US President Barack Obama’s recent decision to appoint a new ambassador to Damascus is further proof positive of the effectiveness of the strategy pursued by Syria over the last half decade. It also showcases the sense that the current US administration appears to be navigating without a compass in its Middle East diplomacy.
The appointment of experienced and highly regarded regional hand Robert Ford to the embassy in Damascus is not quite the final burial of the policy to “isolate” Syria. The 2003 Syria Accountability Act and its sanctions remain in effect. But with Syria now in possession of a newly minted American ambassador, in supposedly pivotal negotiations with Saudi Arabia over the Special Tribunal in Lebanon, with its alliance with Iran intact, having repaired relations with Iraq, and in continued, apparently cost-free defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency over inspections of its nuclear sites, the office of President Bashar Assad could be forgiven for feeling slightly smug.
According to the Arabicmedia, in the course of questioning a suspected male Al Qaeda terrorist, the Iraqi police in Diyala were given the name of an Iraqi woman, Shahlaa Al-Anbaky, as someone who would soon be perpetrating a suicide bombing. The police immediately went to look for her in Mandali, a town sixty miles northeast of Baghdad. On Christmas Eve, 2010, when they could not find her, they pulled her father, Mohammed Najm al-Anbaky, a small-time trader of chickens and sheep, in for questioning.
Amatzia Baram is a professor in the Department of the History of the Middle East and director of the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, he served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In 2003-2005 he was Senior Fellow at the USIP and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and in 2006 taught an honors course on Iraq at Melbourne University. He also advised various branches of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations on Iraq and the Gulf region. Presently he is a Goldman Guest Professor for Middle East at Georgetown University. On October 28, Mr. Baram addressed the Middle East Forum in New York on the current political situation in Iraq. The following is a brief summary, including updates to the end of November 2010.
Ali Allawi, Iraq’s first post-Saddam civilian minister of defense, was born in Baghdad in 1947. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University. On top of a long and successful career as a merchant banker, he has held visiting posts in a number of academic institutions, including the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, founded by the Islamic philosopher Syed Naquib al-Attas, and the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University.
During the 1980s and the 1990s, Allawi was a prominent member of the London-based Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime, and in 2002, was one of the drafters of a declaration of Iraqi Shiites,[1] a statement that helped lay the groundwork for Saddam’s ouster.
Allawi returned to Iraq in September 2003 after forty-five years of exile and was made minister of trade in the Interim Iraq Governing Council, followed by a year’s stint as minister of defense. In January 2005, he was elected to Iraq’s Transitional National Assembly, and three months later, was appointed minister of finance in the Transitional Government headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He held this post until May 2006 when he returned to private life.
Romeo and Juliet are alive and well in Dokan, Iraq — well, not exactly. Romeo (Aram Jamal Rasool) was murdered in an honor killing. Juliet (Sirwa Hama Amin) gave birth to her legal husband Romeo’s son, but was also permanently shunned by her own family — the same family who killed her beloved Romeo. Juliet now lives in a house filled with weapons and is escorted by armed guards provided by Romeo’s family when she leaves the house.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 8, 2008, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and coalition forces commander in Iraq, reported a dramatic reduction in violence levels and civilian deaths from fifteen months before when Iraq seemed on the brink of civil war.[1] Petraeus attributed this turning point to the increased numbers of coalition and Iraqi forces, part of the surge declared by President George W. Bush in January 2007, but he gave equal credit to the predominantly Sunni popular movement known as the Sons of Iraq (SOI). “These volunteers have contributed significantly in various areas,” he said. “With their assistance and with relentless pursuit of al-Qaeda-Iraq, the threat posed by AQI, while still lethal and substantial, has been reduced significantly.”[2]
Christians in Iraq have been, and not for the first time, deliberately targeted in a major terrorist attack. Indeed, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Iraq, from the Gaza Strip to Egypt to Sudan to Nigeria, Christians are being assaulted, intimidated, and murdered by militant Muslims.
Yet virtually never do Christians in any of these countries-perhaps with some occasional exceptions in India–attack Muslims. In the West, there have been no armed terrorist attacks on Muslims or the deliberate killing of Muslims. There does not exist a single group advocating such behavior.
Salim Mansur writes eloquently about the deafening silence of many Muslims when blood is spilled in the name Islam. He emphasizes that the “…silence of Muslim minorities in the West is even more despicable than that of Arab-Muslim governments. It reveals how little they understand, or respect, the political culture of societies where they have made their homes.” From the Toronto Sun:
The non-Muslim world is increasingly not surprised and unmoved by the depravity of Muslim jihadis committing outrage, one after another without end in sight, and what can only be explained, unsatisfactorily, as a pathological wish to cause pain to the living by random acts of terrorist violence.
The murderous attack on the church in central Baghdad last Sunday by Muslim terrorists, if we go with the news reports, was merely another not unusual blood-soaked event in the daily cycle of news from Muslim countries.
But if such an atrocity was not just another criminal event in a “normal” day across the Arab-Muslim world, then we should have heard of a special meeting being called at the UN, or in one of the capitals of member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to express outrage against those who killed innocent worshippers inside Our Lady of Deliverance Syriac Catholic Church in Baghdad.
We then should have heard of Muslim political and religious leaders expressing their grief over the dead and wounded — there were some 120 Iraqi Christians in attendance at the Sunday evening mass when Muslim terrorists attacked the church and left 58 dead with only a dozen escaping unhurt. …
Iraq’s release of its full statistics for oil production in August 2010, illustrates the continuing decline of its oil industry since the end of 2009. In August, total output stood at 55.4 million barrels, compared to 61.3 million barrels in December, 2009. Consequently, government revenue from petroleum has dropped, with earnings at $3.9 billion in August compared to $4.4 billion only half a year earlier.
The reality of these trends lies in stark contrast to announcements from Iraqi officials that followed the completion of the second round of petroleum bids, which resulted in ten contracts being signed with foreign companies such as the Russian firm Lukoil and Royal Dutch Shell. The Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani had claimed that Iraq could boost production capacity from the current level of approximately 2.5 million bpd (barrels per day) to around 12 million bpd in six years, rivaling Saudi Arabia’s capacity of 12.5 million bpd. Similarly, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has affirmed that additional revenues generated by increased oil production would not only help to pay off Iraq’s foreign debts of roughly $120 billion, but also solve problems of reconstruction.
President Barack Obama’s speech to the UN, September 23, 2010, is revealing on several levels. Indeed, I learned something very important about his foreign policy. But that’s at the end.
He began by discussing terrorism as if it is carried out by faceless, doctrineless, causeless mystery men who have no sponsors, ideology, or goals and attack everyone equally.
Did the U.S. spending of $53 billion on reconstruction efforts, or “nation-building,” work in Iraq? According to New York Times’ columnist David Brooks, it did. Unfortunately, however, his argument is flawed on numerous counts by selective evidence.
To begin with, he cites the International Monetary Fund’s report that Iraq will have the twelfth fastest growing economy in the world with a projected 7% economic growth this year, but such a statistic is misleading because, as in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, this expansion is almost entirely due to rising oil prices, and has nothing to do with development projects funded by U.S. taxpayers. Indeed, Iraq has become increasingly oil-dependent like its neighbors in the Gulf region, such that petroleum revenues account for about 70% of GDP and around 90% of government revenues.
President Bush was right about Iraq, sticking to his guns, and helping plant the seeds of democracy there. Even John Murtha admitted that Bush’s troop surge was working. More importantly, Iraqis agree:
… A new poll by an Iraqi company found that nearly 60 percent feel it is the wrong time for U.S. soldiers to leave and 53 percent oppose President Obama’s ending of the combat mission. A little more than half believe the withdrawal will hurt the country and only one-fourth view the development positively. And in a statistic that is sure to bother those that boast of Obama’s worldwide popularity, nearly 42 percent feel the president does not care about the situation in Iraq.
Back in September 2006, the year when Iraq nearly fell to civil war, 71 percent of Iraqis wanted U.S. forces to leave their country in a year or less. There was a widespread perception that U.S. soldiers were the ones responsible for their misery. Most disturbingly, 61 percent of Iraqis felt attacks on U.S. soldiers were legitimate, a 14 percent increase from the beginning of 2006. But by March 2008, only 38 percent wanted U.S. forces to leave immediately and a majority wanted them to stay until the country was secured.
What happened? The surge is what happened. Contrary to what opponents of the surge said, the increased presence and aggressiveness of U.S. forces did not trigger a popular backlash because security visibly improved. The increased exposure to American forces likely also led to a certain degree of affection and respect as the anti-American myths were busted by reality. …
With the official end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq, what bodes for Iraq’s future in terms of its relations to other nations in the Middle East? One useful way to examine this question is through the lens of what Daniel Pipes describes as the present “Middle Eastern Cold War.”
This new Cold War represents the current ideological division in the Middle East between the “revolutionary bloc,” led chiefly by Iran, Syria, and more recently Turkey, and the “status-quo bloc,” led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. While most Sunni Arab states align themselves with the “status-quo bloc,” there are notable exceptions in that Qatar and Oman back the “revolutionary bloc,” while Libya simply sits on the sidelines.
Screaming, “Allahu Akbar” (”G#d is great!”), while trying to kill people?!?!?! Should we call it “religious murder?” Well these Iraqi terrorists got nailed in the act — instantaneously — and filmed themselves getting sent to “heaven?!?!?.” Watch the video, then read the description of the tactical details provided by Jeremy Buff (below):
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