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U.S. Dumps Massive Load, of Weapons and Ammunition, in Lebanon
The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon announced a new shipment of weapons and ammunition have arrived in Beirut, the latest American assistance to Lebanon’s army as it fights ISIS along its border with Syria. The Ambassador said the equipment includes more than 70 M198 howitzers and over 26 million rounds of ammunition and artillery “of all shapes and sizes, including heavy artillery.”“We are very proud of this top-of-the-line equipment. This is the best that there is in the marketplace. It’s what our soldiers use,” the Ambassador continued. “I know that in a matter of days it’s going to be what your brave soldiers are using in the battle to defeat terrorism and extremism.”
Hale told reporters that Lebanon has become the fifth-largest recipient of U.S. foreign military assistance. He added that weapons worth more than $100 million were given to Lebanon last year and over a $1 billion worth in the last eight years. In November, France and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement to provide the Lebanese army with $3 billion worth of weapons paid for by Riyadh.
So How’s that Working Out for You?
And so, one must ask the snarky question “So how’s that working out for you?”
The current U.S. war “against ISIS,” (aka Iraq War 3.0) has spread around like spilled paint into Syria, Iraq and threatens Turkey. It has drawn into its sucking vortex Lebanon, Jordan, Iran (a very happy participant as every victory against ISIS is a double win for Tehran), Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Britain, France, Canada and bits and pieces overt and covert of other nations.
In Iraq, the U.S. war has solidified Shia control of the government in general, and reestablished the Shia militias as the government’s bully boys and the vanguard of ethnic cleansing even now underway. The war midwifed an independent Kurdish nation-state in every sense but name; that toothpaste is never going back into the tube. The need to play nice with Iran inside Iraq has weakened the U.S. in nuclear negotiations. Syria’s Assad, a year and a half ago the man in America’s crosshairs for crimes against humanity, is now allowed to sit comfortably in power in Damascus, his name barely even mentioned by the White House.
America at War!
The move to overt combat by U.S. forces in Iraq is one incident away, assuming you don’t count defensive operations, getting mortared, and flying ground attack helicopters as “combat.” Fun prediction: some incident will indeed occur, maybe a hostage rescue scenario, right about the time the Kurds/Iraq Forces run into trouble this spring retaking Mosul from ISIS. Cynical? Remember the current round of U.S. intervention in Iraq began with a rescue mission for the Yazidi people.
So in the shadow of all that, what possible harm could come out of sending another 26 million rounds of ammunition into Lebanon?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Lebanon Arrests ISIS Leader Baghdadi’s Wife and Child
Lebanese security forces have detained a wife and nine-year-old child of Islamic State (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The pair were picked up after entering Lebanon with forged passports ten days ago, and are being interrogated at the defence ministry. Baghdadi is the leader of the “caliphate” created by ISIS in the parts of Syria and Iraq it controls.Describing them as “a valuable catch”, the Lebanese newspaper al-Safir said that the IS leader’s wife and child had been detained in coordination with foreign intelligence services. Indeed, CNN cites a “source” with knowledge of the arrest, describing the wife as a “powerful figure who is heavily involved in ISIS.”
So let’s drill down a bit into this story.Given that ISIS is a strict, conservative, fundamentalist Islamic organization that follows Sharia law and uses captive women for rape and as slaves, the statement that one of Baghdadi’s three wives is indeed a “powerful figure who is heavily involved in ISIS,” seems suspect at best. She would be in fact the only woman ever connected with ISIS with any known power at all. Her role as an ISIS leader has certainly not been discussed before. It is not common anywhere in the conservative Muslim world for powerful men to share responsibilities with their spouses; among the reasons, other men would be unlikely to take orders from a woman, regardless of who she was married to. In addition, having one’s wife play such as role would certainly weaken the status of the husband.
Given that, and given that a child was also arrested, one cannot avoid the term hostage. By coincidence, Lebanon is deeply engaged in negotiations to free more than 20 Lebanese Army soldiers held hostage since August by ISIS and the al-Nusra Front.
In a better world, one would expect to hear the United States condemning the arrest of a woman and a child simply because she is married to a bad guy. Even more so when there is the appearance that her arrest has some connection to ongoing hostage negotiations, and that it involved a young child.
I will update this story when the U.S. issues its condemnation of the hostage taking…
A Different Update: An Iraqi official denied that a woman detained in Lebanon is a wife of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claiming she is the sister of a terror suspect being held in Iraq. Same church, different pew.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Iraq: No Comfort in Being Right
Antiwar.com’s Kelley Vlahos’ end-of-the-war-for-now Iraq wrap up is worth reading. Unlike some of the lumbering garbage being churned out (“we need to wait for the judgement of history”), Vlahos calls it like it is:After years of talking about what victory would look like (and downgrading that definition, conveniently, to accommodate evolving realities “on the ground”) it seems to matter little. No one — not the most strident defender of Bush’s preemptive strike strategy or the war’s greatest skeptic — can say with any sincerity that the U.S. and its coalition partners have achieved greatness in Iraq. For those who feel obligated to maintain pretenses, any rhetoric about democracy and peace sound like boilerplate now and feel as satisfying as a tie in a fight. Everyone just wants to go home, pride dented, bodies bloody and tired, and without cause for celebration. “Empty” seems like the right word.
Vlahos includes comments from a number of people on the war, including me:
So who won the war? Iran. Iran sat patiently on its hands while the United States hacked away at its two major enemies, Saddam and the Taliban, clearing both its east and west borders at no cost to Tehran. (Iran apparently reached out to the U.S. government in 2003, seeking some sort of diplomatic relationship, but after being rebuffed by the engorged Bush administration, decided to wait and watch the quagmire envelop America.) We leave Iraq now with an increasingly influential Iran seeking a proxy battleground against the United States and a nicely weak buffer state on its formerly troublesome western border.
None of that tallies toward a stable Iraq. Indeed, quite the opposite. Worst-case scenario might look a lot like the darkest days in Lebanon, with many of the same players at the table.
Also featured are remarks by Boston University professor and author Andrew Bacevich, Celeste Ward Gventer, director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas and former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Bush administration, Gordon Adams, professor of international relations at American University and a former White House national security official in the Clinton administration and others.
The whole article is worth reading over at Antiwar.com.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Proxy War: US v. Iran in the Middle East
It’s all about oil.It’s all about Iran.By the time my tour in Iraq was wrapping up, the mine resistant vehicles we traveled in could take a solid hit from pretty much anything out there and get us home alive, except for one thing: (allegedly, cough, cough) Iranian-made IEDs. These shaped lens explosively formed penetrating devices fired a liquefied white hot slug of molten copper that was about the only weapon that really scared us. The Iranians were players in all parts of Iraqi society post-2003, including the daily violence. You found Iranian products in the markets, and the tourism business around significant Shia shrines was run by and for Iranians. They were at minimum fighting a proxy war in Iraq, and that war was very, very real for me.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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