by Laura Gottesdiener

There’s a dark joke going around Baghdad these days. Noof Assi, a 30-year-old Iraqi peace activist and humanitarian worker, told it to me by phone. Our conversation takes place in late May just after the Trump administration has announced that it would add 1,500 additional U.S. troops to its Middle Eastern garrisons.

“Iran wants to fight to get the United States and Saudi Arabia out of Iraq,” she began. “And the United States wants to fight to get Iran out of Iraq.” She paused dramatically. “So how about all of us Iraqis just leave Iraq so they can fight here on their own?”

Assi is among a generation of young Iraqis who lived most of their lives first under the U.S. occupation of their country and then through the disastrous violence it unleashed, including the rise of ISIS, and who are now warily eying Washington’s saber-rattling towards Tehran. They couldn’t be more aware that, should a conflict erupt, Iraqis will almost certainly find themselves once again caught in the devastating middle of it.

In February, President Trump sparked ire by claiming that the United States would maintain its military presence — 5,200 troops — and the al-Asad airbase in Iraq in order to “watch Iran.” In May, the State Department then suddenly ordered all non-emergency government employees to leave Iraq, citing vague intelligence about threats of “Iranian activity.” (This so-called intelligence was promptly contradicted by the British deputy commander of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS who claimed that “there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.”) A few days later, a rocket landed harmlessly in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses the U.S. embassy. Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi then announced that he would send delegations to Washington and Tehran to try to “halt tensions,” while thousands of ordinary Iraqis rallied in Baghdad to protest against the possibility of their country once again getting dragged into a conflict.

Much of American media coverage of rising U.S.-Iranian tensions in these weeks, rife with “intel” leaked by unnamed Trump administration officials, bears a striking resemblance to the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As a recent Al Jazeera piece — headlined “Is the US media beating the drums of war on Iran?” — put it bluntly: “In 2003, it was Iraq. In 2019, it’s Iran.”

Unfortunately, in the intervening 16 years, American coverage of Iraq hasn’t improved much. Certainly, the Iraqis themselves are largely missing in action. When, for example, does the American public hear about how female students in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, heavily bombed and taken back from ISIS in 2017, have organized to restock the shelves of the once-famed library at the University of Mosul, which ISIS militants set aflame during their occupation of the city; or how booksellers and publishers are reviving Baghdad’s world-renowned book market on Mutanabbi Street, destroyed by a devastating car bomb in 2007; or how, each September, tens of thousands of young people now gather across Iraq to celebrate Peace Day — a carnival that started eight years ago in Baghdad as the brainchild of Noof Assi and her colleague, Zain Mohammed, a 31-year-old peace activist who is also the owner of a restaurant and performance space?

In other words, rarely is the U.S. public allowed glimpses of Iraq that make war there seem less inevitable.

Assi and Mohammed are well accustomed not only to such skewed representation of their country in our country, but to the fact that Iraqis like them are missing in action in American consciousness. They remain amazed, in fact, that Americans could have caused such destruction and pain in a country they continue to know so little about.

“Years ago, I went to the United States on an exchange program and I discovered people didn’t know anything about us. Someone asked me if I used a camel for transportation,” Assi told me. “So I returned to Iraq and I thought: Damn it! We have to tell the world about us.”

In late May, I spoke with Assi and Mohammed separately by telephone in English about the rising threat of another U.S. war in the Middle East and their collective two decades of peace work aimed at undoing the violence wrought by the last two U.S. wars in their country. Below, I’ve edited and melded the interviews of these two friends so that Americans can hear a couple of voices from Iraq, telling the story of their lives and their commitment to peace in the years after the invasion of their country in 2003.

Laura Gottesdiener: What first inspired you to begin doing peace work?

Zain Mohammed: At the end of 2006, on December 6th, al-Qaeda-[in-Iraq, the precursor to ISIS] executed my dad. We are a small family: me and my mom and two sisters. My opportunities were limited to two options. I was 19 years old. I had just finished high school. So the decision was: I had to emigrate or I had to become part of the system of militias and take revenge. That was the lifestyle in Baghdad at that time. We emigrated to Damascus [Syria]. Then suddenly, after about six months, when our paperwork was nearly ready for us to emigrate to Canada, I told my mom, “I want to go back to Baghdad. I don’t want to run away.”

I went back to Baghdad at the end of 2007. There was a big car bombing in Karrada, the part of the city where I used to live. My friends and I decided to do something to tell our friends that we have to work together to promote peace. So, on December 21st, on International Peace Day, we held a small event in the same place as the explosion. In 2009, I received a scholarship to the American University in Sulaymaniyah for a workshop about peace and we watched a movie about Peace Day. At the end of the movie, there were flashes of many scenes from around the world and, for just one second, there was our event in Karrada. This movie was amazing for me. It was a message. I went back to Baghdad and I spoke to one of my friends whose father had been killed. I told him it’s systematic: If he’s Shiite, he’ll be recruited by a Shiite militia for revenge; if he’s Sunni, he’ll be recruited by a Sunni militia or al-Qaeda for revenge. I told him: we have to create a third option. By a third option, I meant any option except fighting or emigrating.

I spoke to Noof and she said we have to collect youth and organize a meeting. “But what’s the point?” I asked her. All we had was this idea of a third option. She said: “We have to collect youth and have a meeting to decide what to do.”

Noof Assi: When Baghdad was first built, it was called the City of Peace. When we first started talking to people, everyone laughed at us. A City of Peace celebration in Baghdad? It’ll never happen, they said. At that time, there were no events, nothing happened in the public parks.

Zain: Everyone said: you’re crazy, we’re still in a war…

Noof: We didn’t have any funding, so we decided let’s light candles, stand in the street, and tell people that Baghdad is called the City of Peace. But then we grew into a group of around 50 people, so we created a small festival. We had zero budget. We were stealing stationery from our office and using the printer there.

Then we thought: Okay, we made a point, but I don’t think people will want to continue. But the youth came back to us and said, “We enjoyed it. Let’s do it again.”

Laura: How has the festival grown since then?

Noof: The first year, around 500 people came and most of them were our families or relatives. Now, 20,000 people attend the festival. But our idea isn’t only about the festival, it’s about the world that we create through the festival. We literally do everything from scratch. Even the decorations: there is a team that makes the decorations by hand.

Zain: In 2014, we felt the first results when ISIS and this shit happened again, but this time, at the societal level, lots of groups were starting to work together, collecting money and clothes for internally displaced people. Everyone was working together. It felt like a light.

Noof: Now, the festival happens in Basra, Samawah, Diwaniyah, and Baghdad. And we’re hoping to expand to Najaf and Sulaymaniyah. Over the last two years, we’ve been working to create the first youth hub in Baghdad, the IQ Peace Center, which is home to different clubs: a jazz club, a chess club, a pets club, a writing club. We had a women-and-girls club to discuss their issues within the city.

Zain: We had a lot of financial challenges because we were a youth movement. We weren’t a registered NGO [non-governmental organization] and we didn’t want to work like a regular NGO.

Laura: What about other peace efforts in the city?

Noof: In the past few years, we’ve started seeing a lot of different movements around Baghdad. After many years of seeing only armed actors, wars, and soldiers, young people wanted to build another picture of the city. So, now, we have lots of movements around education, health, entertainment, sports, marathons, book clubs. There’s a movement called “I’m Iraqi, I Can Read.” It’s the biggest festival for books. Exchanging or taking books is free for everyone and they bring in authors and writers to sign the books.

Laura: This isn’t exactly the image that I suspect many Americans have in mind when they think about Baghdad.

Noof: One day, Zain and I were bored in the office, so we started Googling different images. We said, “Let’s Google Iraq.” And it was all photos of the war. We Googled Baghdad: Same thing. Then we googled something — it’s famous around the world — the Lion of Babylon [an ancient statue], and what we found was a picture of a Russian tank that Iraq developed during Saddam [Hussein]’s regime that they named Babylon’s Lion.

I’m an Iraqi and I’m a Mesopotamian with that long history. We’ve grown up living in a city that’s old and where every place, every street you pass, has a history to it, but the international media doesn’t talk about what’s happening on those streets. They focus on what the politicians are saying and leave out the rest. They don’t show the real image of the country.

Laura: I want to ask you about the rising tensions between the United States and Iran, and how people in Iraq are responding. I know you have your own internal problems, so whatever Trump tweets on a given day might not be the biggest news for you…

Noof: Unfortunately, it is.

Especially since 2003, Iraqis have not been ones controlling our country. Even the government now, we don’t want it, but no one has ever asked us. We’re still paying with our blood while — I was reading an article about this a few months ago — Paul Bremer is now teaching skiing and living his simple life after ruining our country. [In 2003, the Bush administration appointed Bremer head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran occupied Iraq after the U.S. invasion and was responsible for the disastrous decision to disband Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s army.]

Laura: What do you think about the news that the U.S. is planning to deploy 1,500 more troops to the Middle East?

Zain: If they end up coming to Iraq, where we have a lot of pro-Iranian militias, I’m afraid there could be a collision. I don’t want a collision. In a war between the United States and Iran, maybe some soldiers will be killed, but a lot of Iraqi civilians will be, too, directly and indirectly. Honestly, everything that has happened since 2003 is strange to me. Why did the United States invade Iraq? And then they said they wanted to leave and now they want to come back? I can’t understand what the United States is doing.

Noof: Trump is a businessman, so he cares about money and how he’s going to spend it. He’s not going to do something unless he’s sure that he’s going to get something in return.

Laura: That reminds me of the way Trump used the rising tensions in the region in order to bypass Congress and push through an $8 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Noof: Exactly. I mean, he was asking Iraq to pay the United States back for the costs of the U.S. military occupation in Iraq! Can you imagine? So that’s how he thinks.

Laura: Amid these rising tensions, what’s your message to the Trump administration — and to the American public?

Zain: For the U.S. government, I’d say that, in every war, even if you win, you lose something: money, people, civilians, stories… We have to see the other side of war. And I’m sure we can do what we want without war. For the U.S. public: I think my message is to push against war, even against economic war.

Noof: For the U.S. government I would tell them: please mind your own business. Leave the rest of the world alone. For the American people I would tell them: I’m sorry, I know how you’re feeling being in a country run by Trump. I was living under Saddam’s regime. I still remember. I have a colleague, she’s American, and the day Trump won the elections she came into the office crying. And a Syrian and I were in the office with her and we told her: “We’ve been there before. You will survive.”

***

On September 21st, Noof Assi, Zain Mohammed, and thousands of other young Iraqis will crowd a park along the Tigris River to celebrate the eighth annual Baghdad City of Peace Carnival. In the United States, meanwhile, we will almost certainly still be living under the Trump administration’s nearly daily threats of war (if not war itself) with Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and god knows where else. A recent Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll shows that Americans increasingly see another war in the Middle East as inevitable, with more than half of those polled saying it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that their country would go to war with Iran “within the next few years.” But as Noof and Zain know full well, it’s always possible to find another option…

Reprinted, with permission, from TomDispatch.

Laura Gottesdiener, a TomDispatch regular, is a freelance journalist and former Democracy Now! producer currently based in northern Lebanon. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II. Copyright 2019 Laura Gottesdiener

by Daniel Van Lehman and Lindsay J. Benstead

President Trump—citing national security concerns—signed an executive order in April granting a one-year extension to the mandate of U.S. Special Operations Forces in Somalia. This has led many to question military involvement, especially after the release of an Amnesty International report attributing civilian deaths in Somalia to American airstrikes.

The United States has been involved in Somalia off and on since the 1990s when the failed mission to capture Mohamed Farrah Aideed’s top officials, popularly referred to as Black Hawk Down, brought the U.S. role in Somalia’s civil war into international focus. In this present phase of U.S. military involvement, 500 U.S. service members are stationed in the city of Kismayu in southern Somalia—the traditional homeland of Somali minorities—on a mission to train an elite Somali National Army (SNA) unit known as Danaab (“lighting”) to fight al-Shabaab, a Somali militia with ties to al-Qaeda. The United States also conducts drone strikes to target al-Shabaab leaders and prevent attacks against coalition troops.

Based on our research and experience working in the Horn of Africa, which includes a 2017 survey of 139 Somali minority households from the Lower and Middle Jubba Regions that we conducted through local interviewers and more than a dozen recent qualitative interviews with minority community leaders—we believe that the United States and Somalia will be unable to degrade and contain al-Shabaab with their current military strategy. To improve success and ultimately help end U.S. involvement in Somalia, U.S. military leaders must more fully integrate Somali minorities into the SNA and Danab and work with minorities to improve airstrike targets against al-Shabaab, rather than relying on majority-clan members with little incentive to defeat the terrorist network.

Somalia’s Complex Clan Geography

Somalia is not a homogeneous country. Those Somalis who do not belong genealogically to one of the four majority clans—Darood, Hawiye, Dir/Isaaq, and Rahanweyn/Digil Mirifle—are classified in the Somali constitution and political system as “minorities.” The Somali Bantu nationwide are the largest of the minority groups and, despite being referred to as minorities, may make up to 40 percent of the national population. They face severe discrimination and are grossly underrepresented in the country’s system of power-sharing known as the 4.5 framework. Minorities are also largely excluded from political and military positions, including those the United States is training, especially at the senior level.

Southern Somalia is the homeland of the Somali Bantu (locally known as Jareer). It is also ground zero in the fight against al-Shabaab. Yet the Lower and Middle Jubba Regions (Image 1) are governed not by the Somali Bantu but by the Interim Jubbaland Administration (IJA), a majority-clan regional government. This fact helps explain why the United States and Somalia have had limited success against al-Shabaab. The IJA, which benefits from the wartime economy and seeks to strengthen its control of the region’s resources, obstructs efforts by the United States and SNA to degrade and contain al-Shabaab. Preventing the equal representation of the Somali Bantu in the SNA and Danab is a key element of the IJA’s obstruction.

The president of the IJA, Ahmed Mohamed Islam (Ahmed Madobe), and an overwhelming majority of his militia fighters are from the Ogaden sub-clan of the larger Darood clan. The Ogaden clan is not native to Kismayu. In addition to positioning Ogadeni Somalis in Kismayu, Ahmed Madobe has recruited to the city Ogaden clan members from their other native regions in Kenya’s Northeastern Province and southern Ethiopia’s Ogaden region. Ahmed Madobe’s militia conquered Kismayu years ago to control and exploit the land, labor, and infrastructure in southern Somalia. In addition to committing human rights abuses against the Somali Bantu, the IJA has partnered with al-Shabaab in the illegal and lucrative transnational trade in sugar and charcoal, according to the UN. The governing body in the Lower and Middle Jubba Regions stands in the way of any real success by the United States and the SNA to reduce the influence of al-Shabaab.

Kismayo shown at the Southern tip of Somalia. Map of the five administrative districts in the Lower and Middle Jubba Regions claimed by the Interim Jubbaland Administration (IJA). Source: Authors.

Sabotage of American Military Efforts in Somalia

Yet the SNA and Danab are also primarily made up of these same majority clans who have little interest in fighting al-Shabaab because they have family and clan relations working with the military force in areas under its control. In our recent interviews, Somali Bantu leaders accuse Ogaden and other majority-clan soldiers of providing the American military with bad intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Shabaab that results in drone and airstrikes that hit civilian Somali Bantu locations. These airstrikes—and likely those launched by the Kenyan Defense Forces—have decimated some Somali Bantu communities and farms, adding to the more than two million internally displaced people, most of whom are Somali Bantu.

At the same time, the Somali Bantu leaders, according to our interviews, see the United States as their last hope to avoid being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral farmland. Rather than calling for the U.S. military to abandon southern Somalia, Somali Bantu leaders want to work directly with the United States—not through Ogaden or other majority-clan interpreters and officers—to provide legitimate intelligence on al-Shabaab targets that limit civilian casualties.

Yet U.S. forces seem to be bending to the pressure of the IJA to eliminate the Somali Bantu from the SNA and Danab forces in southern Somalia. This is the case even though the Somali Bantu are ready, willing, and able partners who are motivated to protect their families and homes in southern Somalia from al-Shabaab’s extortion, rape, slavery, and killing.

Making Hard Decisions

To improve success and ultimately help end U.S. involvement in Somalia, U.S. military leaders must overcome IJA obstruction that sabotages efforts to more fully integrate minorities into the SNA and Danab. This sabotage by the IJA includes impeding accurate intelligence on airstrike targets against al-Shabaab from reaching American forces.

The U.S. military and its partners must demand that the SNA recruit more soldiers—including officers—from the Somali Bantu ethnic group and seek their direct input when identifying airstrike targets against al-Shabaab. Since most SNA units apart from Danab and the 14th October Battalion are legacies of clan militias, this could involve taking the difficult step of integrating Somali Bantu into existing units or creating new units for minorities to operate against al-Shabaab in the Lower and Middle Jubba Regions. But Danab and the 14th of October Battalion have also eliminated many of their Somali Bantu soldiers and are now largely made up of troops from the majority clans.

Somali Bantu units with minority leadership must be formed and allowed to operate against al-Shabaab. If this does not happen, then the United States will be facilitating the majority clans to ethnically cleanse the Somali Bantu from their native regions rather than reaching the goal of degrading al-Shabaab.

To be sure, a problem the U.S. military faces not only in Somalia but also in Afghanistan is how to achieve its objectives through existing power structures. The U.S. military is aware of the limits put on the recruitment of Somali Bantu foot soldiers and officers, including those within the Danab. But the present strategy of relying on Ogaden and other majority-clan interpreters, intelligence officers, and soldiers, whose loyalties and interests lie with their clans and are often counter to the international community’s goal of defeating al-Shabaab, represents a missed opportunity for the United States to partner with the Somali Bantu to liberate their own homeland from al-Shabaab.

Opposition from the IJA and other majority-clan elites to allowing the Somali Bantu to be fully integrated into the SNA and Danab is predictable. But bending to that opposition will maintain the status quo and the suffering in Somalia and only prolong U.S. engagement there. The U.S. military should have enough leverage to include more Somali Bantu in the SNA. Degrading, containing—and indeed defeating—al-Shabaab depends on it.

Daniel Van Lehman is an affiliated scholar at Portland State University and a former officer with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Kenya. He has collaborated on human rights with UNSOM and the U.N. Security Council’s Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea. He can be reached at dvanlehm@pdx.edu. Lindsay J. Benstead is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. She is an associate professor in the Hatfield School of Government and director of the Middle East Studies Center at Portland State University. Her research can be found at @lindsaybenstead and https://pdx.academia.edu/LindsayBenstead.

by Paul R. Pillar

The “fog of war,” about which Carl von Clausewitz wrote, refers to the confusion and lack of knowledge of what an adversary is up to on a chaotic battlefield. Currently, those promoting or welcoming a war with Iran are using a different kind of fog. It should be easier to see through the current war-selling fog than it was to see what was happening on smoke-filled battlefields of Clausewitz’s time. It only takes a little effort to do so. But that effort cuts against some common human tendencies, including inattention, fear, and a desire for revenge.

Much of the current war-selling fog is remarkably similar to the selling of the Iraq War of 2003, in which the sales campaign depended on fear and an unthinking thirst for revenge after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The apparent failure to have learned lessons from that blunder reflects another common human tendency, which is to focus narrowly on events of the moment while losing sight of context, background, and history, even recent history. The recent sabotage of tankers in the Gulf of Oman has led to a preoccupation with the question of whether Iran was the perpetrator—as if the answer to that question would provide a ready-made prescription for a policy response, which it doesn’t—with less attention paid to the more important question of why Iran might do such a thing. The clear answer is that Iran is responding directly to the Trump administration’s unlimited economic warfare campaign, saber-rattling, and other aspects of its “maximum pressure” policy.

An analogue in the Iraq War case was the preoccupation with the question of whether Iraq had so-called weapons of mass destruction—as if the answer to that question should have been enough to determine the right policy toward Iraq, which it didn’t. Even if the Iraqi regime had possessed the feared weapons, the Iraq War would have been just as much of a civil-war-inducing, region-destabilizing mess as it in fact was. (Actually, it would have been even messier and bloodier, because Saddam Hussein probably would have used such weapons in response to the U.S. invasion.)

An even more direct analogue with the selling of the Iraq War is the effort to associate the targeted regime with undisputed bad guys such as terrorists of the al-Qaeda ilk. Here the fog consists of playing upon confusion over what some “link” or “connection” between a group and a regime really means, no matter how nebulous or outdated any such connections may be. The makers of the Iraq War were so successful in exploiting this part of the fog that they induced a large proportion of the American public to believe that Saddam had been directly involved in the 9/11 attack. The would-be makers of a war with Iran evidently were so impressed with this success that they have copied this part of the Iraq War playbook almost verbatim. They also are using the issue to perform an end-run around Congress by claiming that a post-9/11 resolution authorizing force against al-Qaeda would apply to a war with Iran.

The use of this page of the playbook is just as fraudulent in the case of Iran as it was with Iraq. There is no evidence of Iran being an ally or operational partner of al-Qaeda or of offshoots such as the Islamic State. To the contrary, Iran has been a target and victim of attacks by such groups, including attacks in the heart of Iran. Iran has been the leading source of support to the government of Iraq in combating one of the more destructive ramifications of the U.S.-led war there, which was the emergence of the Islamic State.

Perhaps the most authoritative word on this subject comes from al-Qaeda members themselves as recorded in declassified documents seized in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The documents date from 2004 through the week of the raid in 2011. The documents say nothing about any terrorist collaboration between Iran and al-Qaeda. They say a great deal about antagonism and mistrust toward Iran on the part of the al-Qaeda members.

The specific story those members tell involves fleeing from Afghanistan to Iran out of “necessity” after the fall of the Taliban. Iranian authorities initially let them stay temporarily, under strict conditions that prohibited any communications with jihadists elsewhere. When the jihadists violated those conditions, Iran’s policy switched to one of arrests and deportations. The policy evolved further after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the resulting rapid rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group that under a changed name and different leadership became the Islamic State. According to the al-Qaeda record in the documents, Iran detained their “brothers” as a “bargaining chip.” Among the detainees were members of bin Laden’s family, held to put pressure on bin Laden himself. When Iran finally began releasing some of the detained jihadists in 2009, it was, according to the al-Qaeda account, because of the pressure the group exerted in return on Iran, including “the threats we made” and the kidnapping of the Iranian commercial counselor in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Amid the fog of war-selling, contradictions get overlooked and individual assertions become part of the mix. Thus, administration spokespersons can express with a straight face concern about Iran possibly exceeding limits of the same nuclear agreement that the Trump administration has itself blatantly violated and unremittingly trashed. The administration can both assert that sanctions have tamed aggressive Iranian behavior and claim that, amid the current tensions in the Persian Gulf, Iran is more aggressive than ever. And as Joe Cirincione and Mary Kaszynski observe, today’s warhawks assert that “somehow Iran is so powerful that it is the source of all evil in the Middle East, yet so fragile that a small cruise missile attack on an Iranian civilian nuclear plant will cause it to crumble.” (Herein is another analogue to the selling of the Iraq War—if you liked that cakewalk, how about another one?)

And amid the fog, roaring illogic gets overlooked. When asked about Iran indicating that, after more than a year of the United States reneging on its obligations under the nuclear agreement, Iran may start exceeding some of the limits on low-enriched uranium, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared, “This tells you how flawed the deal was, right?” The absurdity of that statement—attributing to an agreement a problem that directly results from a U.S. assault on the agreement—is breathtaking. But devoid of any context about what led to the current state of affairs, and how the agreement in question was working fine before the administration set about to destroy it, an utterance like Pompeo’s probably will sway some ill-informed minds.

As noted earlier, it does not require much effort to cut through this fog. It is up to editorial boards, other opinion leaders, and especially Congress to make that effort.

by Assal Rad

Under the guise of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and ties to al-Qaeda, the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003—and the consequences have reverberated across the Middle East to this day. With the specter of war again on the horizon, striking parallels have emerged between the lead-up to the Iraq War and the current discourse on Iran. The media has parroted the Trump administration’s claims regarding Iranian “threats,” and U.S. media outlets continue to provide a pulpit for fringe Iranian opposition groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a formerly designated terrorist organization. 

Just as the Bush administration hinged their hopes of Saddam Hussein’s fall on the exiles of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) who duped U.S. officials with the now infamous “Curveball,”

Trump and his regime-change cabinet are now touting the MEK as a viable alternative to the current government in Iran. Despite these parallels, the mainstream media continues to give a platform to radical groups like the MEK, which are weaving together a questionable story to build a case for regime change and war with Iran.

Also similar to the INC, which claimed that it did not seek power in Iraq, the MEK pretends to work for democracy in Iran in the name of the Iranian people. Though both organizations have used fabrications to push their agenda, the tools of disinformation have evolved over time and the MEK has mastered the art of false narratives.

Coordinated efforts by small interest groups to undermine critics of Trump’s Iran policy and stifle pro-peace and pro-diplomacy voices have become increasingly hostile. Revelations have come to light on the role of the MEK in magnifying efforts at misrepresentation through inauthentic social media accounts aimed at manufacturing “Iranian” support for the Trump administration’s pro-war policies. The MEK also utilizes promoted content on news sites. For instance, The Hill is running a 10-week mini-series on Iran sponsored by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities (OIAC), a front group for the MEK.

Even more unsettling is the MEK’s creation of fake personas that publish in major U.S. outlets as a way to promote the pro-regime change narrative, falsely inflate support for war, and secure legitimacy as real “analysts.” Outlets such as Forbes and The Hill continue to host the writings of a person that is not real, a character created by the MEK called Heshmat Alavi.

Evidence of MEK machinations are substantiated by online campaigns intended to influence the narrative on Iran in favor of regime change. Former MEK members have confirmed the operation of MEK troll farms based in Albania, where members create thousands of inauthentic accounts and promote hashtags, propaganda, and tweets targeting anyone that favors diplomacy with Iran. The group also uses front organizations, like the OIAC, to take out paid ads that advance its cause at the expense of U.S. security interests in the region.

Despite its propaganda mission, the MEK is loathed inside Iran and has no support as an opposition force. Support for the fringe group fares no better in the Iranian diaspora. According to a 2018 poll among Iranian-Americans, only 6 percent said that they supported the MEK as a legitimate alternative to the current regime in Iran. The history of this enmity can be traced back to the Iran-Iraq War, when the MEK fought alongside Saddam Hussein.

The United States first placed the MEK on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list when the list was established in the 1990s based on their role in the murders of Iranians as well as Americans in bombings at U.S. companies in Iran in the 1970s. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the MEK has continued to carry out assassinations and terror attacks inside Iran.

The group’s ideological premise is a subversion of Islam. In his seminal study of the history of the MEK, Ervand Abrahamian argues that it “developed an all-consuming hatred for the clerical regime and, at the same time, the burning conviction that its own radical version of Shiism was the one and only true interpretation of Islam.”

Although the MEK outwardly espouses human rights as a guiding principle, it is itself a cult-like group with a history of abuse and torture against its own members. According to a report by RAND, the group’s disturbing human rights cruelties against its members include physical abuse, seizure of assets, imprisonment, mandatory divorce, emotional isolation, and forced labor—to name but a few. Former MEK members who have escaped the group also report sexual abuse and forced marriages during their captivity. One of their more nefarious practices of authoritarian control over members is removing children from their parents.

The group’s removal from the terror list in 2012 was a result of a well-funded PR campaign led by paid spokespeople, including National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has received at least $40,000 in “speaking fees” from the group. Other members of the Trump team, such as his attorney Rudy Giuliani, have also received money from the MEK to lend their endorsement and speak at rallies calling for the overthrow of the Iranian government. The MEK has never revealed the source of its funding, although evidence suggests that Saudi Arabia may play an integral role in propping up the organization to manipulate U.S. policy and sow discord in Iran.

Ultimately, despite the parallels between the run-up to the Iraq War and today’s escalating tensions with Iran, the MEK and other radical faux-opposition forces with no legitimacy in Iran continue to be given platforms to propagate distorted Iran narratives. Despite the failures of the Iraq War, the experience seems to have done little to impel the mainstream media to produce more accurate, nuanced reporting.

Assal Rad is a research fellow at the National Iranian American Council. She received her PhD in History at the University of California, Irvine

by Nelly Lahoud

As the U.S. government continues to escalate its policy towards Iran, it would be sensible to eliminate al-Qaeda’s historical ties to Iran from its list of grievances. President Trump cited these ties when, in May 2018, he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). For years, Iran detained al-Qaeda militants and their families who fled Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, causing some U.S. officials to question whether Iran then enabled the detainees to carry out terrorism. Although mindful of the ideological differences between Iran and al-Qaeda, former DNI James Clapper still characterized the relationship as a “marriage of convenience.”

Thanks to the declassified documents recovered in May 2011 during the U.S. Special Forces’ raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, scholars (with Arabic fluency) can now provide a clear assessment of the nature of al-Qaeda’s ties to Iran. The Abbottabad documents, described as “intelligence jackpot,” were al-Qaeda’s secrets. As fortune would have it, bin Laden did not destroy the electronic files on his computers, as one of his associates in Waziristan had instructed him to do a month before the raid.

In a study based on nearly 300 declassified documents published by New America in 2018, I concluded that al-Qaeda’s views of Iran were consistently hostile. The documents provided no evidence of collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iran to carry out terrorism.

Having now examined all of the declassified internal correspondence, which amounted to nearly 6,000 pages, I identified additional letters that expand on the nature of the relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran. The most illuminating are letters penned by those freed from Iran after years of detention.

One such letter is by bin Laden’s son, Hamza, who was detained in Iran with his mother and six of his half siblings. Since 2015, Hamza has emerged as a voice of global jihad, vowing to follow his father’s path. His letter, dated December 5, 2010, described the conditions in Iranian detention centers and included a message from al-Qaeda detainees to his father. According to the letter, a meeting of senior al-Qaeda detainees took place in prison in August 2010, nine days before Hamza was freed. Among those present at the meeting were “Sheikh Muhammad Shawqi al-Islambuli, Sheikh Ahmad Hasan Abu al-Khair, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Misri al-Zayyat, Sheikh Sayf al-‘Adl, Sheikh Sulayman Bou Ghaith and Sheikh Abu Hafs al-Mauritani.”

The names are recognizable to those who study the history of al-Qaeda. They include the heads of the group’s military committee (al-‘Adl) and legal committee (al-Mauritani), the lead of the 1998 East Africa bombings (al-Misri), and one of its spokesmen (Bou Ghaith). It has been reported that Iran enabled some of them to mount terrorist operations.

Hamza’s letter reveals that, far from being operational in Iran, the detained “sheikhs” were in despair. During the August meeting, they considered staging another “bloody Sunday,” similar to a protest they had mounted a couple of years earlier. According to the letter, after more than five years of imprisonment “without being charged with anything,” al-Qaeda detainees staged a protest that turned violent. In addition to numerous sit-ins, they burned public properties in prison. Bin Laden had known about “bloody Sunday” from his son Sa‘d, who, with the help of his brothers Hamza and Ladin, had escaped from Iranian prison in June 2008. He made it to Waziristan, before he was killed by a drone strike in 2009.

Hamza and Sa‘d’s letters relate that on that Sunday Iranian authorities unleashed some 50 security forces, armed with canes and tear gas, to quell the protest. Sulaiman Bou Ghaith, who married bin Laden’s daughter Fatima (because conjugal visits were allowed), took a piece of iron and started fighting “like someone who does not fear death.” But Iranian forces overpowered him and he received blows to the head until he lost consciousness. Fatima, who was protesting separately with other women, witnessed the fighting and rushed to the aid of her fallen husband. When the Iranian female squad could not stop her, the male squad intervened and hit Fatima with a cane across her shoulders.

“The brothers in prison repeatedly asked,” Hamza wrote to his father, “why have our brothers not done anything to free us??” One of the sheikhs told Hamza, “tell the brothers that we are angry with them because they forgot about us.” The message of al-Qaeda’s sheikhs to bin Laden, through Hamza, included the following:

From your brothers in the oppressive Iranian intelligence prison to our brothers in Khurasan … for years we have been waiting for God to free us, through you, the soldiers of God, the guardians of the creed. Based on our seven and a half years of experience with those people, we propose the following: Those people, “the Iranians”, do not respond except through force. God knows that we shall not be freed unless the jihadis resort to force. What we want you to do is to kidnap Iranian officials, then negotiate with their government without publicizing it.

Other Abbottabad letters exchanged between bin Laden and his associates in Waziristan make it clear that they believed that Iran was using the detainees “as a bargaining chip,” and al-Qaeda had decided not to attack Iran for fear that Iran would hurt the detainees.

Hamza also remarked in his letter that he believed that the Iranian government was spreading “rumors that the brothers in Iran are content with their situation there, or that they do not desire to leave Iran, or that they are concerned about the [dangerous] situation in Waziristan.” He assured his father “that these rumors have nothing to do with the [harsh] reality inside the prison.” One of the “brothers” asked him to tell his father that “if Waziristan is dangerous and under excessive bombing, we [prefer] to go there to achieve martyrdom; as for this life, it is a life of servility, only God knows its bitter taste.”

If Iran had indeed spread these rumors, perhaps to sow divisions among al-Qaeda’s ranks, the United States should nevertheless stick to evidence-based grievances in its policy towards Iran. The Abbottabad papers make it clear that Al-Qaeda did not consummate the so-called “marriage of convenience,” if ever there was one.

Nelly Lahoud is Senior International Security Program Fellow at New America. She is writing a book about the declassified Abbottabad papers.

by Gary Sick

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the entire U.S. government insist that the United States has authorization to strike Iran at will since, among other things, it temporarily sheltered some al-Qaeda leaders when the United States invaded Afghanistan. By this logic, Iran is subject to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that permits attacks on those who planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks.

At the same time, the United States is engaged in the final stages of diplomacy with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now, the Taliban did not plan or conduct the 9/11 attacks, but they provided shelter and sovereign protection for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who did. Reports indicate that Washington will ask the Taliban to give solemn assurances that they will not do that again in return for the removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

To add to the confusion, Afghanistan has a government that the United States originally installed—with the active assistance of Iran—to replace the Taliban. However, that government is not included in the negotiations, although it is the sovereign state and will have to deal with the Taliban on its soil once the deal is struck. Why? Well, because the Taliban (the terrorist opposition to the ruling government) won’t talk to them. And the United States acquiesces in the interests of negotiation.

Washington insists that the fatal flaw of the Iran nuclear deal (officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) was that it permitted Iran to enrich uranium on its own soil. Contrary to the rest of the world, the United States insists that Iran should not have a single centrifuge spinning. And the Trump administration enforces that minority opinion by imposing crushing sanctions not only on Iran but on every other country in the world that might be prepared to carry out the decisions agreed unanimously in 2015 and ratified by a vote in the UN Security Council.

But President Trump, in his negotiations with the ruler of North Korea, may be prepared to let the government of Kim Jong Un keep the bulk of its nuclear weapons, if they promise not to increase them. National Security Advisor John Bolton has made it clear that he does not approve, but it remains to be seen what will happen in the end. At a minimum, such a generous offer is at least on the table.

Iran, for those who have forgotten, has already given absolute assurances that “under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons.” And that commitment has been ratified by all the leading powers of the world and is now firmly enshrined in international law. It is in the preamble of the JCPOA, so despised by the Trump administration. And it is enforced by the most advanced monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In perpetuity.

That, if I understand it, is precisely the kind of denuclearization commitment that the Trump administration would like to get from North Korea.

According to official statements, the United States believes its security interests are threatened by the malign actions of Iran. Yet one of our principal allies in the region has launched a brutal war against its neighbor that has created the greatest humanitarian crisis of modern times. It has put a blockade around another neighboring state—an intimate military ally of the United States—in an attempt to coerce its government. This close U.S. ally has attempted to extort a resignation from the prime minister of a third state, and it has brutally murdered a dissident journalist in its own consulate in a fourth regional state. But these rulers are wealthy, and their behavior is breezily dismissed with a casual presidential suggestion to just “take the money.”

In the interest of confronting Iran, the U.S. government has sacrificed its credibility, has put at long-term risk U.S. primacy in global finance, and has infuriated virtually all of this country’s closest traditional allies. Washington is goading Tehran to renege on its nuclear promises, bringing both countries perilously close to another catastrophic war in the Middle East.

Trump administration policy toward Iran has been, in my view, mistaken from the start. Increasingly it appears to be at war with itself, contradicting even its own transactional principles in what may prove to be, in the famous phrase, worse than a crime: it’s a blunder.

Gary Sick served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis and is the author of two books on U.S.-Iranian relations. Mr. Sick is a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy, with service in the Persian Gulf, North Africa and the Mediterranean. He was the deputy director for International Affairs at the Ford Foundation from 1982 to 1987, where he was responsible for programs relating to U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Sick has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, where he is Senior Research Scholar, adjunct professor of international affairs and former director of the Middle East Institute (2000-2003). He is a member (emeritus) of the board of Human Rights Watch in New York and chair of the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East. He is the founder and executive director of the Gulf/2000 project.

by Emile Nakhleh

The recent mass murder at Walmart in El Paso was an act of terrorism, not much different from similar international terrorist attacks. Terrorizing innocent civilians, whether domestically or internationally, and spreading fear among the populace for whatever warped ideology or justification is part and parcel of the classical definition of terrorism.

International and domestic terrorist groups, cells, and individuals usually commit acts of terror in the name of specific religious, racial, ethnic, and other social ideologies. Ignorance and fear drive their view of the “other” and their desire to kill. Internationally, the “other” might be Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Kurds, Hutus, or Tutsis. Domestically, the “other” has included African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, Germans, and Japanese.

Three important factors are driving domestic terrorism: the pervasive use of the dark side of social media; the ubiquitous presence of deadly weapons; and the changing demography of the nation, which projects that within one to two generations a majority of Americans will be people of color. The “whiteness” of the minority is dimming, and the “brownness” of the majority is shining brighter. Because of these factors, which are not expected to recede anytime soon, domestic terrorism is expected to rise exponentially over the next decade.

Those who resent this demographic inevitability are burrowing deeper and deeper in the dark side of social media in search of empowerment, purpose, identity, and belonging. When a disgruntled, alienated, and angry young man joins a domestic terrorist group and begins to read its abhorrent literature and so-called manifestos, he expresses his commitment and fealty to these intolerant, exclusivist ideologies by committing violence against members of an “other,” perceived by the group as an existential threat.

Unlike terrorist recruitment and indoctrination a decade or two ago, today’s aspiring terrorists go online and read about hating other communities perceived by these radicalizers as non-white and non-Christian. Mental health and other explanations are for the most part simplistic and unproductive in understanding the nature of terrorism, domestically or internationally.

Leaders’ words and rhetoric matter in the indirect empowerment and recruitment of potential terrorists. I have studied Osama bin Laden’s public statements, messages, and pronouncements over the years. In every message, whether on Al Jazeera or online, Bin Laden had something to say to his followers and indicated a program of action against his perceived enemies.

He frequently repeated certain words and phrases as an effective tool to communicate his message to the “believers.” Examples included “crusaders,” “infidels,” “invasion,” and “anti-Islamic wars.” Similarly, such words as “invasion” figure prominently in the “manifestos” of some hate groups, as the El Paso massacre showed. Bin Laden’s targets were Christian “Crusaders,” Jews, Shia, the U.S., and Israel. The targets of domestic terrorists are for the most part non-white groups—African Americans, Sikh, Muslims, Latinos, LGBT, children, students, and the “invaders” from Mexico and Latin America.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

A decade or so ago, potential recruits and so-called lone wolves within the United States were usually radicalized and recruited by a human extremist. A Sunni Muslim young man, for example, who graduated from high school in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or some other country, might find himself unable to find a job, unable to get married, and forced to live at home. He might start going to the nearest mosque, get acquainted with a “jihadi” cleric, and embark on a process of radicalization and the urgent need to do “jihad” against the perceived enemies of Islam.

Defending Islam as a faith and a territory would become the overwhelming goal of such a young man. Jihad in this case often is expressed through violence against groups, countries, and individuals. If such a radicalized recruit were working with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, he would be taught to adhere to the message of the group’s leader—Osama bin Laden in the case of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The simple message from these leaders, which recruits came to know by rote, is simple: Since Islam is under attack by “Christian Crusaders and Zionists,” “jihad” becomes a required duty on Muslims to repel such attack.

In the case of the Islamic state, al-Baghdadi urged his followers to leave their countries and move to his self-designated Islamic caliphate. Life in the caliphate would allow them to live among other Muslims—people who hold similar beliefs, adhere to the same principles, speak the same “sacred language” of the Koran—safe from “invasion,” secure in their jobs, and unconcerned about being “displaced.” In this idyllic state, the inhabitants share sameness in culture, heritage, religion, and global vision.

Today—in part because of the pervasive use of social media—the situation is different: potential terrorists often become militants on their own. Domestically, potential terrorists are encounter radical ideologies online by burrowing into the dark side of the Internet and social media platforms and reading whatever tracts and manifestoes they can access. Here again the message is simple: the potential recruits are indoctrinated into believing that their culture, race, and heritage are being threatened by “foreign invaders” and dangerous “immigrants” (mostly Mexicans and Latinos). They are told that their jobs will disappear because of the hordes of immigrants. These recruits often do not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants.

They are never told by their recruiters on the dark side that climate change, technology, and robotics, not immigrants, are the real culprits for job displacement. Nor are they told that the global economy often determines where jobs are located. Political leaders’ promises about bringing jobs back to the country are too simplistic and rarely materialize. Consequently, recruits and potential domestic terrorists focus their anger on a specific group of people, view them as the source of threat, and begin to plot violent acts against them—in schools, shopping malls, department stores, movie theaters, and churches. As domestic terrorist groups and individuals see their “sameness” eroding, they begin to justify their violence against other groups and the “diversity” they represent.

The Path Forward

America’s national security and value system are grounded in diversity—cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic. This amalgam of global cultures since 1776 has made America great for all Americans. When communities embrace and celebrate diversity, the voices of hate and division are drowned out.

At least three paths should be pursued at the national level. The president should reach out to the leaders of the House and Senate and ask them to join him in a nationally televised address to the nation, calling on all Americans to denounce racism, division, and hate. They must also tell hate groups and their recruits and adherents that they will be prosecuted as terrorists under the terrorism laws that were enacted before and since the heinous acts of 9/11.

Second, the Department of Justice, including the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security should establish a joint task force to track domestic terrorism, report on it, and advise policymakers on on-going activities and gathering threats of terrorist groups and individuals. The expertise that the National Counterterrorism Center has accumulated in tracking international terrorists should be utilized in the fight against domestic terrorism. The two departments should begin to issue annual domestic terrorism threat reports, similar to the Director of National Intelligence’s annual report on international terrorism.

Third, the United States Congress should work to enact appropriate legislation to counter potential domestic terrorist groups and individuals. Terrorist recruiters, whether individuals or social media platforms, should be held responsible and prosecuted where appropriate.

The scourge of international terrorism has shaken the world for decades. It should not be allowed to metastasize domestically.

By Shireen T. Hunter

The death of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State (IS), is good news. However, it would be a mistake to think that his demise means the end of IS. Even if IS as an organization is dismantled, it will regroup under a different name and a different leadership. According to some reports, in August 2019, al-Baghdadi appointed Abdullah Gardash—a former Ba’athist officer and an ethnic Turkuman known for his extreme cruelty—as his successor. The experience of other extremist groups, including al-Qaeda and its various local branches, also indicate that the death of the leader of an organization does not necessarily result in the end of the organization itself. The best way to assess the chances of either resurgence of IS or the spawning of new terror groups modeled after it is to inquire into the causes of the emergence of these particular types of groups in the last four decades.

The rise of Sunni extremist and Shia revolutionary ideologies

Beginning as early as the mid-1960s, Saudi Arabia systematically began to spread its version of Wahhabi Islam in the Sunni world, including South Asia, as an instrument of its foreign policy and a tool for expanding its regional and international influence.

The Saudi Islam, unlike other Sunni schools, especially the Hanafi Islam, is highly intolerant and views those Muslims, especially the Shias, who do not subscribe to its tenets as heretics and therefore deserving of death. It cannot be denied that the spread of this type of Islam has greatly contributed to the rise of groups such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda and its various local branches, Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and IS.

Meanwhile, after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, a politicized and revolutionary version of Shia Islam emerged with highly negative attitude towards conservative Arab regimes, most notably Saudi Arabia. This revolutionary version of Shiism challenged the legitimacy of these states and intensified their fears. It also added a sectarian dimension to traditional animosities and rivalries. The simultaneous emergence of these trends caused a deep ideological rift within Islam, later linked to more mundane power struggles and rivalries for influence.

Cold War politics and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989)

The Soviet -Afghan War and the American and Arab assistance to the Afghan Mojahedin, coupled with the acceleration of Wahhabi proselytizing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, provided the breeding ground for the rise of Sunni extremist groups from Al Qaeda to its various off springs in the Middle East, North Africa and the North Caucasus. For example, the so-called Afghan Arabs, nurtured in the crucible of Afghan-Soviet war, were a major player in the more than decade-long Chechen War. Although the Soviet-Afghan War ended in 1989, regional and international competition over deciding the fate of Afghanistan continued and significantly contributed to the outbreak of civil war beginning in 1989 that even after the 2001 American invasion is continuing.

State manipulation of terror groups as instrument of foreign policy

All states claim that they are against terrorism and that they are fighting terrorist groups. The sad truth is that this is not the case. All states, and not just the so-called rogue or outlaw states, use such groups to achieve their own political and strategic goals. Only when these groups become unruly and pursue their own independent agendas that states turn against them.

A good example is the case of the Taliban. It is generally accepted that beginning in 1994, the United States, Saudi Arabia, later joined by the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan nurtured the Taliban as an instrument of preventing Iranian presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia as well as limiting Russian influence. For a long time, the U.S. closed its eyes to the atrocities of the Taliban, including its methods of dispensing justice and treating women.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, became a haven for al-Qaeda. Only after the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Dar al Salam did the U.S. attitude change. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan continued to use the Taliban for their regional goals even after 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Their policies has been one reason for the Taliban’s longevity.

The emergence of IS was also closely linked to the rivalries over the shaping of Iraq’s post- 2003 invasion political structure and to efforts to counter Tehran’s influence. By the same token, Iran has used groups such as the Hezbollah and some Iraqi Shia militia, that other players see as terrorist, for the advancement of its own regional ambitions.

Military interventions and the collapse of internal and regional orders

The rise of terrorist groups has also been directly related to foreign interventions and regional wars. These interventions have dismantled state structures in several Middle East and South Asian countries, unleashed dormant ethnic and sectarian tensions and, by altering regional balances of powers, have intensified regional rivalries. These developments have provided breeding grounds for the emergence of new terror groups often supported by external actors.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the civil war that engulfed the country after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The civil war that followed after the end of the Soviet-Afghan war led to the emergence of new radical groups such as the Taliban with the help of regional and international players as they tried to determine its outcome. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 prompted by its desire to get rid of the Palestine Liberation Organization gave birth to the Hezbollah. The 2003 American invasion of Iraq both dismantled the Iraqi state system and caused an intense regional rivalry to determine the fate of the Post-war Iraqi state and the nature of its foreign relations. The emergence of groups such as al-Qaeda Iraq and later IS were a direct result of these domestic and regional rivalries. Regional countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey initially supported IS. The Syrian Civil War, helped and abetted by outside players, meanwhile, extended the field of al-Qaeda and IS operations to the Levant. The same is true of Libya.

These military interventions were partly rationalized in terms of fighting terrorism. Thus, ironically, the “War on Terror” became the catalyst for the emergence of new terrorist groups. Terror groups are the product of deep-seated economic and political grievances as well as radical ideologies of secular or religious variety, plus the manipulative policies of key regional and international actors. As a long as these causes are not addressed, the pursuit of maximalist goals by key actors are not stopped and the solution to terrorism and terrorists is sought solely by the use of military force and the total subjugation of the enemy of the moment, we will see more terror groups coming to the fore and clones of al-Baghdadi emerging.

By Paul R. Pillar

Confusion has prevailed regarding the purposes of the U.S. troop presence in Syria, and whether the declared purposes are the actual ones. Originally the expedition was widely understood to be all about combating the Islamic State (ISIS) after the group had established a mini-state on a large portion of Syrian and Iraqi territory. Then hawks within the Trump administration and President Trump himself, in a classic case of mission creep, declared that the U.S. troops were also in Syria to “watch Iran.” Later variations of the creeped-up mission included not only watching Iran but also, through some unexplained mechanism, getting Iran and maybe Russia to abandon their positions in Syria.

More recently, Trump has been under much pressure from various parts of the political spectrum to keep the U.S. military in Syria, in contradiction with his earlier stated intention to exit and his orders to redeploy troops that had been in the Kurdish-inhabited northeastern part of the country. Political pressures and contradictory tendencies are a prescription for even less clarity than before about what the troops’ mission is or ought to be. Trump, who is trying to milk as much political advantage as possible from the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and proclaimed that because of al-Baghdadi’s death “the world is now a much safer place,” is resisting the idea that the original mission of combating ISIS in Syria is still necessary, at least in the general and open-ended way in which that mission was first framed. So now the declared mission has evolved yet again, with a new rationale that had emerged even before al-Baghdadi’s removal. Some U.S. troops are staying in eastern Syria, according to this rationale, to secure Syria’s modest oil resources.

There is still an ISIS dimension to this rationale, in that the group, while it had its mini-state, gained some revenue from exploitation of oil fields under its control. But to do that it needed the mini-state. Any scenario in which ISIS once again exploits, rather than just damages, Syrian oil fields presupposes re-establishment of its territorial caliphate, which means the world would once again be facing a bigger and more general anti-ISIS task. In its current status as an insurgent movement and terrorist group rather than a mini-state, ISIS is in no position to exploit the oil, except perhaps in an extremely small way, in the manner of Nigerian banditry, by surreptitiously tapping into a pipeline.

This leaves open the question of what the Trump administration intends to do with the oil that it has “secured” through military occupation. That in turn raises disturbing questions of whether the United States is engaging, contrary to international law, in wartime pillaging of Syria’s oil.

But there is another disturbing implication that deserves attention especially because of how big a deal Trump is attempting to make of the blows against ISIS and how they supposedly have made the world “much safer.” From a counterterrorist perspective, taking possession of oil resources is one of the worst possible rationales for justifying a U.S. military presence in a foreign country. And in his Sunday morning performance, Trump couched the subject in one of the worst possible ways.

A prominent and longstanding theme in the ideology and propaganda of terrorist groups rooted in the Arab Muslim world—including al-Qaeda and ISIS—is that the United States and the West are out to plunder the resources of Muslims. Such groups violently oppose U.S. troops in Muslim countries partly because they are seen as furthering the plundering mission. Osama bin Laden repeatedly returned to this theme. In a 2004 audio recording, for example, bin Laden stated that “the biggest reason for our enemies’ control over our lands is to steal our oil.” Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a 2005 video called on his followers to “focus their attacks on the stolen oil of the Muslims…This is the greatest theft in the history of humanity. The enemies of Islam are consuming this vital resource with unparalleled greed.” The terrorists’ focus on oil has raised concerns about terrorist attacks on oil facilities, but the idea of stealing resources that rightfully belong to Muslims has motivated attacks on the United States wherever such attacks can be staged.

Trump’s Sunday appearance before the press played right into this theme. Referring back to the Iraq War, Trump described as his own view at the time that if the United States was going into Iraq, it should “keep the oil.” As for Syria’s oil, he said it can help the Kurds but “it can help us because we should be able to take some also. And what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.” A propagandist for ISIS or al-Qaeda would hardly have written the script differently.

Even if there were any ISIS fighters who turn away from their cause in response to Trump’s probably embellished account of a “screaming, crying, whimpering” al-Baghdadi, there surely are many more who are energized by the evidence confirming what their leaders have always told them about U.S. plundering of Muslim resources.  Trump’s priority, however, was not in speaking to them but instead, as always, to his domestic political base.

By Danny Sjursen

Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17, the “combat patch” on one’s right shoulder — evidence of a deployment with a specific unit — had more resonance than colorful medals like Ranger badges reflecting specific skills. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks ushered in a series of revenge wars “on terror,” the vast majority of officers stationed at West Point didn’t boast a right shoulder patch. Those who did were mostly veterans of modest combat in the first Gulf War of 1990-1991. Nonetheless, even those officers were regarded by the likes of me as gods. After all, they’d seen “the elephant.”

We young cadets arrived then with far different expectations about Army life and our futures, ones that would prove incompatible with the realities of military service in a post-9/11 world. When my mother — as was mandatory for a 17-year-old — put her signature on my future Army career, I imagined a life of fancy uniforms; tough masculine training; and maybe, at worst, some photo opportunities during a safe, “peace-keeping” deployment in a place like Kosovo.

Sure, the U.S. was then quietly starving hundreds of thousands of children with a crippling sanctions regime against autocrat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, occasionally lobbing cruise missiles at “terrorist” encampments here or there, and garrisoning much of the globe. Still, the life of a conventional Army officer in the late 1990s did fit pretty closely with my high-school fantasies.

You won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the world of future officers at the Academy irreparably changed when those towers collapsed in my home town of New York. By the following May, it wasn’t uncommon to overhear senior cadets on the phone with girlfriends or fiancées explaining that they were heading for war upon graduation.

As a plebe (freshman), I still had years ahead in my West Point journey during which our world changed even more. Older cadets I’d known would soon be part of the invasion of Afghanistan. Drinking excessively at a New York Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day in 2003, I watched in wonder as, on TV, U.S. bombs and missiles rained down on Iraq as part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s promised “shock-and-awe” campaign.

Soon enough, the names of former cadets I knew well were being announced over the mess hall loudspeaker at breakfast. They’d been killed in Afghanistan or, more commonly, in Iraq.

My greatest fear then, I’m embarrassed to admit, was that I’d miss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t long after my May 28, 2005, graduation that I’d serve in Baghdad. Later, I would be sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan. I buried eight young men under my direct command. Five died in combat; three took their own lives. After surviving the worst of it with my body (though not my mind) intact, I was offered a teaching position back at my alma mater. During my few years in the history department at West Point, I taught some 300 or more cadets. It was the best job I ever had.

I think about them often, the ones I’m still in touch with and the majority whom I’ll never hear from or of again. Many graduated last year and are already out there carrying water for empire. The last batch will enter the regular Army next May. Recently, my mother asked me what I thought my former students were now doing or would be doing after graduation. I was taken aback and didn’t quite know how to answer.

Wasting their time and their lives was, I suppose, what I wanted to say. But a more serious analysis, based on a survey of U.S. Army missions in 2019 and bolstered by my communications with peers still in the service, leaves me with an even more disturbing answer. A new generation of West Point educated officers, graduating a decade and a half after me, faces potential tours of duty in… hmm, Afghanistan, Iraq, or other countries involved in the never-ending American war on terror, missions that will not make this country any safer or lead to “victory” of any sort, no matter how defined.

A New Generation of Cadets Serving the Empire Abroad

West Point seniors (“first-class cadets”) choose their military specialties and their first duty-station locations in a manner reminiscent of the National Football League draft. This is unique to Academy grads and differs markedly from the more limited choices and options available to the 80% of officers commissioned through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Candidate School (OCS).

Throughout the 47-month academy experience, West Pointers are ranked based on a combination of academic grades, physical fitness scores, and military-training evaluations. Then, on a booze-fueled, epic night, the cadets choose jobs in their assigned order of merit. Highly ranked seniors get to pick what are considered the most desirable jobs and duty locations (helicopter pilot, Hawaii). Bottom-feeding cadets choose from the remaining scraps (field artillery, Fort Sill, Oklahoma).

In truth, though, it matters remarkably little which stateside or overseas base one first reports to. Within a year or two, most young lieutenants in today’s Army will serve in any number of diverse “contingency” deployments overseas. Some will indeed be in America’s mostly unsanctioned wars abroad, while others will straddle the line between combat and training in, say, “advise-and-assist” missions in Africa.

Now, here’s the rub: given the range of missions that my former students are sure to participate in, I can’t help but feel frustration. After all, it should be clear 18 years after the 9/11 attacks that almost none of those missions have a chance in hell of succeeding. Worse yet, the killing my beloved students might take part in (and the possibility of them being maimed or dying) won’t make America any safer or better. They are, in other words, doomed to repeat my own unfulfilling, damaging journey — in some cases, on the very same ground in Iraq and Afghanistan where I fought.

Consider just a quick survey of some of the possible missions that await them. Some will head for Iraq — my first and formative war — though it’s unclear just what they’ll be expected to do there. ISIS has been attritted to a point where indigenous security forces could assumedly handle the ongoing low-intensity fight, though they will undoubtedly assist in that effort. What they can’t do is reform a corrupt, oppressive Shia-chauvinist sectarian government in Baghdad that guns down its own protesting people, repeating the very mistakes that fueled the rise of the Islamic State in the first place. Oh, and the Iraqi government, and a huge chunk of Iraqis as well, don’t want any more American troops in their country. But when has national sovereignty or popular demand stopped Washington before?

Others are sure to join the thousands of servicemen still in Afghanistan in the 19th year of America’s longest ever war — and that’s even if you don’t count our first Afghan War (1979-1989) in the mix. And keep in mind that most of the cadets-turned-officers I taught were born in 1998 or thereafter and so were all of three years old or younger when the Twin Towers crumbled.

The first of our wars to come from that nightmare has always been unwinnable. All the Afghan metrics — the U.S. military’s own “measures for success” — continue to trend badly, worse than ever in fact. The futility of the entire endeavor borders on the absurd. It makes me sad to think that my former officemate and fellow West Point history instructor, Mark, is once again over there. Along with just about every serving officer I’ve known, he would laugh if asked whether he could foresee — or even define — “victory” in that country. Take my word for it, after 18-plus years, whatever idealism might once have been in the Army has almost completely evaporated. Resignation is what remains among most of the officer corps. As for me, I’ll be left hoping against hope that someone I know or taught isn’t the last to die in that never-ending war from hell.

My former cadets who ended up in armor (tanks and reconnaissance) or ventured into the Special Forces might now find themselves in Syria — the war President Trump “ended” by withdrawing American troops from that country, until, of course, almost as many of them were more or less instantly sent back in. Some of the armor officers among my students might even have the pleasure of indefinitely guarding that country’s oil fields, which — if the U.S. takes some of that liquid gold for itself — might just violate international law. But hey, what else is new?

Still more — mostly intelligence officers, logisticians, and special operators — can expect to deploy to any one of the dozen or so West African or Horn of Africa countries that the U.S. military now calls home. In the name of “advising and assisting” the local security forces of often autocratic African regimes, American troops still occasionally, if quietly, die in “non-combat” missions in places like Niger or Somalia.

None of these combat operations have been approved, or even meaningfully debated, by Congress. But in the America of 2019 that doesn’t qualify as a problem. There are, however, problems of a more strategic variety. After all, it’s demonstrably clear that, since the founding of the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008, violence on the continent has only increased, while Islamist terror and insurgent groups have proliferated in an exponential fashion. To be fair, though, such counterproductivity has been the name of the game in the “war on terror” since it began.

Another group of new academy graduates will spend up to a year in Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states of Eastern Europe. There, they’ll ostensibly train the paltry armies of those relatively new NATO countries — added to the alliance in foolish violation of repeated American promises not to expand eastward as the Cold War ended. In reality, though, they’ll be serving as provocative “signals” to a supposedly expansionist Russia. With the Russian threat wildly exaggerated, just as it was in the Cold War era, the very presence of my Baltic-based former cadets will only heighten tensions between the two over-armed nuclear heavyweights. Such military missions are too big not to be provocative, but too small to survive a real (if essentially unimaginable) war.

The intelligence officers among my cadets might, on the other hand, get the “honor” of helping the Saudi Air Force through intelligence-sharing to doom some Yemeni targets — often civilian — to oblivion thanks to U.S. manufactured munitions. In other words, these young officers could be made complicit in what’s already the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.

Other recent cadets of mine might even have the ignominious distinction of being part of military convoys driving along interstate highways to America’s southern border to emplace what President Trump has termed “beautiful” barbed wire there, while helping detain refugees of wars and disorder that Washington often helped to fuel.

Yet other graduates may already have found themselves in the barren deserts of Saudi Arabia, since Trump has dispatched 3,000 U.S. troops to that country in recent months. There, those young officers can expect to go full mercenary, since the president defended his deployment of those troops (plus two jet fighter squadrons and two batteries of Patriot missiles) by noting that the Saudis would “pay” for “our help.” Setting aside for the moment the fact that basing American troops near the Islamic holy cities of the Arabian Peninsula didn’t exactly end well the last time around — you undoubtedly remember a guy named bin Laden who protested that deployment so violently — the latest troop buildup in Saudi Arabia portends a disastrous future war with Iran.

None of these potential tasks awaiting my former students is even remotely linked to the oath (to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”) that newly commissioned officers swear on day one. They are instead all unconstitutional, ill-advised distractions that benefit mainly an entrenched national security state and the arms-makers that go with them. The tragedy is that a few of my beloved cadets with whom I once played touch football, who babysat my children, who shed tears of anxiety and fear during private lunches in my office might well sustain injuries that will last a lifetime or die in one of this country’s endless hegemonic wars.

A Nightmare Come True

This May, the last of the freshman cadets I once taught will graduate from the Academy. Commissioned that same afternoon as second lieutenants in the Army, they will head off to “serve” their country (and its imperial ambitions) across the wide expanse of the continental United States and a broader world peppered with American military bases. Given my own tortured path of dissent while in that military (and my relief on leaving it), knowing where they’re heading leaves me with a feeling of melancholy. In a sense, it represents the severing of my last tenuous connection with the institutions to which I dedicated my adult life.

Though I was already skeptical and antiwar, I still imagined that teaching those cadets an alternative, more progressive version of our history would represent a last service to an Army I once unconditionally loved. My romantic hope was that I’d help develop future officers imbued with critical thinking and with the integrity to oppose unjust wars. It was a fantasy that helped me get up each morning, don a uniform, and do my job with competence and enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, as my last semester as an assistant professor of history wound down, I felt a growing sense of dread. Partly it was the realization that I’d soon return to the decidedly unstimulating “real Army,” but it was more than that, too. I loved academia and “my” students, yet I also knew that I couldn’t save them. I knew that they were indeed doomed to take the same path I did.

My last day in front of a class, I skipped the planned lesson and leveled with the young men and women seated before me. We discussed my own once bright, now troubled career and my struggles with my emotional health. We talked about the complexities, horror, and macabre humor of combat and they asked me blunt questions about what they could expect in their future as graduates. Then, in my last few minutes as a teacher, I broke down. I hadn’t planned this, nor could I control it.

My greatest fear, I said, was that their budding young lives might closely track my own journey of disillusionment, emotional trauma, divorce, and moral injury. The thought that they would soon serve in the same pointless, horrifying wars, I told them, made me “want to puke in a trash bin.” The clock struck 1600 (4:00 pm), class time was up, yet not a single one of those stunned cadets — unsure undoubtedly of what to make of a superior officer’s streaming tears — moved for the door. I assured them that it was okay to leave, hugged each of them as they finally exited, and soon found myself disconcertingly alone. So I erased my chalkboards and also left.

Three years have passed. About 130 students of mine graduated in May. My last group will pin on the gold bars of brand new army officers in late May 2020. I’m still in touch with several former cadets and, long after I did so, students of mine are now driving down the dusty lanes of Iraq or tramping the narrow footpaths of Afghanistan.

My nightmare has come true.

Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris Henriksen.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II. Published with permission from TomDispatch.