The New Yorker

Iran's Dinner Diplomacy
By Robin Wright 

Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, did not shake hands with Barack Obama at the United Nations this week, a year after their celebrated cell-phone chat. The two men didn’t even pass each other in the hallway. But Rouhani did give a quiet dinner at his hotel on Tuesday for twenty former American officials—including a secretary of state, three national-security advisers, and a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—from all six Administrations since the 1979 revolution.

He and his guests sat at four tables arranged in a rectangle, around a four-foot-tall bouquet of showy flowers, including pastel gladioli, an Iranian favorite. The private event may have been more important in shaping the thinking of Washington’s policy community than Rouhani’s speech to the General Assembly yesterday.

It’s crunch time for diplomacy on Iran’s controversial nuclear program, with not much moving lately and the November 24th deadline looming. Tehran and Washington have also, suddenly, found themselves with common cause in confronting the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham. The ISIS threat was Rouhani’s primary focus during his week of intensive public diplomacy in New York. It overshadowed the nuclear issue—and redefined Tehran’s motive for wanting a deal.

“I deeply regret to say that terrorism has become globalized—from New York to Mosul, from Damascus to Baghdad, from the Easternmost to the Westernmost parts of the world, from Al-Qaeda to Daesh,” Rouhani told the General Assembly. (Daesh is another name for ISIS.) “The extremists of the world have found each other and have put out the call: ‘Extremists of the world unite.’ But are we united against the extremists?”

Rouhani blamed unnamed intelligence agencies, implicitly in oil-rich Arab countries, for putting “blades in the hands of madmen, who spare no one.” And he indicted the West, for “strategic blunders” that spawned havens of chaos exploited by extremists, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. He challenged the legality of the new U.S.-led military campaign in Syria, operating without an international mandate or an invitation by the Syrian government. (Iraq did request intervention.) He suggested that bombing Syria was a violation akin to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

As in previous U.N. speeches by Iranian leaders, Rouhani portrayed the Islamic Republic as ever the innocent neighbor, victimized by others’ misdeeds. Iran is actually on the State Department’s official list for sponsoring terrorist groups, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas. For three years, Iran’s aid, arms, and advisers have helped Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, to beat back both secular rebels and Islamic extremists.

But the ISIS threat has generated a new willingness, even among naysayers, for Tehran and Washington to listen to each other, despite differences over what to do about it. Rouhani’s language, including a reference to the “savages’’ of the Islamic State, echoed the speeches of Obama and other Western leaders at the U.N. this week.

The mood at the dinner was subdued, even somber, I am told. After a meal of Middle Eastern dishes, heavy on lamb and rice, Rouhani engaged in a give-and-take for almost two hours. Among his guests were the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the former national-security advisers Stephen Hadley, Samuel Berger, and Brent Scowcroft, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, and the former congresswoman Jane Harman, who served on the House Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Armed Services Committees.

“It was a pretty stellar group of Americans,” James Dobbins, a special envoy to crisis zones for the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations, told me. “It was a tribute to the importance of the issues and our fascination with the individual that the Iranians could attract such a group.” The event was coördinated by the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank led by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and Suzanne DiMaggio.

Rouhani, a mid-ranking Shiite cleric who wears a white turban (signifying that he is not a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad), took five questions at a time.

“Some he dodged. Some weren’t answered satisfactorily. But some were very interesting exchanges,” Berger, Bill Clinton’s national-security adviser, said. “I was impressed by him. My impression was that he wants a [nuclear] agreement. I think he sees it as an important path. Whether we have the room or they have the flexibility, I don’t know.”

Reactions varied widely. Some guests felt that Rouhani genuinely wants to do business with the United States. “He wants to engage, and I think that’s very positive,” Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush’s national-security adviser, told me. “One of our problems with Iran for a number of years has been that the mullahs, or whoever runs the place, have not wanted real engagement.”

But another former official, who did not want to be quoted, was scornful of Rouhani, and others were skeptical. Hadley, George W. Bush’s national-security adviser, described Iran’s President as “formidable” and “tough,” even when Rouhani was arguing that nuclear talks could be “a stepping stone” for future collaboration with the United States.

Robert Einhorn, who until last year was a member of the U.S. nuclear-negotiation team and is now at the Brookings Institution, said, “The theme he was trying to stress was that a nuclear deal was a gateway opportunity, and if only there was political will on the nuclear issue then there’d be real opportunity to coöperate on a whole range of issues. He mentioned it four or five times.”

One of those issues is Afghanistan, which shares a five-hundred-and-seventy-mile border with Iran. In 2001, after the Taliban was ousted, the world’s only theocracy and its most powerful democracy, in a rare collaboration, worked together on forming a new government. Dobbins and the current Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, were the primary brokers. Both were at the dinner. Now Iran and the U.S. are worried about whether Afghanistan, still a fractured country, can survive political fissures after a disputed election, in the midst of a Taliban insurgency, and with NATO drawing down military forces.

“They called on me, so I said a few words about Afghanistan,” Dobbins told me. “I said that a few weeks ago we almost saw the overthrow of an Afghan constitutional order that Iran and the U.S. had worked together to put in place. We’ve overcome those difficulties, but a new national unity government is very fragile and needs support. I said we’d be more successful if Iran and the United States collaborated more closely. Rouhani responded positively. He effectively confirmed that our approaches were similar.”

Rouhani’s answers were “reasonable, in the main, except when he had to defend Syria,” the career diplomat Thomas Pickering told me. “He did try to strike the right note and find helpful things to say, but he didn’t give away for free things he was hanging on to. He knew his brief.” As for Rouhani’s decision not to shake hands with Obama this year, Pickering said, “Why do it if it would not get him an answer on the major question and might get some serious backlash back home? Why do it if it’s not going to push the ball ahead in the future in a way that would bring him tangible benefits or get sanctions lifted?”

At a breakfast that I and other journalists attended with Rouhani on the same day as the dinner, the Iranian leader acknowledged that any nuclear deal was likely to face a “dust bowl” backlash from conservatives in Tehran.

The unexplained detention, two months ago, of the Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian, who is American-born, and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, an Iranian journalist, is widely seen as a political ploy by Iran’s conservative judiciary to signal limits on Rouhani’s Presidential power. He and Zarif have both published op-eds in the Post during the past year. Both have intervened to win the couple’s release—so far to no avail. “The judiciary is independent,” Rouhani told several audiences in New York.

Rouhani predicted that Obama, too, would face opposition at home. He wasn’t wrong. This morning, Ted Cruz, the Republican Senator from Texas, declared, “This week, the government of Iran is sitting down with the United States government, swilling Chardonnay in New York City, to discuss … a very, very bad deal that tragically is setting the stage for Iran to acquire nuclear-weapons capability.” (Only soft drinks were served at the dinner; the Iranian delegation adheres to Islam’s strict ban on alcohol.)

At the breakfast, Rouhani recalled that when he spoke with Obama on the phone last year they had discussed “in depth” the potential for collaboration—provided they could broker an agreement guaranteeing that Tehran could develop independent nuclear energy without acquiring a nuclear weapon. As to the question of possible coöperation on other matters, he said that he had answered Obama with a Persian proverb: “Let’s raise the baby we just gave birth to before we have another.” This year, given the success of ISIS, the Iranians seem to be in a bit more of a hurry to get that process started.

The Wall Street Journal

Is the Afghan Deal Viable?

By Robin Wright 

After the largest vote recount ever undertaken anywhere, the Afghan election is finally over. But a pivotal question still looms: Will the novel political compromise–with a unique division of power between a president and a “chief executive officer”–actually work? It’s dubious.

The two competitors signed a power-sharing agreement Sunday in Kabul, then embraced, albeit tepidly. The rivalry remains so intense that the country’s Independent Election Commission opted not to reveal the final election recount, which was paid for by the United States and conducted by the United Nations. It was too volatile–at least for now–and too vulnerable to further dispute.

So much for transparency in a new democracy.

The bigger danger ahead is that the deal will not resolve the political rivalry between the camps of the two candidates. Ashraf Ghani, the former World Bank economist and Afghan finance minister, has been declared president. Former foreign minister Abdullah Abullah (or someone he designates) is the new CEO, which is vaguely defined as a kind of prime minister. And there’s the rub.

Afghanistan has an executive presidency. But the four-page agreement signed Sunday gives the CEO significant powers over the country’s cabinet as well as over a newly created council of ministers. And presidential powers have not been changed or redefined.

The outcome is supposed to be a coalition government. But Afghanistan’s new political pact is a bit like saying that the system will be both presidential and parliamentary–and that there are two effective heads of government. In a fragile society with a history of warlordism and ethnic violence, the new formula is still susceptible to implosion.

Secretary of State John Kerry journeyed twice to Kabul this summer to broker the deal. The White House said Sunday that the agreement “restores confidence in the way forward” and “marks an important opportunity for unity and increased stability.”

Three questions remain:

First, is the pact a short-term solution that ends up contributing to long-term instability, especially as NATO winds down its military presence? Afghanistan might have been better served if its first peaceful and democratic transition of power had been a decisive hand-off from one executive to another. It’s hard to imagine a comparable power-sharing arrangement–at least one that worked well–between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, for example, or John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Second, what impact will the beleaguered election process have on Afghans, who defied death threats and violence to vote–twice. Widespread fraud was alleged in the April election among eight candidates and the June run-off between the top two. As the election saga dragged out, Afghanistan’s economy and security situation deteriorated. Will Afghans believe in the process enough to keep participating?

Third, the constitution does not include a prime minister so will have to be amended. Can Afghanistan’s volatile political environment endure a formal debate, which could trigger new tensions over the division of power? And what happens in the meantime?

“This whole agreement and process is out of Afghan law and unconstitutional,” said Mohammad Ali Elizadah, a member of parliament. “I don’t think we will have an efficient and effective government.”

The New Yorker

Iran & the Coalition of Repenters

When I was in Tehran last December, I called on Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, who had been the student ringleader of the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover and hostage crisis. His hair is white these days, and coiffed, and he has the girth and the slouch of his years. He still speaks with the same intensity, but his cause now is the need for coöperation between Iran and the United States.

“We have common ground in fighting terrorism,” he told me, sitting on an elegant settee in his apartment. “I would like to spend all my energy to heal this wound”—he meant the legacy of the hostage crisis—so that both countries might confront the “cancerous tumor” of Sunni extremism in the Middle East. “Shiites get on better with the West,” he said. “Sunni leaders are more radical than Shiites.”

  

I’d come to Iran to report on the new nuclear diplomacy between Tehran and Washington. But Iranians often brought up a different subject. The Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, warned me about a frightening group that had originated in Iraq. Little noticed by the rest of the world, it was operating from Syrian bases, had a cult-like attraction, and was clearly trying to get back into Iraq.

“The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”—ISIS—“is a group that is killing more people today in Baghdad than they are killing in Damascus,” he told me. “These are very, very dangerous groups of people, and we need to take corrective measures in order to preclude their expansion in other parts of the region. And, also, we need to work together in order to contain the spread of sectarian tension and violence in the region.” He went on: “It is in the interest of all players to help facilitate a resolution to the Syrian crisis, and Iran is simply one of them.”

A month later, the Iranians were disinvited from the international conference in Switzerland, attended by nearly forty countries, on how to end the Syrian civil war. Tehran believed that it could help broker a new government, as it had for Afghanistan after the Taliban’s ouster, in 2001. Iran had a four-point plan, which included a ceasefire and democratic elections that would be monitored by the United Nations but would allow President Bashar al-Assad to campaign to keep his office. Other participants balked. The reasons reflected regional rivalries and sectarian tensions, and, more fundamentally, Iran’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism by the State Department and its longstanding military ties to Assad. The Islamic Republic had credibility problems.

The diplomatic initiative, which brought together representatives of the Syrian government and Western-backed rebels, quickly fizzled, and ISIS gained ground against both the government and the moderate rebels. By June, black-hooded gunmen were racing their pickups across the Syrian border back into Iraq.

To salvage Iraq, another peace effort was convened in Paris earlier this week, with representatives from more than two dozen countries. Again, Iran was excluded, owing mainly to pressure from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two Sunni sheikhdoms that deeply distrust Iran’s Shiite theocracy. Iran lashed back, arguing that it’s now stuck mopping up a crisis created by the mistakes and miscalculations of others. In New York this week, before the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Zarif led the charge. “The United States responded to this menace long after it started,” he said at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Iran was not invited to Paris, which I would call a Coalition of Repenters, because most participants in that meeting, in one form or another, provided support to ISIS in the course of its creation and upbringing and expansion—actually, at the end of the day, creating a Frankenstein that came to haunt its creators.”

The United States shared the blame, he said, because Iraq had not become a “terrorism magnet” until after the American intervention, in 2003. The thousands of foreign recruits now swelling the Islamic State’s ranks didn’t come from Iran, he noted, but from the countries “sitting around the table in Paris.”

Yet, after a decade of trying to drive each other out of Iraq, the United States and Iran find themselves on the same side. Last month, Washington and Tehran separately came to the military rescue of the beleaguered Iraqi government after it lost a third of its territory, as ISIS threatened both Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Erbil. U.S. warplanes began air strikes on August 8th. Iran flew in planeloads of equipment and military advisers to Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Shiite militias.

Other countries in the new U.S.-led coalition will play their roles—French warplanes launched their first air strikes on ISIS earlier today—but the fact that Washington and Tehran have a shared interest in the outcome may prove just as decisive. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, disclosed this week that Washington had made at least three recent approaches to Tehran about Iraq—through Secretary of State John Kerry, the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, and the top U.S. negotiator at the Iran nuclear talks.

  

“I said no, because they have dirty hands,” Khamenei said on his official Web site. Washington, he declared, wants a “pretext to do in Iraq and Syria what it already does in Pakistan—bomb anywhere without authorization.” Zarif told me. “We have serious doubts about the willingness and ability of the United States to engage in a serious reaction to this menace across the board.” He meant ISIS. “This is a very mobile organization,” he said. “It’s not stationary so you can [just] attack it in Iraq.”

For all the rhetoric—perhaps for domestic consumption—Tehran does not oppose a virtual partnership with Washington on Iraq. “We were on the side of the Iraqi people, the Iraqi government, and the Kurdish government to actually help them fight ISIS,” Zarif said at the Council of Foreign Relations. “If the United States does the same, then it is up to the Iraqi government to coördinate how it wants to coördinate.”

But Zarif’s main pitch in New York—which is likely to be a theme of President Rouhani’s appearance at the United Nations next week—is that any campaign to eradicate the ISIS forces can’t rely on mere aerial bombardment. He told the Council, “We also need to stop providing them with those recruiting grounds, with those fertile possibilities of resentment, of disenfranchisement that can allow them to attract the youth in so many parts of the world, from the Middle East to Europe and the United States.” Next time, it was clear, Iran doesn’t want to be excluded from the process.

 And maybe it won’t be. Kerry hinted as much this afternoon, when he chaired a Security Council meeting on Iraq. The coalition required to eliminate ISIS, he said, “is not only, or even primarily, military in nature.” He went on, “It must be comprehensive, and include close collaboration across multiple lines of effort. It’s about taking out an entire network, decimating and discrediting a militant cult masquerading as a religious movement. There is a role for nearly every country in the world to play. Including Iran.”

The Wall Street Journal

Fighting the Islamic State:

A Name is a Name is a Coalition 

By Robin Wright   

It’s all in a name, after all. The U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State is facing skepticism even before it gets off the ground, reflected in the assorted titles used to describe it.

“The Reluctant Posse,” offered Rami Khouri, the Beirut-based columnist for The Daily Star and Agence Global.

“It’s the Coalition of the Hesitant,” said Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of al Arabiyya, appearing on National Public Radio this week.

“A Coalition of Uncertainty,” offered Tom Lippman of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

I think I’d call it – for now – the House of Cards Club because it’s a precarious frame without support beams, floor plan, doors or windows or furnishings, much less full financing.

The Obama administration is clearly trying to build a coalition that is something in-between the alliances that fought the last two Iraq wars. It wants participation that is more credible than the token U.S.-led coalition that fought Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. But it appears willing to settle for an alliance less robust than the coalition of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which, ironically, included troops from key Arab nations, even Syria.

Once the administration opted to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State, Secretary of State John Kerry scrambled to rally partners. Two hastily assembled summits this month – one in Jeddah of 10 Arab countries plus Turkey, the other in Paris bringing together 30 delegations from 26 countries – have produced a coalition largely in principle rather than in practice.

Their words are strong but their roles are vague. The imprecise language out of the two summits was participation “as appropriate.” Some of the commitments even seem tepid.

Jon Stewart poked fun at the coalition on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Monday.

“Oh really, Arab partners don’t want to be named. … So you’ll join the coalition as long as no one knows you’re joining it. On the DL. Just as long as none of your buddies find out. It’s like our coalition is your hookup, that you pretend not to recognize us at parties but as you walking by us, you go: ‘I’ll see you in Kurdistan at 3 a.m.’ Well guess what? Guess what, Mister. We’ll take it. Anything that help us avoid another Mideast walk of shame.”

Some partners have imposed their own conditions. The Saudis and Emiratis reportedly threatened not to participate in the Paris conference if Iran was included, even though Tehran played a key role in formation of a new government in Baghdad and is advising the three Shiite militias now fighting—along with Kurdish Peshmerga forces—against the Islamic State. Operationally, France indicated a willingness to provide air power for Iraq—but not Syria.

There’s a lot of picking-and-choosing that is not in the spirit of a coalition, especially from countries far closer and more vulnerable than the U.S. Unless its members offer a lot more muscle and momentum, the coalition risks being more of a diplomatic idea than a military reality.

The New Yorker

Iraq: The Risks

By Robin Wright

In 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell commissioned two of the State Department’s most respected diplomats to write a candid assessment of the risks if the United States invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The six-page memo, entitled “The Perfect Storm,” is still classified. Parts of it eventually leaked, however. Amid the enthusiasm to go to war, its warnings challenged conventional wisdom within the Bush Administration. It predicted that, at best, Saddam’s ouster would not magically transform Iraq, as one of the memo’s authors, Ryan Crocker, subsequently wrote. At worst, the invasion might unleash a multitude of forces that the United States was not equipped to confront or contain. The memo proved prescient.

A different Administration now faces the uncertainties of another Iraq war. American public opinion seems to be shifting in support of military action. On the eve of President Obama’s speech to the nation, and on the anniversary week of the September 11th attacks, seventy-one per cent of Americans said they fear that Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS (also called ISIL), now has the means to attack inside the United States, according to a CNN survey. A second poll, released today by the Washington Post-ABC, found that seven in ten Americans now favor a U.S. air campaign against the militants—up from forty-five per cent in June.

The menace posed by ISIS is undeniable, the danger of inaction great. “It is hard to overstate the threat that this organization poses,” Crocker, who served as Ambassador to Iraq from 2007 until 2009, wrote today in the Wall Street Journal, in an enthusiastic call for immediate action. Yet the risks of another American intervention in Iraq, this country’s third war in a quarter century, also give serious pause.

For the United States, the best possible outcome would be for the militants to withdraw from their illusory state in Iraq to bases in Syria, where they might wither in the face of strengthened Syrian rebels; ideally, the rebels would also bring an end to the Assad regime in Damascus. Iraq and Syria, with their multicultural societies, would then have breathing room to incubate inclusive governments. That’s the goal, anyway.

The worst outcome would be another open-ended, treasury-sapping, coffin-producing, and increasingly unpopular war that fails to erase ISIS or resurrect Iraq. It might even, in time, become a symbolic graveyard of American greatness—as it was for the French and the British. The Middle East has a proven record of sucking us in and spitting us out.

The risks extend beyond Iraq as well. A broad alliance is the centerpiece of President Obama’s new strategy, and Secretary of State John Kerry departs today for Jordan and Saudi Arabia to beef up the ten-nation “core coalition” formed at the NATO summit in Wales last week. “Almost every country on earth has a role to play,” Kerry said yesterday. Washington needs the Arab world to give the mission its imprimatur and defray costs, and support from Sunni leaders is critical in persuading Iraq’s Sunni tribes to turn against Sunni extremists in ISIS. But the Arabs may be skeptical, given the failure of the Palestinian-Israeli peace initiative brokered by Kerry and the fact that NATO’s well-intentioned intervention in North Africa three years ago has all but transformed Libya into a failed state.

These are just the obvious risks, apparent even in the early days of a war that the Administration has conceded may last years, into the next Presidency. Washington has pledged to defeat ISIS, or “drive it to the gates of hell,” in Vice-President Biden’s words. That inevitably means some sort of second phase in Syria. And, potentially, in Lebanon, where the movement also has new roots. Or even in Jordan: thousands of Jordanians are reportedly now fighting in Iraq as jihadists alongside ISIS, and Jordan’s monarchy, on the other side of an amorphous desert border, feels vulnerable.

In the past six decades, the United States has arguably won only one big war both militarily and politically. Operation Desert Storm, in 1990-91, forced Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait and restored the royal family. Yet the unintended consequences haunt us still. The presence of “infidel” forces based in neighboring Saudi Arabia helped convert Osama bin Laden from a de-facto ally into the leader of Al Qaeda.

In the intervening years, the barometer of “winning” has gradually changed. Paul Hughes, a senior adviser at the United States Institute of Peace and a former Army planning officer during Operation Desert Storm, told me this week, “The idea that we can stomp the bejesus out of a rival and put a bayonet to its throat does not define victory as it once did. The last person standing on the battlefield is no longer necessarily the winner.”

Success will depend foremost on the cohesion of a unity government of Iraq’s fractious politicos, the disparate Arabs and Kurds, and rival religious sects. That has been an unachievable goal since the second American intervention, in 2003, ousted Saddam. The political chasm doomed the otherwise successful American surge of troops in 2007, when the Shiite-dominated government failed to follow through in sharing power with the Sunni tribes that had ousted Al Qaeda.

Yesterday, more than four months after Iraq’s national elections, the country’s leaders finally formed a new government. Secretary of State John Kerry heralded it as a “major milestone,” with “the potential to unite all of Iraq’s diverse communities for a strong Iraq.” He said that the United States now stands “shoulder to shoulder with the Iraqis.” President Obama called to congratulate the new Prime Minister, Haidar al-Abadi, after his government was sworn in.

The process almost imploded, however, when disgruntled Kurds threatened a last-minute boycott over Baghdad’s failure, since January, to provide the Kurds with their agreed upon seventeen per cent of Iraq’s oil revenues, leaving northern Kurdistan unable to pay provincial salaries or its peshmerga fighters. The government is also short of the two positions most pivotal to national security, since the squabbling factions can’t agree on a minister for defense or for the interior.

During the Ottoman Empire, the land mass that is today’s Iraq was ruled in three distinct vilayets, or provinces, centered on Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. The primordial identities in those provinces—based on Shiite and Sunni religions as well as Arab or Kurdish ethnicity—still define Iraq. To accommodate the divisions, Iraq’s new government is bloated with three deputy prime ministers and three vice-presidents. (One of the vice-presidents is Nouri al-Maliki, whose autocratic rule over the past eight years produced the current crisis.) In a toxic climate, Prime Minister Abadi faces formidable challenges in trying to enact reforms, redistribute power, equitably share oil revenues—and prevent the government from fraying further.

The Administration’s strategy is premised in large part on government forces fighting ISIS on the ground, supported by foreign air power. But so far the Iraqi Army, which lost four divisions in the early days of the militants’ sweep across a third of the country’s landmass, has left most of the fighting to the Kurds’ peshmerga and to three Shiite militias that are loyal to their own leaders rather than to Baghdad.

The goal of a new intervention is to restore modern Iraq, carved out of the dying Ottoman Empire a century ago. But it also risks the reverse, accelerating Iraq’s breakup, especially without effective national-security forces to fight in its name or hold it together.

Last week, in a joint operation, the peshmerga and Shiite militias succeeded in liberating Amerli, a town of fifteen thousand, from ISIS. As victories go, it may have been a microcosm of what is to come. After the town was secured, the liberators went after each other. According to the Washington Post, Shiite militiamen were waving rifles at the peshmerga and warning that they were not welcome in the town. “We fought for three months here, and now we have to fight these bastards,” one of the peshmerga fighters told the Post. “If this continues, we’ll have another war.”

The Wall Street Journal

Rampant Global Child Abuse

By ROBIN WRIGHT 

Pity the children. In numbers sure to shock and numb, UNICEF Thursday issued the largest collection of data detailing violence against children globally.

World-wide, just over one-third of all students between the ages of 13 and 15 regularly face bullying in school, the U.N. agency reported. Western nations that pride themselves on honoring human rights – and condemn others for abuse, usually in high and mighty language – are no exception. In Europe and North America, roughly a third of all students aged 11 to 15 actually admit bullying other students.

Can there really that many child bullies in “civilized” nations? It only makes you wonder how many more are not fessing up? The prospects are scary, for both the young and their parents.

Violence against girls is especially noxious although, sadly, what girl doesn’t know that already?

World-wide, some 120 million girls under age 20 have experienced forced intercourse or other sexual acts, UNICEF reports. That’s roughly one out of every 10 girls.

What is particularly striking are the numbers in Switzerland, a country that can blend diverse languages and cultures but apparently doesn’t do so well with gender. UNICEF cites Switzerland’s own report showing that 22% of girls between 15 and 17 “experienced at least one incident of sexual violence involving physical contact.”

“These are uncomfortable facts—no government or parent will want to see them,” UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in announcing the report. “But unless we confront the reality each infuriating statistic represents—the life of a child whose right to a safe, protected children has been violated – we will never change the mindset that violence against children is normal and permissible. It is neither.” Lake is a former national security adviser during the Clinton administration.

Tragically, the least surprising number may be the U.N. findings on the murders of children and adolescents under age 20. UNICEF reports that they accounted for one-fifth of all homicide victims world-wide in the latest data.

The U.N. data has been collected from 190 countries. The report can only make you come away asking: What’s wrong with us–everywhere?

The New Yorker

NATO'S DIFFICULT TRIFECTA 

By Robin Wright 

The lordly Celtic Manor, a Welsh spa and golf resort down the road from Cardiff, will play host this week to a NATO summit of sixty world leaders. It may be the most important such meeting since the organization—the world’s mightiest military alliance—was created, in 1949. And it may determine what the United States does next on a trifecta of particularly troubling crises.

The Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS) has succeeded in redrawing the map of the Middle East. It poses a greater threat than Al Qaeda—and one that extends well beyond its “caliphate,” carved out of Iraq and Syria and now the size of Indiana. The recent American intervention—more than a hundred and twenty air strikes since August 8th—has destroyed a few dozen armed pickup trucks, mortar positions, and roadside bombs in the dusty scrubland of northwest Iraq. Last week, the Defense Department put the cost of these operations at five hundred and sixty million dollars, yet ISIS remains entrenched. Yesterday, the group released a video purporting to show the beheading of an American journalist, Steven Sotloff. In Estonia this morning, President Obama, who is en route to Wales, said, “One of our goals is to get NATO to work with us to help create the kinds of partnerships regionally that can combat not just ISIL but these kinds of networks as they arise and potentially destabilize allies and partners of ours in the region.”

In Afghanistan, the flaws and fraud in the country’s presidential election, held in April, threaten to spark a new conflict between ethnic groups—a conflict separate from the Taliban insurgency—just as NATO withdraws its troops. A runoff was held in June, again plagued by fraud. Even if the two rival candidates eventually form a coalition government, as Secretary of State John Kerry has tried (twice, since mid-July) to arrange, there is widespread fear that they won’t really share power or provide long-term stability. Could thirteen years, thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars all have been spent for so little? For political anarchy?

Meanwhile, Russia’s corrosive advances in Ukraine challenge the international order. In a private telephone call with the president of the European Commission, Vladimir Putin reportedly boasted that he could “take Kiev in two weeks” if he wished. Europe is shaken by fears that Putin might try similar incursions in the Baltic states, again in the name of protecting Russian-speaking residents. Russia would then be pressing into Europe from both the east and the north. “A great war has arrived at our doorstep, the likes of which Europe has not seen since World War II,” the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Valeriy Heletey, proclaimed in a Facebook post on Monday.

At the NATO summit, Obama, flanked by his Secretaries of State and Defense, will seek to galvanize the international community on all three crises, pool resources, build credibility, and defray costs. The gathering will include the twenty-eight NATO members, from North America and Europe, as well as some thirty other leaders from four other continents, representing countries as far-flung as Mongolia and the island nation of Tonga. (Though Ukraine is not a full NATO member, President Petro Poroshenko is scheduled to be in Wales.)

On paper, NATO’s numbers imply power. Its combined troop strength exceeds3.3 million, and the members’ combined military budgets represent well over half of the world’s defense spending—the finest technology, and the most extensive matériel. To cap it off, seven of the eight former members of the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s Soviet-era rival, now belong to NATO.

Yet NATO seems to have less nerve and energy than it once did. It has focussed more on preventing or containing new fires than on putting out existing blazes raging in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. Its recent stats aren’t encouraging, either. Since 2001, NATO has spread its wings beyond the European theatre (its original mandate), into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The first of these deployments was in Afghanistan, after the September 11th attacks, when NATO invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. (“An attack on one is an attack on all,” as Obama put it in a speech in Tallinn this morning.) In 2004, NATO formed a training mission for Iraqi security forces. And in 2011 it authorized warplanes to intervene in Libya. That air campaign was pivotal in ousting Muammar Qaddafi. But today Afghanistan teeters. Iraq and its military are in a shambles. Libya is a virtual failed state.

NATO initially planned for the Wales summit to focus on its accomplishment in seeing Afghanistan through its first democratic transition, after the alliance’s longest military intervention. But one head of state who will be missing from the gathering is the new Afghan president, since the votes are still being recounted. There was hope that both candidates might show up, but the latest talks between their two camps over how to share power collapsed—again—over the weekend.

Instead, NATO will create a “spearhead” military force—around four thousand troops—capable of deploying in hot spots within forty-eight hours. “This spearhead would be provided by allies in rotation . . . ready to respond where needed with air, sea, and special-forces support,” the NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told reporters on Monday. It will “travel light, but strike hard,” he said.

The nimble new force is part of NATO’s response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, which shares borders with a handful of member states. It is a message to Moscow: Don’t move any closer. NATO’s formal announcement will surely be accompanied by tough talk.

But the spearhead may prove little more than a palliative, a way to make the assembled powers feel as if they have a mechanism in place in case something else happens. It appears reactive, a kind of military tit-for-tat, and it does nothing to reverse Ukraine’s dismemberment. (It might even provoke Russia.) Rather than resolve the underlying problems, it merely reflects, writ large, the quandary in Washington.