From Revolution Muslim to Islamic State: The American Roots of ISIS’ Online Prowess, New America DC

From Revolution Muslim to Islamic State: The American Roots of ISIS’ Online Prowess
Event

ISIS has lost the vast majority of its territorial holdings in Syria and Iraq, yet attacks continue from France to Indonesia. Many have pointed to ISIS’ online capabilities as an explanation. However, little known is that ISIS’ online capabilities owe their strength in large part to a group of Americans known as Revolution Muslim, who developed the template and network ISIS later adapted. Mitchell Silber, former director of intelligence analysis at the NYPD, and Jesse Morton, the former leader of Revolution Muslim, provide a unique view into this history based on their experience working against each other in their report for New America, From Revolution Muslim to Islamic State: An Inside Look at the American Roots of ISIS’ Virtual Caliphate.

New America welcomes Mitchell Silber and Jesse Morton for a discussion and launch of their report. In addition to having previously being NYPD’s Director of Intelligence Analysis, Silber is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs and a founder of the Guardian Group in New York. Before co-founding Guardian Group, Mr. Silber was the head of Geopolitical Intelligence at FTI Consulting. Jesse Morton is the former leader and co-founder of Revolution Muslim for which he served time in prison. More recently along with Mitch Silber and others he founded of Parallel Networks an organization founded to combat hate and extremism. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Human Services and a Master’s in International Relations from Columbia University. New America also welcomes to discuss the report, Candace Rondeaux, a Senior Fellow with New America’s International Security Program and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, who formerly was a Senior Program Officer at the United States Institute of Peace, where she launched the RESOLVE Network, a global research consortium on conflict and violent extremism.

Participants:
Mitchell Silber, @MitchSilber
Author, From Revolution Muslim to Islamic State: An Inside Look at the American Roots of ISIS’ Virtual Caliphate
Former Director of Intelligence Analysis, NYPD

Jesse Morton, @_JesseMorton
Author, From Revolution Muslim to Islamic State: An Inside Look at the American Roots of ISIS’ Virtual Caliphate
Former Co-Founder, Revolution Muslim

Candace Rondeaux, @CandaceRondeaux
Senior Fellow, New America International Security Program
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
When
Jun. 4, 2018
12:15 pm – 1:45 pm
Where
New America
740 15th St NW #900 Washington, D.C. 20005
RSVP
New America
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005

The good news from Iraq, CNN.com

Bergen: The good news from Iraq
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is writing a book for Penguin Random House about the national security decision-making of the Trump administration.

(CNN)On Saturday, Iraqis go to the polls to elect their new Parliament and prime minister.

And the news here is that Iraq — which only four years ago seemed on the brink of collapse as ISIS’s army menaced the Iraqi capital Baghdad — is in the best shape it has been for years.

In 2014, ISIS stormed onto the world stage seizing Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, declaring its self-styled “caliphate” there, while the Iraqi military fled in ignominious retreat.
Last year, ISIS lost Mosul and today its black flags no longer fly over any of Iraq’s territory. The group exists now only as a rump terrorist organization, capable of mounting only sporadic attacks in Iraq.

As a result, civilian deaths have fallen sharply in recent months and nightlife has even returned to Baghdad.

The defeat of ISIS was an Iraqi-led operation supported by the US-led coalition. It was Iraq’s elite Special Forces Counterterrorism Service that spearheaded the charge against ISIS.

As a result, the Iraqi military is no longer widely despised; indeed it is now the most admired of any of Iraq’s institutions. More than 80% of Iraqis had “confidence” in the Iraqi military, according to a nationwide poll conducted in March by the organization 1001 Iraqi Thoughts.

The halo effect around the defeat of ISIS also extends to Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, who also enjoys similarly high favorability ratings.

When Abadi became prime minister four years ago, he was seen as a colorless technocrat with scant chance of successfully governing Iraq’s fractious ethnic and sectarian groups — but there’s nothing quite like being invaded by ISIS to bring a nation together!

Abadi deftly managed the defeat of ISIS using the Iraqi military in alliance with Shia militias and Kurdish forces.

Abadi also benefited from another crisis when the Kurds, who dominate much of northern Iraq, voted in a referendum for independence in September — a referendum that the United States and the central Iraqi government warned them not to go through with.

The Kurdish independence referendum was a gross miscalculation by Kurdish politicians who already enjoyed a high degree of autonomy.

When the referendum took place, Abadi ordered the newly capable Iraqi army to take back key sections of Iraq held by the Kurds, including the oil-rich region around the city of Kirkuk. The central government also took control of all the border control points and airports in Kurdistan.

As former National Security Council director for Iraq, and New America senior fellow, Doug Ollivant observed earlier this month: “Iraq now has the best ground forces in the region.”

Abadi goes into Saturday’s election having vanquished ISIS and asserted central government control over the Kurds, which is a strong set of cards, but he is quite unlikely to win the outright majority that would enable him to become prime minister again, as there are a host of other parties competing in the election.

What is striking about these various parties is that none of them are running on overtly sectarian lines as “the Sunni party” or “the Shia party.” This bodes well for the future of Iraq.
What happens after the election will be as important as the election itself, because that is when the horse-trading will begin over which parties can create a majority bloc in Parliament, and then choose the prime minister. Abadi is regarded as the likely winner in this horse trading, although that isn’t certain.

That Iraqi politics is being settled at the ballot box rather than by the barrel of a gun is a great sign of hope for the country.

To be sure, there are significant problems. When Mosul was liberated from ISIS it was largely demolished, and reconstruction in Mosul and elsewhere is going to take many years and much investment.

And a wild card is Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. We have already seen Iranian forces and proxies launch rocket and missile attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia since Trump announced the pullout on Tuesday.

Iran also has considerable sway in Iraq and could signal to those Shia militias that take some degree of direction from Tehran to turn up the heat inside Iraq.
That said, Iraq benefits from having among the largest oil reserves in the world and a relatively educated population, which is why Saturday’s election could portend a much better future for Iraq.

On Iran, Trump becomes a prisoner of his own hyperbole, CNN.com

On Iran, Trump becomes a prisoner of his own hyperbole

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 5:32 PM ET, Tue May 8, 2018

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is writing a book for Penguin Random House about the national security decision-making of the Trump administration.”

(CNN)In withdrawing the US from the Iran nuclear deal, President Donald Trump is taking a huge gamble. And aside from his desire to repudiate everything done by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, it’s really hard to see why he is making this decision.

Let’s stipulate first that the Iran nuclear deal is working surprisingly well. That’s according to the congressional testimony of Trump’s own secretary of defense, James Mattis, who testified in October that the Iran deal was in American national security interests.

That the deal is working is also the considered view of some of the most hawkish Israelis — for instance, Ehud Barak, who is a former Israeli prime minister and former defense minister as well as a former chief of staff of the Israeli army.

As recently as Monday, Barak told the Daily Beast that the Iranians have “kept the letter of the agreement quite systematically… [and] all in all it delays the new starting point or countdown towards a nuclear capability.”

Yukiya Amano, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is monitoring the Iran agreement, said in March that, “The IAEA now has the world’s most robust verification regime in place in Iran. We have had access to all the locations that we needed to visit… As of today, I can state that Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments.”

So why blow up the Iran nuclear deal, given that this array of impressive, independent observers say it’s working?

Trump, it seems, has become a prisoner of his own hyperbolic rhetoric, constantly repeating his mantra that the Iran deal is “the worst deal ever negotiated.”

Of course, this is nonsense. For the Obama administration it was simply the best deal on offer. Could the Obama team have pushed harder for tougher “sunset” clauses on the deal that would have pushed even further into the future the moment when Iran could resume its nuclear program? Maybe.

But that is hardly an argument for effectively walking away from the deal, which delays the Iranian nuclear weapons program from resuming for around a decade from its inception three years ago.
In the tricky art of diplomacy, a reasonably good solution is not the enemy of a perfect solution, since those are rarely on offer. To be sure, the deal didn’t address the fact that Iran has a robust ballistic missile program, but the deal wasn’t about the unilateral disarmament of Iran — which Iran would be quite unlikely to agree to since its only real ally around the world is Syria! — but rather it was to stop the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons with all the new, additional leverage that would give them in the region.

Also, if Iran has nuclear weapons, that is sure to spark a regional nuclear arms race in which Saudi Arabia would also try to acquire them as soon as feasible.

Three of the United States’ closest allies, Britain, France and Germany, are all signatories to the Iran deal. In recent weeks leaders of these countries have all begged Trump to remain in the deal. These allies were even willing to negotiate amendments to the deal about issues such as Iran’s ballistic missile program under the rubric “fix it, don’t nix it,” but even that wasn’t sufficient for Trump.

Why? Historians will likely be debating this question for years. After all the Iran deal is quite popular with Americans, a healthy majority of whom — 63% — want to stay in the deal, while only 29% want to leave it, according to a new CNN poll.

Those numbers are quite similar to these who opposed President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement last year: 59% opposed that decision, while 28% supported it, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Similarly, Obamacare is now favored by a majority of Americans, according to a March poll by Kaiser.

Trump is intent, it seems, on undoing the key international and domestic accomplishments of the Obama administration. The question is: does he have a “plan B” that makes any sense? Trump said he would repeal and replace Obamacare, but when it came down to it he and the Republican Party didn’t have a real viable plan to do so.

The Iranians have repeatedly said they won’t renegotiate the nuclear deal, which means they could restart their nuclear enrichment program. That, of course, will lead to renewed tensions with the United States, Israel and the Gulf States that the nuclear deal was designed to tamp down. And that path takes us back to the real and renewed possibility of a war in the region.

We can all hope that Trump’s big bet that he will force the Iranians back to the negotiating table will pay off, but history suggests that these kinds of bets are easy to make on the campaign trail, but are much harder to pull off when you are sitting in the Oval Office.

Iraq After ISIS: What to Do Now, New America DC

Iraq After ISIS: What to Do Now

In 2017, the United States dealt ISIS a devastating blow eliminating its territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria. Iraq, which will hold national elections on May 12th, emerged out of the war against ISIS strong and in an increasingly positive mood.

Yet as Iraq looks ahead to a post-ISIS future, numerous challenges lie ahead. In a new policy report, Iraq After ISIS: What to do Now, Bartle Bull and Douglas Ollivant propose the contours of a positive, forward looking U.S.-Iraqi relationship.

New America welcomes Bartle Bull and Douglas Ollivant to discuss their report and the future of U.S.-Iraqi ties. Bartle Bull is an author and founder of Northern Gulf Partners, an Iraq-focused merchant banking firm. Douglas Ollivant is an ASU Senior Future of War Fellow with New America and former Director for Iraq on the National Security Council under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. He is also Senior Vice President of Mantid International, LLC, a global strategic consulting firm with offices in Washington, Beirut, and Baghdad.

Join the conversation online using #IraqAfterISIS and following @NewAmericaISP.
Participants:
Bartle Bull, @bb_bull
Co-Author, Iraq After ISIS: What to do Next
Founder, Northern Gulf Partners

Douglas Ollivant, @DouglasOllivant
Co-Author, Iraq After ISIS: What to do Next
ASU Senior Future of War Fellow, New America
Moderator:
Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Director, International Security Program, New America

When
May. 1, 2018
12:15 pm – 1:45 pm
Where
New America
740 15th St NW #900 Washington, D.C. 20005
RSVP
New America
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005

After Syria strikes, now what? CNN.com

After Syria strikes, now what?

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is writing a book about President Donald Trump’s national security policies.”

(CNN)The US-led military strikes in Syria raise a number of questions:

First, and most basic, what exactly is US policy in Syria? President Donald Trump said just two weeks ago in a speech in Ohio that the US would “be coming out of Syria like very soon.” Now, Trump has presided over a large-scale bombing operation aimed at several targets in Syria, including in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

So what is the Trump administration policy? Is it that Syrian leader Bashar al Assad must go, which has been the stated policy of the United States going back to the early days of the Syrian civil war under President Barack Obama? Or is there simply just a red line on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, but not much more?

The answer is far from clear. When President Trump announced the US-led strikes on Friday he emphasized the latter, while his own ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said earlier this week that there is no political solution in Syria with Assad still in power.

Second, beyond responding to the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons, does the Trump administration have a plan to protect Syrian civilians in the war that has destroyed much of their country over the past seven years?

Nearly half a million Syrians have died in the war, of which chemical weapons have only killed a tiny fraction. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump sometimes raised the idea of creating “safe zones” for Syrian civilians.

Is the next step for the Trump administration the creation of such zones? And how would these work? Such safe zones would require “no fly zones” because the Syrian air force has hitherto enjoyed total air superiority allowing them to drop chemical weapons, “barrel bombs” and other munitions more or less at will. Enforcing such a no fly zone is complicated by the fact that there are considerable numbers of Russian aircraft flying over Syria.

Third, might Trump’s laudable concern about civilian casualties caused by chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war change his view about Syrian refugees entering the United States? Right now the Trump administration has effectively banned the entry of Syrian refugees into the US, despite the fact that most are women and children.

Fourth, do the strikes mark some kind of turning point between Trump and Russia? The President had been loathe to critique Russia President Vladimir Putin, yet on Friday he had harsh words for the Russians, saying: “To Russia, I ask: What kind of a nation wants to be associated with the mass murder of innocent men, women, and children?”

Fifth, when US Secretary of Defense James Mattis spoke at a press conference at the Pentagon on Friday night he said the legal authorization for the strikes was under the president’s Article 2 authority in the Constitution as commander in chief. Many legal experts — as well as a number of members of Congress — would beg to differ. Attacking Syrian regime targets, as opposed to ISIS targets has not been authorized by Congress which is supposed to sanction US military actions, although recent presidents have tended to minimize the role of Congress in such matters.

Sixth, is there a bit of “Wag the Dog” to all this? This was the accusation, adapted from the title of a popular movie, against President Bill Clinton who, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky affair, launched military strikes against al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in August 1998 following al Qaeda’s bombing of two US embassies in Africa.

As Mark Twain is supposed to have observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

John Bolton; New Trump adviser is ‘not much of a carrot man’, CNN.com

New Trump adviser is ‘not much of a carrot man’

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 2:40 PM ET, Sun April 8, 2018

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.””

(CNN)As John Bolton settles into his new job as US National Security Adviser this week in the midst of raging international issues, officials in Washington and foreign capitals will be putting significant effort into trying to predict the behavior of the mustachioed 69-year-old aide to President Donald Trump.

They should start by reading “Surrender is Not an Option,” Bolton’s comprehensive 2007 memoir about working for the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. It provides much insight into Bolton’s views about American national security.

Despite its tendentious title — has any US politician or policymaker really advocated American surrender? — Bolton’s 504-page memoir is an invaluable road map to what he believes and how he does business. For that reason alone it should be required reading for those at the White House, Pentagon and State Department who will be dealing with him, as well as for his foreign counterparts and their staffs.

Monday is Bolton’s first day at the White House as National Security Adviser and already his inbox is overflowing. There are multiple reports of a suspected chemical attack outside the Syrian capital of Damascus, which anti-regime activists claim was conducted by the Syrian regime. Television images are emerging of some of the dozens that are believed to have died in the attack.

On May 12 there is a deadline for President Trump’s administration to decide whether to pull out or to remain in the nuclear disarmament agreement with Iran. And by the end of May, Trump is due to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to discuss the possibility of his regime’s denuclearization, the first time an American president has met with a North Korean leader.
Here are nine takeaways from Bolton’s memoir:

1. Bolton has been a “movement conservative” for more than half a century. As a teenager in 1964, Bolton volunteered to work on the Barry Goldwater Republican presidential campaign and while he was a law student he interned for President Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew.

2. Bolton owes his position to hard work and smarts. The son of a Baltimore firefighter, Bolton went to Yale and then to Yale Law School where he was a contemporary of Bill and Hillary Clinton, though they moved in quite different circles.

3. Bolton is a longtime swamp dweller and is far from a Washington outsider, as many of Trump’s senior administration officials have been. He has held a variety of key jobs in Republican administrations going back to the time when Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” was the No. 1 song and “Dallas” was the top-rated TV show. During President Reagan’s first term, Bolton was appointed to senior jobs at the US Agency for International Development and he went on to work in a number of other key positions, culminating in serving as George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton understands on a deep level how to operate in the DC bureaucracy.

4. Bolton is inclined to bring a gun to a bureaucratic knife fight. Bolton approvingly quotes himself on the matter of diplomatic “carrots and sticks,” writing, “I am not much of a carrot man.” This made him plenty of enemies in Washington. In 2005, Carl Ford, a former assistant secretary of state who had worked with Bolton in the George W. Bush administration, testified before a Senate committee that Bolton was a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy,” as the New York Times recently recalled.

5. Bolton is steeped in the arcana of arms-control negotiations. He served as the top official at the State Department working on arms-control issues in the George W. Bush administration. As a result, Bolton’s memoir is a forest of acronyms such as SALT, START, PSI, CBW, and IAEA that only arms-control wonks will likely instantly understand.

6. Bolton’s skepticism towards both North Korea and Iran is longstanding. He believes that North Korea will “never give up its nuclear weapons voluntarily” and that any promises to do so are simply to get what it wants, such as the lifting of sanctions. North Korea, Bolton writes, “has followed this game plan many times, and it has every reason to believe it will succeed in the future.”

Bolton has a similar longstanding view about Iran and wrote that “Iran will never give up its nuclear program, and a policy based on the contrary assumption is not just delusional but dangerous.” However, Bolton’s view of Iran is undermined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which since the Iran nuclear deal was inked in 2015 has nine successive times certified that Iran is sticking to the restrictions it agreed to under the terms of the deal. Given Bolton’s attitude toward those regimes, it’s hard to see how he could advocate for any negotiated settlements with them.

7. Bolton believes US State Department careerists are “overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal,” suggesting he is unlikely to defend the agency against the deep cuts that the Trump administration has proposed for it and will mostly ignore the advice of career State Department officials.

8. Bolton has a deep skepticism about any kind of constraints on American power and was an “America First” guy long before this became a common slogan. Bolton writes in his memoir that his happiest moment working at the State Department was “unsigning” the agreement that made the United States a party to the International Criminal Court, which he saw as a grave risk for US political and military leaders who might be hauled in front of it. When Bolton pulled the US out of the agreement in 2002, “I felt like a kid on Christmas Day,” he recalled.

9. Finally, Bolton takes very good notes about what his counterparts say in meetings and what he says to them, so we should expect another Bolton memoir at some point — this one about his time in the Trump administration.

On some levels it is hard to think of a more qualified American official to deal with the issues concerning weapons of mass destruction and Iran, Syria and North Korea than Bolton, who has great expertise in those matters and also of dealing directly with American adversaries such as the Iranians.

At the same time Bolton is also a longtime and well-known advocate of preemptive wars against regimes such as Iran and North Korea. As recently as February he argued in the Wall Street Journal for a unilateral American military strike against North Korea.

Will his pugnacity help or hurt Bolton as he coordinates the Trump administration’s responses to the Syria gas attack and its diplomatic outreach to North Korea? We will soon have an answer to those questions.

Kushner and MBS: A tale of two princes, CNN.com

Kushner and MBS: A tale of two princes

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 8:06 AM ET, Mon March 19, 2018

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.”

Beirut (CNN)Jared Kushner has a vast foreign policy portfolio, including brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, as well as managing relations with both Mexico and China.

Those efforts are far worse off today than they were a year ago because Kushner’s father-in law has instigated policies that have sabotaged them.

President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has torpedoed any chance of the United States acting as an honest broker with the Palestinians for the foreseeable future. Trump insisting that Mexico pay for “the wall” resulted in Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto canceling plans last month for his first visit to the White House. And Trump unilaterally pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal reduced American influence in Asia, while strengthening Chinese power.

There is, however, one area where Kushner has scored a win, which is placing a big bet on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 32, who only four years ago was an obscure Saudi prince and today is running the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

History will tell if the Trump administration’s backing of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly referred to as “MBS,” is merely a tactical victory rather than a strategic victory, but nonetheless a win it is.

On Tuesday, MBS will visit the White House on what is effectively a state visit. (MBS’s 82-year-old father, King Salman, is monarch in name, but it’s clear his son is calling the shots.)
How well do Saudis know Donald Trump?

Given how significant MBS is to the future of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and also the fact that Kushner and Trump have bet the house on MBS, it’s worth exploring how that happened and what it means.

Kushner and Trump have embraced both the Emiratis and MBS who share a deep suspicion of Iran. Kushner believed they would also help with his now-dead-in-the-water peace deal between the Palestinians and Israelis.

And why is that? Well, Kushner is close to the powerful and effective United Arab Emirates Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba, who has served in Washington for a decade and shaped Kushner’s view of the Middle East. Of their first meeting, Otaiba said, “He did all the asking, and I did all the talking.” They have remained in regular contact since.
Kushner, 37, and MBS, just a few years his junior, have also bonded. MBS was one of the first foreign officials to visit the Trump White House even before his father had elevated him to his present role of crown prince.

The US-Saudi political allegiance

A demonstration of how all-in the Trump administration is with MBS is that Trump chose to pay his first state visit to Saudi Arabia. Typically, first state visits by American presidents are made to closely allied Western democracies such as Canada rather than to absolute monarchies such as the Saudi kingdom. In Saudi Arabia last May, Trump was treated to the kind of royal welcome — elaborate ceremonial sword dances in opulent palaces — that warms the Trumpian heart.

It was hardly an accident that just days after Trump’s triumphal trip, Saudi Arabia and the UAE began the blockade of their neighbor, the gas-rich kingdom of Qatar. The Saudis and Emirati ruling families loath Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV news channel. They also dislike Qatar’s tolerance for leaders of Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a number of whom live in the tiny kingdom.

The fact that the blockade of Qatar hardly aligned with traditional American foreign policy goals didn’t seem to bother Kushner or Trump, although then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis did try to push back. After all, the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is one of the most significant American bases in the world. That’s where the bombing campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and against the Taliban in Afghanistan are directed from.

Trump’s eagerness to scrap the Iranian nuclear deal also, of course, aligns with Saudi foreign policy, as does the Trump administration’s almost complete silence on the Saudis’ disastrous military campaign in Yemen against the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels.

The Saudi campaign in Yemen helped instigate what UN agencies in December described as “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” According to those agencies, more than half of Yemen’s population don’t have enough to eat. Yemen has also seen the worst outbreak of cholera in recorded history.

Trump and Kushner have, in short, largely absorbed the Saudi/MBS view of foreign policy in the Middle East despite the scant benefits and significant costs that come with this.

MBS at home

Domestically, MBS is moving fast to change the kingdom. What was once an absolute monarchy where the invariably geriatric monarch ruled in consultation with other members of the massive royal family, as well as with the Wahhabi religious establishment, is now a secularizing dictatorship ruled by a young prince who brooks no dissent or even any other power source.

On the one hand, MBS has cut down the powers of the feared religious police, allowed women to drive starting in June and encouraged once-forbidden concerts. As of this month, divorced women will get custody of their children without having to go to court, which is progressive family policy compared to some other Arab states.

On the other hand, beginning in November, MBS imprisoned more than 200 businessmen and members of the royal family in the ritzy confines of the Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh on charges of corruption. Only six months earlier Trump and Kushner were given the royal treatment at the very same hotel.

Corruption is an odd charge in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world where the ruling family has named the entire country after itself, an indicator of how little separation there is between the resources of the state and the whims of its ruling family. MBS, for instance, is reported to have paid more than half a billion dollars for a yacht he took a fancy to in France.
Last month, MBS also fired much of the leadership of the Saudi military and replaced them with his own men. On one level, this seems entirely reasonable given the fiasco of Saudi military intervention in Yemen, but this also has the effect of making the leaders of the armed forces beholden to MBS.

Similarly, MBS has imprisoned a number of leading conservative clerics. This too can be justified as an effort to remove opposition to his liberalization of Saudi society, but it also has the effect of discouraging any opposition to MBS from the clergy, an until-now powerful force in Saudi society.

At the same time that MBS is both liberalizing Saudi society and quashing any form of possible dissent, he has also embarked on an ambitious plan known as Vision 2030 for weaning the Saudi economy from its almost entire dependence on oil and its citizens from their almost entire dependence on the state.
The long road for Saudi's women drivers

Saudi Arabia is a strange polity in that it is an absolute monarchy that functions simultaneously as an almost perfect socialist state, where most of the population work for the government, pay no taxes, receive subsidies for energy and electricity and enjoy free health care and education.
All that gets expensive. And in a world where $100 a barrel for oil won’t be seen again any time soon, Saudi Arabia simply can’t afford this kind of largesse anymore.
The aim of Vision 2030 is to privatize the defense sector as well as agriculture, education and health care and to sell off chunks of the oil giant Saudi Aramco. This has bankers salivating from Manhattan to London to Riyadh, as even selling a small part of Aramco might be the largest IPO in history, worth around $100 billion.

However, the IPO is unlikely to take place in Manhattan as the Saudis are well aware that ongoing litigation by the families of 9/11 victims might eventually end up in a massive settlement against them, so why take the risk of a flotation on Wall Street when it can be done in Riyadh or elsewhere?

When MBS meets with Trump and Kushner at the White House, the President and his son-in-law can give themselves a pat on the back; they supported MBS, who now controls every aspect of the Saudi economy, society and military. And there is the added benefit that he is moving Saudi Arabia in a more liberal direction at the same time he has a real plan to diversify the Saudi economy.

What is less clear is how some of MBS’ foreign policy gambles will play out. His intervention in neighboring Yemen remains a fiasco, while his blockade of Qatar has ended in a stalemate. His saber-rattling against Iran has intensified a sectarian proxy war between the Gulf States and Iran, raging from Yemen to Syria.

Kushner and Trump have placed a big bet on MBS. Let’s hope he doesn’t continue to deepen the conflicts across the already fragile Arab region.

The White House is losing a real warrior, CNN.com

Bergen: The White House is losing a real warrior

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 10:30 AM ET, Fri March 23, 2018

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.”

(CNN)The departure of Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster from the White House removes one of the most capable public servants in the Trump administration, a war hero in both US wars in Iraq whose doctorate became “Dereliction of Duty,” an influential best-seller that excoriated the generals who waged the Vietnam War for not providing President Lyndon B. Johnson with unvarnished military advice.

At least McMaster wasn’t fired by tweet, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was last week. Tillerson first learned of his defenestration via the President’s preferred mode of communication.

McMaster was allowed to resign and received an effusive statement of thanks from Donald Trump for his more than three decades of military service. Given all the abrupt firings of White House officials, this is the Trump administration’s version of a golden parachute.

Undercutting Trump’s public eulogy for his departing national security adviser, for many months White House officials had told reporters on background that McMaster was on the way out because the three-star general’s briefing style grated on Trump. This resulted in a steady drip-drip of stories that McMaster was headed out the door.

It’s hardly surprising that Trump objected to McMaster’s briefings because the President says he already knows all he needs to know and relies on his gut alone to make decisions.

As Trump claimed during the election campaign, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.” No need for a general’s briefing then.

Trump also told Fox News that the many unfilled senior positions at the State Department didn’t affect the conduct of foreign policy because “I’m the only one that matters.” No need for informed briefings then.

The removal of Tillerson and McMaster is being framed by anonymous White House officials as a necessary reshuffle as Trump gears up for his meeting with Kim Jung Un, the first-ever such encounter between a US president and a North Korean leader, a meeting slated for late May.

This rationale makes little sense because in The Wall Street Journal only last month newly appointed national security adviser John Bolton argued forcefully for a unilateral American military strike against North Korea.
It’s the same type of argument that Bolton had advocated in the run-up to the Iraq War, which had the dubious honor of marking its 15th anniversary this week.

Bolton also publicly called for the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities three years ago on the grounds that “time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.”

His longstanding advocacy for pre-emptive wars is reminiscent of Talleyrand’s quip when the Bourbons were restored to power after the French Revolution, “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Bolton is also among the most vocal and influential advocates for tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, which does exactly what would likely emerge from any possible deal with the North Koreans: They would dial back their nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against them.

As recently as Tuesday, Bolton described the Iran deal as a “strategic debacle” on Fox.

This is not the well-informed view of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who testified in October that the Iran nuclear deal is in American national security interests.

In short, it’s hard to imagine a worse negotiator to sit across the table from the North Koreans than Bolton.

Russian roulette

It’s not just McMaster’s style that rubbed Trump the wrong way: They also have important, substantive differences about how they see the world.

Take Russia: In December the Trump administration released its national security strategy, a dense 55-page document supervised by McMaster that focused heavily on Russian aggression against neighboring states and its efforts to undermine Western democracies. These are actions that Trump barely acknowledges, while he repeatedly embraces Russia’s apparent President for life, Vladimir Putin.

A month before the release of his own administration’s national security strategy, Trump said of Putin, in regard to the 2016 US election, “He said he didn’t meddle. … Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”

By contrast, the national strategy stated that Russia is “using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. … Russia uses information operations as part of its offensive cyber efforts to influence public opinion across the globe. Its influence campaigns blend covert intelligence operations and false online personas with state-funded media. …”

McMaster publicly endorsed this analysis last month at the Munich Security Conference when he said of the just-handed down American indictments of 13 Russians allegedly involved in meddling in the 2016 presidential election, “The evidence is now really incontrovertible.”

This reference to evidence of Russian electoral meddling was swiftly and publicly rebuked by Trump, who tweeted, “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems.”

After that public dressing-down it was clear that McMaster’s days at the White House were numbered — a case of not if he was going, but when.

Sarah Sanders, who has turned into the “Baghdad Bob” of the Trump administration, tweeted only a week ago that she “just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster — contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC.”

In fairness to Sanders, she can only repeat what the President tells her. Summoning the shade of Sanders’ Nixonian predecessor, Ron Ziegler, her tweet is now no longer an “operative” statement.

Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb A Story of Defiance, Deterrence, and Deviance, book discussion w Hassan Abbas, National Defense Univ. DC

Pakistan?s Nuclear Bomb
A Story of Defiance, Deterrence, and Deviance

By Hassan Abbas
Professor, The College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University

Moderator & Discussant: Peter Bergen, Vice President, New America

WHEN: Tuesday, March 6, 2018 from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

WHERE: Marshall Hall, National Defense University Library, Special Collections

BOOK SUMMARY: This book provides a comprehensive account of the mysterious story of Pakistan?s attempt to develop nuclear weapons in the face of severe odds. Hassan Abbas profiles the politicians and scientists involved, and the role of China and Saudi Arabia in supporting Pakistan?s nuclear infrastructure. Abbas also unravels the motivations behind the Pakistani nuclear physicist Dr A. Q. Khan?s involvement in nuclear proliferation in Iran, Libya and North Korea, drawing on extensive interviews. He argues that the origins and evolution of the Khan network were tied to the domestic and international political motivations underlying Pakistan?s nuclear weapons project, and that project?s organization, oversight and management. The ties between the making of the Pakistani bomb and the proliferation that then ensued have not yet been fully illuminated or understood, and this book?s disclosures have important lessons. The Khan proliferation breach remains of vital importance for understanding how to stop such transfers of sensitive technology in future.

Finally, the book examines the prospects for nuclear safety in Pakistan, considering both Pakistan?s nuclear control infrastructure and the threat posed by the Taliban and other extremist groups to the country?s nuclear assets.

​​The Future of the “Islamic State,” American Univ. of Beirut, Lebanon

​​The Future of the “Islamic State”
Provinces and Affiliates:
Decline or Continued Impact after the Fall of the
“Caliphate” in Iraq and Syria? ​

Conference at the American University of Beirut
Organized by AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung
March 20th – 21st, 2017

​
​​​​​​​

​​Concept Note: ​​​
The “Islamic State” (IS) has increasingly come under pressure on the battlefields in its core territories in Iraq and Syria. Although the Mosul offensive is still ongoing, a conventional military defeat of the organization has never been more likely. However, IS is not just a highly efficient terrorist organization that occupies certain territories and their populations – it is a phenomenon with multiple dimensions, which include terrorist attacks in Europe, a highly successful propaganda machinery, the ability to exploit both regional power vacuums and the refugee situation, and, last but not least, the creation of franchises or offshoots in the so-called provinces (wilayat) of their self-declared “Caliphate”.

In 2014 and 2015, the organization claimed a total of 20 new provinces in areas of Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Russia, however, the incorporation of these provinces into the core structure of IS varies greatly. While the majori-ty of the groups that have joined IS are local jihadist organizations such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, which existed before the rise of IS in 2014 and have their own distinct identities and histories and operate largely independent of the core IS leadership, a few organizations are more closely connected to IS, such as the cells in Libya and the Wilayat Khorasan in the Af-ghan-Pakistani border region. Even though these branches only exert marginal territorial con-trol, the nominal existence of provinces outside Syria and Iraq is crucial, as it supports IS’s claim of global domination. In addition, these branches present a danger for Europe due to their geographical proximity and their function as safe havens, where terrorists can plan and prepare attacks on European targets. In Western Africa, an increased presence of IS-affiliates could further encourage larger refugee flows from the region to Europe. An expansion of IS in Afghanistan would be particularly critical, as Western nations have spent millions to stabilize Afghanistan over the past 15 years. Its destabilization could lead to a disastrous spillover into Pakistan and Iraq. Likewise, Egypt’s destabilization due to an IS takeover of the Sinai Penin-sula could also have negative consequences for the region, as it is one of the few pillars of stability, hosts key trading routes and shares a border with Israel.

With the imminent defeat of IS in the conventional sense, the question about the future of these provinces arises. This conference’s aim is to discuss this future and the potential impact of the provinces on the local countries after the military defeat of IS in Syria and Iraq. How will the provinces develop, and will they manage to hold on to power? What are the potential influences that these franchises can exert upon the countries that host them? Special focus shall be put on the views that young academics, journalists and professionals from the coun-tries concerned hold on the possible influence of IS on their generation. How attractive do IS and its offshoots seem to young inhabitants? Do they see the offshoots in their countries as posing a real threat, or do they rather think that their influence will vanish once the core of IS is defeated?

​ The conference aims to cover hotspots with a significant IS presence all over the Islamic world, as well as countries in the immediate proximity of the core territories, and will include the Wilayat Khorasan (Afghanistan, Pakistan), West Africa (Niger, Nigeria, Mali), the Maghreb (Libya, Egypt, Tunisia), the Mashreq (Lebanon, Jordan, GCC), and Europe (Germany, France/Belgium, United Kingdom). The conference will be designed as a two-day event, with three panels of 90 minutes each per day, and three speakers plus a chair per panel. The second day will also feature a wrap-up session, held by one speaker, who will summarize the main points and give their thoughts on them.