Liberals Need to Stop Flattering Islam and Ask Tough Questions Instead: Amir Taheri, New York Post, Dec. 13, 2015 — I remember back in the 1980s, the diplomat then in charge of United Sates counterterrorism program, Robert Oakley, insisted that the US will never be targeted by homegrown Islamist terrorists because it was “their final destination, their last best hope.”
‘Playing into the Hands of ISIS’?: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Dec. 14, 2015— Playing into the hands of ISIS” is the new Beltway mantra.
On the Front Line Against Islamic State: Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 2015 — Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani’s forward base on the Iraqi-Syrian border isn’t easy to reach.
The Worst Job in the Middle East: Kevin Sullivan, Real Clear World, Dec. 1, 2015— Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi sits in a rather unenviable and at times impossible position.
They’re ‘So Nice,’ Until They Get Religion and Want to Kill Us: Paul Sperry, New York Post, Dec. 13, 2015
Saudi Arabia Forms Muslim Anti-Terror Coalition: Ahmed Al Omran & Asa Fitch, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 15, 2015
How Saddam’s Men Help Islamic State Rule: Isabel Coles & Ned Parker, Reuters, Dec. 11, 2015
The Fall of Anbar Province: Sterling Jensen, Middle East Quarterly, Winter, 2016
LIBERALS NEED TO STOP FLATTERING ISLAM
AND ASK TOUGH QUESTIONS INSTEAD
Amir Taheri
New York Post, Dec. 13, 2015
I remember back in the 1980s, the diplomat then in charge of United Sates counterterrorism program, Robert Oakley, insisted that the US will never be targeted by homegrown Islamist terrorists because it was “their final destination, their last best hope.” That was the time when groups controlled by Ayatollah Khomeini kidnapped or killed Americans in the Middle East.
So what happened to make that “final destination” a stopover to paradise for martyrs? Why do so many Muslims hate Americans to the point of wanting to massacre them in their offices as in 9/11 or at a Christmas Party at San Bernardino — despite the fact that the United States is the only major power in modern times to offer Muslims a helping hand when they needed it?
Wasn’t it President Woodrow Wilson who insisted at the end of the First World War that the main European imperial powers of the day, Great Britain and France, publicly commit to respecting the right of self-determination for nations freed from the Ottoman yoke? The Americans invented the idea of “mandates” to prevent the European imperialist world-grabbers from turning their Muslim conquests in the Middle East into a new colonial galaxy.
And wasn’t it President Harry Truman who in 1946 used eyeball-to-eyeball diplomacy against the Soviet despot Josef Stalin to force him to take Russian occupation troops out of Iran’s northwestern provinces and forget about his plan of creating a Soviet Iranistan? Then we had the 1956 crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Wasn’t it President Dwight Eisenhower who went against American’s oldest allies to let the Egyptians assert their national sovereignty?
The US was the only major power to have no state-owned oil company, and thus never used its military clout to obtain a share of the Middle East’s energy resources. Should Muslims hate Americans because they refused to disband their military bases on Islamic lands? Again, history shows that the US was the only major power prepared to pack up and leave as soon as its hosts showed it the door.
In 1969, an astonished Col. Moammar Khadafy watched as the Americans closed one of their most important aeronaval abases in the Mediterranean, located on Libyan territory, as soon as his newly installed military government asked Washington to leave. A couple of years earlier, it had taken months of bloody battles and tens of thousands of lives before South Yemen was able to force Britain to close its base in Aden.
In 1979, the US had 27,000 military personnel in Iran, operating “listening posts” set up as part of the strategic arms limitation accords to monitor Soviet missile tests. But when the new Islamic regime led by Khomeini asked the US to close the listening posts, which had been approved by the Soviets as well, the Americans did no foot dragging. The only Americans left behind were diplomats soon to be seized as hostages by Khomeinist militants.
We witnessed a repeat of that in the 1990s on a grander scale when the Americans simply packed up and left when the Saudis asked them to close their bases after driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, tangentially also saving Saudi Arabia from Iraqi occupation.
That the US was a friend of Muslims and of Islam was again illustrated when American power helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and, later, to liberate Afghans and Iraqis, a total of 50 million Muslims, from the vicious domination of Taliban and Ba’ath Party. In 2005, the Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Sharestani was publicly wondering why the Americans were not coming to “steal our oil” which anti-US propaganda claimed had been Washington’s key objective in toppling Saddam Hussein. We left there, too.
During the past six decades, the US has been by far the largest donor of aid to more than 40 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations. In the 1940s and ’50s, tens of millions of Muslims were saved from starvation and famine thanks to US food-aid. And the Point IV program, launched by President Truman, helped eradicate a number of endemic diseases, including smallpox and malaria that killed large numbers of Muslims each year. Many Muslims nations have been annually receiving large checks from the US for decades, among them Egypt, which gets $2 billion and Pakistan, the homeland of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino, Calif., killer, which gets $1 billion.
Since the 1970s, the US has been host to more than 5 million Muslims from all over the world, many of them fleeing brutal Islamist regimes in their homeland. In a conversation in 2002, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis expressed the hope that Muslims in the United States and other Western democracies could become “beacons of enlightenment” projecting light back to their old counties. Many of us shared that hope.
Now, however, we see that the opposite is happening. Instead of exporting “light” back to the Muslim world, a growing number of Muslims in Western democracies have become importers of darkness in their new abodes. Worse still, the politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.” Is it Islamophobia to question why a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach against us?
More prevalent than Islamophia is Islamophilia, where liberals treat Muslims as children or teenagers whose feathers should not be ruffled. The Islampophilia crowd do a great disservice to both Western democracies and to Islam itself. They invite Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era. They also invite Muslims in the West to learn how to pose as victims and demand the rewards of victimhood as is the fashion in Europe and America. To the Muslims world at large, the message of Islamophilia is that Muslims need no criticism although their faith is being transformed into a number of conflicting ideologies dedicated to violence and terror.
Never mind if Islamic theology is all but dead. To say so would be a sign of Islamophobia. Never mind that God makes only a cameo appearance in mosque sermons almost entirely obsessed with political issues. All that Western intellectuals or leaders need to do is stop flattering Islam, as President Obama has been doing for the past seven years, claiming that virtually anything worthwhile under the sun has its origin in Islam. Many Muslims resent that kind of flattery, which takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake from its slumber and ask: What is going on?
‘PLAYING INTO THE HANDS OF ISIS’?
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, Dec. 14, 2015
Playing into the hands of ISIS” is the new Beltway mantra. The finger-shaking by the administration and its supporters warns Americans not to give in to their supposedly natural biases against Muslims. Never mind that FBI statistics show that Jews in this country are the objects of hate crimes at nearly four times the rate of Muslims. It is mysteriously never reported who are the main perpetrators of hate crimes against Jews. In any case, when the administration alleges Islamophobia, it assumes that if it did not, ISIS might announce to Muslims worldwide, “We told you so,” to confirm its suspicions of American prejudices toward Islam.
But according to Obama’s own logic, his constant suggestions that Americans are prejudiced against Islam would themselves strengthen ISIS by providing them a rationale or justification for their anti-American terrorism. Would they not think, “If President Obama himself is constantly worried that his own people are anti-Muslim, then surely they must be — even though statistics do not support that charge”? Or are we to think that ISIS reasons along the following lines: “Even after 9/11, Americans let in hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and yet hate crimes against them are far rarer than against Jews. Therefore Americans are our friends, and we will refrain from attacking them”?
When the president pontificates on the evils of Guantánamo Bay, rather than worries over the subsequent careers of terrorists who were released from the detention facility, does that encourage or discourage ISIS? Do its members think that a resolute America is perfectly willing to lock up a terrorist murderer for years and therefore understand that the United States is a formidable foe, or do they conjecture that an embarrassed nation is doing all it can to appear accommodating to grievances?
Sometimes we are also told that any suggestion of suspending immigration from the Middle East, Syria in particular, until we can properly vet arrivals is likewise a gift to ISIS. Yet ISIS has promised to infiltrate so-called refugees with terrorist operatives. I suppose the administration’s logic is something like the following: “ISIS promises to infiltrate migrant arrivals from the Middle East; so if we suspend accepting migrants, it may make ISIS terrorists even angrier, and they will try to infiltrate even more.”
This same strange logic applies to bombing ISIS. Caution, circumspection, and professions of reluctance to strike at ISIS supposedly will win the hearts and minds of the potential ISIS recruiting pool. That way we can lure them back from the dark side. ISIS must know that we already don’t target the drivers of their fuel tankers, who are so integral to their cash income. Did ISIS also hold back a bit on learning that Obama once suspended air strikes in fear of the environmental damage? Did the ISIS green wing appreciate that? Unfortunately, there is scant evidence from military history in general to suggest that human nature operates in the manner that the administration assumes, and in particular none at all that the administration’s approach to ISIS has lost the terrorists support.
What exactly has been won in the Middle East over the last seven years by the Obama apology tours, the Trotskyization of the vocabulary of terrorism (“workplace violence,” “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disasters,” etc.), the mythographic Cairo speech, the embarrassing Al Arabiya interview, the surreal NASA mission statement about Muslim outreach, the gratuitous slights to “high-horse” Christianity, the “special relationship” with Recep Erdogan’s Islamist Turkey, the outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the calibrated distancing from Israel, or the dismissals of ISIS as “jayvee” and “contained” and of al-Qaeda as “on the run”?
After all that, U.S. popularity is still near rock bottom in the Middle East. In the latest Pew Global Attitudes & Trends poll, Turkey seems not to have appreciated its special friendship with Barack Obama (58 percent unfavorable view of the U.S.). Nor did the recipients of massive American aid such as the Palestinians (70 percent unfavorable) or Jordanians (83 percent unfavorable) gravitate toward America after the Obama administration’s distancing from Israel. Muslim Pakistan (62 percent unfavorable) does not seem to appreciate annual U.S. aid or the president’s deferential and politically correct pronunciation of Pakîstan, or his reminders that his family has had a special affinity with Islam. Iran has never been more ascendant or more contemptuous of the United States. We have alienated the Gulf emirates. Old friends distrust us, and older enemies no longer worry much about the U.S. How could all that be? Did not the Middle East street appreciate that the Obama administration had been willing to blame a supposedly right-wing video-maker for the killing of Americans in Benghazi rather than fault al-Qaeda?
In short, the Obama administration has crafted a policy toward ISIS that is contrary to unchanging human nature. Should we have expected Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik to be so grateful that they had been allowed to enter and leave the U.S. so easily, and so appreciative that Mr. Farook had landed a nice job with the San Bernardino County health department, and that his father and mother were welcomed into America, that they decided to demonstrate their gratitude by not killing 14 Americans and wounding another 22? Did their bizarre and scarcely veiled behavior truly warrant not a peep from either politically correct neighbors or somnolent authorities in the anything-goes United States?..
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
ON THE FRONT LINE AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE
Sohrab Ahmari
Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 2015
Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani’s forward base on the Iraqi-Syrian border isn’t easy to reach. On a bright Sunday morning, two members of his staff drive me there from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. We race four hours around Kurdistan’s barren hills, passing numerous checkpoints, a circuitous route that avoids the tentacular territory that Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has carved out of Iraq and Syria.
It is late November, and the Kurds have just severed one of those ISIS tentacles by capturing Sinjar, 15 months after the jihadist army overran the Iraqi city and forced Kurdish Peshmerga forces to beat a hasty retreat. The Kurds’ comeback at Sinjar means the main highway linking ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq, and the so-called caliphate’s capital in Raqqa, Syria, is now cut off. Security is tight at the base. Mr. Barzani, who heads the Security Council of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, is dressed in fatigues, with a pistol at his waist. We sit in a trailer that serves as a conference room. A portrait of Kurdish-nationalist hero Mustafa Barzani—Mr. Barzani’s grandfather; his father is KRG President Masoud Barzani—hangs above opulent furniture with golden, rococo details that look oddly out of place. Liberated Sinjar lies 40 miles southwest. A little beyond it is an ISIS front that stretches for 650 miles.
“The Kurds have broken the myth of ISIS,” says Mr. Barzani, who speaks English fluently. Including Sinjar, Peshmerga forces have retaken 7,700 square miles of territory and nearly double that if you count the successes of Syrian Kurds across the border. The Kurds’ front-line efforts combined with coalition airstrikes, Mr. Barzani says, have removed about 20,000 ISIS fighters from the battlefield.
He attributes the Sinjar triumph to Western air cover, good planning and a swiftness that surprised ISIS fighters. “Excellent intelligence” also helped, Mr. Barzani adds, because it allowed the Kurds to defuse the jihadists’ main defensive barrier, a network of remotely controlled booby traps and improvised explosive devices, before it could be detonated. Military analysts had predicted days of house-to-house combat. “But it didn’t happen,” Mr. Barzani says. It was all over in 48 hours. While ISIS fighters may be inspired by a “radical, terrorist, extremist ideology,” he says, the Peshmerga go into battle with a fervor “to defend their territories and defend their people.” It was the same spirit that deterred previous attempts, by Saddam Hussein’s regime and others, to eradicate the Kurds, he says. “That has been the only reason that we as the Kurds still exist.”
But Kurds alone can’t put ISIS on the path to defeat, especially with the group still able to recruit new members and acquire weapons. Defeating the jihadists will require stanching the flow of funding, arms and fighters. War needs to be carried out on the ideological front too. “If Islam doesn’t accept what ISIS is doing,” he says, “the Islamic scholars have to talk to their own people, to say ‘Islam rejects this. You cannot terrorize people.’ ” This, he adds, “is an Islamic duty—the West cannot help.”
The most important factor remains geography. Islamic State’s legitimacy rests on its ability to exercise sovereignty over land. The Kurds have reclaimed much of their territory, but now the front has moved to “other parts of Iraq, and in Syria, where you don’t have such a reliable force to fight on the ground while airstrikes target the enemy,” Mr. Barzani says. That’s an implicit rebuke to the Obama White House, which says it can “degrade and destroy” ISIS without committing U.S. ground forces. The American strategy of airstrikes and special operations, Mr. Barzani says, is “very effective in terms of weakening ISIS, disabling their movements, targeting their leadership. But you can never defeat an enemy if you don’t have ground forces.” And contrary to Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, the Kurds can’t serve as “our troops on the ground”—at least not outside their traditional territories.
Consider Mosul. The second-largest city in Iraq, today it remains under ISIS control. Mosul lies just 50 miles west of Erbil, and were it not for coalition airstrikes that came in the nick of time last year, the Kurds’ vibrant capital would almost certainly have fallen to ISIS as well. Today Peshmerga surround Mosul. Kurds have pledged to help dislodge ISIS from the city, but they can’t spearhead the operation. The majority of Mosul’s 1.5 million people are Sunni Arabs, the core ISIS constituency. The Kurds think it’s up to the Iraqi central government in Baghdad and the coalition to take the lead on Mosul.
The job calls for a “liberating force, not a force that can create sensitivities in that community,” Mr. Barzani says. That is, a Shiite-dominated Baghdad must win the trust of Sunnis and encourage them to rise against ISIS. That’s a tall order for an Iraqi government increasingly under Iran’s thumb, and dependent on Shiite militias whose preferred counterinsurgency methods are burning Sunni villages and drilling Sunni skulls with power tools…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE WORST JOB IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Kevin Sullivan
Real Clear World, Dec. 1, 2015
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi sits in a rather unenviable and at times impossible position. With just one year under his belt as the country's premier, it would be difficult to give al-Abadi's administration poor marks without first accounting for all of the factors both domestic and external that have constrained the Iraqi leader's ability to accomplish much of anything in the country.
Facing a real war against the militant Islamic State group in the country's north and a political battle in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, al-Abadi now finds himself stuck between the regional wranglings of larger powers such as Iran, Russia, and the United States.
The Islamic State group's advances and territorial gains in the past year, moreover, have provided Tehran with an opportunity to further insert itself into Iraqi politics, and many of the modern-day Hoplite fighters currently fighting ISIS's jihadist army — more formally known as Popular Mobilization Units — have been trained and paid by Tehran, from whom many of these Shiite fighters take their marching orders. These same Shiite militias have become a political force in Iraq, and they have pressed an already budget-crunched Baghdad in recent weeks to provide them with more resources and funds in their fight against ISIS.
When summertime power cuts and concerns over mounting corruption in the capital led to protests throughout Iraq's Shiite heartland, al-Abadi saw an opportunity to slash spending and eliminate seemingly superfluous cabinet positions, such as the country's multiple vice presidencies. Backed by influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, it appeared as if al-Abadi had finally found his mandate to govern. The premier's reform push sputtered rather quickly, however, and one of the vice presidents he dismissed earlier this year simply refuses to leave. Al-Abadi lost the support of the Iraqi parliament last month, and his proposed cuts to civil servant salaries even cost him the support of the Grand Ayatollah.
Al-Abadi appears to have overplayed his hand, and his move to stem corruption by eliminating plush patronage positions in the government only served to alienate the very Iraqi political operatives he counted on to fuel his reform agenda. Worse yet, it was probably unconstitutional. "The constitution requires that the president have at least one vice president, and the 2011 law that provides a legal framework for the appointment and removal of vice presidents gives the prime minister no role in this," writes political risk analyst Kirk Sowell, an expert on Iraqi politics.
Compounding the prime minister's troubles is the fact that internal political disputes in Baghdad now hold larger geopolitical implications. While al-Abadi has largely hinged his hopes on the support of the United States, his Iran-aligned rivals in the capital have openly invited Russian intervention in the country, a move that would most certainly agitate Washington, and likely alienate Iraq's Sunni minority. Moreover, while al-Abadi's colleagues in Baghdad antagonize Washington, his allies in Washington appear to be doing their very best to antagonize pols in Baghdad. The United States has pressed the Iraqi government in recent days to expedite its efforts to retake the ISIS-held city of Ramadi, and just this week the prime minister found himself fending off calls by U.S. senators for a larger American troop presence in the country.
Thus, the Iraqi prime minister finds himself jockeying for power in a capital city with ever diminishing control over its own country's fate. It is a thankless and diminished position, and it's one al-Abadi might not be long for.
They’re ‘So Nice,’ Until They Get Religion and Want to Kill Us: Paul Sperry, New York Post, Dec. 13, 2015—‘We see growing efforts by terrorists to poison the minds of people like the Boston Marathon bombers and the San Bernardino killers,” President Obama said while addressing the nation in the wake of the latest homegrown massacre at the hands of Muslims.
Saudi Arabia Forms Muslim Anti-Terror Coalition: Ahmed Al Omran & Asa Fitch, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 15, 2015 —Saudi Arabia’s plan to form a Muslim antiterrorism coalition has underlined a new muscular foreign policy aimed at confronting the extremist group Islamic State, even at the risk of wading deeper into the region’s messiest conflicts.
How Saddam’s Men Help Islamic State Rule: Isabel Coles & Ned Parker, Reuters, Dec. 11, 2015 —Mohannad is a spy for Islamic State. He eavesdrops on chatter in the street markets of Mosul and reports back to his handlers when someone breaks the militant group’s rules. One man he informed on this year – a street trader defying a ban on selling cigarettes – was fined and tortured by Islamic State fighters, according to a friend of Mohannad’s family. If the trader did not stop, his torturers told the man, they would kill him.
The Fall of Anbar Province: Sterling Jensen, Middle East Quarterly, Winter, 2016— On May 17, 2015, the city of Ramadi, capital of Anbar, Iraq's largest province, fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Soon after, the Iraqi government chose to send the Hashid ash-Sha'bi (Popular Mobilization Force) into Anbar to help Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) liberate the city from ISIS control. Thus far, the tactic has been a manifest failure.
