Foreign Policy In Focus

As always, emphasis added.

Credibility: The Only Thing People Value More Highly Than Their Credit Rating

So why do so many smart people keep embracing an approach to Iran that is internally contradictory and has consistently failed for more than a decade? I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect it has a lot to do with maintaining credibility inside Washington. Because Iran has been demonized for so long, and absurdly cast as the Greatest National Security Threat we face, it has become largely impossible for anyone to speak openly of a different approach without becoming marginalized. Instead, you have to sound tough and hawkish even if you are in favor of negotiations, because that's the only way to be taken seriously in the funhouse world of official Washington (see under: the Armed Services Committee hearings on Chuck Hagel).

On Iran, try backscratching, not blackmail, Stephen Walt, Foreign Policy

Netanyahu's Alarmist Tachometer

So if we are looking for real “red lines,” the obvious trip-wires should be either the expulsion of IAEA inspectors or the detection of diversion of nuclear material to non-peaceful uses – not some artificial red line drawn by a non-NPT member state.

How close is Iran to nuclear weapons?, Yousaf Butt, Reuters

Nuclear Disarmament on the Sly

… the administration continues to keep secret the current size of the stockpile, which, among other effects, forces officials such as Dr. Cook to be unnecessarily vague about the extent to which the United States continues to make progress on reducing nuclear weapons in compliance with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. [Because] the unilateral retirement of roughly 500 warheads from the stockpile since 2009 – an inventory comparable to the total stockpiles of China and Britain combined – is political dynamite (no pun intended) because conservative Cold Warriors in Congress (and elsewhere) vehemently oppose unilateral reductions of U.S. nuclear weapons.

(Still) Secret US Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Reduced, Hans Kristensen, FAS Strategic Security Blog

What Would the Supreme Leader Do Without the U.S.?

Reaching a lasting deal with Khamenei has never been about Iran's nuclear program but rather the political legitimacy — and thereby survival — of the Islamic regime. … Mindful of threats to his power by rival conservative and reformist factions, Khamenei has nearly always undermined efforts by any one of these groups to resolve Iran's long-standing disputes with Western powers. … Simply put, normalization of relations between Iran and the United States would deprive Khamenei and the deeply invested cohort of radical ideologues around him of a powerful justification for their arbitrary rule.

Why Iran says no, Hussein Banai, The Los Angeles Times

"A war against a name is a war in name only"

Last September, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified to Congress that “core Al Qaeda”—the original, Arab-led group, whose surviving members, hiding mainly in Pakistan, are thought to number in the dozens or low hundreds—is at “its weakest point in the last ten years.” Yet, to explain the White House’s policy, he and many other counterterrorism analysts warn of a resilient threat posed by Al Qaeda “franchises” … Each group has a distinctive local history and a mostly local membership. None have strong ties to “core Al Qaeda,” …  A franchise is a business that typically operates under strict rules laid down by a parent corporation; to apply that label to Al Qaeda’s derivative groups today is false. … If Al Qaeda is not coherent enough to justify a formal state of war, the war should end."

Name Calling, Steve Coll, The New Yorker

The arrest of a "suspected" Hezbollah operative who is "suspected" of a plan to kill Israeli tourists has become the equivalent of an actual terrorist attack.

Following U.S news media coverage of the Burgas, Bulgaria bombing, one would conclude that the Hezbollah provenance of the attack can be determined from recent alleged Hezbollah terrorist plotting against Israelis in Cyprus and elsewhere. The New York Times quotes anonymous U.S. officials as saying the Burgas attack bears “all the hallmarks” of “the Hezbollah plots, including the arrest in Cyprus earlier this month of a suspected operative on the suspicion of scheming to kill Israeli tourists.” 

So an arrest of a “suspected” Hezbollah operative who is “suspected” of a plan to kill Israeli tourists is the equivalent of an actual terrorist attack that has killed Israeli tourists? Bibi Netanyahu talked about the case on Fox News Sunday as though the Lebanese man arrested in Cyprus had done everything that was done in Burgas except actually detonate the bomb. So has the Israeli press.

But as I reported earlier this week, the Cyprus case is far murkier than Netanyahu and those U.S. officials have been suggesting. A senior Cypriot official told Reuters, “It is not clear what, or whether, there was a target in Cyprus.” Furthermore, the Cypriot investigators believe the Lebanese they suspected of planning to harm Israeli tourists was acting alone, which doesn’t make it sound like a Hezbollah operation at all. And perhaps most significant of all, there has no sign of a bomb or even of materials with which to make a bomb in conjunction with the Lebanese detainee. The Cypriot government has not yet decided whether there is enough evidence to prosecute the man on any violation of Cypriot laws.

The need for skepticism surrounding the Cyprus arrest applies even more strongly to the arrest in Bangkok in mid-January of another Lebanese with a Swedish passport who was suspected of being a Hezbollah operative. The arrest came after what was described by the Thai Deputy Prime Minister as “weeks of coordination with Israel.” The Israelis convinced the Thai police chief of their speculative allegation that the man was planning a massive terrorist attack along the lines of the 2008 Mumbai massacre that would include the Israeli Embassy, synagogues, tour companies and kosher restaurants. 

The Lebanese who was arrested was charged with possession of ammonium nitrate and urea fertilizer, which are potential bomb-making materials, but none of the other necessary components for bomb-making, such as fuses and timing devices were ever found. And the former police chief, who is now the Secretary General of the Thai National Security Council, expressed doubt that the man was actually a terrorist.   

Given the fact that the Israelis were then planning the assassination of an Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan in early to mid-January, the Israeli tale of a massive terrorist threat coming in mid-January, which first passed on to Thai authorities on December 22, was extremely convenient in terms of  distracting attention from the inevitable negative press accompanying the Israeli terrorist action.    

While the Obama administration has pointed to these murky allegations in Cyprus and Bangkok as relevant to Burgas, it has exhibited no apparent interest in the historical record of actual suicide bombings against Israeli tourists. The reason, apparently, is that, all of the terrorist attacks that fit that description have been claimed by al Qaeda or an affiliate.   

The first suicide bombing against Israeli tourists was an al Qaeda attack in Mombasa, Kenya in November 2002. That operation involved an effort to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet as it took off from Mombasa's airport, using shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, and then the triple suicide car bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa. The missile missed the aircraft, but the suicide bombing killed three Israeli tourists and 10 Kenyans.

The small number of Israeli deaths did accurately reflect al Qaeda’s intentions. In claiming responsibility for the Mombasa attacks, Al Qaeda proclaimed that it was targeting "The Christian-Jewish alliance" and promised future and more lethal attacks on Jews around the world.

In October 2004 three suicide bombers detonated a truck bomb and car bombs at the Hilton Hotel in Taba and two other Red Sea resorts which were favorites of Israeli tourists in Egypt, and most of the 34 dead were Israeli tourists.  The Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, took responsibility for the attack. The organization said the attacks were intended to "purify the land of Taba from the dirt and corruption of the grandchildren of monkeys and pigs."

In July 2005, three more terrorist attacks by suicide bombs killed at least 88 people at a shopping area and hotel packed with tourists, including Israelis, in the Egyptian Red Sea resort city of Sharm el Sheik.  The Abdullah Azzam Brigades again claimed responsibility for what it called an attack "on the Crusaders, Zionists and the renegade Egyptian regime."

The Abdullah Azzam Brigades organization was designated by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on May 24. Strangely, the designation ignored the history of the organization in suicide attacks on Israeli tourists in Egypt and said it was established only in 2009. But it did point out that the organization has bases in Lebanon which have launched rocket attacks on population centers in northern Israel.

Even if the U.S. national security state does not wish to acknowledge that the Burgas bombing fits the profile of an al Qaeda terrorist operation rather than Hezbollah, there is no excuse for the U.S. news media failure to report that inconvenient truth.

Gareth Porter, an independent investigative journalist and historian covering US foreign and military policy has been awarded the Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 by the UK-based Martha Gellhorn Trust.

As usual, Al Qaeda makes a mockery of Islam.

The New York Times reports on yet another tragic weekend in Iraq, courtesy of, apparently, Al Qaeda in Iraq

In a coordinated display intended to show they remain a viable force, Iraqi insurgents launched at least 40 separate attacks on Monday morning, setting off car bombs, storming a military base and ambushing checkpoints, Iraqi authorities said.

It was the single bloodiest day this year, with at least 112 people killed and more than 300 wounded in preliminary totals, according to local Iraqi officials in the many areas where attacks took place. The toll could rise still further as reports of further strikes continued to come in from provinces in northern and central Iraq well into the afternoon.

What makes it especially twisted is that the

… offensive was launched on the third day of the Ramadan holy month, and apparently took advantage of the widespread practice in Iraq and many other Muslim countries of staying up most of the night, and then sleeping late during daytime when fasting is required. … The first attack came about 5 a.m. on Monday. … Then in steady succession, mostly between 6 and 10 a.m. local time, car bombs were set off at places from Taji and Husseiniya.

However impressive the coordination, how can this be halal for an organization supposedly based on a strict interpretation of the Koran? As usual Al Qaeda makes a mockery of Islam.

It's starting to look more and more like Osama bin Laden was not only in hiding at Abbottabad, he was in forced exile. It seems as al Qaeda may have seized the opportunity of his need to go into hiding to put him out to pasture. In a blockbuster piece on May 3 for Truthout titled The Truth Behind the Official Story of Finding Bin Laden, Gareth Porter provides evidence.  When a senior U.S. intelligence official said that he "was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions," Porter writes, he and CIA officials were:

… blatantly misrepresenting … bin Laden's role in al-Qaeda when he was killed. …  In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real story … is that bin Laden was in the compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the al-Qaeda leadership. 

In fact

… several months after the Abbottabad documents [taken by Special Operations forces from the scene] had been thoroughly analyzed and the results digested by senior administration officials, the administration was unable to cite a single piece of evidence that bin Laden had given orders for -- or was even involved in discussing -- a real, concrete plan for an al-Qaeda action, much less one that had actually been carried out. Far from depicting bin Laden as the day-to-day decisionmaker or even "master strategist" of al-Qaeda, the documents showed a man dreaming of glorious exploits that were unconnected with reality.

Porter explains that retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir gathered information from "Pakistani tribal and ISI sources" about bin Laden's exile and his discovery by the CIA.

"Nobody listened to his rantings anymore," said one of the [former couriers for TTP, Pakistan's Taliban] in a conversation with Qadir. "He had become a physical liability and was going mad," another told Qadir a couple of days earlier. "He had become an object of ridicule," said the second courier. … That situation led Zawahiri to propose … that bin Laden be forced to retire from active involvement in the organization's decisions. 

Also on May 3, the Combating Terrorist Center (CTC) at West Point published/posted its analysis of the small sample of the documents released to it by the Director of National Intelligence. The report, of course, contains none of the inside information Porter gleaned about how other al Qaeda members felt about bin Laden. But as you can tell by the title -- Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined? -- it attests to his waning influence and at times suggests he was being indulged. Surprisingly, it may have been partly because, by this point, no longer a loose cannon, he had become al Qaeda's force of restraint (if you can call anything it does restrained). (I wrote about this on May 8: Bin Laden Grows a Conscience.)

In particular, his concern was curbing the brutal excesses of al Qaeda affiliates. Today's al Qaeda is characterized as decentralized. Viewed through the lens of complexity science -- in particular, complex adaptive systems -- it exhibits self-organization, adaptation in response to "perturbation," and "emergent" leadership (different leaders rise to the top in different situations).  But the inclination of affiliates to go their own may have partly been a symptom of their lack of respect for bin Laden.. As Patrick Cockburn wrote: "A striking feature of these letters is that there is no evidence that their recipients made any effort to carry out their leader’s instructions." Other examples of bin Laden's waning influence from the CTC report follow.

The documents show that some of the affiliates sought Bin Ladin’s blessing on symbolic matters, such as declaring an Islamic state, and wanted a formal union to acquire the al-Qa`ida brand. On the operational front, however, the affiliates either did not consult with Bin Ladin or were not prepared to follow his directives.

… Far from being in control of the operational side of regional jihadi groups, the tone in several letters authored by Bin Ladin makes it clear that he was struggling to exercise even a minimal influence over them.

… One of the letters … from a “loving brother” addressed to Bin Ladin. … alerted Bin Ladin that when one is distant from reality, as Bin Ladin was because of security measures he was forced to take, the soundness of one’s judgment was bound to be impaired.

… The documents make it clear that Bin Ladin was not informed of the TTP’s planned bombing of Times Square in New York City, a failed attack on U.S. soil attempted by Faisal Shahzad in May 2010.

… Bin Ladin had apparently sent `Atiyya [al Qaeda leader Atiyyatullah] some suggestions on how to improve the economy, but `Atiyya either ignored them or had not attended to them. … Not only does he seem to have acted as Bin Ladin's conduit, but it is alos possible that he exercised more control than he was authorized. In one of the letters, for example, Bin Ladin appeared frustrated that the audio or visual recordings he was sending to`Atiyya were either being delayed or not being released at all.

… Bin Ladin's decision not to grant al-Shabab a public union with al-Qa`ida [may have been] the subject of internal debate within al-Qa`ida and possibly behind his back.

[Al Qaeda's functioning leader Ayman] al-Zawahiri is conspicuously distant from people in bin Ladin's immediate circle.

It's ironic that bin Laden's step back from the abyss of mass murder -- if less out of compassion for the suffering of innocent Muslims than to advance the cause of jihad -- left him out of touch with the al Qaeda affiliates. As he aged, he seems to have forgotten that jihad was just another name for exploding body parts on the parts of the disenfranchised young men who formed and joined the affiliates. Bin Laden, with his newfound focus on providing services, was taking the fun out of jihad.

As you've no doubt heard by now, the Director of National Intelligence released a tiny sample of the documents that U.S. Special Operations Forces captured at Osama Bin Laden's compound to the Combating Terrorist Center (CTC) at West Point  for it to analyze. Still reading Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?, we'll single out one Focal Point™.

In contrast to Bin Ladin’s public statements that focused on the injustice of those he believed to be the “enemies” (a`da’) of Muslims, namely corrupt “apostate” Muslim rulers and their Western “overseers,” the focus of his private letters is Muslims’ suffering at the hands of his jihadi “brothers” (ikhwa). He was at pains advising [the latter] to abort domestic attacks that cause Muslim civilian casualties and instead focus on the United States, “our desired goal.”

In fact …

… High on his list of concerns was their flexible understanding of tatarrus, which resulted in the unnecessary deaths of Muslim civilians. … Bin Ladin was concerned that regional jihadi groups had expanded the meaning of a classical legal concept meant to be applied in rare circumstances and turned it from an exception into the norm. … Tatarrus refers to special circumstances when it is permissible, from an Islamic law of war perspective, for a military commander to attack enemy territory, even if the attack may result in the deaths of non-combatants, including Muslim women and children [aka] collateral damage.

"Flexible," "expanded"?  Stretching the definition to the breaking point would be more like it. The CTC report continues:

As a result, the jihadis, he worried, have lost considerable sympathy from the Muslim public; this loss was compounded when “the mistakes of the jihadis were exploited by the enemy, [further] distorting the image of the jihadis in the eyes of the umma’s general public and separating them from their popular bases.”

But, even though

… Bin Ladin largely disapproved of their conduct, he did not consider publicly dissociating … himself and al-Qa`ida from the actions of regional groups, as Adam Gadahn strongly urged the senior leadership to do.

It's obvious that whatever compassion Bin Laden had come to evince for Muslims -- infidels, including civilians, were still fair game -- he was more concerned that the Muslim public would sour on the al Qaeda brand, thus imperiling the success of jihad, than he was with their actual suffering at the hands of al Qaeda's affiliates.