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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 20, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Today, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York indicted three men for illegally influencing the foreign policy positions of a presidential candidate and then, after the election, of the United States government.

They were acting in the interests of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a wealthy country in the Persian Gulf. The candidate was Donald Trump, and one of the three men was his ally Thomas Barrack. Another was Matthew Grimes, a 27-year-old employee who reported to Barrack. The third was UAE citizen Rashid al-Malik Alshahhi, who lived in California until 2018, leaving abruptly after the FBI interviewed him about the case.

The return of Barrack to the news recalls the outsized influence of foreign actors in the previous administration, and how U.S. policy appeared to change to suit their interests. On Twitter, Mark Mazetti of the New York Times wrote: “One of the mysteries of Trump's first six months was why the administration came out of the gate so hot for Saudi and UAE—with Trump traveling to Saudi Arabia and then going along with the Qatar blockade. The Tom Barrack indictment explains a lot.”

A billionaire private equity real-estate investor and longtime ally of Trump, Barrack was a key fundraiser for Trump’s campaign, which he advised between April and November 2016. In June 2018, New York Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick wrote a profile of Barrack, explaining that he is the son of Lebanese immigrants to Los Angeles and so grew up speaking Arabic, which helped him do business and make contacts in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Barrack got to know Trump in the real estate world of the 1980s, and by 2010, he acquired $70 million of Jared Kushner’s debt and retired enough of it to keep Kushner from bankruptcy. When Trump launched his 2016 campaign with anti-Muslim rhetoric, Barrack calmed his Middle East contacts down, assuring them that Trump was simply using hyperbole.

Barrack urged Trump to hire Paul Manafort—fresh from his stint working for a Ukrainian oligarch—and served as chair of Trump’s inaugural committee. Grimes and Barrack proposed to contacts in the UAE that it should use “its vast economic surplus to obtain a level of influence…which the country should rightfully command.” They suggested it should use financial investments to “increase [its] influence with USA and European governments and people.”

A final draft of their proposal explained that “[w]hile the primary purpose of the platform [will be] to achieve outsized financial returns, it will also…garner political credibility for its contributions to the policies of [the recently elected Candidate, hereinafter, the ‘President-Elect’]....We will do so by sourcing, investing, financing, operationally improving, and harvesting assets in those industries which will benefit most from a [President-Elect] Presidency.”

Barrack’s investment firm raised more than $7 billion between 2016 and 2018, 24% of it from either the UAE or Saudi Arabia.

According to today’s charges, once Trump was in office, Barrack continued to lobby for the UAE until April 2018. He allegedly worked with allies in the UAE to draft passages of Trump’s speeches, hone press materials, and prepare talking points to promote UAE interests. Without ever registering as a foreign agent, he worked to change U.S. foreign policy and appoint administration officials to meet a “wish list” produced by UAE officials.

Barrack helped to tie the Trump administration to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, turning the US away from Qatar, an ally that hosts US air bases (although they are now being closed as bases and in the process of becoming housing for our Afghan allies before their US visas come through). From the beginning, the administration worked closely with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, who controls $1.3 trillion in sovereign wealth funds and essentially rules the UAE, and with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), whom Prince Mohammed championed.

In May 2017, Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, along with Saudi and UAE leaders, met without the knowledge of then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to talk about blockading Qatar. When Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt launched a blockade on June 5, 2017, Trump cheered them on, although the State Department took a neutral stand and the Pentagon thanked Qatar for hosting US troops.

Today, prosecutors said that Barrack provided foreign government officials “with sensitive non-public information about developments within the Administration, including information about the positions of multiple senior United States government officials with respect to the Qatari blockade conducted by the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries.”

They say he also "met with and assisted senior leaders of the KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia], a close ally of the UAE."

In May 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared an emergency to bypass congressional oversight of an $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. After the UAE signed onto the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel, the U.S. sold them another $23 billion of arms, including 50 F-35 advanced fighter planes.

Barrack and Grimes were arrested this morning in California.

When announcing the arrests, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, said, “American citizens have a right to know when foreign governments, or their agents, are attempting to exert influence on our government. This is especially important to Americans during a Presidential election year, and the laws on the books were created to protect our nation from such untoward influence. This case is about secret attempts to influence our highest officials.”

Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s National Security Division Mark J. Lesko said, “Through this indictment, we are putting everyone—regardless of their wealth or perceived political power—on notice that the Department of Justice will enforce the prohibition of this sort of undisclosed foreign influence.”

Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn M. Kasulis said, “These arrests serve as a warning to those who act at the direction of foreign governments without disclosing their actions, as well as those who seek to mislead investigators about their actions, that they will be brought to justice and face the consequences.”

Prosecutors warned that Barrack was a flight risk because of his wealth, private jet, and “deep and longstanding ties to countries that do not have extradition treaties with the United States”: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Barrack’s lawyer says that Barrack “has made himself voluntarily available to investigators from the outset,” possibly indicating a willingness to flip.

A judge has ordered Barrack be held in custody until a bail hearing on Monday.

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Notes:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/former-advisor-presidential-candidate-among-three-defendants-charged-acting-agents

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/press-release/file/1413306/download

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/thomas-barrack-indictment-trump/2021/07/20/d40b64f0-e985-11eb-84a2-d93bc0b50294_story.html

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/politics/trump-arms-sales-saudi-arabia-uae/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20210105060948/https://www.state.gov/u-s-approves-advanced-defense-capabilities-for-the-united-arab-emirates/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/20/trump-friend-tom-barrack-arrest-puts-the-spotlight-on-united-arab-emirates.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/thomas-barrack-trump-s-inaugural-committee-chair-arrested-federal-charges-n1274533

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/world/middleeast/trump-tom-barrack-saudi.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/world/middleeast/crown-prince-mohammed-bin-zayed.html

Mark Mazzetti @MarkMazzettiNYTOne of the mysteries of Trump's first six months was why the administration came out of the gate so hot for Saudi and UAE--with Trump traveling to Saudi Arabia and then going along with the Qatar blockade. The Tom Barrack indictment explains a lot.1,732 Retweets6,683 Likes

July 20th 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/08/troubling-overlap-between-jared-kushner-business-interests-and-us-foreign-policy

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/20/us-afghan-interpreters-qatar-kuwait-military-bases-500275

https://www.stripes.com/branches/army/2021-07-01/us-military-closes-qatar-camps-in-move-that-could-play-into-iran-policy-2009140.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #Corrupt GOP #Criminal GOP

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libertariantaoist · 4 years

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News Roundup 1/29/20

By Kyle Anzalone

US News

A police officer killed a man while trying to enforce a ‘Red Flag’ law. [Link]

The House may pass two bills in the coming week that assert Congress has not approved Trump to go to war with Iran. Trump is threatening to veto the bill. [Link]

Poland will sign a contract with the US to buy 20 F-35s for $4.6 billion. [Link]

Afghanistan

That Taliban are repelling Afghan Army efforts to reach the site of a downed US plane in Afghanistan. [Link] The US reports it was able to recover the remains of the two people on board the plane. The Taliban claim they saw six bodies at the crash site. [Link]

Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu withdrew his bid for immunity from parliament and was formally charged with corruption. Netanyahu is accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in corrupt money. [Link]

Trump unveiled his “Deal of the Century.” According to Trump, the deal creates a sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. However, Israeli leader Netanyahu said the plan will create a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty and its capital will be in an area east of Jerusalem. [Link]

A map of the proposed Palestinian state shows small, disconnected areas separated by Israeli settlements. [Link]

Israel will hold a vote on Sunday about annexing 30% of the West Bank. [Link]

Iran

Iranian lawmakers introduce a motion that would withdraw Iran from the NPT. [Link]

Iraq

The Pentagon now says 50 US soldiers suffered some form of brain injury in the January 8th Iranian missile attack on Iraqi bases. Thirty-one of the soldiers have returned to their jobs. [Link]

The UN expresses concern for how Iraq is prosecuting cases of people accused of supporting ISIS. Teenagers who sold food to ISIS have been sentenced to 15 years and a pharmacist who provided medical care to an ISIS fighter was sentenced to life in prison. [Link]

Africa

The French Foreign Minister tells the US reducing troops in West Africa is dangerous. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper says the US has not made a decision on troops. [Link]

Thirty-nine people were killed by militants in Burkina Faso. The government claims it was a terrorist attack. Al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked groups operate in the region. [Link]

Up to 50 people were killed when rival Muslim factions clashed in the Central African Republic. [Link]

#kyle anzalone #immersion news #libertarian institute #news roundup

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okletsgoalltheway · 3 years

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A knowledgeable assessment made by a former CIA colleague who served in Europe and the Middle East...

The Verity Courier

Israel, Our Best Ally

By Ron Estes

2 January 2021

In 1987, Jonathan Pollard, a former Pentagon intelligence analyst, plead guilty to performing as a spy for Israel, providing Israel top-secret US classified information. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for violations of the Espionage Act. Pollard was the only American who has received a prison sentence for passing classified information to a US ally.

To set the stage, on October 25, 1985, Pollard was seen carrying a large bundle from his office to his wife’s car, and was consequently placed under surveillance.

On November 21 he was arrested as he approached the Israeli embassy in Washington and charged with espionage. After serving his 30 years sentence, Pollard was released November 20, 2015, and placed on parole in accordance with federal guidelines in place at the time of his sentencing. On November 20, 2020, the parole expired and all restrictions were removed. Pollard was a free man.

On 29 December 2020, Pollard and his wife left the United States and arrived in Israel on a private plane provided by American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major funder and board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a pro-Israel lobbying group, and a billionaire supporter of the GOP, and both Netanyahu and President Trump. Upon disembarking from the aircraft in Israel, Pollard, who had never lived in Israel before, triumphantly kissed the ground, “We are ecstatic to be home at last after 35 years," he said as he was greeted at the airport by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader jubilantly immediately presented Pollard, and his wife Esther, with Israeli ID cards, granting them Israeli citizenship.

The American people must wonder why the prime Minister of Israel would meet at the airport a released American convict. According to a retired CIA station chief, in 1985, a month after Pollard's arrest, the CIA director William Casey stated: 'The Israelis used Pollard to obtain our war plans against the USSR - all of it: the co-ordinates, the firing locations, the sequences, and Israel sold that information to Moscow for more exit visas for Soviet Jews. Casey said CIA obtained that information from a CIA penetration of the Soviet Government.

The FBI and the Justice Department both have declared Israel the 2nd most aggressive nation running espionage operations in the US, against the US. China is 1st.

To support that contention, Pollard had also passed to Israel reams of reports gathered by US military attaches in the Middle East, identifying informants, and details of the radio frequencies being tapped by the US.

To put the Israeli, US relationship in perspective, the FBI and the Justice Department have both released statements declaring Israel the 2nd most aggressive nation running espionage operations in the US, against the US. China is 1st.

US politicians may prefer to express undying love for Israel, and hand over billions of dollars annually in aid, but the US security establishment has — at least, in private — always regarded Israel as an unfaithful partner.

Current and former CIA officials admitted that the US security establishment has always regarded Israel as its number one counter-intelligence threat in the Middle East.

At least two more Israeli spies in t he US have been identified in the past few years. In 2008 a former US army engineer, Ben-Ami Kadish, admitted that he had allowed Israeli agents to photograph secret documents about US fighter jets and nuclear weapons in the 1980s. And in 2006 Lawrence Franklin, a defense official, was convicted of passing classified documents to Israel concerning Iran.

There is a mistaken impression in the American populace that Israeli intelligence is an important and necessary bulwark in US national defense. The truth is most intelligence professionals (in major intelligence services) consider the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, to be small, under-financed (compared to major power services) and second rate. After the US Iraq invasion, the US Senate Intelligence Committee stated most of the intelligence Mossad had passed to the US was false. A former CIA officer who was part of the CIA representation at intelligence exchange liaison meetings with Israel said: “Israeli intelligence assistance is often of dubious value, and CIA is appalled at the lack of quality. Mossad doesn’t know its Arab enemies. Its Arab political reporting is lousy, laughably bad...it was gossip stuff mostly. They often pass faulty, misleading intelligence.”

Mossad has conducted some professional operations, mostly against the US target, but they can not be compared with the major intelligence services in the world. They are not effective against Islamic terrorist organizations, and they don’t target on them.

President elect Biden will face a political and national security problem when conducting relations with Israel. Support for Israel in the US is formidable, including highly effective Israel lobbies and Evangelicals who support unfettered US support for Israel for religious reasons, the Messiah will not return until God’s promise to the Jews of the Holy Lands is realized. But the President must balance those political considerations with the fact that many aspects of our relationship with Israel adversely affect our strategic interests in the Middle East.

Ron Estes served 25 years as an Operations Officer in the CIA Clandestine Service

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ericfruits · 4 years

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How an overpriced warplane complicates diplomacy in the Middle East

Stealth gap How an overpriced warplane complicates diplomacy in the Middle East

America wants to sell F-35s to the United Arab Emirates. Israel objects

DON’T BE FOOLED by the nondescript buildings of the Nevatim air base, deep in the Negev desert. Lately the facility in southern Israel has served as something like an advanced testing ground for the most state-of-the-art warplanes made in the West. Take the American-made F-35 stealth fighter jet, which Israeli pilots flew over Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip in 2018—the plane’s first combat missions. Israel receives such weapons long before America’s other allies in the region, giving it a unique military advantage. But it may be losing some of that edge.

When Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) agreed to establish diplomatic relations on August 13th, it seemed like a straightforward deal. The countries had been moving closer for some time. Israel quietly works with the Gulf states to counter Iran. The UAE’s decision to become just the third Arab country to recognise Israel, despite its occupation of Palestinian lands, reflected these warmer ties. There was more to it than that, however. It has since emerged that the UAE is in talks with America over an arms deal that will include weapons such as the F-35, which America has hitherto only sold to close allies.

This has not gone down well in Israel. Its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, reportedly went along with the proposed arms deal in private as a way of smoothing the talks over diplomatic relations. He denied this when the deal became public last month, criticising it. But the complaints stopped after a meeting with Mike Pompeo, America’s secretary of state, in Jerusalem. “Netanyahu may have said that he’s against selling F-35s in principle,” says Amos Gilad, a retired major-general in Israel’s army. “But he certainly gave America the impression that Israel wouldn’t try and block it.”

America has long ensured that Israel has a “qualitative military edge” (QME) over its neighbours. The concept, which has been codified into law, means that Israel is consulted on big arms deals in the region. America’s Arab allies, though able to buy its warplanes and missiles, are usually blocked from purchasing its most advanced weapons. “There are teams of Israeli experts who deal with the QME constantly in a dialogue with the Pentagon,” says an Israeli diplomat. “But Netanyahu has gone ahead without consulting them.”

Those experts are now voicing their concerns. The F-35’s unique shape and radar-absorbent materials allow it to evade detection. It is not just a warplane, but a sophisticated intelligence hub capable of swapping intelligence on faraway targets with nearby planes and ships. Other advanced weapons said to be included in the UAE deal—such as Reaper drones and the EA-18G Growler, an electronic-warfare plane—also raise questions about whether they could be used against Israel in a conflict. Some worry that the technology might eventually end up in the hands of Israel’s enemies. “We can’t predict what will happen in ten years, whether radical Islamists take over a country like the Muslim Brotherhood did in 2012. Or a country becomes allied with Iran,” says Mr Gilad.

The UAE has been building up its air force, which has seen action in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. It has long wanted the F-35, despite its price tag of around $80m per plane. “Under Barack Obama they couldn’t even get a classified briefing on the F-35’s capabilities, let alone the planes,” says Dan Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel. But President Donald Trump has made arms sales a central part of his foreign policy. “They have the money and they would like to order quite a few F-35s,” he said of the UAE. “We’ll see what happens.” Last month the Emiratis reportedly cancelled a meeting with Israel and America because they were cross about Mr Netanyahu’s public opposition to the deal.

In normal times the sale would take many months to process. The State Department must certify that it does not undermine Israel’s QME. It might also place restrictions on how the F-35 is used. The Defence Department must ensure that the UAE is capable of securely owning and operating all of the weapons in the deal. (A former American defence official says the sale of F-35s probably would not affect Israel’s QME, in part because the UAE would struggle to exploit the plane’s most advanced capabilities without other technology.) The deal must also be approved by Congress, which has criticised the UAE’s role in the war in Yemen and its support for a warlord who is challenging the UN-backed government in Libya. Still, many politicians will probably say yes if Israel does not make too much of a fuss.

Mr Trump could try to placate Israel by providing it with other advanced weapons. He might also invoke his emergency powers to sidestep Congress and push the deal forward before November, when he is facing re-election. The president did as much last year, declaring an “emergency” over Iranian activity in order to expedite an $8bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE over objections from Congress. Still, it could take up to a decade to deliver the F-35—plenty of time for a different administration to reconsider the contract. Turkey was kicked out of the F-35 programme over its purchase of a Russian air-defence system.

“It’s not just about the UAE,” says an Israeli diplomat who works on defence issues. “Netanyahu has created a precedent and now other Arab countries will demand F-35s as well.” A precedent was set four decades ago, when Egypt made peace with Israel. Since then America has sold Egypt everything from fighter jets to frigates—but nothing as advanced as the F-35. Some in Israel’s defence establishment think such weapons are a price worth paying for the normalisation of relations with the Arab world. Others question whether such a volatile region really needs more arms. ■

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Stealth diplomacy"

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#IFTTT #Feedly

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report47 · 5 years

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'' You are a liar'' Goodluck Jonathan reacts to David Cameron's claim he refused UK govt's help to rescue Chibok girls

Goodluck Jonathan, former Nigerian president, has denied claims by former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, that his government rejected the help of the UK government to rescue the Chibok girls after they were abducted in April 2014. Cameron in his recently released memoir titled ''In For The Record'', Cameron claimed some British troops spotted the location of the abducted Chibok girls and offered to help in rescuing them but Jonathan refused. ““In early 2014 a group of its fighters centered the government secondary school in the village of Chibok, seizing 276 teenage girls. They were taken to camps deep in the forest. The Christians among them were forced to convert to Islam. Many were sold as slaves, entering the same endless violent nightmare the Yazidi women suffered. “As ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaign spread across the world, we embedded a team of military and intelligence experts in Nigeria, and sent spy planes and Tornadoes with thermal imaging to search for the missing girls. And, amazingly, from the skies above a forest three times the size of Wales, we managed to locate some of them. But Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, seemed to be asleep at the wheel. When he eventually made a statement, it was to accuse the campaigners of politicising the tragedy. And absoluely crucially, when we offered to help rescue the girls we had located, he refused.” Cameron wrote in his memor Reacting to the former Prime Minister's claim, Jonathan in a statement released by his media aide, Ikechukwu Eze, said Cameron was a liar. “I read the comments by former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, in his new book, For the Record, in which he accused me and the Nigerian Government, which I headed, of corruption and rejecting the help of the British Government in rescuing the Chibok Girls, who were kidnapped on April 14, 2014,” he said. “It is quite sad that Mr. Cameron would say this because nothing of such ever occurred. As President of Nigeria, I not only wrote letters to then Prime Minister David Cameron, I also wrote to the then US President, Barrack Obama, and the then French President, François Hollande, as well as the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appealing to them for help in rescuing the Chibok Girls. “How could I write to appeal for help and then reject the very thing I appealed for? “Also, history contradicts Mr. Cameron. On March 8, 2012, when the same Boko Haram linked terrorists abducted a British expatriate named Chris McManus, along with an Italian hostage Franco Lamolinara, in Sokoto, I, as Nigerian President, personally authorised a rescue effort by members of the British military Special Boat Service supported by officers and men of the Nigerian Army, to free the abducted men. “So, having set a precedent like that, why would I reject British help in rescuing the Chibok Girls, if it was offered? I also authorised the secret deployment of troops from the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel as a result of the Chibok incident, so how Mr. Cameron could say this with a straight face beats me. “I would urge the public to take Mr. Cameron’s accusations with a grain of salt. I will not be the first person to accuse him of lying on account of this book, and with the reactions in the UK so far, I definitely will not be the last. Moreover, on March 8, 2017, the British Government of former Prime Minister, Theresa May, in a widely circulated press statement, debunked this allegation and said there was no truth in it after Mr. Cameron had made similar statements to the Observer of the UK. In his book, Mr. Cameron failed to mention that I wrote him requesting his help on Chibok. Why did he suppress that information? I remind him that copies of that letter exist at the State Houses in Nigeria and London. He never called me on the phone to offer any help. On the contrary, I am the one that reached out to him.” Jonathan said in his statement

Read the full article

#GoodluckJonathan

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Infamy at Sea: Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty 50 Years Later

By Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, June 2, 2017

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

Soon more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.

The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound.” Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier.

Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. McNamara’s injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: “You get those f---ing airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down.” The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.

After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. Nobody was going to get out alive that way.

After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”

The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “F--k you.”

The Israeli boat turned and left.

A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s conning officer refused.

Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.

The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.

Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.

In Assault on the Liberty, a harrowing first-hand account by James Ennes Jr., McNamara’s version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes’s book created a media storm when it was first published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies, but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.

It’s a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of Ennes’s first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.

Now, decades later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the US government and the government of Israel.

The Attack on the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe.

Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a “spook ship”, as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty’s normal routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.

The Liberty had barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.

As the war intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. It was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.

On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to the ship.

A little after seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a “flying boxcar” (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown over the ship at a low level.

Ennes says he noticed that the ship’s American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light breeze.

At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes flew over the Liberty five more times.

When the first fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded the men closest to him.

After the explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.

At that point, Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them didn’t occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.

Ennes was finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.

After the attack ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O’Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He got an immediate message back. “They said, ‘Wounded in what action? Killed in what action?’,” O’Malley told Ennes. “They said it wasn’t an ‘action,’ it was an accident. I’d like for them to come out here and see the difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bast--ds.”

The cover-up had begun.

The Pentagon lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso.

The military press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance, objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the reporters or their publications.

Predictably, Israel’s first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn’t respond to calls for it to identify itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israeli’s said they were justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.

“The Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy ship,” the IDF report concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on the ship.

Even though the Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps the Liberty’s flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.

After the initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry investigation.

The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn’t have a free hand. He’d been instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to protect the reputation of Israel.

The Kidd interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators “asked nothing that might be embarrassing to Israel, and testimony that tended to embarrass Israel was covered with a ‘Top Secret’ label, if it was accepted at all.”

Ennes notes that even testimony by the Liberty’s communications officers about the jamming of the ship’s radios was classified as “Top Secret.” The reason? It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. “Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship’s identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn from it,” Ennes writes.

Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag--Ennes had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.

It also refused to accept evidence about the IDF’s use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.

“No one came to help us,” said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty’s physician. “We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and we were turned down.”

None of this made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.

McCain approved the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and contrary to the evidence.

Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing himself from the report. The JAG seemed to take Staring’s objections to heart. It prepared a summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:

that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel; that it’s flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze; that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range; the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.

This succinct and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It didn’t take Clifford long to come up with the official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.

It turns out that the Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that concluded it was an accident?

Twenty-five years later we finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times: “Officers follow orders.”

It gets worse. There’s plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.

As the attacks were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.

Initial reports on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.

A particularly damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:

“[The source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, ‘This is pure murder.’ One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan.”

This amazing document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned about his role in the attack.

The analyses by the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: “So as not to embarrass Israel.”

More proof came to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to “attack.” He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders.

How tightly does the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an American ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State Department press release announced the payment said, “The book is now closed on the USS Liberty.”

It certainly was the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign. Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.

But the book wasn’t closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told: “Forget about it, that’s an order.”

The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag orders didn’t work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something right out of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.

“In an incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base hospital,” Ennes writes. “For days these men were drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack by a ‘therapist’ who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer.”

Since coming home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly. They’ve been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often, it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah, they’ve also been painted as anti-Semites.

So why did the Israelis attack the Liberty?

A few days before the Six Days War, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US could not support such an attack.

It’s possible, then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel’s devastating and swift victory. In fact, it’s possible that the Liberty had been sent to the region to spy for the IDF.

A somewhat more likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel’s plan to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.

It has also been suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.

There’s another factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used town’s mosque tower to fix the location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: “The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death.”

The bigger question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there’s plenty of that in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.

That’s but par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they hushed it up.

In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.

Perversely, then, the IDF’s strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.

Thus does the legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another.

#USS Liberty #Israel

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mideastsoccer · 4 years

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Israel Shines in the Gulf Where Big Powers Falter, but That Could Prove Tricky

by James M. Dorsey

This story was first published in Inside Arabia

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.

Israel is proving to Gulf states that it is a more reliable partner in some respects than big powers like the United States, China, or Russia. But the limits of cooperation with Israel could come to the forefront at a time of economic crisis in which Gulf states are likely to have to renegotiate long-standing social contracts.

The Firefly, an Israeli-built loitering kamikaze drone, part of the Spike family of missiles that the Jewish state has sold to various European nations, may be one reason why Gulf states, and particularly Saudi Arabia, have cozied up to Israel in a seeming reversal of their past support of Palestinian rights.

If there is one lesson that Gulf states have learned from the United States’ reduced commitment to the region and the strains in US-Saudi relations, it is that putting one’s eggs in one basket is risky business.

That has not prevented the United States from continuing to secure its place as the region’s foremost arms supplier as this month’s arms and related commercial deals prove.

The US Defense Department announced a $2.6 billion USD Saudi deal to acquire 1,000 air-to-surface and anti-ship missiles from Boeing. Within days, Saudi Arabia’s Al Tadrea Manufacturing Company tweeted that it had reached agreement with Oshkosh Defense to establish a joint venture to manufacture armed vehicles in the kingdom.

The Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, disclosed separately that it had recently taken a $ 713.7 million USD stake in Boeing at a time when the company, already suffering major setbacks because of its 737-Max fiasco, took a significant hit as a result of a collapse of the civilian aviation industry.

The continued Saudi arms focus on the United States has not deprived China of opportunities. China has stepped in to help Saudi Arabia produce unmanned military vehicles after the United States refused to sell its MQ-9 Reaper killer drone to the kingdom. Saudi Arabia expects production to start next year.

Like China, Russia has been urging Saudi Arabia to purchase its acclaimed S-400 anti-missile defense system. So far, the kingdom, having watched the United States cancel NATO-member Turkey’s purchase of US F-35 fighter jets and its co-production agreement of some of the plane’s components after it acquired the Russian system, has been reticent to take the Russians up on their offer.

The limitations of Saudi-Russian cooperation have since become obvious with April’s price war between the two major oil producers that sent oil markets into a tailspin from which they are unlikely to recover any time soon.

Israel, like China and Russia and unlike the United States, puts no problematic restrictions such as adherence to human rights and use of weaponry in accordance with international law on its arms sales.

But Israel has one leg up on its Chinese and Russian competitors who maintain close ties to Iran. Israel shares with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) a perception of Iran as an existential threat and a destabilizing force in the Middle East that at the very least needs to be contained.

To be sure, that is a perception that Saudi Arabia and the UAE see reflected in the United States’ maximum pressure policy towards Iran which aims to force the Islamic Republic to “change its behavior,” if not change its regime.

The problem is that maximum pressure two years into the imposition of harsh US economic sanctions has produced little result.

Add to that the fact that the United States has proven to be an unreliable ally when the chips are down, persuading the UAE and other smaller Gulf states to reach out to Iran to ensure that their critical national infrastructure does not become a target in any future major US-Iranian military conflagration.

The watershed moment for the Gulf states was when the United States failed to respond forcefully last spring and summer to alleged Iranian attacks on key Saudi oil facilities as well as oil tankers off the coast of the UAE.

The Trump administration, in a bid to reassure Gulf states, weeks later sent troops and Patriot anti-missile defense systems to Saudi Arabia to help it protect its oil installations, although the United States withdrew two of those systems earlier this month.

It took the killing of a US military contractor in December 2019 for the United States to respond to tens of Iranian-backed attacks on American targets in Iraq. And when it did, with the killing in January of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Gulf states privately celebrated the demise of their nemesis, but also feared that it was overkill, bringing the Middle East to the brink of an all-out war.

Gulf states are likely to find that cooperation with Israel has its limits too. Israel may be eager to sell weaponry and have the capability to push back at Iran in Syria. If need be, Israel can also severely damage, if not take out, Iranian nuclear and missile facilities in military strikes that Gulf states would be unable to carry out.

But ties to Israel remain a sensitive issue in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world. And Israel has so far restricted sales to non-lethal equipment and technology. That could change with a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations.

Public opinion, however, may be one reason Gulf states have refused to turn unofficial relations into diplomatic recognition, suggesting that there may be greater public empathy for Palestinians than Gulf rulers wish to admit.

That could count for more with Gulf rulers finding it increasingly difficult to provide public goods and services, among which first and foremost jobs, as a result of the global economic crisis and the collapse of oil prices.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He is also an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture in Germany

#saudi arabia #uae #iran #qatar #turkey #Israel #United States #Russia #china #middle east #military

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usafphantom2 · 2 years

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Four more F-16s are sent from Israel to Top Aces

The jets participated in the First Lebanon War and the operation to destroy Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in Iraq.

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 02/11/22 - 5:00 pm in Military

Two F-16s sent by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to the Canadian company Top Aces. (Photo: Israeli Ministry of Defense)

The Israeli Ministry of Defense sent four additional F-16 fighters to the United States to be used as aggressor forces with the Canadian company Top Aces.

The planes and equipment were loaded on an Antonov An-124 cargo plane that landed at Ben-Gurion Airport. This week's delivery reaches the mark of 12 fighters that were sent to the US on three different shipments.

The remaining 17 will be delivered later this year and will be used by the company for U.S. Air Force "aggressor" training purposes.

A total of 29 F-16s were purchased by Top Aces, based in Montreal, in an agreement with the Directorate of International Defense Cooperation of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Top Aces buys older aircraft to act as enemy forces and provides training services for Australian, Canadian, American and German air forces.

The planes sold to the Top Aces were first delivered to Israel in the 1980s and participated in the First Lebanon War and air battles against the Syrian Air Force. They also participated in Operation Opera in 1981, which successfully destroyed Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

After arriving in the US, the F-16 undergoes a revision to return to complete operational and airworthiness status.

Top Aces received its FAA certification for the F16 to act as aggressor forces in May last year and began testing the jets in January with new capabilities that would give fifth-generation fighters “a more realistic training partner” for dogfight combat and other training.

The first flight of the F-16 equipped with the Advanced Aggressor Mission System took place on January 19. The air-to-air missile system (AAMS) comprises an active, electronically scanned radar, helmet-mounted signaling system, technical datalink, infrared search and tracking system, weapons system simulation, electronic warfare and much more.

“When you combine the power and avionics of the F-16 with the AAMS, it provides the most realistic and economical training solution available for pilots flying fifth-generation fighters, such as the F-22 or F-35,” said Russ Quinn, president of Top Aces, 26-year-old USAF veteran and former Aggressor pilot with more

Tags: AggressorMilitary AviationF-16 Fighting FalconIAF - Israeli Air Force/Israeli Air ForceTop

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, has participated in several air events and operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work around the world of aviation

Cavok Brasil - Digital Tchê Web Creation

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Syrian troops enter towns in northeast as Erdogan warns of wider offensive

By Erin Cunningham, Sarah Dadouch and Kareem Fahim | Published October 14 at 12:02 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 14, 2019 5:30 PM ET |

The abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria has unleashed dramatic developments, with Syrian government forces retaking territory long held by U.S. allies and Turkish-led forces expanding their offensive. Here’s what we know so far.

●Syrian government troops have moved back into towns in northeastern Syria for the first time in years after U.S.-allied Kurdish fighters, in a stunning reversal, reached a deal with the government.

●Turkish-backed rebels have begun a push to retake the northern city of Manbij, which has long been a flash point.

●Hundreds of Islamic State family members have escaped a detention camp in Ain Issa, which has been the administrative capital of the Kurdish-led government in northeastern Syria.

ISTANBUL — Syrian rebels allied with Turkey launched a fresh offensive on Kurdish fighters in the flash point city of Manbij, broadening a Turkish-backed military campaign as forces loyal to Syria’s president deployed in key towns to ward off a wider assault.

The operation, part of an offensive called Peace Spring, comes amid a rapid U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria as Turkish forces and their proxies battle Kurdish fighters in towns and cities along the border, plunging the region into chaos.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday that Turkey was “in the process of implementing our decision on the subject of Manbij,” a town about 25 miles west of the Euphrates River.

Turkey has long demanded that the United States, which partnered with Kurdish forces in Manbij to battle the Islamic State militant group, expel the fighters from the town. Turkish officials complained that a deal struck with Washington to remove the fighters — who lead the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF — was not being implemented.

On Sunday, U.S. officials declined to confirm reports that troops had withdrawn from Manbij and another border town, Kobane.

Syrian Kurdish authorities said they struck a last-minute deal with the government of President Bashar al-Assad to allow Syrian troops to reenter towns across northeast Syria, following days of heavy Turkish airstrikes and artillery shelling against SDF positions.

While the details of the agreement remained unclear, Syrian government forces deployed in several locations in the area for the first time in years, state media reported. Images from Ain Issa, the headquarters of the autonomous Kurdish-led administration, showed Syrian troops arriving atop pickup trucks and waving government flags. In Tel Tamer, a village near the Turkish border, a crowd threw rice and candy as it approached a line of Syrian soldiers.

“With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you, Bashar!” the people in the crowd said, reciting a chant praising the Syrian leader.

The sudden return of Assad’s forces to areas of northeastern Syria promises to further roil security in that region, analysts said, and marks a stunning reversal for Syrian Kurdish authorities, whose fighters once controlled a wide swath of territory.

A statement from the Kurdish-led administration said Monday that the agreement was a “military deal to protect Syria’s borders and Syrian sovereignty against Turkish aggression.”

“The understanding that took place yesterday, between the autonomous administration and the SDF on one side and the Syrian government and Russia on the other, was restricted to the Syrian army deploying along the border,” said Luqman Ahmi, a spokesman for the Kurdish administration. Russia is a key ally of the Syrian government.

“There has been no political agreement until this moment,” he said. And “the autonomous administration will continue to govern these areas as it has been doing before.”

Turkish officials view the Kurdish fighters in Syria as terrorists for their links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged a decades-long war for autonomy inside Turkey. Its military launched the operation with allied Syrian rebels to oust the SDF from the Syrian-Turkish border, where it planned to establish a buffer zone.

As the campaign escalated, aid agencies pulled out of the area, and President Trump ordered the final withdrawal of all U.S. troops in the coming weeks.

On Monday, Trump suggested, without evidence, that Kurdish forces may have purposely released some Islamic State prisoners amid the fighting to prevent U.S. troops from withdrawing from the region.

“Kurds may be releasing some to get us involved,” Trump said Monday on Twitter. “Do people really think we should go to war with NATO Member Turkey?”

On Sunday, hundreds of family members of Islamic State fighters escaped a detention camp in Ain Issa after Turkish shellfire hit the area.

Security has generally deteriorated around a constellation of camps housing families that fled battles against the Islamic State — among them the relatives of militants. About 950 foreign women and children were among potentially thousands of escapees from the Ain Issa camp.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said late Sunday that it had “grave concerns” for the population of the camp, which hosts about 13,000 civilians.

On the road to al-Hol, a sprawling camp holding 70,000 people disgorged from the Islamic State’s final scrap of territory, SDF forces also have pulled back.

“It’s quiet in the camp for now, but we’re all scared of the uncertainty,” said a medic, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to the media. “We thought that America would protect us here. Why are they walking away?”

Dadouch reported from Beirut. Louisa Loveluck in Irbil, Iraq, and Asser Khattab in Beirut contributed to this report.

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In the Middle East, there’s one country every side talks to: Russia

By Will Englund | Published October 14 at 12:14 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 14, 2019 5:30 PM ET

MOSCOW — In the not so distant past, no reference to Saudi Arabia in the Russian media would be complete without one official or another denouncing its radical Wahhabi Islam as an extremist threat to Russia’s own way of life.

But there was President Vladimir Putin Monday, descending from his plane in Riyadh, Sauid Arabia, to the echoes of a 21-gun salute and traveling to the royal palace with a cavalry escort.

Less than four years ago, Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near its border, prompting fears of a widening conflict between those neighbors as they faced off in Syria.

Yet today, with the withdrawal of American troops from northeastern Syria, analysts agree it now falls to Russia to restrain Turkey through talks and persuasion.

Several years of adroit diplomacy and politicking have left Russia in a new and untested position in the Middle East: It is the one country all sides can talk to.

Saudi Arabia and Iran, for instance, have nothing but deep enmity for each other, yet Moscow maintains good relations with both Riyadh and Tehran. In a sense, it plays one off the other, Mark Katz, a professor at George Mason University who studies Russia and the Middle East, said in a recent interview.

“You don’t like the Iranians in Syria?” he paraphrases the Russian message to the Saudis. “Then it’s a good thing we’re there to keep an eye on them.”

The Turks loathe Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad. Russia is Assad’s staunchest ally, yet Russia just sold an antiaircraft missile system to Turkey.

Now Putin wants to sell one to Saudi Arabia, too. Plus a nuclear power plant.

“Saudi Arabia appreciates Russia’s active role in this region and in the world,” King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud said Monday as he opened talks with Putin.

“In Soviet times, relations between Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union were at a rather low level. In recent years, the quality of our relations has changed dramatically. We consider Saudi Arabia a friendly nation,” Putin responded.

Analysts say that American confusion, bungling and missteps — especially in the past few days — have opened the door to the Middle East for Russia. Moscow, by not talking about human rights and transparency, is a welcome change of pace from the West, they say. Putin finds common ground with leaders as diverse as Assad of Syria, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Hassan Rouhani of Iran and even Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Russians do not scold the Saudi prince, Mohammed bin Salman, over the 2017 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist.

But experts question whether Russia, having established diplomatic beachheads, has the means to bend the Middle East to its will. “They don’t have enough oomph to turn it,” said Heather A. Conley, a former U.S. diplomat who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The American withdrawal from Syria gives Russia an even freer hand in that country. Turkey’s invasion of Kurdish areas does not directly threaten Russia’s interests. In fact Turkey offered Russians the opportunity to persuade the Kurds to start talks with Assad’s government. The mutual recriminations between Turkey and the United States — two NATO allies — give Russia even more to build on as it attempts to weaken the Western alliance.

Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said in a tweet that Russia’s influence in Syria “has been again tested and proven strong” by the Kurds’ decision to talk to Damascus. “Keeping contacts with all, including Turkey, and having a clear view of one’s own interests and thus a coherent policy is paying off.”

Yet the dramatic turn of events of the past few days has led to signs of an underlying uneasiness among some in Moscow.

“The Turkish military invasion in the north of Syria has only complicated the situation in the region,” Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the foreign affairs committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, wrote on his blog. “Trying to solve its problem by military means, Turkey creates a new one and exacerbates the old ones.”

Invading a neighboring country, he wrote, is not an effective counterterrorism tactic.

Russia, he concluded, must call for more substantial dialogue.

There is not a great deal else it can do while it waits to see how the invasion plays out.

Vladimir Dzhabarov, the deputy head of the Federation Council foreign affairs committee, suggested that Russia and the United States could jointly broker further talks between the Kurds and Assad’s government.

Syria is just one item on the agenda during Putin’s visit to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The price of oil is another — both Riyadh and Moscow believe its price should not be allowed to go too high. Russia wants to pursue a number of energy and military deals — that nuclear power plant being one of them. They will also talk about the attacks on a Saudi oil refinery last month and on an Iranian tanker on Friday. Another topic sure to come up is war-torn Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and Iran back opposing sides — both of which, as it happens, have had cordial talks with the Russians.

It is a balancing act for Moscow: Sow some friendship with one side, then the other; sow some uncertainty at the same time, get some deals done, some boots on the ground. Katz argues that Russia does not have an actual strategic goal for the Middle East. It wants to continue as a player and prevent any one side from becoming dominant.

“They’re dependent on keeping the pot simmering but not boiling over,” he said.

It is not clear, he said, that is possible in the long run.

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Trump’s retreat in Syria turns into a mess

By Ishaan Tharoor | Published October 14 at 12:59 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 14, 2019 5:30 PM ET

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A week ago, President Trump shocked Washington and announced he wouldn’t impede an imminent Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria. Now, in the space of just a few days, his administration is already reaping what it sowed.

Turkey’s incursions at various points along its border with Syria began on Wednesday and, by the weekend, had already plunged the region into chaos. Turkish artillery pounded Syrian Kurdish positions, while footage emerged appearing to show Turkish-affiliated militiamen carrying out grisly roadside executions of Kurdish fighters allied to the United States. Tens of thousands of panicked civilians attempted to flee the Turkish-led advance, raising fears of an eventual exodus into Iraqi Kurdistan, where more than a million people displaced by conflict still live in camps.

Trump, who spent part of the weekend at one of his golf courses, insisted on Twitter that his country ought to be rid of its commitments in the “quicksand” of the Middle East. Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper told CBS’s “Face the Nation" on Sunday that the United States was now in “a very untenable situation” and would evacuate its roughly 1,000 troops in northeastern Syria entirely.

“The order to remove troops came Saturday, toward the end of a chaotic day in which the viability of the U.S. mission in Syria rapidly unraveled after Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel proxies advanced deep into Syrian territory and cut U.S. supply lines,” my colleagues reported. It flew in the face of the Pentagon’s assurances last week that the United States would not “abandon” its Syrian Kurdish partners, who have been on the front lines in the war against the Islamic State and borne the brunt of the casualties in a U.S.-led campaign.

But security headaches have only mushroomed amid American maneuvers to withdraw. Hundreds of Islamic State detainees may have escaped a prison camp run by beleaguered Syrian Kurdish fighters. Separately, in the late hours of Sunday, reports indicated that Syrian regime forces were also converging on areas once guarded by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led alliance now in Turkey’s crosshairs.

Hung out to dry by the United States, the SDF turned to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for protection. A senior Syrian Kurdish politician told Reuters that SDF officials met counterparts in the Assad regime at a Russian air base in Syria to hash out a deal. By Sunday evening, the SDF confirmed that, to repel or stall the Turkish invasion, it had invited the regime into areas it had formerly controlled with U.S. protection.

For many on the ground, this seemed an inevitable and relatively welcome outcome. “For the regime to intervene and deploy its forces on the Turkish border is a comforting thought,” a Syrian Kurdish woman, who gave her name as Nowruz, told my colleagues. “If a deal with the regime is what it takes to stop these massacres, then so be it. At the end of the day, we are all Syrians, and the regime is Syrian, too.”

Turkey’s thinly veiled goal in launching the invasion was to smash Rojava, the name for the autonomous enclave in northeastern Syria carved out by the SDF over the past few years. Ankara views the main Syrian Kurdish faction as a direct outgrowth of the PKK, an outlawed Kurdish separatist group that has fought a bloody decades-long insurgency in Turkey. If northeastern Syria falls back under the security umbrella of Damascus, that may in and of itself be a satisfying outcome for the Turks. Russia’s role in brokering the rapprochement between Assad and the Syrian Kurds after the Turkish invasion may be a sign, analysts suggested, of a tacit Syrian endgame being thrashed out by the Turks and the Russians.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration painted itself as a somewhat helpless bystander. “We have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies,” Esper told CBS. In his Sunday tweets, Trump seemed to wave away any interest in the battle and reiterated his position that it’s “very smart not to be involved in the intense fighting" along the Syrian-Turkish border. This followed reports Friday that Turkish artillery appeared to be firing multiple “bracketing” rounds near positions manned by U.S. Special Forces, an astonishing act by a NATO ally that U.S. officials thought was deliberate.

Trump attempted to underscore his point of view with a garbled history lesson, but it only emphasized his lack of genuine engagement with the intricacies of Middle East policy. He brought up a supposed incident in 2017 when “Iraq was going to fight the Kurds in a different part of Syria” and his critics then also urged the United States to stand by their Kurdish allies. But no such event took place. Trump was possibly thinking of the Iraqi government’s seizure of the city of Kirkuk — in Iraq — from the control of fighters affiliated with factions based in the semiautonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan.

Whatever the case, some experts argued that the sudden American departure from northeastern Syria was inevitable — if not the chaotic manner in which it’s being carried out. Trump has been determined for months to pull out U.S. forces. The American support of the SDF — no matter the great affection for the Syrian Kurdish fighters among U.S. politicians and military officials — was always in conflict with Washington’s need to keep Turkey on its side.

At the same time, somewhat in opposition to the president, senior Trump officials steered a policy that let the SDF think it had “indefinite” backing from the United States. They also pursued an ambitious agenda of ending Iranian influence in Syria, a goal that is deeply at odds with Trump’s desire for an exit.

“For three years we have kidded ourselves about this, and those that pushed policies at odds with Trump, working to sketch out a maximalist policy that ignored Ankara’s obvious intent, and the wishes of the world’s most powerful man, should be ashamed," said Aaron Stein, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, to Al-Monitor.

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U.S. allies in the Mideast consider their options as Russia’s Putin visits the Gulf

By Adam Taylor | Published October 14 at 12:47 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 14, 2019 5:30 PM ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin landed in Riyadh on Monday for his first state visit to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in more than a decade, emphasizing not only coordination between three of the biggest oil producers in the world but also Moscow’s growing influence in the Middle East.

The timing may be especially fortuitous for Putin. President Trump’s announcement last week that the United States would be pulling out of northeast Syria, as well as his equivocation over the conflict with Iran, has left many traditional U.S. allies in the region nervous.

Some, such as the Syrian Kurds, already argue they have been abandoned, but the wider implications are still being felt in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and even Jerusalem. Notably, Russia maintains relations in all those cities, even as it works with rivals in Tehran, Damascus, Syria, and Ankara, Turkey, and faces U.S. sanctions.

“We build bilateral relations that rely on positive trends generated by our contacts; we do not build alliances against anyone,” Putin said in a joint interview with Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, Sky News Arabia and RT Arabic that aired Sunday.

Putin’s trip to Saudi Arabia and the UAE marks his first state visits to the countries since 2007. It shows continuing warming ties between Russia and the two Gulf States, which were traditionally Western allies with little ties to Moscow during the Cold War and which, until recently, maintained relatively modest trade links.

It is part of a strategy that puts Moscow at the center of Middle East politics. Putin recently announced he intends to visit another U.S. ally, Israel, early next year. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Russia to meet with Putin last month, just days before a bitterly contested election.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as Israel, had viewed the Trump presidency as a chance to reinvigorate their relationship with the United States. But while they appeared to favor Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran and other world powers, as tensions across the Persian Gulf grew, there were increasing doubts.

A crippling attack on key Saudi oil facilities last month raised new questions about Saudi Arabia’s ability to protect itself, even with its expensive relationship with the United States and the masses of U.S.-made weapons it buys. The United States announced Friday it would be sending 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia, but the president emphasized the financial aspect of the deal.

“Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing,” Trump told reporters. “That’s a first.”

The announcement that troops would be sent to Saudi Arabia came as U.S. forces were abruptly pulled out of northeastern Syria, allowing a Turkish offensive that threatened to devastate Syrian Kurds, who had been instrumental in the fight against the Islamic State.

The U.S. pullout resulted in a last-minute agreement between forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Kurdish forces, once on opposing sides of Syria’s long-running civil war. Since an intervention in 2015, Russia has been allied with Assad, providing air power and other support in an often brutal conflict.

Russia had played a key role in three days of negotiations that led to the agreement between the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a primarily Kurdish military alliance in Syria’s northeast, a Kurdish intelligence official told The Washington Post.

Moscow has good relations not only with the Kurds and Syria, but also with Turkey. Though Turkey is a member of NATO and an ally of the United States, Russia began deliveries of its S-400 missile defense system to Turkey in the summer, hastening a spat between Ankara and Washington, which suspended Turkish involvement in the U.S. F-35 fighter jet program in response.

The S-400 system is considered one of the most advanced missile defense systems in the world, but most U.S. allies have avoided purchasing it for fear of angering Washington. Last month, after the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, Putin jokingly suggested at an event in Ankara with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the kingdom should have purchased the weapons.

“The political leadership of Saudi Arabia just needs to make a wise state decision,” Putin said, pointing to the purchase of the S-300 missile system by Iran and the S-400 missile system by Turkey. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, also in attendance at the event, was shown smiling after the remark.

Russia ultimately remains far weaker than the United States in a variety of ways. Its economy has suffered greatly under sanctions, and it has suffered a number of humiliating military setbacks in recent years; even its vaunted S-400 system remains untested in real life.

But with longtime partners Syria’s Kurds finding themselves at odds with Trump’s Middle East plans, and even those with many friends in Washington such as Israel’s Netanyahu unsure of their footing, allies such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE may see Russia as a more reliable alternative — even if it is opposed to the United States and allied with many of their own rivals.

In his interview with Arab media outlets on Sunday, Putin emphasized the positives of his relationships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE but made no secret of his government’s ties to Iran and Syria. He said that while his government did not need to mediate, it could play a role.

“What you can do is maintain a friendly conversation with them and present some ideas from a friend’s perspective,” Putin said. “I am convinced that as highly intelligent people, they listen and analyze everything they hear.”

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The four biggest foes of America that gain from Trump’s Syria pullout

By Rick Noack | Published October 14 at 8:49 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 14, 2019 5:30 PM ET

When President Trump announced his decision to pull troops from northern Syria, his critics immediately warned that the move would pave the way for a Turkish offensive with potentially catastrophic repercussions.

State Department officials swiftly denied that Trump supported the Turkish incursion. Meanwhile, Trump appeared convinced he had made the right choice.

“Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out,” Trump wrote.

They now indeed are, but not to the advantage of the United States.

“What’s clear is that the U.S. has shot itself into the foot,” said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.

Who are likely winners?

The U.S. pullout has enabled Turkey to pursue its military incursion without having to fear U.S. interference, but it has also created opportunities for four of the United States’ key foes: Iran, the Assad regime, Russia and — potentially — the Islamic State group.

Who is set to lose most?

The biggest losers — it appears at this stage — are the allies who fought alongside U.S. soldiers in Syria: Europe and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The former are afraid the move will free Islamic State prisoners held in Kurdish prisons and camps and expose Europe to new militant attacks after a period of relative calm. The latter had established a de facto state in the north of Syria during the past years — in large parts in places previously ruled by the Islamic State. The Kurds hoped their territory was somewhat protected by a U.S. military presence that acted as a deterrent.

How did we get to this point?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long viewed the Kurdish-held territory in Syria as a haven for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK — which Erdogan considers to be a terrorist group.

Meanwhile, to the south of the Kurdish-held territories, Russia and Iran-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have been waiting for an opportunity to seize back the cities and swaths of land he lost during the war.

Trump’s announcement of a pullout one week ago offered an opening for both Erdogan and Assad. On Wednesday, Turkish troops began their offensive at multiple points along the Turkish-Syrian border. Turkish artillery fire on the Kurds, a mass exodus of civilians and apparent footage of roadside executions of Kurdish fighters soon followed. Hundreds of Islamic State family members escaped detention, according to Kurdish officials.

Without U.S. backing and amid mounting chaos, the Kurds appeared to face the choice between a deadly confrontation with the militarily superior Turkish forces — or a deal with the Assad regime.

By Sunday, the SDF had opted for the second option: They announced a deal with the Syrian government to allow forces loyal to the regime to enter its territory. By Monday, Syrian government troops were raising flags in the towns close to the Turkish-Syrian border in a move that could make the presence of the remaining U.S. troops in the region unsustainable.

How do the Assad regime, Russia and Iran benefit?

With the United States voluntarily giving up much of its leverage in Syria, Russia has probably the most to gain. Throughout the Syrian civil war, Russia has staunchly supported the Assad regime. During the weekend, the New York Times revealed that the Russian Air Force deliberately and repeatedly bombed Syrian hospitals in rebel-held areas, indicating how far Russia is willing to go to support Assad.

But apart from military force, Russian President Vladimir Putin has also pushed ahead with diplomatic initiatives, positioning him at the center of the Syrian morass. The U.S. pullout expands the Russian leverage in at least two ways.

Firstly, the strengthening of the Assad regime would inevitably also bolster Russia, a key backer.

But ironically, it could also help to deepen Moscow’s ties to the country Assad’s forces may now face off in northern Syria: Turkey. With the United States potentially poised to impose sanctions on Turkey, as Trump indicated Monday, Russia’s rapprochement with Turkey could speed up — despite the countries’ differing interests in Syria.

From Russia’s perspective, this apparent contradiction may not seem so contradictory at all. In the past, Moscow has argued that SDF fighters should yield control to the Assad regime. The Turkish incursion and U.S. pullout may lead to exactly such a scenario, as Sunday’s deal between the SDF and the Assad regime appeared to suggest.

The developments of the past week may also be an opportunity for Iran, another backer of the Assad regime. The U.S. pullout, said Brookings researcher Fathollah-Nejad, “will expand Iran’s opportunities to engage with Kurds and portray itself as the only reliable partner.” This could help Tehran restrict the Kurds’ drive for empowerment, which Iran opposes.

But Fathollah-Nejad cautioned that Russia’s and Iran’s interests in Syria were not necessarily aligned and that the Turkish incursion may still end up becoming a “double-edged sword” for Iran, which explains why Iranian officials have officially condemned the Turkish offensive.

Iranian officials may fear a radicalization of Kurdish separatism, said Fathollah-Nejad, and a full-blown resurgence of the Islamic State.

How does Islamic State gain?

Amid the backlash against his decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria, Trump went on the offensive last week and blamed European countries for what he suggested was a lack of willingness to take back Islamic State fighters born in Europe and held by the Syrian Kurds.

“Europe had a chance to get their ISIS prisoners, but didn’t want the cost,” Trump reiterated on Monday.

European officials have rejected Trump’s criticism, arguing that Islamic State returnees would in many cases walk free in Europe, as authorities often lack evidence for crimes committed in Syria or Iraq. Despite fierce criticism from human rights advocates, major European governments have opted to leave Islamic State fighters in Kurdish detention.

The U.S. pullout has resulted in an outcome detrimental both to U.S. counterterrorism officials and their European counterparts. Some 785 people affiliated with the Islamic State escaped from a camp on Sunday, according to Kurdish officials.

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Could Iran Crush Great Britain in a War?

Which leaves naval and air power as the key factors. Like its tank fleet, the Iranian navy is a large hodgepodge of Russian, North Korean and indigenous designs, as well as old Western vessels from the 1960s and 1970s. But it does have dozens of missile and torpedo boats, as well as small craft equipped with rocket launchers and machine guns that could potentially overwhelm a larger but lone warship. Britain has a more conventional navy of high-tech destroyers, frigates and even a new aircraft carrier – but at 76 ships, the Royal Navy is but a shadow of its former glory.“A comparison of the UK and Iran’s military strength shows Britain falling behind when it comes to manpower, land and naval strength and petroleum resources,” the newspaper proclaimed after Iran seized a British tanker in the Persian Gulf, in retaliation for Britain seizing an Iranian tanker at Gibraltar.The Daily Express article was based on GlobalFirepower.com, which features both statistics on the armed forces of 137 nations, and ranks those nations using a proprietary formula that apparently includes a nation’s population and military manpower, geographical size, financial strength, oil reserves, transportation infrastructure, and quantity of military hardware.(This first appeared earlier this month.)Britain ranks eighth on the “Global Firepower Index,” while Iran comes in not far behind in 14th place (the U.S. comes in first place, Israel 17th). Indeed, GlobalFirepower.com lists Iran as being stronger than Britain in several categories: 873,000 military personnel to Britain’s 233,000, 1,634 Iranian tanks to 331 British vehicles and 386 Iranian naval vessels to 76 British (Britain is credited with more airpower, with 811 military aircraft to 509 Iranian). Iran has more oil, but weaker finances.All of which proves how much statistics can be misleading. Britain and Iran are not in the same league at all.First and foremost, while Iran may or may not be developing nuclear weapons, Britain most certainly has them. And not some jury-rigged “physics package” assembled in an underground bunker, but four Vanguard-class nuclear submarines, each armed with 16 Trident thermonuclear-armed ballistic missiles. That’s enough atomic firepower to send Russia and China back to the Middle Ages, let alone Iran.However, Britain wouldn’t use nukes against Iran for political reasons, and Iran would be committing suicide to use them against Britain or anyone else. Which leaves the more immediate prospect of a limited conflict in the Persian Gulf, most likely a reprise of the 1980s “Tanker War,” in which Iran will attack or seize oil tankers in retaliation for economic sanctions, while Britain (and the U.S., and possibly Europe) will attempt to stop them.In which case, how many tanks Iran and Britain have doesn’t matter. Never mind that Britain’s Challenger 2 tanks are world-class vehicles that leave behind Iran’s larger but motley fleet of Russian, 1970s American and British, and indigenously manufactured tanks. But that’s not the point: Britain isn’t sending an armored division to invade Iran. And if it did, it would certainly be part of a multinational (mostly American) force.Which leaves naval and air power as the key factors. Like its tank fleet, the Iranian navy is a large hodgepodge of Russian, North Korean and indigenous designs, as well as old Western vessels from the 1960s and 1970s. But it does have dozens of missile and torpedo boats, as well as small craft equipped with rocket launchers and machine guns that could potentially overwhelm a larger but lone warship. Britain has a more conventional navy of high-tech destroyers, frigates and even a new aircraft carrier – but at 76 ships, the Royal Navy is but a shadow of its former glory. Currently, Britain is only sending a single destroyer and a frigate as convoy escorts in the Persian Gulf.Ditto in the air, where Iran’s museum mix of a handful of old American-made F-14 and F-4 fighters, Russian-made aircraft that fled from Iraq to Iran and were interned, and Iranian designs such as the Saeqeh, which looks remarkably like the F-5 fighters the U.S. sold to Iran in the 1970s. Britain has the advanced Eurofighter Typhoon, has now received its first F-35 stealth fighters, and can support its combat aircraft with an array of tankers, electronic warfare planes, and drones.But here is where numerical comparisons of military strength really fail. If Iran were to invade Britain, there would be no question of which party is stronger. However, in the Persian Gulf, British forces are operating 3,000 miles from the UK. Even with access to bases belonging to Iran’s hostile Arab neighbors, the British would still be operating in Iran’s home waters, where all the tools of coastal guerrilla warfare – mines, small boat attacks – would be available to Tehran.So is Britain or Iran stronger? It depends on the circumstances.Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.Image: Wikipedia.(This article was originally published earlier this month and is being republished due to reader interest.)

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