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TEHRAN: Iran on Saturday hailed a UN Security Council vote rejecting a US bid to extend an arms embargo on the Islamic republic, saying its foe has never been so isolated.President Hassan Rouhani said the United States had failed to kill off what he called the half alive 2015 deal with major powers that gave Iran relief from sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.The United States failed in this conspiracy with humiliation, Rouhani told a televised news conference.In my opinion, this day will go down in the history of our Iran and in the history of fighting global arrogance.Only two of the Councils 15 members voted in favor of the US resolution seeking to extend the embargo, highlighting the division between Washington and its European allies since President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear accord in May 2018.Washingtons European allies all abstained, and Iran mocked the Trump administration for only winning the support of one other country, the Dominican Republic.In the 75 years of United Nations history, America has never been so isolated, said foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi.Despite all the trips, pressure and the hawking, the United States could only mobilize a small country (to vote) with them, he tweeted.The result increases the likelihood that the US will try to unilaterally force a return of UN sanctions, which experts say threatens to plunge the Council into one of its worst-ever diplomatic crises.The Security Councils failure to act decisively in defense of international peace and security is inexcusable, said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.The embargo on conventional arms is due to expire on October 18 under the terms of a resolution that blessed the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.Since Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and slapped unilateral sanctions on Iran under a campaign of maximum pressure, Tehran has since taken small but escalating steps away from compliance with the nuclear accord as it presses for sanctions relief.European allies of the United States who, along with Russia and China, signed the deal with Iran have voiced support for extending the 13-year-long conventional arms embargo, saying an expiry threatens stability in the Middle East.However, their priority is to preserve the JCPOA.The US text, seen by AFP, effectively called for an indefinite extension of the embargo on Iran, which diplomats said would threaten the nuclear agreement.Iran says it has the right to self-defense and that a continuation of the ban would mean an end to the nuclear deal.Pompeo announced that members had failed to back the proposal around 30 minutes before Indonesia, the current president of the Security Council, announced that the official results included two votes against and 11 abstentions.Russia and China opposed the resolution.The result shows again that unilateralism enjoys no support, and bullying will fail, Chinas UN mission tweeted.Ambassador Gunter Sautter of Germany, which abstained, said more consultations are needed to find a solution that is acceptable to all council members.During a call between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, the leaders discussed the urgent need for UN action to extend the arms embargo on Iran.Hours earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin called on China, France, Russia, Britain, the US, Germany and Iran to convene an emergency video summit to avoid an escalation of tensions in the Gulf.Washington has threatened to try to force a return of UN sanctions if it is not extended by using a controversial technique called snapback.Pompeo has offered the contested argument that the US remains a participant in the nuclear accord as it was listed in the 2015 resolution and therefore can force a return to sanctions if it sees Iran as being in violation of its terms.European allies have been skeptical on whether Washington can force sanctions and warn that the attempt may delegitimize the Security Council.Nevertheless, the US is expected to deliver the snapback letter next week, AFP understands.Analysts suspect that Washington purposefully put forward a hard-line draft that it knew Council members would not be able to accept.The fact is that everybody at the UN believes this (resolution) is just a prelude to a US effort to trigger snapback and sink the Iranian nuclear deal, Richard Gowan, a UN expert at the International Crisis Group, told AFP.

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Iraq reports 24-hour virus toll record of over 3800 - Arab News

Book Title:War in the Age of Trump, The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran

ISBN-13:978-1839760402

Author: Patrick Cockburn

Publisher:Verso

Guideline Price:18.99

Patrick Cockburn has been a familiar figure on Middle East battlefields for decades, racing around frontlines despite a weak leg, the legacy of childhood polio when he was growing up in Youghal, Co Cork.

War in the Age of Trump begins with the US assassination of Gen Qasem Soleimani, Irans eminence grise in Iraq, at the beginning of the year.

Adel Abdel Mahdi, who was prime minister at the time, told Cockburn he was scheduled to meet Soleimani on the morning he was killed. He came to deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered from the Saudis to Iran, Mahdi said.

Trumps decision to kill Soleimani was widely condemned as a blunder, but it takes on a whole new significance if, as Cockburn suggests, the Iranian commander was endeavouring to defuse tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is the sort of exclusive information we have come to expect from a veteran Middle East correspondent with 10 books and a half dozen awards to his name.

Over the past two decades, Washington has wrought regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both countries, the previous regimes were viscerally anti-Iranian. As Cockburn points out, Shia Muslims allied with Iran are winning in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The mullahs must be saying thank you America.

The US and Iran, arch-enemies of the Middle East, shake their fists at each other over the table, but shake hands under it, says an Iraqi adage quoted by Cockburn. Washington and Tehran have agreed on the appointments of all Iraqi presidents and prime ministers since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Though Cockburn clearly dislikes Trump, he credits his administration with successfully co-ordinating a multitude of fractious parties in Iraq and Syria in the offensive against Isis strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa. Cockburn finds Trumps December 2018 decision to pull US troops out of northern Syria perfectly rational. There was to be an open-ended US commitment with no attainable goals in an isolated and dangerous part of the world where it was already playing a losing game.

Cockburn is part of a cohort of western intellectuals and public figures who have sympathised with the plight of stateless Kurds. Because Kurdish self-determination would threaten the territorial integrity of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, the Kurds, like the Palestinians, are invariably betrayed.

The Syrian Kurds lost 11,000 lives fighting Isis, only to be ruthlessly discarded by Trump when he gave a green light to the Turkish invasion of northern Syria in late 2019. As Turkish forces ethnically cleansed the Kurdish enclave of Rojava, Syrian government troops moved in to reoccupy the territory.

Despite his sympathy for the Kurds, Cockburn sees the realpolitik sense of Trumps move. He was lucid about Washingtons five-year alliance with Syrian Kurds. One day the Americans would have to choose between two million embattled Kurds in Syria and 80 million Turks in Turkey, and it did not take much political acumen to foresee what they would decide, he writes.

Iraqi Kurds fared no better. Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish Regional Government, made what Cockburn calls a gargantuan error of judgment in calling a referendum on Kurdish independence in September 2017. Iraq, Iran and Turkey, as well as the US, UK, France and Germany, condemned the referendum as destabilising. The Baghdad government used the landslide vote for independence as a pretext for seizing Kirkuk, which the Kurds had held since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Cockburns account of the October 2016-July 2017 battle to drive Isis out of Mosul is particularly poignant. As Cockburn continued attempts to enter the besieged city, residents risked their lives to talk to him on the telephone about the terrible conditions inside. Civilians were faced with the horrendous choice of starving in their homes, where thousands were killed in US aerial bombardments, or running the gauntlet of Isis snipers in the attempt to flee.

Cockburn makes a powerful denunciation of double standards in western media. The US-Iraqi assault on Mosul was as fierce as the Syrian-Russian assault on Aleppo, yet only the latter was widely condemned. Media widely reported Syrian atrocities in the siege of eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, in 2018, but ignored Turkish atrocities against Kurds in Afrin, northwest Syria, the same year.

I saw the same pattern repeated in wars in the Middle East and beyond, Cockburn writes. Civil wars were portrayed as black-and-white conflicts between a demonic dictator or movement (Saddam Hussein, Taliban, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad) fighting a pure-as-snow popular opposition. The model was reversed when US-installed Afghan and Iraqi governments were attacked by terrorists.

If the West really wants to help Syria, it must accept that Assad is going to hold on to power, Cockburn writes. Recognition of this fact should be conditioned on a return home for refugees and an internationally monitored amnesty and freeing of prisoners.

Despite its many qualities, War in the Age of Trump suffers from poor editing. The title is misleading, since the book is limited to the past four years in Iraq and Syria, rather than Trumps broader Middle East policy. It does not address Trumps appointment of his son-in-law Jared Kushner to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or his continuing support for Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman despite the grisly murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Cockburns short summaries, printed in italics at the beginning of each section, are the most readable parts of the book. The rest of the text is comprised of reprinted articles, with many repetitions and disorienting references to last week and last month regarding events that took place years ago. It makes a hard slog for the reader, without the assistance of a timeline, index or chart of acronyms. If Cockburn and his publisher had used the articles as building blocks for a rewritten, smooth-flowing narrative, this good book could have been great.

Lara Marlowe is France Correspondent of The Irish Times

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War in the Age of Trump: Four years of fighting in Iraq and Syria - The Irish Times

ARBIL, Iraq: Turkish bombardment killed three Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq, a local official said Friday, as Baghdad seeks to rally support to end Ankaras offensive on its soil.

Turkey launched a cross-border ground and air operation in mid-June against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels in the mountainous terrain of northern Iraq. "A Turkish bombardment targeted a car in the village of Rashanki, in Dohuk province, killing three PKK fighters, and injuring a fourth who fled," said Mushir Bashir, the local mayor, of the bombardment late on Thursday.

The men, who were travelling in an off-road vehicle, were killed when they stopped outside a grocery store, he added. The attack comes as Iraq tries to drum up support from its Arab neighbours to form a united front against Ankaras offensive.

Turkey defends its right to bomb the PKK, which it considers to be a "terrorist" organisation, and accuses Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan of not stopping the group. Earlier this week, two senior Iraqi officers and their driver were killed in a Turkish drone strike, prompting Iraq to summon the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad for the third time in two months.

On Friday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein contacted his Bahraini and Emirati counterparts, after calling the day before the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and Kuwaiti foreign ministers, as well as Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit. Hussein pleaded for "a united position, forcing Turkey to withdraw its forces that have infiltrated Iraqi territory."

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Strikes kill three Kurds in Iraq - The News International

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, is in discussions with the Iraqi government to reach a settlement regarding thousands of antiquities in its collection with suspicious or incomplete provenance.

The museum, which was founded by the president of the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, Steve Green, has returned thousands of antiquities to Iraq since it opened in 2017.

While a final agreement is still pending, the Iraqi government has reportedly consented to a $15 million settlement over 4,000 disputed antiquities in the Museum of the Bibles collection, which have been handed over to Iraqi control based on the suspicion that they were looted. In exchange, the museum may retain the right to display some of the objects on loan.

Iraqs culture ministry says agreement in principle will pay Iraq $15 million for training, technical and other assistance in exchange for loan of objects, NPRs international correspondent Jane Arraf tweeted. Arraf also said that Iraq has dropped lawsuits against Hobby Lobby as part of the deal. Artnet News reached out to the Iraqi embassy in DC to confirm but did not hear back by press time.

A spokeswoman for the Museum of the Bible confirmed to Artnet News that the museum has recently returned artifacts that do not meet its acquisition standards (she did not immediately specify exactly how many) and that the museums chairman Steve Green is in discussions with the Iraqi embassy. The museum seeks to support research, exhibitions, and technical assistance projects with Iraq, she said, although the full details of these plans have yet to be finalized. The museum denied knowledge of any previous or pending lawsuits from the Iraqi government.

The bronze doors marking the grand entrance of the Museum of the Bible. Image courtesy Museum of the Bible.

The saga of Hobby Lobbys ties to Iraq is long and winding. Questions about the provenance of Greens many antiquities have dogged the executive since he began collecting in 2009. In 2017, the company was the subject of a US Department of Justice civil action that accused it of engaging in a years-long, willful pattern of smuggling Iraqi artifacts into the US, including by importing ancient cuneiform tablets as tile samples. As part of a settlement with the US government, the company returned 5,500 artifacts to Iraq and paid a $3 million fine for not exercising proper due diligence in its acquisition practices.

At the time, the museums founder attributed the mistakes to his inexperience as an antiquities collector and vowed to reform the museums approach to collecting. As part of this resolution, Green revealed in March that he would be returning a further 11,500 artifacts from the collection to the governments of Iraq and Egypt after their provenance could not be verified.

These items included a valuable clay tablet etched with the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh that Green had bought for $1.67 million from Christies in 2014. In May, Green announced that Hobby Lobby was suing the auction house for selling him the tablet after it turned out to have been looted from Iraq in the 2000s. (The US government seized the tablet from the museum in September of last year.)

Meanwhile, other controversies surrounding the collection have also cropped up, including the shocking revelation earlier this year the museums collection of 16 fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls were fake.

Additional reporting by Eileen Kinsella.

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The Museum of the Bible Is in Discussions With Iraq to Reach a Settlement Over Thousands of Disputed Antiquities in Its Collection - artnet News

What was once an autocracy has become a kleptocracy, a 'giant graft scheme' with protesters ever in the streets.

An Iraqi anti-government demonstrator walks past posters of Iraqi politicians and a U.S. flag in Tahrir Square in the capital Baghdad, on August 1, 2020. (Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images)

Last week, the New York Times published one of its finest pieces of reporting this year. Written by Robert F. Worth, its an autopsy of post-Saddam Iraq, where the autocracy of the Baathist regime has given way to a kleptocracy in which literally everything is for sale. Worth depicts an Iraq thats essentially a giant graft scheme, with elites cashing out while everyone else scrounges for scraps. Construction projects meant to create new community spaces or just fix up the local mosque sit half-finished, their funding either stolen or bottled up in disputes. Thuggish militias threaten violence to land lucrative contracts and establish monopolies.

All of this is made possible, naturally, by Uncle Sam. Every month, the Federal Reserve of New York, where the Iraqi government has an account, ships hefty sums of dollars to Baghdad. This cash is then ostensibly auctioned off to Iraqi banks, which are supposed to then lend it out. Instead the auction acts as a banquet for thieves and fraudsters, who have even created fake banks in order to launder money. And the corruption isnt just limited to the financial system. The root of the problem is Iraqs parliament, which, after every election, allows the winning parties to divvy up an ever-expanding number of civil service jobs. This is the linchpin of the graft: powerful positions are filled with cronies who then enable contract corruption and kickbacks, greased by pilfered dollars and enforced by militias.

Iraq has become a den of thieves. Its a rude awakening for anyone who thought the 2003 war would eventually result in a model democracy. Ironically, one of the oft-forgotten rationales for that war was Saddam Husseins shaking down of the Oil-for-Food program, which was established by the UN to allow Iraq to sell oil on the global market in exchange for food and medicine. The Hussein regime, the United States alleged, had siphoned off much of the money in order to enrich itself. Yet today, Oil-for-Food-style malfeasance is the norm in Iraq, as powerful government actors capture funds intended for the public good. The perma-complacent Donald Rumsfeld, after he was asked about looting in Iraq in 2003, famously declared, Freedoms untidy. The problem is that the untidiness never seems to end. And the looters now work for the state.

Increasing numbers of Iraqis have grown fed up with this strip-mining of their country. Iraq has seen anti-corruption demonstrations before, during the Arab Spring and between 2015 and 2018. Yet the protests that spilled into the streets last autumn and have continued on and off are unlike anything since the fall of Saddam. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have participated, demanding an end to poverty, government malfeasance, and foreign interference by Iran and the United States. The protesters are disproportionately young, a new generation tired of having their futures conned away. Back in November, they even managed to force the resignation of Iraqs prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi. And while the demonstrations have sometimes turned violent, thats often been thanks to government forces and Shiite militias, which benefit from the current patronage system and seek to preserve it.

Driving the protests is an economy thats been paralyzed by corruption. My wish is to own just 50 square meters in this country, one protester said. I have a disabled son and two other children, I just want to care for them. Elsewhere the Timesreported of the demonstrators, Many suggested the government is no better than the system in place before the American-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein. Thats a striking statement and a familiar one. Back in 2016, an AFP report found frustrated and impoverished Libyans pining for the days of Moammar Gaddafi, the dictator overthrown with help from a NATO intervention in 2011. Gaddafi was brutal, surely, but at least the electricity worked and you could withdraw money from the bank.

Whenever Washington supports toppling a dictator, it suffers from a failure of imagination. It cant grasp that what comes afterwards might be worse than whats already in place, whether a robber regime in Iraq or a failed state in Libya or an even more brutal dictator in Egypt. Instead it remains trapped in a series of abstract causes and effects, believing that the average man will favor freedom and freedom will translate into democracy and democracy will lift everyone up. Yet the average man also isnt a nose-pierced democratic activist, laudable though such people might be. He cares about what kind of government presides over him, but he cares more, and firstly, about feeding his family. If he cant do that, then it doesnt matter how power is in theory distributed, whether one is a member of the democratic club or not. Thats the calculus now facing many Iraqis, for whom too little has changed since Saddams statue was yanked down. That we spent so much money and blood to empower this nationalized looting ought to shame us more than it does.

The yearning for democratic representation is nothing as against the pang of an empty stomach. And so the question becomes whether Iraq can fix the latter by means of the former. That will first require scrubbing away the stain of endemic corruption, an enormous challenge given how many elements of Iraqi society are entangled thereinthe militias, coexistence with Iran, the need for those dollars. Yet the most important necessity of all is that the government keep its legitimacy, and on that, the hour may be late.

As proof of how stark matters in Iraq have become, consider one of the countrys most enigmatic figures: Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr is best known in the United States as the leader of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia that in the early days of the occupation killed American troops. Yet since then, hes reinvented himself as a kind of nationalist rabble-rouser. In 2016, he led formidable demonstrations in Baghdad that demanded an end to corruption and patronage.

Yet two years later, a political bloc controlled by Sadr, called Sairoon, won the largest number of seats in the Iraqi parliament. And when the next (and current) round of protests broke out, Sadrs position was more muddled. His supporters initially showed up, only to be called back and then return in opposition to the reformers theyd marched with, according to reporting from theWashington Post. Sadr also issued a code of conduct for the demonstrations, calling for them to be gender-segregated and warning of immoralitywhich only served to peeve the women in the movement. Why the mixed signals? Some said it was because Sadr had joined the political class, which is true, but the protests themselves have changed too. As analyst Abbas Kadhim told thePost, For Sadr, reform means a gradual movement towards putting the country on track rather than the radical reform that the protesters are taking about. (Sadr the Burkean! What will 2020 bring next?)

That more balanced approach may ultimately leave Sadr trapped between two falling stilts, no longer able to exist in both worlds as the gap between them widens. Unstable oil prices, the coronavirus, a heat wave, electricity shortages, and the recent explosion in Beirut have all served to fuel the protest movement, which seems both unlikely to peter out any time soon and more revolutionary than those that came before. We in the West, accustomed to understanding Iraq through a sectarian identity politics lensSunnis versus Shias with the Kurds up northmay soon find our expectations scrambled. Instead Iraq looks a lot like many other places, divided along class lines with a populist appetite for change. Once Iraqis were oppressed by Saddam Hussein. Now they long to be free of the den of thieves we bequeathed them.

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We Turned Iraq Into a Den of Thieves - The American Conservative