Recent setbacks suffered by Iraqi forces in the country’s contested Sunni areas have led senior Pentagon officials to question their courage. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said the Iraqis “showed no will to fight” when ISIS moved to seize the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi despite greatly outnumbering their enemy, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey observed that Iraq’s military wasn’t driven out of the city, “they drove out.” The reality, though, is that Iraqi forces had been fighting for over a year in Anbar with little support from Baghdad. So Marina Ottaway of the Wilson Center got it right when she told the Associated Press that the defeat at Ramadi was not a failure of courage, but a failure of politics.
Unfortunately, that assessment could be accurately applied to Iraq’s entire modern history, which began a century ago when European powers invented the nation without any real understanding of the region. That flawed beginning nearly guaranteed that Iraq would one day become a failed state, just like Lebanon, Libya, Syria and other Arab countries that the Europeans played a role in creating. The discovery of vast quantities of oil in Iraq may have delayed its dissolution by giving the central government the resources needed to impose order, but in the end Iraq will cease to exist. So a U.S. strategy focused on stabilizing the country is unrealistic. Here are five basic reasons why Iraq can’t be fixed.
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Mixed reactions as Egyptian president recruits scholars to counter radical ideology with moderate Islam
A campaign by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi to combat radical jihadist ideology with Islamic education has been met with mixed reactions.
According to a Reuters report on Sunday, Sissi sees Al-Azhar University — the 1,000-year old center for Islamic learning — as a key to combating radicalism and reforming Islam. And while the institution is cooperating, critics say the president’s two-year crackdown on Islamists and Islamism has been too heavy-handed.
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Iranian school textbooks, such as The Qur’an and Life (Grade 12, p. 125) prepare Iranian children for the Ayatollahs’ sublime goal: the apocalyptic, horrifying, millenarian, military battle against the USA and other “arrogant oppressors of the world,” which are ostensibly led by “idolatrous devils.” While the “savior”—the infallible, immortal, divinely ordained and eventual global leader, the Mahdi—has not surfaced yet, Iranian children are taught that the battle is already raging throughout the world, awaiting their sacrifice.
School textbooks of Western democracies are the most authentic reflection of peoples’ values and worldview. School textbooks of tyrannies are the most authentic reflection of the nature and mission of the regimes.
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Anyone who has followed the issue over the past few years knows that a compromise may not be possible.
Despite the governments’s wish to negotiate a solution with the Negev Beduin for their resettlement, it is much more likely that such a deal is unreachable, leaving both sides on a trajectory for a big confrontation.
Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that he would first study the issue and then try to reach an agreement with the Beduin. However, anyone who has followed the issue over the past few years knows that a compromise may not be possible.
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Less than three weeks has passed since the highly successful IDF field hospital team returned from saving lives and limbs in Nepal. The sights and sounds still remain with them.
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH, JPOST
Dr. Ofer Merin (top, second from left) and Prof. Jonathan Halevy next to him; Prof. Amos Peyser (bottom row, second from left) . (photo credit:SHAARE ZEDEK MEDICAL CENTER)
One of the smallest countries in the world – Israel – surpassed by far the largest in the world – China – in providing search-and-rescue and medical assistance to the victims of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that devastated Nepal on April 25.
Not only was the Israel Defense Forces’ field hospital by far the largest, with 260 people, including 45 physicians and with nurses, x-ray technicians and more. It was also among the speediest to arrive, even though the team came from nearly 5,000 kilometers away, and it included the director-general of a major Israeli medical center and senior department chairmen rather than only junior physicians.
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Naftali Bennett, a former tech guru who co-founded Cyota, a cybersecurity software company in the United States, is not just Israel’s new education minister. Because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing coalition government wields such a slim majority in parliament, Bennett is also a kind of kingmaker — able to influence Netanyahu’s policies in exchange for the majority his party helps furnish. He told The Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth this past week that Israel should annex large parts of the West Bank. Edited excerpts of their interview follow:
How do you like the makeup of this new government?
We can do great things. It’s challenging because we have only 61 [of the Knesset’s 120] members in the coalition. We have no margin for error.
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Asharq Al-Awsat says Moscow has pulled military experts from Assad’s war room in Damascus, evacuated non-essential personnel and stopped declaring there is no alternative to Assad.
Russia is pulling away from its relationship with embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad and withdrawing key personnel from Damascus, the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported Sunday, citing senior Gulf and Western officials.
“The Kremlin has begun to turn away from the regime,” the newspaper said.
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Analysis: The main concern is what will happen in the fall, once the nuclear talks with Iran are over, at the time of Ramadan and the Jewish High Holy Days; meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority is getting weaker.
IDF troops operating in a West Bank refugee camp. The Palestinian Authority is absent in the camps. (Photo: IDF Spokesman)
The Palestinians are sending us mixed messages. In Zurich, Jibril Rajoub – or Gabriel Regev, as his friends at the Shin Bet security service like to call him – was until this weekend trying to get Israel kicked out of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. And in Jordan, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is moaning bitterly about the actions of the Israeli government, while speaking in the same breath about the need for increased economic cooperation due to the dire situation facing an already despairing West Bank population.
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Intelligence Squared US arranged one of its excellent debates on the upper West Side of Manhattan this week. The debate had as its subject the merits of President Obama’s pending arrangement with Iran. Addressing the proposition that the deal is good for the United States, the debate matched Philip Gordon and Amb. Thomas Pickering (for the affirmative) with Michael Doran and Mark Dubowitz (for the negative), with moderator John Donvan cracking the whip in impressive fashion. The audience votes on the proposition before and after the debate; the team that maximally moves the dial is declared the winner.
Intelligence Squared has made resources on the debate accessible here. The video is above; the transcript is here..
T. Belman. It is obvious that Israel is focused on destroying our nationalists rather than destroying Arab terrorists. Livni’s Nationalist Crime Unit must be disbanded.
This article is focused on highlighting two cases, yet they are only the tip of the iceberg. Our hilltop youths are constantly being harassed, defamed and detained as though they were the enemy.
Arab protesters are tolerated beyond patience while nationalist protesters are treated with zero tolerance.
Op-Ed: The Credo of the Hilltop Youth
The credo of the “hilltop youth” is expressed in this article whose subject is the undercover police operation at Kochav Hashachar and the story of Elad Selah, an IDF soldier who has been jailed for alleged spying for the hilltop youth.
[Meir Ettinger is a Jewish activist. He is the grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, H”yd, and the unofficial leader of the hilltop youth. He sent this article to Arutz Sheva and we present it to readers so that his opinion is heard.]
The Nationalist Crimes Unit was created three years ago by Tzipi Livni and graced with a huge budget. It’s purpose was to eradicate nationalist crimes, i.e. actions of what are known as Jewish “rebels” who, for their part, feel that they are acting to prevent the further deterioration of the state of Israel.
The officials in this unit harass those they suspect and try to put as many as possible behind bars. They claim repeatedly (and inaccurately) that the Jewish activists hinder them from focusing on the major security problems on which they would prefer to focus, but it is they who decide to expend their energies that way.
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[Caution. I think the ethnic numbers are very wrong. At least they don’t come close to agreeing with Wikepedia.]
Op-ed: Imagine the Islamic Republic falling apart like Syria, Iraq, Libya or Yemen in a civil war with armed militias – and nuclear facilities all over the area.
On Independence Day, I received a message on Facebook from a man who lives in Iraq and wanted to congratulate the State of Israel on its independence and thank it for destroying Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in 1981.
If it were not for that, he wrote, Iraq would have been filled with nuclear facilities, and imagine what would happen now, with the all-out war taking place there, where there are no rules and no limits and everything is permitted. Israel saved the Iraqi people, he wrote and thanked us.
Indeed, Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor, had it remained, would now be in the area occupied by the Islamic State in the al-Anbar province. What would the world do then?
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Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers is a deftly written account of the Jewish revolt against the British in 1940s Palestine. Despite its scholarship—it draws heavily on recently declassified British documents—and its significant bulk, it is a page-turner that leaves the reader feeling sorry once the book is finished.
Unlike most accounts of the Jewish underground, this one tells the story from the British point of view, though without taking Britain’s side. It leaves the reader with no doubt that it was the Irgun, and to a lesser extent the much smaller Lehi, that drove the British from Palestine, and not, as the longtime mythology of Israel’s Laborites would have it, David Ben-Gurion’s skillful politicking.
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T. Belman. Abe Foxman, whom I am no fan of, rightly points our that “Legislation that bars BDS activity by private groups, whether corporations or universities, strikes at the heart of First Amendment-protected free speech, will be challenged in the courts and is likely to be struck down.” He is referring , of course, to ” legislation at both the state and federal level making it illegal to conduct boycotts, divestment or sanctions against Israel.”
But it is not so clear. This legislation which seeks to penalize participation in the boycott of Israel is modeled after the legislation passed in the 70’s to penalize people or corporations for participating the in Arab boycott of Israel. That legislation is still here and effective.
This legislation seeks to prevent economic harm to Israel. That’s only part of the problem. I have also believed that the BDS movement is basically a vehicle to put in question the legitimacy of Israel. I have attended a number of events and came away with the feeling that it was all about demonizing, deligitimating and defaming Israel. It didn’t matter whether a the boycott was passed, what was important was that a public forum be created to spread their lies. In that, the movement has been very successful.
It is for this reason I wrote Israel should be legally protected from defamation
Comprehensive approach to fighting BDS is needed
By Abraham H. Foxman, JTA,
NEW YORK (JTA) — Let’s be clear from the outset: the BDS movement, the effort to support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, is sinister and malicious and is having a negative effect on Jewish students on some campuses and on the wider Jewish community.
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It would be easy to scoff, in a worldly wise way, at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent speech in Montreal. Harper, in town to receive the first-ever King David Award from the Jewish Community Council of Montreal, spoke of the deep friendship between Canada and Israel, of the unique challenges Israel faces as the sole democracy in the Middle East and of his government’s unwavering support for the Jewish state.
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By Victor Davis Hanson, National Review
From ISIS at Ramadi to riots at home, nothing is going right. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” – W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Things are starting to collapse, abroad and at home. We all sense it, even as we bicker over who caused it and why.
ISIS took Ramadi last week. That city once was a Bastogne to the brave Americans who surged to save it in 2007 and 2008. ISIS, once known at the White House as the “Jayvees,” were certainly “on the run” — right into the middle of that strategically important city.
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Dershowitz holds otherwise. Obama is Neither Anti-Israel Nor Anti-Jewish
Is US President Barack Obama an anti-Semite? This question has lingered in the air since his first presidential bid in 2008. It first arose due to the anti-Semitic sermons that Jeremiah Wright, his pastor for more than 20 years, made as Obama and his family sat in the pews.
Throughout the six-and-a-half years of his presidency, Obama has laughed off the concerns.
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UJA Federation president claimed its decision to include even Israel boycotters such as the New Israel Fund was the same position taken by the Government of Israel. Not so, says the Government of Israel.
By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus, JP
Dividing Jerusalem will solve neither the problem of how to maintain a Jewish majority in the capital nor the very real security issues facing its residents, such as the violence that has flooded out of east Jerusalem since the latest intifada started.
By Nadav Shragai, ISRAEL HAYOM
More than 20 years ago, the diplomatic and security leadership of Israel entered dark days when it signed the Oslo Accords. The results were tragic: More than 15,000 terrorist acts committed against the State of Israel, over 1,500 Israelis murdered, thousands more wounded, and great suffering for the Palestinian population.
Dividing Jerusalem could bring a disaster of similar proportions, if not worse, upon the city.
By Henry J. Barkey, FOREIGN POLICY
What ever thee upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections may prove to be far more dramatic than any in Turkey’s recent past. No matter what the outcome, the country is likely to be heading into an unprecedented crisis.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has staked Turkey’s future constitutional order on the outcome of the vote. Erdogan, after 11 years as prime minister with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), has assumed the largely ceremonial position of president. While the president is supposed to be impartial, he has been campaigning ferociously in support of his old party because he wants it to win a comfortable majority in parliament — more than 330 seats in the 550-seat parliament, to be precise. Such an outcome will enable him to lay the groundwork for a new political system, which would shift power from the prime minister to a French-style executive president.
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Motivated by revolutionary fervour, Kurds succeed where Iraqi army fails
The Associated Press Posted: May 28, 2015
The Kurds, motivated by a desire for their own homeland and backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, have now retaken more than 200 cities from ISIS fighters.
In contrast to the Iraqi army’s failures, Kurdish fighters in Syria are on the march against ISIS, capturing towns and villages in an oil-rich swath of the country’s northeast under the cover of U.S.-led airstrikes.
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