Where Did the Migrant Crisis Come From?

By Peter Bergen
April 16, 2024

American voters say immigration is the number one issue on their minds in this crucial presidential election year. How did we get here? In part one of this series we look at Venezuela, a country that has seen a massive exodus of its population over the past decade, many of whom end up in cities and states across the U.S.

What does Iran really want? CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen
7 minute read
Published 6:45 PM EDT, Sun April 14, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
On the surface, Iran’s Saturday missile and drone attack on Israel was a response to the Israelis’ airstrike on an Iranian consulate building in Damascus two weeks ago that killed at least seven officials, including commanders of the nation’s Revolutionary Guards.

Yet it also was an outgrowth of the enmity between Iran and Israel, including its ally the United States, that has been building for decades, a result of both the Iranian regime’s nature and of policy reversals and blunders by the US ever since the Western- and Israel-allied Shah of Iran was overthrown by Islamists in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

“A modern, strong, peaceful Iran could become a pillar of stability and progress in the region,” former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in 2006. “This cannot happen unless Iran’s leaders decide whether they are representing a cause or a nation – whether their basic motivation is crusading or international cooperation.”

Like other regimes driven by a revolutionary ideology, Iran’s ayatollahs chose to be a cause, exporting their influence and ideas to other countries and to an array of militant groups.

The goals of the ayatollahs are threefold: to evict the United States from the Middle East, to replace Israel with Palestine and to bring down the US-led world order, according to Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, whom I recently interviewed for the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.” These are not modest goals, but Sadjadpour said you can’t underestimate the revolutionary fervor of Iran’s leaders.

The Iranian campaign to evict the United States from the Middle East began in Lebanon in the early 1980s, when Iran backed a ragtag bunch of militants living in the Shia-dominated areas of southern Beirut who had founded Hezbollah, “the party of God.”

Using the then-novel technique of suicide bombings, they bombed the US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including eight CIA officers, the deadliest day in CIA history. Hezbollah also bombed the Marine barracks building in Beirut, killing 241 American service members.

Those attacks by Hezbollah achieved their aim. The Reagan administration pulled all US forces out of Lebanon. A wealthy young Saudi fundamentalist named Osama bin Laden was watching closely: He concluded that if you applied enough military pressure on the Americans, they would pull out of the Middle East.

After bin Laden’s al Qaeda attacked the US on September 11, 2001, the Americans effectively handed the Iranians a big gift, which was the 2003 overthrow of their mortal enemy, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, against whom Iran had fought a ruinous, almost-decade-long war during the 1980s.

Following the fall of Saddam, Iraq was wracked by a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands. Iran introduced into the Iraqi war zone highly effective roadside bombs known as EFPs – Explosively Formed Penetrators – that wounded and killed hundreds of American soldiers. In 2011, the US withdrew from Iraq.

The official US Army history of the Iraq War concluded that Iran was the only winner of that war. This wasn’t the conclusion of vocal war critic Noam Chomsky but of a group of sober US Army historians.

Norman Roule was the top US intelligence official on Iran from 2008 to 2017. Roule observed to me for the “In the Room” podcast that “Iran uses a cookie-cutter approach across the region, but the dough in each country is different, and the cooking time is different.”

In Syria, a civil war began in 2011, and Iran saw another opportunity for this cookie-cutter approach by propping up the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad with billions of dollars of aid as well as Iranian advisers and Hezbollah forces on the ground fighting for the Assad regime.

That explains the continued presence in Damascus today of senior Iranian military leaders and advisers like the ones who were killed by the Israeli airstrike on April 1 that precipitated Iran’s missile and drone barrage against Israel on Saturday.

In Yemen, the Houthis started fighting the central government, and – particularly after Iran’s rival for regional dominance, the Saudis, intervened in the Yemeni war in 2015 – Iran trained the Houthis and supplied them with missiles and drones. These are the same weapons that the Houthis have been using against ships in the Red Sea, effectively closing the shipping route to and from the Suez Canal and cutting off a critical route for global trade.

And then there is Hamas. While Iran had no foreknowledge of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, according to Christine Abizaid, the director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Iran has supplied Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars for weapons and training, according to the US Treasury Department.

Iran’s proxies in the Middle East, to one degree or another, now exert significant influence on Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. These proxies are grandiloquently known as “the axis of resistance” to Israel and the United States, and they exert their influence on a region that extends 1,500 miles from the north in Lebanon to Yemen’s Red Sea coast in the south. And now the Iranians are closer than ever to having nuclear weapons.

The most significant foreign policy blunder of the Trump administration was pulling out of the Iranian nuclear deal inked by the Obama administration, which was preventing the Iranians from enriching uranium above around 4%; you need around 90% enrichment of uranium for a nuclear device. Before former President Donald Trump reneged on the deal, Iran was observing the terms of the nuclear agreement, according to Trump’s own intelligence chiefs. Today, the Iranians reportedly have enough highly enriched uranium for three weapons and are considered closer than ever to having a workable nuclear weapon.

Saturday’s drone and missile attacks against Israel were designed to show Israel and the region that the Iranian regime can’t be trifled with, and the Israeli attack on its military leaders in Damascus would be avenged. However, it might not trigger a major war since 99% of the 300 drones and missiles launched by Iran were intercepted, according to the Israeli military. It’s likely that Iran’s theocratic regime, which has faced major internal protests and is approaching a generational transition, wanted to respond to calls for retribution for the Damascus attack without triggering a major war with two superior militaries – that of the US and Israel.

The Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York released a statement as Iran’s attacks were in progress, saying they had now responded to the strike against “our diplomatic premises in Damascus” and “the matter can be deemed concluded.”

That, of course, doesn’t mean that Israel will deem the matter concluded. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who hasn’t achieved his strategic objectives in Gaza of wiping out Hamas militarily and returning the 100 or so hostages held by Hamas, and is also not well-liked by most Israelis, can surely benefit from a rally-around-the-flag effect by casting himself as an assertive wartime leader. Of course, the Israeli public may also demand action to restore deterrence against Iran, having just lived through a barrage of Iranian missile and drone strikes.

So, despite President Joe Biden calling Netanyahu on Saturday night to tell him that Iran’s attack hadn’t succeeded and saying the US wouldn’t support any counterattack, it would hardly be in character for Netanyahu not to respond in some fashion against Iran.

And here is where things might get even worse as the burgeoning regional conflict that the Biden administration has long tried to avoid is now in higher gear, and it’s unclear where everyone’s red lines are and what might trigger a major war with Iran.

As Abizaid noted in an interview for my podcast before Saturday’s attack by Iran, the issue is that “everyone has sort of a loose understanding of what these red lines might be, and events could change your perception of whether one of those has been crossed at any given time.”

On Monday, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani will meet with Biden at the White House. The meeting comes at a time when there is considerable pressure in Iraq to withdraw the 2,500 US troops who remain there on an anti-ISIS mission.

The withdrawal of the US troops from neighboring Iraq is a key goal of Iran, which exerts considerable influence over some Iraqi politicians.

This poses a dilemma for both the Iraqi government and the Biden administration since the US troops based in Iraq have been frequent targets of Iranian-backed militias since the Gaza war started. While these attacks stopped following the killing of three US soldiers by an Iranian-backed militia in Jordan in January, if conflict were to start heating up with Iran, those attacks against US bases in Iraq could resume.

Balanced against that is that the last time the US pulled all its forces out of Iraq was in 2011, and within three years, ISIS had taken over much of the country, a history that the vast majority of Iraqis do not want to repeat.

It will be interesting to see whether, given the increasingly bellicose stance of the Iranians, the Biden administration puts considerable pressure on the Iraqi prime minister to keep those US soldiers on the ground in Iraq.

The Art of Diplomacy How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World, New America online

[ONLINE] The Art of Diplomacy
How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World
EVENT
Art of Diplomacy book cover
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
In his new book, The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World, diplomat and negotiator Stuart E. Eizenstat provides a history of the major international agreements that have defined today’s world. Eizenstat examines cases from the treaty to end the Vietnam War to the Kyoto Protocols and the Iranian Nuclear Accord. Drawing upon experience and perspective as a participant in top-level negotiations and interviews with over 60 key figures in American diplomacy, including former presidents and secretaries of state, and major political figures abroad, Eizenstat recounts the events that led up to the negotiation, the drama that took place around the table, and draws lessons from successful and unsuccessful strategies and tactics.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Stuart E. Eizenstat to discuss his new book The Art of Diplomacy. Eisenstat served as U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and Deputy Secretary of both Treasury and State. He is also the author of President Carter: The White House Years (2018), The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States (2012), and Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (2003). The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #ArtofDiplomacy #NewAmericaEvents and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speaker:

Stuart E. Eisenstat
Author, The Art of Diplomacy
Former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

When
Jun. 13, 2024
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
New America and ASU
Online Only
RSVP
New America
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005

Deterring America’s Rivals and Enemies, ASU in DC

Deterring America’s Rivals and Enemies

Deterring America’s Rivals and Enemies

Event description
FreeOpen to the public
The Leadership, Democracy and National Security Lab is proud to present Peter Bergen, Author, documentary producer, podcast host, professor of practice at Arizona State University, vice president at New America, and CNN’s national security analyst.

Topic: The world’s leading superpower has sometimes stumbled when it comes to deterring its rivals and enemies, from unenforced redlines in Syria to misreading the capabilities and intentions of al-Qaeda before 9/11. Today, the US must attempt to prevent Iran from widening the regional conflict in the Middle East, China from invading Taiwan, and Russia from winning the war in Ukraine. So, how has the US fared in exercising its deterrence capabilities over the past several years, and how might it continue to do so in the future?

This event is offered in-person or virtually:

In person at the ASU Washington Center (11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. ET)
Virtually (9:00-10:00 a.m. AZ MST)

Tuesday, April 23, 2024
11:30 am – 1:00 pm Deterring America’s Rivals and Enemies

What UFO Conspiracies have to do with Jan. 6th

The Pentagon UFO office just released its investigation of UFO sightings going back to the 1940s. We talk with maybe the most serious historian to study UFOs, Garrett Graff, to learn what UFO questions the Pentagon investigation has laid to rest, what new questions have been raised, why it’s sometimes in the interest of national security to keep information secret, and the connection Graff sees between UFO conspiracy theories and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East, New America, Online

[ONLINE] The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East

In 2023, Yemen again burst into the news, as Houthi rebels attacked shipping in the Red Sea, and the United States along with the U.K. and other countries responded with a campaign of air strikes. Yet this is only the latest crisis the United States has faced in Yemen. In her new book The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East, New America Future Security Program Fellow Alexandra Stark examines the history of U.S. policy in Yemen beyond the most recent crisis. Stark argues that the U.S. approach to Yemen offers insights into the failures of American foreign policy throughout the Middle East and makes the case that despite often being drawn into conflicts within Yemen, the United States has not achieved its policy goals because it has narrowly focused on counterterrorism and regional geopolitical competition rather than on the well-being of Yemenis themselves. She offers recommendations designed to reorient U.S. policy in the Middle East in pursuit of U.S. national security interests and to support the people of these countries in their efforts to make their own communities safe, secure, and prosperous.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Alexandra Stark to discuss her book The Yemen Model. Stark is a fellow with New America’s Future Security Program and an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation whose research has been published in academic and public outlets. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #YemenModel #NewAmericaEvents and following @NewAmericaISP.

GUEST

Dr. Alexandra Stark

Author, The Yemen Model

Fellow, New America Future Security Program

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen

Vice President, New America

Co-Director, Future Security

Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

New America and Arizona State University Logos
When
Apr. 30, 2024
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
New America and ASU
Online Only

Counterterrorism Chief Says Hamas Attack and Gaza War Have Reshaped Terror Threat

Counterterrorism Chief Says Hamas Attack and Gaza War Have Reshaped Terror Threat
In the Room with Peter Bergen

When Christine Abizaid — the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — first began working for the United States government in 2002, the biggest terror threat facing the U.S. was from Al-Qaeda. Now, homegrown far-right terrorists pose a key threat; the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the ongoing war in Gaza are fueling new risks, and some American politicians claim that lots of terrorists are entering the U.S. through the southern border. In a rare interview, Abizaid describes the real terror threats facing the United States today.

Can the U.S. Just Pull Out of the Middle East?

The answer is probably not. And that has to do with oil, the internet, and one of America’s most persistent foes, Iran.

ISIS comeback, CNN.com

Putin’s glaring mistake

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

If ISIS was indeed responsible for the attack Friday at a Moscow-area concert venue that killed at least 133 people, it would suggest that, unfortunately, the terror group is making something of a comeback.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack; a US official told CNN the US has no reason to doubt it.

Back in its heyday of 2014 and 2015, ISIS had controlled territory in Iraq and Syria around the size of the United Kingdom and a population of millions of people. During that period, the group also carried out a number of terrorist plots in Europe, including an attack in Paris that killed 130 people in 2015. ISIS had also inspired terrorists in the US, including the gunman who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 in what was then the most lethal terrorist attack in the US since 9/11.

But between 2017 and 2018, ISIS lost its so-called geographical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, and it has since devolved into a loosely allied group of ISIS affiliates in Africa and Asia with seemingly scant capabilities to carry out large-scale attacks elsewhere.

One of the most virulent affiliates is ISIS-K in Afghanistan, which killed 13 American service members and some 170 Afghan civilians at Kabul Airport as the Biden administration pulled all US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Yet, the understanding at the time was that ISIS affiliates in Afghanistan and certain African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Somalia were not capable of carrying out major international attacks. But then came a large-scale terrorist attack in Iran in January that killed 84 people at a memorial service commemorating General Qasem Soleimani, one of the most powerful military leaders in Iran who had been killed by a US drone strike in 2020. Through that attack, ISIS-K showed that the group, which is very anti-Shia, could target a hostile state like predominantly Shia Iran.

In March alone, a Russian state news agency said the country had thwarted multiple ISIS-related incidents, including a plan to attack a synagogue in Moscow.

The US embassy in Russia also said on March 7 that it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow,” including concerts. According to a US National Security Council spokesperson, “The US Government also shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy.” But Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed the US’ warning as “provocative,” saying, “These actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

Taken together, the fact that Russian authorities had detected a number of ISIS-related plots earlier this month and that US authorities were warning of an attack at the same time indicates that there was an active terrorist threat in Moscow from ISIS that was known not only to the US but also to the Russians.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin linked the suspects in Friday’s attack to Ukraine during a five-minute address on Saturday. State news agencies said that authorities arrested the four men suspected of attacking the Moscow-area concert venue while they were trying to cross the border into Ukraine, and that they “had relevant contacts on the Ukrainian side,” according to the FSB.

Ukraine has emphatically denied any role in the attack, and both Ukrainian and American officials expressed concerns that Putin’s comments may be used to justify an escalation in the ongoing war.

ISIS-K certainly has the capability and motive to attack Russia. When it comes to motive, the Russian support for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which helped him remain in power during the Syrian civil war, certainly comes to mind. For ISIS, Assad is a mortal enemy, both because he is a member of a Shia sect and because he has systematically killed Sunnis in Syria. Also, historically, Russia has brutally repressed Muslim minorities like the Chechens. As for capability, the ISIS-K attack in Iran earlier this year demonstrated that the group could carry out a large-scale attack outside of its home base in Afghanistan.

What we do know is that Putin made a glaring mistake by denouncing the US’ warning. And if ISIS-K did attack the concert hall, the Biden administration would have to ask itself some serious questions about whether the decision to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan allowed ISIS to regroup there with the capability to carry out large-scale attacks in other countries. If that were the case, that would be a blow for the Biden administration.

What world is Jared Kushner living in? CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Is Jared Kushner clueless?

Kushner’s newly disclosed musings last month that Gaza has a lot of “very valuable” waterfront property reminds one of Marie Antoinette’s purported observation, “Let them eat cake.”

The former Trump White House senior adviser talked up the possible worth of Gaza’s waterfront real estate at an event at Harvard in February when already more than half the buildings in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed, according to multiple news reports. And this week, the UN warned of impending famine in northern Gaza.

At the Harvard event, Kushner also suggested that the 1.4 million people sheltering in southern Gaza in Rafah might be moved into Egypt or to the Negev desert in southern Israel to shield them from a potential Israeli attack. Kushner’s thoughts appeared to be in sync with those of his old family friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who has approved a plan to invade Rafah.

Kushner’s notions are fantasies, of course, since the Egyptians are not going to accept substantial numbers of Palestinian refugees, let alone the more than one million sheltering in Rafah, something they have made clear repeatedly. Nor is Israel going to accommodate them.

The October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel were inexcusable, and Israel had every right to avenge them.

Still, Palestinian rage has been building for years, and Kushner, as then-President Donald Trump’s shadow secretary of state, helped contribute to this, something Kushner seems to be blissfully unaware of.

The pace of new West Bank settlements built by the Israelis accelerated during Kushner’s tour of duty as the self-appointed Middle East peace czar, according to analyses by The Associated Press, and the Trump administration publicly took the position that these new settlements were not illegal, reversing decades of US policy on the issue.

The Trump administration also moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something previous administrations had avoided doing because Palestinians also regard Jerusalem as their capital, and Muslims look upon it as a sacred city because the al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem is the third holiest site in Islam.

When the US embassy opened in Jerusalem, Kushner declared, “Peace is within reach.” Meanwhile, in a telling split screen, Israeli forces in Gaza were simultaneously killing dozens of Palestinians protesting the opening of the embassy.

Kushner’s “Abraham Accords” were supposed to bring peace to the region because, in Kushner’s fantasy, if some Arab states recognized Israel, they would invest in Gaza and the West Bank and help set the conditions for a two-state solution, which he characterized in the Wall Street Journal as a mere “real estate dispute.”

It appears that in Kushner’s mind, he is a modern-day President Jimmy Carter bringing peace to the Mideast as Carter did by brokering the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, mortal enemies that had fought four wars against each other, and a peace agreement that still holds nearly half a century later.

In his modestly titled memoir “Breaking History,” Kushner wrote: “Humbled by the complexity of the task, I orchestrated some of the most significant breakthroughs in diplomacy in the last fifty years.” Wow!

The Abraham Accords resulted in two small Gulf monarchies, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signing deals recognizing the state of Israel for the first time, and Kosovo, Morocco and Sudan following suit. The agreements had helped ease tensions and promote economic ties in the region before the Hamas attack on October 7, but they did nothing to resolve the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

As a corollary to the Abraham Accords, Kushner planned to drum up $50 billion for Palestinian projects, but this never happened because the Palestinians boycotted an investment conference that Kushner hosted in Bahrain in 2019.

At the conference, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed that investments in the West Bank and Gaza were “going to be like a hot I.P.O.,” the phrase for an initial public offering of stock, which may have been the dumbest thing that anyone in the Trump administration said publicly during their four years in office.

The “hot IPO” is now a smoking ruin that evokes Dresden after World War II. Yet, six months out of office Kushner kept failing upward with a nice investment from the Saudis of $2 billion for his investment fund, which had all the appearances of a reward for the work he did aiding the Saudis when he was the Middle East czar during the Trump administration.

Perhaps Kushner’s fund will lead the charge to build the first Trump Tower in Gaza with some really fantastic waterfront views, but somehow, I doubt it. Even Jared Kushner can’t be that clueless.