government keeps insisting that the Islamic State is of no consequence, and that the real danger is the axis running from Iran through the Syrian government to Hezbollah in Lebanon. (The IS has sent suicide bombers to attack Hezbollah.) The one country in the region where they hate the Islamic State as much as the US and France do is Iran.

I think one of the main reasons our policy in Iraq and Syria is incoherent is that we keep dividing the parties into good and bad guys according to our own notions of good and bad, which so far as I can tell are not shared by anyone in the region. If we were really serious about defeating the Islamic state we would ally with the thuggish Syrian government and their Iranian and Russian supporters and tell the Turks, Saudis and Israelis to keep out of the way or else. But in our calculus Iran, Vladimir Putin and the Syrian government are bad guys, and Turkey and the Saudis are good guys, so we refuse to do that. Plus it would enrage Israel and create lots of other problems.

I cheered earlier this week when the Kurds, reinforced by Yazidi volunteers, drove the Daesh from the city of Sinjar where fanatics had been enslaving women and carrying out mass executions. But I thought it was telling that the Times headline read Kurdish Fighters Retake Iraqi City, when in fact the Kurds had never been in Sinjar before. It used to be part of the Shiite run Iraqi state, and in Baghdad they were not at all happy about its falling into Kurdish hands. Not only that, but there are forces in the city loyal to at least three different Kurdish factions, and they have already started to squabble about credit for the victory and control of the city. There are no neat lines to be drawn in this conflict between good guys and bad guys, or even between allies and enemies.

If we are going to make war against a dangerous enemy, shouldn't we do it in a serious way, with an actual plan for winning? Obama really doesn't want to be involved in this mess, but he is trapped by foreign commitments and domestic politics into "doing something." He has taken some consequential steps. He engineered a change of government in Iraq and made it clear that the US would not support a Shiite regime that wrote off the whole Sunni populace. He has provided arms and air support to the Iraqi government, the Iraqi Kurds, and Kurdish fighters in Syria. We have repeatedly bombed every Islamic State target we can find, including the infrastructure of their oil wells. But none of this has really changed the situation on the ground, in the face of Iraqi incompetence, the massive unpopularity of the brutal Syrian regime, and the indifference of our allies.

If we are going to wage war against enemies who have the power to strike back against us anywhere in the world, shouldn't we at least have a policy that makes sense? And shouldn't someone in power make a real effort to explain to our citizens what we are doing and why? I look in vain across the political landscape for anyone in power who is honest about the situation and what it would take to change it. I think that on Syria Donald Trump makes more sense than Obama, which is a sentence I never imagined myself writing.

I hate the Islamic State, and I would support fighting it if we had a policy that made any sense. But we don't. To invite terrorist attack on our people by getting involved in a war we have no real desire to fight and no plan to win is crazy.

I wonder if the Paris attacks will make any difference to this -- after all, France is a NATO ally, so now that they have been attacked we are obliged to come to their defense. But any effort to do more will inevitably run smack into all of the complications I just laid out and probably dozens of others I don't even know about. So all in all I doubt it.