Iran Closes Airspace To Iraqi Kurdistan Ahead Of Historic Independence Vote

The diplomatic and economic noose is tightening around Iraqi Kurdistan one day ahead of its historic independence referendum. On Sunday, the Iranian government announced closure of its airspace to northern Iraq"s Sulaimani and Erbil Airports, at the request of Iraqi authorities. The Baghdad government has repeatedly threatened military intervention in Iraq"s autonomous Kurdish region should the vote proceed on Monday, which Baghdad warns could provoke invasion by neighboring states. The United States too has warned that the non-binding referendum will be “particularly provocative and destabilizing” - this as Turkey musters tanks along its border with Iraqi Kurdistan. 

On Sunday the Iranian Supreme Security Council announced through state media that, “At the request of the Iraqi central government, Iranian airspace has been closed on all flights that originate from Kurdistan Region.” The move comes after a month"s worth of warnings that Iran could close its borders to Iraqi Kurdistan should the independence vote proceed. Iranian government officials had previously warned that, “The republic of Iran has opened its legitimate border gates on the premise of the consent of the federal government of the Iraqi state. If such an event [referendum] happens, these border gates from the perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran would lose its legitimacy."

Kurdistan referendum ballot book held by an employee from the Independent High Electoral Referendum Commission. Image source: AFP

Iran worries that an independent Kurdistan at its border would be a destabilizing force concerning Iran"s own sizable Kurdish minority. Iran also reportedly launched Revolutionary Guard led military drills in its northwest region bordering Iraqi Kurdistan on Sunday.

Likewise Turkey has for the past week amassed tanks and troops along its border with Iraq, while reportedly conducting "anti-terror operations" in Kurdish areas of the country. In a geographic sense Turkey would play a key economic lifeline for the completely landlocked Iraqi Kurdistan region. But Turkey"s Parliament voted Saturday to renew for one year a mandate authorizing military intervention across Iraq"s border should Turkey"s national security come under threat.

Over the weekend the Kurdish regional capital of Erbil saw tens of thousands of Kurds flood the streets demonstrating in support of an independent Kurdistan. However, protests against the planned referendum broke out in other areas of Iraq. Violence also began to hit the region as an IED killed four Iraqi Kurdish soldiers and injured over a dozen more in the province of Kirkuk, an area where the referendum is set to be held. 

Arab parts of the country have voiced frustration that such a divisive move would come at a key moment in the fight against ISIS. The fact that Israel is the only outside country voicing official support for Kurdish independence is also deeply controversial. 

Map source: International Iran Times

On Sept. 13 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stunned the region when he commented specifically of the referendum saying, "Israel supports the legitimate efforts of the Kurdish people to achieve their own state" (though he"s made similar statements starting in 2014). Netanyahu noted further that Israel still considers the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) a terrorist group.

Other current and former Israeli officials have made bolder and more detailed statements, however. The former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Major General Yair Golan told a national security policy conference in Washington D.C. in early September that he believes establishing a Greater Kurdistan (a state that will include the Kurdish-populated territories of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey) in the Middle East could be a positive stabilizing force in the region. He also said that he personally does not be believe the PKK to be a terrorist organization. 

Israel"s public stance provoked a quiet diplomatic war with Turkey, which Israel accuses of supporting Hamas. Turkey has for years accused Israel of forging a secretive vengeful alliance with the PKK due to Turkey"s pro-Palestine statehood position. But Israel has consistently pointed to what it perceives as Turkish hypocrisy in failing to designated Hamas a terror organization. Furthermore, Iranian state media has frequently equated an independent Kurdistan with Israeli plans to Balkanize the region as part of a "divide and rule" policy in the region. 

But despite signs of looming destabilization ahead of Monday"s vote, it appears Kurdish authorities in Erbil are determined to see the referendum through, no matter the consequences.

Quoted by Bloomberg, Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani said in televised news conference that Iraq’s Kurds "reached conclusion that only through independence can we secure our future" and said he is ready to engage in "very long" talks with Iraq govt on borders, oil, gas, water after the vote. He also added that the Iraq, Kurdistan partnership failed after Baghdad violated the constitution.

Like in Germany, Barzani urged voters to head to polls and maintain a "peaceful process" while saying that Peshmerga forces will continue cooperation with Iraqi troops and the U.S.-led coalition in the "fight against terror."

Barzani also said that referendum is not a threat to Turkey’s national security, and added that he "doesn’t expect military confrontation with Iraq after referendum", a rather clear hint that military confrontation with Iraq after the expected vote to break away may be inevitable. To be sure, Iraq Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi said in televised speech that Kurdistan’s problems are "a result of corruption, mismanagement of public money" adding that a referendum would only exacerbate such issues.

Finally, addressing Iran"s closure of airspace, he said that it was Tehran’s decision.

Pepe Escobar: Daesh, Creature Of The West

Authored Op-Ed by Pepe Escobar via SputnikNews.com,

James Shea, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Emerging Threats at NATO – now that’s a lovely title – recently gave a talk at a private club in London on the Islamic State/Daesh. Shea, as many will remember, made his name as NATO’s spokesman during the NATO war on Yugoslavia in 1999.

After his talk Shea engaged in a debate with a source I very much treasure. The source later gave me the lowdown. 

According to Saudi intelligence, Daesh was invented by the US government – in Camp Bacca, near the Kuwait border, as many will remember — to essentially finish off the Shiite-majority Nouri al-Maliki government in Baghdad.

It didn’t happen this way, of course. Then, years later, in the summer of 2014, Daesh routed the Iraqi Army on its way to conquer Mosul. The Iraqi Army fled. Daesh operatives then annexed ultra-modern weapons that took US instructors from six to twelve months to train the Iraqis in and…surprise! Daesh incorporated the weapons in their arsenals in 24 hours.

In the end, Shea frankly admitted to the source that Gen David Petraeus, conductor of the much-lauded 2007 surge, had trained these Sunnis now part of Daesh in Anbar province in Iraq.

Saudi intelligence still maintains that these Iraqi Sunnis were not US-trained – as Shea confirmed – because the Shiites in power in Baghdad didn’t allow it. Not true. The fact is the Daesh core – most of them former commanders and soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army — is indeed a US-trained militia.

True to form, at the end of the debate, Shea went on to blame Russia for absolutely everything that’s happening today – including Daesh terror. 

Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot, you’re dead

Now let’s go back to the proclamation of the Daesh Caliphate in June 29, 2014. That was choreographed as a symbolic abolition of the Sykes-Picot border that split the Middle East a century ago. At the same time, abandoning the option of a military push to take Baghdad, Daesh chose to regionalize and internationalize the fight, creating their own transnational state and denouncing regional states as “impostors”. All that coupled with the amp up of any chaos strategy capable of horrifying Western public opinion. 

For large swathes of a Sunni Arab audience, this was powerful stuff. Daesh was proclaiming themselves, in a warped manner, as the sole real heir of the different Arab Springs; the only totally autonomous regional movement, depending exclusively on its own local base, made up of numerous Bedouin tribes.

But how did we get here?

Let’s go back once again – now to Iraq in the 1990s, during the Clinton era. The strategic logic at the time spelled out an instrumentalization of UN resolutions — with Washington de facto controlling Iraq’s oil, manipulating the price as a means of pressure over trade competitors much more dependent on Iraqi oil such as China, Japan and selected European nations.

9/11 turned this state of affairs upside down – leading to the 2003 neocon ideological stupidity and subsequent amateurism managing an occupation in total ignorance of history and the ultra-complex dynamics between the Iraqi state and society. Saddam Hussein was the de facto last avatar of a political arrangement invented by imperial Britain in 1920. With the invasion and occupation, the Iraq state collapsed. And the Cheney regime had no clue what to do with it.

There was no Sunni alternative. So Plan B, under major pressure by Shiites and Kurds, was to give voice to the majority. The problem is political parties ended up being religious and ethnic parties. The partition of power, Lebanese-style — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds – turned out to be a dysfunctional nightmare. 

Between 2005 and 2008, this American attempt to rebuild the Iraqi state yielded a horrendous confessional civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. The Sunnis lost. And that largely explains the subsequent success of Daesh in creating a “Sunniland”.

The US occupation-Arab Spring love affair

Now let’s turn to the Syrian version of the Arab Spring in February/March 2011. Initial protests against Assad’s iron rule were peaceful – multi-communitarian and multi-confessional. But soon anti-Alawite rancor started to radicalize a significant part of the Sunni majority.

As historian Pierre-Jean Luizard, a specialist in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon at the French CNRS reminds us, Syria was the favorite land of Hanbalism – a most conservative branch of Sunni Islam that highly influenced the emergence of Wahhabism in the Arabian Peninsula. That implies a virulent anti-Shiism. Thus the emergence among the Syrian armed opposition of multiple Salafi-jihadi groups, most of all Jabhat al-Nusra – a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria. 

Meanwhile, Assad fine-tuned a message to the West and his own Sunni bourgeoisie oscillating between allegiance and dissidence; it’s me, or chaos. Chaos ensued, anyway; horrendous structural violence, all-around institutional decrepitude, total territorial fragmentation. 

So it’s fair to argue that both US occupation and the Syrian Arab Spring ended up producing the same result. With some differences; in Iraq, Daesh enjoys the (silent) support of a majority of Sunni Arabs. In Syria, Sunnis are divided; Daesh may rule the desert — Bedouin culture, but it’s Jabhat al-Nusra that captured significant Sunni support in big urban centers such as Aleppo. In Iraq, the borders between the three large communities – Sunni, Shiite, Kurd – are more or less frozen. In Syria, it’s a never-ending jigsaw puzzle.

What happens next is a mystery. The de facto independence of Iraq Kurdistan may solidify. The Baghdad government may increasingly represent only Shiites. Yet it’s hard to see Daesh consolidating its control of Sunni Iraq – not with the ongoing Battle of Mosul.

Blowback rules the wilderness of mirrors

It’s easy to dismiss Daesh as the apex of barbarian cultural idiosyncrasies. Even wallowing in gruesomeness, Daesh has been able to project a universalist dimension beyond its Sunni Arab Middle Eastern base. It’s like the clash of civilizations playing in a wilderness of mirrors. Daesh amplifies the clash not between East and West, or the Arab world and the Atlanticist hegemon, but mostly between a certain (warped) conception of Islam and assorted infidels. Daesh “welcomes” everyone, even Catholic Europeans while persecuting Arab infidels and bad Muslims.

It’s no wonder the Caliphate — a concrete utopia on the ground – finds an echo among young lone wolves living in the West. Because Daesh insists on the colonial Franco-British – and then neocolonial American — history of Muslims being trampled upon by a dominating, infidel West, they manage to channel a diffuse sentiment of injustice among the young.

Everyone – US, France, Britain, Russia, Iran — is now at war with Daesh (Turkey only half-heartedly, as well as the House of Saud and the GCC petrodollar gang; for them this not a priority.)

But this is a war without a serious political long-term perspective. No one is discussing the place for Sunni Arabs in an Iraq dominated by the Shiite majority; how to put the Syrian state back together; or whether private donors to Daesh from Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will simply disappear.

The encirclement of Raqqa and the re-conquest of Mosul will mean absolutely nothing if the causes of Daesh’s initial success are not addressed. It starts with the West’s mission civilisatrice as the cover story for unbounded colonial domination, and it straddles the methodical, inexorable, slow motion American destruction of Iraq. Blowback will continue to reign over the wilderness of mirrors; an attack near the British Parliament by a knife-carrying lone wolf “soldier answering “its call” killing four people mirrored by US jets bombing a school near Raqqa killing thirty-three civilians.

Petraeus may have trained them in the deserts of Al-Anbar. But most of all that rough beast, slouching towards Camp Bacca to be born, bore the touch of a Western mind.

From New World Order To Hazy Global Disorder

Submitted by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Donald Trump administration and the Brexit severance of ties between the United Kingdom and the European Union have, in a matter of a little over a half year, changed the world from a post-Cold War «new world order» based on American supremacy to a global «disorder» of altered alliances on a multipolar geo-political chessboard. In many respects, the new global disorder has also placed in jeopardy various post-World War II contrivances, including NATO, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) alliance.

Every international relations textbook and playbook can be thrown away with the advent of the new global disorder. Trump has kicked off his foreign policy by introducing an incoherent foreign policy. On one hand, Trump claims he wants to partner with Russia on the war against «radical Islamic terrorism». Yet, Trump has also indicated, through his UN ambassador Nicky Haley and Defense Secretary James Mattis, that he is committed to NATO and wants Russia to withdraw from Crimea. It is well known that the annual National Football League’s Super Bowl coordinates its patriotic military-oriented events with the Pentagon. In recent past years, U.S. troops serving in places like Afghanistan and Iraq were featured during and after the game on the host stadium’s jumbotron television screens.

The 2017 Super Bowl in Houston was different. This year the live shot of U.S. troops with the 3^rd Brigade Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4^th Infantry Division, was from a military base in Zagan, Poland. The Pentagon’s psychological operations specialists wanted to convey the message that under Trump, the new U.S. front lines were no longer in Afghanistan and Iraq in a war against Muslim radical insurgents but in Poland with Russia as the new «enemy». The optics simply do not match Trump’s statements about seeking closer ties with Russia.

Trump has indicated he hopes to increase the U.S. «defense» budget to accommodate a 90,000 troop increase in Army ranks; a 350-ship Navy, including new aircraft carriers at $12 billion per vessel; an increase in Marine Corps battalions from 23 to 36; and 100 additional advanced fighter planes for the Air Force. That is equivalent to an increase in the military budget from $500 billion to $1 trillion over a ten-year period.

Essentially, Trump’s national security team desires a military that can fight both Russia and China and that can be able to match every Russian and Chinese warplane, tank, and naval vessel in a battle space.

Trump and his national security team of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Mattis, and other war hawks are also laying the ground for a military confrontation with Iran. Team Trump has helped ratchet up tensions with Iran by authorizing the sale to Saudi Arabia of $300 million worth of precision-guided missiles and billions of dollars of advanced F-16 fighters to Saudi Arabia’s vassal state of Bahrain. These packages were suspended by the Obama administration because of Saudi war crimes in Yemen and Bahrain’s bloody suppression of its Shi’a majority. Trump is greenlighting continued Saudi genocidal aggression in Yemen’s civil war. The Saudis and Bahrainis are now being positioned by Trump to gain a military advantage over Iran. Trump’s executive order banning Iraqis with valid U.S. visas, refugee documents, and, originally, permanent U.S. resident «green cards», irritated the Iraqi government, an ally of Iran, to the point that it vowed to limit Iraqi visas for U.S. contractors and journalists. That will only embolden Islamic State and Al Qaeda irregulars fighting U.S. military forces in the country. Anything that threatens the Baghdad government is welcome news to the Saudi regime.

Trump, in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, emphasized close U.S.-Turkish relations. In July 2016, after an attempted coup against Erdogan, Trump, in an interview with The New York Times, praised Erdogan’s handling of the insurrection. Since the coup attempt, Erdogan has ordered the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of journalists, military and police officers, professors, civil servants, politicians, and businessmen for allegedly supporting the so-called «Fethullah Terrorist Organization (FETO)», a pejorative term for those affiliated with Turkish exile leader and former Erdogan ally Fethullah Gulen.

Gulen is currently exiled in Pennsylvania and has been under the protection of the Central Intelligence Agency. However, Flynn and others part of the Trump security apparatus favor extraditing Gulen, a political refugee, to Turkey to face trial and certain imprisonment, torture, and possibly, execution.

Trump’s dalliance with Erdogan will also jeopardize the safety of the Kurdish forces in Syria, which have been allied with the United States against the Islamic State, and the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil in Iraq. Turkey considers the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to be supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and if Trump sides with Erdogan against Kurdistan it will represent another double-cross by Washington of that beleaguered unrecognized nation. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger abandoned the Kurds in the 1970s when he sacrificed their interests to the Iraqi military regime.

Trump’s chief strategist Stephen Bannon is believed to have gotten involved in an internal «civil war» within the Vatican and which saw a virtual takeover of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) in Rome by Pope Francis. Bannon opposes what he considers the Pope’s «socialist ways». The Vatican may be a micro-state without a grand army, but a fracture in Vatican-Washington relations can only have a negative impact on the EU, NATO, and other traditional alliances.

Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal has thrown the Asia-Pacific region into «controlled chaos». Mattis’s first foreign trip as Secretary of Defense was to reassure South Korea and Japan of America’s military commitment. But the abandonment of the TPP by its largest cheerleader, the United States, has provided impetus to China’s alternative trading bloc, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). America’s longtime ally Australia, a supporter of the TPP, is now anxious to join the RCEP. Trump’s bellicose phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee swap, has Australia incensed with Trump. While they are friendly adversaries with Australia over sports and national pride, New Zealand came to Australia’s defense in its spat with Trump. The bottom line is that the ANZUS alliance is now severely damaged but, in any event, it had long outlived its usefulness.

Other testy phone exchanges between Trump and German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Francois Hollande also shook Euro-Atlantic bonds with Washington. Trump thundered to Hollande that the French and other NATO countries should pay the U.S. back for NATO expenditures. European Council president Donald Tusk called Trump a «threat» to the European Union.

After a meeting at the White House with Jordan’s King Abdullah, Trump shocked the Israeli government when he told Israel that it should stop announcing new settlements in the West Bank. While Trump’s rhetoric suggests that he is the most pro-Israeli president to ever occupy the White House, his mercurial attitude toward Israel has some Middle East observers wondering whether Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is merely window-dressing for a different U.S. policy in the region.

The venerable, but relatively staid and useless OAS, headquartered in Washington, is not likely to survive Trump’s promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border or his saber-rattling toward Cuba, which has returned to the OAS and the Inter-American political system. Latin America and the Caribbean has more worthwhile alternatives to the OAS, including the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), all of which are free of U.S. membership and influence.

It is a new global disorder but in this chaos, a return to a multipolar world and the end of «sole U.S. superpower» status may be a blessing in the long run. In the short run, however, the chaos will confuse every foreign ministry and international organization bureaucracy on every continent.