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The United States and its allies face a dilemma and opportunity in Iraq. The October 2022 parliamentary elections produced a winner in Muqtada al-Sadr, the traditionally anti-Western cleric who leads Iraqs most powerful socio-political movement and one of its most dominant armed groups. Sadr has long been at odds with the West. His militia, the Peace Brigades, fought U.S. and British troops during the occupation of Iraq, and his fighters have been complicit in wide-ranging atrocities.

But the cleric also has historic differences with the Iranian regime and is engulfed in ongoing violent rivalries with several militia groups that Tehran controls or is closely aligned with. Since his victory, Sadr has made a ferocious push to form a majority government that excludes Iranian-backed militias and their political sponsors, a bold and unprecedented move that has been met with significant pushback. These are strange times in Iraq. Sadr, who has a support base of some 2 to 3 million mostly destitute Iraqis, represents one side of a country that has long been shackled by militias and radical Shia Islamist groups. The other side of the country is represented by a burgeoning civil-society movement that yearns for good governance and reforms.

Sadrs victory presents less than ideal circumstances. Yet his triumph combined with the electoral decline of Iran-aligned militias, and the alliance Sadr has forged with moderate, U.S., and Western-aligned political actors like the Kurds in an attempt to form a majority government suggests the U.S. has a historic opportunity to support and capitalize on a credible cross-sectarian alliance. Such a partnership could reduce the space in which extremist militia groups thrive, bridge the gap between Iraq and the Arab world, and in the long-term, restore the authority of the Iraqi state.

Sadr is by no means a natural U.S. ally. His organization is complicit in a catalogue of brutalities, including sectarian violence against Arab Sunnis and the repression of activists. U.S estimates suggest the Shia militias who operated within and later left the once-heavily decentralized Sadrist movement were responsible for killing 600 American personnel. The most prominent of the commanders responsible for these deaths fell out with Sadr and formed their own factions after splintering from the movement with Iranian encouragement and backing.

Both the Sadrists and Iran-aligned militias operate under an ideological outlook that is underscored by Shia supremacism and combating Western imperialism. Both have opposed the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. But there are crucial distinguishing features that separate Sadr from his rivals, and these matter for the trajectory of Iraq and its relationship with the West.

First, Sadr, and other powerful figures like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are actively seeking to re-assert the authority of the Iraqi state against a particular group of Iranian-backed militias who are complicit in ongoing attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and in rocket and drone attacks on civilian targets in the Kurdistan region. These militias continue to engage in widespread atrocities against Iraqi civilians.

Sadr sees it as imperative that such groups are excluded from the next government or contained. The future of the Sadrist movement depends on preventing Iran-aligned militias from extending their tentacles within the state as part of the Popular Mobilization Force (PMF), the umbrella militia organization that these groups control and that oversees a $2 billion budget. Irans proxies may have stumbled in the elections so far, but these are groups whose young leadership and cadres will politically mature. Sadr does not have an indefinite window of opportunity.

The clerics own militias have also yet to submit to state authority, and present long-term challenges. But the nature, scope, and scale of the daily attacks committed by Irans proxies makes their dominance a more immediate threat, and their containment an urgent priority beyond Iraqs wider efforts to reform its security sector, a process that would be helped by the political containment of the PMF.

Second, Iran-aligned militias have struggled to make the transition from insurgents to viable social movements, not least because of their complicity in systemic human rights abuses and deference to Iran. Iranian-backed militias are the only political actors who use rocket and drone attacks to influence and pressure their rivals, and who deploy these measures as a negotiating tactic. By excluding the Iranian-backed PMF from the parameters of the Iraqi state, Sadr can remove the political cover the group relies on to carry out attacks with impunity. This will add to the woes of an organization that has already lost the support of the public.

The West has its own track record of working with its enemies in Iraq and elsewhere, including members of the Sunni insurgency who turned to the U.S. for support and were instrumental in defeating al-Qaida in Iraq as part of the U.S.-established Awakening Movement in 2007. The West does not have to partner with Sadr. But it should accommodate his pre-eminence as a political reality and find ways of empowering his alliance, which is the lesser of two evils.

It should not be taken lightly that Sadr has partnered with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Kurdistans ruling party led by Masoud Barzani, the former president of Kurdistan who led the Kurds historic push for independence in 2017. Sadrs alliance with Barzani will not have been entirely popular among his Shia support base, which has derided Kurdistans push for independence and has echoed Sadrs past toxic ethno-sectarian discourse towards the Kurds. Similarly, Mohammed al-Halbousi, the newly elected speaker of the Iraqi parliament who, with Barzani, completes Sadrs tri-partite alliance, has emerged as the champion of Arab Sunnis and is popular in the Arab Gulf and Turkey, both of which have come under derision within the wider Shia community.

In other words, Sadr has passed the litmus test. Western observers should look toward his actions like aligning with the Kurds and Halbousi when determining whether and how to accommodate his electoral ascension. If Sadr can form such an alliance with unconventional bedfellows, then so too can the U.S. accommodate a cross-sectarian, historic, and regionally backed alliance that includes some of the Wests most ardent allies.

Iran and the PMF are doing their utmost to derail the tri-partite alliance by launching missile and drone attacks on Erbil (the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan), assassinating rivals, and exploiting divisions amongst the Kurds to force through a coalition government in Baghdad that does its bidding. In an effort to economically pressure Kurdistan, Baghdads Federal Supreme Court, under pressure from Iran, recently decreed that Kurdish oil exports are illegal. However, the timing of the ruling and the fact that the court has no constitutional standing has rendered its ruling dubious and politically motivated.

The courts ruling has also failed to deter regional actors from forming closer ties to Erbil and they continue to back Sadrs alliance. This has been notably displayed by Kurdistans Prime Minister Masrour Barzanis energy-focused visits to Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar since the February ruling. Irans decision to attack Erbil with missiles is telling of the desperate straits in which Tehran finds itself in, but it also highlights the vulnerabilities of Americas allies. This should encourage Washington to work on maintaining the momentum generated by Barzanis regional outreach, as well as Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimis attempts to bring Iraq into the orbit of the Arab world.

The Kurdistan region, like Baghdad, must continue to reform its security sector so it can combat Irans proxies. But the U.S. must also stop being a bystander to Irans coercive tactics and find direct ways to ensure the Sadr-Barzani-Halbousi political roadmap comes to fruition. The alliance may succumb to demands for a government that includes Irans allies but it can still function as a buffer against these groups within the government and parliament.

However, Washingtons attempts to mobilize its allies in Iraq and the region will be made redundant if Iran is holding a gun to their heads. Tehran has been able to ensure political disputes, like Kurdish divisions over the Iraqi presidency, have a disproportionate impact on the Sadr-led alliances ability to push through Iraqs post-election deadlock. Washington should consider proportionate retaliatory military responses to Tehrans attacks on Erbil and consider supplying Kurdistan with comprehensive air-defense systems, a move that will be welcomed in the Arab world and could be premised on the vulnerabilities of U.S. personnel and strategic interests in Erbil.

There is now recognition across the region that both Sadrs determination to exclude Iran and its proxies from Iraqs next government, and the alliance itself, presents a unique opportunity to nullify their political reach in ways that were unimaginable in the past. Iraqis will have to undertake the heavy lifting. But there is an opening for the U.S. to empower an alliance that could be Baghdads least-worst option for managing the Iranian proxy threat and achieving some degree of stability in Iraq.

Visit link:
Muqtada al-Sadrs alliance: An opportunity for Iraq, the US, and the region - Brookings Institution

In December 1998, Bill Clinton called Boris Yeltsin, pleading: The relationship between the United States and Russia that you and I have worked so hard to build is far too important and, to my mind, far too sound, to be subverted by Saddam Hussein. To Clintons dismay, Yeltsin answered that indeed, what is at stake is not just the person of Saddam Hussein but our relations with the U.S. As I have discussed elsewhere, this was but one of many tense exchanges between American and Russian officials over Iraq during the 1990s. Such quarrels between the two former Cold War rivals irrevocably damaged their relationship in the post-Cold War period, but they have been largely overlooked by history, even in the memoirs and post-hoc analyses of officials who participated in those events. Nevertheless, these disputes are worth reexamining today as they provide critical insight into what drives the deep animosity between Moscow and Washington.

The war in Ukraine has reignited decades-old debates about what went wrong in the post-Cold War Russian-American relationship. On one side of this debate, politicians and pundits ranging from Bernie Sanders on the left to Tucker Carlson on the right as well as realist international relations scholars have blamed American and Western policies in Eastern Europe for the breakdown in Russian-American relations. Hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism led to NATO expansion into Moscows traditional sphere of influence, which was a clear threat to the Russian homeland. Moscows policies in places like Ukraine, this argument goes, is a regrettable but predicted response to this provocation.

Of course, others have countered that such arguments are inconsistent, and that conflicts between Russia and the West in Eastern Europe stem from Russian pathologies and Moscows paranoia rather than Western liberalism. Yet, even these critiques have focused on Eastern Europe.

The Eurocentric fixation of the discussion has blinkered all sides to the global nature of the American disagreements with Russia since the 1990s. After all, in addition to Ukraine, Russia also intervened militarily in Syria and, less prominently, in Libya. Likewise, bringing Iraq into the conversation expands the discussion about Russian foreign policy. Doing so belies the notion that delusional American commitments to liberalism and the threatening nature of NATO forces butting up against the Russian border drove post-Cold War history.

Russian disagreements with the United States were just as intense in Iraq, which is nowhere near the Russian border. American actions there were certainly not a threat to the regime in Moscow. Rather, focusing on Iraq suggests that Russias main problem in its post-Cold War relations with the West has been its own weakness, which thwarted Moscows attempts to shape international politics as it had during the Cold War.

Iraq played as important a role in the breakdown in Russian-American relations in the 1990s as anything that occurred in Europe. Moscow went along with Washington in the Gulf Crisis of 1990 because it was powerless to stop it. As a British diplomat privately quipped in the wake of Iraqs invasion of Kuwait, it doesnt make any difference what the Soviet analysts may think since the person determining Soviet policy in the Middle East these days is [U.S. Secretary of State] James Baker. Although the Soviet Union supported the United States in the Gulf War, the Iraqi military was armed with Soviet weapons. Moscow watched with embarrassment as its military hardware proved impotent in the face of a high-tech Western onslaught in Iraq.

Following the war, the Russians tacitly supported a humanitarian intervention in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, but behind closed doors they expressed some reservations to Bush about encroachments on Iraqs territorial integrity.

Internal Iraqi archives reveal that Iraqi diplomats struggled to maintain influence in Moscow in 1991 and early 1992. However, by courting the Russian opposition they were able to transform American policies toward Iraq into a wedge issue in Moscow. By the end of 1992, the Iraqis forced a change of policy. Despite the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government increasingly fell into old patterns of treating Iraq as a client state in the fight against American hegemony.

When Iraq moved surface-to-air missiles into a no-fly-zone in January 1993, the Americans, British, and French launched airstrikes against Saddams regime. As declassified American intelligence reports show, these air strikes caught Russia by surprise. Moscow believed it was not adequately consulted and it began to question Western attempts to manage UN-authorized military actions independently. These reservations about American unilateralism in Iraq bled into suspicions about American actions in the Balkans later in 1993. American intelligence reports suggested that Russia was taking a harder line in the Balkans because of domestic reactions to the latest [American-led] military actions against Iraq. Yeltsin began pairing the two issues, accusing the US of dictating to the international community on Iraq and Yugoslavia.

By the end of 1993, internal Iraqi files show that the regime in Baghdad could count on the support of every major political party in Russia from the Christian Democrats to the Communists to the Liberal Democrats and everyone in between. In their meetings with Iraqis, they all agreed repeatedly to aid the Iraqi regime and many of them visited Iraq to show their support. Moscow hesitated to break publicly with Washington, but by the fall of 1994 it clearly opposed American-backed sanctions.

Iraq owed Russia large sums of money, and the regime in Baghdad enticed Moscow further by offering lucrative oil and reconstruction contracts to Russian firms. Thus, Moscow had considerable economic interests in backing Iraq.

However, Russian condemnations of American policies were most severe when the United States failed to live up to the liberal principles that it claimed to support. The George H.W. Bush administration had sold the Gulf War and sanctions on Iraq as a means to launch a new world order in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. The Clinton administration adopted similar rhetoric. Yet, while the United Nations never authorized regime change in Iraq, both the Bush and Clinton administrations made it increasingly clear that they would settle for nothing less than that. Such hypocrisy inflamed the Russian-American relationship. As Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev argued in 1994, if Iraq adhered to U.N. resolutions, the United States and the U.N. Security Council must be ready to take Yes for an answer. The Russians were not liberals. They certainty were not immune to hypocrisy and cynicism. In Iraq, they were supporting one of the late 20th centurys most brutal dictators someone who launched two wars against his neighbors and gassed his own people. However, in this instance, it was not Americas imposition of liberal concepts like a rules-based system or international law, but rather the flouting of them which sparked Russian ire.

Disagreements over Iraq increasingly inflamed tensions between Moscow and Washington as the decade progressed. In 1996, Baghdad sent the Iraqi Army into the autonomous region of northern Iraq to intervene in a Kurdish civil war. In response, the United States and Britain launched cruise missiles at Iraq without a Security Council resolution. Russia described the attack as inappropriate and unacceptable. Its foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, condemned the United States, arguing that Washington felt there was only one superpower in the world that could dictate its terms to others.

Then, in 1997 and 1998, Iraq provoked a series of crises when it restricted U.N. weapons inspections. In August 1998, Baghdad suspended inspections until the teams were reconfigured with fewer Anglo-Saxons. The Russians could not defend Iraq in the face of such a blatant violation of a U.N. resolution and they remained uncharacteristically quiet throughout the fall. However, as it became clear that Washington and London were moving toward another military campaign in Iraq without a new U.N. Security Council resolution, Clintons relationship with Yeltsin worsened.

Yeltsin recognized that Iraqi actions were problematic, but in private, he implored Clinton not to overdramatize the situation. In December 1998, as military strikes became imminent, the relationship hit rock bottom. Internal American assessments argued that Yeltsin was under immense domestic pressure and that Russian Foreign Minister Primakov was acting very emotionally. On December 18th, Moscow recalled its ambassador to Washington for the first time since World War II. It did so not because of NATO expansion or Western intervention in the Balkans, but because of Iraq.

In the following days, the exchange that opened this article occurred. Yeltsin made clear that what was at stake in the crisis over Iraq was not just the fate of the regime in Baghdad, but the entirety of Russian-American relations. However, none of the Russian protests and threats in the 1990s, including this one, had any influence on American policies. In the following years, the Russian-American relationship deteriorated further, hitting another low point against the backdrop of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, again without clear authorization from the U.N. Security Council.

Highlighting the role of Iraq in the breakdown in Russian-American relations during the 1990s does not negate the importance of NATO expansion or Balkan interventions. However, it does challenge some of the assumptions that stem from a Eurocentric analysis. Pundits and analysts who blame the West for the breakdown in Russian-American relations often point to Western policies in Russias near abroad. Yet, expanding the scope to include Iraq suggests that threats to the Russian homeland did not necessarily drive Russian policies. By extension, a few Western policy shifts in Eastern Europe would not have changed the course of history.

Neither was American liberalism necessarily at the heart of the dispute. Russias fury with American policies in Iraq were most acute when Washingtons propensity for unilateralism led it to defy liberal principles such as commitment to a rules-based system and international law.

That type of unilateralism was at the heart of Moscows disagreement with the United States both in Iraq and in the post-Cold War world more generally. After winning the Cold War, the United States dominated the post-Cold War order. Moscow did not like how decisions were being made, or who was making them. As the case of Iraq shows, the Russians could complain and protest, yet they were not powerful enough to shape events in the manner that they saw fit. In the end, Moscows dissatisfaction with its own weakness was and remains a much more fundamental issue than NATO expansion. But addressing it would require more than simply changing a few American policies in Eastern Europe.

Samuel Helfont is an assistant professor of strategy and policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is the author of Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018). His next book, Iraq against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order, is currently undergoing peer review.

Image: Department of Defense

Original post:
From Iraq to Ukraine: A New Perspective on the Russian-Western Confrontation - War on the Rocks

Iraq's vast swamplands are the reputed home of the biblical Garden of Eden, but the waterways are drying out and becoming so clogged with waste their very existence is at risk, activists warn.

"For 6,000 or 7,000 years the inhabitants have protected the marshes," said Raad al-Assadi, director of Chibayish Organisation for Ecotourism, who this week began work on a boat to try to clear some of the worst areas of trash.

"But we have reached a stage where the marshes are threatened with extinction."

The swamps, nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, are one of the world's largest inland deltas.

The wetlands barely survived the wrath of dictator Saddam Hussein, who ordered they be drained in 1991 as punishment for communities protecting insurgents and to hunt them down.

But after Saddam was toppled, Iraq pledged to preserve the ecosystem and provide functional services to the marshland communities, and they were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016 both for their biodiversity and their ancient history.

Tourists have returned, but one of the main visible sources of pollution in the area are visitors who throw away their "plastic waste", said Assadi.

- 'Respect our land' -

After decades of brutal war, Iraq lacks structures for the collection and disposal of waste, and 70 percent of its industrial waste is dumped directly into rivers or the sea, according to data compiled by the United Nations and academics.

A team of 10 joins the boat, cruising the maze of narrow waterways to collect the piles of plastic bottles filling the channels, and erecting signs urging people to "respect our land", and not to litter.

But it is far from the only threat: Iraq's host of environmental problems, including drought and desertification, threaten access to water and livelihoods across the country.

The UN classifies Iraq "as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world" to climate change, having already witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

The water level of the marsh is falling, a phenomenon accentuated by repeated droughts and by the dams built upstream of the two rivers, among Iraq's upstream neighbours, Turkey and Iran.

"There is a threat to this ecosystem, which has significant biodiversity", said French ambassador Eric Chevallier, at the launch Thursday of the French-funded boat project.

Chevallier called for "much greater mobilisation, Iraqi and international, to meet all the challenges" that a heating planet is causing.

A string of sandstorms in recent weeks have blanketed Iraq, with thousands needing medical care due to respiratory problems.

The Middle East has always been battered by dust and sandstorms, but they have become more frequent and intense in recent years.

The trend has been associated with overuse of river water, more dams, overgrazing and deforestation.

The rubbish collectors are not the only unusual team in the marshes: earlier this year, the Iraqi Green Climate Organization launched a veterinary ambulance to help farmers treat their water buffalo.

Read more here:
Trawling Iraq's threatened marshes to collect plastic waste - Al-Monitor

The Second Amendment reads: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Most people think that this amendment was included in the Constitution to protect the right to bear arms (i.e., firearms). However, when I read Carol Andersons interesting, well-written, and very well documented book The Second, it became clear to me that this was not really the case at all.

The Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to assure the Southern states that they would be able to continue to have militias in order to put down slave revolts and to hunt down runaway slaves.

James Madison needed to keep the Southern states in the Union and on board for ratification of the Constitution. That required acquiescence to safeguarding their ability to continue slavery. The amendments to the Constitution that make up the Bill of Rights are about individual rights; therefore, the right to have a militia could not be included there. However, a militia needed armed men, and thus, the individual right to bear arms was a means to put the right to a militia in the Constitution and keep the Southern states in the Union.

Another aspect of the Second Amendment speaks about the right of the people to bear arms. People when the Constitution was drafted meant white male citizens. Black people, enslaved or free, were not considered citizens. Immediately after the ratification of the Constitution, all states but one (Vermont) passed laws prohibiting Black people from owning and using guns, presumably to make absolutely sure that the right to bear arms was a white right, not a universal right.

Thus, the Second Amendment assured white supremacy. Anderson shows clearly in her book that, to the present day, Black individuals who legally carry a gun are treated differently from white gun carriers by law enforcement, and this not infrequently leads to the killing of African Americans who were legally carrying a gun.

The U.S. Supreme Court ignored the militia part of the one-sentence Second Amendment in the Heller vs. District of Columbia decision in 2008 when it ruled, 5 to 4, that The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. This was essentially reaffirmed in the McDonald vs. Chicago decision of the Supreme Court in 2010 (also 5 to 4). There have been no state militias in the U.S. since the National Guard was established as replacement by the Militia Act of 1903.

The consequences of the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court rulings have been devastating. Gun ownership has skyrocketed in the U.S., contributing to the significant recent rise in gun homicides and injuries, as well as to suicides by guns, gun accidents, and use of deadly force by law enforcement who are afraid of people they deal with having a gun, legally or not.

The wording of the Second Amendment does not support the notion that the intent of the original framers was to guarantee in the Constitution an individuals right to own and use guns for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Rather, as pointed out in Andersons book, the right to bear firearms was connected to the need of the Southern states to have armed militias, consisting of white men to keep Black slaves in their place.

More mass shootings have occurred while I was writing this: 10 dead and 3 wounded in Buffalo in what appears to have been a white supremacist, anti-Black act of gun violence. And in Milwaukee at least 17 people were injured in a shooting where police recovered no less than 10 guns at the scene (likely handguns).

Why are we waiting to ban all semiautomatic rifles and all handguns outside ones home for which there is no traditionally lawful purpose. Self-defense in the home, if one sees a need for that, can be accomplished with a handgun provided that it is safely stored and fitted with a trigger-lock and has a limited magazine capacity.

And there is no place in the U.S. for ghost guns that circumvent any sort of regulation, such as universal background checks, age limits, red flag laws, stolen-gun reporting requirements, and so on.

How many more people have to die in the U.S. because of the lack of common-sense gun regulation and our misinterpretation of the Second Amendment?

Maarten Bosland, a former Oak Park resident, is a member of Gun Responsibility Advocates.

Excerpt from:
The Second Amendment revisited - Wednesday Journal

(WHTM) With one day left to make their final pitch to voters ahead of the May 17 primary general election, candidates made their way out across the state, including United States Senate candidate Carla Sands who attended a gun-rights rally.

Every day is a day for the second amendment, Sands said. Including, Sands says, the Monday after a weekend of mass shootings, including one in Buffalo, New York.

None of these tragedies trump our Second Amendment rights. We hold this right dear, along with all of our constitutional freedom, our constitutional rights, Sands said. She says the gun wasnt the problem.

The family knew, the community knew. They should have stepped in and a mental health expert should have helped and intervened in this situation, Sands said.

Democratic State Senate Leader Jay Costa says he is astonished. And to think that a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate is going to talk about gun rights on Monday, today, after the weekend after is astonishing and just simply irresponsible.

Costa says that the conversation should be focused elsewhere.

We should be talking about gun reform measures. We should be talking about the hate crimes that have spewed some of this stuff thats taken place. Thats what we should be talking about and having rallies around those types of things, Costa said.

Costas district in Pittsburg includes the Tree of Life Synagogue, which was the scene of another hate-related mass murder. And every time it happens, they have to relive it, Costa said. And its just frustrating that were going to be out there today in Mechanicsburg talking about promoting more guns.

A supporter of gun rights, and of Sands,s says times like this are exactly when you need to know which politicians support gun rights. Anthony Terrace remembers his days in the United States Air Force.

You could have a gun strapped to you. So just like I do here, and I think its not necessary in a way. But I think everybody should still have that right to carry their arms, Terrace said.

Sands is one of even Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, all strong supporters of gun rights. All four Democratic Senate candidates support more gun control, to varying degrees.

The primary election is on Tuesday, May 17. To see who is running for Pennsylvanias open U.S. Senate seat, click here.

Read more:
Astonishing or every day is a day for the second amendment? Sides spar over gun-rights rally - ABC27