Bad news for Sunni jihadists; good news for the World

From the article:

In an effort to buttress the Iraqi military’s abilities, the Obama administration has sought congressional approval to lease and eventually sell Apache helicopter gunships. But some lawmakers have been hesitant, fearing that they might be used by al-Maliki to intimidate political opponents. [Emphasis added.]

No doubt the same Senators who want greater sanctions against Iran, just as the US is negating a peace treaty with Iran and Russia and China and France and England and Germany.  Those Senators like Sunni extremists.  I wonder why.  Are the Senators ideologically committed to Sunni jihadists, or are they paid for a commitment?  Or both?  In any case they are not a credit to America.

allie durell douthit

3423 francis street

808/675-8750

ddouthit@mac.com

შეიძლება თქვენ ფეხით სილამაზე. 

Dallas Morning News, by way of The New York Times

Karim kadim/The Associated Press

A man stood guard while women walked through the site of a bombing in a Christian section of Baghdad on Wednesday.

Published: 25 December 2013 10:56 PM

Updated: 25 December 2013 11:00 PM

U.S. sends arms to help Iraqis fight extremists

WASHINGTON — The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by an al-Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria. 

The move follows an appeal for help in battling the extremist group by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who met with President Barack Obama in Washington last month. 

But some military experts question whether the patchwork response will be sufficient to reverse the sharp downturn in security that has already led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis this year, 952 of them Iraqi security force members, according to the United Nations, Iraq’s highest level of violence since 2008. 

Al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, has become a potent force in northern and western Iraq. Riding in armed convoys, the group has intimidated towns, assassinated local officials and, in an episode last week, used suicide bombers and hidden explosives to kill the commander of the Iraqi army’s 7th Division and more than a dozen of his officers and soldiers as they raided an al-Qaeda training camp near Rutbah. 

Bombings in Christian areas of Baghdad on Christmas Day, which killed more than three dozen people, also bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation. 

The surge in violence stands in contrast to earlier assurances from senior Obama administration officials that Iraq was on the right path, despite the failure of U.S. and Iraqi officials in 2011 to negotiate an agreement for a limited number of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq. 

Iraq’s foreign minister has floated the idea of having U.S.-operated, armed Predator or Reaper drones respond to the expanding militant network. But al-Maliki, who is positioning himself to run for a third term as prime minister and who is sensitive to nationalist sentiment at home, has not formally requested such intervention. 

The idea of carrying out such drone attacks, which might prompt the question of whether the Obama administration has succeeded in bringing the Iraq war to what the president has called a “responsible end,” also appears to have no support in the White House. 

“We have not received a formal request for U.S.-operated armed drones operating over Iraq, nor are we planning to divert armed ISR over Iraq,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. 

For now, the new lethal aid from the United States includes a shipment of 75 Hellfire missiles, which were delivered to Iraq last week. The weapons are strapped beneath the wings of small Cessna turboprop planes and fired at militant camps, with the CIA providing targeting assistance. 

In addition, 10 ScanEagle reconnaissance drones are expected to be delivered to Iraq by March. They are smaller cousins of the larger, more capable Predators that used to fly over Iraq.
U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say they have effectively mapped the locations and origins of the al-Qaeda network in Iraq and are sharing this information with the Iraqis.
Administration officials said the aid was significant because the Iraqis had virtually run out of Hellfire missiles. The Iraqi military, with no air force to speak of and limited reconnaissance of its own, has a very limited ability to locate and quickly strike al-Qaeda militants. The combination of U.S.-supplied Hellfire missiles, tactical drones and intelligence is intended to augment that limited Iraqi ability. 

The Obama administration has also given three Aerostat balloons to the Iraqi government and has provided three additional reconnaissance helicopters to the Iraqi military. The United States also is planning to send 48 Raven reconnaissance drones before the end of 2014 and to deliver next fall the first of the F-16 fighters Iraq has bought. 

But the lack of armed drones, some experts say, will hamper efforts to dismantle the al-Qaeda threat in Iraq over the coming weeks and months. 

“Giving them some ScanEagle drones is great,” said Michael Knights, an expert on Iraqi security at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “But is it really going to make much difference? Their range is tiny. 

“The real requirement today is for a long-range, high endurance armed drone capability,” added Knights, who frequently travels to Iraq. “There is one place in the world where al-Qaeda can run a major affiliate without fear of a U.S. drone or air attack, and that is in Iraq and Syria.” 

In an effort to buttress the Iraqi military’s abilities, the Obama administration has sought congressional approval to lease and eventually sell Apache helicopter gunships. But some lawmakers have been hesitant, fearing that they might be used by al-Maliki to intimidate political opponents. 

Using extortion and playing on Sunni grievances against al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government, the al-Qaeda affiliate is largely self-financing. One Iraqi politician, who asked not to be named to avoid retaliation, said al-Qaeda militants had even begun to extort money from shopkeepers in Ramadi, Anbar’s provincial capital. 

A number of factors are helping the al-Qaeda affiliate. The terrorist group took advantage of the departure of U.S. forces to rebuild its operations in Iraq and to push into Syria. Now that it has established a strong foothold in Syria, it is in turn using its base there to send suicide bombers into Iraq at a rate of 30 to 40 a month, using them against Shiites but also against Sunnis who are reluctant to cede control. 

Michael R. Gordon
and Eric Schmitt,
The New York Times

Images from Google Images:

A tradition of treating captives humanly has not, unfortunately, 

taken root in the Middle East. 

Nor in America, sadly.

Conflict in the East China Sea; and a recommended movie

The Times article below tells of potential conflict between China, Japan, and South Korea in the East China Sea.  I won't try to summarize the Times article.

Here are maps and pictures of the islands -- Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China -- in dispute, and the names of the three seas in the region.

The last map shows how extraordinarily close Japan and Korea are.  A beautiful movie, about disaffected young men in Korea an Japan and heir peculiar relationships with each other, is, in netflix streaming, named Boat.  Google has no good stills from the movie but here are posers:

The movie has Korean subtitles when he Japanese  guy is talking, and Japanese when the Korean is talking; English for both. T he guys can understand each other's language.

One can, apparently, row a boat from Korea to Japan, overnight if one is a smuggler, so close are the two countries.   And at times the East Sea or Sea of Japan is flat and tiny waves lap both coasts.  Life as we don't know it.  Highly recommended.

∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼

The New York Times

December 1, 2013
In the East China Sea, a Far Bigger Test of Power LoomsBy DAVID E. SANGERWASHINGTON — In an era when the Obama administration has been focused on new forms of conflict — as countries use cyberweapons and drones to extend their power — the dangerous contest suddenly erupting over a pile of rocks in the East China Sea seems almost a throwback to the Cold War.
Suddenly, naval assets and air patrols are the currency of a shadow conflict between Washington and Beijing that the Obama administration increasingly fears could escalate and that American officials have said could derail their complex plan to manage China’s rise without overtly trying to contain it. As in the Cold War, the immediate territorial dispute seems to be an excuse for a far larger question of who will exercise influence over a vast region.
The result is that, as the Chinese grow more determined to assert their territorial claimsover a string of islands once important mainly to fishermen, America’s allies are also pouring military assets into the region — potentially escalating the once obscure dispute into a broader test of power in the Pacific.
Now a maritime outpost that had modest strategic significance is taking on enormous symbolic import. South Korea, which has broader concerns about China’s regional power, is building a new naval base for 20 warships, including submarines, arguing that it has to protect vital shipping lanes in the East China Sea for its exports — including many electronics headed to China.
The Japanese, after largely depending on American bases on Okinawa to back up their own limited patrols in the area, plan to build a new army base by 2016 on a small, inhabited island near the disputed islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.
The Japanese are also planning to deploy more F-15s and radar planes to Okinawa and a new helicopter carrier, and, for the first time, have considered buying unarmed American drones to patrol the area, part of a three-year-long shift in military strategy to focus on their southern islands and on China. That is part of a fundamental change in the national mind-set toward a Japan that is more willing and able to defend itself than anytime since World War II, in part because of doubts about America’s own commitment to the region.
As Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left on Sunday for a trip that will take him to the capitals of all three major contestants — Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing — the administration’s public message is that all sides need to cool down and keep nationalistic talk from making a tense situation worse.
Mr. Biden will encounter countries that are now re-examining how civilian and military officials interact: Over the past few weeks, for very separate reasons, Japan and China have each approved the creation of a national security council. For Japan, it is an effort to strengthen the hand of the prime minister in times of crises, a concept the Japanese body politic long resisted because of the legacies of World War II.
For China, it appears to be an effort by President Xi Jinping to exercise a degree of control over all sources of national power that his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, never fully mastered. Interestingly, as China sent its aircraft carrier to another potential trouble spot, the South China Sea, its path avoided the disputed islands, perhaps a sign that the Chinese realize they may have overplayed their hand.
Still, in private, American officials say they are worried that a small incident — a collision like the one between an American intelligence plane and the Chinese air force a dozen years ago off Hainan Island — could rapidly worsen the situation.
On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Tom Donilon, who was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser until earlier this year and a principal architect of the administration’s approach to China, said a similar “risk of miscalculation” is what “we need to be very concerned about going forward here.” A senior administration official said Mr. Biden’s message would be that the United States will “seek crisis management mechanisms and confidence-building measures to lower tensions and reduce risk of escalation or miscalculation.”
But one of Mr. Obama’s current advisers said, “It’s pretty clear this isn’t really about the islands.” Declining to speak on the record about a sensitive strategic issue, the official added that it was about a desire by some in China, including the People’s Liberation Army and perhaps the new political leadership, “to assert themselves in ways that until recently they didn’t have the military capability to make real.”
The adviser added: “They say it’s in response to our efforts to contain them, but our analysis is that it’s really their effort to push our presence further out into the Pacific.”
In fact, on his last trip to Asia as secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates said in January 2011 that he believed the long-term goal of the Chinese was to push the United States to “the second island chain,” farther out in the Pacific, keeping American air and naval assets ever farther from the region around China’s coast. Two years later, Obama officials will not utter that view in public, but it is a running theme in American intelligence assessments about the Chinese military, tempered by evidence that some Chinese officials worry about blowback if they overreach.
That has been a repeated cycle in Mr. Obama’s relations with the Chinese. In 2010, a series of episodes, touched off by American arms sales to Taiwan and the ramming of a Japanese coast guard ship in the Senkakus by an inebriated Chinese sea captain, led China to cut off military-to-military relations between Beijing and Washington and the sale of rare-earth metals, used for electronics, to the Japanese.
Both proved temporary, and by the end of the year some senior Chinese officials, led by the state councilor, Dai Bingguo, warned that China’s actions were driving countries in the region into American hands. “Some say China wants to replace the United States and dominate the world,” Mr. Dai wrote in an article that Mr. Donilon frequently cited. “That is simply a myth.”
But Mr. Dai is gone from power, and the Obama administration is now trying to figure out how to interpret each new Chinese action under Mr. Xi, of which the recent “air defense identification zone” was considered the most calculated and, perhaps, the most muscular. Many countries claim such zones; China knew it was claiming it over disputed territory.
Mr. Obama’s immediate response was to send two unarmed B-52 bombers on what the Pentagon called “routine” runs over the territory; they were routine, but the timing and symbolism were lost on no one. Now the White House faces the more complex task of its longer-term response. To make the promise of his “Asian pivot” real, the president will have to convince Congress, and allies in the region, that he means to devote more military, diplomatic and economic attention there — not to contain China, he insists, but to preserve and extend America’s longtime role as a keeper of the peace in the Pacific.
That will be challenging at a time of Pentagon budget cuts, a national mood to focus on problems at home and a national security apparatus focused on Iran, Syria and the future of the Middle East.
Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Beijing, and Martin Fackler from Tokyo.