You may have noticed that recently my posts on the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have petered out somewhat. When they do turn up the quality is appalling. As usual there are plenty of excuses for this but the main one is that the Lausanne round of Iran talks have left me with a sort of writers block. So I'm not being lazy and I've not forgotten about it. I'm just having a great deal of trouble getting the words out at the moment and I'm working on that.
In the meantime I should point out that on Tuesday (14/4/15) the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi travelled to the US to meet with President Barack Obama. You would have thought that this would have been a warm meeting between close allies committed to defeating ISIL. Instead the US seemed to see the visit as an opportunity to further rough the Iraqis up.
The main part of this was the decision for the visit to coincide with Congressional Foreign Affairs Committees meeting on the Iran issue. The US-led sanctions on Iran have been one of the main driving forces behind the turmoil the Middle-East has experienced over the last 4-5 years. Essentially they have handed dominance of the region to Saudi Arabia who seem intent on burning everything to the ground. Foolishly the US seems to be viewing ISIL as an essential ally in this process by delaying expelling them from Iraq as a way to put pressure on Iraq's neighbour Iran.
The Iran issue is also an incredibly complex one. Even before you get into highly technical aspects of nuclear power and nuclear weapons programs you have the sanctions themselves that fall into multiple categories. The most widespread category is the sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). However beyond that you have the sanctions imposed by the US some of which were imposed by Presidential executive order and others that were imposed with Congressional approval. Some of these sanctions are extra-territorial meaning that they extend beyond the US and US companies. So for example if a Spanish company decided that it wanted to do business with an Iranian company in defiance to the US sanctions that Spanish company could still be prosecuted in the US. Finally there are a host of sanctions imposed by individual US states and some sanctions that have nothing whatsoever to do with Iran's nuclear program.
Obviously it is quite difficult to keep track of all these variables especially if - like Iraq - you are not party to the negotiations themselves. However by agreeing not to veto a bill granting Congressional approval to any Iran deal it seems that the Obama has not heeded the criticism piled upon it by the international community during the Lausanne round of talks. Instead the Obama administration seems to have come out swinging in an attempt to punish the international community for pointing out his mistake.
Initially the hope was that the Obama administration would lift the extra-territorial sanctions while vetoing the Congressional bill. So while Congress was working to overturn the Presidential veto the majority of sanctions could be lifted and the World could get back to trading with Iran. By declining that solution the Obama administration appears to be threatening the entire process positioning itself to demand a tougher inspection regime linked to the phased lifting of sanctions. That highly inappropriate to the situation but to admit to that the Obama administration would be forced to admit that it made a grievous mistake in the first place.
Next the Obama administration took the opportunity of Prime Minister Abadi's visit to announce that it was removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism reversing a position stated just two days previously. With the sheer volume of terrorism being exported by nations that are not on this list the list itself is considered a bit of a joke. It is also an extremely complicated issue because Obama's main motivation behind lifting sanctions against Cuba is to take advantage of the 1995 "Wet foot, Dry foot" amendment to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act to gerrymander the vital Florida district in favour of Hillary Clinton. Obviously to understand that you have to understand quite a bit about US electoral politics. To confuse matters further Hillary Clinton took the opportunity of Prime Minister Abadi's visit to hold her first campaign event in Iowa.
The Cuba issue was also the centrepiece of last weekends Summit of the Americas in Panama. South America is obviously not part of Iraq's neighbourhood so the are unlikely to be experts in the weekends events. Despite the focus of Cuba the US main business at the Panama Summit was the negotiations for a global Climate Change agreement. Due to the fight against ISIL this is an issue that I'm struggling to find time to deal with and it's not my country that ISIL are occupying.
Finally the US blockade of Cuba functions rather neatly as an example of how the sanctions on Iran should be handled. Basically the US and Israel can do it if they like but the rest of the World should be free to ignore it.
The element I found most interesting though was the announcement that the US intendeds to exhume and identify the bodies of some 400 US servicemen who were killed in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour. Now that we are moving back into spring the season is upon us when large numbers of African migrants try to cross into Europe illegally over the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the increasing volumes of migrants attempting this journey the number of people being killed in the process has also increased. That very Tuesday a boat carrying some 400 migrants was lost with all on board presumed killed.
Key to the Mediterranean issue is Libya which is also another front in the fight against ISIL. Prior to the overthrow of the Qaddafi government a large number of those migrants simply wouldn't have bothered trying to cross into Europe instead opting to take jobs in Libya's oil and construction industries. So not only has the chaos in Libya increased the number of migrants trying to reach Europe it has also stripped Libya of its ability to make any real effort to stop them. Therefore in order to solve the migrant problem the international community needs to build a functioning Libyan government around the internationally recognised government in Tobruk. Unfortunately the US in particular seems intent on maintaining the status quo granting de facto legitimacy to the Islamist factions in the west through these seemingly never ending peace talks.
The migrant situation in the Mediterranean actually reminds me of this old phrase about how you can either fish the corpses from the river as they float by or you can travel upstream to stop the person who keeps dumping the bodies in the river. Sadly the US doesn't seem to have any interest in fishing the bodies out of the river. It has promised to help identify them though.
The US' continuing delays became a lot harder to explain when on Monday (13/4/15) ISIL released another video entitled; "We Will Burn America." Although I wasn't quick enough to catch it I gather it was mainly stock footage of the 9/11 attacks interspersed with the beheading of James Foley and the burning of Moaz al-Kasasbeh alongside calls for lone-wolf supporters to carry out attacks within the US. The US is currently stopping attacks of this type at a rate of about one a week making it increasingly likely that as time goes on one will slip through the net.
14:45 on 17/4/15 (UK date).
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