Just in Case You Needed Help Spitting Out Your Morning Coffee…

…here’s today’s headline from the Los Angeles Times print edition

CIA sizes up Syria radicals for drone hits

For the webversion, the LAT went with the more conventional and presumably more accurate presentation:

CIA begins sizing up Islamic extremists in Syria for drone strikes

Syrian radicals of the non-Islamist extremist persuasion can, I suppose, breathe a sigh of relief that they do not occupy the “kill on sight” overlap region of the Arab/radical/Islamist extremist Venn diagram, at least as far as the US government is concerned.

As to the motivation for assembling “target packages” on drone-worthy individuals:

Identifying possible threats in Syria would be "a logical step if the policy community sends a signal that, 'Hey, you guys might want to think about how you would respond to a possible request for plans about how you would thin the herd of the future insurgency,'" said a former CIA officer with experience in the Middle East.

I assume the target audience for this article is not “Syrian radicals” or “Islamic extremists in Syria”, neither of whom probably has the inclination to enjoy the LA Times’ superior blend of world-class reporting, in-depth entertainment news, and punchy headlines.

It is probably the Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, which are receiving a warning that the fall of Assad to predominantly Islamist forces will not mean the end of Syria’s civil war, or US attempts to channel Syrian politics into more US-friendly channels.

In other words, that designation of the al Nusra Front as a terrorist organization—which appears rather nonsensical as the Front advances the US cause of removing Bashar al Assad through its bloody business-- is good for something.  It provides a continuing justification for US intervention a.k.a. "thinning the herd" even after the insurrection ends.

Considering that the United States has been unable to effect the removal of Assad, a secular authoritarian eager to do business with America, I wonder if US disapproval, as expressed by the occasional drone strike, will be enough to deter the Saudis and their Salafist assets in pursuit of their project of Sunni resurgence in Syria and Iraq.

Sunni Rollback: the Second Front

“If Syria falls, we are liberated; if we are liberated, Syria will be liberated. We have the same battle with Iran – by defeating them we break the Shia crescent of Iran, Syria and Lebanon."

Readers of this blog know I have been promoting the idea that Saudi Arabia, in particular, will not be interested in negotiating an end to the bloodshed in Syria that involves anything less than an overthrow of Assad and a triumph by the largely Sunni rebels.

That’s because I believe Saudi Arabia has its eyes on the prize: a Sunni resurgence that captures Iraq as well as Syria and isolates Iran.  And it isn’t going to endanger the regional Sunni insurgency by letting peace break out in Syria and standing idly by as Western and non-Sunni governments mop up the extremist foot soldiers (as happened in the “Sunni Awakening” a.k.a. the violent suppression of Al Qaeda in Iraq coordinated by the US military with more moderate Sunni sheiks).

So the pot is going to stay boiling, in my opinion, with Saudi fuel thoughtfully provided via western Iraq as well as directly to Syria.

On the subject of Iraq—the second Sunni front, by my formulation--two data points torn from the headlines.

First, from the Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on the apparently snowballing (if such a simile is apt for the torrid deserts of western Iraq) Sunni insurgency against the Maliki regime and the major buy-in it has received from the Gulf:

In Mosul and Falluja, tent cities have sprung up in public squares. Some have even demonstrated in Sunni areas of Baghdad, braving the draconian Friday security measures imposed on them.

But perhaps more remarkable is the scene inside the tent. Among the tribal sheikhs and activists around Abu Saleh are former enemies and victims, men who feared him and men who hunted him on behalf of the Americans. Sensing an opportunity, Sunni factions have put aside their differences to mount a common front against Baghdad.

Abu Saleh, rotund and balding, explains how a week after the first demonstrations in Sunni cities, he and other fighters commanding the remnants of Sunni insurgent groups held a series of meetings to form a pact and use the momentum in Sunni cities.

"Call us the honourable nationalistic factions – people here are still sensitive to using words like mujahideen or resistance. We decided to sign a truce with the tribal sheikhs, other factions and even moderate elements in al-Qaida," he said.

"The Sunnis were never united like this from the fall of Baghdad until now. This is a new stage we are going through: first came the American occupation, then the resistance, then al-Qaida dominated us, and then came internal fighting and the awakening ... now there is a truce even with the tribal sheikhs who fought and killed our cousins and brothers.

"The politicians have joined us and we have the legitimacy of the street. To be honest, we had reached a point when people hated us, only your brother would support you."

One of the things that transformed the reputation of men such as Abu Saleh in the eyes of their fellow Sunnis has been their involvement in the Syrian conflict, a few hundred miles west along the highway.

The conflict pitted Sunni rebels against government forces and Alawites, backed by Iran, also patrons of Iraq's Shia leadership. Weapons flowed to the rebels from the Iraqi tribes – sold for a comfortable profit – while the Iraqi Shia prime minister toed the Iranian line and lent his support to the Syrian regime. With both sides using the same sectarian rhetoric, it was easy to join the dots between the two conflicts.

Abu Saleh found himself fighting his old war in a new field. He lent a hand to the novice Syrian rebels and joined the fight, commanding a unit of his own operating in the city of Aleppo and the countryside north of it.

"We taught them how to cook phosphate and make IEDs. Our struggle here is the same is in Syria. If Syria falls, we are liberated; if we are liberated, Syria will be liberated. We have the same battle with Iran – by defeating them we break the Shia crescent of Iran, Syria and Lebanon."

Abu Saleh claims that once he and his men had been accepted back in Ramadi, they formed three battalions that had hit convoys carrying supplies to Syria as well as an Iraqi army helicopter.

In another echo of recent Arab uprisings, Abu Saleh says he and other Sunni leaders have now secured support from wealthy Gulf state figures who funded them during the early years of their insurgency against the Americans.

After the truce between Sunni groups, he says, a meeting was set up in the Jordanian capital, Amman, between a united front of Iraqi factions and representatives of "charities" from the Gulf.

The Iraqis asked for money and weapons; after a decade of war their arsenals were almost depleted. What didn't get destroyed by US or Iraqi forces was sold to the Syrians. They needed money to train and recruit new fighters but more importantly a religious sanction from the religious authorities for a new round of fighting.

The Gulf figures asked for more time and a second meeting was held in Amman, this time attended by a higher-ranking group of officials from the both sides. The answer was yes: the "charities" would offer support as long as the Iraqi Sunnis were united and used their weapons only after Iraqi government units used force against them. Another Sunni leader confirmed to the Guardian that the Amman meetings had taken place.

"There is a new plan, a grand plan not like the last time when we worked individually," another commander told me. "This time we are organised. We have co-ordinated with countries like Qatar and Saudi and Jordan. We are organising, training and equipping ourselves but we will start peacefully until the right moment arrives. We won't be making the same mistakes. Baghdad will be destroyed this time."

And, at LobeLog, ex-US diplomat Wayne White describes the Iraq/Syria synergies and writes about the somewhat desperate (and in his view deluded and self-defeating) US efforts to assist the Maliki government in putting a lid on Sunni extremism inside Iraq—as a parallel to the well-publicized US efforts to funnel arms preferentially to more friendly or, at least, more tractable elements of the Free Syrian Army as a counterweight to Islamist groups:

With a long history of misguided, damaging American intervention and meddling in the Middle East, the reported CIA effort to target the al-Nusra Front in Syria by helping Iraqi anti-terrorism units to attack its roots in Iraq seems to be the former and possibly destined to be the latter.
…
Resentment over Maliki’s disinterest in anything that would re-integrate Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority into much of the country’s core activities has done a lot to sustain a drumfire of AQI bombings inside Iraq and, since late 2011, sent gaggles of Islamic fighters from Iraq’s Sunni Arab northwest into the raging battle for Syria.

Al-Nusra probably is to a large extent an arm of AQI, as the US alleges, but also could be the recipient of many Iraqi fighters simply enraged over the plight of Sunni Arabs in their own country more generally. Additionally, there are quite a few historic tribal and family connections that extend far beyond the Syrian-Iraqi border, making events in Syria that much more palpably personal for quite a few Sunni Arabs inside Iraq.

 I have a feeling that the United States, when it opportunistically encouraged the bedraggled Syrian opposition not to negotiate with Bashar al Assad, did not realize that what it would get in return was not an admirable but weak and easily led democracy in Syria but a near-total loss of control of the Middle East agenda to the Gulf autocracies and a narrative of trans-national sectarian aggression.

Not the Obama administration's finest hour, perhaps.

Saudi Arabia vs. Qatar, Redux

My post on the competing strategies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar received a considerable amount of thoughtful comment and pushback by e-mail and on the Web, more than I’m accustomed to receive for a non-China post from somebody who has only an informed layman’s interest in the Middle East.

Maybe I came up with something worth thinking about.  Well, even a blind hog finds a truffle every once in a while.  [see note below]

More to the point, I think my post contributed to a crystallizing sense in the foreign policy realm that Saudi and Qatari differences are probably central to what has become the nagging Syrian conundrum, namely, why have the Western regimes, Turkey, and the Gulf Cooperation Council been unable to club together and crater the Assad regime?

From the moral imperative side of the equation, consider Libya.  We interrupted Gaddafi in what the midst of what was much less than a counterinsurgency and more of a police action in pursuit of the armed rabble of eastern Libya.  When the NATO no-fly zone was launched, only two or three thousand people had died, about a quarter of them in Gaddafi’s forces.  At the time, correspondents in Washington were given a bullsh*t backgrounder claiming that intervention was required because of an impending massacre of up to 50,000 innocents in Benghazi.  Post-war, there has been an embarrassing dearth of evidence concerning Gaddafi’s genocidal rage; Libya’s Deputy Minister of Martyrs announced that the current count was 4700 rebel dead and 2100 missing, something of a drop from the 2011 estimate of 25,000.

Contrast this with Syria.

No matter who does the counting, there are tens of thousands dead in Syria, hundreds of thousands of IDPs and refugees shivering miserably through the winter, and if there was ever a case for getting off one’s ass and doing a humanitarian intervention, Syria is now it.

If the grim mechanics of regime subversion rather than humanitarian intervention are one’s cup of tea, on the other hand, all the elements are in place to implode the Assad regime: widespread popular dissatisfaction, a collapsed economy, a weary army, international sanctions, covert financial and material support of the rebels, an influx of hardened fighters, and safe havens in Turkey.

Despite the solidarity of the ruling elite, support from Iran, China, and Russia, and Assad’s bloody and successful obstinacy in repressing his domestic opponents, after close to two years of the baleful attention of Assad’s enemies in the West, the Gulf, and Turkey, Syria is a basket case.  

But nobody has stepped up to say (to paraphrase Nigel Tufnel) Let’s turn it up to 11, pour in the money, arms, and fighters, maybe set up a no-fly zone and erase Assad’s air assets, and end this thing.

Instead, the Syrian crisis lurches on, absent the external political will to finish the job or shortcircuit the insurrection with a negotiated transition.

Bernard at Moon of Alabama kindly excerpted my post and took issue with it.  He is of the opinion that even the Saudis are losing their appetite for further butchery in Syria, and Assad may be able to cut a deal to get the Saudis and everybody else off his back (as he’s been trying to do for two years) and weather the storm.

I dunno.  Bernard knows a lot more about the Middle East than I do and his post is detailed and quite persuasive.  But…

I look at what the various players are saying (and not saying) and doing (and not doing) as reported in the Western language press, and I conclude the problem is that the get-Assad coalition can’t get on the same page with Saudi Arabia or find a way to finesse a political settlement out of the bloodbath.

Looking at the political calculus, I find it hard to believe that the United States, after having spent over a year building up Assad as the latest monster of the century, is willing to suffer the loss of face that is involved in having him stay on as part of a deal.  That, to me, is just not how the US operates.  A key element of US foreign policy is the idea of credibility and being perceived as a reliable ally, one that does not stake out positions and then abandon them.  US credibility took a hit in the Gulf countries thanks to the Obama administration’s equivocal response to the Egyptian revolution (first trying to bolster Mubarak and then pulling the plug), and from the plainly stated US desire to pivot to Asia and its riches (and away from the Middle East and its headaches).  I don’t think the US is going to get out in front of the anti-Assad coalition and insist on a negotiated settlement.

Unless there is a united call from Turkey and the GCC, in other words, to let bygones be bygones and work with Assad or through Assad’s circle to end Syria’s misery, the US can’t moderate its Syria position until Assad is driven out of Damascus.

Also, I’m afraid that the key foreign players are reaching the conclusion that the Syrian toothpaste is pretty much out of the tube and a negotiated settlement is just going to be Act I of years of chaos, violence, and misery.  Putting Humpty Dumpty together again, in other words, is not a job for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.  It’s a long-term project for Victor Frankenstein, and nobody’s going to be very happy with the outcome.  The overall feeling seems to be to let ‘er drift (while occasionally berating the Russians and Chinese for not stepping in to fix the mess) and turn to other concerns.

To my mind, Saudi Arabia has looked at this state of affairs and decided that the best policy is one of obstinately supporting the insurrection until Assad is driven out, no matter how protracted and nasty the process is.

I think Saudi Arabia is reacting to the US abdication of leadership to assert its own bloody-minded realist strategy for the Middle East (and, in the process, discredit Qatar as amateur soft power enthusiasts without the belly to do the dirty work needed to neutralize the Iranian challenge).

Perhaps Saudi Arabia is living the neo-con Clean Break dream in reverse.  Instead of carrying the fight from Iraq to Syria, and then Iran, as Dick Cheney dreamed, militant Islamists backed by Saudi Arabia (or powerful elements within Saudi Arabia) are closing in on the overthrow of the Assad regime and creating the social, political, and military conditions for an anti-Maliki insurrection in Iraq’s Sunni heartland.

People whose memories of the Iraq debacle go back a few years will not be too surprised to learn that Fallujah—the bloody and unbeaten heart of the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation—is back in the news.

Take it away, BBC:

Thousands of mourners gathered in the Iraqi city of Fallujah on Saturday at the funerals of Sunni protesters killed by army troops a day earlier.

The funeral processions were followed by renewed protests against Iraq's Shia-led government.

On Friday, five people were shot dead and dozens more were wounded when the army opened fire on a protest.

…

The army had withdrawn from the city for the funerals, fearing further violence.

But in an apparent revenge attack, gunmen killed two soldiers and abducted three more on the outskirts of the city. 

Sunni leaders in Anbar province, where Fallujah is located, had earlier told the BBC that they would attack army positions in the province if the government failed to bring the soldiers responsible for the protester shootings "to justice".

One must, of course, insert the caveat that local Sunni elites displayed a visceral hostility to Saudi-backed AQ types by teaming with the United States during the famed "Anbar Awakening".  However, it should also be remembered that before partnering with the Americans, local Sunnis had had originally teamed with foreign jihadis in order to stick it to a hostile central administration, a pattern that they might revert to in this situation.

SCMP ran a Reuters picture of the funeral procession that gives an idea of the magnitude of the unrest in Fallujah.

In case one needs a reminder of how the whole cycle of demonstration/repression/martyr/funeral rinse-and-repeat that drove the news cycle in Syria two years ago, Al Jazeera reports:

At the protest, the latest in a series of demonstrations against the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, shouts of "Listen Maliki, we are free people" were followed by "Take your lesson from Bashar," a reference to Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria.

Did I mention, by the way, that a suicide bomber killed 42 people in a Shi’ite mosque inside Iraq yesterday?

With the prospect of the chaos in Syria slopping over into Iraq and endangering Maliki’s pro-Iranian administration, I don’t think Saudi Arabia is going to be too interested in putting the brakes on Syria’s headlong rush into collapse.

N.B. In the past I shrank from using the earthy metaphor “even a blind hog finds a truffle once in awhile” since it didn’t seem to make any sense.  Pigs, after all, are employed because of their ability to detect truffles underground by smell.  Sight has nothing to do with it.  However, TIL that truffles rely on mammals detecting them, eating them, and defecating them in order to spread and reproduce.  Therefore, evolution (or the Creator, exercising His/Her/Its prerogative of making everything as bizarre and complicated as possible) selected truffles that emitted smells attractive to animals.  Specifically, the truffles valued by gourmets emit an odor analogous to that of the male pig a.k.a. hog sex pheromone, making them an object of interest and pursuit for female pigs a.k.a. sows.  That is why truffle pigs are sows.  A blind hog (at least one of heterosexual bent) would be doubly disadvantaged in the search for truffles and it would be proper to describe him as uniquely fortunate if he were able to stumble upon one.