by Wayne White
Former General Khalifa Haftar’s (or Hiftar’s) eastern-based military challenge against parliamentary Islamists and armed Muslim extremists continues to spark more violence. Meanwhile, government authority in the capital of Tripoli has practically disintegrated with two rival prime ministers and a parliament bitterly split between Islamists and more secular elements. Amidst [...]]]>
by Wayne White
Former General Khalifa Haftar’s (or Hiftar’s) eastern-based military challenge against parliamentary Islamists and armed Muslim extremists continues to spark more violence. Meanwhile, government authority in the capital of Tripoli has practically disintegrated with two rival prime ministers and a parliament bitterly split between Islamists and more secular elements. Amidst this chaotic scene, the threat to foreign embassies has increased, including to the US, by Libya’s leading terrorist group.
Haftar presses on
Although failing to capture enough organized support across Libya to make decisive gains, Haftar has been able to sustain a robust challenge from his eastern perch. He has found a ready constituency across the country among relatively more secular — even some moderate Islamist — Libyans weary of militia-dominated politics, governmental division, and Islamic extremist violence.
The extent of popular opposition to Islamic militants is illustrated by the personality cult now evident in various locales built around Egypt’s General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Posters of al-Sisi and scattered demonstrations in favor of his presidential bid in Egypt since Haftar began his military challenge last month clearly show many Libyans want Haftar to assume a similar role in Libya, cracking down harshly on the extremists.
Libya’s 2012 parliamentary elections (only a month after Mohamed Morsi’s election as Egyptian president) resulted in a noticeably more secular/liberal line-up than Morsi achieved in Egypt. And this was before Morsi’s abuses of power began undermining his image as a relative moderate.
The possibility of valuable support to Haftar was noted in a May 30 Stratfor assessment: although unconfirmed, Haftar could be receiving Egyptian military aid in various forms. In fact, the Tripoli-based Libyan newspaper al-Wasat claimed on June 2 that Libya’s pro-Haftar minister of culture flew to Cairo along with the foreign affairs, civil society and health ministers seeking “assistance in calming the situation.” The largely al-Sisi controlled Egyptian media has, naturally, favored Haftar. So a measure of concrete Egyptian aid for Haftar either now or in the future is a real possibility.
Fighting in the east especially has continued as Haftar has launched more ground and air attacks against Ansar al-Sharia in Libya (ASL), the most dangerous jihadist militia based there (declared a terrorist organization by the US). Earlier this month, air force assets and Libyan Special Forces troops siding with Haftar attacked ASL facilities in and to the east of Benghazi. In the face of air strikes from helicopters and jets, ASL combatants fought back hard. Multiple rocket launcher fire also was exchanged. Casualties were over 100 by June 2, but the fighting appears to have been militarily inconclusive.
Meanwhile, the near continuous clashes have shut down Benghazi. In the latest bombardments, errant bombs hit the university, rockets fell on a warehouse district, and various munitions have fallen in residential neighborhoods.
A tale of two prime ministers
Compounding Libya’s travails, a dispute has been raging since last month over who holds the office of Libya’s prime minister. Islamists, supported by a number of parliamentary independents in Libya’s General National Congress (GNC), appointed — over bitter secularist opposition — a businessman backed by the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, Ahmed Maiteeq. However, Maiteeq failed to receive sufficient votes on the first ballot, and the shadowy second ballot that elected him has raised serious questions.
Since that controversial early May vote, Interim Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni has refused to step down, citing conflicting instructions from the GNC members following the vote. Later in May, the Libyan justice ministry’s legal department ruled that Maiteeq’s election had been illegal. Finally, on June 5, an official of Libya’s Supreme Court said the manner of Maiteeq’s election violated Libya’s standing temporary constitution. But al-Thinni said a final court statement would not be issued until June 9.
Two days earlier, Maiteeq, backed by some militiamen and police, took the prime minister’s office from al-Thinni and held his first meeting with his new cabinet. The GNC’s Islamist Speaker Nuri Abu Sahmain also ordered the Libyan Central Bank to freeze all government accounts to cut off al-Thinni’s cabinet ministers from funding their activities. Al-Thinni, however, remained defiant, awaiting word from the court.
While it might appear that the standoff is being resolved in al-Thinni’s favor, the situation is likely to remain chaotic. GNC Islamists, and possibly their militia ally (the Libyan Central Shield from nearby Misrata) doubtless have been angered and may stand by Maiteeq, trying to arrange another GNC vote in his favor. Al-Thinni went to Benghazi yesterday to express sympathy over the city’s plight, perhaps tellingly visiting with Libyan Special Forces there that have sided openly with General Haftar.
Rising potential threat to the US Embassy
On May 27 Ansar al-Sharia leader Mohammad al-Zahawi called Haftar an “American agent” on Libyan TV and warned if the US continued to back him it would suffer a “shameful defeat.” The State Department quickly said there has been no US contact with Haftar and no support, either “explicit” or “implicit.”
Nonetheless, with Zahawi’s group declared a terrorist entity by Washington and now Haftar’s most notable target, widespread belief probably exists among Libyan jihadists that Haftar has gotten some sort of American assistance. In any case, the US promptly warned its citizens against traveling to Libya and those already there to depart immediately, describing the situation on the ground there as “unpredictable and unstable.” On June 5 a Swiss worker with the Red Cross was murdered in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte by unknown gunmen.
Although an elite US military evacuation (or rescue) force, depending on the circumstances, has been poised in Sicily for over two weeks, US Embassy personnel in Tripoli have not been withdrawn. According to the State Department, embassy staffing is somewhat limited “because of security concerns.” On May 27, State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki said the US is continuing “to review the situation and address embassy security concerns.”
Last month, the US, along with other major European players, appointed Libyan envoys to work with the UN in trying to engage with Libyan actors interested in “political transition.” UN Libyan Envoy Tareq Mitri, reportedly roughed up by militiamen on his arrival in Tripoli on June 4, warned that it’s ultimately up to Libyans to solve their own problems.
The bottom line now is that with a robust challenge to central authority, governance and the small Libyan military in disarray, militias gaining more sway in Tripoli, and the ASL increasingly under attack and hitting back, there is no coherent security outside the US embassy’s walls. This was illustrated on June 4; hours after Haftar survived a probable ASL truck bombing at his compound near Benghazi, gunmen fired a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) into the same floor of the prime ministerial building in Tripoli that houses Maiteeq’s office.
This apparent tit-for-tat assault (Haftar views Islamists in the GNC backing Maiteeq as aiding “terrorists”) again shows just how vulnerable Libya’s prime ministers have been. Ali Ziedan last year was kidnapped from his office by a militia on the government’s own payroll, al-Thinni’s home was assaulted (unsuccessfully) by gunmen in March, and now it’s clear that Maiteeq has been unable to secure the area surrounding his own offices.
If the very core of governance can be struck so easily, any thought of meaningful local assistance to resist a violent attack against the US embassy is misplaced. And, with embassy staff shielded by defensive walls only meant to slow down attackers, plus a small US Marine security guard contingent not meant to resist a determined attack, reliable local government security is needed for protection. This is true for US embassies around the world. Moreover, aside from the endemic violence that’s now pervasive, it’s not even clear which parts of the government — let alone militias supposedly working for the government — currently answer to whom.
With this in mind, I must continue to warn, as I did on May 22, that it’s imperative for the White House to act quickly to preclude a possible tragedy in Tripoli that could be far more costly than the September 2012 assault on the more thinly staffed US consulate facilities in Benghazi. In fact, a rescue attempt amidst an attack on the embassy by an extremist militia packing heavy machine guns, RPG’s, and light anti-aircraft weaponry also could involve losses among the rescue teams and their helicopters.
]]>by Jim Lobe
While this blog is devoted to U.S. policy toward the Middle East, it should come as no surprise to regular readers that I regard climate change as likely to be the greatest challenge faced by the United States and the world over for the coming century and beyond.
[...]]]>by Jim Lobe
While this blog is devoted to U.S. policy toward the Middle East, it should come as no surprise to regular readers that I regard climate change as likely to be the greatest challenge faced by the United States and the world over for the coming century and beyond.
The most recent news, including the latest government report on how climate change is already impacting the United States, and the studies that came out three weeks ago regarding the apparently irreversible collapse of the West Antarctica ice sheet, clearly underline the rising stakes, not only from a strictly environmental point of view, but also with respect to national security. After all, as Tom Friedman and others have argued, the civil war in Syria owes much to the extended drought conditions that have prevailed in that country over the past decade and more, driving millions of mostly Sunni small farmers from the countryside into the big cities where they were unable to earn a decent living in fast-growing shanty towns that have mushroomed over that period. (Obviously, western-backed neoliberal economic policies and corruption didn’t help.) While that drought, like a similar phenomenon in central Mexico that has sent hundreds of thousands of people across international borders in search of work, may not be 100% provably attributable to global warming, there is sufficient consistency in the predictions by increasingly refined computer models developed by climatologists over decades to conclude that there is almost certainly a strong connection between the amount of carbon being pumped up into our atmosphere and these changes in weather patterns over significant swathes of our planet.
And, as the indefatigable Tom Engelhardt, in an essay about “climate change as a weapon of mass destruction“, requested of anyone in Wyoming to ask former Vice President Dick Cheney if they should happen to run into him:
How would he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use them against us, there was at least a 95% — and likely as not a 100% — chance of them being set off on our soil?
Of course, it’s Cheney and his neoconservative and right-wing friends (too often aided by liberal hawks like the Washington Post’s editorial board), who have consistently derided President Obama’s alleged timidity and failure to “lead” in foreign policy (by which they ordinarily mean using or threatening to use military force in dealing with any crisis). Indeed, just last week, in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Cheney, who, next to George W. Bush, bears the greatest responsibility for the worst U.S. foreign policy debacle at least since the Vietnam War, remarked:
He’s a very, very weak president, maybe the weakest certainly in my lifetime. And I know from my own experience on a recent trip to the Middle East, spending several days talking with folks I’ve dealt with all the way back to Desert Storm, they all are absolutely convinced that the American capacity to lead and to influence events in that part of the world has been dramatically reduced by this president.
We’ve got a problem of weakness. It’s centered right in the White House.
This “weakness” is sometimes attributed by critics to Obama’s supposed left-wing worldview and/or naiveté. Arguing that Obama’s motivations are more cynical and political, others have noted its consistency with the general public’s allegedly “isolationist” tendencies and its disenchantment with the military “hammer”(that was used so promiscuously by Bush and Cheney), as expressed in countless surveys and polls.
In any event, this charge of Obama’s weakness, timidity, retreat, and lack of leadership has now become a neoconservative and Republican mantra repeated and recycled endlessly in the mass media as each new foreign policy challenge moves into the spotlight — from Benghazi to Beijing to Bergdahl. It has become the meta-narrative for analyzing Obama’s foreign policy, from which even many Democrats (watch Hillary Clinton carefully; it’s already out there that she opposed a deal to free Bergdahl) are now trying hard to distance themselves.
Of course, it is in this context that it’s important to ask how such a weak, timid, and “lead-from behind” president could also address climate change as he did earlier this week by taking executive action to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants — a move that appears to offer him no particular political advantage and may indeed prove counter-productive to his hopes of retaining Democratic control of the Senate. In his blog post at the National Interest, Paul Pillar, who, as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia, commissioned the pre-invasion study that predicted much of the fiasco that followed the Iraq invasion — only to be ignored by Cheney, Bush & Co. — was similarly struck by this apparent anomaly and wrote a blog post entitled “Leading from the Front on Carbon Dioxide.” It deserves more attention.
A constantly recurring theme in criticism of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is that he allegedly is a weak leader, or when he leads does so only from behind. An action such as his recent move on power plant emissions highlights how such accusations, insofar as they are not just opposition for the sake of opposition, really aren’t about leadership at all but instead about disagreement on the substance of whatever issue is at hand.
Much criticism of the president has combined an image of him as a weak, stay-in-the-rear leader on foreign policy with a picture of an over-reaching, rule-flouting chief on domestic policy. Opponents will catalog the new rules on power plants in the latter category. Efforts to curb destructive emissions are ultimately a foreign policy problem, however, because Earth is a single planet with a single atmosphere. Pollution problems vary with the locale, and it may be sensible practical politics for the president to talk about respiratory problems among American children, but climate change is global. The heaviest lifting will involve getting China and other heavy polluters to do their part. It is a task as troubling and challenging as any that involve China using dashed lines on maps to make territorial claims.
The task is hard enough given the belief of developing countries that the United States and other Western nations already had their opportunity to develop and to become prosperous and to pollute with impunity as they did so. It would be discriminatory, according to this belief, for late developers to be subject for environmental reasons to more economic restraints than early ones. The least the United States can do, to keep this task from being any harder than it has to be, is to exercise leadership by setting an example and cleaning up its own act.
President Obama also gets criticized for playing small ball in foreign policy, a criticism he partly brings on himself by talking about hitting singles and doubles rather than home runs. Stopping climate change is not small ball. Saving the planet would be a home run. Small ball is played by those, Democrats as well as Republicans, who would rather talk about the health of the coal industry in Kentucky than about the health of the planet. And small ball is played by those who cannot or will not see beyond the powering of most of the world’s economy through any means other than burning what alternative energy guru Amory Lovins has called “the rotten remains of primeval swamp goo.”
Photo: The melting of Mexico’s Orizaba glacier is another consequence of global warming. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS
]]>by Derek Davison
The challenge of rebuilding the once strong but now broken ties between the United States and Iran was the topic of a June 3 Atlantic Council event, “US-Iran Relations: Past, Present, and Future.” The discussion, moderated by Barbara Slavin, included John Marks, founder of the international NGO Search [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
The challenge of rebuilding the once strong but now broken ties between the United States and Iran was the topic of a June 3 Atlantic Council event, “US-Iran Relations: Past, Present, and Future.” The discussion, moderated by Barbara Slavin, included John Marks, founder of the international NGO Search for Common Ground, and former Iranian diplomat, Seyed Hossein Mousavian. Much of the event focused on Mousavian’s insights from his time as a member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team (2003-05), and his involvement in talks between the US and Iran on combatting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Mousavian identified three distinct stages in Iran’s historical relationship with the United States. From 1856, when the first treaty between the two nations was signed, until 1953, when the CIA participated in a coup that overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced it with the autocratic rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, US-Iran ties were friendly, albeit not extensive.
Mutual distrust
Iranians believed that the American people and their government supported Iranian reform and anti-colonial efforts (an American missionary, Howard Baskerville, was killed by government forces while participating in Iran’s 1909 constitutional revolution). But the 1953 coup, and the response by the US and UK to Mossadegh’s plan to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, represented a fundamental shift in America’s policy toward Iran. Where it once opposed colonialism and autocracy, America, as a co-sponsor of the coup and as the Shah’s new great power patron, was now, as far as Iranians were concerned, fundamentally identified with both. According to Mousavian this period of “dominance,” ended in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis. Hostility has been at the root of US-Iran relations ever since.
There are many reasons to believe, as Mousavian does, that the current state of hostility between Iran and the United States cannot be maintained. The international sanctions that have been levied against it to force the government to agree to limits on its nuclear power program are not meant to last forever. They rely on an international consensus that is almost unprecedented and can be disrupted by any discord among the P5+1 member nations (US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany).
Sanctions have severely damaged the Iranian economy, which President Hassan Rouhani promised to fix during his 2013 election campaign. Politics aside, the human cost of sanctions is also growing by the day. The progress that has already been made in the nuclear talks makes the current moment critically important; if negotiations break down now, it’s difficult to see a way forward without a resurgence of the debate here over military action.
Amidst the debate over how much uranium enrichment capacity Iran “needs” and how much it actually wants, or the dispute over modifications to the proposed heavy-water reactor at Arak, the basic, almost insurmountable challenge to the nuclear talks is that the US and Iran simply do not trust the other side to abide by the terms of a final settlement.
Washington, which maintains diplomatic relations with every country it fought a war with in the 20th century apart from North Korea, is unable to move past the 444 days from 1979-81 in which Iranians held 52 Americans hostages in Tehran, despite the fact that no American hostage was killed in the process. The Iranians meanwhile remember the US’ role in the 1953 coup and its support for Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Mousavian argues that broken American promises have also contributed to Iranian (and particularly Revolutionary Guard) mistrust. The IRGC worked to secure the freedom of Americans taken hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s, and likewise cooperated with US military actions in Afghanistan post-9/11 because, according to Mousavian, American diplomats promised that those efforts would lead to closer US-Iranian ties. In both cases, though, those ties never materialized.
Comprehensive negotiations
The solution, as Mousavian sees it, is for the US and Iran to engage in talks on a broad, comprehensive range of issues rather than focusing only on Iran’s nuclear program. He suggests starting with those areas where the two countries’ interests are broadly aligned: the need for stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fight against regional drug trafficking, the effort to contain Salafi extremism and to combat Al-Qaeda-style terrorist movements, and the need for security and stability for Persian Gulf shipping.
These talks can be supplemented with what Marks characterizes as informal, “person-to-person” diplomacy, especially cultural and scientific exchanges, perhaps eventually leading to formal apologies — from the Iranians, for the hostage crisis, and from the Americans, for the 1953 coup and the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655. Once rapport has been built on these areas of common ground, the two sides can begin to tackle more challenging issues, such as (from the US perspective) Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, its relations with Israel, its ballistic missiles program, and its human rights record.
While Mousavian may be right that a comprehensive approach to US-Iran talks would be preferable to the current process, there’s a problem: comprehensive negotiations will take a very long time. The fact is that the current state of affairs around the nuclear talks will resolve itself, one way or another, long before any comprehensive US-Iran talks have a chance to achieve anything. Likewise, the crisis in Syria, which continually threatens to engulf the region, is too immediate a problem to be part of an extensive long-term framework. Mousavian accordingly suggests a two-track approach, where issues of critical, near-term concern are handled in a multi-lateral way, while longer-term, more comprehensive bilateral talks are undertaken. This may not be ideal, but it’s possible that such an approach could have real benefits. As he points out, the nuclear talks, specifically the P5+1′s recognition of Iranian needs with respect to uranium enrichment, offer a blueprint for progress (to wit, the US being receptive and responsive to Iran’s wishes) on a range of other issues.
This is a critical point for the possibility of renewing US-Iran relations. Regional stability requires Iran and the US to find a way of cooperating together, and the resurgence of Salafi extremism and terrorist groups in the region has aligned the interests and incentives of both countries. But working toward that stability requires a considerable commitment to open, comprehensive negotiations before this potentially vital relationship can be repaired.
Photo: After decades of no contact between high-level US and Iranian officials, a historic meeting between US Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif occurred on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York on September 13, 2013 — one month after Iran’s presidential inauguration of the moderate cleric, Hassan Rouhani.
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